CHICAGO, October 7—Today members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) came out in force to support the ongoing United Auto Workers (UAW) strike here on the picket line at the Torrence Avenue Ford plant. We distributed dozens of copies of CHALLENGE and spoke with workers about the need for a communist revolution. Many workers are open to discussing these revolutionary ideas and thank us for our support in the struggle for a better contract.

During past contract "negotiations" the UAW agreed to a two-tier wage division, reduced or eliminated cost of living raises, eliminated pensions, and several other concessions so the auto industrialists could recover from an economic downturn around 2008. In other words, make the workers pay for the crisis of the bosses’ system! Capitalism makes it legal to exploit our labor. Labor is a commodity used by the capitalists to extract profits. When the workers are too old or too sick or injured due to speed ups, they are discarded like an old pair of shoes.

When we withhold our labor power in a strike, the bosses lose their profits. The workers’ struggle against the capitalists is a way to recover some of the stolen value that workers produce. The bosses enrich themselves and maintain the current system of oppression off that stolen value.

PLP is building a multiracial and international working-class movement against this capitalist system’s inherent racism, sexism, unemployment and war. Strengthening our ties with industrial workers – especially Black, Latin, Asian and women industrial workers – will be a crucial front in overthrowing the bosses’ exploitative system for good and building a new egalitarian communist society. Under communism, we will organize to produce and then distribute based on what our class needs, never profit.

Bosses will kill for their profits – Workers organize to fight back!
The Torrence Avenue Assembly Ford plant is the oldest continuously operated auto manufacturing plant and opened in 1924.  It has 4,600 workers and produces about twenty-four hundred cars a day.  These workers produce almost one fourth of all the Ford vehicles made in one year. This plant, and many other Ford plants scattered throughout the world have made the Ford family worth 2 billion dollars (Forbes, August 2023).  It's reported Ford’s CEO in 2022 was paid $21 million, and GM's CEO about $20 million per year.

In our conversations, auto workers related how a worker on the assembly line suffered a seizure. The line stopped, while another worker on the line came to help the worker with the seizure. A supervisor then reprimanded the worker for trying to help her co-worker, and before medical help was called, they replaced the worker and restarted the line, in that order. Profits come before the lives of workers, that is the lesson capitalism teaches us— that is why we fight for communism. Communism is a society where profits will be abolished, and workers’ lives and safety will always come first.

It was with the help and leadership of communist workers that the UAW was first established. In 1936-37 there was a sit-in strike in Flint, Michigan at the GM Fisher Body No. 1 plant that lasted 44 days.  The bosses hesitated to retake the plant because they feared millions of dollars’ worth of equipment would be destroyed by the occupying workers.  Right before the National Guard was to go in the plant, the bosses relented and recognized the UAW union.

But as history has shown us, after the current contract is settled, and the end of the next contract, workers will be back on the picket line to demand a fair contract, because the nature of the system is always to demand more from the workers. Trusting in liberal bosses like Joe Biden to get a “fair” deal is poison for our class, as not only did he help engineer the anti-worker bailout in 2008 he also torpedoed efforts for railroad workers to strike last year.

The bosses want more give-backs, so they can compete internationally against their rivals, mainly the bosses in China. They also want to give enough to workers to lay the groundwork for a patriotic population that is ready to fight and die for their imperialist wars. Capitalism is a never-ending treadmill, a deadly system of contradictions designed to wear us down. We must organize to smash it and replace it with workers' power and communism. Join us, join PLP!

The racists on Staten Island are not stopping their attacks on the asylum seekers being housed in shelters there, but the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and other antiracists are stepping up our efforts to support and defend them.

By order of New York City officials, St. John's Villa, a former private school that was the site of two previous pro-migrant vs anti-migrant demonstrations, is to be emptied of its residents by November 15th. The racists are now concentrating their attacks on migrants in the former Island Shores Senior Residence on Father Capodanno Blvd. Every night, the racists have been congregating in smaller or larger numbers to loudly spew their anti-immigrant filth to disturb the residents. Their continued presence has caused the NYPD to set up barricades on the streets surrounding the facility, ostensibly to prevent any confrontations.

