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Editorial: Iran-Israel - Declining U.S. empire, rising war
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- 03 July 2025 134 hits
The bombing of Iran by the imperialist United States and the vicious apartheid state of Israel is a desperate move that could ignite a broader regional or global conflict. Under claims of curbing the nuclear ambitions of Iran’s capitalist bosses, the U.S. ruling class is seeking to reassert its sway over the Middle East, a vital source of the oil and gas that fuel the imperialists’ war machines and generate trillions of dollars in profits each year (OilPrice.com, 2/14/23).
More than a thousand people were killed and thousands more wounded in June’s “12-Day War” (en-hrana.org, 6/28). The great majority were Iranian civilians, though Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome defense system also showed its vulnerability. Millions of workers were forced to flee Iran’s capital Tehran (Al Jazeera, 6/26). After the U.S. engineered what will likely be a temporary ceasefire, State-Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump declared “mission accomplished” and boasted that Iran’s nuclear sites were “decimated” and its nuclear program set back for years, a claim that may or may not be true.
But communists know there can never be real peace under capitalism. World war is an inevitable outcome of a system built on competition, nationalism, racism, and the drive for maximum profit. Today, with the U.S. losing more and more ground to imperialist China, war feels even closer. When Iran showered Israel with ballistic missiles and the U.S. targeted Iran with B-2 bombers, old redlines were crossed. As the U.S. dollar declines and China leverages its industrial supremacy, the global economic crisis of capitalism may lead some bosses to see mass destruction as a better option than the status quo of stagnation and decay.
At the same time, the carnage of warfare lays bare the ruthless nature of capitalism and imperialism. By destroying workers’ illusions about the profit system, it can trigger revolution. World War I saw the Bolsheviks establish the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. Shortly after fascism was defeated under communist leadership in World War II, workers and peasants in China seized state power.
As the capitalist world becomes ever more unstable, we must urgently build the mass international Progressive Labor Party. Our task is to lead the working class to take power once more—from the genocidal U.S. rulers, from Israel’s nazi war criminals, from the corrupt and brutal Iranian mullahs who have impoverished tens of millions. Our aim is to build an egalitarian communist society where all workers can flourish. Join us!
Oil at the root of bloody imperialist conflict
Iran contains the third-largest oil reserves in the world, after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 5/23). It controls the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic passageway for 20 percent of the world’s oil (The Street, 6/14). The June attacks on Iran are by extension an assault on imperialist arch-rival China, which buys the bulk of Iranian crude oil (USIP, 6/23). Beyond Iran, six of China’s top ten oil suppliers are in or around the Persian Gulf, an incentive for the U.S. to attempt to regain dominance in the region (Newsweek, 6/19). It’s also a powerful motive to instigate regime change in Iran—just as a CIA coup toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, after he moved to nationalize the country’s oil industry.
The downside for the U.S. bosses is that their Middle East entanglements complicate their long-term strategy of a “pivot to Asia” to encircle and eventually confront China across the Pacific Ocean. Though the U.S. has used Israel as a regional proxy by arming the Zionist regime to the teeth, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proven an unreliable ally. The wanton slaughter across Gaza has made Israel a pariah and given the U.S. a black eye in its global competition with the Chinese bosses. While U.S. military dominance makes it tactically strong, its strategic weakness is more glaring by the day.
Trump does the bidding of U.S. liberal rulers
Iran’s oil wealth and its ties to China and Russia have painted the country with a bullseye since the Islamic “revolution” of 1979 overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a willing U.S. lapdog. For nearly half a century, the U.S. has imposed sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil, a form of deadly collective punishment against workers and children that has led to widespread shortages of essential medicines, food, and even water (thelancet.com, 8/10/19).
In this context, Trump and his America First faction of U.S. bosses seem to be pursuing a long-term goal of finance capital, the liberal main wing of the U.S. ruling class. In response, the liberal bosses have voiced mild outrage—laced with their standard cynicism and hypocrisy—that Congress wasn’t consulted beforehand. California Senator Adam Schiff told Trump to “now focus on helping Israel defend itself” (6/13). Fake leftist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Trump’s impeachment (Wall Street Journal, 6/24), but only because he’d failed to follow proper protocol. The liberal bosses understand the need to mislead workers to support a longer and broader war, one that will demand a commitment of ground troops as well as missiles and bombs.
