Seattle (USA): Learning Requires Real-World Struggle

Add New Voices to Our Battle for Communism here ♦ The Best Answer to Anti-Communism is More Communism here ♦ After the Picket Lines, What’s Next? here ♦ A Million Questions About Communism here ♦

Learning Requires Real-World Struggle: Add New Voices to Our Battle for Communism

SEATTLE (USA), October 3— Educators on strike here last month responded to communism with unprecedented enthusiasm. This reflects how the conditions of our struggle have changed. Since 2020, the pandemic and the massive demonstrations against racism, sexism and xenophobia have profoundly affected the strikers, students, and our working-class friends in general. Meanwhile, many strikers worried about the “fascist backlash.”

This called us to focus even more than previously, in all our literature and conversations, on the need for communism and communist education. We distributed a well-received leaflet entitled, “ICWP Stands with Educators and Students—ICWP Stands for Communism to Give Our Students the Education They Deserve.” It emphasized that only communist society can provide such an education.

Build The Party to Advance Our Communist Line in Practice

Many questioned whether such a communist society is possible. These doubts lead many educators and other friends to settle begrudgingly for reforms. One of the best ways to fight for our communist line—as opposed to settling for reforms—is to mobilize new revolutionary forces.

Building the party helps to show that communist revolution is achievable. Leaflets, pamphlets, and Red Flag, while critical, are only the start. Long-term relationships with educators and other workers opened the door to dozens of extended discussions about communism and preparing for communist revolution.

During and immediately after the strike, four potential new ICWP members attended meetings of our collective. Some were connected to the strike through relatives and children, others work in completely different areas. Each came with their own contradictions. Their input was invaluable.

One recalled how a comrade convinced her 33 years ago to help with a summer project. “The relationships I developed with the volunteers from Haiti who stayed at my house is why I am here today,” she said. She concluded that nurturing communist relationships is key to building the party.

Struggles with our friends around communist theory and practice continue at a higher level and involve more people than before the strike. Two additional industrial workers want to attend our meetings as we concentrate on making sure the collective is multi-racial and of all genders.

Now more than ever, we must concentrate on adding many new voices to the battle for communism.

Doing Better:  Start Earlier and Follow Up

Educator comrades and friends did not anticipate that a strike would happen. Self-critically, we should have published a leaflet on communist education anyway and an article in Red Flag. We need such literature for the start of every school year—strike or no strike.

When the schools reopened, comrades went to four high schools to distributed hundreds of Red Flags with a front-page article on the strikers’ response to our communist line. We know teachers and students at three of them. Students inquired after comrades they knew from last year. We ran out of papers at all three.

Thousands of working-class students of all races and genders attend these schools. These students, like the school staff, show exciting potential. We must also add their voices to the battle.

Communist Organizers for Our Global Family

Comrades and friends had many debates with strikers about how capitalist schooling recreates the worst aspects of capitalist exploitation and prepares students to accept it. We estimate that near a thousand educators, students, and other workers in the area have read the party’s literature on communist education.

The Party collective’s struggle during and after the strike is an example of communist education. The conflict between reforming the schools or building the revolutionary force necessary to create communist education for a classless society was in our face 24/7. Real-world struggle helped us, and the masses, see the contradiction.

We didn’t anticipate that so many strikers would be equally concerned with what a communist system would bring to all aspects of society. Friends who do not work for the school district also read the party literature. Their interest in the strike also generated debates about ICWP’s communist politics that brought some closer to the party.

We see the potential to recruit more communist organizers. It is our responsibility to turn this potential into actual party growth.

“The Best Answer to Anti-Communism Is More Communism”

When Seattle schools reopened, comrades distributed hundreds of Red Flags and ICWP leaflets about communist education at high schools. By the time comrades reached the final school, the news had spread. The school district prepped two students to launch an anti-communist confrontation.

Under the vice-principal’s watchful eyes, these students complained that we were distributing communist literature to minors without permission of the school district. When that didn’t stop us, they started the anti-communist attack.

 “Communism was a dictatorship where the rich stayed rich and the poor stayed poor,” they asserted.

