On October 9 in New York City, I joined a rally at the Mexican consulate with several members of my college faculty and staff union (PSC-CUNY), along with school teachers in the UFT, and many others. We were there to protest the murderous ambush of activist students from the Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa in the Mexican state of Guerrero.
The students had come to the town of Iguala to raise money for school supplies, since their college is woefully underfunded. The Iguala police attacked the students, spraying their bus with machine gun fire, killing six people, wounding dozens more and kidnapping 43 students. The students may have been handed over to a local drug gang. As of today, we don’t how many of the 43 were murdered, but a mass grave has been discovered in the area with a couple of dozen bodies. The students have been missing since September 26, and the outlook is grim.
Nearly one hundred of us picketed for an hour, loudly chanting, “Protest the Massacre of Mexic-an Students,” and “Workers United Will Never Be Defeated.” The nervous consulate staff quickly closed their entrance, as they heard our message. After picketing, we held a rally at which CUNY students and faculty, among others, spoke and delivered the same message: we stand with our brothers and sisters in Mexico. We demand that kidnapped students who are still alive be released and we demand that those responsible for the killings be severely punished.
Over the last few days, tens of thousands of workers in Mexico have marched in Mexico City, Guerrero, Vera Cruz, and Oaxaca, carrying signs declaring, “Fascist government, assassin of teachers.” Teacher unions are reportedly calling for school walkouts to protest the outrageous killings.
The teachers college of Ayotzinapa has been training teachers, and producing activists, for many decades. The school calls itself “the cradle of social consciousness” and its students — many of whom are from poor families and work in the fields behind the school — are renowned for their social activism. These students and teachers have allied with farm workers against those who abuse them. Recently they joined a struggle to demand that the mayor of Iguala provide fertilizer to poor farmers. This militancy has earned them the wrath of local politicians, cops and the drug lords they work with.  The same mayor, who is now a fugitive from the law, is accused of recently murdering a popular leader of a reform group.
October 2 was the 46th anniversary of the notorious Tlatelolco Massacre, in which the Mexican military shot and killed nearly 300 student demonstrators, hoping to destroy the massive protest movement ten days before the 1968 Summer Olympics opened in Mexico City. Students from the Rural Teachers College had been planning to join commemoration protests in Mexico City last week.
CUNY Red

Why are working class youth criminalized? For the last few decades, youth have been the most vulnerable sector of the working class under capitalism. With the current crisis of overproduction, the ruling class has no interest in providing education or future employment for our youth. Instead, they have implemented huge and expensive campaigns to warn us that poor and unemployed youth will be the future hired killers of organized crime. Or that youth who participate in protests are black-clad people bent on destruction and terrorizing the general population, which the system must punish harshly with jail sentences.
Smear and elimination policies promote the brutality of the murders. The working class has a long-held affection for teaching students and teachers because of these groups’ commitment to their communities. For this reason, the Mexicanos Primero and Televisa bosses, along with the government, have massively promoted the idea that teachers, including student-teachers, are to blame for the educational backwardness. These workers are labeled parasites who get a salary to spend their time at sit-ins, which are a waste of money the government should not allow. But the context of this campaign was the passage of the education reform, which created huge profits for the groups, promoting the commercialization of education.
Although originally the police and army were trained as the capitalists’ repressive branch. Today due to the increasing violence carried out by drug cartels — amply documented to be sponsored by businesses and covered up by the politicians — the police fire on unarmed students under orders from local drug lords, with the pretext that their lives were in danger. While the cops could use their weapons against criminal groups, they prefer to hunt and murder 18- and 20-year-old youth who the government describes as undesirables.
Ayotzinapa is not an isolated case of police brutality. Thousands of unarmed black and Latino youth are murdered by racist police in the U.S. Even in those few cases where crimes were recorded, the police claimed they feared for their lives because they were confronting one of those “black rappers drug-dealing youth” who could “hurt” them as shown in countless racist movies and TV shows. In Europe, immigrants are massacred by the police, as was the case of the unarmed Brazilian immigrant murdered by the British cops because he looked like an Arab attempting to “commit a terrorist act” on the city subway.
