NEW YORK CITY, May 18—Rivalries between imperialist powers are ravaging the workers of the Middle East. The United States, Russia, China and their junior partners like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel care nothing for working class lives as they compete for power and oil profits.
Today about 1,000 Arab, anti-Zionist Jewish , and other anti-racists demonstrated with militant chants in Times Square and then marched to the Israeli Consulate to protest the barbaric slaughter of Gazan demonstrators over the past month. Two days earlier about 300 members of Jewish Voices for Peace and other anti-racists marched in the rain to the offices of Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, who have said nothing to condemn the violence.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), have killed 111 protestors and wounded thousands of others with expanding bullets aimed to cripple, if not kill. These atrocities were committed with the full support of the U.S., in response to weekly mass protests involving thousands of Gazans, including entire families.
Gaza is uninhabitable
Gaza is small strip of land at the southwestern corner of Israel where thousands of Palestinians fled after being driven from their homes when Israel was founded in 1948. Initially under the control of Egypt, Gaza was captured by Israel in the 1967 war, along with the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Ever since, these territories have been brutally and illegally militarily occupied. For the last 11 years Gaza has been under siege, with very little food or other life necessities allowed in. Gaza is surrounded by a wall and is closely surveilled by Israel. In 2009 and 2014, Israel launched brutal military attacks on Gaza, killing over 3,500 and destroying multiple dwellings, schools, hospitals, power plants and water treatment facilities. Today Gaza has almost no drinkable water, sparse electricity, huge food shortages and very little employment. It is called the world’s largest open-air prison and the United Nations has declared that it is about to be totally uninhabitable.
Israel breeds anti-Arab racism
Jewish Israelis are bombarded with profound anti-Arab racism from the cradle in order to justify the ongoing occupation of Palestine. They are taught a totally distorted view of history, such as that Arab workers fled in 1948 out of anti-Semitism, as opposed to 750,000 being forcibly expelled and their homes and villages razed.
Today Jewish soldiers, or any Israeli, can steal from, injure or kill Palestinians with impunity, only rarely suffering mild consequences if an abuse gains international traction. Palestinians who rebel or protest in any way are painted as vicious terrorists, who have little regard for their own lives and are filled with hatred of Jewish workers. Even children who throw stones are arrested, tortured and sentenced to years in prison.
Israel is only able to exist because of the more than $3 billion in military aid it receives annually from the U.S. This support has enabled it to become a nuclear power and serve as U.S.’s and the West’s main protector of Middle Eastern oil. Israeli military terror also helps the U.S.  to limit the power of rivals like Iran and Russia. For this reason, even Arab powers like Saudi Arabia support Israel and ignore its abuse of Palestinians.
Workers need communist leadership
The Palestinians are also weakened by their own divided and traitorous leadership. The Palestinian Authority (PA), which rules the West Bank, spends as much money on police to prevent opposition to Israel as it does on health and education combined. The PA cooperates with a small financial elite who control most of the economy and are in bed with Israeli capitalists. Gaza is run by Hamas, a fundamentalist organization, which also preserves most jobs and resources for its loyalists. Most Palestinians despise both these groups, but there is no strong alternative leadership at the moment. Israeli workers, though few recognize it, also play a high price for the occupation, with low wages, high unemployment, and scarce affordable housing, along with a racist moral atmosphere.
What is needed is a multiracial anti-capitalist consciousness and struggle in all of Palestine/Israel. Our comrades there raise this idea in the work they do in a multiracial union in Israel. In other countries we try to build communist consciousness in organizations of anti-occupation Jewish, Palestinians and other anti-racist fighters. Internationally there is a boycott of Israeli goods, academia, and cultural events. However, at this moment, it is wars for power and profit that are dominating the Middle East. The wars in Syria and Yemen, where the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel attack each other in increasingly vicious and dangerous conflicts foreshadow larger wars and even world war. An international communist, anti-imperialist movement is the only hope for our class, in Israel/Palestine or anywhere.

Bogotá, COLOMBIA, May 1—We do not believe in capitalist democracy, we organize for communist revolution! One working class, one communist world, one Progressive Labor Party! Peace between social classes serves criminal bosses!
Revolutionary slogans resonated for more than four hours in Bogotá, Colombia where, once again, the International Workers’ Day, May Day, was commemorated.
