NEW YORK CITY, November 28 — Today the City University of New York (CUNY) trustees outdid themselves in fascist absurdity. They locked all Baruch College students, faculty, and other workers out of their own school so that they — bankers and ruling-class stooges appointed by the mayor and governor — could impose a racist 33% tuition hike on the mostly black and Latino and immigrant students.

The events of the previous Monday triggered the lock-down. On November 21, a militant group of 500 students arrived at the “public” meeting where the CEOs and other bosses that make up the Board of Trustees (BoT) supposedly listen to testimonies from the community. This is another capitalist lie. The decision had already been made.

Nevertheless, students and workers gathered, ready to make the BoT listen to them. CUNY responded with baton-wielding “public safety officers” and NYPD cops. Students were sitting in the lobby chanting, “Occupy the Lobby!” The cops attacked, swinging their batons wildly. In discussion during and after the event, PL’ers stressed that this was, and is always, the role of the kkkops: to terrorize workers, especially black, Latino and women workers, into submission.

We were not intimidated, and returned today for the BoT to officially vote on their racist plan. So angry were students and workers over last week’s cop-attack that CUNY bosses had to shut down the entire college to hold this meeting!  Like slave-owners whose greatest fear was the slave revolt, the bosses today acted out of fear for they could not trust anyone at Baruch. More than 15 students were arrested, including one student whom the cops sexually harassed.

With their state power on full display, they could lock us out. One professor got into the meeting and disrupted it with a protest against police brutality. Though he was thrown out of the room, they could not drown out the more than 1,000 protesters outside, chanting “Get up!  Get down!  There’s revolution in this town!” and  “Education is a right! Fight! Fight!  Fight!” The multiracial crowd was a mix of older, more organized union workers and the younger, less organized, angry students taking the streets and challenging the cops.

The union workers deferred to the students’ leadership and stopped their moving picket line. The students then led the whole crowd in a march around the neighborhood and back to the front doors, in time to yell “Shame!” at a few last trustees scuttling out of the building. The last speech given using the human-mike was a student thank-you to their worker-allies for being there to the end.

Where does this leave us, in a town that is somewhat rebellious but far from revolution?  We need a deeper understanding of the class system to really “get up, get down” with revolution. The capitalist university is not, as one sign wished, “a free speech zone,” but an ideological apparatus carefully tailored to reproduce the system. Inequality is not caused by unfair taxation but by the exploitation of labor. Capitalism is not an “economic” system fixable by a  “political” electoral process or the protest of a militant crowd. It is a political economic system where the exploitation of labor is guaranteed by an armed, vicious, racist dictatorship of capitalists. The ruling class not only owns the means of production but also owns the cops, the army, the laws, the courts, the judges, the politicians and parties, the media, the schools, and the churches.

There will be a communist revolution in this town and every town. But when there is, the prophetic, anarchic feelings of youthful revolt now surging in the Occupy movement will have had to become the cold rage of a conscious and fully organized working class. Led by PLP, we must be ready to smash the capitalist system and take state power. Self-critically, although the Party, CHALLENGE and revolutionary politics were present today, it was not nearly enough. We too have a tough transformation to make to become the Party that our class needs and our history demands. And we will.

The working class in Brazil continues to pay a high price for having a  pseudo“leftist” government. These rulers work only to benefit the international capitalist class, spending the country’s international reserves to save Europe’s bosses from their financial crisis. Meanwhile, they continue to exploit Brazil’s workers.

During the first five days of November, 1,800 workers went on strike against LG Electronics, the Korean multinational, demanding the rehiring of ten workers fired for fighting to improve their miserable working conditions. In the state of Ceará, university professors and students have been on strike since November 11 against budget cuts.

Meanwhile, as pseudo-leftist president Dilma Rousseff talks of “democracy,” police in Rio de Janeiro occupied the favelas (slum neighborhoods) of Rocinha (which alone has 70,000 residents), Vidigal and Chácara do Chapéu. The action was justified as part of the Police Pacification Unit (UPP). The occupation began on November 13, to continue indefinitely.

The UPP, initiated by Governor Sergio Cabral in 2008 in the Santa Marta favela, is supposedly designed to expel drug-trafficking gangs from the favelas while installing community security systems. According to Rio de Janeiro’s town council, 29 of the city’s 605 favelas are already controlled by the UPP. Most are in the southern part of the city, where is also home to some of the richest neighborhoods. A good example is Rochinha, sandwiched between such luxurious neighborhoods as São Conrado and Leblon. Unlike most big cities, where the poor population is isolated on the periphery of the city, Rio’s poor occupy the hills throughout the city. The social inequalities are more obvious and transparent here.

