THE BRONX, December 2 — Students worldwide are raging at the exploitation and racist oppression of capitalism. From South Africa — where tens of thousands demanded and won a cancellation of fee increases — to the University of Missouri — where the president was forced to resign after repeatedly ignoring racist attacks on campus — students are rising up. While these actions should rightly be championed for challenging the ruling class’s racism, we must also be aware that militant reform movements will neither end capitalism nor fundamentally change its racist foundations. Only a mass revolutionary party--Progressive Labor Party—can accomplish that. Still, reform actions can be a training ground for communist revolution.
Student fightback on a smaller scale recently played out at a community college. Thirty-five students and professors, including members of Progressive Labor Party, demonstrated against a planned tuition hike throughout the City University of New York. The CUNY bosses’ plan, coming on the heels of five straight years of tuition increases, is clearly racist, as the CUNY system serves primarily Black, Latin, Asian, and immigrant students.
The demonstration was bold as we marched through campus and into the cafeteria. For many, it was their first protest, yet they loudly chanted and held up signs as other students and faculty looked on. Many observers gave thumbs-up in approval and nodded their heads, boosting our confidence to fight back. The protest showed that people are open not only to fightback, but to being trained in class struggle with communists.
Model of Student-Worker Alliance
Students also attacked injustices to the CUNY faculty, who have worked five years without a contract. “The professors have waited long enough!” they chanted. This reflected an understanding that students and faculty and staff are all on the same side, and that the same factors driving up tuition are also driving down wages. Students spoke about having adjunct instructors who need to rush off to teach at another school immediately after class. Many adjuncts live in poverty or are on government assistance. As the faculty fights for a new contract, it is vital to build a student-worker alliance, and to demand that any raise for workers not be funded by a student tuition hike.
Cutbacks for War
After we marched to picket at the college’s front gate, PL’ers injected a communist perspective. One comrade exposed the root cause of the cutbacks attacking the working class worldwide: inter-imperialist rivalry. The U.S. ruling class is raising tuition and cutting financial aid because they need to funnel money to their military war machine to prop up their failing empire. As China and Russia increasingly challenge the U.S. worldwide, as in Syria, we can expect even more racist cutbacks.
The battle against ISIS, a group formed out of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq that the U.S. ousted in 2003, reflects the increasingly dire situation facing U.S. imperialism. The money U.S. bosses need to wage this fight is being stolen from our class in the form of racist and sexist cutbacks in healthcare, childcare, education, housing, jobs and social services. In their attempt to pacify and neutralize the working class, the capitalist rulers are trying to exploit workers’ fears to build all-class unity for an escalated war in the Middle East.
Calling Out the Prez
Finally, we marched to the administration building. Our volume forced the college president to emerge from his office. Campus cops came running down as well, exposing their fear of student-professor power. He offered the usual platitudes about taking our message to the CUNY chancellor and “being on our side.”
One student called out the president’s bluff and took out his cellphone, demanding that Marti call the Chancellor then and there. Of course, that didn’t happen. Under capitalism, at all levels, it’s the job of politicians and administrators to pacify workers and students. While some students seemed to take Marti by his words, there were many looks of healthy skepticism. Most people knew the president’s promise wasn’t worth a damn.
This growing skepticism is an opportunity for PLP to raise our ideas, above all the need for communist revolution and the making of a new society. Over recent years, the fighting spirit of the working class may have burned more dimly than in the past. But the fire is far from extinguished! From South Africa to the Bronx, students and workers are rising up in ways large and small. Their fighting spirit, combined with PLP’s communist politics, will pave the way to a future without bosses, racism, capitalist exploitation or imperialist wars.

DAVIS, CA, December 3—Mounting a tabletop in the center of the local university cafeteria, a student started chanting, “Black lives matter!” “It is our duty to fight!” and other anti-racist chants. Forty students then rallied and obstructed entrances inside the cafeteria in protest of the racist police murder of Laquan McDonald in Chicago.
