TRENTON, N.J. June 23 — The New Jersey Assembly, with the Democratic leadership fully supporting the deadly proposals of their pal Governor Chris Christie, voted for the pension and health “reform” bill here tonight. About ten thousand workers turned out earlier to protest these severe attacks on the working class; at one point, thousands surrounded the statehouse and chanted,  “Kill the bill!” Hundreds of PLP flyers and scores of CHALLENGEs were received positively by the workers.

At the rally, the sorry union leadership held a mock funeral for “the soul of the Democratic Party.” Ironically, a person in blackface joined the New Orleans jazz band walking ahead of the coffin. (The union leadership was apparently ignorant of the racism behind this tradition.)

One after the other, the politicians and union hacks who spoke at the rally claimed to be “true” Democrats. Here is the solution posed by the “most radical” speaker: “Take back the party” in the November election. But these are the “friends” they put in office in the last election.

The 2011 New Jersey budget represents an avalanche of cutbacks and take-aways from employed and unemployed workers and give-aways to millionaires. Last year’s budget had $3 billion in interest allocated to New Jersey bondholders. Of course they didn’t mention who these “bondholders” were: the same banks that have profited from the current economic crisis.

The Democrats in the state legislature put up some token opposition, but in the end provided the necessary votes to pass the biggest blows against organized workers in New Jersey history.

The solution to these massive cuts lies far outside the capitalist system. While it is easy to hate Christie, with his arrogance and disdain for the working class, “austerity” programs are being pushed all over the U.S. and the world. All politicians are falling in line. Enforcing their class dictatorship through the police, the courts, and the media, the capitalists in all countries are shifting the burden of their crises onto the wage slaves.

In the process, they are taking away the gains that tens of thousands of militant fighters worldwide died to achieve over a century and more. This points up the fleeting nature of reform under capitalism. The bosses giveth when they need to stop revolutions or buy the workers off; they taketh away when, as now, the workers are politically weak and lacking communist leadership.

In every struggle, PLP strives to bring the bigger picture into focus by linking the attacks on the most oppressed sectors of the working class to the bosses’ need to drive down wages and benefits. As in Nazi Germany, this is rulers’ standard fascist labor policy. It helps them prepare for the inevitable next war against their rivals. We fight for unity in opposition to the bosses’ plans to turn private against public workers, employed against unemployed.

Organizing to bring to light the true impact of these devastating cuts, including the racist demolition of the General Assistance (GA) program, is the first step toward mounting a united struggle. PLP members are already involved in that process. Within that fight, we will try to learn from our fellow workers while leading them forward. With our active participation, this crucible of struggle can make real the communist ideas workers so desperately need to take down all the capitalists and their puppet politicians.

The recent revelation that 70% of the guns seized by police and the army in the Mexican drug war are in fact from the United States (Christian Science Monitor, 6/15) has infuriated people on both sides of the border. But for those who have followed the drug trade since the 1980s, the revelations of U.S. officials fueling the drug trade were nothing new.

The transfer of guns from the U.S. to Mexico was largely orchestrated by the U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agency in an operation codenamed “Fast and Furious.” Now that disgruntled ATF officials have leaked the story to the press, the Justice and State Departments have moved quickly to deny involvement and lay the blame at the feet of the ATF. However, in the wake of the ATF’s bungling of the 1994 Branch Davidian standoff, it is hard to believe that they would have undertaken such an operation without Bush and Obama administration support.

Indeed the U.S. ruling class has a long history of supporting the drug trade in Latin America. In 1982 the CIA linked up the Medellin Cartel in Colombia with the anti-communist death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua and built the cocaine pipeline between Colombia and the United States. The 38% increase in cocaine users in the United States and the ensuing crack epidemic covertly funded the anti-communist wars in Central America. Drugs flowed north from Colombia to El Salvador and Nicaragua and then through Mexico into the U.S. Southwest or over the Gulf into Florida. Then guns and money for the death squads flowed south through the same channels. (See Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury, 8/18-20/1996).

Even after the scandal broke that the CIA had been nurturing and building these drug pipelines, the CIA continued to operate its Latin American drug-running operation (Washington Post, 3/17/1998). It is therefore not surprising that along with fueling wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Colombia, the U.S. is also fueling the Mexican drug war.

