We don’t need permission to defend the working class!
Today, one hundred students, professors and professional staff rallied and marched on the campus of Queens College (QC), part of the City University of New York. We were protesting a violation of the QC president’s regulations! According to the president, any group wishing to hold a demonstration must submit a request at least three days before the event. This and other tight restrictions are part of a nationwide blitzkrieg on the part of university administrators to curb college protests, especially protests against the Israel/U.S. genocide in Gaza.
There is a clock tower on campus named after three murdered civil rights workers: Andrew Goodman (who attended QC), James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. One of the speakers at today’s protest remarked, “The administration never tires of extolling Andrew Goodman. But do you think Andrew Goodman would have asked for permission to protest injustice on campus?” The large crowd responded loudly, “NO!!”
We marched around campus, stopping at buildings that had been the site of past anti-war protests and protests against tuition increases, with people holding large placards with photos of those events. The rally and march was organized by the chapter of the Professional Staff Congress, which last week had an online teach-in and collected 565 faculty and student signatures on a petition opposing the new policy. We marched into the administration building to deliver the petition — violating the new “no inside demonstrations” rule!
The PSC has also organized an Immigrant Solidarity Working Group, in which PLP comrades are participating. Today, a speaker asked, “If ICE shows up on our campus, do you think we’ll ask for permission to confront them and protect our students from being thrown into a detention center and deported?” The answer again was a vigorous “NO!!”
Years before he co-authored the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote a series of articles arguing that peasants collecting dead wood in the forests of the big landlords should not be beaten and in some cases killed for “property theft.” Marx argued that the fallen tree branches were no longer the property of the landed aristocracy and could be collected by the peasants to warm their homes. He and Engels consistently defended the right of the exploited to organize, to demonstrate and speak out, to publish radical pamphlets, and to strike. In a period of rising fascist repression, the battle to protect freedom of assembly and speech of students, faculty and staff is a necessary part of a larger struggle for social justice and for communism.
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Our Black students matter
During my morning prep, a comrade in my club sent a flier for the memorial for a student who was murdered. Her principal had refused to have any memorial of him in the building, even going so far as to say that teachers weren’t even legally allowed to say his name. I mentioned this to several teachers who were prepping with me.
One of the teachers pointed out that a similar event had happened at her school and that the administration had wanted to keep it business as usual. I pointed out that this was racism, as in predominantly Black schools, the students who are murdered due to capitalism’s wanton violence are considered a norm. The bosses want the death of these students to be seen as an everyday occurrence and not as a horrible tragedy. Their administrators carry out this racist idea that this violence is just the scenery in a Black school.
The teacher, who was both Black and a woman, told us teachers how hard it was to lose students and then be told to tell the survivors to “get it together” and excel in class. She ended up having to leave that historically Black school and was happy to hear that our comrade had fought so hard for Black youth to be seen as valuable and their death is a tragedy that should be felt. This moment helped me to remember that we should be bringing up the victories our comrades are having due to good practice in their work. These are the little things that count.
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Class society is not human nature; fightback is
Over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, Progressive Labor Party hosted a West Coast retreat which brought together workers and students to discuss the world situation and how the Party’s line can be put forth to workers in our base and mass organizations. The retreat focused on three specific areas: (1) Bosses can’t rule in the old way, (2) Workers can’t live in the old way and (3) Why we need a Party. We also had one person join the Party who has since been meeting with the education club in Southern California.
One of the most impressive parts of the retreat was the collectivity everyone put forth. When we arrived someone made a chart that had a space for each person’s name under either set up or clean up for meals and other various jobs. Every person wrote their name in one of the spaces which meant that we each only had one small job to do. Whereas under capitalist society a small group of bosses sit back doing nothing while the masses of workers are exploited and super exploited this weekend showed we do have the ability to live collectively and from each according to their ability to each according to their need.
One of the main highlights of the weekend was a presentation about the progression of human nature. The presenters showed how human beings had existed for tens of thousands of years under primitive communism and showed the progression and development of class society. Often workers are made to believe that class society has always existed and humans don’t have the capacity to live collectively. But, our presenters proved that to be inaccurate and we were able to see through practice that we can and should live collectively under a classless society with communist principles guiding us.
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Enjoying experience at the DC march
Upon entering a Progressive Labor Party member’s home the morning of the People’s march in D.C., I noticed many PL’ers already within the first floor. I turned to my left to enter the dining room where I spoke to two comrades about the Russia-Iran Nuclear Treaty. After the conversation, I had some breakfast and familiarized myself with one comrade I met at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Not long after, PL’ers in charge of organizing our contingent gathered everybody in the living room. They discussed the plans for how we were going to march on Freedom Plaza. I offered to hold a bag of CHALLENGE copies before we left the house. Once it was time to go, the leadership requested us to line up with a partner. We made our way down to the bus stop and got on once we were ready.
Once we got off, we traveled down the street to a corner near the Plaza. We stopped there to form a picket line to get our message across. I was distributing CHALLENGE to passersby. Unfortunately, I was only able to sell two copies before we started marching to our destination. This is where it started to get rejuvenating. During our march, we held up posters and yelled out chants. My favorite one being ‘Arab, Jewish, Black, and White. Workers of the world unite!’ Overall, I had an enjoyable time marching with PLP and I wouldn’t mind going to another one of their protests.
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Fighting modern-day nazis
I have been sending the above document to my base, and to progressive bookstores that take CHALLENGE newspapers that I send them. This document is on how to refuse cooperating with ICE as it looks for undocumented workers. I didn’t write it, but it’s an antiracist attempt to help resist. The arbitrary arrest of undocumented immigrants by ICE (the ‘Gestapo’ of this era ) is dangerous, and represents fascism. True to racist form, ICE is not only targeting immigrant workers from Latin America, especially Black workers from Haiti, but also Muslim workers. Racism hurts all workers. Trump is one of the most blatant open racists since Woodrow Wilson. The international working class must stop this fascist. Workers, students, and soldiers must resist. The working class under Progressive Labor Party leadership, must stop these attempts to create a Nazi 4th Reich. At the same time we must organize for communist revolution, where workers run the world collectively
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