A group of students at Dar es Salaam University in Tanzania have won a victory by standing up to the government and fighting for repairs to dangerous conditions in their dormitory. The struggle of these students to fight back even while coming under extreme attacks from the fascist Tanzanian ruling class is an inspiring example of how our class can gain confidence and overcome fear to unite.
The working class in Tanzania faces worsening fascist conditions. The victory of the students was in their ability to keep fighting for our class interest as much as it was about getting the building fixed. These small struggles are very important as the international working class fights to rebuild class consciousness and a revolutionary communist movement.
Divided ruling class
The Tanzanian ruling class is more divided then at any time since its independence in 1961. Driven by a fight to control the profits from Tanzania’s vast natural resources, the ruling clique, under new President John Magufuli, has been using their power to go after the businesses, media outlets and patronage jobs that support the base of the opposition capitalists. These opposition capitalists are led by many people who came out of the current governing party Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), and had been terrorizing the working class for decades. Changing capitalist parties or leaders will never stop the bosses from using their power to prop themselves up. Building a revolutionary communist movement for workers power is the only way forward for our class.
Magufuli, a fascist ruler
Magufuli rode to power in 2015 campaigning as an honest leader fighting corruption. His nickname is “The Bulldozer” and under the guise of stopping corruption he has tightened his grip on power. He has changed taxation laws to attack small businesses, outlawed exportation of food leading to a crisis among farmers, left districts without funds to provide food for school children, and forced the closure of community banks.
Magufuli has cracked down on dissent and banned opposition rallies and meetings. He uses a death squad, to abduct, jail or shoot politicians, journalists and others who dare to speak out. Although there was a brief period of mass mobilization against his fascist rule, the working class has mostly been mired in fear. But even in this environment, some students at Dar es Salaam University had the courage to stand up to the bosses.
The Magufuli wing is trying to the increase their share of the profits from Tanzania’s natural resources by renegotiating contracts with the multi-national corporations that had long been getting the bulk of the profit. At the same time the ruling class is increasing attacks on the working class by cutting jobs and public services to increase investment geared toward their mines and developing natural gas industry.
Deadly dormitory
Using cheap construction methods and materials, Magufuli built a new dormitory to house 3/4 of the 9,000 students at Dar es Salaam University. The students moved into the dormitory last Fall. Shortly after, massive cracks began to appear in the walls. The images of recent deaths from the collapse of similar buildings was causing intense fear and anxiety among students. The media reported that the University Administration dismissed the students concerns by referring to the cracks as “normal expansion joints.” A group of student leaders raised their concerns with the government, but they were ordered to keep silent. In defiance, they posted pictures of the walls on social media.
Government agents retaliated. They hunted down the student whose computer was used, abducted him to a secret location, and tortured him. Students responded with mass meetings and strikes. The student was released and continued to defy the authorities. Due to the mass unrest, the state was forced to repair the walls, and students were emboldened by the courage of their leaders.
Tanzania is a glaring example of how capitalism is in a spiral of crisis that the rulers try to manage with fascism and war. The bosses constantly try to bail themselves out by attacking the working class and forcing us to fight each other around the globe. The battle to gain confidence in ourselves as a class capable of running society without the bosses will only be won through building a communist movement in the midst of struggles like the students at Dar es Salaam University have been fighting.

COLOMBIA, March 7—The peace referundum deal was that the fake leftist group FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) would surrender their weapons in exchnage for the right to run for office.
More than a year has passed, and none of what was agreed on has happened, generating fierce debate and polarization about the agreements signed by the leadership of the FARC and the Colombian government.
Progressive Labor Party knows that capitalism means unemployment, misery, and the death of workers, and under the current dictatorship of the bosses, nothing else is possible.
Last weekend, five community leaders were assassinated in different parts of the country, and the number of murders of leftist leaders is increasing.  Last year, we saw the assassinations of 194 people dedicated to social causes, communities, and the defense of human rights.
With the support of U.S. imperialism, paramilitary death squads have been killing thousands of Colombian workers over decades. These murders have to be counted on top of the more than five million displaced by a war of imperialist pillage. We workers cannot believe in capitalist peace; all politicians want nothing more than to disarm us, so we can be killed without opposition.  
