FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!International Communist Workers Party |
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July 2 – Two hundred thousand metalworkers and engineers (members of NUMSA) launched a nationwide indefinite strike yesterday, shaking the South African bosses and inspiring masses from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg, with rallies, marches, and roving picket lines. Beyond a 12% pay raise plus housing allowance, their demands include an end to labor brokers (contractors) and halting the Employment Tax Incentive. Health care and education workers, among others, are actively supporting the strike.
Union leaders call this a political strike, but their politics are limited to fighting over control of the giant COSATU labor alliance and trying to elect a new set of bosses to run the same capitalist government. In contrast, two decades of ANC rule have taught many industrial workers that the only solution is communist revolution. That's why we need to organize political strikes against capitalism and for communism. It's why the International Communist Workers' Party is growing in South Africa. Full story next issue.
"The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh
away." So says the Bible. It could well describe the workings of the wage
system with "The Lord" in this case being the capitalist state, or government.
Ask San Francisco's MUNI transit drivers.
As Red
Flag reported MUNI drivers organized a mass sick-out
for three days at the beginning of June. MUNI service was crippled. Why did the
drivers get sick? Was it because they couldn't digest a proposed contract that
gave them a raise then took most of it away in added payments to their
retirement scheme? Was it because they were being offered a new two-tier wage
system, with newer drivers getting paid less and older drivers being targeted
more by management because of their 'high' pay?
While all that
explains the anger among the drivers, it doesn't explain why two out of three
drivers took part in a sick out? The answer is simple. MUNI workers are banned
from legally striking! In legal terms, one of the few avenues of protest left
to them is the sick-out. Who, then, made striking illegal? Was it
Muni management? No!
It was the State, the
capitalist state, that imposed the strike ban. It was
the media, the capitalist media, that argued for it.
And it was democracy - the feel- good idea that appears neutral but in the end
serves capital - that legitimized it! Proposition G passed in November 2010,
after a long racist media campaign attacking MUNI drivers.
What this sick-out will achieve in terms of the contract is still to
be decided (the current deadline is June 30th) but what it showed politically
should be dynamite. It highlighted what we all need to learn. Contract disputes
involve more than simple boss-versus-workers negotiations, but political
struggles where the capitalists assert their dominance over the working class.
For communists, the heightened awareness created during the negotiations
presents an opportunity to present the revolutionary argument to abolish the
whole system of wage slavery.
It is clear in this
case that the Government and its capitalist media create the overall conditions
of work at MUNI. The Union-management negotiations just fine-tune the
particularities. But what is true at MUNI is true, adjusting for local issues,
of all contract negotiations. As long as we approach negotiations as
trade-union disputes, we will all remain tied to capitalist exploitation.
That is why Red
Flag argues for the need to build political strikes against capitalist
exploitation. Introducing
that idea by reading, discussing and distributing Red Flag among our
friends and co-workers is a vital step we can all take!
The global capitalist
crisis has increased international competition and propels humanity toward a
third world war. In response, the ruling classes of the U.S., El Salvador, and
Mexico, among others, have reorganized public schools to produce tech-savvy,
patriotic, obedient wage-slaves—on the cheap. Their initiatives include
standards (including the U.S. "Common Core"), standardized tests,
privatization, and attacks on teachers.
The latest is the ruling
in Vergara v. California stating that state laws on tenure protect "bad
teachers," who are concentrated in poor and minority schools, and deprive
students of their right to an education and violate their civil rights. This attack on teacher tenure is part of
a broader attack on workers' job security as well as a move to tighten controls
over the schools.
The Vergara student
plaintiffs were backed by millionaire David Welch and expensive lawyers who
plan similar lawsuits from New York to Oregon. Arne Duncan, Obama's Education
Secretary, said the decision would "help millions of students who are hurt by
existing teacher tenure laws." (NY Times 6/10/14)
It's
capitalism—and capitalist education—that hurts billions of students
Capitalism rests on
wage slavery, racism and exploitation. The schools exist to support that
relationship by reproducing a working class whose labor is bought and sold in
the capitalist market. All students are taught the capitalist values of
anti-communism, racism, sexism and patriotism, as well as learning to work for
a paycheck (or grade). A few students are co-opted to become the next
generation of managers and bosses, while the majority are taught to be obedient
wage-slaves and/or patriotic soldiers. Teachers are considered to be "good
teachers" to the extent that they teach students whatever knowledge, skills,
attitudes and behavior that the bosses need.
Communism will transform
education
Communist education
will be profoundly different. Labor's fruits will be shared according to need,
rather than produced for a profit. Workers—in industry, agriculture,
medicine, transport—will share their skills and knowledge with youth.
Young people, from their earliest moments, will see themselves as part of a
larger human family, rather than as workers subject to a boss, or soldiers of a
country.
Vergara blames teachers for
unequal education
Educational reformers
from Diane Ravitch to FairTest to the union leadership blame poverty, unequal
funding and standardized tests for unequal education. The Chicago Teachers
Union, for example, issued this response to the Vergara: "The root causes of
differences in student performance have to do with structural differences in
schools…concentrated poverty, intense segregation, skeletal budgets...overuse
and misuse of standardized testing, school closures… and the calculated
deprivation of resources."
But the reality is
that capitalism needs racism and exploitation, and different education outcomes
for the children of bosses and workers, especially black and latino/a workers.
Discriminatory education is crucial to the role of schools in capitalist
society.
Capitalism needs teachers to toe
the line
The judge in Vergara,
arguing that there are "a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers
currently active in California classrooms," put all teachers on notice. But the
answer is not to rely on tenure and the courts, which, according to California
Federation of Teachers President Pechthalt, protect the best teachers,
"activist-teachers."
But teacher activists
fighting, as Pechthalt argues, for multi-cultural education or to move a
polluting factory don't build a movement that attacks the system at its
roots. In fact, they promote the
illusion that capitalism's racist inequalities can be patched up by a few activists,
protected by the courts and the unions.
We need a revolutionary communist
program
The courts are at
least as discriminatory as the grossly unequal educational system. Unions keep
us tied to the status quo of wage slavery. Teachers, students, parents and
other workers must unite to fight for a new world, where the working class,
mobilized collectively in a share-and-share-alike communist system, can raise
and educate young people to reach their highest potential—not as wage
slaves, but as free workers.