BROOKLYN, January 21 — “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” Members of Progressive Labor Party and The Committee for Justice for Kyam Livingston chanted as we took the street and stopped traffic in front of the Brooklyn Criminal Court building where Kyam was murdered thirty months ago.
After hours of suffering in pain, crying for help, being threatened that the kkkops would “lose” her papers if she didn’t stop complaining, Kyam died while waiting for a simple arraignment before a judge. Thirty months have passed but no criminal or departmental charges have been lodged against the kkkops who murdered her by refusing her cries for medical attention. We have also learned how the (in)justice system serves the bosses’ racist, sexist system.
No Justice Under This System
We began our rally as we have many, many times before by detailing the facts and politics of this case. Today, our plan was to demand the arrest of those responsible. Our long struggle has produced the tapes showing the last seven painful hours of Kyam’s life spent in a filthy, vermin-infested holding cell. Kyam’s mom confronted the kkkops outside of the courthouse. She demanded they be held responsible. She demanded the arrest of the murderers. They did nothing. Then Kyam’s mom and several supporters went inside the building. In a courtroom, they made the same demand. The same result. Next, they confronted supervising court cops. Again, either with smiling faces or stony silence, they did nothing. The ska and reggae musician Jimmy Cliff was right: “It’s rebellion these kind of action breeds. I can’t get no justice under this system.”
The long struggle for Justice for Kyam has shown once again that the racist, sexist capitalist system holds little regard for the lives of Black women workers. KKKops ruthlessly kill our working-class brothers and sisters and then get off scot-free. That is how capitalist justice works! Under capitalism, the police serve the capitalist class, not the working class. Their role is to enforce the bosses’ laws and terrorize workers, especially Black and Latin, to prevent rebellions. With worsening capitalist conditions, police terror will only intensify.
Shut This Racist System Down
Only a communist society where the working class has state power can rid the world of racist killer kkkops. Justice is a world without bosses, profits, cops, or borders. We must build PLP worldwide in order to overthrow capitalism and create a state for workers. That is why we chanted, “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” and took to the streets. As we gave speeches about capitalist injustice, almost everyone walking by took CHALLENGE and some had conversations with us about revolution. This long struggle is only the beginning of building for a communism. We invite readers and your friends to join us as we keep up the struggle on the 21st of every month. Kyam means we’ve got to fight for revolution.

WORCESTER, MA — Members and friends of PLP protested at the City Council meeting to condemn cops in public schools.
The police presence is a racist reaction to the majority 55 percent Black and Latin students. From the beginning of this school year to November 23, 19 students have been arrested, including two from the middle school. The majority of these arrests have been for “disruption and disorderly conduct,” which are not crimes. These arrests are another aspect of growing fascism in the schools.
PLP members, some who are educators, spoke about the school-to-prison pipeline and how it has a devastating effect on mainly Black, Latin, Asian and white working-class students. We also read a petition to the Council against arresting children in schools, signed by over 100 community residents.
Schools Teach Obedience
Two professors of sociology at a local university pointed out that police in schools make the environment more dangerous rather than safer for children and teachers. The professors shared studies showing when students are arrested they do not graduate. The City is using the Alabama model for training on School Resource Officers (SRO’s), which maximizes minor infractions or annoyances and make them an offense subject to arrest. Once the cops are called to the school they’re compelled to make an arrest; now these students will have a criminal record. We stated that under no circumstances do we want cops in the schools and called for replacing SRO’s with more art and music teachers and guidance counselors, along with conflict and peer mediation. We need multiracial unity of teachers, students, parents and workers. We cannot leave the education of our children to the police, or to hedge-fund bosses.
Worcester is looking to close its $2 million budget gap, but the highest paid employees of the City, after the city manager, are police. This reflects the role of education. Capitalism needs public education to enforce discipline over our class — to teach the future workers obedience, patriotism and passivity.
Union Head Blames the Victim
Our group was multiracial, well-received, and included women and men, parents, professors, teachers and cafeteria and hospital workers. After the PLP members and friends from the community spoke, the head of the teachers union (who signed our petition) also spoke and said he agrees with us on some things. But he believes having the cops in the schools will keep the teachers safe since there have been some teachers hurt when breaking up fights between students. Such racism towards students is no surprise in a system founded on the racist reaping of super-profits off the backs of Black and immigrant workers. Teachers’ enemies are not students — it’s capitalism. There is no safe place for students or teachers under capitalism.
We need an international communist Party that fights for the working class. Workers led by PLP will continue to struggle against the criminalization of our children. We are meeting with parent groups and will make our demands at the School Committee.
PLP is taking hold of the political climate in the City of Worcester and injecting it with revolutionary politics and action. The only way to really fight for students is through the unity of teachers, students and parents. And we must point out that even with more money, even with any reform, the role of schools is to teach workers to accept and internalize capitalist relations. The final victory will come when we can unite all workers to destroy capitalism through communist revolution.

