NEW YORK CITY, October 10—Over 300 Columbia University students and others held a militant protest against Tommy Robinson, who had been invited by campus Republicans. Robinson, who founded the English Defense League, violently opposes all immigrants, whom he calls criminals. It is Robinson who has been jailed for assault and mortgage fraud. It is ironic that Robinson entered the US from the UK using a stolen passport.
Students from the Muslim Students Association, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Barnard Columbia Socialists, Student-Worker Solidarity (SWS), and Barnard Columbia Solidarity Network united against Robinson. Members of Black Lives Matter, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and several friends of PLP members, who take night classes and teach students by day, also came to protest, despite busy schedules.
Thirty students got inside the poorly attended event and interrupted the speech, holding up signs that read “hate speech = violence” and “Muslims are welcome here.”  Outside, other protestors chanted, made speeches, and marched. The following night a group of about 50 students met to plan actions against upcoming fascist speakers and to defend protestors who entered the hall and have been informed by the Columbia administration that they may be disciplined for their actions.
Liberal Institution Welcomes Racists
Robinson is one of a string of fascists and extreme racists who have been invited to speak at Columbia, including Charles Murray last year. They have been invited under the banner of free speech, which only gives them a platform from which to spread their lies about the working class. The hypocritical Columbia administrators oppose racism in words but in deeds facilitate racist organizing while threatening anti-racist protestors.
No surprise. Columbia is run by a board, 75 percent of which are bankers and corporate executives. They represent a capitalist ruling class whose profit-making requires keeping workers divided, weak, and fighting each other, through various forms of racism and sexism. For example, they need the University community to accept the displacement of mostly poor Black workers from Harlem in order to expand their campus.
Capitalism would have severe difficulty surviving in the U.S., or anywhere, unless the rulers keep wages and living/working conditions as low as possible. They succeed by creating inequalities that divide workers against each other—in particular by forcing non-white and women workers to accept roughly 75percent of the wages of white men on average, whether through lower pay for similar work or because they are forced into less valued jobs. Also the lower levels of health, education, housing and sanitation in Black, Latin, and immigrant neighborhoods save the bosses a bundle. But often unrecognized, these divisions, by severely hindering working class unity, also force down the wages and conditions for white workers, along with their non-white and immigrant sisters and brothers.
PLP members from the community and a nearby activist church in Harlem have been attending Columbia SWS meetings for five years. SWS organizes for better pay and conditions for campus workers, including student workers, and supports the unionization campaigns of adjuncts and graduate student teaching assistants. Almost all of these efforts have been successful because of the students’ militancy and persistence. All the members receive CHALLENGE, and several have attended and spoken at PLP-sponsored May Day marches in recent years. Although these students are very dedicated and pro-worker, we have yet to win them to see the possibility of, and need for, communist revolution. This is a long march, but we will continue to advance.