Oakland, CA—At least 75 out of 90 teachers, students, and community members defied both the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) and the Oakland Education Association (OEA) union.
Oakland High School workers and students led the charge, demanding high wages, smaller class sizes, and more student services (The Hill, 12/11).
 They are fed up after years of stalled negotiations and shenanigans between OUSD and OEA. They called themselves the “Wildcat Underground,” wildcat being the name of the school mascot.
They held a rally in front of the campus to publicize the demands, and then marched to the school district headquarters in downtown Oakland, chanting loudly along the way. The administrators refused to come out to meet with them, or even make a comment.
After arriving at City Hall, where city leaders, including the liberal mayor Libby Schaaf, who hid in her office—actually closing her blinds—refused to address the fearless crowd. A group of students and staff went in to confront the city officials and were highly disappointed by their empty responses.
Progressive Labor Party salutes this working-class defiance of the bosses’ laws. Education workers must put the needs of working-class students at the forefront of the struggle.
Illegality, for who
Outside, John Sasaki, director of communications for OUSD, awkwardly fielded questions from the crowd. He started by repeating the threat that this was an illegal, non-union sanctioned action and that teachers could be punished and lose a day’s wages. Yes, the teachers’ strike was not organized by the union at all.
Teachers quickly responded that OUSD illegally breaks contracts all the time with oversized class sizes and not enough seats.
Teachers also reminded him that years of lost wages due to increasing cost of living makes one day of threatened punishment seem like nothing. He was ridiculed for being an overpaid goon for the district. Sasaki’s transition from a local Fox affiliated reporter to communications director for a continually exploitative District shows you something about what capitalism rewards; people who tow the bosses’ line over teachers who teach critical thinking and are prepared to disrupt the status quo.
Teaching our students by example
Teachers, students and community members told stories and sang before the whole group joined up again and concluded with a rally in front of the cowardly District office. One teacher spoke about the decision to leave the classroom: Teachers had not “abandoned” their students with this action; they were developing the curriculum that students needed to fight for a better future.
Shut it down
There was another amazing outcome of the wildcat walkout: at least two other high schools, Fremont High (in East Oakland) and Madison Park (6-12th grade) also caught wind and joined the action with Fremont sending at least two thirds of its 60 teachers. The loud chants could be heard as the Fremont High contingent joined us in front of City Hall. Community college teachers, who teach in the High School Programs, also joined. Personal-political connections between teachers at different schools helped make this happen.
Hopefully this unity will inspire community college teachers in the Peralta Federation of Teachers (PFT), especially part-time workers and students.
A multiracial fightback
Progressive Labor Party members who participated, observed that this multiracial, multigenerational, militant group reminded us of PL rallies over the years. It had the same outrage and refusal to be controlled by fear.
The ability to see through liberal politicians’ lies and see that the union was unwilling or unresponsive was the big takeaway. To see rank-and-file workers take control and successfully organize the shutdown of three schools, despite the bosses’ threats, shows a glimpse of what’s possible.
When teachers and students fight for their common needs, we see the small steps that prelude building a more collective world where teaching conditions are students’ learning conditions.
Many learned that despite fearing lack of preparedness, the working class was indeed ready to stand up and flex its collective muscle. Stay tuned.

The Women’s March, happening in a number of cities on January 19, 2019, began in 2017 when Donald Trump became President. It was in large part a response to his sexist behavior toward women, as well as the serious threats to women’s access to abortion. Several million women and men marched in the U.S. and around the world.
 The demands included reproductive rights, criminal justice reform, defense of the environment and supporting the rights of immigrants, Muslims, gay and transgender people, and the disabled. The march was consciously intended to prop up the Democratic Party, and many of its slogans implied that workers would have been better off had Hillary Clinton been elected. None of the leaders and few of the marchers connected the problems of racism and sexism to capitalism.
Electing Democrats, however, does nothing to address the crises of capitalism: economic disarray and inequality, the threat of climate change caused by the profitable burning of fossil fuels, and imperialist wars that threaten to become world wars. Women are often the biggest victims of these depredations, with tens of millions working in low-wage factories from Bangladesh to China to the U.S., and they have terribly suffered from imperialist wars in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria and many other countries. Billions of women and men are exploited and oppressed by capitalism, which is why workers of all genders, nations and ethnicities should unite to fight for a society run by and for ourselves – communism. That will require a revolution, and to accomplish that we must stick together and avoid the false promises of liberal reformers, even if well-intentioned.
