TEL-AVIV-JAFFA, May 16 — Within days of workers and youth rebelling against racist cops in Baltimore, U.S., thousands of Ethiopian-Jewish workers protested in the streets of Tel-Aviv against apartheid. Like Ferguson and Baltimore, Black workers here lead the way in fighting racism.
They battled the cops and were not deterred by tear gas and stun grenades. While in the West Bank these weapons are used on a daily basis, this was the first time these “riot control” weapons were used in Tel-Aviv proper. Police cars were turned over. More than 23 cops were injured, and over 40 protesters were arrested.
Unlike the largely peaceful protests connected to the worldwide Occupy movement of 2011, this time workers fought with all their might against the racist cops. The protestors blocked the Ayalon Highway for three hours and resisted the cops’ attempts to remove them. Many other white Jewish and a few Palestinians workers united in fighting the violent cops. Thousands of Ethiopian workers and youth demonstrated in front of the Israeli Police Headquarters in Jerusalem.
The reason for this protest was to fight racist violence against Ethopian workers. The trigger was on April 27, when two policemen beat up and arrested Damas Fikadeh. He is a young Ethiopian who serves as an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier in Holon, a city south of Tel-Aviv. What is Damas’s crime? He is a Black worker under capitalism. Israeli police thrive on racist violence against Black, Arab, and migrant workers.  
The State of Israel brought many Ethiopian Jews here in the 1980s and ‘90s as a source of cheap labour for Israeli bosses to employ in minimum wage and dead-end jobs. Racism is the order of the day for Black workers in Israel. Ethiopians are forced into slum neighborhoods and are targets of police terror. While Ethiopians are 2 percent of the population, they make up 30 percent in juvenile jails. Over 41 percent live in official poverty. Unemployment is twice as high among Ethiopians compared to other Jewish Israelis. The racist system that segregates Black youth into racist housing and schools is the same system that controls the Black population by forcibly injecting Ethiopian women with birth control. The Israeli blood bank also rejects or dumps blood donated by Ethiopians. The tremor of rebellion here is about the systematic racism against Black workers.
The Baltimore KKKonection
The link between the U.S. and Israel is one of racism and fightback. Whether it’s Baltimore, Ferguson, Holon, or Jerusalem, Black workers suffer the brunt of racist attacks from the ruling class. From one imperialist country to another, Black workers are a key revolutionary force. Whenever the most exploited sector of the working class fights back, it serves as an example for workers everywhere. There is also another connection between Baltimore and Israel: the racist cops are trained by the same forces. Nearly every major police department in the U.S. gets training from Israel, the experts of Apartheid and racist occupation. Among them were Baltimore kkkops who learned “crowd control” strategies, “gathering intelligence” lessons and other methods of domination. These Israeli-trained kkkops terrorize Black workers throughout the United States.
Black Workers Lead the Way
These Ethiopian workers and youth showed the working class the way forward to crush the racist system that oppresses us all — not by peaceful protest, but by open rebellion against racism. Surrendering to police demands and listening to misleaders who call for “peaceful protest” will not end racism. The only way to end police terror is by confronting the class enemies — the cops and their racist lords, the big bosses — and fighting them on all fronts. The cops have guns, stun grenades and tear gas, but we the workers greatly outnumber them. We must overcome the racist divisions the bosses put upon us and unite based on class. If Palestinian, Jewish, and Black workers unite, workers can become a force capable of defeating capitalism and replacing it with a system of equality for all ethnicities—communism.
Another lesson from this important struggle is that when workers fight back, they are violently attacked. No matter how much the police chief apologizes for individual abuses of power by rank-and-file cops, it is not just “a few rotten apples” but the whole rotten system.
However, this system is not without weakness. The police command prevented Ethiopian cops (many of whom are Border Guard soldiers, essentially enlisted soldiers pressed into the police) from working at the protest locations. The cops fear that many of these soldiers will switch sides and fight for their families and friends, not for the bosses.
Need Multiracial Unity and Red Leadership
The struggle continues and there will be more demonstrations. As communists, PLP here know from similar cases in history that limited to ethnic liberation struggle alone, the Israeli bosses will be able to suppress this struggle or buy off its leaders. The protest needs two things to grow into a revolutionary movement.
First, the fightback must be multiracial and include all oppressed workers suffering from apartheid, like African refugees and Palestinians. It must also include white Jewish workers. Workers from Palestine to Israel must unite to see that we are part of one struggle for justice, which means a world without racist bosses, whether it is here in Israel or in the U.S.
Second, this struggle needs communist leadership that will be able to move it from a struggle against police terror to a struggle against the racist system of capitalism itself. While we are modest PLP branch in this country, we will fight for these politics in everywhere.

