NEW YORK CITY, February 14 — This past weekend, members and friends of the PLP from throughout the city met, guided by the slogan of “sharpening up the contradictions” between communism and capitalism.

We started on Friday by taking a collective of students and teachers to see the movie “Valentine’s Day.” This film was a piece of crap but the theater was packed and millions more went to see it over the weekend. So we figured we would too, and try to sharpen up the struggle against the racist, sexist and imperialist ideas the bosses need us to absorb.

Our estimate of the period is that the rulers need to win over larger segments of the population to such views. They also are very adept at providing the masses with endless options to escape a reality of economic crisis and war. So we went to the movie expecting escapism, racism, sexism and pro-war propaganda. Sure enough it was all there, and several of the students we brought were spot-on in identifying the bosses’ messages in this seemingly harmless film. We reconvened Saturday morning, veteran and newer comrades alike, and sure enough we had a study group to discuss the movie’s plotlines and politics.

Following the discussion was a very cold but enthusiastic march in Harlem. The march went past project buildings, a precinct where we denounced killer kkkops, a methadone clinic, corporate banks, and an army recruiting station situated in the heart of Harlem.

Response to our chants of “Imperialist war means we got to fight back!” and “The workers united can never be defeated!” was mainly positive. One resident encouraged us to keep marching after expressing his anger of methadone clinics in his neighborhood. Having drug clinics in a mainly black and Latino neighborhood is no solution for health care, and is a result of the ruling class’ racist attempt to oppress workers.

With CitiGroup receiving $45 billion in bailout money, we picketed a Citibank branch and encouraged people to join us. Barack Obama bailed out the banks and Wall St. with hundreds of billions this past year, yet teachers and students are facing cuts to funding for their classrooms.

We picketed an army recruiting station in a mostly black neighborhood. Along with bailing out banks, the bosses also target working-class neighborhoods for their imperialist war operations overseas. The bosses are desperate to gain soldiers for their oil wars by bribing scholarship money or citizenship to soldiers in return for their blood. Our picket received many words of encouragement from those close-by, who joined our chants and called for “death to the bosses!” We will be back in these neighborhoods.

Several young comrades gave street speeches for the first time. CHALLENGE and our chants were well-received in general on streets where major rebellions rocked the bosses system in the past and will do so again.

Sunday wrapped up our weekend with a study group on contradiction, the first law of dialectical materialism, our universal philosophy. We discussed the need to sharpen contradictions in our PL work. We shared common experiences of pushing forward political struggle with allies, of striking the balance of seeking out the points of disagreement with our friends even as we strive for greater unity in the relationship. We reaffirmed the vital importance of building these relationships in the context of campaigns to also sharpen up struggle against the bosses’ system and its attacks on our class wherever we are. We emerged in a stronger position to build towards a fighting May Day 2010. 

Newark Mayor Cory BookerThe bosses want nothing more from their schools and youth organizations than the preparation of the next generation of loyal workers and soldiers. It is a positive development that in the debate world lots of students argue against capitalism. Over the past weeks debate teams have organized picket lines at Senate offices protesting the imperialist invasion of Haiti and also protested Newark Mayor Corey Booker’s opening remarks at a tournament with eighteen letters reading CAPITALISM = POVERTY.

Booker’s lame reply was that he was making capitalism work in Newark, where unemployment rates top 50% among black youth aged 18-30, by bringing in micro-loans to encourage small business. A lot more could have been done to disrupt his speech and a lot remains to be done to keep the U.S. bosses invasion of Haiti in the front of people’s minds. But debaters are learning that real change comes from more than just talk. PLP and CHALLENGE are in the mix to point out the path to real change: communism.

QUEENS, NY — “You know we’re gonna get screwed on this,” said the PLP’er. His coworker and CHALLENGE reader shrugged.  At today’s briefing (the meeting at the beginning of a shift) the boss tried to force extra work onto a group including the PLP’er and several CHALLENGE readers. They would have to work a flight, and fuel vehicles.

One worker objected to the group having to do two jobs at the same time. Not surprisingly, the supervisor ignored the criticism since without class struggle he controls everything and doesn’t have to listen to a word we say. Furthermore, the white boss’s arrogance takes on a racist character as he ignores the input of the mainly black and Latino workers.

“We do all the work and should be making the decisions about who gets what assignments,” said the PLP’er to another group member.

“What do you expect?” responded the worker, who’d seen enough capitalist exploitation to be able to predict a thing or two as well. True, we should expect a dictatorship of the bosses under capitalism, but fighting back and building the PLP can lead to a revolution and workers’ power.

However, the workers were still under capitalism two hours later when the boss stormed into the break room, upset that two vehicles had not been fueled. What did he expect?

Since the head supervisor could now reprimand him, the junior boss told the group of workers they were in trouble. “You’re getting a formal warning, which can lead to a letter on your permanent record and further disciplinary action.” What all this will mean is unclear, but essentially it is a boss attacking a group of workers to save his own neck — nothing new.

“They’re digging their own grave when they attack a group of us,” said the PLP’er later. “They’re happy to call you into the office by yourself because when it’s you alone against a boss they have all the power. They can take your job away; they can take the food off your table; they can take the roof from over your head.”

“But when they attack a group of us? They can’t fire all of us! We do everything around here and they know that when we remind them.”

