Biden kept “baby-killers" propaganda in speech
Al Jazeera, 11/27–US President Joe Biden reportedly rejected the advice of staff to refrain from repeating unverified reports that Hamas had beheaded babies during its attack on Israel on October 7. Some White House advisors appealed to the president to “cut a line about Hamas beheading babies because those reports were unverified,” according to a report by The Washington Post. An Israeli news outlet made the original claim, which was picked up by media outlets across the globe. However, no such beheadings have been verified by any Israeli or international source. Not long after Biden’s speech, the White House said in a statement that it had not confirmed the veracity of the reports.

Times economists fret that workers are pessimistic about the economy
New York Times, 11/23–Americans seem very grumpy about the economy lately, despite what looks like some pretty good news…To an economist, inflation is the change in prices…But to most people, inflation is high prices. So they look at high prices in the supermarket (for example)  and say, “That’s inflation!”...Another thing bugging people is housing. Home prices and mortgage rates are up, and affordability is way down. Rents are also up. This is no problem if you already own it, but it’s awful if you’re a young person trying to buy your first place. That’s why you see TikTok talking about a Silent Depression; that might also explain why 93 percent of people 18 to 29 in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll said the economy was poor or only fair…In an NBC News poll released last weekend, only 19 percent of respondents said that they were confident the next generation would have better lives than their own generation. NBC said it was the smallest share of optimists dating back to the question’s introduction in 1990…That kind of pessimism might be easier to understand if the economy were in the tank.

Zapatistas dissolve autonomous municipalities
AP, 11/6–The Zapatista indigenous rebel movement in southern Mexico said in a statement posted Monday it is dissolving the “autonomous municipalities” it declared in the years following the group’s 1994 armed uprising…“In upcoming statements, we will describe the reasons and the processes involved in taking this decision,” the statement said. “We will also begin explaining what the new structure of Zapatista autonomy will look like, and how it was arrived at.”...Anthropologist Gaspar Morquecho, who has studied the movement for decades, said the Zapatistas — known as the EZLN, after their initials in Spanish — have become increasingly isolated, leading many young people to move out of the townships in search of work or more formal education opportunities…Chiapas has seen the rise of migrant smuggling, drug cultivation and trafficking, and bloody turf battles between the Sinaloa and Jalisco drug cartels...The Mexican government has sent thousands of soldiers and quasi-military National Guard troopers to Chiapas…“The only reason they are here is to stem migration. That is the order they got from the U.S. government,” the statement read.

Arms race expands throughout Asia
NikkeiAsia, 11/28–By the 2030s, the Indo-Pacific region will be filled with thousands of new missiles as the U.S., China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and Taiwan race to expand their arsenals, Ankit Panda, a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow, said Monday. The danger, Panda told Nikkei Asia, is the "intersection between advanced conventional missile systems and the risk of nuclear war." The greatest fear is that countries such as China and North Korea may be more likely to resort to nuclear use if these conventional missiles are perceived to target their national leadership, he said. Since arms control talks are unlikely in the current geopolitical context, one idea is for the U.S. and its allies to publicly "forswear any preemptive" attacks on national leaders, he proposed in a recent Carnegie report, "Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals -- Avoiding Spirals and Mitigating Escalation Risks."

In the night, when the nazi Israeli military viciously bombed Gaza’s largest hospital-turned-shelter, they forced 60,000 displaced workers and children to flee. This is just one atrocity in what can only be described as a genocide of the working class in occupied Gaza.

Since declaring war on Hamas, the Palestinian nationalist bosses who massacred more than a thousand Jewish and Arab workers, the Israeli capitalist rulers have killed a child every ten minutes in Gaza (Reuters, 11/10). In an area smaller than the city of Detroit, Israel has rained 25,000 tons of bombs, 1.5 times the force of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in World War II (Anadolu Agency, 1/11). Israel redoubled its murderous efforts by cutting off water, food, fuel, and electricity to 2.3 million people.

Genocide is the natural outgrowth of a system of vicious competition for profits. The global crisis of capitalism is driving the carnage of workers in Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, and Armenia, as well as in the Gaza Strip. The bosses solve their contradictions with small wars that inevitably lead to world war. Progressive Labor Party calls for no war but class war! Let’s build an international movement from East to West, North to South, for communist revolution—our only solution.

