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	Workers Vanguard No. 879	27 October 2006

Defend Anti-Minutemen Protesters at Columbia!

No Administration Reprisals! Defend Immigrant Rights!

(Young Spartacus pages)

We reprint below an October 9 leaflet by the New York Spartacus Youth Club in defense of protesters against the Minuteman Project at Columbia University. As part of this defense, the SYC makes clear that the defense of immigrant rights requires a class-struggle fight against the capitalist system, which breeds all forms of oppression and bigotry. We fight against illusions pushed by reformist organizations like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the Revolutionary Communist Party that the Democratic Party and Green Party are “lesser evils.” They are capitalist parties that seek to administer a system of profit based on the exploitation of labor and the oppression of blacks, immigrants and women, among others. Historically the party of the Confederacy, a strong proponent of chauvinist protectionism and the preferred party for waging imperialist war, the Democratic Party now advocates tighter border control and more effective prosecution of the so-called “war on terror.”

Nowhere in their coverage of the protest against the Minutemen do the ISO and PSL breathe one word of criticism against the protest’s co-sponsors, the College Democrats–even after members of the College Democrats called in the Columbia Spectator for stronger enforcement of security guidelines and to “prevent outside troublemakers from entering” campus events (12 October)! As we note in our leaflet, the campus administration is the agent of the bourgeoisie on campus, thus by no means a defender of leftists and the oppressed. Columbia University president Lee Bollinger made his views on free speech quite clear when he intervened to prevent Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from speaking on campus because Ahmadinejad’s speech would not “reflect the academic values that are a hallmark of a University event such as our World Leaders Forum.”

Supporters of the ISO and PSL collaborated with the same administration in excluding the SYC from an October 11 meeting of the Columbia Protestors’ Defense Committee, and refused entry to non-students. This effectively strengthens the ability of the administration to suppress protest on campus and undermines the defense of the anti-Minutemen protesters. So why did they exclude us? Because our communist politics stand in stark opposition to their program of class collaboration and reliance on the campus administration.

* * *

The Columbia University administration has initiated an investigation into what occurred last Wednesday, October 4, inside a Columbia College Republicans-sponsored event with Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the racist, fascistic Minuteman Project. A group of students went on stage as Gilchrist was speaking and unfurled two banners, “No One Is Illegal” and “No to Racism.” Gilchrist and his ilk are trying to claim that the protesters violently attacked him. This lie is picked up in the bourgeois media, with the rabid right-wing NY Post describing the protesters as “thugs.” The truth is the opposite. The protesters were physically attacked by Gilchrist’s right-wing goons, who shut down their own meeting. Gilchrist left after saying, “You’re doing a great job, kids. I’m going to have more fun with this than with my prepared speech.” Meanwhile, NYC Mayor Bloomberg stated that the president of Columbia has “got to get his hands around this.” This is the same vile capitalist politician who turned New York into a giant police pen in 2004 against anti-RNC (Republican National Convention) protesters. We condemn the physical attack and call to: Defend anti-Minutemen protesters! No administration reprisals! Defend immigrant rights! The administration is making use of postings, images and personal information posted on the networking Web site “Facebook” in its investigation. We say: Down with the investigation!

The Spartacus Youth Club joined hundreds of students, activists, community members and workers in a protest initiated by the Columbia Chicano Caucus outside the event. The Minuteman Project is an anti-immigrant fascistic organization that rants against “illegal aliens” and calls on the Border Patrol to reinforce measures to prevent immigrants from crossing the border. They are interpenetrated with fascists and have a paramilitary/vigilante component that “patrols” the border. They should be confronted and stopped when they try to carry out physical provocations against immigrants and their allies. This is what happened when the Minutemen tried to create a provocation against L.A.’s diverse working class at a Labor Day march and picnic in the Los Angeles area on September 4. We say “Down with the Minutemen! Mobilize labor to defend immigrant rights!”

The invitation by the campus Republicans was intended to promote the Minutemen’s racist filth and ideology. We argued and acted on the basis that their racist ideas must be refuted through protest and exposure. But shutting them down in this context simply played into the hands of the reactionaries’ false and absurd claim that the left is trampling free speech, when in fact it is the right-wing bigots that have been waging a massive campaign to purge the campuses of leftists, immigrants, blacks and any voice that is in opposition to the ruling-class agenda. Bush’s minions on the campus work in tandem with the likes of racist ideologues David Horowitz and Ann Coulter who seek to harass and intimidate student groups and leftist professors, such as pro-Palestinian Professor Joseph Massad, who was prevented from teaching his course at Columbia. Now the right wing in this country is using and distorting this current incident to whip up and bolster their vicious campaign. In opposition to this right-wing witchhunt, we call on all students who defend immigrant rights to take a side and defend these students under attack!

