NEW YORK CITY, October 15 — More than 90 people filled the room to “Defend the CUNY Six--Drop the Charges Now!”  Others were barred from entering by campus security. As reported in the last issue of CHALLENGE, students demonstrating against General David “Death Squad” Petraeus teaching at the City University of New York (CUNY) were attacked by the NYPD on September 17. A panel composed of two students, two professors, and an Iraq war veteran addressed students and their supporters. They denounced the militarization of the community and explained how U.S. Imperialism must be defeated. While the audience responded well to the speeches, little practical plans were put forward.
An anti-war veteran of the 1960’s struggles gave the most concrete remarks. He stated, “The best defense is a good offense!” Because of the week-by-week demonstrations, Petraeus has been forced to teach his
Monday seminars in a bunker-like environment with underground garages. PLP and friends must resume these demonstrations wherever he hides, wherever he goes. More importantly, we must build a large citywide anti-imperialist movement on every one of the CUNY campuses because most CUNY students do not yet know about Petraeus, and the foul deeds of the U.S. military and the CIA.
More than that, Progressive Labor Party must be at the forefront of this struggle, calling for communism — a system without wages, imperialist wars, racism, and sexism — as the only solution to the terror capitalists rage against workers and students, domestically and internationally. PLP should use this momentum to build for their International College Conference to Smash Imperialism on November 8 and 9, as it will provide a real alternative to building illusions of a safer capitalism. The conference will engage friends in critical questions, such as what is the relationship between imperialism and fascism; how do we build an antiracist and antisexist movement on campus; why is a communist party, PLP, necessary to building, sustaining, and advancing a communist world.
The veteran suggested that we concentrate our forces next week on a particular campus. For example, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) center is at City College. Despite strong faculty opposition voiced at a Town Hall meeting at the College of Staten Island, the Provost continues to connive to bring in ROTC (see CHALLENGE 10/16). Progressive forces from CSI must be brought together with folks from the three campuses where ROTC has already been instituted:  City College, Medgar Evers, and York.
At any rate the students are determined to fight on. They have received letters of support from the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY). Money has been raised to replace broken glasses and to pay for legal expenses. The workers in PSC will raise more money if needed. But the students alone cannot sustain the struggle by themselves. They need to build strong relationships with faculty and other campus workers, and with soldiers and sailors as well. History shows us that during the course of the struggle against the murderous Vietnam War, both soldiers and students alike rebelled against imperialism. And the majority of the U.S. working class was won to see that slaughtering workers in other countries was not in their interest.
Today the task of building an anti-war movement is more difficult than in the 1960’s because we live in a period of developing fascism.
Police terror against black and brown youth has increased. The union movement has been decimated. Thousands of people remain in detention even though they haven’t been charged let alone convicted. More undocumented immigrants have been deported under Obama’s reign than in any other point in history. Every day new reports come out of increased government spying on civilians at home. Why is all of this happening now? U.S. capitalists are on a collision course with capitalists from China, Russia and other countries. (Russia has a naval base in Syria). To prepare for future conflicts the U.S. government plans a stronger military with more black and Latino officers being trained in ROTC on NYC campuses. The ruling class also plans to develop more and more patriotism among workers and students. Well, we are not going to go along with this program! With communist ideas and practice, fight back!

As the bosses’ economy continues to tank, one news report after the next warns that young people are entering the worst job market ever.  This “new normal” of high unemployment and relentless attacks on salaries, benefits, and unions has teachers running scared as well.  In hot pursuit is the main wing of the U.S ruling class. As these capitalists find themselves losing ground to their imperialist rivals, they are pushing for greater, more centralized control over what is being taught.
Most recently that push has taken the form of the Common Core — our common enemy.
The Common Core is a set of learning goals the bosses have established that require even more high-stakes testing.  It is a part of President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top,” a competition where the losers — students and teachers alike — are trained to blame themselves, not the racist, exploitive capitalist system.   Education workers, parents and students must not be fooled by the bosses’ stated goal to use the Common Core to ramp up “critical thinking.” Real critical thinking would uncover the truth that capitalism can never work for the vast majority.
Budget Cuts Tied to Imperialist Wars
The budget pressure facing schools across the U.S. is directly tied to the multi-trillion-dollar expenses from the failed imperialist adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the need to fund future wars in the Middle East and eventually Asia.  The budget cuts are frontal attacks on teachers and their unions. But their primary targets are working-class students. Today these young people spend their days in degraded learning conditions. Tomorrow they may be battlefield casualties in the bosses’ next imperialist war.
United, teachers, parents, and students could effectively fight back against these anti-worker education reforms. That’s why the bosses design these reforms to drive a wedge between education workers and the families they serve.  
