The Occupy Wall Street Movement and opposition caucuses organized a conference to bring together teachers and students who are angry at capitalism’s many attacks on education. The conference took place in The Center for Worker Education and PLP members did their best to give the participants a communist education. PL students and teachers were very vocal in the conference’s many different discussion groups.  

The unionists, liberals, and well-meaning workers all looked to the union, a pawn of capitalist rulers, to fight racism and create an education system that could meet the needs of the working class. They are ultimately wrong since education under capitalism must serve the bosses’ needs, which conflict with the needs of the working class. The ruling class needs a patriotic, loyal working class to passively accept its attacks and fight its imperialist wars, so it can remain the world’s superpower. Workers’ need a society where we make all of the decisions based on our needs to develop as full human beings collectively. That is communism.

Union Helps Resegregate Schools

One participant pointed out that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) was actually a backlash against integration in the ‘60’s and is now helping to resegregate the schools. Unions walk the contradiction of appearing to fight the bosses while selling out the workers.   

The need to fight racism was brought up continually throughout the conference. A PL’er pointed out that contemporary racism isn’t about who perpetuated the action, but who is affected by the outcome. He said the bosses love to use puppets like Obama to carry out their racist attacks on the working class. The Party brought up the need to fight racism through multi-racial unity in opposition to fragmented forms of black or Latino nationalism or the Community Control of a People’s Board of Education that pushed the poison of multi-class unity.  

A PL’er also reviewed the history of the UFT. Agreeing with another speaker who challenged the anti-communist attack on the USSR, he said that without the Soviet Union, the working class had lost its beacon at the time when the Soviets were leaders of the international working class. He also pointed out that the union is made up of workers. “Look around” he said, “You’re all workers and you’re here.” Workers’ power is needed to confront the UFT misleaders at the next delegate assembly and create a wildcat strike on the next professional development day (when only teachers come to school). These types of actions are needed to learn how to fight the bosses as a class. They also provide more opportunities to expose the bosses’ democracy sham, when they use the cops and courts to attack workers’ struggles.

School with No Books

One participant taught in a Bronx school that claimed to be a college prep academy, yet it had no books. She is a technology teacher, but they had closed the computer labs for three years because three computers were stolen. The administration said that books were old and passé and that students should use the Internet instead, while keeping the computer lab closed. Only under capitalism could this kind of racist hypocrisy exist.

Such conferences create the opportunity for Party growth. As we participate in them, we can struggle to advance our communist politics. A new anti-racist caucus was established there, but we have to be in it to win it. We need to struggle with those workers around us to go to conferences like this and bring the need to struggle back to our workplaces. No union will liberate us from capitalism, let alone an anti-racist caucus in a union that’s playing ostrich. Only building the PLP to fight the wholesale attack on our class’s education will eventually give the working class the learning that it really needs.

CALUMET CITY, IL, February 10 — On February 9, a multiracial crowd of 60 workers, students, and teachers packed a city hall meeting here to voice their outrage at the murderous racist kkkops who slaughtered 15-year-old Stephon Watts.

On February 1, Stephon, a black youth who had a form of autism known as Asperger Syndrome, experienced an extreme episode where his father could not get him to go to school. When Stephon’s father called their hospital for assistance, he was told to call the cops. He dialed 311 (the non-emergency number), hoping to get a professional trained to work with special needs children. Instead Calumet City police sent a squad car. 

Bosses’ Thugs in Blue Show True Nazi Colors

When the cops arrived, Stephon’s father insisted his son was “OK,” but they forced their way into the house anyway. These murderers proceeded to chase Stephon around his home.  When Stephon slashed one cop with a butter knife the bosses’ thugs in blue showed their true Nazi colors by slaughtering Stephon, a child with special needs, in cold blood.

But the working-class crowd at city hall would not be fooled. Speaker after speaker correctly described the cops as rabid dogs who either needed to be caged (jailed) or put down for murder. When a commenter attempted to blame Stephon for wielding a butter knife, a high school student declared, “You have no idea what went on in the head of that special needs child. I don’t care about the cuts on the cops! Think about the bullet holes in Stephon!”

Other speakers spoke at great length about decades of the city cops’ blatant, racist harassment and profiling. Some wanted to discuss “the lack of training” of these particular cops. But, especially in black neighborhoods, cops are trained to shoot first and are protected by their departments and city councils later.

To that end, one worker addressed the need to organize against the city council, the cops and the whole racist, capitalist system. The crowd erupted with, “Racist cops, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!” They drowned out the city council’s feeble attempt to restore order by reciting the pledge of allegiance, to a country whose cops have full permission to systematically murder workers, especially black youth. The crowd continued to chant as we slowly marched out of the meeting. 

