Thousands of adjuncts at the City University of New York (CUNY), who fought hard for a wage increase in the last contract, are now facing imminent layoffs (see interview). CUNY students are facing the prospect of a tuition hike, additional fees, less course offerings and the possibility of overcrowded online classes. These cutbacks will be devastating to the careers and dreams of the working class students and adjuncts of New York City. NYC billionaires and their puppet politicians control CUNY. They don’t want to educate the Black, Latin, Asian and white working class students of NYC to run the world. These billionaires want students that are obedient, that can perform the many tasks that keep the capitalist profits flowing, and they want us to fight in their imperialist wars.
Rank and file members within the union have been steadily organizing both students and faculty to oppose these pre-emptive layoffs and budget cuts. With the #CutCovidNotCUNY hashtag they have produced a few short videos and held some well attended events. They have organized town halls and virtual meetings to launch a campaign of “grade striking” or withholding grades until the last minute to send a message of strength and solidarity to CUNY. This campaign, along with a campaign called “A for All”, has been an attempt to galvanize both students and faculty to draw a line in the sand and not go on with “business as usual.”
But stopping “business as usual” is not enough. A CUNY education is meant to reinforce the racist and sexist inequalities of capitalism. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been active in these reform campaigns, but we have been stressing that the entire capitalist system has to be destroyed. These attacks at CUNY are racist and sexist in nature. We need a united, multiracial working class, not only to stop layoffs and budget cuts, but also to fight for communism, a system actually run by and for the working class. We have been promoting these ideas from study groups to mass meetings and town halls. PLP professors have been explaining to students why we are participating in this grade strike, why we need to plan much larger strikes and protests in the fall, and why we ultimately need a communist revolution. We plan to make this a “summer of struggle” whether virtual or on the streets, to build a bigger base for communist ideas and joining PLP.
At a very well attended Solidarity Town Hall meeting for Bronx CUNY campuses, over 220 people attended and discussed issues such as how to build the worker student alliance, how to fight these cuts and layoffs, how to address the racist inequities at CUNY and how to keep ourselves strong during the ongoing pandemic. We talked about how the Bronx has been so hard hit by Covid-19, pointing out that Lincoln Hospital had the highest numbers of coronavirus deaths, how the subway system is totally inadequate and still crowded during the pandemic, and that Bronx politicians have basically abandoned the community.
Two PLP members spoke at the town hall, one pointing out that while some folks think Governor Andrew Cuomo is “doing a great job” he is the politician who closed hospitals and has helped to starve CUNY. He pointed out that militant collective action with students and faculty together is the best strategy. He also commented that the stress that adjuncts live with, not knowing if they will have employment (and health insurance) can be deadly.
Another PLP member spoke, suggesting that our demand be that the Chancellor (who earns $7,000,000 a year not including his exorbitant free rent) and the members of the Board of Trustees take salary cuts. She pointed out that there had been over 200 strikes and job actions since the pandemic, so we should be inspired and follow their lead.
The union leadership, meanwhile, has continued where they left off in the last contract campaign, prioritizing dead-end legislative tactics and demobilizing the membership. At a recent union meeting, the union president called the struggle “the fight of our lives” and then spent the next two hours explaining why we can’t break the Taylor Law (state law outlawing strikes). It’s clear that the union leadership has no plan to save the jobs and healthcare of potentially thousands of adjuncts.
PLP members have been focused on organizing with students and other rank and file activists. We are experiencing modest success during these difficult times. We have a few weekly study groups where students discuss both communist theory and practice. In one group, students read the editorials and discussed how to apply those ideas to the struggles around them- it has a solid core of enthusiastic participants. In another group, we have discussed how students have been dealing with the pandemic as well as reading CHALLENGE articles and evaluating our participation in mass work.
This struggle will be ongoing – join the Summer of Struggle 2020. We must continue the mass virtual meetings, local caravans and protests in the street and more. We will fight hard against the attacks on our working class students and adjuncts, but always with a vision of the communist world we fight to build! Join PLP!
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Interview with adjunct
The The following is an interview with an adjunct instructor at CUNY
1. How long have you been an adjunct instructor? What kind of salary do you earn?
Since 2005, I started making $53 an hour and now after three contracts it's $92. It took me twelve years to have an increase of $10. It’s unfair that adjuncts have to also fight with the administration at times to get our raises - full timers automatically get their raises.