Two massive earthquakes have recently struck Nepal. The first earthquake on April 25 was 7.8 magnitude and killed more than 8,000 people. The second earthquake struck on May 12, with a magnitude of 7.3, killing over 200 and injuring thousands. Between the two earthquakes, entire villages were flattened with more than 95 percent of all houses destroyed in the area. More than 2 million workers are displaced with hundreds still missing. There is nothing “natural” about this disaster — the earthquakes are created by forces of nature, but the disasters are created by capitalism!
It is not surprising that the quake left so much devastation in its wake. Nepal, like many other countries, has been subjected to decades of imperialist plunder. This, combined with a repressive dictatorship supported by the U.S. and European imperialists, has brought about high levels of inequality that remain in place, despite a change in the political scene. From the 1980s, Nepal also was forced to accept structural adjustment loans imposed upon them by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, forcing the country to cut already-limited social services and programs, and allowing for multinational corporations to privatize and profit on everything from health care to natural resources like grain and water.
The outcome of this disaster is not at all natural. It is the direct result of the failure of capitalism, a system which is based upon inequality, crisis, and unpreparedness. Capitalism operates according to this “logic” of crisis, which is ultimately seen as profitable and inevitable. Like the environmental devastation in Haiti, the Philippines, or New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, these disasters expose the inherent racist policies implemented by capitalism, as Black, Latin, and Asian are disproportionately affected and suffer the horrific consequences of such policies.
Many commentators blame the current disaster on bad governmental policy and neglect, which is only one part of the story. In 1934, Nepal experienced an 8.3 earthquake that killed over 8,000 people, and experts have been warning for decades about the next “big one.” An article in the Nepali Times, written just months before the recent quake, cites the unpreparedness of the current government to deal with the next disaster, calling for “communities…and individual communities to have contingent plans”.
The article also drew attention to the crisis in Nepal’s internal politics. Since the 2006 electoral victory of the fake “communist” Maoist movement, the coalition government has been squabbling over what type of federal system to institute to run the country. These fake revolutionaries have eroded the massive support of workers and students. They originally had, and have since embraced the devastating capitalist policies that further impoverished the country. The heart of the matter is that under capitalism, these kinds of disasters will continue unabated.
The Progressive Labor Party fights to unite the international working class to smash national boundaries along with racism, sexism, and the entire capitalist system.
The Maoist stooges elected into the capitalist government in Nepal claims to represent the revolutionary legacy of the Chinese revolution of 1949. While socialism was reversed because of concessions to capitalism like maintaining the wage system and inequality, it was through the combined efforts of millions of women and men, not some “great leader” like Mao, who built the dams and dug the canals to prevent workers from needlessly suffering environmental catastrophes.
Under communism, we can coordinate massive efforts around the world in order to ensure that such catastrophes become relics of the capitalist past!

This is the main speech at PLP’s May Day in NYC

What Day? May Day! Whose Day? Our Day!

Today, we celebrate the working class. today, we celebrate our revolutionary force that can’t stop and won’t stop fighting back!

In Haiti, we fight back!

In Mexico, Pakistan, Ferguson, Baltimore, Brooklyn, we fight back!

