PARIS, September 16 — A national teachers strike — backed by the biggest high school students union and the main federation of parents — is looming in both the public and private schools. The teachers’ unions are calling for a 24-hour walkout on September 27. They’re demanding “an end to job cuts, a different budgetary logic,” and “a democratic transformation of the educational system to ensure the success of all pupils.”

But one-day strikes are no threat to the bosses or the government. They’re a tactic the union misleaders use to keep control and divert workers’ militancy into a dead-end.

Over 52,000 jobs were cut in education in the past four years. Another 16,000 have been axed this school year, and still another 14,000 are slated to go in 2012. Meanwhile, the student population has risen by 60,000 this year.

All this leads to larger classes, difficulty finding substitutes for absent teachers, and the elimination of optional subjects and individual aid for pupils.

In budgetary terms, real teachers’ salaries have been frozen for 16 years. According to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), “even if overtime and bonuses are included, the average salary of teachers [in France] remains below the OECD average.”

An opinion poll published yesterday showed that 64% think the schools “operate badly,” up from 40% in 2007; 60% say the school system does not ensure equal opportunity.

Indeed, 31% of the university students are the children of executives and highly-paid academics. On the other hand, 12% come from white collar families, and 10% are children of factory workers.

Capitalism, Class Bias and Racism Go Hand-in-Hand

It can’t be any different under capitalism. Education in capitalist society is aimed at reproducing the domination of the ruling class. The children of the rich go to the best schools. A gifted minority gets scholarships. All other children are taught just enough to hold down a job, along with patriotism to make them loyal to the bosses and racism to keep them divided. In fact, a secret government report obtained in August by Le Monde newspaper says that racist and anti-Semitic insults and acts, aimed at both teachers and pupils, are becoming everyday occurrences in the schools.

Higher wages and no job cuts are reform demands that might be won, but the present economic crisis and social climate makes that highly unlikely. An isolated 24-hour strike certainly won’t win these demands. And there’s no way that the ruling class will permit “a democratic school system that ensures the success of all pupils.”

The French teachers’ unions are hardly raising revolutionary demands, aimed at winning teachers to realize the need for a revolutionary communist transformation of society. They’re promoting the illusion that their demands can actually be met under capitalism, and that they’re seriously fighting to obtain them.

The union hacks are looking to boost their popularity among teachers in the upcoming Oct. 13-20 elections to the labor-management boards that help run the school system. The outcome of those elections will determine each union’s representation, and consequently public financing of the union officials’ jobs. (Each union is apportioned a quota of paid hours during which its designated representatives are relieved of teaching duties. Not surprisingly, the union hacks leave the classroom permanently, and are paid full-time to “do union work.”)

The one-day teacher’s walkout is also a build-up to the October 12 national all-trades 24-hour strike. Widely-spaced one-day walkouts are the hacks’ recipe for appearing to act while ensuring that momentum has no chance to build and workers remain manageable. In reality, both strikes are aimed at mobilizing workers to vote for the Socialist Party in the first round of the presidential elections on April 22, 2012. This, despite the fact that during the 2007 campaign, Socialist candidate Ségolène Royale was tape-recorded in a behind-closed-doors’ meeting planning to double teachers’ class hours!

Communist teachers need to bring revolutionary politics to the organization and staging of the September 27 strike. By denouncing the union hacks’ corrupt scheming, and exposing how capitalist education serves to maintain the profit system, the strike could become a school for communism.J

French Jobless Mounting

Official July unemployment in mainland France was 9.1% (2.6 million workers). If you include workers who’ve given up looking for a job and those working part-time because they can’t find full-time jobs, the jobless rate rises to 16.1% (4.6 million workers in a labor force of 28.6 million people.

Official unemployment rates in the French overseas departments are much higher. The latest figures available — for 2009 — are 22% in French Guiana and from 22% to 27.2% for the islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique and Réunion. The 2011 unemployment rate on Mayotte Island is 25.4%. According to a 2010 government survey, 60% of the French population said unemployment was one of their top three worries.

In 2009, the latest year for which figures are available, 8.2 million people (13.5% of the population) lived in poverty, set at a monthly income of 954 euros or less (US$1,335).

I just saw the hilarious new movie, “Horrible Bosses,” and want to recommend it to CHALLENGE readers. It is a full-fledged comedy about three buddies who decide, after realizing that they have no other options, to kill their bosses!