2.What are your working/teaching conditions like?
My wage from one college is not enough. I have to commute from one college to another . I have been in three different colleges at one time, one in Brooklyn, one in the Bronx. Over the years, I have taught at eight colleges out of the fifteen [CUNY] colleges. I did have two semesters when I didn’t have enough classes to have health insurance (adjuncts need six credits of teaching hours to get coverage). But, even when I have a full program, it’s not enough to earn a living wage.
We are always cramped into unventilated adjunct rooms where we have to scramble for chairs and computers. At the last campus, NYC Technical College, there was no paper for months and we had to buy our own. Adjuncts are not respected by CUNY. We are seen as second class citizens. We do the same work, but we get less respect. Actually, we are over 60 percent of the teaching faculty.
3. How well do you think the union has done in addressing the inequities?
They have maintained the two tier system. It took me twelve years to get into the top level. In your first year you cannot get health insurance. You must maintain two classes. We are still getting crumbs and facing difficult working conditions. In terms of the dire living and working conditions, we must also emphasize the bloated salaries of administrations, The President receives $200,000, they don’t even play a role in the teaching and learning conditions of students. It's outrageous I think the union is just reactive and not pro-active about these austerity cuts.
4. Do you support the “wild cat grade strike”? Why?
Yes, I think it’s a good step. I haven’t seen enough concrete action in how you can fight the system and show them we are a force to be dealt with. Even if its one day, it’s a big deal It’s a way of dealing with tuition hikes and massive layoffs This is one way of trying to force the CUNY administration’s policy of pre-emptive strikes against both adjuncts and students
5. How have you been impacted by the austerity measures/cutbacks at CUNY?
For the first time in 15 years, I have not been reappointed at any colleges in CUNY. The cut throat austerity measures mean me and potentially thousands of others will lose their positions. There are 435 adjuncts at John Jay who have already received “pink slips”. All adjuncts are now dealing with the anxiety and uncertainty of not knowing if they will have work. We may not be killed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but we are being ravaged by the cutthroat austerity measures.
6. What do you see as the possible solutions, both immediate and long term?
Organizing. Mobilizing. Networking. Coalition building. Unions must make themselves part of the grassroots struggle. In the short term, the unions must provide a lifeline to vulnerable adjuncts. The union should divert funds from their legislative agenda and protect the workers.
We should threaten to strike if adjuncts are not reappointed. What will put pressure on CUNY? Striking is still the strongest weapon workers have. We need to confront both the neo-liberal capitalists and the sellout union leadership in all of our unions. I have had enough of the dictatorship of the profit system which only serves the few. Workers like me have the capacity to lead and re-imagine a better world.
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Oil tensions aggravate U.S. splits and imperialist rivals
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- 17 May 2020 242 hits
Oil is the capitalist rulers’ most vital industrial and military commodity. Since World War I and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, it has kept tanks moving, planes bombing, and factories exploiting workers’ labor. Time and again, the bosses have gone to war for control over oil in the Middle East, from the Suez Crisis to the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars. So it’s no surprise that the recent crash in oil prices has aggravated tensions among competing imperialist powers, moving them that much closer to all-out global war.
Capitalist overproduction, geared for the capitalists’ never-ending dogfight for maximum profit, is fundamentally irrational and chaotic. Even when oil demand dropped off a cliff with the Covid-19 pandemic, companies still had to keep pumping the commodity out of the ground. In April, with buyers scarce and global storage facilities near capacity, a barrel of oil briefly had a negative price—producers had to pay buyers to take it off their hands! As of mid-May, crude oil prices were still at a 20-year low.
In the communist, borderless future that members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fight every day to secure, energy production will be centered around the needs and safety of workers. Decisions about when and where and how much to produce will be based not on profit or imperialist competition, but on what’s best for the international working class.
Split in the fascist U.S. ruling class
The economic misery enveloping the world, deepened by the crash in oil prices, has sharpened a split within the U.S. ruling class. The Small Fascists, who support and fund President Donald Trump, are aligned with domestic energy companies at mortal risk from plummeting demand. Two of these companies, Whiting Petroleum and Chesapeake Energy, have already filed for bankruptcy, and hundreds more may follow (Quartz, 4/3). Many of them produce oil by the costly “fracking” of shale deposits, and were already drowning in debt. From 2006 to 2014, 16 publicly traded shale oil companies outspent what they produced by more than $80 billion (New York Times, 4/20). “At current prices, not one of the 100 largest fracking operations in the country can turn a profit” (Quartz, 4/3).
