As the Israeli rulers’ bloodbath in Gaza reaches new depths, it’s no accident that inter-imperialist conflict is widening around the world’s largest strategic reserves of oil and gas. The latest capitalist disaster began with a ruthless, anti-worker terror attack by Hamas and a genocidal response by the state terrorist Israeli “Defense” Forces (IDF). Now it has spread into IDF violence in the occupied West Bank and bloody fights in at least four neighboring countries: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen (Guardian, 12/26/23). This knife’s-edge volatility marks the snowballing decline of the old U.S.-led world order and the rise of competing imperialist bosses in China and Russia. Along with Ukraine, Taiwan, and the South and East China Seas, the Middle East is a prime potential flashpoint for World War III.

In Syria, months of airstrikes against pro-Iran militias have failed to stop drone attacks on U.S. bases there (National Public Radio, 11/9/23). In Lebanon, Iran’s proxy forces in Hezbollah are firing rockets and drones at military posts and border towns in Israel, forcing the evacuation of 60,000 residents. Not to be outdone, the IDF has bombed Lebanon daily, displacing 74,500 people and killing 160 (ABC News, 12/28/23). Israel’s rulers say they are ready to open a second front in a war that could soon get much bigger (New York Times, 12/27/23).

If anything, the tempo of these clashes seems to be quickening. On Christmas Day, U.S. airstrikes targeted Iran-backed forces in Iraq. On December 31, U.S. Navy helicopters sank three Yemeni Houthi boats in the Red Sea after reports of an attempted maritime hijacking (abcnews.go.com, 12/31/23). On January 2, a top Hamas official was assassinated by a drone strike outside Beirut. One day later, in a rare terror attack inside Iran, explosions massacred more than one hundred mourners on the anniversary of the U.S. assassination of General Qassim Suleimani.

Worldwide, the imperialists’ battle for supremacy is reshaping alliances and escalating their struggle to control markets, resources, and labor—a struggle at the hideous heart of the capitalist profit system. According to the Carter Doctrine, as proclaimed in 1980 by U.S. President Jimmy Carter: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests” of the U.S., and “will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” More than forty years later, we are witnessing the legacy of the president who supposedly championed “human rights”:  the horrific suffering in Gaza.

Joe Biden: war criminal in chief
Make no mistake—it’s the U.S. bosses’ “vital interests” in oil and gas that compel their cold-blooded support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip. Back in October, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s goose-stepping defense minister, made the Zionist regime’s plans clear: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel….We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” The predictable results: the internal displacement of more than 80 percent of Gaza’s population, looming mass starvation, and the slaughter in plain sight of more than 22,000 people, two thirds of them women and children—or about “twice as many women and children in two months…as Russian forces have killed in Ukraine in nearly two years” (cbc.ca, 12/30/23). According to a former United Nations war crimes investigator, "the density of Israel’s first month of bombardment in Gaza” has no parallel since the U.S. genocide in Vietnam, nearly half a century ago (cnn.com, 12/22/23).

Many civilians have been slaughtered by monstrous 2,000-pound bombs dropped on Gaza City south of Rafah, where the IDF steered families to find safe shelter. The bombs have a “lethal fragmentation radius” of about 1,200 feet, an area equivalent to 58 soccer fields (cnn.com, 12/22/23). They are so blatantly criminal that the U.S. military death machine used only one of them in its no-holds-barred war against ISIS (cnn.com, 12/22/23). But since October 7, more than five thousand of these “bunker-busters” have been furnished to Israel by the same Joe Biden administration that’s now publicly advising the Zionist baby killers to “minimize” civilian casualties (cnn.com, 12/22/23). They’re the same pack of shameless liberal liars who vetoed a December 8, 2023 cease-fire resolution at the UN Security Council.

