KOLKATA, INDIA, September 15 — Hundreds of students at a public engineering
university raged in protest at the cricket association’s attempt to privatize one of the campus cricket fields—a seemingly small struggle that reflects a big surge in working-class consciousness and rebellion.
Privatization is the process whereby publicly owned property is given—or rented at a low cost—to private businesses, which then make a profit at the expense of the working class. Such actions by the rulers destroy the illusion of any division between the public and private sectors. In reality, both are controlled by the capitalist bosses.
Bosses’ Bribe Rejected
The association claimed the university’s fields would be turned into “world-class venues” to which students would still have access. They pledged to maintain the upkeep and even build viewing galleries. They also promised this action would lead to more sports development on campus. But we refused to take the bribe!
This is usually a quiet campus; there hasn’t been a major demonstration in more than ten years. Yet today we erupted in protest. Today we forced the dean to call off the deal between the university and the cricket association. Today we asserted working-class student power.
Students Rebel
The cricket field struggle adds to the recent wave of protests and strikes in India. Kolkata in particular has a long history of anti-capitalist militancy. Last year, at least 30,000 students from
Jadavpur University shut down parts of this city of millions to protest cover-ups of sexual abuse and police brutality against students.
Students at a New Delhi college went on indefinite strike on June 12, when the actor-turned-politician Gajendra Chauhan was appointed chairman of their school. Students are continuing to cripple this premier film university despite the ministry’s effort to pacify them.
Through a communist lens, this is an opportunity to build international solidarity. The protests in Kolkata are part of a fight against capitalism worldwide. It’s up to communists on other campuses — from Chicago to Mexico to Israel — to link their local fightbacks to the uprisings in India.
Class War Rages
Students are only one part of the working class that’s fighting back. On September 2, as many as 150 million workers from nearly every sector — from banking and insurance to mining, shipping, manufacturing, and transportation — went on a national day-long strike against fascist Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s economic reforms. Bosses lost $3.7 billion in profits.
Of course, the out-of-power reformist political parties and union misleaders used the strike to build their base of support against Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party currently running the government. The BJP has a mass base in the viciously racist and sexist Hindu nationalist movement, the Hindutva, which bears many similarities to Hitler’s Nazi Party (see CHALLENGE, 2/25/15). While the BJP is openly fascist, the opposition parties and union heads differ only in their strategy. They share the same goal: to maintain a capitalist dictatorship over the working class.
But the workers and students who took the streets in defiance of the police and the capitalist state weren’t out to back one group of politicians over another. Politicians don’t control us! The working class in India is fighting for better working and living conditions. The task of Progressive Labor Party is to show that only a communist
society can meet workers’ needs.
Our movement must follow two key strategies. First, we must make the fight against capitalist divisions front and center. We must reject racist, sexist, ethnic, caste, and religious discrimination—these are the main forces holding back our struggle! Second, we must organize among the masses to become a revolutionary force of hundreds of millions. Progressive Labor Party is building that movement worldwide, from the
Indian subcontinent to Africa to Latin America. We welcome everyone in the working class to add strength, wisdom, and leadership to the struggle to build communism.
BALTIMORE, September 23—The Northeast District police station is home to the racist animals who beat unarmed Black man Tyrone West to death in July 2013. This evening, a toilet was symbolically placed in front of the station’s sign. We chanted, “Killer cops in cell blocks!” This marked the 113th West Wednesday rally, led by Tyrone’s inspiring family every week without fail.
Over the last two years, much has been learned in the struggle to indict and jail the state terrorist gang of cops—as many as 15 of them—who assaulted Tyrone after a traffic stop. They repeatedly called him the “n” word, pulled him from his car by his dreads, and proceeded to mace, Taser, beat, and club him to death!
At today’s rally, a member of Progressive Labor Party explained that there are two classes of
people in the world: the big business owners and the working class. When the business owners hold state power, that’s capitalism. When the working class holds power, that’s communism — a society of sisterhood and brotherhood where we take care of one another. As the PLer explained, only a revolution can move us from today’s rotten world to a communist world. All things change. Racist, murderous cops — and the system they serve — will one day be eliminated!
