Revolution25¢September 2003No. 1

Defeat U.S. Imperialism!

Bloody Conquest of Iraq, Racist Attack on CUNYSame EnemySame EnemySame EnemySame EnemySame Enemy, Same F, Same F, Same F, Same F, Same Fight!ight!ight!ight!ight!

The Role of Students in the WorkersMovement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

AFP

By Moises DelgadoThe U.S. colonization of Iraq is directly

linked to the attack on CUNY – both are partof an all-out war on the oppressed. This waris being waged by the capitalist rulers andtheir Democratic and Republican politicians.It can be defeated only by mobilizing a morepowerful social force: that of the workingclass, at the head of all the oppressed, here,in Iraq, and around the world. Our role asstudents who want to change the world isto put our energies and skills in the serviceof this worldwide fight.

Iraqis are fighting back. Good! Our en-emy is here at home: the ruling class that wantsus to be cannon-fodder for their imperialistwars for world domination, that wants us towork for poverty wages (if we are luckyenough to get any job at all), and is trying tothrow large numbers of black, Latino, work-ing-class and immigrant students out ofschool. After all, learning can be dangerous –it can lead to questions. Military and policerecruiters on campus use phony promises totrick people into joining up for wars of con-quest abroad and repression at home. Themore students know about the real workingsand history of this society, the harder it maybe to fool them. This is another link betweenimperialist war and the drive to push tens ofthousands of us out of school.

So on June 28 tuition was hiked 25 per-cent! It is the biggest tuition hike since 1995.Across the U.S., tuition is being jacked up,particularly at public colleges. State govern-ments claim poverty and cite budget defi-cits caused by the war drive. Here in NewYork this goes together with the hike in tran-sit fares that makes getting to school evenless affordable than before – even thoughthe excuses for this increase were shown tobe a fraud.

Most recently, capitalist greed and capi-talist incompetence brought us the hugeNYC blackout. The ruling class wants to keepyou in the dark so you won’t know the truthabout their system. One way they do this isthrough bourgeois “peace” candidates likeDemocrat Howard Dean, or Green candidateNader in 2000, whose job is to hoodwinkopponents of the war and lead them into thetrap of capitalist electoral politics.

Revolutionary Marxism brings to lightthat the program of socialist revolution showsthe only way to put an end to capitalism’sendless wars, racism and exploitation.

Defend Hostos StudentDefend Hostos StudentDefend Hostos StudentDefend Hostos StudentDefend Hostos Student

Leader Miguel Malo!Leader Miguel Malo!Leader Miguel Malo!Leader Miguel Malo!Leader Miguel Malo!By Abram Negrete

This is a crucial moment in the fightagainst the repressive vendetta that theadministration of the City University of NewYork (CUNY) and District Attorney’s officehave been waging against Miguel Malo, Stu-dent Senate president at Hostos Commu-nity College.

For almost two years now, they havebeen trying to railroad Miguel for the “crime”of holding up a sign at an August 2001 pro-test against cuts in Spanish and bilingualprograms. They have pressed the false, dan-gerous and downright ridiculous charge thatMiguel supposedly “assaulted” two CUNY“peace officers” – when numerous facultyand student witnesses saw that it was Miguelwho was assaulted, by several campus cops

who threw him to the ground. They have“amended” their story and charges over andover (for the sixth time now on April 14),refused to turn over their videotapes of theprotest where Miguel was arrested, failed tobring key witnesses to court, and even triedto throw Miguel’s lawyer off the case.

On March 17, the DA’s office made a ver-bal motion to disqualify Miguel’s attorney,Ron McGuire, who has been defending CUNYstudents for many years. The DA’s “argument”was that McGuire should be disqualified be-cause he is also representing Miguel and oth-ers in a civil rights lawsuit against CUNY andthe campus police. McGuire filed the civil suitlast November on behalf of students at vari-ous CUNY campuses, charging that CUNY“peace officers” are systematically violatingstudents’ free speech rights.

The DA’s blatant and punitive attemptto prevent a defendant from having the le-gal counsel of his choice visibly shockedjust about everyone present that day, in-cluding jaded court personnel and lawyers

continued on page 2

Antiwar protesters chanting at March 5 rally at Hunter College, New York City. Internationalist Group banner calls todefeat U.S. imperialism, defend Iraq.

Sue K

ellogg

Miguel Malo

Revolution photo

present for other cases. The judge deniedthe verbal motion.

The DA’s highly unusual attemptshowed how determined the authorities areto make an example of Miguel Malo. Clearly,

continued on page 3

2 Revolution

Imperialist War on IraqiIn reality, the war on Iraq never stopped

since the first Gulf War of 1990-91 by GeorgeBush Senior. The deliberate bombing of water-works and electrical plants followed by a decadeof brutal economic “sanctions,” sponsored bythe UN, resulted in the deaths of one million chil-dren.. On March 20 of this year, having occu-pied Afghanistan and installed a puppet re-gime, George Bush Junior and his cohorts inthe twin capitalist parties launched a new warof aggression and conquest against Iraq.

Their pretexts and excuses have beenshown to be a pack of lies. While the U.S.rulers have huge stocks of weapons of massdestruction, and have used them repeatedly,there are no and were no WMDs in Iraq.The “documentation” claimed by Bush &Co. was provided by Britain’s Tony Blair,who doctored his dossier and drove a weap-ons expert who objected to suicide. It turnedout Blair cribbed an old paper by a grad stu-dent! Such plagiarism that would get thesefrat boys kicked out of any college.

The assault on Iraq has been an imperi-alist war in every sense of the word. TheHunter Internationalist Club and the Revolu-tionary Reconstruction Club at Bronx Com-munity College support the Trotskyist poli-tics of the Internationalist Group, U.S. secrtionof the League for the Fourth International. Indemonstration against the Iraq war, the IGstood for the defeat of the imperialists and thedefense of Iraq against this mass murder, in-vasion and colonial occupation. Student bu-reaucrats and reformists often tried to drownout our revolutionary chants with social-partriotic rhetoric about “books not bombs,”as if it’s a matter of budget “priorities.”

We look centrally to mobilize the powerof the working class against the bosses’wars, including by refusing to handle (“hot-cargoing”) war materiel and workers’ strikesagainst the war. But the main obstacle tothis is the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracywhich ties the unions to the bourgeois par-ties like the Democrats.

Faced with all the modern technologyand massive firepower of the U.S. military,Iraqis sought to resist. Within days it be-came apparent to the Pentagon heads thattheir fantasy of the Iraqi population risingup to greet American “liberators” wasn’tpanning out. The road to Baghdad includedresistance by Iraqis determined to fight offthe foreign invasion. The colonial occupa-tion is generating continued opposition andresistance, and claims by the White Houseand Pentagon that everything is under con-trol run up against mounting casualtiesamong the forces of colonial occupation.

U.S. troops received orders to use in-creasingly brutal treatment in dealing withthe occupied Iraqi people. Special vicious-ness is employed in dealing with anti-occu-pation demonstrations in Iraq that havebrought thousands into the streets time andtime again. Politically well-connected U.S.oilfield companies Halliburton and Bechtel,armed with multi-billion-dollar contracts,have taken control of key oil fields. The realgoal of this second Desert Slaughter againstIraq is putting the U.S. capitalists’ handsfirmly on the Near East oil tap, giving themcrucial leverage against their European and

Japanese imperialist rivals, who (unlike theU.S.) depend on Middle Eastern oil.

The Iraq war will turn many of thosewho did this dirty work for U.S. imperialisminto pathological killers. Timothy McVeigh,who blew up the Oklahoma City federal build-ing, was trained to be a mass murderer in the1991 Gulf War where he drove a bulldozerthat buried surrendering Iraqi soldiers alive.Some of these returning soldiers will be putto work in local police precincts in inner-citycommunities all over the country to join theranks of armed enforcers of capitalist rule –yet another connection between the waragainst the oppressed abroad, and attackson the oppressed here “at home.”

