Brooklyn, NY November 21 — In the bustling center of Church Avenue, as hundreds of working-class people poured out of the subway station on their way home from work, they were greeted by a militant demonstration demanding “Justice for Kyam Livingston, killed in a Brooklyn jail cell.”
The demonstration included a broad spectrum of the working class, up to 130 people assembled in militant unity to demand justice for this kkkop murder. The group was black, Latino, Asian, white, men, women, and children to mark the fourth-month anniversary of the murder of Kyam Livingston.
Kyam was a 37-year-old black single mother and worker who was arrested and was waiting for arraignment in Brooklyn Central Booking. She was complaining of extreme stomach pain and crying out for help. The KKKops callously ignored her cries, saying, “Shut the f*** up or we’ll lose your paperwork.” Kyam died in continued agony to the horror of the other women in the holding cell.
‘You’re Not Gonna Hide This’
Kyam’s mother was the first speaker and cried for justice for her daughter. In her anguish, she proclaimed that there would be justice to the cops standing there, sending chills up the spines of the collected gathering. Her speech was a note for militancy and a promise that justice would be done for her daughter. “Your’e not gonna hide this, “ she cried.
A black working-class student spoke of the need for multiracial unity in the fight against police brutality and racism. A PLP high school teacher and a member of the Justice for Shantel Davis committee made a call to smash this racist, murderous system that will continue to kill our children. “Only we can stop it,” he said. He pointed out how the kkkops are used as a tool for the bosses to separate the working class — black from white, and men from women.
A parent from a faith-based community spoke of his concern for his black children who clearly are not safe under this system. He said, “As long as Kyam’s family needs me, I’ll be here.” A union member and fighter who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years described how the comunity should create a wall of unity so that no more murders of our children will take place. He also honored the bravery of the Livingston family, especially of Kyam’s mother. A young man of about 12 took the microphone and said that he knew Kyam. She was a good person. He misses her, and he called for “Justice for Kyam Livingston.”
‘We Want The Names. We Want The Tapes!’
The chanting was militant, vigorous and forceful, “Justice for Kyam Livingston, killed in a Brooklyn cell,” “We want the names. We want the tapes,” and “Kyam Livingston means — fight back!” “Police murders mean — fight back!” ”No justice,no peace. No racist police.”
The final speaker called for a march down Church Avenue so that the neighborhood could be as one with the march and the multi-racial nature of the marchers.
Crowds of people stopped and listened to the speeches and chants. Many made comments such as, “You got that right!” and “We’re hearing the truth here!” Kyam’s mother lives in that neighborhood and is well known and well loved. Her neighbors and friends stopped and joined the demonstration. Many people came up to her, greeted and hugged her. A young woman from a downtown Brooklyn church who participated in the demonstration said, “This is great. This is real unity.”
CHALLENGES and many leaflets were distributed.Many protesters said, “next time I’ll try to bring more of my friends.“ The next demonstraton will be on the afternoon of Saturday, December 21st. There will be no end to this struggle until we have smashed racism and capitalism.
New York City, November 16 — Workers from a community mass organization in Bushwick, Brooklyn had a joint “mini conference” with the congregation of a church in Harlem. This was a follow-up to an October rally held in the working-class neighborhood of Bushwick against the renovation-rent hikes that are driving out mainly Latino and undocumented workers who have lived there for years, near their families and workplaces.
Bushwick, fifteen minutes from Manhattan, has become one of the most desired neighborhoods in New York City. It borders Williamsburg, a neighborhood already redefined by a growing wealthy population and rapid capitalist development of overpriced housing, so it’s no surprise that the landowners are now targeting Bushwick. With the recent development of the Barclay Stadium, home to the new Brooklyn Nets, the borough has become even more of a hot spot for the real estate capitalists.
The conference called for multi-racial unity of Latin, Asian, white and black against racist gentrification, since most of the new population moving into these neighborhoods are white. Meanwhile Latino and black families are being pushed out. Most of the latter are feeling hostile against the white workers moving in and landlords, who openly tell them that they want them out so whites will pay their higher rents and buy their new luxury condos.
We have constantly reminded our friends that white workers are not the enemy, that capitalism and its bosses are the true enemy. They use this type of racism to divide the working class and make us fight each other, but it takes a lot of work and convincing when desperation clouds workers’ minds. We reminded our friends, who were pessimistic about winning the fight against the landlords, that back in the 1930s during the Great Depression whole communities would unite and occupy foreclosed houses in order to stop cops from evicting workers out of their homes. One comrade also said, “Don’t underestimate the power of the working class.”
