Raising my voice for workers in Gaza and for May Day
I spoke at a Rutgers University action in Camden, where students took over the Campus Center, demanding that Rutgers’ Board of Governors break ties with Israel. One student condemned Rutgers for being the largest university in New Jersey, while homeless and drug-addicted workers sleep below train stations in New Brunswick, where their main campus is located. Still, solving the homeless and addiction crises are not priorities of capitalist rulers of the academy. Rutgers President Johathan Holloway, a self-proclaimed Civil Rights scholar is instead partnering with Tel Aviv University to build a $665 million ‘Hub’ that will include cybersecurity research. This contradiction, highlighted by the students, resonated with me as a worker in the city of Newark. I work as a nonprofit worker, where the push for community development is explicitly advertised to Black and Latin workers as a solution to crumbling infrastructure and super-exploitation.
I shared with the students that the same night that students were demanding a ceasefire, workers who live in an apartment complex, Georgia King Village, owned by a ‘community developer,’ L+ M, were crying out to the multicultural City Council and Black liberal Mayor Ras Baraka about deteriorating housing conditions. These workers were met with empty promises by their city councilman to regulate developers while in the next breath, the council voted to give L+ M another 30-year tax abatement.
At the same time that we’re fighting against racist displacement in Gaza, workers are also fighting against racist displacement in Newark. All over, the ones we’re fighting against are liberal servants of capitalism and imperialism and we need worker-student unity to win! I ended with the chant that PL’ers out at a Newark city council meeting remixed from ‘No good politician in a racist system’ to ‘No good President in a racist institution!’
I also used this action as a chance to bond with a friend who is active in fights for a ceasefire in the surrounding suburbs of Newark. On the ride back, I asked them what they thought of the action and communist politics. They shared, “I think communism is most aligned with my politics, but I don’t know enough about it.” I shared CHALLENGE and the book that our club is reading, History of the U.S.S.R. by Andrew Rothstein. I also invited them to march with us on May Day.
This struggle is exposing our class’s potential to wage a militant, multiracial, internationalist class war against the bosses, but we have to be in it to win it! The fight for communist revolution continues.
*****
My first PL workshop: ‘I felt heard’
Even though I wouldn’t consider myself a beginner to communist theory if I’m being honest, I was still pretty anxious about attending a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) workshop for the first time. In addition to me generally being an anxious person, it’d also be my first time attending any sort of communist collective, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Maybe I’d be too far behind in my knowledge about communism, and I’d end up not having anything to add to the discussion. Maybe I’d be unknowingly too reformist, so even if I did attempt to add something to the discussion, it wouldn’t be worthwhile at all, or it’d just end up being completely regressive.
In actuality though, my interaction with the PLP was nothing like my apprehensions. All its members were extremely kind and welcoming. Rather than feeling talked down to during our discussion, I played an active role in it, and I felt that my ideas were truly being heard and engaged with. In one workshop, titled, “Why Communism, Why PLP?”, we critiqued a quote by Jay-Z, underscoring its attempt to conflate radical racial progress with upward class mobility within capitalism’s inherently oppressive hierarchy. We also discussed what communism meant to us personally as people from a diverse set of backgrounds, and (re)affirmed that a more equitable, communist future could only be done through a grassroots revolution by the global working classes, and not through superficial reforms by the ruling classes.
This is a collective that I’d keep returning to. I loved that, in addition to analyzing work by Marxist theorists, we also analyzed media and media figures that are more prolific within mainstream culture. This cultural analysis demonstrated that capitalism implicitly undergirds a large swath of the media we consume and that consumption done uncritically is bound to be accompanied by an uncritical acceptance of the oppressive ideologies and material conditions that said media is silently reproducing. Furthermore, what this cultural analysis also indicates is that, in spite of attempts by the ruling class to suppress it, resistance to capitalism, and a pursuit of communism, pervade and continue to accumulate within capitalist culture, especially as global capitalist powers continue to support and facilitate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, whilst repressing those who protest in opposition. Discussions like these are integral to a communist revolution, serving both as a site of revolutionary communist praxis, and, through the warmness of its Party members, their sociality, and their collective sharing of childcare, as a site for revolutionary, everyday, communist practice.
