PL’ers Step Up Class Struggle at Profs’ Convention

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.