U.S.-Russia-Iran conflict brewing in Middle East
AP News, 7/14–The U.S. is beefing up its use of fighter jets around the strategic Strait of Hormuz to protect ships from Iranian seizures, a senior defense official said Friday, adding that the U.S. is increasingly concerned about the growing ties between Iran, Russia and Syria across the Middle East. Speaking to Pentagon reporters, the official said the U.S. will send F-16 fighter jets to the Gulf region this weekend to augment the A-10 attack aircraft that have been patrolling there…after Iran tried to seize two oil tankers near the strait last week, opening fire on one of them…the defense official told reporters the U.S. is considering a number of military options to address increasing Russian aggression in the skies over Syria, which complicated efforts to strike an Islamic State group leader last weekend. The official…said the U.S. will not cede any territory and will continue to fly in the western part of the country on anti-Islamic State missions.

China makes moves in Argentina
Al Jazeera,7/17–Massa, who recently announced his bid for president in this year’s election, met with a wide slate of government and business leaders, securing $3.05bn from Chinese institutions to finance railways, power lines, lithium projects and renewable energy in Argentina…But perhaps the announcement of most consequence came around the currency swap line between the two countries – a yuan lifeline…to the beleaguered Latin American economy, which is seeking more financial room to maneuver. There were a lot of thumbs-up signs from Argentine Economy Minister Sergio Massa on a recent trip to Beijing.

These growing ties have not gone unnoticed by the United States, the traditionally dominant player in the region, which has seen its influence on its so-called back-yard slip. In response, the US has sought to exert pressure on Argentina to rein in its ties with China, advocating privately, and in some cases publicly, against certain projects.

Racist kkkops in U.S. France
New York Times, 7/17–Years before France was inflamed with anger at the police killing of a teenager during a traffic stop, there was the notorious Théo Luhaka case. Mr. Luhaka…was …in his housing project in a Paris suburb in 2017 when the police swept in to conduct identity checks. Mr. Luhaka was wrestled to the ground by three police officers, who hit him repeatedly and sprayed tear gas in his face. When it was over, he was bleeding from a four-inch tear in his rectum, caused by one of the officers’ expandable batons.

Calls to overhaul the police go back at least four decades to when thousands of young people of color marched for months in 1983 from Marseille to Paris, over 400 miles, after an officer shot a young community leader of Algerian descent…Last month, after the police shooting of Mr. Merzouk, Alliance and another police union announced that they were at war with the rioters, whom they deemed “vermins” and “savage hordes.”

Israeli and Palestinian fascists fight on by killing Palestinian workers
The Guardian, 7/17–On the street in central Gaza City where the family of Khalil al-Bahtini lived, the contents of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander’s home and the two houses on either side remain spilled out into the street…The GBU-39 bomb that crashed through three floors of the Bahtini home, down into the basement, also blew apart one side of the Adas’s house, killing the family’s two teenage daughters. Dania, 19, died immediately, while her sister, Imam, 17, clung to life for two hours before succumbing to her injuries in hospital…The assassinations, which came during a ceasefire, led Islamic Jihad to respond with almost 1,500 rockets fired towards Israel over the course of five days…The violence left 33 people in Gaza dead, including at least 10 women and children, and, according to Palestinian officials, 103 homes were destroyed and a further 2,800 damaged.

The Progressive Labor Party in Haiti takes this opportunity to greet our comrades on the occasion of the PLP convention this month. We would like to be there with you, discussing the way we can build our Party into a fighting force for communist revolution, and building the PLP’s influence in the working class and among students and soldiers around the world. However, the phony borders erected by the capitalists around the world have prevented us from sending representatives to our Party’s gathering. We know that one day, those borders will be smashed, and workers will be able to move freely around the world, based on the needs of our class and our Party.

The short-lived mutiny of a Russian mercenary highlights the growing volatility and sharpening threat of fascism and world war as rival imperialists compete for global supremacy. On June 23, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his state-funded Wagner Group rebelled against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military leadership, seizing the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and advancing within 120 miles of Moscow. While many details are still unknown, Prigozhin’s plan clearly backfired. With no backing from within the government or military, or mass support from soldiers or workers, the rebellion ended in failure within 24 hours.

Even so, the instability shown by Prigozhin’s mutiny is driven by the same crisis of capitalism that’s pushing the gangster imperialists ruling the U.S., Russia. and China toward World War III. As competition among rival imperialists intensifies, so does their desperation. Fights within the ruling class are escalating, as we see in the clash in the U.S. that is playing out in the Supreme Court and the 2024 presidential race. None of these capitalists will hesitate to sacrifice millions of workers in the coming world war.

The only way out of this imperialist hellscape is for workers to turn the guns around against all of these bosses, join the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, and turn imperialist war into communist revolution!

Capitalist instability leads to world war
Just as in the U.S. and every other capitalist country, there are splits within the Russian ruling class. Billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin heads the Wagner Group, a private military contractor that Putin was glad to use for nearly a decade to project Russian imperialism throughout the world. Wagner has been most active in Syria, Mozambique, Libya, Central African Republic, and Mali. In 2014, following the U.S.-backed “Euromaidan” coup in Ukraine, Wagner was instrumental in the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Since war broke out in Ukraine in 2022, Wagner forces have been a major part of the Russian offensive.

The limits of the unity between Prigozhin and Putin were exposed during the recent bloody siege of Bakhmut, which was led by Wagner forces. For months, Prigozhin had openly criticized Russian preparation and execution of the war. With no honor among capitalist thieves, Putin replied by letting Wagner lead the attack on Bakhmut — but withheld supplies, dooming the mercenaries to tremendous losses (Seymour Hersh, 6/29).

