For Free, Quality Education for All!

Down With Racist Purge at UCLA!

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below a leaflet issued by the Los Angeles Spartacus Youth Club on November 14. It was distributed at a pro-affirmative action “Day of Reckoning” protest of about 300 minority and anti-racist students at UCLA, many wearing T-shirts reading “Got black students?” The protest, organized by black and minority student groups in the UCLA Admissions Coalition, called on the University of California (UC) Board of Regents not to comply with anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, and for the Regents to support a campaign to repeal it.

The SYC intervened into this and other protests in solidarity with students’ outrage over the racist purge of black and minority youth from the universities. In doing so, the SYC has sought to challenge the liberal illusions fostered by the Admissions Coalition organizers that the Regents are their allies in this struggle. Instead, we pointed to the need for anti-racist students to ally with the power of the multiracial proletariat in a class-struggle fight against the racist, capitalist system for free, quality, integrated education for all. Importantly, campus workers unions endorsed the protest and sent a contingent to attend in solidarity. These included American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, the Coalition of University Employees and the University Professional and Technical Employees Local 2.

Despite attempts by some rally organizers to censor us, we distributed our propaganda, participated in the march and spoke from the platform at the rally. Some students took up SYC-initiated chants during the march such as “Open admissions, free tuition!” and “Racist purge, we say no! Board of Regents gotta go!” The SYC speaker received applause after emphasizing that the Regents are the racist overseers of the UC and that they represent the same capitalist class that is waging the bloody occupation of Iraq and that left blacks to die in New Orleans. He concluded by raising the need to break with the capitalist Democratic Party and build a revolutionary workers party to fight for socialism.

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The racist overturn of affirmative action has led to the admission of only 96 black freshmen out of a class of 5,000 at UCLA this year, the lowest number in over 30 years, while admission of Latinos and Native Americans has also declined. This represents nothing less than a conscious racist purge to exclude blacks and other minorities from getting a higher education. This racist backlash has occurred nationwide, including the Supreme Court ruling in 2003 striking down the University of Michigan point system for minority applicants and now the successful proposition in Michigan banning affirmative action.

We in the Spartacus Youth Club have defended affirmative action programs for university admissions against ruling-class assault because they have meant gains, however limited, against the inherent race and class bias in higher education under capitalism. But even at its peak in the ’70s, affirmative action only barely addressed racial inequality. While supportable as minimal reforms, affirmative action programs were set up in response to the civil rights movement and ghetto explosions of the ’60s in order to defuse social struggle and co-opt a small layer of black middle-class professionals. They never made a dent in the oppression of the black ghetto masses, whose conditions have continued to deteriorate over the past few decades.

Today, ten years after Prop. 209, the situation is so desperate that student activists and anti-racist liberals aren’t even fighting for affirmative action, but for some watered-down version where a student’s “life challenges” are given consideration in the admissions process, known as the “holistic” method. UC Berkeley, which uses a “holistic” method, has only admitted 44 more black students than UCLA! The SYC holds that education is a right not a privilege. We fight not just for a few more black students at the universities, as do bourgeois liberals, but for free, quality, integrated education for all!

At the university level, this means a fight for open admissions and no tuition, along with government-paid living stipends for all students! Nationalize the elite private universities! Massively expand remedial programs so that students deprived of the right to an education in inner-city holding pens, misnamed public schools, can catch up with those who had the advantage of well-funded suburban and private schooling. This program, along with the fight for black equality, cannot be realized by working within the framework of capitalism, but only through struggle by workers leading the oppressed against this racist, class-divided system.

In joining the protests against the racist purge of the universities, we warn against the losing strategy of promoting the capitalist government, its politicians, the Regents and campus administrations as the agency for providing access to higher education for black and minority youth. They represent the class enemy that must be struggled against tooth and nail. Our allies in the fight against this racist purge are the working class and oppressed masses, not the Regents or the Democrats, who, whatever their rhetoric, stand on the other side.

Liberals in the African Student Union (ASU) and Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) look to the wing of capitalist rulers that wants to retain at least a few “black faces in high places.” The ASU has set up voter registration tables at the protests and its leaders worry that the lack of black students will mean that there won’t be future black leaders like Maxine Waters (who is now ramming through the plan to downsize King/Drew [Medical Center] while scapegoating hospital workers as “incompetent”). Such liberal Democratic Party politicians’ role is to confine class and social struggle within boundaries safe for capitalism. We want to win young black radicals to the cause of workers socialist revolution.

The UC Regents, who banned affirmative action in admissions even prior to Prop. 209, are the capitalist class watchdogs over the university. Most are themselves capitalists or executives of corporations, banks, investment houses and the like: Wachovia Bank, Blum Capital Partners, Paramount Pictures, etc. They represent the capitalist ruling class that daily exploits the working class, that decided not to fix the levees in New Orleans because it wasn’t profitable and viciously left black people to die, that wages imperialist war abroad to gain control of foreign markets and resources, such as the brutal occupation of Iraq. We say: Abolish the Board of Regents! As for the campus administrators, who posture as the “concerned” soft cops to the Regents’ hard cops, they are no less enforcers of racist, capitalist policy. Abolish the administration! Those who work, study and teach at the universities should run the universities—for worker/student/teacher control!

