BALTIMORE, July 8 — Today, young people learned an important lesson about state power during an angry and well-organized rally against massive cuts in summer jobs. Last Monday, about 9,000 students, who had registered months earlier with YouthWorks, were supposed to start working at their sites. However, at the last minute, approximately 3,000 of these students were informed that they had no job at all!

That Tuesday one of the youth organizations led a militant sit-in at YouthWorks headquarters, blocking the front doors for about two hours as supporters rallied and chanted. The head of YouthWorks, all of whose offices were essentially shut down for most of the morning, invited a couple of protest leaders to come upstairs to meet with her. Protesters refused, insisting that she come down and talk with the whole group.

Nervous and defensive, she finally did come down, claiming to have the students’ interests at heart, and said there’s no more money for any more jobs. She did agree to a small “concession,” that she would reconsider applications of students in the protesting group, and place some of them on a waiting list. They will then get jobs, she promised, if some students at other sites decide not to work for YouthWorks.

At today’s City Hall rally, students held their ground as they faced off with cops barring the doorway. For nearly two hours, student leaders maintained rock-solid courage, arguing face-to-face with the cops that they have no right to keep us out, and demanding to see Mayor Rawlings-Blake. At the same time, a larger group of students in the rally chanted “Are you angry! Yes!” and “We don’t want your pity! We want money for our city!” Another powerful chant was “Jobs yes! Jails no!” Maryland is spending $104 million to build a new youth jail in Baltimore City, but won’t spend just $3.6 million to employ the 3,000 youth who were denied summer jobs. The organization leading today’s protest has been fighting this school-to-prison pipeline all spring, and continued that struggle today.

Mayor Rawlings-Blake never came out, but City Council President Young did. He asked for two student leaders to come inside, go with him to his office, and represent the group. The students again refused, demanding that he stay outside and talk with everyone! He responded that it was too hot outside. What arrogance, after we’d already been in the 90-degree heat for two hours!

Finally, recognizing our unwillingness to be divided, he stayed outside and talked for a few minutes before walking off hurriedly to his limousine. He claimed to be on our side, to be working hard to fund youth jobs, and that he opposes the new juvenile jail. When asked what he’s doing right now to get jobs for the 3,000 young people who’ve been left out on the street, he angrily said it’s an unfair question; that he doesn’t have the power to make it happen.

One strong bit of truth emerged. Young said he had been trying, virtually begging, to get Johns Hopkins — Baltimore’s largest private employer — along with major businesses, to provide more summer jobs for youth. As a PL’er pointed out, speaking to the rally a few minutes later, there’s a profound lesson in Young’s remarks. It became clear that Baltimore’s big businesses are more powerful than the city government, because — even if just pretending to care about youth jobs — government officials have to go begging to big business. The capitalists are the top dogs who really hold power. The government is simply a tool of the bosses.

We also saw that the cops blocking the doors to City Hall, and all the other cops on the sidewalk who were ready to lock us up, are serving the needs of the bosses. Threatening to use the jails and the courts — if they had arrested us — would keep many of us jobless, but under control. This is called state power.

A PL’er at the rally pointed out that in school they teach us it’s a democracy, but that in reality, it’s a dictatorship of the capitalist class. They use their state power — the government, the cops, the jails, and the courts — to oppress our class, the working class. The PL’er also put forward that only a revolution for communism can create a world that is run by the working class and truly serves our needs, with jobs for all. Just about everybody gladly took copies of CHALLENGE, and some donated money. The vigorous fight for jobs will continue, and so will PLP’s fight for a world free of wage slavery! 

SEATTLE, July 11 — Progressive Labor Party members played important roles in the biannual convention of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) ending here today. We helped lead a rally exposing the Obama Administration’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and a walkout and  rally against billionaire Bill Gates. We helped organize and spoke at three forums held by the AFT Peace and Justice Caucus, distributed 600 CHALLENGES, 300 Juneteenth Anti-Racism Supplements and 4,000 leaflets to delegates.

