No. 11, December 2014 Table of Contents Selected articles linked  Newspaper of CUNY students from the Revolutionary Reconstruction Club and Internationalist Clubs, for the program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, published in accord with the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International Click on image to left for pdf version of complete issue.

 

Uproot Racism – Only Revolution Can Bring Justice! From Ferguson to New York: All Out Against Police Terror! Across the country, hundreds of thousands anxiously awaited the news from Missouri. Then came the dreaded announcement: white killer cop Darren Wilson would face no charges for gunning down 18-year-old black youth Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb last August. Mixed with the outrage, fury and indignation, many felt devastated by the inescapable truth: there is no justice in racist America. That night, November 24, thousands protested in at least 90 U.S. cities; by the next night there were tens of thousands of protesters in 170 cities nationwide. And they haven’t stopped. The grand jury gave a green light for police brutality and murder of black and Latino youth, particularly young men. Many chant that “the whole damn system is guilty.” We say that system is capitalism, which from the days of chattel slavery to Jim Crow segregation to mass incarceration today has been built on black oppression. And the only way to end cop terror is through revolution – socialist revolution – to bring this racist system down. The Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York (CUNY), along with the Internationalist Group and Class Struggle Education Workers, marched in the protests from the outset and called a speak-out the next day which drew over 100 students, faculty and workers at Hunter College. We put forward a revolutionary, working-class program, declaring “No Justice in the Capitalist Courts” and calling for worker/black/immigrant mobilization against police terror. We linked cop terror in Ferguson with the police massacre of students from Ayotzinapa in Mexico. While many repeated, “No justice, no peace,” we chanted “Only revolution can bring justice.”From Ferguson to New York: All Out Against Police Terror!  (December 2014)

Racist Outrage: NYPD Cop Who Killed Eric Garner Walks “Eric Garner, Michael Brown – Shut the Whole System Down!” A week after the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, a Staten Island grand jury announced that no charges would be filed against the NYPD cop who chokeholded Eric Garner to death in late July. The fact that the murder of Eric Garner was caught on video and still the murderers got off exposes all the phony talk by NYC Democratic mayor de Blasio and Democratic president Obama about “retraining” police and putting body cameras on cops. As tens of thousands went into the streets nationwide in the next days, protesters chanted Eric’s last words, “I can’t breathe.” The CUNY Internationalist Clubs joined in the protests from the first hour and held a speak-out the next day to denounce this racist atrocity. Our chants, “Eric Garner, Michael Brown – Shut the whole system down!” and “Only revolution can bring justice!” were widely picked up. The stark fact is that to do away with racist police terror for good, we must kick out the racist ruling class that the police “serve and protect.” “Eric Garner, Michael Brown – Shut the Whole System Down!” (December 2014)

Bourgeois Feminism vs. Women’s Liberation Democratic Party: Faux Friends of Women As the 2014 election campaign got down to the wire, the Democrats appealed to their base, desperately trying to get out the black and women’s vote. Yet attacks on women’s basic democratic rights have accelerated with Obama in the White House, and not just because the Republicans are determined to undermine the Democrats. There have been 231 state laws restricting abortions in the last three years alone. What is behind the Democrats’ faux-passionate appeals to “feminism” and women’s rights? The Democratic Party poses as the “friend” of women, labor and every oppressed group in order to control their struggles in the interest of capital. While capitalist politicians hack away at these basic democratic rights of women, the Democrats “triangulate” by posing soft-core versions of Republican policies, and then cynically trying to get votes as defenders of women. A prime example is Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton a friend of women? Ask the women workers at the Haitian sweatshop she sponsored. Democratic Party: Faux Friends of Women (December 2014)

Colorado Students Protest Censoring of History, Attacks on Teachers This fall, hundreds of high school students in Colorado’s second largest school district participated in massive walkouts in protest of the censorship of their history curriculum. Students held daily demonstrations for two weeks in late September and early October, holding signs that said “Stop Censoring History” and “We Support Our Teachers.” Nevertheless, the conservative Jefferson County school board majority insisted it would continue its plan to purge the curriculum. Why are these reactionaries so afraid of history? Because they fear that questioning patriotic myths about America’s past will lead to students challenging capitalism’s status quo today. The protests showed the potential for united student-teacher struggle. But while their protest was directed at a particularly reactionary school board, the ruling-class assault on public education is coming from conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats alike. And the Jeffco school board action did not stop student protest. In mid-November, thousands of high school seniors in the Denver metropolitan area refused to take high-stakes, state-mandated science and social studies tests. Colorado Students Protest Censoring of History, Attacks on Teachers (December 2014)

CUNY Students, Faculty Speak Out Against Racist Repression The heinous police murder of Eric Garner in Staten Island, followed by that of Michael Brown and the military/police occupation of Ferguson, Missouri, brought a wave of outrage across the United States and around the world. Thousands of anti-racist young and working people of all ethnicities took to the streets in solidarity with the besieged African American population of Ferguson, and with the families of Brown, Garner and others targeted by deadly police brutality. On September 3, the CUNY Internationalist Clubs got a strong response to our call for a “Speak-Out Against Racist Repression” at CUNY’s Hunter College in midtown Manhattan. Here is a report on the protest, with photos and excerpts from the remarks of participants. CUNY Students, Faculty Speak Out Against Racist Repression (8 September 2014)