BAY AREA, March 20—Teachers in the Oakland Education Association (OEA) went on strike and settled a new contract. Oakland public schools are a product of the same racism addressed in the recent LA, Denver, West Virginia and Charter school strikes. This strike was a mass school for pro-communist ideas.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP)members participated in picket lines at seven schools, worked with friends and co-workers before the strike to build consciousness and solidarity, participated in the mass actions organized by the OEA, and distributed leaflets and literature. PLP teachers were embedded in the picket lines and the on-site organizing and decision-making at their schools.
For many young workers, this was their first strike. It was an eye opener. Many questions surfaced: from tactical issues of how to run the picket line, and what is the role of school administrators who appear friendly, to the strike, to who runs the OEA and the deeper issues about capitalism.
Now that the contract passed and teachers are back to work the burning question remains: what will teachers do? Will they continue to be active? Some high school campuses have formed on-going committees. Will some teachers make the leap from fighting around immediate conditions to building a long-term revolutionary movement to get rid of capitalism? After this experience, will some conclude that the unity they built can grow and abolish the capitalist ruling class? This would indicate a growth in class-consciousness.
As one PL’er discussed on the picket line: “All across the globe, workers are flexing their power through organizing strikes to demand better learning/working conditions and higher pay. I know there is no true stability for our class under capitalism. This system is designed to commodify all aspects of our lives, and then leave us in the cold when we can’t afford to fund our own survival. This process of turning all things and experiences into items that are bought and sold absolutely includes education; take it from an undergraduate who is $25,000 in debt with student loans. In the Bay Area, we have been witnessing that the contradictions of extreme wealth and extreme poverty grow deeper over the last decade.”
Strike ends, fight begins?
When the strike ended, 42 percent voted against ratification, which is a big no-vote since the leadership was pushing this as a win-win. Nurses told the bargaining team they needed lower workloads to serve the student needs (not cash bonuses). They distributed a flyer urging a no vote.
The OEA demands were built around securing teacher and student needs; zeroing in on the particular racist attack on students in Oakland’s low-income areas (Black, Latin, and immigrant students) where most school closings are scheduled. The wage demand focused on the fact that a 20 percent annual turnover of teachers was due to the inadequate wages,and inability of teachers to live where they teach due to predatory real estate profiteering (gentrification). Turnover and underfunding has caused great instability in the schools. There were student-teacher centered demands for smaller class sizes, more resources for students like nurses, counselors, and special needs services.
Working-class solidarity on display
This strike showed a lot of strength, unity, and multi-racial fight against the institutional racism in education. There was working-class solidarity. Teachers, students and community residents picketed in the morning and afternoon. There were mass demonstrations downtown, an occupation of the state building and a demonstration against a charter school organization.
The Oakland United School District (OUSD) school bosses tried to intimidate the fighters and break the strike. Teachers set up alternative “strike schools.” Teachers in other districts adopted an Oakland school, joined the picket lines, and held a sickout action.
Strike fever spread to colleges
In the duo-lingual program, both the Laney Administrators and the “strike-friendly” Oakland High principle tried to intimidate both teachers and students to have “alternatives” (i.e., to create scab classes off campus). Instead, the strike energy spread to Laney Community College where students and teachers started a campaign to publicize and fight the conditions facing part-time teachers, adjuncts who are 70 percent of the teaching staff in a campus of mainly working class, Black, Latin, Asian, and immigrant students.
First day back
Monday, the first day teachers went back to work, the OUSD School Board voted for $22 million in austerity cuts which included staffing cuts, cuts to student services, and decimation of libraries. As communists, we see this struggle as a step in building a revolutionary movement. Organization at schools sites and many mass actions show workers can run things based on collectively figuring out what we need as a working class. These are the seeds of a communist society were life is organized based on the needs of the working class not the profits of the capitalists. Many PLP members and friends commented that this battle deepened friendships with families and teachers for the battles ahead.
