No. 22, October 2025 Table of Contents Selected articles linked  Newspaper of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth, youth section of the Internationalist Group (U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International), and CUNY students from the Internationalist Clubs, for the program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. Click on image to left for pdf version of complete issue.

For Mass Worker/Student Action to Stop Raids and Deportations Raids, kidnappings and deportations by masked agents of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement); federal troops sent to one city after another; mass firings and union-busting; the trampling of academic freedom, trans rights, public health … All this and more, on top of two years of unbearable images of mass murder and devastation in Gaza, “Made in USA” under “Genocide Joe” Biden and then Donald Trump. It seems like a new hell each day – but it didn’t come from nowhere. The accelerating drive toward authoritarian rule, backed by some of the world’s wealthiest profiteers and ideologues of “free-market” dictatorship is the result of the spiraling decay of the capitalist system of inequality, exploitation, racism and war. The basic Marxist point is that voting for or otherwise supporting Democrats (or Republicans or any other capitalist politicians) is counterposed to what is urgently needed. Against this class collaboration, what we desperately need is mass, militant class struggle in defense of the rights of us all. The political fight to unchain working-class power is crucial to building worker/student action to stop the raids and deportations. For Mass Worker/Student Action to Stop Raids and Deportations (October 2025) ICE Terror’s Toll (October 2025)

Mamdani Says: “Be My Democrat” No Way – You Can’t Fight Trump with  Democrats For a Revolutionary Workers Party! Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to be elected mayor of New York City on the Dem­o­cratic Party ticket has saturated every corner of the city and grabbed headlines nationwide. After the 33-year-old state assemblyman of South Asian descent who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America scored an upset victory in the June primary, now Democratic Party candidate Mamdani is poised to be elected mayor of NYC. While we denounce racist scaremongering and bigoted threats aimed against him, revolutionary Marxists call for no vote to any candidate of any capitalist party. Democratic Party “socialists” seek to prop up capitalist society and give its discredited political system a makeover. And the closer Mamdani gets to election day, the more he underscores this, courting business leaders and apologizing to the police for having called the NYPD racist, homophobic and a “threat to public safety” back in 2020.  Faced with decaying capitalism’s escalating dangers and attacks against workers, youth and all the oppressed, it is more urgent than ever to unchain the power of the working class, break the stranglehold of capitalist politics and build a revolutionary workers party. No Way – You Can’t Fight Trump with  Democrats (October 2025)

For Student-Teacher-Worker Mobilization Against Police Repression! Vicious Cop Riot Against Pro-Palestinian Protesters at Brooklyn College By the CUNY Internationalist Clubs On May 8, a phalanx of several dozen New York City Police officers stormed onto the campus of Brooklyn College (BC), part of the City University of New York (CUNY), to violently repress and viciously beat demonstrators protesting the escalating genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. It was a deliberately laid trap. The minute the student protesters were pushed out the gate, the militarized NYPD Strategic Response Group (SRG) let loose. Multiple extensive videos show the SRG thugs, including supervisors, repeatedly punching demonstrators, throwing them to the pavement, slamming them up against a fence. The police riot at Brooklyn College was emblematic of the broad assault on universities and pro-Palestinian protests today. This attack comes at the same time as the escalating push by the Trump administration for mass deportations. The Professional Staff Congress, the faculty/staff union at CUNY initiated a mass petition campaign demanding  “No ICE/DHS at CUNY!” which the Internationalist Clubs and Hunter Committee to Defend Immigrants helped circulate widely, gathering thousands of signatures. This and the strong denunciation by the PSC of the police attack on the pro-Palestinian protesters at Brooklyn College underscore the need for student-faculty-worker action against attacks on free speech and immigrants’ rights. Vicious Cop Riot Against Pro-Palestinian Protesters at Brooklyn College (June 2025) McCarthyite Firings and Star-Chamber Inquisitions As the witch-hunters in Congress gear up for a new round of inquisitorial hearings of university administrations, this time including the City University of New York (and the University of California/Berkeley), CUNY authorities fired four professors at Brooklyn College as part of the same campaign of McCarthyite repression that unleashed the brutal NYPD attack on May 8. McCarthyite Firings and Star-Chamber Inquisitions (June 2025)

Capitalism and Slavery in NYC: A Review of The Kidnapping Club Wall Street’s Slave Catchers and the Fight for Black Freedom Today, as masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conduct raids across the United States, kidnapping people and taking them away in unmarked cars, one can hear the echoes of the slave catchers who in the decades before the Civil War prowled through the streets and alleyways of New York City. The close connections between New York’s ruling circles and the Southern slavocracy was central to the city’s economics and politics going back long before the Civil War. This is brought to life in The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War (2020) by historian David Wells. The book also shows the role of New York’s then-nascent police force, its courts, jails and Democratic Party-run political machine in blatantly serving the intertwined interests of Southern slave masters and Wall Street financiers. Bounty hunters, lawyers and informants in the employ of Southern slaveowners prowled the North looking to cash in on the kidnapping of black people. Despite Wall Street’s hope that slavery’s opponents in Northern cities would resign themselves to the slaveowners’ power, militant resistance broke out in a series of places, including the mass upheaval of May 1854 in Boston. In 1857, outrage intensified still further when the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott stated that nobody of African descent was or could be a citizen of the United States and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in any federal territory. In April 1861, the “Confederacy” of secessionist Southern states launched what Karl Marx called the “slaveholders’ rebellion,”  unleashing the Civil War that smashed chattel slavery – the Second American Revolution. Wall Street’s Slave Catchers and the Fight for Black Freedom (October 2025) When the White House Sent Marines to Seize Fugitive Slaves (October 2024)

