CHICAGO, January 15 — A series of struggles centering around the “Boycott/Divest/Sanction” (BDS) campaign against the Israeli government’s apartheid toward Israeli Arabs and oppression in the West Bank and Gaza became a hot point at January’s annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Chicago.
The MLA, the largest organization of academics and students of the humanities draws thousands to its convention to discuss topics in literature and language. PL members take part in the convention to push for a Marxist understanding of class, the need for revolutionary pedagogy (the theory, methods and practices of teaching) and a materialist approach to literary history. Some sessions were led by PL’ers and they participated in others. Topics included “Literature and Life after Capitalism,” and “Teaching about the One Percent, the Rich, the Upper Class and the Ruling Class.”
The MLA convention — which is sometimes called a “meat-market” — also attracts many graduate students interviewing for the few available teaching jobs. It is not surprising that almost all of them went back home empty-handed and discouraged, despite being highly qualified and willing to accept full-time work anywhere. More than 75 percent of college teachers in the U.S. are now part-time workers. In 2012, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported the number of PhDs receiving food stamps more than tripled between 2007 and 2010 to 33,655, while those with a master’s degree living on food stamps nearly tripled to 293,029.  
PL members in the MLA Radical Caucus have for many years brought anti-capitalist analysis to a range of issues raised in the Delegate Assembly (DA), from the super-exploitation of adjunct labor to racist cutbacks to imperialist war. This year the Radical Caucus successfully got the DA to pass a resolution against a bogus attack on San Francisco Community College’s accreditation (and by extension, other working-class colleges). Still, the hot-button issue this year was the impact of the Israeli apartheid system on universities in Israel/Palestine.  
The BDS campaign, modeled on the movement against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s-1980s, calls on institutions to get rid of their investments in companies doing business in Israel. Accompanying this economic strategy is a call for universities and professional academic organizations to boycott any institutional ties with Israeli universities. The latter largely serves to strengthen and legitimatize the policies of the government, and build the false notion that Israel is an oasis of democracy in a desert of Arab authoritarianism.  The boycott expressly does not, however, target individual Israeli academics, many of whom are critical of the Israeli state and, in fact, support the boycott.
In the weeks before the MLA convention, the Asian-American Studies Association, the Native American Studies Association, and the American Studies Association passed resolutions in support of BDS.  The negative reaction, especially to the ASA action, was instantaneous.
About  150 university presidents have condemned the ASA; it has been attacked by the Wall Street Journal; state legislators have threatened to cut funds to universities with American Studies departments; individual members of the ASA have been deluged with hate mail, much of it sexist, racist, and homophobic.  Backed up against the wall, some members of the ASA turned to the MLA Radical Caucus with a request for support. The caucus drew up a resolution defending academic organizations from this neo-McCarthyite attack.
As it happened, this resolution never got to the DA floor because of a right-wing obstructionist attack on another, even milder resolution calling on the State Department to stop blocking U.S. scholars from the West Bank. This “Right to Entry” resolution passed, by a small margin, but the right-wingers had successfully managed to take up so much time that the pro-ASA resolution did not even come to the floor before the meeting was adjourned.
PL forces active in the MLA Radical Caucus — some of whom are now also receiving hate mail — have a lot to learn from these events as we move ahead in the struggle around academic freedom, BDS, and U.S. foreign policy.  We have formed the beginnings of strong ties with left forces in the ASA; we have raised the importance of stressing anti-imperialism and anti-racism within the BDS movement, which promises to spread to other professional academic organizations in coming months.  
At the same time, we need to bring a critical Marxist analysis to bear upon the limitations of the movement as it presently exists.  Too often the defense of groups like the ASA invokes abstract liberal arguments about academic freedom and free speech that ignore — or at least sideline — the brutal repression of Palestinians that motivates BDS in the first place.  Too often the Israeli-Palestinian situation is described in nationalistic terms, overlooking both the class dynamics within Israel-Palestine and the geopolitical imperatives of U.S. capital in the Middle East.
