It’s a tale of two governors: Florida’s racist Republican Ron DeSantis bans books, busts unions and ends tenure. New Jersey’s Democratic “friend-of-labor” Phil Murphy breaks the first-ever Rutgers University strike of 9,000 educators, by summoning union and management into his office to broker a deceptive deal. Two apparent opposites, both waging the current bosses’ war on higher education workers and students.  Do their differences hide their sameness? Dialectical philosophy argues that apparent opposites are also interconnected—both share similarities and differences. In the end they are primarily same. Two sides of the same coin, representing the same rotten system.

Speakers from the Rutgers strike and the Florida antifascist fight took up this question on April 15 at a Modern Language Association Radical Caucus Roundtable, “The Racist Offensive Against Higher Education: Organizing a Marxist Response in the MLA.”

The  accounts of front-line struggle, along with radical analyses by a Newark-based community organizer and faculty speakers from Florida, Rutgers, and CUNY, electrified the 40-plus attendees. PLP participants helped push this discussion to the left with our own speakers, as well as being key organizers of the event.

“Teach students about class society so they can overthrow it”

The Newark community organizer framed the political and ideological stakes of the roundtable debate most sharply:

"Our political work is to make visible how the education system at all levels has been formed by both liberals and fascists to keep capitalism in place. Before fascists were banning books, liberals were creating conditions in which students could not read: the capitalist education system is deliberately designed to give a handful of elite students a ‘liberal’ anti-racist and anti-sexist ‘miseducation’ to prepare us to be part of a capitalist managerial class, while grossly underfunding the overall education system so that the overwhelming majority of students at all levels, including college, are kept in the low ranks of the working class."

“Only a communist education can diagnose the problems of capitalism, and teach students the class nature of society so they can overthrow it,” she concluded.

Appearance and essence
The keynote speaker praised the antiracist opposition to DeSantis and Murphy, yet offered a Marxist analysis of  the anti-fascist struggle in Florida:

"We need to analyze these newer, sharper right-wing offensives in connection to the much longer trends of the massive theft of the social wage and declining standard of living, not only for higher education workers but for the entire working class, native-born as well as immigrant, white as well as Black and brown."

She pointed out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have overseen decades of massive cuts in education that have proletarianized 75 percent of higher education faculty, who have no prospect of tenure and earn less than a living wage.

While DeSantis and Murphy are opponents in the political war between Democrats and Republicans, she emphasized that both governors operate as “state managers” for capital: to preserve the conditions for capitalists to make profits by exploiting workers. Social control of universities and unions by the state—in either its liberal or its fascist  versions—is  key  for capitalism to flourish. Two Florida union speakers later referred to this capitalist control of education as teaching “anticipatory obedience”—forcing union faculty to obey racist state laws, teaching students to obey  future bosses.

“Fascism is on a continuum with liberalism”
“Fascism is on a continuum with liberalism,” the first faculty union speaker from Florida put it starkly, giving a Marxist view different from the dominant liberal view of fascism. Faculty are fighting hard against new laws that tighten state control of curriculum, eliminate DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and erode academic freedom, he said. The most explicit shift from liberalism to fascism in Florida is using state funds to create a new University of Florida institute, The Hamilton Center, to uphold right-wing ideology (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/22).  A recent Scientific American  article (4/7/2023) says that the  new Florida policies “mirror past fascist strategies” used in Italy by Mussolini.

A CUNY community college professor on the panel showed how the liberal CUNY system misleads working-class urban students into the individualism of “social mobility,” a multicultural spin on the American Dream.  “Campus DEI initiatives are held up with pride, but in moments of crisis, this veneer falls away” and administrators show their true colors.

Another Florida faculty union militant called on everyone present to “Organize, organize, organize. That’s what I’ve been doing for 30 years and will continue doing.” A Rutgers graduate student and strike organizer scathingly attacked New Jersey Governor Murphy, as well as Rutgers President “good cop” Holloway (a Black civil rights historian), and the union misleaders who suspended the strike at Murphy’s urging. “Next time union members have to be prepared to go further and stay out against the leaders’ double-cross,” she declared.

Communists never give up building workers’ power
For communists, winning means building workers’ power. Our Florida friends are feeling down today because the DeSantis laws were passed. Many Rutgers organizers were also disappointed by the suspension of their strike.  But look at the Florida motto, “Organize, organize, organize!” It comes from the history of workers fighting again even after a defeat: the only defeat is giving up. As Lenin wrote, “strikes are schools for communism.” The lesson of Florida, that “fascism is on a continuum with liberalism,” puts us already further down the road to revolution.

The role of PLP at this forum was to strengthen ourselves and our co-workers with that communist vision. As they teach us valuable lessons in how to rebel against the racist state control of education, our role is to build power for workers’ revolution, where winning means taking state power from the capitalists. Then a human history—not the history of warring classes but of workers’ control over their lives, can begin in earnest.

New York City, May 18–Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades joined 300 workers and students in a powerful march sponsored by Make the Road NY in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We were protesting against high rents, displacement and evictions in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Comrades connected with many friends in the march and on the streets. The demand of the organization and politicians who spoke was that the state legislature pass “Good Cause” legislation. “Good Cause,” if passed, would supposedly mean that landlords across New York state with buildings with less than six apartments can’t evict or raise rents dramatically without good cause.
                