Workers everywhere must fight back against U.S. imperialist’s atrocities. At the same time, we must call out the regional gangsters who run Israel and Iran, along with “national liberation” misleaders like Hamas. Under capitalism, wars are fueled by the rulers’ need for maximum profit. There can never be world peace as long as the bosses are grasping for their next dollar. Only the international working class, organized for communist revolution by Progressive Labor Party (PLP), can end imperialist war by smashing the bosses and their states. Only our class can cure the fatal diseases of nationalism, racism, and sexism for all time.

Imperialists sharpen knives for oil
Of the ten countries with the largest proven oil reserves, five are in the Persian Gulf region: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, with close to a trillion barrels of oil among them (Oilprice.com, 4/24/23). Four of those countries are also among the top ten for proven reserves of natural gas (www.worldometers.info, 2023). It’s worth noting that significant oil and gas deposits were recently discovered off the coasts of Lebanon, Israel, and Gaza.

Despite U.S. rulers’ warnings to stay out of the Gulf, Russia and China are infiltrating the region. In 2018, Russian military support led torture king Bashar al-Assad to a civil war victory over his equally brutal U.S.-backed enemies. Last year, China Premier Xi Jinping brokered a “peace” summit to restore diplomatic ties between long-time rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. The October 7 attack by Hamas, possibly orchestrated by the vicious mullahs of Iran, shattered U.S. plans to reconcile Israel’s Zionist bosses with the Saudi rulers (CNBC, 10/12/23).

With backing from both Russia and China, Iran has funded and armed the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq—all sworn enemies of U.S. interests. After nine years of devastating civil war, the Houthi bosses control a strategic area of northern Yemen that borders the Red Sea, the gateway to the Suez Canal—“a vital artery for container ships and fuel tankers,” including major oil interests (New York Times, 12/19/23). Despite a U.S.-backed Saudi bombing campaign that wiped out tens of thousands of civilians, the Houthis remain defiant.

Join the fight for communism
With no end in sight to Israel’s mass murder in Gaza, weakness in the U.S. ruling class has been exposed for all to see. Anti-Zionist sentiment and condemnation of Israeli apartheid rule in its occupied territories are at all-time highs around the world. Notwithstanding the trap of Palestinian nationalism, honest workers’ eyes are opening to the hypocrisy of liberal U.S. misleaders. Workers are turning against the Democrats and threatening not to vote for Biden this November. As U.S. politicians keep funding Israeli genocide, a militant anti-war movement is sprouting. Workers in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago shut down holiday access to airports. Others disrupted the lavish Tournament of Roses Parade on New Year’s Day.

As communists, we need to be in this struggle to combat the leadership’s dead-end nationalism with internationalism. But street protests won’t be enough to end the bosses’ butchery. We need to organize soldiers in all capitalist-led armies to turn the guns around for communist revolution. Only a revolutionary communist party, PLP, can lead this fight to smash imperialist war. Only a united international working class can create a world run by and for workers, where the bosses’ profit-driven wars will be a distant memory. Join us!

UPPER MARLBORO, MD, December 4, 2023-For 10 days, members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), Prince George’s County Police Accountability Team, Coalition of Concerned Mothers, and West Wednesday Coalition joined family members in filling the courtroom for the trial of Michael Owen, Jr., the cop who had killed William ‘Boo Boo’ Green. William was no threat to the cop, who shot him six times at point-blank range while he was handcuffed behind his back in the front of a police cruiser. William had been detained after passing out in his car and hitting some parked cars.

Racist kkkourt exonerates killer kkkop
The Prince George’s County State Attorney had charged cop Owen with 2nd-degree murder and he had been kept in jail since 2020. The family received a $20 million settlement from the County through a civil suit and had continued to push for justice by demanding that the state not offer a plea deal but take the case to trial. During the trial, there was no evidence that William had been a threat, but the officer’s dishonest testimony about the events in the car claimed that the handcuffed man had hit him with a shoulder, that the cop’s gun came out of his holster, and that in a supposed fight for the gun, he had no choice but to shoot because he was “afraid I could die.” The jury returned a NOT GUILTY verdict in 90 minutes.

