NEW YORK CITY, December 4 — A forum organized by professors and grad students called “The War Here & Abroad: CUNY and U.S. Empire” drew a packed audience of 60 in a room meant for 40 today, a sign that the fight against CUNY’s complicity with the imperialist war machine is on many people’s minds.  There were no communist panelists but many key points were raised and debated.  PLP’s ideas were summarized in a flyer.
Grad student/adjuncts, undergrads and some senior professors united in the desire to research CUNY’s involvement in “defense” research, to oppose any more ROTC chapters, and to challenge the hiring of war-criminal generals like David Petraeus.  Teachers asked how they could teach Arabic language or International Relations classes from an anti-imperialist point of view; how they could reach students who are drawn to security-state or police jobs out of economic need; and how organizers can reach beyond the mostly left-wing folks already active. One young student challenged a famous Marxist professor to dig deeper into his Marxism and expose the main contradiction underlying the capitalist drive to war — social production vs. private expropriation — and not simply claim that a lot of capitalists profit from war (a secondary factor).  
PLP’s stress on inter-imperialist rivalry as the main manifestation of that principal contradiction in capitalism was our flier’s main point. We will have to fight for this perspective, which seems to come up rarely in discussion. Many are limited in opposition to unipolar U.S. imperialism as the only focus of anti-imperialist struggle.  But imperialism is now multipolar (as it has always been, in fact). All imperialisms are our deadly enemy, and international proletarian solidarity our strength and our hope.  
There is great potential to widen and deepen this struggle, but as two of the panelists said we have to link it to other workers’ struggles, especially to the social movements in other lands which imperialist armies are designed to crush.  One called New York City’s stop-and-frisk “counterinsurgency before the insurgency,” to underline our common fate facing such armies overseas and militarized police here. “War IS Terror” was the striking slogan of the forum.  How can we dig deeper and show how capital is terror, how capitalism drives war? PLP study groups and expanded CHALLENGE sales are crucially needed in this moment of honest searching and political desire.