SAN FRANCISCO, July 9 — Fifteen hundred students, teachers, staff and community members marched without a permit from the downtown campus of San Francisco City College (CCSF) to rally at the Department of Education, protesting the threatened closing of the college. CHALLENGE was distributed to the marchers. PLP’s job is to give communist leadership in this struggle, steer the fighters to the left with our paper CHALLENGE and study groups, continue to build strong ties and recruit them to a communist outlook.
School and community organizers and a few politicians denounced the recent decision by the ACCJC (the publicly chartered but private accrediting agency) to cancel CCSF’s accreditation effective next year. The ACCJC report praises the education offered at the college but cites administrative and financial problems as the reason for their decision.
Some classes for the 85,000 mostly Asian, Latino, black and immigrant students have already been cut, some campuses closed, wages of teachers and staff cut, and some counselors and school workers laid off. These racist and sexist cuts and closings expose the bosses as the bloodsuckers they are. The ruling class doesn’t really care about educating working-class youth. They care about money for their imperialist wars.
The downsizing was triggered by the capitalist-caused economic recession, which saw $53 million cut from the CCSF budget. However this outrage originates with corporate interests who directed the Federal Department of Education to turn community colleges into junior colleges that supply new workers for local businesses. The bosses see community colleges as factories to churn out as low-paid workers and soldiers  as fast as possible.
There is $2 trillion circulating in the world with no place to profitably invest it, so corporate interests speculate with stocks and derivatives or just hold on to their cash. These capitalists have recently discovered the $650 billion yearly spent for U.S. education. And they are in the process of continuing to privatize parts of it through student loans, testing, textbooks, on-line resources, tutoring services, charter schools, and private trade schools.
Some misguided workers, including the “leadership” of the Service Employees International Union, preach obeying administration directives instead of fighting back. Some want to concentrate on winning back the old status quo and characterize the ACCJC as a rogue organization. Others want to focus on the media and politicians. While the politicians and Board of Trustee members pretend to be on the students’ and workers’ side, they are here to placate us.
PLP and others see the cuts as a new reality where capitalists, acting through their government, wage continuous war on the working class for profits and for a better position to battle capitalists from other countries, economically and militarily. We must organize masses of students, workers and the community by building multiracial unity. We need to go beyond an “against-privatization” line and resist ruling-class ideas of education as a neutral space. Private or public, schools are a way for bosses to control students.
As the bosses prepare for war, they need to tighten the chokehold on workers and all the institutions through which they rule. In a word, the bosses are building fascism in the U.S. These attacks on our class are just a glimpse of what’s to come. Democrats and Republicans, their think tanks and their henchmen like the ACCJC, will continue these attacks until we smash them and the working class takes political power.
While PLP is inside the reform movement that aims to save this community college, we must be fighting to win the masses to communist ideas and practice and to join PLP. Building our communist party to smash capitalism is the only way we will ever have an education worthy of our working-class children.