The bombing of Iran by the imperialist United States and the vicious apartheid state of Israel is a desperate move that could ignite a broader regional or global conflict. Under claims of curbing the nuclear ambitions of Iran’s capitalist bosses, the U.S. ruling class is seeking to reassert its sway over the Middle East, a vital source of the oil and gas that fuel the imperialists’ war machines and generate trillions of dollars in profits each year (OilPrice.com, 2/14/23).

More than a thousand people were killed and thousands more wounded in June’s “12-Day War” (en-hrana.org, 6/28). The great majority were Iranian civilians, though Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome defense system also showed its vulnerability. Millions of workers were forced to flee Iran’s capital Tehran (Al Jazeera, 6/26). After the U.S. engineered what will likely be a temporary ceasefire, State-Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump declared “mission accomplished” and boasted that Iran’s nuclear sites were “decimated” and its nuclear program set back for years, a claim that may or may not be true.

But communists know there can never be real peace under capitalism. World war is an inevitable outcome of a system built on competition, nationalism, racism, and the drive for maximum profit. Today, with the U.S. losing more and more ground to imperialist China, war feels even closer. When Iran showered Israel with ballistic missiles and the U.S. targeted Iran with B-2 bombers, old redlines were crossed. As the U.S. dollar declines and China leverages its industrial supremacy, the global economic crisis of capitalism may lead some bosses to see mass destruction as a better option than the status quo of stagnation and decay. 

At the same time, the carnage of warfare lays bare the ruthless nature of capitalism and imperialism. By destroying workers’ illusions about the profit system, it can trigger revolution. World War I saw the Bolsheviks establish the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. Shortly after fascism was defeated under communist leadership in World War II, workers and peasants in China seized state power. 

As the capitalist world becomes ever more unstable, we must urgently build the mass international Progressive Labor Party. Our task is to lead the working class to take power once more—from the genocidal U.S. rulers, from Israel’s nazi war criminals, from the corrupt and brutal Iranian mullahs who have impoverished tens of millions. Our aim is to build an egalitarian communist society where all workers can flourish. Join us!

Oil at the root of bloody imperialist conflict

Iran contains the third-largest oil reserves in the world, after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 5/23). It controls the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic passageway for 20 percent of the world’s oil (The Street, 6/14). The June attacks on Iran are by extension an assault on imperialist arch-rival China, which buys the bulk of Iranian crude oil (USIP, 6/23). Beyond Iran, six of China’s top ten oil suppliers are in or around the Persian Gulf, an incentive for the U.S. to attempt to regain dominance in the region (Newsweek, 6/19). It’s also a powerful motive to instigate regime change in Iran—just as a CIA coup toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, after he moved to nationalize the country’s oil industry.

The downside for the U.S. bosses is that their Middle East entanglements complicate their long-term strategy of a “pivot to Asia” to encircle and eventually confront China across the Pacific Ocean. Though the U.S. has used Israel as a regional proxy by arming the Zionist regime to the teeth, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proven an unreliable ally. The wanton slaughter across Gaza has made Israel a pariah and given the U.S. a black eye in its global competition with the Chinese bosses. While U.S. military dominance makes it tactically strong, its strategic weakness is more glaring by the day.

Trump does the bidding of U.S. liberal rulers

Iran’s oil wealth and its ties to China and Russia have painted the country with a bullseye since the Islamic “revolution” of 1979 overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a willing U.S. lapdog. For nearly half a century, the U.S. has imposed sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil, a form of deadly collective punishment against workers and children that has led to widespread shortages of essential medicines, food, and even water (thelancet.com, 8/10/19). 

In this context, Trump and his America First faction of U.S. bosses seem to be pursuing a long-term goal of finance capital, the liberal main wing of the U.S. ruling class. In response, the liberal bosses have voiced mild outrage—laced with their standard cynicism and hypocrisy—that Congress wasn’t consulted beforehand. California Senator Adam Schiff told Trump to “now focus on helping Israel defend itself” (6/13). Fake leftist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Trump’s impeachment (Wall Street Journal, 6/24), but only because he’d failed to follow proper protocol. The liberal bosses understand the need to mislead workers to support a longer and broader war, one that will demand a commitment of ground troops as well as missiles and bombs. 

Challenge nationalism with communist internationalism

The world’s bosses are expert at whipping up nationalism among workers to serve their own ends. In Israel, Jewish workers and youth are fed a constant diet of racist lies to see Arab workers as less than human. In the U.S., as seen in the recent No Kings rallies, liberal racist bosses are funneling mass resistance to Trump’s open gutter racism into calls for unity and patriotism. In Iran, despite the deep unpopularity of the reactionary, sexist Islamic regime, hundreds of thousands marched to oppose the June bombings (AP, 6/28).

