NEW YORK CITY—About 500 hundred City University of New York faculty, staff and students rallied by the New York Stock Exchange, joined by faculty from Rutgers, nurses from the New York State Nurses’ Association, and members from community and religious groups.
The demonstration was called by the CUNY faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), against the recent brazenly anti-working class tax bill signed into law by U.S. president Trump over Christmas. The PSC claimed this “emergency demonstration” would send a message in the “heart of corporate profiteering” on the day of Congressional voting for the tax bill.
Progressive Labor Party salutes workers who protested the latest attack from Racist-in-Chief Trump. The tax bill will cut social services for the working class and reflects deep splits in the ruling class. As opposed to the domestic wing of the U.S. ruling class, the imperialist wing needs financial and ideological backing for their coming wars. These tax cuts are a hinderance to that long-term agenda(see more next issue). In this period of relatively low class struggle, more people need to stand up against all the bosses’ attacks.  
Symbolic militancy
Chants like “Kill the Bill” and “7K or Strike” were frequently chanted by the multiracial and young crowd of women and men, with the second chant referring to the demands of adjunct faculty to receive a pay increase from $3500 to $7000 per class taught in the current round of PSC contract negotiations with CUNY. Unfortunately for the energetic hundreds who came looking for leadership, they didn’t get any from the PSC!
As a part of the demonstration, fifteen PSC officers and pre-selected faculty coordinated with the NYPD to be voluntarily arrested (see letter from an arrestee, page 6). The cops allowed them to gather and sit near the Stock Exchange entrance, and then allowed journalists from the bosses’ media to take pictures. In a symbolic effort to demonstrate their supposed militancy — despite not actually blocking the Stock Exchange entrance — the NYPD cheerfully obliged the PSC misleadership’s symbolism by arresting them for blocking the Stock Exchange entrance.
For workers and students present who live in neighborhoods under constant racist police terror, the sight of these “militant” union so-called leaders coordinating and staging an arrest with the full cooperation of the NYPD must have been a strange one.
Following liberal leaders is a dangerous trap that will only hurt the working class.
Rise up or die-in?
Members of the Progressive Labor Party and friends among the students and faculty attended, and at one point, the PSC officers had a section of the march lie down in the middle of Broad Street. They called this a “die-in,” where people passively lie down and pretend that they’re dead, while journalists working for capitalist-owned newspapers step on them and trip over them trying to take their pictures (see letter, page 3).
This level of “emergency” mobilization against the tax bill seems convenient given the Supreme Court is imminently ruling against the agency fee, forcing unions to scramble to keep members loyal and dues paying.
Away from the “die-in” and the artificial bravery of the PSC misleaders, PL’ers and rank-and-file members of the PSC and allied unions led militant chants. While selling CHALLENGE, several conversations were held with friends and demonstrators comparing the media saviness of today’s publicity stunt with the PSC misleaders’ claims to fight for the interests of the adjunct faculty. How can education workers, especially adjuncts, tell when the PSC officers are actually fighting for power, or just “symbolically”? Just look at how the PSC officers relied on the NYPD to stage the demonstration.
Real working class leaders like the Black youth of Ferguson, Baltimore, Baton Rouge and elsewhere relied on the working class, because police are exactly the last people workers can ever trust. And as the PSC misleaders’ strange behavior again and again demonstrates, liberals literally lead workers right into the police’s arms.
Unions and capitalism
The behavior of these PSC misleaders is less strange when one considers their role under capitalism. Early on in capitalist history, workers learned that their strength multiplied when they organized trade unions to collectively negotiate for important reforms, like higher pay and better working conditions.
