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	Workers Vanguard No. 934	10 April 2009

Revolutionary Marxism vs. Democratic Party Pressure Politics

For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!

Down With Budget Cuts and Tuition Hikes!

(Young Spartacus pages)

We reprint below a leaflet by the New York Spartacus Youth Club issued on April 3.

Democratic New York State governor David Paterson wants to make working people and the oppressed pay for the capitalist economic crisis through draconian cuts to social services, including with budget cuts and tuition hikes at SUNY and CUNY schools. This has sparked protests on campuses and citywide, including a March 5 rally at City Hall that drew tens of thousands of city workers and other unionists, joined by a contingent of hundreds of students from Hunter and BMCC. However, misleaders from local trade unions, including the UFT [teachers union], 1199SEIU, DC 37 and the CUNY Professional Staff Congress (PSC), built the March 5 rally as a groveling appeal to the very same Democratic Party politicians who are responsible for carrying out the austerity measures.

After helping Obama’s Wall Street cronies bankroll his election victory, the trade-union sellouts (and their left tails) have turned to pushing “fair share tax reform,” “tax the rich” shell games and appeals to the Obama and Paterson administrations to “bail out the people, not the banks.” Lobbying for “fairer” taxes is one of the standard ways the labor bureaucrats divert union members from the militant class struggle necessary to defend their livelihoods. By pushing the lie that the capitalist system can serve the interests of working people and the oppressed, these labor misleaders chain the multiracial working class to the bankrupt system of capitalism, which is based on the exploitation of labor, racial oppression and imperialist war. In rallies at CUNY campuses, fake socialists including the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Internationalist Group (IG) have been pushing a narrow, campus-parochial version of the same class-collaborationist politics, based on appeals to local Democrats and university administrators to stop the budget cuts.

At a March 5 Hunter College rally built by the IG and ISO, a Spartacus Youth Club member explained, “None of these attacks are simply a by-product of mismanagement or ‘greedy individuals’ or some legacy of a right-wing president. Economic crises are endemic to capitalism and both the Republicans and the Democrats are political parties of the capitalist rulers.” The Spartacus Youth Club opposes the budget cuts and the capitalist class’ austerity measures against the working class and oppressed. We fight for free, quality, integrated education for all, and for open admissions with no tuition and a state-paid living stipend for students. While student protest can be a catalyst for broader social struggle, students lack social power and must ally with the working class. Only the working class has the social power and historic interest to liberate all the oppressed by the revolutionary overthrow of the system of capitalist exploitation.

The capitalist class monopolizes the vast wealth of society for its own ends. There can never be equality between oppressed and oppressor: race and class bias are inherent to education under capitalism. The capitalists and their agents run the education system to serve bourgeois interests, including propagating bourgeois ideology and training the next generation of Dr. Strangeloves. In the U.S. the oppression of the black population as a race-color caste, overwhelmingly segregated at the bottom of society, is key for the capitalist class maintaining its rule. This has meant systematic attacks on education for black youth, from the defeat of Boston busing to the rollback of affirmative action to the racist purge of universities through tuition and fee hikes. It will take a socialist revolution to win the quality of education offered to the sons and daughters of the ruling class for blacks, minorities and the working class.

The campus administrations are the agents of the capitalist class on campus, breaking unions, cracking down on student protest and implementing austerity measures. In a leaflet distributed at City Hall on March 5, the centrist fake Trotskyists of the IG blamed the reformist ISO for circulating a petition “calling for Hunter College president Raab to ‘come out against tuition hikes and support student activities in opposition to the tuition hikes’.” They go on to make the correct point: “To call on her to support student protests against that can only promote illusions.” These are fine words on paper, but the IG never raised any criticisms of the ISO in their voluminous speeches at the March 5 and 25 campus protests we attended that were built by both organizations.

