Protesters becoming subject to counter-terrorism investigations
The Intercept, 9/13–The protest did not go off as planned. In February 2023, government recruiters came to the student union at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, stacking National Security Agency-branded plastic cups and splaying out pamphlets about Navy fringe benefits… Everything about the protest had been relatively routine, right down to the arrests, but the local and federal authorities saw something more sinister…the local sheriff’s office in Oakland County, Michigan, documented the incident in a case report as a hate crime against law enforcement. The FBI recorded the incident as part of a terrorism investigation…
Over the following months…the FBI’s counterterrorism investigation unlocked additional federal resources, deepened coordination with military intelligence, generated sustained counterterrorism attention on minor acts of vandalism, and ultimately culminated in a six-person boots-on-the-ground operation conducting physical surveillance of the Stop Camp Grayling Week of Action.
Chip trade war between U.S. and China accelerates
NikkeiAsia, 8/31–An analysis of China's current semiconductor technology revealed that the country is approaching a level three years behind industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), showing the limitations of U.S. efforts to stem Beijing's development of cutting-edge chips….(China’s) SMIC, which is subject to U.S. measures to suppress advanced chip technology, is capable of producing 7-nanometer chips. TSMC supplied 5-nm processors to Huawei for the 2021 phone. Generally, the smaller the nanometer size, the higher the performance and the smaller the chip…The two chips have similar areas and performance levels…TSMC also faces growing hurdles to stay ahead of Chinese rivals technologically as miniaturizing circuits become increasingly difficult.
"The U.S. regulations so far have only slightly delayed Chinese innovation, while sparking efforts by the Chinese chip industry to boost domestic production,"... TSMC also faces growing hurdles to stay ahead of Chinese rivals technologically as miniaturizing circuits become increasingly difficult. "The U.S. regulations so far have only slightly delayed Chinese innovation, while sparking efforts by the Chinese chip industry to boost domestic production," …
India’s intelligence agency active in U.S. against Sikh independence activists
The Guardian, 8/22–A Sikh separatist leader was attacked on a California highway earlier this month in a shooting that his organization has described as an assassination attempt. Satinder Pal Singh Raju, an organizer with Sikhs for Justice and an advocate for the establishment of an independent Sikh state, Khalistan, was traveling on the Interstate 505 near Sacramento on 11 August when the truck he was in was “sprayed with bullets.” He survived the shooting.
Raju is an associate of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian advocate for Khalistan who was assassinated in Vancouver in 2023, according to Sikhs for Justice. The Canadian government has said there were “credible allegations” that “agents of the Indian government” were behind Nijjar’s death. California has long been home to a strong Sikh independence movement, and Raju has helped organize referendum efforts in the state to show support for Khalistan.
Over 600 Palestinians in West Bank killed in the last year
Al Jazeera, 8/16–Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are reeling after Israeli settlers ravaged a village overnight, killing a 23-year-old man and injuring several others in the latest incident of deadly violence against Palestinians in the area. Dozens of masked Israeli settlers descended on the village, opening fire on residents, setting cars ablaze and destroying homes and other property, according to witnesses and video footage from the assault. The attack came amid a surge in Israeli military and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, which has unfolded in the shadow of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. Nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank between the start of the Gaza war…A spokesperson for the US National Security Council said that “attacks by violent settlers against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank are unacceptable and must stop.”
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Editorial: Nazi Israel slaughters West Bank, nationalism is no solution
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- 05 September 2024 1023 hits
On August 28, Israel’s genocidal rulers launched their biggest military raid of the occupied West Bank in more than twenty years. One week later, the Zionist stormtroopers have slaughtered more than thirty Palestinians in Jenin—a longtime flashpoint for anti-apartheid resistance—and other refugee camps. Roads and hospitals are devastated; families are cut off from electricity, water, sewage systems, and the internet. Amid mass evacuation orders, thousands have fled their homes. Since Israel laid siege to Gaza last October, the West Bank death toll stands at close to 700—most killed by Israel’s military, others by racist Zionist settlers stealing all the land they can (news4jax.com, 9/4).
