CHICAGO, April 25—Today marked the first full week of an ongoing strike of over one thousand multiracial graduate workers at the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC), who are boldly fighting capitalism’s racist and sexist miseducation system. Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been active on the picket lines and rallies, distributing CHALLENGE, helping lead chants and chatting with the strikers.
The union representing the workers, the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO), was set to strike on April 1, after 97 percent of workers voted in favor. They are pushing back against the UIC bosses’ attacks of poverty wages, exploitative fees, and hostile and retaliatory work environments. Despite the university’s $2 billion endowment and the chancellors’ six figure salaries, graduate workers here earn as low as $20k a year (Chicago Sun Times, 4/18).
Graduate workers help keep the  university’s miseducation and profit system running, putting in long hours of instruction time, grading, and research while often mentoring other students. Under capitalist education, workers and students are  constantly  degraded. While workers' physical bodies, mental capacity and morale are crushed, bosses get raises and praise from fellow soul-crushing capitalists for how well they exploit our class.
To build a world that serves our interests, we’ll have to organize to smash capitalism with communist revolution. PLP invites GEO strikers and workers everywhere to join the Party and fight for an egalitarian world without borders, racism, or exploitation.
Rally against racist exploitation!
Despite unpredictable Chicago spring weather, the grad workers and their supporters have remained steadfast in  their spirited strike. Moving pickets weaved their way throughout the east campus, with pro-worker and pro-student chants reverberating off the building walls. Students sitting in class are called to walk out and support the fight for improved learning conditions.
Many chants blasted the predatory fees. For the “right” to be exploited by the university bosses, graduate workers are forced to pay over $2,000 in fees every year, over 10 percent of their income. Skyrocketing fees levied against international students—blatantly racist and divisive—have ballooned by over 60 percent since 2013 (ABC7 Chicago, 4/20). GEO’s strike demands rightfully call for an immediate end to such fees in any new contract.
In the campus quad, mass numbers of strikers gave daily  updates on negotiations and supporters gave speeches in solidarity with the strike. Many former grad workers and members of various unions shared experiences from their past fights, inspiring the GEO workers to remain strong. A PLP member proudly shared a statement of solidarity from education workers from the City University of New York, which was received to wide applause. When the working class is under attack, it is our role as communists to build a fight back. In PLP, we raise the line that the sharpest way to fight is dialectically, connecting one moment in history to another and struggles in one area to the other.
Throughout it all the Party has distributed hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE, demonstrating that workers and students are definitely hungry for communist ideas. To prepare for May Day, we also have been pushing hard to invite the friends of PLP to our local march and connecting their fight at UIC to the international struggle against the bosses and capitalism.
From the classroom to the streets – the profit system has got to go!
Reformist demands vs revolutionary solutions
Revolutionary communist politics appeal to the working class because unions in and of themselves cannot get us off this treadmill of reformism, much less put an end to the endemic crises of capitalism. As we fight tooth and nail to obtain our basic needs, we must always be ready to expand the limits of the class struggle at hand.
Any appeals for the bosses to give us workers a “fair” wage or contract is itself a contradiction, as under capitalism the bosses will never compensate us for the complete value of our labor. This exploitation is at the core of their system, and it’s where they get their profits. Our fight should be to smash the wage system entirely. We create all value; and the value of our labor should belong to our class!
What’s more, calls to “defend” the institutions of public education ignore the role of schools and universities in ideologically maintaining capitalism and all its rotten nationalism and extreme competition. Yes, education must be free and equitable for all workers and youth but only under communism, with workers running it would it be grounded in science, collectivity, antiracism, antisexism, and class consciousness.
The bosses, by virtue of their control of the state and economy, are able to roll back even the most hard-fought reform gains. They increase our wages while simultaneously raising the cost of living, and more. The victory that the bosses can’t easily take away is a more unified multiracial working class, steeled in class struggle and ready to make a clean break with capitalism in favor of revolution.
Fight to learn, learn to fight
Many of life’s most lasting lessons aren’t learned in the classroom, but through working people organizing class struggle against the murderous ruling class. A raised fist to the GEO strikers for bringing the fight back to the racist UIC bosses! PLP is with you in this fight!
To write a letter of solidarity to the strikers: https://bit.ly/3vjsHxW To donate to their strike fund: https://bit.ly/3KkPOMT J