Challenge nationalism with communist internationalism
The world’s bosses are expert at whipping up nationalism among workers to serve their own ends. In Israel, Jewish workers and youth are fed a constant diet of racist lies to see Arab workers as less than human. In the U.S., as seen in the recent No Kings rallies, liberal racist bosses are funneling mass resistance to Trump’s open gutter racism into calls for unity and patriotism. In Iran, despite the deep unpopularity of the reactionary, sexist Islamic regime, hundreds of thousands marched to oppose the June bombings (AP, 6/28).
But the poisonous sway of nationalism can be defeated if communists remain bold in asserting working-class internationalism in word and deed. As fascism rises and the drums of war beat louder, winning our fellow workers to class struggle, and ultimately to PLP, is more crucial than ever. Let’s provide bold political leadership in our workplaces, classrooms, unions, and neighborhoods. Let’s draw inspiration from the ongoing mass fightback against genocide in Gaza, anti-immigrant racism, and mass deportations and displacement. Most of all, let’s connect these attacks to their capitalist roots and put forward the communist alternative. Let’s fight today for the communist world that we so urgently need! No war but class war with PLP!
Brooklyn, NY, June 13th–The struggle didn’t end on May Day – it intensified. In the early morning hours, the day before the nation-wide No Kings rallies, school workers, parents, students, and teachers on our campus gathered again, this time with even sharper chants, “Genocide means…we gotta fight back,” “How do you spell fascist? I! C! E!” and a clearer line: “From Palestine to Mexico to NYC, stop attacks on our youth!”
These weren’t just slogans. They were declarations of resistance, of solidarity, of the fight ahead.
While the bosses ramp up Immigration Customos Enforcement (ICE) raids and the state grows more fascist by the day, our response has been clear: we will not stand idly by as our students and their families are terrorized.
A day of defiance
The morning rally was just the beginning. That same afternoon, we held a second rally—this time timed so students could see their teachers standing up, speaking out, and fighting back. This was no symbolic gesture. We wanted our students to see that the fight isn’t theoretical. It’s in the hallways, in our classrooms, and on the front steps of our schools.
On the same day, a student group led by a member of the Progressive Labor Party distributed hundreds of fliers, connecting students with our school’s immigrant solidarity group. The flier offered real, material help and guidance on how to switch in-person immigration check-ins to virtual ones to avoid being kidnapped by ICE.
We will never forget Dylan Lopez Contreras
Between the two rallies, we called on students to write letters of solidarity to Dylan Lopez Contreras, the Bronx high school student violently taken by ICE at a routine hearing earlier this spring. Dylan's case is not isolated—it’s emblematic of the racist violence ICE inflicts daily, especially on Black, Latin, and immigrant youth. Our message is simple: We won’t forget Dylan, and we won’t be silent as ICE disappears any more of our students.
In composing the letters and organizing support, our students showed leadership, clarity, and courage. Many asked how they could do more. Some confided their worries about their families’ situations that they had previously been afraid to reveal or ask for support. Various classrooms now sport “Free Dylan!” on their white boards. This is what working-class political education looks like: students learning to act together, as a class, in solidarity with each other.
A growing fightback
This historical moment is part of a larger, coordinated offensive by the ruling class. From Gaza to Rikers Island, the U.S. ruling class, under Democrats and Republicans alike, is waging war on the working class, and especially its most vulnerable members. ICE raids are only one piece of a growing fascist strategy: sow fear, divide workers, and crush resistance before it grows.
Spreading fear and division is not working.
We are building a new normal in our schools—one where teachers fight back, students lead, and parents organize. One where political struggle is part of the school day. One where the walls that divide us—between schools, between staff and students, between citizens and immigrants—start to fall. The bosses want us to be afraid. They want us to be quiet. They want us to believe we’re alone. We are not.
Toward a communist future
We are clear-eyed about the difficulties of the road ahead. The system will never protect us because it was never built for us. It was built to protect profit, property, and power. Our job is to tear it down and build something new in its place: a communist world where no one is “illegal,” where ICE doesn’t exist, and where the working class holds power.
The fight is far from over. But we are more organized, more determined, and more united than ever. Join us. The future is ours to fight for.
