SAN FRANCISCO, CA March 14 — Days after New York City shuts down 22 schools and Chicago plans to close 54 schools, students and workers fight to keep their community college open here. Two hundred protestors carrying signs lined Ocean Avenue in front of the entrance to San Francisco City College (CCSF) fighting against the attacks on public education. Passing cars and buses honked their horns in support.
After an hour of spirited rallying, we marched to the racist Board of Trustees (BOT) meeting to continue the protest. Despite demands from union leaders (who had called for this protest) and others who spoke, the BOT decided to use Proposition A funds to shore up the reserve funds. The protestors outside and the protestors who packed the meeting room thundered their disapproval.
Meanwhile, 150 members of the CCSF community marched two miles from the Mission District branch to City Hall to join 1,500 protestors. PL’ers and friends distributed 500 leaflets and 100 CHALLENGEs at the demonstration. Several of us played an important part in organizing it.
The marchers entered City Hall, stopped at the security desk, and held a rally making three demands:
That City Hall politicians ensure that Proposition A funds are used for education (a ballot proposition that passed by 73 percent of SF voters to do just that). Proposition A called for maintaining CCSF’s salaries and educational programs, not to shore up reserves;
That City Hall advance money to CCSF to fill any budget gap;
That City Hall call on the Department of Education to stop the ACCJC’s (evaluating committee) unjustified “show cause” sanction against CCSF. Militant speeches and chanting echoed through the building.
This is a multi-layered attack on students and workers at CCSF. They had threatened to shut it down last year, which would affect its largely Latino, Asian, black and immigrant 90,000 students, and 1,650 faculty. The attacks on us include taking away classes in African American and women’s studies. The BOT plan is to cut the number of campuses, cut wages and increase class size. They have just cut 40 part-time teachers, 18 counselors, 30 staff, and forced teachers to take an 8.8 percent pay cut after years of wage freezes!
The attack is broader than CCSF. Statewide, community colleges have lost over $809 million in cuts since 2008-2009. These racist and sexist cuts should be seen as an attack on the entire working class. The bosses see community colleges like they see elementary and secondary education: a means to churn out low-wage workers and soldiers. The U.S. bosses are preparing for more proxy and larger wars. These cutbacks and shutdowns are for the war.
At these protests, PL’ers made contacts with several fighters, one of who thought PLP only “talked about revolution and communism and didn’t have any short-range goals.” On the contrary, PLP is deeply involved in the CCSF fight-back. We want to build ties with our friends in this struggle. We will intensify our struggles with our friends to understand that these reforms won’t cut it. We can’t save CCSF, we can’t save public education through the bosses’ laws. We enter a contradiction of fighting against capitalists’ attack on public education but these schools are owned and run by the bosses.
PL’ers put this struggle in a larger context. The leaflet we distributed outlined CCSF’s problems, explaining that this attack was part of the capitalists’ plan to privatize public services. It went on to describe a communist world in which education would be free, since money and the wage system would be eliminated. Education would be planned and implemented by those who do the work and receive the benefits and would thus be part of the struggle to eliminate the differences between manual and mental labor.
Education would be international and would benefit the world’s workers and teach collectivity and cooperation, rather than the individualism and patriotism taught in capitalist schools. We would teach that all value comes from our labor and that we depend on each other to survive and to thrive. International working-class unity would replace national citizenship and national borders.
We are workers of the world and demand an education, but a communist one. This will not come through the BOT or the ballot box. It requires a mass, militant communist movement. We are meeting people through this fight and will struggle with them about these ideas.