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Editorial: Lebanon - imperialist slaughter & mass displacement
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- 10 April 2026 19 hits
As the Middle East crisis deepens, Lebanon has again become a target for imperialist slaughter. Hours after State-Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump threatened that Iranian “civilization will die tonight,” the war between the U.S.-Israel and Iran reached a fragile ceasefire.Whatever happens next, the conflict has already spiraled into a global crisis. From soaring fuel prices and disruptions of vital global supply chains to the disintegration of U.S. alliances, these events bring the spectre of world war ever closer.
The so-called ceasefire excludes Lebanon. Backed by the U.S. imperialist Reich, the Israeli Zionist regime persists in its attacks on southern Lebanon, killing 1,500, injuring 4,800 and displacing 1.3 million.
There are no good sides in the bosses’ wars, only rival rulers using workers as cannon fodder. No ruling class will save us—not the Lebanese bosses, not Iran, not China, not Russia, and certainly not the U.S. or Israel. The solution lies within the working class. That’s why workers, soldiers, and students must turn this imperialist war into a class war. Progressive Labor Party is building toward that communist future.
A triangle of misery in crisis ridden world
Our class siblings in Lebanon are trapped inside a trinity of misery: U.S.-Israel imperialism, the failing Lebanese government itself, and the bosses of Hezbollah, the fundamentalist, Iranian-backed political party and paramilitary.
While the Israeli bosses claim to be targeting Hezbollah, they are bombing our class into oblivion. The Zionazis are proudly using the genocidal “Gaza Model” to destroy homes and infrastructure, exile 600,000 residents, and possibly occupy southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. Nearly one of five people in the country are displaced. All of Litani’s major bridges have been bombed in order to sever the area from the rest of the country.
Seventy percent of Lebanon’s population lives in poverty (World Bank Report, 2024).Its currency has lost nearly all of its value, and healthcare and electricity are next to nonexistent. Consumed by “political gridlock among Lebanon’s sectarian leadership,” this war could bring Lebanon to the brink of collapse (Foreign Affairs, 4/3).
And then there’s the Shiite Muslim organization Hezbollah, often described as a “state within a state” (Council of Foreign Affairs, 3/2). It grew as a result of the Israeli invasion of 1982 and the subsequent 18 years of occupation. Hezbollah functions as a proxy for Iran and vehemently opposes Israeli and Western imperialism. The Hezbollah bosses cynically foment religious divisions and resentments. They are not for workers’ liberation; they’re just funded by a different set of regional imperialists, Iran.
Crossroads
As imperialist powers compete for dominance, war becomes inevitable. U.S. imperialism is in decline, weakened by decades of failed wars and deep internal splits within its ruling class. But declining empires do not go peacefully. At the same time, rivals China and Russia are pushing their influence.
For the U.S., Israel functions as a pillar of regional power, a counterweight to Iran, which is allied with Russia and China. Iran, in turn, rules via its proxies, including Hezbollah. Lebanon borders Syria and Israel, and its coastline on the Mediterranean makes it a geopolitical flashpoint.
Lebanon’s fragility is rooted in the legacy of colonial rule, where government power was systematically divided along religious lines. “By controlling newspapers, schools, higher education and cultural institutions,” French and British imperialists divided the Arab population (Daily Sabah, 2/17/22). Workers were stripped of power by class collaboration and religious misleaders. This is the standard imperialist playbook—sow divisions while weakening local government, which keeps it vulnerable to imperialist control.
Today’s war builds on that foundation. As U.S. imperialism weakens, it becomes more volatile and dangerous. When Trump launched Operation Epic Fury on Iran without a plan or consultation, it deepened rifts with European allies—first by excluding them, then by blaming them for withholding support, and now by insisting that they deal with the consequences (The Hill, 4/4). These allies are “left searching for better ways to navigate the new world order where Trump whipsaws friends and foes alike” (NY Times, 4/8). U.S. allies are scrambling to delay the inevitable, which is a bigger war.
War brings misery to workers everywhere
Imperialist wars hit workers everywhere. As wars spread across the region, the disruption of energy supplies, especially through the Strait of Hormuz, is driving up fuel prices and the cost of living worldwide. That means higher costs for food, transportation, fertilizer, rent, life-saving medications, and more. Workers who were already struggling are being squeezed even harder.
At the same time, Trump is proposing a $1.5 trillion war budget, the largest funding increase since World War II, while telling workers to make do with less (Reuters, 4/3). Under the profit system, there is always money for war and more racist cops and ICE Gestapo, but never enough for housing, healthcare, or education.
Choosing between ruling-class murderers is a trap. The only force capable of ending this capitalist nightmare is the international working class.
