1. Fighting Fascist Attacks on Education

    Introduction and Key Note Address

The Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association held a virtual roundtable discussion in April, 2023 on the significance of and resistance to the assaults on education, exemplified by banning books and all discussion of critical race theory, LGBT issues, and any other working class, anti-imperialist history. The presentations are presented here and numbered one through five.

In his introduction, Caucus President Geordie Miller, who is an English professor at Mt. Allison University and a leader of the faculty union, explained that:

From its inception in 1968, the Rad Caucus has been a site of organizing and struggle on campuses as well as within and against the institution of the Modern Language Association—an institution that currently has 22,000-plus members representing approximately 145 countries. The Radical Caucus is devoted to organizing a Marxist response in the MLA to the racist offensive against Higher Education. In the fight against fascism and its many forms and faces in higher education, the stakes are ourselves (to amend a line from Diane di Prima). The future that the ruling class is busy securing for higher education workers—indeed, for the workers of the world—is a future fuller and fuller of immiseration and other deadly, systemic commitments. Union busting and the repression of academic freedom are only the beginning of the worst to come. We don’t mourn; we organize.

Organizing a Marxist Response to The Racist Offensive Against Higher Education

by Barbara Foley

I don’t know about you, but I am thrilled to be at this gathering today. I visited the picket line at Rutgers University-Newark earlier this week and was struck by the unity of students and workers, as well as their shared understanding that the union, which comprises everyone from grad students to TAs to lecturers to Part Time Lecturers (PTLs) to full time faculty, can advance only if its most exploited members take the lead: “the last shall be first!”  I have been appreciating how our colleagues down in Florida have been placing antiracist and antisexist politics front and center in their opposition to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attempts to destroy their unions, gut academic freedom, and smother the class-conscious teaching of US history. And these comrades are not alone: working-class rebellions are cropping up around the world as the rulers ratchet up their attempts to make the workers pay for the increasingly evident failures of capitalism.

Fascism: Meaning and Antifascist Strategies

I would like to take a few minutes to consider how a Marxist analysis of the current conjuncture may help us understand the essence, versus the appearance, of what has been going on, and help us devise strategies for fighting back that may avoid some of the pitfalls accompanying a liberal framework of analysis. I will gesture toward ambiguities in what we mean when we use the term “fascism,” which is far more usefully seen as situated along the spectrum of capitalist class rule than as qualitatively different from liberalism.

The term “capitalism” signifies a global system of class rule that is simultaneously economic, political, and ideological. It is premised upon exploitation and competition, as well as upon perpetual crises in capital accumulation, signaled by overproduction, underconsumption, and increasing reliance upon fictitious capital to shore up falling rates of profit in the productive economy. As is evidenced by current developments from Tunisia to El Salvador, India to Italy, Sri Lanka to Sudan, capitalism is becoming more vicious and dangerous every day; racism is built into its DNA.  Climate change is drastically compounding the impact of imperialist uneven development, as is shown by the scores of refugee bodies washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean every week.  Sharpening rivalries between and among major nations and blocs of nations make the threat of global war ever more imminent.

DeSantis and Friends

In the United States, these contradictions are becoming more intense. As Warren Buffet commented back in 2006, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”  Activists in the academic labor movement are aware that attacks on education at all levels go back several decades; the cutbacks, resulting in the proletarianization of the teaching profession, have been massive under both Republican and Democratic regimes. Yet we need to be alert to the increasing divisions within the US ruling class about how best to handle discontent and cement class rule. DeSantis is not simply a right-wing extremist fueled by racist and homophobic passions and presidential ambitions.  His close ties with the Manhattan Institute and a coven of billionaire supporters indicate that his primary affiliation is with a group of domestically based capitalists, from the Kochs to the DeVoses to various owners of sports teams, casinos, restaurant chains, and media outlets, who are intent upon pursuing an overtly anti-immigrant and anti-labor agenda.  His emphasis upon controlling what is read and taught in schools and universities is in sync with his embrace of a divide-and-conquer racist agenda central to social control and super-profiteering. The subtitle of his recent book, “Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival,” signals the ambition of a certain sector of the ruling class to rule through brute force and intimidation, not just in chosen regions but throughout much of the USA.