Trump, White House Witch-Hunters Besiege Academia The Gleichschaltung of American Universities U.S. universities are under attack like never before. It began on March 8 with the seizure of Mahmoud Khalil, a politically moderate Palestinian graduate of Columbia University. In the following weeks, while pushing to deport international students, the federal government launched an assault on academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus intended to be much more deep-going than even the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s. Washington is seeking control over hiring, enrollment, governance and course content, while demanding the expulsion of liberal “activist” faculty and students. The basic outlook of the administration can be summed up by the title of a 2021 speech delivered by now vice president J.D. Vance: “The Universities Are the Enemy.” As Vance put it in a July 2024 interview, the Trump regime seeks to “replace the existing ruling class with another ruling class.” As the U.S. lurches toward authoritarian rule, we are facing a drive to control all education, whipping educators into line to march in lockstep with the MAGA agenda, imitating the German Nazis’ Gleichschaltung (synchronization) of the schools. The Gleichschaltung of American Universities (May 2025)

NYC Higher Education Unions Rally Against Attacks on Universities, Immigrants Hunter Internationalist: “We Are All Under Attack!” In early March, the Trump administration began abducting pro-Palestinian international students for deportation, simultaneously threatening to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding from elite universities deemed insufficiently hard on protests against Gaza genocide. The initial response of college administrations (epitomized by Columbia University) was to capitulate. But when it was announced that 17 international students at the City University of New York had their visas revoked, the CUNY faculty/staff union Professional Staff Congress along with students from the CUNY Internationalist Clubs sharply protested. Shortly afterwards, a national day of action was called by higher education unions for April 17. A student representing the CUNY Internationalists and the Hunter College Committee to Defend Immigrants spoke at the NYC rally. Hunter Internationalist: “We Are All Under Attack!” (May 2025) Video of Hunter Internationalist’s speech (May 2025)

Learning from Our History Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Women’s Liberation Every year the Internationalist Club at Hunter College of the City University of New York holds a forum celebrating International Women's Day. This year’s forum took place amidst a sweeping assault on basic democratic rights across the board, from the rights of immigrants to the right of women to get an abortion, from transgender health services to scientists’ research, the right of teachers to teach and students to learn the actual history of this country. The forum emphasized how women’s oppression is interwoven with the emergence of class divided civilization, and how under capitalism the nuclear family is the central institution keeping women chained to the home, to domestic tasks and child rearing. It stressed that women’s oppression, like black oppression, is bound up in the very roots of this deeply racist, sexist society, and that it is necessary to uproot it by doing away with its material basis, as summed up in  our slogan, “Women’s liberation through socialist revolution.” The speaker highlighted the history of our comrade Marjorie Stamberg, who died last year, and how her experience in the class struggle drove home the need to break with feminism and embrace revolutionary Marxism. She waged the fight for Trotskyism in election campaigns and in struggles for labor/black mobilization against KKK terror, and later as a teachers union delegate and founder of Class Struggle Education Workers. Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Women’s Liberation (October 2025)

Elizabeth Catlett, From D.C. to Mexico City Exile The Inspiring Odyssey of a Black Radical Artist This past Spring, members of the Internationalist Club at the City University of New York and of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth visited the Brooklyn Museum exhibit of the work of black revolutionary artist Elizabeth Catlett. The beauty and expressiveness of her work, and its revolutionary message struck the comrades from the moment they entered the exhibit with its huge fist in deep brown wood. In addition to her well known works, including the portrait of a sharecropper and the print of Harriet Tubman with a rifle, the collection of her drawings, sculpture, linocut prints, and oil paintings were a stunning indictment of Jim Crow racism in the United States, and U.S. imperialist domination of Latin America in particular. She studied with artists at Howard University who had been part of the Harlem Renaissance and became interested there in socialist ideas. She went on to teach ceramics at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School, worked at the George Washington Carver School in Harlem, targeted by anti-communist witch hunters as a “Red Front school” and in 1946 moved to Mexico. There, she worked closely with the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a group of radical print makers, many of them Communists. Some of her most striking works concerned the 1968 massacre of students at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), where she taught, and protests against U.S. wars in Central America in the 1980s.  Denied a visa to return to the U.S. in 1969 she proudly declared that she was, had been “and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist.” Elizabeth Catlett’s defiant courage in the face of racist reaction, and her inspiring art spoke powerfully to us at this time when all of our hard-earned rights are under attack. The Inspiring Odyssey of a Black Radical Artist (October 2025)

On “Home Front” of U.S./Israel War on Gaza Congressional Witch Hunt Comes to CUNY On July 15, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce hauled the heads of the City University of New York, the University of California at Berkeley and Georgetown University to inquisitorial hearings on Capitol Hill. The hearing, titled “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Investigating the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology,” was the latest in a series aimed at regimenting and purging colleges and universities, while providing opportunities for right-wing politicians to advance their careers. The pretext for this ongoing witch hunt is the vile slander that it is “antisemitic” to protest the genocidal war on Gaza, defend the Palestinian people or oppose Zionism. The top inquisitor, the self-styled “ultra-MAGA” New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, went after CUNY chancellor Felix Matos Rodríguez, who was most eager to highlight the measures taken against student protest. Democrats as well, from U.S. president Joe Biden to NY governor Kathy Hochul, have played a leading role in demonizing and repressing pro-Palestinian protesters. At protests at CUNY and elsewhere, the Internationalist Clubs and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth have denounced the new McCarthyism, calling for students, teachers and staff to connect with the power of the multiracial working class, enmphasizing that breaking from the parties and politicians of capital is crucial to the fight to defend our rights. Congressional Witch Hunt Comes to CUNY (October 2025) Columbia Caves (October 2025) Who’s Witch-Hunting CUNY (October 2025)