FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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LOS ANGELES, Feb. 26—Today ICWP participated in a demonstration of thousands called by United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). The union is demanding higher wages and smaller class sizes. We were there to refocus the discussion, distributing 100 of the ICWP Communist Education for a Classless Society pamphlets and 200 Red Flag newspapers.
The last big school district that went on strike was Chicago in 2012. That contract dispute centered largely on the role of student test scores in teacher evaluations.
In contrast, the Los Angeles contract standoff has focused mostly on teacher salaries, class sizes and increasing the number of support staff members like nurses and counselors. The teachers have gone eight years without a salary increase or cost of living adjustment. UTLA is asking for an 8.5 percent pay increase, a demand the Los Angeles Unified School (LAUSD) says it cannot meet without significant layoffs. Whatever the outcome of this reform fight, capitalist education in the service of wage slavery will continue.
UTLA leaders contend the negotiations highlight an ongoing post-Great Recession concern: That while economic conditions have improved, cuts made during the height of the crisis have been disparately restored. They point to new pockets of money that could be used to finance their demands, including the governor’s proposed budget, which would increase spending on K-12 education by at least 8 percent.
In a capitalist framework, LAUSD Superintendent Cortines, is projecting a $160 million deficit for the next school year. He is asking every department to reduce expenses by 8 to 15 percent. In a letter to UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl, Cortines warned that $171 million is at risk if union leaders don’t agree to evaluation requirements necessary for the district to receive its No Child Left Behind waiver.
Cortines and the ruling class he represents want more fascist education on the cheap. They are requiring more standardized tests at the same time as they propose cutbacks, layoffs, and what amounts to a wage freeze. As the crisis of capitalism sharpens and world war becomes inevitable, this is what the ruling class needs to have happen in the public schools.
Capitalist schools are important institutions of class dictatorship. They serve the interests of the ruling class just as much as the cops and the courts. Capitalist schools prepare the children of the rich to be bosses and most children of workers to be workers and soldiers. They teach the ideology, social behavior and skills required to play those roles and to make exploitation and imperialist war seem acceptable.
Some say that public schools are “our schools” that working people fought for and won, our hope for a better world. This is a deception, like the ideas that government is impartial and justice in blind. Government is an instrument of class rule. In capitalist society, all schools serve the interests of the capitalist class.
Education is more than schooling. It includes all the ways we are socialized. All social institutions –family, the exercise of power, popular culture, and more –help shape children and youth.
Communist education will be completely different. It will not create doctors or dentists, but there will be understanding of medicine, health, and dental care. There won’t be agronomists and engineers, but there will be knowledge of agriculture, agronomy and mechanics. In other words, there won’t be professions, but there will be people who understand all aspects of these fields and more. These people will carry out different tasks in different areas, learning and teaching others, combining theory and practice.
In addition, communist education will help to build new human relations where we live, work, play and learn without wages or any form of money. The wellbeing of each collective, in the fullest sense of the word, will be the incentive for what all contribute according to their ability and commitment.
Communist education will help to create the better society that will be made up of hundreds of collectives in all spheres of human activity. We will no longer have to be subject to the tyranny of wage slavery, but rather be a free association of human beings organized around communist principles in a worldwide mass Party.