The only real question left is that of the U.S. ruling-class’ motive. U.S. capitalists, who have always viewed Mexico as their backyard, have long resented Mexico’s 1917 Constitution that limited the ability of foreign powers to exploit Mexico’s labor and resources. Finally, in the 1980s, after decades of U.S. pressure on the Mexican state, the U.S. ruling class was able to exacerbate (some say create) a series of economic crises that began in 1982. Conditions attached to the U.S.-led “bailout” loans were used to begin to dismantle the 1917 Constitution. Mexico’s laws protecting against U.S. exploitation then took another tremendous hit with the 1994 passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The use of the drug war to further destabilize the Mexican state is a continuation of the U.S. ruling-class’ drive to re-subordinate Mexico to U.S. imperialism (La Jornada, 3/26/2009). With U.S. guns flowing to both the drug cartels and the Mexican military, which has been given expansive policing powers, violence has predictably skyrocketed and it is the working class that has found itself in the crosshairs; 34,612 people have died in the last four years of the drug war in Mexico (AP, 1/12). The vast majority were poor workers in no way associated with the drug trade.

And that’s the point: the “drug war” has not been about drugs at all, but rather about terrorizing Mexico’s workers. The facade of the drug war hides the massive maquiladora slave-labor empire the U.S. has built in Mexico. It hides the fortunes that Mexican capitalists like Carlos Slim have made stealing public utilities and goods. It justifies the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border and the ratcheting up of anti-immigrant racism that makes U.S. capitalists rich. Stopping the flow of drugs is about the only thing the drug war doesn’t do.

The new edition of the FBI’s manual for domestic investigations grants agents extensive powers to search databases, go through household garbage and start surveillance on people or groups suspected of crimes. The new manual stresses that evidence of criminal activity is not a pre-requisite for opening investigations or beginning surveillance (NYT, 6/12).

The new rules are in fact only codifying behaviors that the FBI has engaged in since its inception and with increasing frequency since the 1970s. These surveillance powers, “justified” by the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror,” have been primarily used to monitor and harass anti-war, anti-capitalist, pro-labor and other Left-leaning groups.

One activist in the environmental movement was shocked recently when a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that he had been under intense surveillance since 2001. There had been at least five FBI informants in his various groups, and the FBI had collected 1,200 pages of documentation on him (Democracy Now, 6/14/11). Two years ago anarchists were dismayed to discover that Brandon Darby, a man who had run an anarchist collective in post-Katrina New Orleans, had been an FBI informant for years (This American Life, 5/22/2009). In 2007 it was revealed that the FBI had been abusing national security letters, presidential edicts that allowed surveillance without judge-issued warrants, to spy on people with no evidence of a crime (NYT, 3/10/2007).

Of course this kind of harassment of workers has not been limited to the FBI. Immigration Customs and Enforcement raids have been used to intimidate Latino workers from organizing as they were in 2007 at the Smithfield plant in North Carolina (Center for Iimmigration Studies, 7/2009). Anti-war groups formed after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have also been subject to spying and intimidation. In 2003 the campus office of an anti-war group at Texas Tech University was raided by local police. That same year a judge subpoenaed records (attendance lists, conference notes, etc.) of an anti-war conference at Drake University (AP, 2/7/2004). Just last year at the University of Washington, university police tried to place an undercover agent in a student group protesting the budget cuts (ACLU-WA, 7/8/2010). 

The capitalist state has always used its state power to spy on and intimidate the working class. The current changes in the FBI manual represent not a change in policy, but an increasing boldness on the part of the ruling-class’ police forces that shows their true fascist stripes. But in their efforts to intimidate the working class, they reveal their fear of it.

The capitalist class cannot exist without the subjugation and exploitation of workers. The creation of a workers’ state through communist revolution would threaten to eliminate the capitalist class forever, and they know it. That is why they spend so much time and money trying to intimidate us. The continued growth of PLP, despite this intimidation, will ensure that the capitalists will fail in their efforts to prolong their murderous, racist system.

As the economic crisis and wars abroad deepen, the U.S. ruling class has moved toward more direct control of the schools nationwide. In New York, billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg runs the city’s school system on a corporate model, with lawyers and business people in top leadership roles while teachers and school staffers are downsized. This structure attacks the students, the working-class of the next generation.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed a new school board full of corporate “movers and shakers” like board chair David Vitale, the former vice-chairman and director of JPMorgan Chase, and Penny Pritzker of the Hyatt Hotel dynasty. John Veasy, the Los Angeles schools superintendent, worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and completed an executive training program funded by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad.

