NEW YORK CITY, April 22 — Chanting “Education Is A Right, Fight, Fight, Fight!” and “Education Is Under Attack, What Do We Do? Stand Up! Fight Back!” more than 300 students and supporters rallied at City College in Harlem today, the 40th anniversary of the 1969 City College strike and sit-in that brought Open Admissions and integrated the lily-white senior colleges of CUNY. At the administration building where police blocked entry they presented their demands to a Vice-President of the college.

The demands included no tuition hikes, budget cuts, or layoffs of campus workers; free tuition, open admissions, and quality childcare; and pay-cuts and a salary cap for the administration.  Twenty striking workers from Stella D’Oro in the Bronx joined the students to offer their support, and were loudly cheered as they marched down the hill into the rally.

Teachers and students in PLP from CUNY and another college explained that capitalism in 2009 means deep economic crisis, global wars, and ecological catastrophe. The pay-cuts and tuition increases demanded of Stella D’Oro workers and CUNY students is a sign of what capitalism has in mind for our class. Our response to these racist attacks that fall most heavily on black and Latino workers and students must be to unite workers and students to organize for communist revolution.

The best feature of this rally was the collaboration of students with workers, who met jointly to plan a double rally: first at City College with the workers coming down, then at the struck plant with the students coming up. From the administration building, we marched, fifty or sixty strong, chanting “Workers and Students Will Never Be Defeated!” to the subway, and, still chanting and singing “Which Side Are You On?” and “Solidarity Forever,” occupied a couple of subway cars on this “protest train.”

From the elevated train we marched down the long iron staircase to the picket line, chanting all the way, greeted with smiles and cheers from the workers there. About forty students and workers spoke at the two rallies, many of them women taking leadership in both struggles.  The MC at the plant site encouraged CUNY and other students to speak, and after a pause seven or eight came up, many for the first time, including one from New Jersey who had heard the strikers speak at her campus last week.

Our friends, both at Stella and at CUNY, understand that PLP fights like hell for our immediate needs, but is also organizing a Party to bring state power to the working class, so that we can use the value we create to benefit all workers internationally in a communist society. One worker at the CCNY rally told the students that the company’s demands for pay-cuts and their use of scabs was a “great social crime,” which wouldn’t be punished until large numbers of students and workers united to fight for change. Another told the students that they had to struggle now so that “the capitalists won’t take hold of your lives and wreck them.” Students told the workers with passion how much they appreciated their support, and how difficult it was for them to be a student and to work many hours every week to pay for rising tuition.

An Argentine filmmaker was at the rally with a new film on the Zanón ceramics factory that was seized and run by workers —  the syndicalist dream of “a factory without bosses.” Some of the Stella D’Oro workers were inspired by the film, and they all realize that they could, and should, be running Stella D’Oro without the owners and their agents. Workers can run the factories and students and teachers can run the schools, but only when they control the levers of power — the government and the military — with a communist Party. Today on the protest train, workers and students united had a brief glimpse of the world that is struggling to be born.