When members of the coalition of antiracist organizations arrived at the facility for our planned demonstration, we found these barricades in place. Some of the racists were already there, and when we demanded that the cops allow us to demonstrate on the Island Shores side of the boulevard, we were told we had to cross to the other side. The racists were allowed to remain, showing once again on whose side are the police.

Undeterred, we used a bullhorn and our voices to chant support to the migrants. The police then forced us to stop using the bullhorn. To show their "impartiality," they also stopped the racists from using theirs. We then formed a picket line and continued chanting vigorously and loudly. Before we left, members of Peace Action Staten Island, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the PLP made speeches, stressing  the need for antiracist worker unity. The Party members who spoke made it clear that the only solution to workers' problems worldwide is communist revolution.

Prior to the rally, some of the Peace Action members had leafleted at the College of Staten Island and in the Port Richmond neighborhood, which is populated by many immigrant workers. The rain may have had some effect on discouraging students and workers from those areas from coming to the demonstration. Our rally still had double the number of the racists, but about half of us were from outside Staten Island.  We distributed CHALLENGE there and continued to talk afterwards about our plan to build the Party and fight for communism.
The racists have a fairly well-organized core in the community, backed by most of the politicians on the Island.

They attack the immigrants, but they also attack Democratic NYC Mayor Adams, blaming him, Governor Hochul, President Biden, and "white liberals" in general for the immigrant problem and all the other ills facing the working class. Just as did the Nazis in the early days, these racists claim to represent the interests of blue collar workers. Their racism is dangerous to the entire working class. The Democratic Party politicians agree with them about limiting immigration, cutting back  benefits to the poor and other workers, and supporting a bigger military to prepare for war.

It does present an obvious danger, but even more dangerous to workers are the "white liberals" that the openly racist "Small Fascists" decry.

Biden and his cohorts represent the interests of the dominant "Big Fascist'' capitalists. It is their vicious exploitation of workers in Central and South America that has led to the desperate increased migration to the United States from those countries. As the workers struggle across the border, “Small Fascist” governors ship them to cities in the North. Once there, supposedly liberal politicians  crowd our fellow workers into unhealthy shelters, tent cities and even throw them onto the streets. The Democratic Party liberals have no plan to help the migrants and are happy to see the racists attack them and divide the working class.

In NYC, and especially Staten Island, the PLP  and its antiracist allies must continue to build a movement against the open racists. At the same time, we must struggle to show our friends and other workers and students that fighting racism within the system is not enough. We must smash capitalism to destroy racism. THE ONLY SOLUTION IS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION!

This fall has started off with a bang at our Bronx colleges as we started classes facing closed cafeterias on two of our campuses, canceled classes, crumbling infrastructure, broken elevators, and a myriad of other issues.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are involved in many fightbacks on our campuses, including demanding fair wages for adjunct professors, supporting the struggle against the privatization of healthcare for retirees, and building solidarity with migrant workers and our working-class neighbors. We are involved in organizing fightbacks that bring students and faculty, staff together.

An attack on one is an attack on all!
“A victory for anyone of us is a victory for all of us.” An adjunct professor, who teaches at three different campuses, made this comment at a forum we organized last week, sponsored by Rank and File Action (RAFA) and the Bronx City University New York (CUNY) Action Committee. He made a number of points including that the intensification of capitalism was harming the ability of our working-class neighborhoods to secure decent housing, food, and medical care. Three retired municipal workers who have helped to lead the fightback against the privatization of medical care ( see CHALLENGE, 10/20/22) spoke eloquently about how racist Mayor Adams’ proposed change to retiree healthcare would lead to death of older workers. They explained how union leaders colluded with Adams to save the city almost $1 billion on the backs of these workers.

The purpose of the forum was really to educate ourselves about the struggle retirees have been waging, and to send the message that in fact this is the tip of the iceberg. If the city can do this to retired workers, what will stop them from trying to give healthcare on the cheap to those who are currently working?. The forum was attended by students, professors, union members, and the greater school community. The main takeaway was clear—be ready to be in this struggle for the working class for your whole life!

