Defend UCLA Professors Against Right-Wing Thought Police!

(Young Spartacus Pages)

We reprint below a statement issued on January 31 by the Los Angeles Spartacus Youth Club in response to a McCarthyite witchhunt against leftist and liberal professors at UCLA launched by a former protégé of David Horowitz. Alarmingly, some of the victimized professors have stated that this attack should not be taken too seriously. The SYC intervened with our communist program from the floor during a teach-in held by targeted teachers titled, “Defending Academic Freedom” on January 31. At the teach-in, professor Sondra Hale actively discouraged the widespread campus protests that are needed, telling a student who asked what students could do that “we’re not in danger,” because the professors have tenure.

It is not surprising then that only about 30 people turned out at a rally to “Defend Academic Freedom” on Bruin Walk on February 7, at which the SYC spoke. The dangerous illusion that the campus administration can be relied on to protect the victimized professors flies in the face of the reality of the investigations, harassment, firings and even death threats faced by professors around the country, such as Joseph Massad at Columbia University. Importantly, the University Council of the American Federation of Teachers, Locals 1990 and 2226 and the California Federation of Teachers have condemned the UCLA witchhunt. No reliance on the campus administration! Students, teachers, campus workers and others must actively mobilize to defend these professors!

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Andrew Jones, former chair of the Bruin Republicans, wants to purge his UCLA alma mater of liberal and leftist professors, initially offering $100 bounty money to wannabe informants in the classroom. In response, the editors of the Daily Bruin quickly leapt to the defense of their former columnist’s “free speech” rights (as if Jones were the victim!), advised students to ignore the controversy, and warned professors that “…Jones will only infringe on their academic freedom if they let him.” The Daily Bruin absurdly denies any witchhunting campaign at UCLA, claiming that Jones, unlike Joseph McCarthy, has no “Senate hearings” or “government agents backing him up.” But campus reactionaries of Jones’ ilk are spawned by far more powerful political forces. Jones’ mentor was right-wing ideologue David Horowitz, who is intimately connected with the Republican neocon cabal running the White House. Horowitz now tries to distance himself from Jones’ ham-handed efforts because the prospect of a right-wing big brother network running amok on campuses exposes the purpose of Horowitz’s own efforts, in particular his grossly misnamed “Academic Bill of Rights.”

The point of legislation modeled on Horowitz’s “bill” is to enable the government, if university administrations are insufficiently zealous, to victimize professors accused by right-wing students of “abuse” in the classroom and, in Horowitz’s words, “step in and see that this situation is remedied” (frontpagemag.com, 29 April 2005). The Georgia state senate has passed the measure, and it is up for consideration in several other states. In California, this measure failed in a legislative committee last year but is up for reconsideration.

Harassing, intimidating and silencing professors who dissent is part of a broader right-wing campaign to stifle all opposition to the American ruling class agenda. Jones brags that he sponsored the foray of David Horowitz and Dinesh D’Souza onto UCLA in January 2002 to whip up support for the “war on terror.” Horowitz labeled opposition to America’s imperialist wars as “treason,” which is nothing but a thinly veiled justification for government repression. At the time, these notorious apologists for black chattel slavery and racist reaction were met by a sizable contingent of black and minority students organized by the African Student Union, as well as a demonstration we Marxists in the Spartacus Youth Club called to “Protest David Horowitz and Dinesh D’Souza, Racist Ideologues of U.S. Imperialism!” These ideological hatchet men for racist American imperialism should be met with protest whenever they step on campus! Andrew Jones’ boast that he organized the first anti-affirmative action “bake sale” in the country at UCLA shows that these right-wing forces also aim to drive black and minority students off campus.

