The life of Toby “Teddy” Schwartz (1928-2015) reads like a handbook for communists. He was a beloved family member, friend, and comrade. Toby helped to build the Progressive Labor Party and modeled how to win people to its ideas and to organize campaigns of class struggle.
Fighter from the Get-Go
Toby was raised in an immigrant family committed to fighting for workers and social justice. His mother was a seamstress and International Ladies Garment Workers Union organizer, his uncle a Bolshevik. From a young age, Toby committed himself to fighting against capitalism and racism. In 1939, he joined the Young Communist League (YCL), becoming a state youth leader in 1942. Four years later, at 18, he joined with Paul Robeson in the American Youth for Democracy. In his teens, Toby joined the Communist Party (CP-USA). Toby understood that to build an egalitarian world without racism, oppression, or class warfare, one needed to act courageously.
In 1949, as a student at City College of New York (CCNY), Toby helped to lead an anti-racist struggle to fire two racist, anti-Semitic professors. As part of a group of CCNY students led by the YCL, Toby helped to lead a campus-wide strike against racism that eventually involved thousands of students, many of whom had just returned from fighting fascism and racism in Europe during World War II. The resulting weeklong strike shut down the entire campus, a first for a major U.S. college.
Helped Found PLP
During the late 1950s, he and other members of the CP-USA became critical of the party’s politics. After unsuccessfully trying to lead a struggle within the organization to fight for the international working class, Toby joined with a group of 30 who quit the CP in December 1961. Six months later, Toby was among the group of comrades who founded what was to become the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party.
While working toward his PhD in Buffalo in 1964, Toby was active in a PLP chapter that included steel and auto workers. The fascist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched a witch-hunt to “rout the radicals.” Toby and others were subpoenaed to appear before HUAC. Many lost their jobs. But they were not silenced; they organized to openly challenge the very right of HUAC to exist. During the hearings, Toby disrupted the proceedings. He grabbed a microphone that was being used to bug the defense table. Soon he was in a grappling match with federal marshals. Three dragged him from the hall. An Associated Press photographer captured the scene and the picture hit front pages across the country. PLP led a counterattack that saw 1,500 students, workers and professors picket the hearings and launch a campaign that drove HUAC from the city and to its eventual demise.
Staunch Anti-Racist Organizer
As a professor, Toby continued to lead struggles to fight for a better world. In 1973, he helped found what later became the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR). In the late 1970s and 1980s, InCAR led a national movement against expansion efforts by the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party. InCAR’s message of “no free speech for racists — racism hurts all workers” was delivered to hundreds of thousands.
Toby helped to lead this important work throughout New England, meeting the violent tactics of the racists with organized and courageous action. When the KKK attempted to hold a cross burning in the remote rural town of Scotland, Connecticut, Toby led a mass multiracial march of hundreds of workers and students from three states. The demonstrators stopped many Klan sympathizers from attending the cross burning. Not surprisingly, Toby and his family’s livelihood were threatened. Nevertheless, Toby and his wife Helen continued to dedicate their lives to fight for an egalitarian society without racism: communism.
In the 1980s, Toby recruited in the town of Willimantic and helped mount a series of anti-racist campaigns. This was a training ground for developing Party leaders, including a successful struggle to defend a young Puerto Rican man who was targeted for defending himself after a racist gang attack. When local politicians tried to turn a housing project into a gated fascist prison camp, PLP defied racist cops and led demonstrations to defeat it. And when a leading government head publicly slandered Puerto Ricans, PLP’s campaign exposed his racism and forced him out of office!
Toby’s fighting nature helped him recover from a stroke in 1980. He remained active on the University of Connecticut (UConn) campus with InCAR and PLP, leading many a campus-wide anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles. These struggles included preventing the UConn administration from closing the two schools on the main campus that had the largest number of women and nonwhite students, a fight to end the Youth Violence Prevention Initiative and other racist and pseudo-scientific research, and campus-wide opposition to U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.
