LOS ANGELES, March 23—“When students are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!” This chant rang out on busy Los Angeles streets as workers from two unions, Services Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99 and United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), parents, students, and members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) marched in solidarity. Literally hundreds of cars driving by honked in support. For the better part of a week, workers all over LA got to witness the power of a united working class; a working class that must one day overthrow the capitalists and rule the world.
Members of SEIU Local 99, composed of cafeteria workers, bus drivers, custodians, and school support staff, called a three-day action to strike against unfair labor practices and retaliatory action by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) school bosses. UTLA took to the picket lines in solidarity. Both unions have been in contract negotiations for over a year. Meanwhile, Los Angeles public school students are suffering from the chronic, racist understaffing of Special Education Assistants and other positions.
The pouring rain, which continued for most of this three-day strike, did not dampen the strikers’ enthusiasm. At one school, PLP members were welcomed on the picket line and helped lead chants. We brought a back issue of CHALLENGE headlined “Strike” which got the attention of many passing drivers, creating a cacophony of noise. Picket lines of close to a hundred strikers from both unions in front of the school continued for hours in the morning before school workers traveled to downtown LA for afternoon mass rallies.
Money for schools, not for cops
While these education workers have been fighting for crumbs, the military and police always have funds. Biden, with full Congressional support, has dispersed more than $75 billion over the last year to the war in Ukraine. Even after a huge antiracist movement demanding to defund the police, the Democratic mayor and city council of LA increased LAPD’s budget by $87 million. Karen Bass, LA’s new mayor, has already promised to hire more KKKops and increase their funding. This is because capitalism is not designed to benefit workers, but rather funds only what will continue to keep the ruling class rich and powerful. The racist and sexist nature of capitalism is also very clear as working-class Black, Latin, and immigrant neighborhoods take the brunt of the cutbacks.
Thankfully, Local 99 workers have realized that their strength lies in withholding their labor power through striking. This comes on the heels of an uptick of workers striking internationally, most recently seen here in the six-week strike by the graduate students in the University of California system. Except for working-class revolution or mass rebellion, strikes, more than anything else, bring fear into the hearts of the bosses.
This is why we approached this opportunity with urgency. We joined picket lines at the schools we have connections to and attended the larger marches with our literature. A hundred PLP flyers analyzing the strike, and 70 copies of CHALLENGE were distributed. We talked with education workers about standing united and firm in this battle. This is one of the few ways we can force the bosses to give students, their families, and neighborhoods a fraction of the education they deserve. But more importantly, it will be vital for workers, teachers, students, and parents to ultimately learn that any reform or crumbs given can be taken away, so long as capitalism and its drive for maximum profit remains. This conversation led to May Day invitations as well.
Liberal leaders and politicians: no friends to workers
Another common conversation we had with workers is how liberals are the main danger to our class. UTLA leadership has put its faith in so-called progressive candidates to bring about change. They backed Karen Bass and a whole host of city council people and school board members in the last election, most of whom have been silent while Local 99 and UTLA members battled with LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho over the School Board’s $5 billion surplus.
Karen Bass in particular ran on a platform spotlighting the issue of unhoused folks in LA. Yet, before the strike, she was silent as Local 99 workers’ average salary remained below the poverty line and they were constantly under threat of losing their housing. She only inserted herself into the negotiations after it became clear the schools would be shut down because of the strike, and only then to pose as a “friend of labor,” get credit for ending the strike, and preparing to mislead workers in the future. She will no doubt expect the union leadership to continue to support her going forward. We cannot rely on liberals and so-called progressives to save us! Capitalism will always exploit its workers, but we can choose to organize to overthrow this system and replace it with communism where workers run society.
While striking is a crucial step in fighting for reforms and it makes clear the power of a united working class, it will never be enough to end racist and sexist attacks such as those on low-paid education workers. For that, we need a communist organization like PLP which is fighting to get rid of capitalism, the system that relies on unemployment, low wages, and part-time labor to maximize profit. In LA, we will strengthen the ties that we made on the picket lines and fight for this uptick in class struggle to lead to growth in PLP.
