Columbia student strikes vs. capitalism, needs PLP

 Hundreds of members of the graduate and undergraduate Student Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2110 (STC-UAW) blared their chants as both retired professors and members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined the picket line along with many other supporters protesting Columbia University. Protesters are pushing back against this institution of “higher” education’s racist, profit-driven core. Despite its endowment of $14.4 billion, Columbia claims it can’t afford to pay super-exploited student workers a living wage nor provide them with expanded health care coverage and greater protections against harassment and discrimination. Scenes of the protest at Columbia illustrate the power of militant students and workers to force bosses not only to grant the short-term demands of this strike but also how to build a communist system run by workers without bosses.
“Up, up, up with the workers! Down, down, down with bosses!”
The notion that some students, mainly working class Black and Latin students, must work to earn their education while others are handed it for free is a racist practice implemented at colleges and universities across the county. It’s time to smash this capitalist system and the education system that upholds it. Capitalist schools are designed to protect the structures in place that allow inequality to thrive. Under communism, education will be available to all at no cost and will be rooted in thought, collectivity, and ensuring all members of our class are taught skills and ideology that serve the greater good, not a profit system.
This struggle has revealed once again how fearful bosses become when workers realize their true power at Columbia University and beyond. PLP distributed about 30 copies of CHALLENGE, and some picketers nodded their head when we said that the conflict at Columbia needs to become part of a larger collective campaign, like the struggles at CUNY (City University of New York) and many other campuses and workplaces all over the country.
 Meanwhile, the bosses of the institution, scared of the political significance of this struggle, resorted to the same-old fear tactics to protect their financial interests, such as preserving President Lee Bollinger’s salary, apparently having earned $4.5 million in 2018 (Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/31/21).  Administrators’ goals of suppressing rebellion backfired when, after threatening by email to fire strikers who did not return to work by December 10, student workers responded with outrage rather than fear (NYT, 12/3/21).
 At the height of the protest, a 10-foot banner reading “Fair Contract Now” set the backdrop for hundreds of protestors blocking campus entrances and preventing students from attending class, joined by NYU, Fordham and CUNY faculty union members, and members of Teamsters Local 804.  Buses and trucks blew horns in support.
Class struggle is necessary, but workers need communism!
We need to find ways to make these short-term limited struggles part of a larger battle to dismantle a racist capitalist system. When we fight and win limited reforms for better pay, health care, reduced tuition, or classes that teach our real history, we should use them as resources for the larger fight to overthrow capitalism altogether.  We need revolutionary thinking for a new world and need to recruit militant Black, Latin, Asian, immigrant, and white working-class students and their teachers into expanding these reform struggles into a revolutionary movement and an education for communist liberation. Columbia student strikers are already helping provide this important education.
For example, when about 500 protesters demonstrated on October 28 and then disrupted President Bollinger's "Freedom of Speech and Press" classroom chanting: "Bollinger in your ivory tower, we'll fight you with union power."
The Columbia student workers’ unionization drive and strike are part of a seesaw wave of actions by graduate students that has been sweeping the country since 2000 when the National Labor Relations Board first ruled that graduate students at NYU could unionize – only to reverse that decision in 2004. When this decision got reversed again in 2016, it opened the door for Columbia student workers to unionize with SWC-UAW Local 2110, and to include undergraduate as well as graduate student workers, an egalitarian step that counters the divisive tendency to separate workers into different categories.
Graduate student organizing drives and strikes have taken place at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Harvard, University of Michigan, Rutgers University, and many other campuses. The UAW (United Auto Workers) has helped lead these campus struggles, but its total reliance on Democratic Party politicians and labor board decisions is a huge weakness because without shutting down the whole campus, Columbia strikers have a limited capacity to challenge the University which has already dragged out the contract struggle for two years.  
These student strikes – like the growing wave of strikes in industry, of coal miners in Alabama, and workers at Nabisco, Frito-Lay, Kellogg as well as near strikes in the television industry, healthcare, and other areas – all are in response to the growing economic crisis of capitalism, which has seen workers’ wages go down while CEO salaries and corporate profits soar. The root of the problem is not the Columbia budget but capitalism itself. It should be our goal to be part of these struggles with the goal of building personal ties and turning limited union struggles into a larger revolutionary communist movement.