🟡 NOW: German police are once again cracking down on pro-Palestine protests as solidarity activists take to Berlin’s streets under the slogan “No New Year’s celebration during genocide!”

theredstream

"In the meantime, may I wish you in advance every happiness for the New Year. If it’s anything like the old one, I, for my part, would sooner consign it to the devil."

Marx To Engels
In Manchester
Dec 27, 1861

theredstream

Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the “defenders of the fatherland” in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.

The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.

V. I. Lenin
Imperialism and the Split in Socialism

@Communism

Homelessness in US

The number of homeless people living in shelters or on the streets topped 770,000 this year, according to the annual report by the Department of Housing and Urban Development released Friday, a rise of 18 percent over 2023. That is more homeless people than the population of Seattle, Detroit, Boston or Atlanta. Homeless Americans outnumber the inhabitants of Washington DC, the capital city of the richest country in the world.

The estimate is also a gross underestimate of the real scale of homelessness in America. It is based on a one-day “point-in-time” survey conducted every January in cities throughout the country. That methodology ensures a low count, since it is conducted during the coldest period of the year, when very few people can live unsheltered in northern cities, many of which bar evictions and utility shutoffs during the winter for that reason.

Moreover, the survey took place in January 2024, 11 months ago, so it does not include the tens of thousands driven from their homes by natural disasters like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. Nor does it reflect the deepening social crisis, in which rising interest rates, soaring rents, and shrinking real wages have made it increasingly difficult for working class families to pay their most important expense, housing.

It is thus quite likely that the homeless population is well past one million, and that the number of people who experience homelessness for some part of the year is millions higher than that.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/30/xpdj-d30.html

Death feels imminent for 96% of children in Gaza, study finds

A new study of children living through the war in Gaza has found that 96% of them feel that their death is imminent and almost half want to die as a result of the trauma they have been through.

A needs assessment, carried out by a Gaza-based NGO sponsored by the War Child Alliance charity, also found that 92% of the children in the survey were “not accepting of reality”, 79% suffer from nightmares and 73% exhibit symptoms of aggression.

“This report lays bare that Gaza is one of the most horrifying places in the world to be a child,” Helen Pattinson, chief executive of War Child UK, said.

Alongside the levelling of hospitals, schools and homes, a trail of psychological destruction has caused wounds unseen but no less destructive on children who hold no responsibility for this war.

This is merely a news post to highlight the critical situation in Gaza. The political positions of the linked website are not endorsed by us.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/11/death-feels-imminent-for-96-of-children-in-gaza-study-finds

Leve Palestina, Krossa Sionismen
Song by KOFIA

Long live Palestine and crush Zionism

And we will liberate our land
From imperialism
And we will build our land
To socialism
And the whole world will witness

تحيا فلسطين و تسقط الصهيونية

و سنحرر أرضنا
من الإمبريالية
و نبني وطننا
بالإشتراكية
و العالم كله سيشهد لنا
و العالم كله سيشهد لنا

@Communism

🔴 The tears of our children
✍🏻 Vijay Prashad

The 2014 Israeli barrage on Gaza killed at least 150 children in total. When the human rights group B’Tselem produced an advertisement to broadcast the names of the children on Israeli television, the Israel Broadcast Authority banned it. The British poet Michael Rosen responded to the killings and the ban with the beautiful poem ‘Don’t Mention the Children’.

Don’t mention the children.
Don’t name the dead children.
The people must not know the names
of the dead children.
The names of the children must be hidden.
The children must be nameless.
The children must leave this world
having no names.
No one must know the names of
the dead children.
No one must say the names of
the dead children.
No one must even think that the children
have names.
People must understand that it would be dangerous
to know the names of the children.
The people must be protected from
knowing the names of the children.
The names of the children could spread
like wildfire.
The people would not be safe if they knew
the names of the children.
Don’t name the dead children.
Don’t remember the dead children.
Don’t think of the dead children.
Don’t say: ‘dead children’.

Yes, the children have names. We will continue to name all those whose names we can remember. We will not forget them. In September 2024, the Palestinian Ministry of Health released an updated list of the names of Palestinians killed in the U.S.-Israeli genocide from October 2023 to August 2024. On that list are 710 newborns whose ages are listed as zero. Many of them had only just been named.

Though the list is too long to reproduce here, the story of Ayssel and Asser Al-Qumsan is emblematic. On 13 August 2024, Mohammed Abu Al-Qumsan left his apartment in Deir al-Balah, within central Gaza’s ‘safe zone’, to register the birth of his twin children Ayssel and Asser. He left the twins with their mother, Dr. Jumana Arfa (age 29), who had given birth to them three days earlier at Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat. Dr. Jumann Arfa was a pharmacist trained at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. A few days before giving birth to her children, she posted on Facebook about Israel’s targeting of children, citing an interview with Jewish-American surgeon Dr. Mark Perlmutter on a powerful CBS News segment called Children of Gaza. When Mohammed returned from registering the twins, he found that their home had been destroyed and that his wife, newborn children, and mother-in-law had all been killed in an Israeli strike.

Ayssel Al-Qumsan.
Asser Al-Qumsan.

We must name the dead children.

Read the full article here:
https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/palestine-gaza-2025/

On this day, 3 January 1925 anti-Nazi resistance martyr Ulyana Matveevna Gromova was born in the village of Pervomais'kyi in Ukraine.
Aged just 17 when the Nazis occupied her home province, Gromova organised a local underground resistance group of young people in her village. She was arrested the following year during a mass roundup of suspected partisans.
Attempting to learn the names of her comrades the Nazis brutally tortured Gromova: she was whipped with metal, burned with hot irons, had skin and body parts cut off with salt rubbed in the wounds, her arm and ribs were broken and her hair was torn out but she refused to disclose a single name. All the while, she continued to give cheer to her fellow prisoners by reciting poetry.
Gromova was executed in 1943 and thrown down a mine. After the war her body was recovered, buried with other partisans and she was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Working Class History

To call for the overthrow of the existing order
May seem a terrible thing
But what exists is no order.
To seek refuge in violence
May seem evil.
But what is constantly at work is violence
And there is nothing special about it.
Communism is not the extreme outlier
That only in a small part can be realized,
and until it is not completely realized,
The situation is unbearable
Even for someone who is insensitive.
Communism is really the most minimal demand
What is nearest, reasonable, the middle term.
Whoever is opposed to it is not someone who thinks otherwise
It is someone who does not think or who thinks only about himself
It is an enemy of the human species who,
Terrible
Evil
Insensitive
And, in particular,
Wanting the most extreme, realised even in the tiniest part,
Plunges all humankind into destruction.

Bertolt Brecht