Reprint of a 2001 CHALLENGE Editorial

The New York Times (9/14/01) published an extensive article by Middle East expert Judith Miller, titled "Bin Laden: Child of Privilege Who Champions Holy War." While it is no secret that Bin Laden was a creature of the U.S. intelligence services, Ms. Miller merely smoothes it over by saying, "…the U.S. had worked ‘alongside’ him to help oust the Russians from Afghanistan…" The U.S. "work" poured in $2 billion!

If anyone is to blame for the terrorist activities of Bin Laden, it’s the CIA.

Why are bin Laden and the U.S. bosses now enemies? Although the present conflict is posed as a "holy war," it is basically for control of the oil wealth of Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden represents a section of the Saudi ruling class (from which he comes) that does not want to share this oil with Exxon-Mobil. U.S. bosses know if they lose Saudi Arabia after having lost Iraq, they won’t control the biggest oil producers of the cheapest oil in the world. Without it, U.S. imperialist supremacy is in serious question. Bush’s "holy war"for oil is likely to wind up with hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

CIA Trained bin Laden to Wage Anti-Communist Holy War

In 1979, bin Laden, who inherited a personal $300 million fortune from his father (a construction boss billionaire), decided to abandon his former life of luxury and dedicate himself to fight communism. When the Soviet army entered Afghanistan to support a pro-Moscow government there, bin Laden was recruited by the CIA to become the financier of the anti-Soviet "holy war." In 1986, William Casey, CIA chief under Reagan-Bush Sr., approved an old proposal by the Pakistani intelligence services to recruit Islamic fundamentalists worldwide to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

While the Pakistanis did the recruiting, Saudi Arabia provided money and the U.S. gave political support and "funneled more than $2 billion in guns and money…during the 1980s. It was the largest covert action program since World War II (Washington Post, 7/19/92). Soon, 35,000 fundamentalists came to fight alongside the Afghani holy warriors. Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo III (1988) was based on this CIA vision of the world: then the "good" guys were the bin Laden "holy warriors" types fighting the "evil communist" Soviet empire.

Bin Laden and his followers learned all their tricks from the master terrorists: the CIA. "It was the CIA which taught him how to be bold…It was also the CIA which taught him the tricks of a secret war: how to move money around using ghost companies and off shore fiscal paradises, how to prepare explosives, how to use coded messages to communicate with his agents and avoid detection, how to retreat into a safe base after a big blow to the enemy…"(El Pais, Madrid, 9/14).

Soon after the Soviet Army left Afghanistan and the Soviet Union itself imploded, the U.S. and its Pakistani allies began supporting the most backward of all the holy warriors, the Taliban. The Pakistani intelligence services financed all of this by smuggling opium and heroin from Afghanistan. In 1991, when the U.S. led an imperialist coalition against Iraq, and U.S. troops were stationed in the Moslem "holy land" of Saudi Arabia, the fundamentalists united against the new "evil empire," their old friends in the U.S. Bin Laden joined forces with other fundamentalist forces like Islamic Jihad of Egypt who had murdered Anwar Sadat, considered a lackey of the U.S. and Israel. These forces represent a section of the Middle Eastern ruling classes which use religion to cover their desire not to share the oil wealth with U.S, imperialism/Exxon-Mobil.

But even while bin Laden has become the number one bad guy on the U.S. hit list, some of his followers are still serving U.S. bosses. Last April, Secy. of State Colin Powell approved $43 million in "humanitarian" aid for the Taleban. Furthermore, many of the veterans of the Afghan "holy war" were fighting alongside the U.S.-supported Kosovo-Albanian "freedom fighters" during the 1999 air war against the former Yugoslavia. And more recently, some have fought with the Albanian forces against the government of Macedonia.

Again, when one talks about terrorism, don’t lose sight of the big ones: U.S. imperialism and its CIA. And don’t lose sight of what is behind the "holy war" between bin Laden and the U.S. bosses: control of oil profits.