The anti-apartheid thrust of BDS, moreover, ignores a principal lesson to be learned from the abolition of legal apartheid in South Africa — namely, that unless capitalism is eradicated, the inequalities of racist super-exploitation will remain.
You need to be in it to win it, however.  PL members should immerse themselves in the BDS movement, which currently is emerging as one of the key sites of anti-racist, internationalist struggle.

A lot of illusions in the ANC/SACP (African National Congress/ South African Communist Party) have been buried with Mandela, so that we can begin to look at the Mandela period differently. For example, there have always been struggles and movements in South Africa not controlled by them. Long before Mandela got out of prison, there was a strong mass movement in the 1980s that was independent of the ANC/SACP, most of whose leaders were exiled or jailed.
Class struggle carried on despite their absence and was led by a loosely-affiliated “radical democratic” movement called the United Democratic Front (UDF). It comprised new unions of militant black workers like the Dunlop Rubber workers in Durban; community-based organizers among the black youth called “the comrades”; draft resisters among young white men; a vigorous culture of protest and resistance in poster art, drama (“The Dunlop Play”); and militant poetry for worker audiences in the thousands (“Black Mamba Rising”).  
The UDF did not develop communist politics or a revolutionary party, though it might have been fertile ground for both. But in 1990 the ANC/SACP leadership returned and began to negotiate an end to legal apartheid.  
These Pretoria negotiations were “demobilizing” to UDF activists (in their phrase), and many remained wary of the Mandela forces as a result.  The legacy of the UDF lived on after the 1994 ANC election victory: in the independently-organized squatter movements in the shacktowns described in the vivid book by Ashwin Desai, We Are the Poors; in the opposition to the ANC/SACP/COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) neoliberal economic policy called GEAR; and in the campaign against the HIV/AIDS epidemic led by former ANC’ers like Zackie Achmat, who refused to take HIV drugs himself as long as they were not available to the poor.
Such forces continued to resist the “normalization” of capitalism under a ruling class which had narrowly opened up to include a few black entrepreneurs, while installing a new black political class in the government. Even some unions in COSATU, the AFL-CIO-like trade union federation which was the third part of “the Alliance,” continued to strike against the impoverishment of workers under GEAR.  COSATU to an extent became, with left intellectuals, a home for dissents from the ANC.
Now there are new UDF-like upsurges of class struggle and new glimmerings of anti-capitalist organizing in South Africa.  The COSATU-affiliated mineworkers’ union was challenged by a new more militant union group which led the platinum miners’ bloody strike against the multinational giant LONRHO and its ANC supporters. The latest turn to the left is the announcement at the convention of the metalworkers’ union (the largest union in the whole of Africa) that they were breaking definitively with the ANC, and that, because the SACP had abandoned the working class, the union would work for a new party to fight for socialism.  
While still expressing sorrow and respect at Mandela’s death, the metalworkers were in fact repudiating his line and his organizations.  There are many others, from students and intellectuals to wildcat strikers and the housing movement, who may be expected to sign on to a call for a return to anti-capitalist struggle in South Africa.  No doubt at the outset this will keep many aspects of the old communist line (such as socialism as a transition to communism).  
But a new field has been opened up with Mandela’s death.  It’s up to PLP and revolutionary communists everywhere to jump into solidarity with the new struggles in South Africa.  Like workers in motion in Haiti and Bangladesh, they are openings to a new communist internationale rising from the ashes of the old.

There is life in the class struggle in South Africa.  Leading the wave is a strategically important strike that is galvanizing workers and disrupting the global platinum market and the South African economy. On January 23, the world’s big three platinum producers, Anglo American, Impala, and Lonmin, were struck by seventy thousand miners in the Association of Mineworkers & Construction Union (AMCU). This new and militant union is up against the African National Congress government, whose police fired rubber bullets into three thousand strikers trying to stop scabs at Anglo American.  
The strike was expanded on Feb. 3 by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the largest union in Africa, which joined in with their own wage demands.  While the AMCU miners have diverged from the traditional ANC miners’ union (the National Union of Mineworkers), NUMSA has gone further, breaking completely with the ANC and thus opening a new era of class struggle.
