Newark, NJ October 20 — Before the dust could even settle from the Chicago teachers’ strike, national union boss Randi Weingarten and Newark Teachers’ Union (NTU) boss Joe Del Grosso were quick to sell out the education workers and students here in Newark.  The contract, which took over two years to work out, will give the capitalists and their puppets (like Superintendent Cami Anderson) easier access to implement their fascist rule.

While there are members of the teachers’ union organizing a “no” vote against the contract, the ruling class is putting their soldiers in line to make sure it goes through.  Two of the biggest provisions of the contract are the two-tier wage system and the “Election to Work” agreements that teachers in closed schools are forced to sign to keep their jobs.

Two-Tier Wage System

The biggest part of the contract that has drawn outrage from union members is the two-tier wage system.  This scale caps teachers at lower wages.  It also refuses to recognize the difference between teachers with a BA, MA, and PhD, thus making the argument that additional certifications have no impact on how well they teach. Teachers can earn “bonuses” for being rated highly effective.

The union continues to push this merit scale. This will create a division among workers by putting them on two different scales and giving out a limited amount of bonuses to particular teachers. However, as we have seen in areas like Baltimore and other places, after this merit pay system is implemented the number of teachers rated highly effective will definitely drop.

  Many teachers at the contract presentation voiced these concerns, something that the union leadership completely ignores. One of the main goals of the ruling class is to lower the cost of education as it prepares for wider, larger wars in the future. 

Turnaround Schools and ‘Election to Work
Agreement’

One of the most unsettling aspects of the new contract is the union’s willingness to allow the Superintendent to close down 30 schools in the next three years.  That is almost 50% of the Newark schools! When confronted with opposition to allow these closings, Del Grosso said, “Well, she can close as many as she wants, we are limiting her.”

Even more troubling than the complete cooperation of the union leadership in closing schools is the “Election to work” agreement that teachers in these schools will be forced to sign if they want to keep a job.  Any teacher slated for one of these “turnaround” schools will have to sign an agreement that will override many of the rights that union members have fought for in the past.  According to the contract, “the limit on the number of subject or content areas that a teacher may be assigned to teach shall not apply…The limit on the number of classes, consecutive assignments, preparation periods, and room assignments…shall not apply.”  This is what the bosses would like the rest of the schools to be like. 

Clearly this hurts both teachers and students.  These schools, which are very similar to charter schools, can work a teacher for two or three years until they are burnt out and leave the education system.  This can give the bosses greater control over teachers since many will not stay long enough to get tenure (which will be a thing of the past as well). They will be so busy keeping their heads above water that they won’t be able to organize and fight back even if they wanted to. It will save the ruling class millions in workers’ wages by having teachers stay for only a few years rather than making it a lifetime career.

Racist Attack on Students

In a school system that is 96% black and Latino, Newark’s reforms are more similar than different to the ones in Chicago, New York and other cities.  Students suffer because most of these teachers will not have as much room to fight for student rights.

Teachers will not be as effective because of the different content areas that they are responsible for as opposed to becoming more proficient in particular subject areas. And the community of the school will lose out because of the increased turnover of teachers.   This makes perfect sense for the ruling class, which does not care about ”educating” these students to understand the world, but simply to teach students obedience and basic skills to work menial jobs. 

Preparing for fascism
and war

As the U.S. ruling class prepares to fight larger, more intense wars against its rivals, education will become increasingly important.  The disciplining of the future working class to accept low wage jobs or unemployment as well as to give their lives in the bosses’ wars will depend heavily on the teachers’ reduced ability to fight back as exemplified by this contract. 

This will also save the bosses millions of dollars in wages, giving them more wiggle room to spend money in other areas on the war front (reindustrialization for producing war materials and overseas spending) and allow capitalists to accumulate profits.

