We just attended a memorial service for a fallen comrade. This inspired us to write about him because his life embodies what it means to be a communist in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Hundreds of workers attended his memorial. All friends: from his family, from his childhood, coworkers and fellow church members, from many struggles in which he was involved, and from comrades in PLP.  
He attended a local college where he met his wife and PLP. His road to communist consciousness took a turn when he began supporting a strike of immigrant workers. He and his family immersed themselves in that fight. They built relationships that lasted beyond the strike, building bonds of working-class solidarity and friendship.
For those of us around during that period it was a learning moment. We all gained a clearer understanding of what it means to organize for the PLP, to build a communist base and to serve the working class, particularly during a time of class struggle and fightback. It was clear he loved his working-class brothers and sisters.
The strike changed him. He saw how the workers fought hard, faced racist attacks and demonstrated bravery in the face of possible deportations. They emerged from the strike with a short-term reform victory. This reality shook him. He realized that despite the victory, the workers would still be wage slaves, earning very little. They would still live in a world where the working class is divided by capitalist borders and subject to deportation at any time.
It was through this practice of supporting the strike, building the class struggle and a base that he discovered the only way workers could be freed was through overthrowing the capitalist system with communist revolution. It was then that he joined the PLP. We had spent years talking to him about communism and the need for the Party, but what transformed him was engaging in class struggle and becoming part of the fight.
In his two-and-a-half year battle with cancer he continued to be active in the communist movement. Two weeks before he died, he attended a communist leadership school.
His family and the working class have suffered a great loss. Our class will miss his leadership, his commitment and his dry, biting sense of humor. In his honor we must all do more to engage in the class struggle with the goal of serving the working class and building a base for communism. It is the least we can do for a comrade who loved the working class until the end. We pledge to stand by his family and pick up the struggle.
Chicago Comrades

Fifty years after his assassination, John F. Kennedy, a leading instigator of U.S. genocide in Vietnam, still proves useful to war-making U.S. imperialists.  As they mobilize for wider wars with their imperialist rivals, U.S. rulers are using the anniversary to revive JFK’s militaristic appeals for “sacrifice” and “service.”
For the working class, this “sacrifice” means mass racist unemployment and cuts in health care, food stamps and other social services. It means more racist police attacks on black and Latino youth, mass racist incarceration, widespread poverty, the intensified oppression of working-class women, and the mass jailing and deportation of immigrant workers. This is the state of rising fascism in the United States of the 21st century.
The bosses’ idea of “service” is to push jobless youth into the military to fight and die in imperialist wars. To groom the officers to help lead this bloody charge, the bosses are resurrecting ROTC on college campuses. Barack Obama’s Dream Act would use the promise of citizenship to recruit tens of thousands of immigrant Latino youth into the military. (As Pentagon generals have noted, the capitalists are facing an acute personnel shortage in their military.)
But Obama’s ruling-class masters also recognize that oppressing the working class won’t solve all their problems. For U.S. capitalism to survive, they know they must discipline their own ranks as well. Witness the recent deal made between the U.S. Justice Department and JPMorgan Chase. The largest bank in the U.S., Chase has $2.46 trillion in assets. It agreed to fork over $13 billion (roughly half its annual profits) as an example to the other main finance capitalists. By accepting the government’s penalty, Chase was sending a message: The rulers’ short-term greed must be subordinated to the long-range greater good of their class.
Capitalists’ Splits, Then and Now
The renewed focus on Kennedy’s killing sheds light on today’s divisions within the U.S. capitalist class and how they weaken its fighting capacity. The current split involves the billionaire Koch brothers and the Tea Party group, which makes most of its profits domestically, versus the internationally oriented finance capitalist wing on Wall Street. The finance wing needs a broader war to protect its control over energy and cheap labor abroad, and to repel challenges to the dominance of U.S. imperialism.
In the 1960s, the rulers were facing a similar split. Domestic oil interests were up in arms against JFK’s reported plans to revoke the oil depletion allowance. According to one theory, Kennedy was killed by domestic oil interests who were unwilling to cut their profits for the imperialist cause.
Kennedy’s Racist War in Vietnam
In his commemorative November 22 proclamation, Obama said of JFK, “He called a generation to service and summoned a Nation to greatness.” He was echoing Kennedy’s inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
What Obama left unsaid was how Kennedy’s “call” led to the deaths of tens of thousands of GIs for the glory of the U.S. global empire: “The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.” U.S. capitalists today have a renewed interest in a compulsory draft, like the one under Kennedy that forced more than 300,000 working-class youth into the U.S. war machine. The recruits were needed for the run-up to the Vietnam War, a racist, imperialist atrocity against workers who were slandered as sub-human.
The imperialist Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs offered a clearer picture of Kennedy by reprinting a 1957 piece by the future president. JFK praised the U.S. takeover of military operations in Vietnam from the defeated French bosses. He also discussed the tightrope the U.S. needed to walk between a manageable ground war and an unpredictable nuclear clash with the Soviet Union, or “the need to face the prospect of having to wage a limited war while holding the levers of unlimited destruction.”