An Inspiration for Workers
Toby worked to solve problems collectively, rather than relying on charismatic individuals. He would often say, “We don’t believe in the cult of personality. That’s a losing strategy.” At one campus InCAR meeting, a Black woman student and InCAR member stated, “Toby, you have taught me how it’s important to not sit and watch these racist and sexist attacks happen. You taught all of us how to fight back. You also taught us that it’s not enough to just fight racism, but that you have to fight capitalism. That’s why I’m joining PLP.”
Throughout his decades of struggle, Toby was happily married to the love of his life, Helen, until her death in 1999. Together they created a family, raising three children and five grandchildren. Their house was always a place for friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members to gather and share a meal, a glass of wine, and a good discussion of politics and life. They created a household in which lively debate, friendship and compassion were the rule. Everyone was welcome at their table. Their ties created a web of friends across the country and worldwide.
Even in his declining years, Toby made deep connections at his assisted living home. Despite the ravages of dementia and heart disease, Toby lived life to the fullest, attending the opera and taking the train to visit old friends. He was always curious about the world. He and Helen built a library of thousands of books, often processing three or four simultaneously. He wanted to understand how the world worked as well as how people thought and interacted. Toby was a distinguished biophysicist, focused on the specifics of cell membrane transport, and noted for pointing out fundamental principles of thermodynamics.
The kind of fighter he was, and his love for life, became even more evident when Toby entered a hospice, but then fought to recover and return to the home. Then a second entrance to the hospice saw him once again recover to return home! He eventually died there in his sleep.
At his core, Toby believed in the capacity of all people to grow, learn and act, optimistic that our actions can and will create a communist world. Always on the side of the working class, Toby was a militant anti-racist fighter and proud communist, in the true spirit of the word. He never shirked from participating in and leading class struggle.
Toby will live on in all our struggles and in the lessons his life taught us.
Donald Trump’s openly racist presidential campaign is just the latest example of how the capitalist ruling class uses elections to sustain its dictatorship over the working class. From Haiti and Egypt to the United States, competing factions of millionaires and billionaires are sorting out which group will hold state power—and which will be disciplined and suppressed. In addition, the rulers need elections to keep workers tied to the myth that the profit system can be reformed to meet our needs. In the process, these bosses divide the international working class with appeals to racism, sexism, and nationalism. They use stooges like Trump to scapegoat immigrants for mass poverty, unemployment, and the perpetual economic crises caused by the profit system. Capitalism can never serve the working class!
The Progressive Labor Party is fighting back in more than two dozen countries to smash the capitalist class and their electoral farces. Only communist revolution can create a world where workers have a real say over the crucial issues that affect them. Only a communist society—run by and for the working class—can end the nightmare of imperialist war and the mass slaughter of immigrants.
Every politician serves one faction of capitalists or another. In the U.S., the heart of global imperialism, the fight between capitalist factions is heating up. Enter Donald Trump.
A Racist Servant of ExxonMobil
While Bernie Sanders attempts to win over liberal reformists who are disillusioned with eight years of Barack Obama’s empty promises, Trump is busy rallying a different segment of the working class. This group has a deep hatred and distrust of the U.S. federal government, and is vulnerable to being swayed by Trump’s crudely racist and sexist attacks. An the New Yorker magazine (8/31/15) noted, “Ever since the Tea Party’s peak, in 2010, and its fade, citizens on the American far right—Patriot militias, border vigilantes, white supremacists—have searched for a standard-bearer, and now they’d found him.”
But Trump’s greater danger is that he is hardly the renegade outsider he purports to be. His multi-billion-dollar fortune derives from the dominant, finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. These bosses, represented by ExxonMobil, Morgan Chase, and mouthpieces like the New York Times, are scrambling to protect their obscene profits in an escalating competition with their imperialist rivals, notably China and Russia. Trump’s “rogue” candidacy has been intensively publicized by the Times. His proposals are both criminally racist and wildly impractical—to deport all 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S., or erect a wall along the entire U.S./Mexican border, or eliminate birthright citizenship. Even so, Trump’s rants could help legitimize more moderate-sounding—but equally racist—Republicans like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. They could also galvanize frightened liberals into rallying around an imperialist war-maker like Hillary Clinton.
