Students and teachers in Kenya are squarely facing the crises of global capitalism and U.S. imperialism. In September, at the same time as the teachers’ strike in Seattle, public educators across Kenya waged a five-week strike against the national Teachers Service Commission (TSC). The strike was launched by the two national teachers’ unions in response to the government’s failure to follow through on promised pay increases of 50 to 60 percent, as ordered by Kenya’s Supreme Court. According to the Nairobi-based Daily Nation, schools were “paralyzed” in most of the country as striking teachers “stormed” schools where teachers had scabbed (9/8/15). University students supported the strike, and the striking public school teachers built solidarity with non-unionized private school teachers.
Kenya’s capitalist bosses are simultaneously flirting with two imperialist powers, the U.S. and rising China, with workers and students caught in between. Weeks before the teachers’ strikes, in an attempt to ward off Kenya’s growing alliance with Chinese imperialism, President Barack Obama signed $1 billion in trade, oil pipeline and technology deals in Nairobi. As the New York Times noted (7/24/15), trade with China has blossomed to $222 billion, three times the country’s business with the U.S. Meanwhile, China and Kenya are jointly funding a new East Africa railway network to connect Kenya with Chinese interests in South Sudan, Uganda and elsewhere.
As the Daily Nation noted, however: “Billions of shillings in terms of teachers’ salaries, students’ school fees, et cetera... were put on hold...You cannot build a new railway line worth more than Sh300 billion [Kenyan shillings, equivalent to about $3 billion U.S.] and fail to raise a comparatively paltry Sh16 billion to pay teachers” (10/11/15).
Teachers in both the U.S. and Kenya have a world to win if they can succeed in uniting their common struggle against capitalism with workers throughout the world. The education struggle knows no borders, and neither does the international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party! As we fight for education for our youth, our task ahead is to sharpen the militancy of our struggle here and keep connecting our struggle to our class sisters and brothers around the world. We fight for a communist world, where all workers can fulfill their maximum potential after money and borders are smashed.
CHALLENGE readers should share this article with other teachers and students, raise this struggle in their parent-teacher associations and unions, and join PLP to build a movement to fight back!

Last month’s Seattle teachers’ strike, the first in the city’s schools in 30 years, marked a qualitative advance in efforts to build militant anti-racism in a 5,000-member union. Years of struggle by the Social Equality Educators (SEE) caucus paid off in making the five-day work stoppage more politically effective—and a foundation for building a fighting, anti-racist organization for years to come.
In Seattle as elsewhere, public schools have been under sustained attack. Billionaires are raiding what remains in the public coffers as the capitalist ruling class attempts to centralize control of education. In Washington state, the fiasco of school funding was laid bare by a state Supreme Court ruling that held the Legislature in contempt for failing to fully fund basic education.  Educators reached their breaking point, and the strike was the result.
But as subsequent events made clear, reform politics in the current period is a game rigged by the capitalist bosses and their allies in union leadership. Despite a unanimous strike vote by the rank and file, the union’s executive board and representative assembly were authorized to suspend the strike on their own, with the general membership having no real say.
Nonetheless, we achieved some success.  A 40-member bargaining team fought for guaranteed recess time, the requirement of “Race and Equity Teams” at each school, and the removal of test scores from teacher evaluations. These demands generated broad public support. We strengthened our position by defying union leadership and organizing 200 educators in our zone to march five miles to the district headquarters. The march pressured the union leadership and sent a message to the bargaining team to hold the line and stop submitting weak counter-proposals. This action built unprecedented solidarity in our ranks, and a tentative agreement was reached that night.
In the end, we won 30 minutes per day of guaranteed recess for all schools—a rebuff to administrators in low-income, majority Black and Latin neighborhoods, where recess had been cut to as little as 15 minutes in a fool’s errand to increase test scores. We won the establishment of Race and Equity Teams in 30 percent of schools, a wedge for teachers to expose racism and build anti-racist practices.  While we’ll never get rid of racism in the schools under capitalism, we can use these teams to develop more people into anti-racist fighters. Finally, we won the fight to eliminate test scores from teacher evaluations, a major blow to the capitalists’ national education reform movement.
Capitalist Schools Bound to Fail
These concrete achievements are important. But we should be clear that the strike’s main victory was to- develop consciousness among educators as participants in class struggle, however unevenly. Of course, illusions persist.  As many see it, the next step in this struggle is to force the hand of the State Legislature, possibly through statewide strikes, to reform the tax structure for education funding.  This strategy fails to address the reality that capitalist education will never serve the needs of the working class. Even if the state “fully” funds education, by the bosses’ standards, we will still be stuck with the general crisis of global capitalism and the particular crisis of U.S. imperialism.  We will still face attacks from a ruling class demanding that workers do more for less.  Our students will still face a future of racist police terror, mass unemployment, and forced recruitment into the next global imperialist war.
But to the extent that we can continue to develop working-class consciousness and workers’ confidence in their collective power, we will have taken another step forward.  Now we have to mount more mass struggles to demonstrate that capitalism is not a system that can be reformed. It must be replaced by communism, a system that will transform education to meet the needs of all students—and the anti-racist, anti-sexist society they will help to build.

