22,313 people murdered:
9,100 of whom are children
57,296 injured
7,000 missing
2.3 million displaced
Countless diseases due
to lack of clean water and sanitation
58,000 tonnes of high explosives used (equivalent to two nuclear bombs)
355,000 housing units
370 schools and universities
203 houses of worship
23 out of 36 hospitals taken out of service
53 other health centers
104 Ambulances
- Information
Students, workers, families— Smash genocide & fascist censorship
- Information
- 06 January 2024 133 hits
NEW YORK CITY, January 2—When a public school teacher was removed for taking a stance against genocide, students led the way in organizing against this fascist attack. Incidents like this illustrate the capitalist crisis: amid growing volatility and war tensions, the bosses are losing ideological control of the classrooms. An attack on teachers is an attack on student learning conditions, signaling to young people that they are disposable if they do not parrot racist ruling-class ideas. This is an opportunity to expose the bosses’ system and build a movement for an antiracist world.
The attack and response
After weeks of unspeakable carnage visited on the working class of the Gaza strip by the forces of the racist, Zionist Israeli state, a strong letter signed by dozens of student clubs representing hundreds of angry youth was delivered to the principal of one of New York City’s largest high schools. This letter blasted the administration for homicidally deleting Palestinian life from its public registration of grief and memorialization, a cornerstone of the ideological architecture that has been facilitating Palestinian genocide for the better part of a century.
To repress dissent, the Department of Education (DoE) bosses ejected an antiracist teacher from their NYC public high school building and placed them under investigation all because this educator vocally supported this courageous mass student movement against genocide. They were escorted out without charge, supposedly to protect youth, but political dissidents are more quickly than teachers accused of physical violence or racism.
The response from students, alumni and co-workers was immediate in defense of the dedicated antiracist educator. An email campaign began a flood of statements of support that continues to grow in strength.
This educator joins an expanding number of workers and youth on the job and on campuses across the world who have faced repression for taking a stand against U.S.-backed genocide in the Gaza strip. In NYC, a pre-K teacher was targeted for using children’s books to explain Palestinian history in her class. Another teacher has faced calls for his removal for pro-Palestine social media posts. Bay Area teachers have also faced reprisals for holding teach-ins against genocide. Meanwhile in Maryland, four teachers have been placed on indefinite administrative leave for so much as emailing their support of the working class of Palestine.
Education, a battleground
The bosses need schools to produce workers that will produce and have the necessary nationalism for future wars. Fascist responses are a sign of the bosses’ weakness, not strength. In this context, all teachers have a role to play in equipping students to develop a clear understanding of the world. We must teach and model the practice of interrogating what we hear. That the ruling class has succeeded in building a school culture where some educators agree that it is “inappropriate” to struggle alongside students for politically and ethically principled positions that critically interrogate the role their institutions play in extermination is a clear indicator of growing fascism.
Nazi leaders worked to influence young people in youth groups, in their families, and on the streets. Schools also had a key role to play. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, they quickly passed new laws to make public education reflect and teach their nationalist and racial ideologies. Jewish teachers were fired from their posts, and other teachers were encouraged to join the National Socialist Teachers League; by 1936, over 97 percent of teachers were members. Nazi leaders also created new curricula and textbooks to be used throughout the country. (“Schooling for the National Community” Facing History, 8/2016)
Taking a page from the Nazi playbook, DOE Chancellor David Banks has repeatedly issued a policy that supposedly prohibits all political speech in schools. This is despite Banks hypocritically sending mass emails to all DOE staff full-throated defending the actions of Israel. The DOE’s bloodthirsty rallying around the flag has greenlit the targeted murder of a hundred United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) teachers, mass displacement of students, and the bombing of every single university in the Gaza Strip. Indeed, since October 7th the indiscriminate slaughter of the workers and youth of the Gaza strip (see box) has not elicited one peep of condemnation from NYC education bosses.
The ideological veil wrapping its gag order around the throats of student outcry is as predictable as it is shameless. While the NYPD counter-terrorism squad has been sicced on Hillcrest High School students who mobilized in late November against their teacher’s public participation in a series of pro-Israel rallies calling for–among other things–“No Cease Fire!”, that teacher has not been investigated despite openly causing a disruption at school. In fact, the principal of that school, on December 22, received a promotion to work in the central offices of the NYC public schools. Meanwhile antiracist educators are swiftly disciplined.
It is no accident that the bosses have recently unveiled that they will soon roll out a uniform, top-down curriculum throughout all of the NY school system to further repress dissent and to create a further hedge against working class antiracist and anti-imperialist action.