MEXICO, March 19—The International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Denmark in 1910, established March 8 as the International Working Women’s Day, to recognize women’s struggle for their political and economic rights. This communist origin, and its significance in the revolutionary struggle to end the special oppression of working-class women, is generally unknown or purposelessly hidden.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) organizes all workers to put an end to the capitalist system and its sexist ideology that justifies and promotes the special oppression of women. Financially, this oppression generates huge profits for the capitalists due to the super exploitation of women. Politically, sexist ideology divides the working class, limiting its capacity to organize and struggle.
On this holiday, PLP held a conference on sexism at a school on the west of the Mexican valley, in a community where the Party has worked for many years, and where recently several women have been murdered. We explained these murders are crimes against our class, caused by an oppressive system; that we should immediately unite as workers in self-defense, but that we should organize to get rid of the root cause of the problem: capitalism.
Capitalism dehumanizes women workers
Capitalist “culture” degrades women: education, movies, music, books, magazines, and theater, show women as merchandise, focusing on the differences with men, and stereotype women according to the needs of the system at particular moments. Against this sexist ideology, PLP promotes the development of women as communist organizers to lead our class in the struggle against capitalist oppression and for an egalitarian communist society.
In spite of huge advances against sexism accomplished by communists, especially in Russia and China at the beginning of the last century, sexism is still hurting our class. For example, in Mexico:
●In 2018, 845 women were murdered, twice the numbers reported in 2015. Since January 2019, 70 women have been murdered, including 11 minors.
According to the UN, on average nine women are murdered daily, and six out of ten women report to have experienced some type of violence
●Sex crimes against women were also twice as many in 2018 compared to those reported in 2016, to reach 2,733 per 100,000 women; 40 percent of which were committed against minors.
One out of two adolescent women, 12 to 19 years of age, who start their sex life becomes pregnant as a result of sexual violence and early marriage”.
●Women earn salaries that are 34.2 percent less than men’s, that is, for the same job a man gets paid 100 pesos while a woman gets 75. Only 43 percent of working age women have a job and half are self-employed. On average one out of three lack health services, written contracts or benefits.
Capitalists derive huge profits from paying lower salaries to women, but also benefit from their unpaid work, which includes household work, care of other members of the family, such as children and the elderly, and the raising of children. The social and economic value of these activities is vital to capitalism.
As previous statistics have shown, capitalist institutions study the inequalities faced by women, but offer false solutions. These institutions hide the role of capitalism in the oppression of women, create justice and support organizations that misdirect the struggle towards legal or public policy demands that do not get to the cause of the problem, or towards their own feminist organizations, which they finance and promote.
In spite of all this, working women have played an active role in the recent strikes that took place at the Tamaulipas maquila factories, the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM), the Chapingo Autonomous University (UACh), the Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca (UABJO), and in the recent sit-in of the Section 22 teachers belonging to the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacion (CNTE). PLP supports these struggles and organizes these workers in some of these universities and works with the Section 22 teachers.
We make an effort, however, to transcend the limits of trade union or feminist struggles and advance towards the revolutionary struggle for communism.
HAITI, March 19—Working class women are in a precarious condition in Haiti. Despite the fact that the government has a minister of women’s affairs, and there are many organizations who “fight” for the rights of women, against discrimination between men and women and against domestic violence perpetrated against women—nothing has really improved in the lives of working women in Haiti.
International Women’s day is a holiday with communist origins, March 8 is celebrated in many ways around the world. In Haiti, there are conferences or educational meetings, yet none of them tackle the day-to-day demands of working women and students, who do not enjoy real parity/equality with men.Organizations fighting for women’s rights are already engaged in an unequal battle, since in a class society there are bourgeois women and working class women and their needs, demands, and struggles are not the same.
In fact, ruling class women who exploit other women or who benefit from the precarious condition of other women. These contradictions cannot be resolved until class society is destroyed with communist revolution and we live in a truly egalitarian world.
