BROOKLYN, March  6 — Students and workers distributed leaflets, signs and made speeches in Haitian Creole, English and Spanish denouncing recent racist attacks on workers from the Dominican Republic (D.R.) to the U.S. Passersby in East Flatbush, a largely Caribbean and Latin neighborhood, stopped to take over 400 CHALLENGEs. Many chanted along and some stopped to give speeches on the bullhorn in Creole.
On Feb. 11, Henry Jean Claude, known as “Tulile,” a young worker from Haiti who shined shoes and did odd jobs for a living, was found hanging from a tree in a public park in Santiago, D.R., hands and feet bound. This lynching follows last year’s carnival parade where the Minister of Culture Jose Antonio Rodriguez allowed 50 white-robed and hooded KKKers to march. Racist speech inevitably leads to racist action! The day before Tulile’s body was found, a small group of Dominican nationalists gathered in Santiago to burn a Haitian flag and call for deportation of Haitian descent.
Local police immediately and without investigation said that racism was not a factor in the lynching, revealing themselves to be what PLP labels all cops under capitalism: KKKops. These same police arrested two Haitians for the murder in a blatant attempt to cover up government-inspired racism against Haitians in the D.R.
The Dominican ruling class has a long tradition of racism and nationalism directed against Haitians in a concerted effort to crush solidarity and unity between workers in the D.R. and Haiti. Workers from Haiti have been migrating to the D.R. for almost a century because of rampant racist unemployment and poverty created by the capitalist system.
This past week, the U.S. bosses declared that 12-year-old Tamir Rice was responsible for his own death in Cleveland, Ohio by playing with a toy gun in a park, and that KKKop Darren Wilson would not be indicted by the federal government for the shooting death of 18-year-old Mike Brown. What do the murders of Henry Jean Claude in the D.R., Tamir  in the U.S. and refusal to indict killer cop Wilson have in common? The answer is simple: CAPITALISM!
This world-wide economic system cannot not survive without racism. The bosses use racism to divide and conquer. Workers are taught to scapegoat their working-class brothers and sisters for the failures of capitalism. When unemployment is rising, the bosses fuel anti-Haitian racism in D.R. and anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism in the U.S. to keep workers from blaming capitalism. Capitalism can never provide full employment, even in the “best” of times. Only communism will be able to provide jobs and a decent life for all workers and their families. Under communism, we will need collectivity to run society. All decisions made will be in the interest of our class, so racism will not be tolerated!
Let the militant march of 10,000 anti-racist Haitians on Feb. 25 in Port-au-Prince inspire us to reject racist government policy, from Ferguson to Santo Domingo! We call on workers on both sides of the island of Hispaniola to reject the bosses’ ideology and stand together to fight racism and nationalism. And likewise, wherever capitalist-inspired racism and nationalism rear their ugly heads, let workers stand together and fight the bosses who exploit us all! Let’s use the coming May Day — the International Workers’ Day — to build a movement together to reject and smash racism and nationalism and fight for communism and an egalitarian society in the interest of all working people.

LOS ANGELES, February 21 — In the aftermath of Ferguson, graduate students at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have been motivated to fight racism and police brutality on campus. The university bosses have responded by organizing forums on “policing equity” and promoting a new vice-chancellor position of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Many Progressive Labor Party members protested in Ferguson against the racist no-indictment decision of killer kkkop Darren Wilson, and were arrested. One such PL’er suggested that students here on campus organize their own forum to point out how the university system is complicit in producing and perpetuating the racist ideas that underpin police terror against Black and Latin workers.
Universities Churn Out Racism, Sexism
Last week, several student organizations came together to hold a forum on diversity in the curriculum and student body at UCLA’s graduate student programs. A student who has been involved with Black Lives Matter spoke first about why students need to get more involved in actions to fight the racist policing of students on campus. A PL student followed and presented pictures from his visit to Ferguson and discussed his experience fighting the police.