NEWARK, NJ, April 12—For the first time in its 250-year history, a coalition of Rutgers workers— 9,000 graduate workers, adjuncts, and part-time lecturers (PTL)— called a strike on what would have been communist Paul Robeson’s 125th birthday.
On day one of the strike, members of the Progressive Labor Party were out in full force distributing CHALLENGE newspapers as picketers rallied and gave passionate speeches at the Newark campus. Together, workers and students shut down the $5 billion/year university across several campuses!
As the contradictions of capitalism bring the bosses’ global system closer to World War III, such strikes and other forms of class struggle will intensify. Strikes have the potential to be schools for communism, and leading the struggles with revolutionary ideas builds the confidence of workers in choosing our class over the bosses’ system forever.
Workers ready to fight, bosses & their misleaders cower
Workers’ rage and lack of confidence in liberal misleadership and electoral politics is key to producing and maintaining strikes in an environment of growing fascism and war. Thousands of ordinary workers at Rutgers University chose the power of our class over the deadly defeatism of the liberal union bosses and the empty promises of NJ Governor Phil Murphy to fight for our needs. Getting closer to the strike launch, union misleaders tried to fool workers that it was in our best interest to believe that the threat of a strike is more powerful than its actual realization. Their lack of confidence in the working class, opportunism and pacifism - which no union boss or elected official can avoid - had them trying to convince rank and file members that they weren’t “ready” to fight for each other. These misleaders were very wrong. When members were told that Murphy was requesting the union give him a short period of time to resolve the differences between Rutgers bosses and workers to avoid the strike, workers responded with a roaring no! PLP members worked with their union siblings to ensure the membership was ready, and that workers’ need for a strike won over liberal misleaders' doubt and fear.
Cutbacks, low wages part of war prep
As the inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S., Russia, and China reaches new heights, the bosses are hoarding resources and superexploiting workers in preparation for recruiting us into their mounting wars. Universities play a complex role in this preparation. While their workers and facilities absorb the cutbacks that go hand-in-hand with resource hoarding, universities are also key sites for recruiting and training students to become a pacified workforce and the liberal misleaders of tomorrow.
The bosses need masses of people won to liberal ideas in college to reproduce the nationalism and helplessness that supports conditions of war. At Rutgers, diversity projects like the Honors Living and Learning College train students to believe in their individual exceptionalism, convincing them that a few Black students getting elite career opportunities will help liberate the entire Black working class. In the program, students get a minor in Social Justice, but only very few have participated in the strike effort, while even more have spent their time creating a Black Professionals Network. But no amount of politicians of color can change the material conditions for the international working class; only communist revolution led by PLP will smash capitalism’s racist exploitation once and for all.
Bosses like Phil Murphy, Ras Baraka and Jonathan Holloway will show their true colors as liberal supporters of finance capital as they try to crush worker’s unions in the coming days or betray workers in years to come when they run for greater seats of power. Governor Murphy, a former hedge fund executive at Goldman Sachs— the second largest investment bank in the world— will demand sacrifice from workers and will use increasingly fascist tactics to end the strike. Rutgers president Holloway will do whatever his real bosses–finance capital–dictate to keep pumping out obedient workers, generate profit for the state and pay Rutgers’ external debt, which totals more than $250 million, including about $140 million to construct athletic facilities (USA Today 1/19/2022).
As the Rutgers strike continues, it will be imperative for workers and students to use it as a school for communism. Only on the picket lines will they learn the important lessons for liberation, and the tools to refuse the bosses’ austerity without being won to liberal ideas that lead to imperialist war. With multiracial unity and an international Progressive Labor Party on the front lines, the Rutgers strike will help teach us all to have confidence in each other, and to embrace communism as our class’s only way to win the world.
