2022 MLA Convention: Communism or Barbaric capitalism

More than 50 years after it was formed in the era of the Vietnam War, the Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association (MLA) is alive and kicking as new U.S. imperialist wars begin to boil against Russia and China.  Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been a leading force in the RC since the 1980s, our presence showing the importance of a long-term approach to work in a mass organization. At the January 2022 (mostly online) MLA Convention, once again PL brought to the MLA Radical Caucus both the “hard line” of revolutionary communism and the “flexible tactics” of building a communist base among liberal professors.
“Keywords” for communist struggle
PL’ers and friends played important roles in many sessions, analyzing how capitalism shapes the conditions under which teachers of literature think and work. In a session honoring Richard Ohmann, a staunch Marxist who helped found the RC, we emphasized how his work as a scholar and organizer made him part of the “red line of history.” In a session on “Antiracism and the Future of the Profession,” a PLP member urged the teaching of literary texts and contexts that open up “the communist horizon.
The “New Keywords for Our Struggle '' session featured a PL’er who critically and terminally diagnosed the term “white privilege” as capitalist propaganda antithetical to antiracism. Invoking the revolutionary class-conscious poetry of Langston Hughes, the PL’er concluded that only communist revolution can end “systemic racism.” Another panelist analyzed “solidarity” as a continuing goal of multiracial fightback rather than a taken-for-granted liberal value.
Communist politics spreading, tactics evolving
In the session “The Languages of War, Genocide and Climate Collapse” several PLP comrades urged from the panel and the floor that we see these urgent fights as “communism or barbarism.” Our friends who spoke there were also fired up with that urgency, and we are following up with them about joining the Party as the concrete expression of their anticapitalist politics. Two professors we’d never met before asked to know more about PLP’s political line (analysis) and history.
In the past, the RC concentrated mainly on bringing antiracist, antisexist, and pro-working class resolutions before the Delegate Assembly. New developments have changed our tactics. Covid-era restrictions on group gatherings; reactionary changes in the MLA Constitution making it near-impossible to raise and pass political resolutions; the proletarianization of faculty; the resurgence of anti-capitalist activism among young people—these changes have led the RC to broaden its focus.
Younger faculty and adjuncts step forward!
The highly spirited RC meeting at the end of the convention, attended by 33 people, developed this altered approach to organizing all year rather than only at the annual convention. The RC Steering Committee has been expanded to include younger teachers, mostly adjuncts. Inspired by a young elementary school teacher who spoke about the need for the RC to be “really radical,” we discussed an agenda for 2022 to move us from thought into action.  This will involve bringing faculty into students’and workers’ struggles; unionization among academic and nonacademic campusworkers; benefits for adjunct faculty; more study groups interrogating the“keywords” of current social justice movements; involvement in campaigns tomake the bosses pay for Covid-19 safeguards; the urgency of attacking climatecollapse and sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry.  
The challenge facing communists in the RC is to bring to these reform-level struggles over theory and practice an understanding of the need to join a communist party and fight to abolish capitalism. A world without borders; without racist and sexist hierarchies; without toxic individualism and alienation. While some literary works contain glimpses of this better world, it is our writing, teaching and organizing task in the MLA to bring literary people into the Party, PLP, which can make it a reality.