Of a piece with the current witchhunt was the Bruin Republicans’ truly grotesque campaign against MEChA in 2004, which compared this minority student group to the Nazis and labeled them “student-funded” racism. In October, Bruin Republican David Lazar proclaimed that the César E. Chávez Center and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies must “either regain a sense of legitimacy, or risk being replaced” after they deigned to sponsor a campus talk by Raymond Lotta of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

The rabid proponents of U.S. imperialism take particular aim at critics of American and Israeli foreign policy in the Near East, especially those who oppose the bloody occupation of Iraq and voice outrage at the genocidal “collective punishment” of the Palestinian people by Israel’s Zionist rulers. Middle East studies departments with professors who defend the Palestinian people are among the prime targets of these campus witchhunts. Students must defend these professors against the right-wing thought police! More broadly, we Marxists defend the Palestinian people against Zionist aggression and demand: All Israeli troops and settlers out of the Occupied Territories! Defend the peoples of Iraq against U.S. imperialist occupiers! U.S. out of Iraq now!

These campus witchhunts are not limited to loss of job or tenure. Last July, Muslim scholar Ali al-Timimi, a U.S.-born American citizen, was sentenced to life in prison for exercising his right to free speech in September 2001, against the then-impending invasion of Afghanistan. Ali al-Timimi did not carry out any terrorist acts, nor plan any, nor did he provide support or financially assist in any terrorist plots. In a 2 May 2005 piece on Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine Web site, fellow neocon Daniel Pipes hailed al-Timimi’s conviction as “momentous” because “the U.S. government has put away a terrorist not for his deeds, such as raising money or blowing something up, but for his words.” We say: Free Ali al-Timimi!

Snooping, harassment, frame-ups, imprisonment, torture, executions: these attacks have intensified with the U.S. capitalists’ bipartisan “war on terror.” It is waged with the support of the Democratic Party, the other party of racist U.S. imperialism. From their near-unanimous September 2001 support for the military authorization to pursue the “war on terror” to their substantial support for the draconian USA Patriot Act and their vote in support of the Iraq war, the Democrats gave Bush a blank check to unleash U.S. imperialism’s killers.

The American ruling class seeks a docile, regimented society, all the better to send the sons and daughters of working people and minorities to serve as cannon fodder in U.S. imperialism’s wars abroad while ripping up even the most minimal gains of previous class and social struggles at home. The same forces that would like to see the campuses inhabited solely by white frat boys also want to see a union-free workforce that they can more brutally exploit. The organized working class not only has an interest in opposing this reactionary campaign, but also the social power to do so. We warn against any reliance on the supposed “neutrality” of the campus administration. We oppose calls on the administration to regulate political speech on campus because, contrary to the right wing’s howls of “rampaging radicalism,” this is invariably used against the left-wing voices of dissent. Leftist students and defenders of democratic rights must ally with unions on campus and workers more widely in opposing the right-wing assault!

This struggle must be linked to broader struggles against capitalist state repression, including the fight against the racist death penalty, a legacy of chattel slavery. The life of Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost political prisoner, a former Black Panther and courageous fighter for black freedom, hangs in the balance. In 1981, Mumia, a journalist, was known as the “Voice of the Voiceless” because he exposed racist police repression in Philadelphia. To silence him, the state framed him for the murder of a police officer. In a 1982 trial that made a mockery of due process, the state got its false conviction and then used Mumia’s political advocacy of black freedom to obtain the death penalty. Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man! Free him now! Abolish the racist death penalty!

Domestic reaction in America did not just begin with George W. Bush or September 11. The destruction of the USSR, the first workers state in history, ushered in a global offensive against the working class and an ideological climate dominated by widespread belief in the “death of communism”—the lie that the collapse of Stalinism represented the failure of Marxism and the struggle for socialist revolution. Horowitz and his ilk are particularly rabid purveyors of this bourgeois ideological onslaught. Much of Horowitz’s fire is directed at liberals who, however critical of the Bush administration, likewise partake in the “death of communism.” We defend them against right-wing witchhunters, but we do not share their political views. As Marxist-Trotskyists, we have never flinched in defending the workers states, those countries that have gotten rid of capitalism. We fought to the end for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union and the East European deformed workers states against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution. Today we apply the same program toward the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states—For unconditional military defense of China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam! At the same time, we fight for workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies who undermine the very gains resulting from the overturn of capitalism.

It is only the revolutionary transformation of society that will put an end to the American rulers’ racist, witchhunting, warmongering offensives for good. The replacement of this decaying capitalist system through working-class socialist revolution is the necessary goal of those aspiring for the genuine liberation of society.