What does it mean to remember Shantel Davis, the 23-year-old unarmed black woman killed by black NYPD Detective Phillip Atikins in Brooklyn on June 14?

As the six-month mark of Shantel’s murder approaches, family, friends and supporters fighting to send Atkins to prison plan to gather for a vigil on the site where she was murdered.

For the Progressive Labor Party, remembering Shantel means much more than only fighting for Atkins to serve time. The lasting justice for Shantel means fighting for an anti-racist communist world that would be worthy of her life. 

For the Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg, remembering Shantel means reminding the mainly black and immigrant workers of East Flatbush that cops can get away with racist murder.

After six months of protests, including disrupting Ray Kelly’s speech at a forum and militant unpermitted demonstrations in front of the 67th police precient, Hynes has still not charged Atkins with any crime. The DA is sitting on numerous witnesses and videos that show Atkins shot her in cold blood. But publicly Hynes needs to reassure other cops who kill that the courts will look the other way. Privately Hynes promised Shantel’s family an investigation. 

The city’s rulers also want workers to forget the words of former NYPD narcotics detective Stephen Anderson who served under the same command as Atkins. Anderson recently testified in court that he and his superiors regularly planted evidence on innocent people to make arrests. In Shantel’s case the police and media want workers to believe the lies they created about Shantel’s supposedly lengthy (actually non-existent) criminal record to smear her name. 

Shantel’s family and friends remember that during the first seventeen years of her life Shantel devoted free time to care for the elderly, sick and disabled. But while her big close-knit loving family nurtured her to be kindhearted and generous, capitalism failed Shantel.

Shantel was one of millions of U.S. black youth that racist education set up for low wages and underemployment. For all of Shantel’s short life, PLP fought against the racist conditions of capitalism in East Flatbush, from school budget cuts to police brutality. Throughout the city we organized students around local and global struggles to smash a racist system that can never provide jobs for all.

Capitalist education forced her to give up on school. The year Shantel was due to graduate high school the unemployment rate among black youth in New York City was over 40 percent and Shantel dropped out. For several years Shantel cared for her elderly grandmother, a demanding skill that demonstrated Shantel’s aptitude. But to capitalism she was barely worth considering for most jobs.

Six months after Atkins killed Shantel PLP remembers that true justice for Shantel Davis means putting an end to the racist capitalist system that set Atkins loose to begin with. Today, in a period when revolution is not an immediate reality that means putting forward communist ideas of anti-racism, militancy and class solidarity in the fight to put Atkins behind bars. Making the growth of a fighting communist movement our benchmark for victory means that our class can advance whether or not the bosses decide to indict Atkins. 

Without building a long-term revolutionary movement, convicting Atkins could feed the deadly illusion that capitalism can be nice and can do without racist terror. If such false ideas are the heart of Shantel’s struggle we will have won the battle and lost the war. As long as capitalism exists police terror will continue to shatter working-class families. PLP fights to send Atkins away. But we also aim to win the class war against all of the racists bosses and their assassins whether or not we win the individual battle to put Atkins in jail.

DHAKA, BANGLADESH, November 26 — Ten thousand garment workers barricaded roads, shut 50 factories and hurled stones at cops firing rubber bullets and tear gas as workers protested the November 24 fire that killed 124 workers at Tazreen Fashions here. Hundreds of workers were trapped inside, symptomatic of Bangladeshi garment factories that have become infamous for their lack of fire exits and stairwells. Over 100,000 outraged workers attended the burial ceremony of 53 workers whose bodies could not be identified” (New York Times, 12/7).

It’s common practice for the garment bosses to chain doors shut to prevent workers from taking breaks. Combined with poor maintenance practices and flammable materials and chemicals, these factories become firetraps. “More than 600 garment workers have died in such fires since 2005.” (NYT, 12/7)

Tazreen bosses told workers the fire alarm was a false one, to keep them working. Then they fled, but by the time workers realized what was occurring, the fire had snaked to the upper floors, blocking any exit routes. Some tried to escape by jumping out of windows.

