Over several years, myself and other PLP members have been organizing among local transit workers to fight the transit bosses and build PLP. One particular transit worker, Jessica, has become closer to the Party.

Now, after nearly two years of shared discussions and actions, Jessica said she sees the need for a serious long-term, radical, transit rank-and-file study/action group.

Jessica and I attempted to organize a job action group. But when our campaign began this past summer, Jessica threw her energy into an Occupy anti-budget-cut campout led by liberal community groups and phony “leftists.” She thought the campout would “wake up” the whole city. The month-long campout got little media coverage past day one and none of it made front-page or top-of-the-hour coverage. Slowly the campout died out and the city passed the budget cuts.

Throughout all this Jessica stopped organizing for our rank-and-file job action group. Advancing little on my own, I stopped too. Many workers said verbally they would support job actions but in practice most were very cynical about organizing collectively to pull off slowdowns.

I had thought there was enough support for job actions to form a group in which I could spread CHALLENGE and raise the Party. Slowly I realized that a PLP comrade’s advice had been right all along:  communist ideas would help build a base for collective job actions and strikes, not the other way around.

When the Occupy movement grew, the Party decided I should spend more time there, where I ran into Jessica. To the surprise of both of us, Occupy did wake up many people, or at least opened them to discuss revolutionary ideas.  But Jessica also noticed that the media and ruling class supported OWS much more than the summer anti-budget-cut campout. The cops harassed and fined the month-long pre-OWS occupation repeatedly but with little mainstream media coverage. Somehow OWS, which initially was not much bigger than the budget-cut campout, was a front-page top-of-the-news-hour story.

A Democratic Tea Party?

I shared the Party’s analysis with Jessica, that U.S. Democrats wanted OWS to be a Democratic tea party. She agreed and said she was waiting for Obama to jump out from behind a curtain and tell Occupiers, “Gotcha!” We agreed that OWS was an important opportunity to raise militant ideas. She and I have met George, a fellow transit worker, at Occupy. But we both felt that without revolutionaries getting involved, OWS would lead to Obama’s re-election campaign or cynicism.

The Party decided we should pursue a transit study group more seriously. A comrade, Mikey, recently started working in transit. Two old friends of the Party have also recently contacted us and said they want to attend Party meetings about transit.

Mikey, Jessica and I formed a study group in late December. We noted how important correct ideas were. The last transit strike led many transit workers to cynical and reactionary ideas, not to revolutionary or even militant ones. We also discussed the basis of the study group: revolutionary communist ideas or just militant trade unionism?

Jessica agreed revolutionary ideas were important but feared driving people away. She thought the group would be too small if communism was all we talked about. I argued that it was important not to hide communist ideas and that, no matter how hard it was to challenge anti-communism among our co-workers, there’s no other way communists can build a communist movement. If we pretended we were only about militant trade unionism, workers would smell BS because the union hacks have all spit out the same militant trade union lines and then sell out.

‘Be Real About Revolution’

Jessica was still concerned how we would approach communism and the Party. But she agreed it was important to be real with people about studying revolutionary communist ideas. Otherwise other fellow transit worker activists would be driven away by the same hollow trade union rhetoric that the hacks spew.

We decided that for now we would begin the study group with non-Party readings that would enable us to raise communist ideas. Most importantly we each discussed who we would invite to the next study group, making sure to cast a wide net. In January our transit contract expired, although the union “leaders” agreed to continue negotiations. We will have the second meeting of a PLP transit study/action group. Hopefully, and with effort, it will be bigger than the first. The struggle continues.

“I think I want to join the Progressive Labor Party.”

That was how a teacher introduced herself to me after a workshop at last week’s anti-UFT union conference. The workshop was about how to build a union chapter in schools. A veteran comrade spoke about being in PLP and about the need to fight the bosses every opportunity we get. He said that we should all consider ourselves lucky to be able to dedicate our lives to fighting back.

I said I was a member of PLP and described some of the struggles we had been involved in to fight the racist bosses and their UFT lackeys. I mentioned the union’s delegate meeting where I helped unfurl a banner that attacked the union leadership for not fighting the racist budget cuts. We were kicked out of that meeting by the union’s security and then called terrorists by Randi Weingarten, the leader of the UFT at that time. Hundreds of delegates booed her and forced her to apologize. 

That was a positive action, mainly because we forced the bosses to show their true colors. The lesson I took from this conference is that we have to be bold about telling people that we are members of the communist PLP. If we don’t, we will miss countless opportunities to meet workers ready to join our movement!

Red teacher 

The Occupy Wall Street Movement and opposition caucuses organized a conference to bring together teachers and students who are angry at capitalism’s many attacks on education. The conference took place in The Center for Worker Education and PLP members did their best to give the participants a communist education. PL students and teachers were very vocal in the conference’s many different discussion groups.  

