NEWARK, NJ — The struggle over police terror has sharpened here and it has provided an opportunity for more working-class youth to give leadership. Over the past two weeks, multiracial demonstrations have shut down the main streets in the city and have gotten a lot of support from passing drivers. During one demonstration, after kkkop Daniel Pantaleo got away scot-free with the murder of 43-year-old Black worker Eric Garner, workers left the bus stops and the sidewalks to join the march as it went down Broad St.
On the campuses, students are making plans for more militant actions across the city. As a result, we are starting to see a relationship forming between the college and high school students in the city. This is an improvement for the student movement. While most of the demonstrations have been about education, organizing an antiracist fight against police terror will bring the movement to a higher level.
The Party has been involved in both of these demonstrations. At one, we distributed over 100 CHALLENGEs and 250 leaflets, calling for destroying the capitalist system. Many of our friends were happy to see us out there in response to the misleaders who just spoke about peaceful protesting and urging young people to vote. This is a way of co-opting militant antiracist anger into passive acceptance of the bosses’ system.
Over the past month, we have been able to discuss CHALLENGE and our analysis of racism and police terror to many students involved in this struggle. Many of these young people, while still arguing for a federal investigation, are open to PLP and the need for communist revolution. Through more struggle, we can win them to not only being leaders of the working class but also leaders of our Party.

Brooklyn, NY, November 21 — Today the Justice for Kyam Livingston Committee held the latest monthly demonstration in its campaign to hold the racist prison kkkops accountable for the death of this 37-year-old Black woman in a Brooklyn Central Bookings holding cell.
Kyam’s family and the committee have guaranteed that each month there has been some action to mark the date of her death. Although there are similarities in the monthly actions, change has occurred as well. A core leadership has formed closer political and personal ties.
PL’ers in the committee have supported family members who have turned their grief and anger at their personal loss into organizing efforts. We have connected the dots from this racist murder to the other murders of Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray in Flatbush to the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island. Each was a case of systemic police terror.
Tonight, speakers from Church committees, unions, and neighbors joined the family in calling for Justice for Kyam. Speakers, including PL’ers, called for demonstrations when the grand jury’s verdict was announced. PL’ers reminded everyone of the history of no indictments in the past and not guilty verdicts when cases against cops came to trial. We also called into question the nature of capitalist society. Racism, it was pointed out, is the main way the capitalist rulers are able to exploit the entire working class. They divide both to conquer each. Terror is their weapon of intimidation.
What we see, after more than a year of demonstrations and speak-outs, is that the bosses’ tactics and lies can be defeated.
Months of struggle against being penned in during our demonstrations resulted in the barricades being removed.
Our regular presence has led to more neighbors, Black, Latin and white, stopping on their way home to listen to our speeches and chants, getting CHALLENGE and joining our demonstrations. Moreover, more participants agree that this racist system has got to go!

In our Brooklyn PLP club, we’re constantly struggling to get all workers the chance to live with dignity. An opportunity came during the first week of December when, along with a mass organization in which we are active, we participated in the fast food workers’ strike. There were nearly 2,000 people in the rally and demonstration we attended very early in the morning in Manhattan, where we distributed CHALLENGE.
The speakers focused on their rejection of the miserable salary we earn which barely covers our necessities, arguing that workers need $15 an hour and the right to unionize to get benefits.
A comrade from our club spoke at the rally and expressed solidarity with the campaign, and of course, supported the proposed raise in pay for all workers. He connected the campaign against the racist police murder of Eric Garner, observing that unemployment and the miserable salaries that barely keep workers alive deny us from living with dignity. People applauded our comrade warmly.
At the rally we could see the expression on so many people’s faces who wondered about the Grand Jury decision of the previous day, which found no reason to indict the cops who murdered Eric Garner. All of the evidence, all of the images, all of the proof that incriminated this murderer dressed in blue was useless. Now, as a sick joke, they will wear body cameras, even though the entire racist murder was recorded and put on the internet.
We are in the middle of this campaign and will continue in the struggle to win the new friends we made closer to PLP. Although our progress is slow, we’ll forge ahead until we achieve the victory of our international working class.
A Brooklyn Worker

Obama and the bosses’ media are hailing the latest government jobs report as a sign that the economy is improving for the working class, with an alleged increase of 321,000 jobs (see box) and an unemployment rate “holding steady” at 5.8 percent. As Shadowstats.com shows, this figure is “far removed from underlying reality.” It “defines out of existence” millions of unemployed “for political convenience.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) 5.8 percent unemployment rate is based on workers who have actively looked for work in the four weeks preceding their survey. This excludes what they define as “short-term discouraged workers” who have not looked for work in the last year. And it further excludes those millions who have been out of a job for over a year, the so-called long-term discouraged workers, and, as the New York Times says (12/6), “few of the workers who gave up the search for work during the lean years are likely to be hired anytime soon.” On top of that, the BLS further excludes nearly seven million part-time workers who want — but cannot find — a full-time job, which, if included, nearly doubles its rate to 11.3 percent.
However, when all these groups are included in the jobless figures, Shadowstats.com estimates the true unemployment rate at 23 percent, approximately four times the BLS “headline” figure of 5.8 percent! So the BLS simply “disappears” these millions from their phony jobless rate to arrive at their 5.8 percent figure. And none of these totals include those youth who, unable to find a job, join the military. It doesn’t include the economic draft. It definitely does not include unemployed undocumented workers, some of who will be recruited into the armed forces via the Dream Act.
Racist Unemployment
Due to the long-term discrimination against Black workers, racism doubles their unemployment rate even in the BLS figures to 11.1 percent. However, if one were to use the true overall Shadowstats jobless rate of 23 percent, Black workers face an unemployment rate of probably well over 40 percent. This is part of what is behind the police terror in Black communities, murdering and threatening Black workers and especially jobless youth into a feeling of hopelessness that the bosses hope will induce many to join the military. However, the rulers face a dilemma here. How many Black youth will want to “defend a country” whose racist police attack and kill them with impunity?
While many point to the recklessness of the big banks as the cause of the Great Recession — which no doubt contributed to the millions of home mortgage foreclosures, homelessness, and mass unemployment for the working class — the fundamental root of this economic collapse is capitalism. The bankers, like all bosses under this system, are driven to seek maximum profits to stay ahead of their rivals or they will go under, as happened to the Lehman investment house, among others, in this recent collapse.
Decade after decade, for centuries, workers have suffered the boom and bust, the recessions and depressions of a system in which bosses strive to produce as much as they think they can sell. Such a planless system inevitably leads to overproduction, causing the closing of those factories and businesses which cannot sell what they thought they could, and the laying off of millions of workers.
Thus, mass unemployment is built into a system based on competition and the merciless exploitation of its working class. The threat to workers’ jobs from the ranks of the unemployed prevent struggles for a living wage and have allowed bosses to continue to lower workers’ income for decades. When world capitalism suffered the economic bust of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the planning of the communist-led Soviet Union wiped out unemployment altogether in that country.
This is why Progressive Labor Party says only communism — a system free of bosses and profits, and the racism, sexism and wars capitalism produces — is the only answer for the working class. Our class produces all value and under communism we will share it collectively according to need.