The workers argued back and forth about if and how they should take action. “I’ll just go talk to the head supervisor tomorrow” said one worker. Another volunteered to go and try to convince the junior boss at the end of the shift.

“Whatever we decide, we should do it together, because that’s when we are the strongest. That’s when we have the power,” said the PLP’er. Unity is the key to our strength — individually fighting back is no solution.

The bosses love to isolate and alienate workers who speak up and play favorites with others. This takes on a racist and nationalist character: with white and Latino workers encouraged to identify with white and Latino supervisors rather than their sister and brother workers.  All workers get hurt when we are divided and can not stand up together against the bosses’ attacks on us.

The idea of a united response worried another worker. “I don’t know, [the junior boss] tends to get frantic when he feels cornered and won’t listen then,” he reasoned. “Good,” shot back the PLP’er, “he should be afraid.”

The workers continued to discuss their plan of action, but could not come to a consensus. The PLP’er talked later with one worker about escalating the struggle with the bosses, and that while we may not win every battle we need to build anti-racist unity for the war.

This struggle can move forward with more discussions about the need to fight back and how the little struggles we wage today are a necessary training ground for the mass struggles of the future. Workers have now been more intensely exposed to some of the PLP’s ideas of unity, resistance and revolution.

The bosses’ class war is unfortunately far from over, with many more workers from Port-Au-Prince to New York City facing death, unemployment and cutbacks so long as capitalism rages. Positively, young workers like this PLP’er are organizing industrial workers at the point of production, where the struggles to organize working-class fight-backs provide a school where communist ideas can flourish.  More battles lie ahead. J

January 19th was the deadline for state grant applications under Obama’s “Race to the Top” (RttT) program. The program’s goal is to restructure the public education system on a national scale, by bribing states to bust teachers’ unions, centralize and privatize public education. At least eleven states (including CA, NY, MA, IL, and TN) are changing their state laws to be eligible for tiny amounts of grant money ($4-5 billion to be distributed nationwide over the next four years, about  $110 per school-age student per year. This top-down policy change, which attacks the working class and centralizes the power of the ruling class, is a clear example of how fascism is developing in this country.

U.S. capitalists are in an economic crisis. As the budget shrinks, their fiscal priorities become increasingly clear. They will continue to pay for imperialist wars and to prop up falling profits, giving huge breaks to banks and other corporations. Meanwhile, they will continue to depress the standard of living of the working class, through layoffs, reduced compensation and benefits and by slashing public services. Capitalists must cut back on higher-paid, unionized public employees, such as teachers and transit workers.

The two teacher unions represent one quarter of all unionized workers in this country and are an obstacle to the massive cuts and restructuring that the ruling class needs to do at this time. Race to the Top calls for a massive expansion of charter schools, especially through takeovers or conversions of schools that are currently unionized public schools. At such schools, superintendents may “close” a school one day and “reopen” it the next, having thrown the teachers’ contract out overnight. In “underperforming” schools, all staff can be fired and forced to reapply for their old jobs, or the school can simply be given over to a charter school management company. We have seen in recent articles about schools in Chicago that schools facing “reorganization” serve primarily black and Latino students. The same is true of the nineteen New York City public schools now slated for closing.

However bad these reforms will be for teachers, working-class students have much more to lose. As U.S. capitalists restructure the economy to support imperialist wars, they don’t want to pay a lot of money for 10-12 years of public education for every student. They want to further track and segregate public education, in order to educate a small percentage of students in technical fields needed for military service and future war production. This can be done at magnet and high-performing, selective charter schools. Meanwhile, they are abandoning large numbers of inner-city working-class students to a rotten education at low-performing charters and increasingly under-funded public schools where the neediest students land by default. The racist nature of the system ensures that black and Latino students are those most victimized by the crisis in education, as they face the worst odds in finding jobs, healthcare and affordable housing outside of school.

But in this period, U.S. capitalists face more than an economic crisis; they face a political crisis. As they move into a state of permanent wars abroad and cutbacks at home, they must get the U.S. working class to support these changes. Thus, every major newspaper has been attacking teachers and teachers’ unions, blaming them for the poor quality of education in urban schools. At the same time, they claim that charter schools are “the answer” to problems in urban education. Their goal is to split students and their families from the teachers, and get them to support the “reforms” that will worsen their own education. 

RttT also calls for greater standardization of curriculum across the country, and encourages states to work together to develop new state tests. (Previous education articles have discussed how curriculum standards are used to build patriotic, pro-imperialist ideas.) Further, it calls for “linking teacher pay and teacher tenure to student performance.” RttT calls for more data collection on students and teachers which will be used as ammunition for administrators against teachers and for the government against districts. And as teachers lose the job protection the contract used to provide, they may be scared into compliance and will be far less likely to stand up for their students.

We must continue to build a militant teacher-student-parent alliance against these attacks, pointing out how this is part of developing fascism. We must show our friends that the racism which separates us is an obstacle we must conquer as we fight for a new system that will serve all students. We don’t just want reforms that might get a few more books in classrooms or save a few inner-city schools from closing. Workers have won those reforms many times, only to have them taken away as the bosses are doing now. We want communism, a system where workers will run the world, including creating schools that serve the needs of our young people. We need schools that teach all of our children to read, write, do math and know our true history so that they can contribute to a workers’ society rather than serve as cogs in the capitalist machine. J