‘Remember The Dead…’
Organized by a campus group called Davis Stands With Ferguson, the students also denounced the vicious, firing-squad-like execution of Mario Woods, a 26-year-old Black man, in San Francisco a day earlier (see page ). Meanwhile, three other groups stood in front of three entrance doors, holding signs protesting racist police killings. Students were greeted by their fellow students and their signs as they entered and left, bringing the issue of racist police killings up front to several hundred students at the noon lunch hour.
‘…Fight Like Hell For The Living!’
Planning for today’s action began on November 18, after students had assembled at the plaza outside the Memorial Union to write the names of victims of racist police violence. On the Tuesday before the rally, students gathered once more to finalize the details of today’s action.
These actions show that students are aware and angry, know how to organize, and can act together. In a follow-up discussion, a general student strike on campus was proposed as a goal. We will continue to be involved in the planning and execution of these actions to build solidarity between students and faculty.
Progressive Labor Party encourages these students to continue these bold actions! We will struggle with the students to continue organizing students on campus, and organize and build a movement that includes campus workers.
PLP organizes workers, students and soldiers unite and build a mass international communist party that can end capitalism, and its racist police terror and imperialism, once and for all. Only a communist revolution, which unites all workers in the fight against racism and for egalitarian communism can end police racism forever and give our class the future that we want. We look forward to helping these students sharpen the fight against racism on campus, and fighting alongside them in the struggles ahead!

As the City University of New York (CUNY) community gears up to battle the college bosses — against a new contract demand on professors and staff, and a tuition hike for students — it is important to remember that we hail from a long line of fightback. In 1949, a strike shut down the City College of New York (CCNY) campus in Manhattan for a full week—what the New York Times called “the first general strike at a municipal institution of higher learning” in the U.S. The walkout grew out of a demand that the college administration fire two racist professors. One was guilty of anti-Semitism, the other of imposing racist segregation in a college dormitory.
William Knickerbocker, chairman of the Romance Language department, had withheld honors and advancement from deserving Jewish students and professors. He treated Jewish students contemptuously and made anti-Semitic remarks like, “Hitler was right when he attacked the Jews, but when he began attacking the Poles, that was bad.”
William Davis, an economics professor, was a director of the Army Hall dormitory established for students who were World War II veterans. He set up segregated sections for Black and white vets.
The actions of these two professors enraged the mostly Jewish and Black student population, many of whom had fought Hitler’s racism — over 300 students died — in the war against the Nazis.
The CCNY student body of that era had a militant, left-wing character. Two hundred belonged to the college’s YCL (Young Communist League) chapter. Eight hundred had joined the Students for Wallace club in 1948, backing Henry Wallace’s independent run for president against Democratic Party candidate Harry Truman, known for his Cold War policies against the Soviet Union and his genocidal atom bomb attacks against Japan in World War II. (Since then, the old communist movement’s support for lesser-evil candidates has proven to be a losing strategy.)
In the fall of 1948, 2,000 students sat in at the administration building, demanding the firing of the two racist professors. The following April, the CCNY Student Council voted for a general strike for that demand.
On April 11, 1949, two dozen students — many of them YCL’ers as well as veterans in their Army uniforms — picketed the main building. They carried signs demanding, “Fire Kickerbocker and Davis!” and chanted, “Jim Crow Must Go!” As thousands of students emerged from the subway on Broadway and streamed uphill toward the campus, they were greeted with what might have been the most concise leaflet ever created. Chalked across the width of 137th Street, in eight-foot-high letters, was one word—“STRIKE!”
When the students reached Convent Avenue, across from the main building’s picket line, they stopped and watched, holding their books and trying to decide whether to go to class. Suddenly squads of cops under orders  from the college bosses, emerged to attack the picket line. The students fought back but were roughed up and shoved into waiting police vans. Seventeen were arrested.
