ALBANY, NY, January 8 — Nearly 1,000 workers rallied here in a fight to prevent the closing of Downstate Hospital, stop layoffs and preserve patient services. Rising at 4:00 a.m., they used a vacation day to board buses from Brooklyn to the State Capital. Black and Latino women workers led the way, bringing family and friends.
The closing or privatization of this hospital, which serves central Brooklyn’s predominantly black and Latino population where healthcare needs are the highest, is a racist and sexist attack. It will ultimately take patient lives and cause the death of their community. Already 400 layoffs and the threat of many more to come are devastating these workers and patient care. Actually privatization has already begun. Outsourced non-union cleaners are replacing those laid off.
Hundreds of fists in the air in that usually quiet State legislative palace signified workers’ commitment to struggle. The facts were stated clearly, such as Downstate cares for 400,000 very needy patients annually; 15,000 petitions collected by workers and their allies told Governor Cuomo the facts, but he ignores them. He’s been planning healthcare cuts for several years.
He appointed a Wall Street tycoon, Steven Berger, to lead a commission — which includes two leaders of Service Employees International Union’s 1199 Healthcare Workers East — to deconstruct healthcare in Brooklyn.
Cuomo’s plan, mirroring similar cuts around the U.S, takes away gains in job security and healthcare that workers have won from struggles in the 1930s, ’40s and ’60s. The bosses’ success in eroding health care here will spread.
The pro-capitalist misleaders of the State AFL-CIO and the head of the State’s Civil Service Employees Association (representing hundreds of thousands of NY State workers) refuse to lead a real offensive against these cuts. A massive fight could marshal support in our communities and might keep hospitals open. Instead of a plan of action all we got was a pep talk and prayers.
Many workers were frustrated by this show and complained, “Or else what?” and “Where’s the punch?” Some of us tried to start a chant “Occupy Downstate!” The potential energy of the aroused workers was deflated by the union mis-leaders, ministers and politicians.
Progressive Labor Party is committed to leading a militant class struggle to keep Downstate open, return laid-off workers to their jobs and to fight for healthcare services for all. But we also know that a system based on profits first and workers last won’t create jobs and provide decent healthcare. It has to go.
The bosses who control this system aren’t concerned with our health or other needs. They’re locked in competition with their capitalist rivals abroad. They aim to divert funds for healthcare to finance wars that they hope will maintain their domination of the world’s resources and the exploitation of the international working class.
Their system is geared to keep the lion’s share of the world’s wealth for the capitalists who own it and will always sacrifice our needs to that end. We need to develop leadership to build an egalitarian communist world in which society is organized to meet the needs of all workers.

Israel-Palestine, January 12 — More than two dozen working-class supporters, both Jewish and international, came to show solidarity with three of the so-called  “unrecognized” villages in the Negev. Two PL’ers joined this important fight against apartheid and racist evictions and demolitions in the south.
Approximately 150,000 Bedouins live in the Negev, the vast majority in the “Siag” area — a tiny reservation between the city of Beersheba and the towns of Omer and Dimona. Before the state of Israel was established in 1948, Bedouins lived in the entire Negev (which is 60% of Israel-Palestine’s land) and had their own, pre-capitalist system of tribal land ownership. The majority of Bedouins were deported from the Negev between 1947 and 1959, and the rest were forced to re-settle in the Siag area.
Farmers Become Proletarians
Until 1967 they, like all Arabs under Israeli rule, lived under martial law and their movement was strictly limited. In the 1960’s, the Israeli government decided to settle the Bedouins, formerly semi-nomadic herders and farmers, in dense state-planned towns. One reason for this move was to remove the Bedouin peasantry from its ancestral land and give that land over to the state for the benefit of the Zionist movement and its rich U.S. and Western European backers.
Another reason was to try to give the Bedouins no other option than being wage-laborers in the service of Israeli bosses.
Today, half of the entire Bedouin population in the Negev lives in seven (mis-)planned towns, where there are no jobs and where crime, unemployment and drugs are common. The rest live in villages without infrastructure such as proper running water, sewage or electricity, and without services such as healthcare or schooling. They usually have to make do with generators and improvised wells and travel for long distances to get to a hospital or a school.
They are faced with two devastating options: if they leave their ancestral land, the state will most likely confiscate it. But if they move to the “planned towns,” they will suffer from chronic unemployment, as against eking out a living as small-time herders in the “unrecognized” villages.
Zionist Land Takeover
Ninety-three percent of the land inside the “green line” is owned by the State of Israel and managed through the National Fund (JNF) and the Israel Land Administration, both of which have strong Zionist agendas and racist outlooks. The JNF likes to present itself as an “ecological” organization working on “flowering up the wilderness”; in reality, its job is to make sure that the land can only be used by the state of Israel and the wealthy U.S. real-estate tycoons, such as Ronald Lauder, who wish to exploit it.
The first visit in our trip was to the Bedouin village of Bir Hadaj. Since 1904, the Bedouin villagers held title to the land but in the mid 1970’s they were moved by the state far away. In the 1990’s, the villagers were promised five dunams (approximately 1.25 acres) of land per nuclear family for both housing and agricultural use.
The government, however, soon broke its word and said it will only give 2.5 dunams (approximately 0.75 acres) to each family, and, finally, only one dunam (approximately one quarter of an acre). All this was done while rich farmers with the “right” connections to government officials received thousands of acres in “individual farms” from the state, free of charge or for a paltry sum. There are no jobs to be found in the vicinity of Bir Hadaj, so agriculture is the main source of livelihood available to the Bedouins there, and without much land they are doomed to poverty.
The villagers protested against the state’s plan of turning Bir Hadaj into a de facto town with no agriculture or jobs to be found. Since they objected to the state plan, there is no official plan for Bir Hadaj, and, consequently, no way at all for the Bedouins to be granted building permits for their homes. The state uses this as an excuse to demolish the village homes, usually with much police brutality in the process, in order to apply pressure on the villagers and force them to accept the urbanization plan.
Racist State Terror
Faced with this kind of racist state terror and land theft, the villagers have joined forces with supporters of all ethnicities from throughout Israel-Palestine, and are organizing a struggle for land and livelihood.
After Bir Hadaj, we visited the unrecognized village of Wadi al-Naam. The Israeli state, coveting the village’s lands, has allowed chemical factories and even a power plant to be built there in order to force the villagers to leave. Villagers are poisoned by both air pollution from the turbines and electro-magnetic radiation from the generators and power lines. Wadi al-Naam has the highest cancer rate in all of Israel-Palestine.
The state has offered to move the Wadi al-Naam villagers to the nearby (mis-)planned town of Segev Shalom, which is not only stricken with intense unemployment, but also, like Wadi al-Naam, the same deadly pollution. Other re-settlement ideas proposed by the villagers were rejected by the state.
We finished our tour in the village of al-Araqeeb, next to the (mis-)planned town of Rahat and close to Beersheba, which was demolished no less than 42 times (!) by the Israeli state in the last two and a half years. Again, the villagers hold title to their land, but this does not interest the JNF and the government. They speak all the time about how they protect “private property” — but care only about the property of the rich.
This visit highlighted the horrors of Zionist apartheid, where Bedouin workers and peasants may serve in the army and pay taxes, but are thrown off their land and rarely get a decent job. There is no capitalism without racism, not in Israel-Palestine and not in the rest of the world. But we, workers and peasants of all ethnicities and nations, have each other to rely on when we fight back against racism, land theft and capitalism. And we will eventually win!

