Recently I attended a PLP communist school on dialectics with a friend; she’s a student and I’m a teacher at Chicago State University. Our opening presentation described how dialectical principles apply to the process of development from a seed to a bean plant and provoked many questions and challenges about precisely how the principles are to be understood.
In our workshop we continued the discussion of dialectics as a general theory of nature, but it was hard to pin down the discussion. Moreover, it tended to exclude people, such as my friend, who were less familiar with communism. I proposed applying the principles to my friend’s work with a campus group, the Students for Justice (S4J).
This immediately raised a number of issues. S4J had developed a petition demanding child care on campus which would benefit our many single-parent students, mostly women. It also demanded that the money the bookstore pays to the university should be used to fund childcare. (The bookstore treats students like criminals and overcharges for books).
However, S4J literature did not criticize the bookstore policy of barring students from the textbook aisles of the bookstore. Instead students hand their schedule to a clerk who gets their books for them. Consequently, students must wait for hours for their books. The petition did not say the bookstore policy was racist, nor did it connect the campus treatment of students — a large majority being black — to the racism we experience in Chicago neighborhoods where store owners treat customers disrespectfully.
How could we sharpen the discussion within S4J, raising issues of racism? Why hadn’t S4J members said more about racism in its petition and literature? Did students disagree that these practices were racist? Or did they believe they were racist but that saying so would turn people off? Was the petition’s purpose to gain the most possible signatures, or was it to raise the understanding of racism on campus and in Chicago and beyond? Was S4J just trying to win a reform or was it trying to empower students to fight in their own interests and to understand the connection between the racism they experience and the capitalist system?
In the workshop we felt that raising these questions would sharpen the contradictions within S4J between communist, anti-racist politics and capitalist-style politics of trying to be popular. I thought that even if, as a result of the discussion, S4J still did not want to call the lack of child care and the bookstore policies racist and sexist, we still would have encouraged students to think more sharply about what they were doing and what they hoped to accomplish, bringing them closer to communism and the Party.
Sometimes our discussions of dialectics are too abstract because we treat it as a philosophy of everything without applying it to analyzing our political work. On the one hand, it’s essential to study the laws and categories of dialectics, but if we don’t apply them to what we have to do to build the Party and our road to communist revolution, then they do become abstract.
In the above discussion, we attempted to apply dialectics to a real-life experience, showing how various things are not isolated phenomenon but are inter-related, how discussing and sharpening the contradictions — among other principles — help us advance our thinking and therefore our actions.
In effect, both theory and practice are essential and inextricably linked. Combining the two, as we tried to do above, will lead to the most useful discussion in doing the Party’s work.
Professor Red

The dispatch of a U.S. aircraft carrier and 14,300 troops to the Philippines after typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda has nothing to do with humanitarian interests and everything to do with securing an imperialist base to counter China.
In the 19th century, U.S. capitalists, in their rush to acquire colonies and build an empire, invaded the Philippines for a base to control the Pacific and the Far East. Racism, waterboarding torture and genocide were used against Filipinos who fought the U.S. occupation from 1899 to 1905. Thousands of the 70,000 U.S. troops and millions of Filipinos were killed in that war.
On January 9, 1900, racist Senator Albert Beveridge said:

Mr. President…the Philippines are ours forever…and just beyond the Philippines are China’s unlimited markets….The Pacific is our ocean….The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East….It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel….Senators, we must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans; we are dealing with [Asians].

Willard Gatewood’s book, Smoked Yankees and the Struggle for Empire, revealed that an “unusually large number of black troops deserted during the Philippine campaign over anger at the term ‘n*****’ used by white troops to describe Filipinos and themselves. Some deserters joined the Filipino rebels like David Fagan of the 24th Infantry, who accepted a commission in the insurgent army and for two years wreaked havoc upon the American forces.”
After World War II, the Hukbalahap communist movement, which had fought a guerrilla war against the Japanese, began a war against U.S. occupation but by 1953 was temporarily defeated. A new communist insurrection in the 1970s, along with a mass uprising, forced the U.S. to abandon its military control and giant naval base at Subic Bay.
With the loss in Vietnam and the rise of China’s competing economy, the U.S. has been financing corrupt Philippine governments to accept its military presence. In 2001, 4,000 U.S. troops landed in Mindanao to train Filipino soldiers against Muslim and communist insurgents. Three thousand more U.S. troops have been added and the Philippine government agreed to send its troops to fight in Iraq. Recently the U.S. has been conducting air and sea war maneuvers with the Philippine military to counter China’s attempts to drill for oil in the adjacent seas.
Before the recent typhoon hit, the country’s homes, roads and airports were among the worst in Southeast Asia. The storm displaced 4.4 million people and affected 13.2 million in 44 provinces. With millions homeless, facing blocked roads, without food, water or power, and no aid in sight, people began liberating products their labor produced from the rich hoarders in order to survive. There were reports of government troops in gun battles with communists in some villages and civilian complaints that the military is not helping them and only protecting the rich while preventing people from organizing for their needs.
The U.S. military response can only lead to occupation and more neglect like in New Orleans after Katrina and Haiti after the earthquake. The Philippine government bosses and their U.S. imperialist masters fear that present conditions expose their corrupt profit system’s failure and become fertile ground for communist ideas to spark a revolution for a system that serves people’s needs.

