As the bosses’ economy continues to tank, one news report after the next warns that young people are entering the worst job market ever.  This “new normal” of high unemployment and relentless attacks on salaries, benefits, and unions has teachers running scared as well.  In hot pursuit is the main wing of the U.S ruling class. As these capitalists find themselves losing ground to their imperialist rivals, they are pushing for greater, more centralized control over what is being taught.
Most recently that push has taken the form of the Common Core — our common enemy.
The Common Core is a set of learning goals the bosses have established that require even more high-stakes testing.  It is a part of President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top,” a competition where the losers — students and teachers alike — are trained to blame themselves, not the racist, exploitive capitalist system.   Education workers, parents and students must not be fooled by the bosses’ stated goal to use the Common Core to ramp up “critical thinking.” Real critical thinking would uncover the truth that capitalism can never work for the vast majority.
Budget Cuts Tied to Imperialist Wars
The budget pressure facing schools across the U.S. is directly tied to the multi-trillion-dollar expenses from the failed imperialist adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the need to fund future wars in the Middle East and eventually Asia.  The budget cuts are frontal attacks on teachers and their unions. But their primary targets are working-class students. Today these young people spend their days in degraded learning conditions. Tomorrow they may be battlefield casualties in the bosses’ next imperialist war.
United, teachers, parents, and students could effectively fight back against these anti-worker education reforms. That’s why the bosses design these reforms to drive a wedge between education workers and the families they serve.  
Common Core is the latest development in a long-standing ruling-class effort to produce workers to serve its industrial and military machines and to control school curricula. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the Rockefeller Foundation contributed heavily to the creation of the Educational Testing Service, the agency that spawned the College Board and its racist and hated SAT. Starting before World War II, the Carnegie Foundation, a leading force in the racist eugenics movement (breed only genetically “superior” people), spent millions to develop standardized tests. In 1965, it initiated the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is still used today as a national standard to measure the fitness of the working class for industrial and military competition with the U.S. bosses’ overseas rivals. With an estimated 30 percent of high school graduates now lacking the tools for military service, the crisis of capitalist education is acute.  
The same U.S. ruling class forces are now positioning themselves in a desperate fight to maintain supremacy, a struggle that will inevitably lead to bigger and broader wars. Every education reform pronouncement of Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan is framed by a thinly veiled rhetoric of war. The priority, they tell us, is to make sure U.S. capitalism is not “surpassed,” by its rivals, and that its workers are prepared to compete in the global economy. As surely as trade wars lead to shooting wars, education workers, students and parents must harbor no illusions about the true purpose of education reform: war preparation.
The Liberal Myth of Opportunity
The broad shift in the U.S. economy away from manufacturing and toward the so-called “service sector” has placed new pressure on the rulers to dress up their schools as places where any young person can unlock their opportunity to a better future, if only they try.  Racism makes a mockery of this promise. Liberal commentators like Diane Ravitch take this hypocrisy seriously — reforms like the Common Core undermine U.S. democracy, as she says repeatedly.  In Ravitch’s world, we ought not to expect proficiency from all students. She believes we ought to be honest in saying that schools must do a better job in more fairly sorting out young people for various rungs on the job market ladder. And as the job market trends toward a status quo where a small number of highly educated (and debt-ridden) college graduates claw their way into a “knowledge economy,” while most remain locked into a lifetime of sporadic employment and low earnings, the myth that every worker had a chance at success becomes ever more important.  To make workers continue to blame ourselves for the failures of the capitalists’ system, the mirage of a high-quality education available to all becomes ever more crucial.  Enter the Common Core.
The Common Core exists in the same world as the one where racist police murder and National Security Agency surveillance go unchecked.   The Common Core’s intensified monitoring and computerization provides the rulers new avenues for control over what is said in classrooms and staff meetings.  National teacher union leaders have embraced these steps toward fascism. On the local level, union leaders have done little more than question or negotiate the pace of their implementation.  Talk of “higher standards” and “critical thinking” is a foil to win well-meaning and anti-racist teachers into the patriotic fold.  
True critical thinking would lead to massive strikes and walkouts.  We should aspire to this higher standard of learning and action. Yet the important teachers strike in Chicago last fall teaches us that we must aim for even more.  A radical, militant, anti-racist alternative is desperately needed in battles against segregation and racist school closures in Chicago, New York, and throughout the U.S. The Progressive Labor Party is establishing a beachhead for bigger battles to come.  Education workers, students and parents must fight tooth and nail against the Common Core and war budgets with our eye on the biggest prize. We must organize a movement for a working-class revolution. Our goal is to win the world our children — and theirs — deserve: a communist world.

