TEXAS, September 19 — “Racist administration, shut it down!” chanted 15 students marching through the courtyard of our community college here. Led by PLP, we crossed a major street and blocked traffic. We held this protest immediately after a PL-led panel discussion with students titled “Confronting 21st Century Racism” the racist connection between the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the attacks on immigrant workers at the U.S.-Mexico border. This was our college club’s way of bringing the fightback home, and we did just that!
Panel’s Message: Fight Back Like Ferguson Everywhere!
Building for the panel and the march wasn’t easy. Our campus has cracked down on organizing by requiring any leaflet distributed on campus to be approved first by the administration. As an unofficial campus organization, we organize as clandestinely as possible, even though the police caught and reprimanded one of our comrades for distributing unauthorized literature. Our college town has a long history of anti-immigrant racism and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attacks. Many students responded to our leafleting for the panel with eagerness and relief.
The three-person panel had a multiracial audience of 25 students. It included an English professor who connected the prison construction company GEO and its billions of dollars of contracts for building prisons and its lobbying efforts in the U.S. Congress to pass tougher laws and pass stricter immigration laws to fill these prisons. The second panelist followed up the discussion with his experience as an immigration attorney and elaborated on the recent policy known as Criminal Alien Removal Initiative which allows ICE to become more aggressive in deportations.
The third panelist talked about her experiences in the Ferguson rebellion. She changed the nature of the panel by first asking a few questions to the audience, challenging the capitalist media’s labeling of the fightback in Ferguson a “riot.” After leading the audience in a call-and-response chant she had learned from the rebels of “Ferguson! SHUT IT DOWN!” She gave a powerful and moving account of the multiracial unity and resistance there.
The questions from the audience that followed were evidence of how sharp our panel’s political conclusions had been. A black student in the audience asked, “how do we build a revolution?” We responded that everyone in this room chanting with us was an example of a first step towards building a revolution. The second step is doing something — direct action. At this moment our MC who introduced the panel and another comrade unfurled a banner that read, “students and workers unite and fight against mass incarcerations and mass deportations.”
From Panel Discussion to Antiracist Marches!
We then invited everyone to overcome their fears by joining us in an anti-cop protest. Fifteen of the 25 students at the event joined us, and the black student who had asked the question about revolution was one of the march leaders, and led chants through the campus like “no justice no peace, no racist police!” and “Killer cops you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”
An administrator ran outside and had a tantrum telling us we did not have permission to protest on campus. Without having to explain the revolutionary potential we have as students and workers that super-cedes the need for permission from a petty administrator, we continued chanting. Everyone understood that at this moment our words were our resistance. No one was going to stop us and we continued marching and chanting until some lost their voice. We made 20 contacts from interested passersby. Following the march, we invited everyone to join us the next day at another university. Three committed to the proposal!
The next day at the university, we were a smaller group, but just as loud and powerful. We unfurled our banner and passed out over 300 leaflets. As waves of students passed by and some began taking pictures. Many could not believe we were from the smaller community college nearby. We made five new contacts and were joined by at least two university students.
Overall the two days of fightback taught us a lot about our potential. We are not as weak as we often think and boldness pays! The reality is that our Party’s leadership and discipline turned kkkop and anti-immigrant racist terror into ammunition for the working class. We turned student anger into a school for communism. And building for communism means building an army of workers to challenge the bosses’ power. Black, Latin, Asian and White: to smash racism we must unite. All power to the workers!

BROOKLYN, September 21 — On the 21st of September between 300,000 and 400,000 people marched from Columbus Circle to 42nd Street in New York City. It was called The Peoples Climate March. Over 100 people from our church congregation took part as a group. Some marchers took leaflets about the Justice for Kyam Livingston demonstration in Brooklyn.  
That demonstration had a smaller turnout than usual because so many people went on the earlier march. But some went to both. One of the speakers who had been on the march in Manhattan pointed out that the demonstration for Kyam was one of fighting for justice and that both demonstrations were linked.
Progressive Labor Party had pointed out at the climate march that capitalism causes climate change and ruins the lives of workers in many more ways. At the Kyam demonstration a PL speaker concluded that a system which denies justice for families in Ferguson, Staten Island, the Middle East and Brooklyn should be destroyed.
This was the fourteenth month after the death of Kyam Livingston and many who spoke talked strongly about the disgrace that there is still no justice for a woman who died because she was refused medical care. Others pointed out that for black workers in this society there is very little help and much racist police terror and harassment.
Many of the people who stood on the corners listening to the demonstration took leaflets and CHALLENGEs. People stayed and listened intently, clearly affected by what they heard. Some came over and asked questions, paying no attention to the racist police who, as usual, were in evidence. The speakers came from different backgrounds, were of different ages, and were both men and women.
After the demonstration was over we discussed the obvious fact that it was smaller, but in some ways it was more important because people on the street were very involved in listening and asking questions. People were shocked and frustrated that 14 months after a death that was clearly negligent murder, little or nothing has been done. Our new mayor and his group have now been in power in this city for nine months and, in spite of the promises, the attitudes have not changed.  The new District Attorney has done nothing to help this family get the justice they deserve.  
Kyam’s mother spoke in her usual forceful manner about her child who died and that she would never forget. She thanked those who came, and those who always come for being there. We should make sure that the next demonstration is better attended and that we try to get in touch with  other groups, particularly after the recent struggles in Ferguson and in Staten Island where racist callousness towards black workers is so clearly evident. PL’ers in the struggle continue to point out that we would need to have communist revolution to get real justice.

