BROOKLYN, May 21 — “Justice for Kyam Livingston — Killed in a Brooklyn Cell!” chanted the group that broke away from the picket line outside the Kings County district attorney’s office here. The protesters entered the building and walked up the stairs. A group of suited security officers stood at the top. Kyam’s mother, Anita, reached the very top of the stairs and faced the kkkop in charge.
He warned, “If you go in, you’ll all be arrested.”
“I have a petition here to give to the district attorney,” Anita said.
“If you go in, you’ll all be arrested,” repeated the security cop.  
Anita shouted, “Someone from the DA’s office was there in January at our speakout, and again in March. And you said you’d deal with my daughter’s case. But you didn’t do anything!” She waved a bag full of signed petitions demanding prosecution of the New York Police Department jailers who refused her daughter, a 37-year-old mother of two, needed medical help.
The head security officer said, “You can’t take them inside.”
Anita took one of the petitions out of the bag and showed it to him. She said, “This is all we have. I just want to hand in the petitions for my daughter — it’s my daughter!” The rest of the group stood on the staircase chanting, “We want justice!”
The cops were unmoved and shouted, “You can’t chant in here!”  
Finally Anita said, “You’re all full of s—t!  You make promises, you get into office, and you don’t care about ordinary people. You only care if a policeman is hurt or killed!”  
Ten minutes later, we left the building and rejoined the picket line outside at 350 Jay Street, which houses two courts as well as the district attorney’s office. A group of suits came out of the building, stared at our picket line, and talked among themselves.  The picket line formed for a final rally and continued to chant “We want Justice for Kyam Livingston — Killed in a Brooklyn Cell!” and “We’ll be back!”
Hundreds of “Justice for Kyam” leaflets were passed out prior to the attempt to storm the building and reach the DA’s office to give him the petitions. About a hundred Challenges were distributed to the crowds on the street. The demonstration sparked many political discussions on the street between the protesters and passersby. Members of Progressive Labor Party put forward their analysis that racism and capitalism were the root causes of police terror and getting away with murder. When two teachers on their way to their union office saw a teacher they knew at the demonstration, they said, “Keep it up. We’ll see you later!”
Before the demonstration, members of our committee spoke on Kyam’s case to the crowd on the street. We told how she had been arrested last July on a minor matter, became sick in a holding cell at Brooklyn central booking, and was callously denied medical care. After seven hours of intense suffering and begging for help with no response, she died in the cell. She was never accused of a crime, and no one has been held accountable for her death. The demonstration marked our tenth remembrance of Kyam’s death.
Afterward, PL’ers involved in the struggle evaluated the demonstration. Although the rally itself was smaller than usual because it was during regular working hours, it was nonetheless inspiring. We spoke to many students from the local technical college and Westinghouse High School about the case and the horrors of capitalism, namely racism, sexism, and imperialist war. We try to insure that PLP’s communist politics are not lost in the day-to-day details that are necessary in fighting reform battles. As revolutionary Soviet leader Lenin said about reform struggles, comrades should spend five minutes talking about heating the factory and 25 minutes talking about communism. We are struggling to follow that recipe for revolution.

BOSTON, May 31 — An aroused alliance of students, faculty, and staff at Roxbury Community College (RCC) has turned back college bosses’ plans to put armed cops on this campus serving mainly black, Latino, and immigrant students.
News of the plan to bring in gun-packing police originally surfaced at a teach-in in late March where Progressive Labor Party gave political leadership. At a faculty meeting a day or two later, RCC Vice President John McLaughlin confirmed the plan and claimed the only reason there hadn’t been more violence at RCC was “dumb luck.” A job posting for a “sworn officer” with the power to make arrests was posted on the college website.
In response, students presented protest petitions to a joint meeting of the faculty and staff unions. The unions passed a resolution condemning both the armed police and the one-way glass that had recently been installed at the security office. Pizza and Politics, a student club, scheduled a public hearing on the administration’s pacification plan.
Beating a hasty retreat, RCC President Valerie Roberson sent out an all-college memo claiming that the impending arrival of armed police was merely a rumor. Most people saw the memo as her way of backpedaling on the issue, trying to maintain control and counter the unity and growing spirit of resistance among faculty, staff and students.
Despite considerable pressure to cancel the public hearing, Pizza and Politics went ahead with it. Several students argued that there was no objective reason for the administration’s move to more repressive security. Many expressed anger at McLaughlin’s remarks. A faculty member said that our community is made safe when people know and care about each other.