But the poisonous sway of nationalism can be defeated if communists remain bold in asserting working-class internationalism in word and deed. As fascism rises and the drums of war beat louder, winning our fellow workers to class struggle, and ultimately to PLP, is  more crucial than ever. Let’s provide bold political leadership in our workplaces, classrooms, unions, and neighborhoods. Let’s draw inspiration from the ongoing mass fightback against genocide in Gaza, anti-immigrant racism, and mass deportations and displacement. Most of all, let’s connect these attacks to their capitalist roots and put forward the communist alternative. Let’s fight today for the communist world that we so urgently need! No war but class war with PLP!

Brooklyn, NY, June 13th–The struggle didn’t end on May Day – it intensified. In the early morning hours, the day before the nation-wide No Kings rallies, school workers, parents, students, and teachers on our campus gathered again, this time with even sharper chants, “Genocide means…we gotta fight back,” “How do you spell fascist? I! C! E!” and a clearer line: “From Palestine to Mexico to NYC, stop attacks on our youth!”

These weren’t just slogans. They were declarations of resistance, of solidarity, of the fight ahead.

While the bosses ramp up Immigration Customos Enforcement (ICE) raids and the state grows more fascist by the day, our response has been clear: we will not stand idly by as our students and their families are terrorized.

A day of defiance

The morning rally was just the beginning. That same afternoon, we held a second rally—this time timed so students could see their teachers standing up, speaking out, and fighting back. This was no symbolic gesture. We wanted our students to see that the fight isn’t theoretical. It’s in the hallways, in our classrooms, and on the front steps of our schools.

On the same day, a student group led by a member of the Progressive Labor Party distributed hundreds of fliers, connecting students with our school’s immigrant solidarity group. The flier offered real, material help and guidance on how to switch in-person immigration check-ins to virtual ones to avoid being kidnapped by ICE.

We will never forget Dylan Lopez Contreras

Between the two rallies, we called on students to write letters of solidarity to Dylan Lopez Contreras, the Bronx high school student violently taken by ICE at a routine hearing earlier this spring. Dylan's case is not isolated—it’s emblematic of the racist violence ICE inflicts daily, especially on Black, Latin, and immigrant youth. Our message is simple: We won’t forget Dylan, and we won’t be silent as  ICE disappears any more of our students.

In composing the letters and organizing support, our students showed leadership, clarity, and courage. Many asked how they could do more. Some confided their worries about their families’ situations that they had previously been afraid to reveal or ask for support. Various classrooms now sport “Free Dylan!” on their white boards. This is what working-class political education looks like: students learning to act together, as a class, in solidarity with each other.

A growing fightback

This historical moment is part of a larger, coordinated offensive by the ruling class. From Gaza to Rikers Island, the U.S. ruling class, under Democrats and Republicans alike, is waging war on the working class, and especially its most vulnerable members. ICE raids are only one piece of a growing fascist strategy: sow fear, divide workers, and crush resistance before it grows.

Spreading fear and division is not working.

We are building a new normal in our schools—one where teachers fight back, students lead, and parents organize. One where political struggle is part of the school day. One where the walls that divide us—between schools, between staff and students, between citizens and immigrants—start to fall. The bosses want us to be afraid. They want us to be quiet. They want us to believe we’re alone. We are not.

Toward a communist future

We are clear-eyed about the difficulties of the road ahead. The system will never protect us because it was never built for us. It was built to protect profit, property, and power. Our job is to tear it down and build something new in its place: a communist world where no one is “illegal,” where ICE doesn’t exist, and where the working class holds power.

The fight is far from over. But we are more organized, more determined, and more united than ever. Join us. The future is ours to fight for.

We are pausing the luminous four-part series on the Scottsboro Boys to bring you the first of a four part series commemorating the 50th anniversary of Boston’s 1975 Summer Project. That summer, the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) played a pivotal role in the struggle against local Nazis and their racist political allies from attacking young Black youth who were being bussed in effort to desegregate, all-white schools in Boston. The movement mobilized working-class youth and community members in an unforgettable, militant struggle against gutter racist capitalism and state-sanctioned violence.

