On November 24, I joined three other comrades at the "Save Gaza," Black Friday March on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, the "Magnificent Mile," of expensive shops and restaurants. Several progressive groups were present at the event such as the US Palestinian Community Network and Students for Social Justice at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC).

Shoppers unnecessarily crossed through the rally, and at one point a racist shouted, "Stop killing babies and raping women!" While I don't know what kind of statistics there are about rape in this conflict, the hard evidence about the Israeli Defense Force's current killing of 6,150 children in just under two months should be spiking the radar of any "pro-lifer." The dehumanizing tactics of Hamas are centered in the imagination of those all too unwilling to grapple with Israel's own dehumanizing, US-supported tactics on Palestinians, where prior to the current slaughter 40% of the male population in Palestine had been imprisoned.

Once the march of about 1,000 took off,  there were several stopping points in front of businesses like Victoria's Secret and Starbucks shouting, "Shame on You!" while cops blocked the entrances. At one point we chanted, "CPD, KKK, IDF, they're all the same!" At another point an Arab American cop guarding a business was a particular focus for a small group of Arab protesters.

I carried a sign with the picture of Murod Kurdi, an Arab American worker from the nearby suburb of Oak Lawn who was murdered by a drunk driver. I got the opportunity to explain the PLP's support of the case to a worker handing out flyers. He referred to the area Murod was from as "Little Palestine,” on account of the large diaspora there. A family with a 5-year-old boy and his family holding signs of support for Palestine came closer to have him read my sign and ask about it. When the boy struggled to understand the importance of an Arab worker killed by a drunk driver, a member of their group explained that if the driver hadn't been white, they likely wouldn't have gotten away with it.

Though most shoppers hid away in stores or acted as unaffected as possible, I did get some CHALLENGEs to a few of them. A pair of young workers gazed from the sidelines in awe, and when handed a CHALLENGE and told it was a communist paper, one responded, "The people control the means of production!" I got handed one  to a young Black worker who raised her fist and began to march along the sidewalk with us. Another worker outside of Starbucks recognized CHALLENGE and asked for one.

Ending at the historic Water Tower, an organizer called for high school students to organize walkouts, for college students to challenge their learning institutions that often have Zionist backing, and to continue coming out every week.

Workers in Pakistan are grappling with a dire economic situation. Inter-imperialist rivalry is heating up, particularly in dependent countries like Pakistan. It depends upon the financial capital of Saudi Arabia, China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the U.S., in that order. For example, in order to obtain  the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout, Pakistani bosses are forcing workers to produce weapons for Ukraine as collateral for the latest bailout package. In addition, Pakistani bosses are raising funds by stealing from workers and selling national assets like its ports to the UAE.

Various social issues are escalating, while the ruling elite shamelessly serves the interests of imperialism.  Unemployment is spreading rapidly, inflation is increasing daily, and workers across different industries are losing their jobs. Farm workers are being compelled by landlords to work longer hours for lower wages, and women and children are being pushed into bonded labor.  The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is taking a leading role in the working-class fightback in Pakistan, explaining the situation and pointing out the need for a communist revolution as the only solution.

Workers fight back; bosses terrorize with crackdowns
The most impoverished sections of the working class face a lack of job opportunities in both the public and private sectors. Local industrialists and feudalists prioritize exploiting workers and shifting their capital abroad, resulting in daily suicides among workers and their families due to unemployment, lack of food, and shelter. Working-class individuals are actively participating in Action Committees, organizing protests and sit-ins against new taxes, high inflation, unemployment, and terrorism.

Government employees are staging strikes and sit-ins to pressure authorities to increase their pay in line with inflation. However, the finance department's adherence to IMF instructions makes it challenging for the government to provide relief. The fear of displeasing international monetary organizations like the IMF has led to a situation where Pakistan's default could collapse the capitalist economic system, leading poor workers  to challenge the state due to  hunger, exploitation, and poverty.

Protests extend from teachers to clerks, with various organizations, including the All-Government Employees Grand Alliance (AGEGA), mobilizing. The Punjab government's attempt to privatize schools is seen as a move that will increase unemployment and exploitation. The government is also set to introduce amendments to pension regulations under IMF instructions, sparking agitation among poor people against the ruling class's actions.

AGEGA's militancy has triggered a brutal crackdown, resulting in the arrest of over 556 demonstrators. Protesters from various unions, including the Punjab Teachers Union, All Pakistan Clerk Association, Health Employees' Association, and the Punjab Professors and Lecturers' Association, were subjected to torture and false cases, highlighting the intense suppression by authorities.

