CHICAGO, July 14 — Supporters of Trayvon Martin gradually gathered at what first looked like a lonely intersection. News crews and photographers were first to arrive but slowly and steadily students and workers began arriving. The march organizers were college students who were outraged and emotionally affected by the verdict.
Progressive Labor Party members started speaking with the people and distributed 250 CHALLENGES and 700 PL leaflets. All were well- received and 17 contacts were made.
As the crowd grew one could sense the disbelief over the verdict, the anger over another injustice. Reforms, non-violence and prayer were part of this demonstration’s intended message.
However, with every step of the march PL’s message resounded throughout: To fight back and see that the present system is killing us — that racism and cops are tools for the bosses to maximize their profits. The message was so loud cars driving by would honk in support and keep in pace with our chants to let us know that our message was coming across.
As the march approached its destination, PLP members and friends continued to distribute CHALLENGES and flyers, highlighting the key struggles around nationalism, racism and non-violence. The 300 marchers heard the speakers answer the question, “What do we do from here?” with a call for non-violence and prayer and to sign an NAACP petition, reflecting the outlook of the outrage of the organizers, not the protestors.
We had a banner reading, “It’s time for Communist Revolution.” That’s our class’s only alternative to racist cops, courts and their racist laws.

The rulers’ latest education reforms show how the state and the law serve capitalist interests against the working class. Privatizing education enables a handful of millionaires to turn the educational system into a commodity and get rich from the labor of hundreds of teachers and millions of students and parents.
Education is not just a business for the ruling class; it’s also an important way to control workers ideologically. Their education reforms will promote even more individualist, racist and fascist that ideology the bosses need.
Reforms Push Individualism
The use of evaluations promotes individualism because teachers must focus individually on getting their students to pass standardized tests to “guarantee” their jobs. The imposition of quotas means that those who pay the most get a “better” education. This fosters individualism and racist inequality. The students are trained within the individualist criteria of competition, which is what eventually the bosses need for them to produce in the labor market.
Reforms Are Racist
By using standardized tests, without concern for the cultural, social and economic differences of certain regions, indigenous and marginalized communities will be at a disadvantage and as a result will be evaluated in a racist manner and found lacking. This sets them up to receive fewer resources and increases their poverty and oppression.
In Mexico, the capitalists have concentrated their educational investments in the country’s most industrialized nothern regions. Their decisions generate profits, and do not respond to the needs of the working class. As a result, the southern region has been left behind educationally, which is racist. The educational reforms will worsen this situation by assigning resources based on the results of the evaluations.
The reforms will be used to discredit public education and promote private education. This, in turn, will foster an increase in racist inequality.
Reforms Are Fascist
The bosses need a working class that’s easy to control, is productive but with a minimum of technical training. The reforms, through evaluations, try to standardize our youth with a fascist and competitive ideology.
In the capitalist jungle only the “most capable” survive (meaning those who get “better” evaluations) — those who follow the system’s ideology. That’s fascism. Our youth will be forced to work for miserable salaries under repressive conditions. The reforms create the ideological basis for these conditions.
The Education We Need
Reforms like these are implemented around the world to undermine the working conditions of education workers, break their collective contracts, their benefits and their unions. But particularly this is an attack against the youth and their parents, against the whole working class!
The purpose of these reforms is to reproduce capitalist ideology and allow a handful of millionaires to make a bundle in the education business. We must confront these attacks with the international unity of the working class.
We workers need an education based on principles favorable to the working class — scientific, collective, comradely and which promotes solidarity. Education must be focused on solving the problems and needs of our class. That can only be achieved in a communist society in which workers hold state power. To achieve that, we must destroy the capitalist system with a communist revolution.
For that goal we must build a communist party, not a bosses’ electoral one. This party must fight the bosses’ attacks like these reforms, and must train and educate the working class to build a new society.
The role of the teachers is essential to reach this goal because they have the potential to promote the unity of the whole working class to wrest power from the oppressive ruling class. The teachers also have the opportunity to challenge the individualistic, racist, sexist and fascist ideology that capitalism promotes among parents and students. This struggle is essential to destroying the capitalist system.