We helped the Peace and Justice Caucus recruit for forums on Haiti, on the fight-back against the racist, anti-working class Race to the Top competition and on Afghanistan and Gaza. They were attended by many rank-and-file delegates. The discussions there raised interesting questions about fights against the ruling class and built ties between delegates. (See box page 7)

The militant walkout against Gates was caused by Party members having political conversations with their friends and others in general meetings about why we should oppose his presence at a union convention. Gates is spending lots of money through his foundation to make changes in education. While he first used his money to help build small schools, now he’s focusing on “teacher quality.” The AFT leadership invited him because he’s already given millions to four school districts for pilot projects.

Gates uses his foundation’s money to influence policies that attack teachers and students. Smaller schools often exclude students with the greatest needs — special education students, English-language learners and many students whose neighborhood schools have closed. Through actions like “school turnaround,” as we’ve seen in Chicago, the Board of Education fires the school’s staff. Then lower-paid, inexperienced teachers are hired in their places — in urban areas the firings are racist because a disproportionate number of black teachers lose their jobs in the process.

At the same time, students are hurt, now having younger, inexperienced teachers, rather than teachers with skills in managing a classroom and teaching their subjects. The reorganization of the schools also resegregates the schools. The AFT has conceded this battle everywhere — only the organization of angry workers in NY, Chicago, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C. has led to any defeat of the ruling-class’s attacks.

Due to the dysfunction of so many schools in many cities, parents are choosing charter schools and the smaller schools. Studies show that these new schools aren’t doing any better than the original schools. However, parents are desperate to find what they hope are better schools for their children. The major weakness in these education struggles is the lack of a teacher-parent-student alliance. 

The AFT is tightly controlled by the leadership of its NYC local (UFT), and struggle against the pro-ruling-class line of the AFT is difficult. The AFT refuses to criticize U.S. foreign policy. Their Afghanistan resolution was filled with outright lies — such as the U.S. being “drawn into” supporting the government of Hamid Karzai.

Delegates, friends and members of PL and others, fought hard to brand the war in Afghanistan a war for resources, especially oil and gas, rather than a war against terrorism. Other AFT resolutions build plans for further collaboration between the union, politicians and the ruling class. For the union, these conventions are important tools to help win members to the ruling-class’s political agenda — for war and fascism, building patriotism to convince working-class students to fight and die for oil.

Party members on the convention floor and in committee meetings analyzed the situation in Chicago Public Schools, where a rank-and-file caucus has won the leadership of the 35,000-member local and tied poor school conditions to the failure of international capitalism. Some of our ideas took the form of resolutions for debate, which provided talking points for political discussions with teachers and allows us to sharpen our struggles with people we know well.

We held a PLP picnic, bringing friends of the Party to a Seattle park to learn more about our Party and our organizing against the ruling-class attacks. We must build close ties with other workers. PL members spent time with teachers having discussions over lunch and breakfast about the Party and the need to bring revolutionary ideas to our parent, teacher and student relationships.

From the classroom, to the caucus meetings, to the convention floor, to parent conferences, communist teachers must continue to seize opportunities to build the Party. Our Party was essential to the organization of the rank-and-file opposition forces at the convention, providing tactical and political leadership.

Our literature provided ideas and analysis about issues specific to education and also tied those issues to the broader world situations of increasing war and fascism. Our leaflet about the BP oil spill explained how we can’t rely on the ruling-class’s government to solve our problems — either in the Gulf or in the schools. Our comrades led struggle, made new political friends and built stronger ties with old friends.

Overall, the convention was a success for the Party. The recent developments in the Chicago Teachers Union have created opportunities for Party members to focus our work in the AFT while broadening our base among large numbers of workers who are students, parents and fellow teachers. Concentrating on the goal of building the Party and communist relationships while working in the bosses’ organizations challenges us all. Our collective strength and our confidence in the workers will guide us on the road to revolution. 

The AFT Peace and Justice Caucus sponsored a forum on the after-effects of the earthquake in Haiti. There was much debate after two teachers from Haiti spoke about the

efforts of rank-and-file workers to improve conditions in Haiti.