In the U.S., historical twentieth century unions like the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organized militant mass strikes led by women, immigrant, Black, and white workers. Radical organizers like Helen Keller, “The Rebel Girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Mother” Jones, Eugene Debs, “Big Bill” Haywood, William Z. Foster and masses of others led militant, earth-shaking strikes in nearly every major U.S. industry from the mines to the mills prior to World War I. Inspired by revolutionary ideas, these workers didn’t do it with passive “die-ins.” Their massive “sit-down” strikes were organized occupations that mobilized entire industries and cities.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, these same organizers supported the Bolsheviks and formed what became the Communist Party USA. But even after decades of stunning organizing successes, when the old international communist movement decided to put revolutionary politics secondary to union organizing, its defeat was a certainty long before it happened.
Revolution, not reform
Even the relatively few militant unions left today cannot and do not lead the way forward. That’s up to the communists, who must organize within their unions to spread communist ideas. Unions exist within the legal boundaries set by capitalists and do not fundamentally threaten capitalism, but millions of workers who believe in revolutionary communist ideas do!
Today’s unions form an important part of the bosses’ state, colluding with the Democratic Party in exerting political control over the working class. While certain factions of the ruling class clearly want them destroyed, this does not automatically mean that unions and their misleaders are our friends!
The PSC misleaders are trying to convince us to join them on the hamster wheel of liberalism and reform. They are utterly unwilling to confront the cage of capitalism, and meanwhile they build the illusions that capitalism can be reformed and that the NYPD can play nice.
And thus, the PSC misleadership’s behavior is not so strange after all! Their symbolic actions do not represent real working class power, unlike the multiracial rank-and-file mass communist movement of campus faculty, students, and workers that PLP is building on campuses across CUNY. PLP’s growth means the days of this “symbolic” nonsense are numbered. For the masses of workers looking for a way out of capitalism, joining PLP means true resistance to the growing fascist attacks by fighting for communism, and giving the bosses and their capitalist system a new meaning to the term “die-in”!

TEL AVIV—Progressive Labor Party here is working within the Coalition for Direct Employment. This is a reformist mass organization that fights against the horrors of contract labor.
Contract bosses are essentially wage-slave traders. They hire workers, and then lend them to various businesses. Thus, a large business employs the worker in practice, but the legal employer, who pays the wage, is the contract boss hired by that business. This allows all sorts of abuse without holding the actual boss—the one hiring the contractor to provide workers—accountable. Contract bosses often pay very low wages and ignore benefit laws. The actual employer usually treats the contract workers, at best, as second-class workers, and at worst—as slave labor.
The Coalition, an open democratic organization, aims to get rid of contract work and get all workers direct employment. Everyone has a voice, leadership and membership. Even if this is your first day in the Coalition, you can speak up and be heard in it. The leadership team is mostly composed of women; most of the team members are working-class and only a few are “activists.”
The current coordinator (chair-person) is a working-class Black Ethiopian woman. The Coalition replaces its coordinator every five or so years; it has no “Leader for Life” as is common on the Revisionist Left. In short, it is a working-class organization open to everyone.
One coalition member, who is also a PLP communist, is a contract worker at a mall belonging to Azrieli Malls, Israel’s largest mall chain. The super-rich Azrieli family, one of Israel’s 19 richest families, owns this chain. They hire contract workers for housekeeping and security, pay minimum wage and sometimes do not pay for the lunch breaks. They even avoid paying legal benefits.
Sexism in the workplace
The Azrieli Malls employ women to clean toilets, including men’s bathrooms. They often do not allow the workers to lock the bathroom while cleaning. This means that men come and go, and sometimes go to the urinal right in front of them.
When asked to go to the stalls and close the door, some react to the women in a demeaning, sexist manner, sometimes to the level of sexual harassment. The bosses insist that women clean these bathrooms and continue to suffer constant harassment.
Last year, when the boss wanted to fire a worker who protested about this, the coalition bombarded the Azrieli Malls management with e-mails and text messages, and the worker was able to keep her job. The organization is now campaigning for direct employment at the Azrieli Malls.
We organized youth and workers from other work places to form a flash mob in front of the largest Azrieli mall in Tel-Aviv. We produced several videos and shared them on social media. We also leafleted in the malls. Progressive Labor Party will continue this fight with the coalition while exposing the exploitative nature of the capitalist system in the process. Wage labor, in its most basic essence, means being exploited economically and being robbed of our basic human dignity. The conditions are both racist and sexist.