It is important to be involved in campaigns demanding a more diverse student body. It is also important to expose that the university system is another organ of capitalist rule. The first college in the U.S. was Harvard, created to train the next generation of ministers, magistrates, and public officials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The history of universities in the U.S. is entrenched in slavery. The holy trinity of bondage was the church, the state, and the university. The universities are central to developing scientific racism to justify slavery and genocide. This history gives a glimpse of the nature of universities under capitalism.
The racism in education in the U.S. can be understood as facilitating the political economy of capitalism, which is built on the racist super-exploitation of Black, Latin and immigrant workers. Many Black and Latin students will have access only to vocational training to fill the ranks of workers needed in the low-wage healthcare, clerical and public sector industries. Some will fill the ranks of workers in research universities who produce the racist and sexist material for capitalist culture. Many others will simply have access to the imperialist military machine. A young college professor participated and added that faculty are afraid to speak up about confronting the university’s racism because they fear losing their jobs.
Forum, Step Forward to Fighting Back
This forum was the first step in the process of organizing students and professors. It generated much enthusiasm and excitement in a part of the university that has been traditionally passive. Some are committed to confronting the college bosses’ call for “policing equity,” an oxymoron. The term exposes the underlying capitalist propaganda that students and racist cops can get along.
Only the working class — not courts, cops, and politicians — can be trusted to fight for equality. Working-class equality doesn’t include the bosses and their government. Many of our friends correctly want to connect the struggles against racist police terror to anti-immigrant racism: deportation and detention. There is much to be done on the campuses today. Continued unemployment means the student population on campuses will continue to grow. And as colleges and universities grow, and occupy an increasingly central position within the political economy of capitalism in the U.S., they will become ever more important centers of political struggle. It is up to communists to steer these struggles toward revolution by building a wide international network of fighters.

NEW YORK CITY, February 13 — Today, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) bus driver with 30 years on the job was arrested after his bus accidentally struck a 15-year-old girl, injuring her leg. On Christmas Eve, another driver with almost eight years on the job was arrested after his bus accidentally struck and killed a 78-year-old man. The two bus operators, Francisco DeJesus and Reginald Prescott, were charged with failure to yield, a misdemeanor, and have been suspended without pay pending investigations.
This is how Mayor de Blasio and the racist NYPD plan to cut down on traffic fatalities, in a new plan called Vision Zero. They criminally charge bus operators for traffic accidents, while the cops walk away from racist murders.
Not only are MTA bus operators not “reckless drivers,” they are among the safest drivers in the city. Collectively they drive thousands of miles and move two million riders each day on the busiest streets, often with faulty equipment.
In 2013, 176 pedestrians were killed in traffic accidents. After a particularly tragic killing of a young child at an extremely dangerous intersection, de Blasio attempted to target reckless drivers by lowering speed limits, adding street lights at 1,000 intersections, adding speed bumps, and enacting stiffer enforcement of traffic laws.
Also, the law passed by the City Council exempts drivers “engaged in work on behalf of the City, the state of New York....” like cops, fire, and Emergency Medical Services workers. It should certainly include bus operators.
Mass transit around the U.S., is one of the last stable, well-paying jobs for Black, Latin and immigrant workers, and it is under attack. On top of budget cuts, privatization and the increased use of temporary, part-time workers, many cities are imposing criminal background checks on transit workers. PLP-led bus operators in Washington, DC have waged a mass struggle against this. Now NYC bus operators are threatened with being criminally charged for traffic accidents. Building a campaign of racist hysteria to portray transit workers as criminals behind the wheel is the beginning of a massive racist assault on all transit workers and public mass transit.
Transit Workers Union Local 100 President John Samuelson has barked at the arrests and has threatened safety slow-downs in retaliation. But so far, there has been no bite, just bark, as he tries to get the City Council to specifically exempt bus operators from the new law. Shutting down the transit system and taking over City Hall, even for a day, might get their attention.
For our part, PLP is organizing an anti-racist movement among transit workers that can respond to police terror in our communities and on our jobs. We’re building a movement that will put transit workers on the road to communist revolution, where mass transit will be free and safe, and where the racist bankers and bosses and former union hacks will be a thing of the past.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s “Justice” Department report on the racism of Ferguson’s cops and courts is a cynical ruling-class effort to pacify infuriated workers. The report was released the same day it was announced that Holder’s department would not press federal charges against killer cop Darren Wilson for the assassination of Mike Brown. Four days later, Barack Obama led an equally cynical commemoration of the 1965 antiracist struggle in Selma, Alabama.