MAY DAY 2011

Los Angeles: Sunday, May 1^st at 11:00am

W 12^th street and W Broadway  

San Francisco: Sunday, May 1st at 11:00am

24th  Street and Mission St

New York City: Sunday, May 1^st, 2011 at 12:00 PM

Chatham Square (intersection of Bowery and Park Row)

Chicago: Sunday, May 1^st, at 2:30pm

Union Park (intersection of Lake St And Ashland Ave)

PLP Must Spark Revolutionary Opportunities from Crisis Hitting the Working Class

May Day is the day the international working class reviews its forces, assesses the struggles over the past year and marks the beginning of a new year of struggle against the dictatorship of the capitalist class. The international working class faces its worst crisis in decades, but within every crisis is an opportunity. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is using it to unite the working class to smash racism, sexism and nationalism with communist revolution.

PLP has mantained the tradition of marching on May Day and calling for the dictatorship of the proletariat (working class)  for 40 years, since 1971, picking the red flag up out of the mud where it was dropped by revisionists — fake “communists” — who abandoned the fight for revolution. Despite weaknesses, PLP is in motion, leading and participating in struggles around the world.

Fighting Racism Is A Key Struggle

Racism is capitalism’s lifeline because it is both the source of super-profits and the primary weapon against the international working class. Racism, along with its twin — nationalism (advocating unity of all classes in subjection to the bosses’ flag) — divides and pacifies our class from unity.

 Anti-immigrant racism is the cutting edge of racism today. Bosses worldwide hope to build nationalist loyalty among workers to fight their imperialist wars while simultaneously building anti-immigrant racism.  This intimidates both “legal” and “undocumented” workers into passivity.

Capitalists worldwide use racist immigration laws to do this. In the U.S., workers from Latin America are mainly targeted; in France, workers from northern Africa; in Germany, workers from Turkey; in China, workers from Southeast Asia. In many countries, Muslim and Arab workers are also especially terrorized. In an address to members of the German Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU) on October 17th, 2010, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared the German “experiment in multiculturalism” had “utterly failed,” stating non-Germans, particularly Arabs and Muslims, were incapable of living “side-by-side” with the German people.

In the U.S. — a country where 2.6 million, 70% black and Latino workers, are in prison and where Obama’s election supposedly signaled a “post-racial” era — Obama set a record-breaking goal of deporting 400,000 immigrant workers in 2011. He plans to deport up to 700,000 workers per year by 2013. In the state of Arizona, the government passed the fascist law SB 1070, requiring workers to carry documentation proving U.S. residency at all times, and to immediately show them when asked by police.

In response, PL’ers from Los Angeles joined bus caravans to Arizona organized by their labor unions and carried red flags to the Arizona state capitol. Distributing CHALLENGE, PL’ers placed the debate on immigration within the context of the needs of U.S. imperialism, while exposing the liberal bosses’ DREAM Act trap as a disguised military draft.

Capitalists and their politicians, like Merkel and Obama, punish immigrant workers with deportations, but it is their system that creates the conditions forcing workers to roam the globe for work. Workers in Africa have few other options after 400 years of European imperialist-led theft and enslavement of the African continent through privatization of land and resources. This includes the devastating modern-day U.S., European and Chinese imperialist-funded civil wars. Globalization means investments and the bosses that control them are free to travel throughout the world seeking markets, resources, and more workers to exploit for profit.

Only the international working class is bound within national borders, and this is why the Progressive Labor Party is building one international Party and raises the slogan, “smash all borders, workers of the world unite.”

Elections Are No Way Out

Capitalism has always presented workers with crisis and imperialist war for profit, and the working class has always heroically fought back. Today, millions march and strike around the globe against being forced to pay again for another capitalist crisis. But most workers are still limited by reformist ideas: they still believe in some or all of whatever future changes that liberal bosses and political misleaders promise.

In the U.S., “anti-war” president Obama’s famous election slogan “change” has meant continuing the Exxon-backed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; expanding the wars against workers in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, as well as against workers in the United States. Reformists like Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, or the FMLN in El Salvador have not served the working class. The FMLN, the current governing party, betrayed the guerilla army which waged a bloody civil war  in the 1980s against fascist U.S.-backed death squads.