Contract Shows Need to Fight For Communism

This struggle has opened up the door for a student-teacher-parent alliance.  Many parents have been passing out flyers to teachers urging them to vote no.  Discussions in the school have become much more political as well.  In one elementary school two workers were talking about the implications of the contract.  One worker organizing against the contract spoke to a group of workers on the need to organize for communist revolution in the long term while fighting against the contract now.  Some of the teachers were skeptical.

As the days went by and more information came out about that contract, one of the teachers put a note in the comrades’ mailbox at school saying, “You’re right, we do need a revolution.”

While it may be jumping the gun to believe that workers can be won to the overthrow of capitalism in a week, this shows that workers are more open to our politics.  Those that argue for limiting our fight to reforming capitalism are starting to see the limits. 

In the 1960s and 70s many courageous teachers in Newark fought hard and went to jail for the reforms that other teachers enjoyed.  Now that the struggle has died down, the bosses have been working overtime to take these reforms away.  This is not just happening in Newark but worldwide. The only way to guarantee that workers control their future and create schools that will allow students to reach their fullest potential is through the building of communism. Therefore, we will continue to work with teachers, students, and parents to fight the bosses’ attack, expose the class nature of capitalism, and link this to the need for a communist revolution.  There is no other choice.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, November 13 — Sign reads “Brooklyn to Port-au-Prince: Professors Unite to Smash Racism!”

About 12,000 students and workers took the streets for a two-day teachers’ strike!  The entire demonstration was carried by the energy and vitality of the students. The international solidarity was vibrant. We stopped in front of schools calling on students and teachers to join the march. It was militant, and resulted in a battle between the MINUSTAH troops and students. (See next issue for full story.)

San Salvador, September 23 — It’s everyone’s job to put communist ideas into practice

The process of building a base for these ideas is hard but not an impossible task for each PL’er. We feel that the lack of commitment to establishing a collective that can plan and guarantee the accomplishment of the tasks assigned to each member explains the slow growth of PLP in El Salvador.

Our comrades have a large membership; we could have three zonal collectives and one leadership collective in charge of planning areas of concentration for each member. In this way, we can guarantee that communist theory and practice remain primary. This could also help us deal with some contradictions amongst our membership.

We are organizing among a working class not yet ready to believe in the need for a party, but that needs to find an alternative to fight against the oppression that’s suffocating and destroying it. The working class is tired of all the lies that the bosses and their associated politicians push. It’s urgently necessary to take advantage of the failures of the FMLN (National Liberation Front Farabundo Marti) government

Inter-Imperialist Rivalry

Inter imperialist rivalry is also played-out in poor countries. So-called leftist bosses play a dirty role, deceiving workers, trying to makes us believe that the Chinese economic model is better, when it’s just more of the same. The cooperatives that are being organized in indigenous and working-class regions aren’t designed to improve our lives and build class consciousness, or to foster collectivism. The support that the bosses are giving to some phony FMLN leaders is designed to create the false idea that some bosses are not so bad, but that’s a lie. Under the capitalist system there are no good bosses; they are all bad for the workers.

We must build collectives to improve our lives, and build solidarity and the awareness that as city or rural workers we can, in fact, transform this society. 

There have been over 120 reported deaths from Hurricane Sandy in the U.S., with another 100 or more in the Caribbean countries, the majority in Haiti, a reflection of the worst racist oppression in the Western Hemisphere. Sandy is the largest hurricane on record — over 1,000 miles in diameter —though it did not have the highest winds recorded.

In the U.S., tens of thousands were displaced by destruction of their homes, while in Nigeria in West Africa, the worst flooding in half a century has displaced more than two million people over the last few months and killed hundreds, with the figure still climbing. The overflow of the Niger River, the third largest in Africa, has mixed sewage with fresh water and brought crocodiles, snakes, and hippos into people’s homes. Are these exceptionally destructive events just a coincidence, or is there a common cause?