What’s to be done?
Bosses who proclaim the need for ‘trauma-informed’ and ‘culturally sustaining’ education have traumatized students organizing against genocide. The removal of teachers aims for a fascist chilling effect, but the righteous anger of youth and workers will defeat these attempts to silence anti-war voices.
Student anger is not going to simply melt away. Every day without a committed antiracist teacher is a slap in the face to their aspirations to live in a world free from the scourges of racism and genocide. A follow up-email blasting the principal for ignoring the student letter against genocide and racism was sent recently indicating strong resolution to pick up the struggle against imperialist war in the new year.
Stitching together disparate instances of repression into a strong, internationalist, antiracist movement will be at the forefront of anti-fascist organizing in 2024. Some jobs and positions will be won, others will be lost. Ruling classes of incomparable bloodthirst hold sway. Lives lost to the bombs of US imperialism are forever gone. If you are angered by this, you are an internationalist. The ruling class illusions of “free speech” are eroding as capitalists continue to repress workers who step out of line. Workers sense that a better world is possible, rooted in science and justice. They are organizing against this outright mutilation of reality to create a world in which youth are not repressed but are leaders of the revolution.
If you want to fight…
If you want to take action against genocide and fascist repression of those who take a stand against it you have a choice—to join the Progressive Labor Party. Our class will feel its strength as masses move beyond the borders of nationalism to defend targeted friends and comrades. In the crucible of class struggle the growth of a revolutionary communist party from hundreds to thousands and eventually to millions means that communism itself is transformed from an idea into a material force with the power to defeat all bosses, erase all borders, and inaugurate a classless society that is the only true basis for peace and justice for the working people of the world.
- Information
2024 RESOLUTION: FIGHT THE BOSSES, RISE UP With the working class
- Information
- 06 January 2024 141 hits
Barely 24 hours into 2024, workers shut it down, ruining the bosses’ holidays, blocking roads on the way to JFK, LaGuardia, and Chicago Airports, and keeping the fighting spirit of solidarity alive as bombs continue to incinerate our siblings and children in Gaza. Workers on the West Coast rang in the New Year by swarming the U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi’s residence in San Francisco, and others surrounded D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, demanding the liberal fascist politicians heed our cries for ceasefire in Gaza.
Despite the nonstop agitation, U.S. President Joe Biden, for the second time, bypassed Congress to send more weapons to Israel. It is a grave mistake to think that our conditions from 2023 will not carry into 2024 if we leave the bosses in charge of our destiny.
As the war drums sound toward World War III, U.S. rulers on both sides of the ruling class will be forced to make concessions to pacify workers. As military recruitment and trust in this system continues to tank, the liberal bosses and their Trump flag waving fascist counterparts will pull all the stops out all tricks to fool us into choosing sides, pledge their allegiance to U.S.flag, and sign up and die in their next world war, deciding which imperialist power will be top dog.
As we ring in 2024, demands for a ceasefire will forever ring hollow as long as the demand for oil and global supremacy over Chinese and Russian bosses grow louder and stronger. Whether it’s Gaza or Sudan, 1948 or 2023 as long as capitalist democracy exists genocide will always be mainstay for this decaying rotten imperialist capitalist system. But Progressive Labor Party has a brighter vision for our class. From Vietnam, Iraq, to Palestine, every year for 60 years, PLP has put forth our solution to the non-stop cycle of war, racism, sexism, and the infinite list of horrors it breeds.
Our 2024 resolution to the perpetual crisis of capitalism in 2024 and beyond is to organize the international working class from every corner of the capitalist globe to fight back, and turn every battle against capitalism and imperialism–big or small– into a class war for communist revolution. To achieve our goal we need to organize in our schools, on the job, in our neighborhoods, in our homes here and abroad, and inject our antiracist, antisexist, communist, internationalist ideas We need to organize millions of workers to join the Party and organize a global red army of workers, so we can turn imperialist wars into a class war for communism to smash these racist butchers once and for all.
As we look back at 2023, remember all the historical lessons and triumphs of the international working class from the Haitian, Bolshevik, and Chinese communist revolutions to the on the job and school strikes, to anti-war demonstrations, and the decades of class struggle against racist oppression and apartheid; from South Africa, to India, and Gaza Palestine as they illuminate our potential.
LONG LIVE THE FIGHT OF THE WORKING CLASS
In the Bronx and Illinois, PL’ers fought the racist courts alongside the family and community members of Raymond Chaluisant, a Latin man murdered by a killer Corrections Officer; Hadi Abuatelah, an Arab teenager who was jumped by kkkops; and Murod Kurdi, killed by a white drunk driver. We disrupted many court hearings and consistently exposed the phony order of the racist injustice system.