“Sounds more like the US,” a comrade answered. Even the students who had been prepped had to nod in agreement.

Other students gathered around, listening to the debate. From then on, the prepped students prefixed all their remarks with something like, “As I was taught about communism…”

The conversation expanded into the difference between socialism (which maintains wage slavery) and communism, which will end wage slavery and the whole superstructure that supports exploitation.

The discussion lasted until the final bell rang, about fifteen minutes. The two students who started it took our communist literature and gave it to the vice-principal. Other students took extra copies to read and give to their friends.

District administrators thought anti-communism would win the day. It’s a weapon that the ruling class has employed for decades. But now, more than ever, it can be defeated. As another comrade said, “The best answer to anti-communism is more communism.”

After the Picket Lines, What’s Next?

B is a long-term friend who was a leader in the recent Seattle educators’ strike. He wants to continue to fight racism and fascism. In particular, he wants to end Trump and his following.

He had many conversations with comrades. In one, he asked why Trump had been so successful. A comrade suggested that Trump’s emergence was related to the U.S. being a declining imperialist power. The U.S. ruling class was finding it difficult to rule in the same way it did when it was the world’s dominant power.

But the capitalists won’t just surrender. The bosses have decided that fascism is on the table and with it the violence every capitalist government is capable of. This is true whether it is the Democrats or Republicans in power.

Meanwhile, the working class can’t live in the old way. Foreign Affairs, the mouthpiece of the U.S. Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), calls this the “age of uncertainty.”

Another comrade said, “This hastens the moment when communist revolution is possible.”

This was the first time B had heard this analysis. He thought about it as we unloaded supplies from his van for the strike rally.

CFR president Richard Haass wrote an influential article admitting that U.S. hegemony no longer exists. He sees no way for U.S. imperialism to manage world chaos, given the country’s divisions. He calls on educators to help bind the country’s political splits.

A third comrade, who lives near the elementary school where B works, often talks to him. In our next conversation, we will delve more deeply into the question that is so much on the ruling class’s mind, “What are schools for?” The working class must not accept capitalism’s agenda: to use educators to restore the violent reign of U.S. imperialism.

What started as a discussion about how to continue the fight against Trump-style racism and fascism expanded to the necessity of building an international communist movement and the ICWP.

—Seattle comrades

A Million Questions about Communism

X, an industrial worker, had “a million questions.” After attending a Seattle party collective meeting during the educators’ strike, he had “a million more.”

ICWP literature emphasizes that only a communist society can provide the education that students deserve. But X’s concerns go beyond communist education. He questions the very nature of that society.

He was uneasy about the merging of “mental” and “manual” labor in a communist society. He criticized a sentence in the education pamphlet: “The agronomist and the farmworker, the engineer and the construction worker, the molecular biologist and the nurse will be the same person.” To him, it sounded magical.

X thought specialization was inevitable. We all have a limited time to learn.

The party collective agreed that no individual can know everything. That is why the communist slogan is: from each according to their commitment and ability, to each according to their needs.

X argued that even a society without social classes would still need specialization. “We will need people who are at the top of their game if humans are to survive pressing threats,” he said. “Never trust a mediocre rocket scientist.”

Yet even the production of rockets requires many brains and hands.

Other comrades argued that much of what X calls specialization, we call stratification. Capitalism requires stratification to maximize profits and maintain a superstructure that justifies exploitation, racism, sexism, xenophobia and more.

Communist collectivity will unleash the creativity and potential of the whole working class. Breaking down the division between mental and manual labor is not only possible in a communist society but will lead to great advances in education, healthcare, and all aspects of society.

X has since asked new questions that he thinks are more urgent: How would one mobilize the masses? Is it even possible? What would motivate the working class? To justify the costs, the future “state” would have to be much better—and obviously so—than current conditions.

X takes the struggle for a new communist society seriously. This makes discussions of our collective more useful. We especially welcome Red Flag readers’ thoughts on these questions.

As the meeting ended, we suggested that once he has read and discussed more of our literature, X should join ICWP.

“Yes, let’s make it official!” X replied.

—Comrades in Seattle (USA)

Read our pamphlet:

Communist Education for a Classless Society 

available here 

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