U.S.’s entanglements amid decay
The instability in the world today reflects a dramatic shift in imperialist competition, with the U.S. in sharp decline and Chinese finance capital rapidly ascending to challenge for worldwide supremacy. The genocide now underway in Gaza was spurred by a move by Saudi Arabia and Israel to “normalize” their relations, a deal that threatened to further isolate Iran and Hamas (Egmont Institute, 10/11). It also reflects the fight to control Middle East oil and the U.S. “pivot” to Asia, a desperate attempt to contain China. This left traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia feeling abandoned and the Middle East open for business with U.S. rivals—again, mainly China.

The U.S. may soon face a three-front war it can’t win: in the Middle East, against a Russia-backed Iran; in Eastern Europe via the Ukraine-Russia war; and in the South China Sea and Taiwan in a battle over shipping routes, naval dominance, and semiconductors. Tensions are growing between the U.S. and its NATO allies and the BRICS alliance of emerging economies, which includes Brazil, India, and South Africa as well as China and Russia.

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has played a big role as a junior partner of U.S. imperialism—first as a counterweight to Russian influence in the region, then to counter Iran. In return, the U.S. has armed the brutal Israeli bosses to the teeth and financed their fascist occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Now, as children in Gaza are dismembered and premature babies in incubators die for lack of electricity, the U.S. is sending an additional $320 million in weapons to the Israeli killing machine (New York Times, 11/6).
Meanwhile, once-solid alliances seem more fragile by the day. Regional rulers make lukewarm calls for a cease-fire. Turkey and Colombia, formerly staunch U.S. allies, have pulled their ambassadors from Israel. Iran, the chief U.S. rival in the region, has exploited this volatility to its advantage. The chief funder of Hamas, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen (Vox, 10/14),  Iran has encouraged their attacks on U.S. installations. Iranian-backed militias recently attacked two U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria.

As a deterrent, the U.S. has shifted additional warships, missile systems, and 2,000 Marines to the Middle East (Reuters, 10/21). But now they’re worried they’ll be spread too thin to prepare for the coming war with China and Russia (NY Times, 11/9).

Despite the beginning of a global transition to renewable energy, oil will remain the lifeblood of capitalism for the foreseeable future. China gets half of its oil from the Middle East. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, it has gained a foothold in port cities that link the Persian Gulf to the Arabian, Red, and Mediterranean Seas. China’s real agenda is “increasing military cooperation and exporting…surveillance technologies to countries under BRI” (Arab Center DC, 1/13/21).

Between the Abraham Accords,  a 2020 peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and the proposed Saudi-Israeli peace agreement, Iran was confronted with the prospect of “U.S.-centered” alliances controlling “the maritime choke points of the Straits of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, and the Straits of Bab Al Mandab” ((Egmont Institute, 10/11). That was an existential threat to the Iranian bosses. To disrupt the deal between Israel and the Saudi bosses, Iran is widely speculated to have pushed Hamas to conduct its October 7 slaughter.

It’s important to note that workers shouldn’t be fooled by peace deals and promises of “normalization.” At best, these agreements only delay the eventual inter-imperialist war to determine which capitalists will reign supreme. Workers have only two choices: to accept war and fascism, or to build a revolutionary communist party.

Nationalism is deadly
Hamas, like all junior capitalists, is driven by profit, not the needs of workers and children of Gaza. The group’s nationalism undermines the essential unity of Arab and Jewish workers. To paraphrase a PLP document, “Nationalism Hurts the Palestinian Struggle” (1974), the task is not to determine who is the rightful owner of the land of Palestine/Israel. Rather, it is to fight for communism—for the collective ownership of all means of production by the working class.

No matter how militant they may seem, nationalist movements are counter-revolutionary. Consider Haiti, the world’s first “free” Black republic. Enslaved by debt to French bankers, occupied mercilessly by U.S. and UN forces, it has become a workers’ hell run by local capitalist gangsters. Or consider South Africa, where a courageous struggle wound up replacing white bosses with Black rulers who happily worked with the same white bosses—as long as they could steal their share of the spoils. Today South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with the wealth gap between white and Black workers unchanged since apartheid (Time Magazine, 8/5/21).

These national liberation movements, and too many more, show what happens when fights against imperialism fail to fight for international communist liberation. We must reject both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, both anti-Muslim racism and anti-Jewish racism. The workers united will never be defeated!

Workers charge bosses with genocide
We can’t fall into the trap of backing any bosses–not the ruthless gangsters of Hamas, not the genocidal state terrorists of Israel. We must win workers, youth, and soldiers to the idea that an attack on one is an attack on all. When the capitalist system resorts to violence, to remain silent is to fall in line with the bosses’ war agenda.

