BROOKLYN, November 22—A multiracial group of twenty-five students, teachers, and parents armed with chant sheets and signs returned to Brooklyn Tech High School where school security agents had treated the students like criminals weeks earlier. Students and members and friends of Progressive Labor Party are leading the fight against racism (see student letter, page 6). We are giving School Safety, the arm of the NYPD that criminalizes mainly Black and Latin students, a taste of what an organized and committed group can do.
NYPD Criminalizes Students
On November 1, the volleyball team from Park Slope Collegiate High School (PSC), comprised of Black, Latin, and South Asian students, arrived at Brooklyn Tech for the game that would decide their entrance into the playoffs. Immediately upon arrival, they were treated like criminals by security. The team was forced to line up against the wall. The team’s managers and supporters were not allowed into the game and were told that only people on the roster were allowed in, even though for the last ten years of playing games at the school they were never asked for rosters. One student yelled, “What, are we in prison?”
The team’s captain protested a security guard’s abuse, saying, “This is racist!” to which the security guard yelled, “Keep your opinions to yourself.” The coach overheard another security guard saying, “That’s what happens when you go shopping.” This comment was in reference to the last match the team played where a member of the team was implicated in the theft of a phone, which was immediately returned. The implicated student was not in attendance as a consequence of these events. While these students were being treated like criminals, another school, made up of mostly white students, was allowed to walk right into the gym without being checked or made to line up.
This discriminatory treatment from School Safety is part of the racism that is necessary for capitalists. Capitalists need to maintain the lie that Black and Latin kids and teens are criminals, in order to justify mass incarceration and police terror. This ideology also justifies unemployment, low wages, and homelessness, even though huge numbers of white workers suffer the same oppression. Anti-Black racism is why oppression and terrorization of Black workers is not taken as seriously as other struggles like DAPL (see front page).
Students Fight Back
That our students felt the indignity of racism while simply trying to play a game understandably angered and upset members of the volleyball team, student body, staff, parents, and alumni from Tech. Unwilling to take the racist treatment of the other team lying down, the team met with members of the student government to tell their story and asked for help in preparing a sit-in if the three agents who treated them horribly refused to apologize.
In preparation for the sit-in the captain of the team wrote a letter about the experience, which was sent to every teacher and parent in our school asking for support. Parents e-mailed and made phone calls to the principal of Brooklyn Tech and other higher ups in school safety demanding that these agents apologize to the team.
Knowing the team’s intention to have a sit-in, the principal and assistant principal of Tech greeted everyone and invited them to a meeting with the head of School Safety. The team received apologies from all three but the students were not having it. The team’s demand for an apology from the actual agents that treated them like criminals baffled the lieutenant who came to give lip service to the NYPD’s “Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect” motto. She assumed her apology would be enough and tried to relate to the parents and students in the room by pointing out that she’s both Black and a parent. Our students and parents still weren’t having it. When the students wanted to go through with the sit-in, the Tech principal Randy J. Asher said that he wouldn’t stop the officers from arresting the team. He would rather have Black and Latin students with their hands behind their backs than being treated with simple dignity and respect.
Our school community is used to fighting back whether that be against racist budget cuts, school segregation, or school scanning that makes our students feel more like criminals than students. This fightback and the multiracial, teacher-parent-student alliance that we have built over the years has forced the powers that be to respond much faster to this incident. We have been told to expect an apology from one of the three officers any day now. If we don’t, we’re prepared to keep fighting for it.
The leadership the students have given to this fightback has been amazing. They have stood up against racism and criminalization of Black and Latin students. We are up against a segregated and therefore inherently unequal school system. This system is no accident. Capitalism needs racism to survive, by dividing white from Black and Latin students and workers so that all can be oppressed and exploited for profit. Mayors, governors, and presidents claim that Black lives matter that police brutality needs to stop; meanwhile their troops on the ground (the police) brutalize and terrorize the working class. Capitalist leaders don’t actually care about Black and Latin workers, and that is what we saw. The higher-ups were hoping that their willingness to say the right thing would satisfy us, while their agents continue doing exactly as they’re supposed to—terrorize our students.
