TELL-AVIV, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, July 20 — Moshe Silman, died from his wounds after setting himself on fire during last week’s rally against the government’s economic policy. This act of desperation served as an example to several other workers, pushed to the brink of suicide by the inhuman capitalist system, who began setting themselves on fire to protest their poverty.

One hundred sixy years ago, Marx and Engels wrote how the capitalist system, in its dog-eat-dog competition between businesses, drives many petit-bourgeois (the self-employed and the small businessmen) into the proletariat (working class). Silman’s tale is a clear example of this. At one time he owned a tiny transport company with four trucks, but due to debts to the National Insurance (Israel’s “Social Security”), one of his trucks was repossessed, starting a downward spiral for him.

Soon he found himself penniless, forced to work for his living as a taxi-cab driver. Eventually he suffered a series of strokes, forcing him off his job. He then had to live on about $550 a month in disability benefits, hardly enough to pay for food, medications and rent. Finally, he found himself living on the mean streets. As an act of protest, he committed suicide by setting himself on fire.

Capitalism is an economic system with no mercy. The bosses (much less than “1%” of the population) own great wealth produced by the labor of workers. The workers (more than “99%”) own nothing substantial and are forced to sell their labor  power — essentially, the best part of one’s life and livelihood — in order to earn an often meager existence. There is no real middle ground between these two classes. Competition between businesses leads to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few big capitalists at the expense of their smaller and less vicious competitors, who end up, in many cases, driven into the working class. Even the so-called “middle class,” workers who were given a few more crumbs than usual from the bosses’ table, find themselves more and more thrown back to the bottom of the working class by the crisis of the capitalist system.

The only real way out of this hell on earth is to get rid of the root of the problem, the capitalist system itself. Instead of harming themselves out of desperation, workers should organize, fight back and eventually lead a communist revolution under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party to overthrow the profit system once and for all. Only together, led by a Party of millions of workers, will  we be able to build a real future — a communist future where workers will run the world for the interest of the working class!

Local working-class people in Iraq and Afghanistan, mainly civilians, have bore the brunt of suffering in the U.S. imperialist wars, with casualties, both deaths and injuries, numbering in the millions. This carnage has also damaged working-class U.S. troops — who’ve survived physically uninjured — by what they’ve seen and done. For every U.S. soldier killed in the war zone, about 25 vets die by suicide.

The racist lies the Pentagon uses to direct U.S. working-class troops’ anger towards local workers, especially anger over a battle buddy’s death, underlie  these skyrocketing suicide rates. These racist lies lead many troops to kill, beat or harass innocent local workers or at least passively support those troops that do.

Since the U.S. military defines the troops’ mission as only to “carry out good intentions,” it’s easy for troops to get angry at civilians who refuse to turn in insurgents and view these civilians as “ungrateful savages.”

Individualism A Loser

But once troops learn more about the profit motive behind the mission and are separated from the chain of command that reinforces racist lies, it becomes difficult to live with what happened.

Unlike Vietnam War veterans who had the option of joining a massive GI and veterans’ movement against racism and war (see box, page 2), today many veterans individually tear themselves up with guilt, shame, depression and rage. Many feel no one knows what they’re experiencing except maybe those who were there with them.

For thousands of veterans who wonder why they survived, the burden of carrying the memories of dead friends and civilians haunts their minds and becomes too much to bear.

Additionally, troops have been driven to suicide because of racist harassment. Army Private Danny Chen killed himself in Afghanistan after repeated anti-Chinese harassment from two Officers, four NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers) and two fellow lower enlisted soldiers.

After public outrage from Danny’s family and the Chinese working-class community in New York City, the Army pressed charges on the eight soldiers who hazed Danny for weeks before his death. But the first soldier to stand court martial only received a 30-day sentence, a fine and demotion out of a possible 30-month sentence!

A Veterans Affairs hotline on suicide exists but capitalism has little to offer veterans dealing with suicidal thoughts. Addressing the racist lies of profit wars on a mass scale would undermine the bosses’ imperialist mission.

According to a pair of liberal mental health pundits, the mental damage imperialism does to working-class troops is a “moral wound” that can only be treated socially by a non-judgmental community that has the moral courage to “examine its own responsibility for the war.” 

But it is not this “community” that is responsible for the U.S. bosses’ wars, it is capitalism. The VA suicide hotline may help some individuals but it cannot own up to exploiting the good intentions of working-class troops without risking rebellion within the ranks.

The most positive, lasting and significant way to address profit wars, racism and the intense feeling to make amends is to become part of a communist movement to smash the capitalist system that spawns these oil wars and racism. Getting vets involved in anti-racist fight-backs for jobs, education and more veterans’ services can be an important part of healing for many troops.

But ultimately, taking anti-racist and anti-imperialist actions in the barracks, on the battlefields and in the neighborhoods as part of the Progressive Labor Party is the most important way to undercut the imperialist mission that drives troops to suicide.

Landless farmers are facing horrible exploitation in Pakistan. They are absolutely dependent upon the rule of big landowners, even in their private life. They’re constantly abused, physically, verbally and sexually, and may be kept imprisoned while they have no work.

When laboring in the fields, they are treated as slaves. From dusk to dawn, they either endure the scorching heat or shiver in the cold. Their legs are chained, and are even denied access to food. These parasitic bosses are becoming richer and richer off the blood of the poor workers and are gaining increasing control of the state.

A comrade addressed the 65th anniversary of the death in Sindh province of Mai Bukhtawar, a poor farmer woman who worked in the fields. She had no formal education, but she had great class consciousness. She refused to accept the so-called laws formulated by feudal lords (landowners descendent from aristrocracy) to control the working class. A brave worker, she stood firmly against new methods of exploitation and subsequently was assassinated by these powerful bosses.

