MEXICO—The approval of the national security law by both chambers of the legislature will enshrine the military’s role in law enforcement. This law, which was promoted by President Peña Nieto along with the consent of the Supreme Court, establishes the ability of the military to take over civilian law enforcement and exposes the power the capitalists have. It clearly shows we live in a dictatorship lead by oppressive billionaires who use democracy or fascism to guarantee the existence of their system of exploitation and profit.  
The law legalizes the military state imposed by Calderon when he was president. Solidifying the Mexican Army’s role as the frontline of fascism. “Since Mexico launched its “war on drugs” in 2006—with major deployments of the armed forces to fight organized crime—more than 100,000 people have been killed and more than 30,000 have gone missing. Homicide rates dropped in 2014 and 2015, but have climbed steadily since, with 2017 on track to be the deadliest year in Mexico in two decades”(Human Rights Watch 12/7/17).
On the imperialists interests in Mexico, Trump’s fuss at the beginning of his presidency about sending troops to Mexico to control the drug cartels and possible terrorist threats shows that the U.S. wants a more fascist control of the population, and to guarantee control of its backyard.  This has become more pressing to the U.S. bosses with the increased presence of is world arch rival China, which has more and more investments in Latin America.  
Even though there were some capitalists and their institutions, intellectuals, artists and human rights organizations, like the useless UN who opposed to the law, the government still approved it. But, the workers know the capitalist class needs its legal system to protect the bosses interests when the workers try to fight its abuses. The history of the military’s attacks on workers is long. For example: the mass murders in Tlatelolco in ’68 and El Halconazo in June 1971. The dirty war of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. The systemic murder of dissident teachers from the CNTE union and militant PRD base members. The repression of the Zapatista communities. The massacres in Aguas Blancas and Acteal. The brutal repression of the Oxaca Comuna. The murders in Tlatlaya and Tanhuato. The Ayotzinapa students disappearance. The criminal repression in Nochixtlan.
Capitalism is a genocidal and murdering system. It is a dictatorship that uses different forms of violence against its workers, the violence mentioned above and the violence of inequality and misery.  The bosses will use their state apparatus, its laws and repressive forces to defend itself.  We can’t make a system like this one fulfill the needs of the working class, that is an illusion. We need a communist revolution to end this capitalist dictatorship of a minority over the whole population.   
One sector of the capitalist class, including many of its intellectuals and artists, believe that capitalism can function democratically, they trust that the system can be more fair, and they have convinced millions of workers. One of the leaders of these ideas is López Obrador.  But it is a scam, capitalist dictatorship has a two face mask, one is fascist, the other democratic, using each one according to its needs and class interests.  Behind the mask are the same class oppressors with their guns to our backs.
All electoral candidates defend capitalists interests; Jose Antonio Meade, Ricardo Anaya, López Obrador, Jaime Rodríguez “El Bronco” and Margarita Zavala.  Not one is going to end the profit system of exploitation, but they want us to believe that we have the power to decide who will govern us. Yet, in a system rigged against us, we are only free to choose the next oppressor.
There is a difference with Mari Chuy, the Indigenous Council’s candidate. Much of the support for her represents resistance of our class to capitalist oppression, but her candidacy is a reflection of the wrong line. Her candidacy represents support for the capitalist framework on elections, autonomy, and nationalism within the leadership of the Zapatista’s Army of National Liberation.  
During the debate on the new security law, many specialists and opposition leaders exposed how it violates the Constitution, but even in this exchange of ideas the fact that the bosses dictate the laws and modify them at will did not come up.  
One example of how laws are used is the energy reform law, approved along with several other reforms, it was the result of the work of the capitalist class since the De la Madrid presidency. The energy law, helped along over the years by even the most liberal administrations increased the ruling class’ control over the energy riches. While workers in Mexico suffered cuts in pay and a lengthening of the work week.
We have to fight against the National Security Law and all the injustices in the capitalist system.  We have to be prepared for what this law has in store for the working class and be prepared to keep fighting and build a communist movement that will end the oppressive and enslaving capitalist system with a communist society of social equality.

Ines Weiner, a beloved math teacher in the New York public schools and a revolutionary communist with Progressive Labor Party (PLP), died on January 16 after a year-long battle with cancer. She was only 61 years old. In her last week, over a hundred people visited her hospital bed.
Politicized at an early age in the Dominican Republic, Ines graduated from Walton High School in the Bronx and got her degree in math at Lehman College, where she began Party organizing. She was known for her fighting spirit first as a student, and then as a teacher she was popular with her students, who often sought her out for help.
