ISRAEL-PALESTINE, September 16 — The Zionist government continues its racism against the 20 percent Palestinian minority within the state. According to Minister of Education Naftali Bennett, the new school year in Israel began on September 1 in an orderly fashion. The 33,000 Palestinian-Israeli students on strike since the first day of school disagree! These students attend 47 “community schools” administered by a private Christian church whose existence precedes Israel’s itself. The schools teach students of all religions and employ teachers of all sectors as well.
These schools reject the racist brainwashing curriculum of the Ministry of Education. The Palestinian nationality is preserved in these non-government schools. Students are told the truth about the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, the forcible expulsion in 1947-48 of 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of over 500 villages by terrorists who would become the leaders of the future Israeli state. Government schools teach the lie that all Palestinians voluntarily left rather than live with Jews.
Furthermore, the relatively high quality of this education results in 94 percent of the graduates ending up with an academic degree. In fact, out of all Palestinian academics within Israel, 84 percent of those in technology, medicine, and law are alumni of the private Christian schools.
Naturally, the Israeli state is threatened by the idea of educating Palestinian students, whom it treats as second-class citizens, and has been cutting the Christian schools’ budgets year after year. The crisis escalated this year. In addition to cutting the budget, the state is limiting the fees these schools are allowed to charge parents. Private Jewish schools still get 100 percent funding from the state. A Palestinian student in Israel gets 29 percent of what a Jewish student would get.
For the past two weeks, there has been only limited coverage in the Israeli media. The capitalist state has offered two “solutions” — either these schools become official state schools, which would definitely abolish the only places where students get an alternative to the Zionist version of history, or they become schools for rich Arab people only. Considering the majority of Arabs in Israel are below average financially, this option would make the church money. But, it would also force many students to go to state Israeli schools. Lastly, many of these private schools are the only option in places where the State hasn’t even provided official schools for the Arab families.
To support this struggle, here is a link to a statement signed by a large group of Palestinian-Israeli academics on this issue: https://www.facebook.com/hossam.haick/posts/508729419305184.
The racist and savage anti-Palestinian ideas and practices of the Israeli government are used to justify and win Jewish workers to support its existence as a violent state where only Jews enjoy full rights. However, Jewish workers do not profit from this racism. While Palestinian workers suffer more directly and sharply from the occupation and racism, Jewish workers also endure high unemployment, low wages, housing shortages and a militaristic culture. So long as bosses are able to keep workers separated physically or ideologically, all workers will suffer.
Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — or any other boss, politician, Jewish or Arab — is a friend of the working class. All of them maintain their power and profits from the exploitation of workers. And they build and depend on racism, nationalism, sexism and religion to divide us.
For a better world where all children can live in true peace, justice and egalitarianism, all workers in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, whether Jewish, Arab, African, refugee or immigrant, must unite to fight back. As a united working class, we can rid the world of capitalism and the exploitation, racism, wars and other horrors inflicts upon us.

Editor’s note: Let’s fight in solidarity with thesestriking students, and raise communist ideas. These Christian schools are limited by their own religious and Palestinian nationalist ideology. The fight against racist cuts to
education must be coupled with a rejection all religion, nationalism, and borders.

Albinos workers are being mutilated in Tanzania (76 since 2007), and their body parts sold to witch doctors.  Men are raping albino women to cure themselves of HIV-AIDS.  Who bears the blame for these atrocities? So-called “human nature”? The ignorance and superstition of the masses?  Corrupt Tanzanian government officials?  Profiteers—the witchdoctors and middlemen who abduct, mutilate, and kill?
Knowing who or what to blame leads us to the solution.  The international Progressive Labor Party lays the blame squarely on imperialism, the competition among capitalist bosses that keeps the working class mired in ignorance, misery and desperation. Capitalism has transformed the centuries-old discrimination against albino workers into a profit-inspired atrocity.  Only by destroying this system can we liberate our class from the rule of profit and build a truly humane society: communism.  
Tanzania Workers Enter a Dark Night
In 1985, the capitalist class in Tanzania agreed to comply with the U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund (IMF) to boost profits. The Tanzanian government eliminated free health care, subsidies for farmers, laws that prevented politicians from investing in business, and many more gains won during Tanzania’s earlier pro-Soviet/Chinese period.  In order to fool the workers into accepting these attacks, the ruling class promised the workers empty “get rich quick” schemes, the illusion that everyone could become a capitalist boss.