Party exposes bosses’ privatization schemes and corruption
The impending privatization of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) is perceived as a ploy to appease capitalist supporters. Capitalist bosses, in every election, fund campaigns of almost every party expected to form the next government. This privatization, along with other institutions, is viewed as a means to bribe capitalists, although it raises concerns about the impact on public services.

Despite approximately 23 million out-of-school children in Pakistan, public school' neglect continues. Teachers' unions are criticized for their role, seen as self-serving and aligned with bureaucracy and politicians. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP)  is involved in these actions, using them to provide true revolutionary leadership, guiding workers to see their revolutionary potential, and understanding the root causes of Pakistan's political, social, and economic challenges. While participating in reform struggles, PLP offers hope for a brighter future, distinguishing itself from other leftist  and socialist parties.

Only working class PLP can lead the way
Political parties in Pakistan have often manipulated Palestine and Kashmir issues for sympathy and funds. Religious parties exploit these issues for financial gain. Despite working-class people's disconnection from these geopolitical concerns, religious parties use mosques to mobilize mainly businesspeople, shopkeepers, and government employees in rallies lacking the passion of the working class.

Religious parties' reluctance to aggressively address the Palestinian genocide is attributed to their ties with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The PLP supports progressive students, workers, and political activists in organizing demonstrations against imperialist greed and exploitation. The Party emphasizes the need to fight against the capitalist system, which it sees as the main cause of global bloodshed. PLP advocates for international organizations under its red flag to eradicate every evil of capitalism and establish a political and economic system guaranteeing equality, justice, and peace – communism.

NOVEMBER 29, ATLANTA, GA – This year's American Public Health Association (APHA) annual conference was held in Atlanta, a hotbed of ongoing class struggle against the expansion of the ruling class’s racist police state and environmental pollution and deforestation, called “Stop Cop City.” This is a prime example of the role of liberal bosses, their Democratic Party, and their Black misleaders paving the way toward fascism.

For several months, the national health collective and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), with decades of experience organizing against racism in medicine, from health determinants to the shackling of patients in hospitals to imperialist war, met virtually in preparation. Building off our ties working within our mass organizations, we joined nurses and public health organizers and were able to connect with health organizers on the ground involved in the militant “Stop Cop City” fightback.  

A comrade and friend from Los Angeles co-presented on a panel with Atlanta healthcare workers involved in the Stop Cop City campaign. We were joined by an organizer in the Santa Marta struggle against the fascist state and mining bosses. Workers there are organizing to protect hard-fought wins to keep foreign mining companies out of El Salvador. Comrades from Chicago also co-presented with the Atlanta healthcare organizers in a session on Decarceration and Abolition.  

Together, we wrote and distributed a brochure explaining Stop Cop City through a public health lens, distributed it at sessions throughout the conference, and coordinated a rally and press conference outside.The PLP contingent also guaranteed that our communist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist message was disseminated through our APHA CHALLENGE and in our speeches at the rally.  

Indeed, even the leadership of APHA did us a favor.  About a week before the conference, after nearly a month of genocidal attacks on workers in Palestine and widespread protests, the APHA’s Executive Director, Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, released a statement supporting  “peace” and “Israel’s right to exist.” This incited massive anger from many public health workers and students who were attending. Then, after discovering that we were planning the protest outside, conference organizers sent a warning, including the date and time of our protest to all 12,000 attendees of the conference.  We thank them for the mass invitation and for showing their true fascist colors!

Two protests: against racist cops and racist genocide
This resulted in two simultaneous actions; our Stop KKKop City rally planned with local Atlanta organizers and the other protest that grew out of the visceral anger of public health workers at the conference itself. We divided our forces as about 100 healthcare workers held a silent protest inside the governing council meeting urging the passage of a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and end of the occupation. 

On the outside, comrades linked the fascist attacks on workers in Gaza to the fascist attacks in Atlanta, including violent attacks on protestors just one day prior at the proposed “Cop City '' – the same site where environmental activist Tortugita was murdered.   

A comrade started his speech by saying, “If there was a chant that connected the fightback against Kkkop City and racist mass incarceration here to the open-air prison and genocidal attacks in Gaza, it’s booming in protests in cities across the world, with ‘Biden, Biden you can’t hide, We charge you with Genocide!’” The crowd outside began chanting it as well.  After a few rounds of chanting he asked, “But how many of us voted for him?”

