Utter chaos, destruction and brutality have followed the October 7 Hamas incursion into Israel that murdered 1,300 and wounded 3,000. The relentless response by the unity government of Israel, led by the butchers Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his liberal counterpart Benny Gantz (Reuters 10/12) has to date has murdered over 4,000 people including more than 1,000 children, wounded over 10,000, and leveled hospitals, schools, and homes in Gaza (UN 10/17). The war reflects and foreshadows the collapse of U.S. imperialism and the callous deathtrap that imperialist rivalry and nationalism hold for the workers of the world. This capitalist genocide will grow to even greater proportions in the coming days, as the bodies of hundreds murdered at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City are counted and the bombings continue and likely ground invasion begins.

Capitalist Genocide
The deaths of workers in Gaza are not collateral damage. They are the inevitable result of indiscriminate bombing of workers trapped in a densely packed city carried out by the Israeli military (Al Jazeera 10/18). The criminal war minister of defense of Israel Yoav Gallant, ordered the complete siege of Gaza, referring to workers there as “human animals” and promising, “There will be no light, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” (Times of Israel 10/9/2023).

The fascist cliques that rule Gaza and Israel are state terrorist murderers sacrificing the lives of workers to carve out their positions and profits in a volatile and shifting world order. Workers and soldiers on both sides —and everywhere—must break down nationalist, religious and ethnic divisions, to fight together to crush a capitalist system that so completely fails the workers of the world.

This war in Gaza also creates greater instability and the risk of an escalation that, together with other conflicts like the one in Ukraine, paves the way for the outbreak of a Third World War. Capitalism only offers war and death to workers. The working class must destroy it with communist revolution.

From top dog to dogfight
This current war between Israel and Hamas is the continuation of the fight for dominance of the Middle East and its oil as the hegemony of the U.S. empire continues to decline.

The same U.S. ruling class who refused to bomb transport lines to Nazi concentration camps and turned away Jewish survivors of the Nazis, supported the creation of a “Jewish state” and the displacement of millions of workers from Palestine in exchange for a Cold War ally against Soviet influence in the Middle East and support in the fight to control the production and flow of the region’s oil. This nationalist bribe, sold to workers as a solution to centuries of anti-Jewish racism is leading to the mass slaughter of workers in Gaza and now Israel.

Nationalism and alliances with bosses anywhere are deadly for workers
Over the decades, the bosses in Israel in exchange for vast sums of money and weapons from the U.S., have provided crucial support for U.S. interests. The Israeli bosses helped secure the Suez Canal in the 70’s. They funneled weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 80’s (NY Times 7/21/83) and provide crucial geopolitical and intelligence support to the U.S. bosses’ control of Mideast oil. Meanwhile, the U.S. bosses support the Israeli bosses’ apartheid laws and help to negotiate “peace” treaties with neighboring countries that continually condemned workers in the West Bank to live under a contiguous state of attack from Israeli nationalists and the IDF, and workers in Gaza to live in what is largely recognized as an open-air prison.

But, recently, the U.S-Israeli partnership and dominance have begun to unravel. Netanyahu refused to support sanctions against Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine. Earlier this year, China brokered a restoring of relations between Saudi-Arabia and Iran that undercut decades of the U.S. bosses strategy of playing them against each other (CNBC 3/15).

United States weakness
This week the U.S. has mobilized two aircraft carriers to the area, anticipating a further escalation of the conflict and hoping to discourage its global imperialist rivals such as China and Russia as well as local nationalists such as Iran from providing support to Hamas.

Even as the world is witnessing genocide in Gaza, Biden can only react by giving his unconditional support to the butcher Netanyahu, who half of the population in Israel rejects but who, by murdering workers in Gaza, will try to gain support in a divided Israeli society.

The decline of U.S. imperialism around the globe is creating an increasingly volatile situation. The U.S. is being challenged by rivals big and small. The increasingly desperate U.S. bosses will not go down without a fight. Their growing desperation is adding fuel to the fires.

Israel created Hamas
Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007. It was founded as a nationalist organization in 1988 at the onset of the first uprising against the Israeli occupation. But its roots date to the late 1960’s and 70’s when the Israeli bosses were grasping for an alternative to Yassir Arafat’s Fatah organization. When an adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheik Ahmed Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya in 1979 Israel recognized it as an official organization. According to Ishaan Tharoor, “Yassin's Mujama would become Hamas, which, it can be argued, was Israel's Taliban: an Islamist group whose antecedents had been laid down by the West in a battle against a [Russian backed] enemy” (Washington Post 7/30/2014). Israel encouraged the rivalry between Fatah and Hamas even looking the other way as Hamas amassed weapons.