The working class in the fishing industry around Lake Victoria and the mining industry around Shinyanga and Geita were the most vulnerable.  These industries were European capitalist-owned with an all-African workforce. For years, the workers had seen these bosses become wealthy from exploiting Tanzanian resources and workers.
But without a communist movement, they had no way of understanding the inner workings of imperialist exploitation.  When their livelihoods collapsed, they were susceptible to being lured into a strange and horrible new “occult economy”—the buying and selling of the body parts of albino people.
Modern Origins of Ritual Murder
In the 1950s, British colonial officers stocked Lake Victoria with a fish called Nile Perch.  It was to be a new “cash crop,” exported as a delicacy more profitable than coffee or cotton, while the European bosses exported automatic weapons on the return flights to fuel imperialist-backed civil wars on the African continent.
But for 40,000 local fishermen in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, all bordering Lake Victoria, this capitalist ecological experiment turned out to be a disaster.   The locals couldn’t afford to buy the motor boats or fishing gear that were necessary to catch the Nile Perch that lived in the rougher, deeper parts of the lake.  Furthermore, Nile Perch, like the British, turned out to be vile predators—killing every living thing in the lake, from algae to the smaller fish the locals depended on.
In the 1980s, European, Asian, and Israeli capitalists were allowed by the Tanzanian government to build fish processing plants in the cities around Lake Victoria.  The fishing industry was booming, but true to the capitalist business cycle, the predictable bust followed. By 2005, the lake was overfished, factories had closed or were operating below capacity, and workers’ livelihoods were ruined.  This story is told in the documentary film, Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), by Hupert Suaper.
It is no coincidence that the first murder of an albino person occurred shortly after this crisis, in 2007.  Witch doctors made a promise to desperate fishermen that the golden hair of albinos, spun into their fishing nets, would attract fish and make them rich, and that albino body parts, made into amulets, would usher in other kinds of good fortune.  Some workers, infected by capitalist greed and individualism, became middlemen in the trade of albino body parts to witch doctors.
Bosses’ Solution: Blame the Workers
Predictably, the capitalist press has reported extensively on this “barbaric, backward, human rights disaster” while neglecting to connect the ‘occult economy’ to the crimes of capitalism—the destruction of workers’ livelihoods, imperialist exploitation of resources, and the failed promise of the “free” market.
There is no justice under capitalism. President Jakaya Kikwete and other politicians are using these atrocities to expand their power and establish legitimacy with the international capitalist community. They have reinstituted the death penalty for those found guilty of participating in the trading of albino body parts, and instituted a method for neighbors to anonymously turn in those they suspect of being middlemen. These measures help them pass the so-called “human rights” test, guaranteeing a steady flow of money from the United Nations, NGOs and other funders who use “human rights” as a smokescreen for imperialism. At the same time, these politicians created tax laws that exempt most international companies from paying taxes for the first ten years. Along with tax evasions by businesses, this amounts to more money per year than what the UN says cut poverty levels in half (http://www.policyforum-tz.org/files/Howmuchrevenuearewelosing.pdf). Politicians are rewarded with luxury for fanning the flames of poverty -that make the working class of Tanzania vulnerable to the witchdoctors’ scams.
Good Morning, Revolution
When the Tanzanian ruling class unleashed this era of naked exploitation and robbery in the 1980s, they left the workers as bad off or worse than they were during British colonialism.  The murders of albino people have to be seen within this context.  As dark as the situation seems, the solution – communist revolution- must be seen in context as well. Throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th century, under the leadership of the international communist movement, workers around the world, including Tanzania, made great strides in the class war.  The capitalists have been on the offensive since then to take back everything the workers won. The Progressive Labor Party fights to end the dark night faced by our international class by organizing a mass, PLP for armed revolution, from East Africa to Latin America. Only communism can outlaw profit-making and build a society that values all workers’ lives, because communism means the working class is in power. Under communism we will put behind us once and for all the depraved practices spawned by capitalism, and unleash a new era dedicated to the health and well-being of our class throughout the world.

“We aren’t pro-violence, our music reflects the reality we live in,” the actor portraying O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson says in one scene to a journalist in the recently released film Straight Outta Compton. He continues, “I thought we were here to talk about Rodney King...you can’t treat people like that and not expect them to rise up.”
