Staten Island, NY July 19 — Youth, workers and residents here have been gathering for vigils, rallies and demonstrations to express their outrage over the July 24 racist killing of a 43-year-old black worker, Eric Garner.
Known as a “gentle giant,” Eric’s nickname was Nice. If you needed something and didn’t have the money, he would help you. Eric sold single cigarettes to try to get by, but wasn’t selling them at the time of his murder. After trying to break up a fight between two other people, he was choked to death by one cop as several others held him down. Unfortunately for the working class, this is not unusual. Unfortunately for the cops, there was indisputable evidence of this particular brutal attack. The soundtrack of Eric Garner saying, “I can’t breathe” over and over can be heard on a video from the scene, recorded by an antiracist young man. The next day, a second video documented the failure of the cops or EMTs to try to help the victim for nearly seven minutes after he stopped responding.
Even so, the prosecutors, the press and the politicians are still talking about “investigating,” but in essence are in cahoots to terrorize mainly black working-class men.
Broken Capitalism
Targeting minor crimes and violations is the policy of liberal New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. His reappointed police commissioner, Bill Bratton, first established a “broken windows” enforcement policy in New York in the 1990s, based on the racist theories of social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. This policy has led to record numbers of arrests in New York despite a plummeting crime rate. In reality, it is designed to break down poor and working-class people, especially black and Latin workers. The murder of Eric Garner was no accident. He was trying to fight back against police harassment; he had told lawyers at Legal Aid that he wanted to take his cases to trial.
Ramarley Graham, Kimani Gray, Shantel Davis, Kyam Livingston — all slaughtered by the cops in the past few years in New York. The local bosses “investigate,” but there can be no justice for these families under capitalism. In these committees against police murders, PLP is struggling around this point. Many protesters were also receptive to CHALLENGE and our communist leaflet about the killing of Eric Garner.
The murder spree by the racist criminal injustice system has occurred amid a growing attack on the entire working class. Real unemployment in the U.S. has been growing every year, and is even more brutal in poor neighborhoods. Wages have fallen for over 40 years. Falling wages and unemployment spur these racist killings. The capitalist ruling class needs to intimidate workers into not fighting back, and uses racism to try to divide us. The real broken window is capitalism.
Cops’ Crime Spree on Staten Island
While talking to people at the memorial site where Eric was killed, we heard two other stories of people severely beaten by cops in Staten Island in the last month. According to the New York Daily News, “seven of the city’s top 10 most-sued officers — and 14 of the city’s top 50 most-sued officers — are assigned to a Staten Island narcotics unit working in the territory of the 120th Precinct….The unit has racked up a staggering amount of lawsuits despite being the smallest narcotics bureau in the city.”
Eric Garner’s murder was shocking but not surprising. What else can we expect from a racist criminal injustice system in a notoriously racist preserve like Staten Island? Even electing liberal politicians won’t buffer us from racist murder; elections are a passive dead end. At the same time, the capitalist class is preparing for bigger wars. To fund them, they must steal even more profits by cutting wages, jobs and benefits to workers.
Under capitalism, workers produce all of society’s wealth but are ultimately expendable. The only justice for the working class will come with a communist revolution to smash capitalism once and for all.

Brooklyn, NY, July 21 — Outside Brooklyn Criminal Courts Building at 120 Schermerhorn Street, a mother still grieving for her daughter after a year, faced off against three court cops who told her she had to move her car away from the front of the courthouse.
“No parking,” one of them said. He wore three stripes. The mother’s voice, breaking but angry, said, “You killed my daughter in this building. Why aren’t you examining that and not me parking my car?” Her car had a large banner of Kyam Livingston’s photo surrounded by the dates of her birth and death. “Go inside and send out the captain. I’ll talk to him,” the mother said. The officers retreated.
No captain came out while a picket line was gathering. A few reporters from television news and newspapers showed up. No captain appeared. The chants started, “We want Justice for Kyam Livingston, Killed in a Brooklyn Cell!” The picket line grew larger as more people turned up from work. The chanting got louder and stronger. And then speeches began on a loudspeaker explaining that a racist system that can kill a black woman simply by refusing to get her medical care when she was clearly in distress for seven hours does not deserve to exist. The sounds of the picket line echoed down the street.
One-Year Memorial
This demonstration was larger and angrier than usual. Kyam’s mother had brought large photos of her daughter which some of the demonstrators carried. She also handed each demonstrator a red rose to carry in memory of her daughter. Small electric candles were given to everyone to turn on in unison. Balloons were released into the gathering dark and people watched them float higher and higher. For many it was a memorable moment. One woman struggled to maintain her erect posture as she walked on the picket line. There were the young, the old, black, white, Latin, men and women united in grief and anger.
The court police almost disappeared at the militancy of the demonstration. When the struggle against the cops for allowing Kyam to die first began one year ago, the officials would not release to the family the surveillance tapes of the cell or the names of the officers involved. The struggle has forced them to reveal the names and the videos, proving what they knew to be true all along. They now want those responsible to be brought to justice for racist murder.
To ensure that the officials don’t doubt that we will be back, every speaker said this is a continuing and growing struggle. The family is also demanding changes in the way those facing incarceration are handled. The committee wants to clean up the racist culture of indifference towards those waiting to be charged at Brooklyn Central Bookings and clean up the filth people have to endure while they are waiting. Anti-racist struggles like this are important for the survival of the working class in this racist, violent, and greedy system. PLP is fighting to end the system where racism rules the day and the bosses use their cops, courts, and prisons to threaten and divide workers.
The Progressive Labor Party knows that it’s necessary to end capitalism to destroy racism and all of the filth this system produces. This is the beginning of another year of attempting to build the Party as the agency of change. Dare to struggle, dare to win. Join us.

