No. 21, September 2024 Table of Contents Selected articles linked  Newspaper of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth, youth section of the Internationalist Group (U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International), and CUNY students from the Internationalist Clubs, for the program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. Click on image to left for pdf version of complete issue.

All-Purpose Bigot Trump or Genocide Joe’s VP Harris? The Only Choice: Build a Revolutionary Workers Party After Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the presidential race and replacement by his vice president Kamala Harris, the mood in U.S. capitalism’s governing Democratic Party turned from gloom to what it’s hyping as an explosion of “joy.” In Gaza, the explosion of bombs provided by the Biden-Harris administration to Israel continued to obliterate schools, hospitals and entire neighborhoods, burying whole families under the rubble. In her acceptance speech, Harris vowed that “as Commander-in-Chief,” she would ensure that the U.S. has the  “most lethal fighting force in the world.” While Republican ex-president Donald Trump is, once again, demonizing “illegal immigrants,”  Harris’ response to Trump’s provocations has been to try to outdo him in anti-immigrant rhetoric. As the genocidal war on the people of Gaza rages on, and U.S. imperialism’s bipartisan drive toward World War III accelerates, the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth and CUNY Internationalist Clubs say no to Harris and Trump, no to the Democrat/Republican war machine, and call to build a workers party that fights for socialist revolution. The Only Choice: Build a Revolutionary Workers Party  (August 2024) DNC: Militarism on the March (August 2024)  AOC: Biden-Harris’ Prime-Time Promoter (August 2024) The Rap Sheet of “Top Cop” Kamala Harris (18 September 2020)

Women’s Liberation through Socialist Revolution! A Struggle for Survival: Women in Gaza Today Women in Gaza today – under the bombs supplied to Israel by U.S. imperialism’s Biden-Harris administration – face a desperate daily struggle for survival. Driven from one part of the besieged enclave to another, feeding their children becomes nearly impossible. Homes, hospitals and entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, with families buried beneath the ruins. Famine looms, and the starvation is intentional. Now bourgeois feminists who wanted Hillary Clinton to become Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism in 2016 hope to pass that torch to Kamala Harris. Many students are rejecting the “official story” of the U.S. role in the world that they were taught, in which the crimes of the capitalist rulers around the globe are presented in humanitarian garb, “human rights” rhetoric, or sometimes in feminist garb. For Palestinian Arab women today, the double oppression of women fundamental to capitalist society is made even more dire by this genocidal war, compounded by the oppression by the religious/ethnic-based Israeli state. Zionist and imperialist oppression and war can’t be defeated through a nationalist program, but only through internationalist class struggle leading to socialist revolution worldwide..  A Struggle for Survival: Women in Gaza Today (September 2024)

Mass Arrests Hit Gaza Solidarity Encampments Across U.S. Flash Point UCLA: Student Workers Strike Against Repression of Pro-Palestinian Protesters On the night of April 30/May 1, the Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles was subject to a vicious attack by Zionist and fascistic thugs. The organized goon squad attack was carried out in tandem with the university authorities, and followed up by mass arrests of those defending the encampment. The union of graduate student workers at the University of California, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811, responded to the attack by voting to strike for free speech. Tens of thousands of academic workers took strike action to defend democratic rights and to show their solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people. But instead of striking the whole UC system, UAW leaders called on select campuses to be shut down while keeping large parts of the membership at work. A class-struggle leadership is needed to shut down the entire UC system and bring in other sectors of labor and the oppressed, to defend the democratic and union rights of all. Flash Point UCLA (August 2024)

Hunter College Students, Faculty Demand: “NYPD, Out of CUNY Now!” Speak-Out Against Repression of CCNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment On May 1, the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York held a speak-out outside Hunter College, bringing out approximately 200 students and members of the CUNY faculty/staff union, to protest the New York Police Department’s violent dispersal of Gaza solidarity encampments at City College and Columbia University the previous night and early that morning. Four members of the Hunter Internationalist Club were among those arrested. The NYPD attacks were part of the nationwide wave of repression launched by university administrations, as well as state and local politicians (including Democrats from City Hall to the state house to Congress), who unleashed the cops to brutalize and disperse campus protests against the joint U.S./Israel genocidal war on the Palestinian people. Speak-Out Against Repression of CCNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment (August 2024)