In Brooklyn, brave students occupied the offices of administrators at Kingsborough Community College in protest of racist charges against four students.
In Haiti, we organized a community kitchen, preparing large pots of food as a way to build familial bonds with our class siblings in the struggle and challenge the individualist “chak koukouy klere pou je w” or “everyone for themself” ideology of capitalist bosses.
In Newark, we fought back against the school district for firing a Latin antiracist teacher over attending a rally with his students in NYC. We defended students who walked out of their high schools in solidarity with workers in Gaza and showed this same fiery militancy when gutter racists and liberal administrators attacked teachers from San Francisco to Brooklyn for standing with these students.
PL’ers in the American Public Health Association (APHA) celebrated their 40th year sharpening struggle within the organization and took over the recent conference in Atlanta with communist ideas and rallying. As a result, many workers stood beside our leadership, and the APHA bosses were forced to make a statement supporting Palestine, showing our potential to shift power from the bosses to thousands of workers in the association.
From NYC to Chicago to Worcester to D.C., we stood beside healthcare workers, transit workers, and auto workers, striking against crummy conditions, budget cuts, and layoffs. The Covid-19 pandemic, in which hundreds of thousands of workers were killed by the bosses' neglect and carelessness in the face of deadly disease, exposed how fragmented and racist the capitalist infrastructure really is. To top it off, many of these bosses are still riding high from inflating costs and overburdening workers with new levels of exploitative labor. These extreme conditions gave us PL’ers righteous fury that boosted us to shout out our communist ideas and practices that can smash this system.
For the 500th time, a multiracial group of workers rallied for West Wednesday (an ongoing commemoration of Tyrone West, a Black man murdered by police) with a 22 vehicle-long caravan. We roared NO MORE police terrorism on the streets of Baltimore!
On May Day, the international workers’ holiday , we marched among hundreds of workers through the pouring rain in NYC, waving our red flags high and passing the torch to Black, Latin, Asian, and white students to take the mic and inspire the crowd to press on through struggle! We also marched throughout Chicago, the Bay Area, and Israel-Palestine.
We held our line at the 300,000 strong New York People’s Climate March and witnessed our communist chants spread throughout the crowd. We kept this same energy at weekly protests against gutter racists in Staten Island who are terrorizing migrants in shelters. We pushed for and demonstrated multiracial unity and internationalist communist fightback every step of the way.
In each of these fights, we exposed the bankruptcy of liberal identity politics, using the bosses’ race, gender, and nationality ideas as a way to knock down the militant multiracial potential of our class. Again and again, we proclaimed that a boss is a boss and a cop is a cop. Both are in place to serve the interests of capital expansion. These political pawns are not allies but potentially ultimate traitors to our class. Our only victories happen when communist ideas catch on to the masses and, ultimately , when workers agree to join the PLP!
WE NEED A REVOLUTION
Young comrades from Haiti to Newark are taking up leadership and steering the PLP into this future. They are reading and leading study groups around the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and giving speeches from the picket lines to crowds of communists at our march on May Day. The youth are rising and learning how to hit the kill switch on this genocidal machine called capitalism.
As both the gutter-racist Republican and liberal-racist Democratic parties prepare to cripple the minds of billions in the next presidential election, we will continue to share with blue-collar and administrative workers, students, and elders alike the evidence that all bosses will fall in line and enforce the rules and laws that serve their interests, and the ideas that will be our spears to forge a world where workers come first.
In 2024 dare to struggle and dare to win, dare to hope and imagine the crises we can resolve when we keep our confidence in our class potential rather than the bound-to-betray bloodhounds that run our class from Gaza to Israel. We communists know that if workers join the fight, to rebuild the red army we so desperately need the days of racist police terror, capitalism, and imperialism are numbered and can one day be extinguished forever. Join us as we aim to win 2024 and the future beyond!
- Information
Kkkops & kkkourts kill William— No justice in a racist system
- Information
- 06 January 2024 107 hits
UPPER MARLBORO, MD, December 4, 2023-For 10 days, members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), Prince George’s County Police Accountability Team, Coalition of Concerned Mothers, and West Wednesday Coalition joined family members in filling the courtroom for the trial of Michael Owen, Jr., the cop who had killed William ‘Boo Boo’ Green. William was no threat to the cop, who shot him six times at point-blank range while he was handcuffed behind his back in the front of a police cruiser. William had been detained after passing out in his car and hitting some parked cars.