Each of the three has a different situation: Nick (Jason Bateman) is a dedicated white-collar worker whose deceitful, treacherous, and completely evil boss (Kevin Spacy) chastises him for being two minutes late for work, among other things. He fails to give him a promotion after leading him to think he’ll get one for months, just to trick him into working harder. Nick tells the boss he’s going to quit, but the boss threatens to blacklist him with all the other companies in the field.

Kurt (Saturday Night Live’s Jason Sudekis) is another hard-working office worker for a small family-owned industrial company, and shows genuine concern for his coworkers. When the druggie, immoral, hedonistic son (Colin Farrell) takes over as head of the company after his father’s death, he threatens to fire Kurt if he doesn’t fire two other workers.

The third main character is Dale (Charlie Day), an innocent, young, and engaged-to-be-married dental assistant who is sexually harassed by his female boss, a dentist played by Jennifer Aniston.

The three men realize that each is stuck in a situation that they can’t get out of. They also realize that each of them would not be able to find another job in the failing economy, and are left with the decision to find a way to kill each other’s bosses.
    The rest of the film deals with the bumbling plans of the three men to carry out the killings. There are great supporting roles played by other top actors, especially Jamie Foxx as an equally bumbling potential hit man. A couple of his scenes expose the subtle racism of the three men, making their plans even more difficult. But in the end, things work out in a way that would generally please readers of CHALLENGE.

The film is not for everyone — much of the humor revolves around drug and sexual themes. But the jokes are there from the start of the movie until the end, and the contempt we feel for the three bosses does not dwindle. That was my main worry before seeing the film — that the writers would let the film’s bosses off the hook at the end. But all three bosses get what they deserve. There’s even a cameo at the end, by an actor many will recognize (I won’t give that away), who plays a new boss, but it’s clear, in a humorous little scene, that he’ll be no better!

“Horrible Bosses” is obviously not meant to be a political film, but it can still be useful to communist organizers. It would be a fun way to introduce topics like class structure, capitalist methods of management, and how the threat of unemployment keeps us as wage slaves. It is also interesting to note that this movie is one of the few that deals with sexual harassment of women against men — which is of course far less common than the reverse — but in the movie’s case could only happen because the male worker
was employed by the female dentist.

Finally, I suggest that this movie be seen by comrades and their friends, followed by a discussion of what life would be like in a world without any bosses. There could be rich talks about several topics: the pitfalls of sexism, racism, and drug abuse; how wage slavery exploits us not just economically but emotionally, and intellectually,  as well; 
why the increasing threat of unemployment leaves workers with few options; why you can’t kill off the bosses without killing capitalism; and finally, how the workplace could be organized under communism, with workers directly in control of their environments.

Red Critic

Annie Jacobsen and her new book “Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base” have been popular with NPR, the New York Times, the Daily Show and Democracy Now. Her book is a rehash of what goes on at the U.S. military testing base in the Nevada desert. However, what is grabbing headlines are the allegations made in the book’s final section.

Jacobsen alleges that the “Roswell Incident” –– in which a UFO supposedly crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947 –– was actually a failed Soviet propaganda campaign. She claims that the UFO in question was a Soviet spy plane designed by the Nazi Horten brothers and flown by 12-year-olds who had been genetically/surgically altered to look like aliens by the infamous Nazi Josef Mengele. The plane was crashed in the U.S. in order to cause a War of the Worlds panic (reference to H.G. Well’s novel that details the conflict between invading Martians and humans) that would serve as a cover for a Soviet invasion. The grand mastermind of this plan was, “naturally,” Joseph Stalin.

This theory is yet another method to equate two diametrically opposing forces: the Nazis and Soviets. Nazism is a variety of fascism (a form of capitalism in crisis) at its most brutal combining vicious racism with sexism and nationalism. While Nazism is inherently anti-working-class, the Soviets were fighting for a workers’ state. The Soviets vehemently fought the Nazis. Yet the U.S. continues to keep the workers in the dark through outright anti-communist lies.

Jacobsen’s anti-communist nonsense was spewed forth by a single anonymous source (most likely her over-active imagination) without any concern for facts or evidence. The media, owned by the ruling class, has been praising the book’s unscientific allegations. But facts are stubborn things, and they belie Jacobsen’s tale.

