NEW YORK CITY, October 21 — “They say cut back, we say fight back!” “What do we want? A raise! When do we want it? Now!”
Workers of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) of City University of New York (CUNY) packed the Board of Trustees meeting on September 29. To enter, they first had to be stopped-and-frisked by campus police, a policy too familiar for black and Latin students. Chairman Benno Schmidt, known nationally for his defense of “freedom of expression,” threatened the protesters with being removed by campus cops if they continue to speak out. The meeting proceeded. Fifteen minutes later, PSC president Barbara Bowen signaled for the 100 protesters to chant and walk out. They rejoined 800 protesters outside the building.
The PSC continues to mislead its rank and file by relying on electoral politics. Bowen addressed the crowd, stating they must continue to pressure the new CUNY Chancellor James B. Milliken to put a financial offer on the table. (Milliken makes $670,000 a year, which doesn’t include his new car, driver, and his $3.7 million house paid by tuition hikes and budget cuts.) PSC members have been working for four years without a new contract.
Today, 500 protesters again assembled to demand a raise. At the union meeting, three officers spoke for a total of nearly one hour. No time was allocated for questions and answers from the workers. One worker said, “I didn’t learn anything. They don’t seem to have much of a strategy.” Because the PSC endorsed then liberal Mayoral Candidate Bill de Blasio, we are told we have gained “political capital” with his election.
It is unlikely de Blasio will give PSC a better deal than the contracts that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the city workers District Council 37 recently received. Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo controls the larger portion of CUNY’s funding. He had forced a contract on State University of New York professors that required them to pay more for healthcare. On the way to CUNY’s central office, protesters passed by Cuomo’s office but didn’t rally there. Go figure!
Unionist or Communist Leadership?
Some rank and filers argue that at least the PSC leaders are taking to the streets whereas most city and state worker unions have rolled over and accepted contracts without a semblance of fighting back. Whether or not PSC gains a new contract, its workers will continue to be exploited. Unions today are a tool to discipline and control the working class (read: coming fascism). Unions serve the dominant liberal wing of the bosses, whose imperialist ambitions lie in combating rivals China and Russia. Workers’ living conditions will continue to deteriorate, and it is up to the politicians and unions to sell us this new fascist normal.
 PLP has long said that workers cannot fight the bosses if we play by their rules. The Taylor Law forbids government workers in New York from striking or even taking work actions. In 1966, transit workers defied the Condon-Wadlin Act with a strike! The Act would penalize workers who went on strike with firings and a three-year pay freeze. Those workers defied the law without immediate repercussions. CUNY workers can learn from history and challenge the Taylor law today. To do this, workers need the support of CUNY’s 250,000 students and other city workers.
Despite internal struggle, the PSC leadership has never had a real program to ally with students. Only with communist leadership can we build a real worker-student alliance to fight the union misleaders, CUNY bosses, and politicians. Many CUNY workers are open to communist ideas. Nearly 200 CHALLENGEs were distributed in total. It is up to PLP workers inside the union and PLP students in CUNY to steer this bartering struggle into one exposing the inevitable decay of capitalism. Only viable option is to fight for a communist revolution.

MEXICO, September 30 — Students from different colleges that are part of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) in Mexico went on an indefinite strike and led a large demonstration of more than 60,000 students and workers from several universities to support this struggle. On September 24, the former General Director of the IPN had imposed new study guides and regulations, which not only undermine IPN student rights but also open the door to make higher education more technocratic and reduce the quality of education at the intermediate level. In addition, these changes not only affect students but also teachers and workers in general.
In spite of the significance of the demonstration, the IPN General Director failed to respond. The government Secretariat immediately agreed to a dialogue, and promised to give a positive response to students. Politicians, however, such as Osorio Chong, Government Secretary, and the parties they represent, are the capitalist class’s loyal servants, and always advance their class interests over those of the working class. Proof of that is the “Human Resources Strategic Program for Energy Matters.” Public Education Secretary Emilio Chuayffet  and the officials Pedro Joaquin Coldwell (Economy Secretary) and Emilio Lozoya (PEMEX) claimed, “we must train 135,000 energy experts in the next four year.”  However, “8 out of 10 graduates will have technical profiles or vocational careers, while 20 percent will have higher training or postgraduate education.” To respond to the demand for qualified cheap labor the federal government will offer 60 yearly “scholarships” and will transform educational curriculums… (Eje Central.com.mx 10-9-2014)
The attacks on education are not only taking place at IPN and other universities in Mexico, but all around the world. Students in Spain are fighting against cuts in education and education reform at the high school, college, university and polytechnic level (La Jornada, 3-28-2014).
In Chile students are fighting for a free, quality and public education (Pacarina del Sur: revista de pensamiento crítico latinoamericano, 10-12-2014).
The objective of the capitalist class is to privatize education, which means that a handful of millionaires will own the educational system to turn it into a commodity. Primarily, education is also the most important means of exerting ideological control of the workers; public and private universities are capitalist ideological factories.       
The imperialists and their governments are not willing to invest more in education; the money, product of the taxes all workers pay, is used to purchase weapons and hire soldiers to fight for the control of markets through wars with other countries.  Imperialists, after all, want to increase their profits and expand their businesses by eliminating other imperialists. That’s why our struggle must be geared toward the construction of a new society where education is designed to develop the working class.
To struggle for reforms alone creates fascist, individualistic and racist conditions that divide the international working class; it only offers a temporary solution and the conditions to attack workers at the point of production. That is how bourgeois dictatorship disguised as democracy works: it imposes its laws, ideology, economic and political interests; when this strategy fails it resorts to an open military dictatorship through fascism.
The attacks on education are global; our goal should be to build working-class unity internationally, to confront capitalist attacks and destroy their system. We can only achieve this goal with an anti-electoral, revolutionary, international party like PLP.

