Worcester, MA,  September 19 — Members and friends of PLP, and many workers from an unemployed workers’ organization held a rally outside of Harry’s Pizzeria.
The workers here are fighting back against physical assaults, sexual harassment, and poverty wages.
In March of 2013 the manager at the restaurant struck a worker on the job. When the worker filed a battery complaint, the bosses’ court dismissed it.  A woman worker filed a separate complaint against the restaurant for sexual harassment from the bosses.
The workers from the area took our flyers and agreed that something should be done to stop the injustices.  The working class needs communism to take the bosses out of the driver’s seat of society.  Only then will these attacks on the working class be ended.

NEW YORK CITY, September 30 — Nearly 400 workers and students rallied in front of the Board of Trustees meeting at Baruch College today. We attacked our local enemy, the trustees who are responsible for hiring general David Petraeus, raising students’ tuition, decreasing services on campus, and forcing professors and staff to work to petty wages and under fascistic control of their departments and curriculum.
The Professional Staff Congress (PSC) union for the workers of the City University of New York (CUNY) had called a protest, demanding the trustees respond to the no-confidence in Pathways and the workers’ lack of a contract for the past three years. Pathways is the racist common core of this public university system that went into effect this semester. It is an assembly-line style curriculum that limits what professors can teach, lowers the standards for these working-class students, saves the administration loads of money. Pathways is a crisis-ridden curriculum for a system in crisis.
Over 60 protesters were inside the trustees meeting, calling them out on their anti-worker agenda. They chanted, “A good contract makes a good education.” The Trustees are bankers, former counterintelligence FBI agents, former presidents of multinational corporations, members of the ruling-class think tanks such as Council on Foreign Relations, corporate lawyers, politicians who control labor forces, and more minions who have international ties for the U.S. imperialists.
Meanwhile, protesters picketed outside, drawing attention from passers-by and other students getting out of class. We need to make the connection that these local bosses are tools for imperialism. Our decision on uniting with our professors and attacking the trustees while still having some forces hound Dead Squad Petraeus at the Honors College was a step in that direction.
We also need to struggle for our friends to see the limits of unions as the negotiator of exploitation. They chanted,

Who’s got the power? We Got the Power!
What kind of power? Union Power!

Some student PL’ers tried to change the chant to “workers power!” but without much success. Our professors and staff need more than just a good contract. We need political control of our own labor. For that we need to build a communist movement. Progressive Labor Party is doing just that. We have a long way to go in building a worker-student alliance that even machine guns can’t break.

See Petraeus Run

It was announced this afternoon that CUNY has just moved war criminal Petraeus’s seminar from the Macaulay Honors College building to 555 W 57 St, a location with increased security. The new location provides underground garages so racist Petraeus can arrive and leave without being detected.
As CHALLENGE reported (10/2), militant students with faculty support, confronted war criminal and former CIA Director Petraeus in the street every Monday, charging him with genocide.  On the evening of last Tuesday, September 17, NYPD attacked and brutalized six students, who have come to be known as the CUNY 6 (see box on the left).
We were not intimidated by this attack!  The following Monday, over 150 students and workers came out! The cops sealed off the entire residential block from vehicular traffic. NYPD brought out their most muscular cops, lined them up directly in front of the protestors. The thugs were ready to go, with their packets of plastic handcuffs hanging off their waists. Not counting the cops waiting at the street corners, inside the building, and around the block, there were 30 thugs in blue failing miserably to intimidate us.
Shortly after 5 PM, a line of cops pressed up against the pen and contained all the demonstrators — we were not “arrested” but we were in a “frozen zone.”  Leaving his class early, bloody racist Petraeus came out and stepped into an SUV coming down the block going the wrong way on the a one-way street. Students led a march out of the pens and off to Columbus Circle, chanting:

1,2,3,4 — Defeat U.S. Imperialist War!
5,6,7,8 — Petraeus Out, We Can’t Wait!

Slowly but surely, a working relationship is being developed between students and professors and staff.  PL’ers at CUNY have developed concrete plans to build an anti-imperialist movement through film showings and teach-ins on campuses throughout the city. They will build local campaigns on their campuses through their mass organizations.

 NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 24 — Today vigorous opposition to Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) filled the auditorium at the College of Staten Island (CSI) campus of the City University of New York (CUNY), where the Administration had been forced by anti-ROTC faculty to call a Town Hall meeting. CUNY administrators are determined to impose ROTC on this campus as well as at York and City Colleges. ROTC was thrown out of CUNY during the protests against the Vietnam War and has been gone since 1971.
A growing movement of students and faculty against the militarization of CUNY has targeted the administration for trying to bring back ROTC as well as for hiring former general and CIA director David Petraeus to teach at the elitist Macaulay “Honors” College. At the Town Hall meeting, among the dozen CSI faculty or staff who spoke, not a single one supported ROTC. PL’ers in this movement believe that we need to link the concepts of fascism and imperialism to understand the current militarization of universities (see box).
A few students spoke in favor of ROTC, for their right to choose, and the character-building, career opportunities, and freedom from debt they said ROTC brings to working-class students. Other students pointed out what’s missing from this rosy picture: ROTC trains officers for a military which uses the 1,000 U.S. bases in 130 countries around the world to kill people by the hundreds of thousands and send back home thousands of dead, maimed, and psychologically devastated U.S. vets. Killing and dying is the name of ROTC’s racist game as it tries to recruit, especially, black and brown CUNY students to their killing machine.
The panel of speakers included two recent anti-ROTC vets and a student leader of the CUNY anti-militarization movement. The unimpressive speakers for ROTC included a regional ROTC officer, the head of ROTC at City College, and a faculty member from York College. The latter spoke proudly about the new War Sciences curriculum at York, allegedly to be academically respectable and to develop critical thinking.
Their pro-ROTC views were echoed by very few. Many questions came from the floor. What about U.S. military sexism and the rape and assault inflicted on a third of women soldiers? The weak answer was, “We only speak for ROTC, not for military policy in general.”  
What about U.S. use of chemical weapons like napalm, depleted uranium, and white phosphorus? “We only speak for ROTC, not for the military as a whole.”  
What about the illegal imperialist invasions and occupations, the drone strikes, the targeted assassination of U.S. citizens, torture and renditions, Guantanamo, and more?  “We only speak for ROTC.”  By the end, ROTC hypocrisy, lies, and evasions were exposed to everyone.
The anti-ROTC views were varied. Some faculty said that their ideals of bringing  mass democratic college education to CUNY students were the exact opposite of the inhumane ideals of the military. They pointed out that building character and critical thinking was the province of educators, not military recruiters.
Others objected to using their university to legitimize a military discredited by war crimes. One or two blasted U.S. imperialism as the real explanation of the recent role of the military. They correctly stated that ROTC should be kept out because the university has used military recruiting to support and enforce imperialist foreign policy, beginning with genocide against indigenous people in the Americas. One student described the racism he experiences every day at the hands of the New York police, and said the U.S. military is doing the same thing to his sisters and brothers overseas. The antiwar vets were eloquent about the abuses they saw in Iraq and Afghanistan and how their own thinking had changed. The student activist linked ROTC to Petraeus, Department of Defense research at CUNY, and pro-war curriculum.
The next step will probably be a debate in the Academic Senate. Faculty are angry at growing administration arrogance taking away their authority over academic matters like curriculum and departmental organization.
They see the imposition of ROTC on the campus as another example of university managers seizing more control. They understand that it is the CUNY bosses who are responsible for militarization.
Students connect more immediately to the racism of ROTC’s plans at CUNY because many of them experience racism every day. The ROTC move and the Petraeus hiring have exposed to some students the CUNY administration’s function of enforcing capitalist class rule. This movement must grow both in numbers and in political understanding, as PLP at CUNY forms communist study-action groups and distributes more CHALLENGEs.

A strong, quiet man, Knut Langsetmo preferred deeds to unnecessary words. He was only two days away from this 60th birthday. He was a dedicated friend to many and a beloved comrade. Knut was a scientist and a communist, a scholar and a warrior. Born in Norway, Knut grew up in Minnesota. Although a talented student and swimmer, he chose to work as a truck driver for several years after high school. This experience helped develop his anti-racist, pro-working class political consciousness, as well as the grit and work-ethic that made him a successful scientist.
In his mid-twenties, Knut enrolled at the University of Minnesota to study biology, eventually earning a PhD. It was here that he met the International Committee Against Racism and the Progressive Labor Party, beginning a lifelong commitment to organizing for an egalitarian society.  He also joined the National Guard to win GIs away from serving the U.S. war machines.
During the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, neo-Nazi and Klan organizations attempted to hold rallies in Minnesota and other parts of the Midwest. Knut helped to lead workers and students to oppose these groups. Drawing on his experience in the military, he drilled groups of students and workers in preparation for attacking these fascists. He provided tactical leadership at many anti-fascist counter demonstrations, forcing the racists to crawl back into their holes.
At the University of Minnesota, Knut was active in the anti-apartheid movement on campus. He was a key leader in the demonstration that seized the administration building, demanding the university divest its investments in South Africa. Knut later moved to Boston to do his post-doctoral work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In spite of the heavy academic demands placed on him, he remained an active member of the Boston PLP organization. There were many tense and sometimes violent demonstrations against the local racists, the Klan and the police.
Knut enthusiastically participated in all of these demonstrations as well as distributing literature, organizing study groups, social events and other Party building activities.
Knut made a key contribution to the communist movement by helping to establish the web version of CHALLENGE newspaper. He recognized early on that the internet could be an important tool for spreading ideas and organizing political activity. For many years, he maintained the www.plp.org website, scanned and digitized key Party documents and many articles from PLP magazine, The Communist. This was especially important to the international work of the Party, enabling groups of workers and students from around the world to study PLP’s ideas.
In his scientific career, Knut was very forthright about his political convictions. You could always find CHALLENGE and other political literature when visiting his lab or office. After leaving MIT, Knut went to Boston Biological Research Institute (BBRI) where he spent the majority of his career. There he became the go-to person for the many experiments being conducted, often putting others’ work before his own. He became a teacher and mentor for dozens of young scientists. What he contributed to these young co-workers was more than just scientific techniques and procedures. He shared with them a communist understanding of the world and the need to change the social order.
This past spring, Knut learned that he had late-stage cancer. He thought first about the impact that this would have on his family, especially his teenage daughter Signe, as well as his friends. He fought to maintain an upbeat attitude for the many people who came to visit. Although he had been dealt a horrible hand, Knut felt that he was fortunate to have lived the life he did. He understood the world both scientifically and politically. He fought courageous battles against racism and capitalist exploitation, and for communism that will have a lasting impact. He was a great father and a wonderful friend. His life was special, not only because he understood the world, but because he had worked to change it. Bella Ciao comrade Knut, rest assured, you will be remembered.