The exploitative, sexist mall and contract bosses will not get away with their crimes!

BALTIMORE—For the fourth time, the capitalist courts will put Keith Davis Jr. on trail after being framed for two crimes. In 2015, he was the target of a brutal police shooting, the first since Freddie Gray earlier that year.
What has followed in the over two-year wake of that shooting has been nothing short of a racist judicial and prosecutorial circus. Keith is a target of police terror, a fact the cops are trying to justify by making up murder chargers against an innocent member of our class.
Criminal system prosecutes the victim
What began as a case of mistaken identity has evolved into a framing and cover-up of significant scale. A short recap:
At around 10 a.m. that morning, a hack driver reported an armed robbery in progress in his vehicle. The suspect fled. Police already on scene for another incident proceeded to chase. Neighborhood folks witnessing the chase, Davis included, scattered. Police lost sight of the suspect and began to chase Davis mistakenly.
The cops hased fired at Davis 44 times, struck 3 times, including once on his face, and rendered unconscious. Another lodged in his neck, not far from his spine.
Davis survived, only to be subsequently charged as that armed robbery suspect. He sat trial in late February of 2016 and was acquitted.
Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced charges of first-degree homicide regarding the murder of Kevin Jones, a security guard at Pimlico Racetrack shot hours before in the early morning on June 7, 2015.
On what grounds? A heavily-disputed partial palm print on a gun found near Davis in the garage. The gun was planted. There are no other connections at the murder scene. No motive. No personal connection to Jones. No DNA. No CCTV footage. Finally, he was cleared by eyewitness testimony.
Regardless, the first homicide trial was heard in May 2017. It ended in an 11-1 hung jury. That’s 11 not-guilty votes to 1 abstained vote. Rather than poll the jury, the now-disgraced Judge Alfred Nance declared a mistrial.
The second trail this past October was under Judge Lynn Stewart Mays. With the eleventh hour discovery (read: manufacturing) of a jailhouse witness, the capitalist state declared a second degree felony murder.
But the details of that witness soon would unraveled, leading Davis’ legal team, led by Latoya Francis-Williams, to win an appeal on the grounds of an ill-informed jury and perjured witness testimony.

In a few months, Davis will sit for his fourth trial. It begs the question: what is the State’s Attorney’s goal? How is the community being served by repeatedly prosecuting a man for whom there seems to be no case? What began as a mass acquittal of 15 charges relating to the initial robbery incident, evolved into a heavily defense-favored 11 to 1 hung jury mistrial, and ultimately ended up in an overturned conviction.
Servants of capitalist govt
This case exposes the role of this capitalist state that will go above and beyond to frame, convict, and lock up Black and Latin workers. The police, the courts, and politicians all work together to preserve this racist system. The criminal injustice system originates from slave patrols and slave laws. The modern capitalist legal system is born out of the law enforcement system that existed for the purpose of controlling the slave population and protecting the interests of slave owners.
We can only deduce that Mosby is not operating under the guise of being a public servant, as she claims. In fact, she is not a public servant. She is the capitalist state’s servant. She is the State’s Attorney, not the workers’ attorney. The Baltimore Police Department is an arm of the state and Mosby is fighting to preserve that arm. After all, Davis was mistakenly shot just one month after the Baltimore Uprising—the city was in no condition to handle another incident and Mosby’s career could not withstand a second round of cop indictments. Davis thus became the fall man.
Take the streets
Some argued for a new State’s Attorney come election time later this year. Voting is getting to choose which criminal will rob our dignity and livelihood next.
