BROOKLYN NY,  October 21 — “We want justice for Kyam Livingston, killed in a Brooklyn cell!” rang out as the Committee for Justice for Kyam Livingston rallied in the Flatbush neighborhood where Kyam had lived. Today’s demonstration was bigger than last month’s, more neighbors joined the rally and many more watched and listened across the street from the rally or stopped as they exited the nearby subway. Hundreds of leaflets and over 250 CHALLENGEs were eagerly grabbed up by the rush hour crowd.
PLP has supported this fight from the start. We salute the family for their resolute commitment to continuing the struggle against the racist and callous treatment which caused Kyam’s death. What does it mean to get justice for Kyam? Can this family or others who have lost loved ones to racist police terror get justice under the rule of capitalism?
For months we chanted “we want the names, we want the tapes.” The cops who run Brooklyn Central Booking had refused to provided the names of those who were on duty in the Central Booking jail on July 21, 2013 when they denied medical attention to Kyam until she died. Likewise, they refused to acknowledge that there were video tapes of the holding cell let alone provide copies of them to the family. The months of struggle from the family, the community and the Party on the streets of Brooklyn helped us get that information.
The family has said that they want Brooklyn Central Booking to be cleaned up — to literally clean up the dirt and get red of the vermin — and changing the treatment of those held in the cells. It also means getting rid of those whose actions caused the death of Kyam. This is more difficult, because the atmosphere of the so-called criminal justice system is dictated from the top. The ruling class needs to politically divide the working class and intensify the oppression of black workers, and so wants racist, vicious treatment to be the usual way black workers and especially youth are dealt with by the system. While the cells might be clean for a while or a cop “thrown under the bus” here and there, the ruling class relies on terror here and around the world to make sure they remain in power.
While in some ways Kyam’s death was different from other racist police murders because the cops don’t even claim that she posed a threat or had a weapon, it is a part of the bigger pattern of racist murders by cops who view the lives of black and Latin workers unimportant and without value.
The main way that capitalists stay in power is by dividing all workers using racism, sexism and nationalism, and especially terrorizing some. In rare cases, some crumb will be thrown to try to pacify the workers, such as an indictment or even conviction of a racist cop. PL’ers have constantly raised the message of fighting for working-class unity to defeat racist police terror and destroying the ruling class, who rely on it for their very existence. We say the only way to win real justice is to destroy the capitalist’s system with communist revolution, and in order to get there we must fight back like Ferguson against each and every racist police murder with working class multi-racial unity.

NEW YORK CITY, October 29 — Nearly 30 students, professors and members of a Harlem church protested a talk by war criminal David Petraeus in Manhattan this evening. He was having a “conversation” with conservative NY Times columnist David Brooks, hosted by the Macaulay Honors College of City University New York, which hired the former commander of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and later CIA Director to teach a seminar course.
Last year hundreds of CUNY students and faculty demonstrated against his presence on a regular basis, to the point where he now is surrounded by dozens of NYC cops every time he appears publicly.
We chanted “Petraeus Out of CUNY” and “1, 2, 3, 4, We Won’t Fight Your Imperialist War; 5, 6, 7, 8, Petraeus Out, We Won’t Wait.” The last chant was particularly significant since many of the people in the audience were older, well-dressed business people who would never think of sending their children or grandchildren to the Middle East or Central Asia to risk their lives.
The people from Wall Street who admire Petraeus have big stakes in U.S. wars of occupation: (1) control over trillions of dollars worth of resources (oil and gas in the Middle East, a fortune of precious minerals in Afghanistan); (2) billions in profits from companies that produce the helicopters, jet fighters, tanks, cruise missiles, drones and other weapons; (3) markets for U.S. goods; and (4) profitable investment opportunities for U.S. companies.
So, who does the ruling class think will do the fighting for them? Who will come back in coffins, or with shattered bodies and minds? It will be working-class youth who will die and suffer, as well as inflicting widespread death and pain on those being occupied and attacked. That’s why Petraeus is at CUNY, to convince its working-class students to join ROTC, to serve in the military and to politically support the U.S. empire and its crimes. But the people who were demonstrating outside — a diverse group from many countries — aren’t buying what Petraeus is selling and have committed themselves to fighting imperialism.
Students spoke eloquently of last year’s many struggles at CUNY. A person from a church in Harlem described how NYC cops raided a housing project in Harlem, arresting many young people, which he called an “imperialist attack at home” and called for supporting the arrested youth at their court hearings.
Another speaker pointed out that Petraeus is a war criminal whose death count keeps rising. From 2003-2005, Petraeus was in charge of creating, arming, training and funding Iraqi paramilitary units to crush the Sunni insurgency. These units were formed out of Shia militias, who kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of Sunnis. That sparked a brutal sectarian war between Sunnis and Shias in 2006, that took the lives of tens of thousands. The victory of the Shias consolidated the rule of Nouri al-Maliki, who in ensuing years did everything possible to antagonize the Sunnis, resulting in the rise of the fundamentalist Islamic state, which now controls much of Sunni-majority Iraq.
Petraeus is currently teaching at Macualy Honors College and is expected to teach again in Spring 2015. The seminar is titled The Coming American Decades, a course that examines how the U.S. and its North American allies can continue to maintain world domination when capitalism is in crisis. The course meets Monday afternoons at 555 West 57th Street. Surely this war criminal deserves another greeting from our students and faculty.
Many students are starting to understand that the problems we face — war, racism, sexism, poverty, unemployment, low wages, global warming — are due to capitalism, and that we need to make a revolution. We distributed CHALLENGE at the rally and are committed to building a revolutionary party to rid ourselves of people like Petraeus and his corporate masters.

