For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below, slightly edited for publication, the speech given by a Spartacus Youth Club spokesman at the March 4 Day of Action to Defend Public Education protest at the University of California, Los Angeles.

As communists, we in the Spartacus Youth Club understand that the fight against racist reaction on campus must be linked to the fight for free, quality, integrated education for all. For open admissions! No tuition! Racial oppression and all forms of oppression are endemic to the capitalist system. Only through the struggle to get rid of this system and replace it with a socialist, egalitarian social order can the material roots of oppression be eliminated. The racist lynch rope provocations sprouting across the UCs are a result of the racist purge of the universities. They demonstrate that Obama’s so-called “end of racism” is a cruel lie. We say: Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!

The main obstacle to this struggle is the illusion promoted by liberals, black politicians, trade-union misleaders and reformist socialists like the Revolutionary Communist Party that the capitalist system can be reformed to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. Obama is the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism, director of mass murder in Afghanistan and Iraq, and yet Progressive Labor Party worked in his campaign. We say: Break with the Democrats! For a revolutionary workers party that fights for socialist revolution!

What is needed here are not appeals to the campus administration, but militant joint student-worker protest to beat back the racists and the bigots. The UC Regents are the capitalist watchdogs over the university, yet liberal groups like Student Worker Front and BAMN promote them as allies. We say: Abolish the Board of Regents! For student/worker control of the universities! We oppose demands on the campus administration and the capitalist state to police “hate crimes” because these foster illusions in the racist cops and courts and bolster their repressive power. Such measures have historically been used against leftists, black militants and student radicals.

In the depths of the “Great Recession” students need to realize that only the multiracial working class, including immigrants and blacks, has the social power and the interest to fight this capitalist system. The Spartacus Youth Club seeks to win students to the working-class struggle against capital, based on the full program of revolutionary Marxism.