Does it fight drug trafficking?

As usual, the capitalist-controlled media considers UPP’s military operation in Rocinha a ´´success,´´ praising the police and the residents’ acceptance of them inside the favela. Tomás Ramos, an advisor to State Deputy Marcelo Freixo (the human rights activist who recently fled to Europe after receiving seven death threats), says that many residents actually have mixed feelings about the UPP: “What they approve of is the end of frequent shooting between the drug-trafficking gangs and the cops, but they don´t necessarily approve of how the police manage the territory in which they live.”

In reality, the UPP’s mission is not to fight against trafficking or to reduce crime, but to control the favelas in economically strategic areas. Even Governor Cabral publicly acknowledges that the UPP cannot solve the drug problem. As he noted just before the first UPP occupation, “The [objective] is not to end trafficking; no one has been able to do that….The objective is to reach a civilized level of crime.”

Pacification for Sports

This UPP project was never designed to make the entire city safer. The pacification units are concentrated in wealthy areas of the city that are frequented by tourists, to protect revenues from the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. They also occupy the favelas bordering these areas, like those around Maracaná, the scheduled site for the World Cup final. As Luiz Antônio Machado, a sociology professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, noted, “The big [sports] events were decisive for the creation of UPP.” Brazil needed to guarantee security in these neighborhoods to be awarded these games. “The objective,” Machado said, is to criminalize poverty and impose public order with a military occupation.

Meanwhile, little is done to develop social programs in these communities. While the police have sponsored some school sports and sweet-sixteen parties to gain acceptance by favela residents, no one is addressing the needs of poor workers. The government demonizes young people as criminals instead of pointing to the root of crime in Brazil and elsewhere: capitalist unemployment.

Cops Defend Property of the Rich

History shows that the police are in place to defend the capitalist state and the rich. The cops have yet to arrest a boss for stealing workers’ labor each day, but they are always ready to arrest striking workers for the “crime” of fighting for raises. The police in Rio are considered the most violent in Brazil. According to data from the security secretaries in each province, the Rio police killed three times as many people as the cops in Sao Pablo (who are also considered extremely violent) during the first half of 2011. In 2010, the Rio police officially killed 885 people in the province, half of them in the capital. Many were the poor children of the working class.

As CHALLENGE has pointed out (6/8/11), Brazil´s government has trained its forces within the United Nations’ MINUSTAH army in Haiti to prepare them to pacify its favelas at home. Brazilian bosses are using the UPP to evict and silence the poor and show a “friendly face” to the World Cup, excusing the murder of workers with stories about drug trafficking or terrorism. But workers’ potential power was evident as they rose up and organized the favelas to resist these evictions. Workers in Brazil and around the world need to join the PLP to build a society of true social equality, and to destroy this putrid system of exploitation and profit.

HAMMOND, IN, November 27 — Demonstrations at Purdue U. Calumet (PUC) against racist Professor Maurice Eisenstein show no signs of dying down. Students have been campaigning without let-up to force the administration to fire Eisenstein.

The students’ actions include circulating petitions, urging victims of Eisenstein’s racist and sexist attacks to file formal complaints, and organizing public demonstrations and a campus-wide forum. Despite right-wing opposition and institutional apathy, students are demanding nothing less than immediate termination of Eisenstein’s professorship at PUC, and won’t back down until that goal is achieved.

Eisenstein has used his classes to disseminate his extreme Zionist and imperialist rhetoric — advocating extermination of Arabs, and the colonization of their lands by Israelis and Americans. He has stepped far beyond the usual pro-imperialist stance on current events, propagating into hateful dehumanization of Arabs, blacks, Latinos, migrant workers, and women. His extremism has culminated in direct personal attacks on students and faculty.

Despite much evidence to show his complete unsuitability as a professor, the university has been apathetic to the point of complacency for almost two decades. Only after the impassioned protests from a multi-racial coalition of angry students has the university begun to take the issue seriously. Meanwhile, both Eisenstein and a small group of his supporters are hiding behind a right-wing excuse of “free speech” while turning a blind eye to his abuse of power as a professor and the potential consequences of racist indoctrination.

PL’ers have been active in this fight since its onset, working with fellow class-conscious demonstrators to inject a much-needed energy and radicalism to the struggle. While some demonstrators want to fight within the restrictive confines of university policy, PL’ers and friends have been ensuring that the struggle won’t be diluted to fit a weaker liberal agenda.