*****
Bringing solidarity to students against genocide
On April 17th, a couple of comrades with whom I have been organizing within a mass organization and I went up to Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus to show solidarity with students who have been organizing around Palestine and were having a rally that afternoon. We wanted to bridge the gap between Rutgers Newark, New Brunswick, and Camden campuses, and discuss some of the organizing we’ve been doing not just in Newark, but in Teaneck, Morristown, and West Orange, making parallels between gentrification and imperialism while reiterating that the genocide in Gaza is an attack against workers worldwide. It isn’t enough to just fight for a ceasefire or to call for divestment. We have to continue to organize and build so that we can wrest power from the bosses!
While the rally was happening, I found out that there was another rally being held by union faculty workers who were protesting President Holloway’s cutting of the writing program at the college. I saw many signs that were similar to PLP’s chants (e.g. The Students United Will Never Be Defeated; Make the Bosses Take the Losses). A Pro-Israel heckler disrupted the rally, and it led the Pro-Palestinian students and union faculty to split from one another.
I felt that it was a big mistake for many of the faculty to ignore the students and not show solidarity with them. After all, Holloway’s attack on the writing program is the result of increasing attacks on the humanities programs in colleges, which is one of the hallmarks signs of fascism. We need to defend the humanities at all costs—which is where thoughts, ideas, and consciousness are spread. Furthermore, it was sad to see that one lone person could easily cause so much chaos and discord. It was a learning lesson, for sure.
*****
U.S. now directly involved in Israel’s military operations
Wall Street Journal, 4/21–Biden…ordered the Pentagon to step up its efforts to protect Israel, and the U.S. military activated highly classified plans for assisting Israel in a crisis…A team of U.S. military personnel secretly went to Tel Aviv to work out of a missile defense operations center with their Israeli counterparts…bulked-up force of F-15E fighter jets… F-16s based in the region…Plans were made for Saudi and Jordanian planes to defend their airspace.
…The more than 150 attack drones that Iran launched first…would take five to seven hours to reach Israel. Then…30 land-attack cruise missiles with flight times of two to three hours. Last were ballistic missiles that would reach Israel in just a dozen minutes. Israel’s Arrow system intercepted most of the ballistic missiles, while the two American destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean downed several others. An American Patriot anti missile battery in Erbil, Iraq, intercepted another one…drones, in the meantime, were shot down by a combination of American, British, French and Israeli aircraft…The White House had, at least for a time, avoided a wider war. …
U.S. bosses use Israel as a forward operating base
Haaretz, 4/20–The U.S. House resoundingly voted to provide Israel with $26 billion in emergency assistance on Saturday, including nearly $14 billion in unconditional military aid…The bill's provisions include $4 billion earmarked to replenish Iron Dome and David's Sling missile defense systems and $1.2 billion for the Iron Beam defense system, designed to counter short-range rockets and mortar threats…$3.5 billion for the procurement of advanced weapons systems…$1 billion to "enhanc[ing] the production and development of artillery and critical munitions"... $4.4 billion will replenish military supplies and defense services…and $2.4 billion for current U.S. military operations in the region…
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the U.S. Congress…saying it "demonstrates strong bipartisan support for Israel and defends Western civilization"...
The battle between imperialists for West Africa continues
Al Jazeera, 4/20–The United States will withdraw its soldiers from Niger as the West African nation is increasingly turning to Russia and away from Western powers. The US Department of State agreed to pull out about 1,000 troops from the country that has been under military rule since July 2023…The US built a military base in Niger to combat armed groups that pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS)...Like the military rulers in neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso, the West African nation had kicked out French and European troops following the military takeover. All three countries have now turned to Russia for support, with Moscow confirming earlier this month that it has sent military trainers and an air defense system and other military equipment to Niger as it deepens its security ties.
