BROOKLYN, NY, January 2—The struggle continues two years after winning the fight to integrate two formerly separate sports programs on John Jay’s Campus–one with mostly white and Asian students and another of mostly Black and Brown students. Under capitalism, we are constantly reminded that a win under this system is just the beginning and even as communists we can never let our guard down or coast on reform victories.
For the second year in a row the fall start of sports programs on campus continued to be combined but not integrated–leading to teams filled with mostly white and Asian players. Self-critically, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members in the school incorrectly focused on in-house fixes instead of making the struggle more mass and visible to bring together antiracist fighters in the building to fight back against these racist practices.
Inspired by a sharp antiracist flier written by PLP parents and others in 2017 that rocked the racist status quo and forced the Department of Education (DoE) to combine the sports teams, one school’s student government created and distributed hundreds of their fliers demanding that the sports teams on campus be truly integrated and that teams that do not look like the racial makeup of our campus not be allowed to compete. That flier will continue to be passed out in front of the school even as it spreads through students’ social media.
Invigorated by the mostly positive response of their peers, the students plan to convene a forum to attract more students to the fight and to discuss and plan for when their demands are not met.
Capitalism forces our youth to compete against each other, fostering artificial and racist divisions that they will later use to divide white, Black, and Latin workers so that all can be oppressed and exploited for profit. PLP members on campus are committed to building anti-racist and integrated teams on and off the court. Fighting to expand an ever-growing group of multiracial students, parents, and staff to take on the racist attacks capitalism will continue to throw at us, is the only way forward. The struggle continues!
Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, which killed 1200 mostly civilians and took more than 200 hostages, workers around the world have been focused on the massive, Nazi-like ethnic cleansing being carried out in Gaza by the Israeli fascists and their U.S. imperialist partners. Millions have taken to the streets to oppose this racist genocide that threatens to become a much wider war. As of December 29, about 22,000 Palestinians have been killed, hundreds of thousands injured and more than 1.5 million have been displaced, mostly children.
Bosses kill workers exposing their genocide
Within this mass destruction of an unarmed civilian population, there is another target besides Hamas, a war against journalists and journalism. Of the 1,200 Palestinian journalists and media workers based in Gaza at the start of the war, 95 have been killed. Reporters Without Borders stated, “The Palestinian territory has been subjected to a veritable eradication of journalism.”
Most of the media workers were specifically targeted by the Israeli military. According to information collected by the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS), at least 84 of the 95 were killed in “surgical” or sniper Israeli attacks that targeted either their homes or the area where they were covering news stories. Some received direct and specific threats to their lives from the Israeli military before they were killed. Hundreds of family members have also been killed in targeted strikes on journalists’ homes.
On October 25, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh lost his wife, daughter, son, and grandson in an Israeli airstrike on the home where they were sheltering in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Al-Dahdouh remained in Gaza City to continue his coverage of Israeli atrocities, despite threats made against him.
On November 8, a Zionist group published a false report that photojournalist Yasser Qudih and three other photographers had prior knowledge of the October 7 attacks. Reuters published one of Qudih’s photos and categorically denied the false claims. Even though the group withdrew its false accusations, on November 13, four Israeli missiles targeted Qudih’s home in southern Gaza and killed eight of his family members.
On November 22, Al Jazeera reporter Anas Al-Sharif received multiple phone calls from Israeli military officers instructing him to stop reporting and leave northern Gaza and that he was under surveillance. On December 11, an Israeli airstrike targeted his family home in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, killing his 90-year-old father.
On December 6, 2023, Al Jazeera correspondent Momen Al-Sharafi lost 22 family members—including his parents, siblings, their spouses, and nieces and nephews—in an Israeli airstrike on the home in Jabalia refugee camp where they had sought refuge.
Israel has not permitted foreign journalists into Gaza. On December 19, the Foreign Press Association (“FPA”) in Jerusalem, representing about 370 journalists from 130 media outlets in more than 30 countries, filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court requesting immediate access to Gaza. Because foreign journalists have not been able to enter Gaza, Palestinian journalists are the world’s only media eyewitnesses to the war crimes being committed by Biden and Netanyahu.
U.S. reporters against genocide fightback
This war is also being carried out, on a less violent but no less important level, within the U.S. Award-winning New York Times magazine writer Jazmine Hughes was forced to resign from the Times after signing a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Nine reporters for the Los Angeles Times were suspended for 30 days from the regular beats for also signing a ceasefire letter. This intimidation and retaliation are creating a chilling effect in newsrooms around the country, already battered by mass layoffs, where media workers are afraid to speak out.
