In many ways, U.S. imperialism is already at war with Iran.  Assassinations and cyber-attacks by the U.S. lapdog Israel, sabotage and incursions, sanctions that can be more devastating than physical attacks — all of this has been going on for years.  

The debate in the U.S. ruling class is not whether, but how to step up this war.  There are three main camps, both in Washington and in Tel Aviv:

Assassination, a Weapon of Choice?

1. Step up the clandestine war.  Meir Dagan, the former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, says there is no need to bomb Iran. What he’s really saying is: We spies can solve the problem by assassinating Iranian scientists and messing up Iran’s computers.  This camp calculates that massive bombing risks provoking a nationalist “rally-around-the-flag” response, along with international sympathy for Iran.  So clandestine war is the first choice.  But the issue is: Will that slow down Iran enough?  Iran’s fascist regime has been working on a bomb for 23 years, and they still are not there.  But they are getting closer.

2. Work to overthrow the clerical fascists.  This camp argues that Iran’s nuclear issue is only one of many threats from that country.  Iran has also sponsored Hezbollah, which has built an impressive missile arsenal to threaten Israel. It has also been active in Iraq, encouraging those who would pull down the democratic façade the U.S. created and replace it with a new dictatorship like Saddam Hussein’s — except this time run by a different faction of the Iraqi ruling class (the Shia instead of the Sunni).  So this camp advocates regime change, which means overthrowing the Islamic Republic.  

Iranian workers, professionals, and many capitalists hate the Islamic Republic, a backward, religious, fascist regime.  Ordinary Iranians want to join the world. They want to use the internet, hold hands in public, watch Western TV and movies, and wear reasonable clothes in place of the chador. As a result, some U.S. and Israeli bosses support regime change.  They calculate that the Iranian people may rise up to overthrow the detested Islamic clerics, an uprising that could happen as quickly and unexpectedly as the recent regime change in Libya and Egypt. Unfortunately, the result will probably follow those two countries’ as well. Another faction of capitalists will take over from the Islamist fascists.

3. Bomb Iran. This is a risky step.  It could backfire on U.S. imperialism or bring great rewards.  The Saudis and other Gulf monarchies are urging the U.S. to act, but they would be the first to criticize if the action failed to go well.  The Iranian ruling class makes all kinds of threats about what they would do if attacked, but they have a long track record of not responding if their only options are poor ones.  An attack on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, for example, would anger oil-importing countries like China that would otherwise sit on the sidelines.  

The most likely scenario is the first one, with U.S. imperialism stepping up the pressure and the Iranian fascists escalating their response.  That is a recipe for starting a bigger war. Iran’s ruling class appears to have convinced itself that the United States is a paper tiger that talks tough but does nothing — a dangerous illusion.  

Three Imperialist Wars Too Many?

In recent years, U.S. rulers have ignored provocations from Iran because they’ve been tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington did not want to take on another imperialist war while it was losing two others.  Now that the U.S. military has mostly exited Iraq, there may be less patience with Iran.  Standing up to Iran is one issue that unites the often bitterly divided U.S. ruling class. The Senate approved a recent law increasing sanctions on Iran by a vote of 100 to zero. In short, 2012 may be the year for a dramatic escalation of the ongoing U.S.-Iran war.  Israel may attack.  A broader war may be brewing.  

In that event, our communist position is: to hell with both of you.  We have no sympathy for either U.S. imperialism or for the clerical fascists in Iran. The only victory for the working class would be for us to use the war to win broad masses of workers for  communist revolution, in Iran, the United States and the world.

 Over several years, myself and other PLP members have been organizing among local transit workers to fight the transit bosses and build PLP. One particular transit worker, Jessica, has become closer to the Party.

Now, after nearly two years of shared discussions and actions, Jessica said she sees the need for a serious long-term, radical, transit rank-and-file study/action group.

Jessica and I attempted to organize a job action group. But when our campaign began this past summer, Jessica threw her energy into an Occupy anti-budget-cut campout led by liberal community groups and phony “leftists.” She thought the campout would “wake up” the whole city. The month-long campout got little media coverage past day one and none of it made front-page or top-of-the-hour coverage. Slowly the campout died out and the city passed the budget cuts.

Throughout all this Jessica stopped organizing for our rank-and-file job action group. Advancing little on my own, I stopped too. Many workers said verbally they would support job actions but in practice most were very cynical about organizing collectively to pull off slowdowns.

I had thought there was enough support for job actions to form a group in which I could spread CHALLENGE and raise the Party. Slowly I realized that a PLP comrade’s advice had been right all along:  communist ideas would help build a base for collective job actions and strikes, not the other way around.

When the Occupy movement grew, the Party decided I should spend more time there, where I ran into Jessica. To the surprise of both of us, Occupy did wake up many people, or at least opened them to discuss revolutionary ideas.  But Jessica also noticed that the media and ruling class supported OWS much more than the summer anti-budget-cut campout. The cops harassed and fined the month-long pre-OWS occupation repeatedly but with little mainstream media coverage. Somehow OWS, which initially was not much bigger than the budget-cut campout, was a front-page top-of-the-news-hour story.

A Democratic Tea Party?

I shared the Party’s analysis with Jessica, that U.S. Democrats wanted OWS to be a Democratic tea party. She agreed and said she was waiting for Obama to jump out from behind a curtain and tell Occupiers, “Gotcha!” We agreed that OWS was an important opportunity to raise militant ideas. She and I have met George, a fellow transit worker, at Occupy. But we both felt that without revolutionaries getting involved, OWS would lead to Obama’s re-election campaign or cynicism.

