CHICAGO, April 21 — Using fascist police-state tactics, president Wayne Watson is attempting to stifle the growing outrage of students and faculty at Chicago State University (CSU). As a multiracial worker-student alliance, we are learning to fight back. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) strives to turn this struggle into a school for communism. Several students expressed interest in boarding the May Day bus to Brooklyn, NY.
Racist Administration
The struggle against Watson and interim provost Angela Henderson took a qualitative leap forward with the arrest of Willie Preston on March 7. After being expelled for speaking against the racist administration, he returned to campus to speak at the public Board of Trustees (BOT) meeting. He now faces charges of trespassing and violating an order of protection. Racist Henderson acquired an order of protection by referring to Willie as a domestic terrorist and invoking the racist stereotype of the violent black man.
Willie became Watson’s enemy because he, along with his fellow students and faculty, is exposing the misuse of student activity fees, the corruption of the Student Government Association (SGA) elections, the racist treatment of students at the bookstore, and the need to restore childcare on campus. These attacks are happening on campuses across the U.S. and are symptomatic of the bosses’ plan for our class in time of global crisis: more cutbacks, war, and use of the state to suppress working-class rebellions.
It’s Not Just the BOT; It’s Capitalism
So spring break started with students and faculty raising bail money and phoning the campus police station in support of Willie. (Illinois State Police are the CSU campus security.) We went to Willie’s first court appearance. At a nearby restaurant, a committee was organized to continue the fight against Watson’s attacks. Faculty members added their grievances, which include Watson’s attempts to squelch the dissident CSU Faculty Voice blog, hiring of cronies and paying them exorbitant salaries. PLP pointed out the racist nature of Watson’s attacks. Although black himself, he and the mostly black BOT willingly carry out the racist policies of Governor Quinn and the state legislature. Mass imprisonment of black men is the New Jim Crow and Watson, Henderson, and the BOT are breeding that same racism in CSU.
PLP exposed the bosses as exploiters of all workers, making super-profits from black, Latino, and immigrant workers. The bosses divide the working class with racism to stop us from uniting, and at CSU, it’s not any different. Capitalism rewards Watson and Henderson for trying to control and terrorize working-class students. This is a sign of a system fearful of the potential power of multiracial unity. We must wage a struggle to turn this fightback at CSU into a revolutionary movement to destroy capitalism and to replace it with communism, a society without racism, sexism, and other forms of inequality.
Biggest Threat to Bosses:Multiracial Unity
The anticommunist administration revoked PLP’s reservation for a “Repression at CSU” forum on April 9, locking the auditorium, and posting a police guard. More than 80 people attended the forum, which somehow ended up sharing space in a nearby lecture hall with a history class, which then joined us.  Challenge was distributed widely. Students described how the SGA kept those who fought back off the ballot. Willie shared his struggle via Skype. An anonymous statement was read from a student who had been physically threatened for speaking out.
The SGA president, a Watson clone, appealed to racism saying: “the organizers of this forum don’t look like you.” This mimics Watson’s attempts to characterize the current fightback as being fomented by “white communist professors.” These lies expose Watson’s and the BOT’s fear of the multiracial unity of the organizing committee, the worker-student alliance, and the unity of the communist organization PLP with students and faculty. Two students sought out PLP after the forum to sign up for May Day.
Sexist Shutdown of Daycare
On April 15, our committee joined a campus rally to demand “Daycare Now” at CSU. In 2009, the campus daycare program was closed. Five years later and there is still no childcare! It’s worth noting the demographics of CSU. Of its nearly 4,400 students, 72 percent are women, 99 percent apply for need-based financial aid, 86 percent are black, 6 percent are Latino, and 69 percent are single parents. The average age of students is 31. So when the University shuts down daycare, it is attacking mostly black women workers.
The morning of the rally, the administration announced a new daycare center is being “planned” for June of 2016. Despite being prevented by the cops from using a bullhorn, students testified loudly how the bloated administration budgets and salaries could pay for daycare now. Obviously childcare for these working-class students’ children is not in the interest of the administration!
Our struggle at CSU demonstrates the use of the bosses’ police and legal system to suppress any antiracist and antisexist fightback. The university is a locus of ruling-class ideologies and attacks. But it is also a site of fightback and potential for a communist base. Several students signed up to learn about PLP and the May Day bus to Brooklyn. We have been meeting with and recruiting these students to May Day, with some success. One student is trying to recruit classmates. We are now hoping to march as a CSU contingent in Brooklyn!