On October 9 in New York City, I joined a rally at the Mexican consulate with several members of my college faculty and staff union (PSC-CUNY), along with school teachers in the UFT, and many others. We were there to protest the murderous ambush of activist students from the Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa in the Mexican state of Guerrero.
The students had come to the town of Iguala to raise money for school supplies, since their college is woefully underfunded. The Iguala police attacked the students, spraying their bus with machine gun fire, killing six people, wounding dozens more and kidnapping 43 students. The students may have been handed over to a local drug gang. As of today, we don’t how many of the 43 were murdered, but a mass grave has been discovered in the area with a couple of dozen bodies. The students have been missing since September 26, and the outlook is grim.
Nearly one hundred of us picketed for an hour, loudly chanting, “Protest the Massacre of Mexic-an Students,” and “Workers United Will Never Be Defeated.” The nervous consulate staff quickly closed their entrance, as they heard our message. After picketing, we held a rally at which CUNY students and faculty, among others, spoke and delivered the same message: we stand with our brothers and sisters in Mexico. We demand that kidnapped students who are still alive be released and we demand that those responsible for the killings be severely punished.
Over the last few days, tens of thousands of workers in Mexico have marched in Mexico City, Guerrero, Vera Cruz, and Oaxaca, carrying signs declaring, “Fascist government, assassin of teachers.” Teacher unions are reportedly calling for school walkouts to protest the outrageous killings.
The teachers college of Ayotzinapa has been training teachers, and producing activists, for many decades. The school calls itself “the cradle of social consciousness” and its students — many of whom are from poor families and work in the fields behind the school — are renowned for their social activism. These students and teachers have allied with farm workers against those who abuse them. Recently they joined a struggle to demand that the mayor of Iguala provide fertilizer to poor farmers. This militancy has earned them the wrath of local politicians, cops and the drug lords they work with.  The same mayor, who is now a fugitive from the law, is accused of recently murdering a popular leader of a reform group.
October 2 was the 46th anniversary of the notorious Tlatelolco Massacre, in which the Mexican military shot and killed nearly 300 student demonstrators, hoping to destroy the massive protest movement ten days before the 1968 Summer Olympics opened in Mexico City. Students from the Rural Teachers College had been planning to join commemoration protests in Mexico City last week.
CUNY Red

Why are working class youth criminalized? For the last few decades, youth have been the most vulnerable sector of the working class under capitalism. With the current crisis of overproduction, the ruling class has no interest in providing education or future employment for our youth. Instead, they have implemented huge and expensive campaigns to warn us that poor and unemployed youth will be the future hired killers of organized crime. Or that youth who participate in protests are black-clad people bent on destruction and terrorizing the general population, which the system must punish harshly with jail sentences.
Smear and elimination policies promote the brutality of the murders. The working class has a long-held affection for teaching students and teachers because of these groups’ commitment to their communities. For this reason, the Mexicanos Primero and Televisa bosses, along with the government, have massively promoted the idea that teachers, including student-teachers, are to blame for the educational backwardness. These workers are labeled parasites who get a salary to spend their time at sit-ins, which are a waste of money the government should not allow. But the context of this campaign was the passage of the education reform, which created huge profits for the groups, promoting the commercialization of education.
Although originally the police and army were trained as the capitalists’ repressive branch. Today due to the increasing violence carried out by drug cartels — amply documented to be sponsored by businesses and covered up by the politicians — the police fire on unarmed students under orders from local drug lords, with the pretext that their lives were in danger. While the cops could use their weapons against criminal groups, they prefer to hunt and murder 18- and 20-year-old youth who the government describes as undesirables.
Ayotzinapa is not an isolated case of police brutality. Thousands of unarmed black and Latino youth are murdered by racist police in the U.S. Even in those few cases where crimes were recorded, the police claimed they feared for their lives because they were confronting one of those “black rappers drug-dealing youth” who could “hurt” them as shown in countless racist movies and TV shows. In Europe, immigrants are massacred by the police, as was the case of the unarmed Brazilian immigrant murdered by the British cops because he looked like an Arab attempting to “commit a terrorist act” on the city subway.
Mexico is not a failed state. Capitalism is a criminal system. We cannot conclude that Mexico is simply a failed state (a concept which describes government institutions that cannot solve the problems of its population) when on a daily basis its ruling class invests huge amounts of money to promote racist ideas, smear campaigns, or wars designed to obtain resources to stay in power. They won’t solve the current situation because they deliberately created it. Only the organized international working class is capable of stopping these crimes by destroying the system that promotes them. We took power in the past; we can do it again.