MASSACHUSETTS — As inter-imperialist rivalry and the worldwide capitalist crisis continue to deepen, the U.S. ruling class is forcing the government to restructure public schools, healthcare, and other public services, like the Post Office. Its twofold goals are to enforce cutbacks and centralize control. These cutbacks in higher education severely effect working-class students’ access to colleges and universities. After the revolts in universities in the 1970s and 1980s, the ruling class created community colleges to appease the masses. This tricked many working-class students, including immigrants, into believing they were getting a piece of the “american dream.”
Now, as the needs of the ruling class are changing, working-class students are under attack. The bosses no longer need as many workers with college degrees. The government is more tightly controlling local institutions and intimidating workers in community colleges. For bosses to gain maximum profits and control, options for many working-class students are limited to either a low-paying job, or the military for benefits and the lie of secure employment and/or citizenship.
Restructuring public community colleges to serve corporations more efficiently is one way the U.S. ruling class is trying to boost its profitability. More importantly, the bosses need to control the colleges to reproduce the racist, sexist inequalities and the ideologies to justify it. By using their state power in this way, they expose themselves as a class dictatorship rather than a democracy.
Governor Deval Patrick takes his marching orders from the ruling class to restructure the community colleges. He is relying on the Boston Foundation (BF), a liberal think tank, to plan and execute it.
In 2011, the BF issued a report entitled: “The Case for Community Colleges:  Aligning Higher Education and Workforce Needs in Massachusetts.”  BF has assets of $860 million spread out among hundreds of non-government organizations (NGOs) set up to serve the ruling class, whether these employees know it or not. Local politicians and administrators, who serve the bosses and want to maximize profits in local industries, tightly control NGO leaders.
By limiting working-class students’ access to education and training with low-level certificate programs under the “workforce development” agenda, a larger pool of contingent labor is created. These students are to work for low pay without unions or decent benefits. This opens the door to diminishing wages and working conditions for all workers. The push towards vocational education has created what is known as the “Crisis in Higher Public Education.”
With a national perspective, the BF report applauds community college systems that are “doing a good job” of complying with bosses that could be “models for reform” here. Corporations work through the government and foundations to develop the desired workforce.
Forbes lists Virginia as the best state for business due in part to its investment in workforce development programs. Virginia leadership assigns the task of “saving the middle class” to their community colleges, slowly chipping away the few choices these students have.
Washington State was the first to systematically implement “performance based metrics.” This means offering financial rewards for the community colleges who achieve milestones set by the state board and denying or limiting funding to those community colleges who do not comply. “A college’s ability to achieve these success points has an impact on its basic funding allocation from the state” the report reads.
This “carrot-and-stick” approach to governance has already been implemented by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education in some instances since the 1990s. This means funding hinges on complying with the bosses’ agenda. The ruling class is preparing for more centralized control of our class, as it prepares for greater war in the Middle East.
The BF report attacks community colleges as being “uncooperative and hard to work with,” blaming them for failures in the educational system as well as for unemployment and underemployment here. It calls for fascistic tactics of bullying and terror to control staff and faculty at community colleges by threatening to withhold funding for jobs and programs if the schools fail the “performance metrics.” These metrics are the yardstick that will punish the college workers who cannot measure up to imposed state standards.
However, attacks on education hurts students the most, as they are forced to accept cutbacks and fed anti-communist ideology. Models with reduced or accelerated developmental education are praised by the BF report for helping to boost graduation rates. This limits working-class youth’s access to college-level education, and feeds into institutional racism by holding down the most vulnerable of our working-class sisters and brothers:  black and latino urban youth.
PL’ers are participating in a union committee that aims to give leadership to the faculty, staff, and students to fight back against the ruling class’s’ plans to vocationalize the community colleges.  We are also participating in a newly formed caucus, Educators for a Democratic Union, which is dedicated to fighting back against the attacks on working-class students and teachers.  Through this work, we are meeting people who we can introduce to PLP’s idea.
PLP needs to win faculty and students to understand that the restructuring of the community colleges is not a response to a temporary crisis, but rather a response to an unsolvable contradiction of the capitalist system that will require fascism to stay afloat. Under capitalism, competition forces technological advancement, putting millions out of work. The capitalist’s ability to produce outpaces their ability to sell what they produce. This causes mass unemployment, underemployment, economic crisis, and war to become permanent features of society.
A reform in education is a restructuring of a capitalist institution in order to better control our class. We must build a worker-student alliance in order to fight against these cutbacks and control. In the struggle, PL’ers can win college workers and students to destroy this system that churns out racism and sexism, and build an egalitarian society: communism.

