“Peace is an extension of war by other means,” said U.S. strategist Anthony Cordesman, referring to Barack Obama’s shaky nuclear deal with Iran (Center for Strategic and International Studies website, 3/30/15). The agreement, which calls for Iran to scale back its nuclear program in exchange for a relaxation of sanctions, is  a move toward war. While the deal may represent a temporary thaw in hostilities, the fact remains that U.S. bosses remain locked in an increasingly deadly struggle with China and Russia — the main backers of the Iranian regime — for control over the Middle East’s vast energy wealth.
At the same time, U.S. capitalists are fighting among themselves over how best to curb Iran’s influence in the Middle East. What they fear most is the encirclement and isolation of Saudi Arabia — the grand prize of U.S. imperialism for its oil fields — by Iran and its regional allies.
As the inter-imperialist conflict intensifies and the U.S. inevitably wages a broader war in the Middle East to protect its vital interests, workers will be the cannon fodder. The international working class has no stake in this capitalist competition. Our only solution is a communist revolution led by the Progressive Labor Party.
Buying Time
For the dominant wing of U.S. capitalism, Obama’s Iran deal is a ploy to buy time until the bosses are ready for all-out invasion. When John Bolton, former UN ambassador under George W. Bush, wrote a New York Times Op-Ed column titled, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran” (March 26), he was attacked for “criminal stupidity” by Harlan Ullman, a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council, a finance capital think tank. Ullman is no pacifist. He co-authored the Pentagon’s “Shock and Awe” doctrine that guided the U.S. invasion of Iraq — and slaughtered thousands of civilians — in 2003. This doctrine stipulates the use of overwhelming force to undermine the enemy’s will to fight.
Shock and Awe ultimately failed in Iraq because it did not anticipate the scale of anti-U.S. backlash, now exploited by the Islamic State (ISIS). But the U.S. bosses will do their best to apply the lesson of Iraq to Iran. As Ullman noted,

“We will have to take out a good portion of their air defenses and other conventional forces, and that is going to get a retaliatory series of strikes by Iran... We need to know what that’s likely to be, and how we’re able to deal with it, before we make a decision to go to war” (Newsmax, 3/27/15).

U.S. Capitalists Prepare for Onslaught
U.S. rulers are nowhere near prepared — politically or militarily — to take on Iran. But they are working on it. The Council on Foreign Relations, the leading think tank for U.S. imperialism, outlined a strategy that the hair-trigger Bolton would admire. Should Tehran drag its heels in shutting down its nuclear program on Obama’s terms, the Council laid out a scenario for action:

In week one, the Security Council or the alliance of the willing would demand that Iran verifiably reverse itself within no more than two weeks. Failure to comply would result in week three’s suspension of all international commerce to isolate Iran’s economy....Week five would bring the cessation of all commercial air and maritime travel to Iran to further isolate…Week seven, the partners would implement a Cuban missile crisis…Then, in week nine, the United States would lead air strikes to destroy all suspected nuclear sites…until Tehran opened its territory to international inspectors authorized to eliminate all nuclear contraband.

