NEW YORK CITY, July 9—“It’s the best meeting I have attended all year!” This statement was made by a professor who participated in the City University of New York (CUNY) Student Speak Out, where over 30 students, along with professors, from CUNY participated in this virtual event to challenge the latest wave of racist attacks coming from the administration. Four students immediately joined a student strike community at the end of the event and pledged themselves to get more involved with this growing movement.
Friends and members of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are part of this organizing effort. From learning about the daily frustrations that the racist CUNY administrators impose on students to guiding the fight-back with principles of multi-racial unity, youth leadership is growing to transform these reform struggles into a fight for communist revolution.
Rising student anger, sharpening class struggle
Anger is rising at the worsening conditions and racist “austerity” measures taken by the CUNY administration: decreased services coupled with rising costs in a university system that serves 274,000 mainly Black, Latin and immigrant students. Students are organizing against increases in class size, financial barriers to registering, reduced class offerings because of layoffs of part-time professors, decreases in services because of understaffed campus offices, and a rush to return to unsafe campuses.
The Student Speak Out gave us an opportunity to advance the struggle over the idea that we need to destroy capitalism – and its colleges and universities. The stories were powerful:
Multiple students reported not being able to get in touch with the financial aid office or the registrar for weeks.
Bursar holds – a block on registering because of money owed to the college – prevents  students from graduating on time. This despite CUNY receiving more than $800 million dollars in pandemic relief from the federal government!
One student reported that a class she signed up for, which she thought was going to meet asynchronously, meaning there is no set class time, was meeting four days a week for four hours. Neither the students nor the professor knew that the modality had been changed by administration.
Another student had been kept waiting to learn about her financial aid. Still others were barred from registering, even though they were just about to graduate, because they owed money.
These daily humiliations feed worker  anger with a racist capitalist system and with communist political leadership can result in  openness to revolutionary ideas. One of those ideas is that the workers on campus, mainly Black and Latin, are not the cause of students’ problems- they are poorly paid, and the first ones to be called back to schools that may not meet health and safety standards.
This event did not just focus on the problems that the system throws in our faces. We also heard stories of faculty and students fighting together to solve these problems – a display of crucial solidarity. The assembled students rejected the politics of identity and representation, clearly seeing CUNY administration as the enemy, even though the Chancellor is Puerto Rican and the president of one of the campuses is Nigerian. They spoke about their past organizing of motorcades and rallies throughout the year, whether it was snowing, raining, or  during a heat wave. Most importantly, we agreed to continue the fightback.
Capitalism and universities
Capitalism’s entire existence depends on exploitation of the working class. Schools and universities like CUNY train workers and professionals essential to running the capitalist state on one hand, while on the other hand producing and force-feeding us individualist, anti-communist, racist and sexist ideas. While the universities pretend to be “neutral” centers of “free” or “critical thinking” the reality is that since the capitalists hold state power, they wield it at the universities to ensure their “education” meets the capitalists’ needs, not the working class’. Ignoring the fake liberal hoopla around CUNY’s Latin Chancellor, proof of this can be seen by looking at CUNY’s Board of Trustees.
CUNY’s financial stream is made up of  Wall Street bankers and lawyers who only have more racist attacks in store, starting with how to make the cuts that were implemented during the pandemic permanent. More online classes, fewer professors, fewer campus workers, and fewer classes mean working-class students are working even harder to make less—the capitalists are launching the same attacks against students worldwide.
Students and revolution!
The U.S. capitalists’ empire faces sharpening rivalry and increasing threat of world war with Chinese and Russian imperialism. As the U.S. turns toward fascism, students have a historic opportunity to join a revolutionary movement instead of lining up as cannon fodder for the bosses’ next war. Student demonstrations against racism and imperialism have fanned wider flames of working class rebellion around the world for decades, and CUNY is no exception. At the end of the Speak Out, students planned to participate in and help to lead a motorcade to the homes of two of the campus presidents, bringing our righteous anger at the racist treatment of our students to their doorstep. We invite all students to join this event next time around and join PLP to turn the next bosses’ world war into revolutionary war for communism!
Try as the capitalist class might, they can never extinguish the flames of rebellion. CUNY’s future is student, worker, and faculty unity and, led by communist politics, to transform the fightback for a better CUNY into a revolution for a new, worker and student-led communist society.Join PLP and help build a fighting student movement!