BRONX, NY, November 18- Amidst hundreds of other anti-genocide protests across the nation and the world during the past several weeks, 150 protesters rallied outside of a Starbucks in the Bronx and later took over the streets to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and expose U.S. Representative Adriano Espaillat’s snake-like support for U.S. funding of Israel’s genocide. Millions of workers are exposing the role of these murderous politicians in Israel’s fascist slaughter. Although the main demand of the march was a ceasefire, our signs said ceasefire is “not enough!” “Smashing the Israeli state” is “not enough!” Workers need to smash capitalism and its racist borders worldwide! Many workers voiced agreement with the need to go further than reform demands. When one worker read the headline of the 11/29 CHALLENGE “From the rivers to the seas, communism will set us free!” she said, “NOW we are talking!!”

The rally and march were organized by a local multiracial pro-Palestine group that is only a little over a month old. Comrades in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are taking leadership in the struggle, and friends of the Party have become energized and feel compelled to get more involved. Among other chants, we chanted, “Not another nickel, not another dime! No more money for Israel’s crimes!” We handed out more than  75 papers and made several contacts. Immediately after the march, we held a packed study group with several base members, including a comrade’s former student and the college-aged son of a longtime friend of the Party who wanted to join the struggle. During the study group, we read the latest CHALLENGE editorial and discussed the meanings of words such as Zionism, capitalism, imperialism, fascism, and communism, and we made plans for future study.

This working-class neighborhood, with many Latin and Arab workers, came out in support of our rally and march. People were beeping their horns, raising their fists, and cheering our cause. One driver opened his window to yell, “Stop the genocide!” Workers are seeing through the bosses’ lies about this war and siding with the working class in Palestine. We in PLP are not surprised: in fact, we put our confidence in the development and strength of workers and youth in these neighborhoods, part of the international working class that will one day seize power from the capitalist bosses.

No justice in a capitalist system
In solidarity with workers in Palestine, many workers in the United States are boycotting Starbucks and other companies that support Israeli apartheid and genocide. The lists of company after company circulating on social media serve as indictments of U.S. capitalism and evidence that the very rotten core of this profit system is genocidal. Even if one genocidal company were to go bankrupt, the bloody wheels of imperialist war would continue to turn. The whole damn system has got to go!

Identity politics is a dead-end
In an attempt to build nationalism for a multicultural United States, while distracting workers from the fundamentally racist fabric of capitalism, the liberal fascists have succeeded in convincing many workers to vote for a multiracial array of misleaders who are very quickly exposing themselves to be managers of genocide. Adriano Espaillat, who is praised for being the first Dominican and formerly undocumented immigrant to serve in the U.S. Congress, is using the phony language of “friendship and love” to push multicultural nationalism for both Israel and the United States and justify Israel’s incessant bombing of workers and children in Gaza. On October 31, he spoke at a fascist Israel solidarity event at Yeshiva University, where the Israeli-flag-waving audience responded to his introduction with a standing ovation. At this same event, which a pro-Israel news outlet celebrated as “a visible demonstration of the bedrock connection between the Latino and Jewish communities in Washington Heights,” participants sang both the Israeli and American national anthems. Not a single word was spoken about thousands of Palestinian women and children murdered by Israeli bombs, exposing a hallmark of fascism: racist disregard for workers’ lives.

Workers must reject electoral politics
Espaillat is far from alone in this multiracial contingent of bloodthirsty misleaders. In the Bronx, for example, U.S. Representative Richie Torres, the first gay Afro-Latin in Congress, received almost $300,000 from pro-Israel PACs in 2022 alone. As election season approaches, there is no doubt that the U.S. ruling class will use all tools available in an attempt to funnel the working class’ righteous rage at genocide into campaigning that we vote for the “lesser of two evils.” Just as Jim Crow Joe Biden and Kkkamala Harris misused the passion and energy of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 to garner support for their racist administration, they will try to do the same again. We must not let them! While the liberal fascists work overtime to convince workers in the United States to side with the Israeli ruling class, the truth is that workers in New York City have way more in common with workers in Palestine than with any capitalist ruler. No politician, from president to council member, will provide the answer to genocide. Don’t vote, revolt! We need an international communist movement led by millions of workers to smash all borders and end racist genocide once and for all. Join the Progressive Labor Party and fight with us for communism.

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!

NOVEMBER 29, OAKLAND, CA—Class consciousness and anti-capitalism were on full display during the past weeks of actions to shut down business as usual in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Tens of thousands marched in Oakland, San Francisco and outlying areas. Multi-generational, multi-racial\ethnic, international groups took action & power in the streets, in Schools and on the job.  The actions focused on stopping the genocide in Gaza, shutting down APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation), and stopping IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity) & End Capitalist Destruction of the Environment. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members urged all working people and students to follow the examples of the internationalist-minded Palestinians and non-Zionist Jews, who are not united with their ruling elites and who emphasized the commonality of their struggles. We had the opportunity to tie these immediate struggles to the need & goal to destroy capitalism with a world-wide revolution and to build a communist world.