The bosses of these companies are mobilizing Trump’s racist “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) base in a desperate attempt to save their profits. The American Legislative Exchange Council (backed by the Small Fascist Koch family) and the Michigan Freedom Fund (linked to the Small Fascist DeVos family) have organized gun-toting protests at state capitols. They’re demanding an immediate reopening of local economies, even as thousands of people are infecting one another and dying of Covid-19 every day.
While the heavily armed white demonstrators with swastikas, nooses, and Confederate flags are repulsive, the other side in this fight is no friend of the working class. The liberal Big Fascists, who trace their origin to John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil monopoly, are spearheaded by multinational oil and finance capital companies. To protect their long-term profits, they are pushing for a slower emergence from the pandemic lockdown. Since deep-pocketed giants like ExxonMobil are better equipped to wait out a price squeeze than smaller domestic companies (Motley Fool, 4/27), they can pretend to care about workers’ health while they watch their competition wither and die.
In fact, the Big Fascists and their liberal politician puppets are planning for even deadlier, wider-scale wars with global rivals China and possibly Russia. Let us not be fooled. None of the bosses or their stooges—from Trump to Joe Biden and Barack Obama—care about workers’ lives. They simply have different strategies for how we should be sacrificed on the altar of capitalist profits.
Oil crash roils geopolitics
While the historic, pandemic-driven reduction in energy demand lies at the root of the oil price crisis, the virus is not solely to blame. In early March, when the global economy was still up and running, Saudi Arabia and Russia launched a price war that flooded the market with millions of additional barrels of oil. Republican Senator Ted Cruz suggested that Saudi Arabia, a once-reliable U.S. partner, was intentionally driving U.S. shale oil producers out of business (CNBC, 3/31).
Accelerated by the isolationist and incompetent Trump, the U.S. rulers’ loss of influence in the Middle East, even with so-called allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel, is a clear sign of their decline as the world’s number-one power. As China and Russia seek to fill the void, the region is becoming even more unstable. The twin crises of overproduction and the falling rate of profit, which Karl Marx showed to be inherent properties of capitalism, are intensifying imperialist competition. For the bosses, there is one sure-fire way to resolve their contradiction: a war that demolishes much of the world’s productive capacity. In other words, the bosses will gladly sacrifice the lives of millions of workers to “reset” their crisis-riddled system and start fresh.
Communists understand that capitalism can’t ever be reformed to meet the needs of our class. The profit system must be completely destroyed and replaced with one that’s run by and for the working class—a system that CAN meet our needs.
Main rivals on the rise
The two main challengers to U.S. dominance could emerge from this crisis stronger than before. U.S. sanctions against Russian oil forced Russia to diversify its economy, leaving it “in very good shape to cope with lower [oil] prices” (Bloomberg, 3/6). China, a net importer of oil, generally fares better when prices are low. Further, the Chinese government willingly supports its national oil companies to keep them solvent.
Combined with the economic disaster of the pandemic, the latest conflict over oil could accelerate the U.S. bosses’ decline and make them all the more eager to enlist U.S. workers for World War III. On April 28, the U.S. sent the guided-missile destroyer USS Barry to sail near the Paracel Islands, a disputed archipelago in the contested South China Sea. Two days later, the U.S. flew two Air Force B-1B bombers over the South China Sea in a provocative show of force.
Oil greases the wheels of global capitalism. As long as they remain in power, the bosses will continue to send millions of workers to fight and die to protect the rulers’ profits. They will keep on burning oil and other carbon-based fuels, the source of catastrophic climate change. For the workers of the world, there is only one alternative: communist revolution. Only when we have wiped the capitalists and their murderous system from the face of the planet will we be safe from their plunder, pandemics, depressions, and oil wars. Join PLP and help make revolution a reality!
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The Petrostates crash
The crash in oil prices is devastating the less powerful “petrostates,” nations that rely on petroleum revenue to run their economies. In Iraq, oil revenues—which make up 90 percent of budgetary income—plunged by nearly half for March, even before Covid-19 fully crushed demand. “This fiscal collapse has dire implications for the country’s struggle to stave off ISIS, for Iraq’s ability to stand up to interference by its neighbors…” (Bloomberg, 4/29). After sinking trillions of dollars and murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers in the genocidal Iraq War, the U.S. may have no more control over the region than it did before its invasion in 2003.