Media workers in three major unions are working together to overcome this fear. Workers have attended marches and rallies against the war and are planning a three-union, “Know Your Rights” panel to encourage media workers to speak out. Also, a report is being produced that will document retaliation taken against media workers for opposing Israeli/U.S. genocide in Gaza.
Two of these unions, the NewsGuild-CWA (the largest U.S. union of staff journalists) and the National Writers Union (a union of freelance media workers and authors) contributed $10,000 each to the International Federation of Journalists’ Safety Fund to provide journalists in Gaza and the West Bank with helmets, flak jackets, battery charges and whatever else they need.
As we enter the New Year, the Dark Night of imperialism and growing wars is getting darker. The international working class is shackled by racism, nationalism, and religion without a mass communist movement to lead us. As the night gets darker, our light must burn brighter. Fighting back is winning. In the heat of class struggle our ideas can come to life and create the conditions for building a mass international Progressive Labor Party.
The following are letters from just some of the organizing against the imperialist genocide in Gaza. Are you organizing where you are? Tell us about it. Do you want to push past the limits of what the bosses have to offer? Push for communist ideas and join the International Progressive Labor Party!
HAITI, December 28—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) here in Haiti is organizing for our annual “Soupe de Solidarité” on New Year’s Day. It is a celebration of the successful fight in Haiti against slavery and colonization by the French slave masters. Before Jan. 1, 1804, soupe joumou (pumpkin soup) was reserved only for the slave masters and their minions; afterwards, the former slaves relished their soup, not only for its tastiness but as a reminder of their fight for justice against racism and slavery.
This year, we are dedicating our soup in class solidarity with the workers and students of Palestine—Gaza and the West Bank—who are facing a brutal genocide at the hands of their capitalist oppressors in Israel, and against those imperialist powers complicit in the brutality. We in Haiti know from bitter experience that capitalism and imperialism have created the conditions of poverty and despair—and an eagerness to fight back—that we both face.
We charge the imperialists, especially the U.S., Canada, and France, with sharing a bloody history of supporting Israeli bosses’ aggression and racism, much as they did and continue to do in Haiti. Just as the workers and students of Palestine are under occupation, so too will Haiti be, again, with the coming of U.N. troops from Kenya and other African countries (as if we should welcome oppressors in black skin), supposedly to be peacekeepers. Imperialism needs colonial violence; clearing the land of Indigenous peoples to make room for settlers; imposing and entrenching that land theft with police or military violence; stealing resources and the value of our labor, trying to normalize inequality, etc.
Mexico
Our young comrades are taking the lead in organizing the day’s activities with their families, neighbors, and classmates. As we shop, cook, serve, and eat together, we will have yet another opportunity to discuss with them the need for international working-class solidarity to fight against all the misery that is baked into capitalism and imperialism in its eternal bloody quest for profits and control. We will talk about the need to reject nationalism as a response to this brutality; all our alliances must be with our class, not with the national bourgeoisie, who only want to maintain capitalism and become the masters themselves. And, most importantly, we will talk about the need to fight for communism, an egalitarian society that will serve the needs of workers and students everywhere, under the leadership of the PLP.
PLP comrades took the lead in introducing a resolution at the November meeting of our transit union calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to military aid to Israel. It passed overwhelmingly! Later we used that resolution to bolster the fight for the reinstatement of teachers put on leave for pro-Palestinian posts in Maryland.
Progressive Labor Party members and friends in Mexico have participated in four demonstrations against the war in Palestine. In two of them we have carried flyers with the communist analysis of the situation in Gaza that have been published in CHALLENGE. One of those demonstrations was organized by the teachers of Oaxaca, where the party has been organized for decades, and there was a massive distribution. Our analysis is generally well received, but in the leadership of the protests a nationalist line predominates that supports Gaza without distinguishing the workers in Palestine and workers in Israel with the capitalist oppressors that run both the Israeli knesset (parliament), the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas in Palestine. For this reason, some workers receive our pro-international working-class position with reserve and criticism.
We have also held meetings in our collective to analyze the international situation and especially in Gaza, to improve our understanding and bring it to our base. We have had a couple of virtual meetings with colleagues from Colombia on the topic. Three weekends ago we had an activity in an industrial neighborhood with teachers and workers, in which the analysis of the party was presented, which was very well received and was linked to the situation that workers in Mexico are experiencing.
