Shut down capitalist line!
Saturday, November 9, 2019 at 7:32PM
Challenge_DesafĂ­o

BROOKLYN, November 1— Over 1,000 protestors, including members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), illegally took to the streets of Brooklyn to fight the racist New York Police Department’s terrorism directed at Black youth in the subways. After marching in the streets for more than an hour, the protestors did a mass fare evasion action and took over one of the  busiest subway stations in Brooklyn while chanting “How do you spell racist? N-Y-P-D” and “No NYPD in the MTA!”
Cops protect profit
It’s inspiring to see workers and students break the bosses’ laws and attack racism with militant, multiracial unity. But it’s not enough to get the kkkops out of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). Police everywhere protect the bosses and their capitalist system, and racism is its backbone. Wherever fighting against police terror, we must also organize for communist revolution.
Liberal Governor Andrew Cuomo recently announced the hiring of 500 more cops to terrorize workers, particularly Black and Latin youth, for evading the $2.75 subway and bus fare. The MTA has plastered stations with messages that pit workers against one another and spread the lie that less fare evasion means better service.
While the MTA claims it will lose $260 million from fare evasion this year (CBS, 6/18), it plans to lay off 2,700 MTA workers (Daily News, 7/17) while splurging an additional $663 million on policing in the next decade (City and State NY, 10/28).
Capitalism criminalizes youth
The MTA spends $9 million every single day to pay back debt to Wall Street, some of which dates back a century or more (ny.curbed.com, 10/2018).  As shown by the recent installment of cameras in front of every turnstile in one Manhattan station, it is evident that the MTA cares about terrorizing workers more than providing quality transportation.
In late October, kkkops punched two Black teenagers during an altercation on a subway platform (The Hill, 11/1). In a separate incident, a teenager hopped the turnstile and was held at gunpoint by around a dozen kkkops who stormed his train car (The Huffington Post, 11/1). These incidents, along with the police murder of three Bronx residents earlier this month, sparked the uprising in Brooklyn.
The largely young and multiracial crowd chanted and gave speeches before taking the streets. Once in the streets, the march broke into a run at times, preventing the police from infiltrating the crowd. Bus drivers and motorists cheered us on. One worker carried a projector and projected phrases like “NYPD hands off our kids. Being broke is not a crime,” and “NYPD out of subway” in gigantic letters onto buildings. Calls to ban the police from the subways and the chant that “we keep us safe”contain seeds of communist ideas: workers do not need the bosses or police. We can organize a communist society that serves the needs of the working class and ends racism once and for all. This mass outpouring of rage demonstrated that years of liberal rule under Mayor Bill de Blasio have not extinguished the will of workers and students to resist racist police attacks.  
Liberal misleaders are trash
Despite these militant qualities, the march’s leadership displayed dead-end politics, including instructions to segregate the crowd, breaking its multiracial character. White marchers were asked to form a perimeter around the sides and rear of the march, allowing Black, Latin and Asian workers to lead. Our multiracial PLP group stuck together, rejecting the illusion that “whiteness” will protect us from a police attack. While a few white marchers tried to implement such folly, most marchers remained united. Young PLP members led our section of the crowd in chants like “NYPD, KKK, how many kids have you killed today?” and “If we don’t get it, shut it down!! Shut this racist system down.”  
When PLP chanted, “Don’t vote! Revolt!” some marchers joined us, but a large portion was reluctant. Instead, many protestors shouted “One solution! Revolution!” That’s what Bernie Sanders says. But his revolution involves voting and that’s far from revolutionary.Leaders of the march come from neighborhood mass organizations that will be the foot soldiers for mayoral candidates against de Blasio’s record of racist gentrification.
No election will change the reality of debt service, where the MTA funnels billions from the working class directly into the coffers of finance capital. Those who led today’s march allow militant youth to hold up signs saying “revolution” as long as the movement funnels back to the ballot box on election day.  To paraphrase Malcolm X, you don’t have a revolution by begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it.
Instead of voting let’s fight back through our mass organizations: on CUNY campuses, in our unions, and  in our churches against liberal Governor Cuomo and the MTA bosses racist attacks on workers and youth in the city. PL’ers will continue to raise the communist flag, and politicize  workers and students vis-a-vis lousy service, fare hikes, and the racist fare beating campaigns that criminalizes mainly Black and Latin working class youth.
Cannot vote in justice
Workers cannot vote our way to justice. We need a communist revolution. The working class built every inch of the subway; it should be ours. Through communist revolution, we can take it back and build a world run by the international working class: a world without police, without racism, and without profit. Join us.

Article originally appeared on The Revolutionary Communist Progressive Labor Party (http://www.plparchive.org/).
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