Common Core is the latest development in a long-standing ruling-class effort to produce workers to serve its industrial and military machines and to control school curricula. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the Rockefeller Foundation contributed heavily to the creation of the Educational Testing Service, the agency that spawned the College Board and its racist and hated SAT. Starting before World War II, the Carnegie Foundation, a leading force in the racist eugenics movement (breed only genetically “superior” people), spent millions to develop standardized tests. In 1965, it initiated the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is still used today as a national standard to measure the fitness of the working class for industrial and military competition with the U.S. bosses’ overseas rivals. With an estimated 30 percent of high school graduates now lacking the tools for military service, the crisis of capitalist education is acute.  
The same U.S. ruling class forces are now positioning themselves in a desperate fight to maintain supremacy, a struggle that will inevitably lead to bigger and broader wars. Every education reform pronouncement of Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan is framed by a thinly veiled rhetoric of war. The priority, they tell us, is to make sure U.S. capitalism is not “surpassed,” by its rivals, and that its workers are prepared to compete in the global economy. As surely as trade wars lead to shooting wars, education workers, students and parents must harbor no illusions about the true purpose of education reform: war preparation.
The Liberal Myth of Opportunity
The broad shift in the U.S. economy away from manufacturing and toward the so-called “service sector” has placed new pressure on the rulers to dress up their schools as places where any young person can unlock their opportunity to a better future, if only they try.  Racism makes a mockery of this promise. Liberal commentators like Diane Ravitch take this hypocrisy seriously — reforms like the Common Core undermine U.S. democracy, as she says repeatedly.  In Ravitch’s world, we ought not to expect proficiency from all students. She believes we ought to be honest in saying that schools must do a better job in more fairly sorting out young people for various rungs on the job market ladder. And as the job market trends toward a status quo where a small number of highly educated (and debt-ridden) college graduates claw their way into a “knowledge economy,” while most remain locked into a lifetime of sporadic employment and low earnings, the myth that every worker had a chance at success becomes ever more important.  To make workers continue to blame ourselves for the failures of the capitalists’ system, the mirage of a high-quality education available to all becomes ever more crucial.  Enter the Common Core.
The Common Core exists in the same world as the one where racist police murder and National Security Agency surveillance go unchecked.   The Common Core’s intensified monitoring and computerization provides the rulers new avenues for control over what is said in classrooms and staff meetings.  National teacher union leaders have embraced these steps toward fascism. On the local level, union leaders have done little more than question or negotiate the pace of their implementation.  Talk of “higher standards” and “critical thinking” is a foil to win well-meaning and anti-racist teachers into the patriotic fold.  
True critical thinking would lead to massive strikes and walkouts.  We should aspire to this higher standard of learning and action. Yet the important teachers strike in Chicago last fall teaches us that we must aim for even more.  A radical, militant, anti-racist alternative is desperately needed in battles against segregation and racist school closures in Chicago, New York, and throughout the U.S. The Progressive Labor Party is establishing a beachhead for bigger battles to come.  Education workers, students and parents must fight tooth and nail against the Common Core and war budgets with our eye on the biggest prize. We must organize a movement for a working-class revolution. Our goal is to win the world our children — and theirs — deserve: a communist world.

MEXICO CITY, October 13 — The fascist repression against the striking teachers of the National Coordinating Committee (CNTE) unleashed by the bosses’ government of President Enrique Peña Nieto reveals the criminal and anti-working class nature of the capitalist system.  The complicity of Miguel Angel Mancera, the mayor of Mexico City, also illustrates how politicians of all the electoral parties — PRI, PAN, PRD, or PT — are capitalists’ loyal servants bent on turning education into a profit-driven business during their global crisis.
The brutal eviction from the city center carried out on September 13 by thousands of federal cops and Federal District riot police, and the subsequent military occupation of the city center, exemplify the fascism the bosses will use to impose their plans.
CNTE teachers’ courage in resisting fascist repression (see CHALLENGE, 10/2) as well as the attacks from the bosses’ media, has inspired thousands of teachers nation-wide, to go on strike, occupy public squares and fight the cops.
Fascist Dictatorship and Imperialists’ Interests
In two CNTE-sponsored discussions about education reform, columnist Luis Hernandez Navarro presented the paper “The Counter Education Reform,” describing how the ruling class, represented by businessman Claudio Gonzalez, outlined for Peña the content of the reform, and how to pass it into law.
The September 13 fascist repression demonstrates the role of the police and the army as enforcers of their law. That apparatus serves the interests of the class in power, the bosses, as do the executive, legislative and judicial branches, at the federal and state level.
As long as the bosses hold political power, the laws and the might of the state will be used to impose the interests of the ruling class on the working class — a dictatorship of a minority of millionaires oppressing an impoverished majority.
