The civil war in Syria has U.S. rulers in a quandry. They are targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad in line with their perpetual need to secure Middle East oil and gas. Only by limiting arch rival China’s access to energy for its growing economy and military can the U.S. bosses maintain their imperialist advantage.
At the same time, U.S. capitalists are concerned that a Syrian invasion could repeat their fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan — especially in light of U.S. workers’ skepticism and lack of support for the next war for profit. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a national security advisor to Jimmy Carter and other U.S. presidents, told Bloomberg Television that military involvement in Syria would risk “a large-scale disaster for the United States.”
Last August Obama warned Syria it would be crossing “a red line” and inviting U.S. intervention if it used chemical weapons. Amid recent reports that both Assad and his Syrian opposition may have used poison gas (New York Times, 5/6/13), Obama must choose between unpopular military force and a loss of credibility. A lead front-page Times article (5/5/13) said Obama was “reluctant to become entangled in another war in the Middle East, and, well aware that most Americans oppose military action, the president has deliberately not explained what his ‘red line’ actually is.”
Israeli rulers, acting as front men for the U.S., have twice launched air strikes on Syria’s Iranian-supplied missiles, setting their own red line to stop shipments to Israeli enemy Hezbollah, as well as exposing Syria’s weak air defense.
Obama’s promised intervention has his defenders in the liberal media and think tanks claiming that his worries stem from a rare diplomatic mistake on his part. “Off-the-Cuff Obama Line Put U.S. in Bind on Syria,” reads the Times’ May 5 top headline. An op-ed article in the same issue by Brookings Institution director Daniel Byman blames Obama’s lack of planning: “In the Syrian case, the red line on chemical weapons appears to have been issued without a decision as to how we might respond to a Syrian breach.”
Obama’s ‘Blunder’ Or
Service to Finance Capitalists?
But Obama didn’t blunder into his Syrian dilemma. He is boxed in by his subservience to U.S. finance capital. In particular, Obama must protect the interests of ExxonMobil and other energy companies in competition with Chinese and Russian capitalists, who regard Syria as a toehold for their own imperialist interests.
ExxonMobil has hired James Jeffrey, formerly U.S. ambassador to occupied Iraq, to help negotiate huge oil deals with Baghdad (Reuters, 2/8/13). Without acknowledging his Exxon paymasters, Jeffrey wrote an April 27 article for the Washington Post-owned Foreign Policy entitled “Intervention Escalation.” In it, he identified U.S. imperialism’s main global foes in Syria: “Iran, Russia, and China have deep stakes in the preservation of the Assad regime.” Then he highlighted U.S. bosses’ temporary opportunity: “The power balance in Syria’s immediate neighborhood is so tipped in favor of the United States and its friends that there is little China and Russia (or Iran) could do to counter the United States directly.”
In short, the diminished “potential for a Russian, Chinese, or Iranian backlash should not deter Washington from taking necessary military action in Syria,” Jeffrey asserted. Alluding to his Exxon bosses’ hold on Iraqi and Saudi oil fields, he said, “Middle Eastern stability is a key U.S. interest...as is living up to our red line threat on chemical weapons use.”
According to the Exxon mouthpiece, the U.S. war machine is very capable of cashing obama’s check for Syria. He referred to an April 17 report in the Los Angeles Times:
The Pentagon is sending about 200 troops to Jordan, the vanguard of a potential U.S. military force of 20,000 or more that could be deployed if the Obama administration decides to intervene in Syria to secure chemical weapons arsenals or to prevent the 2-year-old civil war from spilling into neighboring nations.
Limits of Military Power
Obama may strike Syria soon. If he doesn’t, it will mean that the U.S. bosses’ longer-term strategists have prevailed. Strategic Forecasting, Inc., an influential policy analysis firm that counts the Pentagon and much of the Fortune 500 as clients, warns on Syria:
Many things are beyond the military power of the United States....You cannot stop a civil war by adding another faction to the war unless that faction brings overwhelming power to bear. The United States has a great deal of power, but not overwhelming power, and overwhelming power’s use means overwhelming casualties. And you cannot transform the political culture of a country from the outside unless you are prepared to devastate it as was done with Germany and Japan.
