NEW YORK CITY, October 26 — Last week a young black worker was pulled over by the cops on his way to work at LaGuardia airport. Initially the cops told the worker he had been pulled over for a broken taillight, but on the ticket, they cited him with not stopping at a stop sign. Why did the police pull him over? DWB (driving while black) seems his most likely offense.

When the racist cops questioned the young worker, they found his license was temporarily invalid and placed him under arrest. After dragging him to jail, the police rifled through the worker’s car and found a laptop in his trunk. The racist cops went to the exhaustive step of running the serial number on the computer. At this point, they discovered it had been reported stolen at the airport six months earlier.

Right now, it is not known if the worker stole the laptop. What is known is this: the NYPD proceeded to contact the fascist airport police, who confiscated the worker’s airport ID, making it impossible for him to work and notifying his bosses of the proceedings, which will undoubtedly lead to his firing. The cops then charged him with theft on federal property, a mandatory felony, and threatened to send him to Riker’s Island prison.

What is also known is this: last November the airport police (to fill a quota of arrests) attacked a worker helping passengers. Every day the NYPD harasses black and Latino workers doing nothing more than coming and going from work. Every week the black worker was harassed by the racist airport bosses for petty uniform violations and the like. And on every flight that the arrested worker loaded and unloaded, the bosses stole thousands of dollars from him and other workers by paying them as little as $7.50 an hour and reaping $10,000s in ticket sales (per flight).

Capitalism is based on wage slavery, a system where bosses steal from workers every day. It uses the brutality of the police to enforce and defend this law. At the same time, it tries to teach us as workers to be individualistic and only look out for ourselves.

PLP does not condone hurting other workers, and this includes stealing. However, we should remember that workers under capitalism steal either because they do not have enough or because the system teaches us selfish individualism and to not care about others. Fighting for communism means not only fighting to meet the material needs of the working class but also fighting for more collective, pro-worker thinking.