The forum revealed that many workers have illusions, fostered by the media and the U.S.
government, that the UN “peacekeeping” forces and the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), like the Red Cross, are the good guys.

At the forum educators from Haiti stated that these NGO workers in Haiti live off the NGO’s U.S.dollars, drive around in  large dark SUVs with tinted windows, and live in big houses. The desperation for U.S. dollars has led to an increase in prostitution paid for by this NGO money. Friends from Haiti warned that if workers want to send money to Haiti we should find workers to send it to, and not send money to the NGOs to steal. And while we’ve all been told that the UN forces are the saviors of the working class in Haiti, we heard reports of the UN troops abusing and terrorizing young men there.

A PLP member from the Dominican Republic called for the unity of the working class to  over-throw the yoke of U.S. Imperialism in Haiti and around the world.

At the forum about fighting back against the Race to the Top (RTTT) competition, the panelists described their fights against attacks on educators and students. Unfortunately, too many of the panelists described their struggles merely to get more tax money to pay for schools during this period of capitalist crisis. However, that just means taxing the working class, not the bosses, and it does not suspend payments to the banks. No matter how the budgets are cut everywhere, the debt service (money to banks to pay back debts) is never cut. Another serious weakness in the RTTT forum was the lack of discussion of the affects of RTTT and budget cuts on students, and the lack of any clear call for unity between parents, students and educators.

We should continue these kinds of discussions, continuing to bring our line to honest educators, parents, and students, to build our movement.

CALIFORNIA, July 2 — Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends from all around the state met up for three days of activities and study during a camping trip in central California last weekend. Six students from the high school where a comrade teaches came on the trip. We started out at seven in the morning and drove six hours to get to the campgrounds.

During our quick stops for meals on the road, we met to discuss how to organize a study group around the current anti-immigrant racism in Arizona. The high school students took the lead and created questions to help keep the discussion moving. A few drew on their prior experience leading a discussion on a similar topic at a forum in Los Angeles.

At the campgrounds, after a refreshing dip in the river, we prepared dinner collectively before the study group, which went really well.

After the study group, we made s’mores and told ghost stories. Everyone got along really well. People partnered up to make the s’mores, since it turned out to be a two-person job. The high school and middle school students told stories to the younger children. The next day, we made breakfast together and continued our study group from the night before. This time, we also talked about communism: what is it and how do we achieve it? Once again the high school students impressed us all by helping to lead the discussion and asking questions. They also learned a lot. They said:

“At the camping trip we had a very good discussion about communism and what everyone thought it was. We also talked about what Barack Obama was doing and what he was supposed to be doing. Communism to me means making the world a better, more diverse place to live without all the differences.”

“The camping trip was really fun and a good experience for me, since I’ve never been camping before. It was good hanging out with other ‘races’ and hearing their opinions.”

Many of the teacher comrades who came were inspired by the work at this high school and felt encouraged to go back to their schools and bring up our ideas more openly with their students. The success at this high school was in part the result of a year-long curriculum that incorporated discussions on racism, sexism, working-class consciousness and the need for black students (like the ones who came on this trip) to unite with others and take the lead in the fight to change society for the better.

There has also been some limited work with the parents at this school. The grandmother of one of the students disagreed with us on the question of immigration. She believed that immigrants who come to the U.S. without documentation are criminals and should be punished, and that Latino immigrants were taking jobs away from black workers. The student was unclear on the issue and had a lot of questions about it. After a discussion with the comrade teacher, the grandmother agreed to let the student go camping, and the student has since spoken up in favor of helping all people, no matter what color. Another grandmother also reads the paper and agrees that her granddaughter should learn to fight the system.

This is only the beginning. The work with these students, and others, will continue throughout the summer and on into the next school year. Hopefully, this will result in these students taking part in the actions around the racist Arizona law (as well as other struggles) this summer. We have also asked them to join PLP. We discussed creating a PLP club at the high school next year that will take the lead in fighting the budget cuts and attacks from administration. The students are all open to participating in and leading these fights. We will update CHALLENGE as things progress.