The hearing also gave students an opportunity to testify about their experiences with racist police terror. They warned that bringing armed police on campus would make them feel less safe. One student spoke passionately about having been recently beaten and arrested by Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority police for intervening on behalf of an elderly woman. PL’ers announced the New York May Day march and tied the issue of armed police to growing fascism in the U.S.
On April 15, the day after the hearing, hundreds of RCC faculty, staff and students attended an all-college meeting called by the administration. Roberson addressed several recent “reforms,” including the firing of top- and mid-level managers and the abrupt (if temporary) shutdown of a community ESL program.
On the matter of the armed cops, Roberson tried to use diplomacy to win our allegiance. She affirmed that despite the “confusion,” there would be no armed police on campus. This was certainly our victory, but by denying that this plan was ever in the works, she was trying to take it away from us. Led by militant students, we refused to let her off the hook, making it an even more solid victory for our class! Most people left the meeting encouraged and energized by the way we stood up to the administration.
For working-class organizers, there are many lessons to learn from these events. “Shared governance” — which gives the faculty and staff a voice and the illusion of democracy at the college — is being thrown out the window in favor of top-down, corporate-style management. This is happening due to the latest crisis of capitalism, which is forcing the bosses to rein in their public institutions and get more profits for their buck. This situation will open up opportunities for struggle, but it will take bold students and workers’ organizing to seize them.
Since the 2006 shootings at Virginia Tech, armed police have been installed on campuses nationwide. The ruling class used this tragedy just as they used 9/11 to pave the way for the Patriot Act, as an excuse for more surveillance and militarization. The rulers are preparing for worker and student rebellions against the devastating cuts to our standard of living.
At colleges like RCC, the bosses will have a harder time getting away with it. Because of racism, black and Latino students have less entrenched illusions about U.S. democracy. They know all too well what it is like to be policed in AmeriKKKa. Crafty administrator/politicians like Roberson, who are black or Latino and often from working-class backgrounds, are highly useful to the ruling class to legitimize its agenda. Exposing Roberson’s political role will loosen the rulers’ hold over the RCC community.
Building communist consciousness — a long-term strategic outlook for creating a society without bosses, profits and racism, run by the working class — is crucial for strengthening the class struggle at RCC. Distracted, pacified and confused, many people at RCC do not yet see Roberson’s transformation of the college as a part of the move toward war and fascism. Nor do they see themselves as being able to make a difference in the bosses’ murderous plans.
It is a communist understanding that gives people staying power in reform struggles, where others either become self-serving or burned out. Now we need to sharpen and expand the class struggle at RCC. PL’ers need to focus on building a regular CHALLENGE readers group that can explain what is happening around the world and how it relates to our own college.

If any evidence was needed to demonstrate that universities in the U.S. are run as corporations, one need only examine the latest example involving the largest private university in the U.S., New York University. They follow four capitalist principles: making profit, teaching their ideology, fueling racist division, and bilking the students.
NYU has built a campus in the city of Abu Dhabi in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE), a U.S. ally. The UAE is “an oppressive regime which has been accused of torturing prisoners [and] looking the other way at abusive labor conditions for migrant workers” (NY Times, 5/27). Much of the UAE lives off of the super-exploitation of South Asian workers, who live in prison-like labor camps.
Much of the UAE The Times reported (5/19) that these racist conditions suffered by an all-South-Asian migrant workforce who built this campus included “workers being arrested, beaten and deported for going on strike, being charged a year’s wages to get their jobs, and being denied access to their travel documents.”
This campus is part of a campaign guided by NYU’s racist president, John Sexton, “to transform the university into an international…platform with hubs around the globe — the equivalent…of a far-flung multinational corporation. He was supported in that ambition by a who’s who of corporate America accustomed to seeking growth abroad” (NYT, 5/27).
A public letter from a group of NYU faculty declared that these “global ambitions were motivated more by the bottom line for NYU — which has raised nearly $6 billion during [Board of Trustees chairman Martin]
Lipton’s tenure than [by] education” (NYT). CEO Lipton “has made his career as the top advisor to corporate boards during mergers and acquisitions as a founder of Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.” Such are the “educational” resumés of the governing boards of U.S. institutions of “higher learning.”
Wall Street’s Campus
Hours after the exposé was published, “Mr. Lipton went into full crisis mode and sent an email to…member of NYU’s board, which is stacked with Wall Street boldface names [more “educators”?] like Laurence Fink of BlackRock; the hedge fund impresario John Paulson; and a Home Depot founder, Kenneth Langone” (NYT). He said he had been “unaware of the reported abuses and that an ‘independent’ investigation would” begin.