The bosses’ frantic maneuvers in Missouri and Alabama were reminiscent of Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, which muted what remained of a mass anti-war movement against the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In New York City, meanwhile, Mayor Bill de Blasio is playing a racist shell game. He’s come out against “stop-and-frisk” while “quality-of-life” arrests have soared. He’s granted Muslim students two public school holidays while the NYPD spies on their parents — the Muslim working class.
As calls mount for U.S. ground troops to battle the Islamic State in Iraq and occupy Afghanistan indefinitely, liberal politicians are leading the charge for racist, genocidal U.S. imperialism. Since the first Gulf War was launched in 1990, the U.S. bosses’ program to protect their Middle East oil fields has been in high gear. But the rulers also know that a mass conscript army would be significantly more effective than the current “all-volunteer” force, an unstable mix of alienated Black and Latin enlisted women and men and Christian fundamentalist officers. Racism is alive and well in the post-9/11 U.S. fighting force.
History of Fightback
The limited reform successes of the Civil Rights Movement were made possible by a global anti-colonialist movement in Africa and Asia after World War II. As part of its Cold War offensive against the Soviet Union, the U.S. ruling class needed to put on an anti-racist charade. In the face of persistent, militant organizing and mass demonstrations, the federal government desegregated of the U.S. military in 1946, enacted Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 (to supposedly desegregate public schools), and passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
This original civil rights movement dated from before World War II. It attacked lynching and segregation and was led on a national scale by the old communist movement. But the old movement made a major error when it suspended sharp anti-racist struggle in the U.S., in line with the Moscow leadership’s devastating turn away from armed struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat and toward a “united front against fascism..
Victory over the German and Japanese fascists was won over the dead bodies of tens of millions in communist-led Russia and China. But within the U.S., the united front meant abandonment of dedicated anti-racist fighters to the tender mercies of the segregationists and their lynch mobs. Coupled with a timid response to the anti-communist purges known as McCarthyism, this retreat took a huge toll. Bereft of fighting communist leadership, the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties ultimately became a toothless reform movement. It would exhaust itself searching to reform the un-fixable.
Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s. With the revisionist Soviet Union imploding, the U.S. ruling class no longer had to represent itself as a “democratic” alternative, either at home or around the globe. As their economy lost ground to imperialist rivals, U.S. bosses intensified their exploitation and brutal oppression of U.S. workers. The officially sanctioned, everyday racist policies in Ferguson are just one illustration of the gutter racism in the age of Obama.
Bosses Desperate to Pacify Angry Workers
The Justice Department’s report is a revelatory document for millions of anti-racist white workers and youth who could not have imagined how racist policing suffocates Black neighborhoods. For the Black workers, there may be a sense of vindication. Even the federal government, it seems, can no longer deny the realities of racism.
Last summer, Obama’s pleas to “keep it peaceful” (read: don’t upset the status quo) on primetime TV failed to stop the anti-racist movement sparked by the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner. When KKKop Panteleo walked free last December, after choking Garner to death on videotape, mass anger erupted into demonstrations in over a hundred cities. The old-guard leadership of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson was unable to corral the masses into the electoral dead end of the Democratic Party. Chants of “Eric Garner, Mike Brown — shut this racist system down!” and “NYPD, KKK, how many kids have you killed today?” resonated among hundreds of thousands of marchers who blocked traffic and subjected themselves to mass arrest.
The U.S. ruling class has a problem. The Black and Latin workers and youth who have taken to the streets are the very same people the bosses need to fill their military enlistment quotas.
The U.S. ruling class has been at it for a hundred years and more, but they still don’t have it figured out. Their weaknesses are our opportunities. The twentieth century taught us that workers will fight for communism. Now in the twenty-first century, we must carry the fight to the finish — from revolution to the final victory of communism. Join PLP!