NEW YORK CITY, June 16—“Worker unity is stronger than any law!” This was one Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member’s message during a recent UFT (United Federation of Teachers) town hall about Union misleader Michael Mulgrew and KKKop-Mayor Eric Adams’ new tentative agreement (TA) contract for UFT members. A group of comrades joined other education workers to sharpen the criticism of the contract proposal and make plans to fight back. Capitalist education will never meet the needs of working-class educators or students. It is designed to train young people to be exploited in the workforce or serve as cannon fodder in the next imperialist war.

Instead of seeing ourselves as pawns in the bosses’ profit game, imagine a mobilized working class confronting the city bosses and demanding what we need. Instead of waiting for the union to negotiate our demands away, we could be building a revolutionary movement to wrest power away from the bosses ourselves. A hundred thousand working-class educators, over a million working-class students, and add their working-class families: WE ARE MIGHTY!

Union misleaders are class collaborators: “Fair Deals” impossible under capitalism
While UFT leadership is trying to pressure workers to vote yes on the proposal, dangling so-called “raises” and “bonuses” in our faces and threatening the possibility of an even worse deal if we don’t go along for the ride, we must be clear on the truth: The contract proposal is nothing other than a viciously racist attack on educators, students, and their families. It does nothing to address the recent underhanded assault on workers’ healthcare (see box) or the overcrowded classrooms, woefully inadequate mental health services, and rampant racist segregation that systematically deprive primarily Black and Latin students. Instead, it serves to further divide teachers and families and placate education workers into accepting a raw deal.

Throughout the nearly year-long contract struggle, UFT leaders have exposed themselves as lying, racist, class-collaborators. Mulgrew may brag about his 500-member negotiating committee, but the UFT’s function, like that of all unions, is to make a deal it can “sell” to its members. They can have 500 or even 1000 members on the “negotiating committee” and congratulate us on our “hard work” and “activism,” but the fact is, this contract is a result of backroom deals with the city, being sprung on us at the last minute and rushed to a vote during the last two weeks of the school year.

This is the role of unions under capitalism: keep the workers in line and “manage” the class struggle for the bosses, as well as push them to vote for the Big Fascists’ pro-Wall St./U.S. imperialist agenda. To accomplish this, they bribe, sweet talk, deceive, manipulate, obstruct, divert, pacify, steamroll, threaten, and try to wear us out until we capitulate. But communists in PLP and many of our class sister and brother educators are saying NO!

Bosses’ contracts and laws serve only the ruling class
The contract does nothing to address students' abysmal learning conditions. Mulgrew’s claim that new state laws will protect smaller class sizes is a proven lie. Not only does the recently passed law allow for numerous exceptions–including lack of space, “over-enrolled” programs, a shortage of licensed teachers, and schools in “severe economic distress"–but the bosses already break their own laws whenever it suits their interests. One school’s administrators recently packed 42 kids (8 more than the current law) into a PLP teacher’s classes. Only when the comrade united with other teachers and fought back did the local bosses take measures to reduce the class size. Meanwhile, thousands of other NYC students are forced to remain in overcrowded classrooms.

The ruling class knows that teacher-student-parent unity could threaten to destroy them. That's why they do everything they can to sow divisions. The TA would also phase in new forms of remote work that will further isolate students, educators, and families. One change will deemphasize parent engagement time and parent-teacher conferences, potentially making them fully remote. This will make it more difficult for teachers to build meaningful relationships with families. A major expansion of virtual learning included in the contract proposal opens the door to use more online programs instead of real instruction, further decaying the quality of education for hundreds of thousands of students and contributing to the racist fast-foodification of learning, while also paving the way for larger class sizes.

Even on its face, the proposed pay “raises” do not even keep up with inflation and are actually a pay cut. Even worse, there continue to be union educators like paraprofessionals, mainly Black and Latin, who are making nowhere near enough money to survive in the city. Many of these educators are forced to take on second jobs or choose between basic needs like food and rent.

Can’t get mired in dead-end reforms; fight for communist revolution!
MORE (Movement of Rank and File Educators) is one opposition caucus in the union that has raised criticisms of UFT leadership, taking a “social justice” stance that includes pro-student positions against “racial segregation” and spotlights the interests of the mostly Black and Latin paraprofessionals and other non-teaching titles that the city has already tried to outsource. Although MORE has provided some useful inside information and caught the union leadership in their duplicity (doubletalk) multiple times, their criticisms of the contract abandon their most powerful antiracist arguments.

