City College of New York-Reinstate the Morales/Shakur Center! Cops Off Campus!

(Young Spartacus pages)

Workers Vanguard No. 1034	15 November 2013

We reprint below an October 26 leaflet issued by the New York Spartacus Youth Club. The City College of New York (CCNY) is one of 24 public colleges and schools that make up the City University of New York (CUNY). As we go to press, the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and Student Center, a room in CCNY’s North Academic Center (NAC), is still shut down with a sign above the door that reads, “Careers and Professional Development Institute.”

The Spartacus Youth Club denounces the outrageous eviction of the Morales/Shakur Center by the CCNY administration on October 20. As the Center was raided and all of its contents confiscated, campus cops shut down the entire NAC building, arresting a CUNY alumnus. The timing of this raid is no coincidence, coming off weeks of CUNY protests against the reinstatement of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) military recruiters and the appointment of war criminal David Petraeus as a visiting professor. At an anti-Petraeus protest on September 17, cops brutally attacked the crowd and six protesters were arrested, all part of an attempt by the CUNY administration to stifle leftist activism. The sinister eviction of the Morales/Shakur Center represents an attack on the democratic rights of all campus groups to organize. Reinstate the Morales/Shakur Center! Drop all charges against CUNY protesters! ROTC and Petraeus out of CUNY!

The Morales/Shakur Center was a space for leftist, minority and other student groups and community organizations to hold meetings and events. Assata Shakur is a former Black Panther who was framed up for the 1973 killing of a New Jersey state trooper. Guillermo Morales was a member of the FALN, a Puerto Rican nationalist group. Shakur is now being hunted by the FBI as part of a racist “anti-terror” vendetta.

The CUNY administration is currently considering a new draconian policy on “expressive activity,” i.e., campus protests. The proposed rules enhance the powers of the administration to crack down on protest and other political activity. Along with this attack on democratic rights, the CUNY Board of Trustees has been on a drive to make the city university more exclusive, making it harder for black, Latino, poor and immigrant students to attend. CCNY, which sits in the middle of Harlem, has seen the enrollment of black students plummet in the last 10 years, from 31.2% in 2001 to 14.4% in 2010. In 2011 a new round of tuition hikes was pushed through—accompanied by the violent repression of students who protested it. This was just the latest wave in a decades-long campaign to reverse the gains of the 1969 student strike, which won open admissions for high school graduates to CUNY’s community colleges and lowered entrance requirements at the four-year universities. In 1976 tuition was imposed for the first time in 129 years and has gone up steadily. Open admissions has been whittled away over the years, and was completely gutted in 1999. We fight for free, quality, integrated education with a full stipend! For open admissions! Abolish the student debt!

The Morales/Shakur Center was won in 1989 as a result of massive student struggle against tuition hikes at CUNY. But under capitalism these gains are always reversible. Universities under capitalism serve the purpose of upholding bourgeois ideology and training the next layer of technicians and managers. We hold no illusions in the administration to act in the interest of students—we say abolish the administration, for student-teacher-worker control of the university! In order to remove the universities from the control of the bourgeoisie, you need a workers revolution to sweep away the whole capitalist system. Students, who have no real social power to transform society, must ally with the multiracial working class which can bring production to a halt. To do away with the decaying capitalist system, we need a socialist revolution.

At the recent protests in defense of the Center, some students have expressed the view that the campus cops work for the students since the students pay tuition. The Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee also peddles illusions that the cops can be pressured into serving students and the oppressed by calling for “any security force to be controlled by the community” (RSCC Platform). In reality the cops carry out the orders of the administration and the capitalist state, not the students. The role of all cops under capitalism is to defend the interests of the bourgeoisie—they cannot be reformed. The brutal enforcement of capitalist rule is their job, whether in the ghettos and barrios, on the picket lines, or on the campuses. Cops off campus!

With the mayoral elections approaching, students and workers are being told to place their hopes in the liberal populist de Blasio. The illusion is that this capitalist politician will bring some relief from the racist police brutality, union-busting and attacks on democratic rights that marked Bloomberg’s years. Don’t be fooled! Whether it’s through Wall Street Democrat Obama or more left-talking local politicians like de Blasio, Ydanis Rodriguez or Charles Barron—the Democratic Party is charged with defending the interests of the racist, imperialist capitalist system. And don’t forget it was Democrat Obama’s FBI that increased Assata Shakur’s bounty to $2 million. Break with the Democrats! We need a class-struggle workers party independent of and in opposition to all parties of capitalist rule. If you are interested in a program to get rid of capitalism and imperialism once and for all, check out the Marxist Spartacus Youth Club, youth group of the Spartacist League, and our paper, Workers Vanguard.