Currently, the chief dispute among U.S. bosses centers around imperialism. On one side stand the biggest finance capitalists and industrialists, who need to hold on to the Middle East’s energy riches by force. Clinton, Bush, Rubio, Sanders, and Joe Biden all front for this wing, as does Trump. As the Times pointed out (9/1/05), Trump and Bush “are the only leading Republican candidates who have not signed a pledge not to raise taxes.” More specifically, Trump is threatening to raise taxes on greedy hedge fund managers and to close overseas tax loopholes for U.S. corporations—measures that will be needed to fund the broader global war to come.
On the other side are the more domestically oriented bosses, led by Charles and David Koch, who have less to gain from current and projected U.S. wars—or from the corporate taxes required to pay for them. The Koch brothers plan to raise nearly a billion dollars for the 2016 elections, and are still searching for the right candidate to represent them.
Americans for Prosperity, a Koch front group, excluded Trump from its recent “Defending the American Dream” summit because his candidacy originates from the main imperialist camp:
Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House….Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party (Washington Post, 8/5/15).
According to Bloomberg News, a major Wall Street news service:
Failing to win the nomination won’t make Trump electorally irrelevant….His chance of winning the presidency [as an independent] would be poor, but his chances of splitting the conservative vote and helping a Democrat get elected would be good (Bloomberg, 8/24/15).
Even Trump is open about his allegiance to the main U.S. imperialists!
Donald Trump wants to “knock the hell out of” Iraq’s oil fields in order to strike ISIS. And then he wants to take over the oil fields and funnel the profits back to the United States…. [H]e would then send in Exxon or another oil company to quickly rebuild the infrastructure once the conflict is over (CNN, 8/18/15).
Workers’ True Enemy: Imperialism
By his own words, Trump adhere to the Carter Doctrine, the imperialist stance codified by former President Jimmy Carter in 1979: that any threat to U.S. oil interests in the Middle East would be met with a military response. Followed by every U.S. president since, this policy has cost millions of working class lives.
In another token of imperialist loyalty, Trump floated the name of Jack Welch, ex-CEO of the huge military contractor General Electric, as a potential Treasury secretary. It was war-maker GE, through its NBC subsidiary, that catapulted Trump to national fame by running his TV show, “The Apprentice,” for 14 seasons.
The self-styled “independently wealthy” Trump has also offered the Treasury post to his real source of cash, hedge fund billionaire and imperialist tool Carl Icahn. In 2014, a single bond issue left Icahn Enterprises LP in $3.5 billion of debt to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley (Bloomberg, 1/6/14). Icahn bankrolls many of the hideous building projects with the “Trump” name plastered over their entrance.
Don’t Be a Sucker for the Bosses
Workers must not be fooled into falling for Trump’s racist filth. At the same time, it would be a mistake to dismiss his clownish behavior as a circus sideshow. In appearance, capitalist elections in every country are always something of a circus. But it is through them that the bosses conduct their deadly serious business.
PLP organizes workers, students and soldiers worldwide under the slogan, “Don’t Vote, Revolt!” The international working class doesn’t need phony elections or professional politicians to build the world we need. PLP is building an international revolutionary communist movement of millions that will smash all racist borders, smash anti-immigrant and sexist attacks on our sisters and brothers, and smash capitalism once and for all. Join us!
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Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says they are just deportees.
Deportees, by Woody Guthrie, 1948
Capitalists love to point to voting as the height of human achievement. Whenever the bosses ruling the European Union and the United States launch an invasion, they justify their slaughter for profit by claiming they are “spreading democracy.”
Today, the international working class is facing a crisis. Millions of our class sisters and brothers have been displaced by imperialist wars, imperialist-backed civil wars, or capitalist economic crises. Because capitalism deprives workers of real choices, thousands of them brave dangerous journeys to the EU and U.S. in the hope of finding work and surviving. Nearly every day there is another tragic story of immigrating workers killed by this murderous system.
Throughout the world, capitalists are using this crisis to drum up working-class support for more racism and more imperialist war. France’s neo-Nazi National Front, U.S. presidential candidates like Donald Trump, and fake leftist Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro are just a few of the bosses seeking to intensify lethal anti-immigrant racism. In Sweden, where the neo-Nazi party recently polled 25 percent of the electorate, the fascists have proposed a series of laws to prevent desperate immigrants from entering.