This connection was shown once againwhen the NYPD added black city workerAlberta Spruill to the long list of those killedby the cops. At a march in Harlem on May24, Revolutionary Reconstruction Club(RRC) and Internationalist Club memberschanted, 1, 2, 3, 4, Defeat U.S. imperialistWar! 5, 6, 7, 8, Smash the racist police state!”Just days afterwards, African immigrantOusmane Zongo was killed by police bul-lets, reminding us all of how Amadou Diallowas gunned down here in the Bronx. As theRRC emphasized in a forum last semestercommemorating Diallo, the fight for blackfreedom, for immigrant rights and againstracist police terror can only be a fight todefeat the imperialist rulers once and for all.It is a fight to put an end to the social systemrooted historically in slavery and based onunending exploitation: the capitalist system.

Racist War on CUNYThe all-out assault on the education of

the sons and daughters of New York City’spoor, immigrants and workers is a battle inthe racist rulers’ overall war, launched un-der the phony name of a “war on terrorism”after the indiscriminate World Trade Centerattacks. Proof of this is that the prelude tothis June’s tuition hike was the “war purge”declared against undocumented students infall 2001 under cover of “national security”– with undocumented students being cyni-cally described as the supposed threat.

In 2001, CUNY officials openly declaredtheir tuition increase for undocumented immi-grant students was a response to the Septem-ber 11 attacks. Working hand-in-hand withthe capitalist politicians (Democrat and Re-

publicans), they carry out the racist orders ofthe bourgeoisie, the class of owners who lordit over us in workplaces across the country. Asfar as they’re concerned, we’re good enough towork ourselves to death for them or die fightingtheir dirty imperialist wars, but not worthyenough to receive a proper education. Ourworth to them is that miserable monetary valueprinted on that miserable paycheck.

The Revolutionary Reconstruction Clubat BCC and the Internationalist Club atHunter are proud that alongside the Inter-nationalist Group, we worked to organized amilitant demonstration at Hunter College inNovember 2001 that drew hundreds to pro-test that anti-immigrant war purge. Wewarned that this attack against immigrantswould be followed by an attack against allCUNY students.

The onslaught against us by Pataki andthe Democratic/Republican war party seeksto accelerate the devastation of CUNY. Notonly in New York but all over the country,

there is a push to accelerate re-segregation ofschools (insofar as they were even minimallydesegregated), with minority students ware-housed in rundown inner-city facilities. Therulers seek to fit us into their racist portrayalof us as uneducable troublemakers who de-serve to spend our lives in broken-down ghet-toes or in their prisons. As industrial jobs havebeen decimated, the ruling class sees less andless reason to educate working-class youth(white as well as doubly-oppressed minori-ties). Today in NYC, unemployment officiallystands at 8.1 percent. A liberal charity notes,“1.5 million New Yorkers are now in need offood…. 500,000 children [in the city] simplydon’t get enough to eat” (Food Bank for NewYork City statement, August 2003).

What access we have won to educa-tion has always been through our ownstruggles. Power never yields anything with-out a battle, and the concessions the rulingclass is sometimes forced to make can al-ways be taken away so long as the capital-

ists have the power.From the beginning the slave masters

feared what might happen if their slaves wereto become educated. So great was the fearthat it was a crime to teach a slave to read. Acentury and a half after the Civil War de-stroyed chattel slavery, they fear what canhappen if their wage-slaves become too wiseto the real nature of this society. Above allelse, they’re fearful of the revolutionary im-plications when black people see that thestruggle for their liberation is bound up withthe struggle for workers power.

The CUNY system is a blot in their por-trait of us as an uneducable people because itcontinues to produce brilliant minds that of-ten excel in their respective fields. Add thatthe CUNY system is “guilty” of graduatingmore black and Latino students than any otheruniversity in the history of the United Statesand you will begin to understand why CUNYis constantly under attack. In reality CUNY’sgates were opened to oppressed minorities’student population by the massive 1969struggle that led to the establishment of openadmissions. This was the result of campusoccupations by black and Puerto Rican stu-dents and the insistence of the powerful labormovement that opening up the elite city uni-versity system had to benefit all workingpeople. This victory transformed CUNY, andhas been a target of the racist rulers ever since.

In 1976, the same year that the fresh-men CUNY class was for the first time in itsmajority composed of minority students, rac-ists in office determined to destroy open ad-missions and put a stop to the influx of mi-nority students.

The first attack on open admissions camethat year in the form of the introduction oftuition during the “fiscal crisis” provoked byWall Street bankers with Democratic mayorAbe Beame acting as hatchet man. As manyas 50,000 CUNY students were forced outthen. In 1979 tuition was hiked by $900 peryear. In 1982 Democratic Governor MarioCuomo proposed a hike of $200 more per year.

In 1985 another attack was launched, this timea tuition hike of $750 led to the forced exit ofsome 8,000 more students. In 1990-91 tens ofthousands of CUNY students took to thestreets against cutbacks ordered by liberalDemocratic governor Mario Cuomo and blackDemocratic mayor David Dinkins. Thousandsof students occupied campus buildings andmarched in the streets with striking 1199 hos-pital workers and others.

Tuition was increased again in 1996,causing thousands more to drop out of col-lege. In 1999 the CUNY Board of Trusteesvoted to eliminate remedial classes atCUNY’s senior colleges, a backhanded wayof knifing the policy of open admissions thathad existed since the 1969 struggles.

But the rulers are not content to stop atthe destruction of the 1969 gains; their suc-cess only encourages them to go further. OnJune 23 of this year, in a lightning-quick stealthattack in the auditorium at Baruch College –while the campuses were close to empty – the

Faley Kheiber/ReutersDemonstration by former Iraqi soldiers under American bayonets in Baghdad,June 17. U.S. soldiers shot point-blank into the crowd, killing two.

RevolutionNewspaper of CUNY students from the RevolutionaryReconstruction Club and Internationalist Club, for theprogram of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, published in accordwith the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of theLeague for the Fourth InternationalRevolution is published by Mundial Publications, P.O. Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY10008, U.S.A. Telephone: (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614-8711 E-mail: internationalistgroup@msn.com

No. 1 September 2003

CUNY, Iraq...continued from page 1

Moises Delgado inHarlem protestagainst cop murderof Alberta Spruill,May 2003.

Sue K

ellogg

September 2003 3

Visit the InternationalistGroup on the Internet

http://www.internationalist.org

Board of Trustees voted the 25 percent tu-ition increase. This means students must pay$4,000 per year at the four-year colleges, and$2,800 at the two-year colleges. Only dayslater, on June 30, the State University of NewYork (SUNY) decreed a $950 increase for in-state students and a whopping $2,000 in-crease for out of state students.

It’s nothing more or less than a racist,anti-working-class purge. The Republicansand the Democrats have found that one ofthe most effective methods is the use of thebursar to “build a color wall,” as JimmyBreslin called it in Newsday (June 24).

Ruling-Class CynicismAnother weapon in CUNY officials’ ar-

senal is that of purge-tests. A July 5 NewYork Times article reports “hundreds of stu-dents at the City University of New York arequietly being bounced out of college be-cause they could not pass a test intended togauge whether they have reading, writingand thinking skills appropriate for studentshalfway through college.” This exam wasintroduced two years ago and has been usedby CUNY officials to unfairly weed out stu-dents they deem unqualified regardless ofwhether they have successfully completedall the courses required by their major. Cur-rently, if a student takes and fails the exami-nation three times he or she is booted out ofschool. Of the students who took the purge-test in March 2003, about 25 percent failed.

Lest any more proof be needed of theCUNY administration’s intentions, chancel-lor Matthew Goldstein – who attended CityCollege when it was free –is quoted in thesame July 5 New York Times article as sayingthat if students can’t pass the test “after somany attempts, they ought to be thinkingabout doing something else with their lives.”

No doubt what the chancellor has in mindis something along the lines of cleaning hishouse, taking his food orders, or pumping gasinto his car. Or maybe he would have us go tothe nearest military recruiting stations whichhave been working overtime to find economicconscripts to serve as frontline killers for theU.S. imperialist war machine.

At heavily minority CUNY campuses likeBCC, military recruiters have been calling stu-dents up at home, talking about their majorsand courses, and trying to sucker them intothe army with promises of education aid. Wedemand to know what information the CUNYadministrators are giving to these bloodsuck-ers, and that this practice be stopped now. AtBCC opposition to military recruiters led themto stop showing up in uniform; now they sneakaround the cafeteria in civvies. At highschools, meanwhile, under Bush’s cynically

titled “No Child Left Behind” Act, Pentagonrecruiters are demanding lists of names, ad-dresses and phone numbers of seniors so theycan be pressured into the military.

