CUNY: ‘New Deal’ is for imperialist war preparations

QUEENS, December 11 — More than 700 students, faculty, and staff at the City University of New York (CUNY) marched from LaGuardia Community College to the CUNY School of Law today in protest against racist budget cuts, tuition increases, and chronic underfunding. The march was called by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), union misleaders whose reformist action is stopping short at demands for a “New Deal for CUNY.”  Tensions within the march were palpable as misleaders fought for liberal reforms, while many students and marchers, including members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), chanted loudly for militancy and an overthrow of an education system that continues to put the needs of its working class students last.
Yes, we must join our class brothers and sisters in the streets and fight for these small demands, but we must also never lose sight that ultimately racist capitalism can never be reformed. Only communism can give us the education system the international working class deserves.
PSC’s “New Deal” lists free tuition; increased faculty-to-student ratios; and more funding for student mental health counselors and academic advisors, as some of its demands. While there is nothing inherently wrong with each of these requests, PLP remains clear that these asks will never truly be provided at a university that is run for and by capitalist bosses.
Members and friends of the revolutionary communist PLP sharpened the struggle at the march, highlighting the “New Deal’s” contradictions by distributing leaflets, copies of CHALLENGE, and connecting with coworkers to expose the toxic liberalism of the PSC misleaders and Democratic Party.
Liberals’ ”New Deal”= same old racist sham
The PSC misleadership put on a lukewarm show of performative rebellion with tired speeches alongside a rogues’ gallery of politicians. Among the fake-leftist guest speakers were New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, two Black Democratic misleaders that have been put into power to dampen the revolutionary spirit of young Black and Latin workers.
Some among CUNY’s 525,000 mostly Black and immigrant students and 29,000 PSC members were deceived into supporting these politicians as alternatives to worsening racist and sexist capitalist crises. But beneath the empty speeches the “New Deal” is nothing more than protection for the same racist capitalist system that has spurred us to take these streets in the first place.
Free tuition, the centerpiece of the “New Deal,” might have been a bolder proposal decades ago when tuition was first imposed in 1976. But no matter how many PSC misleaders’ speeches try to spin it, free tuition is an utterly limited demand and does nothing to attack the capitalist cause of racist educational inequality in the first place.
Today, 66 percent of CUNY students already attend tuition-free through financial aid and scholarships but are saddled with expenses that double the cost of tuition or more. It’s these supplemental fees that  hold back and hinder opportunities for Black and immigrant students but fall to the
wayside as liberals congratulate themselves under the guise of charity (Vox, 2/13/20).
In addition to free tuition, university-wide full healthcare, childcare, housing, food stipends, textbooks, transit fares, tutoring, and work-study programs, irrespective of immigration status, should be among the PSC’s MINIMUM demands for students and faculty. These incremental needs, all of which rack up a hefty price tag, aren’t even considered in the proposed and short sighted deal.
 Fake leftist politicians like James and Williams know all this. But the government, courts and kkkops serve the capitalist state, not the working class. Wall Street bankers and lawyers fill CUNY’s Board of Trustees not by accident, but because the role of universities under capitalism is to reproduce and protect this racist system.
Rank-and-file leadership of communists and antiracist fighters in the PSC membership must organize alongside students for strikes against CUNY, racism and imperialism, and turn our campuses into “schools for communism” as the old communist movement did nearly a century ago.
1930s: Red-led students, faculty fought like hell
In the 1930s capitalism was under crisis during the Great Depression, and in the middle of it all the old Communist Party organized industries as well as the Teachers’ Union (TU) and College Teachers’ Union (CTU) in cities like NYC.
Communist-led students and faculty in the TU/CTU fought back and won demands like tenure, higher pay and better classroom conditions. They won by uniting Black and white students and faculty in the classrooms through internationalism and militant antiracism against Jim Crow through campaigns like the Scottsboro Boys. They also organized to expelracists and Nazi sympathizers from campuses.
PLP has analyzed the mistakes of the old movement elsewhere, and as we continue to learn from the revolutionaries before us, PL’ers today fight to revive the rank-and-file militancy of that era in every classroom and union meeting to build a mass Party for communist revolution.
Discontent and dissatisfaction with the PSC misleaders at today’s event was expressed by many colleagues. Our task is transforming those feelings into action to build student-worker- faculty unity through sharpening local campus struggles and continuing to build our growing Party study-action groups.
Bosses’”Deals” are preparation for imperialist war
Even if passed, no bosses’ “New Deal” has ever or will ever save the working class. The U.S. bosses have their sights set only on saving their sagging blood-soaked empire. They want our students and youth to fight and die for it in wider imperialist wars against their working class sisters and brothers in other countries.
Tellingly, the “New Deal for CUNY” apes the bosses’ Great Depression-era New Deal, by liberal Democrat president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR’s New Deal was a racist attack on Black and immigrant workers that did not end the Great Depression — World War II did. Government spending on WWII was 10 times the amount that it spent on the New Deal. The U.S. capitalist class ramped up its war production and set the stage for the decades-long world dominance of U.S. imperialism, while the then-communist led Red Armies in the Soviet Union and China defeated the bulk of the Nazi and Japanese fascists.
With U.S. imperialism now on the decline against rising Chinese and resurgent Russian imperialism, imperialist world war and fascism are once again on the horizon. Only the international working class can smash capitalism once and for all. From NYC to Moscow to Beijing, PLP fights to build a mass Red Army to fight for a new revolutionary communist world, not another capitalist “Deal”! Students, workers and faculty, JOIN PLP!