NEW YORK CITY, March 10—The fight against the closing of Downstate Medical Center heated up this week as hundreds of workers, patients, and community members rallied, closing down Clarkson Avenue that runs in front of the hospital. Members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined the rally and distributed all the CHALLENGEs we had. We emphasized the racist nature of attacking healthcare in this largely Black neighborhood that has triple maternal mortality and double infant mortality than that of white workers.

You can’t turn on the news without seeing horrific pictures of death and dying. Thirty thousand are dead in Gaza under ruthless attack from Israeli forces, in the latest of the decades-long wars over Middle Eastern oil. Millions are dead in ongoing wars in the Congo over mineral riches, with each of the big powers arming one side or the other. Now New York State (NYS) wants to cut the guts out of healthcare in central Brooklyn by closing Downstate Hospital. Often it is women and children who bear the brunt in both wars and cutbacks.

These Brooklyn attacks on the working class are connected to world events.  Downstate, a safety net hospital, has been shortchanged for years in NYS budgeting. The politicians cry that too much is being spent on healthcare. All this is against a backdrop of $3.8 billion per year going to arm Israel, plus a Biden proposal of $14 billion additional to help in the current war against Palestinians. The U.S. has given Ukraine $46 billion in military aid, but only $1.6 billion in humanitarian aid. Last year, the U.S. gave only $3 billion to the World Food Program. No penny-pinching when it comes to arms, but plenty when it comes to the care of working people.

But women are not just helpless victims. Women in Gaza and Congo are fighting to feed and shelter their families. It was largely women workers at Downstate who spearheaded the fight 11 years ago to keep it open, and they will lead again this time as we fight for our patients and our jobs. Women, (and children grown), will fight alongside men from Gaza and Israel, to Congo, to Ukraine and Russia, to Brooklyn to turn the guns around on the callous leaders who are killing us to feed the imperialist profit machine that needs world domination.

​NEW PALTZ, February 28—Signs saying “No War Criminals on Campus” and “Jews Against Genocide”  were among the sea of placards carried by hundreds of protestors at SUNY New Paltz today. The demonstrators, who included SUNY students and community members, were protesting the presence of Israeli soldiers, members of the IDF (Israeli Defense Force), who were brought to campus by the New Paltz Jewish Student Union in collaboration with Students Supporting Israel, a well-funded Zionist organization with chapters on dozens of university campuses. A spokesperson for the Jewish Student Union said, “I thought it would be beneficial to the community to humanize these [IDF] people…” The response showed that polishing up the image of soldiers who are carrying out mass slaughter of women and children is not so easy. 

Plans for a demonstration sprang up shortly after the IDF speakers were announced and within days 300 - 400 angry protestors were chanting loudly in the pouring rain. Pro-Palestinian organizations in the area, including Students for Justice in Palestine, New Paltz Women in Black, Jewish Voice for Peace, and others collaborated to get the word out. The energy was high. The political thrust of the protest was humanitarian, including reading the names of hundreds of Palestinian children killed in recent weeks. Still, the complicity of politicians and the university administration in the ongoing genocide was reflected in many chants. 

The rapid and spirited outpouring of political anger we are seeing, even in places that you won’t read about in the bosses’ media, shows that the lid is blowing off. There are so many people looking for answers today, especially young people, that organizers have our work cut out for us! Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades here in the Hudson Valley are becoming active in local mass organizations where communist politics can be injected into the protests against the brutality of imperialist slaughter.

All the many brands of suppression – racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, classism – are historical; they have not always been with us. It was not ever thus. And it’s not going to be this way, come the revolution.
— Clara Zetkin

March 8 marked the 115th International Working Women’s Day since its initial celebration by NYC garments workers in 1909. The date was chosen in recognition of a rebellion by women workers that began the overthrow of both feudalism and capitalism in Russia during the victorious October Revolution of 1917. In 2024 working women around the world remain leaders of class struggle, defying the bosses’ sexist divisions as well as all other divisions meant to divide what would be an undefeatable, united working class.

From Palestine to Sudan working class women are serving as leaders in meeting the needs of their communities. From New York to Haiti, working women are leading struggles against the bosses to ignite the revolutionary consciousness of their fellow workers. 
In February Dr. Amira Al-Assouli, a physician working in occupied Palestine, displayed both indomitable courage and collectivism by running through Israeli gunfire to rescue an individual at the entrance of the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis. [Palestine Chronicle 2/11). When interviewed later about the incident, with the incident widely circulating on social media, Al-Assouli said “If I feel someone needs me, I will never think about my life.” Her words and her actions prove how women and all working-class people’s values stand in stark contrast to the individualism championed by the capitalist system that is funding and profiting from Israel’s genocidal occupation of Gaza. 

