The following statement by the US Marxist-Humanists, London Corresponding Committee and international Marxist-Humanists from Canada, India, and West Africa is a contribution for the events in solidarity with the democracy movement in Iran in September and the fall.

For eighteen days, from July 20 to August 7, a group of workers at the Vestas wind turbine factory at Newport, on the Isle of Wight, on the south coast of England, held a sit-in at the plant. The occupation was part of a continuing campaign to prevent the closure of the plant by the Danish-owned company, Vestas Wind Systems, and the loss of about 625 jobs.

The group left the premises, to the cheers of hundreds of supporters, just before bailiffs were due to enforce a court order to remove them. A picket of the factory continues at the time of writing, and a national day of solidarity activities has been called for Sept. 17.

Of all the problems and contradictions that have afflicted the radical movement since the time of Marx, those pertaining to the dialectics of organization has proven to be the most difficult and perplexing of them all. Leftist groups and radical tendencies of various sorts have come and gone over the years, but the effort to develop revolutionary organizations on the basis of the insights of dialectical philosophy remains a task to be done.

Radical change is never accepted easily. With the current discussion on health care reform, we have an opportunity to dismantle three basic dysfunctional tenets of the current system.

The first tenet is that access to health care is a privilege and not a basic human need that our society as a whole values for everyone. Second, for most people, access to health care services is dependent on a person’s employment status. And third, insurance companies and employers are in control of the kinds of health care to which we have access.

Racism, Class and Profiling

Author’s note: The arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates speaks to the question of race and class in America. In terms of the media and pundit response, it also speaks to the absurdity of personalization and thus the substitution, in this case, of Gates’s socioeconomic status for the social question of “race” in the United States.

There are “two worlds” in each country, the “rulers” and the “ruled” or to put it more concretely, between workers and non-workers. Never, in my lifetime, has the divide between workers and non-workers in the U.S. been as vast as it is during the current economic crisis. The working class is bearing the brunt of the crisis, yet how much of their actual voice are we hearing in the political debate about the economy?

Given the importance of the events in Iran to the worldwide movement for human emancipation, I would like to call attention to the Iranian American translator Frieda Afary’s blog, “ Iranian Progressives in Translation .” In recent weeks, Iranian Progressives in Translation has featured the voices of feminist, gay, youth, and Marxist thinkers and activists. While we have already reprinted some of these translations on our website, I would like urge our readers to visit this website directly. Its statement of purpose reads: “This site is devoted to publishing English translations of statements or articles by progressive Iranian thinkers and activists who may not be widely known internationally but offer important ideas.”

By Kamran Afary and Kevin Anderson

The upheaval in Iran has shaken up Iranian and even regional politics. Not since the Palestinian Intifada of 1987 has the Middle East seen such a massive and persistent grassroots mobilization. At the same time, the Iranian upheaval is also the product of deep divisions inside the nation’s dominant classes.