NEWARK, NJ, January 26 — Education workers are angry.  The Newark Teachers Union (NTU) has let teachers and support staff go two years without a contract with no end in sight.  Most schools are falling apart and some are hazardous.  Students are forced to suffer through state testing every year only to be told their improvement is still insufficient.  The NTU addresses neither issue with members or the Newark community.

This is hardly surprising given the lack of resistance from NTU leaders against ruling-class unity on education reform.  The recently passed Urban Hope Act is a prime example. It allows private companies to build and manage public schools using public funds. Up to 12 schools in the mainly black and Latino districts of Newark, Camden, and Trenton will be affected. The largest teacher’s union in the state, the New Jersey Educators Association (NJEA), supported this pro-corporate, for-profit legislation.

The NTU leadership did nothing to inform the rank-and-filers about this law, much less organize against it.  Further, liberals and conservatives in the privatization debate want teachers to churn out pro-capitalist ideas to maintain this crisis-ridden system. Under capitalism, education is a private industry for the accumulation of profit.

Workers’ Response

Some education workers in the NTU are responding to the union misleadership by forming a caucus.  To align the caucus with the class nature of Newark, it was named Newark Education Workers (NEW) Caucus. The NEW Caucus held three steering committee meetings and two general membership meetings. PL’ers participated to push the struggle to the left.

Three main ideological struggles took place. The first was winning workers to understand the importance of developing a working-class consciousness. The second was to recognize that alienation — the commodification and separation of workers from their labor and from themselves as producers — is a product of capitalism. Alienation makes workers feel like a cog in a wheel. Overlooking this is the primary issue preventing more education workers from fighting back, not apathy. Apathy is a bourgeois myth that functions to blame workers for their inaction, not the misery-inducing capitalist system. The third was to increase the fight against oppression, especially racism, both inside and outside the NTU.

When working on the mission statement for the caucus, it did not take much struggle to persuade education workers that alienation was the primary barrier to more workers participating in the union.  Members of the NEW Caucus are also working toward building unity with all workers and students in Newark, the source of proletarian strength.

Fighting Against Racism is Primary 

Much to the surprise of a PL’er, the issue of fighting racism took much struggle. A caucus member said union leaders were not defending black and Latino workers in the NTU. Another person then brought up the need to defend students by fighting racist attacks within and outside of the school system.  

For some, racism was seen as a personal thing that individuals use against one another and thus no longer a primary problem in society. PL’ers must point out that racism is a class issue and source of immense super profits. Some workers believe we live in a “post-racial” society, a myth the ruling class has worked hard to spread. Another member added that if the mission statement opposed racism then it would have to include all the other “-isms” like ageism.  

After much struggle, caucus members acknowledged racism as a major social problem necessary to fight back against. It is one of the ruling class’s main weapons in dividing and conquering workers. Anti-racist language was included in the mission statement. 

The next step is another mass meeting in two weeks with rank-and-file education workers. Committees will be formed, direct actions will be proposed, and discussion will ensue over how best to introduce the caucus to NTU (mis)leaders.  Be assured that the essence of the NEW Caucus will be reformist, even if militant at times.  But with struggle and CHALLENGE, PLP can build a base with fellow education workers by consistently pushing anti-racist class struggle towards communism.  PLP hopes to win these workers to fight for a communist world where education is for the benefit of all workers, not for the profit of the ruling class.

BALTIMORE, January 16 — As another strong step in the struggle against Maryland Governor O’Malley’s plan to build a new $100-million youth jail, a bold protest rally was organized by Occupy Baltimore, Schools Not Jails and the Baltimore Algebra Project.

While a sizeable group of supporters erected a huge tent, and as volunteers brought supper for everyone, six people defied state and local police by crossing the fenced perimeter of the would-be construction site. A large truck of pre-fabricated construction material was collectively unloaded. Then pieces of a one-room, red wooden school house were passed, hand to hand, up to and over the fence.

As kkkops decided exactly what to do and when, the six people who had entered the site managed — before being arrested — to finish building the schoolhouse, symbolizing the demand being chanted: “Education, not Incarceration!” One of the six, a teacher, also managed to conduct a brief class, repeated in mic-check Occupy-style by everyone at the support rally, just outside the fence. The class cited anti-racist lessons to be learned from the life of Frederick Douglass.

Meanwhile, all 50 CHALLENGES that were brought were eagerly taken by rally participants. In an electrifying moment, a young comrade, recognizing the need for mass advocacy of Progressive Labor Party’s revolutionary ideas, took the initiative to give a dynamic and well-received speech, explaining the necessity for working-class revolution and communism.

It’s now appears that the governor and the local ruling class may back down on this issue, at least for now, and forego construction of the new jail. Even of more profound importance is the emergence of a new PLP study group, led by young comrades, to help create the next generation of revolutionary leaders.

Dare to struggle, dare to win!

BROOKLYN, NY, January 12 — In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, students marked the anniversary of the 2010 earthquake with a march between two campuses of UEH, the State University of Haiti, while simultaneously PLP rallied in a Brooklyn neighborhood where many workers from Haiti live.