Richard Wright was a famous anti-racist Black writer in the United States during the mid-20th century. While the ruling class portrays him as an anti-communist from the get-go, Byline Richard Wright: Articles from the Daily Worker and New Masses (2015), compiled by Earle V. Bryant, reveals Wright’s enthusiasm for the U.S. and international communist movement in the 1930s. By reading this collection, we can gain historical insights on how to organize among masses of workers.
Best known as the author of Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), Wright was Harlem chief for the Daily Worker—the newspaper of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA)—for six months in 1937. He wrote more than two hundred news stories, along with several pieces published in the New Masses, the CPUSA’s cultural magazine. A large sampling of these writings are gathered in Byline Richard Wright.
The collection sheds valuable light on political organizing during the high point of the CPUSA’s leadership in the class struggle:

• “The Shame Spot of New York” focuses on rent strikes, demonstrations for lower prices, and protests against denial of medical care and police brutality. Many of these actions were spearheaded by women.

•  “The Winds of War” documents support in Harlem for the Spanish Loyalists and Chinese anti-fascists.
• “Heroes Sung and Unsung” describes Harlem’s memorials for William Campbell, a white truck driver who lost his life saving Black children from a tenement fire. 
• “Art for Life’s Sake” details the emergence of a revolutionary culture around the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, the reception of radical blues artist Lead Belly, and the short-lived literary magazine, New Challenge.

A study of the anti-racist history of the U.S. is important for communists in the current period. It helps to develop leaders who are in touch with the masses and fight for principled politics, in the interest of the whole working class.
Wright No Anti-Communist Skeptic
While literary historians have stressed Wright’s break from communism, his enthusiasm for the achievements of the CP-led mass movement is stunningly apparent here. For example, in an August 1937 piece titled “What Happens at a Communist Party Branch Meeting in the Harlem Section,” Wright alludes to how the Soviet Union is “building Socialism”; details egalitarian interactions between women and men, Black and white; and concludes that “for the first time in American history the Negro is receiving his [sic] highest possible pitch of social consciousness  [through]…education from the vanguard of the working class, the Communist Party.”
In Harlem’s reaction to the victory of Joe Louis, a black U.S. boxer, over Nazi Germany’s Max Schmeling, Wright discerns “the secret dynamics of proletarian aspiration. . . . They wanted to feel that the world was theirs as much as anybody else’s. . . . They wanted to own things in common and do things in common.”
These are not the words of an anti-communist skeptic.  
Besides detailing rank-and-file CP activity, Byline Richard Wright reveals the significant influence of the CP within the broader antifascist workers’ movement of the time, known as the Popular Front. The names in Wright’s reportage are an honor roll of anti-racist fighters from the time:  Benjamin Davis, Angelo Herndon, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., “Queen Mother” Audley Moore, Louise Patterson, Richard B. Moore, Thyra Edwards, Harry Haywood, Langston Hughes, Max Yergan, A. Philip Randolph, and—yes—even Thurgood Marshall, who subsequently would become the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice.
While a number of these figures would later pull back from their communist affiliations, and the Popular Front involved the CP in problematic cross-class alliances, Wright’s writings reveal the other side of this contradiction: Leftist politics guided many aspects of the mass movement.
Lessons from Old Movement
The CP’s turn towards reformism (e.g., its support for Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Jim Crow Army) alienated Wright and others, and initially led them to criticize the CP from the left. Under pressure from the CIA and FBI, Wright later cut himself off from the communist movement. But Bryant’s compilation contradicts the anti-communist lie he was fooled into or financially forced into being a communist.
PLP has consistently attacked the CP for selling out the workers and siding with liberal bosses. We organize directly for communism, relying only on the working class (not “lesser-evil” politicians). We understand that fighting racism is essential to defeating the profit system. These differences from the old communist movement have enabled us to grow internationally and win many workers to a communist outlook.
Times were very hard in the Harlem of Wright’s day. But Byline Richard Wright reveals that thousands of class-conscious anti-racists, both Party members and rank-and-file activists, threw themselves into organizing efforts guided by the vision of a better world. Although circumstances have changed, PLP members working in mass organizations today can gain both guidance and inspiration from studying the achievements of the 1930s.

