The new edition of the FBI’s manual for domestic investigations grants agents extensive powers to search databases, go through household garbage and start surveillance on people or groups suspected of crimes. The new manual stresses that evidence of criminal activity is not a pre-requisite for opening investigations or beginning surveillance (NYT, 6/12).

The new rules are in fact only codifying behaviors that the FBI has engaged in since its inception and with increasing frequency since the 1970s. These surveillance powers, “justified” by the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror,” have been primarily used to monitor and harass anti-war, anti-capitalist, pro-labor and other Left-leaning groups.

One activist in the environmental movement was shocked recently when a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that he had been under intense surveillance since 2001. There had been at least five FBI informants in his various groups, and the FBI had collected 1,200 pages of documentation on him (Democracy Now, 6/14/11). Two years ago anarchists were dismayed to discover that Brandon Darby, a man who had run an anarchist collective in post-Katrina New Orleans, had been an FBI informant for years (This American Life, 5/22/2009). In 2007 it was revealed that the FBI had been abusing national security letters, presidential edicts that allowed surveillance without judge-issued warrants, to spy on people with no evidence of a crime (NYT, 3/10/2007).

Of course this kind of harassment of workers has not been limited to the FBI. Immigration Customs and Enforcement raids have been used to intimidate Latino workers from organizing as they were in 2007 at the Smithfield plant in North Carolina (Center for Iimmigration Studies, 7/2009). Anti-war groups formed after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have also been subject to spying and intimidation. In 2003 the campus office of an anti-war group at Texas Tech University was raided by local police. That same year a judge subpoenaed records (attendance lists, conference notes, etc.) of an anti-war conference at Drake University (AP, 2/7/2004). Just last year at the University of Washington, university police tried to place an undercover agent in a student group protesting the budget cuts (ACLU-WA, 7/8/2010). 

The capitalist state has always used its state power to spy on and intimidate the working class. The current changes in the FBI manual represent not a change in policy, but an increasing boldness on the part of the ruling-class’ police forces that shows their true fascist stripes. But in their efforts to intimidate the working class, they reveal their fear of it.

The capitalist class cannot exist without the subjugation and exploitation of workers. The creation of a workers’ state through communist revolution would threaten to eliminate the capitalist class forever, and they know it. That is why they spend so much time and money trying to intimidate us. The continued growth of PLP, despite this intimidation, will ensure that the capitalists will fail in their efforts to prolong their murderous, racist system.

As the economic crisis and wars abroad deepen, the U.S. ruling class has moved toward more direct control of the schools nationwide. In New York, billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg runs the city’s school system on a corporate model, with lawyers and business people in top leadership roles while teachers and school staffers are downsized. This structure attacks the students, the working-class of the next generation.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed a new school board full of corporate “movers and shakers” like board chair David Vitale, the former vice-chairman and director of JPMorgan Chase, and Penny Pritzker of the Hyatt Hotel dynasty. John Veasy, the Los Angeles schools superintendent, worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and completed an executive training program funded by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad.

In spite of rhetoric to the contrary, these billionaires and millionaires have no intention of creating policies to benefit students. Children who attend urban public schools are disproportionately black, Latino and low-income, the children of the same workers these bosses exploit. The racist segregation of housing and education in the U.S. makes poor black and Latino students the most likely victims of closed schools, empty test-prep curricula, and inexperienced teachers.

In this still-racist (not “post-racial”) country, children of the most exploited workers, including the unemployed, are the ones most likely to attend schools where rigid obedience is demanded and rote learning is the norm. The critical analysis skills that all students need are the last thing the rulers want most of them to learn.

The degraded conditions of these schools — and of an economic system that thrives on low-wage/no-wage workers — push nearly half of their students to leave without having graduated. The system needs only a handful of working-class students to be well-educated, for skills the bosses need and for use as misleaders of the mass of workers who are left behind by the school system.

Members of the ruling class are directly funding “reforms” in education through the Broad and Gates foundations, along with Walton Family Foundation and groups like Democrats for Education Reform and Educators 4 Excellence. The new Chicago schools’ CEO is Jean-Claude Brizard, who left his job as the Rochester (NY) superintendent of schools with a 95% no-confidence vote from teachers and a similar lack of support from parents and community members. Brizard is a graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy, described by James Horn, of the blog Schools Matter, as “Eli Broad’s corporate training school ... for future superintendents who… [learn] to hand over their systems to the Business Roundtable.”

This stepped-up corporate control is both about making money in the short run and trying to save capitalism over the long haul. A revolving door of new, lower-paid teachers saves public systems money, while attacks on teachers’ unions and pension funds are cutting wages and benefits for all education workers.

More fundamentally, the nationalization of education will prepare workers for increased fascism and war by defining the ideas taught to youth. Common Core State Standards and the accompanying battery of tests (now in development) will advance the centralized control of the content of education. By tying seniority, pay, and job security to teacher evaluation and student test scores, the ruling class hopes to develop a teaching force that shies away from independent thinking, both for themselves and their students. The end goal is a working class trained to be loyal to U.S. imperialism and willing to fight in wars to defend it.