Capitalism never completes what it promises and signs on to; all it cares about is that we believe in its rotten bourgeois democracy.  The bosses only want to increase their profit margins, and this can be achieved through the misery of millions of proletarians. This is the essence of capitalism. They exploit and deny workers our necessities and do it all through the force of arms and political trickery.
Cops kill & terrorize farmers
In the month of October, members of the repressive police force fired without provocation against groups of workers that were protesting in some mountain towns like the Tumaco municipality, leaving nine dead and 21 wounded.  The farmers were protesting the slow implementation of the program meant to switch out illegal crops, something expected to result from the peace process.
According to the medical examiner, the bodies showed wounds caused from high velocity projectiles, with ballistics experts determining that the shots were fired at close range and by official weapons. Vice president Germán Vargas Lleras has gone on to say that the victims were not from the area.  This official lie spread as a smokescreen to divert attention from the accusations of repressive force and paramilitaries in the state, looking instead to blame guerilla dissidents as the parties responsible for these crimes.
CHALLENGE shows us that there are no good capitalists, and that we cannot ally ourselves with any sector of the bourgeoisie. We reject any goals other than the fight to achieve communism. Only the unity of the working class around the revolutionary politics of the PLP and the fight for communism will free us from capitalist murder and its sexism, racism, nationalism, and wage slavery.
Workers on the farms and in the cities, students, and revolutionary soldiers, everything you do matters!  Join us.

This celebratory column is in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the world communist movement of the 20th century. We mainly examine its triumps. We welcome your comments and criticisms, and encourage all readers to discuss this period of history with their friends, classmates, co-workers, family, and comrades.

The international working class led by the Soviet Union crushed fascism during World War II, a great achievement. Capitalist rulers lie about it, hiding the key role of the workers and communist leadership in that victory. We reject those lies. Last issue, CHALLENGE busted the following myths:
Lie No. 1: British, French and U.S. Capitalists (”Allies”) Always Opposed Hitler
Lie No. 2: The U.S. And Britain Defeated Hitler, With Little Help from the USSR
Here’s the rest.

Lie No. 3: Churchill Was A Great War Leader
Churchill was anti-communist, racist, and a fervent class warrior for British imperialists. In 1910 as Home Minister he sent troops against striking miners and transport workers. He also advised the compulsory sterilization of the “mentally deranged” to “improve British racial stock.”
During the Civil War in Russia (1918-21) he organized British intervention against the new workers’ state in a vain attempt to crush it. He advocated the use of poison gas in Iraq against rebelling Arabs, and organized the Black and Tans, which terrorized Catholics in Ireland.
During WW II, Churchill delayed the opening of the Second Front in the East against the Nazis. After WW II, he sent British troops to Greece to install a fascist king, after it was liberated from the Nazis by communist-led partisans. Churchill served the British ruling class well, but the masses in Asia and Africa booted out British colonial rule soon after the war.
Lie No. 4: Japan Was Defeated By The U.S.
The Chinese Red Army destroyed more than a 1.7 million fascist troops and their puppets. This was far more than the number of Japanese soldiers destroyed by the British, U.S. and the Kuomintang (the Chinese nationalists) armies combined. The two major war campaigns against the U.S. involved less than one-fifth of the Japanese forces fighting against the Communists in China.
Lie No. 5: Atomic Bombs Were Necessary To End the Japanese War Quickly
Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that the Soviet Red Army, after defeating the Nazis, would attack Japanese forces in China, supposedly to avoid the high casualties that would result from an invasion of Japan. But the U.S. had already tested the A-Bomb and dropped it on August 6, two days before the planned Soviet attack. The U.S. was thus able to claim credit for the Japanese surrender and gain full control of Japan after the war.
The A-bombs were used to warn the Soviet Union and workers of the world struggling for revolution, that a capitalist power possessed a super-weapon and would use it to maintain dominance. Even capitalist scholars now admit that the U.S. lied about the Bomb saving 500,000-700,000 American lives that Truman said would have been lost in a full-scale invasion (the Japanese government had sent surrender proposals for months).
Lie No. 6: Hitler Was the Cause of WW II and the Holocaust
The root cause of war is the continuous need of the ruling class to amass capital and to exploit workers and natural resources. The European capitalist classes fought colonial wars for control of labor and resources. The U.S. invaded Panama to secure the Canal and launched the Gulf War to control Middle East oil.
