Anarchists Unite with Big Brother Against Reds

Hampshire College

(Young Spartacus pages)

The following letter by the New York Spartacus Youth Club was submitted to the Climax newspaper at Western Massachusetts’ Hampshire College on October 11.

On September 7, Hampshire College’s self-appointed speech police struck a blow for censorship. When the Spartacus Youth Club brought our revolutionary Marxist newspaper Workers Vanguard to campus, a group of “politically correct” self-described anarchists waged a two-day campaign to kick us off. These junior McCarthys showed their “anti-authoritarian” credentials by crying to the campus administration, which was only too happy to revoke our permit for a literature table. Our purported “crime” was being communists who engage in political debate. These anarchists smeared us as “racist,” “transphobic” and “anti-gay” for trying to argue with one of them about capitalism, because the student in question was a transgender “person of color.” This argument is as transparently false as it is paternalistic.

Only genuinely anti-gay and racist forces, who seek to silence all opposition, benefit from such idiotic and cowardly censorship. Does this clot seek to suppress the speech of religious groups, the Green Party or Democrats canvassing for votes—who we think have every right to express their views—or only the reds? Those groups seek to uphold the system of capitalist exploitation. We want to do away with it. The revolutionary movement has a proud tradition—which we uphold—of scathing arguments and polemics. It is through such clashes of opinion that one actually learns something.

Against the liberal idea of these lifestyle anarchists that one’s personal sexual identity can alter the oppressive conditions of capitalist society, we understand that liberation is a material act that requires changing the conditions that people live in. Like women’s oppression, the oppression of homosexuals is rooted in the institution of the family, which is fundamental to capitalist society. To do away with all forms of oppression engendered by capitalism, we put forward a Marxist program for socialist revolution. The racist U.S. ruling class pushes every kind of chauvinism and bigotry to divide working people and the oppressed. We fight to win students to become partisans of the working class and to help forge a multiracial workers party that will act as a “tribune of the people,” championing the cause of all the oppressed, crucially fighting to achieve black liberation through revolutionary integration in a socialist society. This is what the Hampshire anarchists don’t want you to hear!

We fight against race and class privilege in education. The administration is the capitalists’ agent on campus—as shown by its vicious ongoing campaign against the unionization of campus workers. We say: Nationalize Hampshire and abolish the administration! For the campuses to be run by those who go to school and work there! We fight for open admissions and no tuition with a state-paid living stipend so poor and working-class students can attend college. Open up elite $50,000-a-year Hampshire to the black, immigrant, poor and working-class people of the area, including Springfield!

We urge those students opposed to political censorship to protest to Hampshire Dean of Students Dawn Ellinwood at (413) 559-5412 or dellinwood@hampshire.edu. Check out our Web site: www.spartacist.org!