Of course, capitalism grants no “right to vote” to millions of immigrant workers worldwide on whether they want to be stuffed into tiny ships, cross hot deserts or suffer abuse from human traffickers.
Communism means workers’ power, no racist borders, and no workers forced from their homes and families to find work. Voting strengthens the dictatorship of capitalism by giving workers the illusion of participation while following the capitalists’ laws. Smashing capitalism for good means building a mass international PLP and a mass Red Army for armed revolution. The road to revolution will break a lot of capitalist laws. As we continue on that path, we must struggle with workers to break with the dangerous notion that voting under capitalism can bring communism any closer.
click to viewSUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN, August 26 — “Tianjin means we got to fight back!” As we responded to the industrial explosion that has killed 158 people in China, hundreds of workers in this mainly Chinese and Latin neighborhood took our leaflets in Chinese and English. Many Latin workers took CHALLENGE in Spanish. Dozens stopped to observe our multiracial group of women and men chanting, “When the working class is under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!”
This was Progressive Labor Party’s second rally in the neighborhood this week. Workers attentively listened to our speeches in Chinese and English calling for solidarity with protestors in China in the wake of the Tianjin massacre. We connected hazardous working conditions in China to those in the United States. In this neighborhood, one of three people live below the poverty line. Whether they are in Ferguson, Brooklyn, or Tianjin, workers have everything to gain by uniting to smash capitalism.
Murder, Not Accident
On August 12, two dangerous and toxic chemical warehouses owned by Rui Hai Logistics exploded near the port city of Tianjin. The death toll is still rising. It left thousands more injured, homeless, exposed to future health problems, or missing. The explosion also damaged 17,000 homes. Since then, in Shandong, a Runxing Chemical Technology Co. factory has also exploded.
The capitalist media has called the explosion in Tianjin a number of things: tragedy, industrial accident, disaster. But the working class can see Tianjin for what it is: capitalist murder. The government, businesses, and environmental academics all knew about the dangers of this chemical industry as early as 2008! But the lives of workers are expendable under capitalism, and their deaths a calculated risk the bosses gladly take in this “thriving economic development zone” (New York Times, 8/31). The port in Tianjin is the fourth largest in the world, with nearly 500 million tons of cargo passing through it each year. It connects 500 other ports in 180 countries.
Surely a port that reports over $104 million (USD) in annual profits—and a Chinese government that invests $145 billion in its military—could have a few dollars left over for safety measures for workers? No, not under capitalism, where workers are treated as commodities and used to churn profit. Tianjin and Shandon are but two of the latest atrocities of a system that is based on the exploitation of workers. We need a world based on our needs and run by workers, not bosses and their drive for profit.
No Good Bosses
While the western capitalist media like the British Broadcasting Corporation and the New York Times are quick to blast imperialist rival China for putting “profits over people,” they don’t dare point fingers at their own rulers’ murderous exploitation. What was their bosses’ response? John Deere and Toyota are closing their factories near Tianjin. (Read: Unemployment and poverty for workers.) Other companies like Wal-Mart are “monitoring the situation” in their facilities in Tianjin.
The international working class must respond to these explosions. We must shut the bosses’ profit system down. Whether in Mexico or the U.S., in Nepal or Syria, workers know too well the devastation this profit system wreaks on their lives: racism, sexism, unemployment, deportation, deadly infrastructure, murders by the state, inter-imperialist war. That’s why today we chanted, “Asian, Latin, Black, and white, workers of the world unite!”
We Can Make a Better World
Workers once ruled China and developed a system that valued the health and safety of working women and men. The Chinese Revolution and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution raised the living standards of the masses, from mass literacy to mass health care and education. In the span of ten years, workers doubled their life expectancy and cut the infant mortality rate in half! The gains communists made with women workers were commendable. The sexist practices of arranged marriage, foot binding, illiteracy, prostitution, and female infanticide were eradicated. This was possible only under a worker-run society. While the Chinese Revolution fought for socialism, Progressive Labor Party has learned from the old movement and fights directly for communism.
With the return of full-fledged capitalism, workers in China and worldwide are suffering under horrendous economic and political burdens. In China alone, nearly 70,000 people died while working with toxic chemicals last year (truth-out.org). What does the working class have to look forward to? More capitalist mass murders and an eventual world war among rivals like China, the U.S., and Russia.