Ukrainian workers pay the price in inter-imperialist conflict
Foreign Affairs, 4/19–After more than two years fighting one of the world’s most powerful armies, Ukraine has enacted a new mobilization law…army commanders demanded 500,000 new soldiers…“Even the most determined [soldier] will consider this to be an eternal contract”...the original draft mobilization bill…proposed to mandate demobilization after 36 months of active duty. But that provision was dropped because of pressure from military leaders, who feared they would lose their most experienced troops…
…In early April, the president also signed into law a bill lowering the military mobilization age by two years, from 27 to 25…the military understands that soldiers in their 20s are fitter and recover faster, allowing them to bounce back from injuries and return to the front…a young person who has experienced a concussion from an explosion may be able to recover from temporary hearing loss, whereas someone over 40 faces a higher risk of permanent deafness…
The war is already estimated to have caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage…Entire industrial regions and large corporations have been destroyed…Millions of professionals have left the country, and multiple economic sectors have simply disappeared…
- Information
Editorial . . . The Middle East, tinderbox for wider imperialist wars
- Information
- 13 April 2024 1307 hits
On April 1, Israel’s rulers struck Iran’s embassy compound in Damascus, Syria—equivalent to bombing Iran itself, according to the capitalists’ international law. They killed 11 workers and two Iranian generals tied to the country’s “shadow war” against Israel. The same day, Israel deliberately targeted and bombed three cars in Gaza that carried aid workers with World Central Kitchen(WCK), according to WCK founder Jose Andres. This was no isolated incident. With a blank check for arms and bombs from the U.S., Israel has murdered two hundred aid workers and more than 33,000 Palestinians, the great majority of them noncombatant women and children, according to U.S. “Defense” Secretary Lloyd Austin (alajazeera.com, 3/1). The arms flow and atrocities continue despite Genocide Joe Biden’s phony call for a ceasefire as he slaps his defiant lapdog, Israeli president and mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu, on the wrist.
Capitalist profits and racist genocide continue to sit at the heart of the one-sided slaughter of workers in Palestine. U.S. imperialists have long relied on Israel as its military proxy in the Middle East, a permanent “aircraft carrier group” for U.S. oil interests. But that arrangement is now under attack. A wider war looms in the Middle East, one that might escalate into an inter-imperialist World War Three. In an all-out global conflict, the devastation of the international working class will intensify exponentially. It is time for all workers to turn these attacks into anti-racist class war against all imperialists and capitalists under the leadership of the international communist Progressive Labor Party.
Many smaller capitalist gangs in the region have allied with imperialist Iran against the U.S. and Israel, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and an array of militias in Syria and Iraq. With funding and weapons from Iran, along with the capitalists’ ideological weapons of nationalism and religion, these groups have gained broad support among workers who are courageously fighting back against the Zionist war machine. But even if the groups’ misleaders succeed, they can offer nothing but more exploitation of the working class under the guise of anti-imperialism. Communism, not a new set of capitalist bosses, is what our class needs for liberation!
Iranian bosses’ leverage
The U.S. bosses have been trying and failing to topple Iran’s bosses since the Iranian “revolution” of 1979 overthrew their lackey, the Shah of Iran. What is stopping the U.S. imperialists and their junior criminal partners in Israel from launching genocidal attacks on Iran itself? Iran’s regional alliances and its deepening economic and political ties with the United States’ arch-rivals make it a more formidable foe than Hamas. Both the Chinese and Russian imperialists are ignoring international sanctions and buying large quantities of oil from Iran (Reuters, 11/10/23).
Iran has military and geographic leverage, as well. About 17 million barrels of oil, around 20 percent of total global demand, pass through the Strait of Hormuz each day (strausscenter.org). If Iran were to obstruct the strait, it would cause global economic chaos. Iran’s mountainous topography is a natural fortress against invading powers. Finally, Iran has tailored much of its navy to fend off the U.S. imperialists with an armada of speed boats equipped for naval guerilla warfare.
Israel, racist pariah state
Workers worldwide are showing that they will not take the genocide of Gaza sitting down. Millions have protested against Israel, which has become a pariah state. On April 4, seven Arab workers from Israel and four Palestinians from the West Bank attempted to assassinate Ben Gvir, Israel’s fascist national security head. Unfortunately, Israel’s anti-war movement is still trapped in Zionist ideology and focuses on the hundred or so Israeli hostages in Gaza while largely ignoring the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims of Israel’s vicious ethnic cleansing. A recent call for elections, regardless of how it turns out, will not change Israel’s commitment to apartheid in the West Bank and mass open-air incarceration in Gaza.
The rise of global opposition to the U.S. may seem like a good thing. But we must beware of the motives of these opponents when they belong to the capitalist ruling class. As U.S. imperialism declines, China and Russian and their allies are seeking opportunities for inroads in the Middle East and elsewhere. No matter who comes out on top of the bosses’ next big conflict, workers will lose—unless they turn the guns around to wage class war against our oppressors. Only a united, multiracial working class led by a revolutionary communist party can end the cycle of imperialist wars to re-divide the world for profit. Workers have no dog in this fight!