Tazreen manufactures clothing for Walmart, Sears and the Gap, among other U.S. companies, all of whom make enormous profits from the poverty wages and hazards in these death traps. They are all aware of these conditions, making them complicit in the murders of these workers.

This latest factory fire is the worst in Bangladeshi history. As the families and friends of the trapped workers crowded around the inferno to offer whatever assistance they could, they knew who was to blame. Sabine Yasmine, one victim’s mother and a factory worker herself, moaned, “Where’s my soul? Where’s my son? I want the factory owner to be hanged! For him, many have died, many have gone.” (Associated Press, 11/25)

Yet factory owners are rarely punished for the deadly conditions they enforce in their workplaces. The garment industry is a massively profitable one in Bangladesh, exporting $20 billion annually, mainly to the U.S. and Europe. The Tazreen Fashions factory alone makes $37 million annually.

These massive profits flow from sweatshop conditions inside the 4,500 factories. Safety is ignored as workers are locked inside, working 60-hour weeks for around $37 a month. Workers opposing this murderous system are marked for death. Earlier this year a union organizer was found tortured and murdered outside the city. (AP, 11/25; New York Times, 11/25)

Such mass murder is common under capitalism, particularly in developing industrial economies. Just two months ago factory fires at a garment shop in Karachi and a shoe factory in Lahore, Pakistan killed a combined 314 people. Workers were trapped in the factories with no emergency exits and all doors locked to hold the workers imprisoned inside. Again, these sweatshops netted profits primarily for U.S. and European bosses. (CNN, 9/16; BBC, 9/11)

In 1993, a fire in the Kader Toy Factory in Thailand killed 188 workers and injured more than 500. It was the worst industrial disaster ever until the Karachi fire in 2012. The Kader factory, which made toys for Disney and Mattel, paid their workers slave wages and locked them into the building during the work-day. When the fire started, managers fled the scene, leaving the largely female workforce trapped inside to burn. (International Labor Organization, Encyclopedia of Occupational Health and Safety)

Capitalists care only for profits. The fiery death of hundreds of workers is only part of the super-exploitation of the working class. Only a communist revolution to smash the capitalist class can end this mass murder of workers. Until that day it’s just a matter of time until the next big fire.

ALGIERS, December 5 — Workers and students are blocking buildings and striking for better conditions on the job and at the university against the socialist fig-leaf being used to hide a capitalist economy and the wealth of the bosses. Although a national liberation struggle gained independence from France in 1962, capitalism has remained in the name of socialism.

Large sectors of the economy were nationalized. Today, 90% of the banks are public, the hydrocarbon company is state-owned, and government spending represents two-thirds of non-hydrocarbon Gross Domestic Product. Yet almost one-fourth of the population lives in poverty. Twenty percent of the youth 15-24 are jobless. So the workers and students are fighting back.

Today, municipal workers in Zeribet El Oued struck, blockading the municipal popular assembly building demanding back pay, having gone unpaid for two to six months. The strike united temporary and permanent workers. “Whole families have been paralyzed by accounting and administrative malfunctions, which deprive us of our monthly income for months at a time,” said a public records worker.

Also today, forestry workers in Tlemcen walked out, demanding permanent hiring of temporary workers — in particular safety and security personnel — as well as for promotions that have been delayed, in particular for older workers.

There have been repeated student strikes in Boumerdè condemning the university bureaucracy, which has disorganized teaching and the functioning of different university departments. As of today, the commercial and economic sciences department and the school of hydrocarbons — Algeria is rich in oil and gas — have been blocked for over a week by strikers protesting disciplinary sanctions taken against 15 student strikers.

What is needed is a communist ideology to link all these struggles and to understand the need to fight for communism, not socialism’s state capitalism.

FLORANGE, FRANCE, December 6 — Five thousand steelworkers here are fighting the closure of the ArcelorMittal steel plant, but at every turn they run up against the law of capitalism which seeks maximum profits over the workers’ dead bodies.

Workers at ArcelorMittal’s plant in Fos-sur-Mer on the Mediterranean blocked deliveries today in solidarity with steelworkers here. Some shifts struck and prevented rolls of steel from leaving the plant. Steelworkers at the company’s Basse-Indre plant on the west coast are set to strike on December 10 against plans to transfer sixty jobs to the Florange packaging plant.