The working class has no stake in Chinese or U.S. bosses. Join PLP to create a different future for our class. Let’s build a worldwide communist movement where the health and lives of workers is the order of the day. We can make a better world!
- Information
PL’s 50-Year Convention: ONWARD TO A LIFETIME OF REVOLUTION
- Information
- 03 September 2015 93 hits
I was one of thirty comrades who, in 1961, met and decided to break away from the old communist movement and eventually form a new party, the Progressive Labor Party. If any one of us had predicted that in fifty years our Party would be active in 27 countries, we would have thought that person was smoking something. But here we are!
The words above are from a founding member of Progressive Labor Party at the convention dinner celebrating 50 years of fightback.
In the week leading up to convention this August, in the face of the storm clouds of imperialist war and the fascist attacks unleashed on workers worldwide, young PL’ers waged a week of spirited class struggle. Comrades from all over the world injected their international experiences into our Party’s fight against racist cop murders in New York City. More than 50 comrades with little or no writing background collectively produced our newspaper, CHALLENGE, from start to finish (see page 5).
Friday night’s welcoming address from our outgoing chair was moving in its rock-solid confidence that not only has capitalism outlived its time, but that a communist world can and will be won. Our four incoming leaders are multi-racial, mainly women, international and inter-generational, and will divide the tasks of the chair and lead as a collective. Two of them spoke on Friday night, focusing on the state of the world and the potential power of workers to transform it.
Our Saturday workshops saw more than 300 comrades focused on implementing the revolutionary-optimist strategy in our most recent guiding document, “Dark Night Shall Have its End” (see CHALLENGE 9/2). At Saturday evening’s reunion dinner, we sang working-class songs from South Africa and heard a series of greetings from international comrades. Some had traveled to be with us; others were prevented from attending by racist visa restrictions and sent written greetings in their stead. The nearly 500 comrades cheered each message as it was read out loud. We felt their presence nonetheless!
In the last two speeches from our new leadership, the comrades charged with international and U.S. work rocked the house with visions of a growing party worldwide and a review of the many, many fights that have made our party the vibrant force it remains today. As each fight was recalled, comrade veterans of each struggle rose and were recognized with thunderous applause. The evening was topped off by the singing of the Internationale in more than eight languages, led by workers and youth from five continents.
Sunday’s session was an open-mic discussion of five resolutions our Party will unify around in the coming period. It was a strong exercise in communist centralism, the political process that will lead the working class to power and to the final victory of a communist future. Lively discussion and disagreement was held around the most correct way to implement our anti-racist, anti-sexist, internationalist strategy to build the Party and wage armed struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Our Party has thrived for half a century as a vigorous fighting force because we have always understood the importance of entrusting leadership responsibilities with new generations of communist leaders. Those original thirty comrades were nearly all white and mostly male. Anti-racist struggle has played a key role through our Party’s fifty years, and seeing this new leadership group come into its own at the 2015 convention was a huge highlight for me.
We know that workers will develop to their full capacity as human beings only when the working class has wiped out capitalism and established communism. Capitalism wastes more than precious natural resources. Above all, it is wasteful of human potential. Our convention was a small glimpse of how communism will tap into this great potential of the working class.
Our first 50 years gives us inspiration for the next 50 years and more. The Progressive Labor Party—as long as we wage both class struggle and an internal struggle against reformism/revisionism—will continue to lead workers and youth down the long and winding road to communist revolution.
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International Greetings
Hello our fellow comrades in the U.S. and around the world. It is our sincere hope that you are all working and fighting hard against the unfairness of the capitalist system existing among the world’s population. It was our plan to join your summer project against racism and capitalism in the US, particularly in Ferguson, but our plan failed because we were denied visas by the US Embassy here in East Africa. The Embassy wanted to harass us and pocket more than 160US dollars per visa. At the anniversary of Mike Brown’s murder, we saw (through the mass media) your unity and commitment to fight back regardless of the government’s attacks against you. We join your struggle here in East Africa by fighting against the government on the issues concerning the constitution and the general elections. Your fight is our fight, your success is our success. Let us continue to fight against the capitalist system that creates racism, sexism, injustice and inequalities. In doing so, we will create a classless world with a happy life.