Class Struggle Survives the ANC Sellout
We can now see the anti-apartheid period in South Africa as a great wave of antiracist struggle forced into a deadend by its ANC leadership. These leaders reformed the apartheid state but left racist capitalism intact.  Imperialists worldwide first fought the anti-apartheid alliance, which also included the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and labeled participants as communists and terrorists. But when it became obvious that apartheid was a losing strategy for maintaining capitalism in a majority-black society, the rulers changed their tune.
Once the alliance agreed to keep capitalism intact, local bosses and imperialists everywhere praised Mandela to the skies. Despite this misleadership, the class struggle went on independently of the alliance from the 1980s to the present day. Twenty years after the first ANC election, workers suffer the same level of poverty, 10 percent higher unemployment, and a level of inequality among the highest in the world. So they continue to rebel.
With the ANC alliance discredited, what politics will lead the new struggles — reform or revolution? The same clash of ideas can be seen throughout the world, among armed fighters in Syria (some of whom are genuinely fighting for a better world), garment workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia, antifascists in Greece and Pakistan, and students in Chile and Haiti. We need a new communist internationale, the Progressive Labor Party, to lead our class worldwide. Slowly but surely, workers will get there. Militant strikes, breaking with pro-capitalist leaders, can become schools of worldwide revolution.
Two years ago, these same South African platinum miners ushered in the new era with a bang with their ferocious strike against Lonmin’s mines at Marikana. Taking many casualties, they battled not only the company but the National Union of Mineworkers (the key union in the ruling alliance) and the killer cops of the ANC state, whose massacre of 34 strikers reminded everyone of the apartheid years. (The dictatorship of the capitalist class was intact under a new governing party.)
Now the AMCU strikers seek “a living wage” instead of “an apartheid wage” — a doubling of the entry-level monthly pay to 12,500 South African Rand (US $1,129). The raise would threaten the current economy of platinum production. With NUMSA now in the strike, will more workers start thinking about using their power to abolish capitalism and the wage-and-profit system altogether?
Killer Cops Prop Up the Rand
The strike exposes many contradictions in that system. On one side are the local ANC bosses who would like to placate workers and strengthen their political position by showing some improvements in miners’ conditions, along with stronger regulation of foreign direct investment. On the other is international Big Platinum, which wants to keep miners as low-paid as possible and expects the ANC to keep them in check.
The government is pretending to strengthen health and safety provisions in the mines. But the ANC also needs its killer police, their main strikebreaking weapon, to prop up their credit rating and the value of their currency (the rand). In 2012, labor disputes lowered the economy’s growth rate to 2 percent and knocked 25 percent off the value of the rand.
Imperialist investors are worried about the weak performance of South African platinum mines, which contain 80 percent of the world’s reserves but account for only 53 percent of market share. There is high demand today for platinum, a component of catalytic converters and fuel cells, as carmakers turn away from petroleum. But the striking workers stand in the way of capitalist dreams of higher profits. They must save their own lives and capital be damned! The battle lines are drawn.
The Fight for Communism
But again, with what politics?  Forces on the left seem to be reorganizing as the ANC weakens. Amid expanding strikes and a tide of community protests (about thirty a day), NUMSA’s breakaway from the ANC alliance could give a push to organizing directly against capitalism. The NUMSA is exploring a movement for socialism. While these forces seem honestly opposed to capitalism, PLP would point out that history has shown that fighting for socialism leads directly back to capitalism. Even though we hail the tremendous advances that occurred in the Soviet Union and China, in the final analysis, socialism is state capitalism. The working class must abandon socialism as a stage and fight directly for communism.
PLP believes such discussions are exactly what workers everywhere need, and we look forward to working with the comrades in South Africa who are taking up this task. We will learn from one another to create a new communist internationale, the only alternative to the grind of racist capitalism, constant economic crisis, and endless imperialist wars over strategic resources like oil and platinum.

