While workers around the world watch in horror, the escalating slaughter taking place in Gaza leaves many people feeling helpless. With the demise of the old communist movement, workers are increasingly being led to the slaughter by one group of nationalists, religious fundamentalists or another.

While we cannot control the outcome of events right now, we can affect the outlook of our coworkers and within our unions, and fight for the political leadership of the working class. What we do, where we are, is all-important. We can, if we are creative and bold, expose the hellish world the capitalists have built, and organize to destroy these bosses and their system with communist revolution.

Last week, the NYC Jewish Labor Committee hosted an online panel on the Gaza war, chaired by Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Union (RWDSU) President Stuart Applebaum and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten. It included Peter Lerner, Director General of International Relations at Histadrut (the Israeli General Federation) and a Lt. Colonel in the Israeli reserves, Rami Hod - Executive Director at Berl Katznelson Center, a Liberal Zionist think tank, and Congressman Dan Goldman of Brooklyn.
Fascism was on full display! The main point of the call was to rally progressive labor leaders to support the genocidal collective punishment the Israeli government, with U.S. support, is unleashing on Gaza.  

But the Jewish Labor Committee ironically got one thing right; war is union business. No imperialist can wage war for long without the active or passive support of their workers, and their willingness to sacrifice for the costly war effort. Our job is to win workers to oppose imperialist war and overthrow the bosses.

At the urgent request of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, which has hundreds of members in Gaza, the leadership of the National Writers Union issued a statement that opposed the collective punishment, shed light on the journalists who have been targeted and murdered and the 50 media offices that were destroyed.

The statement called on the mainstream media, especially in the U.S. to not rely on unconfirmed statements from the Israeli and U.S. warmakers, and to defend any journalist or author being fired or threatened for daring to oppose the rush to war. It said that we should not repeat the post-9/11 story where the media led us to a 20-year war in Iraq and sanctioned the mass roundup and surveillance of Muslims in the U.S. There are numerous reports of writers and events being canceled and disciplined in the U.S. and across Europe.   

The current situation demands that Progressive Labor Party (PLP) be bold and speak out in our unions, and with our coworkers, in transit, in healthcare, in the schools and campuses. We should boldly oppose Randi Weingarten, who has been a spokesperson for U.S. imperialism in Ukraine and around the world.  There is no short-term solution to this endless nightmare. We must do our best to build the Party. Have lunchroom discussions, raise union resolutions, invite your coworkers for dinner for more discussions, and bring some coworkers to local anti-war actions. Getting CHALLENGE to workers is essential to countering fascist ideas.

Let’s do what we can, as limited as that may be, to oppose the current slaughter that is now underway. The answer in Israel/Palestine, and everywhere, must start with international solidarity, antiracism, and building the unity of Jews and Palestinians, which has been done before, yet today seems unimaginable. It ends with turning imperialist war into communist revolution, and the international working class coming to power.

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!

From Israel: Apartheid kills Palestinians and class consciousness
The slaughter is the bosses’ doing. Those who would argue that we are “assuming symmetry between the occupier and the occupied” are missing the point. There is no symmetry between the big bosses – Chinese and American – and the exploited working classes of the Middle East. For them, we are all slaves to extract profit from and chess pieces in their struggles for geopolitical dominance. The Israeli worker is not the oppressor of the Palestinian worker – rather, the big businessmen oppress both.

Israel’s super-rich ruling class includes people such as Miriam Adelson – the world’s 30th richest person, with a net worth of 27.5 billion USD. This boss is well-involved in Israeli politics and is an adamant supporter of Israel’s corrupt and fascist prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. On the other side, Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas – who considers themselves a “popular resistance movement” – lives safely and in luxury in Qatar, far from Gaza. He has a net worth of 4 billion USD, gained by extorting the Gazan population and by embezzling foreign aid given to the impoverished Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, 65% of the people of Gaza live below the poverty line.
The big businessmen get away with their grisly crimes thanks to the toxic ideology of nationalism. This way of thinking posits that Israeli workers are on the same side as the billionaire Mrs. Adelson, and the oppressed Palestinian workers are on the same side as the ultra-rich Mr. Haniyeh. But the top bosses are the utter enemies of all working-class people. For them, we, the workers, are nothing but machines and tools to generate their profits and fight their wars.

