PL’ers lit MLA convention with communist ideas

NEW JERSEY, January 10— As news was rolling in of the attempted Small Fascist-led takeover of the U.S. Capitol (see page 2), the Modern Language Association (MLA) was hosting its annual convention. The Radical Caucus of the MLA, in which Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been active for many years, was preparing to confront how the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified the ongoing attacks on public higher education.  The fightback among faculty and graduate students must now also confront the intensified political surveillance and ideological repression that are sure to shape teaching and learning in the humanities classrooms in the coming period.  
Attack on faculty = attack on students
The crisis in higher education has been brewing for at least three decades. All the following attacks hurt students the most. Almost 75 percent of all courses are now taught by graduate workers and non-tenure track faculty.  While administrators and athletic coaches rake in huge salaries, these teachers’ pay is pitiful, usually without benefits or job security; some adjuncts are on food stamps and homeless, living in their cars.  Thousands of adjuncts have been laid off because of pandemic-related cutbacks. Many full-time faculty have been forced to increase their workloads, spend many extra hours mastering online teaching, and in some instances take pay cuts. These attacks the faculty—adjunct and non-adjunct—attacks the quality of education for students.
Students who attend most institutions of public higher education—mainly working-class, immigrant, and/or Black or Latin—are shoved into bigger classrooms, often without rigorous instruction, and face costly, delayed graduation dates due to fewer classes being offered. Many colleges have turned into dystopian diploma mills, robbing students of quality education.
Organize with workers on campus
At the 2021 MLA convention, held online, the Radical Caucus organized two panels—one on “The Post-Pandemic University,” one on “Climate Activist Pedagogies”—and held a well-attended meeting where anti-capitalist and pro-communist politics were prominent. There was frank discussion of the intimidation—and anger—experienced by teachers whose zoomed classrooms are subject to surveillance at any time.  
Proposals were made to step up political work among graduate students, most of whom anticipate never getting a tenure-track job, as well as to organize antiracist campaigns uniting faculty with nonacademic campus employees, from janitors to food service workers.
Class consciousness vs. phony liberalism
Given the crisis in ruling-class legitimacy flowing from the failed Capitol invasion, the Radical Caucus must also step up the struggle on the ideological front.  Most academics who devote their lives to the study of culture and literature do so out of humanistic impulses; they want to see a better world and are not trying to get rich.
But liberal ideas, which disempower effective fights against the capitalists, reign supreme. Marxist analysis of the grounding of consciousness in class-based social relations is often dismissed as “class reductionism.” Identity politics—which posit that race, gender, and sexuality define what is essential in human experience—dominate most intellectual inquiry and attempts at campus organizing.
We can anticipate that liberal multiculturalism, the principal ideology embraced by the dominant sector of the U.S. ruling class, will now be promoted still more aggressively as the supreme expression of patriotism. The bosses turn the working class’s instinct of antiracism and antisexism into tools for oppression. The Radical Caucus plans to sponsor a series of mini-conferences where certain keywords popular in liberal academic lingo—such as “intersectionality,” “racial capitalism,” “white fragility,” and “racial privilege”—will be subjected to vigorous critique. All these terms distort the reality of class relations and make identities primary over class struggle.
This ideological offensive is especially important now as campus administrations are increasingly institutionalizing these concepts in the wake of the recent multiracial Black Lives Matter mass movements against racism.
PLP has a long history of working within the MLA Radical Caucus. We have consistently sponsored panels on working-class, antiracist, and antisexist literature.  Starting in the 1980s, we have given strong class-conscious leadership to campaigns against academic racism, imperialist war, sweatshop labor, welfare cutbacks, anti-Muslim racism, and attacks on undocumented immigrants. We were the first force within the MLA to advocate on behalf of graduate student unionization and support for adjunct faculty.  Largely because of our successes in getting resolutions through the Delegate Assembly, the MLA Executive Council changed the Constitution, so that it is now nearly impossible to bring forward rank-and-file resolutions and get them ratified by the membership.
To be self-critical: this barrier to the passage of resolutions led Party members in the last few years to be more passive in our MLA activity. But the current pandemic, intensification of class contradictions, and crisis in class rule have jolted us back into a renewed awareness of the need for militant Communist-led organizing among academics in the humanities. CHALLENGE readers, stay tuned for more from the red fighters in the MLA’s Radical Caucus.