An appeal from students of the State University of Haiti to CUNY students for your help against the cruel and criminal Michel Martelly regime:
Since this neo-Duvalierist dictatorial régime came to power, students here, like so many other working-class people, have suffered under the jackboots of all sorts of government repression.  Arrests, assassinations, beatings, and other contemptuous criminal acts unworthy of human beings are the deliberate policies of the police and of MINUSTAH, the United Nations “peacekeeper” force.
In February 2012, President Martelly himself arrived at the School of Ethnology campus with an armed group firing guns, beating students, and looting offices.  Well before this, however, the repressive machine had cracked down on us. This year the violence and arbitrary arrests are more and more frequent.  We hate this!  It fills us with rage!
Early one morning last week, the entire School of Ethnology was blanketed with tear gas.  No one could breathe.  People were traumatized — fainting, crying, calling for help — all over the campus. That afternoon, the gangsters in the Haitian National Police struck our comrade, a third-year student at the Teachers College.  He was maimed by a stun grenade that hit him directly on the right hand.  Three surgeries later, in spite of our aid and the doctors’ efforts, it became clear there was no chance of saving the hand.
How many more hateful crimes like this must we endure before we understand the criminal mentality and boundless perversity of this régime, this eater of the men and women of our class?
That’s why we are asking for a whole-souled solidarity from you, our comrades. At CUNY, the militarization of your university exposes the administration’s opposition to your struggle for a good education and a more egalitarian society. In Haiti, we have joined the same struggle to counter this worldwide system of injustice that knows no limits.
We commit ourselves to this struggle knowing its risks and dangers. We ask you for your support, for this is one struggle!  Your struggle is ours!  Let us fight together to denounce and combat these inhuman policies, until we put an end to the capitalist system that has so injured our class.
We fighters in Haiti are of one mind with you, in an international solidarity that can only grow stronger.  In admiration we send you our warmest greetings.  We hope with you to lead a common struggle for the betterment of the working class. Marx said, after all, that the interests of the proletariat are the interests of humanity itself.

NEW YORK CITY, November 23 — On Tuesday, November 19, more than 120 students and faculty packed the courtroom or waited outside during the arraignment of two anti-fascist City College students. The two are leaders of a movement to oppose the teaching appointment of war criminal David Petraeus, the restoration of ROTC, and the police seizure of a student/community organizing space, the Morales/Shakur Center. They are being charged with disorderly conduct, riot, resisting arrest and obstruction of governmental administration.
The two students, previously suspended by the college bosses, have demonstrated tremendous courage and determination in the face of serious criminal charges. Our presence showed the court they do not stand alone.
Three days after the arraignment, nearly 50 students and faculty packed a hearing on the college’s disciplinary charges. Before it began, lawyers reached an agreement to reinstate the students for the spring semester but maintain their ban from the current semester’s classes. Their tuition will be refunded.
The pressure to criminally charge students who have done nothing wrong appears to come from the New York Police Department, which works closely with higher-ups at the City University of New York. Press reports indicate that people in high circles were furious with the militant demonstrations against Petraeus, who’s been mentioned as a possible Republican presidential candidate for 2020. (Before last year’s exposure of his long-running extramarital affair, he had been touted as a possible candidate in 2016.) The rulers consider him the model “warrior-scholar,” the type of leader needed to encourage military service among youth and to mobilize support for U.S. interventions abroad. Republican Senator John McCain called Petraeus one of “America’s greatest military heroes.” In 2010, Time Magazine ranked him among the top fifty “People Who Matter.’”
Petraeus and his powerful supporters never dreamed that CUNY students and faculty would expose the former general as a war criminal. They never imagined he’d be forced to go to and from class in a tinted-windowed SUV via an underground garage, and then escorted by security to the deserted 16th floor of an office building. They certainly didn’t foresee that angry students would pursue Petraeus on the street after his class.