EL SALVADOR — Since 1927, 14 families have “democratically” dominated El Salvador through military dictators. There have been many elections in El Salvador’s history, elections in which the military  candidates always won while the opposition was always killed or exiled.
The capitalist class in El Salvador follows imperialist orders, especially from the U.S. The current ruling class, who in the past posed as revolutionaries, have proven to be traitors to the workers.
The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) rules for the bosses. Our conditions worsen every day due to unemployment, low wages and murders by the Maras (gangs) and the rulers’ death squads.
For example, in San Sebastian Salitrillo in the state of Santa Ana, five FMLN councilmen have been accused of money laundering. Just like Mayor Francisco Castañeda, all of them have become wealthy with public money. But they authorize budget cuts in health and education. 
The Progressive Labor Party has developed a base here. We are organizing communist schools with the working class to win them to understand that we must destroy these capitalist leeches and their cronies. Our goal is for PLP to spread from east to west. That’s why we recruit new readers of CHALLENGE, which reflects our class struggles worldwide. The bosses’ newspapers only report the lies and crimes that the bosses themselves make. 
Our base continues to grow among workers, peasants and students here. Although it is a small country, it has a great revolutionary tradition. However, without communist leadership, these struggles have always turned reformist. Our goal is to give these schools a real communist character. Only PLP has the alternative of communist politics, which can free us from capitalist oppression — destroyer of workers and peasants. Only working-class unity organized by PLP can smash this fascist system.

BOSTON, MA, January 6 — Members of PLP active in the Modern Language Association (MLA), along with friends in the Radical Caucus, helped to bring communism and class struggle to the 2013 MLA convention here. 
Party members gave papers on various facets of literary radicalism: the role played by communists in the proletarian and post-colonial literary movements; speculation about post-class society in literary works focusing on racism and sexism; debates over the “idea of communism” in current political theory. The current economic crisis, along with the dire job market faced by many humanities scholars and teachers, has many MLA members querying the legitimacy of capitalism. PL members contributed to a sharpening of the discussion and distributed significantly more CHALLENGES than we have in the past.
The activist core of the Party’s work here for years has centered on motions and resolutions raised by the Radical Caucus. One of this year’s initiatives focused on the need for serious data gathering on the wages and working conditions of part-time and adjunct faculty, who teach about 75 percent of college-level humanities courses, for as little as $1,500 per course, with no benefits. The other urged the MLA to condemn the so-called Pathways project at the City University of New York (CUNY). This project overrules faculty governance in an effort to cut costs and exert tighter control over curriculum.
Those in power don’t care that this policy produces inferior education — science courses without labs, writing and language courses with reduced contact hours. Students disadvantaged by the curricular changes are overwhelmingly immigrant, black, Latino, and Asian. Teachers who have opposed Pathways have been threatened with dismissal.
Discussion and debate over the CUNY resolution revealed that Pathways is funded by the Lumina Corporation and the Gates Foundation, both ruling-class efforts to privatize and corporatize public higher education. These efforts are widespread: members of the Delegate Assembly spoke passionately about the capitalist profiteering and authoritarian ideological repression occurring on dozens of campuses around the U.S. and Canada.
Both Radical Caucus initiatives were passed with overwhelming majorities. Several people joined the Radical Caucus, and one delegate, new to the Radical Caucus, helped to fight for passage of the opposing Pathways resolution. While this support was gratifying, our level of success made PL’ers and friends aware that we need to push harder for a stronger anti-capitalist analysis in the measures brought before the Delegate Assembly.
The annual Radical Caucus meeting was large and spirited, with several young new members offering to take leadership in framing the sessions and activities for the 2014 convention. Featured next year will be more discussion of “alternatives to capitalism,” as well as of universities as sites of ruling-class ideology. Onward!