The Party decided we should pursue a transit study group more seriously. A comrade, Mikey, recently started working in transit. Two old friends of the Party have also recently contacted us and said they want to attend Party meetings about transit.

Mikey, Jessica and I formed a study group in late December. We noted how important correct ideas were. The last transit strike led many transit workers to cynical and reactionary ideas, not to revolutionary or even militant ones. We also discussed the basis of the study group: revolutionary communist ideas or just militant trade unionism?

Jessica agreed revolutionary ideas were important but feared driving people away. She thought the group would be too small if communism was all we talked about. I argued that it was important not to hide communist ideas and that, no matter how hard it was to challenge anti-communism among our co-workers, there’s no other way communists can build a communist movement. If we pretended we were only about militant trade unionism, workers would smell BS because the union hacks have all spit out the same militant trade union lines and then sell out.

‘Be Real About Revolution’

Jessica was still concerned how we would approach communism and the Party. But she agreed it was important to be real with people about studying revolutionary communist ideas. Otherwise other fellow transit worker activists would be driven away by the same hollow trade union rhetoric that the hacks spew.

We decided that for now we would begin the study group with non-Party readings that would enable us to raise communist ideas. Most importantly we each discussed who we would invite to the next study group, making sure to cast a wide net. In January our transit contract expired, although the union “leaders” agreed to continue negotiations. We will have the second meeting of a PLP transit study/action group. Hopefully, and with effort, it will be bigger than the first. The struggle continues.

“I think I want to join the Progressive Labor Party.”

That was how a teacher introduced herself to me after a workshop at last week’s anti-UFT union conference. The workshop was about how to build a union chapter in schools. A veteran comrade spoke about being in PLP and about the need to fight the bosses every opportunity we get. He said that we should all consider ourselves lucky to be able to dedicate our lives to fighting back.

I said I was a member of PLP and described some of the struggles we had been involved in to fight the racist bosses and their UFT lackeys. I mentioned the union’s delegate meeting where I helped unfurl a banner that attacked the union leadership for not fighting the racist budget cuts. We were kicked out of that meeting by the union’s security and then called terrorists by Randi Weingarten, the leader of the UFT at that time. Hundreds of delegates booed her and forced her to apologize. 

That was a positive action, mainly because we forced the bosses to show their true colors. The lesson I took from this conference is that we have to be bold about telling people that we are members of the communist PLP. If we don’t, we will miss countless opportunities to meet workers ready to join our movement!

Red teacher 

The Occupy Wall Street Movement and opposition caucuses organized a conference to bring together teachers and students who are angry at capitalism’s many attacks on education. The conference took place in The Center for Worker Education and PLP members did their best to give the participants a communist education. PL students and teachers were very vocal in the conference’s many different discussion groups.  

The unionists, liberals, and well-meaning workers all looked to the union, a pawn of capitalist rulers, to fight racism and create an education system that could meet the needs of the working class. They are ultimately wrong since education under capitalism must serve the bosses’ needs, which conflict with the needs of the working class. The ruling class needs a patriotic, loyal working class to passively accept its attacks and fight its imperialist wars, so it can remain the world’s superpower. Workers’ need a society where we make all of the decisions based on our needs to develop as full human beings collectively. That is communism.

Union Helps Resegregate Schools

One participant pointed out that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) was actually a backlash against integration in the ‘60’s and is now helping to resegregate the schools. Unions walk the contradiction of appearing to fight the bosses while selling out the workers.   

The need to fight racism was brought up continually throughout the conference. A PL’er pointed out that contemporary racism isn’t about who perpetuated the action, but who is affected by the outcome. He said the bosses love to use puppets like Obama to carry out their racist attacks on the working class. The Party brought up the need to fight racism through multi-racial unity in opposition to fragmented forms of black or Latino nationalism or the Community Control of a People’s Board of Education that pushed the poison of multi-class unity.  

A PL’er also reviewed the history of the UFT. Agreeing with another speaker who challenged the anti-communist attack on the USSR, he said that without the Soviet Union, the working class had lost its beacon at the time when the Soviets were leaders of the international working class. He also pointed out that the union is made up of workers. “Look around” he said, “You’re all workers and you’re here.” Workers’ power is needed to confront the UFT misleaders at the next delegate assembly and create a wildcat strike on the next professional development day (when only teachers come to school). These types of actions are needed to learn how to fight the bosses as a class. They also provide more opportunities to expose the bosses’ democracy sham, when they use the cops and courts to attack workers’ struggles.

School with No Books

One participant taught in a Bronx school that claimed to be a college prep academy, yet it had no books. She is a technology teacher, but they had closed the computer labs for three years because three computers were stolen. The administration said that books were old and passé and that students should use the Internet instead, while keeping the computer lab closed. Only under capitalism could this kind of racist hypocrisy exist.

Such conferences create the opportunity for Party growth. As we participate in them, we can struggle to advance our communist politics. A new anti-racist caucus was established there, but we have to be in it to win it. We need to struggle with those workers around us to go to conferences like this and bring the need to struggle back to our workplaces. No union will liberate us from capitalism, let alone an anti-racist caucus in a union that’s playing ostrich. Only building the PLP to fight the wholesale attack on our class’s education will eventually give the working class the learning that it really needs.