On the Picket Lines in Los Angeles School Strike here ♦ Oakland Teachers Wildcat Strike here ♦ Seattle High School Drawing: You May Be Suffering from Capitalism here ♦
On the Picket Lines in Los Angeles School Strike: Long-Term Communist Relationships Open Door to New Advances
LOS ANGELES (USA), March 25— “I’ll read Red Flag. I know a little about Marxism. I used to read this type of literature in the Philippines,” exclaimed a teacher at a rally of school workers on March 15. The unions representing teachers and non-teaching school workers had mobilized thousands to demand a pay increase. The ICWP West Coast (US) schools collective prepared carefully for this opportunity to spread communist ideas.
Nearly eight hundred school workers took Red Flag that day. They also eagerly took a leaflet that attacked capitalist schooling for training youth to be wage slaves for capitalism. It called for communist revolution for the education young people need. Hundreds more took our literature at the closing rally. This was the work of the whole party, not just the schools collective.
Union officials announced on March 15 that Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99, which represents bus drivers, gardeners, cafeteria workers and special education aides, was calling a three-day strike. United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), which represents teachers, school nurses, counselors, and psychologists, would honor the picket lines.
On March 21, in the pouring rain, a united force of school workers marched, chanted, danced, sang—and shut the schools down. We work together and depend on each other every day to do our best for the young people in our charge. But we often don’t recognize how racism, sexism and the wage system operate together to divide us. On the picket lines, people took on those divisions directly, building militant bonds of solidarity and working-class unity.
Comrades who had worked in the schools in these communities for decades brought our signs and literature to the picket lines. On Thursday, after the rain stopped, we had some deep conversations.
“It’s ridiculous that essential workers in the school system earn less than teachers and way less than administrators—what do they do again?” said a middle-school Spanish teacher. “Like school bus drivers. Classroom management and Los Angeles traffic at the same time? There’s no way I could do that!”
A special education teacher added, “My aide and I work with severely handicapped youngsters. We are a team. It’s disgraceful that she doesn’t earn a living wage.”
There were many conversations like these. Comrades talked about how the schools themselves reinforce this hierarchy. The “hidden curriculum,” including grades, creates a tracking system that sorts students into “college bound” and “the rest.” Charter schools skim off the students with the strongest family support. All this helps justify sorting workers into false categories of “skilled” and “unskilled” labor.
Schools help capitalism divide and rule. On the picket lines, we worked to build the working-class unity that can end this system.
“Your generation, the ‘boomers’, blew it,” said a teacher friend in his forties to an older comrade. “You fought against racism and the Vietnam War, and then it all got turned into a culture war. That just divides us. Younger generations are much more concerned about bread-and-butter issues. We see things more in terms of social class.”
The comrade explained that the working-class struggle was an important aspect of the anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements of the 60s and early 70s in the US, Mexico, France and around the world.
After a long conversation, we agreed that the ruling class uses identity politics to divide the working-class struggle. Our job is to build revolutionary communist working-class unity against the whole capitalist system.
The unity on the picket line was a victory for class consciousness.
The Board of Education agreed to the SEIU pay demands over the weekend. But the basic inequality of the wage system remains. It is still blatantly obvious throughout the school system. As are all the divisions of racism and sexism that are built into capitalism.
A teacher friend said, “I’m with you, man. Power to the people! What we need is socialism.” Two comrades spoke with her about the limitations of socialism and the need for communism.
We invited everyone we spoke with to read and contribute to Red Flag. We asked them to help build the revolutionary movement needed to win and build a world without the job hierarchy that the capitalist schooling justifies –without jobs or markets, money, or wages. A communist world where the divisions of “race” and gender can be eliminated by a society organized around collective work for human need, not capitalist greed.
The in-depth picket line conversations signal a period of growth for ICWP in the Los Angeles schools. We renewed long-standing relationships, made new friends, and invited people to our May Day barbecue. We’re looking forward to building on decades of work in the schools, with the energy of enthusiastic younger comrades, to organize for May Day and beyond.
Teachers’ Wildcat Strike: Fight Capitalist Hierarchies and Divisions
OAKLAND (USA), March 24— Hundreds of teachers walked off the job at fourteen middle and high schools today in a wildcat (unauthorized) strike.
A wildcat strike exposes the class-collaboration of the union leadership. The teachers are standing up for themselves and other school workers, while the union officials are still sitting down with the bosses.
Teachers are angry because the district has laid off over one hundred school workers—dozens of people who work in student support—while they offer chump change as a raise to the teachers.
The board’s cheap attempt to divide teachers from other school workers exposes its hypocrisy. Its members were elected on a platform of “equity” but have emphasized identity politics while closing schools in working-class communities.
After picketing their schools, teachers and their supporters rallied downtown. ICWP was there with a leaflet calling for communism for the education students need. It included:
I (teacher) getting a raise but you (the aide) getting unemployment? Hell no to that! We’re all in this together. It is called class consciousness and, using the wage system, it’s the very thing capitalism as a system strains every sinew in its body to destroy.
We’re all in this education system together because it takes an educational village to graduate our kids. It takes our academic smarts, our community smarts, all our lived life experience to reach out to, wrap around, and educate our kids.
It’s bad enough that capitalist schools prioritize competitive, individual achievement, continually grading and stratifying students and forcing teachers to teach to the test.
Most teachers counteract this everyday with lesson plans that strive to include all students. Now the Oakland Unified School District board wants to throw away its claim to champion EQUALITY and demonstrate its abject servility to the dog-eat-dog capitalist system. They offer teachers a 3.5% raise and start laying off classified staff to pay for it!
What sort of lesson in “equality” is that? How does that serve our working-class kids? The fact is that public schools are incapable of delivering equality. Grades themselves are a ranking system teaching students to accept as normal the hierarchy the capitalist system at large needs.
Nearly half the teachers at the rally took the leaflet, which included the cartoon drawn by a Seattle student. We invited them to read Red Flag, and to join the fight against the day-to-day assaults of capitalism in a way that can build the revolutionary communist share-and-share-alike world we so desperately need.
We met old friends and made some new contacts which we will follow up. This is the kind of activity that can expand the conversation about how to build a world without the job hierarchy that capitalist education justifies.
March 26— A Seattle high school student drew this and showed it to a comrade who was distributing Red Flag outside his school. He and two friends were planning to post it around the school. The comrade took a picture of it, and it was used on the ICWP leaflet distributed at the wildcat strike of Oakland (CA) school employees.
The student read this leaflet and texted, “I think that is awesome! I could talk about how right it is for a very long time.” We look forward to hearing more from him and his friends.
Read the ICWP Pamphlet:
“Communist Education for a Classless Society”
Front page of this issue
