First Published: Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume CVII, Number 29, 14 November 1962.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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“We consider ourselves Marxists-Leninists. Whatever name you want to call us – communist, socialist – if it fits, we’ll wear it. We defend the communist party’s right to exist in the United States, and we’re opposed to the sustained campaign against it.” These were statements made yesterday by organizers of the Columbia Progressive Labor Student Club, which held its first organizational meeting Monday night. The club plans to file a registration petition with the university in order to be recognized as an official student club. Its goal is “work toward establishment of a revolutionary socialist party in the U.S.”,/p>
“The aim would be for the working class, people who don’t have a stake in ownership or management, to seize political control of the state,” say the organizers, Levi Laub ’63 and Steve Martinot, a graduate mathematics student. “We’d like to involve students with trade union struggles; some students who are now members took part in picket lines during a strike of the Retail Drug and Hospital Workers Local 1199 in January.” Laub and Martinot hold that one way to stop the cold war is to “remove the situations in the U.S. which make the cold war, such as the demand for arms manufacture.” Laub and Martinot are on the executive committee of the Progressive Labor Student Club of New York City, which numbers about 30 students from colleges in the city. There is also a student club at Chapel Hill, N.C., in addition to the parent organization in New York. About twenty College, Barnard and graduate students attended the meeting Monday.