**Future issues of CHALLENGE will contain further analysis and reports of our involvement in this strike.**
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Workers’ rebellion in France: Coup capitalism with communist revolution
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- 13 April 2023 863 hits
As Emmanuel Macron, the president of France and a shameless stooge for finance capital, tries to ram through a plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, millions of workers are waging the largest mass fightback in that country in more than fifty years. Enraged by former investment banker Macron’s anti-worker reforms, garbage collectors, utility workers, train conductors, and museum workers have walked off their jobs in droves.
Worldwide capitalism--and the charade of liberal democracy that gloves its iron fist—is in crisis. As the global economy plunges into recession and inter-imperialist rivalries intensify, the ruling class has no choice but to claw back wages and benefits from workers—and to use state terror and their mad dog racist kkkops against the inevitable rebellions. Wherever we see workers willing to withhold their labor and militantly reject the rulers’ agenda for fascism and war, it’s a good sign for our class. It points to our potential to build an international communist Progressive Labor Party, and to a future without bosses or exploitation.
Capitalist bosses protect banks, not workers
“The social state and the social safety net is disappearing,” said Francoise, a social worker (The Guardian, 03/23). Three months shy of retiring at 63, she has joined the fightback in Paris. Workers and students are taking to the streets to light garbage on fire and damage bus stops, newspaper kiosks, and traffic lights. They firebombed Macron’s favorite restaurant and stormed the Paris office of BlackRock, the multinational investment giant (Washington Post, 4/6).
For now, France’s trade unions are vowing to stay on strike until Macron withdraws the retirement reform (AP, 4/10). But we know how sell-out union leaders use working-class anger to get a few crumbs of temporary concessions from the bosses—and then to pacify their members and get them off the streets. In 2017, a number of French unions backed Macron for his first term as president, despite his pro-business platform, when he faced off against open racist Marine Le Pen (New York Times, 5/1/17). Many leading French liberals did the same. Liberals are the main danger! The only long-term win for workers is the revolutionary fight for a communist world run by and for the international working class. While this process will be violent, it must be led with discipline and strategy. Smashing property isn’t enough. Workers need to drive out the bosses and smash the whole capitalist system.
French rulers mobilizing for war
For the French bosses to get a seat at the table with the top imperialist powers, they must ramp up their attacks on workers. Even as Macron pushes to cut French workers’ pensions, France is increasing its military budget by more than one third by 2030, to 400 billion euros. As Macron told the French military, “We must be ready for more brutal and numerous wars” (Wall Street Journal, 1/20). In line with Macron’s pension reform, France plans to increase the age limit for army reservists to 70 and in some cases to 72 (msn.com, 4/4).
Amid the sharpening rivalry between the U.S. and China, France cannot be taken for granted. On a recent visit to China to meet with President Xi Jinping and seal a $15 billion trade deal, Macron made clear that the French ruling class won’t be in lockstep with the U.S. bosses. As the New York Times noted, Macron “staked out an independent European position, and both leaders repeatedly lauded a ‘multipolar world,’ thinly disguised code for one that is not American dominated” (4/8). History shows us that any alliance between bosses is temporary, and that they won’t hesitate to attack one another to protect their profits.
At his inauguration last June, Macron called for a “war economy” (Le Monde, 6/14/22). The bosses are telling us loud and clear that they are preparing for world war. It’s the job of the working class, with communist leadership, to turn inter-imperialist war into worldwide communist revolution.
Lesser evils rob workers of revolutionary power
Workers in France have a long history of mass militant fightback. In 1789, the French Revolution overthrew the parasitic monarchy and inspired rebellions against slavery in Haiti and other French colonies in the Caribbean and Africa. In 1871, the Paris Commune marked the first attempt by workers to put communist ideas into practice and provided lessons to future communists on how to win. In the 20th century, French communists and anti-fascists fought vigorously and contributed mightily to the defeat of the Nazis.
