CUNY May Day organizing grows PL’s potential

BROOKLYN and QUEENS, NY––As Progressive Labor Party (PLP) led hundreds of members and friends on Flatbush Avenue this May Day, our multiracial Brooklyn and Queens City University of New York (CUNY) club had our highest turnout ever that resulted in new members joining  PLP! The success we had is a direct result of struggling to be bold  in organizing to fight racism and rebuilding PLP’s presence among a completely new cohort of students.
By the numbers, in addition to new recruits we have: a total regular hand-to-hand CHALLENGE distribution of 25; more than 70 staff and faculty contacts we plan to give the paper to; three upcoming student-planned and led Party events; and new CHALLENGE sales coming at nearby CUNY campuses and transit depots to support our transit work. With organizing for upcoming events underway before the Summer Project, we have a long, hot summer ahead of class struggle and raising hell for the racist kkkops and bosses!
What we do counts
As previously reported in CHALLENGE, three factors central to our Brooklyn campus’ buildup for May Day were boldness in spreading antiracist fightback through fiercely sharing our New Jersey comrades’ Rodwell-Spivey struggle (see page 1), boldness with CHALLENGE sales, and consistency in being a weekly campus presence from week one until finals.
We were bold in antiracist fightback by setting up a laptop and playing the video of the racist arrest of Justin Rodwell — at full volume and on repeat as students passed through a heavily trafficked area. Crowds of mainly Black, Latin and immigrant students formed to watch the video with outrage, connecting Newark’s racist kkkops to the NYPD.
A student PL’er helping organize the local campus club’s anti-racist organizing was present with copies of CHALLENGE. The PL’er ensured that every student, faculty and staff member who gathered around our table received at least one copy, and often, more. In this way, hundreds of CHALLENGEs reached students, dozens of students signed up, and over two dozen students and staff regularly received the paper.
Another strength was our mass CHALLENGE distribution, where we observed an interrelationship between quantity and quality. For example, we found that leaving stacks of CHALLENGEs in public spaces created familiarity and name recognition among students, which led to increased interest when eventually shown a copy.
Our consistency this semester was the third factor in building for May Day. Self critically, once contacts were made, while our initial follow-up was strong, it was the students who pushed us to hold meetings and plan campus actions. We generally “tailed the masses” and received pointed criticisms from several students. They felt that our May Day numbers could have been higher had we been better prepared to advance politically with meetings and plans.
May Day builds PLP
For the young Black and Latin students who attended May Day from our campus, May Day was their first PLP event. We received  enthusiastic feedback about the mix of speakers who ranged from rank-and-file workers to the veteran Party speaker at the end. They commented positively about our commitment to holding a bilingual event with multilingual chant sheets.
Following the march and picnic, we held a planned afterparty dinner. Celebration, debate and socializing continued into the evening over pizza and food from Haiti. One of our students decided to sharpen their commitment and join PLP, bringing a wealth of fighting and organizing experience from the student movement in Haiti. The other students drew closer and committed to helping follow up with our contacts and organize turnout to three club events we’re planning to prepare for the Summer Project.
With three of our club’s newest comrades planning to take courses at other Brooklyn CUNY campuses, this fall, PLP will have a presence at almost every CUNY campus in NYC’s most populated borough! CUNY is aggressively recruiting for summer classes to recoup their Covid-19-related enrollment losses, and we are planning to begin CHALLENGE sales at each campus this summer. This way, our club can know the territory of each campus and get into the groove by the start of the fall semester.
Multigenerational PLP inspires youth
One of our new comrades in Queens said that it was a completely new experience to link up with a revolutionary Party. She enjoyed seeing so many young people as well as veteran comrades. It was encouraging for her to continue with the struggle for a different world when seeing veterans who’ve given their whole lives for the fight for communism.
Another participant said that he was very curious about the Party, enthusiastic to join the march and to meet other Party members. After socializing at the afterparty at the end  of the night, he thanked us for introducing him  to our comrades, and shared that he hopes  to meet again.
Lastly, a coworker of one of our comrades who attended was, one year ago, very reluctant to use words like “communism,” “political organizing”, and “Party.” He listened to the speeches and met Party members from the country where he was born and said that we needed to speak more about the situation going on there. Immigrant workers often yearn for what they had to leave back home, and often look to reproduce their culture and history in their new environment. It can be a struggle to help them open to an internationalist outlook like PLP, and to find among the international working class their new sense of home.
Dark night will end!
We believe our efforts demonstrate that despite being in a period of dark night of rising fascism and imperialist war, and external setbacks like Covid-19, boldness in fighting racism and boldness in selling  CHALLENGE can still mean Party growth in a difficult period. PLP’s line on smashing racism, sexism, imperialist wars, racist borders, and money with communist revolution resonates with the Black, Latin, immigrant and white working class youth around us who will lead our Party’s next generation and take communist revolution all the way. JOIN US!