The Progressive Labor Party encourages all those outraged by the devastation of Gaza to build a base for communism and PLP among workers of the world. Only communist revolution can put capitalist exploitation, racism, imperialist war, and climate catastrophe in the dustbin of history. Only communism can enable the working class to write our own future! Join us!
NEW YORK, NY, March 30 - A multiracial, multigenerational, and international contingent of 30 members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) marched to commemorate the 48th anniversary of Land Day, bringing masses of workers our revolutionary communist message. On this day in 1976, masses of workers in Palestine broke with nonviolence and embraced militant rebellion in response to Israeli-launched fascist land seizures and the murder of six unarmed workers. Across the U.S. in 2024, on an almost constant basis, thousands of workers and students are demonstrating against the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza.
In New York City, PLP, with its dozen red flags and communist ideas and chants, joined the crowds chanting, “Joe Biden, you can’t hide. You’re committing genocide,” and added our own sharper political line, “Capitalism, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide.”
We also countered the nationalist chants with internationalist chants of “Asian, Latin, Black and white, workers of the world unite!” and chanted “Fight for communism, now’s the time!” to let the masses now that communism is the only way the entire planet and working class will be free from violent displacement and genocide.
From Palestine to Mexico smash ALL capitalist borders
During the march, we distributed more than 700 copies of CHALLENGE-DESAFIO and the same number of flyers written specifically for the event with the help of young Palestinian women workers who taught us a new chant. The chant which says that “from Palestine it has been decided we will smash the seige” contains the arabic word“hisar” which means seige, but hisar also has a second meaning: border. This chant reveals what workers in Palestine already know: Israel’s fascist blockade of Gaza exposes the inherent racist class violence essential to ALL capitalist borders. Only communism can realize this chant’s full meaning.
Fightback against genocide exposes growing fascism
Prior to the demonstration, PL members reached out to their friends from workplaces, schools and neighborhoods to march with us. One retired faculty member from a college in New Jersey was joined by her friend, also a teacher, who had come under attack by her campus administrators when she posted a political cartoon criticizing the Israeli military and government for its mass killing of Palestinians, including thousands of students. This teacher was targeted by the Zionist gsroup Canary Mission, which trolls the Internet to identify faculty and students who are critical of Israeli policies and then reach out to Zionist community groups and student campus organizations to file complaints. This faculty member was the victim of such a complaint. Her response was to get more involved and to not retreat.
Aware that at recent demonstrations, police have been aggressively confiscating bullhorns and arresting protestors, PLP kept our contingent tightly organized, allowing us to bring our message of international solidarity and vision of a communist future to the workers surrounding us. Each person had a buddy and phone numbers in the event of police interference. The large crowd also helped provide security to all the protestors.
The sharpening attack, with the U.S. expanding its aid to Israel for the war abroad and aggressively targeting organizers who are protesting these policies at home, reflect the deepening crisis of U.S. capitalism. According to the civil rights organization, Palestine Legal, more than 2,000 faculty and students have been disciplined or fired for their protests against policies of the U.S. and Israeli governments. The spirited demonstration and our careful planning and organizing left our participants with a new resolve to build for the upcoming May Day march and to reach out to more of our friends and co-workers to win them to the importance of building a mass movement for communism.
Fight for communism for a free Palestine
As communists in the PLP, we understand that only when the working class runs society will workers and the land will be liberated. Neither fake elections nor Palestinian misleaders can do the job. As masses of workers in Palestine chant, “From Gaza, it’s been decided, we will smash the siege!”It is clear that workers there and everywhere deserve nothing less than a communist world without borders. From Gaza to Mexico only communist revolution can break the siege and smash the nationalist borders genociding our class. Join the PLP and let’s make these words a reality.
- Information
Long Live PLP, will become beacon for working class!
- Information
- 13 April 2024 828 hits
On April 17 Progressive Labor Party (PLP/PL) will celebrate its 59th year of fighting the cancerous system called capitalism, a system which destroys workers’ lives worldwide. PLP arose in the 1960s splitting from the reformist Communist Party of the United States. We began with barely two dozen members. In 2024 we are an international, fighting party organizing in five continents.