The Chamas action last Saturday has helped to unify all walks of life here and the liberal demos against the so-called “Judicial reform” disappeared and wiped off the earth.
Gal Gadot (the Israeli actress -Wonder Woman) tweeted saying she is opposed to the killing of innocent Jews and Palestinians was labeled a “Traitor” for mentioning Palestinians and Jews in the same sentence.She deleted her tweet and apologized .

The so-called “left” is labeling Palestinians as “Human beasts” and calling to wipe Ghaza off the map. We are staying home most of the time - no schools (closed) and there are sporadic rockets aimed at the Tel Aviv area so we have to be able to enter a safe place - the sirens give you 90 seconds to do so.
The army is now engaged on 3 fronts and the killing of Palestinians continues in the north, the West Bank, and Ghaza under “moral” justification.

Unfortunately, there is no communist leadership among the Palestinians and Israelis, only nationalist and religious motivation. The interest of all working-class people in Israel-Palestine is to place the blame on their true oppressors and butchers: the bourgeoisie. The only way to cast away the poisonous ideology of nationalism and replace nationalist war with class war – is to organize a mass multi-ethnic communist party.

This way, we, the working class, can win a world free from the vicious cycle of slaughter. The only thing that deserves to die is the capitalist system!
*****

NY: in solidarity with UAW strikers
I recently visited a United Auto Workers (UAW) picket line with some fellow union members to see first-hand the determination and bravery of fellow workers against the bosses. After stopping at the grocery store to pick up some solidarity grocery supplies, we arrived at the picket line.
The workers were from a small parts supplier, but we were impressed with the multiracial, cross-gender solidarity and their strength: the picket line is active 24-hours per day, 7-days per week!
While there, we heard stories from long-time workers about how they were forced to make concessions to bail out the auto companies during the Great Recession in 2008 and how the auto companies have never made good on their promise to restore the cuts. Typical bosses. We’re engaged in our own contract struggle, and while our union leadership does everything it can to quash any momentum toward striking, workers are more and more fed up and ready to take action. We can draw inspiration from the UAW workers and their ongoing fight.
*****

Haiti: a communist revolution is their only salvation
On October 2, the UN Security Council voted on a resolution approving the deployment of a force of 1,000 Kenyan policemen to Haiti. Their main stated objective is to combat the proliferation of gangs in the capital of Port-Au-Prince. Those gangs (really armed militias) are the results of decades of exploitation imposed by local and international bosses. The lack of a significant communist organization left unemployed workers with little choice but to join the gangs, many of them controlled by politicians and local businessmen.

As we already know, the real objective is to impose more miseries and exploitation on Haitian workers. In 2004, the UN came to Haiti to impose U.S. and European imperialist will on the workers. The mission objective was to stabilize the country and create a climate where the international and the local bosses could exploit the workers. After 17 years that mission failed miserably. This new mission is also bound for failure. Workers in Haiti and throughout the world don’t need the boss’s solution to solve their problem. Capitalism has no answers to humanity ‘s problems. It must be destroyed. Only a communist revolution can achieve this objective.
*****

Run in memory of comrade Fernando
October 1 marked the first (hopefully annual) Braga 5K Memorial Run at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. The race was named after our fallen comrade Fernando Braga who died by suicide last year. (His obituary appeared in CHALLENGE ,July 20, 2023). Several members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), friends, and family members participated in the race and others we know helped put on the event. The 5K run (and jwalk) acted as a fundraiser for Fernando’s daughter’s college fund and organizations dedicated to stopping veteran suicide.

While it was an emotional day for many, it was also an opportunity to honor Fernando by building relationships around the ideas he fought for. He “was not just a veteran but an Iraq veteran against the war,” I told several participants I met. These included high school and college students. The second place finisher even grew up near me in NYC!

“I think the two of you would’ve gotten along,” I told one of the lead organizers who is a professor at the college. He didn’t get to meet Fernando since he started teaching after Fernando graduated, but teaches a course on the school to military pipeline. I hope I can help with some of the organizing next year and get to know him (as well as others) better.

Fernando was my club leader some years ago, providing our collective in general, and me in particular, with advice and leadership. I always respected the way he put our line into practice as a student, soldier and worker. At one point when we were close, I struggled with a decision of whether or not to join the military or remain an industrial worker. Fernando’s experience, thoughtful application of our line, and objective considerations of my strengths and weaknesses provided rare guidance that meant the most.