Though the actions our collective has taken have been small, they have led to the sharpening of our class’ understanding of capitalism, imperialism, and have deepened our solidarity with our brothers in other parts of the world. Each meeting helps us plant seeds for the future. Every worker we win to the Party brings us a step closer to building a communist world of social equality, where solidarity and collectivity prevail.
Brooklyn, NY, December 17—PLP comrades rallied in an immigrant community where we’ve been organizing for many years. We called for fightback against the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and for refugees, displaced people, and migrants all over the world. Despite the rain we distributed 300 leaflets and 200 CHALLENGEs to a receptive community.
The National Writers Union (NWU), a union of freelance media workers and authors, was the first national union in North America to make a public statement against the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by the State of Israel. PLP members have been active in NWU for some time. As of December 26, 2023, of the 1,200 Palestinian journalists and media workers based in Gaza at the start of the war, 102 have been killed. In solidarity with the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, NWU donated $10,000 to the International Federation of Journalists Safety Fund to provide journalists in Gaza and the West Bank with helmets, flak jackets, battery charges and more.
BOGOTÁ—There have been about 15 marches in Bogotá denouncing the U.S.-Israeli genocide and apartheid violence against workers in Palestine, most organized by anti-Zionist youth groups. There have been sit-ins at the Palestinian embassy as well as several conferences organized by the unions where the genocide of workers in Palestine has been exposed. Several groups of militant young people belonging to different groups are holding neighborhood rallies that expose the ongoing bloodshed in the Gaza Strip. My dad and other colleagues have been accompanying me. Some of these initiatives have lowered their intensity due to the holidays, but future sit-ins are being planned for the week after. We have been distributing CHALLENGE and raising the the party's line whenever possible, explaining to workers that 75 years of imperialist occupation and its atrocities will never be resolved with the creation of a Palestinian state,as many of these collectives and revisionist groups call for, that is being pushed by the fake leftist Petro who openly supports the UN and its liberal policies in favor of a "more humane and regulated" war. We openly propose that war is a symptom of the degradation of the imperialist capitalist system. The only solution to genocide from Gaza to Sudan is a class war for communism. It is only when the capitalist, imperialist system is smashed that we can stop the endless cycle of war and bloodshed over imperialist competition for resources like oil.
Clifton, December 28—Multiracial masses of workers and students across New Jersey continue to join the international working class in exposing capitalism for its profit-hungry genocide in Gaza and the racist poisoning of nationalism that protects it. On December 28, comrades from the Revolutionary Communist Progressive Labor Party joined about 80 other anti-racist fighters in protesting outside of military defense contractor L3Harris, in Clifton, NJ. Amid handing out CHALLENGE, when we asked workers at the L3Harris protest why this particular action was important and what role capitalism plays in connecting L3Harris to the genocide in Gaza, workers responded: “This company is making money from it! Look at workers across Canada. They have blocked this and other defense companies from shipping materials to Israel! This defense company has also helped militarize the U.S. border!”
Building comradery and trust over our common rage towards capitalist borders and genocide warmed us up to express to workers how nationalism is holding workers back from finally overthrowing capitalism. As a Jewish worker we met at another recent protest formulated, in this mass fightback fewer have trouble understanding the backwardness of Israeli nationalism. There it means the ruling class fearmongers Jewish workers into linking their own safety with the national interests of their bosses. This works to poison them with the idea that slaughtering Palestinian workers in Gaza and suppressing antiracist workers elsewhere is necessary.
When asked in return by a great young couple, what is the most revolutionary thing that needs to be said right now, we shared how the history of the 20th century reveals replacing one nationalism for another has kept capitalism alive. In other words, fighting for national liberation from a colonial or imperialist power has been insufficient. Fighting for the genocide of Palestinians to end on the basis of nationalist liberation allows a set of “progressive” bosses to use our uprising as workers to seize state power and continue benefiting from exploiting the working class within their borders.
Workers worldwide are looking to the Palestinian struggle for answers to our own fights against the same capitalist system. To establish a society that organizes the international working class to actively suppress the bosses’ exploitation and destroy it is a conclusion harder to make from this fight. We need to continue to do the life-long work of building fightback side by side and expose the bosses’ contradictions that weaken their nationalist grip against a growing communist practice of working-class internationalism.
