UPDATE, July 3 — Oakland kkkops and school security officers invaded Lakeview Elementary School at 4 this morning, arresting two occupiers and ousting the rest (more next issue). 

OAKLAND, July 1 — The occupation of Lakeview Elementary School has continued for 16 days (see CHALLENGE 7/4/12). Tonight, more than a hundred occupiers, parents, students and supporters held a “16 Candles” community potluck and a screening of The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman. 

Here are the demands the occupation has made on the Oakland Unified School District:

Superintendent Tony Smith must reopen all five closed schools or resign;

Keep all neighborhood schools open; 

Stop union-busting attacks against the Oakland Education Association and other school worker unions;

Repudiate the crippling debt and interest payments imposed by the state of California on the Oakland school district after the district went into receivership;

Fully fund quality public education for all.

PLP in the Mix

Progressive Labor Party is participating in the occupation and organizing support for all actions. During extensive debates over the five demands, we are learning from others. Some parents and teachers are focused on short-term goals but agree with our broader analysis. For example, PLP members and others have argued that Superintendent Tony Smith is not our main target; whether he resigns or stays, attacks on public school students and teachers will continue.

The likeliest path for winning reform demands is not through sympathetic school board members, but by mobilizing workers and parents through the occupation. In any case, the only long-term solution to the perpetual crisis in education worldwide is a communist revolution. Only then will schools serve the needs of the working class.

Growing Militancy

A daily People’s School at the occupied Lakeview site offers classes for children on social justice, science and gardening, art (including posters), as well as exercise and free meals. There has been a lot of discussion and planning about how to organize the school, which is running well—despite threats by the Oakland School Police Department (OSPD) to evict the occupiers for trespassing. 

Even as the occupation movement fights to reopen the five closed schools, many involved also want to inject a new style of education within these buildings. The teaching group is working hard to develop alternative curricula that help kids become critical thinkers about capitalist society. Their goal is education based on equality and the development of all students to their full potential, with a shared responsibility for the well-being of the collective.

While PL’ers understand that this goal cannot be fully realized under capitalism, we see glimmers of communist consciousness in working with teachers, parents and activists at Lakeview. We’ve learned that running a school is hard work, with many opportunities to learn, teach, and take action. 

Children from the People’s School recently led a march and mobilization of more than 250 to the school site. (See photo.)  The march was built by the continuing Lakeview occupation and resulting media coverage, along with activism by Occupy Oakland and mass leafleting at the school and in surrounding neighborhoods. PLP posters about capitalism and communism caught the attention of many, as did our chant: “For Education and Kids to Grow, Capitalism Has Got to Go.” The following week we joined a rally at the Oakland Board of Mis-Education.   

We distributed many CHALLENGEs at these events, mostly through agitation but some to individuals we’ve met through the struggle. The headline “Wanted for Racist Murder” (7/4/12) struck a nerve in Oakland. One non-profit group mobilized the Board of Education meeting to protest the OSPD’s racist treatment of students, and in particular the school police murder last year of 20-year-old Raheim Brown, Jr. outside Skyline High School while he was attending a dance. In May, Skyline student Alan Blueford, 18, was gunned down by Oakland city police a month before he was set to graduate.

Students and organizers were interested in the CHALLENGE reports of other cop killings in New York. At the rally, an Oakland parent summed up one aspect of the education system: “Public schools are a farm team to prepare young adults for the prison system.”

A Lose-Lose Proposition

PLP sees capitalist education as part and parcel of the ruling-class effort to marginalize the working class of the future, especially students from the poorest neighborhoods. While we are fighting now for multi-racial unity and equality in the schools and curriculum, we need to create a revolutionary communist movement to destroy the capitalists’ institutions that control education, culture, media, and work.

The bosses use schools to impose social control to make capitalism as natural as the air we breathe. Institutional racism takes the form of segregated schools and revolving-door buildings and teachers. After the capitalists have guaranteed that these schools will fail, they move to close them, leaving black, Latino, and immigrant children with long bus rides to a new school.  

In a period of capitalist economic crisis, students are channeled into an economy with little opportunity for upward mobility. A few might make it to professional or tech jobs, but most end up in non-union, low-wage jobs, the informal economy, prison, the military, or on the unemployment line. Racist education policies further stratify the future working class into competing subgroups while blaming dropouts for their failure to succeed in the capitalist economy. For the working class, the bosses’ schools are a lose-lose proposition.