Sadly, no amount of anger or chanting will bring back Stephon Watts or any other victims of police slaughter. That being said, it’s good the Watts family and their mostly black, working-class community are mobilizing to fight police brutality and racism in hopes of getting justice for Stephon.

But justice won’t come from the Illinois state police (who are “investigating” this crime), the courts or the federal government, all of whom work for the same capitalist bosses. Even if — on the extremely remote chance — that these murderous cops get convicted, it won’t stop the onslaught against the working class from the bosses’ cops worldwide.

To end class war, we must fight in class war. Join with the Progressive Labor Party to organize the international working class on the basis of communism with collectivity, militancy and unyielding anti-racism. We must smash capitalism and create a society where there’s no exploiting class, racism or murderous cops serving that ruling class. That’s the only way to gain true justice for all the victims of capitalism’s crimes, including Stephon Watts.

THE BRONX, NY, February 7 — Once again, “New York’s Finest” have demonstrated the true purpose of the kkkops: to protect and serve the bosses’ state, not the workers of the world or in the Bronx. These fascist, racist cops use petty crimes to racially profile, beat, illegally frisk and search, and even kill our young, especially in impoverished neighborhoods where the majority are black and Latino.  

On Thursday, February 2, an unarmed black man, Ramarley Graham, 18, was chased into his grandmother’s apartment and shot dead in front of her and his six-year-old brother by Richard Haste, an NYPD cop.  The police initially claimed that Ramarley had a gun, but no weapon was found, only a small amount of marijuana.   The police then dragged Ramarley’s grandmother to the 47th precinct and held her for seven hours, refusing to release her until she gave a statement.

Not long before Ramarley’s murder, another young black man, Jatiek Reed, 19, was beaten viciously by the NYPD.  This pattern of violence is the cops’ real job. It has the single purpose of keeping working-class people, and black and Latino workers in particular, terrified and quiet.  

But the bosses’ strategy isn’t working, because the outraged neighborhood has not stood passively by.  The Monday after the attack, a demonstration of many hundreds marched on the 47th precinct.  The crowd was angry, and some young workers had to be held back from physically attacking the precinct house.  CHALLENGE has been sold for years in this neighborhood. After the incident, Progressive Labor Party distributed nearly 800 copies of a leaflet that explained why these attacks are on the rise. 

New York’s bosses fear the working class, especially the workers in the Bronx.  The Bronx is the poorest of New York’s five boroughs, with up to 45 percent living in poverty and 54 percent youth unemployment in some neighborhoods.  As the capitalist economic crisis in the U.S. and worldwide continues to get worse, workers can only expect more repression.  There will be more murders and beatings, in the Bronx and elsewhere.   

We believe there is only one way to rid the Bronx of its racist murders, along with the violence, drugs, unemployment, and substandard education and healthcare that capitalism imposes on us. We must destroy the profit system at its roots.  The only reason these conditions prevail, and the only reason that the mad-dog police ruthlessly enforce them, is because the bosses are making money on workers’ misery.

Capitalism must be wiped out once and for all.  Workers, students, soldiers; black, Asian, Latino and white, unite and FIGHT BACK!

In Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, he said:

We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

In reality, however, Obama and the U.S. ruling class he serves cannot possibly produce economic fairness. Because capitalism is a super-exploitative, racist, sexist system, based on the drive for maximum profits, it is inherently unequal. “Fairness” would require eliminating the system itself.

Under capitalism, bosses and bankers own the means of production while they themselves produce nothing. Workers create everything of value and, for the most part, receive just enough to survive — if that. Phony “Fair Share” Obama is cynically trying to manipulate Occupy Wall Street-inspired sentiment for the section of the ruling class he represents.

No matter what popular phrases he opportunistically mouths in the run-up to this November’s election, Obama has no room in his agenda for the redistribution of wealth. His proposals to raise taxes on the very rich and to tighten regulation of investors have a different aim entirely. They are designed to enable the most most powerful imperialist bosses to wage the ever-wider wars they need in order to control energy resources and cheap labor, the vital elements in maintaining U.S. supremacy over its capitalist rivals.

War and Taxes At Heart of 2012 Election Circus

But not all U.S. capitalists have the same vested interest in U.S. imperialism. As a result, taxes and war will likely be the central focus of the 2012 election dogfight, which Obama kicked off with his blatant campaign speech in the State of the Union. The candidates’ positions differ according to their capitalist backers’ varying needs. The spectrum runs from arch-imperialist Obama to isolationist Ron Paul.