Her family remembers her as someone who valued growth—of a flower in her garden, a child, a husband, a comrade, a communist party. They say she knew struggle—through all the anger, frustration and tears—was growth. Though capitalism failed Ines like many millions of others, she knew that communism would eventually destroy it. Her family will miss her and remember her as someone who showed them and many others how to struggle, grow, and win. As she wished, they intend to scatter her ashes at abolitionist John Brown’s grave.
”La Maestra, Luchando, También Está Educando”
As an active PLP teacher in the Bronx, Ines was critical to many political struggles. First, she fought against police terror. When Jose Luis Zarate, a young unarmed worker from Mexico, was gunned down on the job by the KKKops, Ines helped the family see why they should take to the streets with a group of victims’ parents and PLP. A few months later in 1999, ten blocks from where Zarate was murdered, Amadou Diallo, another young unarmed worker from Guinea, was shot 41 times by the NYPD, and Ines was key to PLP’s launching the first demonstration against one of the most infamous of New York racist police killings. In 2012, she helped the Party organize against the murder of Ramarley Graham. Ines was clear that there will never be justice for the working class under capitalism.
Second, Ines struggled on the job. She believed students should “fight to learn and learn to fight.” She created math lessons that taught her students the system of capitalist inequality. When she spoke at union meetings, everybody listened. When her large school was being restructured, her organizing infuriated the school bosses. As Ines neared retirement, morale at her school was so low that staff no longer held celebrations. They made an exception, however, for Ines—a grand retirement party of 100 staff members.
Third, she was a communist organizer. Ines was a collective base-builder: she knew how to work jointly with other comrades to help build a wider base for the Party, spending many hours with them visiting the families of their students, or forming friendships with those they brought to Party events. Ines helped build the Party among many people, such as the Bronx Stella D’oro biscuit company strikers.
Boston: ”Death to the Fascists!”
Ines also took part in the 1975 PLP Boston Summer project, showing great courage in the face of the vicious racists of the anti-busing movement. In 2002, Ines went to Boston with other NY comrades to help shut down a Nazi meeting scheduled to take place at the Wakefield Public Library. PLP set up a militant picket line and Ines helped lead our action, hitting a Nazi over the head with a stick. She was charged with assault and battery, and a long court case ensued with her teaching license and pension at risk. The party built a strong legal defense that eventually won the case. Ines came up to Boston for many court dates, and became comrades forever with her Boston family. Her communist courage made that day in Wakefield a victory for the working class.
Haiti: When the Trees Marched
Ines came from the Dominican side of Hispaniola and belied in unity with workers in Haiti. Our Haitian comrades loved her for overcoming the bitter history of Haitian-Dominican relations, poisoned by the bosses of both sides. Once, on an afternoon swim in that sea which had been a graveyard of slaves, the swimmers of different nations and colors floating over the swells seemed to promise the future Ines dreamed and fought for.
A hunger strike by a protesting high-school teacher gathered union teachers in support. He lay half-dead on a concrete floor and Ines whispered that we had to put a stop to this. We tried, but it was not in our hands. We marched in the streets and headed for the Education Department with our demands. Teachers flanked and led students as though on a school trip, but this was an unauthorized march which stopped traffic for over an hour as hundreds of us crowded through the dust and mud and noise, swept along by the memory of the man lying on the schoolroom floor to protest with his life. We all carried branches the children had pulled from trees to act as flags and banners. The trees marched. The trees marched, the children danced and sang, and there was Ines waving her branch, and there she will always be for us, in the streets of the whole world, in the struggle of all the workers, among the children, with the teachers, singing for liberation.
Bella Ciao, Comrade
Ines had the inspiring life of a comrade so able in working for our class, and so human with everyone, including your second family of comrades spread around the globe. Ines, you loved nothing more than to speak with us, to struggle with us, to eat with us. Students who came to be tutored, family stopping by, comrades in a struggle or just there to talk. A house of love, comradeship, and food. Bella ciao, comrade! We will continue the struggle for communism, and through the struggle, you will live on.

City University of New York (CUNY) made an agreement with the Professional Staff Congress union (PSC) about reduction in teaching load for full-time faculty. While an improvement in the working conditions of full-time workers, it is also a prelude to increasing attacks on our job security. But most importantly, the workload reduction is a racist attack on the 270,000 students, who are mostly Black, Latin, Asian, and undocumented.