The Boston ’75 Summer Project had broken the back of the fascist ROAR movement but 50 years later, the fight against racist state sponsored violence is not over. Like the Black workers in Cincinnati militantly organizing their against Neo-Nazis and multiracial groups of workers standing against ICE in L.A., Chicago, and Newark, to smash racist attacks and any far-right movement, we need Progressive Labor Party (PLP)— a mass internationalist communist Party, committed to militant fightback and revolution. 

The Boston ’75 Summer Project

The capitalist ruling class and the media and academic pundits that serve them often distort history to hide the truth of working class struggles against oppression. They seek to convince us that any improvement in the lives of working people is a result of enlightened liberal capitalist politicians, judges, foundations, and philanthropists, not the class struggles of workers, students, and soldiers. In this way, the capitalist rulers promote a sense of powerlessness and cynicism within our class. 

Sometimes the history of a working class struggle is simply erased. Such is the case with the 1975 Boston Summer Project to fight racism and support desegregation of public schools. Fifty years ago, over 150 college students and young adults came to Boston for the summer to fight the segregationist anti-busing movement ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). This was more than a struggle for civil rights. It was a fight to check the rise of a fascist movement among the white Boston working class. Inspired by the Mississippi Freedom Summer, which 10 years earlier had mobilized 600 volunteers to register Black voters, the Boston ‘75 volunteers sought to unite Black and white workers to demand quality, integrated public schools and to defeat racism. Officially sponsored by the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) and its ally Progressive Labor Party (PLP), the Boston Summer Project held daily rallies and demonstrations throughout the city. It collected 35,000 signatures on an anti-racist petition, ran a multiracial Freedom School in a Black church, defended Black families that moved into segregated white neighborhoods, led the effort to integrate a public beach, and physically confronted the ROAR fascists in street battles. More than 250 InCAR members and friends were arrested. Three received prison sentences. 

Putting fear into racists

The last official action of the Summer Project was to welcome Black students who were bussed to South Boston High School on the first day of school. A year earlier, when busing in Boston began, a racist mob of thousands had stoned the buses carrying Black students to this school. The police arrested few if any of these racists and made no effort to protect the Black students. But 1975 was different. There was no racist mob at South Boston High. The cops had no one to arrest except for the hundred InCAR members who’d come to the school to welcome the students. The Boston ’75 Summer Project had broken the back of the fascist ROAR movement. It broke it by speaking to tens of thousands of white and Black working people on the streets and convincing them that bad schools and poor living conditions weren’t caused by other workers with a different skin color, but by the greedy capitalists and their corrupt politicians. The Project broke ROAR by canvassing door to door with antiracist literature at poor white workers’ housing projects in South Boston. It broke ROAR with multiple militant confrontations, with a bold and multiracial group of InCAR members squaring off against the ROAR racists and the cops who protected them. While other forces played a role in the downfall of ROAR, the role of InCAR and PLP was critical. 

In many ways, the ROAR anti-busing movement was a trial balloon for U.S. fascism. The United States had just lost the war in Vietnam after spending $4 trillion and killing 2 million Vietnamese and 60,000 U.S. soldiers. Japan and West Germany and their revived economies were challenging the U.S. manufacturing base. But when former President Richard Nixon experimented with fascism with his FBI COINTELPRO program aimed at antiracist and antiwar activists, he mostly succeeded in turning millions of working people against the U.S. government. 

Liberals behind fascism

For fascism to succeed, it needs popular support among the masses. In Boston, a propaganda campaign was aimed to mobilize white racist support for fascism by promoting the racist myth of Black crime and attacking “forced busing” (school integration) and affirmative action. South Boston, with its impoverished Irish-Catholic population terrorized and controlled by the Irish Mafia, was a perfect venue for the bosses. If a popular fascist movement could be built inside Boston, a bastion of liberal antiwar activism, fascist populism might spread across the country. Both the liberal and openly racist factions of the U.S. ruling class backed this racist campaign. The Boston ‘75 Summer Project succeeded in blocking this fascist movement and set back the development of U.S. fascism for years, if not decades. That is the legacy of Boston ’75 that both the liberal fascist and gutter fascist rulers wish to bury.

Today we face yet another concerted effort to build fascism in the U.S. While immigrants are the main focus of the bosses’ scapegoating attack this time around, Black workers and other oppressed groups are also targets, as indicated by the aggressive elimination of DEI and affirmative action programs. Once again, the U.S. capitalist rulers are deeply divided, with the gutter fascist Donald Trump administration attacking the liberal fascists at Harvard University as part of a bitter dispute over how to manage the declining U.S. empire. 

