Imagine that your home will be given, without your consent, to a rich man who will do with it as he pleases and dump you into the street. What would you say then? This is a reality in Kfar Shalem and Givat Amal, two suburbs of Tel Aviv in Israel, where Jewish workers are being expelled from their homes to make room for Israeli bosses to build skyscrapers. These two suburbs were once Arab villages prior to the racist, Zionist expulsion of Arabs in 1948, and now it’s Jewish workers being expelled by the Israeli bosses, once again in the name of profit. The fate of Jewish working class families in Givat Amal and Kfar Shalem is no different from their Arab counterparts in the Palestinian villages of El Arakib, Dahamsh and various neighborhoods in East Jerusalem where Palestinian residents are evicted to make room for Zionist settlement projects.
Zionism – Dividing Arab and Jewish Workers since 1948
Under capitalism, the main motive of the bosses to constantly maximize profits. Despite Zionist claims to promote phony all-Jewish unity, the fate of Jewish workers does not interest the Israeli government or the billionaire boss who bought the land, Yitzhak Tshuva, any more than the fate of Palestinian workers expelled in 1948 or today.
In 1948, Givat Amal was built on the ruins of the Palestinian village, Jamasin, whose residents were expelled and Jewish working class families were brought in. Each Jewish family that moved there was given an apartment by the Israeli parliament, supported by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and mastermind behind the Palestinian genocide. When Tshuva was asked in an interview to comment on a famous speech by Ben-Gurion containing this empty promise, he replied, “[workers should] go look for Ben-Gurion in the desert.”
The cost of living for workers is very high, making the prospect of evacuation a poverty sentence. Tshuva has offered each family $150,000 to leave Givat Amal, while a two-bedroom apartment in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area costs somewhere between $5-600,000. For the lower amount, Jewish workers are forced to live 80 miles from Tel Aviv, forcing many workers to leave their jobs and uproot their entire families to a future of unemployment.
Same Enemy, Same Fight
The struggle of Givat Amal residents to save their homes is the same struggle of the expelled Palestinian residents over a half century ago, and is the same struggle of the Arab workers of El Arakib, Dahamsh and the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem now. Jewish and Arab workers have the same enemy — the capitalist class, which in Israel hide behind the genocidal Zionist mask of “Building the Jewish homeland.” As communists we must expose the fascist nature of this slogan just like the Nazi “Thousand Year Reich” or the U.S. “American Century” for what they are — attempts to lure workers into supporting local bosses against other workers.
Until both Arab and Jewish workers unite under the red flag of the Progressive Labor Party, both will live with boots on their necks — dead-end Palestinian nationalist groups for the Arab workers, and Zionism for the Jewish workers. The Progressive Labor Party in Palestine as well as elsewhere around the world organizes to unite all workers and to see the connection of their struggles. Only in a society where money is abolished can workers live and raise their families without fear of expulsion or genocide — and only a communist revolution led by the PLP can do it!

The much hoped-for peace in Colombia as negotiations continue between the government and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) is just another capitalist farce in which the working class has nothing to win. This farce is so shameless that those affected by war, the displaced from the countryside, and the murder victims are only spectators of this process. Misleaders  in the political opposition with connections will reap all the benefits of restitution.
Behind the negotiations are the interests of the mining and oil corporations. All those sectors that could benefit Colombia to exploit the working class. These companies only offering miserable salaries and horrible working conditions.
Recently, there is repression against any demand or workers’ struggle, with private armies and officers murdering workers and union leaders,as well as the raping of workers and peasant women, which makes more evident the racist and sexist character of exploitation. Capitalists from Europe, the U.S. and Asia want a piece of the pie, so they are offering generous donations to politicians guarantee to buy their right to exploit workers.
World capitalism is in a crisis and the generosity they are trying to show with legislation benefiting undocumented workers in the U.S., and removing the needs for visas in Europe are only tactics to prop up their declining rates of profits. We must pay attention to these conditions and refrain from siding with any capitalist faction. We must organize and fight around PLP’s line to develop a communist base and, in the not so distant future, abolish capitalism with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Join PLP.

