“I think I want to join the Progressive Labor Party.”

That was how a teacher introduced herself to me after a workshop at last week’s anti-UFT union conference. The workshop was about how to build a union chapter in schools. A veteran comrade spoke about being in PLP and about the need to fight the bosses every opportunity we get. He said that we should all consider ourselves lucky to be able to dedicate our lives to fighting back.

I said I was a member of PLP and described some of the struggles we had been involved in to fight the racist bosses and their UFT lackeys. I mentioned the union’s delegate meeting where I helped unfurl a banner that attacked the union leadership for not fighting the racist budget cuts. We were kicked out of that meeting by the union’s security and then called terrorists by Randi Weingarten, the leader of the UFT at that time. Hundreds of delegates booed her and forced her to apologize. 

That was a positive action, mainly because we forced the bosses to show their true colors. The lesson I took from this conference is that we have to be bold about telling people that we are members of the communist PLP. If we don’t, we will miss countless opportunities to meet workers ready to join our movement!

Red teacher 

The Occupy Wall Street Movement and opposition caucuses organized a conference to bring together teachers and students who are angry at capitalism’s many attacks on education. The conference took place in The Center for Worker Education and PLP members did their best to give the participants a communist education. PL students and teachers were very vocal in the conference’s many different discussion groups.  

The unionists, liberals, and well-meaning workers all looked to the union, a pawn of capitalist rulers, to fight racism and create an education system that could meet the needs of the working class. They are ultimately wrong since education under capitalism must serve the bosses’ needs, which conflict with the needs of the working class. The ruling class needs a patriotic, loyal working class to passively accept its attacks and fight its imperialist wars, so it can remain the world’s superpower. Workers’ need a society where we make all of the decisions based on our needs to develop as full human beings collectively. That is communism.

Union Helps Resegregate Schools

One participant pointed out that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) was actually a backlash against integration in the ‘60’s and is now helping to resegregate the schools. Unions walk the contradiction of appearing to fight the bosses while selling out the workers.   

The need to fight racism was brought up continually throughout the conference. A PL’er pointed out that contemporary racism isn’t about who perpetuated the action, but who is affected by the outcome. He said the bosses love to use puppets like Obama to carry out their racist attacks on the working class. The Party brought up the need to fight racism through multi-racial unity in opposition to fragmented forms of black or Latino nationalism or the Community Control of a People’s Board of Education that pushed the poison of multi-class unity.  

A PL’er also reviewed the history of the UFT. Agreeing with another speaker who challenged the anti-communist attack on the USSR, he said that without the Soviet Union, the working class had lost its beacon at the time when the Soviets were leaders of the international working class. He also pointed out that the union is made up of workers. “Look around” he said, “You’re all workers and you’re here.” Workers’ power is needed to confront the UFT misleaders at the next delegate assembly and create a wildcat strike on the next professional development day (when only teachers come to school). These types of actions are needed to learn how to fight the bosses as a class. They also provide more opportunities to expose the bosses’ democracy sham, when they use the cops and courts to attack workers’ struggles.

School with No Books

One participant taught in a Bronx school that claimed to be a college prep academy, yet it had no books. She is a technology teacher, but they had closed the computer labs for three years because three computers were stolen. The administration said that books were old and passé and that students should use the Internet instead, while keeping the computer lab closed. Only under capitalism could this kind of racist hypocrisy exist.

Such conferences create the opportunity for Party growth. As we participate in them, we can struggle to advance our communist politics. A new anti-racist caucus was established there, but we have to be in it to win it. We need to struggle with those workers around us to go to conferences like this and bring the need to struggle back to our workplaces. No union will liberate us from capitalism, let alone an anti-racist caucus in a union that’s playing ostrich. Only building the PLP to fight the wholesale attack on our class’s education will eventually give the working class the learning that it really needs.

CALUMET CITY, IL, February 10 — On February 9, a multiracial crowd of 60 workers, students, and teachers packed a city hall meeting here to voice their outrage at the murderous racist kkkops who slaughtered 15-year-old Stephon Watts.

On February 1, Stephon, a black youth who had a form of autism known as Asperger Syndrome, experienced an extreme episode where his father could not get him to go to school. When Stephon’s father called their hospital for assistance, he was told to call the cops. He dialed 311 (the non-emergency number), hoping to get a professional trained to work with special needs children. Instead Calumet City police sent a squad car. 