But for the working class, none of these candidates will solve its problems: mass racist, long-term unemployment; constantly shrinking wages; foreclosed homes; prison-like schools; mass detention and deportation of workers who are immigrants; and a criminal injustice system that imprisons 2.4 million people, of whom 70 percent are black and Latino (see page 5). Capitalist-created horrors confront the working class worldwide even more intensively, especially in the U.S.-spawned imperialist wars that slaughter millions in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Obama’s War Moves

On January 24, Obama asked Congress to hike rich people’s taxes and revive manufacturing, steps required for mobilization for armed conflict with China. (Saving the auto industry means saving the means to produce tanks and armored personnel carriers in wartime.) Obama’s supposedly pro-worker pronouncements came shortly after he had installed a new Marine base in Australia and officially “rebalanced” the Pentagon “toward the Asia-Pacific region.”

Obama represents the dominant, liberal Rockefeller wing of U.S. bosses who financed his election. Their financial and energy firms (JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Exxon Mobil, Chevron) operate in virtually every country on earth, and are on a collision course with China’s rising capitalists. Liberal Obama bankroller George Soros has bought big into Petrobras, a Brazilian oil company and its potential 4.9 million barrels per day, a prize for which Washington and Beijing are now jockeying.

Romney and Gingrich Clash Over Mobilizing Against China

If the sinking economy winds up wrecking Obama’s drive for re-election, the next U.S. president most likely will be Republican Mitt Romney, who stands close behind Obama in his loyalty to U.S imperialists. Romney’s primary source of election cash is U.S. global investment flagship Goldman Sachs. Like many U.S. capitalists, Goldman Sachs has ties to the Rockefeller forces but keeps a foot in both camps. 

Romney wants to keep the current tax rates but doesn’t explain how he intends to fund his proposed 50 percent increase in Navy ships. He pledges to “maintain robust military capabilities in the Pacific” and “implement a strategy that makes the path of regional hegemony for China far more costly than the alternative.” Although Obama is ideal for the bosses’ campaign to rally U.S. workers to their imperialist war agenda, the U.S. establishment could also live with Romney. That’s why its leading mouthpiece, the New York Times, editorialized, “Newt Gingrich will pass like a tantrum. That leaves us with a general election between two serious and certifiably sane candidates” (11/13/11).

Gingrich’s financial backers are soft on both taxes and China. He wants to abolish levies on capital gains and never mentions China on his national security webpage. “Radical Islamism” constitutes his chief global foe. No wonder that Gingrich’s top backer is the pro-Israel, billionaire casino owner, Sheldon Adelson, who has ongoing deals with China’s rulers to set up gambling dens there. The Gingrich-Romney divide crystallized last fall when Gingrich branded Romney as a friend of the Rockefeller imperialists: “It’s not that he’s a Mormon. It’s his Nelson Rockefeller problem” (Wall Street Journal, 10/16/11).

But the problematic and erratic Gingrich is not yielding to Romney as conveniently as the main rulers wish. He recently terrified them by trouncing Romney in South Carolina’s primary, triggering an anti-Gingrich frenzy in the capitalist media. They’ve turned up the pressure for Romney to win in Florida.

Ron Paul is backed by the smaller bosses. The darling of the conservative Cato Foundation, Paul appeals to U.S. businesses that either do not operate overseas or do not wish to antagonize their foreign hosts. He says that both the Internal Revenue Service (the federal tax collector) and the U.S.’s military role as “the world’s policeman” should be eliminated immediately. But he may be playing a double game, which would explain why the main rulers tolerate him. A potential third-party bid by Paul could split conservative Republicans’ vote and help a beleaguered Obama.

Looming Pre-Election Surprise:
Attack on Iran?

Confronting China, the Rockefeller wing’s biggest platform issue, looms years away for U.S. rulers. But a clash with Iran could well come before Election Day. The New York Times prepped its readers for an October (or earlier) surprise that would strengthen the U.S. imperialists’ hand. It devoted much of its Sunday Magazine (1/29/12) to an article by a well-connected Israeli journalist named Ronen Bergman. He concluded, “After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.” Responses from Iran’s allies —Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah — and from U.S. bosses could lead to “full-scale war” in the Middle East, Bergman wrote.

For the working class, the only political alternative to Obama, Romney, Gingrich and Paul is our Progressive Labor Party. No matter which of the bosses’ candidates wins, the ruling class’s agenda will prevail. We reject the electoral process that rewards one or another capitalist faction. Instead, we work painstakingly on the job and in the unions, schools, neighborhoods and churches to eradicate the death-dealing profit system. We immerse ourselves in and help to lead class struggles in these areas (see reports on pages 1, 3, 4 and 5) to win workers and youth to join and build the PLP.

Bringing masses of workers to our Party will motivate millions to actions far more meaningful than flipping a lever in a voting booth. It will produce a revolutionary communist movement to create a society that dumps the bosses and establishes workers’ power. Then the international working class, which has always produced all value, will share it according to workers’ needs.