Modern Language Association: Democrats & Republicans, all enemies of the working class

It’s a tale of two governors: Florida’s racist Republican Ron DeSantis bans books, busts unions and ends tenure. New Jersey’s Democratic “friend-of-labor” Phil Murphy breaks the first-ever Rutgers University strike of 9,000 educators, by summoning union and management into his office to broker a deceptive deal. Two apparent opposites, both waging the current bosses’ war on higher education workers and students.  Do their differences hide their sameness? Dialectical philosophy argues that apparent opposites are also interconnected—both share similarities and differences. In the end they are primarily same. Two sides of the same coin, representing the same rotten system.

Speakers from the Rutgers strike and the Florida antifascist fight took up this question on April 15 at a Modern Language Association Radical Caucus Roundtable, “The Racist Offensive Against Higher Education: Organizing a Marxist Response in the MLA.”

The  accounts of front-line struggle, along with radical analyses by a Newark-based community organizer and faculty speakers from Florida, Rutgers, and CUNY, electrified the 40-plus attendees. PLP participants helped push this discussion to the left with our own speakers, as well as being key organizers of the event.

“Teach students about class society so they can overthrow it”

The Newark community organizer framed the political and ideological stakes of the roundtable debate most sharply:

"Our political work is to make visible how the education system at all levels has been formed by both liberals and fascists to keep capitalism in place. Before fascists were banning books, liberals were creating conditions in which students could not read: the capitalist education system is deliberately designed to give a handful of elite students a ‘liberal’ anti-racist and anti-sexist ‘miseducation’ to prepare us to be part of a capitalist managerial class, while grossly underfunding the overall education system so that the overwhelming majority of students at all levels, including college, are kept in the low ranks of the working class."

“Only a communist education can diagnose the problems of capitalism, and teach students the class nature of society so they can overthrow it,” she concluded.

Appearance and essence
The keynote speaker praised the antiracist opposition to DeSantis and Murphy, yet offered a Marxist analysis of  the anti-fascist struggle in Florida:

"We need to analyze these newer, sharper right-wing offensives in connection to the much longer trends of the massive theft of the social wage and declining standard of living, not only for higher education workers but for the entire working class, native-born as well as immigrant, white as well as Black and brown."

She pointed out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have overseen decades of massive cuts in education that have proletarianized 75 percent of higher education faculty, who have no prospect of tenure and earn less than a living wage.

While DeSantis and Murphy are opponents in the political war between Democrats and Republicans, she emphasized that both governors operate as “state managers” for capital: to preserve the conditions for capitalists to make profits by exploiting workers. Social control of universities and unions by the state—in either its liberal or its fascist  versions—is  key  for capitalism to flourish. Two Florida union speakers later referred to this capitalist control of education as teaching “anticipatory obedience”—forcing union faculty to obey racist state laws, teaching students to obey  future bosses.

“Fascism is on a continuum with liberalism”
“Fascism is on a continuum with liberalism,” the first faculty union speaker from Florida put it starkly, giving a Marxist view different from the dominant liberal view of fascism. Faculty are fighting hard against new laws that tighten state control of curriculum, eliminate DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and erode academic freedom, he said. The most explicit shift from liberalism to fascism in Florida is using state funds to create a new University of Florida institute, The Hamilton Center, to uphold right-wing ideology (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/22).  A recent Scientific American  article (4/7/2023) says that the  new Florida policies “mirror past fascist strategies” used in Italy by Mussolini.

A CUNY community college professor on the panel showed how the liberal CUNY system misleads working-class urban students into the individualism of “social mobility,” a multicultural spin on the American Dream.  “Campus DEI initiatives are held up with pride, but in moments of crisis, this veneer falls away” and administrators show their true colors.

Another Florida faculty union militant called on everyone present to “Organize, organize, organize. That’s what I’ve been doing for 30 years and will continue doing.” A Rutgers graduate student and strike organizer scathingly attacked New Jersey Governor Murphy, as well as Rutgers President “good cop” Holloway (a Black civil rights historian), and the union misleaders who suspended the strike at Murphy’s urging. “Next time union members have to be prepared to go further and stay out against the leaders’ double-cross,” she declared.

Communists never give up building workers’ power
For communists, winning means building workers’ power. Our Florida friends are feeling down today because the DeSantis laws were passed. Many Rutgers organizers were also disappointed by the suspension of their strike.  But look at the Florida motto, “Organize, organize, organize!” It comes from the history of workers fighting again even after a defeat: the only defeat is giving up. As Lenin wrote, “strikes are schools for communism.” The lesson of Florida, that “fascism is on a continuum with liberalism,” puts us already further down the road to revolution.

The role of PLP at this forum was to strengthen ourselves and our co-workers with that communist vision. As they teach us valuable lessons in how to rebel against the racist state control of education, our role is to build power for workers’ revolution, where winning means taking state power from the capitalists. Then a human history—not the history of warring classes but of workers’ control over their lives, can begin in earnest.