The IG criticizing the ISO for “promoting illusions” is a joke. Well-known IG supporter Sándor John serves as the Hunter College representative of CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU), a formation in the PSC that seeks to pressure the existing PSC leadership to adopt a more militant posture. What they really offer is the same class-collaborationist strategy, organizing protests outside Paterson’s office and distributing a November 18 fact sheet on CUNY and SUNY budget cuts, which mobilizes people to go to the Board of Trustees meeting and contact “your local representatives” in the Democratic-controlled New York State Assembly, Senate and City Council. They draw no class line against the Democratic Party in their fact sheet and newsletters.

Telling of the political basis for this lash-up is CCU member Jennifer Gaboury’s February 2 open letter to Hunter College president Jennifer Raab, signed by other prominent members of CCU. In reference to “labor and contract issues,” Gaboury advises Raab that “the head of a college has a bully pulpit from which to take a stand on an issue that is central to the health and success of the college.” Such appeals can only build illusions in the anti-union campus administration. At a November 2008 rally, IG supporter Sándor John carried a sign referring to CUNY Chancellor Goldstein that called to “Cut his salary—or lay him off!” So while the IG criticizes the ISO for calling on the college president to “support students protests,” the IG’s John is calling on the Board of Trustees, the top body of the CUNY administration, to pick a different henchman or at least pay the current one less! We say: Abolish the administration! For worker/student/teacher control of the universities!

The ubiquitous Sándor John is also listed as a contact together with ISO spokesman Doug Singsen on a March 4 press release that bemoans: “For several decades, the city and state have been rolling back their commitment to provide a quality higher education for all New Yorkers.” Tell that liberal pabulum to the poor, largely black and minority youth trapped in inner-city holding pens more segregated today than in the past four decades! The capitalist class’ “commitment” to education extends only so far as they believe it will serve their interests, and in a period of capitalist economic crisis, social services, including education, are first on the chopping block.

The ISO is defined by its support for counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union, which was a devastating defeat for workers and the oppressed internationally. As Trotskyists, we stand for unconditional military defense of the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states—Cuba, North Korea, China and Vietnam—against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution, and for proletarian political revolution to oust the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies and replace them with workers democracy based on revolutionary internationalism. As a centrist, sometimes revolutionary in words but reformist in deeds, Sándor John may, rarely, say the same thing. But the ISO is on to something when they make John their contact person while excluding us Spartacists, who sharply raise political differences, from their “public” events. The ISO can depend on the IG not to expose their treacherous politics, past or present, because the IG is simply pushing the same tired campus pressure politics in more inflated, militant language. (See “IG Disappears Red Army Fight Against Islamic Reaction in Afghanistan,” WV No. 772, 11 January 2002.)

When it comes to the Commander-in-Chief of racist U.S. imperialism, the IG presents its opposition to Obama like the reformists do, as a question of policy. Comically, they wrote in “No to Teacher-Basher McCain and Education-for-War Obama” (The Internationalist online, November 2008) that Obama wouldn’t be “teacher- and student-friendly” because “Obama himself was educated in an elite private school in Hawaii and went on to the elite private institutions of Columbia University and Harvard Law School. He has no real experience of the public schools except from the outside.” By this criterion, CCNY graduate Colin Powell, imperialist war criminal and former Secretary of State, would be a better candidate! As revolutionary Marxists, we oppose Democratic Party politicians and politicians of all capitalist parties on principle, not because of policy differences or “experience,” but because they are agents of the capitalist class enemy.

As for the centrists, Leon Trotsky, leader of the Left Opposition and defender of the banner of the 1917 Russian Revolution, aptly noted: “A centrist always remains in spiritual dependence on rightist groupings and is inclined to cringe before those who are more moderate, to remain silent on their opportunist sins and to cover up their actions before the workers” (“Centrism and the Fourth International,” 22 February 1934). The IG provides a pseudo-Marxist cover for the rotten campus reformists and the class-collaborationists in the unions, who tie the working class and militant youth to the system of capitalist exploitation. By combating the politics of these opportunist frauds, the Spartacus Youth Club seeks to win students to the revolutionary Marxist program that can free working people worldwide from the obsolete system of capitalist exploitation, which threatens us all with annihilation. The only way out is through world socialist revolution, led by a vanguard party modeled after the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky that led the October 1917 Russian Revolution.