In preparation, Obama is beefing up anti-Iran firepower. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “the Pentagon has upgraded and tested the largest bunker-buster bomb in the U.S. arsenal…that could destroy or disable Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear facilities should a nuclear deal fall apart” (4/3/15). But doubts persist about the megabomb’s effectiveness in destroying sites buried under mountains. Air Force generals concede that a successful hit would require the long-shot maneuver of “guiding two or more of the bunker busters to the same impact point, in sequence” (Wall Street Journal). In response, Obama is preparing for another plan. He has initiated a trillion-dollar modernization of the U.S. nuclear arms arsenal.
The dispute over when to bomb Iran — now or later — is already shaping the 2016 presidential race. Ted Cruz, the GOP’s first announced candidate, has enlisted Bolton as an adviser. Jeb Bush, whose father and brother both led genocidal Middle East oil wars, has fallen afoul of pro-Israeli Sheldon Adelson, the arch-Zionist U.S. billionaire who wants to blast Iran tomorrow. Bush is following the counsel of James Baker, the ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase heir who applauds Obama’s more measured approach and favors an eventual massive land war over air strikes. In 1991, as George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, Baker helped lead the 750,000-troop effort to “liberate” Kuwait for British Petroleum and Exxon. In 2007, advising George W. Bush, his Baker Institute engineered the bloody Iraq “surge” that Obama called a success “beyond our wildest dreams.” As for Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton, she voiced skepticism about Obama’s latest maneuver by noting that “the onus is on Iran” (Washington Post, 4/5/15).
Workers of the World, Unite!
Regardless of which wing of the ruling class prevails in defining U.S. policy in Iran, the working class will pay the price in the bosses’ fight for war-driven profits. Sooner or later, U.S. bosses will need ground troops to consolidate their oil interests in the Middle East. Using racism and nationalism, they’ll do their best to win millions of working-class youth and workers to fight and support that war.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party has a different plan. We are organizing workers in the U.S. and worldwide to turn imperialist war into a war for communist revolution — and to smash the capitalist system for all time.  On May 1 and May 2, PLP in the U.S. and around the world will commemorate May Day, marching for a society that will abolish imperialism, racism, sexism, poverty, and unemployment. We celebrate the power of the working class to one day run society in our collective class interests.Join us!

Brooklyn, APRIL 1 — Working-class anger raged this week at our school as students, parents and teachers united against an attack on a student by both school “safety” cops and New York City cops.
The incident began last Thursday on March 26, as students were on the line to pass through metal detectors to get to class. One student was wearing a pair of glasses fastened with a straight pin to replace a missing screw, as he’d done for several weeks. The school cops told him the pin was a weapon and made him remove his glasses so they could confiscate it.
When the student reached for his glasses, three agents tackled and handcuffed him. After one agent claimed she’d been elbowed in the face, the student was issued a summons for assault.  When school security released him, he went to the principal’s office to write a statement about what had happened. As he was writing, several cops — not the school cops who are under the command of the New York Police Department (NYPD) — entered the office. They stated they were arresting him for assault, pushed past the principal, slammed the student’s head into the table and handcuffed him again.
‘Students, Not Prisoners’
While this attack is particularly disturbing, it reflects a pattern of racist police terror that we have been struggling against for a long time. Last fall, we held a town hall meeting to demand an end to police harassment of our students as they leave school every afternoon. We also protested after the non-indictments of the police murderers of Mike Brown and Eric Garner.
After this latest incident of police terror, our student government and Parent Teacher Association sprang into action once again. Student government members, who were helping at parent-teacher conferences that night, quickly produced a button that read, “We are students, not prisoners.”
‘We Will Not Be Intimidated!’
By the next afternoon, we organized a protest during Friday’s early dismissal. An integrated group of parents, teachers and students picketed in front of school, demanding justice for the attacked student and the removal of scanners from our building. Over the weekend, parents met to organize observation of scanning for the following week. That Tuesday (3/31) we rallied outside the building’s student entrance, where scanning takes place. Students linked the cop terror at their schools to murder of Black, Latin youth throughout the country. One student boldly stated in response to the increased presence of NYPD that morning, “we will not be intimidated!”
Officials Seek to Pacify
Throughout the week, suited officials from school cops and the NYPD were in and out of our school, trying to “solve” things by pacifying the protesters rather than improving the treatment of students or removing the metal detectors. At lunchtime Tuesday, in the wake of our second protest, four officials met with students to listen to their concerns about security.
Their “listening” consisted of trying to convince students that they need scanning to protect them. But most students see through this racist rhetoric. They know that only a small percentage of New York City schools have scanning, and virtually all of them are predominantly Black and Latin.
Neither the Department of Education nor the NYPD have any interest in removing metal detectors from our school, a mainly Black and Latin school in a mainly white, well-to-do neighborhood. They have a vested interest in keeping our students intimidated and forcing them to leave the area immediately after school.
As we left school for spring break Thursday (4/2) afternoon, we learned of the officials’ intended solution for our school. The school’s head cop and the three agents involved in the attack are being transferred to other schools, but not disciplined or reprimanded in any way.
Some may see this as a victory; we made enough noise for the racist NYPD bosses to want to placate us. But the school cops in question will be free to attack students at their next school, and the ones who replace them here will have the same training and agenda. These cops are used to intimidate and criminalize students. That will change only when we destroy capitalism and the cops with communist revolution.
The real victories are the lessons we have learned and the relationships we have built. Over the years, our school has struggled against police terror, budget cuts, and the co-location of an “elite,” exclusive school in our building. Out of these struggles we have grown, and our fighting forces are stronger and more integrated than ever. This week we stood up to the system with a group of parents, teachers and students. We are men and women, young and old, Black, Latin, Asian and white. Now it is our job to turn this group for school reforms into dedicated fighters for communism!