— PLP in East Africa
PLP Comrades of Pakistan, El Salvador, Africa, France, Mexico, Colombia, China, the Dominican Republic, the U.S. — comrades from all around the world! Once again the capitalist-made borders are preventing us in Haiti from being physically present among you to share our experiences in organizing in the class struggle. One day, we will put an end to these divisions created by this system of inequality. In fact, in spite of the distance and different capitalist divisions of racism, nationalism, borders used prevent the unity of our class, we are more and more organized! We believe in communist revolution, and our international Party and our revolutionary line grows and strengthens day by day. Our presence in different struggles inspires the working class’s confidence in our communist leadership and our confidence in the working class and our future.
Our convention brings new blood to the building of our Party and strengthens each comrade. We have much to lose if we fail to win the working class to destroy capitalism. If we fail, the current system will lead humanity to another stage of barbarism. We must not allow this to happen!
Only communist revolution can put an end to the material conditions and ideology that lead to racism, sexism, terrorism, climate change: all the phenomena that can only lead the world to savagery. We building a fighting organization and the decisive struggles to change the world. This is the enormous task ahead faced by each comrade of our party: to organize millions of workers around the world under the red flag of Progressive Labor Party!Long live communist struggle! Long live our Party, the PLP!
— PLP in Haiti
TEXAS, August 24 — Today an international group of students, teachers and workers rallied in front of our city’s Mexican Consulate to support the struggles of teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico. Progressive Labor Party and friends marched down city streets chanting, “When students and teachers are under attack, what do we do, stand up fight back!” And “Las Luchas Obreras, No Tienen Fronteras!” (workers’ struggles have no borders).
U.S.,Mexico — It’s All the Same
We passed out leaflets that connected the struggles of students and teachers in Mexico to the struggles of students and teachers in the U.S. Workers at bus stops and in storefronts expressed agreement with our chants and leaflet. One worker pointed out the similarities of the U.S. Common Core education reforms in the U.S. to the reforms in Mexico.
The Mexican ruling class’s reform efforts have shut down the teacher-union run education institute that serves primarily indigenous working-class families. This reform includes a new teacher evaluation system that ties student test scores to the teachers’ job security. This new system mirrors the Common Core education reforms in states such as New York, and the new T-TESS evaluation system in Texas, which uses a similar system of rating teachers based on students’ standardized test scores. This tactic pits teachers against students and blames teachers rather than capitalism for the inequalities in the education system.
Following the lead of the federal government, Texas is taking more direct control of teacher job evaluations. This is a fascist attack. Fascism is the outgrowth of global capitalism. It is the intensification and centralization of the repressive and ideological forces in order to maintain the existing capitalist class domination. Under these reforms, the government targets teachers, threatening to fire them for low-test scores. This new system is racist, hurting working-class Black and Latin school districts the most.
At a recent faculty meeting in a Texas school where this new evaluation system is being rolled out, school administration showed a film of a supposed “master” teacher teaching a class. This “model” class was of an all white senior honors English class. Afterward the faculty was asked for their input. One teacher stood up and explained that the video was disrespectful to teachers who teach in mainly Black, Latin, and immigrant schools and to their students who face greater challenges from capitalism. The faculty erupted in applause.
Rely on the Working Class
The local teachers’ union claims to oppose this new system. However, in practice they have actually helped implement this all-out attack on teachers. The union has known about the development of this new system for at least one year, but has done nothing about it. Now, instead of organizing teachers, students and parents to fight back, they have hired “experts” to help teachers avoid being fired. The working class must only rely on itself to fight back, not experts. That power of workers must be organized under a revolutionary party fighting to end this system.
We will continue to fight alongside all teachers and students of the world. The fight against capitalist education reforms has no borders. We will continue to discuss the connection of struggles of teachers around the world with teachers and students on our campuses. We will continue to raise international working class unity with our friends until our working class army destroys all borders and build a communist society.
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NEW YORK CITY, August 24 — Education workers in Mexico are fighting back against the government racist education reform law. Progressive Labor Party here in NYC organized a protest outside of the Mexican consulate today in solidarity with the struggle of the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) union of section 22 in Oaxaca.