In the U.S. the education market is valued at $1.3 trillion. For the multimillionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, the business of education in the U.S. represents an “opportunity” of $500 billion (La Jornada, 1/3/13).
U.S. bosses are enacting reforms to destroy public education and turn it into a lucrative business. It’s the same plan being implemented in Mexico; Claudio Gonzalez is advisor to private schools and is connected with Televisa, the media conglomerate.
We Need A Revolutionary Party
Labor, education, energy and fiscal reforms are all interconnected, responding to the needs of the imperialists and local capitalists. It means more oppression, fascist control and exploitation for the working class, and more profits and power for the capitalists. Trade union struggles are limited in confronting these interests and their leaders defend the system.
We must fight these attacks, which affect all workers. But we need to be organized as a class to destroy the capitalist system that’s behind these attacks. It’s in the bosses’ interest to separate these reform struggles and separate those involved in each one.
Working-class liberation can only be achieved by seizing political power through a communist revolution, led by a workers’ revolutionary party, not a bosses’ electoral party. Only a revolutionary party can tie these struggles together, not just to fight the bosses’ attacks, but to smash the capitalist dictatorship and build a workers’ dictatorship.
We must unite as a class internationally since similar reforms confronting us affect workers worldwide.
We’re calling on all teachers in struggle, and to the working class as a whole, to join Progressive Labor Party. The best lesson teachers can give their students is to join the struggle for a socially just society: communism! That’s REAL education.

Many people talk about human nature, saying that competition is “natural,” and that it leads to progress and that the selfishness of capitalism is really natural and acceptable. An important book puts a big hole in that idea, using scientific research into the emotions of animals. And it points out how capitalism has distorted the science for its own reasons by emphasizing competition over cooperation.
Marc Bekoff’s book, The Emotional Lives of Animals, (2007) records anecdotal evidence that most “higher” animals show rich emotional behaviours, more similar than different from the joy, grief and anger of humans. There is a foreword by Jane Goodall, famous for her years of observing primates in their natural habitat. Bekoff’s purpose parallels her work in his description of the interactions of many species. But by far the more interesting conclusion from his work lies in his secondary thesis that cooperation forms the basis for continuation of the species of all social animals.
Distorting Darwin
We have been taught that Darwin’s legacy is survival of the fittest (and from that, the “social Darwinist” theory that the spirit of competition ensures superiority of the wealthy under a profit system). Current capitalist philosophy takes this distortion of Darwin to promote the idea that basic human nature needs to be self-centered to win the race of life. On the contrary, Darwin and many others have observed that most animals are social beings whose collective societies can only survive through mutual aid and co-existence. Bekoff quotes Darwin, “Those communities which included the greatest number of sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
In The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin argues that “emotions evolved in both animals and humans for the purpose of furthering social bonds in group-living animals.”  He believed that emotions connected us with the rest of our community and with the rest of the earth. He discussed morality as a natural extension and outgrowth of such social instincts.
As an example, Bekoff’s book cites evidence of parallel “brain-wiring” for cooperation which exists in both animals and man.  A study from The New Scientist, December 2, 2006, reported that in many species of whales — humpback, fin, killer and sperm — spindle cells were found to be in the same area of their brains as human spindle cells.  This brain region is linked with social organization, empathy, intuition about the feelings of others . . . And whales have more of them than humans! (p. xix preface)
The critical nature of social interaction has been documented through observation by Bekoff and others. His fieldwork among coyotes for over seven years in the Grand Teton National Park revealed the importance to survival of group dependence where those yearlings who drifted away from their society suffered a 55% mortality rate, compared to less than 20% for their stay-at-home peers.
Egalitarianism = Survival
Coyotes, as well as many domestic animals, compensate for differences in strength and size during play and close social connections in order to prolong the activity.  They manifest self-handicapping (lying down, exposing their stomach) and role-reversing (when a large animal plays with a much smaller one) to make the interaction more mutual. This “egalitarianism” as Darwin labelled it, is another basis for the survival of species.  
Further, Bekoff says that affiliative behaviour, the egalitarianism of fair play, and shared caring for the young is a precondition for evolution of humans. He concludes that, in the “survival of the fittest” philosophy, cooperation has long been ignored because of the ideological basis of competition. He says the “more we look for cooperation, the more we discover its presence. Animals certainly will compete, but cooperation is central in the evolution of social behaviour, and this alone makes it key for survival.”
The first primitive communist societies of tribes shared resources and cherished the land. Today, billions living in poverty survive by employing collectivity, and fighting back against their exploiters who profit off their misery. History is teaching working people that class struggle for communism is the real key to survival and happiness.