If any evidence was needed to demonstrate that universities in the U.S. are run as corporations, one need only examine the latest example involving the largest private university in the U.S., New York University. They follow four capitalist principles: making profit, teaching their ideology, fueling racist division, and bilking the students.
NYU has built a campus in the city of Abu Dhabi in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE), a U.S. ally. The UAE is “an oppressive regime which has been accused of torturing prisoners [and] looking the other way at abusive labor conditions for migrant workers” (NY Times, 5/27). Much of the UAE lives off of the super-exploitation of South Asian workers, who live in prison-like labor camps.
Much of the UAE The Times reported (5/19) that these racist conditions suffered by an all-South-Asian migrant workforce who built this campus included “workers being arrested, beaten and deported for going on strike, being charged a year’s wages to get their jobs, and being denied access to their travel documents.”
This campus is part of a campaign guided by NYU’s racist president, John Sexton, “to transform the university into an international…platform with hubs around the globe — the equivalent…of a far-flung multinational corporation. He was supported in that ambition by a who’s who of corporate America accustomed to seeking growth abroad” (NYT, 5/27).
A public letter from a group of NYU faculty declared that these “global ambitions were motivated more by the bottom line for NYU — which has raised nearly $6 billion during [Board of Trustees chairman Martin]
Lipton’s tenure than [by] education” (NYT). CEO Lipton “has made his career as the top advisor to corporate boards during mergers and acquisitions as a founder of Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.” Such are the “educational” resumés of the governing boards of U.S. institutions of “higher learning.”
Wall Street’s Campus
Hours after the exposé was published, “Mr. Lipton went into full crisis mode and sent an email to…member of NYU’s board, which is stacked with Wall Street boldface names [more “educators”?] like Laurence Fink of BlackRock; the hedge fund impresario John Paulson; and a Home Depot founder, Kenneth Langone” (NYT). He said he had been “unaware of the reported abuses and that an ‘independent’ investigation would” begin.
NYU president Sexton followed this by saying that “the contractors responsible for the…problems weren’t under the university’s control.” But this turned out to be unadulterated racist garbage. “The general contractor that helped oversee the construction of the campus isn’t some fly-by-night firm outside NYU’s purview” but “is run by a trustee of NYU’s board [emphasis added]: Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, the chief executive of the Mubadala Development Company.”
Racist Al Mubarak persuaded Sexton and the Board to build the campus, “with a $50 million donation from the government of Abu Dhabi.” Mubarak is chairman of Abu Dhabi’s governing executive council. Faculty member Mark Miller said Sexton’s “contractor” response “was a classic exercise in damage control, meant to distance NYU as far as possible from the horrific wrongs inflicted on those workers, and — therefore — divert attention from the fact that …Al Mubarak is not some faraway rogue operative but an NYU trustee” (NYT). Confirming that characterization, NYU spokesman John Beckman said, “Mr. Al Mubarak is a respected member of the NYU board and his membership is not in question.”
‘Global Clip Joint’ Bilks the Students
Some NYU faculty members objected to the new campus and said Sexton’s initiatives have “led to one of the highest tuitions in the country and soaring debt levels for its students.” The aforementioned faculty public letter declared that, “Any school that profiteers so avidly is sure to be renowned…as a global clip joint with an academic logo.”
NYU is not alone in running a university like a corporation. The presidents of numerous colleges have become millionaires, not to mention the football and basketball coaches. Their huge salaries that help rake in hundreds of millions from the colleges’ sports programs that help pay these salaries and the perks.
Under capitalism, education is a big business that reaps huge profits. It teaches the principles that govern a racist profit-making system, much of it on the backs of its students, their debts and the banks that collect the interest on that trillion-dollar debt. The exorbitant cost of education is increasingly freezing out the working class from any schooling that might enable them to get a decent job.
But, again, capitalism is designed to oppress the working class, not uplift it, in the U.S. as well as in the UAE. We need a profit- and boss-free system, run by and for the working class communism. Workers will collectively run the schools, teach ideas benefitting our class and enable everyone, regardless of area of origin, to fulfill their potential in all fields of endeavor.

The enactment of fascist labor, education, tax, and energy reforms demonstrate the nature of a capitalist system, designed to benefit the bosses and attack the working class. There are no legal ways to enact changes for workers’ benefit.
The bosses’ mass media tells us that the majority is in charge and the laws are just, but in reality the electoral process is completely controlled by the business, financial and political oligarchy. Therefore only those in this oligarchy can get access to power through the vote. Similarly, the rule of law is an illusion, when the same minority of millionaire parasites determines what’s legal, and can change laws to benefit their businesses, as with structural reforms here in Mexico.