We denounced the killings, disappearances, and harassment of workers and youth. Some of the consulate workers supported us and took our literature. A Dominican woman passing by stopped to chanted with us in solidarity. Another worker congratulated us and said he was happy to see this movement. He said we must not minimize things because out of each worker that supports us we can build hundreds more. No matter how few in numbers we are now, the communist politics will spread. That is why what we do now is important.
Situation in Oaxaca
The government is dissolving the Oaxaca State Institute of Public Education (IEEPO), putting an end to the CNTE’s over 20-year control of education. Judges have also ordered arrests of 15 CNTE teachers in Oaxaca, charging them to disrupting elections. This is a part of the fascist move to discipline a militant workers’ struggle that has been going on strike almost every year since 1970. The bosses seek to exert control over a crucial institution through which they rule: the schools.
The government Governor Gabino Cué Monteagudo and his lackeys don’t tell the public that Section 22 of the CNTE fought along with parents more than 20 years ago for schools to be built, uniforms and books to be given so that children could study. And now, they take away the gains workers have made. They only want education according to the bosses’ needs.
Bosses Attack from All Angles
The teachers’ union, a profession of mainly women, there have been one of the most militant and the largest force in Oaxaca, not only for the positions they can give other teachers, but also their militant defense for workers and education against the policies of the local and federal state government. In the last elections they burnt all the voting ballots, so there would be no voting. They’ve carried out many strikes against the disappearance and killings of teachers. These education workers fight racism, and in the interest of indigenous and rural working-class families.
Scared, the government responded with militarizing the city with the navy, establishing a curfew, and firing and attacking workers any way they can. They are using scabs to break the movement and have infiltrated paramilitaries and provokers in the demonstrations. It has even used another unions as an alternative of organization and the teacher’s national union has frozen the accounts of section 22 so that they don’t have any funds. Despite solidarity from parents, the bosses and their media have been using some parents to discredit the movement. Government officials are also paying home visits to parents to coerce them into opposing teachers.
Struggle Must Continue
There is no solution under capitalism. Any reform we win is temporary, as we know from Oaxaca, because the capitalists will take it away as soon as they can. The real solution will come when workers organize under our party the PLP to destroy the capitalism with a communist revolution. Only then can lives of workers and students change in every sense; education will be in service of the working class, no more nationalism, sexism, racism, or any other divisive rubbish the capitalist system throws at us.
There is great potential for international solidarity here. It would be important for the teachers of Oaxaca to link this struggle to teachers currently on strike in Uruguay. As schools open in the United States, youth and teachers have a lot to learn from workers in Latin America about defying the bosses. From Mexico to the United States, the struggle continues!
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WASHINGTON, DC, August 24 — When communists set the stage for fightback, the working class takes it up with enthusiasm, and advances the fight. This is what happened at a local Progressive Labor Party rally here near the Mexican Cultural Center. We called on workers and students to join in the anti-racist solidarity with the bold mainly-women teachers of Oaxaca as they embarked on a strike against the Mexican government’s militaristic gang-up against them.
Suddenly, a worker from Oaxaca joined our rally with great joy and took the bullhorn, declaring that he had many friends in Section 22 (the union local in Oaxaca) and that all workers had a stake in the outcome of this monumental battle. A worker at a local non-profit housing developer rode by on his bicycle, and later noted that his son has spent several months organizing with workers in Chiapas, another of the areas under racist attack by the Mexican government. A board member of the local postal union also joined in speaking on the bullhorn, expressing his union’s solidarity with the teachers and insisting that his local and PLP participate in each other’s future actions against the bosses. No problem! Many drivers and passersby grabbed 180 leaflets and 120 CHALLENGEs. This response from workers shows workers across borders have every reason to unite and fight back as one class.
As this demonstration proves, the opportunity for international solidarity is real. The fight in Mexico is a battle against racism against the indigenous workers of southern Mexico. Similar to movements in the U.S., the government in Oaxaca is trying to seize centralized control of education. The bosses are blaming fighting workers for a capitalist crisis they created.
The struggle will continue worldwide!
