CHICAGO, March 10 — Chanting, “Let Us Teach”, 250 teachers, parents, and students rallied in support of 25 Chicago teachers who have taken the bold step of refusing to give a state-mandated test. The Illinois State Achievement Test (ISAT) is given over an eight-day period for two hours a day. In addition to teacher boycotters, more than 1,000 parents have signed “opt-out” letters telling the schools they don’t want their children to take the test. Top dogs at Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have had a virulent reaction to the stand taken by teachers and parents.
CPS has called opting-out parents every day for a week urging them to have their children take the test. They have patrolled the classrooms of active anti-ISAT schools, making sure that testing, not teaching, was occurring. Although non-testing students should have been allowed to read a book or engage in another quiet learning activity, at some schools students were forced to just sit there with the test booklet in front of them. Teachers were threatened with loss of their teaching license. At Saucedo School, where 20 teachers boycotted, educators were admonished for teaching opted-out students. They were told not to do any more teaching, just to supervise silent activities.
This seemingly irrational behavior on the part of those running the school system is motivated by power and control. As U.S. capitalism fights to retain its world dominance and prepares for the next world war, they need to control education. This was made very clear in the March 2012, Council on Foreign Relations report about military preparedness.
They write that more than half of all high school students either don’t graduate or are unable to pass the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and “many U.S. generals caution that too many new enlistees cannot read training manuals for technologically sophisticated equipment.” Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, authors of this report, recommend “the creation of more meaningful assessments and simulations of student learning and, then, a coordinated, national effort to create targets and repercussions tied to the Common Core.”
ISAT is an old test, not tied to the national Common Core standards, but CPS does not want teachers and parents to get in the habit of deciding what to teach or what tests students should take. Current education policies — national standards, attacks on unions, and accountability tied to test scores — are consistent with a plan to shape the workforce and the military to best serve capitalist interests. Schools have always played this role, but the intensity of worldwide competition makes schools particularly important now.
The teachers who bravely stood up to CPS and decided to teach, not test, put the interests of the students first. They broke the rules. Although these teachers are not communists, they have demonstrated the important communist principle of allegiance to the working class. This display of allegiance also brought on the harsh CPS reaction. PLP looks forward to the day when even more students, teachers, and parents rise up against the racist, oppressive education capitalists provide and fight for a communist future.

The education system is in crisis not only in Tanzania but in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Latin America, the U.S. and the worldwide. The crisis is caused by the fact that the schools are in the hands of the bosses. The bosses control of education leads to inequalities in the system, the haves and have-nots. 
In the colonial era the educational system worsened in the African states because it was based on “races.” Whites were favored as were certain tribes that the colonialists chose to prepare for managerial and professional duties. Most of the schools were built in urban areas where whites used to live.
After independence the masses thought that the educational system would improve but it remained a cursed system on the African continent and in the world at large. Education remained a commodity in which the sons and daughters of the rich got better education, especially in private schools owned by the bosses, while the poorer majority failed to get any education at all.  In 1985, Tanzania succumbed to the pressures of neocolonialism and became a “free market economy.”  Through the UN’s machinery, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and UNESCO, education became too expensive for most Tanzanians.
The IMF imposed conditions on the Tanzanian government.  In order to get aid they had to cut back on government expenditures, like public education, health services, public transportation, and communication.  They caused the stagnation of technology by draining Tanzania of its experts, like professors, doctors, engineers.  Their offers of investment were tied to the importation of their expensive finished goods.
The net result of these policies means that today about 85 percent of Standard Three pupils in government schools are unable to read Kiswahili and solve mathematics problems (Zaida Mgalla). Mgalla reports that English performance is even poorer. Her results show that vast numbers of children are not acquiring basic skills in primary education. Ms. Mgalla said, “We are in a society of two classes. The privileged with more wealth who can afford private schooling do much better than most people. When it comes to education, Tanzania is not one nation.”  The reforms that she calls for could never succeed since the system is still owned by the bosses. 
Education is serving the imperialist system that blocks true economic advancement for the masses. Teachers and students need to form an alliance to fight for free and equal education for all, to end employment benefits for some while others face a lifetime of insecurity, for a good supply of food to the students, for extra-curricular activities for students to keep them physically fit and mentally stable.  
