BROOKLYN, NY, March 21 — Today was the second speak-out and eighth event commemorating the death of Kyam Livingston, who was killed due to the cops’ deliberate racist medical neglect at Brooklyn Central Bookings. It’s now nine months since she died last July 21 when her agonized cries for medical attention were ignored. So far the authorities have answered none of the questions people have been asking.
The struggle for Justice for Kyam, and in all the recent struggles on behalf of those who have been killed by the racist criminal injustice system, have occurred amid a growing desperation for the working class. Unemployment is at unimagined levels. Wages have been falling for 40 years. Racism is on the rise as shown by these killings by the cops of mostly young black and Latino youth and workers.
Capitalism is, indeed, in crisis. The system has shown its intransigence and its culture of indifference towards the working class, as a relative of Kyam pointed out, by not even giving information on what happened, refusing to answer demands that the killings be stopped and the killer cops punished.
A member of the City Councilman Hakeem Jeffries’ staff attended the event. He said, “Just call our office. We’ll see how we can help.” This resembles what the office of the newly elected District Attorney said at our January speak-out.  The new mayor has been in power now for three months. This is a short time for them, but for people waiting for answers it’s long and anger-driven.
“Democratic” capitalism maintains that all the people in this society have a fair chance. Over the past nine months it’s clear to the Justice for Kyam Committee that this is a bald-faced lie. And in fact, it has become increasingly obvious that the profit system simply does not care what happens to working-class people, especially black and Latino. As one speaker said at this speak-out, “A system that creates these problems doesn’t deserve to exist.”
This second speak-out in our Justice for Kyam campaign occurred on a very nice day and drew more participants than during the January snowstorm. More people spoke up about personal grievances against the court system, jails and other aspects of the criminal injustice system.
Some of the stories made us angry, such as the black woman worker’s whose son was severely beaten by police at Riker’s Island while waiting to be charged. This happened many months ago and he’s still at Riker’s and has not been charged. No one has ever investigated this beating.
Another speaker described the death of James Parrish, an unarmed black man with cerebral palsy who was shot and killed by Brooklyn cops.  No charges were ever brought  against them.
But, what can we expect from a racist criminal injustice system? We don’t need politicians to fight for us. If we rely on them, they will turn our struggles into passivity and reliance on elections.
The Kyam Livingston Committee has grown closer over the course of this campaign. PLP members who are active in it have consistently raised with individuals how capitalism will never care about the working class because we are merely there as producers of wealth for those in power. We, the working class, must recognize that only we can speak for ourselves. The Progressive Labor Party points workers towards the ideas of communism as the solution to our problems.

NEW YORK CITY, April 6 — Thirty-five thousand education workers have been laid off in NY State since the economic crisis of 2008. Furthermore, millions of dollars in Governor Cuomo’s new budget is slated for Charter Schools, leading to even more layoffs. And the response from our statewide union leadership? Silence.
At a statewide convention this weekend of 2,400 representatives of union locals in the NY State United Teachers (NYSUT), the mis-leadership settled for meaningless resolutions calling for the removal of NYS education commissioner John King and only critiqued the timing, but not the essence, of Common Core implementation. Under the guise of “raising standards for all,” the Common Core will further legitimize the main function of capitalist education: to sort future workers into the few slots at the high end of the labor market, the many slots at the low end, along with unemployment, incarceration and military enlistment.
Unions which facilitate implementation of such regimes, while keeping workers from fighting back, are useful to the ruling class. NYSUT, though composed of workers, is an arm of the bosses’ state apparatus as it tries to pacify workers whom the ruling class is directly attacking.
It was also useful for the rulers to have Randi Weingarten — head of the national American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — visit the Ukraine to offer “solidarity” and “encouragement” to its distinctly fascist-led “democratic” movement which is aimed at undermining one of the U.S. bosses’ main imperialist rivals, Russia.
A willing puppet of U.S. bosses, Weingarten has been at the helm of major unions for over 17 years and has midwifed the birth of every major attack on education workers — as well as their students and families — that today’s misleaders pretend to oppose: merit pay, Common Core, charter schools, and more. Signs that these mis-leaders’ thin veneer of legitimacy is wearing off were on display this weekend. Opposition rank-and-file forces exposed the fascist-style repression of dissent the UFT’s ruling Unity caucus imposes within its ranks in order to effectively fulfill its role as junior partner to the ruling class in controlling teacher labor.  
Education workers responded well to PL literature with its communist analysis of education under capitalism, in general, and the current union elections at the convention in particular. Rotten union leadership can’t prevent workers from wanting a better system, though that’s the major role these mis-leaders play as the “labor lieutenants of capital.”
As we head to May Day and the next school year, communist educators must be bolder and more determined to win the many teachers closer to PLP and the fight for communism.

