It is January in Toronto, Canada. It is very cold outside. Several thousand scholars and teachers in the Humanities are attending the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA).  They are huddled in conference sessions where they attempt to find some light in the darkness. Those who aspire to teach the literature that they love face a future of precarity and poverty. Those who have jobs are painfully aware that they must be careful not to talk about “critical race theory,” “gender politics,” colonialism and imperialism, and the class struggle. 

Those who have protested the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza are paying the price for telling the truth.  With few exceptions, their university administrations have shamefully acceded to the transit into fascism. And too many professional associations--the MLA, AHA, and APHA--have been complicit in this transition, preventing discussion and debate over the government assault on the freedom and funding of universities. Fascist politicians silence students and fire our colleagues, suspend students and deport international scholars.

Turning loss into its opposite under growing fascism

Radical activists in the MLA have witnessed some painful defeats in recent years.  The  Executive Council has undermined all efforts to take a stand against the Palestinian genocide. Scores of members have quit the MLA in disgust, though the Radical Caucus persists. The antifascist playwright Lillian Hellman described the descent into McCarthyism I as “Scoundrel Time.” We are now in the midst of McCarthyism II. Scoundrels are everywhere, riding high in Washington, state capitols and university administrations. 

This might seem like a strange time to talk at the MLA about the possible communist future buried somewhere under the fascist rubble. Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) disagree. The Palestinian revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani said after the defeat of the 1967 war:  “What is happening now is only the labor pains of something great that will be born from the rubble of defeat like a volcano born from under the cold ashes of a forsaken mountain.” Dark times are the best times to think ahead.

As capitalism leads to greater crises we must offer an alternative

It is precisely because the crisis we face in higher education is rooted in the broader crisis in global capitalism—and the threat of global war--that we must think beyond the idealist myths of bourgeois democracy. Fascism is not just undemocratic authoritarianism; it is a mode of capitalist class rule resorted to in ‘polycrises’ of economic stagnation, fading political legitimacy and proliferating war. The only antidote to a system based upon the brutal pursuit of profit is its revolutionary transcendence by an egalitarian  system of mass participation based upon the fulfillment of human needs—communism. 

There is a mass base for fascism in many parts of the planet. About this we cannot fool ourselves.  But there is also a mass hunger for a better world. The millions who have been marching and striking against genocide and xenophobia around the world embody what the U.S. proletarian writer Tillie Olsen called “the not-yet in the now.”  Repression breeds resistance. As Kanafani wrote, “Resistance is the essence.” Communism is the future and that requires a communist party. This could be the time to join PLP!