The following is an excerpt from the Keynote speech given at the college conference by a young woman leader (see article, front page).
What are we learning in school today? I see a lot of beautiful and diverse faces, and I know I’ll get a million different answers. For today, let us take stock of what the bosses really want us to learn.
We’re learning about the artifice of race, class, gender, religion, and national borders that divide the international working class. We’re learning that we must climb this elusive social ladder to separate ourselves from the working class. We’re learning that the role of the university is to accept the inevitability of war, and to remain loyal to a system that murders, deports, and exploits our working brothers and sisters abroad, and to accept the fascist conditions at home.
We’re taught that the quickest way out of the hood or to stay out of trouble is to join the military, so the bosses lure us into their death traps with their ROTC [The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps]. We’re learning that being Black, white, gay, straight, lesbian, trans, male, female is primary over working-class unity—they got us hooked into identity politics, or shall I say the latest opiate of the masses.
We’re being taught that we’re criminals by the bosses who’ve turned our schools into juvenile corrections facilities. Last year, Khalif Browder, a student from my campus committed suicide. He was jailed for two years on Rikers Island [New York City’s main prison complex] WITHOUT BEING CHARGED WITH A CRIME, just because he couldn’t afford bail. He was physically beaten and psychologically tortured when he was put in solitary confinement. Ironically CUNY [public university system] invests in the prison industrial complex. For students outside these U.S. borders, our classrooms may be miles apart but the lessons remain the same.
From Haiti, Quebec, to the U.S to Europe, and South Africa, vicious cuts on education have become a worldwide pandemic.
In Quebec University, tuition has more than tripled. In South Africa the tuition hikes are a reminder that the apartheid isn’t over.
Students learn that professors are underpaid and disposable. At CUNY, racist and sexist tuition hikes, budget cuts, are the order of the day. These rapacious attacks are not coincidental: they’re happening against the backdrop of escalating imperialist wars.
But there is one lesson that you won’t learn— that these cuts are the bosses’ way of preparing for the next world war. They won’t teach us the rival arch-capitalists in the U.S., Russia, the E.U, and China vie for who will hold the title of the next world super power; they spend trillions on nuclear weapons, arming “rebels”, and installing brutal fascist regimes to gear up for their carnage campaigns. The working class people are their sacrificial lambs.
The bosses have you believe that their invasion of the Middle East is necessary to spread “democracy”, and rescue women from the oppressive forces, but they won’t teach you that their brutal tactics actually hurt women the most.
When it comes to the refugee crisis, our schools won’t teach you the truth: that ever since capitalists started dividing up the world and drawing borders, there have been refugees.
The U.S. was founded on the creation of millions of indigenous refugees. Today, we’ll remind ourselves that 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees overnight in 1948 and are still kept off their ancestral lands.
13.5 million Syrian workers are in need of humanitarian assistance as the result of a fight between U.S. and Russian imperialists, not just Bashar al-Assad. And 15 million Africans, from places like Somalia, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, have been made refugees by the centuries of imperialist fighting over resources.
We’re learning there is no phonier lesson in human responsibility than the boss’s claptrap about climate change. They say we must recycle, go green, or go vegan. Meanwhile, the capitalist bosses’ corporations are free to ravage the planet as they please. Not surprisingly the imperialist war machine is one of the world’s worst polluters.
We’re being lead astray by the bosses who play us into believing that education is a right, but the global attacks on students say otherwise. But today, you’ll learn that while that geographical distance, borders, languages, culture, and race may separate us, we must recognize that our struggle is one, and that we must fight back. Fortunately, today we’ll learn the bosses’ racist borders and the refugees that they create have an expiration date.
What are we learning about elections? I know that’s a really popular subject that many of us students worry about these days.
We are taught that the presidential election is the most important decision facing U.S. workers in decades, that we have a real choice here: the fascist Trump or the socialist Bernie. Today we’ll learn that choosing sides in a capitalist election is a death trap for workers. Bernie, Hillary, Donald, Ted, it doesn’t matter. Whoever is president will become the commander in chief of the largest imperialist army in the world, aiming to maintain its global power, no matter how many workers and students have died for their oil wars.
The best we can do, we’re told, is to work within the system to make small changes. But today we’re going to hear about militant fightbacks going on worldwide!
We have been taught the university is a world of ideas, that the world will become a better place through education. But a look at history will illuminate the truth: the way the world will become a better place is through struggle, fightback, building a worker-student unity, and planting the seeds of communist revolution in everything we do. In 1970s and 80s, PLP led the movement to kick racist theoreticians off campus. During the Vietnam War, masses of college students participated in strikes, sit-ins, and mobilizations against imperialism.
1999 was the year of the longest student strike in Mexican history at the Mexican National Autonomous University. They united workers and peasants against the privatization of electricity. Student strikes against austerity, increasing tuition, and budget cuts raged over London, Quebec, Chile, and South Africa the last few years. In South Africa, the slogan “fees must fall” swept the country. From University of Missouri to Yale, campus protests against racism have made headlines.
In the spirit of fightback, let us go to school today. Not to learn lies about our working-class brothers and sisters around the world; not to be fooled into thinking that elections are the path to liberation for workers.
No. Let us go to school today to learn about the origins of racism and nationalism. We’ll learn today about how our predecessors in the communist movement fought and won advances for the working class. Most importantly, today we’ll learn how we can fight against racism, sexism, nationalism and individualism, and we’ll learn why communism is the only force truly capable of eradicating these social diseases created by capitalism. For a new world, for communism, we must fight back.