For centuries, schools in France were run by the Catholic church. It was only in 1882 that the promotion of religion in public schools was ended. Ever since then, keeping religion out of the schools has been a left-wing position.
The fascist National Front (FN) copies the Hitler-era Nazis.  The FN tries to co-opt left-wing causes. This is one way they attract workers disgusted with the broken promises of the Socialist Party and other fake left organizations.
The latest case in point was on April 4, when FN leader Marine Le Pen announced on RTL radio that the fascists would begin serving pork again in school canteens in the ten cities where the FN controls the city council. She claimed that Muslims were preventing non-Muslim students from eating pork because Islam forbids eating pork. She said the FN would defend the exclusion of religion from public schools.
Journalists from Libération newspaper discovered that it was all a big lie. Pork is on the menu in all French schools. In schools with Muslim and Jewish students, but there is often also a school lunch without pork.
The basis for the big lie was the fact that, for one week in 2011, in the town of Séméac (population 4,700), the school canteen only served non-pork meals – not because Muslims had imposed religious dietary laws, but because of a temporary kitchen problem that prevented the chef from preparing two different meals. The fascists used this to create a rumor to stir up hatred between Muslim and non-Muslim workers.
This is a typical example of the fascist technique of the big lie. Workers everywhere, and not just in France, must beware of this. In particular, the fascists are very clever at spreading their lies and rumors on the Internet.
Anti-fascist from France

Part 1 of the article on the Soviet famine of 1932-33 traced its causes to environmental factors leading to a poor harvest which did not produce enough grain to feed the entire population. While there were other contributing factors  — crop disease infestations, shortage of labor to harvest the fields and of horses to do the plowing and soil exhaustion reducing fertility — Ukrainian nationalists (who later fought on the Nazi side in World War II) spread the myth that the Soviet government deliberately cut off grain to the Ukraine, causing the famine. There was absolutely no evidence supporting this. The Soviet government reduced grain exports and diverted supplies to the famine-stricken areas, trying to distribute what grain was available in an egalitarian manner but this did not meet the overall need (see CHALLENGE  3/26).

The Question of Grain Exports
Like the pre-revolutionary Czarist regimes, the Soviet government exported grain. Contracts were signed in advance, which created the dilemma. Professor Mark Tauger of West Virginia University has spent the past two decades studying Russian famines and the famine of 1932-33. He describes the situation with grain exports as follows:

The low 1931 harvest and reallocations of grain to famine areas forced the regime to curtail grain exports from 5.2 million tons in 1931 to 1.73 million in 1932; they declined to 1.68 million in 1933. Grain exported in 1932 and 1933 could have fed many people and reduced the famine: The 354,000 tons exported during the first half of 1933, for example, could have provided nearly 2 million people with daily rations of l kilogram for six months. Yet these exports were less than half of the 750,000 tons exported in the first half of 1932. …[A]vailable evidence indicates that further reductions or cessation of Soviet exports could have had serious consequences. Grain prices fell in world markets and turned the terms of trade against the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, its indebtedness rose and its potential ability to pay declined, causing western bankers and officials to consider seizure of Soviet property abroad and denial of future credits in case of Soviet default. Failure to export thus would have threatened the fulfillment of its industrialization plans and, according to some observers, the stability of the regime.