Despite all their talk, the reformers are servants to one or another group of capitalists. Elections are no way out. Fighting in the day-to-day class struggle, raising communist politics, and expanding CHALLENGE networks, the Progressive Labor Party is gradually building a revolutionary mass party that will lead the working class off of the reformist treadmill.

Dangers and Opportunities Amid Crisis and War

Following the October Revolution in Russia, the first victorious communist-led revolution, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote:

“Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries. And this ‘booty’ is shared between two or three powerful world plunderers armed to the teeth, who draw the whole world into their war over the division of their booty....Imperialism is the eve of social revolution of the working class. This has been confirmed since 1917 on a world-wide scale.” (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Preface to the French and German editions, 1920)

World War I ended with the victory of the Bolsheviks, who built the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. Twenty years later, the Soviet-led international working class smashed the Nazi war of annihilation in World War II, which was followed in 1949 by the victory of the Chinese revolution over U.S. backed Chinese fascists. 

Both world wars began as imperialist wars costing tens of millions of lives, but they ended in class wars for revolution that inflamed revolutionary upsurges and class struggles around the world. The Progressive Labor Party was born out of these struggles, learning from the fatal political errors and reversals of the old communist movement, which fought for socialism. It carried capitalist baggage, leading back to a full-blown profit system.

The rival imperialist bosses in the U.S., Europe, Russia and China will inevitably clash again in world war — but PLP raises the red banners of working-class internationalism to win millions of workers, students, and soldiers to our Party, that can turn the looming imperialist World War III into a revolutionary war for communism.

On May 1st, workers around the world celebrate the working class’ only real holiday — May Day. A long march is ahead, but joining the Progressive Labor Party means building a mass fighting party in over 20 countries and counting, to free our class from the nightmare of capitalism. JOIN US!

U.S. imperialism needs to control militarily whatever it can of the world’s energy supplies. This hard fact underlies U.S. rulers’ selective response to uprisings and crackdowns across North Africa and the Middle East, and enables us to make sense of these responses.

Libya contains 42 billion barrels of oil and over 1.3 trillion cubic meters of gas. Testifying before the Senate on April 6, Richard Haass, president of the Rockefeller think-tank Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) representing the dominant wing of U.S. capitalists, said: “U.S. interests in Libya simply do not warrant such an investment [of ground war]…” But nevertheless, Libya’s oil and gas resources do make it worth killing Libyans from the air — invoking a phony “responsibility to protect” Libyan citizens — while saving U.S. resources for strategically more important areas.

Meanwhile, hypocrite-in-chief Obama stands by as Syrian ruler Assad slaughters protesters — even mourners — since that country possesses little oil and gas. U.S. imperialism’s top oil source, Saudi Arabia, holds a hundred times more crude than Syria. So, when demonstrations in neighboring Bahrain — where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed — threatened to spill over the Saudi border, Obama, instead of “protection,” saw a “responsibility to suppress.” The invading Saudi troops that shot Bahraini protesters got a White House green light.

Main U.S. Bosses Favor All-out Gulf War and/or World War over Ground Strikes at Individual Foes

The Israel Lobby in the U.S. (ignoring Israeli massacres of workers in Palestine) howls at Obama’s “shameful U.S. inaction on Syria’s massacres.” (Washington Post editorial, 4/22): “It [Syria] is Iran’s closest ally; it supplies Iranian weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip for use against Israel.”

However, Exxon Mobil-JP Morgan Chase, the dominant wing of U.S. capitalists — whom Obama strives to serve — keeps its eyes on the Saudi grand prize. New York Times scribe and CFR member David Sanger explained: “The Europeans, and some of Mr. Obama’s political opponents at home, sense a lack of commitment. Inside the White House, the opposite argument is made — that after a bruising decade of misadventures, the United States is preserving American power for the moments when truly vital interests need to be protected.” (NY Times, 4/24)

In 1980, following Exxon’s ouster from oil-rich Iran, Democrat U.S. president Jimmy Carter declared access to Persian Gulf oil and gas as being a supreme U.S. “vital interest,” to be defended or regained “by military force.”