Hamas does not represent the resistance of workers in Gaza against the oppression of the Israeli state any more than Fatah did. Hamas, with the tacit support of the Israeli government, has always been primarily interested in seizing control of Gaza from Fatah and securing its own control of the territory (WSJ 1/24/2009).

For years Hamas has been reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on food (The Guardian 2010) and clothes (The New Arab 7/20/22) from the starving workers of Gaza to fill the pockets of its leadership and maintain it’s network of supporters.

While the working class on both sides of the Gaza war are trapped in the ambition of the nationalist group Hamas and Israel's murderous ruling class, for workers around the world there is no good choice under this deadly system.

The only way out is communist revolution
For the workers there is only one way out, to demolish capitalism and its rhetoric of nations, religions, races and borders, and build the communist state to guarantee us health and housing, together as a single international working class.

Capitalism creates religious and racial differences to undermine the revolutionary potential of global working-class unity. Thousands of workers inside and outside these countries will be dragged to support one of the fascist nationalist sides led by Israel or Hamas, both oppressors and enemies of the working class. Both must be swept away through a communist revolution.

From the ruins of Gaza and all the places devastated by capitalist war, the revolutionary consciousness of the international working class must be reborn. Let the imperialists start their wars, the workers will finish them with communist revolution.

From Israel: Apartheid kills Palestinians and class consciousness
The slaughter is the bosses’ doing. Those who would argue that we are “assuming symmetry between the occupier and the occupied” are missing the point. There is no symmetry between the big bosses – Chinese and American – and the exploited working classes of the Middle East. For them, we are all slaves to extract profit from and chess pieces in their struggles for geopolitical dominance. The Israeli worker is not the oppressor of the Palestinian worker – rather, the big businessmen oppress both.

Israel’s super-rich ruling class includes people such as Miriam Adelson – the world’s 30th richest person, with a net worth of 27.5 billion USD. This boss is well-involved in Israeli politics and is an adamant supporter of Israel’s corrupt and fascist prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. On the other side, Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas – who considers themselves a “popular resistance movement” – lives safely and in luxury in Qatar, far from Gaza. He has a net worth of 4 billion USD, gained by extorting the Gazan population and by embezzling foreign aid given to the impoverished Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, 65% of the people of Gaza live below the poverty line.
The big businessmen get away with their grisly crimes thanks to the toxic ideology of nationalism. This way of thinking posits that Israeli workers are on the same side as the billionaire Mrs. Adelson, and the oppressed Palestinian workers are on the same side as the ultra-rich Mr. Haniyeh. But the top bosses are the utter enemies of all working-class people. For them, we, the workers, are nothing but machines and tools to generate their profits and fight their wars.

The Chamas action last Saturday has helped to unify all walks of life here and the liberal demos against the so-called “Judicial reform” disappeared and wiped off the earth.
Gal Gadot (the Israeli actress -Wonder Woman) tweeted saying she is opposed to the killing of innocent Jews and Palestinians was labeled a “Traitor” for mentioning Palestinians and Jews in the same sentence.She deleted her tweet and apologized .

The so-called “left” is labeling Palestinians as “Human beasts” and calling to wipe Ghaza off the map. We are staying home most of the time - no schools (closed) and there are sporadic rockets aimed at the Tel Aviv area so we have to be able to enter a safe place - the sirens give you 90 seconds to do so.
The army is now engaged on 3 fronts and the killing of Palestinians continues in the north, the West Bank, and Ghaza under “moral” justification.

Unfortunately, there is no communist leadership among the Palestinians and Israelis, only nationalist and religious motivation. The interest of all working-class people in Israel-Palestine is to place the blame on their true oppressors and butchers: the bourgeoisie. The only way to cast away the poisonous ideology of nationalism and replace nationalist war with class war – is to organize a mass multi-ethnic communist party.

This way, we, the working class, can win a world free from the vicious cycle of slaughter. The only thing that deserves to die is the capitalist system!
*****

NY: in solidarity with UAW strikers
I recently visited a United Auto Workers (UAW) picket line with some fellow union members to see first-hand the determination and bravery of fellow workers against the bosses. After stopping at the grocery store to pick up some solidarity grocery supplies, we arrived at the picket line.
The workers were from a small parts supplier, but we were impressed with the multiracial, cross-gender solidarity and their strength: the picket line is active 24-hours per day, 7-days per week!
While there, we heard stories from long-time workers about how they were forced to make concessions to bail out the auto companies during the Great Recession in 2008 and how the auto companies have never made good on their promise to restore the cuts. Typical bosses. We’re engaged in our own contract struggle, and while our union leadership does everything it can to quash any momentum toward striking, workers are more and more fed up and ready to take action. We can draw inspiration from the UAW workers and their ongoing fight.
*****

Haiti: a communist revolution is their only salvation
On October 2, the UN Security Council voted on a resolution approving the deployment of a force of 1,000 Kenyan policemen to Haiti. Their main stated objective is to combat the proliferation of gangs in the capital of Port-Au-Prince. Those gangs (really armed militias) are the results of decades of exploitation imposed by local and international bosses. The lack of a significant communist organization left unemployed workers with little choice but to join the gangs, many of them controlled by politicians and local businessmen.