PLP was present selling the newspaper Desafió, distributing more than three thousand communist leaflets. We talked to workers and students, letting them know about our revolutionary politics and inviting them to join our study and action groups to stop the continuous capitalist attacks. We explained that capitalism deteriorates our living conditions and fighting to destroy it and replace it with a communist society is the only solution.
Eighty participants which included comrades, sympathizers and readers participated in this march along our banner, enthusiastic young people also raised our red flags and chanted PLP slogans: “Down with capitalist dictatorship, up with communist revolution! The good life of the ruling class, makes the worker destitute!”
 We were advancing our politics among the demonstrators, contrasting with the vast majority of trade union groups, politicians and phony left leaders that make this day an electoral carnival. To their reform messages, we responded, “Down with capitalist nationalism, up with communist internationalism” and “The history of the working class is not a carnival party.”
We received support and admiration for our anti-electoral and anti-capitalist slogans and support for PLP’s communist program as the only solution to the problems of the world’s working class. We emphasized the discipline and vigor of the students, workers, and sympathizers, women and men, that help us and demonstrate that organized workers’ struggles have a future, which makes our commitment even greater.
We sang the Internationale when we arrived at the Bolivar Plaza, the main site of the march and where the big unions had prepared their pro-boss speeches and support for social democratic candidates. There we chanted, “The history of the workers’ struggle is not in the ballot boxes!” Communists do not believe that racist capitalism can be reformed to serve the needs of the proletariat. We participate in these protests and local struggles to build the class consciousness and our social base. It is necessary to help the international working class, transform this outdated society by uniting ourselves in our common interests and against capitalism. PLP fights to win workers to communist revolution as the only way to a better world.

­­Oakland, April 28—Progressive Labor Party comrades, friends and families celebrated May Day with a rousing May Day dinner. There was living, breathing International working class unity as the 70 plus participants came from over 10 countries, were multiracial and multi-generational. We welcomed new members with applause and congratulations all around.
Every topic was about communism, and workers were involved in table talk conversation which followed each presenter.(See quotes from dinner participants.)
A young student opened with a bilingual greeting and history of May Day. We closed with singing the International.
Oaxaca teachers fight bosses’ terror
A slide presentation about the long, massive, on-going struggle of Teachers in Oaxaca against the State Violence of the Mexican ruling class and their fascist police/military apparatus by a comrade who has participated in leading that struggle for many years. Workers who heard the presentation commented:
“It was inspiring to hear about the hundreds of thousands who have united in this struggle and that PLP has played an important role in developing working class unity for 30 years.”
 “It had an awesome, international flavor. Teachers in Oaxaca and teachers in the U.S. are fighting for their students and families. We think in local terms about our community…but here, we find out about what happens in other places. ”
“We can’t always predict when and how battles will unfold…Struggles happen that we don’t expect and have many contradictions. We admire the striking teachers in the U.S. but many were Donald Trump supporters…..Yet, they broke the law and fought for their students and families.”
Red social relations
A comrade from El Salvador described communist relations in the daily lives of her small town before and during the civil war in the 80s. Mass murder sponsored by U.S. Imperialism and the Salvadorian capitalist class caused huge internal migration so that workers and peasants flooded into her small town. The people mobilized to build shelter and feed the migrants—all without money or wages. For generations, families had produced for their needs, created products for their use value and shared or traded what abundance they had. This communal life-style developed from both the indigenous and African heritage of the people in the town.
Gradually, capitalist commodity production undermined this culture and introduced money and profit. People in the town needed products that they could not produce themselves, so they were forced into commodity production for individual use. Workers who heard the presentation commented:
“People feel better and healthier when they live as a community….it’s a side of human experience that capitalism destroys.”
“People already lived in a community…which is communism. They did not have a name for it.”
“This story gives me confidence to talk about communism as the best way to organize society because people have some connection with communist relationships. Anti-communism is not all we know.”
Game highlights gains & lessons of past revolutions
Three young comrades redesigned the game to show the victories and lessons from the communist revolutions of the 20th century. Each table discussed photos from the Soviet Union and China to illustrate the fight against racism, sexism, and capitalism led by the communist parties in the USSR and China.
Then with visual aids and participation at each table, they presented some policies that communist parties implemented which brought socialism back to full blown capitalism and reversed the gains of the working class. Such as: cult of the individual, wage differentials as material incentives which developed inequality, welcoming former bosses into the communist party,  making productivity and efficiency primary over ideological struggle for “share and sharer alike” society. They thought communism required a prior state of abundance for the working class to get on board.