The West Wednesday mobilizations offer a taste of the bright future we’re fighting for. Members of the West family appreciatively hug everyone who attends. And this week, as usual, nearly everyone took a copy of CHALLENGE.
Cops’ Job: Guarding Capital
Through this struggle, protesters have witnessed how the mayor, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney, the police, the medical examiner’s office, the state legislature, and the media have lined up behind racism. None of these officials have done anything about Tyrone’s murder.
Although eyewitnesses described in detail the horrific violence of the kkkops as they beat Tyrone to death, the cops were given immunity even before they completed their testimony. They remain free to brutalize and kill again.
The job of the police, a profession descended from the slave patrols of the 18th and 19th centuries, is to uphold the bosses’ laws and protect private property. The entire legal system is designed to serve the ruling class and oppress the working class. About 75 percent of U.S. law deals with property relations, including businesses, machinery, money, and stocks—everything of monetary value. One half of one percent of the population owns most of that property. The legal system is their system.
After more than two years of struggle and learning from experience about the true nature of the capitalists’ government and police, it’s become common to hear speeches at West Wednesday that lay the blame for Tyrone’s death squarely on the system.
Ignite Rebellion,Build Revolution
In April, the outrageous police murder of Baltimore’s Freddie Gray ignited a righteous rebellion against police terror. The protests against the murders of Freddie and Tyrone are part of the same struggle. The persistence of the fight for justice for Tyrone West has advanced antiracism in Baltimore. At the first pre-trial hearings for the six cops who killed Freddie Gray, as these racist thugs tried to get their charges dropped, we held a West Wednesday rally outside the courthouse.
Ending police terror and changing the world is a long process. Let’s not forget that the struggle to defeat slavery in the U.S. took more than two hundreds years. Like chattel slavery, the wage slavery of capitalism will also be abolished. To achieve that goal, Progressive Labor Party is organizing for a communist revolution. Never give up! Dare to struggle! Dare to win!
BROOKLYN, September 21 — Forty workers and students demonstrated today in the continuing struggle for justice for Kyam Livingston, murdered in 2013 by the kkkops’ medical negligence in Brooklyn’s Central Booking Jail.
Kyam’s family and the Justice For Kyam Committee, with strong support from the Progressive Labor Party, have guaranteed monthly actions to remember July 21, the date of her murder. The racism of Kyam’s indifferent cop jailers caused her death, the speakers explained to scores of neighbors who stopped on their way home from work. Members of PLP explained that the capitalist rulers use their police forces to terrorize workers and discourage fightback. Many residents of this mainly immigrant working-class neighborhood listened, donated money, and took leaflets and over 300 copies of CHALLENGE. The overwhelmingly positive response to our monthly actions prove that the bosses, their lackeys and their brutal profit system can’t stop the struggle of the working class.
Kyam’s mother spoke movingly of her daughter’s final hours, the conditions faced by those held in central booking, the callousness of those responsible for her daughter’s death and her own commitment to seeing those responsible punished. She vowed to shut down the Central Booking Jail and the crowd responded, “Shut it down, shut it down, shut this racist system down!”
A speaker related the struggle in Palestine/Israel to the struggle in the U.S. against racist police violence.
Among the several members of PLP speaking at the rally, one young teacher, holding her toddler in her arms, moved the crowd when she said no mother should have to bury her child. There is something wrong with a system, she went on, where the mainly Black and Latin students in her school are forced to start their day by passing through scanners like criminals.
Another teacher spoke about students being forced to learn how to “assume the position” by the NYPD. Both related the murders by police from Brooklyn to Texas to Ferguson to Baltimore, as well as the everyday oppression faced by the working class, to the need to destroy capitalism with communist revolution.