We demand all cops and military recruit-ers off campus!

Pressuring students into the militarygoes together with targeting many for pro-grammed non-graduation: as an August 27Times article notes, “A preliminary report onthe problems with a statewide math testneeded for graduation from high school inNew York State has found that even earlytrials of the test indicated that the averagestudent would be unable to pass.” Obvi-ously this is no fluke. Excluding huge num-bers of students is the whole point of thesetests, tuition hikes and budget cuts.

Mobilize the Power of theWorking Class

Against this onslaught there must bean all-out fight for the basic democratic rightof free public education for all. A revolu-tionary leadership is needed to link studentsto the enormous potential power of the mul-tiracial working class, which has a vital in-terest in the right of its children to educa-tion. In its absence, the hand-raising of afew miserable capitalist appointees wasenough to ram through the tuition hike.

As part of our efforts to build that revo-lutionary leadership, we participated in theprotest of students (and some faculty) in-side the CUNY board meeting in June.Among the chants we raised were: “OpenAdmissions, No Tuition” and “Abolish theBoard of Trustees!” Student-teacher-workercontrol of the universities, nationalizing pri-vate universities, providing a living stipendfor students so they can devote themselvesto their studies; ripping out the turnstiles sopublic transit is free to the public; cops andmilitary recruiters off campus – these de-mands are part of the overall fight for a work-ers government that can make quality, inte-grated education a reality for all.

As opposed to this, the reformists,though employing different “tactics” anddifferent degrees of militancy, are alwaysreduced to bourgeois pressure politics. Somany trips have been made to Albany (shrineof the state legislature) that an outsider mightmistake this for some sort of recurring reli-gious ritual. But this pilgrimage can lead toonly one revelation: the reverence of reform-ists for the myth that they can appeal to themorals of the masters of society to makethings fairer. And how else to reach them –these pious pleaders ask – than through theirpolitical agents (Republicans and Demo-crats alike) at the altars of Albany and City

NY

PIR

G

Snuggling up to Governor Cutback: Groups like NYPIRG (pictured in photowith New York Gov. Pataki) chain campus activists to capitalist parties.Democrats praised Republican Pataki as he signed bill to allow some“undocumented” students to go back to paying in-state tuition. Then theyturned around and hiked everyone’s tuition. Thanks a bunch, NYPIRG.

Hall, from which alone one can communi-cate their plea to the almighty capitalist lords.

At Hunter, shortly after the bombing ofIraq began, SLAM (Student Action Libera-tion Movement, that is, the student govern-ment bureaucracy with “militant” verbiage)sat in at the office of college president Jen-nifer Raab trying to get this right-winger (aformer “issues director” for Rudy Giuliani’smayoral campaign) to “take a stand” againstthe war and tuition hikes. Pathetic! Instead,campuses should have been shut down bystudent, teacher and campus worker action.

For its part, before the trustees’ votethe CUNY4All coalition put out a statementsubtitled “Whose Side Are You On,” askingthe Board if they stood with the students orwith the millionaires.

The answer is not rocket science. TheBoard of Trustees and CUNY administrationare the representatives of the ruling classwhose task is to keep students, teachers andcampus workers in check. There is a world ofdifference between a strategy of pressuringthe rulers while criticizing the “policies” oftheir figureheads and administrators, and fight-ing for their defeat and expropriation as a class.

And here as in other things the commu-nists set themselves apart as the one politi-cal tendency fighting against every form ofillusion, deception and self-deception, toeducate young people in class politics andwin them to participate in forging a revolu-tionary vanguard party of the working classthat will take up their battles as its own. Thatis where the power lies to defeat all the at-tacks launched by the capitalist ruling class,and knock them off their pedestal of oppres-sion through a revolution based on the pro-letariat, the workers of the world.

Why We Publish RevolutionIt is not in the interest of the working

people – black, Latino, Asian, white, immi-grants or U.S.-born – to live and work onlyto make enormous profits for a filthy richclass of exploiters while being repressed andeven killed by their police.

Nor is it in our interest to be sent to killour class brothers and sisters anywherearound the world.

Nor is it in the interest of the workersand oppressed to support the governmentof our “own” exploiters, whether it is admin-istrated by their Democrats or by their Re-publicans. On the contrary, our interest liesin their defeat.

Finally, it is not in our interest to standby as the racist rulers steal our access to aneducation. The battle over CUNY is not justa “student issue,” it is an assault on all work-ing people, minorities and immigrants. Theworking class has the interest and power todefeat this assault, just as it has the powerand interest to defeat the imperialists’ colo-nization of Iraq; to put an end to imperialistoppression and capitalist exploitationthrough international socialist revolution.

The Revolutionary Reconstruction Clubat Bronx Community College, and the Inter-nationalist Club at Hunter College, arelaunching Revolution to help win youngpeople to the revolutionary program of Marx,Lenin and Trotsky, advanced today by theInternationalist Group, U.S. section of theLeague for the Fourth International.

We are publishing Revolution to helpbring revolutionary Marxism to students atCUNY and other college and high-school cam-puses. We publish Revolution because weare fighting for the liberation of all the op-pressed, for a revolution by the workingclass all around the world – and we wantyou join us in this fight.

Moises Delgado

President of the RevolutionaryReconstruction Club (@ BCC-CUNY)

Member of the Internationalist Group/League for the Fourth International

their interest goes beyond this one case.They are using the prosecution of Miguelto clear the way for even greater repressionthroughout the CUNY system. This is partof the broader onslaught against oppressedminorities, labor and basic civil rights. Rac-ist profiling, mass round-ups of immigrants,the sinister “Patriot Acts” I and II, and theoverall escalation of police-state measures– these are the “home front” of the ever-expanding imperialist war waged by the U.S.ruling class abroad.

Hostos, a miniature police state:Hostos Community College is run like a smallpolice state. Located in the heart of the Bronxbarrio, it is a campus of immigrant, black andHispanic students from poor and working-class families. “Controlling” minority andworking-class youth is a central concern ofthe ruling class as it escalates its attacks ondemocratic rights and social programs. AtHostos, many crucial policy decisions areopenly made by the campus police chief him-self. Hostos cops have gone so far as to tellsupporters of my organization that they areforbidden to distribute leaflets on the samecity block as the main campus entrance.

When students protested racist cuts inbilingual and Spanish programs in August2001, the brittle Hostos regime freaked outand unleashed the campus cops to run wild.Their response to the protest has been aptlydescribed as a “lock-down” of the campus.They decreed that no protest of any kindwould be permitted in the building whereregistration was taking place, and arrestedMiguel when he held up a sign in a publicatrium that is the traditional “free speecharea” in that building. They prohibited pro-fessors from other campuses, and even thepresident of the faculty union, from enter-ing Hostos at all. The campus police openlyproclaimed that Hostos had been closed to“outsiders.” They arrested four students andthe next day arrested CCNY professor BillCrain when he tried to go on campus.

Charges against everyone but MiguelMalo were eventually dropped. Hit withphony charges of assault, resisting arrest,harassment and disorderly conduct, Miguelfaces up to a year in jail if convicted.

The crime of holding up a sign: Thefact that Miguel was arrested for holdingup a sign was proclaimed at the very begin-ning of the complaint CUNY filed in courtagainst him. It states: “Deponent is informedby (CUNY Peace Officer) Sgt. Sean White,that at the above time and place, the defen-dant began to hold up a sign and protestagainst the college administration inside theabove location after being told by the infor-mant that such protest would only be per-mitted outside the building, away from whereschool registration was taking place. Depo-nent is further informed by informant thatdefendant was asked to leave the registra-tion area and refused at which time the in-formant attempted to lawfully place the de-ponent under arrest.”

Test case for repression at CUNY: Theprosecution of Miguel Malo is a test casefor repression at CUNY. The DA’s office andCUNY administration obviously see it thatway – and activists throughout CUNY andbeyond need to see it just as clearly, in orderto fight this repression.