Immediate problems arose in Jacobsen’s story. Nazi Mengele did not disappear after the abandoning of Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945, but rather fled the Soviet Red Army, an odd behavior for a supposed ally. He worked in concentration camps, including Gross Rosen, before taking a job as a medic for the Wehrmacht (armed forces of Nazi Germany).

After the Soviet Union crushed Mengele’s beloved Nazi regime, he continued fleeing west to Argentina on a CIA pipeline eventually ending up in Brazil. At no time was he ever in the Soviet Union, a country which would of course have executed Mengele if it got hold of him. Likewise, the Horten brothers fled west in the face of advancing communists. One brother wound up in Argentina, while the other took a job in the newly U.S.-imperialist-reconstituted West German Luftwaffe (air force).

Of course, these factual problems only add to the ridiculous rational problems in Jacobsen’s fairy tale. For instance, how did an un-aerodynamic flying saucer aircraft, which neither Nazis nor U.S. engineers could fly, make the 6,000-mile journey from the Soviet Union to New Mexico? An aircraft so small that it had to be flown by 12-year-olds couldn’t have held enough fuel for the trip, either.

If this was all a propaganda stunt to terrorize people in the U.S., why was the aircraft crashed in the desert of a barren, low-populated state? Why not LA or Times Square? If this master plan was a stunt to trigger World Was III, where was the war? Where is the evidence of Soviet forces on the brink of invasion? And why did the anti-communist U.S. conceal these horribly abused children from the world media? U.S. fabricated a myriad of stories (and clearly still do so) about the Soviet Union, yet they let this golden opportunity slip? If these were indeed 12-year-olds, how was Mengele working on them in 1935 in the USSR when he was known to be in Nazi Germany at that time? Apparently, Jacobsen’s math is as bad as her journalism.)

These inconsistencies are due to Jacobsen’s poorly constructed, poorly reasoned, anti-communist lies. It stands as proof that the U.S. media will promote any lie that defames the first workers’ state. The capitalist class will go to any lengths to defame and erase the memory of the Soviet Union because it stands as proof that workers can take state power from the capitalist class, resist continuous capitalist invasions, and build a better world in the process. Every time that they fabricate another ludicrous lie about the Soviet Union, they hope to obliterate the memory of real, working communism further out of workers’ minds.

By organizing workers into the PLP, we keep the memory and dream of communism alive for the working class. We build for the day when we can destroy the capitalist state and use communist state power to smash the capitalists once and for all.

A ‘‘study’’ rivaling Nazi experiments on World War II prisoners were carried out in Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods by the Kennedy Krieger Institute, affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, which for six years ‘‘knowingly expos[ed] black children as young as a year old to lead poisoning...exploring the hazards of lead paint’’ (NY Times, 9/16).

Lawyers in a class action suit said ‘‘more than 100 children were endangered by high levels of lead dust in their homes despite assurances from the...Institute that the houses were ‘lead safe.’’’ The Institute provided no medical treatment to the children, who ranged in age from 12 months to five years old.

The ‘‘children were enticed into living in lead-tainted housing...and intentionally subjected to lead poisoning,’’ said the suit, presumably to ‘‘assess the success of lead paint...abatement measures.’’ The suit stated that, ‘‘Nothing about the research was designed to treat the...children for lead poisoning.’’ Baltimore has the highest lead poisoning rates in the U.S.

One court compared the experiment ‘‘to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment which withheld medical treatment for African-American men with syphilis’’ (NYT).

One lawyer declared that when parents signed consent forms, the contracts failed to provide a complete and clear explanation about the research. David Armstrong, father of the lead plaintiff, said he was not told that his son, aged 3, was being introduced to elevated levels of lead paint dust. During the two-year experiment, the child received no medical treatment for lead. Later when he took his son to a pediatrician, he discovered the boy had blood lead levels 2½ to 3 times higher than before the experiment began.

‘‘I thought they had cleaned everything [in the apartment] and it would be a safe place,’’ Mr. Armstrong said. ‘‘They said it was ‘lead safe.’’’

The Institute’s CEO said, ‘‘The research was conducted in the best interests of all the children enrolled.’’

Such are the depths to which capitalist racism sinks. Only by exterminating this stinking system will the working class ever be free of such racist attacks on our children.