When the electoral farce and bourgeois legality are not enough to control working-class rebellions, the bosses resort to the police and military to repress, jail, and murder dissenters. Capitalists use fascist terror against the working class to violently impose their interests on the majority.
The bosses believe that the illusion of bourgeois democracy and fascist terror can prevent the unity of the working class, but they are mistaken. Eventually, millions of workers will unite to build an international communist movement to abolish capitalist oppression and exploitation.
During the last century, the working class made significant advances in the Soviet Union and China by putting into practice its strategy to take power from the bosses. Essential to this strategy were the organization of a revolutionary communist party, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But, its achievements, the old communist movement also had shortcomings. The most important was that even when the workers held political power, revolutionaries limited themselves to the administration of a capitalist economy: Salaries and money were never eliminated, and production was mainly focused on responding to the needs of the market instead of responding to the needs of the working class. The ideological base of this error was the lack of confidence in the working class — that had struggled for the socialist transformation of Russia and China — to accept communist ideas and practices. These errors led to the return of capitalism.
Understanding the failures and successes of the old communist movement are the key to improving our practice in the struggle against capitalist oppression. Revolutionaries believe and practice criticism and self-criticism, as inheritors of the communists of the last century. The members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) call on the workers of the world to once again raise the communist red flag.
We have learned that the struggle should not have stages, must go directly to communism. We must forge a single worldwide communist party, the PLP, as there is only one international working class. We need only one party. The revolutionary struggle to defeat our oppressors cannot be an electoral process or an alliance with a boss or a progressive politician; revolution is necessarily violent and involve millions of workers, students, and soldiers.
Currently, imperialists are readying for global war. The fall of the old communist movement left the working class at a disadvantage to face this period, but the sharp struggle against reformism and revisionism (capitalist ideologies in red clothing), along with our commitment to free our class from capitalist exploitation, eventually will bear fruits.
While the bosses get ready for war, we workers must prepare for a communist revolution. Read and distribute CHALLENGE! Organize our circles of study action!

U.S. bosses’ National Security Agency and other agencies have been spying on other capitalist leaders and scooping up huge amounts of e-mails and phone records around the world. They are up to their necks in spying and sabotage against workers fighting back, In fact, even they are ready to commit murder, or at least stand by while it happens.
While investigating Occupy Houston, the FBI found a plot to assassinate its leaders, but made no attempt to warn them. A plot probably organized by the FBI’s friends.
The information emerged partly from a graduate student’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) document. The government  is now refusing to reveal the rest of the information, on grounds that Occupy is a terrorist group. A Houston judge has called that absurd, and ordered them to prove it or provide the papers, although they probably won’t comply (Houston Chronicle, 3/18; Vice magazine, 3/21).
Meanwhile, a separate investigation in Olympia, WA, has exposed a coordinated effort on the part of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, all three branches of the military, and 16 other local and national police agencies to infiltrate the Port Military Resistance Movement and Evergreen College Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The exposures prove an FBI campaign to spy on and suppress the Occupy Movement — something widely believed, but vigorously denied by the Obama Administration.
A 2009 FOIA request filed by SDS members revealed the man they knew as “John Jacobs” was actually John Towery, a member of the Army’s Force Protection Service (Democracy Now, 7/28/09). Now an SDS lawsuit has revealed an email sent by Towery saying he was trying to “develop a leftist/anarchist mini-group for intel sharing and distro [independent publishing source]” with police departments in Everett, Spokane, Portland, Eugene, and Los Angeles. He even repeatedly tried to convince SDS members to stockpile guns and suggested that they engage in domestic terrorism, so he could entrap them (Democracy Now, 2/25/14).
Spying on the Left is nothing new. In 2004, Drake University in Iowa was subpoenaed by a federal prosecutor to turn over records from an anti-war conference it hosted. This led to the exposure of police infiltration of anti-war groups in Fresno, CA, Grand Rapids, MI, Boulder, CO, and Albuquerque, NM (Salon, 2/11/04).
In 2007 the New York Times revealed that the NYPD had extensively infiltrated Left groups prior to the 2004 Republican National Convention as part of a massive surveillance operation (3/25/07). This spying operation continued well past the Convention, at least until 2008 (Guardian, 3/23/12). The memoir of Minnesota cop Richard Greelis bragged about his state’s massive infiltration of Left groups prior to the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul.
