NEW YORK CITY, November 28 — Today the City University of New York (CUNY) trustees outdid themselves in fascist absurdity. They locked all Baruch College students, faculty, and other workers out of their own school so that they — bankers and ruling-class stooges appointed by the mayor and governor — could impose a racist 33% tuition hike on the mostly black and Latino and immigrant students.
The events of the previous Monday triggered the lock-down. On November 21, a militant group of 500 students arrived at the “public” meeting where the CEOs and other bosses that make up the Board of Trustees (BoT) supposedly listen to testimonies from the community. This is another capitalist lie. The decision had already been made.
Nevertheless, students and workers gathered, ready to make the BoT listen to them. CUNY responded with baton-wielding “public safety officers” and NYPD cops. Students were sitting in the lobby chanting, “Occupy the Lobby!” The cops attacked, swinging their batons wildly. In discussion during and after the event, PL’ers stressed that this was, and is always, the role of the kkkops: to terrorize workers, especially black, Latino and women workers, into submission.
We were not intimidated, and returned today for the BoT to officially vote on their racist plan. So angry were students and workers over last week’s cop-attack that CUNY bosses had to shut down the entire college to hold this meeting! Like slave-owners whose greatest fear was the slave revolt, the bosses today acted out of fear for they could not trust anyone at Baruch. More than 15 students were arrested, including one student whom the cops sexually harassed.
With their state power on full display, they could lock us out. One professor got into the meeting and disrupted it with a protest against police brutality. Though he was thrown out of the room, they could not drown out the more than 1,000 protesters outside, chanting “Get up! Get down! There’s revolution in this town!” and “Education is a right! Fight! Fight! Fight!” The multiracial crowd was a mix of older, more organized union workers and the younger, less organized, angry students taking the streets and challenging the cops.
The union workers deferred to the students’ leadership and stopped their moving picket line. The students then led the whole crowd in a march around the neighborhood and back to the front doors, in time to yell “Shame!” at a few last trustees scuttling out of the building. The last speech given using the human-mike was a student thank-you to their worker-allies for being there to the end.
Where does this leave us, in a town that is somewhat rebellious but far from revolution? We need a deeper understanding of the class system to really “get up, get down” with revolution. The capitalist university is not, as one sign wished, “a free speech zone,” but an ideological apparatus carefully tailored to reproduce the system. Inequality is not caused by unfair taxation but by the exploitation of labor. Capitalism is not an “economic” system fixable by a “political” electoral process or the protest of a militant crowd. It is a political economic system where the exploitation of labor is guaranteed by an armed, vicious, racist dictatorship of capitalists. The ruling class not only owns the means of production but also owns the cops, the army, the laws, the courts, the judges, the politicians and parties, the media, the schools, and the churches.
There will be a communist revolution in this town and every town. But when there is, the prophetic, anarchic feelings of youthful revolt now surging in the Occupy movement will have had to become the cold rage of a conscious and fully organized working class. Led by PLP, we must be ready to smash the capitalist system and take state power. Self-critically, although the Party, CHALLENGE and revolutionary politics were present today, it was not nearly enough. We too have a tough transformation to make to become the Party that our class needs and our history demands. And we will.