COLOMBIA​​, January 17—In Colombia, after the surge of the conflict in Gaza in October, the government of Gustavo Petro has taken a different position than the majority of governments, refusing to condemn the Hamas attacks, questioning the incursion of the Israeli army, and talking about the role of the Zionist mercenaries in the shaping of paramilitarism in Colombia and the subsequent wave of violence that has plagued the countryside and the cities for decades.

Petro has clearly stated that he favors a peace accord that recognizes the two states. He also said, he rejects what “the extreme right wings of both countries that will take both societies to a conflict where all will be defeated” that the Colombian government supports the National Palestinian Authority that is against Hamas.

Petro masquerades as “pro-Palestine”, but quietly supports genocide
Petro has been criticized for his position by the Zionists and the more conservative sectors of the Colombian bourgeoise, traditional ally of Israel. Gilinki, a Jewish banker and oligarch exploiter of the working class of Colombia, has declared his consternation over the declarations of the president, who recently compared Israel’s military intervention with the Holocaust, making this a choice between supporting the Israeli bosses or the Palestinian bosses.  Critical point that has created a wedge inside the national bourgeoise.
Recently this ideological dispute between Petro and the defenders of Israel in Colombia has deepened, especially after the president condemned the Israeli’s army attacks on journalists, as of this writing 109 journalist have been killed and his approval of the suit against Israel by South Africa in the International Court of Justice in the Hague, for violating the provisions if the 1948 Convention against genocide.  

However, these liberal positions that the Colombian government has taken regarding one of the bloodiest conflicts of our time, where 24,000 people have been killed, most of them workers, has not translated into real measures of support for the Palestinian resistance, reducing them to sending humanitarian aid, or calling to consult the Colombian ambassador to Israel, or the support of Argelia’s denouncement of Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes in the International Criminal Court and the demand presented by South Africa.

As we can see, Petro’s support is towards the Palestinian government, not the resistance of the workers in Palestine. We also need to point out that the Colombian government has kept all the commercial relations and especially the military connections with Israel, the “anger” of the president has been reduced to mere words.
Petro defends and shares the imperialist policies of two states, and to serve this purpose he presents his political strategy of a Peace Conference for Palestine.  His refusal to condemn Hamas and support the genocide by Israel, demands breaking relations with Israel and to assume an effective support of Palestine, but he has shown the weakness and limits of his foreign policies when maintaining his opposition to Israel only tangentially, defending only the recognition of a Palestinian state, led by murderous bourgeoise who use nationalism as a form of control of the masses.

Even though the protests in Colombia against Zionism in the last three months have not been as massive as those in the USA, UK, France, New Zealand, Turkey and others, a solidarity committee has been created for the Palestinian cause formed araba activists, independent political organizations, defenders of human rights, student collectives, amongst others.  They have called for massive demonstrations in support of Palestine and spreading the real situation in Gaza, which has not been properly presented by the media, national or international, who serve the Zionist bourgeoise.

Internationalism is essential for workers
Although we understand that these actions are revisionists, because they are limited to the defense of the constitution of the Palestinian state for a free Palestine, they are the first step towards the international solidarity mobilization of the workers against the bosses’ wars.  We have to be clear that marching does not a revolution make, and that only communism can eradicate the state violence against the working class. We have to promote communist education to be able to canalize the potential of the masses in movement.  

In PLP we have been meeting, marching and rallying, we have shared our political line and sold . We have CHALLENGE put up front the necessity of international solidarity, fought against nationalist ideas and fought for unity of the working class. Worker’s oppression will not be eliminated creating new bourgeoise states, only communism and its red flag can break our chains and end all wars.  

We have been very critical of the government’s position and Petro and his bland opposition on this conflict.  We have shown that his support is not with the Palestinian working class, victims of the war policies, but with the Palestinian ruling class; nationalist and oppressive.

No doubt, the expansion of the conflict has made the bosses of the world take a side that benefits their interests, we have to create awareness of the dangers of nationalism, liberal fascism and defending bourgeoise wars amongst the working class.  

For a free Palestine, fight for communist internationalism!

EAST AFRICA, January 12—On this day when East Africa celebrates the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held a meeting of young students and teachers to discuss the genocide in Gaza and how we can fight against this imperialist oppression that is killing innocent children and women and disrupting the day-to-day life of millions of people.

Many participants who are religious Christians were defending Israel’s killing of Palestinians because the Bible says Israel is a holy state given to the Jews by God. We presented the real history behind this war as the product of capitalist expansion, and we exposed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s role in continuing the Nakba of 1948 when the October 7th ethnic cleansing campaign to decimate Palestinians began. We also exposed the religious ideology as a tool of capitalists to maintain their interests and disunite workers.