Once in office, JFK approved the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and increased the number of U.S. military “advisers” in Vietnam, notably Green Beret assassins. His war council included arch-imperialists like Robert McNamara and McGeorge and William Bundy, who remained in office after the Dallas shooting. Under Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, these officials directed a failed campaign that slaughtered more than three million Vietnamese workers and 58,000 GIs.
Like Kennedy, Obama Needs $$$ from the Ruling Class
Along with working-class “service,” Kennedy demanded wartime “sacrifice” from the entire capitalist class in the form of higher taxes and tighter government control. On April 11, 1962, JFK lashed out at Big Steel after it rejected his war-minded demand to freeze prices:
“It [will] make it more difficult for American goods to compete in foreign markets, more difficult to withstand competition from foreign imports, and thus more difficult to improve our balance of payments position, and stem the flow of gold [which French capitalists demanded at the time]. And it is necessary to stem it for our national security, if we’re going to pay for our security commitments abroad.” JFK explicitly challenged U.S. Steel’s patriotism: “Some time ago I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country and I asked the steel companies. In the last 24 hours we had their answer.”
Kennedy had similar problems reining in the domestic oil bosses. He ran into bitter opposition when he threatened to end their oil depletion allowance, a tax break worth hundreds of millions a year to Texas oilmen. (The first 27.5 per cent of oil revenues were tax exempt.) But for the main financial capitalists, the tax break was a problem because it depleted the Pentagon’s war chest.
Given the stakes, there was any number of domestic-oriented capitalists who wished Kennedy dead. But the dominant wing of U.S. bosses desperately wants to portray JFK’s murder as something other than a fight within the ruling class. Leading Wall Street banker and Warren Commission member John J. McCloy argued that it was beneficial for domestic tranquility to conclude that Oswald acted alone (New York Times, 8/20/97).
Imperialists vs. Isolationists
For Obama and the U.S. imperialists he serves, isolationist Tea Partiers and small-government advocates like David and Charles Koch constitute major obstacles to their war aims. Where the Rockefeller-ExxonMobil-JPMorgan Chase-run Foreign Affairs extolled Kennedy’s war planning, the Koch-funded Cato Foundation marked his passing with scorn. It wrote,
JFK and LBJ set out to prove how much the U.S. government could accomplish at home and abroad, a mission that endeared them to those who believe in the promiscuous use of power. They ended up proving how much it could not accomplish, and how little extravagance can buy (11/21/13).
Differences among U.S. capitalists over the need for imperialist war are as sharp now as they were in the 1960s. We can’t predict how or when that war will begin, or who the main combatants will be. But as the main wing of U.S. finance capitalism moves to discipline the internal opposition, it may only be a matter of time before the two sides resume killing one another.

NEW YORK CITY, November 25 — It’s official. The City University of New York (CUNY) is a repressive organ of the racist capitalist state. Today over 100 students and faculty protested the Board of Trustees’ proposal of the “Policy on Expressive Activity,” which exposes “free speech” under capitalism for the myth that it is. Various networks have been building for this rally for weeks. Progressive Labor Party organized friends at a number of local colleges. Newer members are gaining experience in putting our politics forward at these events.
A member of PLP read the SOS letter from Haiti, where fascism translates to tear gas, grenades, and bullets. One student lost a hand after being maimed by a stun grenade from the national police (see page 8). This is what CUNY students and faculty can look forward to from the administration. We need to fight fascism with communist internationalism. “If you want to find out more,” the PLP member said, “come grab a CHALLENGE!” Many protesters thanked the PL’er who brought the international greeting. They took the paper; they are open to the Party’s red ideas.
CHALLENGE has been a crucial part of our struggle at CUNY. We distribute it in a mass way every week to students who otherwise would be unaware of the militarization on our campuses. We use it in our Party clubs to evaluate our work. Our friends read the paper and ask us intriguing questions, like: Why are these attacks happening now? While handing out CHALLENGE at this rally, we reconnected with old friends and exchanged contacts with prospective new ones. We’re also struggling with our friends to write for the paper.
Twenty kkkops were present outside to confine the protest to half the street. One higher-ranking cop threatened Taffy, a suspended student leader, to “watch out.” Many other cops were guarding entrances inside surrounding buildings. These were not campus cops but the racist New York Police Department, the biggest police force in the world’s most powerful imperialist state. It’s not by accident that the NYPD has expanded into a global terror operation. The same force that conducts “special interrogations” (read: torture) in Pakistan, Egypt, and Afghanistan is more than willing to assault protesting college students and faculty. One PL’er made the point that militarization is not limited to CUNY — it’s an international phenomenon.  As the bosses prepare for broader global conflict, we are entering a period of rising fascism. The increased use of city cops to quell on-campus dissent is one reflection of this trend.  