We must be in it to win it!
PLP members are active in our local union chapter as well as with students. We have a literature table where CHALLENGE is distributed and students stop by to talk. Most importantly, we are winning students to get active with us in various campaigns to meet with us, both in mass organizations and PLP study groups. We have seen how students are key to the struggle and that they are the ones who bear the brunt of CUNY’s racist austerity policies. Not surprisingly, they have played a key role in our struggles to get a working cafeteria open, to protest the lack of heat, and to stop early cancellation of classes.

We have also been involved with other union members in “observing”contract negotiation sessions. Along with RAFA members, we have forced union leadership to open the negotiating process to the members. While the point has been made that union members (and students) should be active participants, not observers,involvement in this process has given us the chance to talk with other union members about why, ultimately, nothing short of a strike could win us better working conditions and why capitalism will never provide us with the education our class needs. While “being at the table” with the CUNY administration is infuriating and eye opening, it gives us the chance to engage with others and make the point that the union’s strategy of trying to shame CUNY into offering us a better contract is a dead-end. CUNY’s racist bosses have no shame!  

Build the Progressive Labor Party
We have a lot of work to do as we continue to face the onslaught of racist austerity at CUNY, the lack of equity for part-time educators, and the reality that CUNY bosses plan to  continue to deny proper funding to students, staff, and faculty. As we face the war in the Middle East, we must step up our organizing with teach-ins and actions on the campus. We are already starting to have discussions about how Dominican and Haitian workers have been divided and the parallels to the Middle East situation.

We have a vibrant PLP Study Group, led by college students which meets regularly and analyzes and discusses both the historical foundations of our movement, along with looking at current events. We analyze the struggles we are involved in, look at how we can sharpen our understanding of the world and determine the best way to bring communist ideas into the reform movement. Our group is growing, to involve both college students and graduate students, and our Party’s ideas are so needed in these very dangerous times. We will continue to be in the reform campaigns, but always keep our eye on the ball that although this is the world we inherited, this capitalist nightmare is not the world we want to leave for generations to come!

Utter chaos, destruction and brutality have followed the October 7 Hamas incursion into Israel that murdered 1,300 and wounded 3,000. The relentless response by the unity government of Israel, led by the butchers Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his liberal counterpart Benny Gantz (Reuters 10/12) has to date has murdered over 4,000 people including more than 1,000 children, wounded over 10,000, and leveled hospitals, schools, and homes in Gaza (UN 10/17). The war reflects and foreshadows the collapse of U.S. imperialism and the callous deathtrap that imperialist rivalry and nationalism hold for the workers of the world. This capitalist genocide will grow to even greater proportions in the coming days, as the bodies of hundreds murdered at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City are counted and the bombings continue and likely ground invasion begins.

Capitalist Genocide
The deaths of workers in Gaza are not collateral damage. They are the inevitable result of indiscriminate bombing of workers trapped in a densely packed city carried out by the Israeli military (Al Jazeera 10/18). The criminal war minister of defense of Israel Yoav Gallant, ordered the complete siege of Gaza, referring to workers there as “human animals” and promising, “There will be no light, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” (Times of Israel 10/9/2023).

The fascist cliques that rule Gaza and Israel are state terrorist murderers sacrificing the lives of workers to carve out their positions and profits in a volatile and shifting world order. Workers and soldiers on both sides —and everywhere—must break down nationalist, religious and ethnic divisions, to fight together to crush a capitalist system that so completely fails the workers of the world.

This war in Gaza also creates greater instability and the risk of an escalation that, together with other conflicts like the one in Ukraine, paves the way for the outbreak of a Third World War. Capitalism only offers war and death to workers. The working class must destroy it with communist revolution.

From top dog to dogfight
This current war between Israel and Hamas is the continuation of the fight for dominance of the Middle East and its oil as the hegemony of the U.S. empire continues to decline.