Racist kkkourt exonerates killer kkkop
The Prince George’s County State Attorney had charged cop Owen with 2nd-degree murder and he had been kept in jail since 2020. The family received a $20 million settlement from the County through a civil suit and had continued to push for justice by demanding that the state not offer a plea deal but take the case to trial. During the trial, there was no evidence that William had been a threat, but the officer’s dishonest testimony about the events in the car claimed that the handcuffed man had hit him with a shoulder, that the cop’s gun came out of his holster, and that in a supposed fight for the gun, he had no choice but to shoot because he was “afraid I could die.” The jury returned a NOT GUILTY verdict in 90 minutes.
Enraged by the verdict, the family and friends immediately set up a press conference to express their anger that a killer cop is now free. PLP members from Baltimore and Prince George’s County mobilized and made up about half of the crowd of 50 people. Palpable anger about a long history of police murderers surged through the group. The names are familiar even as details vary. Tawanda Jones from West Wednesday in Baltimore called out the system that murdered her brother and said, “Capitalism has to go.”
No justice under racist capitalism
How did the criminal injustice system work its magic to exonerate yet another killer? Several technical issues of unfairness were raised. The jury selection was not done in public, and even though the jury was predominately Black it was also true that Owen is Black. Second-degree murder requires intent, which was never suggested by the prosecution. Owen’s history of killing another county resident along with multiple complaints of excessive force was never introduced. The prosecution’s cross-examination of Owen (who took the stand, an unusual, usually desperate defense tactic) did not question his story despite the absence of William’s DNA on the gun and the state’s evaluation of the police car showed no evidence of any struggle. Unnecessarily repetitive instructions to the jury about self-defense were part of the judge’s charges to the jury just before they filed out to deliberate. Despite organizers’ pressure on the prosecution to seriously prosecute over several years, it looks like the State’s Attorney’s prosecutors deliberately threw the case. There is no legal way to appeal the failure of prosecutors to prosecute competently – we saw institutional state power in action here!
The family is now looking to the U.S. Department of Justice to consider civil rights violations by Owen at the Federal Level.
Members of PLP have been actively engaged at each step of the way and during the trial, several of us had good lunchtime conversations with family and friends about the role of prosecutors, the criminal legal system, and capitalism. CHALLENGE was widely distributed at the press conference and welcomed by many with whom we have joined over the years in Prince George’s County.
The real story here is that, like the Freddy Gray trials in Baltimore in which multiple police were charged but freed by the court, justice is absent from the capitalist system. The court system of the capitalist class is functioning just as intended – pretending to care about justice but actively working to strengthen the hand of the police in carrying out racist and fascist actions on behalf of the ruling class. These cases also show that Black cops are the same as white cops and all do the ruler’s bidding. We must build PLP to destroy this racist capitalist system, even as we fight each case, from Archie Elliott III in 1993 to William in 2020.
Since 10/7/23, the Israeli state has continued genocidal bombardment on the Gaza strip. This disproportionate retaliation has killed more than 20,000, including at least 6,000 children. Whistleblowers in the Israeli Defense Force’s own ranks report using artificial intelligence named “The Gospel” to airstrike densely populated areas, “’Nothing happens by accident. When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed” (+972 Magazine, 11/30/23). This carnage has been fully backed by a Democratic president and a ruling class of liberal fascists.
On the US side, children are also being targeted by liberal fascist Democratic mayors like Eric Adams in NYC. The NYC schools chancellor, David A. Banks, has made it clear that “politics” are to be barred from schools, except of course unless one speaks unconditionally in favor of Israel.
I know firsthand the fascism that teachers are dealing with. Since 10/7, Muslim students at my school have been afraid to come to school and to participate in after-school activities. With the murder of a 6-year-old Palestinian in Chicago and the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont, the students at my school are understandably afraid. I attempted to solicit support for a student letter asking that my school take a stance against genocide.
In response, I was removed from my own classroom without ever being told any charges. I “disappeared” from school which sends a signal to students that those who stand against racism are targets—that the students that I can no longer teach are acceptable collateral if it chills dissent.
But we will not be silenced! A hundred letters of support across parents, students, and alumni have reached my school. Faculty have begun to organize. Consciousness is being raised. PLP is ready to fight back. The ruling class must not be allowed to make teachers and students disposable. As we organize under conditions of rising fascism, internationalism is necessary more than ever. No worker from Gaza to NYC should ever be an acceptable casualty of fascism. We must resolve to unify and fight for communism, a future in which the international working class finally has the schools that they deserve.