Defend the Palestinians! Defeat the Witch Hunters! McCarthyite Film Ban at Hunter College Struck Down By Student-Faculty Protest As the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza rages on, it has been accompanied by a  “war censorship drive” on the “home front.” Campuses around the country are being hit with bans and witch hunts that bring to mind the McCarthyite period of the early anti-Soviet Cold War. At Hunter College, CUNY Internationalist activists were centrally involved in a fight to defeat the college president’s attempt to stop the screening of a film critical of Israel. McCarthyite Film Ban at Hunter College Struck Down By Student-Faculty Protest (February 2024)

Spartacist League: A Weird and Desperate Frenzy For Mass Student/Labor Action Against U.S./Israel War and NYPD Repression By CUNY Internationalist Clubs After the arrests in the early hours of May 1 of hundreds of participants in Gaza solidarity encampments at Columbia University and the City University of New York, within hours, the CUNY Internationalist Clubs called an emergency speak-out at Hunter College that drew almost 200 students and faculty to protest the police/CUNY repression. In the aftermath, the Spartacist League put out fliers calling to “Strike the Campus!” When there was no walkout, it tried to explain the failure to suck a “strike” out of its thumb by trying to scapegoat the Internationalist Club. While the used-to-be-revolutionary group going under the misnomer Spartacist flits from one stunt to the next, the Internationalists fought for mass CUNY- and city-wide union/student march against the repression and witch hunts targeting pro-Palestinian protesters. For Mass Student/Labor Action Against U.S./Israel War and NYPD Repression (11 May 2024)

Then and Now: Democrats’ War Abroad, Police Brutality at Home The 1968 DNC Protests As the Democratic National Convention assembled this August, promoting “joy” for a new commander-in-chief of U.S. imperialism, they hoped the hoopla would blot out horrific images of the U.S./Israel war on Gaza and of last spring’s violent police repression against pro-Palestinian campus protests. Yet the fact that the quadrennial imperialist shindig was being held in Chicago inevitably harkened back to the infamous DNC of 1968, held amid nationwide protests against the mass murder being carried out by another Democratic administration: U.S. imperialism’s dirty colonial war on the workers and peasants of Vietnam. Despite the brutal cop attacks on protesters at the ’68 convention, and the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton the next year, many antiwar protesters found their way back to the Democratic Party with the 1972 presidential campaign of Democratic Party “dove” George McGovern. The historic task of breaking the stranglehold of the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties, and forging a revolutionary workers party, remains on the agenda. The 1968 DNC Protests (September 2024)

To Uproot Racist Oppression: Socialist Revolution Black Liberation – Struggle and Strategy For many young people who have gotten involved in revolutionary politics in recent years, the protests of 2020 were a deeply politicizing and life-changing experience. It was clear at the time that the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a cold-blooded killer cop was only the tip of the iceberg. We live in a racist country where African Americans are killed for “walking while black,” driving or just being in your car, or sleeping your in  own home while black. The 2008 election of the first black president, while a social change, was not a political change. Marxists understand that racism is rooted in the material reality of racial oppression, arising from the profit-making mechanisms of slavery and the slave trade. It is continuously reproduced based on the massive inequalities of capitalist society. To fight racism, Marxists stand on the program of revolutionary integrationism, rejecting liberal accommodation to the racist status quo, and looking to unite the working class across the color line. A strategy based on separation, such as black nationalism in its various incarnations, is illusory. This illusion, arising in times of defeat and despair, cuts against the actual struggle for black freedom. Black Liberation – Struggle and Strategy (September 2024)