In fact, according to the International Monetary Fund, every country in the Middle East except Qatar requires oil to sell at a minimum of $60 per barrel. Over the past month, the average price of Brent Crude has been a hair above $20 (Bloomberg, 4/29).
MEXICO, May 1—This year, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) collectives in Mexico met to commemorate a virtual May Day because of the Covid-19 pandemic. We met with comrades and friends from Mexico City, Oaxaca, and two collectives from the State of Mexico, as well as friends from Argentina and Colombia. We were able to analyze the health crisis and the impact it has had on workers worldwide. What is prevailing is the inequality generated by capitalism and its profit system.
The situation worldwide is similar because it is governed by a system that does not care about people's lives. We flew the flag of communism and the need to create and continue working in an international party. Since, under this system, the life of any worker, no matter their job, is not guaranteed.
We made an urgent appeal to not miss the opportunity to join the fight against this capitalist caused pandemic. Working from our respective trenches, we can build a communist party. We also called on women, men, and youth to fight shoulder to shoulder from anywhere in the world to achieve a revolutionary communist army, where life will be the priority.
NEWARK, NJ, May 2—It is difficult for workers to organize as a result of the current pandemic, but it’s not impossible. So how do we move forward and continue celebrating May Day? This year in Newark, we organized our first ever May Day motorcade in the Black and Latin working class neighborhoods where Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) we are deeply rooted, to express the communist line “The Only Solution Is A Communist Revolution!”
“Capitalism is the Disease! Communism is the Cure!” That was the theme of this motorcade and was used as a slogan to sharpen struggle with workers and students amidst a deadly pandemic that has already killed close to 10,000 workers in NJ and disproportionately affects Black, Latin and women workers in Newark and around the world (NJ.com, 5/9). For the 25 PL’ers and friends that joined, by car, on bikes and through Zoom, it was as exhilarating as it was a learning experience.
Communists lead class struggle
Unlike other reformist motorcades around immigration and rent strikes that took place downtown, PLP not only brought our politics to the Black and Latin neighborhoods of Newark where we have a base but called out capitalism for exacerbating this virus and incited workers to unite as the cure. Workers along the sidewalks raised their fists, cars beside us honked their horns in response to PLP’s communist politics displayed along the cars and antiracist, antisexist messages blasting from our speakers. We remixed popular songs from classic May Day chants, “The workers united will never be defeated! Who are we? PLP! Raise those red flags, raise them high, PLP is marching by! La migra, la policia, La misma porqueria. Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world unite.”
Along the route, comrades stopped at lights or would slow down to sell CHALLENGE through windows while wearing masks and gloves to protect themselves and others. At the end of the route we entered the Stephen Crane Village Apartments, a public housing unit consisting of Black, Latin workers, and students. While teens ran to one of the car windows to take a CHALLENGE, the front of our Motorcade for Communism was met with a police motorcade for capitalism. “No good cops in a racist system” we chanted while facing a potential confrontation with the growing state’s fascist police.
Preparations and practice for class war
PLP and workers from the Newark Water Coalition collectively made a plan for the route, flyers, translations, posters, chants and who to contact if the racist cops started to make any arrests. For those who were unable to join, they followed the motorcade via Zoom. Some comrades and friends also rode on bikes beside the motorcade to be on the lookout for fascist pigs who would take any reason to disrupt working class fightback.
The route, practiced the week before by two comrades, included residential streets, a supermarket, two low-income housing units, and two hospitals. Flyers in both English and Spanish were passed out along the streets of Ivy Hill and North Newark where we’ve been organizing for decades and hung up on poles days prior to May Day. Cars were suited up with communist signs about the racist nature of this pandemic and some comrades even taped the front page of our May Day—Workers Day issue of CHALLENGE to their cars.
Preparing for this motorcade for May Day was useful to boost the morale of PL’ers, friends and workers alike–we acknowledged the dangers of the pandemic while still encouraging each other to push the limits of a disastrous capitalist crisis in order to move us toward a worker-led revolution.