By organizing across the bosses’ borders and rejecting nationalist divisions, workers can begin to fight for a communist future. We need all of society to be organized to serve the needs of the many, not the profits of a few. There is nothing “natural” about the carnage of war; it’s a necessity of capitalism.
Wherever we are, we must organize to smash the bloodsucking bosses. And to make that victory last, you need to join PLP. March with us on May Day!
NEWARK, March 28th—Fired up by the global rise of racist terror, fascism, and the threat of world war unleashed by the current U.S. ruling class, a multiracial crowd of hundreds marched at our nearest “No Kings” protest—joining millions of workers from New Jersey to Kenya.
Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) task every day is to win our students, coworkers, and longtime and new friends to a clear understanding: capitalism, with every bombing and every attack, is stripping away its liberal democratic facade and revealing its rotten fascist core.
Fascism is not an accident—and it’s not just Trump. Fascism is how rulers respond when their system is in crisis, and it doesn’t happen overnight by electing a MAGA candidate. It is a process. As capitalism plunges deeper into economic turmoil, rulers increasingly turn to open violence and will suspend democracy to maintain their grip on power. Trump represents open fascism — but the liberal Democratic Party is the greater fascist danger. They are the wolves in sheep’s clothing: hiding behind a veneer of progressive politics. Worst of all, they are effective at drumming up the kind of rainbow nationalism and use reformist crumbs to get young people marching to their deaths in World War 3.
Instead, we call on workers everywhere to reject capitalism in all its forms and fight for workers’ power: communist revolution.
Fiery reds roast liberalism
Our multiracial PLP contingent of class-conscious workers and students brought a militant communist line to the “No Kings” protest—centering the struggle against the whole system, not just Trump. That perspective landed. PLP’ers made contact with four new people who found our politics refreshing: a veteran, a worker who called themselves a communist but wasn’t with any organization, and an older neighbor. Around 80 people took our revolutionary communist CHALLENGE newspaper and leaflets, and many were openly critical of the liberal politics on display.
One worker put it plainly: even though the protest was “Lib’d up,” he recognized the importance of seizing every opportunity to meet other revolutionary workers and build a base wherever our class siblings gather in mass. Overall, the protests confirmed that workers are hungry for a real alternative to this rotting system.
Liberal politicians sell workers heartbreaking illusions—that voting for them will end wars or stop racist ICE raids. Electing Black and Brown progressive mayors like Ras Baraka, Zohran Mamdani, or governor Mikie Sherrill will never save us. They are elected to manage a system that was never built for workers in the first place. No matter who is in charge, capitalism will always prioritize profits over workers’ lives. Liberals will occasionally champion reforms—free public transportation, affordable housing, temporarily shutting down immigrant detention centers—to fool workers into thinking they’re on our side. But declining profits under capitalism will make such reforms impossible to sustain. They are a decoy, not a solution.
As the illusion of liberal democracy fades, workers must be clear: bosses worldwide—large and small—are dumping workers’ needs, discarding the rule of law, and abandoning the pretense that we ever had an equal say in their system. With that illusion gone, they must rely on racist, sexist, and nationalist terror to enforce their rule and prepare for war against rising imperialist rivals. ICE deportations in the U.S. and travel bans disciplining workers in China are two sides of the same coin (NYT, 03/08/25). This naked, unmasked approach to ruling is what we call fascism — and it is the future capitalism is building for all of us.
From the masses to the masses
While the official leadership of the protest relied on bland, reformist chants and speeches that mainly attacked Trump and tried to keep us blind towards capitalism, we energized the crowd that did not want to be pacified. We led chants like “Democrats, Republicans! We don’t want your imperialist games!”—one of several messages that clearly resonated with upwards of 150 people who took up our chants at different times.
When two hecklers linked with Democratic Party tried to silence us by yelling things like you are not chanting the same chants, you didn’t organize this, this isn’t about you, this is not the message, go organize your own march, we saw the power of our ideas as workers stepped in to defend us. A young Black man who was so inspired by our antiracist chants came up to us and asked us if he could try out a chant, and he added a new chant attacking the racism of ICE. When the confrontation with the hecklers happened he physically stood by our side and told them we were doing the right thing. He added, the point is for us to learn from each other. His support gave us that boost in confidence as we roared on the megaphone, “Have the democrats not betrayed us? Are we wrong?” To which the people around us enthusiastically agreed with us. That was enough for the hecklers to see people were not on their side and they drifted away. Others who we spoke to one on one were more open to building the power of workers to beat and ultimately get rid of capitalism, after their initial response was to vote Trump out.