During World War Two, the French Communist Party (PCF) adopted the “Popular Front” line of the international communist movement. By calling for collaboration with “good capitalists” in the U.S., Britain, and France, this robbed the international working class of its revolutionary potential. Our class has suffered from “lesser evil” politics ever since. In 1968, when students and workers in France waged a violent struggle against the capitalist state, culminating in a wildcat general strike of 11 million workers, the PCF betrayed them. Just last year, these fake leftists showed their true colors when they backed the finance capitalist Macron for his second-term run-off against Le Pen.
Voting for liberal or fake-left misleaders--whether Macron in France, Biden in the U.S., AMLO in Mexico, Petro in Colombia, or Lula in Brazil--is a deadly trap. Our class deserves a world where older workers are treated with respect and gratitude for their decades of contributions to society. We deserve a world where imperialist war is ancient history, and where workers' needs come first. In short, we deserve a communist world. Let’s fight for it!
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We won’t let gangsters for capitalism bury our kids
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- 13 April 2023 704 hits
BROOKLYN, NY, April 12—After a 17-year-old former student Claude* was killed in the streets, it forced the working class—students and teachers—of a small school to choose: fightback or passivity. While the final verdict is still out, the struggle has become a test for pro-communist ideas in the face of liberal fascism.
School, union, city: all gangsters for capitalism
The racist Black principal has been able to get away with blood on her hands (see boxed letter). When Progressive Labor Party says liberal fascism is the greater danger for the working class, this is what we mean. This principal—in a liberal city run by a Black mayor Eric Adams—has successfully created an environment where students and education workers feel pressured to “lay low” and accept the expendability of Black youth as “normal.” This is one way the school stays one of “America's Best High Schools” in the U.S. News and World Report. To stay on top, the Black leadership throws out Black students like they’re trash.
But, it’s not just her. The UFT District Representative—the educator workers’ union that prides itself on putting the needs of students on the back burner—was silent when one teacher had said, “The union needs to make a fight against these racist pushouts.”
This is the same district rep who spent what felt like hours detailing his diligence in keeping his teacher file up to date.
While this seems small, it’s a reflection of the limits of unions. The UFT leadership cynically puts electoral politics and teacher salaries over students’ learning conditions. This was no surprise considering the racist strike of 1968, when the UFT walked out as a response to the efforts of Black parents to exert community control over schools in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville. A union that sacrifices Black and Brown students is a racist one.
One tenet of fascism (an old capitalist system in crisis headed for world war) is the idea of accepting expendability.
As the future of capitalism becomes more uncertain (see editorial, page 2), the bosses need a tighter control of their class and the working class. Capitalist schools train us to treat our class as disposable—to accept that some youth will just be homeless, unemployed, jailed, killed in war, erased. The ones who can make this fascist argument most convincingly are the ones who present themselves as pro-worker. This is the same type of idea that threw workers into gas chambers.
We will always remember him
How do you respond when a Black principal makes it taboo to discuss and honor a victim of capitalism and pressures a mainly-white-teacher force and a mainly-Black-student force to simmer down?
Several teachers have stepped up in the reform struggle—one organized a card and funds for the family, another made photos of Claude, another printed the poem “Kids who Die,” and yet another helped blow up balloons for the third memorial wall. Every teacher also received a laminated tag, “we will always remember [Claude].”
Several have now made a small memorial with all these items inside their classrooms. Some have also folded Claude into their lesson plans.
Some teachers and students wore a button on their shirts or bags. It was made using printed text, clear packing tape, and a safety pin.
However, through one-on-one conversations, approved personal days, bending of some dress codes for “good kids,” and awarding field trips to previously banned students, the administration has pacified many staff and students.
One described the niceness as “the calm before the storm.”
The working class is not dumb. We understand the administration was threatened by the show of worker-student unity. And it will be our unity that the administration will come after. They will pit “good” students against struggling students, new teachers against tenured teachers.