All unions, including the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, work within the framework of a capitalist system that aims to destroy their members. The NEA leadership recently pledged to support President Barack Obama in spite of his implementation of Race to the Top, a policy that forces corporate-style reforms upon public schools. At its last convention, the AFT honored Bill Gates, the champion of larger class sizes — the key to massive teacher layoffs — in urban schools.

Both of these national unions have many members and local leaders who are fighting the attacks on education, like the “anti-billionaires” campaign of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Unions, however, are bound by the confines of the capitalist system. They negotiate contracts and lobby for laws that set the terms of workers’ exploitation. The CTU cuts deals with politicians when it should be organizing its militant rank-and-file to fight. Recent legislation agreed to by CTU leaders makes it harder to strike and undermines seniority protections for teachers. In reality, workers can never win in the legislative arena; any “victories” are short-term and can always be taken away by the class that rules.

The real value of class struggle doesn’t lie in the reform crumbs that workers may or may not win, but in the experience of fighting the bosses — an experience that too few workers have today. (In 2010, there were only 11 major strikes in the U.S., compared to more than 4,000 strikes in 1937.)

Communists advocate breaking the rules, and to fight back wherever we can. The mothers at Whittier School in Chicago did this last fall, when they took over a building to demand a library. In Brooklyn, students, teachers, and parents recently joined together to demand that the racist Department of Education withdraw its plan to insert an elite school into the John Jay Campus, where black and Latino students face prison-like security scanning and under-funding. Currently, students at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn are battling a trumped-up investigation of PLP teachers (see page 8).

Militant fighting is insufficient; it needs to be coupled with a revolutionary communist outlook and a long-term struggle against capitalist ideology. We must understand how ideas like individualism, racism, nationalism, and class unity with the bosses are built into the schools’ curricula. To keep our students from killing and dying for capitalism, communist teachers must win other teachers and students to see through the rulers’ lies. We must learn and teach the skills of scientific analysis, the true history of workers’ struggles, and the multi-racial, international unity required for revolution. This is the role of a communist education, and the goal of PLP: to build an army of workers and students to destroy the profit system, once and for all.

BROOKLYN, N.Y., June 22 — “At a time when political attacks are met with little response, what you all are doing there gives others the example needed to fight back!” This was the message sent from a teacher in New Jersey to those involved in the struggle at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, and a reminder of how our political work can inspire other workers and students.

As reported in last week’s CHALLENGE (6/22), more than 150 students and staff demonstrated in front of Clara Barton to protest the investigation of two communist teachers who attended a union rally with students in Washington, DC, last fall. It’s no accident that communists are being targeted by the Department of Education (DoE). Communists build class struggle and class consciousness. We struggle to win our class to see its power so that we can build a mass party to fight for revolution. At this rally, the largest and most visible action at the school this year, we did begin to see our strength.

In our continuing efforts to build the Party, more than 500 copies of CHALLENGE were distributed at Clara Barton last week. Students greeted the paper with enthusiasm. They read it carefully, line by line. There was a lot of discussion about the cover story — why did CHALLENGE call principal Forman a racist pig? Some thought that we needed to provide a more thorough explanation of why we regard him as racist. The ensuing discussions both clarified that point (see below) and also addressed a broader one: that capitalist schools can never serve the needs of working-class students. Students also began to wear 700 buttons with the slogan: “SCHOOLS NOT JAILS”.

Forman is a willing agent of the DoE. His job is to exert control over the students while implementing the DOE’s budget cuts and other tools of inequality. In a school system that is more than 70 percent black and Latino, these cuts are inherently racist. A decade after the Campaign for Fiscal Equity first won its case against the glaring funding disparities between city and suburban schools, the cutbacks continue to get worse each year.

At Clara Barton, the systematic racism in U.S. education is especially obvious. Forman was previously a leader of two other schools that closed after he led them to fail. His move to Clara Barton is a clear signal that the DOE doesn’t care about the students at this school. Several classes are still taught out-of-license by teachers with inadequate training. Forman has shown no interest in creating more challenging classes in the social studies department. The same room once used for student leadership classes is now designated for detention. Instead of empowering students, he’d rather punish them.

In particular, the principal has done nothing for the huge population of students from Haiti at Clara Barton. The Haitian Club’s former advisor found himself repeatedly harassed after the activist group organized anti-racist assemblies and debates. Forman has obstructed the creation of a soccer team, which these students — among many others — have long wanted. The fact is, students from Haiti face harsher discipline than other students at Barton, and often feel picked on and harassed.

So there is absolutely nothing positive the racist Forman has done for Clara Barton.

Cutting Bagels A ‘Security Breach’?

In the middle of Regents week, as graduating seniors waited to have their exams graded, there was another attack on teaching staff. Forman used a surveillance camera to determine who had brought a bread knife into the teachers’ workroom to cut bagels, supposedly a rules violation. This teacher was called in for a disciplinary meeting, although Forman claimed that he was only “gathering information.” We boldly challenged him in this meeting by wearing a sticker produced that weekend: “Here is MY bagel knife! Now I’ve created a security breach too!” The principal ultimately backed down. But this small victory will not be the end of this war. After all, we know what the real “violation” is: our political organizing in the school.