A communist world is essential
This may be a dangerous time for many reasons - but there is great opportunity as well. Workers are angry, the fascist underbelly of capitalism is even more exposed and it is up to us to struggle against reactionary ideas. Having collectivized historical analysis, lessons from years of fighting back and most importantly, the potential of an angry working class hungry to fight to win, building for a communist world is essential. The motorcade showed how workers along the march were happy to see and hear communist ideas put forward by a multi-racial, multi-generational group of protestors in cars and on bikes. Join the fight for our world, not run for profits for the bosses, but run by the working class, for the working class!
LOS ANGELES, May 1—“When they say get back, we say fight back!” The coronavirus is causing some of the most horrific attacks on the international working class that we have seen in decades. Yet in the spirit of fightback against this racist profit system, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) here organized a 25-car-strong motorcade to celebrate May Day 2020. While practicing the proper health measures, we were determined to find a way to honor the revolutionary history of May Day and be a beacon of light for our class. The fight against capitalism must continue no matter what external conditions may exist!
Workers take to the streets by any means (safely) necessary
We protested with a motorcade through Inglewood and Los Angeles that included three rallying points symbolic of our fight. As cars filed in to the meet up location, they received packets with maps and information on protesting while maintaining covid-precautions. We decorated our sound truck and leading car with red flags, signs opposing racist gentrification, and a 6-foot banner commemorating Alex Flores and the fight against racist police that we have used in our Flores Friday marches. Cars were also adorned with signs like “Capitalism Kills.” We were covered by masks and gloves yet the spirit of May Day was all around us.
Supporters came from many areas of work outside of the Flores family struggle and tenants work including high school teachers and students, healthcare workers and those involved in a local jail fight. Chants rang from our sound truck which set the tone that on May 1st, the international working class will fight back! Led by two PLP members and the sister of Alex Flores, we made our way to the first rallying point. The first target was an apartment building that was being deliberately allowed to deteriorate by the landlord because it sits in the shadow of the massive Rams football stadium being built across the street, the unmistakable symbol of racist gentrification. As our chants, “racism means… gentrification means, we got to fight back” rang out, passersby and cars driving by raised their fist or chanted in support!
Speakers called out the landlord by name, describing their horrible living conditions, including an immigrant worker and tenant we are working with who have a history of celebrating May Day in Mexico. The sister of Alex Flores, who has been fighting against the racist police murder of her brother for the last six months, gave a sobering speech about the role of police in our society. A comrade called for those fighting racist police murders and gentrification to join Progressive Labor Party and fight for a communist world. He offered a moving metaphor asking those listening to think about “contact tracing” (a method to contact those who could be spreading an infectious disease). Listeners were asked to apply that logic over the last 500 years to the source of all ills, whether it be unemployment, police murder, gentrification, or imperialist war, back to capitalism.
As we left Inglewood and entered Los Angeles, we received massive support from workers in front of their homes, walking down the street or driving by in their cars. The working class of South Central is clearly fed up with ridiculously high rents, killer cops, and many other aspects of capitalism.
Uniting mass work on May Day
In preparation, Progressive Labor Party united the work within a tenants’ mass organization with the fight we’ve organized with the Flores family against racist police murder (see CHALLENGE, 4/15). Our theme for May Day 2020 was communism is the solution to a capitalist system that kills workers in our homes and in the streets.
We connected these struggles politically in the planning meetings. For example, in one of the meetings, a PLP member stressed how the police are used to oppress the working class whether it be through physical violence in the streets or the sheriff’s department evicting families from their homes. A friend from the tenant’s organization wanted a particularly heinous landlord and the broader issue of gentrification to also be included in the list of targets. The proposal was for May Day to call for the cancellation of rent and to abolish the police with the understanding that we can only do this by smashing capitalism.
The fight for Flores lives on
The third leg of the motorcade took us to the neighborhood of Alex Flores where we have been protesting weekly for the last six months. An entire family on a small street jumped and screamed in their front yard as we passed by. We coursed through the neighborhood, taking small streets that we had been canvassing over the last couple of weeks and passed the corner where another person was killed less than two weeks ago by LAPD after a car chase. We have yet to get in contact with anyone from their family at this point. We continued to Newton police station, where we have marched every Friday since November, ending on a spirited note.
From start to finish, it was four hours long, longer than anticipated. Unfortunately, this meant that many people left the motorcade before getting to the end. Nevertheless, we pulled off a major feat by seizing the streets in this period of “sheltering at home” and stretching clear across the city, connecting two key struggles. It was clear that workers are receptive and are searching for answers. We must continue to build the fight for a communist world!