Educators and students in Oakland launched a more pro-student mass struggle when they went on strike in May with a list of “common good” demands (see CHALLENGE, 6/21). Strikers demanded not only better pay for teachers, but also increased staffing for school nurses, librarians, and counselors, as well as school building improvements and the opening of unused school properties to unhoused and housing insecure students. While this struggle has the potential to build class consciousness, it still relies on the limitations of reform. Educators, students, and their families need MORE than that!

That’s exactly the problem with fighting only for reforms. As long as we are fighting over crumbs, we will be missing the big picture: the need to unite with our students and their families to take on the whole capitalist system. Workers need STATE POWER!

As the U.S. bosses prepare for world war with China, they are pushing the working class to make even more sacrifices to preserve U.S. imperialist power. This means worsening conditions in schools, as well as pay cuts and cuts to healthcare for workers across the board. The working class has no choice but to fight for a completely new system: communism. We need a revolutionary communist party, PLP, to get there.

We communists plan to continue fighting tooth and nail alongside our students and their families, as well as struggling with our fellow educators over our revolutionary line, helping to advance the class struggle for workers’ needs and build workers’ unity. We need to continue to work inside groups like MORE to better mobilize workers for the many fights ahead.

Labor misleaders sellout NYC workers
In 2018, the New York City Municipal Labor Committee (MLC)—a coalition of labor unions representing some 390,000 city workers—made an unprecedented backroom deal that assaulted workers’ health care. The leadership of the unions in the MLC collectively agreed (without any union members’ approval or input) to save the city $1.1 billion dollars from 2019-2021 and then $600 million per year, in perpetuity (permanently)! As part of that deal, this year city bosses and the unions are jointly forcing retirees to join a misleadingly named “Medicare Advantage” plan instead of their previous healthcare plans. Medicare Advantage is a private Preferred Provider (PPO) program run by Aetna that will place limits on which doctors workers can see, forcing them to get pre-approvals, and may restrict available treatments. Lower quality healthcare plans are now forecast for next year for all active members of MLC unions.

OAK LAWN, ILLINOIS, June 7–The international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) once again joined forces with several community organizations tonight to protest at the monthly Oak Lawn Police & Fire Board meeting. We are keeping firm in our demand that the three KKKops who beat Arab teenager Hadi Abuatelah be fired and prosecuted for their vicious assault which resulted in his hospitalization and lingering trauma. One kkkop, Patrick O’Donnell, has been indicted, but we demand all three be fired and prosecuted for this racist attack.  

Under capitalism, racist kkkops are the rule, not the exception. Their role within class society is to harass and intimidate, especially Black and brown workers and youth. They also are tasked with protecting the bosses’ private property. In order to get rid of the police, we must destroy the capitalist system that profits by keeping workers oppressed through unemployment, low wages, and systemic racism and sexism. We need to build a multiracial, revolutionary movement that fights for communism, a worker’s state. And to do all this, we need a mass PLP!

Justice for Hadi, justice for all workers
We are nearing the one-year anniversary of Hadi’s beating (see CHALLENGE, 8/5/22). At the last board meeting, protesters marched out when anti-racist fighters were kicked out by the kkkops. We chanted loudly that we will continue fighting for justice and expose the cozy relationship between the Police Board and the kkkops. Many community members related stories of how the Oak Lawn kkkops have for years targeted Arab workers in the area, particularly workers and families from Palestine.                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
At the end of the rally, a comrade grabbed the attention of more than thirty protesters with a rousing speech. He linked the mass antiracist movement sparked by the police murder of George Floyd with the current struggle for justice in Oak Lawn. He said capitalism and racist kkkops go together, and that’s why we need a communist revolution. Everyone was invited to the upcoming PLP summer activities, and several people gave us their contact information to follow-up.

We are pushing to remain consistent in our efforts to fight for justice for Hadi and all other victims of racist police terror and capitalist oppression. We are also working to connect with other plans to protest outside the courthouse where child assaulter O’Donnell is facing charges. With every action that we take part in, we are fighting to win more workers and youth to the need to build the communist movement that connects all these struggles to capitalism and the need to destroy this rotten profit system!