The holocaust is often blamed on “Nazi mentality”. Nazi mentality is really capitalist mentality in its most vicious form. Capitalism thrives on racism. Although the murder of tens of millions within a few years is unprecedented in human history, there are many other examples of racist mass murder, including the slave trade from Africa and the slaughter of native peoples in the Americas.
Lie No. 7: The Nazi Party, Not the Capitalist Class, Turned Germany Fascist
The German capitalist class forced fascism on Germany. This class of bankers and businessmen funded Hitler. It gave him money to organize the storm-troopers who terrorized the working class. Hitler banned strikes and put communists and labor activists into concentration camps. Between 1934 and 1938, while actual wages dropped, capitalists’ profits soared by 50 percent. German capitalists made huge profits from the war from slave labor.
Lie No. 8: The Soviet Forces Were Anti-Semitic.
A big lie is that Soviet forces were anti-Semitic. In fact, one of the first orders Stalin gave to the Red Army was to evacuate Jewish families to the East into the safety of the Soviet rear, out of the reach of the advancing Nazi army. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish workers fought in the Red Army and as partisans in the Soviet Union and Europe. In late 1941, special agents were sent from Moscow to fight any anti-Semitism. In contrast, in the anti-communist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), where the average jail sentence for war crimes was ten minutes per murdered victim, most of the Nazi killers retained their jobs.
Lie No. 9: Liberal Democracy Is the Opposite of Fascism
Every capitalist state, liberal or fascist, is a dictatorship over the working class to create and sustain conditions for the exploitation of workers. Any worker on strike readily gets first-hand experience of this reality.  When the economy is up and workers’ opposition is not militant, the capitalist state can allow some free speech. But when crises happen, the capitalist state reveals its true nature. Fascism is the logical form of capitalist state power.
As the Great Depression of the 1930s gripped the world, fascism spread worldwide. The Soviet Union, then communist-led and a source of inspiration to world’s workers, was its main target. Communism, not liberal democracy, is the opposite of fascism.
Lie No. 10: The Jewish People Let themselves Be Slaughtered by the Nazis
The murder of millions of Jewish, Roma and other people who were considered
“unter-menschen” (German for “subhumans”) by the Nazis is one of the most barbaric acts in modern history. Even though they accept the existence of the holocaust, the bosses’ media has spread a number of lies.
Films like “Schindler’s List” imply that Jewish people went like lambs to the slaughter. In reality, there was widespread resistance to the Nazis in the ghettos and camps. Early in 1943, 50,000 Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto, organized by the Polish Communist Party and other anti-Nazi groups, fought for weeks against an SS division.
Fires of revolt blazed even inside Nazi death factories. Auschwitz inmates blew up a crematorium with the help of smuggled dynamite. At Sobibor, a daring revolt organized with the leadership of a Red Army officer killed 50 SS guards with 300 prisoners escaping to freedom. Communists in the ghettoes fought against sellout “leaders” who served the Nazis by carrying out their orders and telling people not to fight back.
Why does capitalist culture lie about these events? One of its important roles is to spread passivity in the face of oppression. Also, it is a fact that most of the Jewish fight-back against the Nazis was led by communists, and was anti-racist at heart. So the racist, anti-communist capitalists hide the truth of Jewish resistance.
While victory over fascism is part of the legacy of the world’s working class, we mustn’t overlook the mistakes of its communist leadership. In the Soviet Union, concessions were made to nationalism. Military ranks were introduced in 1937, counter to the proletarian spirit. Communists developed coalitions with “anti-fascist” capitalists (e.g. Britain and the U.S.) under the guise of fighting fascism. These mistakes helped maintain capitalism in Western Europe, and restore full-blown capitalism to the U.S.S.R. after Stalin’s death.  
Today, with deepening crises and imperialist rivalry, the fascist clouds are gathering fast. It is essential for Progressive Labor Party to lead the working class in another struggle against capitalism, and its monsters of fascism and war. The struggle is more difficult because there is now no center of working class power like the U.S.S.R. was then. But if we learn from history, we will not go half-way; we will fight for communism and true emancipation for the working class.

