The internal conflict between Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is another example of inter-imperialist conflict between China and United States. The New Silk Road is a part of China’s strategy to protect their oil supply from the U.S. Navy.
The nationalist crisis can be traced back to World War I. After the war, the British and French imperialists carved up the Ottoman Empire, leaving the Kurdish people (spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia) without the statehood they were promised.
Iraqi Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region within Iraq, passed an independence referendum with a 73 percent turnout and 93 percent yes vote. A civil war between the Kurdish and Iraq is heating up. There’s fighting between the KRG’s and Iraq’s armed forces over control of the oil fields around Kirkuk.
At the heart of it are the vast oil fields at the edge of Kirkuk. Its oil reserves are estimated at 45 billion barrels.
Russia, Threat to U.S.
Russia, a major imperialist, did not condemn the independence referendum. Russia has invested in Kurdistan and signed a 20-year deal to buy Kurdistan’s oil and refine it in Germany. In retaliation, the U.S. began to pass new sanctions against Russia, but said that the new sanctions were over Ukraine. These sanctions also affected Germany (see CHALLENGE 8/30).  
Russia announced they plan to build a pipeline from the Kurdistan region to the Black Sea region. They would ensure that Turkey would get a piece of the pipeline action running through it to both Europe and Asia. Letting Turkey in on the deal has sent alarm bells to the U.S.-Saudi-NATO struggle to maintain their control of the world’s oil.
Russia’s presence in the Mediterranean Sea and Middle East is at a greater level than even during the former Soviet Union. Russia and China are directly challenging the Carter Doctrine that any threat to Middle Eastern oil is a direct threat to the U.S.
China’s Pivot to the Middle East
China’s strategy is clear after looking at a map of the New Silk Road. Taking advantage of U.S. decline and rising racism, China seeks exert greater control in the Middle East.  
 [U.S.] is moving out of this region and the US President pledged to build walls…to international immigrants and in particular Muslims, [it] has forced these countries to look east…China’s vital energy interests in the region have given it reasons to take a larger interest in regional security…With the Completion of the Gulf Pearl Chain, China can achieve...control of its energy needs and will open a new markets and trade routes for the Gulf Countries (China Daily, 6/5).
China plans to make Northern Iraq an important economic hub. They’ll either do business with Iraq or Kurdistan. They maintained a close economic relationship with the Kurdish oil industry. The conflict? The U.S. has spent billions of dollars in the Iraqi Kurdistan, and won’t allow China to buy oil companies that have already signed deals with Kurdistan. They will try to use their influence in Iraq to ensure it is U.S. imperialism that controls the oil, not China. They will push back against “the secession of Iraqi Kurdistan [that] would allow China to cut lucrative bilateral deals with Kurdish companies” (The Diplomat, 10/5).
As ISIS is a lesser concern for Iraq, they are continuing to occupy Kirkuk and the oil fields around it. Kurdistan’s forces continue to retreat before Iraq and it remains to be seen how China will profit from this new proxy war. It is a strategic necessity for the U.S. to maintain their dominance over the oil in the Middle East.
Regardless of the flag waving and nationalism being spread in Kurdistan (and Catalonia, see page 2) there are no good guys. The working class is being misled by nationalism. The only flag the working class should wave is PLP’s red flag of communism.

CHICAGO—Capitalism is a sick and sick-making system that at best allows the illusion of healthy choices for the working class. The Sweetened Beverage Tax in Chicago is a toxic choice for workers: either pay more for harmful sugary beverages or sacrifice what little health care remains available to you. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been struggling with co-workers, patients, and friends to oppose both unhealthy foods and the choices presented by liberal bosses and politicians, winning our base closer to a communist vision of a truly healthy society.
The Sweetened Beverage Tax (penny-per-ounce) on juice and soda was proposed by liberal Democrat Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle to cover a $200 million dollar shortfall in the county’s budget for 2018 (Chicago Sun Times, 10/5). She was backed by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who piloted a similar scheme as New York City mayor. He’s contributed some $13 million to push the Chicago version of the tax (Chicago Daily Herald, 10/14).
Illustrating the infighting among competing capitalists, after only a few months the tax is on the verge of repeal, as the beverage bosses and various small business owners oppose it. They exploit the frustrations of the city’s workers, who already pay the nation’s highest sales tax of 10.25% (Fortune, 7/16/15), spinning the tax as a big-government mandate that denies “freedom of choice” – as though there were “freedom of choice” for affordable healthy foods.
Neither of these capitalist factions and their bottom lines can afford to care about workers’ health. Nor do their elected representatives. As one of Preckwinkle’s first acts in 2011, south side Oak Forest Hospital was closed, destroying lives. Meanwhile Bloomberg, crying crocodile tears for children suffering from sugar overload, unleashed the NYPD to “stop and frisk” hundreds of thousands of Black youth and immigrant workers. The beverage bosses only care about the how the tax cuts into their ability to market their profit-making poisons to working-class families.
