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, ATLANTA, GA – This year's American Public Health Association (APHA) annual conference was held in Atlanta, a hotbed of ongoing class struggle against the expansion of the ruling class’s racist police state and environmental pollution and deforestation, called “Stop Cop City.” This is a prime example of the role of liberal bosses, their Democratic Party, and their Black misleaders paving the way toward fascism.

For several months, the national health collective and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), with decades of experience organizing against racism in medicine, from health determinants to the shackling of patients in hospitals to imperialist war, met virtually in preparation. Building off our ties working within our mass organizations, we joined nurses and public health organizers and were able to connect with health organizers on the ground involved in the militant “Stop Cop City” fightback.  

A comrade and friend from Los Angeles co-presented on a panel with Atlanta healthcare workers involved in the Stop Cop City campaign. We were joined by an organizer in the Santa Marta struggle against the fascist state and mining bosses. Workers there are organizing to protect hard-fought wins to keep foreign mining companies out of El Salvador. Comrades from Chicago also co-presented with the Atlanta healthcare organizers in a session on Decarceration and Abolition.  

Together, we wrote and distributed a brochure explaining Stop Cop City through a public health lens, distributed it at sessions throughout the conference, and coordinated a rally and press conference outside.The PLP contingent also guaranteed that our communist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist message was disseminated through our APHA CHALLENGE and in our speeches at the rally.  

Indeed, even the leadership of APHA did us a favor.  About a week before the conference, after nearly a month of genocidal attacks on workers in Palestine and widespread protests, the APHA’s Executive Director, Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, released a statement supporting  “peace” and “Israel’s right to exist.” This incited massive anger from many public health workers and students who were attending. Then, after discovering that we were planning the protest outside, conference organizers sent a warning, including the date and time of our protest to all 12,000 attendees of the conference.  We thank them for the mass invitation and for showing their true fascist colors!

Two protests: against racist cops and racist genocide
This resulted in two simultaneous actions; our Stop KKKop City rally planned with local Atlanta organizers and the other protest that grew out of the visceral anger of public health workers at the conference itself. We divided our forces as about 100 healthcare workers held a silent protest inside the governing council meeting urging the passage of a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and end of the occupation. 

On the outside, comrades linked the fascist attacks on workers in Gaza to the fascist attacks in Atlanta, including violent attacks on protestors just one day prior at the proposed “Cop City '' – the same site where environmental activist Tortugita was murdered.   

A comrade started his speech by saying, “If there was a chant that connected the fightback against Kkkop City and racist mass incarceration here to the open-air prison and genocidal attacks in Gaza, it’s booming in protests in cities across the world, with ‘Biden, Biden you can’t hide, We charge you with Genocide!’” The crowd outside began chanting it as well.  After a few rounds of chanting he asked, “But how many of us voted for him?”

This created a pause and some snaps in the back. He then explained not just Biden’s role in the five-decades-long racist wars on crime/drugs and mass incarceration but explained how this was made possible through our class’s illusions in the so-called Civil Rights “wins” of former organizers turned Democratic Party politicians.

Across the U.S., from Atlanta to DC, Detroit to LA, these politicians became servants of the ruling class and supported the expansion and militarization of the police for decades as a solution to deindustrialization and racist unemployment. Cop City isn’t new, the comrade said; the ruling class and the liberal politicians are doubling down and tripling down on this decades-long fascist build-up. He explained how Chicago and Baltimore have already constructed Cop Cities.  

Voting is a dead end, fight for workers power: communism
In Los Angeles, where this comrade is from, the  entire city council voted to expand the  police size and budget, even though it already takes more than half the city budget and has long been home to the largest jail on the planet — despite the presence of the city’s first Black woman mayor, Karen Bass. So we shouldn’t be surprised when in Atlanta, the current Black mayor supports the destruction of forests so they can build a training center for urban warfare. Speaking in solidarity, the comrade  said, “We can’t continue to make the same mistakes,” referring to illusions that the bosses' state and politicians can ever serve our class interests. They’re arming themselves and terrorizing our class because they are preparing for world war and are afraid of our class.  From Gaza to Atlanta, we must arm ourselves with revolutionary communist class consciousness and turn the guns around on the bosses and their state.   

This speech was well received by the rally participants including two friends from LA in the crowd. Our APHA CHALLENGE was distributed and after the rally and silent protest, about two dozen joined us in a debrief where we further discussed our line in addition to planning for future efforts leading up to next year’s conference.