Today, we celebrate the 50 years that Progressive Labor Party has been a fire under the bosses’ ass. We celebrate the 50 years that PLP has been fighting for the communist aspirations of millions of families, youth, and workers! And we are growing in numbers beyond the hundreds and hundreds present here today, growing beyond the borders this country — across 28 countries and five continents!

PLP is a powerful organization built by ordinary people uniting to accomplish extraordinary things. we began small. small but potent.

when neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan terrorize workers and say, “get back!” what did we do? we fought back! Whether we marched into their own headquarters to smash their brains like we did in 1975 in or beat them with bricks at own their rally, PLP made the fight against racism the heartbeat of our life’s work.

When in Harlem, the cops murdered a black teenager, the mayor and police commissioner outlawed rallies. so when the bosses, the civil rights leaders said, “don’t take the streets!” what did we do? we took the streets! the only force that had the guts to give political leadership was PL. Black workers from the other side of the country recognized our leadership in the Harlem Rebellion.

PLP has a history in defying the bosses. We were and are forceful enough to shake the ground underneath the bosses’ feet, if only for a moment. this history is strong only because we believe that workers got the power! who’s got the power? we got the power! what kind of power? workers’ power!

today, when the bosses said, “don’t march,” what did we do? we marched! and what a powerful march it was! When everybody else abandoned May Day, PL brought the workers’ holiday back to them and have been celebrating it for 44 years! We march to honor your courage to fight back, to honor workers who have fought back, and honor our class that will continue to fight back! I know you are tired as hell. Tired of racism,sexism, borders, killer kkkops, slave wages, exploitation, and war. May Day represents abolishing all of that. Everyone here today is the seed for communism: an entire world simply based on need and collectivity. A world that brings out the best of human potential.

This task sounds impossible. But in the hands of the masses, we can turn the impossible into a living fact! Our class’s history says we can win!

1: When Hitler seemingly ruled the world, the Red Army defeated fascism! That was exactly 70 years ago today, when a red soldier waved the red flag over Berlin! So, defeating fascism. Workers did that!

2: Chinese revolution of 1949 and 1966: Eliminate syphilis, prostitution. Done! Educate the masses and rule society without cops. Workers did that!

I make this sound easy, but in reality these victories required the unshakable commitment of millions working together as one for a vision of equality. As long as revolution and communism is grounded in the working class, there is no stopping communism.

Who’s got the power? We got the power? What kind of power? Workers’ power!

While we look to our history for inspiration, we recognize that many movements have failed and turned a workers’ paradise into its opposite. So the question most people ask is how is it going to be different this time?

We gotta rely on only one force: us! These ideas of communism aren’t for any one person to own. There’s nothing special or smart about us that makes us understand communism as the alternative. These ideas belong to the working class. This is not negotiable. Depends on the youth in the streets, the factory workers, the unemployed workers, the women workers, the undocumented farm workers — not the liberals, not de blasio, or obama. not anyone but a fighting member of the working class. it is with that that we can say, the only solution is communist revolution.

With billions on our side, the task of communist revolution is more than just a possibility. We are breathing in a little victory this very moment.

 Today, the working class says, “the rebellion in ferguson? we did that. Baltimore? yea, we did that.” So, There will come a day, when we look back an say, “kill capitalism? yea, we did that.” “smash racism? yea, we did that”

Communism is not just a possibility. Communism is alive!

 The real impossibility is capitalism.

This system proves day in day out that it sets us up to fail. That’s why thousands of African migrants die crossing the most lethal route in the world. Their only crime was seeking to escape poverty and war. That’s why thousands of women will return to the same garment factory that murdered/burned their co-workers if means another day to feed their family! It is impossible to get justice under this system!

