The Bronx, NY–The newly formed Common Ground student club at one Bronx CUNY (City University of New York) campus took the lead in mid-March and called for a Rally Against Genocide in Gaza on the steps of our community college. A multiracial, multigenerational group of about twenty people including students and staff held a spirited picket line and rally – it included student leaders from a Parents Club, students, professors from a nearby community college, and union members. Short speeches were given as different people stepped up to the mic. One speaker pointed out how the Democrats and the Republicans are all the same and that voting will never put an end to the genocide. Another student spoke about the need for us to get more students involved and to see this struggle as our struggle. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members linked the racist austerity we are facing on our campuses and the bosses’ imperialist wars in other countries— that we are also in a war with CUNY as classes are cut, adjuncts are fired, our cafeterias are closed, etc.

We chanted “Arab, Jewish, Black, Latin, white—to smash genocide we must unite! We were warmly received and greeted by students and over 50 CHALLENGEs were distributed. This was the first public action on campus against the genocide in Gaza, inspiring others to plan more rallies and events.

Fight racist gentrification & displacement!

Early April saw a different type of event on a neighboring campus. Community organizers from the South Bronx and Chinatown joined in a conversation about what is happening in New York City (NYC) with displacement and gentrification. About 35 students and staff joined the discussion, followed by a delicious meal of Oaxacan food. The two speakers focused on sharing their experiences in the movement. We heard first-hand about the sharp struggles that have been going on for years in Chinatown. The first speaker laid out the falsehood of identity politics. He explained how growing up he learned the goal was for marginalized groups to get a “seat at the table.” But he quickly learned the truth while organizing against the Chinese American Planning Council (CPC), a non-profit that super-exploits thousands of immigrant Asian, Black, and Latin healthcare attendants, forcing them to work 24-hour shifts. This speaker also denounced Jonathan Chu, Chinatown’s biggest developer/landlord, who is the head of the board of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). Chu has accepted a $35 million deal in exchange for supporting a new mega jail in Chinatown. That’s not a “seat at the table” for workers. It’s just big profits for the capitalists. The speaker made a very clear case of why workers must reject nationalism and identity politics and fight all bosses, no matter what they look like.

The second speaker has been working directly with migrant families in shelters. It was vital to hear what is happening to migrant families in NYC and not believe the news stories that migrants “have it made” or are staying in luxury hotels. In fact, one of the students present worked as a security guard in the Roosevelt Hotel, one of the main locations where migrant families were placed. He joined the conversation to share what he learned from meeting and talking to people there and pointed out how even in the richest city in the world, capitalism and racism create the most inhumane conditions for workers. The speaker, who is a part of a mutual aid kitchen, engaged the students by asking them how they felt about paying tuition knowing that at one time tuition was free at CUNY. She encouraged them to see the connections between constantly hearing that there is no money when we know that money exists - it exists for war, but not for education. 

As the discussion opened up, several key points were raised, all pointing to the understanding that migration and movement are always a result of imperialism and U.S. foreign policy. People began to speak about U.S. policies in Latin America, the “dirty wars” of the 1980s, the sanctions, etc. One person who grew up in Chile shared about the brutality she witnessed growing up under the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Another professor spoke about hosting a migrant family and seeing first-hand the very difficult reality these families face every day. 

Members of the college progressive group, The Bronx Action Committee, also gave brief speeches about the need for students to challenge racist austerity, get involved with the city-wide strike movement that is growing, and find ways to reach out to newly arrived workers in solidarity. Students, staff, and professors were invited to join the PLP Mayday in Brooklyn. Since then, several students, faculty, and staff have signed up to march with us!

Lessons learned on our Bronx campuses

These two events were important learning experiences. At the Gaza rally, we relied on students to lead, organize, and step forward, and they did! We saw the power of the unity between education workers with different job titles as we all marched and chanted together. We realized the power of “showing up” to support a struggle on a different campus. 

At the forum, which was a conversation, we learned the importance of putting May Day forward in a mass and open way. We were encouraged as students, staff, and faculty expressed interest in marching with us on May 4. PLP will continue to make friends, distribute CHALLENGE, build ties with students and education workers, and fight for communist ideas. As we engage in these struggles we help to lead and learn how to lead even better.