As we already know, the real objective is to impose more miseries and exploitation on Haitian workers. In 2004, the UN came to Haiti to impose U.S. and European imperialist will on the workers. The mission objective was to stabilize the country and create a climate where the international and the local bosses could exploit the workers. After 17 years that mission failed miserably. This new mission is also bound for failure. Workers in Haiti and throughout the world don’t need the boss’s solution to solve their problem. Capitalism has no answers to humanity ‘s problems. It must be destroyed. Only a communist revolution can achieve this objective.
*****

Run in memory of comrade Fernando
October 1 marked the first (hopefully annual) Braga 5K Memorial Run at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. The race was named after our fallen comrade Fernando Braga who died by suicide last year. (His obituary appeared in CHALLENGE ,July 20, 2023). Several members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), friends, and family members participated in the race and others we know helped put on the event. The 5K run (and jwalk) acted as a fundraiser for Fernando’s daughter’s college fund and organizations dedicated to stopping veteran suicide.

While it was an emotional day for many, it was also an opportunity to honor Fernando by building relationships around the ideas he fought for. He “was not just a veteran but an Iraq veteran against the war,” I told several participants I met. These included high school and college students. The second place finisher even grew up near me in NYC!

“I think the two of you would’ve gotten along,” I told one of the lead organizers who is a professor at the college. He didn’t get to meet Fernando since he started teaching after Fernando graduated, but teaches a course on the school to military pipeline. I hope I can help with some of the organizing next year and get to know him (as well as others) better.

Fernando was my club leader some years ago, providing our collective in general, and me in particular, with advice and leadership. I always respected the way he put our line into practice as a student, soldier and worker. At one point when we were close, I struggled with a decision of whether or not to join the military or remain an industrial worker. Fernando’s experience, thoughtful application of our line, and objective considerations of my strengths and weaknesses provided rare guidance that meant the most.

Before the 5K race, there were two speeches. The PL’ers who went agreed that next year we’d make sure we get to make one. The first speech was by a school administrator and reflected some of the nationalist ties between the College and the military. The other, though, was by one of Fernando’s closest friends and fellow veterans at school. He spoke for many of us at the 5K when he said “support each other, tell each other how much you love each other, it really matters. If I could take anything back, I would’ve definitely told him what he meant to me.”
Rest in Power Fernando!
*****

Liberal racists evict workers from shelters
New York City, Oct 11-  Chanting “Fight, fight, fight, Housing is a human right!,” a coalition of housing groups protested at the New York governor’s office against Top kkkop Mayor Eric Adams’ vow, together with the liberal fascist state, to suspend the “right to shelter” law in NYC. As thousands are being evicted under the 30 day limit on shelter, the new proposal would put homeless workers, including migrants, onto the streets. Comrades joined the group, met up with friends and distributed 50 copies of CHALLENGE. The fight continues, and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) will be there to build communism one struggle at a time.

CHICAGO, October 7—Today members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) came out in force to support the ongoing United Auto Workers (UAW) strike here on the picket line at the Torrence Avenue Ford plant. We distributed dozens of copies of CHALLENGE and spoke with workers about the need for a communist revolution. Many workers are open to discussing these revolutionary ideas and thank us for our support in the struggle for a better contract.

During past contract "negotiations" the UAW agreed to a two-tier wage division, reduced or eliminated cost of living raises, eliminated pensions, and several other concessions so the auto industrialists could recover from an economic downturn around 2008. In other words, make the workers pay for the crisis of the bosses’ system! Capitalism makes it legal to exploit our labor. Labor is a commodity used by the capitalists to extract profits. When the workers are too old or too sick or injured due to speed ups, they are discarded like an old pair of shoes.

When we withhold our labor power in a strike, the bosses lose their profits. The workers’ struggle against the capitalists is a way to recover some of the stolen value that workers produce. The bosses enrich themselves and maintain the current system of oppression off that stolen value.

PLP is building a multiracial and international working-class movement against this capitalist system’s inherent racism, sexism, unemployment and war. Strengthening our ties with industrial workers – especially Black, Latin, Asian and women industrial workers – will be a crucial front in overthrowing the bosses’ exploitative system for good and building a new egalitarian communist society. Under communism, we will organize to produce and then distribute based on what our class needs, never profit.