Israel’s bosses say they’re moving against “terrorists” and to block smuggled weapons from U.S. enemy Iran, a claim rejected by a top UN official. “I see a serious…parallel with what is happening on the Gaza Strip,” said Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, “patterns of torture, of destruction, of extrajudicial killings, of uprooting” (msn.com, 9/1). Meanwhile, Joe Biden and his partner in war crime, Kamala Harris, keep pouring arms into the Zionists’ bloodstained hands, including a $20 billion package approved last month. As the Benjamin Netanyahu regime escalates its state terror against children and workers in Palestine, total fatalities—including those killed by war-related disease—are nearing 200,000 (thelancet.com, 7/10), or more than 8 percent of Palestine’s prewar population. Harris’s shameless support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” is a prescription for unchecked baby-killing and a generation of orphans.
At the same time, the threat of all-out conflict in the Middle East keeps growing. Competition to control the oil-rich region could easily lead to a nuclear conflagration and the next world war, with the U.S. and Europe on one side and China and Russia on the other. Millions of workers would be misled and coerced into killing their class sisters and brothers, all for one set of capitalist parasites or another.
Nationalism—including the Israeli nationalism known as Zionism—is toxic for the international working class. It divides workers while promoting false unity between workers and capitalist bosses. Nation states are instruments of racism, anti-immigrant violence, imperialist war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. We must support the brave workers of Palestine/Israel and their heroic fightback against the Zionist/U.S. death machine.But as we’ve seen in so many courageous struggles of the past, from Vietnam and Indonesia to South Africa and Haiti, the antidote to nationalist poison can’t be national liberation. It can’t be the dead-end nationalism of Hamas and its self-serving capitalist leadership. The only cure is communist revolution, the violent overthrow of the profit system and the birth of a society run by and for the working class. Progressive Labor Party is committed to leading the working class to deliver that communist cure worldwide. Join us!
West Bank history of fightback
For nearly three million Palestinians, the West Bank is an open-air prison that they can neither leave nor securely call their home. Squeezed between Israel and Jordan on the west bank of the Jordan River, they are the surviving refugees and descendants of the Nakba of 1948, when the British and U.S. imperialists created the Israeli nation—and spurred the violent displacement of the Arab population that had lived and worked for centuries within the new country’s borders. Since the Six-Day War of 1967, workers in the West Bank have been brutalized and oppressed by Israel’s military occupation and the corrupt sell-outs who head the Palestinian Authority. To tighten their control, Israel’s bosses encouraged Zionist settlers to seize the homes and fields of Palestinian families. Today, nearly 700,000 settlers live in heavily guarded, suburban-style neighborhoods. Their utilities and schools are provided by the Israeli government. They have Zionist-only malls and supermarkets and Zionist-only roads that cut off Palestinians from water sources, relatives, friends, and former neighbors. The settlers vote in Israeli elections and are protected on their stolen land by Israeli soldiers armed to the teeth (Chris Hedges, Substack, 7/12).
The Zionists have carved up and walled off so much of the West Bank that the “two-state solution,” the magical policy embraced by lying snakes Biden and Harris, is a physical and political impossibility. For Netanyahu’s Likud Party, there can be only one state—a Zionist state. According to Likud’s coalition dealt with the open nazis of the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionism party, “the Jewish people have the exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” including “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical term for the West Bank (The Times of Israel, 12/28/22). Members of Netanyahu’s government are now openly plotting to annex the area (New York Times, 8/28).
The current fightback by Palestinians in the West Bank has a long history. In Jenin in the 1930’s and ‘40’s, before the partitioning of Palestine into Israel and Jordan, workers rebelled against the British colonizers. In the early 2000s, young workers in Jenin, many of them teenagers, led the Second Intifada, an uprising against the Israeli occupation. In 2002, a ten-day battle—longer than Israel’s 1967 war against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—killed 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 Palestinians (NY Times 8/28).
The Palestinians’ fightback continues today, against huge odds, and has inspired workers worldwide. As we witness the Zionist bosses’ atrocities with horror and rage, tens of thousands have come out to protest in solidarity with their class sisters and brothers. The looming global imperialist clash presents a great danger for all workers—but also a great opportunity as horror turns into consciousness and rage into insurrection. Our Party must be prepared to lead our class to revolution in the midst of war. However dark the horizon may seem, the future is red for the international working class.
Fight for communism!
