Barack Obama’s best buddy Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has once again proven himself equal to  his buddy in the task of generating ever-new ways of attacking Black youth in this city. Workers here will never forget his sixteen month cover-up of the police murder of sixteen year old Laquan McDonald. Now Emmanuel is trying to pass off a thinly veiled stratagy to bolster U.S. troop levels in an era of widening war as an act of “compassion” for the mainly Black youth of Chicago.
Racist Rahm has cooked up this insidious operation by intrroducing new high school graduation requirements for Chicago Public Schools. Starting with the class of 2020, students who have completed all academic requirements to graduate will not receive a diploma without a “post graduation plan”: seniors must certify they have a college acceptance, a job, a “gap year” (a year off before starting college), a job training program, or have joined the military in order to finish high school.
The finely tuned gradations for “worthiness” inherent in Emmanuel’s multi-track proposal leave unspoken the fate of the many tens of thousands of students who the schools and overburdened counselors will inevitably fail. As scores of students suffer a widespread unemployment crisis with its attendant gang activity, gun violence, police repression and mass incarceration.
The unemployment rate for Chicago youth between the ages of 20-24 is a staggering 47 percent for Black men and 20 percent for Latin men. Black and Latin students make up 84 percent of CPS (Chicago Tribune, 1/17). Due to the racism inseparable from capitalism students who cannot get into college and cannot find work are more likely to be Black and Latin. Such a requirement is a covert attempt to push many of these youth into the bloody hands of the U.S. military.
A hallmark of fascism is winning workers to viewing some portion of our class as good, worthy and productive members of society, and others as hindrances, and a drag on the potential of the nation, and ultimately as expendable. This dynamic is the essence of Trump’s infamous “Muslim ban” or the debates over the “Dreamer” immigration scheme. In each case the capitalist state is expanding agreement with scrutinizing and terrorizing entire populations and branding entire segments as unworthy and stripping them of any pretense of “rights.”
As the drive towards war intensifies, the rulers need our young people to be “military ready”. The Council on Foreign Relations, a ruling class think tank, made this clear in a 2012 report on military preparedness written by former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor to George W. Bush. That report promoted “Common Core Standards” as a way to academically prepare more young people for today’s military, redoubled expansion of STEM programs to produce the engineers and technically proficient soldiers required in today’s heavily computerized military and even more exposure to foreign languages to facilitate communication with the peoples of far off lands US imperialism seeks to dominate.
The bosses’ military has deep roots in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), with six military high schools: three for the Army and one each specializing in training for the Navy, Marines, and the Air Force. More than 9000 students, predominately Black and Latin, are enrolled in Junior Reserve Officers Training Corp (JROTC), where half of the drill-sergeant/teacher salaries are paid by the Armed Forces. For schools suffering from years of racist budget cuts JROTC is less a choice than a necessity. Emmanuel is leading the charge in preparing Black and Latino youth to die or get wounded fighting for the bosses’ profits. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Army soldiers were almost twice as likely to be injured or killed, compared to other military forces. In CPS, 80% of students in JROTC are in Army programs (Chicago Reporter, 1/14).
PLP’s recently concluded summer project was a glimpse of a readiness program for youth that couldn’t be more different from racist Rahm’s. We are making ourselves ready to organize revolution and lead a worker-run communist society. Over the course of a week our intergenerational, multiracial and gender-diverse collective pushed our limits. We organized demonstrations, reached out to workers in the transit, health care, steel and temp sectors. We examined capitalism’s inherent exploitative nature in study groups and explored our communist alternative in theory and in practice. Peers from other cities joined Chicago youth across the U.S. in playing a leading role in this project (see page 6). As the bosses’ war plans gather momentum, PLP is building internationalist class consciousness among workers and youth. We do that so that in coming wars soldiers will do as they have in the past and turn the guns on their class enemies instead of their working class brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. They will be part of rebuilding a new communist world “from the ashes of the old.”