While this system proves everyday it’s a failure, workers prove every day that communism is the answer. The way we intend to treat our kids or stand for someone who is under attack provides clues as to the kind of what world we want to live in. In time of disasters like Hurricane Katrina or Sandy, it is the workers who go out and help. Or when in Ferguson over night, they went from being just another kid being terrorized by the cops to a soldier in the streets! All these are glimpses of collectivity, running a society that feeds on justice. What are only glimmers today will be human nature and instinct under communism.

Our choice of revolution lives, whether dormant or waking, in all.

When capitalism, killer health conditions, not ebola, took the lives of 10,000 in West Africa. Workers fought back demanding basic supplies! And just so the bosses can prove how impossible it is to live a decent life under capitalism, the only thing they provided these protesters were bullets and tear gas! When those workers resisted, it cued us to do the same!

So if workers fight back and have always been fighting back. And if communism isn’t so far fetched, what’s holding the world back? Without one party, there is no revolution.

Like in 1963 in Birmingham Alabama. It was one of the flashpoint of segregation and fightback. That’s where a klan thug bombed a church, murdering four little black girls. That’s where thousand of kids and young people had the courage to stand up against vicious attack dogs, the kkk, the mayor, the water hoses that washed the kids down the streets, the jails. All for what? There’s a footage of this black teenage girl among all her comrades in a jail cell smiling and said, “i want my rights. i want equality.” For these youth, equality meant fighting jim crow. But it wasn’t enough.

They were mostly nonviolent. What the bosses fed them was — when the dog bite, when the cops shoot, when the kkk lynches, stay calm. The bosses shoved nonviolence down the throats of the youth and choked them into defeat. Capitalism is the most violent system in history. We will not surrender our lives to that! We will fight force with revolutionary force. And we will live!

So forward from Alabama to right here in Flatbush — fifty years later — youth ignited a rebellion after the cops slaughtered Kiki Gray.  It was a tremor, but shook the ground underneath the cops’ feet. We chanted, “NYPD you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” But, it wasn’t enough

One year later, Ferguson. Youth again flooded the streets because cops killed Michael Brown. Again, they had courage to withstand the dogs, the kkk, the national guard, the tanks, the rifles, the tear gas, the rubber bullets. With PLP, the chant went from “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot” to “Fists up! Fight back!”

8 months later. Baltimore. and it still won’t be enough.

All For what? To end Jim Crow in 2015  to live in a world without the dictatorship of the racist cops, the banks, the courts, and politicians. But it wasn’t enough. What did the bosses have to offer to black fighters? The ballot box.

Rebellions will spark. The pent up rage of these brutal years will explode over and over. But the flames will be put out. Without a revolutionary party, we can’t turn a spark into a fire this whole system down.

How do we go from from fighting the cops to fighting the Rockefellers? To fighting the oil bosses? PLP. We need one organization leading one world into the final victory? What is victory today? Joining PLP. How can we sustain a victory? Fighting with PLP. With a party armed with communism, turn down for what?

No matter how dark the night, The sun and daughter of revolution will rise! What gives us such confidence to say this? The very people in this march! The people walking by! The revolution will be won by ragtag soldiers, the revolution will be won by the very people the bosses discard as surplus, as useless. the very kids the bosses starve will feed themselves revolution. the very youth the bosses put into prison, or declare not worth teaching will be the ones to lead us into communism. They will break free of the biggest jail of all: capitalism.

And that’s why our future is bright.  Make no mistake of it, that day will come, and workers will live. The Kikis and Kyams of the world will live! But, it can’t and it won’t happen without you.

This Ferguson was a preview. Baltimore was a preview. It was a little taste of we got in store for the bosses. The politicians wanna declare war on our kids, from the neighborhoods of Chicago, Brooklyn to the tents in Haiti, Syria, and Ukraine. To the bosses we say, you can’t stop the revolution!

Every kid you kill is an inch deeper you dig in your grave. Because the working class never forgets. Who killed Shantel? Who killed Kyam? Who killed Eric? Who Kiki? Who killed Rahmarley? Who killed Freddie? Who killed Mike? Who killed Tyrone? There are too many names! For every kid you will, a hundred more bear witness to this racist system that feeds off the blood of your youth. You expose yourself for the bloodsucker you are, leeching off the labor of workers.

