NEWARK, NJ, April 12—For the first time in its 250-year history, a coalition of Rutgers workers— 9,000 graduate workers, adjuncts, and part-time lecturers (PTL)— called a strike on what would have been communist Paul Robeson’s 125th birthday.
On day one of the strike, members of the Progressive Labor Party were out in full force distributing CHALLENGE newspapers as picketers rallied and gave passionate speeches at the Newark campus. Together, workers and students shut down the $5 billion/year university across several campuses!
As the contradictions of capitalism bring the bosses’ global system closer to World War III, such strikes and other forms of class struggle will intensify. Strikes have the potential to be schools for communism, and leading the struggles with revolutionary ideas builds the confidence of workers in choosing our class over the bosses’ system forever.
Workers ready to fight, bosses & their misleaders cower
Workers’ rage and lack of confidence in liberal misleadership and electoral politics is key to producing and maintaining strikes in an environment of growing fascism and war. Thousands of ordinary workers at Rutgers University chose the power of our class over the deadly defeatism of the liberal union bosses and the empty promises of NJ Governor Phil Murphy to fight for our needs. Getting closer to the strike launch, union misleaders tried to fool workers that it was in our best interest to believe that the threat of a strike is more powerful than its actual realization. Their lack of confidence in the working class, opportunism and pacifism - which no union boss or elected official can avoid - had them trying to convince rank and file members that they weren’t “ready” to fight for each other. These misleaders were very wrong. When members were told that Murphy was requesting the union give him a short period of time to resolve the differences between Rutgers bosses and workers to avoid the strike, workers responded with a roaring no! PLP members worked with their union siblings to ensure the membership was ready, and that workers’ need for a strike won over liberal misleaders' doubt and fear.
Cutbacks, low wages part of war prep
As the inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S., Russia, and China reaches new heights, the bosses are hoarding resources and superexploiting workers in preparation for recruiting us into their mounting wars. Universities play a complex role in this preparation. While their workers and facilities absorb the cutbacks that go hand-in-hand with resource hoarding, universities are also key sites for recruiting and training students to become a pacified workforce and the liberal misleaders of tomorrow.
The bosses need masses of people won to liberal ideas in college to reproduce the nationalism and helplessness that supports conditions of war. At Rutgers, diversity projects like the Honors Living and Learning College train students to believe in their individual exceptionalism, convincing them that a few Black students getting elite career opportunities will help liberate the entire Black working class. In the program, students get a minor in Social Justice, but only very few have participated in the strike effort, while even more have spent their time creating a Black Professionals Network.  But no amount of politicians of color can change the material conditions for the international working class; only communist revolution led by PLP will smash capitalism’s racist exploitation once and for all.
Bosses like Phil Murphy, Ras Baraka and Jonathan Holloway will show their true colors as liberal supporters of finance capital as they try to crush worker’s unions in the coming days or betray workers in years to come when they run for greater seats of power. Governor Murphy, a former hedge fund executive at Goldman Sachs— the second largest investment bank in the world— will demand sacrifice from workers and will use increasingly fascist tactics to end the strike.  Rutgers president Holloway will do whatever his real bosses–finance capital–dictate to keep pumping out obedient workers, generate profit for the state and pay Rutgers’ external debt, which totals more than $250 million, including about $140 million to construct athletic facilities (USA Today 1/19/2022).
As the Rutgers strike continues, it will be imperative for workers and students to use it as a school for communism. Only on the picket lines will they learn the important lessons for liberation, and the tools to refuse the bosses’ austerity without being won to liberal ideas that lead to imperialist war. With multiracial unity and an international Progressive Labor Party on the front lines, the Rutgers strike will help teach us all to have confidence in each other, and to embrace communism as our class’s only way to win the world.

**Future issues of CHALLENGE will contain further analysis and reports of our involvement in this strike.**