Our banner here read, in English, Kreyòl, French and Spanish: “International Solidarity with Haitian Workers: The Struggle Will Go On!” We distributed more than 500 Party flyers, along with CHALLENGE, and gathered over 100 signatures on a solidarity petition to be sent to five union and student groups in Haiti, supporting their efforts to defend themselves against the failed system of Haitian local bosses under imperialist control.

Students spoke in Kreyòl and English about the need to abolish capitalism itself, both in the U.S. and in Haiti, and to build a worker-run society, egalitarian communism. Our bullhorn echoed through the busy intersection as thousands of workers hurrying home heard the communist message.

Just as Bill Clinton’s vaunted “reconstruction” has failed in Haiti (his Interim Haiti Recovery Commission folded last October), capitalism itself is failing everywhere. Consider these racist unemployment figures: 80% in Haiti, 70% in Pakistan, 70% among youth in South Africa, 20% in Spain, 17% in France, 21% in the U.S., (50% among black youth).

Capitalism is a system of production for profit but because of overproduction and a credit crisis, its drive to maintain profits has thrown 250 million workers worldwide onto the streets. Meanwhile, U.S. banks sit on $2 trillion of capital they will not release for investment in real production. So workers’ needs simply go unmet.

As Karl Marx showed, these crises inevitably have recurred throughout capitalism’s entire history. The bosses’ solution to mantain profits during crises is to redivide the pie and destroy workers’ lives through gigantic inter-imperialist wars. Haiti too, as an “ally,” will be caught up in the major war brewing between the U.S. imperialists and their rivals.

The bosses’ proclaimed programs of aid to Haiti have gone mostly right back to the bosses themselves, not to workers there. The vast majority of the $4.59 billion in international aid to Haiti went to the donor governments themselves, to major “vulture capitalists” who swoop in to profit from natural disasters, and to the big NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) with their expensive overhead costs.

For example, $600 million of the $1.6 billion the U.S. Congress eventually released went to the U.S. Department of Defense to reimburse it for deploying 20,000 troops to Haiti to guard against post-quake rebellions. (For details see “Haiti: Seven Places Where Earthquake Money Did and Did Not Go,” at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/03-2.) We can never count on any capitalist, only on ourselves as one international working class.

These January 12 actions are small steps in PLP’s strategic effort to revive the proletarian internationalism so necessary for all workers to defend ourselves, defying the bosses’ borders. We see this urgent need as the big imperialists prepare for world war, most menacingly right now in the flash point of the Hormuz Strait near Iran (see CHALLENGE editorial, 1/18).

The mistakes of the old communist movement, as it collapsed because of the abandonment of its principles, dragged the red flag of internationalism into the mud. In 1943, the Soviet leadership, with the agreement of the Chinese and other communist parties, dissolved the Communist International (the Comintern) and lapsed into a loose collection of national parties. This retreat came directly from the parties’ united front with the capitalist “Allies” in the war against fascism. The Soviets and the others saw abolishing the Comintern as necessary to reassure the Allies that they were safe from communist revolution at home — in essence abandoning workers to their own bosses in the Allied countries. 

We need a new version of the Comintern! PLP is organizing as a single international party, a step beyond the Comintern coalition form. This is a gigantic task, but the principle is clear, as we chanted today: “Same Enemy, Same Fight: Workers of the World Unite!”

Workers have no country and want no country: as workers our “country” is the whole world. Workers in Haiti need both solidarity from the entire international working class as well as to contribute to it. From small actions like these simultaneous rallies a great movement will grow.

NEW YORK CITY, January 23 — A steady winter rain couldn’t dampen the spirit of 75 workers and students as we picketed the federal building in lower Manhattan this evening in support of dockworkers in Longview, Washington. Representing a half-dozen unions and college campuses, the protesters challenged the Obama administration’s support of EGT, a union-busting grain consortium. The U.S. Coast Guard has deployed boats and helicopters to escort tankers making deliveries to EGT’s newly constructed grain terminal, which is being operated by scab labor.

EGT made $2.5 billion last year, but it plans to make a lot more by opening its Longview terminal without hiring workers from the ILWU, the longshoremen’s union whose members have worked this port for 70 years. Instead, it brought in a scab union, Operating Engineers Local 701. This is a crude attempt on the part of a major corporation to break the back of the ILWU. If EGT succeeds, port companies all along the West Coast will smell blood and look to hire non-union workers.

The longshoremen have some formidable enemies. The police have arrested hundreds of protesting workers. The corporate media have attacked their struggle. The national AFL-CIO — led by sellout Richard Trumka — has refused to support their cause, calling the matter a “jurisdictional dispute.” The National Labor Relations Board has filed an injunction against the union to prevent further protests.

Despite these obstacles, the workers are fighting hard, realizing that losing would be devastating. In July, after workers blocked train deliveries to the terminal and one hundred were arrested. In September, 500 dock workers and supporters defied the police and took over the port, stopping deliveries and dumping grain.

Many of us at the picket line this evening — transit workers, teachers, professors — are working without a contract. Others have had concessionary contracts forced down their throats. We were there tonight because we understand that our local struggles are part of a larger class war between between the small ruling class of owners on the one hand (along with the politicians and union sellouts who serve them), and the working class on the other. Progressive Labor Party brings to the struggle the understanding that this war can only be resolved by workers taking state power and running society — not for the obscene profit of a few, but for the benefit of all.