We are pausing the luminous four-part series on the Scottsboro Boys to bring you the first of a four part series commemorating the 50th anniversary of Boston’s 1975 Summer Project. That summer, the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) played a pivotal role in the struggle against local Nazis and their racist political allies from attacking young Black youth who were being bussed in effort to desegregate, all-white schools in Boston. The movement mobilized working-class youth and community members in an unforgettable, militant struggle against gutter racist capitalism and state-sanctioned violence.
The Boston ’75 Summer Project had broken the back of the fascist ROAR movement but 50 years later, the fight against racist state sponsored violence is not over. Like the Black workers in Cincinnati militantly organizing their against Neo-Nazis and multiracial groups of workers standing against ICE in L.A., Chicago, and Newark, to smash racist attacks and any far-right movement, we need Progressive Labor Party (PLP)— a mass internationalist communist Party, committed to militant fightback and revolution.
The Boston ’75 Summer Project
The capitalist ruling class and the media and academic pundits that serve them often distort history to hide the truth of working class struggles against oppression. They seek to convince us that any improvement in the lives of working people is a result of enlightened liberal capitalist politicians, judges, foundations, and philanthropists, not the class struggles of workers, students, and soldiers. In this way, the capitalist rulers promote a sense of powerlessness and cynicism within our class.
Sometimes the history of a working class struggle is simply erased. Such is the case with the 1975 Boston Summer Project to fight racism and support desegregation of public schools. Fifty years ago, over 150 college students and young adults came to Boston for the summer to fight the segregationist anti-busing movement ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). This was more than a struggle for civil rights. It was a fight to check the rise of a fascist movement among the white Boston working class. Inspired by the Mississippi Freedom Summer, which 10 years earlier had mobilized 600 volunteers to register Black voters, the Boston ‘75 volunteers sought to unite Black and white workers to demand quality, integrated public schools and to defeat racism. Officially sponsored by the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) and its ally Progressive Labor Party (PLP), the Boston Summer Project held daily rallies and demonstrations throughout the city. It collected 35,000 signatures on an anti-racist petition, ran a multiracial Freedom School in a Black church, defended Black families that moved into segregated white neighborhoods, led the effort to integrate a public beach, and physically confronted the ROAR fascists in street battles. More than 250 InCAR members and friends were arrested. Three received prison sentences.
Putting fear into racists
The last official action of the Summer Project was to welcome Black students who were bussed to South Boston High School on the first day of school. A year earlier, when busing in Boston began, a racist mob of thousands had stoned the buses carrying Black students to this school. The police arrested few if any of these racists and made no effort to protect the Black students. But 1975 was different. There was no racist mob at South Boston High. The cops had no one to arrest except for the hundred InCAR members who’d come to the school to welcome the students. The Boston ’75 Summer Project had broken the back of the fascist ROAR movement. It broke it by speaking to tens of thousands of white and Black working people on the streets and convincing them that bad schools and poor living conditions weren’t caused by other workers with a different skin color, but by the greedy capitalists and their corrupt politicians. The Project broke ROAR by canvassing door to door with antiracist literature at poor white workers’ housing projects in South Boston. It broke ROAR with multiple militant confrontations, with a bold and multiracial group of InCAR members squaring off against the ROAR racists and the cops who protected them. While other forces played a role in the downfall of ROAR, the role of InCAR and PLP was critical.
In many ways, the ROAR anti-busing movement was a trial balloon for U.S. fascism. The United States had just lost the war in Vietnam after spending $4 trillion and killing 2 million Vietnamese and 60,000 U.S. soldiers. Japan and West Germany and their revived economies were challenging the U.S. manufacturing base. But when former President Richard Nixon experimented with fascism with his FBI COINTELPRO program aimed at antiracist and antiwar activists, he mostly succeeded in turning millions of working people against the U.S. government.
Liberals behind fascism
For fascism to succeed, it needs popular support among the masses. In Boston, a propaganda campaign was aimed to mobilize white racist support for fascism by promoting the racist myth of Black crime and attacking “forced busing” (school integration) and affirmative action. South Boston, with its impoverished Irish-Catholic population terrorized and controlled by the Irish Mafia, was a perfect venue for the bosses. If a popular fascist movement could be built inside Boston, a bastion of liberal antiwar activism, fascist populism might spread across the country. Both the liberal and openly racist factions of the U.S. ruling class backed this racist campaign. The Boston ‘75 Summer Project succeeded in blocking this fascist movement and set back the development of U.S. fascism for years, if not decades. That is the legacy of Boston ’75 that both the liberal fascist and gutter fascist rulers wish to bury.