As this alliance organizes struggles, PLP has an oppurtunity to build a truly international party in East Africa and to win workers and students to the idea that a profit system will never truly educate the working class. We must seize power from the bosses in order to end classes and free us from exploitation.  Then education will be for and by those who actually create all value in society: the working class.

The hypocrisy of the Obama administration is off the rails. Obama has denounced Russia’s president Putin for a “breach of international law” by seizing the Crimea in the conflict over the Ukraine. His Secretary of State, John Kerry, has accused Russia of being “in direct violation of international law.” Their mouthpiece, the New York Times (3/3) claims Putin “stepped outside the bounds of civilized behavior.”  And the European Union (EU) is backing the U.S. all the way, “in defense of Western values.”
Dictator Putin sending troops into the Crimea is relatively minor compared to the actions of U.S. rulers — presently and historically — along with EU members France, Britain, Germany and Belgium, among others. While Obama poses as a global sheriff on the side of “international law,” actually he is the world’s outlaw-in-chief. Under capitalism and imperialism, “international law” boils down to the law of the jungle. It represents anything that capitalist powers can get away with, especially through the use of military force.
War By Terror, A Presidential Duty
Last October the McClatchy news service reported that “the Obama administration violated international law with top-secret targeted-killing operations that claimed dozens of civilian lives in Yemen and Pakistan.” And Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s law school, indicated the scope of the Obama U.S. government’s ongoing contempt for that international law:
According to Senator Lindsey Graham…, the Obama administration has killed 4,700 individuals in numerous countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Obama has successfully embedded the process of drone killings into the executive branch is such a way that any future president will inherit it, along with the White House ‘kill list’ and its ‘terror Tuesday meetings. Unbounded global war is now part of what it means to be president.
Obama’s war machine protects over 1,000 bases worldwide, including dispatching Special Forces for targeted assassinations. But his administration is only following U.S. rulers’ war policies to maintain U.S. top-dog status, especially to control the flow of oil and gas which usually is behind many of its invasions. Hardly a year has gone by in the 20th century and into the 21st that the Pentagon and the CIA haven’t engaged in invasions, the overthrow of elected governments and assassinations. Beginning in 1898 when they grabbed Cuba and the Philippines (where they first introduced waterboarding and killed thousands, “outside the bounds of civilized behavior”), then throughout Central and South America in the first half of the 20th century and then triphammer style in the post-World War II era.
U.S. Presidents’ Military Machine Marches On
Their “breaches” of a non-existent international law included:
1953: Overthrowing the elected government of Iran and installation of the dictatorial Shah
(Eisenhower);
1954: Overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala which led to 100,000 deaths
(Eisenhower);
1962: The CIA-directed assassination of Congo’s elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba
(Eisenhower);
1965: Invasion of the Dominican Republic to eliminate an elected president who didn’t bow to Wall Street’s wishes (Johnson);
1971: The CIA-aided anti-communist massacre of over a million workers in Indonesia by dictator Suharto’s government (Johnson);
1963-1973: Invasion of Vietnam and accompanying bombing of Cambodia and Laos, a failed effort which led to five million deaths over ten years (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon);
1973: CIA-Henry Kissinger-inspired overthrow of the elected government of Salvatore Allende in Chile and takeover by the fascist Pinochet (Nixon);
1979: The $30 billion CIA campaign from Pakistan to invade Afghanistan and counter the Soviet presence there (which led to the Taliban seizure of power and training of Osama bin Laden) (Carter);
1983: Invasion of tiny Grenada that presumably had a “Marxist” government (Reagan);
1979: Arming and backing of fascist death squads in Nicaragua and El Salvador (Reagan);
1989: Invasion of Panama to squeeze out Japanese banking influence (Bush, Sr.);
1994: U.S. Invasion of Haiti (Clinton);
1999: Wholesale bombing of Yugoslavia which killed thousands and destroyed huge amounts of infrastructure (Clinton);
2003: “Shock and awe” invasion of Iraq — on the pretext of non-existent weapons of mass destruction — which killed hundreds of thousands and displaced four million, leaving that country in a shambles of daily killings (Bush, Jr.);
2001: Invasion of Afghanistan, a key to the oil and gas of central Asia (Bush, Jr., Obama);
2010: The deployment of the U.S. Navy around Haiti and backing of the UN force there, keeping workers under wraps (Obama);
And now the invasion of U.S. Special Forces into southern Libya to fight “enemies” in four adjacent African countries (Obama);
European Bosses No  Slouches
Either
But EU capitalists, while not up to U.S. “standards,” are no slouches either. French imperialists engaged in the slaughter and torture of tens of thousands in its carnage in Algeria. It now has troops in half a dozen African countries to protect its investments in these former French colonies. Belgian King Leopold perpetrated a holocaust in the Congo, killing and mutilating up to 15 million workers and peasants in 1876--1908. Over two centuries, British capitalists ran roughshod over central Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, among others), South Africa and India. Nazi Germany under Hitler enslaved and slaughtered tens of millions in his master-race scheme. These are the “Western values” they’re protecting in the Ukraine whose people are suffering from a Nazi-led overthrow of another autocratic government, protected by Putin.