Migrants not our enemies
As we marched, comrades chanted with the marchers and distributed 150 CHALLENGE papers about May Day around the world and 200 PLP leaflets  demanding low rent housing for all homeless people in shelters and arriving migrants. New York City is now housing new migrants in the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, paying the hotel owners $200 a night per room! The liberal bosses and their lackey politicians in NYC are deviously using these migrants to divide the working class and to distract us from the real enemies (the capitalists). The same way racism affects the entire working class, so does unemployment, which the bosses use in order to bring down wages for the entire working class, including for white workers. We can’t let the bosses divide us and that’s why all workers need to unite, Black, Latin, Asian and white. The bosses want to use migrants as  scapegoats and want to blame them for their problems, but we need to direct our anger against the capitalist bosses.

Reform is never enough
Marchers enthusiastically took CHALLENGE and our leaflets which stated, “Workers need power, not crumbs! A worldwide system that won’t provide jobs, housing and healthcare for the working class doesn’t deserve to exist. The working class needs to destroy capitalism with revolution. We need a system that will collectively and globally eliminate exploitation, war, racism and sexism. We need communism, community in its essence.”
                                                    
The contradiction between reform and revolution was on display. While desperate, angry workers support reform, they know from experience that even if “Good Cause” is passed by the state government, it will largely be ignored by the landlords without long, drawn out cases in landlord court.

“Why are so many politicians speaking?” asked a participant.

“To direct and control the workers’ movement,” answered a comrade.

“Why can’t they pass a law forcing the landlords to open up empty buildings and apartments the landlords are holding?” a friend asked.

“Landlords are part of the capitalist ruling class and dominate all aspects of our lives,” the comrade answered. Some workers say the fight for reforms is a step toward revolution. That’s an illusion. There is no peaceful transition from reform to revolution. PLP’s role is to participate in the reform fight while sharpening the revolutionary side of the contradiction. It’s happening now!

Washington, DC, May 6-8–PLers met with antiracist fighters from across the U.S. at The University of California Washington Center for a 3-day abolitionist conference. Conference organizers brought together theorists, students and organizers working to abolish police, prisons, ICE, racist child “protective” services, and other institutional structures that capitalism has built to attack and repress the working class.

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members led a panel on abolishing capitalism, the undergirding of all repressive institutions of the capitalist state. We do not just want to abolish or outlaw capitalism, we want the system fully smashed and guaranteed to never be introduced back into existence. In order to crush capitalism and its state, we need many of these serious organizers in attendance to join a revolutionary fighting party, the PLP, in order for it to grow and lead class struggle against the ruling class. This strategy is really the only way to achieve the abolitionist goals they so fervently desire.

To abolish cops, we must abolish capitalism
Participants in the conference were extremely open to a revolutionary perspective. Many already had this idea, but were not sure how to develop it further. Even two of the keynote speakers agreed, when questioned from the audience by a PLP member, that a revolutionary party was needed to achieve abolitionist goals. You just cannot abolish capitalist institutions without abolishing capitalism!

PLP maintained a literature table throughout the conference. In addition to CHALLENGE, the table featured flyers and information about many of the mass organizations in which PLP is active. The fight for justice for William Green and other Black workers murdered by the police and numerous public health struggles were featured.

Over 40 participants received CHALLENGE from the table and from other comrades throughout the conference and many connections were made. Many of these fighters are already engaged in various forms of class struggle.We will continue to make ongoing connections with these fighters, and try to win them to our radical abolitionist vision of society– a communist world rid of the capitalist ruler’s racist and sexist kkkops, kkkourts, and prisons.

Progressive Labor Party marched on May Day here in the city of Cambridge, where Sayed Faisal, a young Bangladeshi man was murdered by the police on January 4th.  Sayed was having a mental illness episode, and his neighbor called the cops for help. Instead of helping, they shot him five times in the chest. Then, distorting the facts, the Cambridge PD claimed he was a threat to the community because he was carrying a knife, even though it was clear he was using the knife to harm himself. Furthermore, the city has put the killer cop on paid administrative leave and is refusing to release his name.  That, plus the exceedingly long criminal investigation, stinks of a cover-up. This is yet another lethal example of how trigger-happy cops handle workers or students with mental health issues. The cops shoot first, blame the victim, and receive all the protection from the city government; meanwhile another member of the working class is murdered, and his family and community are traumatized.

We assembled at a nearby plaza, where college students and workers warmly received our militant speeches, flyers and CHALLENGEs. Some folks joined us as we marched, 30 plus strong, to Cambridge City Hall. There, we formed a picket line and heard more militant speeches from our comrades and friends condemning Cambridge’s liberal politicians for the role they play in pacifying and disarming the working class.They throw a protective shield around the cops and the whole fascist injustice system while they spread illusions that capitalism can be reformed.

Racist police murder is one example of how capitalism destroys the lives of working people here and around the world. As U.S. capitalists give tanks to Ukraine and prepare for wider war to defend their declining profit empire, they cut mental health and housing services at home. That is why the ruling class will need more fascism and police terror at home to quash working class anger.

Our chants of, “Racist cops, you can’t hide we charge you with genocide” resonated with the workers and students on the street. We held our red flags high, and our banner called for smashing capitalism, racism, and borders with communist revolution. To achieve a just and healthy society, we need to destroy capitalism and build the egalitarian communist world that May Day represents. Because we held our event locally, rather than join the larger march in Brooklyn, we organized with increased vigor and now have more potential for growth than we’ve had in the past several years. Our future is bright if we fight for it! Join us!