The reduction agreement reduces the annual teaching load by three credit hours, about one full course, across CUNY institutions. It will be phased in over three years, starting in the Fall of this year. This agreement will allegedly allow more free time for individual work with students, office hours, research, and scholarship.
Every decision made by college and/or union bosses must be viewed in light of how it affects students. Often the impact is clear: the policy of charging tuition simultaneously with the advent of open admissions; the subsequent tuition increases; the weakening of education standards through Pathways, the trimming of financial aid, the increasing use of adjuncts (non-tenured instructors). All of these decisions are racist attacks against our students. Other times it’s less evident, but the unrelenting stream of racist attacks should inform the analysis of every CUNY decision.
an attack on students
A decreased workload for professors means a higher work-and-stress load for students. Adjuncts will almost certainly teach the excess hours that full-timers no longer have to. There were no provisions or guarantees in the agreement that the excess hours be taught by full-time instructors. CUNY’s goal of increasing the percentage of courses taught by adjuncts is clear, and their history is well documented.
The poverty-level wages paid to adjuncts means they have to teach on multiple campuses, while also working as Uber drivers, or waiting tables, or selling their blood plasma, and all the things that poverty-stricken workers are forced to do. No professor can be expected to teach effectively under these conditions. The instructors’ working and living conditions are students’ learning conditions.
What does this mean for students needing office hours and/or advisement? To the extent that the mostly Black, Latin and immigrant youth are even afforded higher education in the U.S., they are in classrooms led by these super-exploited faculty. Students today are effectively paying more for less—less education, less student services and resources, and less of a job prospect after college. “While college tuition surged from 2003 to 2013 by 94 percent at public institutions and 74 percent at private, nonprofit schools, and student debt has climbed to over $1.2 trillion, much of that money has been going to ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats” (The Atlantic, 9/15/15).
No guarantees to increase full-timers
The liberal leadership of the PSC union shares the blame for failing to guarantee to cover excess hours with more full-time faculty.
CUNY’s working-class students need guarantees that a reduced teaching load reduction means more attention to students without increasing workload on adjuncts. Since the union leadership is unwilling to wage the reform struggle necessary, waging this struggle all the more requires building a mass Progressive Labor Party with communist leadership hailing from the students and rank-and-file faculty. That means exposing that negotiations benefiting one sector of our class, like workload reduction, amidst many-sided attacks on students and adjuncts, are no “victories” at all.
Connect campus struggle to imperialism
We cannot underestimate what tremendous tools these “attacks-as-victories” are to the capitalist class. Handing out crumbs to some workers at the expense of others pits workers against one another. The Wall Street bosses running CUNY know they can pit students against faculty, and pit full-time faculty against part-time. These divisions weaken our class, just like storm clouds of imperialist wars and fascism, are growing.
The history of liberal reforms of capitalism has exposed itself to be deceitful and short-lived—the needs of workers and students cannot and will not be met under capitalism, let alone at negotiating tables, or voting for Democrats at the ballot box. In the richest city of the richest country in the world, the working class continues to be beat down. CUNY workers and students, already targets of viciously racist capitalist attacks, are being set up for worsening education, racist unemployment, more police terror, war, and fascism.
Join PLP and fight for more than just crumbs. Fight for more than incremental improvements in working conditions that are mirrored with racist attacks against our students. Fight for more than bandages on the gaping wound that is global capitalism.
Our fight is to destroy this system and replace it with communism, where all workers and students will live, work, study, and play from a place of freedom. It is the freedom to recognize our class needs and collectively act towards meeting those needs. Join our fight for better learning conditions for students, smash the two-tier wage system, while organizing students and coworkers to fight for the communist system our international working class deserves.

*****

Fight the two-tier wage system

The PSC union bosses, along with the college bosses, systemically upload a two-tier wage system that run on the backs on the mainly women and nonwhite adjunct labour. The proletarian-ization of academic faculty with contingent and poverty-waged professors has long been a clear goal of the U.S. ruling class.
The Atlantic published findings that we knew all along—“state schools with the highest-paid presidents seem to be offsetting their administrative bloat with cheaper labor… The temporary status and low income of adjunct professors can make it difficult for them to provide quality instruction and support to their students” (9/24/15). Around the country, about 75 percent of college faculty are adjuncts, and 25 percent of those adjuncts are on public assistance to keep afloat. The unions representing them and/or full-time faculty have been unable or unwilling to stem the tide.
Having adjunct and full-time faculty is a two-tier wage system that drives a wedge between workers. These divisions weakens our collective power, opening us to attack by CUNY on other fronts. Combined with the body-blow that public sector unions are about to receive from the Janus Supreme Court decision, the jobs of all CUNY faculty are placed under greater threat.

