Harlem
This past November, we resumed monthly political meetings in Harlem. We are organizing against Mayor Eric Adams' police harassment and fighting for adequate low-income housing for ALL residents and immigrants. We are also joining the Episcopal Peace Fellowship to fight against genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and to fight to end the Occupation, end military funding for Israel, and for a permanent cease-fire. We are organizing to send church and community people to all pro-Palestinian actions in NYC.

In our town, we are joining all demonstrations in support of Palestinians and demanding a cease-fire, ending the occupation, and ending all military funding for Israel. We organize to support a Jewish and Muslim dialogue. and work to involve high school students in it. Also, my grandson just went with his high school group to tour the Holocaust museum in D.C. and I am encouraging him to organize his friends who went (and other students) into a study group about the roots of fascism and how to fight it!

I am leading an online book group discussing "The 1619 Project" and examining what kinds of activism its analysis can suggest for our congregation's Social Action Committee.

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Don’t use ‘ethnic cleansing’
A recent CHALLENGE editorial spoke about horrific mass murder and ethnic cleansing being carried out in Gaza by the Israeli ruling class. It was an excellent editorial - like the rest of the paper too - offering a breath of fresh air, in contrast to all the deadly nationalism underlying the mass murder in Gaza, and also mistakenly upheld by some people participating in the current, widespread protests against that killing.

However, I think we should always refrain from using the expression: ethnic cleansing. The word cleansing, as we know, means to clean. But there’s absolutely nothing clean or positive about genocide. The expression - ethnic cleansing - embodies the intolerable ideology of racists who commit genocide. Let’s not give them an inch, not politically, not militarily, and not linguistically.

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Struggling against nationalist ideas in the movement
Some of us from the Progressive Labor Party went to a Boston Teachers Union teach-in, “Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism.” Since the teach-in, I’ve been thinking about the complexities of raising our line within a movement that’s strongly impacted by nationalism and liberalism.

The movement takes aim at Israel as a settler colonial state rather than as a capitalist (fascist) state, capitalism being at the root of all types of colonialism and imperialism. Settler colonialism is when a colonial power claims the land, not just the resources and labor of an exploited people. This form of colonialism leads to racism and genocide, like what the British and then the U.S. did to Native Americans. But is this worse than “plain old colonialism,” which morphed into imperialism in the 20th century? Both continue to oppress, displace, and murder workers all over the world, for example in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central America, Haiti, and Sudan. Workers in these places all suffer the brutality of imperialism.  
When the concept of globalization became popular in the 1990’s, it seemed to reflect new realities in the world making the Leninist concept of imperialism irrelevant. Playing with words in this way is what liberals do when they don’t want to embrace a Marxist analysis. But Marxism-Leninism is necessary for understanding the world today and all its interconnections and necessary because it leads us to a revolutionary solution.

Because of its nationalism, the revisionist left plays up ethnic identity and plays down class. It refuses to condemn capitalism for fear of sounding like Marxists. Their fixation on settler colonialism reinforces the obsession with land that seems to be at the heart of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. They also embrace self-determination for Palestinians (and everyone else) which is also the justification for a Jewish state (self determination for Jews). This places the conflict within the capitalist framework of nationhood and avoids the all-important question of what class the state serves. For the working class, winning your own state (i.e.nationalism)  means changing the color/ethnicity of your oppressors, not liberation.

Self determination (embodied in the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”) assumes that one’s “self” is primarily one’s ethnicity, religion, or gender rather than one’s class. It’s another expression of identity politics. These things are real and important to many people, but when you think of what mainly determines our condition of life, it is our class. The capitalist propaganda machine pulls the wool over our eyes in order to keep the working class divided. Self determination didn’t solve the problems of workers in South Africa, Algeria, Vietnam or scores of other countries in the world when they fought off the colonial oppressors any more than it will solve the problem of workers in Palestine. 

Despite our ethnicity or religion or gender, workers suffer from the same capitalist economy that seeks short-term profits above all else and results in high prices, low wages, the marketing of products that harm our lives (for example processed food and pharmaceuticals), racism and sexism. During Covid-19, we were all subject to the same dysfunctional, self-serving capitalist class that put profits over people’s lives. 

Capitalist brainwashing causes most people to perceive the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a clash of cultures, rather than a conflict engineered by the imperialist powers to secure their oil interests in the Middle East. With the capitalists controlling the narrative, it seems as though Palestinians and Israelis hate each other because they both want to live on the same land, which fits right into the current movement’s single-minded focus on “settler colonialism.”  For those of us working within this movement, we must counter the nationalist chants with the class conscious chant, “Arab, Jewish, Black, and white, workers of the world unite”. 

As horrible as wars are, they create opportunities to politicize the working class. They make people want to take a stand and think more deeply about society.  Why shouldn’t we build a movement that is anti-capitalist? The working class is ready for it!! Why shouldn’t workers start thinking about the road to real liberation rather than stay mired in capitalist solutions? 

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