NEW YORK CITY, April 17—On the anniversary of the first encampment of Students in Solidarity with Gaza at Columbia University— the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE) sponsored a National Day of Action. More than 20,000 people participated in almost 200 campus events in 47 states ranging from rallies, protests, teach-ins, walkouts, banner drops, art installations, anti-fascist office hours, flash mobs, and watch parties. CAHE also hosted a day-long series of 14 live-streamed webinars devoted to the genocide in Gaza, the ICE deportations, spiraling student debt, coercive control by boards of trustees, and the collapse of academic freedom in the face of anti-war protests.
The first of these virtual sessions— which attracted 245 registrants—was sponsored by the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association (MLA), in which members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been active for many years. The focus was on the keyword “Displacement,” which draws together a range of capitalist-caused crises: the massive uprooting, theft of land, and genocide in Palestine, the increasingly horrific ICE deportations, precarious labor, in the academy and beyond, racist urban gentrification, and the super-exploitation and forced emigration of entire populations by war, climate crisis, and the imperialist competition for rare earth resources.
While most of the live-streamed panels had a single-issue focus, the many meanings associated with “displacement” enabled the Radical Caucus session to draw connections between different features of the current crisis. Capitalism needs to be understood in its totality; only then can the common interests uniting the global working class be understood. Only then can working-class revolution be seen as not just one option among many, but an absolute necessity for the survival—and flourishing—of life on the planet.
Fighting for communist ideas in the universities
The Radical Caucus has emerged from the April 17 events with a refreshed sense of our mission. While in past years we have focused primarily on waging class struggle within the MLA, many of our leftist friends have quit in disgust at the conservatism of its leadership, which in 2024 brazenly sabotaged an attempt to bring up a Boycott, Divest, and Sanction resolution supporting divestment in Israel (see CHALLENGE, 1/29/25). But our continuing series of “keywords” virtual mini-conferences on Zoom has involved a broad range of people—many unconnected to higher education—who are interested in examining how language functions ideologically to shape consciousness. They have also begun a series of reading groups investigating the nature of Israeli “scholasticide” and the history of the Palestinian left.
We will, however, continue to fight the MLA bosses, because communist work in academic professional associations remains a crucial component of the fight against fascism. A recent article in Foreign Affairs—a major mouthpiece of the finance capitalist wing of the U.S. ruling class—bemoans the fact that the Trump administration, in launching its all-out attack on higher education, is destroying the decades-old “soft power” role played by universities in furthering the interests of U.S. imperialism (Sarah Kreps, “An Attack on America’s Universities Is an Attack on American Power: How Academia Bolsters National Security.” Foreign Affairs, April 29, 2025). Clearly the ruling class itself is torn by its own version of the question, “What Is to be Done?” For the working class, the fight to oppose the current attacks on colleges and universities has to move beyond the slogan of “Save Higher Ed” to “Smash Higher Ed for a Communist World.” That is what we have to do. While anxiety and fear permeate many campuses, the fightback is also growing. The viciousness of capitalist power becomes clearer every day; these are times not to surrender, but to build the movement for communist revolution.
