As the fall semester begins at the City University of New York, nearly 275,000 students are returning to the classroom. Once again, the students are the primary targets of vicious racist attacks and cutbacks, as U.S. imperialism continues its relative decline and sharpening rivalry with Russian and Chinese imperialism. As imperialist wars rage and widen across the world, CUNY students - the majority of whom are Black, Latin, Asian and are immigrant - are saddled with rising tuition costs, crumbling infrastructure, increasingly poor job prospects, and increasing military recruitment to fight and die for U.S. imperialism.
Years of bosses’ racist attacks on students have made it possible for attacks on campus workers and faculty.
Fewer places is this clearer than at Kingsborough Community College (KCC), one of the largest colleges in the CUNY system. KCC has a total of over 15,000 full time and part time students, mostly Black, Latin and immigrants from across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central/ South Asia. Its maintenance and cafeteria staff is mostly Black, Latin, and Asian, in contrast to the faculty, which are almost completely white. With disproportionately higher numbers of immigrant, undocumented and students with DACA status, KCC students are at the cutting edge of capitalism’s system-wide racist attacks.
Members of the Progressive Labor Party have been selling CHALLENGE and making contacts outside KCC. The students, workers and faculty there paint a picture of a campus in need of building a mass, fighting PLP there to smash these racist and sexist attacks.
Students: Main Targets of Bosses’ Racism
To the capitalist bosses, students represent future wage-slaving workers, future empire-saving soldiers, or both. As the U.S. capitalist crisis worsens, increasing student tuition is the most obvious racist attack on KCC students.
Following the most recent political-economic crisis of U.S. capitalism in 2008, the bosses bailed out Wall Street banks with billions of workers’ tax dollars, deeply cut education funding, and raised the cost of tuition. Tuition has increased every year since 2011. On June 26, CUNY trustees (who come from some of the top Wall Street-tied investment banks and firms) voted to increase yearly tuition another $200 for a total of $6,530/ year for senior colleges, and $4,800/ year at the community colleges. At this same meeting, the trustees voted to cut the operating budgets that actually fund the schools by 1 per cent. The top salaries of CUNY administrators, however, were raised up to $402,700/ year. Chancellor Milliken passed this round of salary increases. Apparently, he’s satisfied with his $724,470/ year (NY Post, 6/26).
The true costs of college are far more than just rising tuition, however. At colleges like KCC, where many students are non-white and disproportionately single parents, expenses like MetroCards, textbooks and childcare can present impassable obstacles to maintaining full-time student status. Many students have family or work obligations that do not allow a full-time course load, which can complicate financial aid and scholarship packages.
For example, students hoping to qualify for the “Excelsior Scholarship,” which provides free tuition to certain students, must be enrolled full-time in consecutive semesters, and do not even qualify if they make under $50,000/ year (studybreaks.com, 4/19).
In comparison, students working full-time at the New York state minimum wage of $10.50/ hour  will only receive an annual salary of about $21,840/ year. In 2020, when the minimum wage increases to $15/ hour, that full-time salary will reach $31,200/ year.
KCC Workers: ‘Too Many Coaches, Too Few Players’
The situation of the mostly Black and high percentage women campus workers at KCC is worsening fast. While CUNY cuts the entire operations budget each year, at KCC 28 maintenance workers have left in two years, out of about 80 originally. And the college isn’t replacing them- supervisors in suits are a common sight but, as one worker explains, it’s like having a sports team “with too many coaches and not enough players.”
CUNY’s cuts mean the campus is in a state of deterioration and collapse, with heavier burdens falling on fewer maintenance workers. Bathrooms regularly flood and are shut down; toilet tissue can be scarce. Workers are burdened with maintaining more buildings and tasks they can handle. Most workers are forced to do jobs outside of their specific job title, and do so out of their commitment to providing KCC’s students with the best learning environment they can.
Many workers have worked at KCC for decades. Despite worsening conditions, many campus workers look out ‘beyond their job title’ to take care of students, workers, and faculty alike - an attitude of solidarity that all must learn from, and emulate, if a strong movement is to be built here.
Faculty: Adjunct Profs Pitted Against Full-timers
The working conditions of the mostly-white working class faculty, while relatively better, are worsening with their class sisters and brothers among the students and campus workers.
CUNY has come rely on adjunct professors for instruction, who are now 59% of all CUNY faculty, but paid about one third of what full-timers make. Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. While the professors’ union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) won certain benefits for adjuncts recently, the situation is worsening faster than the union can hope to keep up.
Issues like scheduling and teaching loads, as well as a path to full-time status, are among the issues motivating adjunct professors, whose struggles must be joined by full-timers to achieve.
KCC’s reliance on adjunct labor is no different than throughout CUNY. With the rise of ‘adjunctification’ throughout CUNY, faculty are following their students and campus workers with intensifying factory-like exploitation, where the education itself becomes more visibly a commodity, like everything else under capitalism.
An Injury to One Is An Injury to All
Decades of attacks on students have occurred with the growing needs of U.S. imperialism for obedient, low-wage workers and obedient soldiers in the widening wars between the U.S., Russian and Chinese imperialists. By keeping our struggles separate, the capitalist class has been able to segregate and control our class with racism, sexism and nationalism.
There is very little, if any, significant political contacts and joint organizing among the segregated students, workers, and faculty. But all of this can turn be turned around, and we call on all students and workers to join PLP and organize to fight back together.
We need to organize together and fight back for better conditions for all- immigrant and citizen,  Black and white. The longer campus workers and faculty to remain segregated to their narrow unions, the longer this dark night of capitalist attacks will be.
PLP is building a mass, international party for communist revolution to smash these racist borders, racist police attacks, and racist cutbacks in education to pay for the bosses’ imperialist wars.

