NEW YORK CITY, October 27—Forty students, joined by church and community groups and members of Progressive Labor Party, rallied to protest the exploitation of campus workers at Columbia University, a wealthy ruling-class school with a long history of attacking the working class.
Student Worker Solidarity has been organizing for three years at Columbia, which pays students about $9 an hour while hoarding a $9.6 billion endowment and lavishing its president, Lee Bollinger, with a salary of more than $3 million a year (businessinsider.com, 12/16/14). At today’s demonstration, students told of how they earn so little that they cannot afford both food and books. One student noted that vital positions—like sexual violence hotline counselors—are not paid at all.
Only a system based on wage slavery would force workers to pay for the bare necessities of life. Under communism, work will be organized according to the needs of society and the commitment of the individual. There will be no money or wages. Incentives will be political, not material. We will work to serve our class.
Today’s demonstration culminated in a march into the office of the provost, the university’s number two official, with the group chanting loudly all the way.  After the provost failed to respond to their demonstration on October 13, as one student put it, the protesters had “no choice but to escalate” the class war.                   
Under the profit system, all businesses—from fast-food chains to hospitals to colleges—attack workers on a daily basis. As an elite educational institution, Columbia helps develop next-generation leaders for U.S. capitalism as the rulers move toward broader war and rising fascism. That’s an important job, and Columbia will crush anyone who gets in its way. In recent years, Columbia students have sided with community residents against police sweeps of adjacent, mostly Black and Latin public housing projects. They have exposed the university’s racist designs to displace long-time neighborhood residents in campus expansion schemes.
Reform Struggles, Revolutionary Ideas
Fifty years ago, when PLP was founded, it undertook a strategy to inject revolutionary content into student anti-war and anti-racist movements. A worker-student alliance was born.  PLP’s early growth among students was rooted in the conviction that capitalism was the real enemy, and that only a revolutionary party could lead workers to a communist world that will liberate us all.
During the Vietnam War, anti-imperialist campaigns at Columbia and other campuses, along with PLP summer projects, inspired students to take jobs in factories and transit. This Party-led movement produced committed revolutionaries who dedicated their entire lives to overthrowing the whole rotten capitalist system.
Students in Student Worker Solidarity are becoming accomplished organizers as they recognize the need to unite with workers. The next step is to deepen our understanding of the limits of capitalism, a system than can never provide a decent standard of living for most workers. In fact, as international competition for markets and resources intensify, and inter-imperialist conflicts inevitably follow, cuts in wages and services will only get worse. Ultimately, capitalism has got to go! And that means joining PLP to create a world of work without the exploitation of wage slavery.