Letters of February 21

Rallies vs. Bosses’ Slaughter of Muslim Workers in Yemen
Nothing exposes the vicious, racist brutality of imperialist rivalry like the genocidal civil war in Yemen. The U.S. is supporting Saudi Arabia to keep Yemen and its oil out of the hands of Iran. Meanwhile, over 100,000 children have been killed, famine is widespread, and there is the worst cholera epidemic in modern history.
On January 30 there were two demonstrations in New York City protesting these murderous acts by the U.S. government against Muslims. About 50 people, outside the offices of Senators Gillibrand and Schumer, demanded an end to US complicity with the Saudi Arabian bombing campaign in Yemen. There were members present of the NYC Action Corps, the United Auto Workers union, the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY, Jewish Voices for Peace and other organizations, but thankfully no politician’s representative deigned to speak to the crowd. We don’t need politicians promoting themselves and voting as solutions to these imperialist wars. We need more and more people building a mass movement against these imperialist wars that are leading us ever closer to a world war, likely with nuclear weapons.
An hour later, about 100 protestors, including the Arab-American Association, gathered in Washington Square Park against Trumps Muslim ban, where speakers told tales of family separation and inability to find sanctuary from oppression.
Challenges were distributed at both rallies and a few new friends were made. Let’s get more of our friends to turn these wars between imperialist powers into a revolutionary class war for communism, a system run by and for the working class.
*****
Disagreement over Union Leadership
I disagree with the CUNY article (1/10). The article presents the Bronx rally as being opposed to the leadership that called the December 4 event.
The author makes a big deal out a tactical issue: whether to have rallies on individual campuses or have a city-wide demonstration of hundreds of members and supporters that marched to the CUNY Board of Trustees hearing. The union leadership is not “leading us to passivity and to accepting, rather than fighting, the terrible conditions that we face.” Passive leaders don’t call for rallies and marches at all. And passive leaders also don’t call for $7,000 a course for adjuncts, which would more than double their salaries and would be unprecedented at a public university.

It is true that one speaker in the Bronx raised the issue of striking, which would be a violation of the Taylor Law and subject the PSC to massive fines. The article’s implicit suggestion that it’s only the leaders preventing a strike is misleading.
The article is so intent on lambasting the union “bosses” that it neglects to say a word about the main obstacle to obtaining better conditions at CUNY for both employees and students: the capitalists and the politicians who work for them. Although NYC is the home to more billionaires than any other city on earth, CUNY is starved of funds and the PSC is confronting the following reality:
• The Governor, Andrew Cuomo, recently vetoed a bill that would have provided millions more in funding for CUNY, and he has engineered a state budget deficit of $4.5 billion, so he’ll be able to say he has no money to raise the salaries of adjuncts.
• Trump’s federal tax bill and budget will result in serious losses of revenue to NYS.
The author might have provided a serious critique of the leadership strategy, but chose to make unfair accusations instead, even ludicrously suggesting that PSC leaders are “capitalists of one stripe or another.” This is sectarianism at its worse.


CHALLENGE RESPONSE: You’re correct in criticizing the emphasis placed on tactical disagreements. The article would’ve been stronger had it described how PLP is building a strategic alternative for communist revolution, and how that informed their tactical criticism of the PSC.
However, the point of the article is that PLP is building the only alternative to capitalism—not how “active” the PSC leaders are in calling for this and that. Why take such offense to an attack on union bosses? PL’ers are hardly the only people to criticize the union for being passive—just ask CUNY adjuncts and students. Our criticism comes from a place of understanding a hard lesson from the old communist movement: liberal bosses, which include union misleaders, are the working class’s main danger.
PLP fights to earn the mass leadership of students, workers, and faculty on the road to communism. PL’ers organize on campuses and in unions like the PSC, join antiracist fights against budget cuts and tuition increases. We use CHALLENGE to build communist ideas like workers’ power, and the necessity of strikes and breaking the bosses’ laws to train our class for revolutionary struggles.
Class struggles sometimes result in important, but temporary, gains like reforms and liberal unions. But only a mass PLP can lead our class to communism. Struggling for that isn’t sectarian. On the contrary, it would be dishonest to sell CHALLENGE readers the false idea of PSC union exceptionalism.