It is with this in mind that we gathered to commemorate International Working Women’s Day. About 30 people met in a conference room in a small provincial town to discuss the role of women in the fight for change in Haiti and around the world on Sunday, March 10. A presentation, using in part the article that previously appeared in CHALLENGE, summed up the story of March 8. It inspired many of the young women present to take control of the future by participating in the struggle against the established order. They understood that gender inequality, exploitation and all sorts of discrimination are all fruits of the capitalist system, and it is only by overthrowing this system that we will have a fair society.
Two of the participants believe that the situation that women face is not by accident. Women are trained and educated to believe they are the weaker sex and should be subordinate to men, that there are studies and jobs that should be reserved for men, that they shouldn’t make the effort needed to aspire to equality, or that they should depend on the men they marry, that they should not make decisions as equal partners.
These young women think that it is the obligation of women to fight for the collective well-being, that it is horrid to see women forced to prostitute themselves in order to get a bite to eat for themselves and their families, or be resigned to violence out of fear of losing whatever livelihood they may have.
We wanted to give full value due to women in our struggle and to recognize their courage. There was a general consensus among the participants in this conference that women have to become equal partners in the struggle for equality and to end the system of exploitation that engenders it. And even more, become leaders in the struggle, both in the day-to-day struggle and in developing the communist ideology. And that our class brothers in struggle have to welcome their participation and their leadership!
To end the day on a social note, we had pizza and drinks while we watched a film called “Black November” about a volatile, oil-rich Nigerian community that wages war against their corrupt government and a multi-national oil corporations in order to protect their land from being destroyed by excessive drilling and spills.
The end of capitalism will be the end of all sorts of inequalities. Let’s fight to end capitalism!
During a forum discussion about the recent outbreak of teacher strikes, a Bronx college student asked “Yes, but when will we go on strike here at CUNY?” Whether raising tuition every year or paying poverty wages to part-time instructors, these attacks are racist as they target students and faculty that are disproportionally Black and Latin. But militant, multi-racial, student & faculty fightback is growing on a number of campuses. We are organizing forums, conferences, rallies and “grade-ins.”
Whether organizing to oppose tuition hikes or demanding better pay for part-time instructors, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are there, fighting hard now but also for a better future. And that future is communism where the workers and students fighting back today run all of society in the future.
CUNY runs on part-time (adjunct) labor. More than 60 percent of the courses are taught by adjuncts, many of whom make approximately $3,000 a course. An adjunct teaching the maximum number of courses (which is never guaranteed) at this salary makes a yearly salary of around $33,000 per year. This is a poverty wage in New York City! This two-tier system of full-time and part-time faculty has allowed CUNY to get away with running its 20 campuses on the backs of low wage faculty, who are disproportionately Black and Latin.
But let’s be clear, even though the current fight is to improve the wages of part-time faculty, we can never forget that the primary targets of racist attacks at CUNY are the students. The majority of students at CUNY are Black and Latin and the racist attacks on them come from every direction. Their instructors struggle with poverty wages and they are overworked, often having to travel long distances between campuses. Student’s books become more and more expensive and the buildings where they attend classes crumble around them, and their tuition keeps going up.
To build unity between faculty and students, we have invited students to our union meetings. This has strengthened the connections between faculty and students revealing, for example, that many of our students and some adjuncts are Uber drivers. Students see the adjunct struggle as part of their struggle and they are also the most willing and ready to fight.
In a significant development, more than eight campuses passed resolutions last spring endorsing militant actions, including a strike. However, due to the dead-end politics of the union leadership, the 25,000 members of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) union are not prepared for a strike. Instead of seriously planning for a strike the union leaders plan endless, useless trips to the state capitol to lobby politicians or spend time and energy figuring out how to shame the CUNY Board of Trustees. As if any of the CEOs who launch these racist attacks on our faculty and students have any shame!