This year’s March will push the same limited Democratic Party-endorsed set of reforms, and has also been marred by accusations of anti-Semitism against the leaders. Two of the four leaders have had some relationship with Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam(NOI), who has a long history of  perpetuationg racist and anti-Semitic, and anti- gay rhetoric. In February, at the NOI’s annual Saviour’s Day event, Farrakhan falsely accused Jewish people of being “the mother and father of apartheid” and offered his unique conspiracy theory that they had used marijuana to chemically induce homosexuality in Black men.
The NOI leader has repeatedly blamed racist conditions on bad behavior by Black fathers or providers, rather than on the ravages of racism.  This was the theme of his famous Million Man March of 1995. Farrakhan has long been a right-winger, a proponent of Black capitalism and an enemy of Malcolm X, who he said was “worthy of death.” When Malcolm X was assassinated by members of NOI in 1965 when he broke with Elijah Muhammed and began to advocate multi-racial unity, Malcolm’s family accused Farrakhan of ordering the killing.One of the leaders of the Women’s march, Tamika Mallory, is a businesswomen and Democratic Party operative. She is close to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and is the national director of the National Action Network, led by Hillary Clinton supporter and Democratic Party activist Al Sharpton. Mallory attended the February NOI event and had nothing but praise for Farrakhan.
Facing criticism, Mallory denied she supported anti-Semitism. Another leader of the Women’s march, Linda Sarsour, has often spoken out against anti-Semitism while being an active supporter of Palestinian rights. Sarsour raised money to support the victims of anti-Semitic attacks, especially after the recent massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Most of the people accusing her of anti-Semitism are doing so because Sarsour opposes the brutal apartheid policies of Israel. Rather than being concerned about fighting racism, her detractors defend Israel’s mistreatment and murder of Palestinians. So bitter is this dispute that the Women’s March has been cancelled in Chicago and several other locations, and two competing marches are scheduled in NYC.
Rather than calling for multiracial unity against a racist and sexist system perpetuated by the two big capitalist parties in the U.S., the leaders allow Democratic Party spokespeople a platform (presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren was a featured speaker for two years in a row).  The Guiding Vision statement of the Women’s March calls for some worthwhile reforms:“accountability and justice for police brutality and ending racial profiling, [dismantling] the gender and racial inequities within the criminal justice system,… an economy powered by transparency, accountability, security and equity,… and equal pay for equal work.”
They also called for an end to “aggression caused by the war economy and the concentration of power in the hands of a wealthy elite who use political, social, and economic systems to safeguard and expand their power.”
However, the only means discussed to accomplish these goals are a new Constitutional amendment, adherence to UN Human Rights Declarations and maintaining the right to unionize. Change, presumably, will come by electing Democrats. Such demands are pipedreams under capitalism. While some policies can conceal or shift the racist and sexist effects of capitalism, the system that produces these inequalities goes unchallenged.
Rather than separatist struggles, in which each oppressed group fights for its own rights under capitalism, we need a unified and fighting working class. Despite an apparatus for voting which allows for a periodic (and often manipulated) choice between various members of the ruling class, neither political party offers anything other than minor tinkering with a capitalist system that cares only about profits, and is in deep crisis and threatens to take us all down through war, depression and the destruction of the environment. It has got to go.

Meeting a real communist from China has given me a chance to deepen my understanding of revolution and counter-revolution. My friend was a factory worker in China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and, besides his lived experience, he has studied the events in his country that led up to the Cultural Revolution (CR) as well as the restoration of capitalism that happened after the CR ended.
A group of comrades in the U.S. has begun studying Chinese history in the period before the capitalist restoration using some of the insights from our new Chinese friend as well as analyses written by Progressive Labor Party at the time.
Corruption in the CCP
Our friend points out two pivotal developments in China in the mid-1950s, a decade before the Cultural Revolution. The first was the institution of the multi-level pay and perk scale for cadre. Cadre were people responsible for leading the day to day tasks of building the country, such as organizing factory or farming work. Not all cadre were members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) when the party took power in 1949. Many were carried over from the bureaucracy of the old regime. Those cadre who were members of the CCP had lived for years on a supply system that provided very similar levels of essentials (food, clothing, lodging, etc.) to all cadre, regardless of their level of leadership. The old bureaucracy had a graduated wage scale with more responsible individuals paid more.