With the tax’s repeal on December 1st, it’s virtually inevitable that the Cook County Health System of Chicago will resort to another round of layoffs and patient-service cuts to cover the $200 million dollar deficit. As with the Chicago Public Schools’ budget crisis, the workers will suffer the cutbacks while the politicians use billions in workers’ tax revenue to pay for their banking and real estate masters’ bond interest and other services. The pretense of winning working people to healthier lifestyles sinks into a cynical and destructive parody.
Communists in PLP know that only a mass international Party of millions, fighting for revolution to achieve an egalitarian society, can guarantee our optimal health as a class. Fighting for communism means that we abolish the profit motive that drives health care under capitalism, where decent care is available only if you can pay for it. It means replacing profit with comprehensive health care available to any worker who needs it, without cost to the individual, but rather borne by our class as a whole. Fighting for communism means that we struggle long-term with our fellow workers to win them away from unhealthy lifestyle habits that go with living in a divisive and competitive class society. Building the Party brings closer the day that all decisions affecting the masses, from food production to public health to minimizing destruction from natural disasters, will be made collectively, and based on science and our needs as workers.
The capitalist bosses want us to pick our poison: consume their unhealthy food that destroys our bodies, or pay a punishing tax in order to cover their latest budget crisis. PLP organizes with our working-class sisters and brothers to reject both! Join us to fight for a communist world and the health we truly need and deserve.

The Ken Burns documentary “The Vietnam War,” has been touted by the rulers’ media as an outstanding depiction of that U.S. invasion, presenting “both sides”—the opposition by GIs and the anti-war movement, as well as the soldiers’ so-called heroism on the battlefield and their families’ support at home.
But the 10-part series has a huge omission: It leaves out the mass rebellion of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, many times led by Black GIs. The achievements of Vietnam’s workers and peasants in their “people’s war” laid the basis for GIs to “turn the guns around” on U.S. officers, and which helped force the U.S. surrender.
How serious was that rebellion? While it was certainly the Vietnamese people and not the U.S. anti-war movement that was decisive in their victory, the U.S. rulers faced such a wave of rebellion that they were afraid they could lose control of the armed forces.
In a June 1971 article titled “The Collapse of the Armed Forces” in the Armed Forces Journal, a newspaper for military officers, Col. Robert Heinl detailed the extent of the rebellion and opposition of GIs on the ground, saying that “the morale, discipline, and battle-worthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces…are lower and worse than at any time in this [20th] century and possibly in the history of the United States.”
He added that the mass rebellion had “only been exceeded in this century by…the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917…. There appear to be some 144 underground newspapers published on or aimed at U.S. military bases in this country and overseas….At least 14 GI dissent organizations (including two made up exclusively of officers) now operate more or less openly.”
Beyond that, he reported that soldiers were offering bounties for the death of unpopular officers, and that fraggings (grenade attacks on officers) were up to one-a-day in one division. In many cases, troops refused to go out into the field; sometimes the refusers were set up in separate no-go units. Desertion was also common; in the seven years of war from 1966 to 1973, half a million troops simply left.
In the Navy, rebellions, often led by Black sailors, were common on major ships. Rebellions often included setting fire to parts of aircraft carriers, including the captain’s and admiral’s quarters. These rebellions kept five of the Navy’s aircraft carriers in port and out of service for months or years. Heinl says: “When the USS Kitty Hawk was ordered to return…to Vietnam…black sailors led a major rebellion, including hand-to-hand battle with Marines sent to break up a meeting on board the ship….The Kitty Hawk was forced to return to San Diego…and was essentially removed from the war altogether….”
The Air Force, too, was the scene of soldier resistance to the imperialist war
When Nixon launched a 12-day all-out bombardment of much of North Vietnam, “individual pilots refused to participate on moral grounds.” Part of the super-secret 6990th Air Force Security Service — whose task was to warn B-52 bombers about Vietnamese air defenses — “staged a work stoppage bordering on open mutiny.” Seymour Hersh interviewed ten members of this unit for his book, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House, and was told there were cheers whenever a B-52 was shot down.
None of these events appeared in Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War. However, they confirm the validity of PLP’s entrance into the services to win GIs to “turn the guns around.” Our members who joined up played a modest role in these actions (which drew “honorable mention” in Burns’ quoting Vice-President Spirew Agnew’s condemnation of PLP, among others). (A future article will describe PLP GIs’ activities in the military.)
That’s the part of the Vietnam War history the ruling class would like us to forget as they prepare for new imperialist wars. They will need working class soldiers to fight their wars, as always, and the working class will again need to turn the guns around!

In its entire 400-year-plus existence, capitalists have been hard at work decimating forests, poisoning rivers, polluting the air and exterminating ocean life. The pursuit of profit turns the life-sustaining qualities of the planet are commodities to be exploited and fought over. Moreover, the capitalist treatment of the planet mirrors its treatment of the working class. The same profit motive that drives them to ruin our environment also subjects us to the horrors of racism and sexism, brutal working conditions, and imperialist war, with its threat of nuclear holocaust.  Buying a hybrid car, recycling plastics and using more efficient light bulbs will not change the destructive tendencies of capitalism. Only communist revolution can rescue the planet, and the workers that inhabit it.
