In a letter to The Daily Orange on Feb. 13, T. Slone wrote that I could not be a socialist because I am a professor ‘comfortably enjoying privilege under the capitalist system.’

I am a teacher, a worker, without job security. Almost 75 percent of U.S. college teachers in 2009 were graduate students, adjunct instructors or short-term teachers, like myself, working under temporary contract.

No university is a protected island within a turbulent sea of capitalism. Teachers, students and staff at a university share fears and fates common to all workers during this terrible capitalist economic crisis.

Nineteen students are on hunger strike at the University of Virginia in support of a Living Wage Campaign for employees — mostly women and African-Americans.

We teachers see students burdened with crushing school loans. A Rutgers University study found half of college graduates between 2006 and 2010 were unable to find full-time work. Some students tell us they have to choose between food and textbooks.

At the same time, a ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ sends disproportionate numbers of young people of color, especially those of African descent, to labor behind bars in prisons-for-profit.

Divisive attacks against postal workers, public school teachers, public employees at all levels and unionized workers attempt to keep us from uniting with each other. ‘Austerity measures’ pit white-collar workers against suffering post-industrial, blue-collar workers along lines of race, nationality, sex, gender, sexuality, religion and disability.

Woman-hating epithets attempt to keep basic contraception from being affordable and available to women. Political ‘leaders’ utter dehumanizing language about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, even as we fight for job nondiscrimination laws.

State-sponsored actions try to divide us, like the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim covert surveillance of the SU Muslim Students Association by the NYPD, working in cooperation with the CIA and the arrest of a local Latino community leader by ICE. These racist attacks target oppressed workers, not the economic system.

The 1 percent is defending capitalist profits when it pours trillions of dollars into wars of military and economic aggression on working and oppressed peoples around the globe and here in the United States.

The Occupiers ask: Why is power in the hands of the wealthy 1 percent who prop up an increasingly exploitative and ecologically ruinous system?

Socialism answers: Working and oppressed peoples, who collectively create the wealth of the world, can stop wars for profit, tear up the deed of private ownership and build a just and sustainable economic system to meet human needs.

My experiences as a teacher, worker, woman, feminist, lesbian, mother, grandmother, poet, white anti-racist and anti-imperialist are a foundation of my consciousness as an activist.

I struggle for socialism as the path forward to build a better world.

Minnie Bruce Pratt 

Published on March 5, 2012 at 12:00 pm