On February 10, in response to an alleged Iranian drone flight over Israeli territory, an Israeli F-16 jet was shot down while bombing a region in Syria occupied by Iran, the first time an Israeli warplane has been lost in combat since 1982. The incident sparked the largest Israeli air raid on Syria in decades, with both Syrian and Iranian military installations being targeted.  As Russian imperialism strengthens both its foothold in Syria and its alliance with Iran, this flashpoint in the Syrian war signals the possibility of broader conflict between an expansive Russia and a U.S. empire in decline.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump has openly called for regime change in Iran for its human rights abuses (though he’s said nothing about the indiscriminate bombing and slaughter in Yemen by U.S. ally Saudi Arabia). Trump has vowed to bail out of the Iran nuclear deal in May and reintroduce sanctions unless the multilateral agreement is renegotiated (independent.co.uk, 1/12). In a recent Op-Ed column in the New York Times, Nikki Haley, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, warned that unless Iran’s export of non-nuclear ballistic missiles to Yemen’s Houthi rebels is stopped, “then someday soon … the chance for peace will be lost” (2/17). At the Munich Security Conference, National Security Advisor H.R McMaster appealed to U.S. allies to halt trade with Iran to stem Iran’s funding of proxy armies and militias in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq: “So the time is now, we think, to act against Iran” (Reuters.com, 2/17).
The U.S. bosses have yet to galvanize popular support at home for another ground war in the Middle East, much less a global conflict with Russia and/or China. But their accelerating strategic weakness and the unpredictability of external events could push them to move before they are ready.
Scramble for Syria
Following the attack, the U.S. condemned Syria and affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself. Even so, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ceased the air barrage after Russian President Vladimir Putin called and warned him “to avoid a course of action that could have ‘dangerous consequences for the region’” (Daily Mail, 2/12). For now, Russia, not the U.S., is calling the shots in Syria.
Since 2011, Syria’s civil war has widened into a proxy war for the superpowers vying for control over the oil-rich Middle East. The latest Israeli attacks are part of a protracted regional conflict dating back to 1967, when Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria during the Six-Day War. Over the past five years, Israel has launched over 100 air strikes inside Syria, often attacking Iranian forces (Washington Post, 9/7/17). As Iran further entrenches itself in Syria and along the Israeli border, escalation toward global conflict is ever more likely. Russia is standing squarely behind Iran, the second most populous country and third biggest oil producer in the Middle East. The U.S. will stop at nothing to protect its interests in Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer and Iran’s main regional rival.
More than a century ago, Lenin argued that the world had entered the age of imperialism. With no new colonies to “discover” and subjugate, the imperialist powers could only re-divide territory and resources through war. In the current inter-imperialist scramble, Syria is at the epicenter of a re-division of the Middle East.
Now that ISIS is largely defeated in Syria, the conflict there has devolved into a free-for-all of imperialists competing to expand their influence in the region. With the Iran-leaning Syrian president Bashar al-Assad once again entrenched in power, and Russian and Chinese bosses positioning themselves to exploit the Syrian nightmare, the U.S. bosses seem more and more likely to find themselves on the losing side.
Insecure rulers debate Iran tactics
For the U.S. capitalist ruling class, the threats posed by a crisis with Iran are potentially catastrophic. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a ruling-class think tank, pointed out:
Iran has the ability to trigger a major war in the region, and to threaten the world’s main source of oil and gas exports—the 17 million barrels of oil a day that flow through the Strait of Hormuz. Any such Iranian action threatens the stability of the entire global economy, the global (and U.S. domestic) price of oil and of transportation fuels, and the import and export capabilities of America’s key trading partners in Asia—more than a third of U.S. manufactured imports (CSIS, 1/10).
The U.S. bosses’ main concern in Syria is the growing sway of Iranian and Russian imperialism in the region. Despite spending trillions on two wars in Iraq and an ongoing war in Afghanistan that has led thousands of U.S. workers to their deaths and killed millions in the Middle East, U.S. bosses have seen their influence in the region continue to wane. James F. Jeffrey, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq, highlighted the rulers’ dilemma: “We told the Turks that the Kurds were temporary…to defeat ISIS. Now we need them to contain Iran. The whole purpose of this is to split the Russians from the Syrians by saying we’re going to stay on to force a political solution in Syria” (New York Times, 1/22).
