NEW YORK—At a Brooklyn high school, comrades have been organizing against the attacks of capitalism for around two decades. What appear to be isolated events are in fact flashpoints in a single struggle: this semester has seen a faculty protest against deportations, student resistance to anti-Black racism, and ongoing fight-back against fear and censorship around teaching about Palestine. At stake is whether schools will reproduce racist, sexist capitalism or become sites of multiracial, working-class resistance and revolutionary communist possibility.
As the capitalist ruling class leads society in a headlong rush toward climate catastrophe and imperialist war, schools become sites for recruiting young people to kill and be killed, unless communists can offer an alternative horizon in which students and workers organize to overthrow the ruling class itself. The capitalist status quo cannot allow students to reach their full potential. A system built on disposability must train young people to accept sacrifice, competition, hierarchy, genocide, and mass death as normal. Schools are tasked with normalizing this brutality.
Communists intervene to disrupt that training. Without our leadership, anger is individualized, resistance is scattered, and reform becomes a pressure valve that leaves the genocidal capitalist system intact.
Organizing, basebuilding, and communist leadership
Teachers and students recently took collective action to oppose deportations and immigration terror, making clear that schools are not neutral spaces but battlegrounds in the class war. This did not happen spontaneously. A comrade organized through the teachers’ union to build a collective of educators willing to act openly together. Through one-on-one conversations, union structures and even boss-provided professional development time, teachers were organized to co-write and publicly sign a statement condemning deportations and calling for collective action.
That statement became a tool for organizing, helping lay the groundwork for a rally and picket line one Thursday before the school on a cold December morning. Teachers, students, and community members stood together declaring that immigrant students are not disposable and that families torn apart by the state are members of our class. Students later told their teachers they were overjoyed to see that solidarity modeled so clearly.
A month prior, Black students led a mass protest against the daily reality of anti-Black racism embedded in the structure of the school itself. Despite its claims of neutrality and excellence, this school operates to reinforce racism, as Black and Latin student numbers are kept low year after year by a test-based admissions regime. Racist harassment is normalized, Black enrollment shrinks by design, and Black students are subjected to constant scrutiny, isolation, and behavioral management. Students named this clearly: neutrality is violence, and the system itself is the problem. Meritocracy is a lie that launders racism through exams and “objective” standards to protect ruling-class interests.
A comrade advises the Black Student Union, helping students think about the power of multi-racial unity in bringing parents, teachers, and community members into the struggle. The Department of Education has responded with investigations, not to dismantle racism, but to contain working-class rage. Students continue organizing, actively discussing how to expand the movement by drawing in non-Black students to build multiracial unity and collective power.
After October 7, 2023 students demanded to understand Palestine, genocide, settler colonialism, and U.S. imperial power. Communists defended students’ right to protest genocide in Gaza even as administrators and bosses moved to discipline teachers and suppress discussion. Capitalism demands ignorance. Being attacked by the enemy is good. It confirms the ruling class understand that it cannot survive if students draw the line from Gaza to the Bronx, from occupied land abroad to occupied lives at home.
Educating for communism
Communist organizers reject fragmentation. We insist that the struggle against deportation, anti-Black racism, and imperialist war is one struggle. Capitalism survives by dividing U.S. citizens against immigrants, Black against Asian, student against teacher, domestic against foreign. Our task is to build unity across these false divides and to ground politics in material reality: who benefits, who is exploited, and who has the power to transform society.
Communists understand that everything we do counts. This organization does not appear overnight. It is built through workplace struggle and base-building, through advising student organizations, organizing parents, activating union structures, and consistently siding with students in daily conflicts over discipline, curriculum, tracking, testing, and surveillance. It is built by showing, again and again, that communists do not try to manage capitalism more humanely; we fight to expand a scientific understanding of society that will enable the working class to overthrow it once and for all.
The ruling class wants schools to be factories for compliant labor and nationalist ideology, preparing students to accept genocide, endless war, and permanent climate crisis as inevitable. Communists fight to make schools sites of struggle, clarity, and preparation for a world beyond capitalism. From opposing deportations to exposing anti-Black racism, from defending Palestine to organizing multiracial unity, comrades are proving that revolutionary politics belongs everywhere working people are, including the classroom.