WASHINGTON, DC, June 28 — Over 60 protestors including bus drivers, transit riders, workers from other unions, and Occupy activists rallied and picketed outside the board meeting of the DC Metro transit system. The rally demanded cancellation of the planned fare hike for riders and the racist pay freeze and benefit cuts for the predominantly black workforce. Chanting, “lower fares, higher wages, make the bosses pay”, demonstrators condemned the bosses for putting the cost of the system on the backs of the working class.

The transit system makes billions of dollars for the businesses (like the Verizon Center, the Nationals’ baseball stadium, and dozens more law firms and big office buildings) located near subway stops. It makes economic activity possible in the city as a whole. So why shouldn’t the real estate developers, big businessmen, and banks pay for something that makes profits for them?  Because they run the government and will do everything they can to maximize their profits at our expense.

Metro is trying to play off riders against the union, blaming the wages, pensions and benefits of workers for the fare hikes, and then turning around and telling Metro workers that they should support the fare increase so they can be paid. But even under capitalism, most transit systems don’t rely on the farebox for their operating costs. In D.C., 70% of the operating costs of the system come from fares, a national record!

At the rally today, several Metro workers took their first step in getting involved in conscious class struggle. All of the Metro workers as well as most of the other demonstrators received copies of CHALLENGE, learning more about the long-term struggle for revolution that will take from the bosses everything that the bosses have stolen from the labor of our class. All of the demonstrators were pleased to see the unity in life shown by the rally, and pledged to continue the struggle together.

PAKISTAN, June 28 — Prolonged daily power outages in almost every big city and small town have provoked widespread violent protests and strikes by angry workers. They have set fire to government-owned buildings, property, vehicles and offices belonging to the Water and Power Development Authority.

Almost every day the protestors are besieging grid stations, blocking trains, closing roads, pelting the police with stones and fearlessly facing attacks from cops wielding batons and hurling tear gas. They have destroyed traffic signals and attacked shops which do not close down. 

When angry workers burned a few homes of ministers and ruling-class-elected representatives, the latter’s personal guards and police shot four demonstrators to death and injured dozens of others. 

Workers staged a sit-down outside the Guddu Thermal Power House in Sindh province, chanting against the bosses for their negligence, lousy working conditions, lack of necessary tools and corruption, all of which caused the death of a co-worker. The security commander — a politically influential person affiliated with the ruling party — demanded the workers end their protest and chanting. After trading hot words with the workers, he left for his office. Later, his brother, accompanied by some gunmen, arrived and killed five workers on the spot, severely injuring 14 others.

Responding to this brutal act, workers shut down the plant and organized a huge march, demanding the arrest of all the culprits, including the security commander and the managing director of the power house. Workers are fuming and are organizing a city-wide strike in Guddu and its surroundings.

The energy crisis, caused by the bosses’ corruption, incompetence and lack of planning, is forcing layoffs, as well as riding roughshod over workers’ daily lives. Workers are angry over the poverty, unemployment, exploitation and oppression. Recognizing their enemies, they believe these bosses are responsible for all their miseries; and want to get rid of the bosses. But they do not yet have the leadership which can organize their anger and militancy towards an international communist revolution.

Comrades and friends of PLP are trying to expose the bosses and explaining that voting for one bosses’ party or another won’t change their lives but will continue their misery. 

At the Guddu Power House demonstration, our comrade and some friends delivered revolutionary speeches and asked the workers to organize against the viciousness of the capitalist system and the brutal bosses, and for a communist revolution. They condemned the puppet union leadership, explaining that PLP is the true party of the working class, fighting for a society run by our class, for a world without exploitation, poverty, inequality, injustice and torture — a communist world!

The ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the core provisions of President Barack Obama’s health care reform is no victory for the working class. The mandate forcing people to buy insurance on a for-profit basis is a bonanza for the insurance companies and health maintenance organizations (HMOs). These companies will now have tens of millions of new customers from whom to reap enormous profits. The same is true for the pharmaceutical and hospital industries that will continue to rob the general population with over-priced drugs and tests, many of them unnecessary. The more money they rake in, the less workers will have for basic needs.