Today we face yet another concerted effort to build fascism in the U.S. While immigrants are the main focus of the bosses’ scapegoating attack this time around, Black workers and other oppressed groups are also targets, as indicated by the aggressive elimination of DEI and affirmative action programs. Once again, the U.S. capitalist rulers are deeply divided, with the gutter fascist Donald Trump administration attacking the liberal fascists at Harvard University as part of a bitter dispute over how to manage the declining U.S. empire.
There is much that the anti-fascist fighters of today can learn from Boston ’75. How racism is used to build populist fascism. How the liberal establishment manipulates the mass movement to promote their own version of fascism to defend the U.S. imperialist empire. How a relatively small group of militant antiracists can affect the course of history. This series will provide examples to illustrate these lessons. While the rise of U.S. fascism may be inevitable, so too is growing opposition to it—and the potential for mobilizing the working class to fight for a communist revolution.
Stay tuned for Part II in our July 30th issue.
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Retired, not resigned: Ed workers declare war on fascism
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- 03 July 2025 73 hits
NEW YORK, June 27 —In a city where billionaires craft education policy behind closed doors, and the Democratic Party mayor makes dirty deals with President Donald Trump to save his own corrupt skin, the Retired Teachers Chapter (RTC) of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) is putting the workers’ fight front and center, not just for educators’ pensions or perks, but in antiracist defense of our students and the entire working class. At the last two RTC meetings of the year and the last UFT Delegate Assembly, both in-service and retired educators converged to demonstrate their overwhelming desire to fight rapidly rising fascism, showing unmistakable potential for building workers’ power inside the UFT, one of the largest union locals in the U.S. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been in the thick of this significant mass struggle.
Union leadership destabilized
This past year has laid bare deep fractures within the UFT. In the union-wide election in May, Michael Mulgrew and his “Unity” Caucus—the incumbent leadership since the UFT’s early years—barely scraped by with 54 percent of the vote, their worst showing in history. Unfortunately, the opposition—with the chance to capitalize on the RTC’s overthrow of the Unity leadership in last year’s retiree chapter election (see CHALLENGE, 10/30/24)—suffered an ugly split, primarily caused by a renegade Unity faction that broke with Mulgrew and topped a new slate they dubbed A Better Contract (ABC), which stridently attacked anything but what they labeled “bread and butter” issues. A second opposition slate, the Alliance of Retired and In-Service Educators (ARISE), was composed of the union’s three opposition caucuses. Though ARISE made some attempt to address broader “social justice”/pro-student issues, they studiously avoided or minimized crucial “hot-button issues” like the Israeli genocide in Gaza or fighting racism.
PLP members actively organized throughout the campaign, mostly in the ARISE coalition, bringing our newspaper and antiracist, pro-student/pro-working-class, internationalist politics to bear at critical points. In the end, in an election poisoned by nasty infighting, the result still underscores a growing restlessness from the rank and file, retirees included.
Retirees rise up against rising fascism
But a major turning point came at the final RTC meeting of the year with the membership’s resounding passage of a resolution on the rising threat of fascism. To the surprise of some, the vote wasn’t even close (85 percent), and it sent a clear message: retirees recognize the urgency of the moment and won’t sit quietly while reactionary forces—from school boards to statehouses—attempt to erase hard-won rights.
Of course, not everyone welcomed the resolution’s clarity. A well-known retired Unity misleader attempted to strike it down—watering down some of the language without fully gutting the intent. It was an act of bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, but we answered it head on, and it failed to derail the momentum.
This decisive and inspiring retiree vote came in the wake of another major, hard-fought victory at the last UFT Delegate Assembly of the year just a week before. After seven months of often intense struggle, delegates were able to push through a comprehensive resolution in defense of our immigrant students, families, and staff. Not only were we able to push it to the top of the agenda and extend the meeting to guarantee a vote, the resolution passed with an astounding 93 percent!