Nonetheless, while we realize that we may not be in a position to just “go on strike” we know we have to try to expand the limits of what’s possible at CUNY. That means getting to know people, joining committees, and getting people to trust one another, all the while organizing collective actions. Many rank and filers and PLP members are involved in this kind of work. At a recent conference led by a rank and file group, over 100 people attended to share experiences about the strike wave and make plans for future actions. One PLP comrade spoke about the “traveling strike panel” where students go from class to class talking about a strike. Another spoke about the need to make the fight against racism a central theme in our organizing.
PLP members have many plans to continue participating, learning, and leading in these struggles. In our staff and student organizations, we are involved in many activities- from social evenings at the movies to hosting a forum on U.S. policy in Venezuela. We are participating in a rally at the Bronx Borough President’s Office where student leaders will denounce racist plans for tuition hikes and fare hikes and demand higher pay for adjuncts.
PLP is fighting hard for the worker-student alliance, challenging the divisions that exist between students and teachers. As we get closer to May Day, we plan to organize a CUNY contingent that reflects this sense of urgency and class struggle. We want to be clear in our study groups and meetings that we participate in these struggles not only to win some reforms and make life a little better under capitalism, but we also fight for a better future, communism. With the dynamic students and young adjuncts we are working with, the future is bright!
- Information
Workers' studygroup debate Blackkklansman, a pro-cop film
- Information
- 24 March 2019 69 hits
NEW YORK CITY, March 19—Over 20 Progressive Labor Party members (PLP) and friends at a local study group compared the nationalist lies of “Blackkklansman,” the film directed by Spike Lee to Boots Riley’s heroic tale of multiracial workers fighting back in “Sorry to Bother You.” We watched both movies. We discussed how Riley’s is a pro-working class movie while Spike Lee (who started his career as an anti-cop writer/director) is now doing the work for the ruling class in his pro-cop film.
We were a multiracial group of workers, students and retirees. After the movie, we passed out a copy of a CHALLENGE article, which was a critique of “Blackkklansman” by Boots Riley and the PLP. Having the leaflet as a source material, we opened the floor for thoughts and questions. Someone said, “Spike deserves credit for bringing the story to light.” A comrade rebutted that statement by saying, “This story is all a lie, as stated in the CHALLENGE article. The film upholds the ideas of capitalism which are very dangerous for the working class.”
“Well, how is it dangerous when it’s just him using his poetic license?” a friend questioned. Another PL’er said, “It’s dangerous like “Birth of a Nation” is dangerous. It’s stories like these that promote ideas that the oppression we feel is coming from other workers and not the system.”
Someone mentioned that a Jewish cop was in the film, as if that is promoting multiracial unity. As a criticism, it was clear by this point we should’ve done the reading together, before watching the movie. Another PL’er pointed out that it wasn’t even true. The real Ron Stalworth character had a non-Jewish white partner made to be Jewish in the movie to share a vested interest in stopping the Klan. “The only unity this film wants us to feel is the unity with cops,” the comrade insisted.
A different PL’er disagreed, “The other unity is with Black nationalism. In this film we only see the racism and sexism of the Klan and no criticism of Stokely Carmichael or the Black Student government as if they were flawless. Spike Lee wants Black workers to trust the system and Black nationalism when the rulers attack, which are both dead-ends for Black workers.”
In response, someone said, “The end of this movie really moved me. When I saw the footage of what happened in Charlottesville, it put it all in context for me. That we need to do something to fight this!” Another friend replied, “That’s what’s so dangerous about this movie, it uses emotions about a very dramatic experience for all of us to conform to their solution.”
Final comments were, “The unity in “Sorry to Bother You” was better because it showed the unity between the workers,” and “I liked “Sorry to Bother You”—it was just a better film.”
It’s important to note how art is used under capitalism. Just as in everything else under this system, it is used to hide capitalism’s true nature, which is racist, sexist and in a constant state of war for profit.
At the end of the event, we spoke about communism and how May Day is coming up. That’s when we get to use our voices and tell the truth about our past, future and the truth of who we really are. We are workers fighting to end this system of torture and greed. We collected donations and encouraged our friends to come to May Day. Join us as we prepare to write our own story. Fight for communism!