Witnessing this cop brutality against a peaceful picket line, the students across the street immediately formed a new line, a thousand strong. An anti-racist strike was on. The students cheered as a car drove by with a student holding up the front page of the New York Sun (one of eight daily New York papers at the time) with a headline screaming, “Students Riot At CCNY.” Virtually no one went to class as the campus was shut down. Many in the faculty supported the strike. After it was over, one professor told his students that if they’d attended his class, he would have sent them out to join the walkout.
Davis was removed from his post as director of the Army Hall dorm. Knickerbocker resigned as department chairman, and later retired.
Two decades later, many of the striking students used their militant experience at CCNY in the anti-racist and anti-Vietnam War movements. Today, 66 years after the strike, it would be fitting for the current student and faculty body to call upon this legacy and strike for their demands against the bosses of CUNY and shut it down. It would be even more fitting for them to join Progressive Labor Party and joinf the fight for communist revolution, the only way to destroy the racism that continues to plague the working class.

WASHINGTON, DC, November 27 — More than 70 people celebrated the 30th annual “Thanks-For-Fighting Racism Feast,” a marvelous international, militant, youthful and multiracial event. Two carloads of Howard University students and a vanload of Baltimore youth kicked off the dinner. We raised funds to support the struggle against racism in Ferguson and sold dozens of new “No to Racism” buttons bearing the names Freddie Gray and Tyrone West, both killed by kkkops. The feast linked different aspects of the Party’s work — from transit and education to health and fighting police terror — as one movement of women, Black, Latin, youth and immigrant leaders for an egalitarian communist society.
Many worked long hours to make posters on the history of militant struggles in the Baltimore-Washington region. The posters attacked a range of racist crimes under capitalism, from supermacist gangs and police terror to modern eugenics and inadequate health care. These visuals prompted intense discussion.
Four youth from Baltimore spoke about their West Wednesdays rallies against the racist murderers of Tyrone West and a high school walk-out to protest the murder of Freddie Gray. Another high school student addressed the intensifying racism aimed at undocumented workers. A professor from China—sharing the viewpoint of many workers there—called the U.S. Thanksgiving a myth of all-class unity that glossed over the genocide of indigenous people in the New World. He said he was happy to be at a dinner in the U.S. where workers agreed with that idea! His friends are pleased that we are fighting back against racism in the U.S.
A mother whose son, Gary A. Hopkins, Jr., was killed in 1999 by the Prince George’s County cops, was heartened to see so many militant youth and called on them to step up and fight back. Ongoing struggles by the People’s Coalition include the fight against the “Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights” and demands for other reforms. The mother noted thatthe problem of police terror went deeper than “a few bad apples.” As long as other cops maintain the Blue Wall of Silence by protecting murderers in their ranks, she said, there are no “good apples.”
Members of Progressive Labor Party presented their work in the American Public Health Association. On World AIDS Day, December 1, the main target was the big drug companies that value huge profits over workers’ lives (see page 3).
A Howard student, invited by a friend, gave a moving spoken word entitled “One.” It addressed the need for unity as one force against racism. Afterward, she said she was excited to be at the dinner and connect with so many people who are fighting back.
A young Metro bus operator campaigning for union office spoke about the bosses’ attacks on transit operators, including cuts in the pension plan, hikes in health care contributions, the racist background check policy, and increased harassment in the new discipline policy. Back in August, he said, the idea of going on strike was not taken seriously by many Metro workers. After four months of organizing, however, workers have been moved closer to striking to gain leverage over the bosses. But as the driver emphasized, striking alone cannot solve the problem of racist, capitalist exploitation. She talked about the need for a disciplined Party to uproot capitalism and plant communism in a society run by and for workers.
As we prepare for another year of battles against racism and its source, the capitalist system, we are optimistic that more workers will be joining the battle. In the coming year, we need connect racism in the U.S. to racism in the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and worldwide by highlighting PLP’s international leadership for the working class. The future remains bright!