For now, we workers must fight against the genocide of workers living under apartheid in Palestine. We must do all we can to build international support for those under mortal attack in the West Bank and Gaza. Harris and Trump represent different camps of capitalists, and so they have their disagreements. But when it comes to backing the despicable Israeli bosses, they have no real disagreement. Workers must not be trapped by the vague hope for a ceasefire in Palestine, or the myth of a “lesser evil” in this fall’s U.S. elections. In the name of capitalist profit, both Democrats and Republicans plan to massacre many more workers in the Middle East—and, as war spreads and fascism rises, many millions around the globe. As Kamala Harris blustered in her acceptance speech at the Democrats’ convention, “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” As the potential next leader of the nation that wreaked the atomic holocausts in Japan and a genocide in Southeast Asia, she should be taken at her word.
But there’s an alternative to the bosses’ failing liberal democracy and its cynical, deadly choices: a revolutionary communist party. We must organize the working class not to build two states, or one state, but to smash all states in our fight for international communist revolution.
CHICAGO, August 23 – Dozens of members of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) wrapped up a powerful summer project this afternoon, after nearly five straight days and nights in action against the capitalist bosses’ system of genocide, fascism and war. PLP comrades, ranging from the newly recruited to veteran members with decades of experience, traveled from across the country to directly challenge the liberal Big Fascist U.S. bosses as they held their Democratic National Convention (DNC) here.
Our revolutionary, pro-worker efforts contrasted completely with those of the liberal racists and their pro-genocide spectacle. The deadly Democrats trotted out international war criminals from the Clintons to the Obamas, all endorsing the nomination of Killer Kamala Harris for president in a desperate bid to save their declining U.S. empire in the face of fierce competition from imperialist rivals. Meanwhile, those of us in the summer project showed egalitarian communism in action: workers and students of all ages and genders striving to give leadership and act collectively.
Summer projects like these are the perfect opportunity to expand our revolutionary movement, our base in the working class, and our limits as a Party. While the bosses in the U.S. and around the world can only offer different brands of fascism to the working class, PLP remains YOUR international Party for a future free of racism, sexism, and world war!
Jumping into the struggle
Our project formally kicked off Monday morning, as our local collective held a welcoming event for all participants. We gave a rundown of the week’s activities and shared our goals of sharp agitation, building camaraderie, and political education. Equally important, we stressed the necessity of having security plans and collective discipline in the face of potential violence from the bosses’ police state.
This planning was essential as we jumped right into the first scheduled mass rally and march against the DNC that afternoon in a park near the convention site. Among thousands of workers and students, PL’ers seized the opportunity to engage our class and distribute hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE newspaper and other literature.
After hours of congregating in the park, the march was finally mobilized to begin. Our PLP contingent kept tight ranks behind our banner of “No War but Class War,” using our own marshals to keep pace. We had multiple bullhorns on hand to lead chants calling for internationalism over so-called “revolutionary” nationalism. We also called for the necessity of communist revolution.
A number of comrades made speeches in between chants, including a newer PL’er who gave her first Party speech! Once the march reached its end point, we returned in groups to our original briefing place where we socialized and created some revolutionary art to use in our actions through the rest of the week.
Base building and class struggle over voting
Day two of the project began with the first of two scheduled study groups, centered around PLP’s foundational document “Build a Base in the Working Class.” Unlike the bosses’ dishonest relationships with the working class, in which they make empty promises and outright lies to mobilize workers to vote, the Party strives to develop deep personal connections with workers to build a foundation for revolution. Comrades shared personal experiences in our small groups of how we embed our own lives in the working-class struggle and build confidence in our class’s potential to win power.
This discussion dovetailed well with our event that same evening, a mass forum titled “Don’t Vote, REVOLT!” The forum championed the international working class and revolutionary action as the real source of social progress over the bosses’ bogus elections. Two comrades gave a fiery presentation to kick off the discussion, before we broke into smaller groups to share historical and personal examples of class struggle being the engine of change. We came back together to share discussions as a group before a veteran PL’er gave a rousing speech for everyone to build PLP!
Struggling beyond reforms and nationalism
Day three kept up the pace with our collective joining forces with an organization on the west side of Chicago which has been pushing for the U.S. bosses to provide reparations to Black workers and families who had their lives destroyed by the arch-racist “War on Drugs.” Although as communists we have doubts about the likelihood of capitalism to ever remotely address the harm it has unleashed on Black workers, we were proud to participate in the group’s march to build ties with our fellow workers, talk politics, give speeches and lead chants.
