CHICAGO, December 6 — I went downtown to the shopping district to join a march against the racist cop murder of 17 year-old Laquan McDonald and the racist cover-up by the politicians running the city. It was advertised on the evening news the day before, so it was probably being used to lead angry working class people back into the fold of pacifism and politics as usual.
Sure enough, Jesse Jackson the famous misleader was there. About 200 marched, mostly Black men and women, young and old. For a while I concentrated on being a part of the march. I am a white worker and wanted to help create a multiracial force marching down the street. The chants were fairly liberal like, “Sixteen shots, stop racist cops, “No justice, no peace, and “Rahm Emanuel [ the mayor] has got to go.”
A comrade and I got out a 50 CHALLENGEs along the march and used the cover of the paper “RACIST TERROR MEANS FIGHT BACK” as a poster. We both got out 100 papers more at the closing rally of the march.
People are interested in communism. I stressed that everyone agrees it takes a community to raise a child. Then I add that it will take communism to make a world fit for everyone to live in. Both “community” and “communism” basically means the same thing: we will all pitch in and meet people’s needs.
When I told another protester it was a communist newspaper, he asked, “What was wrong with socialism?”
I showed him the sidebar on page two that says, “Capitalism returned to Russia and China because socialism retained many aspects of the profit system, like wages and privileges.” We talked awhile and then I continued distributing the paper. He later returned for another paper because he had given the first one to someone else and wanted his own copy! A few people said, “Give me that CHALLENGE.”
One fellow specifically said that he was familiar with the paper. So CHALLENGE sales and everything we do for the Party does make a difference!
A young non-Black woman had made sandwiches and put them in a bag with fruit for the marchers! Free! I accepted and told her what she was doing was what communism is all about: helping each other meet our needs. She didn’t take the paper, but it was a good feeling to see a worker being selfless to support a rally against racist murder.
Also, I met a woman whose son had been shot several times by the police on her front steps. He had survived but is disabled. She struggles with him to get up and do things for himself and not solely rely on disability benefits. I agreed that this is what is important in life — to be able to contribute to the functioning of society, in whatever manner they are able to, and tie ourselves to co-workers¸ friends, family and neighbors. I mentioned to her the angry young people I had met in Ferguson, MO. Their most spirited chant went, “They think it’s a joke, they think it’s a game.” These young people are angry at the endless joblessness, the few opportunities and constant harassment brought down on them, and they are supposed to sit on it and accept their fate. And the bosses and politicians play with working-class lives like it’s a game.
I told her of a PL’er who had lost a nephew in a supposedly gang shooting, but he had lots of friends that came out in his support. She said that she cries for all the deaths dealt to the young people.
I invited her to a holiday gathering we were having in a few weeks. We exchanged phone numbers, shook hands, and hopefully she’ll come.
At the end, somebody called for a cheer for pacifier Jesse Jackson. It was very weak! We should cheer the workers and youth who made it out here today and want to fight for a world without racist police killings. The Party will stay in this fightback and win some new members to a lifetime of struggle for workers’ power: communism.

TEL AVIV-JAFFA, November 28 — Thousands of people protested against the “great gas robbery,” a government plan to grant control of the second largest natural gas field in the Mediterranean to a handful of capitalists and exempt them from taxes or regulations.
But there is one obstacle to developing the Leviathan gas field off the coast of Israel—namely Israel’s isolation in the Middle East. Its deplorable treatment of Palestinians has created many enemies, and few countries are willing to invest in critical infrastructure for potential profits. The exceptions? Noble Energy, a Texas energy company that conducted the initial exploration in 2010, is already investing in the gas reserves. In October, Russia made a deal with Israel to allow Gazprom, the mostly state-owned Russian gas company, to get in the mix. This adds another variable to the volatile competition between U.S. and Russian imperialists for control over Middle Eastern oil. But one thing is clear. Leviathan makes the region even more valuable to the imperialist powers—and more likely to trigger the next global war.