Toxic air plagued much of the U.S. in early June as wildfires raged throughout Canada. On June 6, New York City experienced the worst pollution on record, beyond the “emergency” level set by the Environmental Protection Agency and nearly four times the level considered “unhealthy.”. Hypocritical calls by liberal misleaders like New York Mayor Eric Adams, to “stay home if you can'' were too little too late, as smoke darkened orange-hued skies. Most workers couldn’t heed Adams’ call, since no work means no pay–and the capitalist bosses weren’t about to lose profits to protect workers. Black and Latin workers in the poorest neighborhoods suffered the most as the choking air caused emergency room visits to soar, especially for those with asthma and other respiratory illnesses (Gothamist, 6/12). The dirty air crisis piled on the already poisonous effects of living under capitalism.

While wildfire smoke is unusual for New York, breathing toxic air is the everyday norm for much of the world’s working class. South Asia has nine of the world’s ten cities with the worst air and “persistently hazardous” pollution that causes an estimated two million premature deaths a year” (New York Times,, 6/15). Capitalism wreaks devastation on the working class every day. From non-stop deforestation in the Amazon rainforest to the proposed bulldozing of a forest in Atlanta to build a $90 million facility to train more killer kkkops,  the rulers keep spreading the horrors of their toxic system. We cannot rely on a ruling class that kills us daily. We can’t trust our children’s future to the profit-mad monsters who caused  climate change in the first place. Only communism, a system run to serve workers’’ needs, not the profit of a few, can change the conditions that lead to so much death and disease for the international working class!

Capitalist drive for profits = wildfires
“Wildfires” aren’t  the natural disasters that the term might imply. Although lightning was the primary cause of the recent Canadian conflagrations, many of the burning trees were not in natural forests. Much of the devastated acreage was in industrial tree farms. Timber companies cut down forests that had been there for hundreds of years to “make space for commercial tree varieties and eliminate competition”(Earth Island Journal, 4/8/19). As usual, the drive for maximum profits led to the planting of profitable but “less fire-tolerant tree species, [making] it easier for fires to spread” (BBC, 6/12). Rising temperatures worldwide due to the burning of fossil fuels lead to drier conditions, making wildfires more frequent and intense...which in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause even more global warming.

Protecting the health of the environment and humanity will never be society’s goal until capitalism is destroyed. Under communism, there would be no need to put workers’ lives in such danger. Without money and the drive for profit, all decisions–including environmental decisions–made would be based on the needs of the international working class.

Environmental racism is part of life under capitalism
The smoke that blanketed New York didn't spare wealthy neighborhoods. But like most environmental disasters, the most exploited workers in already neglected neighborhoods are hurt the most. The harm from smoke comes from  tiny solid and liquid particles that are inhaled and trigger respiratory illnesses or worsen existing conditions. With already higher-than-average asthma rates, Black and Latin workers are among the most vulnerable to the hazardous impacts of the smoke. This, too, is not a natural occurrence.

Racist segregation, a criminal abomination created by the capitalist ruling class,  has forced Black and Latin workers to live in neighborhoods cut through by highways and packed with industrial plants. “[B]lack and Hispanic communities in the U.S. are exposed to far more air pollution” and “neighborhoods once shaped by discriminatory housing policies…have more pavement, fewer trees and higher average temperatures — a combination that can lead to deadly heat illness” (Washington Post, June 2020).

During the wildfire crisis, the highest rates of emergency room visits related to asthma were in these areas (Gizmodo, 6/16). Historically Black and Latin neighborhoods–such as New York’s South Bronx, nicknamed “Asthma Alley”– have the highest rates of death and disease from asthma in the country. In New York, 80 percent of the people hospitalized with asthma are Black and Latin workers (Columbia University). Capitalism was already killing these workers! This smoke only made things worse.

Capitalism won’t solve climate change
Liberal misleaders like Adams and President Joe Biden would have us think that climate change denial is a new phenomenon pushed by a conservative fringe. But it was oil giant ExxonMobil, a bulwark of mainstream finance capital, that hired the scientists in the 1970s who found that fossil fuels were dangerous, and then paid them to hide their findings and misinform the public. They “were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks” (Scientific American, 10/26/15).

With Canada in the spotlight, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s hypocrisy stands out. In June 2019, Canada declared a national climate emergency. “The next day, it approved the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion… to move almost 600,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta to the port of Burnaby” (mronline.org, 6/23). The bosses’ promises at United Nations climate conferences to cut carbon dioxide emissions mean next to nothing.

As oil profits soar, in large part due to the war in Ukraine, trillions of dollars are being invested worldwide in fossil fuel infrastructure (NYT, 4/6). These plans are making a mockery of the UN’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, never mind their members’  “commitment” at the Paris Agreement in 2015. “Temperature rises over 2 degrees could bring catastrophic and potentially irreversible impacts, including pushing three billion people into chronic water scarcity” (CNN, 1/30). As the world’s imperialist superpowers ramp up to the next world war, they will keep doing whatever it takes to protect their profits and power.