What is undeniable is the power of organized multiracial fightback. There has been mass organizing. In additions to bold protests in the streets, we protested in the lobby of the office building of the City State Attorney. We wrote letter to all the other judges, and held fundraising events. We also filled the courtrooms.  The judge told everyone to sit back down, and lectured us about how it’s illegal to attempt to influence a judge. She also said she didn’t read the letters sent to the judges. But, she was seemed to be clearly responding to the was strength, content, and quantity of those letters. The judge lied. Clearly, our mass actions had an effect.
And so, as 2018 begins, we must remain the streets. It is incumbent that we create new leaders and foster new relationships. Free Keith Davis, Jr. and all political prisoners! Here’s to a louder 2018.

HARLEM—The Washington Post has documented that 903 of our brothers and sisters were killed by kkkops in 2016. That’s more than two times the number reported by the FBI. This furious statistic compares with a Berea College study that estimates that an average of 54 lynchings a year were committed between 1882 and 1968. The U.S. bosses now arm and train a much deadlier “Klan in Blue” under the cover of white sheets. This racist practice is designed to intimidate all from fighting with multiracial unity. But where they have failed, we will succeed as the working class join in mass struggle against this racist capitalist system.
According to the same Washington Post survey, 418 of those killed by cops were white; 205 Black; 163 Latin: A total of 368 were Black and Latin! These figures prove that no worker is safe under this system. Seventy percent of the U.S. population is white, while 30 percent is Black and Latin. This huge display of racial disproportion, as because Black and Latin workers are killed at a rate three times higher than their white counterpart.
The Post evaluated that one out of four of these killings involved people undergoing mental crisis. Typically, family, friends, or neighbors become aware of a person suffering an acute, psychotic episode.  They call for help and too often the only number available is 911. Police arrive in uniform with visible weapons and command the person in crisis to surrender. A conflict ensues, and the person in need of help ultimately is shot dead, instead.
Deborah Danner
Over the past year, PLP comrades and friends in our congregation joined in many struggles for justice, first, on behalf of Deborah Danner who was killed in the Bronx on October 18, 2016 under the same circumstances. We rallied with many others in front of her building, and then marched to the precinct to demand prosecution of Sgt. Hugh Barry who claimed he feared for his life because this elderly woman approached him with a baseball bat.
Barry didn’t even thin of less violent tactics. Instead, with two shots to her torso, he murdered her life. After seven months delay Sgt. Barry was finally indicted for murder. Still, no trial date has been set: No doubt Police Benevolent Association lawyers are working around the clock to get the indictment thrown out, as was Richard Haste’s for the killing of Ramarley Graham in February of 2012.”Justice delayed is justice denied”!
The multiracial Justice and Peace Committee scoured the internet to find whatever response the cops’ officialdom had made to this telling evaluation. For months, nothing! Finally, we brought this travesty to the attention of our church’s governing board which, in July 2017, issued a firm request to the Police Commissioner and the Mayor asking for documentation of a response to the Inspector General’s report.
PLP understands this system depends on racism to thrive. Which is why we must continue to fight back. Erickson Brito, James Owens, Ariiel Galarza, Dwayne Jeune, Alexander Bonds, and Miguel Richards:  All brothers in mental distress (Black or Latin) shot to death by NYPD from November 2016 in Brooklyn to September 2017 in the Bronx.  And all killings were pronounces “justified” according to NYPD protocol. A police body camera chillingly documents Mr. Richard’s death on You Tube- a classic psychotic “suicide by cop “ case where the psychotic victim is goaded to expose his toy gun by belligerent military police orders before the fatal shots were fired. These racist killings will continue until the workers raise up and defeat the racist capitalist of the world!
PLP have repeatedly organized and demonstrated in solidarity with several victims, their families and friends. And, most importantly, we have reached out to a wide number of community organizations and congregations to develop a fighting platform to struggle to take away resources from the NYPD in order to fund civilian mental health-trained personnel who should be the first responders in all cases involving people in mental distress.
As members of PLP we understand that no reform is premiant and the only true way to free the working class from the horrors of this system is to over throw it with communist revolution! As the fighters against apartheid in South Africa powerfully sang “We have just begun to FIGHT, we have only started!”