Imperialist rivalry on display
After Presidents Biden & Xi Jinping met, Biden laid out his “calming” assurance that the two imperialists had reached mutual agreement on three items: 1) limiting fentanyl production. 2) Open military communication channels and  3) The impact of AI.  Then he made a “gaffe", calling Xi a dictator. As the PLP leaflet pointed out: U.S. and China bosses do play buddy-buddy, but the clash of their empires is inevitable. The Real Agenda: Biden & Xi Jinping seek to exploit & divide workers around the world while they compete for “allies” in their imperialist ventures.  The Biden administration launched IPEF in 2021 as a U.S.-led alternative for countries in the Indo-Pacific Area who developed deeper economic ties to China; also, as an alternative to the Belt & Road Initiative.  IPEF excludes China and includes some countries, not in APEC, like India. Some U.S. allies in the Americas accept capital investments from China. Some, now, criticize Israel as well as Hamas.  

Protests overwhelm police repression and media propaganda
Demonstrators denouncing imperialism and genocide joined up at the SF Civic Center, Market St,  Black Rock headquarters, (asset management), Democratic Party Convention in Sacrament. Many called for Free Palestine. At one demonstration, protestors physically surrounded CEOs as they sought to enter APEC Sessions: yelling & booing: “Shame, Shame” “Blood on your hands,” videoing CEOs for further shaming on the internet.                                                                                                                        

A day after Biden & Xi Jinping met,  a coalition against genocide, racism and imperialism  shut down the Bay Bridge; stopping traffic from Oakland to SF & disrupting those attending APEC(similar action happened on a bridge between Cambridge & Boston Ma.)                                                                                                               

In sharp contrast to anti-imperialist, internationalism  actions, groups of pro and anti-China demonstrators waved their national flags.  They clashed, on the side-lines of APEC, over which capitalist bosses to support. (Asian Diaspora from Tibet, Hong Kong & Uyghurs vs groups that support Xi Jinping ruling class in China & hoped to meet with him.).                                                                                        

Education workers in OEA (Oakland Education Association), UESF (United educators of San Francisco) & UAW 2865 (adjuncts, grad students and others in the UC System) passed resolutions for ceasefire and no weapons for the Israeli war machine. SEIU 1021 (service workers) & United Service Workers West(many janitors)passed resolutions calling for ceasefire.                                                                                             

The Belgian Transport Union has refused to load arms for Israel.                                               

No war but class war
PLP members’ experience at these actions brought home, in a real way, that thousands have turned fear and cynicism into anger and solidarity; particularity against imperialist genocide in Gaza. We got a great reception to our posters, CHALLENGE and flyers. (see pictures) Many eagerly responded to “No War but Class War”; “Stop the Genocide”, “Read a communist leaflet about what’s happening in Israel and Gaza.”  We focused on the interconnected oppression of capitalist rule in the USA to the oppression\genocide that imperialism brings down on workers around the world; especially with their junior partner, the Israel ruling class.
Tax dollars needed for public services like education and transit exported to fund the Israeli military, (i.e. cash for profit in the U.S. armament industry

Export of Israeli military training\intelligence to police departments in the USA which carry out racist attacks on Black, brown and low-income communities. C)$44 million for a new “Cop Campus”, regional training center, in San Pablo Ca. (near SF & Oakland). D) Needing to maximize profit demands that the US capitalists carry out with fascist attacks on immigrant labor with prisons, murder & family separation, similar to Israeli capitalists’ fascist attacks on immigrant labor inside Israel and Gaza.  E) the history of US capitalism’s displacement of indigenous peoples from “manifest destiny,” westward expansion to US imperialist actions throughout the “Americas” with wars and support of fascist coups.  Some people were not aware of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement about the death of 500,000 Iraqi children from US war\sanctions: "I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.” Such conversations helped us to get names and several young people invited us to come to the actions they were planning to Shut Down APEC.

Internationalism & nationalism both on display
We, in PLP, learned a lot from the contradictions expressed in these actions. While groups were formed around nationality or national borders, expressed ethnic identity, carried Palestinian flags or focused on particular issues like climate, police terror, or the unhoused, they also contained multi racial\ethnic approaches and called for international unity among working people. In common struggle, there is plenty of room to argue that nationalism is no way out for working people. The worldwide solution is for the international working class to run society, with no borders; that means communism.                                                                                                                                           

During the protests, we explained our communist goals: PLP strives to build the world-wide movement for revolution and for a share and share alike, communism: no capitalist profits, no wage-system, no national borders, no racism, no sexism, working class unity with class siblings around the world.  We expressed our confidence that a mighty working class won’t be stopped when armed with commitment to production/distribution for the need and ability for all to contribute to an emerging communist world.

What is APEC?
In APEC’s own words: “Cooperation” means to “ensure that goods, services, investment and people move easily across borders. by promoting balanced, inclusive, sustainable, innovative and secure growth and by accelerating regional economic integration.” APEC trade deals cover 60 percent of global energy systems and impact some of the most climate-vulnerable areas of the world  ( https://www.apec.org/About-Us/About-APEC/)                                                                                                                            

*1,200 global, corporate CEOs (including: General Motors, Exxon, Chevron, Citibank, Tesla, SpaceX’s Musk, Boeing & big tech like Microsoft), 20+ heads of state (including Biden & Xi Jinping), 30,000 lobbyists, corporate execs, & international media.  President Xi Jinping met with American business leaders at a $2,000-per-plate dinner.

Trying to make SF look good on the world stage, the SF city bosses spent thousands to “clean up the City.” Homeless workers were removed from downtown areas. Some businesses were shut down.  Bridge and freeway exits/entrances were blocked. There was a huge police\security presence.  The media blasted that a great opportunity was coming to San Francisco to capture investments from “domestic and international” Finance Capital and to change its tarnished image as a failing city.