Fascist Menace at Murray State

(Letter)

Chicago
16 September 2016

Dear Workers Vanguard,

I wasn’t shocked to hear my alma mater, Murray State University, would be welcoming the white nationalist “Traditionalist Worker Party” to campus when classes resumed in August. Defending his decision to allow it to disseminate propaganda on campus, university president Bob Davies referred to a “Marketplace of Ideas,” and went on to say the university’s role is “to hear all ideas and to test them.” I’m not sure where Davies has been for the past century, but the “ideas” of fascist race-terror have been “tested,” in a “Marketplace of Ideas” that begins with a recruitment table but ends with the lynch rope and the gas chamber!

The obvious hypocrisy at the heart of this “Marketplace of Ideas” hailed by Davies is it apparently overlaps with the staff of the campus newspaper being dragged before the board of trustees for devoting an issue of the paper to s-e-x (God forbid!) in 2010 and campus staff tearing down propaganda aimed at organizing a protest against Mitch McConnell’s commencement address in 2013.

This has nothing to do with any professed dedication to a “Marketplace of Ideas,” but everything to do with campus administrators’ need to keep these shock troops of reaction in reserve in light of recent protests on college campuses. When students, workers, and the oppressed mobilize, the administration will mobilize its own thugs—extending from the campus cops to the race-terrorists their “Marketplace of Ideas” cultivates!

When I left Murray State, there was no “campus left” to speak of. But on many college campuses, ostensible leftists affiliated with the ISO, SAlt, or other reformist groups will inevitably call for increased power for administrators to ban these groups. This reflects their petty bourgeois social composition and opportunist program, which relies on clinging to the bourgeois state and basking in the illusion it can be made to act in the interests of workers and the oppressed, filtered in this case through the public university. This is nothing less than a betrayal of the working class and the oppressed! When empowered, the administration will not clamp down on the race-terrorists, it will use the power accorded to it to smash the left, trade unionists, and the oppressed.

The only way out is to smash the embryonic fascist threat while it is still small and extend the fight against the race-terrorists to the system which produces them: U.S. imperialism. To do this, the social power of America’s multiracial working class must be mobilized by a political party with such a perspective. The Spartacist League/U.S., uniquely on the American left, has this perspective and can lead into battle those for whom racist U.S. imperialism’s “Marketplace of Ideas” has never meant anything other than training for servility against those for whom the “free speech” rights of the Nazi/KKK/Skinhead killers rank more highly than the lives of working people and the oppressed!

Comradely greetings,
A WV supporter