Forman has made it clear that he will stop at nothing to lash back. He has shown us that the same measures used to oppress students — like the cameras installed throughout the school — can and will be used against teachers, too.

The principal began by attacking communists in October and is now moving against anyone who will stand up or speak out for their students. This pattern of harassment is not limited to Clara Barton, of course. It’s part of the DOE’s bigger plan to crack down on teachers, especially any who fight back. The two communist teachers received an unsatisfactory rating towards the end of the school year. They are continuing to fight the principal’s harassment. Throughout the system, investigators are being called in over the most trivial incidents while thousands of teachers face layoffs. The DOE is attempting to keep us in retreat just when we need to mount a more militant offensive.

We need to follow the advice from a veteran teacher: “We have to keep up the fight! They don’t know us if they think we’re backing down. We better make people see that an injury to one is an injury to all, and they will be next if they don’t stand up now!”J

“Run, Bruce, Run! You can run but you can’t hide!” sang hundreds of spirited Brookdale Hospital workers about CEO Bruce Flanz as they picketed outside of the hospital’s main entrance on June 15th. PLP brought support and CHALLENGEs to these workers, who lost their insurance coverage when Brookdale violated the labor contract and stopped paying into their insurance benefits fund six months ago. This forced the workers onto a more expensive plan under Blue Cross Blue Shield (see CHALLENGE, 6/22). More than that, their very jobs are at stake, as the workers face union decertification, bankruptcy and possible closure. Brookdale workers are mostly black and Latino, and all together over 1,000 workers picketed at some point during the day as workers came out in uniform on their lunch break from almost every department.

We distributed our CHALLENGEs quickly, and realized we had not brought nearly enough. At the same time, some hospital workers and members of the main hospital union 1199-SEIU (Service Employees International Union), distributed 400 leaflets that exposed the attack on Brookdale workers as a racist ploy to increase profits on the backs of the majority black and Latino workers that live in the Brookdale community. The anti-racist leaflet called on workers, patients and community residents to unite and called on the Brookdale bosses to pay up. Both CHALLENGE and the leaflets were greeted with positive responses from the workers. On a couple of occasions, PL’ers were asked for more copies of the paper. We made several contacts, and will bring more literature next time.

The conversations we had with workers described a hospital that has been sucked dry by the bosses for years. A nurse who worked there since 1982 told us: “We serve the poor but the bosses don’t give us anything! We never have supplies or nearly enough staff. We’re gonna have to take the hospital back!” Under-staffing was the unanimous complaint with every worker in every department, especially among the janitors and food and nutrition workers.

This is also a sexist attack on the Brookdale workers, who are mostly female, not to mention gambling with the health and lives of women workers who live in the Brownsville community. They depend on Brookdale for OB/GYN and pre- and post- natal care, in addition to emergency care for pregnancies, obstetric emergencies, and complications.

Union Official Wants to Save the Bosses

Local 1199’s president, George Gresham, made an appearance and shared his disappointment that the bosses weren’t playing fair: “Two years ago we saw that times were tough, so we offered to forgo our pay raises to keep our benefits...Management must come to its senses! We’ll help them save money if they would listen to us!” Gresham’s argument was ‘if only’ the bosses would listen to reason, everything could be resolved at the bargaining table.

Workers shouldn’t look to the 1199 leadership for solutions! Every hospital that Gresham has “vowed” to keep open has shut down. But the problem isn’t just bad union leadership; under capitalism, no deal, contract, treaty or law is worth anything when profitability is at stake. Union misleaders like Gresham serve the bosses’ interests by controlling the rank-and-file through empty promises and symbolic gestures.

The Progressive Labor Party is fighting for a society run by the workers worldwide. PL’ers are in the struggle building support for the Brookdale workers from the majority black and Latino workers in Brownsville, and spreading their fighting example to other hospitals and communities experiencing similar struggles. By making contacts and building hospital worker-community unity, PLP is building a mass Party to serve the workers’ interests and, instead of relying on misleaders like Gresham, encourages every worker to become a leader.

PLP calls on the Brookdale workers to go all the way in defending their contract through job actions, like sit-downs and strikes. Maximizing profits at all costs is what the capitalists want, and job actions like strikes can temporarily deny them their profits. The 1199 leadership is surely terrified of the prospect of thousands of angry black and Latino workers shutting down a major hospital.

Win or lose, contracts can still be taken away. In Greece, the waves of heroic general strikes have frustrated the bosses there attempting to carry out massive cutbacks. However, getting off the treadmill of reforms and ending wage slavery requires a revolutionary party that can ultimately lead an armed struggle for state power. The sharpening struggle at Brookdale can be a step in that direction.

Local 1199 announced a chartered bus trip to the home of Brookdale CEO Bruce Flanz in New City, NY on Sunday, June 26th, to hold a picket line. We invite all PL’ers and friends to meet at the main entrance of Brookdale Hospital (corner of Linden Blvd and Rockaway Pkwy) at 11:30 AM to board the bus and continue the struggle!