BROOKLYN, NY, May 23 —“IF GAZA DOESN’T GET IT? SHUT IT DOWN!” And shut it down is exactly what a militant, multiracial group of overall more than 50 Kingsborough Community College students and faculty did! The fiery protest was sponsored by KCC clubs Common Ground and the Muslim Students Association, joined by members of the Progressive Labor Party, and led by mainly Black, Latin, Arab, Palestinian and immigrant women workers. The protest was against a campus event featuring a “former high-ranking officer” in the genocidal Israeli army, sponsored by a pro-Zionist campus club.
When we learned KCC’s president canceled the event, the rally proceeded anyway, with student-led anger boiling in the streets over the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, and the support of local community mass organizations. Then, as the rally approached campus, KCC closed its gates — with the NYPD blocking all entrances and even local side streets. With waves of class cancellations, we turned up and shut down the racist business as usual!
Women-led, multiracial student-worker unity SHUTS IT DOWN!
With the continuous chanting and continuous arrival of waves of students and workers, we held our ground at the gates and kept the main gate shut for almost seven hours, with all gates shut at one point! We easily drowned out the goofy, nearly all-white fascist counter-protestors, and one fascist professor who waved the U.S. flag near us quickly fled and later cried to the bosses’ Jerusalem Post that he felt threatened (5/15). Meanwhile, revolutionary communist PLP members led militant internationalist chants like “ARAB, JEWISH, BLACK AND WHITE: WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNTE!” and called for international working class revolution versus anti-working class “national liberation” and capitalism.
The only violence were threats from the fascists, who yelled out rape threats and one threatening to “burn down” the nearby halal cart – to which the lines of police guarding campus property enabled. Communists in PLP and more KCC students than ever know that the NYPD, KKK, Israeli fascists and CUNY administration are all the same! And so, many students on the way to campus stayed to join or watch the protest, meet Common Ground and MSA club members, discuss Common Ground’s leaflet and CHALLENGE, and exchange contact information.
Illusion of democracy, reality of sharpening fascism
On the surface, the large police presence may appear like an overreaction. In essence, however, the all-out police presence - from the local precinct with reinforcements from Manhattan - is a sign of weakness and desperation from the U.S. ruling class. The U.S.’ democratic façade is slipping as the bosses are forced into supporting their most important imperialist lap dog, Israel, which guards U.S. imperialism’s vital Middle Eastern oil interests. In weakness and desperation, the bosses resort to open fascist terror.
These aren’t the only illusions communists in PLP are on the ground here exposing. The administration claims they’re concerned about safety, but they spread tired ‘copaganda’ about the supposed violent intentions of the protestors. Almost no students believe this. They see an administration that refuses to send even an email about multiple hate crimes against a Muslim halal cart worker outside of campus, but is perfectly fine with thousands of students walking by graffiti that says “Kill Palestinians” every day.
And the harder that Black Democrat mayors like Eric Adams push the illusion of democracy and liberal Black administrators at KCC push the illusion of neutrality, the more visible this reality becomes to masses. The bosses expose their own fake “neutrality” more clearly than a leaflet, and they can’t hide — we charge them with genocide!
Capitalist dictatorship and state violence
Unlike whatever the KCC administration, CUNY, New York City or the U.S. government claim, NO capitalist state —the government, cops, courts and legal system, educational institutions – is ever pro-working class, or neutral. The U.S. capitalist state has normalized fascist terror against peacefully protesting students against the backdrop of the declining, genocidal empire, with storm clouds of world war gathering around rising imperialist rivals China and Russia.
Most dangerously for the working class, unlike the Trump-led gutter racist Small Fascists, it’s the liberals who are the Big Fascists. KCC’s “neutral” liberal -and often Black - bosses and campus cops especially love to throw around words like “safety” to pretend they care about the students, but they serve the capitalist dictatorship. Unless we fight for workers’ dictatorship and expose the liberal and “national liberation” misleaders – from Brooklyn to Gaza – they will lead us deeper into the arms of fascism and imperialist war.
Workers’ dictatorship means smashing racism, sexism, imperialism, these racist borders and money. Workers’ dictatorship means we run the world - the student encampments showed we can! - and use workers’ state violence against the fascists wherever they crawl out of their holes.
Globalize communist revolution: build a mass PLP
Amidst the holocaust in Gaza, the times are clearly changing for KCC, this former Zionist bastion. The Nazi Kahanist Zionists lost their stranglehold over campus life. Soon enough, they’ll lose our local staff chapter of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) too; as PL’ers and friends grow, we’ve only gotten started exposing the sellout liberal misleaders and revisionists. The future is ours, and the students and workers are proving that endless imperialist wars is not our class’ fate.
Over seven months, the fascist Israeli bosses have slaughtered more than 35,562 workers, while dropping more than twenty times the amount of bombs the U.S. used throughout the entire Iraq War over an area not much larger than Manhattan. Only a mass working class-led communist revolution, from all the rivers to all the seas from NYC, Gaza to Shanghai and between, can free us from this imperialist hellscape. We urgently continue using CHALLENGE within our mass organizations to build a mass, anti-imperialist student-worker movement and mass PLP which every student, worker and soldier can join and help build: FIGHT BACK and JOIN US!
