The War Before the Iran War Division in the ranks of the conservative movement is a critical sign that a war with Iran isn't inevitable.

The War Before the Iran War

Division in the ranks of the conservative movement is a critical sign that a war with Iran isn't inevitable.

By John Feffer, August 1, 2018.

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Tucker Carlson has impeccable conservative credentials.

He started out as a low-level staffer at the Heritage Foundation and now he hosts a popular show on Fox News. In between were stints at The Weekly Standard and the on-line publication he co-founded, The Daily Caller. His often contentious prime-time show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, which now occupies Bill O’Reilly’s former slot at Fox, is third in the cable news ratings war behind Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow.

When Tucker talks, the president listens.

Carlson believes that Donald Trump has been, on balance, a long overdue wake-up call for the Republican Party and an assault weapon that can be used against America’s misguided ruling elite. “Shocking, vulgar, and right,” is how he described Trump in a Politico article back in January 2016.

Since Trump entered the White House, Carlson has occasionally disagreed with the president, but usually for not being sufficiently tough and reactionary, for instance on immigration.

“I think President Trump is interesting, and I agree broadly with his agenda,” he recently told the Heritage publication The Daily Signal.

That’s why his commentary last week on Iran is so important.

Carlson initially supported the Iraq War but then became disenchanted about a year later, along with many others who’d ordered a cakewalk and received a quagmire instead. Now Carlson is warning Trump not to go down the same road as George W. Bush.

If there’s one thing that Washington loves more than open borders and fat lobbying contracts, it’s pointless wars half a world away. Contractors get rich. Neocon intellectuals feel powerful. Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and Nancy Pelosi agree on one thing: War is good as long as the war does not help the United States. …

We are moving toward, however slowly, some kind of confrontation with Iran. And that should worry everybody, but it should especially be of concern to anyone who supported the president.

If President Trump decides to go to war with Iran, it will destroy his presidency just as the Iraq War destroyed the presidency of his Republican predecessor George W. Bush.

Things must be getting pretty hairy if a top Fox News pundit feels that he has to talk the president down from the ledge.

Perhaps Carlson has good reason to be freaked out. In the last 10 days, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a rah-rah rant in favor of regime change in Iran. The president issued an all-caps tweet threatening Tehran with “consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before.” And Australian government officials told the press that the Trump administration is prepared to start bombing Iranian nuclear facilities as early as this month.

But, as always, the Trump administration has been aflutter with mixed messages. Pentagon chief James Mattis, for instance, categorically denied the Australian reports. Then, on Monday, the president himself announced that he was willing to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani with “no preconditions… anytime they want.”

As if this weren’t inconsistent enough, even as Trump was talking about a meeting without preconditions, Pompeo was directly contradicting his boss:

If the Iranians demonstrate a commitment to make fundamental changes in how they treat their own people, reduce their malign behavior, can agree that it’s worthwhile to enter into a nuclear agreement that actually prevents proliferation, then the president said he’s prepared to sit down and have the conversation with them.

Since Iran already entered into a nuclear agreement that actually prevents proliferation and since the government (like all governments) thinks it treats its people fine and dandy and behaves properly toward all other countries, Pompeo’s very obvious preconditions are not likely to go down well in Tehran.

The question remains: How likely is a war between the United States and Iran?

The War Before the War

First of all, this is not a repeat of the Venezuela situation in which a hotheaded president had to be disabused of his plan to invade a country by his more circumspect advisors. Nor is it a North Korea situation in which the president ignores his advisors in order to take a bold leap into the unknown. It’s not even a Cuba situation in which the president has rolled back the previous administration’s initiatives but otherwise largely ignored the country.

Instead, the likelihood of a conflict breaking out with Iran depends in large part on another war: the war before the war.

This other Iran war has divided the conservative world into two parts. In one corner are the rabid Iranophobes, the Benjamin Netanyahu fan club, the hawks who never met a war they didn’t like, the neocons who cling to a dream of regime change and nation-building throughout the Middle East, and the fanatics who believe that intervening in a longstanding conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran on the side of the former will (improbably) be a net plus for U.S. national interests.

There is considerable overlap among these groups.

For instance, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton have been pushing for war with Iran for years. They’re joined by congressional hawks like Tom Cotton (R-AR) and John McCain (R-AZ). Likudniks like Republican Party donor Sheldon Adelson adhere closely to the Israeli right-wing’s agenda and its even more belligerent approach to Iran. Neocon think tanks like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — with Mark Dubowitz and Richard Goldberg — have been vigorously supporting the war option. And then, of course, there are all those — from Rudy Giuliani to John Bolton — who have been handsomely compensated for talks given to the fanatical, cult-like Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian exile organization dedicated to regime change and with little to no support within Iran itself.