Enraged by the verdict, the family and friends immediately set up a press conference to express their anger that a killer cop is now free. PLP members from Baltimore and Prince George’s County mobilized and made up about half of the crowd of 50 people. Palpable anger about a long history of police murderers surged through the group. The names are familiar even as details vary. Tawanda Jones from West Wednesday in Baltimore called out the system that murdered her brother and said, “Capitalism has to go.”

No justice under racist capitalism
How did the criminal injustice system work its magic to exonerate yet another killer? Several technical issues of unfairness were raised. The jury selection was not done in public, and even though the jury was predominately Black it was also true that  Owen is Black. Second-degree murder requires intent, which was never suggested by the prosecution. Owen’s history of killing another county resident along with multiple complaints of excessive force was never introduced. The prosecution’s cross-examination of  Owen (who took the stand, an unusual, usually desperate defense tactic) did not question his story despite the absence of William’s DNA on the gun and the state’s evaluation of the police car showed no evidence of any struggle. Unnecessarily repetitive instructions to the jury about self-defense were part of the judge’s charges to the jury just before they filed out to deliberate. Despite organizers’ pressure on the prosecution to seriously prosecute over several years, it looks like the State’s Attorney’s prosecutors deliberately threw the case. There is no legal way to appeal the failure of prosecutors to prosecute competently  –  we saw institutional state power in action here!  
The family is now looking to the U.S. Department of Justice to consider civil rights violations by  Owen at the Federal Level.

Members of PLP have been actively engaged at each step of the way and during the trial, several of us had good lunchtime conversations with family and friends about the role of prosecutors, the criminal legal system, and capitalism. CHALLENGE was widely distributed at the press conference and welcomed by many with whom we have joined over the years in Prince George’s County.

The real story here is that, like the Freddy Gray trials in Baltimore in which multiple police were charged but freed by the court, justice is absent from the capitalist system. The court system of the capitalist class is functioning just as intended – pretending to care about justice but actively working to strengthen the hand of the police in carrying out racist and fascist actions on behalf of the ruling class. These cases also show that Black cops are the same as white cops and all do the ruler’s bidding. We must build PLP to destroy this racist capitalist system, even as we fight each case, from Archie Elliott III in 1993 to William in 2020.

Barely 24 hours into 2024, workers shut it down, ruining the bosses’ holidays, blocking roads on the way to JFK, LaGuardia, and Chicago Airports, and keeping the fighting spirit of solidarity alive as bombs continue to incinerate our siblings and children in Gaza. Workers on the West Coast rang in the New Year by swarming the U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi’s residence in San Francisco, and others surrounded D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, demanding the liberal fascist politicians heed our cries for ceasefire in Gaza.

Despite the nonstop agitation, U.S. President Joe Biden, for the second time, bypassed Congress to send more weapons to Israel. It is a grave mistake to think that our conditions from 2023 will not carry into 2024 if we leave the bosses in charge of our destiny.

As the war drums sound toward World War III, U.S. rulers on both sides of the ruling class will be forced to make concessions to pacify workers. As military recruitment and trust in this system continues to tank, the liberal bosses and their Trump flag waving fascist counterparts will pull all the stops out all tricks to fool us into choosing sides, pledge their allegiance to U.S.flag, and sign up and die in their next world war, deciding which imperialist power will be top dog.

As we ring in 2024, demands for a ceasefire will forever ring hollow as long as the demand for oil and global supremacy over Chinese and Russian bosses grow louder and stronger. Whether it’s Gaza or Sudan, 1948 or 2023 as long as capitalist democracy exists genocide will always be mainstay for this decaying rotten imperialist capitalist system. But Progressive Labor Party has a brighter vision for our class. From Vietnam, Iraq, to Palestine, every year for 60 years, PLP has put forth our solution to the non-stop cycle of war, racism, sexism, and the infinite list of horrors it breeds.

Our 2024 resolution to the perpetual crisis of capitalism in 2024 and beyond is to organize the international working class from every corner of the capitalist globe to fight back, and turn every battle against capitalism and imperialism–big or small– into a class war for communist revolution. To achieve our goal we need to organize in our schools, on the job, in our neighborhoods, in our homes here and abroad, and inject our antiracist, antisexist, communist, internationalist ideas We need to organize millions of workers to join the Party and organize a global red army of workers, so we can turn  imperialist wars into a class war for communism to smash these racist butchers once and for all.