The recent nuclear deal signed by the rival bosses of Iran, the U.S., Russia, China and others has nothing to do with peace. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) limits Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons in exchange for an end to sanctions that have punished Iran’s economy and workers since 1979. But the agreement’s real purpose is to buy these rivals time to build their militaries for the broader imperialist wars to come.
Bosses’ ‘Peace’ = War

When the leaders talk of peace, the people know the war has already begun.
—Bertolt Brecht, communist poet
and playwright

In 2011, George Friedman’s The Next Decade warned that a military conflict between Russian and the U.S. (and its NATO allies) was inevitable. Friedman, founder of the private intelligence firm Stratfor and a former consultant to the U.S. armed forces and the arch-imperialist RAND Corporation, argues for “a temporary understanding with Iran … that gives the United States room to withdraw… [and] create a new regional balance of power” (Stratfor, 11/24/14).
In the halls of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, a “new regional balance of power” is code for propping up and pitting regional rivals against one another. U.S. rulers could then shift their focus to their longer-term plan, a prospective all-out war with Russia and/or China. That’s what the capitalists mean by “peace.”
JCPOA Spells FASCISM
The dominant U.S. bosses, tied to finance capital and the likes of ExxonMobil and Citigroup, are in disarray. Their invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were costly failures—not because they killed millions of workers, but because they failed to bring the bosses decisive victories. As a result, U.S. imperialism was weakened throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, the region that produces most of the world’s cheaply extracted oil.
To finance these failures, the rulers have imposed viciously racist budget cuts on the U.S. working class—and a siege of racist state terror to discourage insurrection. Yet despite this escalating repression, Black workers have led heroic rebellions against murderous police from Ferguson to Baltimore.
While a ground invasion of Iran will likely be needed, sooner or later, to consolidate the U.S. bosses’ regional control, rebellious Black workers may be more committed to fighting against the government than for it.
JCPOA will give the U.S. bosses a freer hand to impose fascism. Their first step will be to force the Tea Party and other rogue capitalist factions to support Exxon’s agenda. Then they’ll enlist—or coerce—workers to support the next U.S. imperialist bloodbath. Once again, the working class will be expected to pay, kill and die amid escalating racist police terror, mass unemployment and a sharp decline in living standards.
Powell Doctrine: Blueprint for Fascism and War
One of the top Exxon-backed strategists for U.S. imperialism and its fascist vision is Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the four-star general who oversaw the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1990.
The Powell Doctrine holds that ready and willing ground troops, along with broad support from the U.S. working class, are essential to the continuing dominance of U.S. imperialism. But it also notes that a large-scale ground invasion will require years and massive investment. U.S. workers’ loyalty to the bosses’ war plans cannot be assumed, Powell says; it must be built.
While U.S. imperialism is in an increasingly desperate position, it cannot afford to stop defending its barbarous empire. Millions of workers will continue to be slaughtered as the world’s capitalists divide the planet and compete for profit and control.
Bosses’ Problems = Workers’ Opportunities
Workers worldwide have drawn inspiration from the anti-racist rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore. For Black and Muslim workers, fascism is already well underway. Latin, immigrant and women workers are also bearing the brunt of U.S. fascist terror. From Iran to Russia, from China to the U.S., our enemies are the bosses who gun down, imprison and deport our class sisters and brothers.
The Progressive Labor Party fights to end imperialism once and for all with mass armed revolution for communism. PLP organizes for class war because the working class has no country; only international communism can end this imperialist nightmare. Only a red army can smash this capitalist system.
The JCPOA is a warning shot from the world’s capitalists to the international working class that bigger wars are coming. Join us to build a mass party of millions to destroy these racist borders—and smash the brutal imperialists who drew them!