After the march a small group of us including students, educators, and a healthcare worker ate pizza together, read CHALLENGE, and discussed the protest. As we ate we shared how we felt affirmed by the people driving by, and on the sidewalks, enthusiastically taking our newspaper, chanting along, and genuinely engaged and identifying with the protest. The students who are getting to know the PLP expressed our sharp understanding of the “lesser of two evils” crap, recognizing that neither Democratic nor Republican party offers a real solution to capitalism or global conflict.
Hopelessness in capitalist democracy vs blossoming communist mindset
Some workers are drawn to No Kings protests from the hope of democracy prevailing or democracy “returning” or the possibility of “saving democracy”, when there is not enough hope that capitalism can be challenged itself. As bosses betray that demand, for more workers the hope is born in seeing liberalism criticized, in realizing we don’t have to rely on the emptiness of voting for the “perfect” candidate or “hero”, and that the bosses’ hunger for profits and lawless dependence on global war trapping us in bloodshed is being challenged by working class fighters every day.
In turn, the base for communist ideas inside the working class grows by learning from this leadership and the initiative of the masses willing to do nothing less than overpower the ruling class to defend each other like in Minneapolis. And asserting the need to organize that power into an army of millions of communist fighters capable of defeating the whole rotten profit system.
Fascist politicians like Donald Trump and billionaire bosses like Elon Musk are reviving the poison of IQ, “genetic superiority,” and human hierarchy. Trump brags about his “good genes… a very high IQ” (Washington Post, 10/2016), reducing people to bloodlines and rankings. Musk pushes a high-tech version of the same lie, claiming “AI will surpass human intelligence by the end of 2026” (World Economic Forum, 01/2026), treating intelligence like a number that can rank workers, machines, and whole populations. Underlying this logic is a racist, sexist logic meant to prime the working class for fascism. Billionaires like Peter Thiel openly defend inequality and attack even the façade of liberal-democracy, insisting that society must be led by a so-called superior few (Cato Institute, 2009). Different voices, same message: some people are meant to rule, and the rest are meant to obey.
These ideas are not new. They are the same old ruling-class lie dressed up in a new language. From Charles Murray to earlier racists like E. O. Wilson, the bosses have always tried to “prove” that inequality is natural. What they call science is propaganda for the ruling class. Today they dress up eugenics in the language of data, genetics, and technology to make that lie seem modern and inevitable, but the goal has not changed: to justify exploitation and prepare the ground for repression and genocide.
This fascist message is clear: if workers are poor, exploited, or discarded, it is because they lack intelligence. This lie must be smashed. Intelligence is not biological destiny. It is produced through the collective labor of the working class.
Working-Class intelligence is social labor
Intelligence does not belong to individuals. It is created through the collective labor of the working class. Every day, workers generate knowledge through cooperation, improvisation, and struggle. A teacher reads a classroom, adjusts instruction, and develops new ways to reach students under pressure. A transit worker carries out an emergency evacuation, coordinating movement, calming passengers, and restoring service in the face of danger. A nurse makes rapid decisions that balance training with the unpredictable realities of a patient’s condition. These are not isolated acts of individual genius. They are expressions of social labor, rooted in shared experience and collective practice.
This intelligence is cumulative. It is built over time through shared struggle, passed between workers, refined in practice, and sharpened as a class project. On the job, workers constantly solve problems that management cannot anticipate. Workers build shortcuts, informal support systems, and collective strategies that keep workplaces functioning despite underfunding, speedups, and outright repression. Without it, production would grind to a halt.
This intelligence is also fundamentally cooperative. It emerges through communication, trust, and coordination. Workers depend on one another, pooling insight and synchronizing action in ways no isolated individual could replicate. Even under conditions designed to fragment and isolate workers, they generate shared understanding. This stands in direct opposition to the capitalist myth of intelligence as an individual asset to be measured, ranked, and rewarded. In reality, intelligence is relational. It is produced between people, not contained within them.
Capital depends on this worker’s social intelligence at every level, yet it refuses to recognize its source. Instead, it extracts knowledge from workers and presents it as the property of institutions, experts, and machines. Training manuals, algorithms, and management techniques are all built on the accumulated knowledge of workers, stripped from its social context and repackaged as capital’s property. What workers create together is turned into a force that disciplines and controls them.
Scarcity, debraining, and the myth of experts
To maintain this system, capitalism makes knowledge scarce. Access to education is restricted, expertise is enclosed within elite institutions, and information is hoarded behind paywalls and credentials. The knowledge produced by workers is taken, concentrated, and repackaged as specialized expertise (LARB, 02/2025). At the same time, the working class is subjected to social debraining. Exhaustion, precarity, and endless distraction fragment attention and prevent collective understanding (Brooklyn Rail, 02/2026). Workers are denied the time and space needed to connect their experiences into class consciousness.