CHICAGO, October 3 — “This is what a communist society will look like!” remarked one comrade after observing our international and multi-generational, working-class gathering. The occasion was our city collective’s second annual October Revolution Celebration Dinner, hosted at a banquet hall on Chicago’s south side. More than fifty comrades and friends, hailing from Oakland, Guyana, Mexico and the Philippines, came together.
After everyone had eaten their fill of international cuisine, the program kicked off with a fiery speech from a comrade who blasted the racist and sexist failures of capitalism and emphasized the need to organize for communist revolution. Next came an interactive, bilingual presentation that summarized the history of the first days of the Russian Revolution, and also highlighted past and present struggles of Progressive Labor Party’s first fifty years. Communist songs were sung, and the evening wrapped up with dancing.
Having a DJ made the event livelier, but a number of comrades were upset that some of the songs played contained openly sexist language. This underlined the importance of infusing culture with communist, egalitarian ideas and replacing abusive and degrading themes with powerful, pro-working-class messages. Cultural events are just some of the many steps needed to build the class struggle to the level achieved by the Russian and Chinese revolutionaries. They wielded working-class culture as a powerful weapon in the fight to violently overthrow the rotten capitalist class and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. We’re committed to making this event twice as big next year, and to win more workers to the Party and the fight for a communist world!

BALTIMORE, October 7—A multiracial group of more than 40 protesters rallied against racist police brutality in front of Central Booking in downtown Baltimore today. This was the 115th consecutive “West Wednesday” decrying the 2013 murder of Tyrone West by Baltimore cops after a routine traffic stop. One young activist, seasoned by the rebellion sparked by Freddie Gray’s murder here in April, gave a stirring speech about the need to organize against police terror.
Even as darkness fell, passing drivers kept honking their horns in support of demonstrators’ signs. Twenty copies of CHALLENGE, including coverage of previous “West Wednesday” rallies and the Freddie Gray rebellion, were distributed to protesters. The Progressive Labor Party is advancing our analysis that abuse by authorities is a necessary part of capitalism. Police brutality intimidates workers in general. In particular, it discourages Black workers, the most militant section of the working class, from fighting back against this racist, oppressive system built on exploitation and imperialist war.
Today’s rally marked an expansion of the struggle, with two more recently victimized families joining the protest. The family of Darrell Murray, who died suspiciously in a Cumberland, Maryland jail, called for continued vocal opposition against police brutality and condemned the failure of the district attorney to prosecute brutal officers and guards. Darrell’s sister Shawna, an activist with Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, noted that deaths inside jails routinely go unreported. She called for independent investigations of these deaths, not the standard prison cover-ups. She also noted that correctional officers in the Western Maryland facilities are known to belong to racist groups and target Black and Latin inmates. Darrell Murray had a reputation for calling out guards when they abused inmates’ rights. He had told his family that he feared for his life because he refused to keep quiet. His fear was evidently justified.
Kelly Holsey, the girlfriend of Keith Davis—chased by police into a garage and barraged with bullets despite being unarmed—spoke poignantly of his fight for life. Just three minutes away from a hospital, Davis was left bleeding on the ground for more than 40 minutes. After undergoing several operations to repair the bullet damage, he remains in jail, where guards keep him in line by depriving him of his medicine. Kelly told the crowd that Davis’s shooting was a wake-up call. She said she would no longer remain silent about the murder of Freddie Gray, Keith’s unwarranted shooting, and the scourge of police brutality. Chants calling for justice for all victims of cop violence brutality rang out as the rally ended and planning began for the next action.
The following Saturday, October 10, PL’ers continued to spread the word about the West Wednesday struggles at the “Justice or Else!” rally in DC on the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March. We distributed hundreds of flyers and CHALLENGEs with stories about this ongoing battle. We challenged people to think about what “justice” means within a system of equality and state terror, and what the Black capitalist Nation of Islam means by “or else.” Justice is not possible under capitalism. Whenever kkkops murder someone, they are simply doing their job: serving the capitalist class by intimidating workers. Even on those rare occasions when a cop is indicted, justice cannot be served; there will inevitably be more racism, killings and mass poverty. Only a communist revolution can eliminate profits and exploitation, the basis for brutality and racism. Only a revolution can deliver justice to victims of police brutality, their families, and the international working class.