Jewish workers are demonstrating every week for regulation of the gas. Some groups want Israel to nationalize the gas field, while others are demanding limited taxes or price controls. Either way, the capitalist ruling class wins. Regardless of any controls or regulations, profits from Leviathan will be massive.
More important, the demands are racist and further divide the working class by feeding Zionism. Workers at the protests overwhelmingly wave Israeli flags and chant fascist slogans: “Left and right unite! Come together for Israel!” In reality, the politicians promoting the protests have no interest in meeting the needs of workers in Israel-Palestine. The Israeli bosses are using this struggle to promote Zionism and foster the continued exploitation of all workers, and specifically the super-exploitation of Arab, Black, and undocumented immigrant workers. Only when all workers of the world unite under the red flag of Progressive Labor Party will we be able to meet workers’ needs.
PLP’s response was to chant, “Arab, Jewish, Black and white, workers of the world unite!” We distributed CHALLENGEs and fliers that exposed the dangers of Zionism and the need to fight for communism. We explained that is impossible to be “progressive” and fight for the rights of only one group of workers at the expense of another. In fact, the oppression of Arab workers allows the bosses to exploit Jewish workers and keep the brutal profit system in place. If natural gas is truly to be controlled by the working class, we must overthrow capitalism and replace it with the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat. Communism is the only system where all workers will organize resources for the common good.

TEL AVIV-JAFFA, December 4 — Forgoing a chance to eat turkey on Thanksgiving and celebrate the decimation of the indigenous in the Americas, PLP members traveled to Israel-Palestine to meet with veteran and new PLP members here. One new member was a Palestinian student. He attends a private “progressive” school, where he is the only non-Jewish student in his class. He asked his teachers if he could invite us to speak to his classmates and, they said yes. What we discovered what a racist education system that eradicated the history of this region.
Teach the Youth the Truth
One visiting comrade was a recent high school graduate herself. She spoke about the racist nature of capitalism. She emphasized that like Black and Latin workers in the U.S., Palestinians and Black workers in Israel-Palestine bear the brunt of racism. But, white and Jewish workers are also exploited. These racist divisions weaken the power of the working class.
It soon became evident that the students in this private “progressive” school were lied to about the conditions in and history of Israel as much as students in public schools, where it is illegal to mention the Nakba (the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians and destruction of over 500 villages in 1948). Not one student had ever heard of the Nakba. Not surprisingly, as the teacher said during the discussion that treatment of Palestinian workers “is not racism” but based on “truth” (read: racist stereotypes of Palestinians). Palestinians are stereotyped as animalistic and bent on killing Jews. In truth, most Palestinian families carefully teach their children to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Society is so segregated that very few Jews and Palestinians have any contact.
We talked concretely about the history and conditions of Palestinians during the second class. We showed the maps of shrinking Palestinian territory from pre-1948 to the present. Students were surprised! After showing pictures of the destruction of Gaza last summer, we presented statistics of over 2,300 deaths, 70 percent being civilians, including many kids.
The teacher interrupted to say that Israel made no such civilian-combat distinctions since everyone was a soldier, so the statistics should be paid no mind. We proceeded to show slides about how only 20 percent of the land in the West Bank is Palestinian controlled. Over half a million Israeli settlers now live there, and the apartheid wall and over 400 checkpoints restrict movement. That was all we had time for—the staff felt they had had enough of us.
Students were eager to learn the truth. We provided a list of websites in Hebrew where some true history could be learned. The student PL’er here can forge communist friendships with his peers.
Erasing Workers’ History
Later, we wandered around Jaffa, from which 95 percent of the Palestinian residents had been expelled in 1948 when Israel became a capitalist state. It has now been incorporated into Tel Aviv and almost completely “judaicized.” Along the new waterfront parks and shopping areas, there are historical signs. Each one explains the Turkish, then the British, and then the Jewish origins of the area. The Palestinians have been completely erased from history. Their homes and mosques have been razed. Most of the street names have been changed from Arabic to the names of Zionist “heroes” (read: war criminals). While the racist capitalist rulers erase our history, CHALLENGE can be the working class’s paper of record, and will carry on the stories of both the brutal oppression of our class, and our class’s capacity to fight back, raise consciousness, and one day, win!  