Later in the afternoon, we dove deep into discussions of internationalism, first with another study group on the topic and later with a movie night where we watched the documentary Israelism about Jewish soldiers and workers rejecting the Zionist state. Given the overwhelmingly nationalist tone of the mass movement against the genocide in Palestine, it remains essential that we continue to debate and sharpen our line on what communist internationalism means in theory and practice.
Finish strong for the working class
For our final full day, we jumped right into a picket line at a local hospital where over 1,000 nurses were on strike. We unfortunately ran into some anti-communist attitudes from the union hacks and some nurses, but overwhelmingly our Party was well-received, allowing us to have good conversations and make some contacts.
By the evening, we were fired up for the final mass march on the DNC, coinciding with Harris accepting the nomination. Even compared with the previous march, there was a noticeable rise in the energy and enthusiasm in which our collective – stimulated largely by the youth – engaged with all workers present. Beyond getting CHALLENGE into the hands of countless marchers, we set the tone with our multiracial group and militant chants. We even riffed off a popular track: “Kamala, she a genocide cop! She not like us!”
Dare to struggle, dare to win
Although many of us are leaving Chicago and heading back to our areas, we realize the need to keep up the same urgency and collectivity where we’re at. Although our Party is still small, our communist ideas and leadership remain the only solution to this nightmare of capitalism and will one day be wielded by billions to take power! Dare to struggle, dare to win!
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Kentucky: Shut down slumlords & liberal racists
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- 05 September 2024 824 hits
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members from Kentucky organized a protest in downtown Corbin on Friday, August 30th to bring attention to rising rents and record evictions in the state. We also wanted to call out HB5, a bill which criminalizes homelessness, as an anti-worker bill supported by both Democrat and Republican legislators. The protest was sparked when local PL’ers noticed that a particular group of landlords, known as the Freeman Brothers, were notoriously infamous in Corbin for charging high rents and doing very little maintenance or upkeep on the properties they manage. The brothers are not just landlords, but also lawyers who own a property management business, a real estate brokerage, and have their own podcast. They have been known to make posts on social media websites such as Facebook, where they gloat about the negative attention that they receive from workers online who have seen their own rents go up as a result of the Freeman Brother’s influence on the market. Freeman Brother’s posts are often littered with comments from working-class tenants complaining and attacking the landlords for their disgusting behavior.
Shutting scum landlords down with communist fightback
This was how local PLP members realized the need to organize a protest and bring these workers together so that they can realize their struggles are the same! The local PL’ers sprang into action before the summer came to an end by creating an event page with a flyer that had the PLP logo. By sharing it with friends on social media, the event page quickly got 52 responses because of the already existing hatred against the crooked landlord brothers. In addition to this, PL’ers went to properties managed by the Freeman Brothers and spoke with the local tenants, handing out flyers and explaining the causes behind this crisis and the need for workers to join together and fight back. The response was positive and many of the workers who we spoke to were in agreement with the need for a communist society run by and for the working-class.
At the protest we had a small turnout made up of PLP members from the area, members of the Madison County Tenant Union, as well as local residents. The turnout was smaller than expected, but despite this, PLP led the group of militant organizers out into the street where they marched to the Freeman Brother’s Property Management office. We were shouting chants against landlords, capitalism, racism, and the Brothers themselves, linking together all these things as symptoms of the capitalist system which needs to be gotten rid of. When the protestors made it to the Property Management office, it was closed despite being during their business hours. The group decided to stand in front of the office anyway and chant, where many passing cars honked in support, and some workers even pulled over expressing their hatred for landlords and sympathy with our cause! We gave them copies of CHALLENGE and invited them to join us.
Liberals show their true, racist colors
Afterwards we returned to the park where the protest began and shared hotdogs that a PLP member cooked while having important discussions. One member gave a speech highlighting the absurdity of workers being the ones who built all of the houses, only to be forced to pay rent to landlords who produce nothing. This same comrade also called out the Democrats for supporting HB5, as well as the lackluster response from Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky who vetoed the bill, but in a letter, wrote that his concerns were the bill’s lack of any plan for increased prison funding that would be needed to deal with increases in incarceration. “He claims to be against the criminalization of homelessness, but at the end of the day it’s only under the condition that anti-working-class legislation isn’t carried out logistically.”