OAKLAND—The owners of the Oakland A’s (Major ­­­­­­­­­League Baseball team) had set their eyes on the Laney College site for a new stadium. To many, this was impending doom for the neighborhood and Laney Community College.
Many seemed resigned to hopelessness or dreamed about what they could gain from a stadium deal. A fiery group of staff & students from Laney Community College and community groups organized against the capitalists and their administrative stooges. After over six months of fightback, the college bosses were forced to halt plans with Oakland A’s.
Institutional Racism
Crooked chancellor, Jowel C. Laguerre, and a native of Haiti, has a history of shifting moneys into his own pockets at Solano and Peralta Community Colleges with Measure B funds (tax money that was supposed to be used to hire more part-time teachers). He met with the A’s­ president, Dave Kaval, several times to try and spur deals. The Chancellor tried to sell the bitter pill of a Coliseum takeover of Laney property with the sugar coating that this would bring more revenue to the “starving” Community College budgets.
The A’s owner is John Fisher from the Fisher family, founders of the GAP clothing company. They are also the owners of the Mendocino Redwood Company, the lumber company in Northern California. The Fishers are players in the third most unaffordable housing market on the planet, San Francisco. They will be responsible for tenant evictions and displacement of mainly Black, Latin, and Asian working-class people.  
The new Stadium will drive up the cost of living and housing for its current residents. It will spur the development of residential and commercial properties catered toward non-working-class people. This is an ongoing trend of racist displacement throughout Oakland.
Worker-Student Alliance Fight Back
An alliance of students, staff, and community members fought back. Because of collective organizing, hundreds attended the past four Board of Trustees meetings to give personal testimony to why the A’s deal was nothing more than a land grab and a push to gentrify the Oakland land next to Laney College. The organizing efforts included: emails, phone calls, classroom meetings and articles circulated about how stadiums damage working-class neighborhoods.
While the Board sat perched like faux royalty, many antiracists spoke passionately about why Laney College and the surrounding community are a remaining oasis for the multiracial, immigrant working class in Oakland.
Speakers denounced the institutional racism of a Board decision or the Chancellor’s support for a deal that could lead the way to privatization of Laney College, which now serves a population that is mainly Black, Latin, Asian, immigrant and low-income students.
The A’s management wined and dined fans before the Board meeting and brought them to testify about how important the A’s were to Oakland. They also tried to sway people with stories of exceptionalism (rags to riches from Haiti) or stories of money for shrinking budgets.
But ultimately, these misleaders serve the ruling class and use identity politics to confuse and conquer. We need to see those pretending to speak for the community, like the Chancellor tried to, as predatory servants of big money-capitalists.
After many months of struggle, the teachers union, PFT (Peralta Federation of Teachers), finally endorsed the fightback collective and said “NO” to the stadium deal. This was powerful. The PFT leadership only acted after members pushed for it, after the anti-stadium collective pressured the union.
This working-class pressure from below forced the Board of Trustees to instruct Chancellor Laguerre to stop deal-making conversations with the A’s. Yet, even after the Board of Trustees officially voted, the Chancellor made sure to mention to the San Francisco Chronicle “the door is never closed” on such deals.
Within a week of this victory, the Oakland Unified School District elected Board (k-12) voted to cut $9 million from the mid-year school budget over the protest of hundreds of teachers, students, parents and community. The racist dismantling of public education continues.
PLP members and others responded from the knowledge that deal or no deal, the current trend is one of dismantling public education for the multiracial working-class students at Laney.
Mobilization and Lessons
It was everyday workers (especially a multiracial group of women), students, and staff that had the most to lose who showed up and spurred each other on to fight. Through the struggle, individuals gained confidence in their ability to contribute.
During the fight back, there were efforts made to formalize the organizing coalition, but those who continued to fight, refused to let a hierarchy of leadership form. People in the coalition stressed the need for collective responsibility and to instead allow for informal parings and groupings to fuel the fire.
This was a positive environment to bring up how a communist collective society could function, a place where the motivation was “serve the people” not “what’s in it for me.”
The Oakland A’s team colors of green and yellow do not represent the working class. Instead, let us cheer for everyday workers, ourselves, to have a healthy, educated, meaningful, collective life. That color is revolutionary red.
PLP members aim to build a movement and a Party for a communist society. We have confidence that the working class will destroy capitalism and create and rule a society with no borders. Join us.