What We Saw – and Didn't – at Important Met Exhibit Black and Red Keys to Harlem Renaissance Story This summer, activists from the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York and the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth visited the “Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was exhilarating to see the incredible art in the exhibit, but the exhibit left much of the “red” – the radical political connections and reverberations of the Harlem Renaissance – out of the picture. To understand the sources of, for example, the poems “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay and “White Man” by Langston Hughes, it is necessary to look at the history of the “Great Migration” to the North of the Southern black population, the “Jim Crow” system of violent racial segregation and the explosion of artistic creativity and innovation in the first years of the Russian Revolution. Yet while displaying a glorious oil painting by Elizabeth Catlett and Winold Reiss’ portraits of Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, the exhibit noted nothing about their leftist radicalism, and the word communist was not mentioned at all. We have to fill in the blank spaces the exhibit left out. Black and Red Keys to Harlem Renaissance Story (September 2024) Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) (September 2024)

Facing U.S. Rulers’ Democrat/Republican Duopoly Party for Socialism and Liberation: A Revolutionary Alternative? Facing the “choice” of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, a good number of young people can’t stomach backing war-criminal politicians. A few express some interest in the Green Party, a minor bourgeois party whose purpose is to pressure the Democrats. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is running its own presidential campaign under the watchword Vote Socialist 2024. The fight for a sharp break from the Democratic Party is at the center of genuinely revolutionary politics in the United States, yet the PSL’s actual politics cut against that struggle. Throughout its history – and today – it advances “tactics” that help tie workers and youth to the Democrats. In 2016 and again in 2020, the PSL called called on people voting in the Democratic presidential primary elections to vote for Bernie Sanders, and this spring the it hailed the movement to  “vote uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries. Moreover, in Chicago the PSL joined an “Abandon Biden Convention” in a political bloc with the Green Party. What is urgently needed today is a class-struggle workers party that puts forward genuinely revolu­tionary politics counterposed to all capitalist parties and politicians, and forthrightly advances a program of international socialist revolution. That the PSL most certainly does not. Party for Socialism and Liberation: A Revolutionary Alternative? (August 2024)

Cosplay Communism? From Bernie Boosters to “Revolutionary Communists of America” An article on the group’s website declares that “Hundreds of millions watch launch of the Revolutionary Communists of America!” Other articless bombastically announce,  “I Built a New Communist Cell Over My Spring Break,” and “I Met Another Communist on the Street and 30 Minutes Later, He Was an RCA Member.” They plaster stickers on street light posts with an image of Karl Marx depicted as Uncle Sam, asking “Are You a Communist,” complete with a QR code for a form to join the brand spanking new RCA. Actually, it is the transmogrification of the staid old International Marxist Tendency, now calling itself the Revolutionary Communist International, hyped up with gimmicks galore to give off a “with it” vibe. This is the same outfit that over years has supported “strikes” by and “unions” of police and prison guards, claiming that these professionals of state repression are “workers in uniform.” It’s the same reformist social-democratic group that only a few a years ago was among the most assiduous boosters for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, was “excited” to be best builders of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America, and avoided the word “communist” like the plague. After the makeover, the facade is different but the politics are still reformist. A genuine communist party is not built by such self-aggrandizing posturing and unserious stunts  From Bernie Boosters to “Revolutionary Communists of America” (September 2024) New Members Not Supposed To Know About It RCA/IMT’s Long History of Supporting Cop “Unions” When new members of the recently rebaptized “Revolutionary Communists of America” are confronted with their organization’s longstanding support for police “unions” and “strikes” they tend to voice angry denial, or sheer disbelief. Older members, more experienced in the twists and turns of opportunist politics, try to change the topic. Yet these social democrats in Trotskyist garb wrote a 30,000 word diatribe against the Internationalist Group defending their call to include the protection societies of the professional strikebreakers in the labor movement. Real Trotskyists call for “cops out of the unions.” Providing the proof, we cite the RCA’s the shameful record on the armed fist of the bourgeois state. RCA/IMT’s Long History of Supporting Cop “Unions” (September 2024)

Fight Against Censorship At Hunter College Continues

On Joining the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth