College Conference: educate to organize and fight back

NEWARK, NJ, November 9 — More than 40 multiracial friends and members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in the greater New York City area gathered for the annual College Conference. The conference aims to bring students, workers, faculty and staff together each year, and the main topic this year was the growth of fascism on campuses and how to fight it.
Speakers and workshop discussions were organized so that all conference participants could learn from one another how to build a mass movement across our campuses uniting, students, faculty and workers. And that means building a mass, fighting PLP on every campus to fight back against increasing “austerity” and to smash racist and fascist repression with communist revolution!
Envisioning communist education
The conference began by inviting participants to think about what education might look like if the working class ran the world under communism. Participants were inspired by the idea of a system that could help everyone to succeed, and questioned how differently universities would be structured in a world run by the working class — or if they would exist in their current form at all. Ideas flowed about breaking down the racist and sexist divisions between mental and physical labor, the power of education through collective working class struggle, and what apprenticeships and collaborations might look like among workers with different experiences and skills sets.
While we recognized that we could not know how the needs of a worker-led communist world would change education, this stimulating discussion revealed many of the problems working class youth face fighting for an education under capitalism. This set the stage for the panel of speakers discussing struggle and fightback on their campuses.
               What we do counts!
A State of the World speech from a PL’er then set the tone of struggle and fightback from workers around the world in the midst of a period of sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry among groups of capitalists and the growing reality of deadlier wars. The panel of speakers gave inspiring and detailed reports of struggles on New York and New Jersey campuses — from the strike movement at Rutgers University to the struggle to defend undocumented students from deportation at the City University of New York, struggles documented in previous issues of CHALLENGE.
These reports were also connected with the State of the World speech in that the conflicts within the capitalist class of the U.S. and around the world framed the significance of each struggle within an international context. They showed the potential of how building a fighting PLP on these campuses can eventually influence the course of global events, and put emphasis on the reality that each new CHALLENGE reader we win, each antiracist struggle, each fightback on each campus that we organize today — they all count. Each one counts because they build a Party that will move millions to build the mass revolutionary movement we need to smash capitalism.
Workshops: education to
 organize and fight back
The workshops that immediately followed focused on these questions: who are our class enemies on campus? How do we fight our class enemies on campus? New friends of the Party stepped up to help each workshop group collectively analyze the roles of local politicians, campus administrators, disciplinary rules for students and faculty, financial aid, and campus police. These are all a part of the capitalist state, and they exist to control students and faculty. We discussed and applied the philosophy and science of dialectical materialism to connect our individual and particular experiences and struggles with the systemic and general pressures our working class sisters and brothers collectively face.
A big part of the workshop discussions focused on selling and building a mass readership of CHALLENGE on each campus. CHALLENGE is not like any capitalist newspaper; it is our collective organizer. It summarizes and shares the experiences of working class fightback around the world, and teaches us all how to build a PLP capable of destroying this capitalist state dictatorship, not only responsible for every racist and sexist attack on each campus, but also for every imperialist war and every forced migration of workers around the world.
By the time we reassembled as a large group share out what we learned, it was clear that everyone, from our new friends to the veteran fighters, were inspired and educated. We concluded with sharper plans for continuing the struggles on our campuses, and many of those present left to join other friends and comrades at the celebration dinner of the Bolshevik Revolution in Brooklyn. The struggle to build a mass communist movement on our area campuses continues!