Oakland School Strikers Advance Our Understanding of Communism
OAKLAND (USA), May 26 — “Parents, students, and teachers can run a picket-line, the educational system, and the whole society!”
The Oakland teachers strike is settled but the struggle continues. Teachers, parents, and students put up a lively fight but the united front of the School District, Union officials, and the Democratic Party kept control.
The strike continued the struggle against the push of state government and real estate developers to shutter five schools in January 2022, prelude to further closures and mergers. The job action was provoked by the district’s refusal, over six months, to seriously negotiate a contract with the teachers’ union.
A teacher comrade reports:
Although the District had the initiative, they were challenged immediately. From day one, as we were face-to-face on the picket lines, a sense of “it’s all of us or none” took over. This was strengthened by parental support, built in earlier struggles against racist school closings. Students stayed home en masse. This was a teachers’ strike, but it was also a statement of Oakland’s working class. The unity was powerful.
This heightened sense of our own power, together with the uncertainty of the outcome, created a tension that led to sharp discussions over strategies and tactics.
I am a long-time teacher here. This is not my first strike.
Communists in the class struggle can make two mistakes. One is to focus on the reform and get caught up in leading the union’s tactical struggle. A second error, fearing getting lost in reformism, is to dismiss the importance of the day-to-day struggle.
I tried to avoid both errors. Being on the picket lines without trying to lead the struggle allowed me to deepen ties with several teachers and to introduce myself as a communist with others.
Picketers debated whether to demonstrate outside the house of the “progressive” School Board Director. This led to a discussion of who runs “public” education. Was it the local elected officials? Or the State-appointed Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), which directly guards the interests of big money (capital)? As the capitalist crisis deepens, cutbacks in public education funding will continue, no matter who gets elected to the local school board.
A similar question was “Why have Oakland teachers been paid so low (compared to most Bay Area teachers) for so long?” Surely, I argued, this was a systemic issue rather than one decided by the politics or personalities of former School Boards.
Capitalism needs a few bosses, a few more professionals and technicians, and masses of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers. It constructed its school system to meet that need.
The wage system requires racism, to keep us divided and to guarantee that especially Black, Latinx and immigrant workers must take the lowest-paying jobs. Oakland, especially in the flatlands, has historically served the capitalist class as a source of low-paid workers.
Since we ran the day-to-day actions of the strike, I argued, we are perfectly capable (with parents and students) of running education. We could even run society.
What would communism look like? It would look like “abolished capitalism,” one said. It would look like socialism, another argued.
I said that socialism wasn’t good enough. It kept wages, money, and inequality. I said we need a society without bosses, wages, money, or profits, where we share-and-share-alike what we produce. I talked about how education in a communist society would rest on theory and practice to serve the needs of the masses, not the needs of capitalism.
We teachers ran the strike activities but not the negotiations. Class solidarity was positive and emotionally powerful, but it wasn’t enough. We need a revolutionary organization, a mass communist party, capable of taking on the combined liberal/conservative institutions of capitalism.
That’s the Party we’re beginning to build around the world, as you can see in the pages of Red Flag. We invite Oakland readers to keep reading it, share it with others, contact us, and join us.
Read Our Pamphlet:
“Communist Education for a Classless Society”