HARLEM, April 1 — Twenty-five Columbia University (CU) students, along with some City University students and fighters from the local St. Mary’s church, marched to the McDonald’s on 125th Street and Broadway, and rallied today. Workers there are demanding a wage increase to $15 per hour. By exposing the racist bosses and their drive for profit, there is potential in this struggle to win students and workers to fighting for a communist world.
Worker-Student Solidarity
This action was in alliance with the national campaign by United Students Against Sweat Shops (USAS). Under nationwide pressure, McDonald’s has agreed to a measly $1 above minimum wage hike. This increase doesn’t even apply to 90 percent of its stores, which are franchises. The new CEO of McDonald’s, Stephen Easterbrook, just got a base-pay increase to $1.1 million, while his predecessor Don Thompson will rake in $3 million in cash for “consulting services.” And his predecessor, Jim Skinner, raked in $10.2 million cash upon retiring in 2012. Meanwhile, the average wage slave at a fast-food restaurant makes $18,880 per year.
CHALLENGEs were distributed. Two workers from St. Mary’s spoke about their experiences fighting racist unemployment. Students cheered! A retired teacher recalled the victorious 1968 student-and-worker struggle to prevent CU taking over a park in Harlem.
A larger action, involving students from the whole city, is planned on the CU campus on April 15, beginning with a march from City College at 3 PM.
Unite Under One Banner of Communism
The CU students were from the campus Student Worker Solidarity group, which supports campus workers in their struggles against benefit cuts and other abuses. The students recognize the importance of building student-worker solidarity on campus and in the neighborhood. This is especially important as racist CU is involved in a new massive expansion into Harlem, which has cost housing and jobs in this mainly working-class Black and Latin neighborhood. CU not only made false promises to provide jobs and job training to local residents, but also backed the massive police raids on local housing projects in which 103 young people were arrested in June 2014. Most still remain in jail.
There has been a lot of student organizing at CU recently: calling for divestment from private prison investments and polluting industries; opposing mass incarceration and sexual harassment; and fighting for justice in Palestine, among other issues. The potential for a movement grows if these different groups unite, with workers on and off campus.
All issues need to be viewed as functioning aspects of capitalism that cannot be solved in isolation or within the system. This system needs racism and sexism in order to super-exploit and divide workers. It also needs prisons to intimidate and control those whom the system drives to desperation or rebellion. No amount of reforming and restructuring can eliminate the bosses’ drive for profit, and universities’ drive for indoctrinating students to accept a world with profit.
There is no such thing as a “fair wage.” Capitalism cannot survive without paying the lowest wages that workers will bear to make profits. By definition, a wage is the leftover part of total value returned to workers as income after most of it has been stolen as profit by the bosses. Furthermore, $15-an-hour is certainly not enough to live on! We don’t need bosses to run the system. In fact, the parasitic bosses need workers to survive. Imagine a world where workers make the decisions, without being motivated by wages or profit: communism.
Workers and students must make a life-long commitment to fighting capitalism. They must strive for a communist revolution to have hope of overcoming the injustices they so deeply care about. Marching on May Day on May 2 will help them see that masses share and embrace this egalitarian vision.