Workers all over the world are currently in a period of low class consciousness and struggle against the world’s capitalists. We call this period Dark Night. It is characterized by inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. imperialists and the alliance of Chinese-Russian imperialists. As this rivalry escalates, the imperialists are resorting to ever-increasing levels of war and fascism to divide, kill and control workers everywhere.The working class desperately needs a fighting, communist party to take us out of this Dark Night and into a victorious fight against the world’s capitalists.
Our line & our vision
Progressive Labor Party struggles for a communist world run by and for workers. Capitalism has caused world wars costing millions of workers’ lives and capitalists are preparing for WorldWar III. In a world run by the working class all goods and resources would be shared according to need. There would be no production for the profit of a few. There would be no need for profiteering wars. The working class need only realize its unlimited potential to fight and rule. PLP has and will continue to struggle alongside fellow workers to help us realize this potential.
To realize this potential, PL implements a strategy of practice and theory. We get involved in fighting the bosses (practice). We analyze our fightback and the struggles of workers worldwide. We analyze the world situation(theory). Then we implement what we learned in future struggles (practice) and apply it to our line (theory). These lessons and beliefs together make up Progressive Labor Party’s unique political line. Here are some elements of PL’s line gained from 59 years of practice and theory:
Society must be run by and for the working class. That’s communism.
The wage system and money itself must be abolished. Resources must be distributed based on need.
Workers can only gain power through armed struggle. The bosses will not give up peacefully.
We reject the concept of nations; no nationalism, and no borders. We are all workers and a worker in Israel is more like a worker in Gaza than like an Israeli capitalist.
Multiracial unity: Racism is a product and tool of the ruling capitalist class meant to divide and conquer the working class. A united, multiracial working class is unstoppable.
Antisexism: The systemic super-exploitation, oppression and objectification of women divides and weakens the working class.
We need to concentrate among industrial workers and soldiers, key to defeating the capitalists.
We struggle to inject these ideas into every struggle and will continue to do so until the working class runs the world. (For more see: Our Fight on page 2)
A legacy of struggle and theory
Ever since its birth in 1965 Progressive Labor Party has been fighting back against the bosses' attacks on workers. We have organized and supported auto workers and striking teachers in Mexico; striking miners in Hazard, Kentucky; fiber workers in India; bank workers in Colombia; sit-down strikers at Detroit’s Mack Avenue Chrysler plant; farm workers in California, and bakery workers at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx. We have stood with evicted workers in Palestine-Israel, earthquake victims in Pakistan, and hurricane victims in Haiti and New Orleans. More recently the Party has organized with tenants fighting abusive slumlords in Lennox, California, stood with students facing racist school policies in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and struggled alongside a family in Newark, New Jersey physically assaulted by racist police.
Fighting racism has always been a core tenet of PLP. We backed Black workers and youth in the 1964 Harlem Rebellion and fought off racist school segregationists in Boston in 1975. In 1976 we integrated Chicago’s Marquette Park, while smashing the Nazi headquarters there. We have led more than 100,000 protesters against the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis across the United States. We have mobilized against racist killer cops from Brooklyn, to Los Angeles, to Chicago, to Ferguson, Missouri.
PLP has led intense fightbacks against the bosses’ wars. In the 1960s, we were the first to organize mass demonstrations against the U.S. imperialist war Vietnam. We worked both within the military and on the streets to expose the U.S. rulers’ invasion of Iraq as a mass-murdering oil grab. More recently PL has participated in fightbacks against the bosses’ genocidal occupation of Palestine, saying that this attack on workers in Gaza is about profits and won’t be solved by fighting for a Palestinian state ruled by a new group of capitalists.
These ideas, struggles, and victories came directly out of our Party’s analysis of past class struggles and the achievements of millions of workers. PLP studied and continues to study the strengths and weaknesses of the communist movement throughout history. In 1917 this movement created a revolution in Russia; in 1949, a revolution in China, two of the largest countries in the world under the red banner of communism! But PL also acknowledges the weaknesses of the past movements. Nationalism, allowing wages and money to persist, and allowing elitism to form within party structures are some of the mistakes of the old movements that led to the rebirth of capitalism. We are committed to not repeating those mistakes.
Celebrate the Party on May Day
Next month is May Day, where every year the Party celebrates communism and the working class. We would be honored if you would join us in these celebrations and join our Party in this fight for a communist world. Let’s all chip in and build a united, multiracial working class capable of winning a communist world. Happy birthday PLP!