TEXAS, April 22 — Every year one city hosts a large Cesar Chavez march. Chavez was a reformist who led a very large movement for the rights of migrant laborers in the United Farmworkers Union in the 1960s-70s. And during an election season like this year’s, the march swells with liberal misleaders. This year PL members in our area made a plan to coordinate several activities in order to counter the Chavez Committee’s “vote-for-lesser-of-two-evils” line.
We planned to bring a large base along with a leaflet and bullhorn in order to project a clear outlook of multiracial unity against capitalism and against voting for the bosses. In the past we executed a similar plan and were able to win hundreds of students and workers away from the march organizer’s meaningless “Si se puede” (“yes, we can!”) chant toward more militants chants like, “Obreros, unidos, jamás serán vencidos” (“The workers united, will never be defeated.”) As this year’s march date grew closer, however, our plan unraveled. We hadn’t written the leaflet and we had not sufficiently won our friends to attend the march.
Instead of feeling down, we regrouped. We printed sheets  with militant working-class and anti-capitalist chants and brought a bullhorn, something we have never brought to the Chavez march.
As the march began, we chanted, “Up, Up with Education, Down, Down with Deportations.” “Abajo Con Banderas, Afuera Con Fronteras.” (“Down With the Flag, Out with Borders!”) “When workers and students are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!”
At first, our friends and the crowd around us were hesitant to join in. But the few PL’ers were persistent. We continued chanting and pointed out the limits of the march organizers’ chants.
As we entered downtown, our bullhorn rang loud and hundreds began to join in. At one point the march organizers tried to trick one member away from us and into the front of the march by telling him what a good leader he was. Their real intention was to steal away his powerful voice from leading the working class in militant anti-capitalist chants. We told the march organizer to get lost and we continued pressing forward.
By the end of the march we had influenced hundreds of students and workers. Students who attended with us and were initially hesitant ended up being some of the most active participants. As the march ended, several of us went for coffee. We had a good conversation stemming from the events of the day — ranging from racism and slavery to the politics of recent movies. We plan to continue organizing with these students and building toward May Day! With a revolutionary line and militancy, we can eventually influence millions.

NEW YORK CITY, April 11 —  Twenty-five Columbia University students met up with fighters from Harlem’S St. Mary’s Church to picket the University’s fake employment office near 125 St. Loud chants rang out and speeches were made by students and community residents. Then we marched to the church a few blocks away and ate a delicious supper. More discussion ensued, and students were transfixed by a superstorm Sandy survivor who, a year and a half later, is still living in a shelter, without adequate financial support. Capitalism and its racist state apparatus can and will never serve the needs of workers!
Columbia’s 17-acre expansion into Manhattanville, the western edge of Harlem, is well underway but will not be completed until 2030. It is making unemployment and affordable housing shortages worse. Columbia itself estimates that 3,300 Harlem residents will be displaced by gentrification in the area surrounding the expansion. They talk about building affordable housing, but “affordable” is based on median income in the whole metropolitan area and has nothing to do with local incomes.
Columbia says 6,900 new jobs will be created, but only 1,500 of those will not require an advanced degree. No sign of apprenticeship programs promised in the Community Benefits Agreement has been seen. As of 2009, Columbia had only 213 employees who lived above 125th St. or in public housing. The so-called “employment” office on Broadway south of 125th St. has not actually offered jobs or job training to local residents.
Manhattanville is a primarily poor black and Latino community, with youth unemployment about 50 percent, rising rents, and poor schools and health care. Columbia’s disregard for the people of this neighborhood is blatantly racist. It is totally in line with Columbia’s mission of training the ruling class of tomorrow and inculcating today’s students with the certainty of their superiority. In 1968, a mass movement of students and local residents defeated Columbia’s plan to build a gym in a park in Harlem, to the exclusion of local residents.
For the past year students have been researching the history of Columbia’s treachery in the neighborhood. They have held two well-attended campus forums about gentrification, in which community groups also participated. Now they are deciding how to proceed on a campaign of action and education next school year, along with their new community allies.
Other student groups, involved in campus-worker solidarity, climate change, and against Columbia’s investment in prison corporations, to name a few, are also participating. The upsurge in campus activism makes it possible to once again build a worker-student-community alliance and engage in anti-racist struggle against this elitist, monolithic university.
More students are also reading Challenge. Several are coming to May Day; many are open to considering how capitalism exploits and abuses all workers, from white collar to blue, and how an alliance between them is necessary to fight for change, from reforms to the ultimate overthrow of capitalism.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, April 14 — The human tragedy of the global economic crisis continues to smash workers’ daily lives here, but PLP communists and the working masses are building strength by resisting the regime’s moves towards more fascist social control, with the open agreement of the U.S. Embassy. We need revolutionary imagination to arrive at the only worthwhile response: overthrow capitalism and take power for the workers.