NYU president Sexton followed this by saying that “the contractors responsible for the…problems weren’t under the university’s control.” But this turned out to be unadulterated racist garbage. “The general contractor that helped oversee the construction of the campus isn’t some fly-by-night firm outside NYU’s purview” but “is run by a trustee of NYU’s board [emphasis added]: Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, the chief executive of the Mubadala Development Company.”
Racist Al Mubarak persuaded Sexton and the Board to build the campus, “with a $50 million donation from the government of Abu Dhabi.” Mubarak is chairman of Abu Dhabi’s governing executive council. Faculty member Mark Miller said Sexton’s “contractor” response “was a classic exercise in damage control, meant to distance NYU as far as possible from the horrific wrongs inflicted on those workers, and — therefore — divert attention from the fact that …Al Mubarak is not some faraway rogue operative but an NYU trustee” (NYT). Confirming that characterization, NYU spokesman John Beckman said, “Mr. Al Mubarak is a respected member of the NYU board and his membership is not in question.”
‘Global Clip Joint’ Bilks the Students
Some NYU faculty members objected to the new campus and said Sexton’s initiatives have “led to one of the highest tuitions in the country and soaring debt levels for its students.” The aforementioned faculty public letter declared that, “Any school that profiteers so avidly is sure to be renowned…as a global clip joint with an academic logo.”
NYU is not alone in running a university like a corporation. The presidents of numerous colleges have become millionaires, not to mention the football and basketball coaches. Their huge salaries that help rake in hundreds of millions from the colleges’ sports programs that help pay these salaries and the perks.
Under capitalism, education is a big business that reaps huge profits. It teaches the principles that govern a racist profit-making system, much of it on the backs of its students, their debts and the banks that collect the interest on that trillion-dollar debt. The exorbitant cost of education is increasingly freezing out the working class from any schooling that might enable them to get a decent job.
But, again, capitalism is designed to oppress the working class, not uplift it, in the U.S. as well as in the UAE. We need a profit- and boss-free system, run by and for the working class communism. Workers will collectively run the schools, teach ideas benefitting our class and enable everyone, regardless of area of origin, to fulfill their potential in all fields of endeavor.

The enactment of fascist labor, education, tax, and energy reforms demonstrate the nature of a capitalist system, designed to benefit the bosses and attack the working class. There are no legal ways to enact changes for workers’ benefit.
The bosses’ mass media tells us that the majority is in charge and the laws are just, but in reality the electoral process is completely controlled by the business, financial and political oligarchy. Therefore only those in this oligarchy can get access to power through the vote. Similarly, the rule of law is an illusion, when the same minority of millionaire parasites determines what’s legal, and can change laws to benefit their businesses, as with structural reforms here in Mexico.
When the electoral farce and bourgeois legality are not enough to control working-class rebellions, the bosses resort to the police and military to repress, jail, and murder dissenters. Capitalists use fascist terror against the working class to violently impose their interests on the majority.
The bosses believe that the illusion of bourgeois democracy and fascist terror can prevent the unity of the working class, but they are mistaken. Eventually, millions of workers will unite to build an international communist movement to abolish capitalist oppression and exploitation.
During the last century, the working class made significant advances in the Soviet Union and China by putting into practice its strategy to take power from the bosses. Essential to this strategy were the organization of a revolutionary communist party, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But, its achievements, the old communist movement also had shortcomings. The most important was that even when the workers held political power, revolutionaries limited themselves to the administration of a capitalist economy: Salaries and money were never eliminated, and production was mainly focused on responding to the needs of the market instead of responding to the needs of the working class. The ideological base of this error was the lack of confidence in the working class — that had struggled for the socialist transformation of Russia and China — to accept communist ideas and practices. These errors led to the return of capitalism.
Understanding the failures and successes of the old communist movement are the key to improving our practice in the struggle against capitalist oppression. Revolutionaries believe and practice criticism and self-criticism, as inheritors of the communists of the last century. The members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) call on the workers of the world to once again raise the communist red flag.
We have learned that the struggle should not have stages, must go directly to communism. We must forge a single worldwide communist party, the PLP, as there is only one international working class. We need only one party. The revolutionary struggle to defeat our oppressors cannot be an electoral process or an alliance with a boss or a progressive politician; revolution is necessarily violent and involve millions of workers, students, and soldiers.
Currently, imperialists are readying for global war. The fall of the old communist movement left the working class at a disadvantage to face this period, but the sharp struggle against reformism and revisionism (capitalist ideologies in red clothing), along with our commitment to free our class from capitalist exploitation, eventually will bear fruits.
While the bosses get ready for war, we workers must prepare for a communist revolution. Read and distribute CHALLENGE! Organize our circles of study action!