Under pressure from several members of Congress, the NYPD and an embarrassed CUNY administration — two parts of the capitalist state apparatus — mounted a counterattack on radical students. First they closed the Morales/Shakur Center, used for decades to organize against higher tuition and the militarization of their university. After the closure sparked large demonstrations, CUNY suspended the two students while the cops arrested them.
The point of this repression was twofold: to intimidate students and to distract them. Instead of demonstrating against Petraeus and ROTC, we were now attending suspension hearings and criminal arraignments. But this heavy-handed attack is also a positive thing. It shows that ruling-class forces are worried. They need to restore ROTC to urban campuses to integrate their officer corps. Militant opposition to this strategy is a big problem for them.
Young people at CUNY are not rushing to enlist in the U.S. military. The failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not morale-builders. Thousands of soldiers died, hundreds of thousands returned home seriously impaired (including half a million with mental problems), and one of three female soldiers was sexually assaulted. The military is struggling to meet recruitment goals. Without enough soldiers, the bosses will be unable to project U.S. power abroad in the current period of global instability and inter-imperialist conflict.
U.S. wars of occupation — from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan — have killed millions and damaged tens of millions. While imperialism protects the profits of the very wealthy, it gravely harms the working class — both the workers forced to fight and those losing social services at home. With nearly a trillion dollars a year spent to maintain a thousand military bases and a global U.S. empire, there is little left over for health care, education, or adequate nutrition.
Members of Progressive Labor Party at CUNY are committed to use every class and gathering, every forum and film event, to win students to rebel against the agents of U.S. imperialism on campus: Petraeus, ROTC, recruiters, and military researchers. Join the communist PLP and end this murderous capitalist system!

U.S. capitalists have a growing crisis on their hands. As they prepare for a wider global conflict with their imperialist rivals, they’re having trouble forging the coalition they need. This process will have unpredictable twists and turns. What’s clear is that the U.S. is in sharp economic decline and increasingly unable to go it alone in paying for their war machine.
Of the nations Washington counts on as strategic bases of operation, sources of troops and financial backers, two key ones are balking. The German rulers’ public outrage at U.S. phone tapping reflects their reluctance to toe the U.S. bosses’ line, economically or militarily. Some important Japanese capitalists, meanwhile, aren’t ready to abandon the post-World War II pacifist edicts (forced into the Japanese constitution by the U.S.) that helped enrich them. The prohibition of a standing army boosted the profit margin for Japanese corporations.
These edicts could change, however. Capitalism is a dictatorship of the ruling class. Capitalists use the government to maintain their profit system. They use war to resolve their conflicts with other capitalists. The bosses’ sole interest in the working class is to exploit labor for profit — and to use workers’ sons and daughters to fight and die in inter-imperialist wars. The rulers will alter or nullify any laws that limit their ability to pursue their profit goals.
We, the international working class, need to smash this bosses’ dictatorship. We need to establish a workers’ dictatorship that represents our class interests and eliminates the profit system and all its evils: unemployment, racism, sexism, mass poverty and war.
German Bosses Won’t Bow
to U.S. Demands
On November 4, Paul Krugman, a liberal economist at the New York Times, wrote, “German officials are furious at America, and not just because of the business about Angela Merkel’s cell phone. What has them enraged now is...a U.S. Treasury report. [It] argues that Germany’s huge surplus on current account — a broad measure of the trade balance — is harmful, creating ‘a deflationary bias for the euro area, as well as for the world economy.’ ” Krugman went on to attack Germany’s relentless impoverishment of Eurozone U.S. allies and NATO members like Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal.
A day later, the Times further exposed the root of the Obama-Merkel rift. In the eyes of U.S. rulers, Berlin is withholding its military potential from the cause of U.S. imperialism. As Jochen Bittner, editor at the pro-U.S. Die Zeit, complained in an op-ed piece:
Germany is Europe’s unrivaled superpower, its largest economy and its most powerful political force. And yet if its response to recent global crises, and the general attitude of its leaders and citizens, are any indication, there appears to be nothing that will get the German government to consider military intervention.