This created a pause and some snaps in the back. He then explained not just Biden’s role in the five-decades-long racist wars on crime/drugs and mass incarceration but explained how this was made possible through our class’s illusions in the so-called Civil Rights “wins” of former organizers turned Democratic Party politicians.

Across the U.S., from Atlanta to DC, Detroit to LA, these politicians became servants of the ruling class and supported the expansion and militarization of the police for decades as a solution to deindustrialization and racist unemployment. Cop City isn’t new, the comrade said; the ruling class and the liberal politicians are doubling down and tripling down on this decades-long fascist build-up. He explained how Chicago and Baltimore have already constructed Cop Cities.  

Voting is a dead end, fight for workers power: communism
In Los Angeles, where this comrade is from, the  entire city council voted to expand the  police size and budget, even though it already takes more than half the city budget and has long been home to the largest jail on the planet — despite the presence of the city’s first Black woman mayor, Karen Bass. So we shouldn’t be surprised when in Atlanta, the current Black mayor supports the destruction of forests so they can build a training center for urban warfare. Speaking in solidarity, the comrade  said, “We can’t continue to make the same mistakes,” referring to illusions that the bosses' state and politicians can ever serve our class interests. They’re arming themselves and terrorizing our class because they are preparing for world war and are afraid of our class.  From Gaza to Atlanta, we must arm ourselves with revolutionary communist class consciousness and turn the guns around on the bosses and their state.   

This speech was well received by the rally participants including two friends from LA in the crowd. Our APHA CHALLENGE was distributed and after the rally and silent protest, about two dozen joined us in a debrief where we further discussed our line in addition to planning for future efforts leading up to next year’s conference.

Inter-imperialist rivalry has reignited genocide in the Horn of Africa. Workers in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea are trapped in nationalist conflicts that are stealing their homes, their future, and their lives. Spurred  by inter-imperialist rivalry, these hostilities have descended into genocide, the systematic destruction of an identified group of workers. The working class has no stake in these ruling class dogfights. As Progressive Labor Party says: “No war but class war!”

The rulers’ age-old myth is that workers can better their lives  by uniting with bosses based on geography, religion, ethnicity, or the phony concept of race. It’s a myth because those bosses are driven only by their hunger to grab ever bigger pieces of the capitalist pie. As we’re seeing in Russia and Ukraine, they appeal to “loyalty to the nation” to pit workers against their class brothers and sisters in murderous wars for profit.
Beginning with our criticism of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese leadership in the 1960s, our Party has consistently attacked nationalism as poison for the international working class (see PLP’s Road to Revolution 3, 1971). Without exception, every national liberation struggle–from Vietnam to South Africa to Haiti–has betrayed the courageous workers who threw off their imperialist oppressors. Every single one has replaced one set of bloodsucking bosses with another. We’re seeing the same tragedy play out today in Palestine. In reality, there are no “one-state” or “two-state” solutions to the contradictions of capitalism. The only solution is communist revolution–a world where all capitalist states are smashed, all national borders erased, and all bosses kicked to the curb. That solution will come when workers flung into the rulers’ bloodbaths are organized to turn the guns around and create a new society run by and for our class: communism.

Horn of Africa: inter-imperialist flashpoint
As the worldwide crisis of capitalism intensifies, the imperialist bosses of the U.S., Russia, and China are sharpening their competition over the world’s labor and resources. By stoking racism and nationalism to a fever pitch, capitalists seek to deflect workers’ legitimate rage over the profit system and scapegoat other workers. Genocide is the inevitable result. From Gaza to the Horn of Africa and beyond, it’s how capitalism consigns workers to mass graves.

Africa is the world’s most mineral-rich continent and boasts two-thirds of the planet’s arable land (Forbes, 5/25). China has invested heavily in African economies, while Russia and the U.S. have stationed thousands of troops across the continent (Foreign Policy, 9/20). The Horn of Africa is a geopolitical flashpoint because it lies along the Red Sea, an essential shipping lane for oil from the Middle East. The imperialists who gain control of the Red Sea and access to the Indian Ocean through the Bab el-Mandeb strait will gain a huge strategic advantage over their rivals.

Sudan’s latest genocide
Ever since 1956, when Sudan won its independence from its colonial overlords in Britain and Egypt, local bosses have used nationalism as a weapon in their feuds over land, water, and oil. At every turn, they have sowed divisions between the mostly Arabic-speaking, Muslim population in northern Sudan and the mostly English-speaking, Christian population to the south.