There is much that the anti-fascist fighters of today can learn from Boston ’75. How racism is used to build populist fascism. How the liberal establishment manipulates the mass movement to promote their own version of fascism to defend the U.S. imperialist empire. How a relatively small group of militant antiracists can affect the course of history. This series will provide examples to illustrate these lessons. While the rise of U.S. fascism may be inevitable, so too is growing opposition to it—and the potential for mobilizing the working class to fight for a communist revolution.

Stay tuned for Part II in our July 30th issue.

NEW YORK, June 27 —In a city where billionaires craft education policy behind closed doors, and the Democratic Party mayor makes dirty deals with President Donald Trump to save his own corrupt skin, the Retired Teachers Chapter (RTC) of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) is putting the workers’ fight front and center, not just for educators’ pensions or perks, but in antiracist defense of our students and the entire working class. At the last two RTC meetings of the year and the last UFT Delegate Assembly, both in-service and retired educators converged to demonstrate their overwhelming desire to fight rapidly rising fascism, showing unmistakable potential for building workers’ power inside the UFT, one of the largest union locals in the U.S. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been in the thick of this significant mass struggle.

Union leadership destabilized

This past year has laid bare deep fractures within the UFT. In the union-wide election in May, Michael Mulgrew and his “Unity” Caucus—the incumbent leadership since the UFT’s early years—barely scraped by with 54 percent of the vote, their worst showing in history. Unfortunately, the opposition—with the chance to capitalize on the RTC’s overthrow of the Unity leadership in last year’s retiree chapter election (see CHALLENGE, 10/30/24)—suffered an ugly split, primarily caused by a renegade Unity faction that broke with Mulgrew and topped a new slate they dubbed A Better Contract (ABC), which stridently attacked anything but what they labeled “bread and butter” issues. A second opposition slate, the Alliance of Retired and In-Service Educators (ARISE), was composed of the union’s three opposition caucuses. Though ARISE made some attempt to address broader “social justice”/pro-student issues, they studiously avoided or minimized crucial “hot-button issues” like the Israeli genocide in Gaza or fighting racism.

PLP members actively organized throughout the campaign, mostly in the ARISE coalition, bringing our newspaper and antiracist, pro-student/pro-working-class, internationalist politics to bear at critical points. In the end, in an election poisoned by nasty infighting, the result still underscores a growing restlessness from the rank and file, retirees included.

Retirees rise up against rising fascism

But a major turning point came at the final RTC meeting of the year with the membership’s resounding passage of a resolution on the rising threat of fascism. To the surprise of some, the vote wasn’t even close (85 percent), and it sent a clear message: retirees recognize the urgency of the moment and won’t sit quietly while reactionary forces—from school boards to statehouses—attempt to erase hard-won rights.

Of course, not everyone welcomed the resolution’s clarity. A well-known retired Unity misleader attempted to strike it down—watering down some of the language without fully gutting the intent. It was an act of bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, but we answered it head on, and it failed to derail the momentum.

This decisive and inspiring retiree vote came in the wake of another major, hard-fought victory at the last UFT Delegate Assembly of the year just a week before. After seven months of often intense struggle, delegates were able to push through a comprehensive resolution in defense of our immigrant students, families, and staff. Not only were we able to push it to the top of the agenda and extend the meeting to guarantee a vote, the resolution passed with an astounding 93 percent!

Small steps to a larger fight

We in PLP are fully aware that resolutions are often only token measures, but each of these carefully crafted measures deliberately includes concrete, practical steps both educators and retirees can now put into practice in the schools as well as on the streets, and has the potential to qualitatively improve our organizing efforts.

We are taking this momentum through the summer and rolling straight into the Labor Day March, where RTC members will carry signs and wear shirts that broadcast our anti-fascist, pro-worker stance without ambiguity. This isn’t nostalgia—it’s strategy. We retirees are reclaiming our power not in memory of past struggles but in continuation of them.

The RTC’s growing militancy isn’t accidental—it has been influenced by the sustained ideological engagement and organizing by our Party and its allies. While the mass movement may surge with righteoussanger, we in PLP understand that the class struggle is long-term, and our work must harness that energy toward a revolutionary horizon. We fight within the struggles of today, not as an end in themselves, but to deepen political understanding and forge leaders for the struggles of tomorrow.

We don’t romanticize retirement; we radicalize it. Our goal is to win masses of people to communism, and that requires a conscious, organized base willing to challenge capitalist decay with revolutionary communist clarity. The fight isn’t easy! But we’re not in it for symbolism or reform. We’re in it to win it.