As millions of impoverished Mexican and Central American immigrants risk their lives to find some means of livelihood in the U.S., the racist U.S. imperialist rulers, both Democrat and Republican, seek to blame the immiseration of the U.S. working class on immigrants. They consciously whip up anti-immigrant hysteria through racist “English only” laws, deportations, and now the construction of a 700-mile-long wall on the border with Mexico. Some Democratic Party politicians posture as “friends of immigrants” as part of their efforts to round up votes. Whether it’s the Kennedy-McCain “guest worker” program—a form of indentured servitude—or the more nakedly repressive legislation pushed by the Republican-controlled Congress, the capitalist rulers are united in targeting immigrant workers for greater repression. We fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. As the SYC speaker stated at the outside protest, “The bipartisan ‘war on terror,’ which is a war on immigrants, blacks and labor here, and is the pretext for imperialist war abroad, gives groups like the Minutemen the green light to carry out fascistic, vigilante mobilizations against immigrants.” It is in this reactionary climate that the usual racist bigots, like Chris Kulawik of the Columbia Republicans, target the pro-immigrant rights students and the left on campus.

The statement released by “Those who occupied the stage,” which includes supporters of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation-backed ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and Racism) Coalition, wrongly conflates racist ideas with fascism. We understand that fascism is not a question of “free speech” but racist terror. Our class-struggle program of labor/black mobilizations has succeeded in preventing fascists from carrying out their murderous program. Fascists like the Nazis and the KKK are groups that have a long history of “speaking” with the lynch rope and recruiting to a program of genocide and racist terror. They are paramilitary terror organizations who mobilize for murderous action against blacks, Jews, immigrants, smashing the labor movement, exterminating communists, and totalitarian suppression of bourgeois democratic rights and institutions. Fascists’ “speech” is a call for destroying all rights for the labor movement, annihilating blacks and communists.

The perspective encapsulated in the slogan “No ‘Free Speech’ for Racists,” present on a sign at the outside protest, is a liberal, moralistic call to suppress racist ideology, rather than to fight it, and an appeal to the bourgeois state to regulate what people can and cannot say. This is a dangerous illusion. Furthermore, it is false to think that the source of racism and oppression is backward ideas. Liberal preaching cannot overcome these racist attitudes. Racism and all forms of oppression are rooted materially in the class-divided society in which we live.

The ISO speaker at the outside protest stated that the Minutemen “don’t have a right to free speech because it’s not free speech, it’s hate speech....” We oppose demands on the campus administration and on the capitalist state to police “hate speech” because it bolsters the repressive power of those institutions, enabling them to use such codes and laws to victimize student protesters, minorities and leftists. While the statement released from “Those who occupied the stage” criticized the administration for “failing to condemn the perpetrators of violence,” we warn against reliance on the administration. The administration’s role is to administer Columbia on behalf of the racist capitalist ruling class. The reformist ISO acts as though the university is some kind of “ivory tower” that will be “tainted” by racist ideas, which fits in with their consistent class-collaborationist politics. In fact, Columbia is a notorious union-busting racist slumlord, the third-largest landowner in New York City, now pushing yet another expansion plan that would drive even greater numbers of blacks and Latinos out of the areas surrounding the campus. We demand the nationalization of the university system under student-teacher-worker control. Abolish the administration! Tear down the Columbia gates and let Harlem in!

In the U.S., black oppression, the bedrock of capitalism, is based on the legacy of chattel slavery. Opposition to anti-immigrant racism must be intertwined with the struggle against black oppression. The fight for black freedom and immigrant rights will go forward together or fall back separately. A model, both of joint struggle of blacks and immigrants, and how to fight against fascists, was the November 1982 labor/black mobilization in Washington, D.C., initiated by the Spartacist League, which stopped the race-terrorist KKK from marching against a minor amnesty proposal for immigrants. We provided revolutionary leadership, and 5,000 people, mostly black, came out and stopped them. We understand that those who organize for race terror, such as the fascist KKK and Nazis, must be swept off the streets through mass, militant labor/black mobilizations, such as the 23 October 1999 anti-Klan demonstration in New York City that the Spartacus Youth Club helped build. These mobilizations are a microcosm of what a mass revolutionary workers party would do.

As our SYC speaker said at the anti-Minutemen protest outside: “The capitalist rulers, both Republicans and Democrats, see immigrant workers as a source of cheap labor, and deny them citizenship rights in order to better exploit them and keep the working class divided.” As Marxists we understand that only socialist revolution internationally can put an end to the growing immiseration of the working class and oppressed—both in dependent countries like Mexico and in the imperialist centers. The fundamental divide in all capitalist countries is between the working class, whose labor makes society run, and the capitalist class that reaps enormous wealth from exploiting that labor. Under capitalist imperialism, a handful of wealthy imperialist powers strive to divide and redivide the rest of the world for their own enhancement, leading to neocolonial exploitation and imperialist wars.

We in the Spartacus Youth Club, the youth auxiliary of the revolutionary Marxist Spartacist League, fight to link the outrage of students who oppose racism and defend immigrant rights to the social power of the integrated working class, of which immigrant workers form a key component. Through mobilizing against racist anti-immigrant terror, wherever it rears its head, the working class can be made more conscious of its power and historic interests in fighting the racist exploiters on behalf of all the oppressed. We seek to win youth to the side of the working class and to the fight to build a revolutionary internationalist workers party that can lead the workers and oppressed in overturning capitalist rule here and throughout the world.