NEW YORK CITY, September 8—As a new school year begins, working-class students and families are again faced with dangerous lose-lose conditions created by capitalism in crisis. Rising numbers of Covid-19 cases, crumbling school buildings, and a demand to return to business as usual threaten the lives of students, their families, and education workers. This is unfolding as the shortcomings of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan, next door to their main rival China, are on full display to the world (See Editorial, page 2). This school year, let’s continue to build student-worker-parent solidarity and turn crises into opportunities to build a culture of fightback for communist ideas and culture.
A divided U.S. ruling class united in contempt for workers’ lives
Led by President Joe Biden, the finance capitalist Big Fascists are trying to create a more unified approach to schooling. The Small-Fascist Republicans are more domestically oriented and isolationist. In states like Florida and Tennessee the governors attacked smaller city governments that pushed for more vaccinations and use of masks in schools. In response the U.S. Department of Education launched civil rights investigations and lawsuits to block the attacks.
It’s a deadly mistake to think that Biden, the federal courts, or local Democratic politicians in cities like New York and Los Angeles, are motivated to protect the safety of the working class. As the dominant grouping since World War II, these Big Fascists were the architects of the liberal world order with the U.S. bosses on top. Their dominance rests on U.S. financial and military power and its strategic control of the Middle East and the flow of oil to Europe, Asia, and Africa. To maintain this dominance against their rivals, the Big Fascists need a future generation of workers, soldiers, and managers that are willing to fight and die for this unequal system.  
A “lost generation” disillusioned and unfit for this task will hinder their ability to wage such a war. Liberals’ phony, silver-tongued appeals to workers that “we are all in this together” and empty assurances that “we are ready” show that the liberal wing is the main danger to the working class.They are just as ready as ever to have workers die from both Covid-19 and World War III for their long-term profits.
The blatant disregard for workers’ lives shown by both wings of the U.S. ruling class is a hallmark of rising fascism. Capitalists of any stripe are workers’ enemies.
Fight to learn, learn to fight
Capitalist schooling trains us to treat the working class as expendable. We are taught to accept that some workers and youth will be homeless, unemployed, homeless, incarcerated, or killed. Education workers are habituated to accept some dropouts, suspensions, and failure as unavoidable. Capitalist schools also teach patriotism and build loyalty to U.S. imperialism. If millions of youth question capitalism, while the façade of stability crumbles, imperialists will have a harder time winning workers to fight a war against China. Thus as students and education workers fight to learn, they must also learn to fight a capitalist system that fails our class daily.
Even before the pandemic, capitalist schools were unsafe: suspensions, crumbling toxic-filled walls, unhealthy cafeteria food, racist police criminalizing Black and Latin students. The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked additional havoc on student learning. Students have learned even less under these conditions and the bosses plans to catch students up will be plagued with cracks and holes for working-class students to fall through.
Communists and many antiracist education workers refuse to accept this fate. We know the working class is full of fighters, and that whether remote or in-person, education workers and students must use the sharp study of math, science, history and language to understand the racist poison of capitalism and the need for a new, communist society.
Education workers must fight back alongside their students and parents against the bosses’ system, which has set our class up to fail in what will certainly be a tough school year. Every rotten aspect of capitalist schools reinforces the same lesson for us: a system that can’t educate and care for its youth does not deserve to exist, and we must learn together what it will take to smash it.Join the fight with PLP!