This same governor was also one of the potential candidates for Kamala Harris’ VP pick, which makes sense as he has been a large supporter of police, and has also stood idly by as anti-trans legislation has been passed in Kentucky, and as abortion was banned. A worker at the protest in a discussion about electoralism as a route for change said “I think that’s what’s caused me to become cynical, following electoral politics and seeing very little change made.” Another PLP member who works as a social worker gave a speech sharing her experiences seeing those who struggle with housing. Her speech was submitted as a letter to CHALLENGE. By the end of both comrades’ speeches, they stressed that the reason housing was treated as a luxury and not a necessity is because of capitalism’s drive for profit, and that in order to change this we need to fight for a communist society and join the PLP!
Worcester, MA, September 1— Progressive Labor Party (PLP), workers, and students rallied at City Hall against the racist and sexist murder of our class sister, Sonya Massey, a Black grandmother who should still be alive with her loved ones. Instead, she was shot in the face by killer KKKop Sean Grayson for the crime of being a Black woman in distress simply calling 911 to report suspicious activity outside her home. A grand jury indicted Grayson, but that does not mean much since far too many of our class brothers and sisters have met the same fate at the hands of the racist police. No politicians or apologists for capitalism can reform this cesspool of a system. A PL’er at the rally spoke and summed it up best when they said: only workers, students and soldiers can smash this racist system. Workers can shut it down at the point of production in the factories, hospitals, and offices, students can shut it down on college campuses and soldiers in the battlefield, in the air, and at the drone controls. She called on soldiers to turn their guns around and shoot the profit system down! She called for the abolition of borders and to fight for communist revolution!
Our literature table was well received, and CHALLENGEs and leaflets were distributed. Members of the community spoke at the open mic and shared their thoughts, and class anger about the murder of our class sister. A young, Black high-school student said, "We should be safe in our houses." A Latin woman said "I should be able to sit in my car and not be worried about getting shot by the police." Another woman said, "Here we are again at another rally mourning the loss of a Black person murdered by the police." Progressive Labor Party members led antiracist chants "Racism means, fight back!" "Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world unite" and called for an end to this profit system with communist revolution. This racist capitalist system has been murdering and terrorizing Black, Indigenous, and Latin workers for hundreds of years. As Progressive Labor Party has been saying for years, racism opens the door for attacks on all workers, and that is why we see attacks on the unhoused, mentally ill, students on the college campuses against the genocide in Gaza, and the attacks on unions, abortions, and healthcare. Inter-imperialist rivalry is intensifying between China and Russia and the U.S. rulers see their empire slipping away, so in order to hold on to their power and resources both here and abroad they need to keep us in line, and get us ready to fight their next war. We have to be united from the Mexican border, Haiti, Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza and Israel to smash this capitalist system.
Liberals show their true, racist colors
Our comrade who took leadership in organizing this rally, was fierce in his pursuit of making sure this demonstration took place and exposed the systemic nature of racism in Worcester. As a result, our multiracial rally had 45 members of the community attend. We called out the city bosses and police who are in lock-step with criminalizing our Black and Latin youth in public spaces. Another comrade spoke about the role of the police under capitalism. She said the cops are not your friends. They might help you cross the street, or play basketball with your kids, but don’t be fooled. They are there to protect the ruling class and their property, and at the end of the day they will throw your child up against the wall after playing basketball with them. The kkkPD run a summer camp for Black and Latin kids in the city. These gutter racists refer to it“thug” camp or the “gang unit” of the Boys and Girls Club. She said the police should have nothing to do with the education or mentoring of our youth, especially our Black and Latin youth.
In Worcester, systemic racism is alive and well. The crime rate is at an all-time low nationally; according to the FBI there has been a 13 percent decline in homicides relative to 2022. (ABC News, March, 22, 2023.) But in Worcester, the police department made disproportionate numbers of arrests in Black and Latin neighborhoods. Progressive Labor Party and others have opposed these arrests. A report of an independent audit of the Worcester Police shows that arrests show systemic racism. The new police Chief stated that systemic racism has a negative impact and harms Black and Latin communities, but he is now walking back his comments. The City Manager has refused to hold hearings with the public about the report, and the Mayor has blocked efforts to investigate it. The City Councilor who heads the Public Safety Committee says systemic racism is not her job. This is an example of how the government protects the bosses and their profit system. It cannot be reformed. We have to fight for an egalitarian communist world and smash all borders, and end poverty! Fight for communism sisters and brothers! Join us!