Racist police terror, from the everyday harassment of the Black youth living in South Central Los Angeles to the 1992 rebellions against the savage police beating of Rodney King, frame the rap group NWA utilized to make their music. Straight Outta Compton follows the rise of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy-E. It is a piece of capitalist garbage that dodges every opportunity to confront racism, even though racism pervades almost every scene of the film. Which makes sense, because the present-day multi-millionaire capitalists Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy’s widow were all producers of this movie, and owe their vast fortunes to being part of the very dictatorship of capitalism their music pretends to rebel against.
Fightback Takes Back Seat
 NWA’s biggest hit and anthem of the Rodney King anti-racist rebellion, “F*** tha Police,” and the fight against racism that followed are still relevant today. It is Black youth that have been rebelling and taking the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore, New York and Los Angeles. Instead of focusing on racism and the politics of living under every day police terror that fired NWA, however, the film focuses instead their personal struggles to become business owners. The racism that the film shows influencing them, and the heroism of the Black youth who fought back, take a back seat to the business aspirations of the young trio. Eazy-E sheds tears of disgust when the police who beat King are all acquitted from the living room of his mansion, while Dre rides through South Central in the middle of the rebellion in his new Mercedes.     
NWA’s gangsta rap has its roots in the rise of gang and drug activity in South Central LA during the 70s and 80s. Ice Cube had it right when he described the gritty realities their music responds to. Art, in the form of paintings, literature or rap, is communication, and the artists’ starting points are the social and cultural environments they live in and the language they use to describe them. In the late 1980s, the art that NWA pioneered emerged from LA gang culture. LA gang culture began as a response to the crisis in political leadership that followed the anti-racist rebellions and strike waves of the 1960s and 70s. Where was the political leadership of the next generation of Black youth suppose to come from?
The vacuum in political leadership would spawn the rise of gangs, especially the the Crips and the Bloods, moniker adopted by Black soldiers serving in Vietnam. These were originally street clubs of Black youth that lived under mass unemployment, racial segregation and poverty after many of the old LA Automotive industry shut down and left the city (GM, Ford, Chrysler, Firestone and Goodyear) leaving the city with empty fields and broken down businesses, if there were any. The two would become the biggest gangs to run the streets of LA and later branch out across the country.
Ten years after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, workers lives were worse off, especially when the gang rivalry between the Crips and the Bloods hit a new high when crack cocaine hit LA in ‘81, spawned by the CIA, as a part of the Iran-Contra Affair. The best this movie did to address the capitalist sources of drugs and weapons is one passing comment by Ice Cube’s character. In a television interview, Cube wonders out loud how, if AK-47s are made in Russia, cocaine from Colombia, and nobody he knows of in the community has a passport, then who was “really” bringing them in. The movie abruptly cut to the next scene.
Rampant Sexism
With a few scenes portraying the capitalist media’s racist hostility to rap music, and period news clips attacking “gangsta rap” and denigrating the form as something less than “art,” the movie doesn’t explore what NWA’s members describe as “reality rap.” Capitalism creates the racist reality that fuels their art, ignored by the movie, as well as the rampant sexism the main characters were infected by, perpetrated, and symbolized. Eazy-E was well known for having multiple relationships and unprotected sex, which led to his death from HIV. His dying message was “If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.” There is no mention of the increasing numbers of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, mass incarceration and substance abuse that continues to plague the Black community. Eazy’s past as a drug dealer is glamorized, while saying nothing about the rise of homeless workers, rise of substance abuse and the closure of mental institutions that happened during the Reagan era.
Another important part of “reality” left out in the movie is Dr. Dre’s history of violence towards women. His ex-girlfriend (and the mother of his children), Michel’le  and the journalist, Dee Barnes, have publicly spoken out about Dre’s history of assaulting women. While occurring during the events of the film, it was never mentioned.  The real-life Dr. Dre even went as far as putting out an apologetic statement: “I apologize to the women I’ve hurt...I deeply regret what I did and know that it has forever impacted all our lives.”  This was a statement that was backed up by Apple, who paid Dre $3.2 billion for the Beats headphones and streaming-music companies he co-founded, and currently employs him.  While his albums and films receive maximum publicity, his long history of sexist violence against women are swept under the rug, and his sexist portrayals of women in his “reality” music are ignored, as long as his products rake in profits.