The same U.S. ruling class who refused to bomb transport lines to Nazi concentration camps and turned away Jewish survivors of the Nazis, supported the creation of a “Jewish state” and the displacement of millions of workers from Palestine in exchange for a Cold War ally against Soviet influence in the Middle East and support in the fight to control the production and flow of the region’s oil. This nationalist bribe, sold to workers as a solution to centuries of anti-Jewish racism is leading to the mass slaughter of workers in Gaza and now Israel.

Nationalism and alliances with bosses anywhere are deadly for workers
Over the decades, the bosses in Israel in exchange for vast sums of money and weapons from the U.S., have provided crucial support for U.S. interests. The Israeli bosses helped secure the Suez Canal in the 70’s. They funneled weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 80’s (NY Times 7/21/83) and provide crucial geopolitical and intelligence support to the U.S. bosses’ control of Mideast oil. Meanwhile, the U.S. bosses support the Israeli bosses’ apartheid laws and help to negotiate “peace” treaties with neighboring countries that continually condemned workers in the West Bank to live under a contiguous state of attack from Israeli nationalists and the IDF, and workers in Gaza to live in what is largely recognized as an open-air prison.

But, recently, the U.S-Israeli partnership and dominance have begun to unravel. Netanyahu refused to support sanctions against Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine. Earlier this year, China brokered a restoring of relations between Saudi-Arabia and Iran that undercut decades of the U.S. bosses strategy of playing them against each other (CNBC 3/15).

United States weakness
This week the U.S. has mobilized two aircraft carriers to the area, anticipating a further escalation of the conflict and hoping to discourage its global imperialist rivals such as China and Russia as well as local nationalists such as Iran from providing support to Hamas.

Even as the world is witnessing genocide in Gaza, Biden can only react by giving his unconditional support to the butcher Netanyahu, who half of the population in Israel rejects but who, by murdering workers in Gaza, will try to gain support in a divided Israeli society.

The decline of U.S. imperialism around the globe is creating an increasingly volatile situation. The U.S. is being challenged by rivals big and small. The increasingly desperate U.S. bosses will not go down without a fight. Their growing desperation is adding fuel to the fires.

Israel created Hamas
Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007. It was founded as a nationalist organization in 1988 at the onset of the first uprising against the Israeli occupation. But its roots date to the late 1960’s and 70’s when the Israeli bosses were grasping for an alternative to Yassir Arafat’s Fatah organization. When an adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheik Ahmed Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya in 1979 Israel recognized it as an official organization. According to Ishaan Tharoor, “Yassin's Mujama would become Hamas, which, it can be argued, was Israel's Taliban: an Islamist group whose antecedents had been laid down by the West in a battle against a [Russian backed] enemy” (Washington Post 7/30/2014). Israel encouraged the rivalry between Fatah and Hamas even looking the other way as Hamas amassed weapons.

Hamas does not represent the resistance of workers in Gaza against the oppression of the Israeli state any more than Fatah did. Hamas, with the tacit support of the Israeli government, has always been primarily interested in seizing control of Gaza from Fatah and securing its own control of the territory (WSJ 1/24/2009).

For years Hamas has been reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on food (The Guardian 2010) and clothes (The New Arab 7/20/22) from the starving workers of Gaza to fill the pockets of its leadership and maintain it’s network of supporters.

While the working class on both sides of the Gaza war are trapped in the ambition of the nationalist group Hamas and Israel's murderous ruling class, for workers around the world there is no good choice under this deadly system.

The only way out is communist revolution
For the workers there is only one way out, to demolish capitalism and its rhetoric of nations, religions, races and borders, and build the communist state to guarantee us health and housing, together as a single international working class.

Capitalism creates religious and racial differences to undermine the revolutionary potential of global working-class unity. Thousands of workers inside and outside these countries will be dragged to support one of the fascist nationalist sides led by Israel or Hamas, both oppressors and enemies of the working class. Both must be swept away through a communist revolution.

From the ruins of Gaza and all the places devastated by capitalist war, the revolutionary consciousness of the international working class must be reborn. Let the imperialists start their wars, the workers will finish them with communist revolution.