The presenters, then, connected these previous experiences to the struggle in PLP to learn and develop towards the fight for communism around the world: for example: collective leadership, internationalism not nationalism and much more.

There is no more striking U.S. example of the futility of trying to change the conditions of workers under capitalism through elections than Newark, New Jersey. Elections are used by capitalists to both give false hope of change to workers and to settle differences within the ruling class. The bosses’ media tells us it’s our civic duty to vote every two or four years, after which they tell us to sit down and wait for change. Only communist revolution will solve the problems that confront our class.
Liberal politicians fail working class
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has won another term as the mayor of New Jersey’s largest city. During his campaign in 2014 and now, Baraka promoted himself as a “radical” and promised to address the affordable housing crisis. But whose class interests has Baraka actually served? “[He] has overseen a downtown development boom that has won him unexpected support from the business community” (Newark’s Radical Mayor Has Been Good for Business, WNYC, 5/1). At the same time, a city-run shelter at 224 Sussex Avenue, housing 154 homeless people will close at the end of May, with little notice or alternatives for the shelter residents.
A resistance to the City’s cooperation with the local bosses is developing. The War Against Poverty Coalition (WAPC) and other organizations attended the last City Council meeting. They spoke out against the closing of the shelter and the police harassment of homeless and hungry people and the organizations that distribute food and clothing to them in Peter Francisco (PF) Park. Other speakers exposed the fact that Newark cops chased away people lined up for food before an unveiling of a memorial to immigrants in PF Park. The ceremony was attended by Baraka, racist Councilman Augusto Amador and Seth Grossman of a local Business Improvement District, who has described homeless people as “trash.”
Racism and capitalism leave workers on the streets
Like many U.S. cities and urban areas around the world, Newark is plagued with mass homelessness. Homeless workers are unemployed or employed at low-wage, part-time or seasonal jobs. They do not make enough to afford to pay the high rents charged by landlords. Homelessness is a by-product of the exodus of manufacturing jobs from urban areas, mass racist unemployment, and the lack of affordable housing—all caused by capitalism’s thirst for maximum profits.
In the U.S., homeless workers are disproportionately Black and Latin. In Newark, an 80 percent Black and Latin city, half of the children “live in low-income homes. The median household income is $37,000 per year and only 18 percent of residents” work in the city itself. “Rents have risen 20 percent since 2000 in a city where 78 percent are renters.” (NJ Advance Media 4/9). Meanwhile, workers’ incomes have fallen 10 percent in the same period. (Rutgers CLiME Report, 2017)
Baraka’s collaboration with capitalism is flagrant. As he put it, “You’re not going to stop the market, the only thing you can do is mitigate it or build a bubble so you’re not crushed” (NJAM 4/9). Meanwhile, with his help and that of the last two mayors, Prudential Insurance Company and other Newark bosses have largely succeeded in their plan to gentrify the downtown area. Although the City Council last year passed a zoning ordinance, backed by Baraka, that mandates that new housing developments have 20 percent of their units as “affordable,” it does not apply to all of the many developments under way.
Elections are a dead end
As someone who is well aware of the role of elections under capitalism, Baraka has long since sold out the Black and Latin workers whom he claims to represent. Councilwoman Gail Chaneyfield, who challenged Baraka in the recent 2018 election, is no better. During her campaign, she opportunistically claimed to be on the side of the homeless, after previously opposing the feeding of people at PF Park because it was being done by “outsiders.” Many Newark workers were not fooled and refused to participate in the 2018 vote because they knew it would not change things. Between the Prudential Arena and plush storefronts, the message to long time residents is loud and clear. As one worker stated, “Down here, you got the cosmetic stuff. But the real issues [are] where the real people live, and that’s up the hill.” (WNYC, 5/1)
More actions to combat homelessness, racism, poverty, and gentrification are being planned.
WAPC has called for a rally at Newark City Hall to demand the shelter be funded and stay open. Some members of WAPC want to tie this struggle to a growing national campaign against poverty modeled on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign.
While we stay in the midst of the fight, Progressive Labor Party will continue to hammer away at the false hopes spread by elections and reform under capitalism. Communists have a proud history of battling the racist bosses’ attacks on our unemployed and low wage brothers and sisters. The capitalist system feeds a tiny minority of ultra-rich bosses while tens of millions have little or nothing. Elections only tinker with this reality. Change will only come with a workers’ revolution to overthrow capitalism.