The war economy, a primary engine of fascism and imperialism, thrives in Western Massachusetts. Seizing on our state’s relatively high educational attainment and general deindustrialization of the region, weapons manufacturers — L3Harris, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Elbit Systems and others — have set up operations in our communities and on our backs. As our state and local administrations proclaim their opposition to the MAGA movement, they work to recruit the same industries of death that bankroll the fascist right.
In coalition with mass forces of the peace movement, progressive faith groups and the movement for Palestinian sovereignty, we seek the immediate end to military-industrial production in Massachusetts. We are part of a broad coalition to ban weapons manufacturing at the municipal level in Northampton, with the intention of laying out a legislative model for ending weapons manufacturing everywhere. While imperialism is an inherent feature of capitalism, and it cannot be legislated out of existence within bourgeois democracy, we recognize that mass movements led by the working class are the only decisive path to peace — most of all, the campaign against L3Harris envisions a strategy to build exactly that.
As elements within the coalition take up direct actions, often facing arrest to draw public attention to the role of L3Harris in the genocide of the Palestinian people, they have successfully contested new legal precedents which expand our political terrain. The successful use of the necessity defense in a civil trial — arguing that civil disobedience is a necessary response to the illegal and genocidal activities of weapons manufacturers — has established a basis for more robust legal protections for the peace movement, in a time when such democratic rights are under siege in the legal sphere by the extreme right.
Western Massachusetts CPUSA 