Al-Assouli, herself a displaced refugee, had her home destroyed in an Israeli bombing, is far from the only worker volunteering to help other working class people being killed and maimed in Gaza. Many other workers in Gaza and around the world are putting their lives on the line to help their fellow workers during one of capitalism’s countless attacks on workers, serving nothing but the pockets of bosses, worldwide.

In Sudan, women workers are responding to Sudan’s own civil war, working to provide shelter, food, medical and healthcare supplies, as well as psychological support to workers displaced and in need of aid (UN Women July, 2023). Women also play crucial journalistic roles in conflicts worldwide, providing the working class with vital information about attacks on the working class.

Women workers in leadership

The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to smash capitalism along with its special oppression against women that hurts all workers. Sexism forces women to prioritize reproductive labor, such as cooking, cleaning, and care work, promotes sexist culture that cheapens, degrades, and helps enable the exploitation and abuse of women as sexual objects. Capitalist-bred sexism pits men and women against each other, driving the global epidemic of femicide, in other words the murder of women and girls.

From NJ to Colombia, women in PLP are pushing to make the outcry against the Israeli State’s genocidal occupation of Gaza a fight against the system which created the occupation, capitalism. Women comrades have worked to attain positions of trust and respect in mass organizations, led chants, and sold CHALLENGE to workers. This is in marked contrast to reformist leaders and politicians making meaningless, toothless calls for ceasefires that not only fail to help women under attack by capitalist, imperialist attacks but in fact provide ideological cover for them.

Where workers worldwide are looking for leadership, women communist leaders are meeting that need! Join them in the fight for a communist future without sexism! Join PLP!

Cuba: international solidarity with working class in Gaza

Thousands of people gathered as part of World Day in solidarity with the Palestinian people, so that another genocide is not committed, this time in the city of Rafah. The event in Havana, Cuba, where I am spending a few days with my family, was an anti-imperialist tribune, in front of the embassy of the North American government, attended especially by young people. During the protest event, young representatives from different sectors of the country spoke, including workers' unions and several young Palestinians studying at the international medical school. Their broken voices narrated all the pain and suffering of their people who have been carrying on for more than 75 years fighting against Zionism and Israeli apartheid in the occupied territories. Their families have had to unite and leave everything behind.

All voices agreed in a unanimous condemnation of the Zionist government of Israel for the genocide committed against the heroic Palestinian people. This occasion has cost, in a few months of bombing, the lives of more than 30,000 innocent civilians, including more than 19,000 lives of children.

Different slogans were shouted, including the now famous one, “FREE, FREE PALESTINA!” 

​Transit workers say bosses’ attacks mean fight back!

After the recent attack on New York City Transit Conductor Alton Scott, city transit workers took a brave stand against the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) bosses. They filled out safety forms and refused to operate their trains, causing mass service disruptions on several subway lines for a day! Workers were and are fed up with the bosses’ failed solutions to protect them and for a moment in time realized that withholding their labor is part of the solution! The action has the bosses in full attack mode, with Governor Kathy Hochul announcing plans for 1,000 members of the state police and National Guard to patrol the subway in response. When capitalism is in crisis and the ruling class has no real answer to the racist unemployment, lack of housing, mental health, and drug addiction ailments their system creates. Instead they are  ratcheting up their attacks on workers, specifically Black and Latin workers. These actions don’t serve to keep riders safe but instead foster an environment of fear and unwillingness to fight back. 

Capitalist media tells us day in and day out that the only way to solve these anti-social behaviors in the working class comes through their fascist Klansmen in Blue, complemented by their cousins in the fascist military. This is the same National Guard that has no qualms about taking in  proud card-carrying Neo-Nazis in their ranks! While he forces cuts on the city’s critical social services, liberal Mayor Eric Adams funds the New York Police Department to the tune of $11 billion, the largest police budget in the country. It’s the same cycle: after another of these attacks, more cops flood the trains, yet the attacks continue. Now military forces stand armed with rifles outside Grand Central as a show of the ruling class’s power, while impoverished families struggle to pay their rent and put food on the table. 

Meanwhile, racist Adams blames these cuts on migrant workers escaping U.S. imperialism’s clutches, despite his city council projecting the city to take in an additional $1 billion more than expected for the fiscal year! MTA workers and riders have nothing to gain when looking to these stooges for protection. 

The Progressive Labor Party knows only the working class can put a permanent end to worker-on-worker assaults. Join us in the fight for not just a safer subway system, but a world where workers can be safe once and for all: a communist world.