Regardless of the bosses’ timetable for an attack on Syria, the international working class must prepare for more Middle East oil wars — and potential world wars — as imperialist rivals fight it out for the maximum profits they need to survive. To that end, we must build an international communist party, the Progressive Labor Party. PLP’s sole aim is to organize the destruction of capitalism — with its profits, racism, sexism, mass poverty and unemployment — and to establish a communist society run by and for the working class. This means winning millions of workers, youth and soldiers to communist revolution.

CHICAGO, March 27 — PLP marched with teachers, students, parents and workers to stop school closings and the layoffs of 2,000 teachers. We brought a message that only communism can give our children a real future.
In late March, the Chicago School Board announced that 61 schools would be closed before the opening of the 2013-2014 school year. Most are located in black and Latino neighborhoods of the South and West sides of the city. These racist attacks will hurt black, white, Asian and Latino working-class students. When confronted about these racist closings, the Chicago school CEO stated: “It’s not racist to close schools in those neighborhoods.”
PLP has repeatedly warned of the coming wars to decide which imperialists will control the world. The U.S. ruling class will use its state power to mobilize the population for war. Squeezed by imperialist rivalries, the bosses are only interested in educating black, Latino and white working-class youth for this purpose.
U.S. rulers are trying to seize the opportunity created by the right-wing “education reform movement.” The
reformers have successfully mobilized some parents and others to attack unionized public school teachers, demanded the use of standardized tests for data-driven evaluations of teachers, and popularized the call for more charter schools and corporate privatizing of education. They are calling on state governments to institute a “common core curriculum,” which will emphasize regimentation and loyalty to the state.
Under capitalism, co-locations create smaller schools inside old school buildings, dividing students, parents, and teachers from one another and weakening their ability to organize.  School closings are the order of the day for thousands of black, Latino, Asian, immigrant and white working-class children nationwide. These attacks will continue because the bosses need working-class youth to be the foot soldiers in their continuing wars, as well as low-paid workers or part of the reserve pool of unemployed workers. We will continue to bring the message of communist revolution to students, workers and soldiers in Chicago and all over the world. Capitalism is a rotten system that will be destroyed by the masses led by the PLP.


AL-ARAQEEB, April 20 — A group of Jewish women and a PL’er met with the women of this “unrecognized” Bedouin village to show solidarity with their struggle against the government’s moves to uproot them and steal their land. Most outsiders talk only with the men here, but we needed to hear the village’s women as well. The meeting was initiated by the “Unrecognized Village Team” of the broad left Tarabut movement.
Last week, “the only democracy in the Middle East,” as Israel likes to present itself, demolished Al-Araqeeb for the 49th time since the summer of 2010. This vicious policy exposes Israel as a racist state that serves Israeli and U.S. capitalists, never the working-class residents of Israel-Palestine.
 Under the colonialist Prawer Plan, the Israeli government can evict Bedouins who live in “unrecognized villages” and grab their land. In these villages, the state denies the residents water, electricity, telephone, medical and educational services. All of these communities are Bedouin; no Jewish settlement goes unrecognized by the Israeli bosses. The government routinely funds the moshavim and kibbutzim, the individually or collectively owned farms settled by Jews. One government ploy is to grab Bedouin land by planting Jewish National Fund (JNF) forests on it. Every dollar people give to this Zionist organization is a dollar for theft and demolition.
In 2000, the Israeli rulers established the Ministry for the Development of the Negev (southern Israel-Palestine) and the Galilee (northern Israel-Palestine). Under Shimon Peres (now president of Israel and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize), the Ministry created Givot Bar, a settlement exclusively for wealthy Jews, on lands belonging to Al-Araqeeb.
The Bedouin residents of Al-Araqeeb hold legal title to 115 acres. The village once had a population of nearly six hundred, and none were unemployed. As in East Jerusalem, they paid taxes to the government and got nothing in return. This is the bosses’ method to pressure residents to leave for “planned” towns, the Israeli equivalent of reservations for Native Americans.
In July 2010, the village was demolished for the first time. The Israeli rulers’ media described this act of state terror as though it were a wartime operation in the occupied West Bank. Later, during the winter, the village was demolished five times in a single week. The cops ordered residents to move to a nearby cemetery to smooth the way for the land grab.
In protest, residents are holding a protest vigil. They are struggling to hang on to their ancestral land despite the violence of the U.S. real estate tycoons and the Israeli government at their service. It is important to note that the Bedouins are fighting the state’s racist, divide-and-conquer policy, not Jewish workers.
