MLA: push limits of reform, fight for communism

NEW JERSEY, April 30—On the day before May Day, over 65 faculty, academic workers, graduate and undergraduate students participated in a virtual forum on “Class and Struggle in Higher Education,” organized by the Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association (MLA). The forum’s theme, described by the opening speaker as “the systemic failure of capitalism to meet the needs of the great majority of the world’s people,” reflected the growing mass anger and fightback in higher education in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Even more important, however, the forum demonstrated the sharpening of Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) work among academics, addressing immediate concerns about the crisis in academic labor but also emphasizing the need for current organizing to be guided by a revolutionary outlook.

In response to the call to build a mass national—and international—higher education worker-student-faculty movement, nine speakers reported on sharp struggles they helped lead: winning a 4.5 percent raise for a new grad-student-worker union at Brown, leading a wildcat strike of grad workers at UC Santa Cruz, starting a union at Duke University Press, combating passive union leadership and calling for a strike at two New Jersey campuses, fighting for adjuncts at CUNY, and adjuncts at a Canadian campus challenging full-time faculty to wake up to their duty of care and solidarity. A lecturer from Haiti urged attendees to “use every means possible to bring revolutionary ideas into the universities with the goal of raising student consciousness and integrating militant, Marxist-revolutionary ideas into the campus.”

The April 30 forum grew out of three RC-sponsored events at the January 2021 MLA Convention: two RC panels -- on “Climate Activist Pedagogies” and “The Post-Pandemic University” -- and the RC’s annual meeting, all held virtually. Attendees strongly encouraged the RC to use the opportunity of virtual meetings to organize activities throughout the year; a core group of new and long-standing RC and PLP members volunteered to organize the pre-May Day forum on class struggles in higher education. The forum also drew upon the activism and relationships established by the long-term work of Party members in the CUNY Professional Staff Caucus (union) and the Marxist Literary Group as well as PLP membership in the MLA Radical Caucus since its founding in the crucible of the Vietnam War.
One key decision was to focus the opening talk on the importance of understanding the political economy of present-day capitalism, so that our organizing activities can draw the necessary connections between the crisis in higher education and the shifting needs of the ruling class which has produced, in the words of the opening speaker, the current “obscenity of economic inequality.“  The conference looked at the effects of this kind of crisis, a general capitalist crisis deepened by financialization and globalization and imperialist rivalry, on faculty and students in universities.  One of the key challenges facing communist organizing when mass anger erupts into class struggle, is the illusion workers have that liberal reforms can bring about real change, but history has shown us over and over that reforms will be reversed when struggle dies because the laws of capitalism depend on the drive for profit. Only a communist revolution can fundamentally change the lives of workers, since we will eliminate exploitation and capitalism.
Participants concluded the conference with plans to pursue three initiatives: (1) to build a network of radical academic organizations across disciplines; (2) to hold a second forum in the fall on “the new keywords of our struggle,” that looks at the way in which influential new terminology—terms like “intersectionality” and “social justice”—has drawn people into struggle but also limited them to reformism; and (3) to research and promote new initiatives and campaigns for academic labor organizing.
Members and friends in PLP have a pivotal role to play in this effort, developing deeper ties with fellow workers and students through discussions, study groups, and struggles. A key lesson of the forum was the necessity of having a long-term approach to communist organizing and Party building and having confidence in our fellow workers.