“I personally don’t think that race was a factor in the incident involved in this tragic death” (AM News) said NYC police commissioner Bill Bratton, referring to the murder of Eric Garner, a black father and grandfather.
Racism is so intricately woven within the fabric of capitalism that the untrained eye could easily overlook its repeating patterns as merely loose stitches within the system or within flawed individuals.
The murder of Eric Garner, like the attacks on thousands of working-class black and Latin workers and youth in the U.S., is in fact racist, not only because cop Daniel Pantaleo was white (Shantel Davis’s murderer was a black cop); it is racist because police are trained to target poor working-class neighborhoods, where the population is predominately black and Latin.
The ruling class uses violence to maintain control over the working class and to intimidate impoverished workers to accept their conditions. They use the police force to carry this out. Black cop, white cop all the same — racist terror is the name of the game.
Bill Bratton, whose policing philosophy isn’t much different from that of former commissioner Ray Kelly, has escalated the possibility of these racist attacks. His “broken windows” policy — which claims that punishing small infractions, such as vandalism, or jumping a subway turnstile ­— will deter more serious crimes is ineffectual and only creates a longer thread of injustice in these low-income areas. The fact that Bratton promises to “correct” the police department’s damaged relationship with these communities, while applying the “broken windows” theory, is a blatant contradiction.
 Many people in our class believed that when Mayor DeBlasio was elected, he would work to put an end to police brutality because of his stance against stop-and-frisk. However, when DeBlasio selected Bratton, who is well-known for his racist policies, it showed that this mayor, like all the others, serves the interests of the ruling class: to keep the working class divided in order to maintain power. Systemic racism will continue as long as capitalism exists.
Racism means we’ve got to FIGHT BACK! Police murder means we’ve got to FIGHT BACK! Allegedly, Eric Garner sold cigarettes that were not being taxed. Somebody was losing their profits and in the rulers’ minds that was reason enough for Garner to lose his life. Profits over people: that’s capitalism.
To see the videos and hear this man repeatedly crying out, “I can’t breathe!” to no avail, showed the callousness of the police. The same lack of compassion was shown to Kyam Livingston who called out in pain for seven hours only to die because of the lack of medical attention. And again, a few days after the murder of Eric Garner, a young man was choked and punched by a cop at a subway in Harlem as he was trying to take him into custody.
Capitalism means we’ve got to FIGHT BACK!
A Comrade

WARSAW, July 23 — Meet Marek. He’s in his late 50s and has been driving a 40-ton semi-trailer truck between Eastern and Western Europe for the past 35 years.
For decades, the two-lane R2 was the only road between Warsaw and the German border. Today, Marek drives the 454-kilometer (280-mile), four-lane divided superhighway, the A2.
“Before 2004 [when Poland joined the European Union (EU)], my work was simpler and better,” says Marek. “I also earned more. Today, there isn’t any border any longer, but wages have fallen. Many drivers get paid by the kilometer. Now, your income often depends on how far you get. And the number and the seriousness of the accidents have gone up.” Some trucks are hurtling along at 140 km/h (88 mph). And “anyone who drives the A2 regularly sees serious accidents again and again,” says Marek. “Braking a 40-ton truck is no easy thing.”
Of course, the cost of training drivers for the new superhighway would have eaten into profits. And as for speeding — well, time is money.
One might think inventing a new machine or building a four-lane divided highway to replace a two-lane road would improve life. But not under capitalism. As Karl Marx commented, “The aim of the capitalistic application of machinery….is a means for producing surplus value.” Profit, plain and simple.
The purpose of the A2 is to intensify the exploitation of low-paid Polish workers. In April, 2013 the average net monthly wage in Poland was $945.
The European Commission’s March 2011 document “Frontier Economics” says, “Good transport connectivity is regarded as key to supporting economic activity and inward investment in the Lodz and Wielkopolska Regions….[which] have attracted significant inward investment from multi-national organizations in the food, distribution, electrical manufacturing and car manufacturing sectors” — Nestle, Unicom, Wrigley, Volkswagen and Skoda.
The A2 itself is a capitalist money-maker. Built as a public-private partnership meant the public sector (the EU and Polish government) took the risk, while private corporations rake in the profits.
The construction companies charged 2.5 billion euros ($3.45 billion) for the final section of the A2, largely coming from the European Investment Bank. The rest came from bank consortiums and private investors, who got a 40-year concession to operate the toll road.
Marek isn’t the only worker whose quality of life has plunged. Today, there’s a fast food restaurant (belonging to a U.S. chain) at practically every A2 rest stop. A retired worker shakes his head: “On the R2, I always stopped at one restaurant called the Las Vegas….There was always something fresh to eat. You don’t get that here.”
At the Las Vegas, Magda, 26, has worked a 12-hour shift at the old R2 for the past two years. “My shift begins at 7:20 a.m…. We clean the rest stop, check the stocks and of course serve the customers. However,…when the A2 opened, the number of customers fell practically overnight.” The boss has laid off one-third of the workers.
On June 4, the A2 was officially named Freedom Highway by Polish president Broneslaw Pomerowski and German president Joachim Gauck. But the freedom is only for the capitalists.
So long as the profit system exists, scientific and technological progress will be used to increase the exploitation of the working class. The only realistic answer is a workers’ revolution to establish communism, when progress will serve to lighten the day’s toil.