Meanwhile, the union has been putting up its usual militant front while appealing to the government to force the company to keep the plant open, demanding it renegotiate its deal with ArcelorMittal. The local union leader, Edouard Martin, and a dozen union officials briefly occupied the plant, threatening to stage a sit-down inside. They then left when the bosses promised not to turn off the gas valves which keep the blast furnaces on standby.

While Martin condemned the French government’s “betrayal” of the workers, adding that “those who were supposed to help us are killing us.” Who’s kidding whom? It is these union misleaders who are betraying the workers. They repeatedly steer the workers into depending on a supposedly neutral government to protect them against the capitalist class. But the capitalist government was never supposed to help the workers in the first place.

Martin said, “We’re solemnly calling on you, President François Hollande, to take the matter in hand.” But in reality Hollande’s Socialist government serves the capitalist class. Workers can only depend on their own unity and organization in their fight against the bosses.

Last year ArcelorMittal idled both blast furnaces here because of over-capacity. The anarchy of capitalism leads the bosses to expand production wildly in boom periods and then shut plants in the bust that inevitably follows. Meanwhile, the packaging plant, which makes cans for the food industry, continues to operate because it is profitable.

During the recent French presidential election campaign, Socialist Hollande promised the thousands of steelworkers that if he was elected, he would pass a law forcing “a big company [which] no longer wants a production unit…to sell it” so that the plant will not be “dismantled.” Then, after Hollande was elected in May, a series of promises and “militant” statements by Socialist leaders were ignored by the company (which employs 260,000 workers worldwide), claiming the plant was no longer profitable. On October 1, ArcelorMittal put the Florange blast furnaces on permanent standby, leaving the Hollande government 60 days to find a buyer for the site.

Meanwhile, on November 6, the Socialist government announced a “competitiveness pact,” a “massive and unprecedented” 20-billion-euro gift ($26 billion) to the capitalists aimed at lowering the cost of labor and increasing the competitiveness of French companies against their imperialist rivals.

The measure exonerates the bosses from paying 20 billion euros in social security contributions on their lowest-paid workers. It will be financed by slashing 10 billion euros ($13 billion) from the government budget in 2014 and 2015 — including many social welfare programs — and by a 10-billion-euro increase (another $13 billion) in the value-added tax. That will mainly be paid by the working class.

Pretending to get tough with ArcelorMittal, on November 22 the government minister for industrial renewal announced possible temporary nationalization of the site, to give more time to find a buyer. But this was never more than a hollow threat, given that Socialist Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault admitted that nationalizing Florange would have cost the French government over a billion euros.

His “compromise” deal says, (1) there is no “white knight” buyer; (2) the blast furnaces will be moth-balled; (3) the 629 blast furnace workers will be offered early retirement or jobs at other sites; and (4) the workers at the packaging plant must submit to more exploitation to increase its competitiveness.

The union misleaders had little choice but to condemn such a deal that falls so far short of worker expectations. But the government said there would be no renegotiating the rescue plan.

Capitalism is truly the source of these machinations which dump these steelworkers on the garbage heap. Based on the planlessness of the system, the bosses overproduce at this plant the amount of steel they can sell at a profit. To maintain their overall profit in their fierce competition with rival steel bosses, they are driven to get rid of this particular plant and its workers who they have exploited for decades. Then the union misleaders and their Socialist government play with workers’ lives with phony militancy combined with defending the profit system. Their stance absolutely precludes the real solution: communist revolution to eliminate the bosses and their oppressive, exploitative system.

Workers must be won to understand that capitalism can’t be reformed, as the above class struggle reveals. It is driven by the pursuit of maximum profits, in direct contradiction to the well-being of the working class. Only the workers themselves, led by the communist Progressive Labor Party, can make a revolution that will put the steel mills and all of society in the hands of our class, which produces everything of value.

[Late bulletin: On December 7, ArcelorMittal agreed to mothball the two blast furnaces for six years.