Small steps to a larger fight
We in PLP are fully aware that resolutions are often only token measures, but each of these carefully crafted measures deliberately includes concrete, practical steps both educators and retirees can now put into practice in the schools as well as on the streets, and has the potential to qualitatively improve our organizing efforts.
We are taking this momentum through the summer and rolling straight into the Labor Day March, where RTC members will carry signs and wear shirts that broadcast our anti-fascist, pro-worker stance without ambiguity. This isn’t nostalgia—it’s strategy. We retirees are reclaiming our power not in memory of past struggles but in continuation of them.
The RTC’s growing militancy isn’t accidental—it has been influenced by the sustained ideological engagement and organizing by our Party and its allies. While the mass movement may surge with righteoussanger, we in PLP understand that the class struggle is long-term, and our work must harness that energy toward a revolutionary horizon. We fight within the struggles of today, not as an end in themselves, but to deepen political understanding and forge leaders for the struggles of tomorrow.
We don’t romanticize retirement; we radicalize it. Our goal is to win masses of people to communism, and that requires a conscious, organized base willing to challenge capitalist decay with revolutionary communist clarity. The fight isn’t easy! But we’re not in it for symbolism or reform. We’re in it to win it.
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ICE = Nazis: No Kings, no borders, no liberal illusions
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- 03 July 2025 65 hits
NY: Capitalist rulers got to go
“How do you spell racist? I-C-E!” Millions of workers stood up against Trump’s fascist military parade by participating in over 2,100 “No Kings” rallies and protests across the United States. In New York City, about a group from the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined tens of thousands who defied the rain to march. In our chants, we received applause and cheering from surrounding marchers with the more popular chants being against ICE and also “Stop racist deportations! Working people have no nation!” and “No kings, no bosses! Capitalism has got to go!”
When PL’ers chanted “the only solution is communist revolution,” many marchers surrounding us hesitated. At the same time, however, these same antiracists took over 1,100 PLP leaflets and several hundred CHALLENGE newspapers, cheered at our communist speeches explaining our revolutionary politics, marched alongside us, and some joined us on the bullhorn.
This reveals the contradictions, dangers, and opportunities of the current political period – and the potential for building a mass PLP to smash this racist, sexist, imperialist system with communist revolution!
No flag but the red flag
The liberal misleader-led groups are pushing U.S. nationalism as a way for workers to fight for “our freedoms,” with march organizers handing out thousands of miniature U.S. flags. It was therefore no surprise that many workers hesitated to cheer for communist revolution! As several PL’ers said in their speeches, reaching the hundreds marching around us, PLP rejects all bosses’ national flags. The U.S. flag, in particular, is the symbol of manifest destiny and holocaust, of dispossession and hypocrisy, of slavery and Jim Crow. It’s the flag of the Monroe Doctrine and the Carter Doctrine — of theft, plunder, and the smoking ruins of cities from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Gaza. The international working class has no country, and no flag but the red flag.
In response to these politics, many people carrying U.S. flags around us expressed agreement and asked for our literature. One young person who took CHALLENGE said they agreed with every point but had never connected the dots of history this way and wondered if revolution was really possible. Another young person with a U.S. flag earned cheers when they spoke on the bullhorn, saying they agreed with us communists - and revealed they wore a Karl Marx t-shirt under their jacket!
Appearance and essence in winning masses
These were not isolated examples. The fact that hundreds of workers — thousands in total over the day—were waving the U.S. flag but also embracing internationalist chants reveals the material basis for international working class unity. It’s no coincidence that one of our most popular chants was “same enemy, same fight! Workers of the world, unite!”
Contradictions abound. Despite mass confusion around nationalism, reformism, and belief that elections and the U.S. slave owners’ Constitution will somehow stop fascism, the response to our presence showed the masses are also looking for answers. Wherever we can intensify the struggle for revolution over reform, our communist politics sharpen these contradictions in favor of it.
No war but class war — for communist revolution!
We call on PL’ers and friends to join antiracist mass struggles such as progressive union caucuses, workplace and community watch groups fighting ICE raids – and even political campaigns attracting masses of antiracists but still under illusions about capitalist state power. Struggling with our coworkers, classmates and friends we can introduce communist ideas while exposing the reality of the capitalist dictatorship. And by moving this political base into action, we can build a mass PLP that will overthrow this entire system from New York to Kinshasa and Shanghai.