The comrade noted that her death fueled anger among the peasants against feudal lords, inspiring them to resist and revolt against oppression and exploitation. 

Reform No Substitute for Revolution

He made his point loud and clear that without an international communist revolution we cannot eliminate these miseries. He explained that the struggle against landlords is deep-rooted in Pakistan. Many poor peasants have sacrificed their lives in the fight against exploitation but the situation hasn’t changed. History proves that reform struggle cannot be a substitute for revolution.

The peasants twice forced the rulers to announce land reforms, in 1959 and 1972, but the bosses used these reforms to cheat us. They did this by putting a cap on the amount of land an individual can own but not on the amount a family can acquire. Through many provisions and loopholes, the landlords were allowed to transfer land beyond the cap to their children and relatives. Exemptions were granted for orchards, livestock farms and huge hunting areas.

Ironically, many high government officials used these reforms to acquire land in Sindh and Punjab provinces at exceptionally low prices, using their officialdom to increase their wealth. Thus a new class of landlords emerged to intensify the exploitation of the working class. 

Now 18 million farm workers, about 70 percent of the entire work-force, have no right to unionize nor organize sit-ins or strikes. Most are treated as slaves, receiving only cheap food for their hard labor. The comrade emphasized that to eradicate this exploitation we must build an international communist movement, led by PLP, and establish workers’ power.

AL-ARAKIB, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, July 27 — Hundreds of workers, both Bedouin-Arabs and Jews, marched against the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) attempt to evict the Bedouin village of al-Arakib from its ancestral lands. In the last two years, this village has been demolished no less than 40 times. Yet the villagers, impoverished workers and peasants, still cling to their land and rebuild again and again, bravely defying the will of the racist Israeli regime.

Workers from all parts of Israel-Palestine stand in solidarity with this struggle, encouraging the villagers of al-Arakib in their fight for a piece of land to call their home. But what is this struggle really about? For this, we must look at the history of the Bedouins in Palestine.

Before the 1948 war, 90,000 Bedouins lived in the Negev (southern Israel-Palestine), mostly settling down as pastoral peasants in the early 20th century. When the Zionist movement took power and established the State of Israel, 59,000 of them were deported, mostly to the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip. The rest were kept under martial law in the “Siag” region, essentially a tiny native reservation (or ghetto) until 1966. Then they were allowed more freedom, but were still confined to a small part of the land. Currently, the Bedouins, some of whom were living in the Negev for centuries if not millennia, make up only 25% of the Negev’s population; the remaining 75% are Jews brought by the Israeli government after 1948.

How Israeli Rulers Cheat Bedoiuns 

The Israeli government claims almost all of the Negev as its own state land. Bedouins who live on state land — even if it was their family’s ancestral land for centuries — are considered to be “squatters.” Since the 1970’s, the Israeli government “generously” allowed the Bedouins to “sell” parts of their claimed lands to the state for ridiculously low prices, usually around 25-30% of the land’s market value.

Understandably, most Bedouin workers and peasants were very reluctant to give up their lands, especially for such an unfair price. So most remaining Bedouin settlements are technically illegal — that is, the government and the Zionist JNF can demolish their homes and evict them legally. These “unrecognized” villages, such as al-Arakib, are not allowed to receive electricity or running water from the state infrastructure, and have to improvise amenities. Sometimes their children have to walk for many kilometers to get to school.

Since the late 1960’s, Israel has built “planned” settlement towns,  essentially ghettos, for the Bedouins. In these towns, the largest of which is Rahat (population 50,000), there are almost no jobs, and the residents have to make do with minimal infrastructure and under-funded health and education services. Unemployment in Rahat, for example, is upwards of 50% for men and 85% for women with 60% of households below the poverty line. This poverty breeds crime and drug use.

This is the main reason why half the Bedouin population chooses to stay in “unrecognized” villages with no modern amenities and engage in subsistence farming (usually herding sheep) rather than move to the poverty-stricken “planned” towns where no jobs can be found.

Real Estate Bosses Profit from Racism

The policy of the Zionist movement (and its creation, the State of Israel) places more Jews on more land and less Arabs on less land.

This racist policy is heaven for real-estate capitalists all over the Western world, particularly the U.S. It is hell for the Arab working class, as well as the Jewish working class which was settled in underfunded “development towns” providing cheap labor for local capitalist factories heavily subsidized by the government from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, most of these factories were shut down or moved to the Far East, leaving the entire towns stricken with mass unemployment.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government and the JNF keep planning and building gated communities for wealthy Jews in the Negev, all while claiming that the Bedouins — who were already there long before the state was founded — are “stealing land” from the state.

Al-Arakib, an unrecognized Bedouin village near Rahat and Beersheba, is home to several working-class families. In the past, they engaged in subsistence agriculture to supplement their meager income. In the summer of 2010, however, their village was demolished. The government uprooted their olive trees and destroyed their homes. Since then, the regime has demolished this village 40 times. The locals still fight back, with the help of working-class activists. This struggle is not only for the village of al-Arakib, but for the fate of 100,000 Bedouin workers and peasants who live in “unrecognized” villages. If al-Arakib falls, the racist Israeli regime will move on to demolish many more villages to make room for real-estate development for the profits of U.S. and Israeli bosses.

The only answer to this racist attack on workers and peasants is to fight back, and the villagers at al-Arakib are fighting courageously. However, the only way to ensure a better life for all parts of the working class is to get rid of the root of all evil — capitalism and its creation, nationalism — and replace them by a multi-ethnic communist world ruled by the working class as a whole. Such a communist society will provide real infrastructure and livelihood to all workers. The Progressive Labor Party fights for a communist Israel-Palestine and a borderless communist world. Join us!