Bosses’ Thugs in Blue Show True Nazi Colors

When the cops arrived, Stephon’s father insisted his son was “OK,” but they forced their way into the house anyway. These murderers proceeded to chase Stephon around his home.  When Stephon slashed one cop with a butter knife the bosses’ thugs in blue showed their true Nazi colors by slaughtering Stephon, a child with special needs, in cold blood.

But the working-class crowd at city hall would not be fooled. Speaker after speaker correctly described the cops as rabid dogs who either needed to be caged (jailed) or put down for murder. When a commenter attempted to blame Stephon for wielding a butter knife, a high school student declared, “You have no idea what went on in the head of that special needs child. I don’t care about the cuts on the cops! Think about the bullet holes in Stephon!”

Other speakers spoke at great length about decades of the city cops’ blatant, racist harassment and profiling. Some wanted to discuss “the lack of training” of these particular cops. But, especially in black neighborhoods, cops are trained to shoot first and are protected by their departments and city councils later.

To that end, one worker addressed the need to organize against the city council, the cops and the whole racist, capitalist system. The crowd erupted with, “Racist cops, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!” They drowned out the city council’s feeble attempt to restore order by reciting the pledge of allegiance, to a country whose cops have full permission to systematically murder workers, especially black youth. The crowd continued to chant as we slowly marched out of the meeting. 

Sadly, no amount of anger or chanting will bring back Stephon Watts or any other victims of police slaughter. That being said, it’s good the Watts family and their mostly black, working-class community are mobilizing to fight police brutality and racism in hopes of getting justice for Stephon.

But justice won’t come from the Illinois state police (who are “investigating” this crime), the courts or the federal government, all of whom work for the same capitalist bosses. Even if — on the extremely remote chance — that these murderous cops get convicted, it won’t stop the onslaught against the working class from the bosses’ cops worldwide.

To end class war, we must fight in class war. Join with the Progressive Labor Party to organize the international working class on the basis of communism with collectivity, militancy and unyielding anti-racism. We must smash capitalism and create a society where there’s no exploiting class, racism or murderous cops serving that ruling class. That’s the only way to gain true justice for all the victims of capitalism’s crimes, including Stephon Watts.

THE BRONX, NY, February 7 — Once again, “New York’s Finest” have demonstrated the true purpose of the kkkops: to protect and serve the bosses’ state, not the workers of the world or in the Bronx. These fascist, racist cops use petty crimes to racially profile, beat, illegally frisk and search, and even kill our young, especially in impoverished neighborhoods where the majority are black and Latino.  

On Thursday, February 2, an unarmed black man, Ramarley Graham, 18, was chased into his grandmother’s apartment and shot dead in front of her and his six-year-old brother by Richard Haste, an NYPD cop.  The police initially claimed that Ramarley had a gun, but no weapon was found, only a small amount of marijuana.   The police then dragged Ramarley’s grandmother to the 47th precinct and held her for seven hours, refusing to release her until she gave a statement.

Not long before Ramarley’s murder, another young black man, Jatiek Reed, 19, was beaten viciously by the NYPD.  This pattern of violence is the cops’ real job. It has the single purpose of keeping working-class people, and black and Latino workers in particular, terrified and quiet.  

But the bosses’ strategy isn’t working, because the outraged neighborhood has not stood passively by.  The Monday after the attack, a demonstration of many hundreds marched on the 47th precinct.  The crowd was angry, and some young workers had to be held back from physically attacking the precinct house.  CHALLENGE has been sold for years in this neighborhood. After the incident, Progressive Labor Party distributed nearly 800 copies of a leaflet that explained why these attacks are on the rise. 

New York’s bosses fear the working class, especially the workers in the Bronx.  The Bronx is the poorest of New York’s five boroughs, with up to 45 percent living in poverty and 54 percent youth unemployment in some neighborhoods.  As the capitalist economic crisis in the U.S. and worldwide continues to get worse, workers can only expect more repression.  There will be more murders and beatings, in the Bronx and elsewhere.   

We believe there is only one way to rid the Bronx of its racist murders, along with the violence, drugs, unemployment, and substandard education and healthcare that capitalism imposes on us. We must destroy the profit system at its roots.  The only reason these conditions prevail, and the only reason that the mad-dog police ruthlessly enforce them, is because the bosses are making money on workers’ misery.

Capitalism must be wiped out once and for all.  Workers, students, soldiers; black, Asian, Latino and white, unite and FIGHT BACK!