As sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry leads to a worldwide crisis of capitalism, the bosses are trying to strangle the working class into paying for it. Over the next several issues of CHALLENGE, we will be writing about the various ways our class is under attack.
In the latest racist assault on Black workers in Chicago, the city is closing four high schools in Englewood, a Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Robeson High School will be closed immediately, while the three others—Hope, Harper and TEAM—will be phased out.
Since 2000, 250,000 Black workers have been driven out of Chicago, a drop of 25 percent of the city’s Black population. In 2013, the city closed 50 elementary schools on the predominantly Black South and West sides. Since then, as abandonment and gentrification have continued to accelerate, 32,000 more Black children have left the public school system (Chicago Reporter, 12/19/17).
These attacks on Black working-class families are part of a racist push by the Chicago ruling class to shrink the city and make it wealthier and whiter. In both 2016 and 2017, Chicago was the only city of the largest ten in the country to lose population (Chicago Tribune, 3/22). Overall, the number of city residents has dropped from 2.9 million in 2000 to 2.7 million today.
The central feature of the Chicago bosses’ racist plan is to disperse Black and Latino workers from the city into low-service, high-poverty suburbs, while focusing large-scale development in the areas closest to downtown. “There are probably over 40 cranes currently operating primarily [near downtown]—very little in other parts of the city in the neighborhoods where working class residents live, particularly African-American and Latino communities” (Citylab 5/31/17).
Just as the capitalist system worldwide fails miserably to meet workers’ needs, the Chicago bosses are unable to provide even a basic standard of living and education for tens of thousands of local Black families. The only way out of this mess is to fight for a communist society that is run by and for the working class.
Bosses cut services to Black workers
Since the economic crisis of 2008-2010, when the bosses bailed out the banks and the real estate industry, the working class—and Black workers in particular—have paid the bill.
They closed neighborhood schools and mental health clinics; failed to rebuild public housing, dispersing thousands of poor black families across the region, and inadequately responded to … unemployment and foreclosures in Black communities…It’s a menu of disinvestment… The message that public policy sends to Black families in the city is that we’re not going to take care of you and if you just keep going away, that’s OK (Chicago Reporter 12/19/17).
It’s a brutal cycle: Racist unemployment and foreclosures drive families out of Black neighborhoods; neighborhood schools close for lack of enrollment; more families leave their destabilized communities. As a result, large areas of Englewood are now decimated:
So many homes have been demolished that some blocks are just fields of weeds. What’s left are side streets with wood frame homes, many of which are boarded up…the last decade and a half has been brutal. Not only did the housing crisis hit areas like this hard, but also the expansion of a massive rail yard swallowed up many of the homes...the school district’s policy of school closings …has contributed to population decline. In addition to Englewood High School, CPS has closed 14 [Englewood] area elementary schools over the past decade”(WBEZ News, 2/20).
The Chicago ruling class and their hit man, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, are perpetuating a long history of attacks on Black workers. Even in the mid-20th century, when Chicago was a growing center of industry and finance, Black workers were forced into segregated, underserved neighborhoods.
Now U.S. capitalism is on the decline. As the U.S. ruling class and its imperialist rivals head toward more and bigger wars, decent-paying industrial jobs have been replaced by low-paying service jobs or no jobs at all. Chicago’s Black neighborhoods were “once teeming with manufacturing companies like Brach’s Candy and Western Electric. …If you go up to Cicero [Avenue], you see all these old factories. Well, they moved out and nobody moved in….What replaced them were vacant storefronts or churches” (Chicago Reporter, 3/29/16)
Today, the situation for Black workers in Chicago is desperate. Young Black men between 20 and 24 have an unemployment rate of 47 percent (DNAInfo, 5/26/17).
Bosses need more from real estate taxes
To keep profits and power, the Chicago bosses are chasing out the very workers whose parents and grandparents built the city. Rising residential real estate prices enable the city to generate tax revenues in an era of business tax breaks. In central city neighborhoods, high real estate prices are driving out working-class families while luring affluent people with the promise of elitist, segregated public schools. In neighborhoods further from downtown, like Englewood or Austin on the West Side, the bosses have chosen to chase people out rather than reinvest in deteriorating schools and municipal services.
In the 1970s, when industry began to leave Chicago, the local ruling class lost a big part of its tax base. Instead of cutting profits or reducing the interest payments the city owed the banks, the bosses stopped fixing the schools. “By the early 1990s, audits of school facilities found them to be in abominable condition. Parents protested holding fallen bricks from their children’s schools in hand….” Great Cities Institute 11/2016).
While the city issued $2.5 billion in school bonds to renovate aging buildings and construct new ones, much of the funding was designed to encourage real estate inflation and gentrification by “expand[ing] the number of ‘high performing’ schools: i.e., Montessori and gifted elementary schools and International Baccalaureate, magnet and selective enrollment high schools. As they were intended to reach a city-wide market, most of the selective enrollment high schools were centrally located” (Great Cities Institute 11/2016).
Many billions of dollars are needed to keep the South and West sides livable. Instead, the bosses are shutting schools and cutting services to chase people out. In crisis, the capitalist rulers will always treat the working class as a disposable commodity. Like every other city, Chicago will belong to the bosses until the working class seizes power and builds a communist society to serve the needs of our class.