Racism Makes Super-Exploited Groups The Most Vulnerable
The racism inherent in capitalism means that Black and Latin workers are hurt most by climate change. They are systematically placed in the most vulnerable locations for flooding and housed in poorly constructed homes. The poorest workers don’t have the financial resources to protect themselves and rebuild after extreme storms and are left homeless and more desperately poor.
Sociologist Robert Bullard, discussing how environmental racism impacts people of color in Houston, writes: “They not only have to deal with flooding in their homes, but pollution in water that’s contaminated when water floods refineries and plants. You’re talking about a perfect storm of pollution, environmental racism, and health risks that are probably not going to be measured and assessed until decades later. The fact is that laissez-faire, unrestrained capitalism and lack of zoning means people with money can put protections up, and people without can’t” (Huffington Post, 8/29).
The media refers to these catastrophes as “natural disasters.” However, one thousand people did not die in Bangladesh, Nepal and India this summer only because of nature. Millions of Puerto Ricans were not left without power or water, threatened by outbreaks of deadly communicable diseases and dying from lack of medicines because of nature. Fires alone cannot be blamed for the destruction happening in Northern California, Portugal and Spain. Capitalist racism, greed and drive for profit created the conditions that allowed all of these disasters to occur.
The Future Of Capitalism-Caused Climate Change
The following facts are from “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells (NY Mag, July edition).
Barring a radical reduction in global warming, sea levels will rise AT LEAST four feet by 2100. One third of the world’s cities are coastal, so power plants, ports, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshland and rice paddies will flood.
High temperatures will end the production of many basic foods such wheat, corn and soybeans. By 2080, Europe will be in constant and extreme drought. NASA, in 2015, predicted that future droughts in the Midwest of the US would soon be the worst in 1000 years.
Global warming threatens to release potentially dangerous microbes that have been locked in frozen ground around the poles. Also, the range of the insects that spread diseases such as malaria and Zika virus could increase, meaning millions more will be exposed to these and other diseases.
Higher temperatures increase health-damaging ozone in the air. More ozone leads to deaths from respiratory and cardiac illnesses. Wildfires will increase and add more carbon particulate to the air, causing more health problems.
Capitalists Have No Answer For the Crisis
The response of right-wing “climate deniers” to these well-supported predictions represents the outlook of one segment of the US ruling class, concerned only with short-term profit and  indifferent to the deadly effects of global climate change. Other bosses realize that worsening climate change could potentially eat away at their profits. Even oil companies like Exxon-Mobil have recently been jumping on the “green wagon” and investing in renewable energy sources, because they worry that “severe weather disrupts delivery of supplies.” At the same time, the energy companies fully intend to extract tens of trillions of dollars worth of oil and gas still below the ground, which will spew more carbon dioxide into the air and raise global temperatures, with terrible results.
Meanwhile, the liberal ruling class refuses to blame capitalism for the problem. Instead, they primarily place the blame for climate change at the feet of the working class. We’re driving too many SUVs! We’re not recycling! The New York Times even had the racist nerve to blame poverty-stricken Indians for contributing to climate change by burning cow dung for heat and cooking (12/8/2015).
The capitalist media continuously pushes the false narrative that it is the collective responsibility of workers to fix the problem. So we must change our consumption patterns while they continue to perpetuate the very things that caused the crisis in the first place. So now we have a slew of eco-friendly, sustainable, and green products preying on workers’ guilt, and peddling the false notion that consuming eco-friendly goods will solve the problem.
The bosses push these individual responses in order to avoid opposition to their system. The iron-clad rules of capitalism mean that if Boss A chooses not to exploit a particular resource due to concern about the climate, Boss B will swoop in, claim and exploit that resource, and drive Boss A out of business. This is reflected in the Paris Climate Accords. This agreement between global capitalist leaders represents the best they can do at resolving the contradiction between profit accumulation and environmental destruction. It doesn’t start until 2020, and is merely a non-binding, toothless set of “targets” for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. There are no consequences when countries fail to meet their targets. In a communist, planned economy, targets would be set and all of society would be set to the task of meeting those targets.
Communist Revolution Is the Solution to Climate Change
We are constantly reminded that “human” activities such as fossil fuel burning, deforestation, meat production and agriculture as the main culprits that release gases like methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide, into the atmosphere – without connecting it to the giant corporations that profit mightily from those activities.
In order to reduce carbon emissions and prevent catastrophic climate change, it is absolutely essential to destroy capitalism and replace it with communism. While workers will die and suffer, capitalism will survive all manner of global weather calamity. What they absolutely cannot survive is communist revolution. The united working class is the only force, natural or otherwise, that can bring this exploitative and murderous system to an end. Become a part of this force today by joining PLP.