In the other corner are the cautious conservatives. They include once-bitten-twice-shy Iraq War supporters, a handful of never-Trumpers, some libertarians, a scattering of pugnacious isolationists, and a few realists who rightly calculate that a war against Iran would be devastating for long-term U.S. interests.

So, for instance, this camp includes newly cautious pundits like Max Boot, who thought bombing Iran was a good idea back in 2011 but now thinks that it could spin out of control. Libertarians like Rand Paul (R-KY) supported the nuclear deal with Iran and opposed the appointment of Pompeo to secretary of state largely because of his simmering desire for war with Tehran. The isolationist Patrick Buchanan also opposes the war, arguing that “Bibi Netanyahu, with due respect, wants the United States to fight a war with Iran on Israel’s behalf.”

Not everyone fits neatly into these pro-war and anti-war camps. For instance, some like Michael Gerson would prefer that the Iranians, with U.S. help, accomplish regime change by themselves.

This conflict within conservative circles occasionally breaks into the open, like when Tucker Carlson issued his warning last week. But even here, Carlson wasn’t accurately describing the protagonists. Two of the three abovementioned objects of his ire — Max Boot and Nancy Pelosi — show no interest in a war with Iran. Indeed, Pelosi opposed the Iraq War when Carlson supported it, so his disingenuousness is quite appalling.

Later in his monologue, Carlson zeroed in on the real cheerleaders for war: Bolton, Pompeo, and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. This triumvirate is doing what it can to bait Iran into doing something reckless. They’re thrilled that hardliners like Revolutionary Guard Major General Qasem Soleimani have responded tit for Trump’s tat: “If you begin the war, we will end the war. You know that this war will destroy all that you possess.” In both countries, the escalating rhetoric marginalizes the moderates.

Who Will Win?

But the real question: Who will win the war before the war?

Division in the ranks of the conservative movement is a critical sign that a war with Iran is not inevitable. To prevent such a war, non-intervention advocates have to win this other Iran war first.

After all, it’s not likely that Donald Trump is actually going to sit down with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and work out another nuclear deal. Nor is it likely that the Trump administration will simply decide to ignore Iran and focus on other issues.

In the meantime, there are far too many ways for war to break out — after a naval clash in the Persian Gulf, because of an altercation between Israel and Iranian forces in Syria, as a result of a direct Saudi provocation, or simply because Trump gets it in his head that a war with Iran will boost his party’s sagging political fortunes ahead of the mid-term elections in November.

When it comes to influencing Trump or restraining the warmongering triumvirate whispering in his ear, I’m guessing that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party and the progressive anti-war movement aren’t going to do the trick.

Hey Tucker, want to be the president of the No War in Iran Coalition?

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John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.

Issues: War & Peace

Regions: Iran, Middle East & North Africa, United States

Tags: Donald Trump, Iran deal, Iraq War, isolationists, neocons, realists, tucker carlson

A View From The Left-I Guess- Russophobia Digest: Dentist denial, Manafort’s Russian elephant, and Putin on Brexit Published time: 3 Aug, 2018 15:51 iew

Russophobia Digest: Dentist denial, Manafort’s Russian elephant, and Putin on Brexit

Published time: 3 Aug, 2018 15:51

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Paul Manafort departs US District Court, 31 Jul. 2018, Yuri Gripas / Reuters

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·         Russophobia continued it’s rampant domination of the headlines this week. Donald Trump’s former campaign chief faced the consequences of meeting Russians, while activist Maria Butina faced the consequences of being Russian.

RT takes a weekly look at the last seven days of Russophobia.

Don’t mention the Russian Elephant

The Paul Manafort trial, which ramped up this week, is like a case study in Russophobia. Trump’s former campaign chief is accused of bank and tax fraud linked to his work in Ukraine.

Read more

Paul Manafort ‘guilty of crimes against fashion’ – but still no Russian collusion

The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that Ukraine is not actually Russia, and no one is really mentioning the ‘R’ word at the trial which so far has been dominated by evidence of Manafort’s crimes against fashion more than anything else. The media however is framing the proceedings as the first step in proving Donald Trump colluded with Moscow to win office. Manafort’s main crime is the worst that can be committed… he definitely met a Russian once, maybe two.