NEW YORK CITY, October 27 — Bringing home the events and the fightback against racist murder by cops in Ferguson, PLP members helped organize a “Fight Like Ferguson” forum at Hunter College today. The event’s purpose was to review the current state of resistance in Ferguson and its dynamics and to discuss concrete methods for linking that resistance to the worldwide struggle against racism.
A three-member panel gave a presentation, followed by questions and discussion. About 30 people from Hunter and other City University colleges attended. PL’ers invited the audience to the 2014 College Conference the following week. Everyone in the audience took CHALLENGE.
The first panelist gave basic information about Ferguson and drew parallels between the violence of police repression and brutality seen there with that of the Israeli state-sanctioned violence seen in Palestine. There was a brief overview of the history of Zionism in the Middle East and its relationship to indigenous and later refugee populations.
Our second panelist had captured live footage of nighttime protests, showing both resistance and police tactics, as well as interviews with members of the Lost Voices collective, a central group of working-class youth involved in organizing and coordinating the protests. After showing 15 minutes of raw footage (to be used in a forthcoming, independently produced documentary) the panelist then discussed  connections between the roles of police repression, mass incarceration, and maintaining capitalist exploitation.
The third panelist focused on what can be done to continue to fight. Beginning with a description of living conditions in Ferguson, he continued with anecdotes of being on the ground there, and the different methods used by the resistance to stay ahead of the police and keep up the pressure on them. He also discussed what can tactically be done by people to broaden the resistance to exploitation and racism in a class society. The event formally ended with a general discussion on the content of the panel discussion.
A common theme seen in all of the discussion boiled down to a controversial question: can there be a good cop? Two Muslim South Asians in the audience, a targeted ethnic group on campus and throughout the city by the NYPD, wondered if it’s only individual cops or all cops who are racist. Members of the audience were largely divided. Some believed it’s possible for individual cops to act ethically; others argued that this can’t be. PLP members in the audience and panel pointed out the ideological foundations of policing, and the role that the state apparatus plays in the consolidation and maintenance of power by the capitalists.
Every cop’s job is to ultimately protect capitalism: private property, profits, businesses. For the bosses, a good cop is one who terrorizes and kills our class. For the workers, a good cop is a dead cop.
Despite some disagreements during the discussion, there was general agreement that we have to continue to make concrete fightbacks against racist oppression. We will be sure to follow up on the members of the audience to plan more struggles on campus. PLP strives to give leadership to these struggles, and direct them to a communist revolution and a bright, communist future.

MEXICO CITY, November 12 — The disappearance and murder of dozens of students in Ayotzinapa and the execution of 22 students by a military commander in Tlatlaya, in the state of Mexico, demonstrates once again, the murderous nature of the capitalists who control Mexico. The statewide genocide, (more than 120,000 murders and thousands gone missing) inheritance of Calderonism continues to increase with Peña Nieto whose imperialist funders have named him the state’s  man-of-the-year.
Tens of thousands of students in Mexico City hit the streets calling for a national strike  against the terrorism taking place in the state. Today millions believe that the government must go. But they will not leave voluntarily nor passively, we need revolution to get rid of the entire ruling capitalist class, their thugs, its profit system, its markets and all of its institutions.
Mainstream media has claimed that the UN Security Council was notified of the persecution, murder and forced disappearance of the students in Iguala, Guerrero, at the time it was occurring. Similarly, the surviving students of this massacre have written detailed accounts of the genocide perpetrated by the police, in the presence of PGR (office of the attorney general) officials and the CISEN (Center of Investigation and National Security), just like the involvement of military officials about five minutes from where these events were taking place.
It’s wasn’t just the out-of-control outside groups under orders of a trivial mayor, that the capitalist mainstream media wants the public to believe. The genocide and terror spread by the repressive forces of the state, and the strategies adopted by the ruling capitalist and their imperialist supporters, to contain the discontent of millions of unemployed and poor workers, and the millions of youth without the opportunity of ever obtaining a respectable job.
The mass murders and terror implanted during these past decades respond to the needs of the ruling class to impose low wages and to strip the working class of basic services such as education, healthcare, housing, jobs, and for the exploitation of natural resources like gas, petroleum and minerals. The daily murders relate to the concentration of wealth by the ruling class netting them riches though murdering and impoverishment of millions of workers and their families.
With terror embedded in the entire country, the capitalists intend to stop the rising struggles of the working class, setting an example in sectors like those like in Ayotzinapa, which has been the vanguard of the anti-capitalist struggle for decades.
The use of terror, paramilitary, squadrons of death and hired assassins, shows the political weakness of the capitalists to govern. More often we are seeing large sectors not trusting the electoral politics and capitalist democracy, which have proven to be useless to solve the basic needs of the working class. Just like an Ayotzinapa student said, “they have taken everything, EVEN OUR FEAR,” and that’s what they are really afraid of.
We needs communist revolution that guarantees the end and not the return of capitalism, a communist society led by and for the workers, based on the equal distribution of wealth that is produced by the working class. Let’s make the capitalists shake in fear at the sight of a working-class movement. No more genocide, no more capitalism!