In pushing the frame-up charge thatMiguel supposedly assaulted two CUNY

Defend MiguelMalo...

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continued on page 7

4 Revolution

The Role of Students in the Workers Movement

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by Aubeen LópezStudents have sometimes played a sig-

nificant role in helping the workers’ struggleagainst capitalism. But not always. Undercertain circumstances, they have played areactionary role in helping to defeat suchstruggles. Marxists are often asked, what isthe relationship of radical students to theworkers movement and how can they helpit? This question deserves special attention.To address it, we must first understand stu-dents’ social position.

In capitalist society, students consti-tute the younger elements of the intelligen-tsia. Tomorrow they will make up society’sprofessors, technicians, administrators, sci-entists. Many will become part of the back-bone of capitalist society. Yet others will jointhe fight to abolish capitalist exploitation,and make a real contribution by joining theranks of revolutionaries.

The intelligentsia constitutes the mostunstable section of the non-propertied pettybourgeoisie (the lower middle class). Thepetty bourgeoisie is highly unstable. It is asocial group which, at times of intense so-cial conflict, wavers between the two major,stable classes: the proletariat (workingclass) and the bourgeoisie (capitalist class).

Can the petty bourgeoisie and specifi-cally the intelligentsia, of which students area part, constitute a revolutionary class? Theanswer is no. The petty bourgeoisie is notand cannot constitute a revolutionary class.Why? Because as a group, they lack the col-lective and cohesive common interest neces-

sary to form a revolution-ary class such as the pro-letariat. Only by aligningwholeheartedly with theproletariat and its revolu-tionary leadership canstudents break with theirpetty-bourgeois originsand become communists.Which class they aredrawn to is influenced bythe social and politicalclimate of the time, butmainly by a revolution-ary proletarian leader-ship capable of bringingall sectors of the op-pressed and exploitedbehind its Leninist pro-gram.

For example, in theU.S., as a result of thegrowing militancy of thestruggle against blackoppression, the imperi-alist war on Vietnam anda number of intenseworkers struggles in thelate ’60s and early ’70s (such as the 1969General Electric and 1970 General Motorsstrikes), many students shifted to supportof these historic struggles. Yet the fact thatstudents can be used against the workingclass and oppressed was shown in Germanyin the early 1930’s, when students played anextremely reactionary role in helping Hitler’sfascism rise to power.

In the U.S., not long after the height of’60s radicalism, the fascistic cult-like orga-nization led by Lyndon LaRouche, basedlargely on students, launched “OperationMop-Up,” a vicious campaign of physicalattacks on left organizations, like the Com-munist Party USA. (The LaRouche group,which boasts of its links to ultra-rightist mili-tary officers in Latin America, tried to get afoothold at Bronx Community College at onepoint last school year, but we ran them off.)

If students and the petty bourgeoisiein general are not a revolutionary class, canthey lead a revolutionary class in a revolu-tionary movement, can they become the van-guard of the oppressed or what Lenin calledthe “tribune of the people”? The answer isagain no. Students cannot by themselvesconstitute the political leadership of the revo-lutionary proletariat and the rest of the op-pressed; they can’t even constitute the po-litical leadership of their own social group,the petty bourgeoisie. Only the proletariatand its revolutionary leadership, the Leninistvanguard party, can lead the rest of the op-pressed against the ruling class, the bour-geoisie. As Marx and Engels noted in theCommunist Manifesto: “Of all the classes

Dear God:Why don’t you please stop your lies,

You say if we “believe” we’d livelonger, but instead we just die,

You say when in need just looktoward the sky,

But when in need we look, the sunjust burns our eyes.

When in victory or triumph, “ThankGod” is what everyone says,

But when the stench of defeat rises,“He works in mysterious ways.”

You say follow your footsteps andwe have nothing to fear,

But as soon as we move yourfootprints disappear.

You say you’ll bring peace, but howmany have been killed in your name?

You say it isn’t you, that it’s thedevil to blame.

But I think you’re no different, in factyou’re exactly the same,

The devil’s your scapegoat, anexcuse, and it’s despicably lame.

You say there are no tricks, but I cansee right through your sleeves,

You snuck one by on the world butyou didn’t sneak one by me.

To you the world is blind, but yousee; not me, I can see,

I see what no one else sees, I see thesad sorry truth,

While everyone else sees a tree, I digdeep down to the roots.

What is the truth? Well, the truth isthis and only this:

While everyone else is wonderingwhere you are, “God,”

The truth is…you don’t even exist!

Truly yours,Aubeen

that stand face to face with the bourgeoisietoday, the proletariat alone is a really revo-lutionary class. The other classes decay andfinally disappear in the face of modern in-dustry; the proletariat is its special and es-sential product.”

Thus there is no correct political basiswhatsoever for the call of “student power,”posed by groups like the Student LiberationAction Movement (SLAM) – which disdaincommunists’ call for students to look to thepower of the working class. The call for stu-dent power can only breed illusions andblock students from understanding whichforce in society really does have the powerto carry through revolutionary change: theworking class.

So what is the relationship of radicalstudents to the workers movement and howcan they help it? The workers general strikein France in1968 was sparked when youngworkers joined barricades students set upagainst police attacks. In Mexico City in1999, at the National Autonomous Univer-sity of Mexico (UNAM), students occupiedthe huge campus against a tuition fee whichmeant purging tens of thousands of stu-dents. The strike lasted ten months, and soonfaced the danger of police attack. Duringthis strike the Grupo Internacionalista (GI),Mexican section of the League for the FourthInternational (LFI), fought to mobilize sec-tors of labor who faced mass layoffs andcapitalist attacks themselves (electrical work-ers, teachers and university workers).

The GI played a key role in sparkingworkers defense guards for the UNAM

Members of the Revolutionary Reconstruction Club at Bronx Community College and theInternationalist Club at Hunter College joined in unionization drive at Burritoville, July 2003.

Grupo Internacionalista played key role in sparking workers defense guards(above) in 1999 National University of Mexico (UNAM) strike.

strike, in which hundreds of electrical anduniversity workers did guard duty round theclock to ward off an invasion by the armyand police. The GI also called for the stu-dent strike to become part of a class-strugglemobilization based on strikes by powerfulsectors of the working class. This contrastedsharply with the positions of all wings ofthe student leadership, which in the finalanalysis were part of a “popular front” ofclass collaboration with bourgeois nation-alist politicians. Others, such as the GrupoEspartaquista de México (Spartacist Groupof Mexico) talked of workers action but didabsolutely nothing to bring it about.

At the beginning of 2000, the Mexicangovernment sent a newly formed police forceto invade the campus and repress the UNAMstrike. Several of our comrades were arrestedalong with hundreds of others and held fordays for their role in the UNAM strike.Through the experience of the UNAM strikethe Grupo Internacionalista showed how stu-dents could link struggles to the power of theworkers movement. Smuggling revolutionarytexts into jail and taking students on brigadesto bring Trotskyist literature to the workingclass, the GI won young strike activists, whohad gone through the experience of struggleand repression, to join the struggle for a revo-lutionary workers party – fighting to reforgeTrotsky’s Fourth International. That is themost important contribution revolutionary-minded students can make: transforming them-selves into cadres of the world party of so-cialist revolution.

Aubeen López, RevolutionaryReconstruction Club (@BCC–CUNY)

September 2003 5

The following article is reprinted fromThe Internationalist No. 14, September-Oc-tober 2002.

The Revolutionary ReconstructionGroup, the core of young Marxist activistswho lead the Revolutionary ReconstructionClub at Bronx Community College in NewYork, joined the Internationalist Group at ameeting of the two organizations on August25. This follows the RRG’s presentation ofthe following statement to an IG meeting ear-lier this month:

“After a period of joint work betweenthe Revolutionary Reconstruction Club andthe Internationalist Group, during which timethe ruling class, amidst an imperialist war inthe U.S. and other countries, has engagedin increasingly repressive measures againstworkers and the oppressed, we of the RRGhave seen for ourselves that the League forthe Fourth International today continues theprincipled struggle for workers power. Ourown desire to struggle for workers revolu-tion, and the recognition that this requiresthe creation of vanguard parties around theworld as part of the process of reforging theFourth International, leads us to join forceswith the IG, which today is carrying out thistask. We therefore request membership inthe Internationalist Group, U.S. section ofthe League for the Fourth International.”