At the conference, one new comrade, a victim of Storm Sandy and a homeless parent, spoke eloquently about the racist oppression she and her children have suffered over the past year and how the Progressive Labor Party and friends had given her personal support and political leadership. She demonstrated how victims of the storm and victims of homelessness due to gentrification are being forced to compete in order to receive public assistance and a new home. University expansion is pushing gentrification in both of these communities.
A college student from Venezuela spoke at length about the need for both a worker-student alliance and international solidarity for our struggles to move forward. Three college students participated in the conference, won by three PLP members’ weekly participation in their student-worker solidarity group on campus. One of the students emphasized the importance of a worker-student alliance, since one day students will also be joining the workforce.
The conference proposals included building multi-racial actions against racist gentrification in Bushwick. Brooklyn forces will participate in a University/State Office Building rally and march demanding low rents, jobs and expansion of food stamps.
We tried to connect anti-imperialism to university expansion and anti-racism to racist gentrification. The college students we work with are considering this action as one of their main projects as soon as winter break ends. The college students and workers did come to understand that the problem was the capitalist landlords and the only way workers will ever have safe housing conditions is by destroying capitalism and replacing it with real workers power.
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Dialectics Provoke Sharp Discussion on Racism on Campus
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- 28 November 2013 570 hits
Recently I attended a PLP communist school on dialectics with a friend; she’s a student and I’m a teacher at Chicago State University. Our opening presentation described how dialectical principles apply to the process of development from a seed to a bean plant and provoked many questions and challenges about precisely how the principles are to be understood.
In our workshop we continued the discussion of dialectics as a general theory of nature, but it was hard to pin down the discussion. Moreover, it tended to exclude people, such as my friend, who were less familiar with communism. I proposed applying the principles to my friend’s work with a campus group, the Students for Justice (S4J).
This immediately raised a number of issues. S4J had developed a petition demanding child care on campus which would benefit our many single-parent students, mostly women. It also demanded that the money the bookstore pays to the university should be used to fund childcare. (The bookstore treats students like criminals and overcharges for books).
However, S4J literature did not criticize the bookstore policy of barring students from the textbook aisles of the bookstore. Instead students hand their schedule to a clerk who gets their books for them. Consequently, students must wait for hours for their books. The petition did not say the bookstore policy was racist, nor did it connect the campus treatment of students — a large majority being black — to the racism we experience in Chicago neighborhoods where store owners treat customers disrespectfully.
How could we sharpen the discussion within S4J, raising issues of racism? Why hadn’t S4J members said more about racism in its petition and literature? Did students disagree that these practices were racist? Or did they believe they were racist but that saying so would turn people off? Was the petition’s purpose to gain the most possible signatures, or was it to raise the understanding of racism on campus and in Chicago and beyond? Was S4J just trying to win a reform or was it trying to empower students to fight in their own interests and to understand the connection between the racism they experience and the capitalist system?
In the workshop we felt that raising these questions would sharpen the contradictions within S4J between communist, anti-racist politics and capitalist-style politics of trying to be popular. I thought that even if, as a result of the discussion, S4J still did not want to call the lack of child care and the bookstore policies racist and sexist, we still would have encouraged students to think more sharply about what they were doing and what they hoped to accomplish, bringing them closer to communism and the Party.
Sometimes our discussions of dialectics are too abstract because we treat it as a philosophy of everything without applying it to analyzing our political work. On the one hand, it’s essential to study the laws and categories of dialectics, but if we don’t apply them to what we have to do to build the Party and our road to communist revolution, then they do become abstract.
In the above discussion, we attempted to apply dialectics to a real-life experience, showing how various things are not isolated phenomenon but are inter-related, how discussing and sharpening the contradictions — among other principles — help us advance our thinking and therefore our actions.
In effect, both theory and practice are essential and inextricably linked. Combining the two, as we tried to do above, will lead to the most useful discussion in doing the Party’s work.
Professor Red
The dispatch of a U.S. aircraft carrier and 14,300 troops to the Philippines after typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda has nothing to do with humanitarian interests and everything to do with securing an imperialist base to counter China.