In 2019, the U.S.  ruling class saw an opportunity when two Sudanese generals, Abdel Fatahl al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan "Hemedti" Dagalo, co-opted an uprising against China-backed strongman Omar al-Bashir. Both Burhan and Hemedti are mass murderers who were deeply implicated in the original Darfur genocide of the early 2000’s, a slaughter of at least 200,000 people that grew out of the Second Sudanese Civil War. But these monsters’ criminal history was no obstacle for the ruthless U.S. imperialists. For the bosses, workers’ lives are cheap.

As CHALLENGE warned earlier this year (5/11),workers in Sudan fell into a trap by tying their aspirations to the new military junta and waiting for elections instead of seizing power by force. The U.S. bosses looked the other way as Burham and Hemedti slaughtered protestors, postponed elections, and broke promises to hand the country over to civilian leadership. The U.S. rulers’ priority was to normalize relations between Sudan and Israel, which is why they forced their new puppets to shut down the local branch of Hamas and seize the group’s assets (Reuters, 9/23/21).

Not long after, Burhan and Hemedti turned on one another, resulting in a new civil war that has killed more than nine thousand and displaced more than five million. It has fanned the flames of genocide in the ethnically diverse region of Darfur in western Sudan, including the racist mass rape and massacre of non-Arab workers and children–in particular of the Masalit people who were also targeted twenty years ago. Russia has heightened the conflict by sending arms and mercenaries to support Hemedti, hoping he will reward them with a naval base in Port Sudan (Foreign Affairs, 9/20).

Imperialism brings war to Ethiopia and Eritrea
Across the border in Ethiopia, two years of brutal warfare have ended in an encirclement of the Tigray region by Ethiopian troops from the south and Eritrean forces from the north. The results: widespread starvation, brutal ethnic cleansing, and the deaths of 600,000 people (Al Jazeera, 11/2). The independence movement that broke Eritrea away from long-time U.S. client state Ethiopia in 1993 received funding and training by the Chinese bosses. The leader of that insurgency, Isaias Afwerki, has ruled Eritrea ever since as a vicious capitalist exploiter, profiting off the nation's mineral wealth while workers starve.

Once Eritrea seceded, Ethiopia lost all access to its ports on the Red Sea. It now appears that the bosses backing Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed plan to retake parts of Eritrea’s coastline (Foreign Policy, 11/8). Even after the recent Ethiopia-Tigray peace deal, Eritrean soldiers still occupy large parts of the region and continue to engage in ethnic cleansing (Al Jazeera, 11/2). Meanwhile, relations between the U.S. and Ethiopia have frayed, opening the door for Chinese imperialists (U.S. Institute for Peace, 1/19/22).

Capitalist gangsters, imperialist masters
During the original Darfur genocide of the mid-2000s, the Janjaweed militia raped and murdered over 300,000 people. Nationalist misleaders pushed for the creation of South Sudan as a solution. In a parallel struggle in Ethiopia, nationalists pushed for an independent Eritrea.  Today, the impoverished workers of South Sudan face “staggering levels of localized violence” and rampant corruption by the local elite (United Nations, 9/3/21). An independent Eritrea is notorious for mass roundups, arbitrary detentions, forced labor, military conscription of high school students, and a poverty rate verging on 40 percent (Human Rights Watch World Report, 2021). All over the world, workers have fought and bled to escape the yoke of European colonialism, only to find themselves ruled by blood-soaked national capitalists and their imperialist backers.

Even now, Hamas, the capitalist leadership in Gaza, is peddling the old lie that Palestinian nationalism is the answer to the Israeli bosses’ genocide. But all Hamas can offer is endless bloodshed and exploitation by the ruling classes of Iran and China.

Ultimately, all of these capitalist gangsters and their imperialist masters will send millions of us to die in the killing fields of World War Three. Whichever side wins, our class loses. But as the Russian communists showed in World War One and the Chinese communists showed after World War Two, workers hold the power to turn imperialist war into class war. Though both of these revolutions turned back to capitalism, they proved that workers can seize state power by rejecting nationalism and its rotten tentpoles of racism and sexism. With a mass, international party led by PLP, workers of the world can destroy capitalism for good. We’ll replace it with a society where all resources are shared based on need, and where war is a thing of the past. Join us!