The origins of the Revolutionary Re-construction Club go back to fall of 2000,when a young Puerto Rican Trotskyist be-gan trying to establish a Marxist studentgroup at Bronx Community College. Activein the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal andother issues, he was at that time a sympa-thizer of the Spartacist League. The core ofthe RRC also includes comrades won toBolshevism from the New York Zapatistagroup and through polemicizing against re-ligious obscurantism and nationalism oncampus.

Efforts to build the club received anenthusiastic response from students atBronx Community College (BCC), an over-whelmingly black, Hispanic and immigrantcampus of the City University of New York(CUNY) that was singled out by the NewYork Times as a hotbed of opposition to thewar on Afghanistan. CUNY officials try torun campuses like BCC like a small policestate. (At nearby Hostos Community Col-lege, CUNY is waging a repressive vendettaagainst student leaders for leading protestsagainst cuts in bilingual and Spanish-lan-guage programs.) Putting up one obstacleafter another, BCC functionaries even triedto censor the club from describing itself asMarxist in its statement of purpose!

The Revolutionary Reconstruction Clubwas formally established in spring 2001. Thename was chosen for two reasons. In thehistoric context of the U.S., it reflects thepoint that the full liberation of black peoplefrom social oppression cannot be solvedunder the lordship of capital. The “RadicalReconstruction” carried out in the U.S. Southafter the Civil War ended in the betrayal bythe northern bourgeoisie of hopes for blackequality. This task would require a revolu-tionary reconstruction of society, possibleonly in the form of another social revolu-tion, one led by the working class, and aimeddirectly at the bedrock of black oppression,

U.S. capitalism.Simultaneously, in a broader sense, the

term “revolutionary reconstruction” is bor-rowed from Marx and Engels, whose Com-munist Manifesto calls for the “revolution-ary reconstitution of society” by means of aproletarian revolution.

The intention of those who formed theRevolutionary Reconstruction Club was tobring awareness of Marxist ideas and themany crucial struggles being waged acrossthe world, while waging war against bour-geois liberalism, which saturates the outlookeven of the so-called left in the United States.It sought to model itself after the Marxiststudy groups found in the early 1890s inRussia. The club was an idea born of theneed to recruit fellow black, Latino and otherpoor students to the ranks of communistfighters, thinkers and militants. Until its in-ception the only recruiters at BCC were thoseof the U.S. military, who recruit cannon fod-der on the basis of “economic conscription.”The only political group on campus wasNYPIRG (New York Political Interest Re-search Group), a student lobbying group andDemocratic Party satellite based among stu-dent government bureaucrats.

There is considerable potential for win-ning youth to revolutionary Marxism atCUNY, the largest urban university in theUnited States with approximately 200,000students at over a dozen colleges. Enrolledat CUNY are students from more than 115countries, and according to its own statis-tics its student body is 32 percent black, 31percent white, 21 percent Hispanic and 12percent Asian; a large majority of these stu-dents are working-class. Yet obeying thedictates of capital, after putting an end tothe open admissions won by student andlabor struggles in 1969 the CUNY adminis-tration has been escalating attacks on edu-cational access for the sons and daughtersof New York City’s proletariat.

Joint work with the InternationalistGroup began at a November 2001 RRC meet-ing attended by a dozen people. An IG rep-resentative invited the club to join in build-ing a united-front demonstration against theanti-immigrant war purge in which CUNYsought to force thousands of “undocu-mented immigrants” out of school, througha discriminatory and exorbitant tuition hike,as part of the U.S. imperialists’ “war on ter-rorism.” The demonstration proposal was

Revolutionary Reconstruction GroupJoins the Internationalist Group

greeted enthusiastically (despite the lameattempts of a Spartacist League spokesmanto convince the club not to endorse the rally),and a period of intensive work began. In thecourse of this work RRG activists extendedtheir activity to several different campusesand went head to head against student re-formists and bureaucrats. In the effort to takea real step in class struggle against the U.S.war, an important part of the 28 November2001 demonstration was the presence of im-migrant workers from union and solidaritygroups.

The joining together of the RRG with theInternationalist Group is an example of thekind of revolutionary regroupment made pos-sible on the basis of a class fight against im-perialist war. For RRG members, intensive jointwork provided an important on-the-groundlesson on the Marxist stance on wars. Theunderstanding that the “war purge” at CUNYwas but a manifestation of the very real globalwar provided a powerful weapon againstthose who sought to confine the struggle to“student issues.”

Linking the defense of immigrants to thefight against imperialist war, the IG printed inpamphlet form Lenin’s classic Socialism andWar. Over the course of the next months theIG’s position for the defeat of the U.S. imperi-alist attack and the defense of Afghanistanand Iraq proved to be the only one in accor-dance with the principles of the BolshevikParty under the leadership of Lenin. TheSpartacist League’s abandonment of theLeninist fight for the defeat of “one’s own”imperialist rulers in war dramatically broughthome its step-by-step renunciation of key revo-lutionary principles. The comrades were par-ticularly repelled by the SL’s attempt to smearthe IG with pandering to “anti-Americanism”for upholding Lenin’s position.

Also important in the RRG activists’evolution has been the ongoing and polar-izing struggle against a wide range of op-portunist positions pushed by reformistsand campus bureaucrats who tail after theDemocratic Party. RRG and IG comrades in-tervened together at a range of events tofight for “no discrimination” against the re-formists’ promotion of “less” discriminationagainst immigrants via legislation to “allow”some and only some immigrants to go back

The Internationalist RevolutionaryReconstruction Club

Joint contingent of Revolutionary Reconstruction Club and IG marches acrossBrooklyn Bridge at demonstration protesting Israel’s attack on West Bank,April 6.

Revolutionary Reconstruction Club speaker Leslie Marcos (left) at 28 November 2001 demonstration against CUNY’s“war purge” of immigrant students. The RRC at Bronx Community College joined with Internationalist Group inbuilding the protest.

6 Revolution

to paying the prior tuition rate. We linkedthe fight for open admissions and free tu-ition to the broader program of class struggleand socialist revolution, and connected thefight to defeat specific attacks to the struggleto defeat the capitalist rulers’ war and theirentire system of exploitation and racism.

Joint work continued with the publica-tion of an IG/RRC leaflet for InternationalWomen’s Day and common contingents andsales teams at demonstrations in New Yorkand Washington, D.C. in defense of the Pal-estinian people. The two organizations alsohad a joint presence in support of unioniza-tion drives among immigrant workers, at ral-lies by New York teachers and a strike by busdrivers in Queens. In this period comrades ofthe RRG saw the meaning of the IG’s commit-ment, in deeds and not merely words, to thetasks of bringing the Trotskyist program intothe class struggle. An important part in thishas been played by joint activity with workercadres of the IG. Systematic InternationalistGroup educationals, together with encourage-ment to present Marxist classes themselves,played a crucial part in the comrades’ devel-opment. This intensive course of study hasincluded key works by Lenin and Trotsky,classes on revolutions of the 20th century,and a range of other subjects.

A central focus in these study classeshas been the Marxist theory and analysisof the state, including the origin and his-tory of bureaucratically deformed workersstates such as Cuba and China, and thetasks of their defense in the period sincethe counterrevolutionary destruction of the

Soviet Union. Bringing the RRG comradescloser to the IG/LFI, this underscored thecrucial tasks that Trotskyists are called uponto lead, in particular the fight for proletarianpolitical revolution against the Stalinist bu-reaucracy whose betrayals open the wayfor capitalist restoration. Such a politicalrevolution in China would immediately posethe task of extending the revolution world-wide, with enormous appeal to the workersand oppressed throughout the region andelsewhere.

Joint work and study led RRG comradesto take the measure of the opportunism ofthose who have fought bitterly against theIG’s Marxist politics, strengthening and deep-ening the comrades’ political and program-matic understanding. In coming closer to theInternationalist Group – and especially be-cause the comrade who founded the RRC hadbeen a sympathizer of the SL for most of hispolitical life while others were subscribers tothe SL’s press – the comrades carefully inves-tigated the differences between both groupsand came to the conclusion that the SL’s se-ries of “new” positions add up to a funda-mental break with Bolshevism, which the IGcontinues to uphold.