The 2014 U.S. Congressional or “midterm” elections were the most expensive non-presidential elections in history, costing a total of at least $3.67 billion, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. To many workers, that sum of money is enormous, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the total wealth the capitalists have stolen from the working class.
By understanding how and why elections are funded, we can gain a clearer picture of their role in the dictatorship of the capitalist class. The bosses’ elections will never serve workers’ needs. By sharing this knowledge with our co-workers we can help free them from the illusion of voting and win them to fight for true workers’ power — communism, the dictatorship of the working class — under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party.
Democracy: Heads They Win, Tails We Lose
Elections are an important aspect of capitalist state power as a way to both resolve disputes between the rival capitalist factions and to exert ideological control over the working class. In dominant capitalist countries like the United States, where genocidal levels of Black working class youth are gunned down by the police and immigrants are being deported in record numbers, the bosses hold voting up as the height of all social progress.
Workers in these countries are all too familiar with the campaign circus every two years or so that really amounts to giant advertising campaigns to convince workers to support one ruling class faction versus another. Karl Marx, one of the founders of revolutionary communism, once remarked that in elections “the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”  All of these politicians and the immense campaign machinery behind them are merely the puppets of the most powerful — the capitalist class.
One way to understand the power of the rich is to look at how much wealth they have stolen from all that the working class has produced. Net U.S. household wealth – the value of homes, stocks and bonds, cars, bank accounts, etc. minus debts and other liabilities – was $81.5 trillion in June of 2014. The richest one percent of U.S. families own 40 percent of that, about $32 trillion.
“The one percent” vs. The Concept of the Capitalist Class
But merely looking at the “richest one percent” is to ignore the class role of most of the people in the so-called “one percent.” The richest one percent includes small business, doctors, lawyers and so on.  The vast majority of these people may have large individual sums of money, but are not in control of the institutions vital to U.S. imperialism such as Citigroup, ExxonMobil, J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, etc, which collectively have or control trillions of dollars and determine the course of U.S. government policy.
This number of people is much smaller! Members of the ruling capitalist class are closer to the richest one percent of the one percent, the wealthiest one-hundredth of one percent. That would be roughly one out of every 10,000 U.S. citizens. According to the graph below, these 16,000 families own 11.1 percent of U.S. wealth, or about $6 trillion dollars.
If these top capitalists and their families spent only one dollar for every thousand dollars they own on electing candidates favorable to their interests, they could spend $6 billion a year on elections. However, there is no need for them to spend that much, since for the moment a much smaller amount gives them the control they want. In addition, the capitalists have other resources on their side.
The elected politicians are just one facet of capitalist state power, which as CHALLENGE has analyzed (see CHALLENGE 12/10/14) includes not just all levels of government, but also the so-called justice system, the police, the military, the schools as well as the media of both the liberal and conservative varieties.
The Progressive Labor Party fights to smash capitalist state power and replace it with a workers’ dictatorship where in one stroke the unnecessary waste, corruption and ridiculous media frenzy that accompanies it are all done away with. In a workers’ dictatorship, instead of elections and glitzy ad campaigns that revolve around individuals claiming to represent the working class, all workers will be encouraged to take leadership and responsibility for building a new communist world where exploitation, racism and sexism are abolished.
Workers will use state power to repress and eliminate remnants of the old capitalist class and the me-first selfish ideology that supported their rule. To do that we must continue to build the international revolutionary communist PLP, and we invite all workers, students and soldiers to join us!

When CHALLENGE identifies U.S. rulers as mass murderers in imperialist genocidal wars from Vietnam to the Middle East and South Asia as well as executioners on the streets of U.S. cities, they have a direct link to Hitler’s Nazis as revealed in a just-published book by Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men. It reveals that U.S. government officials employed “approximately 10,000 Nazis, some of whom had played pivotal roles in the [World War II Nazi] genocide” (New York Times book review, 11/2) against Jews, communists, trade unionists and anti-Nazi resistance fighters. After World War II, the CIA and FBI worked hand-in-glove with top Nazis who were guilty of mass murder. This included “more than 1,600 scientists….[who] had developed the chemicals for the gas chambers, or conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners” (NYT review).
“U.S. agencies…hired numerous ex-Nazi police officials and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war crimes” (NYT, 10/27).
CIA director Allen Dulles and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover “aggressively recruited…Nazis” from the highest levels “as secret, anti-Soviet ‘assets’” (NYT, 11/2). They hired over 1,000 Nazis as anti-communist spies and informants, beginning even during World War II. “In March 1945,…American spy chief…Dulles conducted a friendly fireside chat…with Nazi general Karl Wolff, the closest associate of SS leader Heinrich Himmler...[and] a leader of the Waffen SS [Gestapo]….When prosecutors sought to try Wolff at Nuremberg” as a war criminal, Dulles intervened and “worked to have his name removed from the list of defendants” (NYT).
Dulles’s CIA hired SS officer Otto von Bolschwing as a spy in Europe, knowing that he “was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the ‘Final Solution’” and who “wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews.” The CIA then relocated him in New York City as “a reward for his loyal post-war service” (NYT, 10/27).
“In Maryland, Army officials trained several Nazi officers in paramilitary warfare for a possible invasion of Russia….In Virginia, a top advisor to Hitler gave classified briefings on Soviet affairs. And in Germany, SS officers infiltrated Russian-controlled zones, laying surveillance cables and monitoring trains” (NYT, 10/27).
CIA files linked senior Nazi collaborator Aleksandras Lieikis “to the machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked ‘under the control of the Gestapo during the war’…. Even so, the agency hired him in 1952 as a spy in East Germany…and cleared the way for him to immigrate to America….[where] he lived quietly for nearly 40 years” (NYT).
FBI director Hoover “personally approved…ex-Nazis as informants and dismissed…their wartime atrocities as Soviet propaganda.” In 1980, “FBI officials…knew about 16…Nazis living in the United States…. [and] memos show…the 16 men had all worked as FBI informants, providing leads on Communist ‘sympathizers.’ Five of the men were still active informants.”
According to Florida University historian Norman Goda, “The full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher…but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count impossible” (NYT, 10/27).
All this U.S. government use of Nazis in the name of anti-communism occurred for 50 years since the 1940s under every U.S. president, whether Democrat or Republican. Voting for any one of them meant voting for rulers who collaborated with racist mass murderers. This should leave no doubt among workers in the U.S. and worldwide that the U.S. ruling class will be ready and willing to employ full-blown fascism to maintain its profit system. It was the communist leadership of the working class in the Soviet Union and China that defeated Hitler’s Nazis and the Japanese fascists in World War II. Only a communist revolution can smash these barbarians now.