Seattle Teachers here ♦ Communist Education for a Classless Society here ♦ Los Angeles Teacher Comrade here ♦
Striking Seattle Educators Have Unprecedented Positive Response to Communism
Expand ICWP Collectives to Organize For Communist Revolution
SEATTLE (USA), September 13— Six thousand Seattle public school educators went on strike September 7. They mainly demanded the hiring of more paraprofessionals, multi-language aides and nurses, and mental health therapists. They will now vote on a tentative contract.
Comrades talked about communist ideas on the picket lines, with strikers dancing at a major intersection, in the street where traffic permitted, and in cars transporting them to rallies.
“What is communism to you?” a teacher asked an ICWP member during a short ride to a rally.
They discussed the communist motto: from each according to commitment and ability, to each according to need. The comrade explained how collective production, the basis of communism, will replace wage slavery, the material basis of capitalism. They discussed how collective production will allow us to build successful mass campaigns to end capitalism’s horrors, particularly racism, sexism, and xenophobia.
The comrade asked the teacher if this made any sense to him. “Yes, it’s cool,” he answered, taking a copy of the ICWP “Communist Education” pamphlet. Most importantly, this discussion will continue.
Many strikers (paraprofessionals, nurses, multilingual aides, teachers) eagerly took Red Flag, pamphlets, and leaflets about the 2019 Los Angeles school strike. Some were new hires; others had worked in the district for many years. Some have long-term relationships with comrades who work or worked for the school district.
Dancing on the Sidewalks
On Friday, educators from all the South End elementary and middle schools marched to Franklin High School, where comrades distribute 70-90 Red Flags every issue and where one comrade volunteers.
The picket captain asked us what we were doing. “We came to talk to strikers about what education might look like with communism and to distribute our communist literature,” said a comrade.
“That’s fine with me,” answered the captain. “People are having a lunch break now, so go distribute your communist paper and talk about communism. I’m a die-hard red myself.”
After lunch, a retired school-worker comrade arrived with her friends from a nearby elementary school. She carried our very popular ICWP sign (see picture). Soon a striker excitedly asked to take a picture. “This is the best sign here. My son is a communist,” she proudly proclaimed.
The Franklin rally, one of the biggest in the district, showed that more young BIPOC people are working in the schools. We distributed all the literature we had to hundreds of strikers dancing on the sidewalk to a DJ.
A worker from Eritrea said that we don’t need the Democrats or Republicans, we need a workers’ party. In a protracted discussion, a comrade explained more about ICWP. “The communists were terrible in my country,” the worker said, referring to the Soviet-backed Derg that held power from 1974-1991. They then talked about real communism, without money or wage slavery, and he agreed to read Red Flag.
Unprecedented Response
Strikers reacted to communist ideas very differently from the 2015 strike. Even before the pandemic, the school district administration had been understaffing the schools. But all schools, no matter how well staffed and how well educators are compensated, are still capitalist institutions, replicating racism, sexism, and all of class society. Our task is to explain why only communist education can benefit our class, and what that would look like.
Meanwhile the ruling class and socialists push trade union politics as the answer. The vast rank-and-file have not rejected all reformism, but many were interested in discussing communism and taking our literature.
Another difference was the distress and anger among the rank-and-file about racism. The millions who took to the streets in summer 2020 protesting racism and police murder had profound effects on school workers.
We saw many long-term friends, who didn’t seem to be advancing politically, step up. Our retired school worker comrade had maintained connections with others who are now strikers at birthday parties, exercise classes, and more. These friends helped the party advance the fight for communism among other strikers, introducing comrades to their friends, treating us like family, and sometimes recommending our literature to others.
Fighting For Bigger ICWP Collectives
Discussions on the picket lines were gratifying. But due to time and logistical constraints, many questions were left unanswered about how communism works and whether enough people will support it to make communist revolution possible.
We plan to answer questions like these and recruit more ICWP members by expanding our party collective meetings by inviting strikers and other activists to them. There we can delve into what communist education looks like and advance our line. We can continue discussing what communist solidarity is and how communists reject union reformism.
Recently a new friend agreed with us about union reformism. He said that union negotiations just ask workers “which of their fingers they are willing to cut off.” His doubts about communism include how we can counter ruling class anti-communist horror stories. He mentioned the threat of famine after the revolution. He took a copy of the communist education pamphlet to give to his wife, who is a teacher.
We plan to continue distributing Red Flag and leaflets about communist education at the three South End high schools and several elementary and middle schools. These continued conversations can build on the strikers’ response to our communism, expand party collectives, and sharpen our line.
Communist Education for a Classless Society
This is the lead article in our pamphlet “Communist Education for a Classless Society.” The pamphlet is available on our website here
What we learn and how we learn it are tied up with how society organizes production. This was true in pre-capitalist societies and in capitalist society. It will be true in communist society.
Education is more than schooling. It includes all the ways we are socialized. All social institutions –the family, the exercise of power, popular culture, and more—help shape children and youth.
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 is blind. Government is an instrument of class rule. In capitalist society, all schools serve the interests of the capitalist class.
Communism will do away with money and classes and the private ownership of the means of production. Everyone will contribute as best they can, and everyone’s needs will be met so that nobody lives better or worse than anyone else. The individualistic and competitive behavior which capitalist education promotes will be replaced by the collective and cooperative behavior necessary to build a communist society.