The Trotskyist program reflects theaccumulation of crucial lessons drawn frompast proletarian struggles and paid in blood.Yet the current leadership of the SL and In-ternational Communist League makes amockery both of the programmatic contentand of more than a century of courageousstruggles to implement this program in the“boiling water” of the class struggle, and

For ten months beginning in April1999, Mexico’s National University(UNAM) was occupied by a student strikeagainst tuition, fees and cuts the govern-ment tried to impose on direct orders fromthe World Bank. The dramatic story of thestrike, and its crucial political lessons, arerelated in the Internationalist pamphlet TheUNAM Strike and the Fight for WorkersRevolution (see ad below).

In Fall 2001 during the fight againstCUNY’s anti-immigrant “war purge,”young comrades from Mexico’s GrupoInternacionalista wrote “A Message fromUNAM to CUNY. Relating their experiencesin the UNAM strike, they pointed out keylessons for the struggle against the attackon public education launched by capital-ist governments around the world. We re-print excerpts from their message (the fulltext is in the December 2001 International-ist pamphlet Defend Immigrant Students –Stop CUNY’s “War Purge”!).

Dear brothers and sisters:With more than 270,000 students,

UNAM is the biggest university in LatinAmerica. In early 1999 it announced the im-position of outrageous tuition charges, af-ter years in which tuition had been virtuallynon-existent. The tuition hike coincided witha drive to privatize the electrical sector, whichwould bring mass layoffs in the electricalenergy industry as well as the destructionof one of Mexico’s most powerful laborunions. We of the Grupo Internacionalistabegan to put forward the call for a strike byUNAM’s students and workers, togetherwith the electrical workers and other sec-tors of the working class, not only againstthe imposition of tuition, but also againstthe starvation austerity program of the capi-talists and their government.

Thousands of students prepared tostrike – and the UNAM student strikebroke out on 20 April 1999. From the be-ginning our organization sought to putinto practice our call for extending thestrike beyond the limits of the universityitself. In the face of threats of repressionin July 1999, we succeeded in initiating ,

in July 1999 worker-student defenseguards.

We appealed to the working class to callfor its active backing – which was received insome important cases. We visited plants ofthe Compañía de Luz y Fuerza (Electrical Com-pany) where we spoke with the workers, weparticipated in union meetings and assemblies,and we worked regularly at a wide range ofdifferent campuses and schools with the slo-gan of extending the strike. We defended thestrike assemblies against the administration’sporros (hired goons), and we fought for cam-pus cops (Auxilio UNAM) off campus andout of the university workers union. Repres-sion was unleashed against the UNAM strik-ers by the federal government, then in thehands of the PRI (Institutional RevolutionaryParty) with the support of the PAN (NationalAction Party of the current president, VicenteFox) and by the Federal District governmentof Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’ PRD (Party of theDemocratic Revolution), which sentgranaderos (riot police) against the strikers.

When the repression reached its highpoint, we were among the hundreds arrestedin February 2000 as we continued to defendthe strike and put forward our proletarianprogram. The working class has the interest

the present fight to bring the Fourth Inter-nationalist program into the struggles of theworking class. RRG comrades came to com-pare the present ICL leadership’s attitudeto the Marxist program with the outlookof “a spoiled rich kid who inherits a price-less asset and squanders it.”

Members of the Revolutionary Recon-struction Club repeatedly witnessed the in-ability of SL spokesmen to defend theirorganization’s abandonment of Leninism ona series of questions, among them the SL/ICL’s refusal to call for unconditional inde-pendence of the colonies, a question whichLenin and Trotsky rightly saw as a dividingline between communism and social democ-racy (and essential in the fight against allforms of nationalism), and its repudiation ofthe core of Trotsky’s Transitional Program,the understanding that the crisis of human-ity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionaryleadership. Instead of historically and theo-retically-derived assessment, the SL/ICL isguided by temporary appearances, andshrouds its revisions in vague and evasivelanguage. A crucial example is over the na-ture of fascist formations such as the Na-tional Front in France, just when it is mostimportant to strive for the greatest clarity.

The comrades of the RRG join the Inter-nationalist Group as full members, with therights and responsibilities of Bolshevik mili-tants. At the same time, they are youthwhose ongoing training as professionalrevolutionaries will mean integrating the IG’snew opportunities for campus work into theoverall fight to build a Leninist vanguard

party. Needed is the kind of leadership train-ing that can be acquired only in applyingyesterday’s lessons to solve today’s prob-lems on the burning terrain of the classstruggle; the transformation of raw experi-ence into conscious revolutionary lessons.That this can be achieved only in the fightto win new elements among the youth to theproletarian class struggle is a key lesson ofanother recent struggle in which LFI com-rades fought for the Trotskyist program: the10-month strike at the National Universityof Mexico (UNAM). The Revolutionary Re-construction Club at Bronx Community Col-lege, together with the Internationalist Clubat CUNY’s Hunter College, will continue towin students to Marxism and struggles suchas the fight against militarism (such as theincreasingly aggressive military and policerecruiters) and imperialist war.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotskywrote that “every revolutionary party findsits chief support in the youngest generationof the rising class” while noting that “healthyyoung lungs find it intolerable to breathe inthe atmosphere of hypocrisy.” In joining theInternationalist Group, the comrades of theRevolutionary Reconstruction Group join inthe task of winning the next generation ofyoung workers and intellectuals to the causeof the world proletariat and its vanguardparty, which in Lenin’s words much serve as“tribune of the people,” mobilizing the powerof the proletariat for the emancipation of allthe oppressed and exploited throughout theworld through victorious socialist revolu-tion.

Letter from Mexico to CUNY Students

Mexico: The UNAMStrike and theFight for WorkersRevolution

March 2000 US$3For almost a year, tens of thousands ofstudents occupied the largest universityin Latin America, facing repression byboth the PRI government and the PRDopposition. This 64-page specialsupplement tells the story of the strikeand documents the intervention of theGrupo Internacionalista.

Order from/make checks payable to:Mundial Publications, Box 3321,Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008, U.S.A.

and power to wage a victorious struggle tomake real the democratic right to education.Likewise, the working class has the interestand power to fight victoriously to defeat theimperialists’ war....– Ariel and Buenaventura

* * * * * * * * * * * *Brothers and sisters:My name is Quetzal, and when the

UNAM strike began I was a young woman16 years of age. I was in the last year ofuniversity preparatory school, but my in-terest in leftist ideas began when I was insecondary school and the Zapatista rebel-lion broke out in Chiapas. On one side Icould see people who had nothing, and onthe other side people who had very muchindeed. The Indians, like so many otherpeople in Mexico, live in such poverty thatthe uproar over the Chiapas uprising mademe think that something had to be doneagainst this system of inequality. Shortlybefore the UNAM strike broke out, when Iwas in the last year of preparatory school, Iread the Communist Manifesto, because Irelated it to the movements of 1968.* Iwanted to know what it meant to be a Marx-ist and to fight for socialism.

When it was announced that tuition

Parents of arrested student strikers confront police at UNAM’s CiudadUniversitaria on 6 February 2000, demanding their children be released.

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September 2003 7

The unending racist killings by the po-lice show it is not a matter of a few “badapples,” but of a system of racial oppres-sion and the function of police in capitalistsociety, which by its nature is racist. Thisbasic fact is covered over by Democraticpoliticians like Al Sharpton, who respondedto the torture of Abner Louima and the kill-ing of Amadou Diallo by preaching thedeadly illusion that the cops can be mademore “responsive” to the “community” (andwhose demands for “police reforms” evenincluded higher pay for the police!).

When there is a strike, for example forhigher wages and better working conditionsin a factory, it is the job (“duty”) of the stateto protect private property and put an endto the strike by any means necessary, to keepthings in order, the order of the ruling capi-talist class against the working class.

When there are protests or studentstrikes against tuition hikes and budget cuts,the cops are called out for repression. InMexico in February 2000, a special, newlycreated police force (the Federal PreventivePolice) was used to break the ten-monthstrike of the National University (UNAM).Several of our comrades of the GrupoInternacionalista were among the one thou-sand students jailed at the time.