In the last few months, my PL club coordinated an intensive distribution of flyers in our area. We distributed approximately 300 to 400 CHALLENGE flyers daily. The flyers dealt with education reform, energy reform and the attacks against teachers here in Mexico. The main idea was to inform parents and elementary, middle, high school and college students that the purpose of the new reforms wasn’t to help and improve workers’ conditions but to benefit a few capitalists. The smear campaigns and many attacks against the teachers show how the capitalists try to keep people from fighting against the system, and reforms or laws that only benefit them.
We had daily distribution of flyers, and people at the majority of schools took them and shared with us comments or situations about what they were then going through. Only in two of the schools did we meet youth and people in general who were unwilling to take flyers; some threw them away, and crumpled them up. That experience momentarily made me sad and discouraged. I wondered “how useful is this?”
But when other people stopped, came back to talk about their issues and agreed with the flyer’s arguments, and discussed how we’re all affected by the daily bombardment of the newspapers and news, I understood that what the Party is doing is useful. I realized I have a lot to study to learn PLP’s ideas, so that when someone takes an attitude like that, I could approach them and try to encourage them to read it, and if they disagree to talk about it or share it with their group.
Currently, we’re meeting every Saturday to study with a new comrade who’s doing her medical internship, and has participated in some of our flyer distributions and went to a communist school on racism. We’re getting ready to start another school where we can invite people who live close by, friends and folks who know the Party; we’ll discuss Road to Revolution III.
We’re planning to continue the flyer distributions once a month. We’re also organizing a CHALLENGE distribution network  for the people we’ve been talking to, or have been meeting with, or friends we want to invite to get to know the Party.
Personally, I want to organize my schedule better to make time to study the documents I haven’t read yet or those I don’t understand. I want to begin talking to friends, family and acquaintances about the Party, and to invite them to meet comrades and practice with them to lose my fear about talking to people.
I’m committed to becoming more responsible and dedicated to achieving a better understanding of the Party’s ideas and to recruiting many people to fight for the working class, for communism and to destroy capitalism.
A Red Youth

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I am a medical student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). I met the Progressive Labor Party in May through a friend who invited me to discuss PLP ideas. The first document I read in the club was Road to Revolution IV (RRIV). I liked the ideas of that small pamphlet. When I heard that the Party fought for communism, although I didn’t entirely understand it, I knew that was something good. Fight for class equality? That seemed like a good idea. A red army of workers and students, armed struggle to take power from capitalists? That is excellent!
This is the first time I am writing to CHALLENGE. We’ve read several documents, but I liked RR IV the best, and Jailbreak has been hard to understand, you know, because of Dialectical Materialism [the philosophy of science and nature used to advance our communist theory and practice]. I thought the struggle against sexism was very important. I learned many interesting things, including that it’s a form of racism that allows the bosses to increase their profits, that as a woman it’s harder to get a job, that I could get fired for getting pregnant, that we get lower salaries and fewer rights and that part of “women’s work,” such as domestic work, is unpaid and increases the bosses’ profits.
These study groups have taught me many things. Some I haven’t understood, but I’m convinced that the capitalist system doesn’t work for anybody. I’m also convinced that I have to study much more. From the beginning I was willing to change my capitalist ideology for a communist ideology, and I’m very happy with that!
I’ve been part of a communist school where we discussed racism. Most significant was the participation of many people who described their experiences with racism, how we are all affected, how it’s present all the time, everywhere. This time I didn’t talk because I didn’t feel ready, but I heard the disappointment expressed by my comrades — which is what I call them now. I believed that because they worked the fields or were workers, they wouldn’t understand the complexity of this topic. I was wrong. They are people who are very conscious of our conditions under this system.
I’ve also been involved in flyer distribution at several schools and universities with my PL club. In some there was a lot of participation and acceptance of people; in others that wasn’t the case. I must admit that at my medical school people have refused to take the flyers. My classmates have big expectations of personal success. They’ve bought the capitalist idea that personal success is synonymous with a better life. But I’ll persevere. I know that our Party has members in the medical field; they should write more often in CHALLENGE to show that even in the U.S. doctors struggle and suffer under capitalism.
Our next project is a communist school on Road to Revolution III. I got assigned to cover the Paris Commune. Wish me luck.
PLP student