We watched different revolutionary movies about why Zanzibar had a bloody revolution in 1964 and about Marxist Thomas Sankara (the Upright Man), former president of Burkina Faso. Under his leadership, the rate of literacy there increased from 13 percent in 1983 to 73 percent in 1987. We discussed that only by making a revolution with a mass working-class movement can we win the struggle against all false ideas and the humiliation by imperialists against other states and societies in the world. If we build a strong movement led by PLP to fight for a communist society we can win our struggle and form one society in the world with no racism, gender inequality, or nationalist fighting as is happening in Gaza and Sudan. Only by achieving communism can we build a new international peace.

CHICAGO, December 23 – Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) here are putting the racist liberal bosses on blast for their role in murdering our working-class siblings. Today and earlier in the week we have shared communist solidarity outside a mass shelter for migrant workers and families on the city’s near west side, where a five-year-old boy named Jean Carlos Martinez Rivero fell ill and died on December 17th.

As communist revolutionaries, we openly declare that a racist capitalist system that cannot guarantee the safety of children doesn’t deserve to exist and needs to be destroyed. While liberal politicians like Mayor Brandon Johnson offer empty words of condolences and point blame at their political rivals for stoking chaos, none of them have any real solutions for the genocides unleashed on our class. Their position under the system keeps them beholden to capitalism’s need for profit and war.

The only solution to genocide and war, to this sick system murdering children from Chicago to Gaza, is to build a revolutionary class struggle under the leadership of the mass PLP. When we say justice for Jean Carlos and so many others, we mean building the fight for an egalitarian communist world!

In the scene with communist solidarity
The thing most tragic about the death of Jean Carlos is that it was almost certainly avoidable. He and his family had been staying at the former warehouse turned shelter for barely three weeks, herded like cattle next to hundreds of others in a public health catastrophe. Over 2,000 migrant workers and youth were cramped at the same wretched site. In addition to Jean Carlos, four other children and two adults from the shelter were hospitalized in the same week (WTTW, 12/21).

Community organizers quickly organized a memorial vigil outside the shelter for Jean Carlos on the Wednesday after his death. PLP members attended, bringing not just our sympathy, medicine, and some clothes to donate but also our righteous class anger. While everyone present found some comfort in grieving collectively, many workers felt inspired by our sign that read “Justice for Jean Carlos – A system that can’t guarantee the safety of children doesn’t deserve to exist.” Many came up to take pictures, get a copy of CHALLENGE, exchange contact information, and share stories of their struggles under the system.

Today we returned to the same site with an even larger contingent of comrades to continue expressing our solidarity with workers all over the world. We brought pitchers full of warm champurrado to share, along with more CHALLENGEs, medicine, and winter clothing. PLP members took to the bullhorn and gave speeches in Spanish that placed the blame squarely on the bosses for so much chaos. We quickly distributed close to 200 CHALLENGEs and made more contacts.

In a situation of seemingly inescapable desperation and disorder, we point out not only the limits but also the potential. As one comrade shared in his speech, “We are a small party of workers and students. We don’t have many resources and we haven’t taken state power yet from the bosses. But what we do have is our communist ideas and internationalism, which are powerful and will one day create a revolution to build a better world.”

The capitalists’ “solutions” are killing us
The train wreck of a response from the Chicago city bosses to tens of thousands of migrant workers and youth arriving over the past year and a half demonstrates not only their treachery to our class but also the bankruptcy of their so-called “solutions.”

“Progressive” but still capitalist politicians like Brandon Johnson can call out the blatant racism of gutter fascists like Texas Governor Greg Abbott or Florida’s Ron DeSantis for sending busloads of workers from the southern U.S. states. However, his criticism conveniently leaves out the role that his faction of the U.S. ruling class, the Big Fascist wing, has historically played in destabilizing national economies around the world through their control of international finance capital and command of the world’s largest military.

These Big Fascist bosses (mostly Democratic Party “liberal” hacks) position themselves as the more “humane” alternative even as their aid can never be more than a Band-Aid on a mortal wound. Even if shelter conditions were to dramatically improve, there is little to no path for most migrant workers to integrate themselves more widely into a capitalist system in crisis. The status quo of the system will continue to relegate them into positions of instability and as a reserve labor pool for the bosses to super-exploit for higher profits.

We must contrast such notions of capitalism’s “charity” with our vision for a worker-run communist society. Beyond just the working class receiving what we need based on our collective control of distribution, we would be free of the alienation and waste of potential that exists under capitalism. Billions of workers would finally be able to contribute towards the organization and functioning of society.

Planting the seeds for an egalitarian world
Such a reality might seem far off, but we can see the seeds of a more communist world planted in the current struggle. Countless workers in the city have volunteered their time in recent months -- from cooks to carpenters to student doctors -- not because they expect to be paid, but rather because they understand their common existence with workers forced to migrate by capitalism.