Mexico is not a failed state. Capitalism is a criminal system. We cannot conclude that Mexico is simply a failed state (a concept which describes government institutions that cannot solve the problems of its population) when on a daily basis its ruling class invests huge amounts of money to promote racist ideas, smear campaigns, or wars designed to obtain resources to stay in power. They won’t solve the current situation because they deliberately created it. Only the organized international working class is capable of stopping these crimes by destroying the system that promotes them. We took power in the past; we can do it again.

MEXICO, September 27 — The fascist repression against the students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teaching College, which took place in Iguala, Guerrero on September 27, is a reflection of the violence that the ruling class has been willing to use to enforce its plans against the working class. Six people, amongst them 3 students, were killed in that police and paramilitary attack, and to this date, 57 youth are still disappeared.
Events like this has become a daily occurrence as the world capitalist crisis deepens and the imperialist rivals, such as the U.S., Russia and China get ready to fight in wider wars.
One example of the effects of this crisis and the preparations for war on the working class in Mexico is the imposition of the reforms recently “passed”: Energy reform allows the U.S. to have more control over energy resources (which is vital to the U.S. in case of an imperialist war), while the education and labor reforms guarantee access to a cheap labor force, trained and docile, and represents more oppression and exploitation of workers.
The passing of the reforms previously mentioned was framed by the fascist terror created by the army, the police and the crime cartels, the support of all the electoral political parties, the passivity of the working class and the unity of the most important ruling-class groups in Mexico and the U.S.
It is expected that implementation of the reforms will face further working-class resistance and bigger disagreements amongst the members of the ruling class and its politicians who will try to position themselves to increase profits. For these reasons the bosses will use fascist terror to repress working-class resistance and to discipline their own class.
Under these conditions of increasing fascism and low resistance to ruling-class attacks, the massive protests of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) students against changes to their internal regulations and curriculum is very significant. This struggle is part of the entire working-class resistance to the reforms imposed by bosses. It cannot be restricted to the academic arena, as some groups argued; it is a reflection of the class struggle.
The changes that the authorities and bosses are trying to put into effect at IPN are part of the education reform, designed to repress the polytechnic community’s political participation, making higher education more technically oriented and reduce teachers’ benefits. These reforms respond to the needs of the capitalist system to reduce enrollment in public education to benefit the business of private education and turn public schools into cheap labor factories, where they trained. Docile workers who don’t require the instruction of a highly qualified technician.
Under capitalism, education is a business and one of the most important means to indoctrinate youth with nationalist, sexist, individualist, and racist ideology. The struggle of the Polytechnic students opposes these two aspects. The unity they are developing with workers and students in other schools like UNAM, UAM and UAEM will be important to defeating attacks by school authorities and the ruling class. We must remember that Polytechnic students played a key role in the 1968 student movement involving strikes and ruling-class massacres.
The attacks confronted by Polytechnic teachers and students will not end as long as there is a capitalist system. It is essential for capitalism to minimize the living conditions of the working class because this is a determining factor in maximizing their profits. Capitalists will try by any means to cut down salaries, retirement pensions, and health and education services. We workers must fight against these cuts, but as long as the bosses have political, economic and military power, for the most part they will win.
This is why we must understand the urgent need to organize an international party, not an electoral party, to lead millions of workers in a communist revolution to abolish the oppressive capitalist system and build a new communist society. This is the goal that in the last century inspired millions of workers around the world, including many of those who were part of the 1968 movement. We must honor their memory renewing our commitment to the fight for a just and egalitarian society.
From Ayotzinapa to Casco to Ferguson, the struggle of the working class for its liberation will put an end to capitalist oppression!

PARIS, October 10 — The French Senate is considering sharpening a new antiterrorist law passed by the National Assembly which, while ostensibly targeting “suspected terrorists” going abroad, can attack any of the nearly five million Muslims — Arab and black Africans — living in France as well as anyone at all who opposes French ruling-class policies. The measure would also re-establish a level of censorship not seen since the fall of Emperor Napoleon III in 1815.