Raising my voice for workers in Gaza and for May Day

I spoke at a Rutgers University action in Camden, where students took over the Campus Center, demanding that Rutgers’ Board of Governors break ties with Israel. One student condemned Rutgers for being the largest university in New Jersey, while homeless and drug-addicted workers sleep below train stations in New Brunswick, where their main campus is located. Still, solving the homeless and addiction crises are not priorities of capitalist rulers of the academy. Rutgers President Johathan Holloway, a self-proclaimed Civil Rights scholar is instead partnering with Tel Aviv University to build a $665 million ‘Hub’ that will include cybersecurity research. This contradiction, highlighted by the students, resonated with me as a worker in the city of Newark. I work as a nonprofit worker, where the push for community development is explicitly advertised to Black and Latin workers as a solution to crumbling infrastructure and super-exploitation.

I shared with the students that the same night that students were demanding a ceasefire, workers who live in an apartment complex, Georgia King Village, owned by a ‘community developer,’ L+ M, were crying out to the multicultural City Council and Black liberal Mayor Ras Baraka about deteriorating housing conditions. These workers were met with empty promises by their city councilman to regulate developers while in the next breath, the council voted to give L+ M another 30-year tax abatement. 

At the same time that we’re fighting against racist displacement in Gaza, workers are also fighting against racist displacement in Newark. All over, the ones we’re fighting against are liberal servants of capitalism and imperialism and we need worker-student unity to win! I ended with the chant that PL’ers  out at a Newark city council meeting remixed from ‘No good politician in a racist system’ to ‘No good President in a racist institution!’ 

I also used this action as a chance to bond with a friend who is active in fights for a ceasefire in the surrounding suburbs of Newark. On the ride back, I asked them what they thought of the action and communist politics. They shared, “I think communism is most aligned with my politics, but I don’t know enough about it.” I shared CHALLENGE and the book that our club is reading, History of the U.S.S.R. by Andrew Rothstein. I also invited them to march with us on May Day.

This struggle is exposing our class’s potential to wage a militant, multiracial, internationalist class war against the bosses, but we have to be in it to win it! The fight for communist revolution continues.
*****

My first PL workshop: ‘I felt heard’

Even though I wouldn’t consider myself a beginner to communist theory if I’m being honest, I was still pretty anxious about attending a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) workshop for the first time. In addition to me generally being an anxious person, it’d also be my first time attending any sort of communist collective, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Maybe I’d be too far behind in my knowledge about communism, and I’d end up not having anything to add to the discussion. Maybe I’d be unknowingly too reformist, so even if I did attempt to add something to the discussion, it wouldn’t be worthwhile at all, or it’d just end up being completely regressive. 

In actuality though, my interaction with the PLP was nothing like my apprehensions. All its members were extremely kind and welcoming. Rather than feeling talked down to during our discussion, I played an active role in it, and I felt that my ideas were truly being heard and engaged with. In one workshop, titled, “Why Communism, Why PLP?”, we critiqued a quote by Jay-Z, underscoring its attempt to conflate radical racial progress with upward class mobility within capitalism’s inherently oppressive hierarchy. We also discussed what communism meant to us personally as people from a diverse set of backgrounds, and (re)affirmed that a more equitable, communist future could only be done through a grassroots revolution by the global working classes, and not through superficial reforms by the ruling classes. 

This is a collective that I’d keep returning to. I loved that, in addition to analyzing work by Marxist theorists, we also analyzed media and media figures that are more prolific within mainstream culture. This cultural analysis demonstrated that capitalism implicitly undergirds a large swath of the media we consume and that consumption done uncritically is bound to be accompanied by an uncritical acceptance of the oppressive ideologies and material conditions that said media is silently reproducing. Furthermore, what this cultural analysis also indicates is that, in spite of attempts by the ruling class to suppress it, resistance to capitalism, and a pursuit of communism, pervade and continue to accumulate within capitalist culture, especially as global capitalist powers continue to support and facilitate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, whilst repressing those who protest in opposition. Discussions like these are integral to a communist revolution, serving both as a site of revolutionary communist praxis, and, through the warmness of its Party members, their sociality, and their collective sharing of childcare, as a site for revolutionary, everyday, communist practice.
*****

Bringing solidarity to students against genocide

On April 17th,  a couple of comrades with whom I have been organizing within a mass organization and I went up to Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus to show solidarity with students who have been organizing around Palestine and were having a rally that afternoon. We wanted to bridge the gap between Rutgers Newark, New Brunswick, and Camden campuses, and discuss some of the organizing we’ve been doing not just in Newark, but in Teaneck, Morristown, and West Orange, making parallels between gentrification and imperialism while reiterating that the genocide in Gaza is an attack against workers worldwide.  It isn’t enough to just fight for a ceasefire or to call for divestment. We have to continue to organize and build so that we can wrest power from the bosses! 