Bosses will kill for their profits – Workers organize to fight back!
The Torrence Avenue Assembly Ford plant is the oldest continuously operated auto manufacturing plant and opened in 1924.  It has 4,600 workers and produces about twenty-four hundred cars a day.  These workers produce almost one fourth of all the Ford vehicles made in one year. This plant, and many other Ford plants scattered throughout the world have made the Ford family worth 2 billion dollars (Forbes, August 2023).  It's reported Ford’s CEO in 2022 was paid $21 million, and GM's CEO about $20 million per year.

In our conversations, auto workers related how a worker on the assembly line suffered a seizure. The line stopped, while another worker on the line came to help the worker with the seizure. A supervisor then reprimanded the worker for trying to help her co-worker, and before medical help was called, they replaced the worker and restarted the line, in that order. Profits come before the lives of workers, that is the lesson capitalism teaches us— that is why we fight for communism. Communism is a society where profits will be abolished, and workers’ lives and safety will always come first.

It was with the help and leadership of communist workers that the UAW was first established. In 1936-37 there was a sit-in strike in Flint, Michigan at the GM Fisher Body No. 1 plant that lasted 44 days.  The bosses hesitated to retake the plant because they feared millions of dollars’ worth of equipment would be destroyed by the occupying workers.  Right before the National Guard was to go in the plant, the bosses relented and recognized the UAW union.

But as history has shown us, after the current contract is settled, and the end of the next contract, workers will be back on the picket line to demand a fair contract, because the nature of the system is always to demand more from the workers. Trusting in liberal bosses like Joe Biden to get a “fair” deal is poison for our class, as not only did he help engineer the anti-worker bailout in 2008 he also torpedoed efforts for railroad workers to strike last year.

The bosses want more give-backs, so they can compete internationally against their rivals, mainly the bosses in China. They also want to give enough to workers to lay the groundwork for a patriotic population that is ready to fight and die for their imperialist wars. Capitalism is a never-ending treadmill, a deadly system of contradictions designed to wear us down. We must organize to smash it and replace it with workers' power and communism. Join us, join PLP!

While workers around the world watch in horror, the escalating slaughter taking place in Gaza leaves many people feeling helpless. With the demise of the old communist movement, workers are increasingly being led to the slaughter by one group of nationalists, religious fundamentalists or another.

While we cannot control the outcome of events right now, we can affect the outlook of our coworkers and within our unions, and fight for the political leadership of the working class. What we do, where we are, is all-important. We can, if we are creative and bold, expose the hellish world the capitalists have built, and organize to destroy these bosses and their system with communist revolution.

Last week, the NYC Jewish Labor Committee hosted an online panel on the Gaza war, chaired by Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Union (RWDSU) President Stuart Applebaum and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten. It included Peter Lerner, Director General of International Relations at Histadrut (the Israeli General Federation) and a Lt. Colonel in the Israeli reserves, Rami Hod - Executive Director at Berl Katznelson Center, a Liberal Zionist think tank, and Congressman Dan Goldman of Brooklyn.
Fascism was on full display! The main point of the call was to rally progressive labor leaders to support the genocidal collective punishment the Israeli government, with U.S. support, is unleashing on Gaza.  

But the Jewish Labor Committee ironically got one thing right; war is union business. No imperialist can wage war for long without the active or passive support of their workers, and their willingness to sacrifice for the costly war effort. Our job is to win workers to oppose imperialist war and overthrow the bosses.

At the urgent request of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, which has hundreds of members in Gaza, the leadership of the National Writers Union issued a statement that opposed the collective punishment, shed light on the journalists who have been targeted and murdered and the 50 media offices that were destroyed.

The statement called on the mainstream media, especially in the U.S. to not rely on unconfirmed statements from the Israeli and U.S. warmakers, and to defend any journalist or author being fired or threatened for daring to oppose the rush to war. It said that we should not repeat the post-9/11 story where the media led us to a 20-year war in Iraq and sanctioned the mass roundup and surveillance of Muslims in the U.S. There are numerous reports of writers and events being canceled and disciplined in the U.S. and across Europe.   

The current situation demands that Progressive Labor Party (PLP) be bold and speak out in our unions, and with our coworkers, in transit, in healthcare, in the schools and campuses. We should boldly oppose Randi Weingarten, who has been a spokesperson for U.S. imperialism in Ukraine and around the world.  There is no short-term solution to this endless nightmare. We must do our best to build the Party. Have lunchroom discussions, raise union resolutions, invite your coworkers for dinner for more discussions, and bring some coworkers to local anti-war actions. Getting CHALLENGE to workers is essential to countering fascist ideas.

Let’s do what we can, as limited as that may be, to oppose the current slaughter that is now underway. The answer in Israel/Palestine, and everywhere, must start with international solidarity, antiracism, and building the unity of Jews and Palestinians, which has been done before, yet today seems unimaginable. It ends with turning imperialist war into communist revolution, and the international working class coming to power.