In his April 6 Senate testimony, CFR president Haass clarified the main wing’s focus on gearing up for conflict throughout the entire Gulf and with North Korea and China: “Far more important than Libya for U.S. interests in the region are Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, and Iran. The United States also needs to reserve resources for other parts of the world (the Korean Peninsula comes to mind), for possible wars of necessity, for military modernization central to our [U.S. rulers’] position in the Pacific.” Even as they hold oil profits and control of supplies above all else, U.S. rulers’ power has limits.

The only thing holding Obama back from putting GI boots on Libyan soil, or attacking Syria, is not moral scruples, but his ruling-class masters’ need for larger wars. Haass named Syria only in the context of a general Gulf land invasion by U.S. forces.

Obama-McCain-Rockefeller
Imperialists ‘Protect’ Libyan Workers By Bombing Them

War criminal and major strategist Anthony Cordesman, who now toils for the Rockefeller-funded Center for Strategic and International Studies after decades at the Pentagon said: “France, Britain, the U.S. and other participating members of the [NATO] Coalition need to shift to the kind of bombing campaign that targets and hunts down Qaddafi’s military and security forces....Qaddafi, his extended family, and his key supporters need to be targeted for their attacks on Libyan civilians, even if they are colocated in civilian areas....This kind of operation cannot be ‘surgical’ — if ‘surgical’ now means minimizing bloodshed.” (CSIS website, 4/20)

Obama’s bosses intend to “protect” Libyan workers from Qaddafi by blowing them to bits. Cordesman wrote on the eve of a visit to Libyan rebels by John McCain, whom he advises. McCain’s trip had two related goals: boosting U.S. imperialist interventionism and discrediting isolationist GOP Tea Partiers, who obstruct the Rocekefeller-led rulers’ agenda.

Big Oil & Qaddafi Hedge Their Bets, Value Profits over Workers’ Lives

Qaddafi is still holding on despite the imperialists’ willingness to launch more intense air strikes — including U.S. predator drones. The Libyan dictator is hedging his bets, possibly hoping to make a deal with his enemies, with whom he’s been making deals for decades.

Exxon & Co.’s owners know that air raids (unless nuclear ones, which don’t seem worth it here) seldom turn the tide, as proven in Vietnam. So, with Joint Chiefs of Staff boss Mike Mullen talking of a stalemate in Libya, U.S. rulers, allied imperialists and Big Oil are also hedging their bets there. As Businessweek magazine reported weeks into the “allied” campaign (4/14), “Most foreign companies are not taking sides. That appears to be particularly true of the U.S. companies, among them Marathon Oil, ConocoPhillips and Hess.”

Oil Bosses Plan An October Meeting with Qaddafi

Exxon, British Shell and BP more brazenly remain number-one sponsors of Qaddafi’s National Oil Company’s scheduled October 2011 investor conference in Tripoli. And even as NATO bombs rain down on his compound, the equally-opportunist, profit-hungry Qaddafi entices Western firms: “Only 25% of Libya’s surface territory [has been] explored to date.” (oilandgaslibya.com)

Some see in the latest revolts a promise of liberation. Such potential may very well exist whenever masses risk their livelihoods and lives to mobilize against the rulers. But without a class-conscious, revolutionary outlook and a working-class army led by a working-class party to fight for it, more profit wars and exploitation are inevitable. The “Arab Spring” is a signal to keep rebuilding the international communist movement led by PLP.

All this means communists and our militant supporters must intensify the spread of our internationalist line, in every mass organization to which we belong — as is happening in shops and unions, among GI’s, in schools and colleges, community groups and churches. From Colombia to Palestine, Mexico to Haiti, Pakistan to El Salvador, the U.S. to Portugal, we must expose capitalism’s inherent exploitation and lead class struggle against it until communist-led revolutionary forces can bury capitalism and establish a society based on workers’ rule for workers’ needs.