The following report was given to the CPUSA National Committee by Henry Lowendorf on behalf of the Peace and Solidarity Commission on October 11, 2025.

In the news every day now are Trump and Project 2025’s vicious attacks on immigrants, federal workers, the elderly, the poor, children, women, LGBTQ+ people, academic freedom, the right to vote, and his critics. That’s pretty much the 99%.

Trump’s ordering ICE and the National Guard to invade, brutalize, and occupy our cities — majority Black and Latino neighborhoods in particular — is his step-by-step corralling of the U.S. military into becoming his private Wehrmacht. These policies are Trump’s trainwreck to dictatorship. On the upside, countering him are people’s organizations rallying, protesting, and demonstrating, and those organizations being joined by progressive elected officials across the country introducing lawsuits to block that path.

We understand that Trump is doing to us in the belly of the beast what he and his predecessors have practiced abroad for two centuries. Trump is blasting fishing boats out of the water justified from his bed of lies about the drug trade and the Venezuelan government. He’s propelling the Pentagon into a full scale invasion of Venezuela. He was aided in that effort by the gift of the Nobel “Peace” prize to a U.S. asset.

The genocidal war on Palestine — continuing a hundred-years-long attack on Palestinians, the kinetic wars on Ukraine and Iran, and the economic wars on Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, China, and even on U.S. allies like NATO and Japan, are stamped “Made in the USA.” They are being sold to the public. These wars bring in plenty of cash to the merchants of death, the oil monopolies, and their financiers. The rest of us are paying.

The Peace and Solidarity Commission’s strategy is to highlight the monopoly capital connection between the wars at home and the wars abroad in order to stimulate building a just transition from the U.S. war economy to a green, peace economy that benefits the working class everywhere. That’s the basic idea behind the party’s pamphlet, Imperialism hurts workers everywhere, including here in the USA. We are looking at a second printing of this popular hand out.

Peace Conference 2.0

Our primary current effort for this year is organizing the party’s Peace Conference 2.0, entitled “Driven by Justice — United for Peace.” It is a follow up to the party’s peace conference held in person in N.Y.C. almost exactly two years ago.

Two years ago, the peace movement in the U.S. was overwhelmingly elderly, white, fractured and weak. Today, it’s much younger and more diverse, but still politically narrow, very uneven, and highly repressed on campuses and beyond.

In the process of growing the peace movement, we can strengthen all the social justice movements, empower the working class, marginalize the MAGA fascists, and create a broad anti-war front.

The overall aim of Peace Conference 2.0 is to provide the ideological and practical tools for comrades around the country to help grow the peace movement into a formidable force. In the process, we can strengthen all the social justice movements, empower the working class, marginalize the MAGA fascists, and create a broad anti-war front. With these tools, we hope to place the party in the forefront of growing not only the peace movement but also the people’s movements for justice inside the U.S.

This conference will consist of different kinds of workshops to examine and improve a draft toolkit on making peace issues an important priority in all struggles. We aim to bring demands for cutting the military budget and investing in human needs, bringing the troops home to build our country, and ending imperialism’s drive to instigate wars, coups, and sanctions abroad into the broad struggles for good union jobs, civil and human rights, preserving the environment, and so on.

Very importantly, we are asking the party to request each club assign at least one member to attend the party’s peace conference, and to add the experience of the party’s periphery to our collective understanding and program going forward.

The conference will start with a presentation from Rossana on the state of the peace movement today and what we hope it might look like tomorrow. This will be followed by short presentations from representatives of the various commissions and departments with ideas on how we progress from today’s peace movement to tomorrow’s united front.

We will then disperse into small breakout groups to continue to enrich the discussion among members of clubs and districts. We will appoint group chairpersons and note takers, or reporters, for each group.

The third stage of this conference will consist of summary reports from the breakout groups with improvements to the Peace and Justice toolkit, followed by a summation and charge to action by comrade Joe.

Interspersed between the various segments of the conference will be cultural presentations organized by comrade Ben to help raise spirits and contribute to our efforts from different artistic perspectives.

We’re still polishing the framing document and toolkit. The document will contain:

• A statement of the CPUSA’s vision for a peaceful future,
• A brief summation of the current state of war at home and abroad,
• An analysis of the military industrial complex and the capitalist roots of war,
• An accounting of the devastation wrought on the entire planet and all its peoples by the pursuit of war, and
• A roadmap for clubs and districts to take action for change.

The toolkit will contain a short history of the CPUSA’s involvement in the struggle for peace and will incorporate the Political Action Commission’s updated legislative toolkit. It will summarize what drives this country to war, where the peace movement is, where we hope it goes, and, as we learn from the conference, actions to take and practical tools that propel us forward to those goals, which in essence forms the architecture of this conference.

The Americas and Asia-Pacific Committees

In addition to organizing the upcoming peace conference, the Peace and Solidarity Commission also has two committees.

The Americas Subcommittee has been drafting its own toolkit mainly on solidarity with Cuba, which is a priority of our party. We want to make this available to clubs and districts to encourage comrades to participate in solidarity actions and provide the means to do so productively. One of our first actions has been to ask party members to donate to desperately needed material aid in the form of cardiac pacemakers.

The Asia-Pacific Subcommittee meets monthly to discuss current developments in the Asia-Pacific region, including socialist-oriented countries like China, Vietnam, and Laos. Members have published several articles in Peoples World about developments in these countries, with on-the-ground reporting. The subcommittee also researched the growing racist trend toward passing “Alien land laws” in the United States, which discriminate above all against Chinese people and Asians generally. The Subcommittee published its results in People’s World. The collective also collaborates with the Education Commission to create classes and webinars, and supports the campaign for justice and reconciliation for victims of Agent Orange.

With all this, comrades, the Peace and Solidarity Commission hopes to contribute in material ways to constructing a green, peaceful planet.

Image: Children hold up peace signs by CODEPINK (Facebook); “Schools not bombs!” by Brooklyn for Peace (Facebook)