Barely 24 hours into 2024, workers shut it down, ruining the bosses’ holidays, blocking roads on the way to JFK, LaGuardia, and Chicago Airports, and keeping the fighting spirit of solidarity alive as bombs continue to incinerate our siblings and children in Gaza. Workers on the West Coast rang in the New Year by swarming the U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi’s residence in San Francisco, and others surrounded D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, demanding the liberal fascist politicians heed our cries for ceasefire in Gaza.
Despite the nonstop agitation, U.S. President Joe Biden, for the second time, bypassed Congress to send more weapons to Israel. It is a grave mistake to think that our conditions from 2023 will not carry into 2024 if we leave the bosses in charge of our destiny.
As the war drums sound toward World War III, U.S. rulers on both sides of the ruling class will be forced to make concessions to pacify workers. As military recruitment and trust in this system continues to tank, the liberal bosses and their Trump flag waving fascist counterparts will pull all the stops out all tricks to fool us into choosing sides, pledge their allegiance to U.S.flag, and sign up and die in their next world war, deciding which imperialist power will be top dog.
As we ring in 2024, demands for a ceasefire will forever ring hollow as long as the demand for oil and global supremacy over Chinese and Russian bosses grow louder and stronger. Whether it’s Gaza or Sudan, 1948 or 2023 as long as capitalist democracy exists genocide will always be mainstay for this decaying rotten imperialist capitalist system. But Progressive Labor Party has a brighter vision for our class. From Vietnam, Iraq, to Palestine, every year for 60 years, PLP has put forth our solution to the non-stop cycle of war, racism, sexism, and the infinite list of horrors it breeds.
Our 2024 resolution to the perpetual crisis of capitalism in 2024 and beyond is to organize the international working class from every corner of the capitalist globe to fight back, and turn every battle against capitalism and imperialism–big or small– into a class war for communist revolution. To achieve our goal we need to organize in our schools, on the job, in our neighborhoods, in our homes here and abroad, and inject our antiracist, antisexist, communist, internationalist ideas We need to organize millions of workers to join the Party and organize a global red army of workers, so we can turn imperialist wars into a class war for communism to smash these racist butchers once and for all.
As we look back at 2023, remember all the historical lessons and triumphs of the international working class from the Haitian, Bolshevik, and Chinese communist revolutions to the on the job and school strikes, to anti-war demonstrations, and the decades of class struggle against racist oppression and apartheid; from South Africa, to India, and Gaza Palestine as they illuminate our potential.
LONG LIVE THE FIGHT OF THE WORKING CLASS
In the Bronx and Illinois, PL’ers fought the racist courts alongside the family and community members of Raymond Chaluisant, a Latin man murdered by a killer Corrections Officer; Hadi Abuatelah, an Arab teenager who was jumped by kkkops; and Murod Kurdi, killed by a white drunk driver. We disrupted many court hearings and consistently exposed the phony order of the racist injustice system.
In Brooklyn, brave students occupied the offices of administrators at Kingsborough Community College in protest of racist charges against four students.
In Haiti, we organized a community kitchen, preparing large pots of food as a way to build familial bonds with our class siblings in the struggle and challenge the individualist “chak koukouy klere pou je w” or “everyone for themself” ideology of capitalist bosses.
In Newark, we fought back against the school district for firing a Latin antiracist teacher over attending a rally with his students in NYC. We defended students who walked out of their high schools in solidarity with workers in Gaza and showed this same fiery militancy when gutter racists and liberal administrators attacked teachers from San Francisco to Brooklyn for standing with these students.
PL’ers in the American Public Health Association (APHA) celebrated their 40th year sharpening struggle within the organization and took over the recent conference in Atlanta with communist ideas and rallying. As a result, many workers stood beside our leadership, and the APHA bosses were forced to make a statement supporting Palestine, showing our potential to shift power from the bosses to thousands of workers in the association.
From NYC to Chicago to Worcester to D.C., we stood beside healthcare workers, transit workers, and auto workers, striking against crummy conditions, budget cuts, and layoffs. The Covid-19 pandemic, in which hundreds of thousands of workers were killed by the bosses' neglect and carelessness in the face of deadly disease, exposed how fragmented and racist the capitalist infrastructure really is. To top it off, many of these bosses are still riding high from inflating costs and overburdening workers with new levels of exploitative labor. These extreme conditions gave us PL’ers righteous fury that boosted us to shout out our communist ideas and practices that can smash this system.
For the 500th time, a multiracial group of workers rallied for West Wednesday (an ongoing commemoration of Tyrone West, a Black man murdered by police) with a 22 vehicle-long caravan. We roared NO MORE police terrorism on the streets of Baltimore!
On May Day, the international workers’ holiday , we marched among hundreds of workers through the pouring rain in NYC, waving our red flags high and passing the torch to Black, Latin, Asian, and white students to take the mic and inspire the crowd to press on through struggle! We also marched throughout Chicago, the Bay Area, and Israel-Palestine.
We held our line at the 300,000 strong New York People’s Climate March and witnessed our communist chants spread throughout the crowd. We kept this same energy at weekly protests against gutter racists in Staten Island who are terrorizing migrants in shelters. We pushed for and demonstrated multiracial unity and internationalist communist fightback every step of the way.
In each of these fights, we exposed the bankruptcy of liberal identity politics, using the bosses’ race, gender, and nationality ideas as a way to knock down the militant multiracial potential of our class. Again and again, we proclaimed that a boss is a boss and a cop is a cop. Both are in place to serve the interests of capital expansion. These political pawns are not allies but potentially ultimate traitors to our class. Our only victories happen when communist ideas catch on to the masses and, ultimately , when workers agree to join the PLP!
WE NEED A REVOLUTION
Young comrades from Haiti to Newark are taking up leadership and steering the PLP into this future. They are reading and leading study groups around the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and giving speeches from the picket lines to crowds of communists at our march on May Day. The youth are rising and learning how to hit the kill switch on this genocidal machine called capitalism.
As both the gutter-racist Republican and liberal-racist Democratic parties prepare to cripple the minds of billions in the next presidential election, we will continue to share with blue-collar and administrative workers, students, and elders alike the evidence that all bosses will fall in line and enforce the rules and laws that serve their interests, and the ideas that will be our spears to forge a world where workers come first.
In 2024 dare to struggle and dare to win, dare to hope and imagine the crises we can resolve when we keep our confidence in our class potential rather than the bound-to-betray bloodhounds that run our class from Gaza to Israel. We communists know that if workers join the fight, to rebuild the red army we so desperately need the days of racist police terror, capitalism, and imperialism are numbered and can one day be extinguished forever. Join us as we aim to win 2024 and the future beyond!