Soy communista, toda la vida
Y communista he de morir
—Bella Ciao, Italian anti-fascist song

Lenny Dick was a communist his entire life. His parents (a carpenter and a math teacher) were active members of the Communist Party and Lenny grew up in a family committed to revolutionary, anti-racist, working class struggle. When he died from a heart attack on August 26, at the too-young age of 68, he was on his way to a barbecue for CUNY students and professors. The day before, Lenny was enthusiastically talking about a planned rally at Bronx Community College about the expiring union contract. He was already making plans to invite faculty and students.
Lenny joined the Progressive Labor Party at Columbia University, where he was a member of Students for a Democratic Society and took part in the famous 1968 sit-in against Columbia’s racist expansion into Harlem and its war research for the military. After college, Lenny became a Junior High School math teacher in East Harlem, where he was devoted to his students and opposed to a racist, segregated educational system.
In the early 1980’s, Lenny was teaching at Morris High School. Author Jonathan Kozol cited it as a prime example of racist neglect of minority students. Located in a working-class Bronx neighborhood, Morris HS was both segregated and falling apart -- an old building with leaking roofs, vermin, and live wires hanging dangerously in the auditorium. Large classes and few resources to help students, left many behind in reading and math. Many dropped out before graduating. Lenny worked with members of student government to demand improvements. When no one would listen, the students organized a walkout and rally outside the school.
Lenny had three young children and was his family’s only breadwinner. The students asked him to join them and speak at the rally. Lenny knew he could face disciplinary action, but he felt obligated to join the students. Hundreds walked out and demonstrated (forcing the Department of Education to begin making some repairs), and Lenny was there. The DoE rewarded him by taking away his state teacher’s license, so he could never teach in a public school again.
Lenny then taught math at a religious school for affluent students, not where he wanted to be. But he kept organizing. When Eleanor Bumpurs, a 66-year old grandmother living in a Bronx public housing complex failed to pay less than $400 in rent, a special unit of the NYPD broke down her door. Startled, Eleanor picked up a butter knife and turned to the six heavily armed officers, who killed her with a 12-gauge shotgun. Members of PLP organized rallies against this racist murder. Lenny was in the thick of it. He became friends with Eleanor Bumpurs’ daughter, Mary, and invited her to speak at the Progressive Labor Party’s communist May Day March in Washington, DC, which she did.
When Lenny retired from high school teaching, he began teaching math as an adjunct at Bronx Community College, which he loved. He was teaching working class students and he was in a union again (the Professional Staff Congress). Although he had graduated from an Ivy League college and was very knowledgeable about math (as well as being an excellent chess, poker and Scrabble player), Lenny was never an elitist. He loved his long conversations about politics and life with all kinds of people he met, and was just as comfortable talking with a school cleaner or secretary, as with a professor. He gave Challenge to everyone.
When workers at the Bronx Stella D’Oro bakery went on strike for many months, Lenny was a regular on the picket lines, bringing professors and students with him. He talked for hours to the strikers from dozens of different countries. Many appreciated the strike support, the discussions about communism, and receiving Challenge newspaper. Lenny helped organize support for the strike.  Workers spoke at campus union meetings, and the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) faculty union donated money to the strikers. Lenny helped organize a Christmas party at Hostos Community College for the strikers‘ children, and helped bring busloads of NYSUT teachers from other cities to the picket line. Strike captains would meet with Lenny and other Party members at the bar across the street to discuss strike strategy and communism, including the possibility of seizing the plant.
Ramarley Graham, an unarmed, Black teenager, was murdered in his home by cop Richard Haste. He had done nothing wrong. The cop went unpunished. When hundreds of anti-racists, including many PL’ers, marched, Lenny organized PSC members to attend. He became friends with Ramarley’s parents, Constance and Frank, sitting in their living room, discussing everything from citywide protests to personal difficulties. That was Lenny—good comrade and friend, strong fighter against a rotten, racist system.
On campus, Lenny fought hard against racist tuition increases for students and for better pay and working conditions for adjuncts and other campus workers. He marched against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan explaining they were not “mistakes” but the outgrowth of imperialism. Lenny particularly loved bringing anti-war resolutions to the national teacher conventions and doing battle with the union leaders who supported U.S. aggression around the world.
In June of this year, parents, students and teachers at Park Slope Collegiate held a rally on the last day of classes to support the principal and teachers under attack by the DoE for their anti-racist efforts. Although it was hot and he was walking slowly, Lenny was there. He said how proud he was of the teachers and students who were fighting against racist segregation.
Lenny was a mentor to many with tons of political experience, but he was always modest, and often said that many previous communists had sacrificed much more than he had. Lenny always tried to balance the need for patience with a sense of urgency. He was always trying to push the class struggle forward, and to remind people that we can only end capitalism with collective struggle, which means building the communist Progressive Labor Party. He did that for a half century. He will be deeply missed.