But isn’t it true, some ask, that police,prison guards, security guards and otherprofessional guardians of capitalist property,“law and order” are recruited largely out ofthe working class? In Germany in the 1920sand early ’30s, this was the argument of thesocial democrats who, to justify support forthe capitalist state, claimed cops were “work-ers.” Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Leninof the October 1917 Russian Revolution, hada clear answer: “The worker who becomes apoliceman in the service of the capitaliststate is a bourgeois cop, not a worker”(“What Next?” [1932]).

As for the idea that racist terror by thecops will stop if more police are black orLatino, or are required to live within city lim-its, it was a black cop who killed 16-year-old

“peace officers,” the CUNY administrationand DA’s office seek to push through a ma-jor change: to have “assault on campuscops” made legally equivalent to “assaulton NYPD officers.” The purpose is to greatlystrengthen their apparatus for repressionof student protests against the war andagainst tuition hikes, budget cuts, and allthe attacks on the minority and working-class students at the largest urban univer-sity in the United States.

Repression on CUNY campuses hasbeen growing rapidly over the past period,with repeated incidents at Hostos, the Col-lege of Staten Island, CCNY, Hunter and else-where. What many activists do not know isthat CUNY’s campus police force, “SAFE,”purchased 100,000 rounds of live ammuni-tion, including hollow-point bullets andbirdshot. (Even the NYPD is legally prohib-ited from having some of the items the SAFEcops bought.)

A recent posting to the CUNY Senatediscussion forum noted that CUNY’s “pub-lic safety director,” William Barry, is a formerFBI agent. It cited an article from the Wash-ington Post (25 January) reporting that aspart of the repressive onslaught packagedas the “war on terror,” the “FBI has strength-ened or established working relationshipswith hundreds of campus police depart-ments.” As we have previously noted, “the‘SAFE’ unit was formed as a little red squad,compiling lists of student activists, video-taping student activities.” It even disguiseda surveillance camera as a smoke detectoroutside the main office for political activistsat City College. When the CCNY GraduateStudent Council and its newspaper exposedthis, they were suspended. (See “SmashRacist Purge of CUNY–Fight for Open Ad-missions, Free Tuition!” reprinted in theDecember 2001 Internationalist Group pam-phlet Defend Immigrant Students – StopCUNY’s “War Purge”!)

The way that phony charges of “as-saulting a police officer” are used againstdemonstrators after police attack them wasshown again when three Hunter studentswere hit with this charge, as well as resistingarrest and “inciting to riot,” after cops bru-talized them near Times Square during anantiwar protest on March 20. Their case iscoming up in early June; we must demandall charges against them be dropped now!

Defending Miguel Malo is crucial tothe fight against repression at CUNY; it iscrucial to defending the rights of us all. Itis necessary to publicize this case muchmore widely than has been done so far, sothat students at all CUNY campuses becomethoroughly familiar with it; and to mobilizepowerfully to demand DROP THE CHARGESNOW!

* * * *It is important that as many people

as possible come to court to show theirsupport for Miguel Malo.There must beenergetic mobilization and a big turnout,as no confidence can be placed in “jus-tice” from the courts.

The next court appearance will beon Wednesday, September 3, 2003, at9:30 A.M. At: Bronx County CriminalCourt at 215 East 161st Street, oneblock east of the Grand Concourse.Room: Part TAP-1.

The nearest subway station is 161stStreet on the 4 and D trains. Please ar-rive early, there’s often a long line out-side the court. Make sure you have theright court, since there is another courtnearby.

– Abram Negrete, Hunter InternationalistClub

Defend MiguelMalo...

continued from page 3

selves, and then deported many of themwhen they did.

The SEVIS program’s racist profilingof international students is one more facetof the racism that is a central part of capital-ist society. It goes hand in hand with police-state measures like the USA Patriot Act,enacted not just by Bush Republicans butthe Democratic Party, including virtually allthe Democratic members of Congress whostudent bureaucrats and reformist groupson the campuses try to get students to sup-port. The Patriot Act’s provisions even au-thorize the feds to secretly examine all li-brary users’ records to find out which booksthey have checked out.

In April, CUNY’s University FacultySenate passed a resolution protestingSEVIS. While noting that such governmentsurveillance measures “create fear and in-timidation among the international studentsand faculty,” it merely stated that the fac-ulty body “objects to” SEVIS — when whatis required is organized, militant and mas-sive refusal to collaborate in any way withthis racist program.

We demand no university cooperationwith the racist SEVIS program. Down withSEVIS and all racial and ethnic profiling! Wedemand to know which campus offices haveprovided information to the feds, and ex-actly what kind of information they haveturned in. We demand to know exactly whichfederal spy agencies have paid visits towhich departments at each campus, exactlywhen and where, and what transpired. Wedemand they all get off our campuses!

The fight against racism must be a fightagainst the capitalist system which con-stantly breeds it. The program of the Inter-nationalist Group and its supporters in theInternationalist Club (Hunter College) andRevolutionary Reconstruction Club (BCC)points the way for the international workingclass to put an end to racist oppressionthrough socialist revolution!

Leslie Marcos, President, InternationalistClub (@Hunter College–CUNY)

Sinister “SEVIS”...continued from page 8

State Repression...continued from page 8

Black Panther leader Fred Hampton as helay in his bed sleeping in Chicago. Overthirty years later, there are many more blackand Latino cops, and they have carried outinnumerable killings of black, Latino andother workers and youth. Lots of prisonguards, including those who have keptMumia under lock and key for two decades,are recruited from poor, working-class andminority backgrounds.

In obscuring these truths, reformistgroups on the left follow the tradition of thesocial democrats Trotsky exposed in the’30s, and reflect the outlook of the pro-capi-talist union bureaucrats today. Among themare groups like the International Socialist Or-ganization, which hails “unionization” and“strikes” by prison guards like those atRikers Island; Socialist Alternative, whichargues that cops and guards are “workers”;and reformist organizations in Brazil whichhailed “strikes” by the very military policewho routinely kill black street children. Sow-ing confidence and illusions in the capitaliststate, they mislead the workers about thevery nature of the “armed fist of the bour-geoisie.” Such positions can only divert theworkers struggle against capitalism onto apath that leads to its bitter defeat. Socialistrevolution is only possible when workersand their allies clearly see the nature of thebourgeois state.

We of the Internationalist Group call forall cops out of the unions and on the cam-puses demand all cops and military recruit-ers off campus!

would be imposed at UNAM, I participatedin organizing the strike at the PreparatoriaNo. 5 school, which is part of the UNAMsystem. I researched how much money wasgoing to “rescue” bankers in a huge gov-ernment bail-out, as contrasted with howmuch was going for education. The so-called “bank rescue” program calledFobaproa meant spending the equivalentof eighty times UNAM’s annual budget. Sowhen they tried to raise tuition I becamevery indignant. I understood that this eco-nomic policy was part of a system whichexploits the working people, oppresses theIndians and is prepared to do absolutelyanything to squeeze the last drop of sweat(and blood) out of the vast majority of thepopulation here and around the world.

On 17 April 1999 we Prepa 5 studentstook over our school, days before this wasdone in the majority of schools and cam-puses in the UNAM system. We had thesolidarity and backing of the workers atour school, who helped us print leaflets,brought us food, and most importantlyparticipated in the strike pickets and de-fense. From very early on we had to fightagainst the representatives of the popu-lar front, who wanted to sell out the strike,and who began to be known as the “mod-erates.” What these people wanted wasto accept a few crumbs from the govern-ment and put an end to the strike, all inthe name of class collaboration.

Government repression began shortlythereafter. The Mexico City police brutallyattacked student strikers in August, Octo-ber and December 1999, alternating with fre-quent porro attacks against the strike. On 1February 2000, the Federal Police (PFP)seized a preparatory school and arrestedmore than three hundred students. I at-tended the following meeting of the StrikeGeneral Council (CGH), convinced that it wasurgent to do something to get thecompañeros and compañeras out of jail andmove the struggle forward to victory. How-ever, this assembly was also dissolved bythe PFP, and I was arrested together withmore than 600 others.