Before the 5K race, there were two speeches. The PL’ers who went agreed that next year we’d make sure we get to make one. The first speech was by a school administrator and reflected some of the nationalist ties between the College and the military. The other, though, was by one of Fernando’s closest friends and fellow veterans at school. He spoke for many of us at the 5K when he said “support each other, tell each other how much you love each other, it really matters. If I could take anything back, I would’ve definitely told him what he meant to me.”
Rest in Power Fernando!
*****

Liberal racists evict workers from shelters
New York City, Oct 11-  Chanting “Fight, fight, fight, Housing is a human right!,” a coalition of housing groups protested at the New York governor’s office against Top kkkop Mayor Eric Adams’ vow, together with the liberal fascist state, to suspend the “right to shelter” law in NYC. As thousands are being evicted under the 30 day limit on shelter, the new proposal would put homeless workers, including migrants, onto the streets. Comrades joined the group, met up with friends and distributed 50 copies of CHALLENGE. The fight continues, and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) will be there to build communism one struggle at a time.

Chinese bosses begin rehabilitation of Syrian bosses
Reuters, 9/21–Syrian President Bashar al-Assad arrived in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, his first visit to China since 2004 and his latest bid to end more than a decade of diplomatic isolation under Western sanctions. Being seen with China's president at a regional gathering should add further legitimacy to Assad's campaign to return to the world stage. Syria joined China's Belt and Road Initiative in 2022 and was welcomed back into the Arab League in May. "In his third term, Xi Jinping is seeking to openly challenge the United States, so I don't think it's a surprise that he is willing to go against international norms and host a leader like Assad," said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore…Alongside the U.S., Syria faces sanctions from Australia, Canada and European states, but bids to impose multilateral sanctions have not secured the support of the U.N. Security Council, where China and Russia both have a veto. China has used its veto at least eight times on U.N. motions condemning Assad's government…Syria, a small oil producer, holds strategic significance for China. It lies between Iraq, a major oil supplier to China, and Turkey, the terminus of economic corridors stretching across Asia into Europe. Syria also borders Jordan and Lebanon.

Russia selling wheat directly to Egypt, bypassing market
Bloomberg, 9/26–Egypt is in talks to buy 1 million tons of Russian wheat through a government-to-government deal, people familiar with the matter said. The talks have taken place for delivery this season, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information isn’t public. Egypt is one of the world’s top wheat importers and its purchases are closely tracked as a global benchmark…Russia has had two bumper harvests in a row, reinforcing its position as the biggest wheat shipper. Still, some recent sales of Russian wheat to Egypt have been complicated by efforts to enforce an unofficial price floor for the country’s supplies.

Yelling fire in a crowded congress
BBC, 9/30–An investigation has been launched after a congressman in the US House of Representatives triggered a fire alarm as his party was trying to delay a crucial budget vote on Saturday. Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat, says it was an accident. But his opponents have accused him of trying to disrupt the vote designed to avoid a US federal government shutdown. The alarm prompted an hour-long evacuation…The alarm went off as Democrats were attempting to delay the vote as they sought more time to read the bill and decide whether to support it…" Today, as I was rushing to make a vote, I came to a door that is usually open for votes but today would not open. I am embarrassed to admit that I activated the fire alarm, mistakenly thinking it would open the door," Mr Bowman said in a statement. He added that he was not "in any way, trying to delay any vote". "It was the exact opposite - I was trying urgently to get to a vote, which I ultimately did and joined my colleagues in a bipartisan effort to keep our government open."

U.N. decision to send troops to Haiti pending
France24, 10/2–The UN Security Council will decide on Monday whether to endorse an international force to back Haiti's police…Kenya announced in late July that it was ready to take on the lead-nation role and deploy a 1,000-strong force to the impoverished Caribbean country. The United States, which has expressed willingness to provide logistical support but no boots on the ground, indicated last month that several other countries were prepared to contribute to a multinational security force. Those countries include Jamaica, the Bahamas and Antigua and Barbuda. China, which holds a Security Council veto, has previously expressed skepticism about an international security mission. It has instead emphasized a need to crack down on the arms flow from Florida.