On April 18, Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik directed the New York Police Department to arrest 108 students. The students’ crime? They were encamped on a campus lawn to protest Israel’s racist murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, as well as Columbia’s investments in companies that profit from the Zionist regime’s genocide and apartheid (see article on page 3). The incident marked the killer kkkops’ first invasion of Columbia in decades. To some it recalled the 1968 eruption against the University’s racist expansion into Harlem and the U.S. rulers’ genocide in Vietnam, when a police riot ended with nearly seven hundred students arrested and more than one hundred injured (Washington Post, 4/18). 

The recent wave of campus lockdowns, suspensions of pro-Palestine students, banning of pro-Palestine groups, firings of anti-Zionist workers—all are signs that the U.S. bosses’ can’t rely on liberal democracy to gain mass support for the genocidal project in Gaza. More broadly, as they look ahead to the racist austerity they’ll need in the runup to World War Three, the bosses are determined to pacify and intimidate workers by any means necessary. We’re nearing the point where the U.S. rulers can no longer afford the phony spectacles of “freedom of speech” or “freedom of assembly.” As they struggle to fend off rival imperialists in China and Russia, their only alternative is to unleash fascist terror in a bid to save their crumbling empire. That’s the message they’re sending at Columbia and dozens of other campuses.

The bosses’ strategic weakness

But with every starved and murdered Palestinian child, the lies and desperation of the bosses’ liberal politicians—from Genocide Joe Biden on down—are revealed for all to see. Strong-arm tactics are often a sign of strategic weakness—and students and education workers are fighting back! As CHALLENGE goes to press, antiracist Columbia students—including many anti-Zionist Jewish students—are defiantly resisting Shafik’s orders to disband the encampment. Four days after the arrests, hundreds of outraged Columbia faculty walked out in solidarity (Guardian, 4/22). So have hundreds of CUNY and local high school students. Dozens of students have braved arrest at NYU, Yale, and the University of Minnesota. Others have fought with cops at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California (Associated Press, 4/24). Anti-genocide encampments and occupations have sprung up across the country (New York Times, 4/24). 
These bold resisters have a historic message for sanitation, transportation, and industrial workers around the world: We can take on the bosses’ system, build confidence in our class, and lay the foundation for a revolution that will wipe every capitalist, every backer of genocide, off the face of the earth. That is what Progressive Labor Party fights for! 

Declining U.S. imperialism spurs fascist attacks 

Amid the deepening crisis of worldwide capitalism, Israel is a forward base for maintaining fragile U.S. dominance over Middle Eastern oil. It’s the counterweight to Iran, backed by China and Russia, and Iran’s proxy armies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen—as well as Hamas, the Iranian ally that poisons workers with nationalism and religion. As tensions between Israel and Iran continue to escalate (see CHALLENGE, 4/24), and the U.S. seems unable to stop Israel from invading Rafah and endangering the lives of more than a million Palestinian refugees, a dangerous new phase in this regional war is unfolding. 

We’re seeing the crackdown on college campuses against this backdrop of U.S. imperialist decline. Peeling back their liberal mask, the main-wing capitalists of finance capital are out to squash any opposition to the genocidal Israeli regime. While right-wing Trumpers like Rep. Elise Stefanik may be grabbing the headlines, it’s the liberals’ well-paid front people, from the Democratic Party to the bastions of elite miseducation—who are bringing down the hammer. Before taking the top job at Columbia, Nemat Shafik made her mark as an outspoken reformer at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In her book, What We Owe Each Other, she denounces “a winner-takes-all business culture that offers the spoils of capitalism only to those that rise to the top” (Guardian, 1/22/22).

But scratch one of the bosses’ liberal stooges and you’ll find a budding fascist. On April 17, when Shafik appeared before Stefanik’s congressional committee, she couldn’t roll over fast enough to name names and disclose confidential disciplinary proceedings against professors (NYT, 4/17). Feeding into the false narrative of rampant antisemitism on campuses, she eagerly agreed that the Palestinian liberation slogan—“from the river to the sea”—should probably be censored (NYT, 4/17). So much for “academic freedom”!

From NYC to Rafah, nationalism is deadly

One key to fighting rising fascism is to expose the dangers of nationalism and its toxic sibling, identity politics. It was the Egyptian-born Shafik, Columbia’s first woman and first Arab president, who sicced the Klan-in-blue on students, many of whom were Arab. The NYPD is led by a Latin commissioner who spends every day overseeing racist police terror against the Latin, Black, and immigrant working class in New York City. He works for a Black mayor, Eric Adams, who does nothing about the twenty percent of Black workers in New York living in poverty, twice the rate of impoverished white workers (osc.ny.gov). Whether in Rafah, Tel Aviv, New York, or Beijing, workers can’t afford to be seduced by the bosses’ cynical appeals to “their” nation. The capitalists’ only loyalty is to profits—and all profits are created by working class exploitation, oppression, and murder.

Again, Columbia students are showing the way forward. Their encampment was built by a multiracial force of Arab and Jewish students, Black and Latin, Asian and white. Their unity and solidarity must continue to guide us. In the 1968 Columbia rebellion, anti-racist students were no less brave in taking on the cops. But like much of the anti-war movement, most of them deferred to the idea of “self-determination,” the idea that workers would fare better under Vietnamese capitalist bosses than under the French or U.S. varieties. The tragic error of that position can be seen in today’s Vietnam, where over 6,000 sweatshop factories employ more than 3 million people “who work their hands raw just to barely provide their families with food and shelter” (medium.com, 10/24/23). Our class has learned this lesson the hard way: Workers have no borders!

From all the rivers to all the seas, communism will set us free

We can’t predict the spark that will set off the inferno of the next world war. But it’s becoming clearer all the time to workers and students that capitalism is in crisis. It’s growing more obvious each day that the imperialist bosses will turn to fascism to discipline both their own class and the working class. Sooner or later, rival superpowers will move beyond proxy wars and drag the international working class into a global conflagration. We have only one option: to organize to turn the horror of world war into class war. The fight for the workers of Gaza must become a fight for communist revolution. The two are inseparable.

PLP aims to unite the workers of the world and arm them with communist politics, to turn the guns around against the bosses, and to destroy capitalism once and for all. Our task today is to struggle on the campuses and on the job to expose the brutal reality of the profit system—and the necessity of building a mass PLP. From all the rivers to all the seas, only communism will set us free!  JOIN US!