During student protests over budget cuts in 2010-11, campus police infiltrated groups at the University of Washington and UC Davis to spy on student activists. (KIRO7, 4/20/10; California Aggie, 3/10/11)
All this only skims the surface of the capitalist class’s surveillance state. COINTELPRO, a surveillance and disruption program started by the FBI in 1956, included surveillance, police frame-ups, and assassinations in effort to destroy the Left in the U.S. (Ward Churchill, COINTELPRO Papers, 1990). COINTELPRO supposedly was stopped after it came to light in 1971, but recent revelations prove it’s still alive and well. These incidents show that the capitalist class will stop at nothing in order to maintain its economic and political power.

Two news stories today show the peril workers face if they buy into nationalism of any kind (New York Times, May 16, 2014). Nationalism, patriotism, is a boss’s lie. In eastern Ukraine, steelworkers and miners in the companies owned by the billionnaire Rinat Akhmetov put down tools and, led by their managers, occupied their city Mariupol as militias against the pro-Russian secessionists. Akhmetov says secession will bring sanctions that will destroy his businesses and the workers’ jobs. So unity of Ukraine is this billionnaire’s slogan now and he has turned the workers into his private soldiers to enforce Ukrainian nationalism. Forget that tomorrow he might go in the opposite direction. “If you want to keep your jobs, fight for me,” the boss means.
What these workers have done is follow their boss down the path of nationalism. It delivers them into the bosses’ hands, and not just in the obvious sense that they have become cops and soldiers in Akhmetov’s private pro-Kiev army. Worse, it sets them up for war with other Ukrainian and Russian workers, in their own city, in the Ukraine, in the whole Eurasian region. It delivers them into the hands of rival bosses, rival imperialists allied with local capitalists, to be used as cannon fodder against other workers flying different bosses’ flags. Every flag save the red one is a boss’s flag.
The U.S. and Europe support Kiev and Ukrainian nationalism as weapons against their rival imperialist, Russia. If you join Akhmetov’s militia to protect your job you are doing nothing but offering your services to Western imperialism against Russian imperialism. You would do better to think about turning imperialist wars like the one shaping up in Ukraine into a class war of workers internationally against all bosses of whatever camp. You would do better to take over the mills and mines from Akhmetov and call on Russian workers to join you in overthrowing their bosses too. You have the power to do that, as the quick pacification of the city by organized industrial workers showed. But you also need the communist politics of workers’ unity across all ethnic and national borders to use that power for our whole class. And that means turning your back on nationalism, on all nationalisms, as PLP argues. Patriotism is a boss’s lie.
The other story is from Vietnam, where anti-Chinese nationalism turned violently racist.
One Chinese laborer said angry Vietnamese workers had stomped on his hands, crushing them. Another said his son had been struck in the head with a metal rod by a Vietnamese mob that had sought out Chinese for beatings. At least one Chinese worker died (NYT).
This is a tragedy for our class. Both Vietnamese and Chinese workers are exploited by bosses of many nationalities, and nationalist strife between them only serves the exploiters on both sides. When Vietnamese workers turn from attacking foreign-owned factories to killing foreign workers, they show the ultimate peril of nationalism for our class. It is class suicide for workers to turn on one another like this, to define one another as “foreign,” to kill one another for a boss’s lie.
The fact that two generations earlier both Vietnamese and Chinese workers fought for communism together makes this tragedy most bitter. What a falling off from the line of the Vietnamese communist poet To Huu: “For the Party’s long life/together we march/with the same heart.” Now it’s the task of communists to revive that beating heart of proletarian revolutionary internationalism. We know it will need the same heroism that To Huu’s nephew Little Huom displayed, dying in battle “in a jet of blood”:
His cap askew
he whistled away like a warbler on a garden path Even the most tragic moment has its beauty, because Huom’s red song goes on like the life of humanity itself. That is why he fought, and why we fight on in his name.
In Vietnam the inter-imperialist rivalry is between Western and Chinese imperialism, with Japan at the moment on the Western side. Vietnam, so heroic in its defeat of first the French then U.S. imperialist armies, will be crushed under the feet of these elephants if they do battle. The U.S. and Japan want Vietnam to side with them against China. There is nothing but destruction for workers in Vietnam if they follow any of these bosses. Sisters of Vietnam, turn your back on suicidal nationalism. Show us again as you did in my youth, you who “don’t need a beard to be a hero” (To Huu), how communist workers fight for a human future!
Old Comrade