SOUTH ORANGE, NJ, December 31—Progressive Labor Party comrades and friends joined a weekly protest near our homes, in South Orange, NJ demanding a Ceasefire in Palestine/Israel. We continue to see this struggle draw folks to become more militant. There we responded to leadership from a woman supporting the protest and spontaneously shouting we needed to do more. We took her seriously and asked what she suggested. She responded: workers need to make their unions go on strike. We need to connect more what’s happening in Gaza with the lives of workers in the U.S. She was identifying with workers’ power! Therefore, we shared how electrifying it was to recently participate with a multiracial group of workers, locally and abroad, in directly confronting L3 Harris military defense bosses over the bloody profits they make from this slaughter. We encouraged her to share her ideas with the crowd. She ended up leading chants and speaking a couple of times. In return for being inspired by one of us she vouched for us to give a speech. Here’s an excerpt:
“…the L3Harris action demonstrates another way workers can directly confront regional bosses over the limits of their genocidal system at the physical doorsteps where they produce their profits. We need to also see this as an exercise in challenging their power over the state and spread this idea for more workers to seize its potential…From local municipalities all the way to the federal level “progressive” politicians have allowed fascist resolutions attacking antiracist workers or have betrayed measures against genocide vowing down to their U.S. ruling class masters and Zionist interests. The current fightback in nearby West Orange shows this…Therefore, we need to make challenging the bosses over their state power primary over putting our confidence in any politician…The more we do this the more we can see a massive multiracial working class united against racism and imperialism is what fascists need to be afraid of, not the other way around.”
Many workers took CHALLENGE and leaflets explaining how the history of nationalism in Palestine/Israel has contributed to the latest atrocities. We received encouragement from workers to say more!
Learning to challenge the bosses’ control over their states in the fight against genocide now, will build our confidence to finally rip power from their hands once and for all and fight for a world where workers rule without money, racist divisions, nations, and genocide – that’s communism!
Since 10/7/23, the Israeli state has continued genocidal bombardment on the Gaza strip. This disproportionate retaliation has killed more than 20,000, including at least 6,000 children. Whistleblowers in the Israeli Defense Force’s own ranks report using artificial intelligence named “The Gospel” to airstrike densely populated areas, “’Nothing happens by accident. When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed” (+972 Magazine, 11/30/23). This carnage has been fully backed by a Democratic president and a ruling class of liberal fascists.
On the US side, children are also being targeted by liberal fascist Democratic mayors like Eric Adams in NYC. The NYC schools chancellor, David A. Banks, has made it clear that “politics” are to be barred from schools, except of course unless one speaks unconditionally in favor of Israel.
I know firsthand the fascism that teachers are dealing with. Since 10/7, Muslim students at my school have been afraid to come to school and to participate in after-school activities. With the murder of a 6-year-old Palestinian in Chicago and the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont, the students at my school are understandably afraid. I attempted to solicit support for a student letter asking that my school take a stance against genocide.
In response, I was removed from my own classroom without ever being told any charges. I “disappeared” from school which sends a signal to students that those who stand against racism are targets—that the students that I can no longer teach are acceptable collateral if it chills dissent.
But we will not be silenced! A hundred letters of support across parents, students, and alumni have reached my school. Faculty have begun to organize. Consciousness is being raised. PLP is ready to fight back. The ruling class must not be allowed to make teachers and students disposable. As we organize under conditions of rising fascism, internationalism is necessary more than ever. No worker from Gaza to NYC should ever be an acceptable casualty of fascism. We must resolve to unify and fight for communism, a future in which the international working class finally has the schools that they deserve.
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Students, workers, families— Smash genocide & fascist censorship
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- 06 January 2024 222 hits
NEW YORK CITY, January 2—When a public school teacher was removed for taking a stance against genocide, students led the way in organizing against this fascist attack. Incidents like this illustrate the capitalist crisis: amid growing volatility and war tensions, the bosses are losing ideological control of the classrooms. An attack on teachers is an attack on student learning conditions, signaling to young people that they are disposable if they do not parrot racist ruling-class ideas. This is an opportunity to expose the bosses’ system and build a movement for an antiracist world.
The attack and response
After weeks of unspeakable carnage visited on the working class of the Gaza strip by the forces of the racist, Zionist Israeli state, a strong letter signed by dozens of student clubs representing hundreds of angry youth was delivered to the principal of one of New York City’s largest high schools. This letter blasted the administration for homicidally deleting Palestinian life from its public registration of grief and memorialization, a cornerstone of the ideological architecture that has been facilitating Palestinian genocide for the better part of a century.
To repress dissent, the Department of Education (DoE) bosses ejected an antiracist teacher from their NYC public high school building and placed them under investigation all because this educator vocally supported this courageous mass student movement against genocide. They were escorted out without charge, supposedly to protect youth, but political dissidents are more quickly than teachers accused of physical violence or racism.
