Ten months of genocide in Gaza: The way forward in the fight against war

Palestinians gather near the bodies of their relatives killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, at the morgue of a hospital in Deir al-Balah on July 16, 2024. [AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana]

As millions of students across the United States return to classrooms and universities, a stark warning must be issued: the threat of world war and fascism is greater today than at any time since the 1930s.

In the Middle East, the genocide in Gaza is intensifying while Israel and the US continue to provoke a wider war with Iran. In Europe, American and European imperialism's proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has left an estimated half a million Ukrainians and tens of thousands of Russians dead. The recent invasion of Russian troops by NATO forces in Ukraine raises more directly than ever the possibility of a direct clash between NATO and Russia that could lead to nuclear war.

The 2024 US presidential election pits fascist coup leader Donald Trump against Joe Biden's Vice President Kamala Harris, who is deeply involved in genocide, the war in Ukraine and war preparations against China. At the same time, the ruling class is waging a war on public health, allowing the Covid-19 pandemic – now in its ninth wave – to sweep the population while new viruses like Mpox spread.

These political shocks have already begun to radicalize a new generation of youth and workers. Since the genocide in Gaza began, millions of people around the world and hundreds of thousands in the United States have demonstrated against this historic crime.

Since the genocide began, universities have been a center of protest. Fearing that this movement could spread beyond the universities, both Democrats and Republicans responded with a campaign aimed at suppressing free speech on campus and completely subordinating the academic world to the interests of US imperialism.

Based on the slanderous lie that opposition to war and genocide is “anti-Semitism,” they have launched the most comprehensive attack on free speech since the McCarthy era. Several university presidents have been forced to resign, and for the first time since 1968, university administrators have called in riot police to violently suppress student protests.

As the new semester begins, the ruling class has escalated this campaign. Camps are now banned at the University of California, the California State University System, Rutgers University, and Columbia University. The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has imposed particularly far-reaching restrictions on free speech: it has virtually eliminated the right to due process and fair hearings under faculty supervision, while severely curtailing freedom of speech and expression. New York University has virtually banned any criticism of Zionism.

There will likely be renewed and possibly even larger protests in the coming semester. But that raises the crucial question: what should happen next?

The protests of the past ten months have failed to bring about an end to the genocide or the attack on democratic rights. This is because they have been dominated so far by petty-bourgeois forces such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a “left” faction of the Democratic Party, and the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL). They appeal to the anti-imperialist sentiments of the youth with radical rhetoric, but represent a perspective that threatens to derail and demoralize the protests.

FirstThey limited the protests to attempts to put pressure on the Democratic Party, which largely enabled the genocide, and on university administrations, which are connected by a thousand threads to Wall Street and the war machine.

SecondThey have attempted to separate the genocide in Gaza from the war in Ukraine and the decades-long history of US imperialism's wars, undermining any understanding that the real cause of the genocide in Gaza lies not in the decisions of individual governments or politicians, but in the objective crisis of world capitalism and the emergence of an imperialist redivision of the world.

ThirdThey tried to prevent students and youth from directing their protests not against the ruling class, but against the most important revolutionary force in society that can stop the genocide: the international working class.

The challenges and dangers facing young people and workers are enormous. The genocide in Gaza is part of a much broader normalization of mass death by the ruling class that began with the pandemic and the normalization of a possible nuclear war against Russia.

In the US, as in many other countries, the threat of fascism is very real. Trump threatens mass deportations of immigrants and arrests of political opponents, mimicking the rhetoric of fascist regimes. But democratic rights cannot be defended by supporting the Democratic Party. Harris is running to escalate the Biden administration's global war policy. As part of the attack on democratic rights at home, Democrats have forged an alliance with the fascist Republicans who attempted to overthrow the Constitution on January 6, 2021.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the student and youth organization of the International Committee of the Fourth International, therefore calls on all young people and students to take up the struggle to build a socialist anti-war movement that has its roots in a very different social and political force: the working class. As a basis for this struggle, we propose the following principles:

The fight against war must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society. The union bureaucracies and the Democratic Party have worked feverishly to suppress any independent expression of working-class interests and struggles. But a rebellion is brewing among autoworkers, teachers, nurses and other sections of the working class in the United States and internationally against the stranglehold of the union bureaucracies and the decades-long attacks on living standards. This growing working-class movement must be directly linked to the fight against war.
The ruling class cannot wage war abroad without waging a war at home against the democratic and social rights of the working class. This is why resistance to the war is criminalized everywhere. In Ukraine, the Trotskyist youth leader Bogdan Syrotiuk was arrested for fighting for the unification of workers in Russia and Ukraine against the war. This underlines that the fight against the war is inseparable from the fight to defend the social and democratic rights of the working class.
The fight against war is a fight against capitalism and for socialism. There can be no serious fight against war and the attack on democratic rights without the fight to end the dictatorship of finance capital and the economic system that is the real cause of militarism and war.
This struggle must therefore be waged in complete independence from all bourgeois parties. In the United States, this applies above all to the Democratic Party, which has been the main instigator of imperialist violence around the world for decades.
The fight against war and the threat of fascism can only be successful as an international struggle. As the International Committee stated in 2016: “The permanent war of the bourgeoisie must be answered with the perspective of the permanent revolution of the working class, whose strategic goal is the abolition of the nation-state system and the establishment of a world socialist federation. This will enable the rational, planned use of global resources and, on this basis, the eradication of poverty and the raising of human culture to new heights.”

Youth and students cannot lead such a struggle without seriously engaging with history and Trotskyism, the Marxism of the 21st century. In the coming weeks and months, the IYSSE will be organizing public meetings on campuses across the country on the struggle against war and fascism, the 2024 elections, and the perspective of Trotskyism.

We call on all students and pupils to attend these meetings. Contact us today to start an IYSSE club at your college or school! Study the history of the Trotskyist movement seriously! Take up the struggle for Marxist politics among workers and youth!

Ten months of genocide in Gaza: The way forward in the fight against war

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