It is a victory every time we stand up to racism. All students and workers need to be ready to take action over and over again. Racism isn’t going away as long as we have capitalism. Fighting smaller battles steels us for bigger battles ahead. We are now even more committed to the struggle against racism and students are more confident in themselves and each other. This struggle is just one more nail in the bosses’ coffin. We are one step closer to building class consciousness and one step closer to defeating capitalism. Stay tuned for more fightback!

The legacy of Fidel Castro contains two critical lessons for the international working class. The first is that workers will never advance toward communism under a leadership that holds on to capitalist inequalities. The second: Reform victories under the profit system are neither adequate nor lasting. Only a dictatorship of the proletariat can smash racism, sexism, and capitalist exploitation. Only a communist society, run by and for workers, can serve the needs of our class.
In the wake of Castro’s death on November 25, the bosses’ media celebrated “the end of communism” in Cuba. The left-liberal media acclaimed “the Cuban experiment” was to move the working class toward “socialist” or even “communist” liberation. Both camps are wrong. Essentially, the Fidelistas were liberal reformers. They exerted state control over the means of production while preserving the rotten core of the profit system, from wages and social inequality to racist unemployment and incarceration. In short, they were state capitalists. They traded domination by U.S. imperialism for the heavy hand of the imperialist Soviet Union under the rotten, revisionist (fake-left) Nikita Khrushchev. Fidel actively encouraged a cult of personality, elevating his own erratic judgment over the collective wisdom of the working class. Eventually, Cuba’s market-oriented tilt under Castro exposed his self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninism for what it always was—a deception.
Where Castro Went Wrong
Initially, Fidel was daring and resourceful. In 1959, his small rebel group won state power through armed struggle. It smashed the oppressive ruling clique of President Fulgencio Batista—a big defeat for U.S. imperialism, which had enjoyed free rein in exploiting Cuba since the Spanish-American War of 1898. Castro won support from Cuban workers with significant reforms: a price freeze, a tax cut, reduced rents, and, most notably, universal literacy and health care. He abolished official segregation and opened labor unions to Black members. He expelled the Mafia gangsters who controlled Havana and ran its gambling, drug, and commercial sex rackets. He made mortal enemies of the U.S. bosses by expropriating $1 billion worth of U.S. corporate holdings, including oil refineries, banks, and sugar mills.
In response, the U.S. rulers slapped an economic embargo on the island nation. Beginning under the Dwight Eisenhower administration and escalating under President John F. Kennedy, the U.S. began organizing an invasion to overthrow Castro. Meanwhile, several hundred thousand white middle-class Cubans—virtually the entire urban professional class and commercial bourgeoisie—fled to Miami, taking much of the country’s financial reserves with them.
Facing desperate shortages of basic commodities, Castro could have pursued a communist path of self-sufficient economic development. He could have liberated Cuba from the world market and freed workers from the grip of imperialism. Had he chosen that path, it would have lowered material living conditions for many in the short term—though not for the most oppressed workers, who might have become the base for a true revolution.
But Castro was limited by his nationalist ideology. He could not envision a fundamental reorganization of social and production relations. Instead, he turned to a new trading partner—Moscow. By 1960, Khrushchev had openly renounced the revolutionary goal of a working-class dictatorship over society. The Soviet Union’s state capitalist regime wanted to supplant U.S. imperialism in the world market and saw its opening in Cuba, on the doorstep of the U.S. bosses. The Soviet Union agreed to provide Cuba with crude oil, industrial goods, and a $100 million loan in return for sugar, fruit, fiber, and hides (Peter Bourne, Fidel: A Biography of Fidel Castro, 1986). Cuba’s die was cast. For the next three decades, until the Soviets’ economy collapsed, Cuba was tied to an imperialist super-power that systematically betrayed the great Russian Revolution.