The trustees’ new policy calls for increased police presence and restrictions on all public activity, from leafleting to congregating in groups. In other words, the CUNY administration and police would determine the limits of a rally against the college president. The campus cops can change the date, time, or location of any demonstration — or shut it down entirely. This repression reflects the CUNY bosses’ weakness and their fear of the might of an organized working class.
While those rallying outside were mainly students, twenty-five faculty members in the Professional Staff Congress expressed their dissent inside the trustees’ meeting. The Baruch College building was guarded like a criminal court. A squad of cops escorted small groups of five to eight professors and other staff to the elevators. Metal detectors screened everyone who entered the meeting room. Racist board Chairman Benno Schmidt said that anyone who interrupted or disrupted the meeting would be ejected by police and face criminal charges. In a loud voice, a professor asked for one minute to report on how CUNY officials were suppressing student protests with suspensions and arrests. His request was denied.
Liberal and phony-left groups are calling the Policy on Expressive Activity an attack on First Amendment rights. They are leading a campaign to “defend our fight to free expression.” This represents the sharpest disagreement between PL’ers and the fake left.  PLP understands that universities are not neutral spaces where ideas can be debated democratically. We live under a capitalist dictatorship where the bosses change or break their own laws as required by their profit system.
One protester led a chant, “Our People, Our Fight, People of the World Unite! We Got One Solution — Bring on the Revolution!” PLP has a different chant: “The Only Solution Is Communist Revolution!” That’s the kind of revolution students and workers need. Others provide false hope when they say that our colleges should be “ruled by the people” or that “we need to take back CUNY.” The University does not belong to the working class. Like all institutions under capitalism, it belongs to the capitalist rulers. By planning on passing the Policy on Expressive Activity, the Board of Trustees has made this clear.
CUNY is a racist institution where black, Latino, and South Asian students are shuffled into community colleges and ROTC. The senior colleges are increasingly white. This segregation divides students and leads us to blame each other for the failures of capitalism (full analysis next issue). We need to do a better job of organizing across colleges and fighting racism, and also connecting our struggle to the brutal imperialism in places like Haiti.

NEW YORK CITY, November 23 — For the second year, Columbia University (CU) students have been organizing a group, Student Worker Solidaity (SWS), to support workers’ struggles on campus, and they are now beginning to explore racist and anti-worker aspects of CU’s expansion into West Harlem. Last year the students militantly agitated for workers at Barnard (the affiliated women’s college) and for employees of the faculty dining room, who were being miserably exploited by their respective administrations. Partial victories were won in both cases.
This year began with a campaign to lower the temperature in the sweltering kitchen of one of the dining halls. The University tried to claim that ventilating the kitchen would force a raise in tuition and that they had ascertained that students were not concerned about the issue. But SWS demonstrated in the dining hall, collected about a thousand signatures on a petition and confronted the administration, together with the workers. Given SWS’s history of mobilizing hundreds of students, the administration quickly gave in and took measures to cool off the kitchen.
Now SWS is planning to fight the injustices wrought by Columbia’s building a new campus on 33 acres. That land was previously occupied by small businesses and low-income housing for mostly black and Latino residents, all of which have been leveled. The unemployment rate in Harlem is near 50 percent for young black men. The average income is about $30,000, making paying unsubsidized rents impossible. Although Columbia promised jobs and monetary benefits to the community in compensation for lost jobs and housing, none of this has happened. The whole surrounding area is also being affected by gentrification, with landlords raising rents and forcing out low-income tenants to offer housing to students, faculty and other wealthier tenants attracted by the lure of Columbia.
Last week about 40 students joined a walking tour of the expansion area, where they heard from local housing organizers and a restaurant owner who was forced to move at great expense. They learned about Columbia’s plan to build a biohazard lab right on 125 Street. One older student related how a group of students and community residents had occupied 125 Street for five days in May, 2011, to protest the expansion. On the weekend, three students came to a conference against racist gentrification involving Harlem and Brooklyn tenants (see page 5).
SWS has now built alliances with several other campus groups who came to an expanded meeting to plan how to fight CU’s attack on its Harlem neighbors. They will build upon the research and struggles of smaller groups of students over the last several years and are aiming toward developing struggles relevant to jobs and housing. Some students have also been supporting the City College (CCNY) students who are fighting militarization and fascism on their campus. They attended the court hearing of two CCNY students who were arrested for fighting the closing of the political student organizing center on campus.
Several of the more left-wing students have begun to raise a broader political context in the group. It is important that the mostly well-off CU students do not simply see themselves as fighters against inequality from a moral point of view, but recognize that they are future workers, who will likely have difficulty finding employment and housing themselves. Capitalism is the cause of unemployment and increasing racism, fascism and war. The declining position of the U.S. in relation to China and others is making those problems more acute. It will take unity between low- and high-paid workers, men and women, citizens and non-citizens to have a chance of overthrowing this system and building an egalitarian communist society.
As of now, most students are taking CHALLENGE and some are meeting to discuss the ideas of communism and revolution. With hard work, many more will come to see the need for revolutionary change over the coming period as we engage in struggle together.