As we look back at 2023, remember all the historical lessons and triumphs of the international working class from the Haitian, Bolshevik, and Chinese communist revolutions to the on the job and school strikes, to anti-war demonstrations, and the decades of class struggle against racist oppression and apartheid; from South Africa, to India, and Gaza Palestine as they illuminate our potential.

LONG LIVE THE FIGHT OF THE WORKING CLASS
In the Bronx and Illinois, PL’ers fought the racist courts alongside the family and community members of Raymond Chaluisant, a Latin man murdered by a killer Corrections Officer; Hadi Abuatelah, an Arab teenager who was jumped by kkkops; and Murod Kurdi, killed by a white drunk driver. We disrupted many court hearings and consistently exposed the phony order of the racist injustice system.

In Brooklyn, brave students occupied the offices of administrators at Kingsborough Community College in protest of racist charges against four students.

In Haiti, we organized a community kitchen, preparing large pots of food as a way to build familial bonds with our class siblings in the struggle and challenge the individualist “chak koukouy klere pou je w” or “everyone for themself” ideology of capitalist bosses.

In Newark, we fought back against the school district for firing a Latin antiracist teacher over attending a rally with his students in NYC. We defended students who walked out of their high schools in solidarity with workers in Gaza and showed this same fiery militancy when gutter racists and liberal administrators attacked teachers from San Francisco to Brooklyn for standing with these students.

PL’ers in the American Public Health Association (APHA) celebrated their 40th year sharpening struggle within the organization and took over the recent conference in Atlanta with communist ideas and rallying. As a result, many workers stood beside our leadership, and the APHA bosses were forced to make a statement supporting Palestine, showing our potential to shift power from the bosses to thousands of workers in the association.

From NYC to Chicago to Worcester to D.C., we stood beside healthcare workers, transit workers, and auto workers, striking against crummy conditions, budget cuts, and layoffs. The Covid-19 pandemic, in which  hundreds of thousands of workers were killed by the bosses' neglect and carelessness in the face of deadly disease, exposed how fragmented and racist the capitalist infrastructure really is. To top it off, many of these bosses are still riding high from inflating costs and overburdening workers with new levels of exploitative labor. These extreme conditions gave us PL’ers righteous fury that boosted us to shout out our communist ideas and practices that can smash this system.

For the 500th time, a multiracial group of workers rallied for West Wednesday (an ongoing  commemoration of Tyrone West, a Black man murdered by police) with a 22 vehicle-long caravan. We roared NO MORE police terrorism on the streets of Baltimore!

On May Day, the international workers’ holiday , we marched among hundreds of workers through the pouring rain in NYC, waving our red flags high and passing the torch to Black, Latin, Asian, and white students to take the mic and inspire the crowd to press on through struggle! We also marched throughout Chicago, the Bay Area, and Israel-Palestine.

We held our line at the 300,000 strong New York People’s Climate March and witnessed our communist chants spread throughout the crowd. We kept this same energy at weekly protests against gutter racists in Staten Island who are terrorizing migrants in shelters. We pushed for and demonstrated multiracial unity and internationalist communist fightback every step of the way.

In each of these fights, we exposed the bankruptcy of liberal identity politics, using the bosses’ race, gender, and nationality ideas as a way to knock down the militant multiracial potential of our class. Again and again, we proclaimed that a boss is a boss and a cop is a cop. Both are in place to serve the interests of capital expansion. These political pawns are not allies but potentially ultimate traitors to our class. Our only victories happen when communist ideas catch on to the masses and, ultimately , when workers agree to join the PLP!

WE NEED A REVOLUTION
Young comrades from Haiti to Newark are taking up leadership and steering the PLP into this future. They are reading and leading study groups around the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and giving speeches from the picket lines to crowds of communists at our march on May Day. The youth are rising and learning how to hit the kill switch on this genocidal machine called capitalism.