Dentist denial for locked up Butina

Poor old Maria Butina is going to be a regular in this column, you can just tell. The Russian gun activist is being held in a US prison accused of being a government agent sent by Moscow. Or of just being a Russian, it’s hard to tell. She stands at the other end of the Russophobia/paranoia scale to Manafort. He’s in trouble for meeting Russians, she’s in trouble for meeting Americans.

This week it emerged that she’s being given access to a phone in prison, but not a dentist. It’s not waterboarding, but it’s still not nice either. I suppose we can’t have Russian ladies with nice smiles though, it could swing an election.

READ MORE: Accused 'Russian agent' Butina allowed phone calls, but not dental help, after 19 days' detention

‘Pervasive messaging’ could bring down the US

Speaking of swinging elections, the US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told journalists that Russia is trying to meddle in the midterms using a “pervasive messaging campaign”. Translation: Someone Russian posted a Trump meme on Facebook.

Read more

Pervasive… just a click away… not yet: US security chiefs fan Russia election-meddling scare

In the words of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov: “It’s just hilarious when I hear that funny pictures can undermine American democracy.”

Some might suggest that reporting a Russian conspiracy around every corner is the thing that’s really freaking everyone out. Some might.

Don’t worry though Americans, because FBI Director Christopher Wray said he’s working with social media to get on top of the problem. Between them they should be able to make sure election meddling remains a purely American pastime.

Hunt dabbles in Russophobia to save Brexit

Jeremy Hunt has only just taken over as the UK’s Foreign Secretary, but he’s learning fast. The most important lesson: If you want to scare the hell out of people, Russophobia is your friend.

Brexit is looking more disastrous with each passing day so Hunt (no it’s not rhyming slang, it’s his name) said: “Frankly, if we end up with no deal, the only person rejoicing will be [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”

That’s going to be news to a few British million voters, half of Hunt’s own Tory party, quite a bit of the opposition too, and Messrs Farage and Rees-Mogg who would happily accept a ‘no deal’ exit from the EU at this point.

READ MORE: ‘Only Putin will rejoice at a hard-Brexit’: UK foreign sec employs tired Russia scare tactics

Next week voters will probably be told that Putin would also rejoice at tax cuts, free childcare and increased funding of Britain’s National Health Service.

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Attack on MOVE 1978 We Will Not Forget!

Workers Vanguard No. 1137	27 July 2018

Attack on MOVE 1978

We Will Not Forget!

August 8 marks the 40th anniversary of the vicious cop assault on MOVE in Philadelphia’s Powelton Village neighborhood. A mostly black commune advocating the right to armed self-defense, MOVE had been under a months-long police siege when an army of 600 cops assaulted their home and fired thousands of rounds of ammunition. After MOVE members and their children surrendered, police publicly beat, dragged, kicked and stomped a shirtless Delbert Africa nearly to death. A cop was killed in the ferocious police crossfire, and nine MOVE members were framed up and imprisoned on bogus murder charges. A number of witnesses testified that no gunshots came from the MOVE house. Three months prior to the attack the police had removed from the house all weapons, which were found to be inoperable.

Today, forty years later, six MOVE members remain in prison: Janine, Janet, Mike, Eddie, Chuck and Delbert Africa. Merle and Phil Africa died in Pennsylvania prisons under suspicious circumstances. Last month, Debbie Africa became the first of the MOVE 9 to be released on parole, at the same time that Janet and Janine Africa were denied parole. The 1978 assault was a dress rehearsal for the cop/FBI bombing of MOVE’s Osage Avenue home on 13 May 1985, killing eleven, five of them children, and turning to ash and rubble an entire black neighborhood. We will not forget these racist atrocities, which graphically demonstrate American capitalism’s murderous vendetta against anyone who defends black self-defense. Free all the MOVE prisoners!