Under Biden, laughably called the “first climate president,” oil production has increased to record levels. In March,  “the Biden administration approved a massive drilling project in Alaska that could generate the same carbon emissions each year as adding two million gas-powered cars to the roads” (Smithsonian Magazine, 3/22). This Willow Project praised by oil execs is supposed to “secure energy independence” from Russia–the capitalists’ code for sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry.  

The liberal bosses calling for the Green New Deal, the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, or other UN climate goals continue to pose them as solutions to the capitalist-created climate crisis. But global bosses have no real plan to “save the planet.””. Their master plan is to prepare for world war. As of 2019, the U.S. military was “the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world” (The Guardian, 11/21). Capitalism can never combat climate change.

Burn down capitalism with communist revolution
Communism is the only system that can! In a system run by and for the working class, the profit-driven causes of climate change will wither away. Unfortunately, the damage caused by capitalism won’t be undone overnight. But we will reorganize the way we work and the way we power our world. We will organize to protect the working class by moving workers away from vulnerable coastlines, increasing green spaces, and converting to clean energy sources. When “natural” disasters strike, our priority will be to save and protect lives. Join Progressive Labor Party and organize for communist revolution to build that world!

The vicious racketeering and collusion charges, carrying up to a 12-year sentence, leveled by the Joe Biden administration against abortion rights organizers illustrates how the liberal ruling class is the greater danger to the working class. The antisexists’ crime? Spray painting.

The profit system requires maximum profit at all times. Workers are the ultimate source of profit. Every commodity is produced by a producer. Women workers produce the producers of everything. So, the need to produce workers to be bullet sponges is the context wherein we should understand the rising attacks on our working-class siblings and reproductive rights.

Ruling class in crisis
The first context is the 2007 financial crisis where the subprime mortgage collapse was the final straw. The ruling class bailed themselves out. Like in the Great Depression, the lowest birth rates were hit when the crisis of capital was in full tilt in the mid 1930’s. The key difference being that there was an international communist movement that had taken state power in the Soviet Union facilitating a powerful CPUSA (Communist Party USA) who was organizing among the working class. The New Deal was a direct response to the Red ‘30’s. So, this brings up the question of leadership.

Pacifism is a dangerous ideology to the working class. When one is silent, it makes the bully perpetuating the violence feel that they can continue on with it. The liberal ruling class and their state continues to attack working-class women, as well as undocumented and Black workers. They want us to be passive as groups actively attack workers stocking shelves with Pride merchandise.

The ruling class would like for the working class to believe that these parallels to Berlin in 1933 should be handled by them, because history shows us exactly how a liberal government handles growing fascist movements, so we know we need our own Progressive Labor Party (PLP)-led Red Army to smash them once and for all.

Unfortunately, history also shows us that fascism can be decisively defeated by communists with great sacrifice and still not lead to an egalitarian society, so we need to fight for revolution and not reform.

The IMF (International Monetary Fund) postulates that “Policymakers in some advanced economies will need to tackle this trend [of a declining birthrate] and find ways to encourage women to have children. For example, increasing access to affordable and high-quality childcare, family-friendly labor laws, and tax policies” (IMF Blog, 11/13/18) and/or by actively rescinding abortion and reproductive healthcare.

Reproduction and childrearing, a collective responsibility
Under communism, Marx said that “sensuous human discourse” (Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) would be the primary aspect of reproduction. In other words, we would learn how to actively work together to produce what we all need, with children being the responsibility of the whole of society. Instead of any of the identities that are so important to the modern liberal movements, we would struggle to allow for human beings to be who they actually are and love who they choose since there would be plenty of nurturing to go around. The whole human race would be a whole human family.

When the working class takes hold of ideas, they can then turn them into reality. It is the power of the working class being held in the prison of capitalist ideology that allows for the profit system to continue. When the Florida Attorney General points out that she is attacking Antifa and Jane’s Revenge, what she is really worried about is exactly what the Biden big bosses are afraid of, too, and that’s a communist organization being able to actively coordinate and lead attacks on the fascists, and, ultimately, on the bourgeoisie themselves to take hold of the means of production.We need the working class to wake up to the need for communist revolution. This requires patient organizing in mass organizations with the intent of building a mass international Party whose breadth balances being a secret to the bosses while being seen as the bulwark to the working class.