While the USSR was exporting it was also allocating much more grain to seed and famine relief. Tauger documents the fact that the Central Committee allocated more than half a million tons to Ukraine and the North Caucasus in February, and more than half a million tons to Ukraine alone by April 1933. The government also accumulated some three million tons in reserves during this period and then allocated 2 million tons from that to famine relief. Soviet archival sources indicate that the regime returned five million tons of grain from procurements back to villages throughout the USSR in the first half of 1933. All of these amounts greatly exceed the amount exported in this period.
However, there was simply not enough food to feed the whole population, even if all exports had been stopped instead of just drastically curtailed, as they were. According to Tauger:

…[E]ven a complete cessation of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine. This situation makes it difficult to accept the interpretation of the famine as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide. The harvest of 1932 essentially made a famine inevitable.
Grain delivery targets (procurement quotas) were drastically reduced multiple times for both collective and individual farmers in order to share the scarcity. Some was returned to the villages. It is these collection efforts, often carried out in a very harsh way, that are highlighted by promoters of the “intentionalist” interpretation as evidence of callousness and indifference to peasants’ lives or even of intent to punish or kill.

Feed 40 Million People in the Cities
Meanwhile the government used these procurements to feed 40 million people in the cities and industrial sites who were also starving, further evidence that the harvest was small. In May 1932 the Soviet government legalized the private trade in grain. But very little grain was sold this way in 1932-1933. This too is a further indication of a small 1932 harvest. (Tauger 1991, 72-74)
About 10 percent of the population of Ukraine died from the famine or associated diseases. But 90 percent survived, the vast majority of whom were peasants, army men of peasant background or workers of peasant origin. The surviving peasants had to work very hard, under conditions of insufficient food, to sow and bring in the 1933 harvest. They did so with significant aid from the Soviet government.
A smaller population, reduced in size by deaths, weakened by hunger, with fewer draught animals, was nevertheless able to produce a successful harvest in 1933 and put an end to the famine. This is yet more evidence that the 1932 harvest had been a catastrophically poor one. (Tauger 2004)
Government aid amounted to five million tons of food distributed as relief, including to Ukraine, beginning as early as February 7, 1933; the provision of tractors and other equipment distributed especially to Ukraine; “a network of several thousand political departments in the machine-tractor stations which contributed greatly to the successful harvest in 1933” (Tauger 2012b); and other measures, including special commissions on sowing and harvesting to manage work and distribute seed and food aid.
Some anticommunist “experts” have adopted the Ukrainian nationalists’ “intentional” interpretation — the “Holodomor” myth. They claim the Soviet government cut the Ukraine off completely, making no effort to relieve the famine. They ignore environmental factors — which were in fact the primary causes — and fail to mention the Soviet government’s large-scale relief campaign which, together with their own hard work under the most difficult conditions, enabled the peasants to produce a large harvest in 1933. In Tauger’s judgment:
[T]he general point [is that] the famine was caused by natural factors and that the government helped the peasants produce a larger harvest the next year and end the famine.
The so-called “Holodomor” or “deliberate” and “man-made” famine interpretation is not simply mistaken on some important points. Its proponents misrepresent history by omitting evidence that would undermine their interpretation. It is not history but political propaganda disguised as history.
Other writers like R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft adopt an interpretation similar to that of the Russian government. They attribute the famine to several causes, with collectivization being a very important, if not the most important cause. In their opinion environmental factors played only a secondary role. Those who take this view believe the Soviet government could have saved many, perhaps millions, of lives if collectivization had not been undertaken at all, and mitigated if the Soviet government had not handled the famine in a “brutal” manner.
As shown in the last article, this hypothesis, too, is mistaken. Environmental factors caused the famine. Collectivization, the role of the Soviet government in organizing and managing agriculture and seizing and redistributing the grain that did exist, plus the hard work of hungry peasants, brought in a successful harvest in 1933 and ended the famine.