Capitalism is based on competition, first and last. This reality rots all the way into the bones of every part of every capitalist state, without exception. Prigozhin personifies Vladimir Lenin’s analysis of the basic instability of imperialism over 100 years ago. The deepening political and economic chaos of capitalism, as Lenin noted, is reflected everywhere in the capitalist class. Until the working class overthrows the capitalist bosses with communist revolution, world wars are inevitable.

Nationalism = loyalty to imperialism
Like all imperialist warmongers, Russia is using unrelenting nationalist propaganda to win political support from workers for the war. Nationalism is the poisonous idea of unity between workers and bosses in a given nation. But the Russian bosses’ reliance on Prigozhin, like the U.S. bosses’ reliance on Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq, reflects weakness. In both cases, the rulers need to rely on soldiers-for-hire instead of politically committed fighters. To correct this weakness, Russian and U.S. bosses are constantly lying through their teeth with cynical propaganda to build nationalism and win workers to support their empires.

Especially galling are Putin’s references to the communist-led Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany as he claims to be “de-nazifying” Ukraine. Yes, the Ukrainian army integrated neo-Nazi militias—the Azov, Aidar, and Sich battalions—into their National Guard, which then received training from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade (see CHALLENGE, 7/15/15). But the murderous hypocrite Putin had no problem with the fact that the Wagner Group, now officially integrated into the Russian army, openly recruited white supremacist militias like the Russian Imperial Movement and Russian National Unity (Guardian, 3/20/22). Workers have no good choices between the nazis of Russia and the nazis of Ukraine! We say smash them all!

Fascism: a violent shift out of weakness
Internal divisions and threats from rival imperialists are destabilizing Russia, China, and the U.S. As the inter-imperialist rivalry propels the world toward a potentially nuclear weapon-fueled World War III, capitalists in Russia, China and the U.S. are compelled to impose order and discipline on their own class and also upon the working class. This is the essence of fascism: the stripping away of the mask of liberal democracy to expose the bloodthirsty, nationalist, racist, sexist forces that lie at the heart of capitalism.

By contrast to the division and disunity among capitalists in the U.S., the dominant Russian bosses’ ability to discipline their ruling class opposition is far more developed. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 and the Russian rulers lost rich territories such as Ukraine, they responded by hollowing out their pretense of liberal democracy and resorted to more open fascism to claw back their diminished empire. For years, Putin has exiled, jailed or murdered political opponents like Alexei Navalny, while hammering workers with racism and drowning them in blood to reassert Russian control over Chechnya and Georgia. Progressive Labor Party believes that the liberal Big Fascists of U.S. finance capital—fronted by politicians in the Democratic Party—represent the greatest danger to our class. Despite their weaknesses and internal divisions, this set of bosses is best equipped to impose the discipline on other capitalists that we see today in Russia and China.  

Fight for your class, not your country! Join PLP!
As CHALLENGE goes to press, youth, and workers across France are in armed rebellion against a racist police murder, showing the international working class the way. If workers around the world are organized to fight with the bravery and militancy of our class brothers and sisters in France, under the communist leadership of PLP, we will dump every Prigozhin and Putin, every Biden and Trump, into the dustbin of history. We will liberate the international working class by creating a society led by and for workers. By organizing solidarity with the rebellion in France within our unions, classrooms, and mass organizations, we’ll advance the internationalism we need to smash all imperialist bosses. Only by building a mass PLP and fighting for communist revolution can the working class smash racism, sexism, nationalism, and imperialism once and for all! Join us!

The murder of Nahel M. on June 27th by a traffic cop in Nanterre, France set off a nationwide rebellion against racist police murders. Even after the cop who shot Nahel was arrested, people’s anger and cynicism about the system continued to explode. This multiracial rebellion, led by teenage Black and North African workers, spread to more than 200 cities and towns across France. They responded with violence as the police attacked the young rebels in the streets and arrested more than 3000 people over five nights of demonstrations. The rebellion in France is inspiring as it shows the potential power of the working class. At the same time, like so many uprisings before, without an organized communist party and a political vision of fighting for a workers led society it ends as quickly as it began and leaves many people cynical about fighting back.

Nahel was shot by the police at point blank range. Initially the police lied and said he had tried to run them down, but video exposed their lies and showed them murdering Nahel by shooting him through the driver side window as the car started to drive away.

At first French President Emmanuel Macron tried to ignore the rebellion. He was recorded attending  a concert on the second night. But the clashes between young people, angered at the ongoing racism of French capitalism and the police, spread beyond the working-class areas and thousands of people marched in the center of Paris. Macron, who visited police barracks to support his racist killers, looked to the police and the more fascist elements in the country to put down the rebellion.

The rebellion exposed, once again the extreme racism of capitalism. Nanterre is a working-class suburb that has a large number of people of North African descent as well as Black workers. Youth unemployment in Nanterre is at 23 percent (CNN, 7/1) and in France more than 20 percent of teenagers live below the poverty line. Many of them live in suburbs like Nanterre. Instead of the French bosses creating jobs for young people, the area is heavily policed. Across France the police have used identity check powers to harass and terrorize the working class. Young men perceived as Black or North African are 20 times as likely to be stopped by the police than the rest of the population (Guardian, 6/30).

As the demonstrations have died down the French ruling class has organized pro-government rallies across the country. These “restore order” rallies have been led by the most openly racist elements in France, including the fascist Marie Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) which is calling for more prisons and to have people that are arrested for any reason to be evicted from public housing. The working class can’t rely on the bosses to fix capitalism. Instead of making things better the bosses respond with more racism.

These rebellions have shown once again that the working class has the power to shut down and overthrow capitalism. It has also shown that this will only happen by the building of a revolutionary communist movement that can fight to take power through communist revolution.