NEW JERSEY, January 31—As the class struggle in higher education intensifies and the echo of war drums gets louder every day, there is a desperate need for a class-conscious, anti-imperialist war movement on university campuses around the world. While the role of universities is to ideologically train the next generation of exploited workers, middle managers, and soldiers, reproducing the bosses’ racist and sexist divisions within capitalism, they are also an arena for class struggle fertile for planting revolutionary ideas, and winning students to communism.

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been working to build that movement through the Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association (MLA), putting forth a revolutionary agenda that stresses the necessity of  building a revolutionary party to liberate workers and students alike from the chains of capitalism.

MLA: a fountain for communist ideas in academia
Founded in 1968 in the context of mass protests against the Vietnam War, the Radical Caucus insisted on viewing the war as imperialist, and not just a “tragic mistake.” Over the following decades, the RC sponsored sessions on antiracist, antisexist, and pro-working class literature. It brought before the Delegate Assembly resolutions defending immigrant students, graduate student and adjunct unionization, and student organizers fighting campus racism. Deeply involved in all these activities and struggles, PLP continually stressed the pitfalls of liberal reformism and the need for a revolutionary communist outlook.  No doubt because of the RC’s modest success in shifting leftward the outlook of the Association, several years ago the MLA leadership affected constitutional changes making it virtually impossible for resolutions to be passed through the membership.

The angered reactions of millions worldwide to the 2020 police murder of George Floyd led the RC to focus on ideological combat over the language shaping mass consciousness.  Responding to the need to understand and critically interrogate popular concepts such as “abolition” and “democracy,” “intersectionality” and “sustainability,” the RC organized the “Keywords Project.” Its first online mini-conference, called “New Keywords of Our Struggle,” was held in September 2021. More than 80 academic workers, students, and organizers showed up to discuss how to fight back against the higher education bosses. The RC organized three additional mini-conferences on timely topics (war, climate catastrophe, and reproductive justice).

Given the recent intensification of fascist developments worldwide—“Fascism” is now a keyword on the lips of many—PLP, working in the RC, has upped the ante on its activity in the MLA. At this year’s MLA convention in San Francisco, the RC hosted two sessions. The first addressed “The Situation since April 1st.” The speakers, predominantly insecurely employed professors, outlined how our class is under attack, with the mounting barriers to liveable working conditions and increasing political surveillance of our classrooms. Every year, far more money goes into war than into higher education—access to “public” colleges is increasingly a pipe dream for millions of working-class students—reminds us of the bosses’ priorities. The capitalists control “higher education” to develop military weaponry, develop products for profiteering corporations, and to brainwash workers into supporting their system. Using education to destroy poverty and exploitation is not a priority.

The second panel focused on “Radical Pedagogy in Precarious Times.” Better attended than the MLA’s well-publicized “presidential panel” on “working conditions” scheduled for the same time, the RC panel testified to a growing interest in intervening as opposed to wallowing in the higher education crisis. A PLP speaker discussed the ways in which popular terms like “intersectionality” reduce Marxist class analysis to “class reductionism,” opening the door to the anticommunism and identity politics at the ideological core of liberal fascism.

The Annual Meeting of the RC opened with a political discussion of both the need for an antiwar movement and an assessment of the union sell-out in the University of California strike—the largest strike in the history of higher education. A long-time PLP member spoke passionately about how both “sides” in the war in Ukraine are the losing one for workers. Although the recent surge in class-conscious unionizing in higher education offers opportunities for students to learn more about the nature of capitalism, the omnipresence of blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags on U.S. and Canadian college campuses indicates that it will be hard work to bring anti-imperialist consciousness to current understandings of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

PLP members will continue to strive to keep the RC oriented towards a communist revolutionary horizon. It has been decided that the RC’s future mini-conferences will be less focused on ideological analysis—via Keywords—and more issue-oriented, posing and responding to the problems the RC will face as it seeks to build its anti-capitalist capacities. PLP is the solution for transforming these anti-capitalist capacities into revolutionary struggle.