The destruction of Al-Araqeeb is part of an accelerated plan of evictions and theft of Bedouin lands in southern Israel-Palestine. Last year, the state ratified the “Law for the Management of the Bedouin Settlement of the Negev,” which expands the Prawer Plan. Its goal is to evict 30,000 Bedouin workers from their lands and force them into “planned” towns where the unemployment rate ranges up to nearly 50 percent and crime and drugs abound. Objections filed by Bedouin groups and Amnesty International failed to turn back this racist law.
Billionaire Ronald Lauder, heir to the U.S. Estee Lauder cosmetics empire, is the biggest donor to the JNF and president of the World Jewish Congress. While he fattens his profits, his servants in the JNF, the Israeli police and the Israel Lands Administration destroy Bedouin crops and evict Bedouin workers to clear their lands for luxury Jewish settlements.
The Progressive Labor Party has joined this fight against the Israeli state and U.S. real estate moguls. We fight for working-class rule, where each and every worker, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, creed or sex, will have equal rights. Under communism, all workers Bedouin, Jewish, and Arab alike — will share in the bounty produced by society.

WASHINGTON, DC, April 20 — More than two hundred people gathered at Howard University to build the fight against the racist U.S. injustice system, which jails black and Latino people far out of proportion to their numbers in the population.
Organized by the Howard University chapter of Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI), the two-day national conference gathered people from five other campus chapters. Students and friends from the community joined to learn, debate, and plan actions against the abusive, racist prison system.  Progressive Labor Party members distributed more than 200 CHALLENGEs and called on people to join the May Day march in New York.
Conference organizers sponsored a Friday night movie on the refugee camps in Palestine, which are essentially open-air prisons for tens of thousands of Palestinians expelled from Israel over the last 65 years. This event underlined the importance of international solidarity in the struggle against global oppression. Other sessions focused on political prisoners who continue to resist injustice behind prison walls. 
Participants raised several ideas for action. First, confront college administrations that refuse to hire former prisoners or to admit them as students. Second, demand that universities break their ties to corporations that make millions in profits by exploiting prisoners. Third, build solidarity by supporting incarcerated individuals. As SAMI launches these struggles, the ruling class’s racist plans will be sharply challenged.
Prisons are racist institutions that neither improve society nor keep workers safe. They’re part of the bosses’ strategy to divide, terrorize, and exploit the working class. As super-exploited workers, prisoners are a key source of profits for the ruling class. Smashing capitalism and abolishing anti-working-class prisons go hand in hand. 
SAMI’s main weakness is its nationalist outlook. The group defines itself as a black radical student organization and requires each chapter’s leadership to be black. But nationalism limits the effectiveness of the struggle against mass incarceration and capitalism. Smashing the profit system will require multi-racial unity in intense struggle against the capitalist rulers. When organizations focus exclusively on a single “race” or group within the working class, it weakens our solidarity.
PLP is building a revolutionary communist party that fights for black, Latino, and Asian workers and students to be leading forces in a multiracial fight to destroy capitalism and its prisons. As the struggle grows, students are learning that strength comes from unity. In one of the SAMI workshops, a woman looked at some PL’ers and friends, a group of Latino and South Asian students from New York, and asked, “What are you here for?”
One comrade replied, “Most of us come from Brooklyn where two black youth, Kiki Gray and Shantel Davis, were murdered by the cops. The night of Kiki’s vigil, high school students began a powerful rebellion. They took the streets and fought the cops. We are part of that and want to build unity. That’s one of the reasons we’re here.”
People nodded in agreement and were receptive to CHALLENGE and its front-page headline, “NYPD: Wanted for Racist Murder.”
The rest of the day was devoted to performances and panels commemorating the struggles against racism and honoring a legacy of black fighters like Nelson Mandela — more evidence of the problems posed by nationalism. Once his forces seized state power, Mandela ushered modern capitalism into South Africa under a new set of black bosses. He betrayed the working class.
As communists, we need to ask where racism comes from. While it is disseminated in all aspects of society, the ruling class created racism and the phony concept of race to justify the super-exploitation of black workers and to prevent our class from uniting. We must work with people based on their politics and commitment, not their color. To do otherwise is to let the bosses win.
Students at the conference called for justice, liberation and revolution. What do these words mean? How do we organize for revolution, and what happens after the working class seizes state power? These questions were not addressed by SAMI. What black students — and all students — need is a communist party. PLP has a long-term strategy and solution for the international working class.