So while the bosses preach that communism is dead, it’s them whose time is ticking! Everyone in this march — in every place that PLP has a base — can attest that communism is alive!

From the birth of exploitation, workers fought back! For fifty year, PLP has been fighting back! Onwards to another fifty! Because today — May Day — is the beginning of another year of winning thousands to communism. So where do we go from here? We gotta turn up! We gotta toughen up! We gotta bring out the communist aspirations in people and motivate them to act on it! To those who can’t wait to see communism, bring communism to where you are at.

For those of you who are questioning, like my little sisters are, I tell you the same thing i tell them. The only thing I have to offer you is the best organization that exists in this world. There is no security under capitalism. I can’t guarantee food, or a job, or safety. The only thing I could show you is a fighting chance for you to create the kind of world I wish I could’ve raised you in.

So sisters and brothers, join us in creating the world we know our kids need. From Baltimore to Nepal, the world calls out to you. This is your chance to join. Take the leap. And when you do, you are joining the hands, life, and blood of billions of fighters past, present, and future. With that, how could we not win? the future belongs to us only if we dare to fight for it! The fight for communism can’t stop, won’t stop because workers can, workers did, and workers will continue to fight back! Long live communism! Power to the workers!

The cops are one of the capitalist state’s tools of oppression, an essential instrument to terrorize workers and deter  fightback against racism and inequality. But the history of class struggle shows that police atrocities also expose the bosses’ vulnerability. They spark anti-racist rebellion. They bring us closer to the revolution that will smash this brutal system once and for all.     
The latest example of this contradiction came when working-class youth in Baltimore rebelled against capitalist exploitation and the racist murder of Freddie Gray. In a frantic move to turn down the heat, Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby brought criminal charges against six cops involved in the modern-day lynching. (Three of them are Black.) Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic Party candidate for president in 2016, is vowing to reform “justice” in the United States, notably a prison system that locks up a higher proportion of Black men than South Africa’s at the height of apartheid.
But make no mistake: these charges and promises will do nothing to end the scourge of cop terror. All politicians serve one capitalist faction or another; all rely on the police to enforce the racist segregation that divides our class. They need cops to attack strikers and protect the bosses‘ super-profits that depress all wages by paying Black and Latin families $612 billion less yearly in income than white families (PEW Research Center). In addition, cop terror and the school-to-prison
pipeline in poor neighborhoods act to lower wages even further. These racist policies create a desperate army of unemployed youth who are forced to work for poverty pay.  
When liberal politicians like Mosby and Clinton try to pacify workers’ anger, they reflect the dominant finance capital wing’s concern about threats to the capitalist order. As the U.S. ruling class prepares to challenge its main imperialist rivals, China and Russia, it needs to gain the allegiance of working-class youth, the people who fight the bosses’ wars. Mass alienation and anti-racist anger would doom the U.S. capitalists to defeat, as they saw all too clearly in Vietnam.
The Progressive Labor Party stands firmly with the youth who rebelled against the system in Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and Ferguson, Missouri, and in dozens of other cities in the U.S. and around the world. We call upon workers everywhere to follow their example, under the banner of communism — the only system where racist murders, unemployment, sexism and all the evils of capitalism have no place.
Prosecution and Pacification
Mosby’s decision to charge the cops who murdered Freddie Gray — in contrast to the free pass given the killers in Ferguson — is tied to the agenda of the dominant U.S. capitalist wing. The charge is being led by arch-imperialist George Soros, the liberal billionaire whose life’s mission is to make sure the U.S. is ready for war against Russia or China.