NEW YORK, September 25 — A community group recently protested in front of a building near Central Park owned by gutter racist, sexist presidential candidate Donald Trump. We protested racist statements made by Trump against Latin immigrants—in particular, statements referring to Mexicans as rapists, drug dealers and murderers. These slurs, along with a number of Nazi-style proposals, are a central part of Trump’s campaign.
The demonstration was well attended, and many from our local PL club participated. Even though the organizations behind the action push the pro-capitalist agenda of the Democratic Party, the demonstrators militantly responded to our chants of: “Workers’ Struggles Have No Borders”; “We Are Workers, Not ‘Illegals’”; and “Amnesty Now, No More Deportations.”
One comrade connected Trump’s racism to the problems faced by immigrants worldwide. He spoke about Syrians fleeing the violence of war and crossing into Europe, only to be mistreated and humiliated. He mentioned the African migrants who die by the thousands as they flee poverty, war, and disease, as well as those from the Middle East and Asia. All of these crises are caused by capitalism; the situation for the working class is getting worse and worse.
The demonstration’s reformist leaders sidelined two individuals who began yelling insults at Trump. These two had the courage to challenge the police, even standing in the middle of the street. By contrast, when a Trump sympathizer started yelling insults at us, the misleaders failed to respond.
Whenever possible, PL members should try to give leadership to the working class. With militant chants and ideas, we should always lay the blame for the deteriorating world condition at its root cause: capitalism and imperialism. As we unite and fight back to change this horrific profit system, workers will join us to work toward a communist revolution—the only solution to racism and war.
NEW YORK CITY, September 16 — As old and new taxi bosses divide workers to lower their wages, three hundred taxi drivers rallied outside Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Manhattan office today as part of the Global Day of Action Against Ubernomics. They were protesting Cuomo’s plan to give Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) like Uber & Lyft approval to dispatch fares to an unlimited number of drivers using personal cars across New York State. This move increases competition and attacks driver’s income. In June, taxi drivers in Paris went on strike and blocked major highways to stop the Uber advance there.
TNCs are destroying full-time jobs and incomes for tens of thousands of taxi drivers and their families. In San Francisco, the home of Uber, 3,000 regulated taxis compete against 30,000 private cars. Driver income is down 20 to 30 percent. In Boston, 3,000 taxis are pitted against 10,000 private cars. Driver income is down 25 percent.
At the same time, the traditional taxi companies attack their workforce by classifying drivers as private contractors, even though 85 percent lease their cabs every day and are responsible for gas as well. The 16,000-member Taxi Workers Alliance is trying to re-establish a union in an industry that provides no collective bargaining, unemployment compensation, or healthcare benefits. The New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission presides over the racist super-exploitation of these mainly immigrant South Asian and Black workers, similar to the bosses’ attack on workers in construction, home healthcare, domestic workers, and freelance writers. By 2020, contract workers are expected to make up 40 percent of the U.S. workforce.
All drivers—whether unionized or on contract, whether they’re oppressed by Uber or exploited by the traditional taxi bosses—must unite to build a world where our labour is fully valued. We must fight for a society run by collectivity, not profit, to meet our needs of health, food, housing, and education.
PLP is working among contract workers — from Israel-Palestine to New York City — as they fight for
financial and social security, with the outlook of uniting across lines of work. We will sharpen the class struggle and show that the only security we have as workers comes from building an international movement for communist revolution.
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Immigrant Workers Fight Racism
On Sept 15, a driver/organizer for the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) was passing out fliers for the Ubernomics rally to his co-workers at a taxi lot at LaGuardia Airport. He was physically assaulted by a dispatcher, who then called the cops on the driver. All of the drivers got out of their cabs and refused to move. The racist New York Police Department used vans and police dogs to surround the lot full of mostly immigrant drivers from South Asia and the Caribbean. The drivers still refused to get back in their cars. After a tense stand-off, the organizer was released and the dispatcher arrested. Only then did the cab drivers resume work. The organizer spent the night in the hospital, but attended the next day’s rally with his son.