PLP will continue to fight alongside workers wherever we are to minimize the immediate harm of this racist system while stressing the need to overthrow it entirely. In the memory of Jean Carlos and so many others, we deserve nothing less.

On November 30th, 2023, we lost Lorrell, a devoted comrade, organizer, teacher, leader, and friend, to a medical complication. Her absence creates a hole in our lives that is immense and unfathomable. Trying to understand this tragedy is impossible and awful. We will carry on in her memory but what has been lost can never be replaced. We will do her justice by celebrating her life, spirit, and commitment to the international working class.

Early life, meeting Progressive Labor Party
Lorrell spent her early years in the southeast suburbs of Chicago, a region marked by brutal environmental racism due to concentrations of heavy industry and pollution. Undoubtedly witnessing firsthand from a young age how capitalism treats whole populations of workers – particularly Black and Brown workers – as disposable, influenced Lorrell’s understanding of the system and fueled her desire to fight to destroy it.

She met the Progressive Labor Party while a university student and quickly became a committed comrade in the struggle for revolution. Her sharp insights on how racism is indispensable to capitalism notably superseded the liberal interpretations of race and class within the mass movement in general. Her dialectical understanding of how racism, sexism, and capitalism all work to reinforce one another and oppress all working people influenced her to organize firmly based on multiracial working-class unity.

After graduating college, Lorrell committed herself to teaching at local universities attended by working-class students. She also worked as a program director for a disability rights organization, one of her life’s principal passions. She went above and beyond to fight alongside other workers with disabilities to demand their respect and basic accommodations so often denied under the profit system.

Although Lorrell always acknowledged the scale of the class struggle in nearby Chicago, she never once abandoned what she saw as revolutionary potential in workers and students in the smaller towns and cities of Northwest Indiana where she lived. To this end, she passionately advocated like she did for so many other issues for their inclusion in the Party’s overall political work. Because of her, countless people became closer to PLP and remain in our base to this day.

Tireless leadership fighting racism, sexism, and capitalism
As Lorrell’s experience and commitment grew, she was asked to give more leadership, joining the area city committee which included leaders from Chicago and Northwest Indiana clubs. Lorrell played a great role in this body and especially stepped up in 2016 when two leaders were gone for the year. During this year she helped plan the demonstration we held in front of the home of Jason Van Dyke, the racist kkkop murderer of 17-year-old Black teenager Laquan McDonald.

This action took weeks of planning and multiple meetings to make sure everyone agreed with and was committed to the plan. Security planning was crucial given we were directly targeting Van Dyke where he lived. The action was successful and caught Van Dyke unaware—the dirtbag was actually out front watering his lawn when we marched up! This was one of the sharpest actions that took place nationally that year.  

That same summer she led another struggle after city bosses in East Chicago tried to abruptly uproot the majority Black worker residents of the West Calumet Housing Complex after allowing them and their children to live for decades on soil contaminated with lead and arsenic. Lorrell personally made connections with mothers whose children had suffered serious health effects, driving them to doctor appointments as well as protests.

When the GEO corporation was trying to build an immigrant detention center in her area, Lorrell organized to have people oppose their efforts at every turn. She organized workers to go to council meetings and speak out against this racist project. Gary, Indiana is a majority Black city and as a Black worker, she spoke of solidarity with immigrants of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Gary and the surrounding areas needed jobs (since so much manufacturing left the area) but she argued fiercely that jobs jailing other workers was not what the region needed or wanted. This was a struggle that was won—GEO did not get to build their immigrant jail.

Lorrell also participated in a coalition group that found out that a local airport was being used weekly to deport immigrants from the area. Weekly protests at the airport began and Lorrell once again played a leading role. Rejecting the average performative liberal protest tactics, she helped lead other workers onto the actual airport tarmac towards the airplanes during one particularly memorable confrontation against security forces in 2017.

Like millions of other antiracists around the world, Lorrell dove headlong into the mass rebellions that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. She was a mainstay in all the protests in the region, pushing the envelope to be more openly confrontational with the killer cops and gutter racists across the suburbs. The militant organizing spaces that she helped develop stayed busy in the years that followed, notably when staging mass antisexist protests around reproductive justice after the reversal of Roe v Wade in 2022.

Her memory marches on
Lorrell was the stabilizing force in her family and cared for the previous generation with devotion and kindness. Whether it was driving her aunt, mom, or dad to their doctor’s appointments, or having them move in with her, she always went the extra mile. Losing her is being felt deeply by her immediate family, her comrades, and her friends.

Speaking with a friend, she said, “You know, if something were to happen to me, don't mourn me with candles. Make it loud and revolutionary. Make it reflect the movement I gave my energy and passion to. Don't stand around silently with candles. Have a bullhorn, march the street, and more than anything join the struggle I believe in so strongly.”

We will do just that, comrade. We will pick up your rifle and keep fighting this racist and sexist system that took you from us far too soon.