Many workers, students, and soldiers are interested in fighting racism and building a movement for a better world. In countries like the U.S., violent clashes between antiracist workers and open fascists like the KKK have sharply raised the question: when is it acceptable to break the capitalists’ laws?
The Progressive Labor Party fights for communism, for the abolition of capitalism through armed revolution of masses of workers. Racism and these racist borders, police terror, sexism, and imperialist wars will be smashed and outlawed with an armed working class ruling society, and preventing a capitalist comeback with force. The capitalist class will never allow themselves to be removed from power without a fight. Whether the form of capitalist rule is more democratic or more openly repressive, threatening capitalism is always illegal, and the bosses’ state will always defend itself.
Germany: Reformism’s Road to Disaster
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the workers’ movement in highly developed industrial countries like Germany enjoyed mass support. They had fought for and won legal recognition over decades of bitter struggle, and won the respect of the working class along the way. Many workers at the time believed that, given Germany’s developed industrial economy and powerful, organized trade unions, that revolution for workers’ power must logically begin there.
The politics that workers are won to is always the decisive factor, however. While fighting militantly for reforms became a proud working class tradition in Germany, few workers were won to organizing for revolution. Over time, the workers’ organizations became intimately tied to the German capitalist class, with ultimately disastrous results.
For example, the leadership of the trade unions was tightly controlled by a majority of the capitalist Social-Democratic Party. When workers demanded a general strike against the bosses, the workers’ Trade Union Congress was influenced by Social-Democratic leaders to decide against it. Union leaders regularly collaborated with the bosses on long term agreements on wages, hours, and working conditions, tying the workers hand and foot to the very capitalist system exploiting them and preparing their children to fight and die in World War I. Since the Party there considered themselves 100 pecent legal, a recognition they had proudly fought to win, they organized demonstrations with the permission and compliance of the police (sound familiar?)
At the outbreak of World War I, a war of rival imperialists in which the working class had no stake, the workers’ parties and unions completed their betrayal of the workers by supporting German imperialism. In their insistence at fighting for and remaining within the bosses’ laws, the once-mighty workers’ organizations became little more than imperialist tools.
At the same time, a multiracial party women and men communists organizing across the vast Russian Empire, nicknamed “Bolsheviks,” solved the question of legality a different way: by organizing for illegality. During World War I, the Bolsheviks were able to turn the guns around on the warmakers and create the first workers’ state.
Bolsheviks Find Road to Revolution
They did this by organizing fightback directly within the ranks of workers, and struggling over revolutionary ideas from the beginning.
A Bolshevik named Osip Piatnitsky arrived in the city of Odessa, Russia in 1905 to organize the Party after the Russian bosses slaughtered 1,000 workers at a peaceful march. His accounts are instructive for today’s communists. In response to the massacre, revolutionary Bolshevik organizing occurred on ships, small tailoring shops, and large tobacco factories. Bolshevik workers painstakingly made connected the workers’ day-to-day demands with the need for armed revolution, and organized study groups around communist ideas.
Before strikes, workers in many factories and shops went on strike early. In one general strike, the police tried to beat the striking workers into submission. Workers responded by overturning empty train cars, throwing stones and iron fences.
Following these uprisings, the frightened Russian bosses’ mouthpiece, the Tsar, issued a manifesto proclaiming newer and more liberal freedoms. Almost immediately however, racist attacks against Jewish workers began in nearby Moldavanka. Unlike the misleaders of the German workers’ movement, who coordinated their activities carefully so as not to risk their prized legal status, Bolshevik-organized workers fought back in solidarity with Jewish workers in bitter street combat with the racist police. Despite many workers sustaining injuries, Piatnitsky wrote that after these events, the Odessa Party Committee increased its membership! As the Bolsheviks had confidence in the working class and filled its ranks with the best organizers among them, so did the working class gain confidence in the Bolsheviks and in communist ideas.
By World War I, this confidence grew tremendously and proved decisive. The working class in the Russian Empire responded to the Bolsheviks’ call for the seizure of power in 1917, and ended the imperialist World War I with a new state- what became the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union became a beacon of light to workers around the world, putting capitalism on the defensive for the first time in history.
The international working class today is struggling and fighting back in a dark night of sharpening fascism and imperialist wars. The rise of fascist movements around the world means that workers today cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the workers in Germany one century ago. PLP follows in the footsteps of the Bolsheviks, to learn and emulate the best traditions of the past while learning and correcting inevitable political errors. Fight for a mass international anti-imperialist movement of millions of workers to fight back, and seize power for revolution- for communism. Join us!
  