In 1955 the CCP reorganized the compensation system so that all cadre, party members and others, were placed into some level of the same 30-tier pay scale, according to their level of responsibility. This arrangement provided the material basis for cadre focusing on getting ahead by promotion rather than working collectively to build a revolutionary society. Our friend uses the term “bureaucratic privilege” to describe the system in which cadre’s income and access to better housing, schools, etc. was determined by their rank. Articles in PL Magazine in the 1970s criticized this hierarchical system as part of the trend toward capitalist restoration (“revisionism”).
End of rectification
A second development took place in May of 1957, described as a “flip” from the Rectification Campaign to the Anti-Rightist Campaign. (The Rectification Campaign that began in 1956 is known for its slogan “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend”). Mao stated as late as May 14, 1957, that “Our Party will be destroyed without Rectification.”
But the free criticism by Chinese intellectuals and others of features of life in China, including the leadership of the CCP, reached a high enough level of intensity by that time that the majority of the Politburo decided to change course abruptly. At Politburo meetings on May 14 and 16, the decision was made to stop the Rectification Campaign and launch the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Outspoken critics of the CCP were attacked, at times being removed from their posts and publicly denounced. Thus, people who criticized the CCP’s policies were no longer considered part of “the people” but could be branded “enemies of the people” by the CCP leaders. This was, our friend points out, a serious mistake, confusing criticism of bureaucratic and managerial clumsiness with counter-revolutionary activity.
Individualist ideas overpowered pro-communist ideas
These two policy decisions of the 1950s created an environment in which constructive criticism of people’s incorrect ideas to further the development of socialist society (“attack the disease to save the patient”) was replaced by personal attacks and striving for personal power and influence. Combined with bureaucratic privilege, this further widened the growing chasm between the working class and the CCP leaders. Eventually, this led to an interest group of powerful managers who essentially became a new capitalist class inside the Party.
Our friend said life for workers during the Cultural Revolution was a temporary reversal of this trend. Factory workers or cadre of different levels did not risk their livelihood if they raised criticisms of those above them in management or in Party leadership. Maybe the reason that capitalists hate the Cultural Revolution so much is that they fear the very idea of workers being free to criticize them without being fired.
We feel that we have a lot to learn about this very complicated historical period, but having a friend with the personal experience of being a factory worker during the Cultural Revolution can make this study group richly rewarding.

Comrade Jerry Weinberg, one of the earlier editors of CHALLENGE, died on January 2 at the age of 79 after spending nine months in hospice care. Jerry was known for his withering sarcasm directed against all the agents of the ruling class, many examples of which showed up in the pages of CHALLENGE.
Jerry and his wife Ginger were attracted to Progressive Labor Party(PLP)when its predecessor, the Progressive Labor Movement, broke the U.S. ban on travel to Cuba. They later became active members of PLP. In the late 1960s, Jerry became the CHALLENGE editor and Ginger a columnist.
Jerry would devise headlines and front pages that exposed individual rulers and capitalism in general. One vivid example showed two pictures pasted together of Ted Kennedy seemingly kissing George Wallace, representing the ties that bound the liberal ruling class with racists and fascists like Wallace.
Jerry was not only a lover of jazz — which had its roots among Black workers —  but pointed out the racist politics which enabled white musicians to appropriate this music. Being an atheist, he was particularly sharp on exposing how religion was used by the bosses to maintain their oppression of the working class.
Some years following his editorship of CHALLENGE, Jerry became an accomplished chef in New Jersey and would set up fund-raising dinners to raise money for PLP. Eventually Jerry’s family moved to Burlington, Vermont, where he established the Five Spice Café, which for 25 years became one of the most popular eateries in the city. It was there that his working-class sensitivities evolved into training numbers of youth who worked in his kitchen to themselves become accomplished cooks. (One said that Jerry “deserved a plaque for his peanut sauce alone!”) He was well-known in the area, donating to many worthy causes.
Jerry was a storyteller, a lover of poetry and taught about the necessity of living as if we have the obligation to do right by each other. He is survived by Ginger, their daughter Cheryl, and beloved grandsons Ethan Charles and Zander Reed.
Comrade Jerry’s devotion to communism and the working class will be sorely missed, but the delicious meals he prepared will also be remembered by anyone who savored the food in the Five Spice Café.
(Anyone wishing to tangibly honor Jerry can donate to help get a new wheelchair for Jerry’s hospice roommate Chris at Birchwood Terrace https://tinyurl.com/yagsjxqu) Chris and Jerry looked out for each other while rooming together, and Chris was a friend and guardian to Jerry as his health declined.)