BROOKLYN, NY, February 19 — Sixty friends and PL’ers shouted down the military recruiters at the Medgar Evers College (MEC) town hall meeting today. While the administration and recent recruits claimed the program was a way to “provide opportunities and diversity,” the protesters successfully exposed its imperialist agenda. There is potential in turning this anti-war struggle into a fight for communist politics.
PLP hung up Wanted Posters of war criminal David “drones” Petraeus, who is now a professor at one of the university campuses, directly linking these military recruiters to “warrior scholars” like Petraeus they partially aim to produce. CHALLENGE was well-received by all, including the student recruits.
ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps), a college program recruiting youth to a hyper-sexist and racist institution of war — has illegally circumvented the college council and installed itself on this nearly all black and Latino campus where 75 percent of the students are women. One PL student declared that ROTC’s presence at this particular campus is no accident. “This is the same community where Shantel Davis, Kyam Livingston and Kimani Gray were killed [victims of NYC cops]. Essentially you’re trying to recruit black and brown youth — who are policed and killed here — to kill black and brown people across a fake border. That’s a racist agenda!”
Several students agreed, referring to the antiracist spirit of Medgar Evers as they pointed out ROTC’s “dishonorable” tactics. MEC is named after the fighter against segregation in Mississippi and Alabama. He was murdered by the Klu Klux Klan and White Citizen’s Council. Black and brown students are still targets of racism in this era of the new Jim Crow. No matter what the bosses say or try to do, they cannot be antiracist. Perpetuating racism is built into their system. Racism — the economic exploitation, ideology that justifies it and the bosses’ institutions which enforce it — is the backbone of capitalism.
Medgar Evers is not ROTC’s sole target. York College, another branch of the City University system, also an overwhelmingly black, Latino and female college, has also installed the military program. The bosses have been complaining that the third-largest university system in the U.S., CUNY, had no ROTC program. During the anti-Vietnam War era, students and faculty kicked ROTC off campuses. The bosses are concerned about an all-white Southern male military. Think tanks such as American Enterprise Institute worry about the “dangers of a military disconnected from the civilian population.”
Another concern for the bosses is related to the military’s sexist nature. In 2012, soldiers were 15 times more likely to be raped than to be killed in combat. Already, a half million women and men have reported sexual assaults in the past 22 years. One panelist at the town hall meeting was a female combat Iraq veteran, who stated she was “lucky not to have been assaulted.” CUNY is welcoming a sexist institution onto a majority-female campus. Sexual violence is a weapon of imperialism — towards both its soldiers and the civilians it is attacking.
Leadership for Which Class?
Behind the rhetoric of an “opportunity to succeed and diversify” is a buying of working-class youth to a war agenda. Some ROTC recruits argued, “Why are you trying to get rid of ROTC if it helps us with our dreams. It has provided me [a young black woman aspiring to be a doctor] with room and board and schooling [scholarships].” ROTC is exploiting the desperate conditions of students. The ruling class itself has created these conditions of racism, sexism, unemployment and underemployment.
Another ROTC recruit cited “pride, respect, leadership and discipline” as his reason for joining. While the students are genuine in their aspirations, what is left unchallenged is discipline to do what — be cannon fodder? Pride in what — shoot their own class interests in the back?  Leadership for which class — the imperialists thirst for oil or the workers fight for class liberation? One PL’er encouraged the ROTC recruits to aim their guns at the warmakers by organizing their fellow cadets and to read CHALLENGE. Newly gained contacts are open to such a struggle.
As one faculty comrade stated, “Are the functions of college and army compatible? The military is organized violence of the state. And colleges can reproduce those ideologies. Or college can be a site of struggle.”
MEC is a site for exactly that. This event may rekindle friends from past years to wage a fight. One brought friends from their campus club and others joined us for a study group later in the week to discuss the first chapters of Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism (more next issue).  
A growing number of students and faculty are fighting ROTC’s racist and sexist nature in particular and amplification of imperialist agendas on campus in general. This was evident last semester in our fight against Drones Petraeus as a professor on campus (see
CHALLENGE, 9/18 to 12/25). Our friends at the College of Staten Island have already successfully pushed back against ROTC. We must carry on the fight.
Why ROTC? Why Now?
As the previous CHALLENGE editorial (2/26) illustrates, the main threat of another world war seems to be between the U.S. and China, and the bosses are debating the best tactics to win such a conflict. The ruling class understands the need for youth to pledge allegiance to the bosses’ “national interest,” both as soldiers and political supporters. In 2012, the Council on Foreign Relations published a report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security, stating students need to be trained to “safeguard America’s future security and prosperity.”
The ROTC move and the Petraeus hiring have exposed to some students the CUNY Administration’s function of enforcing class rule. To extend the fight from exposing to destroying these capitalists, PLP and the long march for communism must grow.