This divide-and-conquer strategy will be no match for a politically conscious working class. That’s why linking this fight to capitalism and war is key. CHALLENGE readership has grown tremendously compared to its meager distribution before Claude, and building relationships with co-workers and students is needed more than ever. We need to win the masses to see the fight for communism as the only answer deserving of Claude’s memory. Communism means we serve ALL kids. No child is expendable.
Kids over capitalism
If Claude weren’t pushed out, would he have been alive to walk on graduation day in three months? An administration that cares more about data and awards than a Black child has got to go. Claude’s killing has exposed a criminal policy that we need to fight.
Claude was not a number. He was a member of the working class, and he deserved better. A system that treats certain students as expendable DOES NOT deserve to exist. For our students, shut this racist system down.
*The pseudonym Claude is inspired by the communist fighter and writer, Claude Mckay.
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Letter: Fight to stop student pushout!
The following letter is written by a new teacher who became involved in the fight for Claude and against pushout.
As a person new to teaching and new to Brooklyn, the treatment of the legacy of a former student who was fatally shot near the school where I teach opened my eyes to not only how the school to prison pipeline functions, but to how treatment of working class students in a capitalist system kills.
When Claude was killed, the school that I work for not only did nothing to memorialize their former student, but fought hard against students and teachers who wanted to memorialize him themselves. Students created a memorial for Claude that was hung in the hallway. It was taken down by administrators the next day. When they hung it back up it was taken down almost immediately. Students overheard their principal admonishing Claude to other students and teachers, using racist rhetoric and accusing him of being in a gang in order to justify erasing his memory from the school after his death. The principal even antagonized teachers who took a personal day to attend their former student’s funeral.
This strange response can be explained by the fact that Claude was pushed out of our school. Our school boasts a 95 percent graduation rate which is very rare for our district, and one way that they achieve this is by pushing out students who threaten this misleading statistic. Student pushout is incredibly common in New York City, and this event has opened my eyes to how it unfolds in real time. Students are suspended with little reason, harassed by administrators, and working class parents are consistently asked to leave their jobs to attend disciplinary meetings at the school. Since forcing students to leave is illegal, employees of the Department of Education instead harass and bully children and parents until they decide that it is best to leave. Often administrators will convince parents that their students' needs would simply “be better met at another school.”
But this is not the truth.
Suspensions and push outs follow students, making it difficult to keep up with classwork, maintain good grades, and apply to college. It is already widely understood that suspensions, which is a critical aspect of the pushout process, are damaging to students and greatly increase their likelihood of being incarcerated. In a racist school system these practices disproportionately affect Black and brown students. So why do schools continue this practice?
Capitalism forces schools to compete with each other for scarce funding, resources, and even for students. Graduation rates and test scores are important to school bosses, and one way to keep high scores with limited resources is to get rid of students who threaten their scores. Instead of viewing students as fully formed humans, they are viewed as pawns to be traded, bargained for, and cast off. But schools don’t have to be this way!
Teachers should understand that this system not only harms students, but harms us as well. When we treat students like numbers, like problems, and pawns, we create a hostile environment that affects our lives too. We watch students that we care for be harassed, excluded from our classrooms, and disappeared from our schools without our consent. Teachers need to understand that this is a problem that is worth fighting about. Together, with parents and students we can fight for schools that care for all students, not just students who are willing to follow the status quo.
Parents, teachers, and students unite to end this violent, racist practice. Unite to end capitalism!
CHICAGO, March 9 – A multiracial crowd of dozens of students and workers rallied and marched across the campus of the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC) to protest the administration’s decision to allow fascist scum Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk space to spread their brand of gutter racism and sexism. Members of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and our friends joined the action to support the fight and spread communist revolution as the only alternative to fascism, capitalism’s response to a crisis in their system.
Owens and Kirk are right wing organizers and talk show hosts. They travel across the U.S. promoting open sexism, mainly against trans workers. They serve the domestic U.S. capitalists who are mainly represented by the Republican Party. But these are the Small Fascists (see Glossary, page 6).