With Donald Trump has endorsed the return of thousands of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, a sign of the U.S. bosses’ anxiety about leaving a superpower vacuum in Central Asia and the Middle East. This 16-year-old war, the longest in U.S. history, is a product of inter-imperialist rivalries—mainly between the U.S. and China, but also between regional rivals Pakistan and India, and China and India as well.
House of Cards
For three centuries, the bloody British imperialists ravaged what is today Afghanistan. Then the U.S. imperialists followed suit. After 16 years of wreckage for the working class in Afghanistan, with the Taliban resurgent and controlling vast swaths of territory, the U.S. bosses have been forced to admit both their failure to date and their lack of any solution for the future:

American-led efforts, despite some successes, have ended up reinforcing and accelerating the broader cycles of violence and fragmentation that have been growing since the state’s collapse in the early 1990s…Its [Afghanistan’s] location puts it at the mercy of several foreign powers, all of whom would benefit from seeing Afghanistan stabilize but also stand to lose out if another country dominates (New York Times, 8/24).

As the U.S. drew down its military in Afghanistan, from a peak of more than 100,000 troops in 2011 to fewer than 10,000 today, it left an opening for China. The Chinese capitalist bosses are eagerly filling the gap with troops, funds, and training of local forces:

China’s financial interests revolve around Afghanistan’s abundance of natural resources and minerals, and its access to Central Asian markets. Beijing sees Afghanistan as a vital link for its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, an economic policy that seeks to connect Eurasia to China (Military Times, 3/5).

The U.S. rulers can ill afford for China to become the dominant big power in this critically strategic territory. If the U.S. cannot control Afghanistan, it will dig in for a stalemate, which means more chaos, slaughter, and plunder of the working class. In 2016 alone, according to a United Nations report, “3,498 Afghan civilians were killed…and 7,920 were injured, making it the deadliest year for civilian casualties since the U.N. began counting in 2009….[T]he number of children killed in 2016 was 24 percent greater than the previous highest recorded figure” (nbcnews.com, 8/22).
Not for the first time, the U.S. is exploiting the regional rivalry between India and Pakistan to sustain this stalemate. But with India pledging billions to Afghanistan in the wake of its transit and trade agreements with U.S. nemesis Iran, and Pakistan strengthening its economic and military partnership with U.S. archrival China, this strategy may backfire.
No Grand Plan
The war without end in Afghanistan has provoked disagreement within the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, as recently illustrated by two writers associated with the Council of Foreign Relations, the bosses’ leading think tank. While Max Boot favored renewed “nation-building” in Afghanistan (NYT, 8/22), Aaron O’Connell called for a de-escalation and adopting “more realistic, minimal goals” (Foreign Affairs, 6/16).
The rulers’ indecision reflects the relative weakening of U.S imperialism. U.S. bosses have no winning cards to play, which makes them even more dangerous to the international working class.
Workers, the Wild Card
The working class, organized under the revolutionary communist leadership of Progressive Labor Party, holds the trump card. As the imperialists expand their wars, they are forced to recruit into their armies the same workers and students who are targeted by the bosses’ racist attacks.  These young soldiers, won to a worldview of no borders and no capitalism, can turn the next world war into a revolutionary war for communism. The capitalists inevitably will make their wars, but we will finish them!