For hundreds of years, women have been leaders and fighters against sexist and racist oppression in the class struggle. They have been instrumental in victories for women and men alike. It’s this reality that gave birth to International Women’s Day. In celebrating this historic day, members and friends of Progressive Labor Party must shift the discussion to the necessity of anti-sexist struggle within the fight for communism. Capitalism requires sexism; we cannot end sexism without destroying capitalism.  
International Women’s Day was born out of the working class. The first IWD was held on February 28, 1909, as part of the fight for socialism and against capitalist working conditions throughout the world. It recognized the role of women as essential fighters against sexism and racism. PLP keeps this militant history alive by fighting against sexism and building for communism.
Eliminating sexism hinges on workers holding state power and destroying the divisive capitalist system that thrives on gender inequalities and oppression. In Copenhagen in August 1910, with the leadership of German communist Clara Zetkin, an international conference adopted March 8 as the day to recognize the contributions of women in the class struggle. In 1913, women in Russia demonstrated in observance of the first International Women’s Day in Saint Petersburg.
In 1917, the women of St. Petersburg (later renamed Leningrad) let uprisings which sparked the Bolshevik seizure of state power in the October Revolution. They then IWD a national holiday. After seizing state power, the Bolsheviks pioneered many material and social changes in the lives of women, from access to higher education to equality in the workplace. Later, in China after the 1949 revolution, the communist movement eliminated prostitution, sexist foot-binding and the disparity in literacy between men and women.
As we prepare to celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8, the capitalist bosses are intensifying the exploitation of women while pretending to fight against it. In the U.S., women will soon be allowed to serve in combat positions in the U.S. military — a move that Barack Obama and the ruling class media champion as a victory against sexism. But what does this really mean? Many more working-class women will be sent to the front lines to kill and be killed for the profits of U.S. capitalism.
Meanwhile, Sheryl Sandberg, the billionaire chief operating officer of Facebook, wants to build a new movement to push women to “lean in” and work harder to reach the top tiers in business. Her ideas push the lie that women are to blame for their lack of success, even as the economic crisis hits women — and particularly black and Latino women — the hardest.
With the betrayal of communism around the world, IWD has lost its working-class character. Sexism is an attack on the international working class. It is taught in the schools and media. It corrupts our workplaces and our personal relationships. It permeates the military and infiltrates the mass movements. It abuses, rapes, and murders women every day in every capitalist country. Last November, a fire in a garment sweatshop in Bangladesh killed 112 workers, mostly women, as they made clothes for Walmart. It thrives on the disunity between women and men workers.
We must take back International Working Women’s Day and renew our dedication to building a communist movement led by Progressive Labor Party. Raise anti-sexist politics and struggles at the point of production in the workplaces, schools, and mass organizations. Fighting side by side with men, women workers must become leaders of the revolutionary struggle worldwide.

In 2007, Christopher Dorner, a three-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and former U.S. Navy Lieutenant, accused a fellow officer of kicking and punching a mentally ill man while handcuffing him. The claim of excessive force was declared “unfounded” and subsequently Dorner was fired in 2009 for “making false statements.”
Dorner issued a manifesto accusing the LAPD of using excessive force, of being racist and of firing him for raising those issues through official channels. He retaliated by vowing to kill cops and did so, as well as killing some family members of one and vowed to kill others. Such tactics will not fulfill Dorner’s aim of “reforming” the LAPD. Yes, the LAPD has a long history of racism and of brutalizing the working class of Los Angeles — but it cannot be reformed.
Now Dorner is dead, which is exactly where the LAPD wanted him. They had no intention of capturing him alive and allowing him to use a trial to tell what he knows about the racist evils rampant in the 10,000-member LAPD.
A multi-county manhunt for Dormer lasted almost two weeks. The bosses’ media tried to convince everyone that the police and sheriffs throughout Southern California were working around the clock to keep us safe from Dorner, but in reality they were only protecting their racist institutions.
In fact, the LAPD demonstrated their racist reputation during this manhunt when, without warning, they shot two innocent Latina women who were delivering newspapers. Seven cops just wildly opened fired from behind them, riddling their truck and the surrounding neighborhood with over 70 bullets as if they were in combat. The semi-automatic fire destroyed the truck which was not even close to the make and color of the real suspect’s vehicle. The LA Times reported that in the area there were “bullet holes in cars, trees, garage doors and roofs.”
Fortunately the women weren’t seriously injured, yet the round-the-clock coverage kept people in fear, afraid to drive around and get shot by mistake too. People started wearing T-shirts and posting signs on their trucks declaring, “Don’t shoot, I’m not Dorner!”
The cops searching for Dorner were using drones, not the first time they were being used to target civilians on United States soil. Drones have been used on the U.S.-Mexico border against migrant workers.
Imperialist wars in the Middle East continue to take the lives of tens of thousands of  workers there as well as that of  GIs and break apart their families. The returning soldiers are given little or no support to transition back into civilian life. Though we don’t champion Dorner’s actions, we can see where the problem stems from, because he likely suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his tour in Iraq with the Naval Reserves and snapped.
The LAPD has been a kind of paramilitary force, pioneering the military-style Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) approach to “policing.” The U.S. military has employed such a tactic in Iraq and Afghanistan — “spray and pray” — which has led directly to the massive civilian casualties in those U.S. invasions.
Some working-class people rooted for Dorner throughout the chase for exposing the police for their various forms of racism against workers and youth they claim to protect. Yet, Dormer’s methods and goals to “reform” the police system are flawed. We must not confuse exposing the racist police with actual change. The police are agents who “protect and serve” the ruling class when workers organize around their class interests. No killing spree can end the racism and oppression by the police on working-class people until the system that requires them — capitalism — is smashed through communist revolution.

Millions of public sector workers went on a two-day general strike to protest the government’s increase in fuel prices and opening markets to foreign investment in aviation and insurance. Workers say this will lead to layoffs and more price hikes. Workers are threatening further and longer walkouts if their demands are not heeded. Taxi and rickshaw drivers — victimized by police terror — are warning they’ll strike indefinitely as of March 1.
These militant workers, like the bus workers in NYC, are responding to capitalism’s attempt to put their economic crisis on workers’ backs. Once communist ideas and a party develop a base among these workers, their militancy can be transformed into a revolution that will dump the profit system and promote workers’ power.