NWA’s fame was created by major ruling-class institutions: record labels, distribution networks, MTV, radio stations and more. While the film isn’t shy about showing the record labels’ exploitation of NWA by manipulating the members into bad contracts and the millions made marketing their image for profit, NWA wasn’t spreading revolutionary ideas.  They were spewing false consciousness about “making it” — becoming bosses and running their own empires.
In the end, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube become mirror capitalist reflections in the image of the very system that still condemns South Central to mass unemployment, poverty, and drugs. Women play no role in the film, except as sex objects for the main characters. We can’t turn a blind eye when the media impacts our culture and feeds only lies to our working class brothers and sisters! The dehumanization and sexist portrayal of women in this film reveals their justification for sexist violence against them, which is conveniently brushed over or ignored entirely. Straight Outta Compton is nothing but well-marketed garbage straight out of capitalism. It is a betrayal of the masses of workers and youth they dare to claim to still represent.  
PLP’s answer is fight back to abolish racism, sexism, nationalism, and our solution is a communist revolution. Along the way we will create our own culture, culture that reflects, is written by, and is about the heroes of rebellions like in LA in 1992 or in the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore today. Our anthems will be composed by and for the masses of refugees stuffing into leaky boats and braving barbed wire to reach the safety of other lands. The communist culture we create celebrates our class, rebellion and communist revolution, and celebrates collectivity in its creation and participation. Most importantly, communist culture has no tolerance for pretenders and class enemies like Dr. Dre or Ice Cube.

NEW YORK CITY, September 16 — Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Fast Food Wage Board recently recommended that the state’s minimum wage for fast food workers be raised to $15 per hour. The decision is a big victory for the Fight for Fifteen movement (FF15). But we cannot be fooled. This is a victory not for the working class, but for the liberal bosses.
FF15 is a stage for the liberal faction of the ruling class to try to win the allegiance of fast food workers and pacify them. No doubt, the rebellions over the past year from Ferguson to Baltimore have had a lot to do with this concession. The rulers can’t hope to wage imperialist war and maintain their empire if workers and youth are rebelling in the streets. Terror alone won’t work. So everyone from Cuomo to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to Labor Secretary Tom Perez has joined the Fight for Fifteen. With the growing threat of war, the living and working conditions for our class will deteriorate.
The FF15 concession serves another purpose for the bosses: dividing the working class. This concession only includes fast food workers. It excludes retail workers, Emergency Medical Technicians, restaurant workers, and many more who make less than $15/hr. In the current auto contract talks between the United Automobile Workers union and General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, thousands of second-tier Big 3 assembly workers are making $15 or less. In the parts supplier industry, wages are even lower. Many unions, including many Service Employees International Union (SEIU) locals, have been slow to support the campaign because many of their own workers are making less than $15 an hour. Workers are fighting over crumbs when the bosses run away with the whole cake!
Though FF15 is being lauded as a great victory, $15 an hour is only $600 a week before taxes, and not enough to pay the rent and buy groceries. In 1960, the nominal minimum hourly wage was $1, but that is equal to nearly $8 today, after inflation. In fact, the real minimum wage peaked in 1968 at $8.54 an hour (2014 dollars). Since then, the purchasing power of the minimum wage has been falling every year. If it kept pace with increases in productivity, the minimum wage would over $22.
No to Lousy Nickel, Need Hammer and Sickle
Aside from the economics, the bosses are buying our allegiance to capitalism with $15. However much the minimum wage varies, exploitation is an absolute under capitalism. PLP envisions a different kind of society, where the value of labour cannot be stamped with nickels and dimes. We need a system where workers collectively decide what and how to produce, how to distribute it — all based on collectivity, not wages.  
This struggle for a higher minimum wage has involved tens of thousands of fast food workers, many supporting families on poverty wages. Black and Latin workers make up 40 percent of the workforce, and 73 percent are women. Along with the recent rebellions and mass marches against the police, this campaign has been one of the main anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles in recent years. Many fast food workers have also been active in the recent mass marches against racist police terror. The cops, the bosses, the state and its politicians are all part of the ruling class. It’s up to communists to link the minimum-wage struggle to the anti-kkkops struggle as one unified fight against capitalism.  
We cannot settle for $15/hour. Raising the minimum wage is merely giving workers breadcrumbs when we could have the whole loaf! What we need most of all is to abolish wage slavery with communist revolution and a mass PLP.