The ruling class then elevates “experts” as the rightful owners of knowledge. These experts claim neutrality, but their authority depends on their alignment with capital. “Experts” are empowered to interpret and manage knowledge extracted from workers while dismissing working-class understanding as uninformed. This creates a false divide between workers. In truth, expert knowledge is itself a crystallization of collective labor.
It is not the property of a cognitive elite, but a derivative of social production. The real conflict is not between intelligence and ignorance. It is between capitalist enclosure of knowledge and the working class’s capacity to reclaim it.
Communist revolution is the only solution
The problem is not flawed IQ tests or biased algorithms. The problem is capitalism itself. This system turns human intelligence into a commodity, ranks workers to justify exploitation, and deploys science and technology as tools of domination (LARB, 02/2024). No reform can fix this. As long as capitalism exists, knowledge will be privatized, intelligence will be weaponized, and fascist ideas will reappear to defend inequality.
The only solution is communist revolution. The working class must seize the knowledge it produces and abolish the structures that hoard, distort, and control it. Under communism, intelligence will no longer serve profit or hierarchy. It will be shared collectively and used to meet human needs.
The artificial divisions of IQ, expertise, and worth will be destroyed, replaced by a society where the collective intelligence of workers organizes production and social life. As the antiracist anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould argued, we will be “less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
The ruling class fears this future. That is why it clings to the language of IQ and hierarchy. But the truth is simple: the working class already has the knowledge to run society. What it lacks is power. That power will only be won through organized, revolutionary struggle. Join PLP!
Greenbelt, Maryland, March 28—“Whose Park, Our Park” and “ICE out of Greenbelt” were enthusiastic chants as 250 people marched for 24 minutes through Greenbelt Park and past the police station where Federal Park Police detain immigrants for ICE. Several Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends helped the Greenbelt Resistance Network (GRN) organize and guarantee the success of this militant challenge to the ICE machine. As Donald Trump has released police forces throughout the Federal government, even the Park Police have become collaborators with ICE. In this case the Park Police pull over drivers on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, a federal highway. They racially profile drivers and target workers driving pickup trucks. ICE agents often join them at the highway but may also come to the police station in Greenbelt Park.
No such thing as a “good” cop
This march at “No Kings #3” clearly caught the Park Police off guard. With 250 marchers and another 150+ protestors on the other side of the street there was little they could do, although they tried to exert control by telling us to march “single file.” Eventually they called the local Greenbelt police who arrived at the tail end of the event and pretended to help escort the remaining marchers across the street. Already 200 marchers had made it across without a single cop. A comrade gave a speech attacking all police forces and calling for an end to the capitalist system. A couple of people tried to stop him, saying that they love their Greenbelt police who were just trying to help. Others jumped in to support the comrade’s speech. This sharpened the politics within the GRN and supporters and offers us a chance to continue to explain that all police exist to control workers and protect the capitalist class. The idea that local police oppose ICE is a myth being spread in the media to confuse the many new protesters. There are no good cops. The No Kings rallies overall have no political message other than voting for the Democratic Party and opposition to the worst of ICE’s behavior. They do not oppose genocide, and as we have also seen in Congress, have no real opposition to immigrant enforcement or war.
Workers show signs of class potential
The march through Greenbelt Park followed two months of previous rallies against ICE and the Park Police. Weekly meetings of the Greenbelt Resistance Network (GRN) had debated and planned this protest and considered questions of security and safety. In the end, the event went off without a permit, and the numbers made it work! Marching into this federal park with signs and chants is certainly “breaking the law” and shows the potential for the working class to advance with consistent organizing and commitment to class struggle. The rally and march were more multiracial than past rallies. A highlight of the rally was when a Black woman stepped up and said, “We are all in this together” and then led the crowd in singing civil rights songs. Another protestor took the mike to chant “Obreros Unidos no mas seran vencidos” and we translated: “The workers united will never be defeated.” PLP members were able to talk with many residents and make contacts for the party and for GRN. We gave out 30 CHALLENGEs and 50 notices about our ongoing struggle in Hyattsville where ICE is attempting to expand its presence in a local building and where we have given out 50 CHALLENGEs in the past two weeks. PLP has become recognized as a serious organization here.
Winning people to organize with our party for May Day is the next step, as more of our friends learn about our vision of a communist society and the struggle for revolution.
In Northwest Indiana, 800 workers were locked out of their jobs at the British Petroleum (BP) refinery on March 19th. They were followed by another 1600 workers locked out by utility company NIPSCO on April 2nd. PLP members were at the picket sharing communist politics and warm food. The bosses want to build fascism and racism to discipline our class to prepare for war, but workers aren't backing down! More to come in the next issue!