This attitude was apparent in the German population’s overwhelming opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But U.S. capitalists worry most about Germany’s contribution in future global crises. Germany spends only 1.4 percent of it gross domestic product (GDP) on its military. The U.S. tops the world by devoting 4.8 percent to its war machine. Resurgent rival Russia is close behind at 4.4 percent. China invests 2 percent of its GDP in its armed forces, but that figure underplays the true scope of its war preparations:
“The Chinese military budget, at official exchange rates, is one-seventh that of the United States. But on a more appropriate purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, the Chinese military expenditure is about $500 billion, about three-quarters that of the United States” (Global Security).
U.S. Wants Japan on War Footing
Meanwhile, President Obama is desperately trying to get Japan — the world’s third largest economy — to increase its measly 1 percent military outlay by reversing the pacifist Article 9 of its constitution. It states, “The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.”
This edict was imposed in 1947 to prevent a repeat of the massive Asian war launched by Japan prior to World War II, which threatened U.S. supremacy in the Pacific. But today the U.S. capitalists have more pressing concerns with a new emerging superpower, namely China. Obama and the bosses he represents are tilting toward Asia to meet this threat. At the same time, Japan is embroiled in a struggle with China over energy resources recently discovered in the seas that lie between them.
Under circumstances like these, the bosses simply change the rules. Ann Wright, former U.S. Army officer and diplomat, writes in Global Research (11/8/13):
On October 3, 2013, the United States and Japan issued a “Joint Statement of the Security Consultative Committee: Toward a More Robust Alliance and Greater Shared Responsibilities.” In the document, the United States “welcomes” the [Japanese Prime Minister] Abe government’s “re-examining the legal basis for its security including the matter of exercising its right of collective self-defense....”
In other words, they are seeking a way to eliminate Article 9 and allow Japan to participate in wars of aggression. As a side benefit for U.S. rulers, Japan would be forced to pay for a portion of U.S. military outlays in Japan and Okinawa.
But major Japanese capitalists oppose Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s push for “proactive pacifism,” his euphemism for remilitarization. A November 8 editorial in the Japan Times warns:
Through the exercise of the right to collective self-defense “proactive pacifism” could eventually lead to deployment of the Self-Defense Forces overseas on armed military missions. In short, if implemented Mr. Abe’s policy of “proactive pacifism” will destroy the Constitution’s war-renouncing principle and Japan’s traditional “defense-only defense” posture [where military force can be used only internally or if Japan is attacked]. Thus the prime minister’s push for “proactive pacifism” must be stopped.
Japan Times is wholly owned by Nifco, Inc., the largest supplier of plastic parts for Japan’s worldwide automotive industry. The company’s profits are much larger when not
being taxed to finance a world-class military apparatus.
U.S. Post-WWII Policies Backfire?
Shortly after World War II, the triumphant U.S. rulers conducted highly publicized war crimes trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo. Then they restored their fascist former enemies to political and economic power. They re-Nazified Germany to counter the pro-working class Soviet and Chinese movements of the postwar era. But the U.S. refused to restore military power to the vanquished.
U.S. planners like John J. McCloy, chairman of  Rockefellers’ Chase Manhattan Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations, was installed as High Commissioner of Germany, essentially its lord and master. At that point the U.S. capitalists owned half the world’s manufacturing capacity. They thought they could maintain sole military control of Germany and Japan. And so they did for decades, with hundreds of thousands of GIs stationed in the two countries, even at the height of the Vietnam War.
But with their vital interests now threatened in the Middle East and elsewhere, the U.S. imperialists’ huge military outlays are straining their capacity. They need their longtime protectorates to chip in as armed protectors of their global empire. The chief U.S. rivals are China and Russia, two former workers’ states that are now state capitalist. By using their governments to directly exploit their working classes, these rivals threaten U.S. rulers’ world domination.
