INGLEWOOD, CA, October 15—Over the last two days about 100 family and friends showed up for the services of our fallen working class brother Ivan Solis Mora. Ivan, who was suffering from a mental health episode (see CHALLENGE 10/18), was treated with bullets by kkkop instead of compassion and medical care. That’s kkkapitalism for you! Mental illness is a death sentence under a system that routinely treats sick and disabled workers as disposable.

Friday evening was the viewing followed by the morning mass and burial on Saturday.  At the viewing, a family member made green ribbons for us to wear to bring awareness to the growing mental health crisis, along with pins with Ivan’s picture. Surrounding his casket were floral arrangements, most with religious messages, and one shaped like a guitar. Petra, his mother, told us how much he loved playing his guitar and writing music. His actual guitar was also on display.  

Student and teachers organize for Ivan
In addition, there were four large foam poster boards in front of each easel with over 400 signatures of students and teachers from a PL’ers high school with the message, “a mental health crisis does not warrant a death sentence.” This activity was spearheaded by our comrade teacher who created an advisory lesson on what happened to Ivan. With the advisory lesson, all teachers in the school then taught their students about what happened to Ivan as part of a larger problem of police violence disproportionately impacting those with underlying mental illness. Afterward, students from the comrade’s after school club took the boards to every classroom and approximately 400 out of 600 students and teachers signed them. Later, the comrade visited the family to share the story and the messages from the school community. The family chose to display the boards right out front for all to see.  

While these two days were surely tearful and somber, they didn’t lead the family to pacifism.  Over the preceding two weeks the family led two actions that the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) participated in, including a rally and march to City Hall to confront the City Council and a second march from their home to the Inglewood police station.

On the day of the City Hall action, about 30 family members and friends showed up at a nearby intersection.People passing by, whether in cars or on foot, were very supportive, honking horns, stopping to talk about what happened. Groups of high school students walking home after school were particularly interested in learning about what had happened. As they began their march to City Hall, a comrade inspired others who were initially quiet at the rally, and led them in fight back chants as they entered.  

Liberal politicians response: crocodile tears and more dead-end reforms
The City’s head of security first told everyone that only five people could go into the meeting.  After some struggle, he allowed more of us in, but said “none of the protestors.”  So much for open government meetings and free speech under capitalism.  Not surprisingly, despite hearing from the family members, Council members could offer the family nothing more than the usual phony “thoughts and prayers.” There is another group that is also giving leadership in this struggle. One of their leaders is running for Los Angeles City Council.  

At this particular event, not only did he call for the typical tried-and-failed reforms like body cameras, but also invited the City Council to the family’s next action and had the cop-mayor take a photo with the family. There is a clear lack of understanding of the interconnectedness between the state and the police when this is the approach.  

Contrastingly, PLP understands that the entire ruling class and their police state are the enemy. Politics is everything in determining if we will one day end this system once and for all.Different Party members are getting to know members of the family independent of each other making home visits. One comrade had talked with Petra about us working on an article about Ivan for CHALLENGE, and today two other comrades visited the family and showed them the front-page article.Some groups “fight” police brutality by running for elections, but this only makes them part of the bosses’ state. The Progressive Labor Party instead calls on all workers, students, and soldiers to build the revolutionary communist PLP so that we can destroy their state and lead us into a communist world.

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.

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!

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.