BROOKLYN, September 21 — On the 21st of September between 300,000 and 400,000 people marched from Columbus Circle to 42nd Street in New York City. It was called The Peoples Climate March. Over 100 people from our church congregation took part as a group. Some marchers took leaflets about the Justice for Kyam Livingston demonstration in Brooklyn.  
That demonstration had a smaller turnout than usual because so many people went on the earlier march. But some went to both. One of the speakers who had been on the march in Manhattan pointed out that the demonstration for Kyam was one of fighting for justice and that both demonstrations were linked.
Progressive Labor Party had pointed out at the climate march that capitalism causes climate change and ruins the lives of workers in many more ways. At the Kyam demonstration a PL speaker concluded that a system which denies justice for families in Ferguson, Staten Island, the Middle East and Brooklyn should be destroyed.
This was the fourteenth month after the death of Kyam Livingston and many who spoke talked strongly about the disgrace that there is still no justice for a woman who died because she was refused medical care. Others pointed out that for black workers in this society there is very little help and much racist police terror and harassment.
Many of the people who stood on the corners listening to the demonstration took leaflets and CHALLENGEs. People stayed and listened intently, clearly affected by what they heard. Some came over and asked questions, paying no attention to the racist police who, as usual, were in evidence. The speakers came from different backgrounds, were of different ages, and were both men and women.
After the demonstration was over we discussed the obvious fact that it was smaller, but in some ways it was more important because people on the street were very involved in listening and asking questions. People were shocked and frustrated that 14 months after a death that was clearly negligent murder, little or nothing has been done. Our new mayor and his group have now been in power in this city for nine months and, in spite of the promises, the attitudes have not changed.  The new District Attorney has done nothing to help this family get the justice they deserve.  
Kyam’s mother spoke in her usual forceful manner about her child who died and that she would never forget. She thanked those who came, and those who always come for being there. We should make sure that the next demonstration is better attended and that we try to get in touch with  other groups, particularly after the recent struggles in Ferguson and in Staten Island where racist callousness towards black workers is so clearly evident. PL’ers in the struggle continue to point out that we would need to have communist revolution to get real justice.

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!