Meanwhile, endemic joblessness is killing slowly while cholera kills quickly; homelessness, malnutrition, lack of clean water, health care, electricity, transport, education, and drought continue to worsen.
Fascism intensifies inside the gangster government, installing ex-military figures like Himler Rébu in ministerial posts. There are increasing crackdowns on the media and the right to demonstrate in the streets and outlawing any sort of legal opposition. This includes several assassinations of Pres. Martelly opponents: the murder of two prominent human rights workers, and the killing of Fitzgerald, a leader of the reform party Lavalas.
Police gunfire wounded three students inside the Faculty of Ethnology (a long-time center of student resistance), during mass protests against the arrest of the opposition lawyer André Michel. The government has threatened media like Radio Kiskeya and Radio Zénith if they criticize those in power.
Elsewhere, gangs violently harass street merchants and market women (those getting by without wages for work). Landlords’ vigilantes attack peasants in many areas. And the youth are the favorite targets of the gangster rulers.
Parliamentary ‘National Dialogue’ Supplements Fascist Crackdown
Martelly is trying to co-opt any opposition in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies with a “National Dialogue” of all political parties. One result is the newly voted anti-terrorism law, which defines any protester in the streets as a terrorist, justifying mass arrests and heavy sentences in case of a mass uprising. This law shows how capitalist-elected parliaments participate fully in developing fascism (like the U.S. Congress and Homeland Security).
Lavalas, the semi-banned party of the celebrity populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was about to join this Dialogue but pulled out before signing. Jean-Charles Moïse, an Aristide rival inside Lavalas and leader of its fake left wing, was expelled from Lavalas for disobeying the party directive not to demonstrate outside the U.S. Embassy. Thus Lavalas too participates in the advance of fascism.
‘Enrichissez-Vous!’
Drugs, Arms Good for Business
Governing is good business for those who accumulate wealth directly from their government posts. Politicians seize land for urban renewal or reconstruction while themselves being part-owners of the finance or construction companies who get the government contracts. One farcical example: the electricity promised for workers’ districts yielded only a few solar-powered street-lights, illuminating the rutted streets while the houses themselves remained in darkness. The Prime Minister holds shares in the electric company selling such “services” to the state.
In the South, several land parcels which are used as small airports by drug-traffickers as transshipment points between South America and the U.S., have been seized by the State, only so the politicians themselves can benefit more directly from the drug trade. And the Prime Minister has been implicated in the illegal arms traffic entering Haiti from Israeli manufacturers, often destined for use by politicians at election time to intimidate their rivals’ voters.
The Communist Imagination
The step-up of fascist violence makes fightback more difficult. Public demonstrations have slowed since the big December garment-workers’ protests for unionization — tough when rebel workers are so easy to fire.
PLP is always among the masses at these events, determinedly fighting for our communist outlook. Whether youth study groups, literacy classes using communist ideas as texts, a community organizing group, private meetings with workers and professionals (mostly unemployed or unpaid for work performed), or just sitting under a tree in the public park, comrades in Haiti are pursuing our vision. We will overturn this profit-driven heartless world.
International Dimension
With sharpening imperialist conflicts among Russian, U.S. and Chinese bosses, communists are examining Haiti’s position relative to these great powers. Extreme joblessness turns Haiti into a “reserve army of the unemployed,” available to supply low-wage workers, and thus lower all workers’ wages throughout the region. Thousands of Haiti’s workers get easy entry into Brazil, for example, for poorly paid construction work, and the bosses of both countries profit.
Brazil, the region’s rising “sub-imperialist” with an ambivalent relation to the U.S., is the largest supplier of troops for the UN’s military here, where they perfect their dirty techniques of repression for use at home (e.g., in “cleaning up” working-class slums for the World Cup and Olympic games).
Another “sub-imperialist” is Venezuela, which gives cheap oil to Haiti. Henrique Capriles, the Venezuelan millionaire prominent in the opposition to the Chavista regime, is also donating “gifts” such as soccer stadiums to Haiti.
Given Haiti’s relationships to inter-imperialist rivalry, if war erupts, misery and fascism in Haiti will only intensify, especially if the U.S. needs Haiti in an inter-imperialist war, as they did against Germany in World War I when the Marines invaded Haiti and occupied it until 1934. Would Haiti be caught between the U.S. on the one hand and Brazil and Venezuela on the other?
But we are clear here that workers must not take a side in this fight between exploiters, but unite for revolution under the red flag of the international PLP.