It is estimated — as only a capitalist system will do — that Sandy may cost over $50 billion. Some costs will be paid by insurance companies and other capitalists, but a majority will fall on millions of workers. It is the second most costly U.S. weather event in recent history, second only to Hurricane Katrina’s more than $100 billion in damages. No other event comes close. By capitalist reasoning, the many deaths in both the U.S. and Nigeria take a back seat to the monetary losses.

Not ‘Freak Natural Happenings’

The capitalist media are slightly more willing on this occasion than in the past to link the catastrophe to global warming. They usually describe extremely violent and destructive weather events as freak natural happenings, but as even Gov. Cuomo of New York pointed out, horrible events that used to happen once a century are now happening every other year.

This makes it harder for the capitalist media to hide the connection between these events and global warming. They still try hard to do so, or at the very least avoid talking in this context about a solution that could make a difference, namely getting rid of fossil fuels altogether (coal, oil, natural gas). Fossils are fueling not only economies, but also the global warming that produces warmer air and warmer oceans that, in turn, produce faster evaporation and immensely greater amounts of rain. But the rain only falls in certain places, robbing other places of moisture and leaving behind desertification and drought.

The accelerated melting of the Arctic Sea ice (as well as land-based glaciers all over the earth) due to the increase in heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels created a high pressure area over the North Atlantic. This prevented Sandy from moving eastward, as hurricanes usually do, instead sending it crashing into the eastern shore of the U.S.  While the devastation was centered on coastal states, the winds and rain were felt as far away as the Midwest with gigantic waves on some of the Great Lakes, mimicking Sandy’s Atlantic storm surge that raised the sea level almost 14 feet in New York City.

In addition to wind-caused damage, many burst natural gas pipelines in New Jersey and elsewhere caused fires that burned hundreds of homes, and all their contents. Because of downed power lines, gasoline was not available even though it was stored underground at thousands of filling stations. As many as eight million homes and businesses lost access to electricity, causing food spoilage and other damage and leaving people to freeze in the dark.

So it seems that these fossil fuels are both dangerous and unreliable in a pinch. But since Nigeria is a vast source of oil profits and therefore a target of imperialist rivalry, workers there will still suffer worsening imperialist exploitation and oppression in the international competition to obtain even more of these fossil fuels.

Communist Dialectics
Gives Answers

Only dialectics, which is the key scientific tool communists use to understand the world and to describe it, makes this transition from quantitative to qualitative changes a central part of its approach to understanding everything in the world. Such ever-present transformations of quantitative changes into qualitative changes can, and do, take place over seconds, years, or even millennia. But the atmospheric changes brought about by GHGs, emitted relentlessly by all capitalist economies, have entered a phase that is taking place over a few decades. Extreme weather events, particularly where they haven’t happened before, are only the tip of the melting iceberg.

Other expected accelerations include permanent rise in sea level. For example, “normal” sea level at lower Manhattan has risen a foot in the past 100 years, and is expected to rise by at least another two feet in the next 70 years. With rivers flooding here and droughts persisting there, killer heat waves and home-destroying wildfires, migration of forest-destroying insects farther from the equator, desertification and consequent food shortages, many other effects of global warming will occur. These things are discussed fully in our essay on global warming in the Winter 2010 issue of THE COMMUNIST at www.plp.org.

Communist revolution is another example of quantitative change becoming qualitative: not changing the bosses’ system a little, but overturning it entirely, with its profits and competition. And as masses of workers, students, and soldiers in the U.S., Nigeria, and around the world swell the ranks of PLP — a quantitative change — sooner or later will turn into a qualitative change: from capitalist tyranny into a world wide egalitarian communist society run by the workers under the leadership of their communist party, PLP.

Until this occurs, capitalism’s many tragic outcomes will multiply without limit. Neither Obama, Romney, nor Nigeria’s President Jonathan will make any difference in this situation. Only the workers everywhere, through mass collective action from New Jersey to Nigeria, can do that.