Re: Racist, Anti-Communist Attack on Students: Campus Cops Arrest Red Pr

I found this message after I replied to the earlier one. After five years
of disagreeing and arguing with PLP inside SDS, I came to recognize that
serious political change would require a life-long commitment and an organization
that could give political focus and organized expression to the my aspirations
and those of many others to live in a world without racism and exploitation.
I joined PLP in 1972, five years after I first met the party, and have
been a member ever since. I find Micheal Pugliese's remarks ignorant and
insulting. I participate in discussions based on what I know. I would expect
others to do the same.

Paul

P.S. I wrote the article for Challenge that Micheal Pugliese found on the internet. It describes an incident where I was arrested on my campus (a predominately black urban university) for distributing a flier. This really happened. Does anyone have any comment on the content of the article? Or are we reduced to the crudest forms of anti-intellectualism and red-baiting? Michael does indeed remind me of the people in SDS who were very harmful to the organization because they would not engage in serious discussion.

Michael Pugliese wrote:

   I needed more sectariana to add to my hard drive! Paul, I don't discount
your committment. What's wrong about joining some less far loony sect?
Committees of Correspondence? Solidarity? Whatever...

Little did I think all those yrs. ago I was an undergrad reading
Wallerstein's MWS vols. that I'd find a list of suppossed Wallersteinians,
where one person writes extensively for a crackpot New Age conspiracy theory
rag and someone else was in PLP. The internut indeed...

                                                    Michael Pugliese, I
Confess To Red-Baiting Liberalism

                             "I Will Re-Read, "Combat Liberalism" by Mao,
Now For Penance."

                               (Barbara Foley writes good work though. She's
in PLP too, no?)

http://www.plp.org/cd98/cd0415.html#8

Racist, Anti-Communist Attack on Students: Campus Cops Arrest Red Prof

CHICAGO, April 7 — PLP member Paul Gomberg, who teaches philosophy at
Chicago State University (CSU), was arrested April 1st by campus cops for
passing out communist fliers. Paul was in the Harold Washington Hall showing
the PLP May Day video to students on a portable TV/VCR when an administrator
told him to stop. He was told he would have to stop because the fliers "had
not been stamped" by the administration. Paul said no way; he wouldn’t stop.

So the cops were called. They pushed him into a stairwell as Paul made a
speech protesting his arrest, advocating communist revolution to the
students who had gathered around. Then the cops told him they would arrest
him for making a speech, not for passing out fliers. "You mean I haven’t
been arrested yet?" Paul asked. So he returned to talk with some student
friends. A minute later cop Steward rushed him, handcuffed him, threw him
into a police vehicle, and held him handcuffed to an iron bar at the campus
police station for an hour and a half before releasing him.

What fascist crap! The cops manufactured reasons to arrest him. On the
college campus, the great center of "learning" and "open discussion," a
teacher is arrested for passing out communist literature. Why is this
happening?

This arrest is in part a racist attack on the students. In the U.S. the
capitalists have intensified terror against workers, particularly young
black workers. They have introduced fascist labor policies, driving down
wages with Workfare and prison labor. "Full employment" has been achieved,
as the Nazis did, by driving wages down. Many workers work for less than
minimum wage. 1.7 million working class youth have been thrown into jail
where many now slave for the capitalists. (This is six times the rate of
incarceration of thirty years ago.) Blacks are in jail at six times the rate
of whites. On the streets there is increased police terror, community
policing (turning older workers against the youth is part of fascist
terror), and the growth of a criminal justice program at 90% black CSU to
turn young black people into the fascist jailers of other young black
people.

As part of the general growth of fascist terror must also be increased
against CSU students. The lesson they wish to send is "stay away from the
reds, play along with the system, and we will have a job for you (helping to
jail other black people)." PLP members bring the only answer to this racist,
fascist terror: workers can unite, overcome racism and nationalism,
overthrow the bosses, and build a communist society where all workers can
flourish.

The fascists cannot tolerate communism because only communism can destroy
fascism. So they arrest Paul to try to drive the students away.

But it will not work. After being released from jail, Paul went back to
where he was arrested to pass out more literature. That night he and another
comrade met with students in a dormitory to talk about the May Day March for
communism and the arrest. The next day he, other comrades and many students
flooded the campus with fliers describing the arrest, linking it to fascism
and to the racist control of students. Many Challenges were sold. Students
who had remained aloof became curious about communism, taking our Party more
seriously than before. Nationalist students praised Paul’s resoluteness and
integrity. Students began to make plans to take classes that Paul teaches.
Ten students gave their names to find out more about May Day. Students
signed up and gave money to go to the march.

The future is bright. Every attack will be turned into its opposite. Young
working class black students will respond to communism as the only way out
of this racist morass. They will unite with their class sisters and brothers
and join PLP. The coming wars will give us an opportunity to move forward to
communist revolution. On to May Day!

Challenge, April 15, 1998

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