NEW YORK CITY, March 30 — The 2015 communist school was like every PLP communist school in that it provided an opportunity to learn from and to teach each other. But this year was special because it may have been our youngest in terms of the ages of those who attended. The school was mostly comprised of elementary, junior, and high school students. We learned the most from these students that weekend.
After hearing a criticism from them about their group’s conversation being too simple, we struggled to improve it, to add to the content and analysis of the group. This goes to show that we should leave no one out of the revolutionary struggle and should not limit our organizing — we need the entire working class. Every worker and youth is able to understand communism. The school was an inspirational event for all (see letters on page 6).
The first night everyone naturally came together in the way only comrades do. And even when an issue arose regarding a certain bourgeois card game which some students were playing — and unsurprisingly had extremely terrible politics — the problem was highlighted, the criticism was made and the students switched to another game which was just as fun. Problem solving with communists is an efficient affair.
The next morning the collective came into action; the breakfast crew woke up before everyone else and made a delicious meal. After that, like clockwork, the cleanup crew tidied up. The communist school is an affirmation of the value of collective living, a small look into what the world we are fighting for might look like.
The first workshop discussed was the basics of capitalism, but in particular the mechanisms of surplus value as well as the ways that bosses divide workers against each other. The group transformed into an envelope factory. Four comrades transformed into envelope workers and the rest of us, save two bosses, were unemployed, watching the terrible game of capitalism unfold. The “bosses” stole the labor value of every worker, exploited all of them and paid back in wages only the smallest percentage of the actual value that was produced. Furthermore the bosses also paid Black and women workers less, refused to pay undocumented workers at all and fired anyone who was dissatisfied with their wage, replacing them with someone from the crowd of unemployed.
After the workshop, which discussed the likeness and difference of slavery and wage slavery, two high school students taught us about the crisis of overproduction. Some important things that arose were that in order for capitalists to survive they must both exploit workers as much as possible and sell as much as possible. The problem for the bosses is that they sell mainly to workers, who are the very ones they exploit and many can’t afford the very products they produce. This leads to a crisis of overproduction, leading to factory closings and mass layoffs.
A concept arising from the discussion that followed was of the redefinition of “necessity.” Capitalists are constantly wasting workers’ creative minds, creating new things for us to waste our money on.  They change how society works around these things in order to make them seem like a necessity. For example, smart phones: they are ridiculously expensive but everyone has one and society has been so tightly wound around their existence that it’s difficult to function without one. Smartphones are made to be indispensable for workers, the bosses design them to break or become obsolete to impel people buy the next model. A larger example of the push to subordinate the working class to the needs of the capitalists: in the 1950s, the rulers built the suburbs and the interstate highway system to make cars an even greater necessity for workers.
After lunch, we went into the more hopeful and inspiring portion of the day: envisioning what communism will look like. We redefined the concepts of family, education, art, culture and the destruction of race and gender roles. We also envision what it would take to defend the revolution. We learned that education would involve everyone, both students and teachers, healthcare will be based on preventative measures and art and culture would be more communal and public. Ultimately the world would be a much more beautiful and collective place; every comrade would take care of each other.
Everyone at this school was reminded of why we’re fighting for communism, why we’ve dedicated our lives to the struggle against capitalism. The liberation of the working class, and the fight for a dictatorship of the proletariat is a fight for a better world, a world that prioritizes human life. This communist school reignited us with an understanding of what we have to overcome and imparted a vision for what the future could hold. We all have something to contribute to the fight against oppression and we all will add to the vision of communism. But it won’t happen unless we unite and fight, so join us and fight for communism!