It’s time the international working class put an end to hypocrite-in-chief Obama, his capitalist allies and fascist Putin. Only a communist revolution can destroy this motley crew of “breachers” and put our class in the saddle.

The only day the world recognizes women is the one to celebrate their “reproductive” role as mother and wife, Mother’s Day. But it was the Soviets, the communist movement, that celebrated women as political beings with revolutionary power. March 8 is International Women’s Day (IWD), the day that communists organized to salute the strength and contributions of women workers.
Women are not docile but have been organizing and fighting back for hundreds of years. In the United States, the fight of the slave and of women began from the same thread. The Grimke sisters fought against slavery and for women’s rights as one and the same battle. Angelina Grimke declared, “Until he [a slave] gets his rights, we [women] shall never have ours.” Struggles led up to the German communist Clara Zetkin taking the initiative in 1910 to organize an official International Working Women’s Day. Anti-sexist struggle makes it a historic day for all workers, women and men.
Communists Fought to Smash Sexism
During Czarist Russia, the struggle for working- class women became synonymous with the open call for the overthrow of the government. During World War I, the Russian Bolshevik Party tried to turn March 8th into a demonstration of women workers against imperialism. On that day in 1917, the women of
St. Petersburg began and led the February revolution.
Re-centering IWD within its rich revolutionary communist history helps increase the class-consciousness and organization of working-class women. This
militancy is crucial to the future of the working class.
Sexism Inherent in
Capitalism
The inherent sexism in capitalism is clear within the context of maximizing profits. Historically, profits haven’t always existed as part of society. When people began accumulating wealth, society changed from a primitive egalitarian society to one defined by class (see PL pamphlet Communism and the Struggle Against Sexism). In fact, the enslavement of women, the ultimate producers of labor, was essential to class society. To produce surplus, despots had to have unpaid labor and therefore they subjugated and enslaved women. As bosses increased their accumulation of surplus value (profit, value produced by workers over and above their wages), the gendered divisions of labor — previously based on mutual agreements in hunter-gather societies — became coercive. Hence, sexism is an inherent part of capitalism.
Capitalism has become an international parasitic system, and the world is made dependent on the major capitalists. Women and families are alienated, coerced, evicted from their land, and forced to migrate to imperialist countries to earn wages. These women are given the lowest-paying, labor-intensive jobs, which again profit the ruling class. The U.S. profits significantly from the sweat and blood of black, Latino, and Asian immigrant women. Immigrant women are ruled under fascist conditions — working nearly from meal to meal, while nonimmigrant women workers, such as single mothers on welfare, are also treated in a viciously sexist and racist manner.
Sexism Means We Must Fight Back
Women workers have always fought back against oppression. In Bangladesh, thousands of garment workers, mostly women, shut down 700 factories and the roads to the capital, Dhaka. They also hurled bricks at the sexist cops who tried to tear gas and beat them.
These workers produce billions of dollars of profit for corporations such as Walmart and H&M clothing stores, while only earning pennies. Part of the struggle against sexism begins on the factory floor, where women learn to fight fear, an instrument through which the bosses’ state rules.
