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!

FERGUSON, MO — The capitalist ruling class has been rocked by the protests that have gone on for over two months since the racist police murder of our working-class brother Mike Brown. The rebels have shown creativity in fighting back against police terror, including interrupting baseball games and a symphony performance to keep attention on Ferguson.  A group of PLP comrades went to the St. Louis area for the recent protests and are all going back to their areas with new energy and a better political understanding of why the rulers are terrified by this rebellion.
The bosses are using two main tactics to stop the movement: outright fascism, and liberal co-optation. These reflect both a tactical split but also a strategic unity in the ruling class. With the first tactic, fascist terror, the rulers and their police thought they could just beat the fight out of the workers and students in St. Louis County. After weeks of daily protests, they had underestimated the resolve of the protesters who refused to give in to fear and terror, images of which were seen around the world.
Our Party contingent experienced this in a very direct way. On Friday, October 10, riot police with heavy armored vehicles confronted about 150 protesters in St. Louis during a march for another black youth who was recently shot eight times by an off-duty cop after purchasing a sandwich at a convenience store.
After being harassed by police at a march on the following day who demanded our literature and to know why we were there, we were again stopped by St. Louis County police when we entered a predominately black apartment complex in Ferguson to talk to residents. They told us that since the Brown shooting this harassment has stepped up, with St. Louis County police joining the Ferguson police in patrolling the largely black working-class neighborhoods.
Contrary to our assumption that Ferguson residents would be reluctant or even tired of talking to us, the workers and students in the apartments were enthusiastic about talking to us about communism and taking CHALLENGE, with some even giving small donations.
Complementing outright fascist terror, the liberal wing of the ruling class has a more sophisticated – and dangerous — tactic to stop these spontaneous rebellions from turning into a more organized working-class movement: to co-opt the protests and portray themselves as the protectors of the black residents against the racist/fascist police and openly racist white politicians.
After the rulers figured out they could not terrorize the rebels and crush the rebellion with violence alone, they unleashed hordes of liberal misleaders on the protesters, aggressively promoting U.S. nationalism and racial identity politics, particularl, the anti-working class ideas of “white privilege” and
“black power.” These ideas are an ideological attack on working-class consciousness by dividing our class for the rulers who will need more boots on the ground for larger imperialist wars brewing.  
The demand for the indictment of racist cop Darren Wilson is being promoted by the liberal wing of the ruling class in order to diffuse the class anger and prevent a larger rebellion. They want the protesters to settle for a resolution to the situation through the rulers fake injustice system and in doing so restore faith in that system- the same system that murdered Mike Brown.
They especially don’t want the young black protesters to believe that the ruling class is all about maintaining super-profits for a few billionaires by exploiting the entire working class.That the rebellion has been so multiracial and has drawn in Asian, Latin, black, and white workers and students from all over, terrifying for the rulers because they see the potential unravelling of their race-based system of rule. Liberal rulers have had some success in promoting the idea to the protesters that only black, Latin, and Asian are beaten, oppressed and killed by the police.
Even as blacks are killed far more in proportion to their population, a plurality of workers shot by the police are white. From 2003 to 2009, there were 1,529 blacks and 949 Latinos killed by the police in the U.S., and 2,036 whites in this same period (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2011). Liberal misleaders like those at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice want to reform the police only so the racial disparities don’t look as blatant, and so legitimize police violence. Black workers are disproportionately terrorized in apartheid neighborhoods at the same time many working-class whites are also oppressed, but invisibly to the media because their job is to carry on the racist lies of the bosses. Communists don’t want equality in police shootings — we want to smash all police terror!
We militantly opposed the liberals through our bold presence at each demonstration, and through our interactions with the other protestors and workers. We approached them sincerely and looked for points of unity in their political understanding in order to move them toward communist ideas.
Crucial to our success was our organization and discipline in discussing and criticizing our efforts in a democratic centralist manner, and applying our lessons to future plans. In spite of battling exhaustion and sickness. This infused our group with tremendous energy.
We held two large discussions, one with interested college students and another with a group of contacts we had made and wanted to discuss our ideas, which led to new friendships, and furthered understanding of our fight.
Our multiracial, immigrant and native-born PLP contingent was itself a visible statement of internationalism. We proclaimed loudly that is impossible to get true justice through this murderous system and only a communist revolution, which overthrows the entire ruling class and their state, can bring true justice. Through our new friends and contacts with the workers and students there, and through our internal experiences organizing and practicing bringing our line to thousands of workers and students, we’re closer to that day.