On Internment of Japanese Americans In Wolrd War II(Quote of the Week)

Workers Vanguard No. 1137 27 July 2018 TROTSKY LENIN On Internment of Japanese Americans (Quote of the Week) Amid widespread outrage over the incarceration of immigrants in detention centers, the Democrats cynically pretend that such barbarity is unique to the racist Trump administration. During World War II, some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, the vast majority U.S. citizens, were savagely uprooted and thrown into concentration camps in a calculated atrocity ordered by the Democratic administration of liberal icon Franklin Roosevelt. The Stalinist Communist Party expelled all of their Japanese American members in a grotesque example of their support to the “democratic” imperialists in the war. The then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, facing persecution themselves for opposing U.S. imperialist war aims, were among the very few—including the Quakers—who courageously campaigned against the repression of Japanese Americans. We print below an excerpt from an article they wrote shortly after the roundups began. A minority problem as acute as any in Europe is being created by the forced removal of Japanese-Americans from the Pacific Coast. In a move unprecedented in U.S. history, American citizens are being taken from their homes and transported to hastily constructed concentration camps.... Evacuations are being enforced by army officials acting under a presidential decree empowering them to bar from certain areas any person they consider undesirable. The army command has power to declare any district a restricted area and to order the removal of any residents. No reason need be given for the evacuation, and American citizenship is no protection. So far the measure has been applied only to Japanese-Americans and to enemy aliens: but militant workers, liberals or “uncooperative” citizens could be ousted similarly. After Pearl Harbor, the press whipped up an hysterical picture of a West Coast invasion aided by Japanese-American residents. The administration had to make a decisive move to show West Coast residents it was alert to their danger. The FBI rounded up all suspected enemy agents in the first few days of the war, but this was not demonstrative enough to give the effect of energetic preparedness the administration was seeking to offset Pearl Harbor. Considerable pressure for the ousting of Japanese-Americans came, however, from California Chambers of Commerce, the Bank of America, and the reactionary Associated Farmers. These groups see in the Japanese-American farmer not a military menace, but an obstacle to their complete domination of California agriculture. Taking advantage of the situation to demand their ousting in the name of “national defense,” California bankers hope to seize control of the truck gardening fields vacated by the Japanese-Americans.... And so the story of the Japanese-American evacuations stands today—a repressive measure, based purely on racial discrimination and motivated chiefly by the desire of Big Business for additional profits, which is presented as a necessary part of the “war for democracy.” —“Behind the West Coast Evacuations: Bankers Profit from Driving Japanese-American Citizens into Concentration Camps,” Militant (30 May 1942)

A View From The Left- Labor, Minorities, Women Under Attack Capitalist Injustice and the Supreme Court Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

Workers Vanguard No. 1137	27 July 2018

Labor, Minorities, Women Under Attack

Capitalist Injustice and the Supreme Court

Break with the Democrats!

For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

A series of reactionary Supreme Court rulings last month, followed by Donald Trump’s nomination of ultraconservative Brett Kavanaugh to a newly vacant court seat, has struck fear into huge swaths of the population. And for good reason. Kavanaugh’s confirmation would give the Supreme Court a solid right-wing majority lasting perhaps a generation. This would strengthen the hand of the capitalist rulers in their drive to crush the already attenuated rights of the working class and oppressed. Having targeted the unions, blacks, immigrants and other minorities, the forces of capitalist reaction have their guns set on eliminating women’s right to abortion.

In late June, the Supreme Court declared war on public workers unions, the largest remaining concentration of organized labor, when it ruled against the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in the Janus case. The decision eliminates the agency shop in the public sector, under which all employees have to pay union member dues or “agency fees” if they choose not to join the union since they benefit from the union bargaining on their behalf. As we noted in “Janus Case: Assault on Labor” (WV No. 1133, 4 May), the intention is to bankrupt, e.g., destroy, the unions by bleeding them of members, posing a direct threat to all of labor, including private-sector unions. Even before Janus came down, a court case was initiated in Washington State demanding that a large state union “disgorge and refund” fees that nonmembers had already paid. This would be larceny with legal sanction.

The Janus ruling will particularly hit hard against black workers, who are heavily represented in the public sector. In yet another blow to black people, the Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s system for purging voters from the rolls. This was a continuation of the attack on voting rights for black people and the poor; in 2013, the Court had already effectively gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

This year’s round of reactionary legal decrees began with an early June decision supporting a Colorado baker who, citing religious beliefs, refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. It was no more about a cake than the sit-ins at Woolworth’s lunch counters in the early 1960s were about coffee. While couched in narrow legal terms, the ruling gives a green light to use a theological justification to trample on the rights of gays, transgender people and any other persona non grata.

The Court then approved Trump’s permanent ban on citizens of seven, largely Muslim, countries from entering the U.S. Like the roundups and detentions at the Mexican border, Trump’s ban plays to his white-supremacist base, including border guards and other law-and-order forces, whipping them up for further acts of racist violence.