An appeal from students of the State University of Haiti to CUNY students for your help against the cruel and criminal Michel Martelly regime:
Since this neo-Duvalierist dictatorial régime came to power, students here, like so many other working-class people, have suffered under the jackboots of all sorts of government repression.  Arrests, assassinations, beatings, and other contemptuous criminal acts unworthy of human beings are the deliberate policies of the police and of MINUSTAH, the United Nations “peacekeeper” force.
In February 2012, President Martelly himself arrived at the School of Ethnology campus with an armed group firing guns, beating students, and looting offices.  Well before this, however, the repressive machine had cracked down on us. This year the violence and arbitrary arrests are more and more frequent.  We hate this!  It fills us with rage!
Early one morning last week, the entire School of Ethnology was blanketed with tear gas.  No one could breathe.  People were traumatized — fainting, crying, calling for help — all over the campus. That afternoon, the gangsters in the Haitian National Police struck our comrade, a third-year student at the Teachers College.  He was maimed by a stun grenade that hit him directly on the right hand.  Three surgeries later, in spite of our aid and the doctors’ efforts, it became clear there was no chance of saving the hand.
How many more hateful crimes like this must we endure before we understand the criminal mentality and boundless perversity of this régime, this eater of the men and women of our class?
That’s why we are asking for a whole-souled solidarity from you, our comrades. At CUNY, the militarization of your university exposes the administration’s opposition to your struggle for a good education and a more egalitarian society. In Haiti, we have joined the same struggle to counter this worldwide system of injustice that knows no limits.
We commit ourselves to this struggle knowing its risks and dangers. We ask you for your support, for this is one struggle!  Your struggle is ours!  Let us fight together to denounce and combat these inhuman policies, until we put an end to the capitalist system that has so injured our class.
We fighters in Haiti are of one mind with you, in an international solidarity that can only grow stronger.  In admiration we send you our warmest greetings.  We hope with you to lead a common struggle for the betterment of the working class. Marx said, after all, that the interests of the proletariat are the interests of humanity itself.

NEW YORK CITY, November 23 — On Tuesday, November 19, more than 120 students and faculty packed the courtroom or waited outside during the arraignment of two anti-fascist City College students. The two are leaders of a movement to oppose the teaching appointment of war criminal David Petraeus, the restoration of ROTC, and the police seizure of a student/community organizing space, the Morales/Shakur Center. They are being charged with disorderly conduct, riot, resisting arrest and obstruction of governmental administration.
The two students, previously suspended by the college bosses, have demonstrated tremendous courage and determination in the face of serious criminal charges. Our presence showed the court they do not stand alone.
Three days after the arraignment, nearly 50 students and faculty packed a hearing on the college’s disciplinary charges. Before it began, lawyers reached an agreement to reinstate the students for the spring semester but maintain their ban from the current semester’s classes. Their tuition will be refunded.
The pressure to criminally charge students who have done nothing wrong appears to come from the New York Police Department, which works closely with higher-ups at the City University of New York. Press reports indicate that people in high circles were furious with the militant demonstrations against Petraeus, who’s been mentioned as a possible Republican presidential candidate for 2020. (Before last year’s exposure of his long-running extramarital affair, he had been touted as a possible candidate in 2016.) The rulers consider him the model “warrior-scholar,” the type of leader needed to encourage military service among youth and to mobilize support for U.S. interventions abroad. Republican Senator John McCain called Petraeus one of “America’s greatest military heroes.” In 2010, Time Magazine ranked him among the top fifty “People Who Matter.’”
Petraeus and his powerful supporters never dreamed that CUNY students and faculty would expose the former general as a war criminal. They never imagined he’d be forced to go to and from class in a tinted-windowed SUV via an underground garage, and then escorted by security to the deserted 16th floor of an office building. They certainly didn’t foresee that angry students would pursue Petraeus on the street after his class.
Under pressure from several members of Congress, the NYPD and an embarrassed CUNY administration — two parts of the capitalist state apparatus — mounted a counterattack on radical students. First they closed the Morales/Shakur Center, used for decades to organize against higher tuition and the militarization of their university. After the closure sparked large demonstrations, CUNY suspended the two students while the cops arrested them.
The point of this repression was twofold: to intimidate students and to distract them. Instead of demonstrating against Petraeus and ROTC, we were now attending suspension hearings and criminal arraignments. But this heavy-handed attack is also a positive thing. It shows that ruling-class forces are worried. They need to restore ROTC to urban campuses to integrate their officer corps. Militant opposition to this strategy is a big problem for them.
Young people at CUNY are not rushing to enlist in the U.S. military. The failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not morale-builders. Thousands of soldiers died, hundreds of thousands returned home seriously impaired (including half a million with mental problems), and one of three female soldiers was sexually assaulted. The military is struggling to meet recruitment goals. Without enough soldiers, the bosses will be unable to project U.S. power abroad in the current period of global instability and inter-imperialist conflict.
U.S. wars of occupation — from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan — have killed millions and damaged tens of millions. While imperialism protects the profits of the very wealthy, it gravely harms the working class — both the workers forced to fight and those losing social services at home. With nearly a trillion dollars a year spent to maintain a thousand military bases and a global U.S. empire, there is little left over for health care, education, or adequate nutrition.
Members of Progressive Labor Party at CUNY are committed to use every class and gathering, every forum and film event, to win students to rebel against the agents of U.S. imperialism on campus: Petraeus, ROTC, recruiters, and military researchers. Join the communist PLP and end this murderous capitalist system!