The U.S. rulers’ concern is that a unilateral U.S. military confrontation with Iran would require a massive infusion of U.S. troops and further destabilize the region. Some main-wing ruling-class voices inside the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institute, notably author Vali Nasr, are pushing for an inclusive, U.S.-led regional order—including Iran—to counter Russia:
Rather than…contain Iran, the United States…should convince Tehran that it would be better off working with Washington and its allies than investing its hopes in a Russian-backed regional order…the United States should do what the Obama administration failed to: lead an international diplomatic effort to broker a regional deal that would end conflicts and create a framework for peace and stability (Foreign Affairs, March/April issue).
But others in the CFR, including Iran hardliner Elliot Abrams, are emphasizing the limits of diplomacy and the need for war. Abrams urged the Donald Trump administration to consider that Israel “could be a decade away from a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and has bases in Syria—and could logically therefore even place nuclear weapons in Syria, just miles from Israel’s border” (CFR blog, 10/8/17).
Given the ruthless competition created by capitalism, a future world war is inevitable. While the political divisions surrounding Trump’s election has hindered any mobilization of U.S workers for wider war, there remains significant patriotic sentiment within the U.S.—both in Trump’s base and in the liberal opposition. In any case, global events like the recent crisis between Israel and Syria may soon force the hand of the U.S. rulers to act. However these tensions play out, one thing is for sure: workers can expect more fascism as the bosses prepare for all-out war.
Iran-Russia axis
The Iran-Russia alliance is strengthening by the day. Looking to amplify its role as a regional power, Iran is rapidly expanding its infrastructure, positioning itself as a hub of trans-European trade and plugging into China’s One Belt, One Road initiative (Forbes 8/1/17). In August 2017, with both nations facing U.S. sanctions, Russia and Iran signed a $2.5 billion deal for the manufacturing of cargo and passenger wagons in Iran. In 2016, overall trade between Iran and Russia doubled, most of it in military contracts.
U.S. attempts to control Iran through sanctions have reduced opportunities for European companies like Total of France, which must obtain U.S. approval before investing. As a result, the sanctions have driven Iran even closer to Russia. Meanwhile, China has upped its military training and assistance to Syria’s army. Along with Russia and Iran, it has scooped up the lion’s share of Syria reconstruction contracts. China and Russia are leading members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which focuses on economic and counter-terrorism issues; Iran is an SCO partner. “Michael Maloof, a former Pentagon official, noted that China has actually been in Syria ‘for quite some time’…. The latest developments indicate that the U.S. is ‘being basically left out’”  (rt.com, 8/17/16).
Workers fight back
As the threat of wider war looms, the imperialist dogfight over Syria has proven a disaster for the region’s working class. After seven years of conflict, the current death toll stands at over 500,000, with nearly 13 million Syrians displaced. As the bosses fight over the spoils of Syria, our working-class brothers and sisters in the Middle East are paying the price.
In the midst of this chaos, the working class is fighting back. Last December, after going four months without pay, workers at the Haft Tapeh sugar cane plantation and mill complex in Shush, Iran, went on strike. In the Iranian city of Arak, hundreds of workers at Hepco, a private industrial complex, recently demanded months of back pay and better living conditions by forming a human chain around the city’s main square (Riyadh Daily, 2/7).
As Iran continues to develop its infrastructure with Russian investments, transit and construction workers in Iran will be essential in fighting back against the rulers’ move toward World War III.  We must follow the lead of these workers as their strikes threaten to shut down the bosses’ infrastructure. Armed with the analysis of Progressive Labor Party, they can turn these strikes into a larger class struggle against capitalism and inter-imperialist war.

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History of U.S.-Iran-Israel alliance

In the years following World War II, at the height of U.S. imperialist dominance, the U.S. could exert its influence through a combination of financial pressure, military might, and CIA espionage and assassinations. In 1953, the U.S. backed a coup in Iran that brought the murderous Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi into power, a move made possible in part by a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil instigated by Britain. At the time, Iranian oil could easily be replaced by oil from other places.
Through much of the Cold War, Iran and Israel were the two pillars of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. But in the 1970s, with the growing power of OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), once a reliable U.S. ally, Iran began exercising greater independence of U.S. dictates. Now Iranian oil was no longer so easily replaceable, and the 1973 oil crisis revealed that the old equation for U.S. imperialist dominance in the Middle East was no longer reliable. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979 replaced the Shah with an Islamic Republic, Iran switched from U.S. ally to adversary—and eventually opened the door to Russia and China. Meanwhile, as the US continues to lose ground in the region, Israel has increasingly been left to fend for itself.