Rebellion Good, Communist Revolution Crucial
What all the ruling classes fear is how workers will react to their murderous plans. Masses in the European Union are rebelling against the austerity imposed by German bosses. Suffering the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, demonstrators are taking to the streets in Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal. They are fighting the French bosses’ pension and job cuts and the rise of the new Nazis in Germany and Greece.
In China, hundreds of rebellions are underway to oppose the removal of hundreds of millions of peasants from the land and into $2-a-day urban sweatshops and other menial labor. Tens of thousands have demonstrated and fought the cops in Brazil, protesting the rulers’ extravagant spending on the World Cup and the Olympics while transportation fares are raised, wages are cut and food prices climb. Who can predict when U.S. workers will say they’ve had enough of mass racist unemployment? When they’ll fight back against their impoverishment? When they’ll refuse to provide the cannon fodder for the U.S. bosses’ war machine?
Spontaneous rebellion is a positive expression of workers’ anger. But it can never end the exploitation of capitalism. We need a working class led by a mass communist party to smash the state power of the world’s capitalist classes—and to replace it with a workers’ dictatorship.

NEW YORK CITY, November 8 — Thirty people gathered in the frigid cold morning to protest the disciplinary hearing for Taffy and Khalil, two students suspended for rallying against the closing of the Morales/Shakur Center at City College of the City University of New York (CUNY). After the students refused to be bought out by the administration, their hearing was postponed to 9 a.m. Friday, November 15. A rally will be held in front of the City College North Academic Center.
This struggle began October 21, when students and faculty demonstrated against the City College administration for shutting down the student center with no notice. In fact, the shutdown was aimed at the growing fightbacks that began earlier this semester. These protests targeted the CUNY presence of racist General David Petraeus and the Reserve Officer Training Corps [see CHALLENGE 11/13].
Our fight is anti-racist because Petraeus represents the U.S. bosses’ imperialist war on workers in the Middle East and South Asia. City College sits in Harlem, one of the most oppressed communities in the country. It’s also a place where Petraeus and ROTC hope to recruit more black officers for their war machine. Unity with Harlem’s workers would strengthen our anti-racist fight.
Taffy and Khalil are now barred from setting foot on campus, but they are neither silenced nor intimidated. Taffy thanked the cops and administration for their help in growing the movement. He was referring to the collective anger that results when one of our students is attacked. Instead of scaring us, the attack has emboldened us.
What Fascism Looks Like
Militancy was evident both inside and outside the hearing. Although fifteen people at a time were supposed to be allowed in, the cops barred the door. They shunted the crowd behind the NAC building, which effectively hid the protesters from the main entrances. One PL’er yelled at the cops, “This is what fascism looks like!”
Inside the hearing, Taffy and Khalil were offered a deal. They would be readmitted to campus if they renounced political activity and consented to be monitored by the cops. What rubbish! Instead of giving in, they demanded that their comrades be let in for the hearing. These student militants are committed to winning back the student center. Their hearing will now take place in a larger room to accommodate the protesters.
All of us should be out in force on Friday, making our presence known to the school with posters, flags, and chants. Within the reform struggles for the student center and against ROTC, we also need to put communism at the center of the fight. Students have won reforms in the past, but the university later breaks its promises and takes them away. The only lasting victory is to recruit more forces into Progressive Labor Party to fight directly for communism.
Greetings from Haiti
At today’s rally, one student read a letter of solidarity from college students in Haiti who also are fighting the militarization of their campuses [see front page]. The crowd cheered. We need to do more to bring an international outlook to our local fights.
Our main weakness is the lack of mass student support on campus. Class consciousness is at a low ebb. While many students took literature and nodded in solidarity, they have yet to see the importance of building an anti-imperialist movement. Universities are sites of struggle. Although the bankers, generals, and politicians may own the school, we can use this space to expose the bosses’ war aims and win students to the fight for a communist revolution.