As these women fight against their super-exploitation, Arab women and children are defending their village against the Israeli fascists. Women nurses in Brooklyn joined their male colleagues in multi-gender unity, are also fighting hospital closings and massive cutbacks in benefits and wages.
Feminism HURTS Women Workers
Feminism, a bourgeois philosophy, disregards the class nature of sexism. Anti-sexist struggles must reject it, because it divides the working class by blaming male workers and shunning them from anti-sexist struggles. This all-class unity for women sets us up for fascism by mobilizing women against their own class interests and sharpening the racist attacks on all workers.
It is communism, never feminism, that fights to eliminate the sexist divisions of the working class. Only communism can eliminate sexism by abolishing the wage system where work will be divided based on need and commitment, liberating women from the direct responsibility of pre-natal care and child-rearing. It will be shared equally with men. This will remove incentives for sexist divisions and workers will struggle to eliminate gender roles. Women will be valued according to their role in giving political leadership. This egalitarian foundation will give way to producing a society free from treating women as commodities.
For Communism, Women Must Lead Revolution
Historically, women are the most exploited of the working class. Class struggle is sharpest among the most exploited sectors of the working class. The experiences gained from this special oppression provides the basis for this leadership. Therefore, women are key to communist revolution.
The battle against sexism is an international one. When the woman worker in Haiti is raped, when a girl in Pakistan is sold into marriage, when a mother from South Africa is faced with eviction, this is an attack on the working class as a whole.
When we sharpen the contradictions between the ruling and the working class, workers will put anti-racist and anti-sexist politics at the forefront, doing away with the identities capitalism uses to divide us. We cannot fight sexism without having strong communist leaders who are women.
Though communists had made the greatest advances for women in the Soviet Union and China, most of the leadership was still male. PL has been fighting against sexism by maximizing women’s revolutionary potential and having them take more leadership roles, as occurred with the women who led the bakery workers’ fight against Stella D’Oro (see CHALLENGEs in 2009).
We need to expose sexism at work and in all the struggles we are involved in. The fight against sexism is a day-to-day struggle. Challenge sexist notions of male supremacy among co-workers. Raise anti-sexist politics at school. Rally against sexist healthcare cuts at your workplace. Write to CHALLENGE about your struggle against sexism. Women and men, black, brown, and white, must embrace communism as the only weapon against sexism.

WHAT IS SEXISM

Much like racism, sexism is a systematic tool used by the bosses to divide the working class against itself. It is the special oppression of female workers. This is manifested in many forms. In 1921, Lenin wrote:
Under capitalism the female half of the human race is doubly oppressed....not only are they exploited as members of the working class, “they continue to be ‘household slaves,’ for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid, backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and family household” (Supplement to Pravda No. 51).
Part of this women’s unpaid housework includes raising children, which is seen as an extension of their “reproductive” role. These children go on to become the next generation of workers.
Bosses also use women as a disposable labor force. Not only are they paid less to do more work than their male counterparts, they are also sexually harassed, objectified, and subject to mass violence and genocide. Black, immigrant, Asian, and Latino women are triply exploited because of the racist nature of capitalism (see PL pamphlet Smash Racism). The super-exploitation and oppression of women workers affects the whole working class.
Men’s wages are depressed precisely because women’s are especially depressed. The differential pay between male and female wages serves to divide the working class. If men buy into the idea that their work is worth more, not only are they making it easier for bosses to super-exploit women, they are also making it easier for bosses to exploit them.Women working in unpaid labor at home are seen as profitable for men. The inexcusable violence against women is used to justify that it is “natural” for men to beat women. Both notions disregard the class content in sexism. When women are treated as domestic slaves, men become complicit with capitalism’s systemic inequality. Violence is a safety valve for capital, projecting men’s frustrations in their exploitation as wage slaves onto women.
How does a man who degrades his wife and children hurt from sexism? That male worker has divided himself against his family. In what could have been his source of strength against his alienation at work is now a source of disunity. And any temporary “gain” from having women perform tasks for men is greatly outweighed by the losses he experiences as a worker and as a father, partner, or friend of a female member of his own class.