In part this strategy, political and rhetorical, serves to deflect attention from the massive theft of the social wage and declining standard of living for the entire working class, native born as well as immigrant, white as well as black and brown. It is perhaps no accident that Florida ranks 46^th among the 50 states in the percentage of its population possessing health insurance, as well as 49^th in the salaries paid to its woefully overworked public school teachers.  But the strategy of racialized divide-and-conquer, while imposed from above, is not the only game in town.  Significant numbers of Floridians believe not only that K-12 schools should ban the assignment of readings featuring sexuality and race but also that college-level programs stressing diversity and inclusion should be defunded. Should DeSantis knock Trump out of the way without entirely alienating his base and become the standard bearer of the GOP in the 2024 presidential election, it is anybody’s guess whether what appears deviant and particular today may be the common sense of tomorrow.

Liberal Imperialists

The other dominant sector of the US ruling class, who can be called the liberal imperialists, are guided by different priorities and pursue a different strategy of class rule. These globalists, principal beneficiaries of neoliberal capitalism, constitute the main wing of the ruling class.  By comparison with J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, as well as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, DeSantis’s coterie of billionaire backers are chump change, at least for now. Generally represented by the controlling circles within the Democratic Party, the liberal imperialists favor the doctrine of corporate multiculturalism that proposes a rosier view of US history and culture, one acknowledging the nation’s “original sin” of slavery but stressing “e pluribus unum” from now on. Although we hear precious little from the Democratic political leadership by way of criticism of what is going on in Florida, the image of Kamala Harris swooping down to embrace the young Black Democratic state representatives who demonstrated in favor of gun control in Tennessee exemplifies the kind of virtue signaling that constitutes the outer limit of ruling-class liberal antiracism. Calls for diversity and inclusion need not signal significant systemic change.

Meanwhile, through NATO, the G7 and the G20, as well as the IMF and the World Bank, the liberal imperialists labor to consolidate the reach-or stanch the bleeding – of US finance capital. The imperialists preach liberal antiracism at home, but they have never steered away from calling for swollen military budgets or supporting regimes abroad characterized by naked state repression. On a global scale, indeed, ruling-class imperialists – calling themselves “internationalists”- have been complicit in the deaths of far more people, most of them dark-skinned, than the acolytes of DeSantis have yet to murder.  President Obama’s oft-repeated contention that “That is not who we are” – in response to charges that the United States is systemically racist and imperialist – was, essentially, a lie. But the liberal imperialists’ continuing promotion of the image of the US as a multiracial city on a hill has been guided by various strategic necessities, not least among these being the coming possibility – probability? – of the need to deploy a multiracial/multiethnic military in some not yet announced part of the world. Though maybe we can guess.

What I hope to have suggested is that the label “fascist,” while certainly an apt descriptor of many features of the reactionary movement building in Florida and extending throughout much of the USA, should not be confined to overtly racist, sexist, and homophobic US nativists bent upon smashing unions, burning books, scapegoating immigrants, and curtailing academic freedom, especially when we think in global terms.  Nor should fascism—or its various adherents—be seen as a static entity. After all, in the past century many nations have flipped back and forth between liberal democracy and outright autocracy without a murmur from their ruling elites: think Chile, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, and of course Italy and Germany. If the liberal imperialists prevail in elections in the coming period, will the Florida reactionaries draw in their claws and play nice?  If a DeSantis presidency comes into being (what a prospect!), will the proponents of liberal multiculturalism jump on the overtly racist bandwagon in accordance with some pragmatically revised view of the national interest? Will the dominant wing of US finance capital—taking a page from Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s—decide to hold its nose and bankroll a seemingly small-time right-wing extremist? 

The Future: Our Choice to Reject Capitalists of Any Stripe

No one has a crystal ball. But one thing is for sure.  The popular front against fascism for which the Florida Teachers Union leader Paul Ortiz has issued a stirring call will fulfill its potential only if it avoids the seductive call of liberalism, especially the notion that the state constitutes neutral terrain where different classes can contest for power.  Too many anti-capitalist class struggles of the past century and more, begun with egalitarian passion and conviction, have been sidetracked and betrayed by the placing of hopes in liberal democracy—the secret capitalist sibling of the fascism to which it appears to be so steadfastly opposed.  What is at stake in trying to do it right? Everything.

Barbara Foley is Emerita Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University-Newark and  past president of the Radical Caucus of the MLA