NEW YORK CITY, November 11—The ability of youth to provide leadership was on display as teachers, students and workers gathered today for PLP’s annual College Conference. Although capitalism bombards us with the message that youth are lazy, irresponsible, violent and selfish, PLP places trust in them and today a multiracial group of young people led a conference with the theme of “Smashing Borders.” More than 50 attendees brainstormed how to combat the borders designed by the bosses to separate and weaken our class.
The opening speech highlighted how capitalists use borders economically and politically. By drawing borders where they want, bosses control resources, markets and workers. Historically, borders were drawn to give the victorious bosses control over the resources of the defeated power. When the Ottoman Empire was defeated at the end of World War I, the Middle East was carved up into countries controlled by European powers. The countries of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan were created by French and British imperialists in order to control the region and to own the newly discovered oil there. Once bosses draw their borders, the workers there are trapped, unable to leave without approval from the state. Meanwhile, their profits, stolen from those workers, move freely and easily across borders, to be invested wherever the rate of profit is highest.
The speaker also pointed out that borders have a political purpose under capitalism—to divide and weaken the working class. Along with racism and sexism, there is nationalism—the notion that workers of a particular country have more in common with, and should have political allegiance to the bosses and politicians of that country. The capitalists want us to believe that workers are different because of their “race,” ethnicity, gender, and nationality, hoping to prevent the unity of workers necessary to take back the value stolen from our labor.
Panel: From Bolshevik Revolution to the Caribbean to Today
After the opening speech, the struggle to smash borders was discussed by a panel of four speakers who described how communists have successfully fought to overcome borders over the years. The first speaker told of how a hundred years ago the Bolsheviks had made a revolution that liberated more than one-sixth of the world’s population and brought equality to the various oppressed nations that had made up the former Russian Empire. The next speaker gave a brief history of the struggles of communists in the Caribbean from the 1930s on, describing how their national fights are often linked to struggles in other countries, such as the campaign to free the “Scottsboro Boys.” The third speaker discussed how working in an immigrants’ rights group exposed the inhumanity of borders while also providing a good lesson in how we must always struggle to blast capitalist ideas wherever they appear.
Finally, the last speaker spoke of borders that became apparent when she began working at a community college as an adjunct professor. In addition to the racism, nationalism and sexism that divide us, she discovered there are also borders between full-time and part-time professors, between professors and staff and between professors and students. All of which weaken our struggle. She swiftly learned no place is free from stratification and exploitation under capitalism. Despite her delicate position as an adjunct, our comrade fearlessly promoted revolutionary politics and fought to improve conditions for students and their teachers. Over the past year, she worked with antiracist students, professors and staff to organize a conference on immigration and mass incarceration that attracted 500 students, and more recently to raise money for relief aid for Puerto Rico.
Learning to Fight
After the panelists spoke, we broke up into workshops, where we discussed how borders affect us on our own campuses and what to do about it. Students from one West Coast university told us how they were organizing mass opposition to an upcoming campus speech by a notorious anti-Islamic bigot, Robert Spencer. Islamophobia constructs borders between Muslim and non-Muslim people and is used to justify brutal U.S. wars of occupation that kill and oppress people in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. The workshops discussed the idea that if we really are to eliminate all the borders imposed on us, we have to reach out not only to other students and faculty but also to other workers on campus and on our jobs.
At the wrap-up, students and teachers feel emboldened to return to campus and sharpen the fight against borders. We left energized to educate, and organize with other workers on campus. More than anything, we left the conference confident that the future is one of a borderless, international working class.