The unionists, liberals, and well-meaning workers all looked to the union, a pawn of capitalist rulers, to fight racism and create an education system that could meet the needs of the working class. They are ultimately wrong since education under capitalism must serve the bosses’ needs, which conflict with the needs of the working class. The ruling class needs a patriotic, loyal working class to passively accept its attacks and fight its imperialist wars, so it can remain the world’s superpower. Workers’ need a society where we make all of the decisions based on our needs to develop as full human beings collectively. That is communism.

Union Helps Resegregate Schools

One participant pointed out that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) was actually a backlash against integration in the ‘60’s and is now helping to resegregate the schools. Unions walk the contradiction of appearing to fight the bosses while selling out the workers.   

The need to fight racism was brought up continually throughout the conference. A PL’er pointed out that contemporary racism isn’t about who perpetuated the action, but who is affected by the outcome. He said the bosses love to use puppets like Obama to carry out their racist attacks on the working class. The Party brought up the need to fight racism through multi-racial unity in opposition to fragmented forms of black or Latino nationalism or the Community Control of a People’s Board of Education that pushed the poison of multi-class unity.  

A PL’er also reviewed the history of the UFT. Agreeing with another speaker who challenged the anti-communist attack on the USSR, he said that without the Soviet Union, the working class had lost its beacon at the time when the Soviets were leaders of the international working class. He also pointed out that the union is made up of workers. “Look around” he said, “You’re all workers and you’re here.” Workers’ power is needed to confront the UFT misleaders at the next delegate assembly and create a wildcat strike on the next professional development day (when only teachers come to school). These types of actions are needed to learn how to fight the bosses as a class. They also provide more opportunities to expose the bosses’ democracy sham, when they use the cops and courts to attack workers’ struggles.

School with No Books

One participant taught in a Bronx school that claimed to be a college prep academy, yet it had no books. She is a technology teacher, but they had closed the computer labs for three years because three computers were stolen. The administration said that books were old and passé and that students should use the Internet instead, while keeping the computer lab closed. Only under capitalism could this kind of racist hypocrisy exist.

Such conferences create the opportunity for Party growth. As we participate in them, we can struggle to advance our communist politics. A new anti-racist caucus was established there, but we have to be in it to win it. We need to struggle with those workers around us to go to conferences like this and bring the need to struggle back to our workplaces. No union will liberate us from capitalism, let alone an anti-racist caucus in a union that’s playing ostrich. Only building the PLP to fight the wholesale attack on our class’s education will eventually give the working class the learning that it really needs.

CALUMET CITY, IL, February 10 — On February 9, a multiracial crowd of 60 workers, students, and teachers packed a city hall meeting here to voice their outrage at the murderous racist kkkops who slaughtered 15-year-old Stephon Watts.

On February 1, Stephon, a black youth who had a form of autism known as Asperger Syndrome, experienced an extreme episode where his father could not get him to go to school. When Stephon’s father called their hospital for assistance, he was told to call the cops. He dialed 311 (the non-emergency number), hoping to get a professional trained to work with special needs children. Instead Calumet City police sent a squad car. 

Bosses’ Thugs in Blue Show True Nazi Colors

When the cops arrived, Stephon’s father insisted his son was “OK,” but they forced their way into the house anyway. These murderers proceeded to chase Stephon around his home.  When Stephon slashed one cop with a butter knife the bosses’ thugs in blue showed their true Nazi colors by slaughtering Stephon, a child with special needs, in cold blood.

But the working-class crowd at city hall would not be fooled. Speaker after speaker correctly described the cops as rabid dogs who either needed to be caged (jailed) or put down for murder. When a commenter attempted to blame Stephon for wielding a butter knife, a high school student declared, “You have no idea what went on in the head of that special needs child. I don’t care about the cuts on the cops! Think about the bullet holes in Stephon!”

Other speakers spoke at great length about decades of the city cops’ blatant, racist harassment and profiling. Some wanted to discuss “the lack of training” of these particular cops. But, especially in black neighborhoods, cops are trained to shoot first and are protected by their departments and city councils later.

To that end, one worker addressed the need to organize against the city council, the cops and the whole racist, capitalist system. The crowd erupted with, “Racist cops, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!” They drowned out the city council’s feeble attempt to restore order by reciting the pledge of allegiance, to a country whose cops have full permission to systematically murder workers, especially black youth. The crowd continued to chant as we slowly marched out of the meeting. 

Sadly, no amount of anger or chanting will bring back Stephon Watts or any other victims of police slaughter. That being said, it’s good the Watts family and their mostly black, working-class community are mobilizing to fight police brutality and racism in hopes of getting justice for Stephon.

But justice won’t come from the Illinois state police (who are “investigating” this crime), the courts or the federal government, all of whom work for the same capitalist bosses. Even if — on the extremely remote chance — that these murderous cops get convicted, it won’t stop the onslaught against the working class from the bosses’ cops worldwide.

To end class war, we must fight in class war. Join with the Progressive Labor Party to organize the international working class on the basis of communism with collectivity, militancy and unyielding anti-racism. We must smash capitalism and create a society where there’s no exploiting class, racism or murderous cops serving that ruling class. That’s the only way to gain true justice for all the victims of capitalism’s crimes, including Stephon Watts.