We in PLP don’t see Eisenstein as just one “bad apple,” whose dismissal will automatically cure the university system of racism and bigotry. Even if Eisenstein is fired, PL’ers intend to keep the militant fire burning in our fellow students, many of whom have faced the brunt of racism their whole lives from imperialist propaganda. It is our goal to build solidarity with fellow students fighting bigotry and help them see that racism will be eradicated only with the destruction of the capitalist system that needs the extra profits from racist wage differentials to survive.

We will continue working with students and workers who face similar racist intolerance and intimidation. With solid communist leadership, these small struggles can harness the energy and commitment to destroy racism and capitalism once and for all.

“The real number of unemployed or underemployed people in the U.S. is a stunning 26.9 million,” (LAT, 11/30), although figures below indicate it’s closer to 35 million.

“The term ‘reserve army of labor’ is vintage Karl Marx” admits the LA Times. “But,” it continues, “let’s not hold that against it if it’s on the mark. These workers are on reserve; they are standing ready to work. And their sheer numbers make them an army.”

The ‘8.6%’ Scam

The bosses’ media spouts a “drop” in the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.6% (from the previous month’s 9%). Obama hails this as a sign of economic recovery. But this spurious figure results from the fact that 300,000+ workers who gave up looking for non-existent jobs are no longer included in the labor force and therefore are not counted as unemployed. According to such fraudulent figuring, if a few million more workers give up looking for these non-existent jobs, the jobless rate might “drop” to 6%!

Shadowstats.com reports that this “drop” in the jobless rate “actually signaled ongoing economic collapse…not the ongoing recovery heralded by the Administration and…Wall Street,” given the “swelling ranks of ‘discouraged’ workers.”

Not only does the government’s 8.6% jobless rate not include part-time workers who want but can’t find full-time jobs, nor “discouraged” workers who’ve given up looking for work after 26 weeks (which would raise the rate to 22.6% — Shadowstats.com), but it also excludes:

• Part of the massive prison population of 2.4 million being released from jail but also can’t find jobs amid the bosses’ economic crisis;

• GI’s recently returning from the rulers’ imperialist wars whose jobless rate is over 20%;

• Students “holing up in colleges and waiting for the economic storm to pass” (LAT);

• First-time job-seekers among high school and college graduates for whom there are no jobs;

• “Discouraged” workers who have been jobless for more than a year and who the Clinton administration re-defined in 1994 as “no longer discouraged”: the long-term unemployed;

• Workers on welfare who cannot seek jobs, lacking day-care for their children;

• Hundreds of thousands of youth who joined the military as the only “job” they could find.

Add all that up and the LAT’s “stunning 26.9 million” is closer to 35 million.

Unemployment’s Racist Factor

Within this massive misery is the fact that black and Latino workers have double the jobless rate of the working class as a whole. The government admits that even the low-ball figure of 8.6% rises to 15.5% for black workers (NY Times, 12/5), a rate that actually lies somewhere between 30% and 50% depending on the city, when considering the other factors outlined above. Growing out of centuries of racist discrimination, these workers became the last hired and first fired.

The mass hiring of black workers in the auto industry resulting from the black rebellions of the 1960s got wiped out in the 1980s recession when the pro-boss auto union “leaders” agreed to mass layoffs to “save the industry” — again the last hired and the first fired. This set white workers up for the kill when Obama became the savior in bailing out GM and Chrysler, leading to the layoff of thousands of long-time workers. This enables these companies to net profits during the Great Recession. Under capitalism, the bosses’ government exists to enforce the profit system. (See box below.)

Of course, capitalism’s reserve army of unemployed is mounting worldwide, from Britain to Mexico to France to Spain to South Africa to India to Italy to Bangladesh to Pakistan and on and on. The “Arab Spring” was a rebellion by workers demanding jobs. This international crisis is intensifying the rivalry of the imperialist powers as they compete for cheap labor and resources, especially oil and gas — an economic war whose “solution” inevitably leads to world war as it did in 1914 and 1939.

Marx’s “reserve army of the unemployed” is part of a working-class army that, when led by communist ideas, can overwhelm and overthrow the tiny number of billionaires who now run the world in their drive for maximum profits. This is the ruling class’s greatest fear.

Progressive Labor Party is fighting to marshal our class into a mighty force that will drive the money-changers out of their Wall Street temples and bury them with communist revolution. This can produce a society without bosses and profits, run by and for workers who produce all value, and who will distribute the fruits of our labor according to the needs of our class.

Joining and leading this PLP-led army can truly change the world.