While the rally was happening, I found out that there was another rally being held by union faculty workers who were protesting President Holloway’s cutting of the writing program at the college. I saw many signs that were similar to PLP’s chants (e.g. The Students United Will Never Be Defeated; Make the Bosses Take the Losses). A Pro-Israel heckler disrupted the rally, and it led the Pro-Palestinian students and union faculty to split from one another. 

I felt that it was a big mistake for many of the faculty to ignore the students and not show solidarity with them. After all, Holloway’s attack on the writing program is the result of increasing attacks on the humanities programs in colleges, which is one of the hallmarks signs of fascism. We need to defend the humanities at all costs—which is where thoughts, ideas, and consciousness are spread. Furthermore, it was sad to see that one lone person could easily cause so much chaos and discord. It was a learning lesson, for sure.
*****

U.S. now directly involved in Israel’s military operations

Wall Street Journal, 4/21–Biden…ordered the Pentagon to step up its efforts to protect Israel, and the U.S. military activated highly classified plans for assisting Israel in a crisis…A team of U.S. military personnel secretly went to Tel Aviv to work out of a missile defense operations center with their Israeli counterparts…bulked-up force of F-15E fighter jets… F-16s based in the region…Plans were made for Saudi and Jordanian planes to defend their airspace.

…The more than 150 attack drones that Iran launched first…would take five to seven hours to reach Israel. Then…30 land-attack cruise missiles with flight times of two to three hours. Last were ballistic missiles that would reach Israel in just a dozen minutes. Israel’s Arrow system intercepted most of the ballistic missiles, while the two American destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean downed several others. An American Patriot anti missile battery in Erbil, Iraq, intercepted another one…drones, in the meantime, were shot down by a combination of American, British, French and Israeli aircraft…The White House had, at least for a time, avoided a wider war.  …

U.S. bosses use Israel as a forward operating base

Haaretz, 4/20–The U.S. House resoundingly voted to provide Israel with $26 billion in emergency assistance on Saturday, including nearly $14 billion in unconditional military aid…The bill's provisions include $4 billion earmarked to replenish Iron Dome and David's Sling missile defense systems and $1.2 billion for the Iron Beam defense system, designed to counter short-range rockets and mortar threats…$3.5 billion for the procurement of advanced weapons systems…$1 billion to "enhanc[ing] the production and development of artillery and critical munitions"... $4.4 billion will replenish military supplies and defense services…and $2.4 billion for current U.S. military operations in the region…

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the U.S. Congress…saying it "demonstrates strong bipartisan support for Israel and defends Western civilization"...

The battle between imperialists for West Africa continues

Al Jazeera, 4/20–The United States will withdraw its soldiers from Niger as the West African nation is increasingly turning to Russia and away from Western powers. The US Department of State agreed to pull out about 1,000 troops from the country that has been under military rule since July 2023…The US built a military base in Niger to combat armed groups that pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS)...Like the military rulers in neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso, the West African nation had kicked out French and European troops following the military takeover. All three countries have now turned to Russia for support, with Moscow confirming earlier this month that it has sent military trainers and an air defense system and other military equipment to Niger as it deepens its security ties.

Ukrainian workers pay the price in inter-imperialist conflict

Foreign Affairs, 4/19–After more than two years fighting one of the world’s most powerful armies, Ukraine has enacted a new mobilization law…army commanders demanded 500,000 new soldiers…“Even the most determined [soldier] will consider this to be an eternal contract”...the original draft mobilization bill…proposed to mandate demobilization after 36 months of active duty. But that provision was dropped because of pressure from military leaders, who feared they would lose their most experienced troops…

…In early April, the president also signed into law a bill lowering the military mobilization age by two years, from 27 to 25…the military understands that soldiers in their 20s are fitter and recover faster, allowing them to bounce back from injuries and return to the front…a young person who has experienced a concussion from an explosion may be able to recover from temporary hearing loss, whereas someone over 40 faces a higher risk of permanent deafness…

The war is already estimated to have caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage…Entire industrial regions and large corporations have been destroyed…Millions of professionals have left the country, and multiple economic sectors have simply disappeared…