What we choose to do matters. We need to look no further than the anti-Vietnam War movement started by Progressive Labor Party in the 1960s. Though it was later co-opted by the liberal bosses, the movement inspired millions of workers worldwide to fight back against U.S. imperialist genocide and support the heroic workers in Vietnam—who later were themselves betrayed by their own nationalist rulers.

Today, wherever we look, we see sparks of working-class rage against the Israeli bosses’ genocide. From Britain and Barcelona, Spain to Tacoma, Washington, and Oakland, California, antiracist dockworkers and protesters are blocking shipments of arms and Israel-bound warships.

No ruling class of the world can stop the international working class. If you agree, let’s make these small victories last by building an international communist party. We need to arm millions upon millions with the most powerful weapon in the world: communist ideas. Only then can the working class smash the capitalists’ borders and end their terror for all time. Join us!

ATLANTA, GA, November 12—“Ho Ho, Hey Hey, Biden, how many kids have you killed today?” yelled the masked public health students as they descended, forty strong, on the Emory School of Public Health Dean’s Alumni Reception.  The protesting students were all wearing clear latex gloves painted red to represent the blood everyone has on their hands by staying silent while the imperialist U.S. government continued to send billions to fund the fascist Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians.   

The gathering of public health alumni at the Rollins School of Public Health was being held Sunday evening to celebrate the American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting taking place in Atlanta.  While attendees of the reception drank wine and ate cheese as a live band played, the contrast between the masked, militant students with signs calling out genocide and chanting into bullhorns in the middle of this reception was stark.  

The students are furious at the silence of the School of Public Health administration regarding the ongoing genocide of Palestinian workers in Gaza.  The protest was multiracial; most of the protesters were Arab and Black students, but there were also Asian and white students present. They were united in their anger at the school’s unwillingness to call for a ceasefire. After marching through the reception and disrupting it, they went outside and stood at the windows with ongoing chanting. Two women from the reception left and came out to join the protest. They told demonstrators, “We couldn’t stay in there after you all came in, we would be on the wrong side.”  

Private universities often have ties to Israel, as does Emory. Emory’s Institute for the Study of Modern Israel is one way that they fund students and faculty to participate in this ongoing imperialist project. Just this year, Emory boasted about strengthening their ties with Tel Aviv University (8/11). On October 11th, following Hamas’ attack on Israel, Emory University President Fenves declared support for Israel while acknowledging his Jewish heritage, but remained silent about the loss of Palestinian life and discrimination that Muslim students were facing on campus (10/11). It’s not surprising considering their financial ties – and personal ones with Emory Alum serving in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) (10/10). President Fenves encouraged respectful disagreement; the focus on “respect” and “professionalism” that liberal universities resort to in instances like these shows their true nature. Professionalism has no place during ethnic cleansing.

Public health “professionals” often tout the line that evidence-based strategies are the most important for healthy populations. However, it was clear here that evidence crumbles when there are financial incentives. One Emory student got on the bullhorn and said, “I learned in this very building that war and violence have detrimental effects on health.” They continued by explaining we know that a ceasefire is the answer for the health of the Palestinian people, but Emory doesn’t care because of their financial ties to Israel. Other students echoed this call: they learned at the School of Public Health that racism is a social determinant of health, yet the University is showing its true racist nature.

As Progressive Labor Party (PLP)members who had heard of this action from a friend and made the 5-mile trip out to the reception site from the APHA conference to participate in solidarity with the students, we were impressed by their multiracial, well-organized militancy.  The students were very serious in their organizing and security—they had planned the rally in secret and when we arrived at the reception, it was clear that no one knew the protest was coming. They had sent in advance scouts into the reception and communicated via secure text messages to coordinate. Almost every single person was wearing an N95 or KN95 mask and others took additional measures to conceal their identity, wearing sunglasses and head scarves. Many of the students were dressed almost completely in black.   

Once we were outside, there were speeches and we were invited to speak on the mic too.  Making connections between racism here and imperialism abroad was a point that was well-received by the students.  This point was made even clearer when a person from Emory University’s “Open Expression Committee” came to tell us that we were in violation of the school’s free speech policies! She said we had to either move the rally or stop using the bullhorn.  If we didn’t, we would be at risk of arrest by the Atlanta Police Department (APD).  The students called out the racism of siccing the police on Black and Brown students protesting racist genocide.  
The concept of “free speech” under capitalism is laughable. It is a liberal performance, tricking working-class people into thinking they have “freedom” in this system. It’s clear that the APD had no interest in supporting protestors’ freedoms of any kind. The students saw right through this. The rally ended safely and those of us in PLP were inspired by the internationalism, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and sharp, confrontational nature of this action. Power to the working class!