Then came the nomination of Kavanaugh, whose credentials include upholding state voter suppression laws, opposing affirmative action and abortion rights, and repeatedly ruling in favor of employers in workplace discrimination cases. Like Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s earlier Court appointee, Kavanaugh was promoted by the reactionary Federalist Society. Formed in 1982 by law students whose central goal was to limit, obstruct and overturn enforcement of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, the society counted among its mentors Yale law professor Robert Bork, an outright racist who once wrote that a law insisting that restaurants serve black people would be a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness.” It is no accident that the Christian fundamentalists who are mobilizing against abortion had their origins as a political force 50 years ago in the crusade to maintain racial segregation.

The promotion of the Catholic reactionary Kavanaugh has energized “right to life” bigots who see their best opening in nearly 50 years to undo the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. If Roe is overturned and abortion thrown back to state legislatures, it would be catastrophic, resurrecting the days of back-alley abortions and making the already growing number of do-it-yourself abortions the norm. Minority, poor and working-class women, millions of whom are already denied access to this simple medical procedure through myriad state restrictions and lack of funds, would especially suffer.

Against the ghoulish Republicans, whose slogan to “make America great again” conjures up an earlier time of U.S. supremacy when black people and women supposedly knew “their place,” the Democrats see an opportunity to build their anti-Trump “resistance” so they can win the midterm elections and eventually take back the White House. No less than the GOP, the Democratic Party represents the same capitalist system, which is driven by the brutal exploitation of the working class and based on the vicious oppression of black people, who are segregated in the mass at the bottom of society.

It was the Democrats’ own attacks on the unions, immigrants and others that paved the way for the current Republican offensive. What is desperately needed is militant class struggle to strike a blow against the endless ruling-class onslaught. Key to this perspective is the fight to break the allegiance of the labor movement to Democratic Party “lesser-evilism.”

Behind the Black Robes

Labor leaders, feminists and the liberal press claim that the way to fight is through the ballot box: elect more Democrats, who will in turn appoint more friendly judges. But under capitalism, regardless of which political wing of the bourgeoisie holds power, the judiciary is an arm of the bourgeois state machine, whose purpose is to defend capitalist class rule against the exploited and oppressed. Along with the courts, the core of the capitalist state apparatus includes the police, prisons and the military.

On July 9, the same day as Kavanaugh’s nomination, the New York Times published an editorial bemoaning how the “Constitution is about to be hijacked by a small group of conservative radicals well funded by ideological and corporate interests.” Demonstrating bipartisan civility, it simultaneously published an op-ed piece titled, “A Liberal’s Case for Brett Kavanaugh,” which praised the president for his “classiest move” and hailed the nominee as a judge “who prioritizes the Constitution’s original meaning.” Yes, and that original meaning included slavery.

At its inception, when the U.S. was marked by “free labor” capitalism in the North and chattel slavery in the South, the Supreme Court was designed as part of a system of “checks and balances” to insulate government from the unpredictable masses. As Alexander Hamilton put it in the Federalist Papers, its purpose is to be “an essential safeguard against the effects of occasional ill humors in the society.” The Supreme Court, with its august judges appointed for life, has not a little in common with Britain’s aristocratic, unelected House of Lords (though given the current Court’s Christian zealotry, the Iranian ayatollahs’ Guardian Council may be a more apt analogy).

Four years before the outbreak of the Civil War, the Supreme Court declared in the 1857 Dred Scott decision that a black man “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In 1896, the Court sanctified “separate but equal” segregation as the law of the land, a hallmark in the crushing of black rights that had been gained through the smashing of slavery but rolled back with the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. During World War II, the Supreme Court approved the racist internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans, ordered by the Democratic Party administration of liberal icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt and implemented by California attorney general Earl Warren.

A prominent Republican politician, Warren was later appointed to the Supreme Court by Republican president Eisenhower. Liberals who push reliance on the courts as a motor for social progress hark back to that same Earl Warren, the Chief Justice defining the “golden years” of the Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969. Starting with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling against segregated education and over the next two decades, a series of Supreme Court rulings gave some meaning to the protections that most Americans are taught are in the Constitution, like upholding due process rights.