On April 1, Israel’s rulers struck Iran’s embassy compound in Damascus, Syria—equivalent to bombing Iran itself, according to the capitalists’ international law. They killed 11 workers and two Iranian generals tied to the country’s “shadow war” against Israel. The same day, Israel deliberately targeted and bombed three cars in Gaza that carried aid workers with World Central Kitchen(WCK), according to WCK founder Jose Andres. This was no isolated incident. With a blank check for arms and bombs from the U.S., Israel has murdered two hundred aid workers and more than 33,000 Palestinians, the great majority of them noncombatant women and children, according to U.S. “Defense” Secretary Lloyd Austin (alajazeera.com, 3/1). The arms flow and atrocities continue despite Genocide Joe Biden’s phony call for a ceasefire as he slaps his defiant lapdog, Israeli president and mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu, on the wrist.

Capitalist profits and racist genocide continue to sit at the heart of the one-sided slaughter of workers in Palestine. U.S. imperialists have long relied on Israel as its military proxy in the Middle East, a permanent “aircraft carrier group” for U.S. oil interests. But that arrangement is now under attack. A wider war looms in the Middle East, one that might escalate into an inter-imperialist World War Three. In an all-out global conflict, the devastation of the international working class will intensify exponentially. It is time for all workers to turn these attacks into anti-racist class war against all imperialists and capitalists under the leadership of the international communist Progressive Labor Party.

Many smaller capitalist gangs in the region have allied with imperialist Iran against the U.S. and Israel, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and an array of militias in Syria and Iraq. With funding and weapons from Iran, along with the capitalists’ ideological weapons of nationalism and religion, these groups have gained broad support among workers who are courageously fighting back against the Zionist war machine. But even if the groups’ misleaders succeed, they can offer nothing but more exploitation of the working class under the guise of anti-imperialism. Communism, not a new set of capitalist bosses, is what our class needs for liberation!

Iranian bosses’ leverage

The U.S. bosses have been trying and failing to topple Iran’s bosses since the Iranian “revolution” of 1979 overthrew their lackey, the Shah of Iran. What is stopping the U.S. imperialists and their junior criminal partners in Israel from launching genocidal attacks on Iran itself? Iran’s regional alliances and its deepening economic and political ties with the United States’ arch-rivals make it a more formidable foe than Hamas. Both the Chinese and Russian imperialists are ignoring international sanctions and buying large quantities of oil from Iran (Reuters, 11/10/23). 

Iran has military and geographic leverage, as well. About 17 million barrels of oil, around 20 percent of total global demand, pass through the Strait of Hormuz each day (strausscenter.org). If Iran were to obstruct the strait, it would cause global economic chaos. Iran’s mountainous topography is a natural fortress against invading powers. Finally, Iran has tailored much of its navy to fend off the U.S. imperialists with an armada of speed boats equipped for naval guerilla warfare. 

Israel, racist pariah state

Workers worldwide are showing that they will not take the genocide of Gaza sitting down. Millions have protested against Israel, which has become a pariah state. On April 4, seven Arab workers from Israel and four Palestinians from the West Bank attempted to assassinate Ben Gvir, Israel’s fascist national security head. Unfortunately, Israel’s anti-war movement is still trapped in Zionist ideology and focuses on the hundred or so Israeli hostages in Gaza while largely ignoring the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims of Israel’s vicious ethnic cleansing. A recent call for elections, regardless of how it turns out, will not change Israel’s commitment to apartheid in the West Bank and mass open-air incarceration in Gaza.

The rise of global opposition to the U.S. may seem like a good thing. But we must beware of the motives of these opponents when they belong to the capitalist ruling class. As U.S. imperialism declines, China and Russian and their allies are seeking opportunities for inroads in the Middle East and elsewhere. No matter who comes out on top of the bosses’ next big conflict, workers will lose—unless they turn the guns around to wage class war against our oppressors. Only a united, multiracial working class led by a revolutionary communist party can end the cycle of imperialist wars to re-divide the world for profit. Workers have no dog in this fight! 

The Progressive Labor Party encourages all those outraged by the devastation of Gaza to build a base for communism and PLP among workers of the world. Only communist revolution can put capitalist exploitation, racism, imperialist war, and climate catastrophe in the dustbin of history. Only communism can enable the working class to write our own future! Join us!