The money to pay for health reform will, in effect, come from a tax on the entire working class. This was the basis for the rulers’ new hero, Chief Justice John Roberts, to become the deciding vote in declaring Obamacare constitutional. Congress has the power to tax, he said, and tax it will. Not everyone will be covered by the reformed health care system, of course. Twelve million undocumented workers and their children will remain unprotected, facing Obama’s policy of mass deportations, upwards of 1.4 million and counting.

Workers Have No Stake in Elections

The main beneficiaries of the Supreme Court’s decision may be Obama, whose bid to retain the White House in this November’s election gained a needed boost, and the finance capitalists who back him as their imperialist and international assassin of choice. But whether the Democrats or Mitt Romney and the Republicans come out on top, workers have no stake in either of these ruling-class candidates or in capitalism’s electoral process. The bosses’ election circus is designed to enforce the profit system that heaps only mass unemployment, racism, sexism, poverty and war on the backs of the working class. No doubt the medical industrial complex will use this reform to squeeze workers even more, with mergers swallowing smaller competitors and leading to even more layoffs.

Racist discrimination imposes a special burden on black and Latino workers, who suffer from either a doubly high rate of joblessness and lower wages for those who manage to find work. Racism enables the bosses to reap hundreds of billions of dollars from these wage and job differentials, while dividing and weakening the working class’s efforts in trying to fight these attacks. Capitalists need us only healthy enough to create profits, fight their imperialist wars for them, and bear the children the bosses can exploit in the future. These are the narrow limits of Obama’s concern for the masses’ well-being. 

U.S. Bosses in Dogfight

Obamacare’s troubled progress and narrow 5-4 margin in the Supreme Court reflects sharpening conflict among U.S. bosses. The needs of U.S. imperialists who must deal with sharpening global rivalry are not always aligned with the needs of the drug, insurance and HMO bosses, who make their profits primarily from domestic exploitation rather than imperialist wars. 

At the top of Obama’s imperialist agenda is his need to rein in runaway medical expenditures and thereby fund his masters’ war efforts. Second is the imposition of fascist discipline on all capitalists, great and small. Third is fostering patriotism by making workers dependent upon and loyal to a “benevolent” U.S. government.

This isn’t the first time the liberal imperialist wing has tried to advance health care reform as a political strategy. Ted Kennedy made it the centerpiece of his aborted 1980 White House bid. Bill and Hillary Clinton pushed hard for it in Clinton’s first term but were thwarted by the insurance and drug companies. Today it’s the politicians fronting for the domestically oriented bosses who balk at the more centralized control that Obamacare represents. And despite the Supreme Court ruling, the bosses’ internal fight is far from over.

Obama’s inability to rally broad unity for his mandates is a disappointment to liberal, imperialist Brookings Institute think-tankers, who shed crocodile tears for the uninsured while exposing the fact that Obamacare is not all what it seems:

[B]eneath the surface, the ruling is less liberal than it looks....First, the Medicaid ruling limits the power of the federal government to encourage states to extend medical care. This gives states the authority to resist national efforts to expand health insurance....Second, although Chief Justice Roberts supported the constitutionality of the individual mandate, his opinion limited the ability of the federal government to regulate interstate commerce through tactics other than taxes. This part of the decision will restrict the ability of future Congresses to regulate commerce.... The ultimate result of this decision will be that fewer uninsured will be covered than thought by health care reformers (Brookings website, 6/29/12).

The liberal reformers touting Obamacare may deceive some into thinking the U.S. is on the road to a single-payer healthcare system, a la Canada, which seems to be less costly and more efficient. In reality, however, Canada’s system is paid for by higher taxes on the working class as a whole — not so different from Obamacare, with the difference that U.S. workers have the added burden of paying for the profits of the drug, insurance, and hospital corporations.

Only Communism Can Provide for Workers’ Health

Only a communist system, one that puts workers’ needs first, can provide health care that benefits the whole working class. Without bosses and profits, workers — who produce all value in society — can allocate that value to their class’s collective health. Without a parasitic ruling class, health care will be distributed on a communist basis: from each according to their commitment to the social good, and to each according to their need. This is what Progressive Labor Party fights for in organizing for a communist revolution. Join us!