Communism is the only answer to the horrors inflicted by capitalism on the masses of people and on the planet, especially as global economic crisis leads to rapidly-increasing environmental destruction and world war. The international movement for “education reform” is part of this development.
As soon as the working class takes power anywhere, we must mobilize the masses to build communism. We will immediately abolish money, commodity production (producing for sale) and the wage system (which forces workers to sell their labor power or starve).
Workers will be motivated not by the prospect of individual gain, but by the possibility of living in a communist society, in which social relationships of cooperation, collectivity and share-and-share alike are primary. These relations will provide material experience that can develop into a framework for all other decisions.
Communist Education is the Opposite of Capitalists Schooling, Not a “New and Improved” Version of It.
Capitalism gives lip-service to critical thinking and life-long learning. But capitalist schools actively discourage anything beyond what’s required of particular groups of wage slaves or managers.
In contrast, mobilizing the masses for communism demands that everyone possible, not just a few, must learn to analyze, criticize, and help decide everything. The purpose of communist education is the creation of communists and communist social relations.
“We would not believe in teaching, training and education if they were confined only to the school and were divorced from the storm of life,” wrote Lenin. “[Education] must train [the youth] to be participants in the struggle for emancipation from the exploiters.”
Today, under capitalism, communist education prepares us to struggle for workers’ power and the classless society. To win communist power millions of workers must be committed to that goal and armed with an understanding of political economy, dialectical materialist philosophy and more.
Our Party educates through Red Flag, study-action groups, conferences, summer projects, and through our practice. All our work – organizing demonstrations or picnics, producing and distributing literature, raising communist ideas wherever we can – trains us to end the distinction between mental and manual labor, to struggle sharply politically and to work collectively.
After our class wins political power, communist education will vastly extend its reach. It will mean different things at different times, based on the particular needs of the international working class. But basic principles are clear:
Communist education must place the creation of communist social relations before the acquisition of technical knowledge or intellectual expertise. It must prepare us to fight for and build a classless society, without money or racism or sexism or borders or exploitation.
Communist education will not replicate inequality, exploitation, racism, competition, and privilege. Instead, it will expand relationships of equality and cooperation, creating more and better communists.
Communist education must help to merge “mental” and “manual” labor. The agronomist and the farmworker, the engineer and the construction worker, the molecular biologist and the nurse will be the same person. This requires a deep understanding of science for everyone, not just for the few.
Breaking down the division between manual and mental labor, and between the “experts” and the masses, will help eliminate the material basis for the capitalist idea that some people are more important than others and deserve a bigger say or an easier life.
Communist education means combining lifelong work and study, theory and practice. Mass mobilization for communist production requires breaking down the barrier between education and work. Communism will end the marginalization of children, youth, and the elderly. Everyone will learn and work their entire lives.
Instead of relying on full-time expert teachers, everyone will share their experience and knowledge. The division between teacher/expert and student/learner will be destroyed. Students will learn where people actually work, not in isolated classrooms.
We have taken only the very first steps in learning/teaching about what education and work will be like in communist society. Further insights come as we put into practice our line of MOBILIZING THE MASSES FOR COMMUNISM. We invite you – we urge you! – to join us in this world-historic task.
Teacher Writes: The Core of Our Hardships is Capitalism
As a teacher and parent of two school-age children in Los Angeles (USA) my support goes out to all Seattle educators who are currently on strike. I am not surprised there is so much agitation among teachers across the US because teachers, like millions of workers around the world, are going through a significant time in history.
We are transitioning from a devastating pandemic, experiencing a high teacher shortage, and attempting to survive an increased cost of living in major cities like Seattle and Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, amidst a salary dispute, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) is rallying teachers to boycott on October 19, 2022. That is the first of four optional days that the LA Unified School District added to the calendar without any parent or educator input, according to UTLA.
This is, and has always been, the nature of capitalism. When things get rough, we hit the streets to make our voices heard as unions attempt to see eye to eye with our bosses and take a seat at the same table through collective bargaining. Yet, I believe, we must go further than to ask for a seat next to our bosses. We must organize for communist revolution because we must realize that as long as capitalism exists, labor disputes of all kinds will also exist.
The truth is that under capitalism we will always be confronting bosses to justly compensate us for our labor and respect our positions. We can call for better wages now, but the value of our labor will never be matched. The fact that we have to fight, and have always had to fight, for better living conditions, is a testament to the cause of the problem: capitalism.
So it’s time to get to core of our hardships. Whether it is systemic racism, unjust police brutality, unfair wages, or imperialist war – capitalism is the cause of all these problems. Therefore, it is capitalism that we must destroy and replace with communism.
The bosses will never simply give us power. They will never treat us as their equals at a negotiation table. They will always disrespect us. So enough of the bosses! Enough of demanding reforms that only perpetuates their capitalist system!
Teachers, students, and workers in Los Angeles, Seattle, and around the world must organize to topple down the capitalist system that inherently oppresses the working class. We must organize for real long-term systemic changes, and the systemic change is to destroy capitalism so that we won’t have to beg for crumbs but organize a communist society. Join ICWP to get to the core solution: communism!
—Red Teacher