Fifty students, professors and community members rallied on October 20 at City College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY), to demand that the Morales-Shakur Center be returned to students who had it stolen from them. One year ago today, without notice, university police seized the Center — which for years had been an important meeting space for students who fight back — as well as thousands of dollars worth of personal property, which still hasn’t been returned.
One student after another spoke eloquently and passionately about what the Center meant to them. It was a place for women students to share their experiences of sexual harassment and discrimination, a space for black and Latin students to talk about the racism they encountered at college and in their communities, and was a vitally important site for organizing — planning forums and demonstrations, writing flyers, and having political discussions. Members of the community used the Center as well, to plan campaigns against gentrification and police brutality.
In between each speech we chanted, “No center, no peace!” and “We will fight! We will dream! We’re not cogs in your machine!” One faculty member reminded students that open admissions was won at the City University in 1969 through militant struggle, the seizure of buildings on CCNY’s South Campus, abutting Harlem. By the early 1990s, CUNY was awarding more Master’s degrees to black and Latin candidates than any university in the country. But then the racist reversal began, first with the imposition of tuition in 1976 and then with the ending of open admissions in 1999. The percentage of first-year black students at five of the senior CUNY colleges dropped from 17 to 10 percent from 2001 to today, while the percentage of new Latin students  went from 22 percent in 2008 to 19 percent today.
However, tuition and the end to open admissions were met with mass, militant protests of thousands of CUNY students, who have continued over the years to fight repeated tuition hikes. One of the reasons that the Morales-Shakur Center was taken away was to deny students a space to organize.
Another faculty member pointed to a second reason. CUNY administrators eagerly brought Reserve Officer Training Core (ROTC) back to City College, an officer-training program that prepares recruits — in its words — “to master the fundamentals of following orders.” These orders are to violently occupy and control countries for the benefit of U.S. corporate interests. Five million Asians were slaughtered in Korea in the 1950’s and Vietnam in the 1960’s; My Lai in Vietnam was one of many places where U.S. soldiers followed orders to “kill anything that moves.” More recently, soldiers and officers followed orders that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In contrast, the Center was a place where black, Latin, Asian and white students, men and women, gay and straight, came together to challenge authority and the capitalist status quo. Because it was a center of independent thought and activity, CUNY officials couldn’t tolerate it. It was a threat to their plans to militarize the campus (which includes instituting ROTC and military recruiters, conducting war research and having war criminal David Petraeus teach a seminar class), and to drive students from poorer families out of college with rising tuition. The faculty speaker mentioned that the PSC — the faculty and staff union — recently passed a resolution calling for ROTC to be removed from CUNY.
A former member of the Black Panther Party then told of his experiences in the Marines, where boot camp shamed recruits into thinking they were stupid and worthless, in order to make them ready to blindly follow orders. His message to the students was: you’re intelligent and valuable people, capable of fighting for a society not dominated by the “fascist 1percent.”
We agree, but to make that a reality we need to build a mass revolutionary communist party, which is what we in the Progressive Labor Party are doing. We invite CCNY students and other activists to come to the PLP College Conference on November 8 and discuss how we’re going to fight for this new world.
CUNY Reds

DETROIT, MI, October 10 — Today, Wayne County, which includes the city of Detroit, announced it would initiate tax foreclosures on almost 80,000 homes in the city. This follows a racist massive water shut-off for tens of thousands of residents which began last summer and continues today as a judge has lifted a moratorium on the shut-offs despite international outcry from human rights organizations.
According to census and school enrolment data, Detroit’s population has dropped to about 600,000, down by more than 400,000 in the last 14 years. At an average of four people in each home, times 80,000 foreclosures, the math does not look good for the remaining residents who are 80 percent black but also Arab, Latin, and white. If this looks like a mass evacuation of the city, that’s because it is.
Detroit’s new capitalist rulers took over during the population exodus that was triggered by the collapse of the domestic auto industry and accelerated by the financial crisis that put GM and Chrysler in bankruptcy. They are on a privatization binge, and no longer want to provide city services to the remaining working-class residents. That’s why billionaire Dan Gilbert, the owner of Quicken Loans and the Cleveland Cavaliers, and his business cronies bought 100 police cars and ambulances to serve the mainly gentrifying downtown core. Meanwhile, workers in the outer neighbourhoods that make up 80 percent of the population, die waiting for ambulances and fire trucks to arrive. Ageing, unmaintained fire trucks break down regularly on the way to fires (arson is rampant), and ambulance wait times for severe trauma victims can be as high as an hour. Many of the streetlights don’t work, roads are blocked with debris and the entire city is overrun with 80,000 vacant, burnt out, graffiti-covered buildings.
Yet money will be siphoned out of the public schools to finance a new $650 million hockey stadium for the billionaire Ilitch family. The city is still run by the Governor’s appointed crony, Emergency Manager Kevin Orr, which is why many Detroiters boycott paying their property taxes. And with grinding mass poverty and unemployment, many cannot afford the taxes anyway.
Vacant houses and empty lots can be highly valuable capitalist investment opportunities. This is part of a long-range plan called the Detroit Future City Strategic Framework (DFCSF), a massive land-grabbing scheme being marketed as the “Detroit comeback.” While the DFCSF backers showcase urban gardens, charter schools, “experimental” small businesses and self-righteous hipsters, the real beneficiaries will be a handful of billionaires. The working class isn’t even in the picture. Detroit was once the center of world industry and class struggle. Its ruins reflect the decay and decline of U.S. imperialism. Among these ruins, we are rebuilding the revolutionary communist PLP.