In spite of rhetoric to the contrary, these billionaires and millionaires have no intention of creating policies to benefit students. Children who attend urban public schools are disproportionately black, Latino and low-income, the children of the same workers these bosses exploit. The racist segregation of housing and education in the U.S. makes poor black and Latino students the most likely victims of closed schools, empty test-prep curricula, and inexperienced teachers.

In this still-racist (not “post-racial”) country, children of the most exploited workers, including the unemployed, are the ones most likely to attend schools where rigid obedience is demanded and rote learning is the norm. The critical analysis skills that all students need are the last thing the rulers want most of them to learn.

The degraded conditions of these schools — and of an economic system that thrives on low-wage/no-wage workers — push nearly half of their students to leave without having graduated. The system needs only a handful of working-class students to be well-educated, for skills the bosses need and for use as misleaders of the mass of workers who are left behind by the school system.

Members of the ruling class are directly funding “reforms” in education through the Broad and Gates foundations, along with Walton Family Foundation and groups like Democrats for Education Reform and Educators 4 Excellence. The new Chicago schools’ CEO is Jean-Claude Brizard, who left his job as the Rochester (NY) superintendent of schools with a 95% no-confidence vote from teachers and a similar lack of support from parents and community members. Brizard is a graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy, described by James Horn, of the blog Schools Matter, as “Eli Broad’s corporate training school ... for future superintendents who… [learn] to hand over their systems to the Business Roundtable.”

This stepped-up corporate control is both about making money in the short run and trying to save capitalism over the long haul. A revolving door of new, lower-paid teachers saves public systems money, while attacks on teachers’ unions and pension funds are cutting wages and benefits for all education workers.

More fundamentally, the nationalization of education will prepare workers for increased fascism and war by defining the ideas taught to youth. Common Core State Standards and the accompanying battery of tests (now in development) will advance the centralized control of the content of education. By tying seniority, pay, and job security to teacher evaluation and student test scores, the ruling class hopes to develop a teaching force that shies away from independent thinking, both for themselves and their students. The end goal is a working class trained to be loyal to U.S. imperialism and willing to fight in wars to defend it.

All unions, including the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, work within the framework of a capitalist system that aims to destroy their members. The NEA leadership recently pledged to support President Barack Obama in spite of his implementation of Race to the Top, a policy that forces corporate-style reforms upon public schools. At its last convention, the AFT honored Bill Gates, the champion of larger class sizes — the key to massive teacher layoffs — in urban schools.

Both of these national unions have many members and local leaders who are fighting the attacks on education, like the “anti-billionaires” campaign of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Unions, however, are bound by the confines of the capitalist system. They negotiate contracts and lobby for laws that set the terms of workers’ exploitation. The CTU cuts deals with politicians when it should be organizing its militant rank-and-file to fight. Recent legislation agreed to by CTU leaders makes it harder to strike and undermines seniority protections for teachers. In reality, workers can never win in the legislative arena; any “victories” are short-term and can always be taken away by the class that rules.

The real value of class struggle doesn’t lie in the reform crumbs that workers may or may not win, but in the experience of fighting the bosses — an experience that too few workers have today. (In 2010, there were only 11 major strikes in the U.S., compared to more than 4,000 strikes in 1937.)

Communists advocate breaking the rules, and to fight back wherever we can. The mothers at Whittier School in Chicago did this last fall, when they took over a building to demand a library. In Brooklyn, students, teachers, and parents recently joined together to demand that the racist Department of Education withdraw its plan to insert an elite school into the John Jay Campus, where black and Latino students face prison-like security scanning and under-funding. Currently, students at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn are battling a trumped-up investigation of PLP teachers (see page 8).

Militant fighting is insufficient; it needs to be coupled with a revolutionary communist outlook and a long-term struggle against capitalist ideology. We must understand how ideas like individualism, racism, nationalism, and class unity with the bosses are built into the schools’ curricula. To keep our students from killing and dying for capitalism, communist teachers must win other teachers and students to see through the rulers’ lies. We must learn and teach the skills of scientific analysis, the true history of workers’ struggles, and the multi-racial, international unity required for revolution. This is the role of a communist education, and the goal of PLP: to build an army of workers and students to destroy the profit system, once and for all.