The response from students, alumni and co-workers was immediate in defense of the dedicated antiracist educator. An email campaign began a flood of statements of support that continues to grow in strength.
This educator joins an expanding number of workers and youth on the job and on campuses across the world who have faced repression for taking a stand against U.S.-backed genocide in the Gaza strip. In NYC, a pre-K teacher was targeted for using children’s books to explain Palestinian history in her class. Another teacher has faced calls for his removal for pro-Palestine social media posts. Bay Area teachers have also faced reprisals for holding teach-ins against genocide. Meanwhile in Maryland, four teachers have been placed on indefinite administrative leave for so much as emailing their support of the working class of Palestine.
Education, a battleground
The bosses need schools to produce workers that will produce and have the necessary nationalism for future wars. Fascist responses are a sign of the bosses’ weakness, not strength. In this context, all teachers have a role to play in equipping students to develop a clear understanding of the world. We must teach and model the practice of interrogating what we hear. That the ruling class has succeeded in building a school culture where some educators agree that it is “inappropriate” to struggle alongside students for politically and ethically principled positions that critically interrogate the role their institutions play in extermination is a clear indicator of growing fascism.
Nazi leaders worked to influence young people in youth groups, in their families, and on the streets. Schools also had a key role to play. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, they quickly passed new laws to make public education reflect and teach their nationalist and racial ideologies. Jewish teachers were fired from their posts, and other teachers were encouraged to join the National Socialist Teachers League; by 1936, over 97 percent of teachers were members. Nazi leaders also created new curricula and textbooks to be used throughout the country. (“Schooling for the National Community” Facing History, 8/2016)
Taking a page from the Nazi playbook, DOE Chancellor David Banks has repeatedly issued a policy that supposedly prohibits all political speech in schools. This is despite Banks hypocritically sending mass emails to all DOE staff full-throated defending the actions of Israel. The DOE’s bloodthirsty rallying around the flag has greenlit the targeted murder of a hundred United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) teachers, mass displacement of students, and the bombing of every single university in the Gaza Strip. Indeed, since October 7th the indiscriminate slaughter of the workers and youth of the Gaza strip (see box) has not elicited one peep of condemnation from NYC education bosses.
The ideological veil wrapping its gag order around the throats of student outcry is as predictable as it is shameless. While the NYPD counter-terrorism squad has been sicced on Hillcrest High School students who mobilized in late November against their teacher’s public participation in a series of pro-Israel rallies calling for–among other things–“No Cease Fire!”, that teacher has not been investigated despite openly causing a disruption at school. In fact, the principal of that school, on December 22, received a promotion to work in the central offices of the NYC public schools. Meanwhile antiracist educators are swiftly disciplined.
It is no accident that the bosses have recently unveiled that they will soon roll out a uniform, top-down curriculum throughout all of the NY school system to further repress dissent and to create a further hedge against working class antiracist and anti-imperialist action.
What’s to be done?
Bosses who proclaim the need for ‘trauma-informed’ and ‘culturally sustaining’ education have traumatized students organizing against genocide. The removal of teachers aims for a fascist chilling effect, but the righteous anger of youth and workers will defeat these attempts to silence anti-war voices.
Student anger is not going to simply melt away. Every day without a committed antiracist teacher is a slap in the face to their aspirations to live in a world free from the scourges of racism and genocide. A follow up-email blasting the principal for ignoring the student letter against genocide and racism was sent recently indicating strong resolution to pick up the struggle against imperialist war in the new year.
Stitching together disparate instances of repression into a strong, internationalist, antiracist movement will be at the forefront of anti-fascist organizing in 2024. Some jobs and positions will be won, others will be lost. Ruling classes of incomparable bloodthirst hold sway. Lives lost to the bombs of US imperialism are forever gone. If you are angered by this, you are an internationalist. The ruling class illusions of “free speech” are eroding as capitalists continue to repress workers who step out of line. Workers sense that a better world is possible, rooted in science and justice. They are organizing against this outright mutilation of reality to create a world in which youth are not repressed but are leaders of the revolution.
If you want to fight…
If you want to take action against genocide and fascist repression of those who take a stand against it you have a choice—to join the Progressive Labor Party. Our class will feel its strength as masses move beyond the borders of nationalism to defend targeted friends and comrades. In the crucible of class struggle the growth of a revolutionary communist party from hundreds to thousands and eventually to millions means that communism itself is transformed from an idea into a material force with the power to defeat all bosses, erase all borders, and inaugurate a classless society that is the only true basis for peace and justice for the working people of the world.