These reforms were not handed down by generous or fair-minded judges. Such rulings, including the 1973 Roe decision, came in the context of convulsive social struggles, starting with the marches against Jim Crow and culminating in the huge protests against the Vietnam War. Racist segregation and the repressive social climate had also become a liability for the U.S. rulers as they postured as the great defender of “democracy” in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

Aided by the liberals and other misleaders that tethered such struggle to the Democratic Party, the capitalist rulers worked to contain, co-opt and eventually destroy the mass civil rights movement and the burgeoning radicalization centered on opposition to the Vietnam War. And they succeeded. With minimal personnel changes, the Supreme Court immediately started to erode the gains of the preceding 20 years, signaled by the restoration of the death penalty in 1976. The devastation of lives and the shredding of civil liberties over the past few decades, including a massive bipartisan increase of government surveillance, were carried out not only by Reagan and Bush I and II, but also by Democrats Carter, Clinton and Obama.

Don’t Bow to the Democrats—For Class Struggle!

As Trump announced his new justice pick, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, along with their “democratic-socialist” adjunct Bernie Sanders, headed a rally on the Supreme Court steps amid signs reading “Stop Kavanaugh” and “Protect Our Courts.” Democrats are being called on to “pack the courts,” i.e., increase the number of justices to offset Trump’s appointments—once the Democrats regain the presidency. A June 28 article posted on jacobinmag.com, a project of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), titled, “In Defense of Court-Packing,” claimed that “lasting progressive change” lies through such schemes to gain control of the Court, as their hero FDR once threatened to do.

For its part, the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) puts forward a variant of how to tinker with the capitalist state, writing in the article, “Without Struggle, There Is No Roe,” that Kavanaugh “could be rejected if the Democrats are forced to put up a real fight” (socialistworker.org, 20 July). The underlying premise of both the ISO and the DSA is that the capitalist state is a neutral body that can be swayed, and that bourgeois democracy can be made to represent the interests of the exploited and oppressed. But as Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote in a polemic against the granddaddy of the ISO and DSA, German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky: “Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor” (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918).

The strategy of the ISO is to call on the Democrats to resist. Given that the Democratic Party leadership today is about as appealing as a cold sore, the reformist lackeys try to refurbish the Democrats’ credentials by promoting pseudo-socialists in the party. The recent victory of the DSA’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the New York Congressional primary election has been celebrated as an opening for the left, with ISO leaders openly calling to work with such Democrats to “deepen the confidence of our side and strengthen the fighting capacity of the working class” (socialistworker.org, 23 July). In fact, they are acting to keep the working class chained to its class enemy, to the very capitalist party that has targeted immigrants as terrorists and criminals, ripped up democratic rights and beefed up the machinery of state repression, and unleashed U.S. military might against oppressed peoples from the Near East to Africa and beyond.

Even over abortion, Democratic administrations have acquiesced and colluded in the decades-long Republican-led drive to end women’s basic right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. In 1980, the Supreme Court affirmed the Hyde Amendment—signed into law by Jimmy Carter—that denied Medicaid funds for abortion. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton, while axing welfare for mothers, presided over a barrage of additional abortion restrictions. In 2010, Obama ensured that federal funds from the Affordable Care Act would not be used for abortions.

Meanwhile, the bureaucrats who run the trade unions have refused to wage even defensive class battles, instead pushing reliance on the government, its courts and supposed “friends of labor” Democrats. Their central argument for opposing Janus is that they needed a dues base in order to keep a lid on class struggle. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten put it baldly in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, warning that an anti-union decision would disrupt “labor peace.” It is that program of class collaboration that has helped decimate the unions throughout decades of anti-labor and racist attacks.

In “Marxism and Reformism” (1913), Lenin noted how the capitalists “grant reforms with one hand and with the other always take them back, reduce them to nought, use them to enslave the workers, to divide them into separate groups and perpetuate wage-slavery.” While the reformists “restrict the aims and activities of the working class to the winning of reforms,” the goal of revolutionary socialists is to use reforms to broaden the class struggle. Lenin explained, “The more independent the working-class movement, the deeper and broader its aims, and the freer it is from reformist narrowness the easier it is for the workers to retain and utilise improvements.”

There are urgent needs in this country: for decent, high-wage jobs and quality, integrated housing and schools for all; for free abortion on demand as part of socialized health care; for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. It is in the vital interest of the multiracial working class to mobilize through hard class struggle, in defense of itself and all the oppressed. It is through intervention into such struggles that the Spartacist League seeks to forge a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Modeled on the Bolsheviks, such a party would serve as a “tribune of the people,” fighting all manifestations of oppression as part of the fight for workers revolution. With the proletariat in power, justice will be in the hands of workers councils committed to rebuilding this society on a socialist basis, and the bourgeoisie’s supremely reactionary Supreme Court will be a relic of a barbaric past, like the medieval rack and the slaveowner’s lash.