NEWARK, NJ, July 15—The Marxist Literary Group (MLG) is a group of progressive academics who have met annually for half a century; Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades have been regular participants. A hundred members attended this year’s week-long conference, whose theme was “Transition.” As the rulers who run the imperialist world-system gear up for World War III and unleash their guided missiles on the working class, the Party went in with a much stronger political presence than in the past. We distributed dozens of copies of CHALLENGE and spoke openly about the need for a party to make revolution for a communist world.
Attacking the Big Fascists
Front and center in all our presentations was the connection between liberalism and fascism. A multiracial group of Newark, NJ-based PL’ers involved in combating racist police terror presented a film titled Copaganda.
“I’m really nervous!” said the student comrade who was speaking about the role of liberal Big Fascist Mayor, Ras Baraka in enforcing violent police repression in Black neighborhoods. The Big Fascists are represented by the multinational banks and energy companies that control the Democratic Party.
“Hey, you’re fine!” “You’re doing great!” enthusiastically shouted the audience. For many in attendance, this session was the high point of the entire conference.
In the same panel, another comrade presented a documentary film about the politics and economics of Caribbean tourism. Focusing on the history of the walls set up in Aruba to separate visitors from workers, her talk redirected the whole question of building walls away from anti-Trumpism—an easy target—and located its grounding in the “big money” imperatives of colonialism and imperialism.
In a panel on “The Dialectics of Transition,” a comrade argued that the similarity between liberalism and fascism is primary over their difference. What makes fascism and liberalism more similar than different is their political relationship with capitalism itself. Liberal democracy, which has within it the roots of fascism, is a way the bosses cement their class rule.
PLP brings communist politics
 Another panelist examined the failed historical transition during the Reconstruction era in the U.S. toward what W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition democracy.” After the Civil War, both northern capitalists and southern plantation owners commonly feared above all else the specter of a racially unified movement of farmers and workers.
A comrade who has written extensively about the USSR shared his most recent research about the relationship between Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Unless the prevailing falsehoods surrounding scholarship on Soviet history are refuted, and people understand both the actual achievements and the shortcomings of Soviet socialist construction, the revolutionary “transition” from capitalism to communism will be significantly blocked.
Finally, PLP comrades and friends led a reading group that examined Marxist analyses of the grounding of fascism in capitalism and imperialism. One speaker focused on the mid-1930s debate within the communist movement between the call for social revolution issued by R. Palme Dutt and the advocacy of a popular front by Georgi Dimitrov. History shows that the united front resulted in only fortifying the bosses’ system and laid the basis for the corruption of the old communist movement.
Another speaker discussed the Caribbean communist poet Aimé Césaire’s dissection of European fascism as a direct result of colonial brutality.
A third speaker examined the writings of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who ironically observed that democracy “organized fascism when it felt it could no longer resist the pressure of the working class” and no longer hide behind their pretense of  democracy.
Gramsci concluded that when the mask of democracy falls off, the ruler’s naked brutality is exposed, and the bosses use violence and repression to crush the working class in order to regain control of their system.
Be a communist, not just a Marxist
Many intellectuals who attend the MLG conferences describe themselves as Marxists, but not as communists. This needs to change. The Party builds a base with these graduate students and professors to help them unify theory and practice. We urge them to align themselves with the actual struggles of the working class and join our revolutionary Party. The working class, guided by international antiracist solidarity, is the leading force for revolutionary change. While intellectuals may display many of the weaknesses of bourgeois socialization, historically more than a few have been valuable revolutionary fighters for the working class: Karl Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Claudia Jones—thinkers and fighters all.
Besides, many of the younger members of the MLG are themselves at best precarious workers, facing a jobless future in a university in decline in this perhaps “terminal” crisis of capital. Many professors and graduate students see themselves as workers and are active in their campus unions.
PLP argues that all sectors of the working class must reject liberalism as a way to save workers from the increasingly destructive effects—political, economic, environmental—of capitalist decay. In essence, liberal democracy turns into fascism as the imperialists of the world prepare for world war (see editorial, page 2).
We must fight against developing fascism with a revolutionary communist movement.