Socialist Speeches, Capitalist Deeds
In April 1961, Castro’s forces routed the U.S. CIA-directed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, drawing Cuba even more tightly within the Soviet orbit. Fidel declared, “What the imperialists cannot forgive us, is that we have made a socialist revolution under their noses” (Bourne, 1986). In fact, Castro’s socialism had a solid capitalist foundation. Workers were exploited to increase profits and accumulate capital. Guided by Soviet advisors, Fidel’s regime imposed rigid discipline in production, with higher pay for more efficient workers. As with every wage system, these differentials divided the working class.  
By 1962, Cuba’s economy had reached full capacity. More coal and electric plants, transmission lines, and roads were needed. Short of hard currency, Castro’s government subordinated the country to the world market by expanding exports of its one marketable commodity. Cuba became the Soviets’ “sugar colony.” To accumulate more capital, the government imposed “communist consciousness” by cutting wages in the state sector for all but the lowest-paid.
Slowly but surely, capitalist policies expanded the private profit sector. First, licenses were sold to individuals to open small businesses for auto repair, carpentry, and plumbing. By 1981, private contracting cooperatives were building 38 percent of new housing units. Private farmers diverted produce from the state, which paid low fixed prices, and sold it instead on the open market for their private benefit. To increase production and profits, the sugar industry was mechanized, reducing the number of cane cutters from 350,000 in the 1960s to 72,000 in 1985. A new elite was born, defined by their wealth in money.
Apartheid Tourism and Racist Inequalities
In recent years, these capitalist practices have grown even stronger. After a boost from Barack Obama and the reopening of U.S. diplomatic relations, the Cuban tourist industry now earns as much hard currency as the sugar industry. Mexican and Spanish bosses can own up to 51 percent of hotels and export 100 percent of their profits, earned on the sweat of powerless hotel workers. Prostitution, a hallmark of the bad old Batista/Mafia days, is booming once again.
Local workers are barred from these hotels as guests; they call it “apartheid tourism.” Like capitalism everywhere, capitalism in Cuba needs racism to divide and super-exploit workers. [Spanish ships brought 900,000 Africans to Cuba as slaves, about twice the number forced brought to what is now the U.S. (http://bit.ly/2gE6fH5.] While Fidel’s early reforms undeniably helped poor Black workers, he overstated the case in 1961, when he claimed that racist discrimination in Cuba was a thing of the past. In 2005, a year before the end of Fidel’s rule as president, Black workers were unemployed at double the rate of white workers. While darker-skinned Cubans made up somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the population, they accounted for 85 percent of the nation’s inmate population (Al Jazeera, 8/13/15). Under Fidel’s brother and successor, Raul Castro, as Cuba has accelerated its market capitalist reforms, racist inequalities have kept pace. From Al Jazeera:
“The problem,” said Alejandro de la Fuente, director of the Institute of Afro-Latin Studies at Harvard University, “is that the new policies produce losers, because their chief concern is not social justice, but economic growth and survival. None of these policies is racially defined, but they produce new forms of social inequalities, and those inequalities tend to be racialized quickly because of unequal access.”
Under the relentless pressure of the profit system, Fidel’s most admired reforms have suffered. “[A]doption of the Soviet model of economic development contributed to two internal factors that have undermined health care: low productivity of labor and the growth of bureaucracy. Social expenditures declined from 70% of the GNP in 1970 to 36% in 1995,” after the end of Soviet bloc aid (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7593738). As of 2012, according to Al Jazeera, Cuba’s infant mortality rate remained lower than the rate in the U.S. Life expectancy was among the world’s highest. But non-emergency operations were routinely delayed, and there was a chronic shortage of medicines (6/18/12).
The Only Solution is a Communist Revolution!
Yes, the liberal reformers of Fidel’s Cuba improved most workers’ standard of living, at least for a time. They constructed a defense against hurricanes unequaled in the hemisphere. But despite these achievements, the return of capitalism to Cuba is restoring all the evils that are part and parcel of the profit system. In field and factory, Cuban workers need an egalitarian society that will abolish the wage system and its artificial division between intellectual and manual labor. Like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the sweatshop economy in today’s China, Castro-style “socialism” has confirmed the fallacy of the two-stage theory of communism. When a revolution leaves capitalist components in place, it inevitably decays back to full-blown capitalism.
