“Mass Struggle for a Better World”: PLP and the Radical Caucus bring revolutionary ideas and organizing once more to the annual MLA convention

Members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been organizing in the Modern Language Association (MLA) since the late 1960s, primarily in the Radical Caucus, which was founded in 1968 to protest and denounce the Vietnam War. At this year’s MLA convention in Toronto in January, Party members worked closely with MLA friends to get a Radical Caucus resolution passed condemning the doxxing, firing, and deportation of faculty protesting the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza.  We also intensified discussion with our friends about what is needed to build an anti-fascist movement in the current moment. We organized three panels: a guaranteed session on “Radical Lineages,” a virtual “Just-in-Time” session, “Organizing Against the Dismantling of Higher Education,” and a third panel on normalization of the ecological crisis by global capitalism. Helped by ongoing  communication with comrades unable to attend the convention, our small but bold group brought communist ideas and organizing strategies to the convention.

Pushing the MLA 

Our task was harder because many MLA members left last year when the MLA leadership refused to consider a resolution calling for the boycott, divestment, and sanction of organizations doing business with Israel. We stayed because the MLA is a key site of struggle with academic workers.

Prior to the convention, we held several sessions with members and friends of the Party to discuss our tactics. Along with hundreds of Radical Caucus flyers and copies of CHALLENGE, we blitzed chosen sessions and laid out our politics in our special one-page MLA CHALLENGE:

This might seem like a strange time to talk at the MLA about the possible communist future buried somewhere under the fascist rubble. Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) disagree. . . . It is precisely because the crisis we face in higher education is rooted in the broader crisis in global capitalism—and the threat of global war--that we must think beyond the idealist myths of bourgeois democracy. Fascism is not just undemocratic authoritarianism; it is a mode of capitalist class rule resorted to in “polycrises”; of economic stagnation, fading political legitimacy and proliferating war. The only antidote to a system based upon the brutal pursuit of profit is its revolutionary transcendence by an egalitarian system of mass participation based upon the fulfillment of human needs--communism.

Now is the time to join PLP!

There is a mass base for fascism in many parts of the planet. About this we cannot fool ourselves. But there is also a mass hunger for a better world. The millions who have been marching and striking against genocide and xenophobia around the world embody what the U.S. proletarian writer Tillie Olsen called “the not-yet in the now.” Repression breeds resistance. As Palestinian author and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani wrote, “Resistance is the essence.” Communism is the future and that requires a communist party. This could be the time to join PLP!

At the Open Hearing for Resolutions, as well as at the Delegate Assembly itself, we refuted the well-organized pro-Zionist activists who repeated the familiar mantra equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. When our resolution came to a vote, the MLA Delegate Assembly voted in favor of it 61-52, no small victory given the current intimidation of faculty opposed to the new McCarthyism. However, to become official, the MLA Delegate Assembly vote must be ratified by an affirmative mail vote of 10 percent of the total MLA membership – or about 2,000 members, a new requirement instituted several years ago which makes final endorsement of any resolution difficult.

Demonstrating the increasing duplicity of the leadership of many academic professional organizations is the action taken by the leadership of the American Historical Association Convention (AHA), which met at the same time as the MLA and passed the exact same resolution as ours as well as a second BDS resolution. At their convention,  AHA delegates forced its leadership -- which had earlier disqualified both resolutions -- to bring both of them back to the floor; however,  despite their members overwhelmingly passing both of them, the AHA leadership once more rejected both, stating they were redundant.

At the MLA Convention we met at least a dozen interested people—and possible future members of the Radical Caucus. These new friends attended our annual meeting, leafletted with us at the Delegate Assembly, and joined us in exposing the specious claims of the Zionists.

Young comrades take the helm

One of the important developments of our work at this MLA convention was the leadership provided by younger Party members and close friends of the Party. For several decades the main leadership of Party work has been primarily carried out by senior faculty, including those who have recently retired. This year, younger comrades provided the key leadership of our Radical Caucus work at the MLA convention. Entering planning for this year’s MLA, some of us had doubts that we would continue to sustain the level of communist activism that has characterized our work for the past decade. By the time we headed home, those doubts had disappeared.