INDIANA, February 9 — The Fall semester of 2014 saw a growth and renewed focus on political work on campus. This is a look into the rebuilding process of Progressive Labor Party’s presence here. Through involvement in battling racism on campus and in our neighborhoods — mainly regarding the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and murder of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico — the war against global capitalism has gained more forces.
Struggle = School for Communism
Through the semesters over the last couple of years, PLP’s work on campus has been sporadic and inconsistent. The last major struggle on our campus was our fight to remove a racist, zionist professor from campus a few years ago. That struggle was a great learning experience. We were able to create a strong multiracial collective of Black, white, Latin, and Palestinian students, that would go on to develop a campaign against the bombing in Gaza taking place at the time.
Another important struggle protested the racist murder of a young man named Stephan Watts in a Chicago suburb. PLP was instrumental in that struggle. We attended rallies, disrupted, and on a few occasions shut down, city council meetings. The battles were great schools for communism and class struggle.
People grew closer to PLP. Many of them graduated, transferred or left to work, and we were unable to keep consistent contact with them. In that time, PL’ers on campus learned valuable lessons in class struggle and base-building. We had spent so much time developing the quantity of people that we neglected the fact that in order to get a good quantity of people, we had to first look at the quality of people we were meeting. We had focused on “low hanging fruit” which distracted us from students who may have not fully understood all the theory but were ready to fight against racism and its root cause, capitalism.
PLP Leadership Builds Multiracial Unity
The Fall semester of 2014 proved to be a very rewarding one, in terms of building a sound collective of students and bringing many of these students closer to PLP. In the beginning of the semester, it appeared that we might have been too optimistic because we got involved in three student organizations: Black Student Union, the Latin student group, and a multiracial collective called Students for Social Change.
It is important to note that the protests around Ferguson and Ayotzinapa played a significant role in galvanizing the students on our campus. This resulted in forums, trips to Ferguson, marches, petitions, and three protests, on campus and a local city hall.
The Party and our friends helped provide leadership, inspired by 50 militant workers and students. We took the streets, which caught the cops off guard and showed, even momentarily, the true power of the working class. We gained many contacts after that rally, some of which have come regularly to PLP study groups. This is an important development for the working class because these things usually don’t happen in “big, bad, and conservative” Indiana. It shows that the working class is looking for an alternative, and that alternative is communism.
The most important development of this political work was a coalition developed and maintained between all three organizations, which created a strong multiracial force on campus — something that had never been done before. Black students were passing out flyers about the struggles in Mexico surrounding the 43 missing students. Latin and white students were holding “Fight Back like Ferguson” signs at protests on campus. These struggles resulted in many students from all three organizations becoming closer to PLP and being exposed to revolutionary politics.
Communism Is The Only Answer
Last semester we recruited a new member, and many more became closer to the Party and attended our study groups. Four travelled to New York for a college conference, and others have accompanied the Party on trips to Ferguson. We also saw veteran comrades, who had taken some steps back become very involved in providing leadership to the campus base.
This struggle to completely destroy capitalism is a long, frustrating, and brutal one. But it is a fight that we must fully immerse ourselves in, if we wish to build a communist society. The working class is yearning for an alternative to this system that murders us, closes our schools and hospitals, and sends us off to fight in imperialist wars. Communism is that alternative, and the Progressive Labor Party is the organization to make that happen. Join Us.