Soros bankrolls the Open Society Institute (OSI), which seeks to channel anti-capitalist rage into war-bent, pro-U.S. sentiment in strategic areas around the world. The OSI has funneled millions of dollars to potential anti-capitalist hot spots, from Black Lives Matter to the Arab Spring countries in the Middle East. In Ferguson alone, the organization spent $33 million after the racist murder of Mike Brown (Daily Mail, 1/15/15). In Ukraine, the OSI has fervently supported the
CIA-backed leadership in its conflict with Russia. Soros is hoping to influence the trajectory of Baltimore’s unrest in a similar way.
Soros has found an ally in Mosby, whose assistant prosecutor, Portia Wood, has served on OSI-Baltimore’s Leadership Council since 2008. On May 3, the New York Times, the U.S. bosses’ leading daily paper, published Baltimore-based activist Sonja Sohn’s reaction to Mosby’s move: “On Friday, one city official seemed to finally answer the desperate pleas of poor Baltimore residents.” It’s probably no coincidence that Sohn’s Baltimore Wake Up project also cashes OSI checks.
But problems have already surfaced with Mosby’s prosecution. She acted in such haste to please her capitalist masters that she may have undermined her chances of convicting the six killer kkkops, always a long shot in the rigged “justice” system. Technical questions have arisen over whether a knife allegedly found in Freddie Gray’s possession was a switchblade. (Not that the knife had anything to do with his being arrested without cause or subsequently traumatized into a coma while inside a police van.) In addition, it appears that the charges filed by Mosby’s office may have mistakenly identified a plumber and an elementary school cafeteria manager instead of two of the cops (Baltimore Sun, 5/4/15).  
Hillary, You Liar
In an April 29 speech at Columbia University, self-styled humanitarian Hillary Clinton said, “What we’ve seen in
Baltimore should, indeed does, tear at our soul.” She proposed a thorough reform of the criminal “justice” system — an end to mass incarceration, an overhaul of mandatory minimum sentences. But Clinton, too, works for imperialist U.S. interests. The policy-shaping think tank she co-founded, the Center for American Progress (CAP), is bankrolled by Soros, Citigroup, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Its board includes Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, who once said the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children from U.S. sanctions throughout the 1990s were “worth it.”
Clinton’s anti-jailing stance stems from a March 23 CAP report, “Expanding Opportunities in America’s Urban Areas,” which notes that up to 100 million U.S. workers — as many as one in three — have a criminal record. Like her capitalist patrons, Clinton is worried that these millions will have no stake in fighting for a system that robs them of freedom and job prospects.
In her Columbia speech, Clinton spoke of “alternative punishment” to jail. Clinton wants to unpack prisons to fill the barracks. She failed to mention, however, that it was her husband, Bill Clinton, who instituted the policies that threw millions of Black and Latin men and women into the prison system in the first place. Or that it was Bill Clinton who shredded welfare, sending millions of families deeper into poverty. Hillary Clinton’s new talking points are a deceitful ploy to gain support for her presidential bid and to channel working-class youth into the military. She is singing the same tune as the Soros-funded Huffington Post. In a 2014 column, “Uncle Sam (Should) Want You: National Service vs. Mass Incarceration,” an Ohio State University professor, Steven Conn, wrote:

For roughly 30 years between 1940 and 1973 American men were drafted into the Military….[T]hat period of service helped many with their transition into adulthood, exactly at that moment when some young men wind up in the criminal justice system today. I am not suggesting a return to compulsory military service. Instead, I am suggesting that a more widely conceived program of national service might have a significant impact on crime and on the men most likely to commit it by providing them with the kind of work, structure and sense of purpose that is missing for too many of them.

From Rebellion to Communist Revolution
Workers in Baltimore and worldwide should beware of reformers’ attempts to “fix” the exploitation of capitalism.  As long as society is run by and for profit, racism, sexism,
unemployment, and imperialist slaughter can only get worse. The one way to rid the world of these plagues is to organize under the leadership of the Progressive Labor Party. PLP fights to lead the working class to smash the system in its entirety. We will create the only society that values every life — a communist society.