Stand Up and Fight Back
The Jamaican ska and reggae musician Jimmy Cliff sang, “stand up and fight back. You got nothing to lose…you’re the youth, you’re the change.” Progressive Labor Party fights racism and aspires to win millions of students like the one in this school to become communist organizers. Our goal is to build a multiracial movement of women and men who fight for an egalitarian communist society. The exploitation of Palestinians and Black workers have enabled the bosses to lower wages and cutback on healthcare, jobs, education, and housing for Jewish workers as well. “At least you are not Black, Muslim,” the bosses say to Jewish workers. The racism that Zionism perpetuates is to prevent workers from fighting back against their common enemy, the capitalists. Our growing Party is taking steps in this direction, organizing study groups and multiracial fightbacks among youth and workers.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me burst upon the public in the midst of national turmoil over racist police terror. It is a central text in the college-wide freshman seminar at Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, DC. Coates appears regularly on MSNBC television network in connection with the Black Lives Matter movement.
But in the words of the famous dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, “What about the working class?”
All Talk, Missing in Action
The book is written as a letter from Coates to his 15-year-old son, who was both frightened and enraged by the police murders of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Recounting his own struggles on the mean streets of Baltimore and as a student at Howard University and beyond, Coates meditates on what it means to be a Black male in a country founded on racism.
He stresses his own trauma after the 2000 murder of a well-off Howard student peer named Prince Jones. A Black cop named Carlton Jones (no relation) fired 16 shots; eight of them hit Prince Jones, five of them in the back. Any man marked by his “Black body,” Coates concludes, is similarly vulnerable at any time.
To his credit, Coates refuses to endorse the grossly mistaken liberal notion that we are in a “post-racial” society. But in designating racism as a “majoritarian” belief, rather than a capitalist ruling-class ideology, he proposes that racism has taken on a life of its own. Coates’s idealist approach — separating ideas and behaviors from their roots in political economy —makes it impossible for him to correctly analyze the fact that Jones was killed by a Black cop under the control of Black politicians. Or that the politicians are in turn controlled by the capitalist rulers who need racism to terrorize and pacify all workers. And so Prince Jones’s murderer was let off the hook.
The author conveniently neglects to mention the protest movement, in which Progressive Labor Party played an important role, against the racist cop and the system that enabled and protected him. The killing garnered national attention. There were mass demonstrations on the campus and in the broader community, a bus caravan of student protesters to the Fairfax County prosecutor’s office, and finally a march of hundreds of students on the U.S. Justice Department to demand federal intervention (see more next issue).
Coates was absent from those protests. When he treats Jones’s death in his latest book as a turning point in his own awareness of the vulnerability of Black lives, it rings hollow.
Why is Coates’s book being so widely celebrated? First, because it is a timely testament to what it means to be Black in a country built on anti-Black racism. It speaks to readers enraged by the countless police killings of Black women and men. But the real reason Coates is hailed by the capitalist media is because his work breeds cynicism and inaction. He sees no escape from racism in the U.S. and so rejects the possibility of a multiracial, revolutionary strategy to defeat it. He becomes, then, a guiding spirit for the reactionary, nationalist Black Lives Matter movement. He promotes no kind of fightback.
What About the Working Class?
Coates’s main failing is his lack of class analysis. As a result, he cannot explain how or why the capitalist ruling class created racism to divide workers, increase profits, and prevent multiracial fightback. Racism is the foundation of capitalism. Unlike Theodore Allen, whose Invention of the White Race demonstrates the divide-and-conquer origins of the notion of whiteness, Coates fails to show how and why racism has always served the bosses. Communists in Progressive Labor Party need to build a class-conscious movement against racism, one that shows how all members of the working class are hurt by the violence of the capitalist state. We need a communist analysis to understand the material roots of racism in the capitalist profit system. The ruling class created racism, and the working class can abolish it!