Workers fight back with the best ideas and symbols they have available to them. The sharper their ideas and the more deeply they resonate, the greater the opportunities to link these interconnected fights and take them all the way. Communism – and our red flag - represents the ultimate needs and deepest aspirations of the international working class. Join us and fight to make that world a reality!
NJ: Not just Trump, it’s capitali$m
In the pouring rain over 200 workers and students attended the No Kings rally in Newark. The rally, which was called by the Democratic Party liberals, looked to direct the working class anger towards President Donald Trump. It was our job in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to let workers know that there is an alternative to war and fascism – fighting for communism. Despite a small group of us at the rally, we reached over a hundred students and workers in distributing CHALLENGE and leading chants in the rain. Electoral politics still holds a lot of sway over the working class, but this rally has shown us that workers are looking for something more.
Workers need to steer clear of bosses fight
From organizations like Make the Road to politicians like Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, the liberal Big Fascists (see Glossary,page 6) ensured that the only analysis was that Trump must go. They spoke about the attacks on migrant workers but failed to mention the role of liberals like Joe Biden in deporting record numbers of migrant workers or McIver’s history of supporting landlords and finance capital.
PLP brings alternative - and workers responded
That is why PLP showed up that day. While the different speakers were singing the same tune about Trump - we distributed CHALLENGE and explained our line that it isn’t just Trump - It’s capitalism. The reception that we got from our conversations shows the potential of our class and the fight for communism. We distributed over 100 papers and got great feedback. One example from a worker: “I was kind of cynical about coming cause I knew it was just going to be the same Democratic Party BS - so I am glad I got this paper and I’m gonna check it out when I get home.”
After the speakers were done a short march began. The chant, led by Larry Hamm of People’s Organization for Progress, was predictably “Trump Must Go.” One self-criticism is that we should have had our bullhorn with us. Even without the bullhorn our small contingent lead chants like “Democrats and Republicans Are all the Same - Racist Terror Is the Name of the Game.” Others took up the chants for a while until the march leaders heard us and dropped back by our section to take back the chants.
What we do counts
It can be easy to dismiss these ruling class events. We know what the rulers and their mouthpieces are going to say. At the same time workers are organizing rapid response networks and putting their life on the line in fighting these racist anti-immigrant attacks. That is why it is so important to show up. Trump’s open racism is attracting new workers and students to the struggle.
After the rally we discussed the importance of being ready and prepared to give political leadership to the workers. While the liberal misleaders still have a lot of influence over the working class, there is a window for us to spread our ideas and win workers to a life of communism. Our next steps are to reach out to those we met at the rally and plan for future actions.
As the bosses try to limit the imagination of what workers can accomplish, our Party is winning workers to realize that we can run the world - and not rely on the bosses. No Kings was the chant of the bourgeoisie of the past - No Bosses is the chant of the workers’ future. Join Us!
KY: No borders, no nations, resist Deportations
On June 14th, Kentucky Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members attended a national “No Kings” day of action by the 50501 movement to protest the Donald Trump administration on the same day as a fascist military parade took place in Washington D.C. to celebrate Trump’s birthday. This protest was put together by a coalition of liberal groups including “We Show Up” and “Standing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ)” as a part of 50501’s movement to oppose fascism and protect “real American values” and “democracy.” The groups advised people to carry American flags and wear its colors to “take back the flag”, and paint themselves as even more patriotic than the pro Trump fascists. One liberal organizer brought up chanting “USA!” in order to “confuse” the other side.
We heard this and decided to show up waving a red PLP flag and make anti-nationalist signs reading: “No Borders, No Nations, Resist Deportations” or “No War But Class War, No War With Iran.” One comrade made a sign showing Joe Biden in a Nazi uniform saying, “It’s not fascism when we do it” to make a statement and remind people of the Biden administration’s fascist policies like funding genocide, cracking down on college campuses, beefing up border security, and the militarization of police. These workers, while misled by liberal identity politics, need a communist world and under the red flag will lead us in the battle to win it!
