SAN FRANCISCO, CA, August 16—A small but committed group of workers seized the opportunity to distribute Progressive Labor Party (PLP) leaflets in protest against a fundraiser hosted by the Board of Trustees’ President at the City College of San Francisco (CCSF). PLP have been active with campus groups that have been critical of the massive program cuts at CCSF and the following Monday, on the first day back to school, a similar contingent of workers and students attended a press conference to call out the CCSF administration for their lack of health preparations as students, faculty, and CCSF staff return amidst a raging pandemic. The CCSF cuts further demonstrate that capitalism and its education system was not designed for working class students.
Our main contribution to the struggle was to raise our political line and deliver a speech with a message that would inspire students to demolish capitalism  and fight for communism to secure their future. The main lesson we learned today is that capitalist education is not about “educating” students to think critically, solve interpersonal or societal problems, nor does it help them become well-rounded and better human beings; instead it is the total opposite. Not only is university education a diploma mill designed to extract tuition and in debt students, but it drills anti-working class ideas and other harmful ideologies into our students.
On the other hand communist education not based on profit or competition means that  lifelong education and learning be available to everyone. It would be an education where we support and learn from each other so we can build lives that better not just ourselves but also for the collective health of fellow workers and society.
Class politics are in session
With about 28 percent of the CCSF students returning to in-person classes, our group distributed PLP literature at both events, getting out 50 leaflets and 60 copies of CHALLENGE. Hitting the pavement as a collective gave us the opportunity to meet fellow workers and classmates that we had only previously met on Zoom screens.
Much of our club’s work on campus has been directly tied to the shifting course offerings. CCSF used to have programs for LGBT workers, senior citizens, ex-felons, ex-soldiers, and the mentally challenged. The school promoted a curriculum that treated workers and their education a little more than just capitalist programming. It provided a bit of a supportive community for people and had a history of successfully preparing university bound students.
But today, it is a shadow of its former self. CCSF used to have 90,000 students, but now has 35,000. Its prior 90 classes for senior citizens have now been cut to just nine. Its faculty is mostly composed of part-time teachers (called adjuncts) who have all the qualifications of a full-time professor but who receive less pay, have no health care, fewer classes, no offices and no job security. They often have to teach classes at different colleges to pay their bills. (That is why they are called “freeway flyers.”)Members of our Study Group attended both actions and gave political leadership. A PL’er delivered a speech in an effort to bring some politics to the forefront of this struggle. In our speech we highlighted that one of the most important roles of capitalist education is to inculcate our students with liberal ideas about the market being the only solution to human progress, and that all other alternatives, including communism are misguided fantasies. The CCSF’s Board of Trustees’ decision to slash these programs is a reflection of this role. The latest attacks against CCFC students is a teachable moment, revealing that students must uphold the capitalist agenda of austerity, privatization, and exploitation in order to prosper under capitalism.
Thankfully today’s demonstration shows that students and teachers protesting these cuts not only reject the bosses' solutions, but they also reject the bosses’ toxic market ideologies undergirding these attacks. The Party member closed out the speech by calling for communist revolution as the only solution to transforming our unequal, and mediocre education system.
PLP members active in this fightback understand that our struggle right now is one of reform, but until we are able to wave the red flag high and smash this racist, sexist, capitalist system our working-class sisters and brothers must be supported.
Now our task is to continue to build the fightback, to deepen our relationships with the people in our group and those we connected with this month. We will continue to distribute CHALLENGE consistently and to meet students at school with the aim of inviting them to join our study groups and ultimately PLP. Join the revolution for communism!