I was held in the women’s section ofthe Consejo Tutelar de Menores (Minors’Jail), where we were treated terribly. For ex-ample, they doused us with cold water atdawn and forced us to do exercises nude. Inaddition, when we were transported to thejail, police threatened to rape us.

When I got out I rejoined the fight. Imet the Grupo Internacionalista during thestrike, when it was fighting to organize amarch of striking students, together withworkers, for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal. At the time I was a delegate from myschool in the Strike General Council, and acomrade from the Group approached me toask that I propose that the Prepa 5 strikers’assembly back the march.

After the strike had been broken I reallypaid attention to the positions of the GrupoInternacionalista. I wanted to know why thestrike had been defeated, and it seemed to

OrderNow!

Importantpamphlet on thestruggle to defeatracist attack onimmigrantstudents.

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me that the key to this lay in the program.Remaining isolated on the university cam-puses, the strike was not able to strike a realblow against the bourgeoisie. What wasnecessary was to halt production and tradein the fight to stop the capitalists’ offensiveof hunger and repression.

Now you are carrying out an extremelyimportant struggle. I want to tell you, broth-ers and sisters, that we are with you in thisfight. From Mexico City, I say to you: goforward and be brave. Victory will be yours.– Quetzal*[Note: these included the massive stu-dent movement in Mexico, the repressionof which in the 2 October 1968 TlatelolcoMassacre drew attention world-wide tothe brutal nature of the Mexican capital-ist regime.]

Revolution September 2003Sinister “SEVIS” Program:

Racist Profiling of International StudentsBy Leslie Marcos

Deported for changing majors, movingto a new apartment – or even for skipping aclass? These are some of the threats facinginternational students as the Student andExchange Visitor Information System(SEVIS) has moved into high gear. SEVIS isa huge Federal database for surveillance andtracking of foreign citizens studying herewith student visas, as well as professors andother staff who acquired their work visasprior to stepping on U.S. soil.

As with so many other repressive mea-sures, SEVIS was in the works for years, butthe government yelled “9/11” as an excuse tomake it fully operational. Students and fac-ulty across the U.S. have denounced the un-just and sinister program, which requires col-leges and schools nationwide to upload in-formation about foreign students and profes-sors. Schools that refuse to take part in thescrutiny, declining to become informers forthe feds, are denied the right to enroll foreignstudents or employ staff from other countries.

The $36 million SEVIS program monitorseven the slightest change in the academic lifeof international students. The scrutiny in-cludes their major, their enrollment every se-mester, how many classes they are taking, theirgraduation date, whether they have movedfrom one dorm room to another, whether anydisciplinary action has been taken againstthem, and even something most of us do inour life as students, skip a class.

University of Colorado student YasharZendehel got a taste of what this all means.Detained with other Middle Eastern studentsduring the “special registration” ordered bythe Immigration and Naturalization Service,he was threatened with deportation. His“crime”? Falling below the minimum courseload for full-time students when he changedmajors and dropped a course. Theuniversity’s director of international stu-dents noted that the feds’ new snoopingprograms have had a “chilling effect on stu-dents” (New York Times, 17 February).

SEVIS has already caused many col-leges to lose professors, assistants, tutorsand students. Some have reported a drop ofmore than 20 percent in enrollment of for-eign graduate students. “Having fewer in-ternational students can lead to fewer teach-ing assistantships, less research and ulti-mately less diversity,” noted the Universityof Minnesota’s director of graduate admis-sions (Minnesota Daily, 30 June). In majorssuch as math, engineering and science, manyare being denied visas because the Federalgovernment categorizes their nationality orethnicity as suspect. In physics, those mostoften denied visas are students from China,followed by those from the Middle East, ac-cording to a report from the American Insti-tute of Physics’ Statistical Research Center.

Those who do get visas often face enor-mous delays and obstacles. The AIP reportstates that a fifth of students admitted intophysics graduate programs will be delayedby visa application problems for at least a fullterm, and some will not make it to the lab tableat all. Engineering students are often on thereceiving end of this treatment, and interna-tional students make up more than half thestaff of civil, electrical and mechanical engi-neering departments. Yet “for countries withdeveloping economies, engineering is ofcourse very important,” as a spokesman for

the Statistical Research Center noted (InsideScience News Service, 30 June).

With SEVIS, “we are concerned thatthere is a very strong possibility things couldgo crazy,’’ said the director of internationalstudent programs at the California Instituteof Technology, Parandeh Kia (PasadenaStar-News, 11 April). A female Caltech gradu-ate student was stranded in China for monthsafter Christmas break, Kia noted. Becauseof cases like this, many international stu-dents do not want to travel to their coun-tries to visit family members because theyare afraid they will be denied re-entry to theUnited States and will not be able to con-tinue their studies.

As if the scrutiny, threats of deporta-tion, racism, discrimination and other head-aches were not enough, SEVIS makes verydangerous technical mistakes when print-ing students’ personal information. Some-times printouts end up at other schools, inrandom departments, putting students ineven more danger if the information was tofall into the hands of the wrong individualwho could change the document in order toget the student in trouble. To cite one ex-ample, on a single day last term all the for-eign student records from the University ofArizona were electronically transmitted toMichigan State University. On March 12, FBIagents arrested a Southeastern Universitystudent after the school had reported erro-

neously that she had dropped out and theschool was unable to correct the error.

But the racist functioning of SEVIS isno random glitch, and if the system is“crazy,” as Caltech’s Kia called it, there is amethod to the madness: the method of rac-ist discrimination and social regimentation.Thousands of Japanese Americans beinglocked up in camps during World War II issupposedly “ancient history.” But today as

well, imperialist war abroad means racistroundups here “at home.” In the dragnetlaunched after September 11, 2001, over athousand Arab and Muslim men were im-prisoned without trial. A CCNY student wasseized and held with her whole family forthe “crime” of being born in the “wrong”country. The INS forced huge numbers ofundocumented workers to report them-

State Repression on CampusBy Aubeen López

As the United States continues its im-perialist military occupation in Iraq, the im-perialists have got their iron heel on theworking class in the U.S. as well. In recentmonths, the war in Iraq has led to escalatingpolice-state measures. Soldiers with machineguns stalked the subway stations here inNew York. Can it be long before someone isshot for the “terrible” crime of hopping theturnstiles?

At college and high-school campuses,the government and school administrationshave stepped up measures to keep studentsin line. From the war to tuition hikes, stu-dents have cause to protest, and ruling-classrepression is the reaction. The instrumentsof this repression are what Friedrich Engelscalled the “special bodies of armed men”whose job is to protect the interests of theruling class.

Earlier this year at the High School forEnterprise, Business and Technology, a blackstudent named Javon Ross refused to standfor the pledge of allegiance during a basket-ball game. A security guard immediately or-dered him to leave the gymnasium for exercis-ing his democratic rights. As for CUNY“peace” officers being peaceful, nothing couldbe further from the truth. One of countlessexamples occurred on June 17 at the MedgarEvers campus, there, parents who were at-tending graduation ceremonies for their fifth-grade children at PS 92 were pepper-sprayedand beaten by CUNY peace officers. The DailyNews published a photo of a black womanparent dressed in a formal gown and with abreathing device as a result of this attack.

In August 2001 at Hostos CommunityCollege, student government leader MiguelMalo was arrested for simply holding up a

sign during registration to protest the slash-ing of bilingual and Spanish programs dur-ing registration. CUNY “peace” officers thenslapped Miguel with phony charges of as-sault, resisting arrest, harassment and dis-orderly conduct!

CUNY cops are no different in theirfunction and methods from other profes-sionals of repression whose job is to “serveand protect” those in power who have thecapital. As radical black journalist MumiaAbu-Jamal wrote in 1996, in support of ourBrazilian comrades’ fight to oust police fromthe unions, police are not part of, but en-emies of, labor. Police of all kinds are the fistof the capitalist class and the shield of itsprivate property.

Student protester being arrested outside CUNY Board of Trustees meeting,25 January 1999.

Bill M

oore photo

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CUNY students participate in labor demo to free detained immigrants, 16March 2002.

Internationalist photo

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