Rally leaders scared to call out anti-Palestinian racism
When we made it in front of Union Church, the pastor and movement leaders were on megaphones essentially singing kumbaya, with songs like “We Shall Overcome.” When we eventually caught up with someone we know from the local organization Berea4Palestine, the thought occurred to all of us to begin a pro-Palestine chant. A marcher then criticized us, claiming “that was a racist dog whistle” calling for the extermination of Jewish people. This is a line frequently used by Zionists to paint pro-Palestinian activists as antisemitic. We agree that this chant does show the limits of nationalist movements. We fight for a society in which the international working class is in power, not Palestinian instead of Israeli, not Ukrainian instead of Russian. Nationalism has been proven to be a tool of the bosses, whether those bosses are the Israeli government or Hamas. Both Hamas and the Israeli Defense Force operate on racist nationalist principles. Only a united international working class will be able to smash racism, antisemitism, and sexism.
The boss’s banner represents the conditions international workers are fleeing from!
We led other workers in chants: “Smash racist deportations, working people have no nation!” being received well by most of the attendees around us. However, an older white woman walked up after to say we were “putting out bad energy” and going to “manifest deportations” in a bizarre attempt to use spirituality to make us change our chants. The impending war with Iran didn’t seem important enough for them to bring up.
Liberals only care when Trump is in charge
As we continued leading chants, another older white woman, concerned about her produce, tried to get us to chant “who will pick my green beans.” We called this racist chant out for not focusing on how those workers are exploited, and placing their worth on what commodities they can produce. She then added, “I wouldn’t care if it was just the criminals [being deported].” Showing the type of attendees at these rallies– liberals who are fine with some deportations, as long as there is “due process.” As if “due process” is ever possible in a capitalist system.
Liberals in other states posted photos online holding signs that read, “If Kamala were president we’d be at brunch.” A self-report that all liberals wish for is a return to so-called “normalcy” where they can blissfully ignore genocide, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) round-ups, the constant expansion of the prison industrial complex, and the list goes on.
Young workers will lead this fightback!
On the positive side, we seized the moment, meeting some younger workers who are already eager to work with us! A handful of workers appreciated the accuracy of the fascist Biden poster and snapped a pic. We handed out ICE fliers, including to local students attending the rally. Political discussions were had and comrades explained how the emphasis on “king” is used to justify a pre-MAGA world of slaughter that is producing this fascism. Where every boss is a king who dictates every aspect of social life!
For revolutionary workers our outlook is always forward toward the goal, going backwards in this case would be reactionary. When the bosses are weak with crisis and lashing out at workers to offset it, there’s always room to win them to communist revolution! Dare to struggle, Dare to win!
Maryland
“No Cops, No KKK, No Fascist USA” rang out as 300 residents of Greenbelt, a small community in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, gathered at the city hall and marched to the footbridge over the Baltimore Washington Parkway. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and Greenbelt residents have been protesting the deportation of Kilmar Garcia and now are further incensed by the use of the military in Los Angeles to quell anti-ICE rallies. This was one of hundreds of NO KING rallies called around the U.S. to show opposition to Trump’s military parade and birthday celebration. One of our friends led the rally and was aided by another resident who provided militant chants. Later we met this resident, who described her frustration years ago with the communist party in Detroit that encouraged only reform struggles and pushed her into meaningless activities that were tedious and boring and “never improved anything anyway.” She was happy we wanted to photograph her poster “ICE is the new SS” and reflected on how we could advance the struggle.
Rally-goers did not initially advance revolutionary solutions to capitalism as part of their organizing so, despite the enthusiasm and large number of residents on the march and the bridge, we knew we had to bring our ideas to the fore. While cars honked in support of the banners and signs, we handed out our literature and generated discussions. We gave out leaflets of a new PLP flyer covering the events in Los Angeles and copies of CHALLENGE. Young marchers were particularly interested in our communist literature. We continued our campaign to urge Metro to remove recruiting ads for the Border Patrol with 50 fliers and 25 stamped postcards distributed to send to the transit system’s publicity department. When we spotted a sign that both supported opposition to genocide in Gaza with “Arms Embargo now” and support for immigrants with “Abolish ICE” we got another photo. Unfortunately this was one of the few signs that included the fight against war and genocide. It turned out that this signmaker was a former coworker whose family is friends with our comrades. We have to organize all the contacts and friends into the Party so that these marchers will march towards revolution and away from the Democratic Party dead end.