DETROIT, July 26 — There are many lessons to be learned from the city of Detroit being forced into bankruptcy. The bosses and the media they own would have us believe that good wages, health care and pensions are the cause of every financial crisis. But the Detroit bankruptcy is an attempted “Smash and Grab” by the bosses to steal $3.5 billion in city workers’ pensions and $5.7 billion in retiree health care. The bankruptcy will enable a federal bankruptcy judge to impose further cuts to city services and to void union contracts.
If they pull it off here, there is an estimated $3.5 trillion in city and state pensions around the U.S., $134 billion in New York City alone. With union leaders committed to their bosses’ success and politically wedded to the profit system, the bosses have driven down wages, destroyed private-sector pensions, doubled the “normal” unemployment rate, attacked the pensions and healthcare of retired auto and steel workers, and are out for more. Every attack can be “doubled” when applying it to black, Latino and immigrant workers. Which brings us to Detroit, with an 80% black population.
Charlei LeDuff of the Detroit Free Press wrote in the New York Times (7/25), “Of Detroit’s debt of at least $18 billion, about $7 billion is secured by collateral like casino revenues and utility taxes. That means creditors — read: big banks — will get paid. Of the remaining $11 billion or so in unsecured debt, about $9 billion is owed to retirees and current municipal workers…These debts come in the form of promised pension checks and health care benefits, all backed by a false, unsecured promise. These are the people who are likely to lose out.”
Thanks to the Bush and Obama bailouts and billions in UAW concessions, the auto bosses and bankers are once again making billions in profits. Yet Detroit is a hollowed-out shell. Banks and auto companies make profits, cities don’t. The latter provide services, and that costs tax money. Soaring racist unemployment, half the population it had in 1970 and lower wages all add up to reduced income tax revenue. The bosses and Obama are not about to bail out Detroit.
Chrysler’s Jefferson North plant on Detroit’s east side, in the midst of mass poverty and surrounded by barbed wire, is producing $2 billion in annual profits (NYTimes, 7/15). Most workers in the plant make $12/hr. and have no pension, reduced health care, and the union is in the midst of a 5-year no-strike contract. These workers cannot afford the $50,000 Grand Cherokees they build. When they go home, many have no street lights. If anyone in their family should have a medical emergency, they cannot count on an ambulance showing up.
The racist profit system can never guarantee a future for the international working class. For decades, Detroit and its auto workers led the whole working class in winning a higher standard of living, from decent wages to home ownership, from retirements you could live on to some of the best health care coverage for U.S. workers. These hard-won advances often required violent mass struggle, from the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike to the 1967 armed rebellion against racist police terror. These victories have been wiped out. As long as the bosses hold power we will be fighting for crumbs and that can never be guaranteed. Only a PLP of millions leading tens of millions more can crush the bosses and build a communist society to meet the needs of the international working class.

Hammond, IN, July 20 — In front of the federal court house, over 100 angry workers protested the racist verdict from the trial of George Zimmerman, murderer of Trayvon Martin.  The demonstration was sponsored by the Rainbow/Push coalition, but much of the contingent were community residents and friends. The misleaders of the protest offered workers no real solutions to the callous and racist murder of black youth under capitalism.  
Instead, one organizer offered the repealing of the “Stand Your Ground” law in Indiana as a means to keep black youth safe from racist vigilantes in their neighborhood.  However, Zimmerman’s lawyers didn’t even have to invoke “Stand Your Ground” in a trial that clearly demonstrated how the racist kkkourts see black youth as expendable.  Zimmerman’s lawyers said that he was using self-defense when he approached an unarmed black teenager with a gun and shot him down in cold blood.  Additionally, repealing “Stand Your Ground” wouldn’t address the racist police murders of black youth that is enabled and protected by the same kkkourts.
Another organizer requested that everyone in attendance pressure the U.S. Department of Justice to file a civil lawsuit against Zimmerman on behalf of Trayvon Martin’s parents.  Why should workers believe that justice can be found in any of the bosses’ courts?  Even in the best-case scenario, Martin’s parents get paid off while their son, and hundreds of others like him, are refused true justice.  Regardless of what the bosses tell us on a daily basis, a worker’s life has no price tag.
As if things couldn’t get worse, another organizer said, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.”  This comes just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court removed the veil of voter equality by gutting the Voting Rights Act, not to mention the mass killing of black youth by racist police that has happened under Obama’s watch.  In addition, a point that all of these misleaders fail to mention is that black workers didn’t vote to gain the right to vote. A multi-racial  group of workers fought against the kkkops, the kkkourts, and the Ku Klux Klan to win the right for black workers to vote.  And even after all of the blood, sweat, and tears, voting has never helped the working class.  Instead, it has provided false hopes that workers have a say in a system that’s designed to exploit and oppress them.  Don’t vote, revolt!
Despite what all of these misleaders say, workers won’t find justice through the bosses’ laws or by fighting one or two laws! Workers won’t find justice through the bosses’ kkkourts or payoffs! Workers must not vote for their exploiters and oppressors!  To end racist murder, workers need a revolution!  Workers need state power!  Workers need communism!  Join PLP!