In the 19th century, U.S. capitalists, in their rush to acquire colonies and build an empire, invaded the Philippines for a base to control the Pacific and the Far East. Racism, waterboarding torture and genocide were used against Filipinos who fought the U.S. occupation from 1899 to 1905. Thousands of the 70,000 U.S. troops and millions of Filipinos were killed in that war.
On January 9, 1900, racist Senator Albert Beveridge said:
Mr. President…the Philippines are ours forever…and just beyond the Philippines are China’s unlimited markets….The Pacific is our ocean….The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East….It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel….Senators, we must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans; we are dealing with [Asians].
Willard Gatewood’s book, Smoked Yankees and the Struggle for Empire, revealed that an “unusually large number of black troops deserted during the Philippine campaign over anger at the term ‘n*****’ used by white troops to describe Filipinos and themselves. Some deserters joined the Filipino rebels like David Fagan of the 24th Infantry, who accepted a commission in the insurgent army and for two years wreaked havoc upon the American forces.”
After World War II, the Hukbalahap communist movement, which had fought a guerrilla war against the Japanese, began a war against U.S. occupation but by 1953 was temporarily defeated. A new communist insurrection in the 1970s, along with a mass uprising, forced the U.S. to abandon its military control and giant naval base at Subic Bay.
With the loss in Vietnam and the rise of China’s competing economy, the U.S. has been financing corrupt Philippine governments to accept its military presence. In 2001, 4,000 U.S. troops landed in Mindanao to train Filipino soldiers against Muslim and communist insurgents. Three thousand more U.S. troops have been added and the Philippine government agreed to send its troops to fight in Iraq. Recently the U.S. has been conducting air and sea war maneuvers with the Philippine military to counter China’s attempts to drill for oil in the adjacent seas.
Before the recent typhoon hit, the country’s homes, roads and airports were among the worst in Southeast Asia. The storm displaced 4.4 million people and affected 13.2 million in 44 provinces. With millions homeless, facing blocked roads, without food, water or power, and no aid in sight, people began liberating products their labor produced from the rich hoarders in order to survive. There were reports of government troops in gun battles with communists in some villages and civilian complaints that the military is not helping them and only protecting the rich while preventing people from organizing for their needs.
The U.S. military response can only lead to occupation and more neglect like in New Orleans after Katrina and Haiti after the earthquake. The Philippine government bosses and their U.S. imperialist masters fear that present conditions expose their corrupt profit system’s failure and become fertile ground for communist ideas to spark a revolution for a system that serves people’s needs.
An appeal from students of the State University of Haiti to CUNY students for your help against the cruel and criminal Michel Martelly regime:
Since this neo-Duvalierist dictatorial régime came to power, students here, like so many other working-class people, have suffered under the jackboots of all sorts of government repression. Arrests, assassinations, beatings, and other contemptuous criminal acts unworthy of human beings are the deliberate policies of the police and of MINUSTAH, the United Nations “peacekeeper” force.
In February 2012, President Martelly himself arrived at the School of Ethnology campus with an armed group firing guns, beating students, and looting offices. Well before this, however, the repressive machine had cracked down on us. This year the violence and arbitrary arrests are more and more frequent. We hate this! It fills us with rage!
Early one morning last week, the entire School of Ethnology was blanketed with tear gas. No one could breathe. People were traumatized — fainting, crying, calling for help — all over the campus. That afternoon, the gangsters in the Haitian National Police struck our comrade, a third-year student at the Teachers College. He was maimed by a stun grenade that hit him directly on the right hand. Three surgeries later, in spite of our aid and the doctors’ efforts, it became clear there was no chance of saving the hand.
How many more hateful crimes like this must we endure before we understand the criminal mentality and boundless perversity of this régime, this eater of the men and women of our class?
That’s why we are asking for a whole-souled solidarity from you, our comrades. At CUNY, the militarization of your university exposes the administration’s opposition to your struggle for a good education and a more egalitarian society. In Haiti, we have joined the same struggle to counter this worldwide system of injustice that knows no limits.
We commit ourselves to this struggle knowing its risks and dangers. We ask you for your support, for this is one struggle! Your struggle is ours! Let us fight together to denounce and combat these inhuman policies, until we put an end to the capitalist system that has so injured our class.
We fighters in Haiti are of one mind with you, in an international solidarity that can only grow stronger. In admiration we send you our warmest greetings. We hope with you to lead a common struggle for the betterment of the working class. Marx said, after all, that the interests of the proletariat are the interests of humanity itself.