The working class of Cuba needs what Fidel Castro often promised but never pursued: a communist revolution.

NEW YORK CITY, December 7—The hung jury in the trial of kkkop Michael Slager who murdered Walter Scott once again exposes the courts’ role in upholding a racist system. We will continue to fight for justice for Walter, and the countless targets of racist police murders.
The court system is part of the capitalist state, an arm of the ruling class to enforce racist laws and a racist prison system. While there have been a few instances where the courts were forced to convict, their main job is to work with the police to enforce racism and anti-working class laws designed to keep the capitalists in power.
When you go to court, the judges, the prosecutors the police and even the defense attorneys all work together on a daily basis. Cop Slager was part of that system, a system that needs its police to feel free to terrorize workers, especially Black workers.
Walter was a 50-year-old forklift operator who had served two years in the U.S. Coast Guard. He was struck with five bullets, three of them in the back.
In this particular case, the bosses are trying to put the blame for the acquittal on the jury. Certainly the jury was full of racism. It’s a society that was founded on slavery and the forced segregation of Black and white workers. It’s a society that has filled the prisons with Black men and women, and filled our minds with racist lies.
Slager chose a jury trial because his lawyers played the overwhelming odds that the racism would prevail. His lawyers knew the prosecutor would not take the path of exposing this murder as an inevitable outcome of a racist system.
We will fight for justice for Walter Scott in the streets, in the courts, in the schools, in our work places and every other battlefield. Ultimately, justice will be in the form of freeing ourselves to smash capitalism once and for all.

BAY AREA, UNITED STATES—This year, 2016, is the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China. The 10-year period from 1966 to 1976 is viewed by communists as the most left period in post-revolutionary China, the farthest any society yet progressed toward trying to put ordinary industrial and agricultural workers in charge of running things. It is also the period of China’s history most attacked and slandered by the capitalists who now rule China.
These political traitors who still call themselves the “Communist” Party of China have grown incredibly wealthy at the expense of the working class. Most academics in Europe and North America are eager to amplify and spread the distortions and lies about the GPCR published by the capitalist scholars and politicians who dominate China today.
There is another side to the story. Gatherings in China celebrating the positive accomplishments of the GPCR, mostly low profile, have taken place in a number of cities. There have also been pro-communist gatherings in other countries, including the U.S. One in particular was held in the Bay Area of northern California in October.
The evening centered on reproductions of two giant character posters (dazibao), one written by communists from the U.S. who were living and working in China. One of the poster writers, in her 80s and wheelchair bound, was present at the conference. She was an inspiration to the younger generations present. In 1966, she wrote posters criticizing the Chinese authorities for giving them and other foreign “experts” special treatment, like better living conditions and no expectation for manual labor. They declared that they, too, aspired to be real revolutionaries and the special treatment undermined their political will and created a separation from the Chinese masses. The special treatment undermined internationalism.
At the event, many new publications were discussed about the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins by Yiching Wu (Harvard University Press, 2014) starts from the perspective that the restoration of capitalism began with Mao Zedong’s betrayal of the revolutionary aspirations of the masses of left workers and students mobilized in the first months of the GPCR. He writes, “Quashing the restless rebels as early as late 1967, Maoist politics … exhausted its once explosive energy. … [and] eventually led to the historic changes in the social, economic and political life in post-Mao China.”

To find out more about the Cultural Revolution you can see three articles from PL Magazine, available on PLP.org:
The Gpcr & The Reversal Of Workers’ Power In China (1971)
Whither China? (1972)
Why Were Communist Revolutions Reversed In China And The Ussr?
Additionally:
The titles and brief summaries of the papers from the San Francisco Conference are now posted at www. wholeworldjustice.org