Meanwhile, French troops in four African countries, as well as their widening imperialist interventions in the Middle East and as part of NATO in Eastern Europe, are engaged in far bigger terrorism. If these interventions lead to working-class protests, France’s rulers will assuredly use this antiterrorist law, and others, against any protesters, especially against communists, the deadliest enemies of the capitalist class because we want to eliminate the whole capitalist system. This law mirrors what the Nazis did in their occupation of France during World War II when communist Resistance fighters were branded as terrorists. If necessary, the bosses will act without “legal” excuses, although even fascists prefer a “legal” cover.
The law allows the police to stop a person leaving France if they “suspect” that he or she wants to commit terrorist acts abroad. The government can also summarily block internet sites. Finally, the law creates the new crime of an “individual terrorist undertaking” — which amounts to a one-person conspiracy!
This is fascism, plain and simple. While liberals moan about the erosion of individual liberties and the sapping of bourgeois democracy, they avoid discussing the three basic questions listed below.
Who does the law target?
A September 22 BFM (France’s main news station) television report quotes writer David Thomson saying that “the emirs of the Islamic State are certainly going to order their foreign combatants to return to their countries to conduct terrorist actions.” This could easily mean hunting down “terrorists” among the 4.7 million Muslims living in France (7.5 percent of the population). A Brookings Institute article “Being Muslim in France” reported: “Though France’s Muslims represent 123 different nationalities, nearly three-quarters are from the countries of the Maghreb: Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia.” Many of the others are of black African origin.
So essentially it’s an anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-black law. Its racist nature is concealed by both its advocates and its liberal opponents because racism is integral to their capitalist society. On the one hand, capitalism requires a pool of super-exploited workers both to divide the working class as well as to depress working conditions for everyone (by saying, “if you don’t like your job, there’s a black/Arab/other waiting to take it”). On the other hand, the French Republic motto is “freedom, equality, brotherhood,” meaning it has to pretend to be anti-racist. That’s why the racist nature of the law is concealed by both the reactionary and the liberal wings of the French ruling class — and why communists emphasize its racism.
Why Join ISIS?
According to a March 11 article in the Observatoire des Inégalités, seven percent of the population lives in a “sensitive urban zone” — the official name for a ghetto. This “zone” disproportionately contains immigrants from non-EU countries, young people and unskilled workers.
Poverty and unemployment were always worse there, but the economic crisis triggered by the 2008 financial crisis hit this population the hardest. Between 2006 and 2011, their poverty rate shot up 7.5 times faster than those outside, unemployment five times faster and youth unemployment 1.7 times as fast; 36.5 percent live below the poverty line, almost three times higher than outside these “sensitive urban zones.” The unemployment rate is 24.2 percent, 2.4 times the rate in the surrounding city. Youth unemployment (age 15-24) is 45%, compared to 23.1% outside.
These conditions marginalize and alienate Arab and black youth, opening them to ISIS recruitment. But Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily their main motivation: most of those arrested recently by the French police charged with trying to join jihadist groups cannot speak Arabic, and some of the young women would-be jihadists thought “sura” (the term for a Koran verse) was the name of a fashionable singer! According to an October 5 Le Parisien newspaper article, a website close to the Islamic State says they promise free housing, food, medical care and monthly allowances.
Thus, the Islamic State promises Arab and black youth everything French society cannot. Whether they will deliver is questionable. Without a revolutionary communist party to explain that the Islamic State bosses are just like French bosses — out to maximize profit from the labor of the working class — the youth can be sucked in.  The French ruling class only offers a repressive antiterrorist law, which will only increase the marginalization and alienation of Arab and black youth.
Who does the law ultimately target?
While the law’s immediate targets are Arab and black youth, it can and will attack any dissident group in the ruling class’s sight. Already, the Green Party deputies in the National Assembly are worried that the law can describe popular and civic dissidence as terrorist, asking, “Will the ‘Big Useless Projects’ that threaten the quality of life and the environment now pass for ‘incitement to terrorism’? In Canada, the government is…considering ecological activism as a terrorist threat.”
The French ruling class has learned well from the Nazis how to combat opposition to its racist and fascist policies.