As both the gutter-racist Republican and liberal-racist Democratic parties prepare to cripple the minds of billions in the next presidential election, we will continue to share with blue-collar and administrative workers, students, and elders alike the evidence that all bosses will fall in line and enforce the rules and laws that serve their interests, and the ideas that will be our spears to forge a world where workers come first.

In 2024 dare to struggle and dare to win, dare to hope and imagine the crises we can resolve when we keep our confidence in our class potential rather than the bound-to-betray bloodhounds that run our class from Gaza to Israel. We communists know that if workers join the fight, to rebuild the red army we so desperately need the days of racist police terror, capitalism, and imperialism are numbered and can one day be extinguished forever. Join us as we aim to win 2024 and the future beyond!

LOS ANGELES—As the strike wave continues to roll across the country, more and more workers are gaining a deeper understanding of the true meaning of “labor power.” In Los Angeles alone, we have seen teachers, hotel workers, hospital workers, writers, and actors all take to the streets to fight for better working conditions, a living wage, and respect from their employers. Combine this historic moment with a communist educator who has been putting forward these ideas with teachers at a school for nearly a decade and some pretty exciting things can happen.

Charter schools are notorious for overworking their staff even more than traditional public schools. A charter network in LA where comrades work requires 10 more work days for staff than all the other schools in the county. Additionally, we have two professional development sessions a week which add up to one hundred hours of meetings each school year. So when the principal wanted to add even more training this year outside of our contracted work year, the teachers said “hell no.”

We started by trying to find a compromise with the principal. We would have these meetings if she canceled something else in its place. Of course that was refused. We decided collectively to file a grievance through the union. We found out it was not just our school where this was happening. The management of the charter network refuses to follow the definition of the workday in our contract and thinks they can add meetings whenever they want. This is just one small example of how education workers are exploited under capitalism.

The plan: no talk, collective action
The grievance process is unbearably and intentionally slow of course. The first meeting happened before we even got to step two of the process. When the second non-contractual meeting was coming up, we decided as a staff we needed more action than just waiting on the results of a grievance. During our union meeting, we decided that people should either call out completely and no-show on the meeting or for those who didn’t have hours available for that, they could keep their cameras off and refuse to participate. The meeting was on Zoom.

The night before the meeting, the assistant principal sent an email trying to scare people from participating in our plan. She sent a veiled threat that people would be docked for not participating. Our comrade reached out to staff immediately to reassure the team that we must face our fears together and stand united.

Less than 24 hours later we would see just how united our staff was. Of the 28 teachers on campus, 12 were no-shows to Zoom altogether. Of the 16 who came on Zoom, 15 had their cameras off. Some teachers had planned to message the facilitator at the start of the meeting to let them know why we would not be participating. Our comrade sent a private message in the chat to the facilitator saying that this meeting was non-contractual and that’s why so many teachers had their cameras off and we would not be participating verbally either.

Small victory builds solidarity
After about five minutes of welcoming people into the meeting and sharing the nearpod, the facilitator thanked us for all our private messages in the chat giving us the context of the situation. He said he is a union member also and therefore stands united with us and refused to facilitate the meeting. Both the assistant principal and our area superintendent were on the call, scowls on their faces.

A couple minutes later the person who seemed to be the facilitator’s supervisor came on the call and asked the admin present if they wanted to reschedule the meeting for another time. After jumping off the Zoom for about five minutes, the assistant principal returned and said that since we all refused to participate she was going to close the Zoom and have a “nice” Thanksgiving break.

Ironically, the topic of that professional development session we boycotted was “checking for understanding.” Our action checked the bosses’ understanding of where the power lies. While we will always be exploited workers as long as we live under capitalism, that day we got a small taste of our power as workers when we stood together. Nothing runs without workers contributing their labor power. The more we can help our coworkers learn that lesson, even if in small bites, the better positioned we are to fight for a communist world where exploitation is ended for good!