Although the threat presented by these open fascists is very real for our class, PLP holds that they do not represent the primary danger for workers – the finance capital, liberal bosses within President Joe Biden’s camp do. These are the Big Fascists, the finance capitalists who want to maintain their worldwide empire. They want a united working class brainwashed by patriotism and willing to fight and die in a world war to defend these capitalist’s profits.
So while we directly confront these gutter racists head on, we need to fight even harder against the multicultural, liberal Big Fascist bosses that seek to disarm our class through shallow identity politics as they build the path to all-class unity and imperialist war.
Fascism is at its core not just about “wicked people” but rather the desperate strategies employed by all capitalist bosses to save their profit system in crisis. We need to build our international Party to overthrow the capitalist system that ultimately gives rise to fascism and war–no matter the appearance or the promises of the bosses at the top
Fight gutter fascists head on
The anti-fascist, antisexist students and workers first gathered at the quad area to assemble before marching a short distance across campus to the forum site. Those of us in PLP and our friends came equipped with signs, a flyer about growing fascism, and copies of CHALLENGE in order to sharpen the militancy of the protest.
At first, the leaders of the march and their marshals directed the protestors to an open site on the other side of the street from the forum. But after a short while enough participants pushed to be closer to where the gutter fascists were entering. Once there, we were able to confront the open fascists more directly.
Organizers from different student groups led chants and gave speeches that shared their “disappointment” that the university had permitted the forum. All in all, a naïve tone dominated the politics of the event, as if we could ever trust the university bosses (or any boss) to really be on the side of the students or workers.
Thankfully, a more militant Black student took the megaphone and called for more open confrontation with the fascist goons. He recalled recent experiences that he had getting arrested while protesting against the racist Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) in more remote areas of the state. Other speakers followed, highlighting the connections to March 2016 when a multiracial crowd of hundreds of protestors were able to shut down a Donald Trump rally (see CHALLENGE, 3/25/16).
Self-critically, our contingent of PLP members and friends could have been bolder in giving leadership to this event. Even though the protestors moved across the street to be closer, there was still a good fifty yards separating us from the entrance where the pro-fascists were entering. The working class can’t be satisfied with taking the “moral high ground” against the fascist foot soldiers of the capitalist class – we need to organize to attack them head on! As such, we need to be much less timid in sharpening the struggle in these settings.
Capitalist bosses, big and small, attack workers
The recent rise of fascist hate speech is nothing new under capitalism. As the profit system barrels through crisis after crisis en route to world war, we can expect to see more scum like Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk getting platforms to scapegoat sections of the working class for the failures of capitalism.
At present, LGBTQ+ workers are a principal target for the domestically-oriented Small Fascist wing of the U.S. ruling class that Kirk and Owens belong to. These Small Fascists pin practically everything wrong with capitalist society on LGBTQ+ workers, maliciously smearing them. In doing so, they are directly responsible for obscene rates of violence committed against LGBTQ+ workers and youth, particularly Black and Latin workers who are transgender. We need to fight side by side as a united class against the attempts by the bosses to divide and attack us.
However, to side with the “lesser evil” liberal bosses in this battle is the kiss of death. The still-dominant Big Fascist bosses like those in charge of Chicago and UIC pay lip service to “diversity” and other high-minded concepts while still opening the door for gutter racists in their own backyard. They lie to our face and stab us in the back, all the while promoting a “friendlier” multiracial capitalism.
By avoiding more overt fascist ideology, they can package a more insidious version of pro-capitalist nationalism that is necessary to win our class – including many LGBTQ+ workers -- to future bloodbaths against imperialist rivals like China and Russia. There is no “lesser-evil” – the whole system has got to go!
Communist revolution is the only solution
To accomplish a communist revolution to get rid of capitalism, we need the mass international PLP and our own Red Army. The fascists -- Big and Small -- already have a wide head start on organizing and arming themselves. But they are no match for a united working class armed with communist politics and leadership! Join PLP and fight back today!