With the Democrats winning control of Congress, many student protesters think they now have friends in high places. Don’t believe it. The Democrats ran as more effective military strategists for U.S. imperialism and better prosecutors of the “war on terror,” which is nothing but a war on blacks, immigrants and labor that has shredded the rights of all of us. The Democratic Party is the other major capitalist party of racism and imperialist war. It alternates with the Republicans in administering the same capitalist state machinery that enforces this system of exploitation and oppression.

Racist reaction didn’t just begin with Bush: the attacks on affirmative action started during the Carter administration with the Bakke Decision in 1978 and continued through Prop. 209, enacted during the Clinton years. It was under Clinton that the gap between rich and poor increased massively, as did the wealth gap between blacks and whites. It was Clinton who ended “welfare as we know it” and presided over the gutting of affirmative action and the huge incarceration of black and Latino youth in the 1990s.

Students need to realize that there is only one class in society that has the social power and interest to fight this capitalist system: the multiracial working class. Workers have their hands on the means of production, which also means that they have the power to shut it down and stop the flow of profit! Workers should be the natural allies of this struggle, but only if it challenges the bourgeoisie’s maintenance of universities as elite bastions for the privileged few. We seek to mobilize the working class in a fight for jobs for all and free, quality integrated education for all!

Anti-racist students should ally with black, Latino and immigrant workers on the campus whose children are excluded from attending and who actually have the power along with other campus workers to shut down the universities. And not only black and minority workers, but all workers would have a stake in this fight. To reach out to the masses of unemployed minority youth and women, we call for special union recruitment and training programs. The unions must also organize the unorganized, in particular the masses of immigrant workers. The anti-immigrant Proposition 187 was immediately followed by the anti-black Proposition 209 banning affirmative action: black rights, immigrant rights and union rights will either go forward together or fall back separately. Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! This kind of broad fight against capitalism requires class and social struggle outside the framework of liberal pressure politics.

The main obstacle to mobilizing the power of labor is the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, which politically ties the workers to their class enemy through its support to the Democratic Party. Instead of seeking to lead class struggle based on the understanding that the interests of workers and the oppressed are irreconcilably counterposed to those of the capitalists, the trade-union leaders pursue a policy of class collaboration, preaching reliance on their Democrat “friends” in government. This has led over the decades to the precipitous decline of organized labor.

For some former labor bureaucrats, like Antonio Villaraigosa, the labor movement was itself simply a stepping stone to bourgeois politics. Whatever their road to office, the so-called Democratic Party “friends of labor” rule on behalf of capital. Their job is to suppress class struggle, divert social protest into safe electoral channels, and enforce austerity on the union movement and oppressed black and Latino masses. Villaraigosa in office demands concessions from the city workers unions and openly crossed the striking EAA [Engineers and Architects Association] picket lines, while his cops viciously drive the homeless out of downtown L.A. on behalf of the real estate moguls. To unchain the power of labor, it is necessary to break with the Democratic Party and forge a revolutionary workers party, which would have as a crucial task the fight for all the oppressed, not least the liberation of black people.

Black oppression forms the bedrock of American capitalism. The capitalist class today continues to profit from and enforce the subjugation and segregation of the black population as an oppressed race-color caste, overwhelmingly concentrated at the bottom of this society. The social conditions that imprison the impoverished black masses in the ghettos—the lack of decent jobs, education and housing as well as rampant police terror—cannot be solved through capitalist reforms.

Full political, social and economic equality for the black masses requires that the working class rip the economy out of the hands of the racist capitalist rulers and reorganize it on a socialist basis, where production is for human need, not profit. Only in this way will it be possible to eliminate the material roots of black oppression through the full integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society. It is only through this struggle for integration by revolutionary socialist means that black equality can be achieved.

This government and its courts will never fundamentally “redress” racial injustice. The capitalists consciously pit white against black, native-born against immigrant, men against women in order to divide and weaken the working class and thus ratchet up their rate of exploitation and profit. When school busing to integrate Boston’s schools was defeated in 1974, at the hands of howling racist mobs in the streets, it opened the floodgates to a nationwide assault on school integration. While we actively fight for school desegregation, it was liberals and reformists who helped set up busing for the kill, channeling the fight to defend busing into dead-end appeals for federal intervention. With social struggle at an ebb, the Bakke Decision outlawing racial quotas came four years later. It became the leading edge of racist reaction aimed at rolling back every gain made by blacks.

To turn this around will require a class-struggle fight. No decisive victory for black and working people was ever won in Congress or the courts. It took a mass movement of millions on the street, courageously defying southern Democratic “Dixiecrat” governments and their baton-wielding cops and KKK mobs, to put an end to Jim Crow. It took the Civil War to smash the slave system. It will take a third American revolution, a socialist revolution, to finish the unfinished tasks of the Civil War. Complete freedom and equality for black people in this country requires a workers revolution to sweep away the entire capitalist system and wipe away the centuries-old legacy of racial oppression. Our program for black liberation through socialist revolution stands in sharp contrast to the reformist socialists such as Spark, which is utterly indifferent to the fight for black rights, or the Socialist Workers Party and International Socialist Organization, which endorse the liberals’ program that views government affirmative action as a solution to racial inequality. The Spartacus Youth Club fights for workers rule, where everyone’s labor and talents will be needed to build a socialist world of abundance and equality, and where education for all will be a natural part of this collective labor. Join us in this fight!