MEXICO CITY, October 13 — The fascist repression against the striking teachers of the National Coordinating Committee (CNTE) unleashed by the bosses’ government of President Enrique Peña Nieto reveals the criminal and anti-working class nature of the capitalist system.  The complicity of Miguel Angel Mancera, the mayor of Mexico City, also illustrates how politicians of all the electoral parties — PRI, PAN, PRD, or PT — are capitalists’ loyal servants bent on turning education into a profit-driven business during their global crisis.
The brutal eviction from the city center carried out on September 13 by thousands of federal cops and Federal District riot police, and the subsequent military occupation of the city center, exemplify the fascism the bosses will use to impose their plans.
CNTE teachers’ courage in resisting fascist repression (see CHALLENGE, 10/2) as well as the attacks from the bosses’ media, has inspired thousands of teachers nation-wide, to go on strike, occupy public squares and fight the cops.
Fascist Dictatorship and Imperialists’ Interests
In two CNTE-sponsored discussions about education reform, columnist Luis Hernandez Navarro presented the paper “The Counter Education Reform,” describing how the ruling class, represented by businessman Claudio Gonzalez, outlined for Peña the content of the reform, and how to pass it into law.
The September 13 fascist repression demonstrates the role of the police and the army as enforcers of their law. That apparatus serves the interests of the class in power, the bosses, as do the executive, legislative and judicial branches, at the federal and state level.
As long as the bosses hold political power, the laws and the might of the state will be used to impose the interests of the ruling class on the working class — a dictatorship of a minority of millionaires oppressing an impoverished majority.
In the U.S. the education market is valued at $1.3 trillion. For the multimillionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, the business of education in the U.S. represents an “opportunity” of $500 billion (La Jornada, 1/3/13).
U.S. bosses are enacting reforms to destroy public education and turn it into a lucrative business. It’s the same plan being implemented in Mexico; Claudio Gonzalez is advisor to private schools and is connected with Televisa, the media conglomerate.
We Need A Revolutionary Party
Labor, education, energy and fiscal reforms are all interconnected, responding to the needs of the imperialists and local capitalists. It means more oppression, fascist control and exploitation for the working class, and more profits and power for the capitalists. Trade union struggles are limited in confronting these interests and their leaders defend the system.
We must fight these attacks, which affect all workers. But we need to be organized as a class to destroy the capitalist system that’s behind these attacks. It’s in the bosses’ interest to separate these reform struggles and separate those involved in each one.
Working-class liberation can only be achieved by seizing political power through a communist revolution, led by a workers’ revolutionary party, not a bosses’ electoral party. Only a revolutionary party can tie these struggles together, not just to fight the bosses’ attacks, but to smash the capitalist dictatorship and build a workers’ dictatorship.
We must unite as a class internationally since similar reforms confronting us affect workers worldwide.
We’re calling on all teachers in struggle, and to the working class as a whole, to join Progressive Labor Party. The best lesson teachers can give their students is to join the struggle for a socially just society: communism! That’s REAL education.

Many people talk about human nature, saying that competition is “natural,” and that it leads to progress and that the selfishness of capitalism is really natural and acceptable. An important book puts a big hole in that idea, using scientific research into the emotions of animals. And it points out how capitalism has distorted the science for its own reasons by emphasizing competition over cooperation.
Marc Bekoff’s book, The Emotional Lives of Animals, (2007) records anecdotal evidence that most “higher” animals show rich emotional behaviours, more similar than different from the joy, grief and anger of humans. There is a foreword by Jane Goodall, famous for her years of observing primates in their natural habitat. Bekoff’s purpose parallels her work in his description of the interactions of many species. But by far the more interesting conclusion from his work lies in his secondary thesis that cooperation forms the basis for continuation of the species of all social animals.
Distorting Darwin
We have been taught that Darwin’s legacy is survival of the fittest (and from that, the “social Darwinist” theory that the spirit of competition ensures superiority of the wealthy under a profit system). Current capitalist philosophy takes this distortion of Darwin to promote the idea that basic human nature needs to be self-centered to win the race of life. On the contrary, Darwin and many others have observed that most animals are social beings whose collective societies can only survive through mutual aid and co-existence. Bekoff quotes Darwin, “Those communities which included the greatest number of sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
In The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin argues that “emotions evolved in both animals and humans for the purpose of furthering social bonds in group-living animals.”  He believed that emotions connected us with the rest of our community and with the rest of the earth. He discussed morality as a natural extension and outgrowth of such social instincts.
As an example, Bekoff’s book cites evidence of parallel “brain-wiring” for cooperation which exists in both animals and man.  A study from The New Scientist, December 2, 2006, reported that in many species of whales — humpback, fin, killer and sperm — spindle cells were found to be in the same area of their brains as human spindle cells.  This brain region is linked with social organization, empathy, intuition about the feelings of others . . . And whales have more of them than humans! (p. xix preface)
The critical nature of social interaction has been documented through observation by Bekoff and others. His fieldwork among coyotes for over seven years in the Grand Teton National Park revealed the importance to survival of group dependence where those yearlings who drifted away from their society suffered a 55% mortality rate, compared to less than 20% for their stay-at-home peers.
Egalitarianism = Survival
Coyotes, as well as many domestic animals, compensate for differences in strength and size during play and close social connections in order to prolong the activity.  They manifest self-handicapping (lying down, exposing their stomach) and role-reversing (when a large animal plays with a much smaller one) to make the interaction more mutual. This “egalitarianism” as Darwin labelled it, is another basis for the survival of species.  
Further, Bekoff says that affiliative behaviour, the egalitarianism of fair play, and shared caring for the young is a precondition for evolution of humans. He concludes that, in the “survival of the fittest” philosophy, cooperation has long been ignored because of the ideological basis of competition. He says the “more we look for cooperation, the more we discover its presence. Animals certainly will compete, but cooperation is central in the evolution of social behaviour, and this alone makes it key for survival.”
The first primitive communist societies of tribes shared resources and cherished the land. Today, billions living in poverty survive by employing collectivity, and fighting back against their exploiters who profit off their misery. History is teaching working people that class struggle for communism is the real key to survival and happiness.

October 4 marked the 77th anniversary of a great battle against fascism — the “Battle of Cable Street” in London’s East End. Stories of that day are still talked about amongst the British working class.
For 300 years the East End of London had been a passageway of poor working-class immigrants into Britain. In 1936 the area’s population was largely Polish and Russian Jews, Irish Catholics and non-immigrant English working class. Most streets were a crooked tangle. Tiny houses were crammed together — 18th century industrial housing with flush toilets out the back. Many people worked on the nearby docks and in small factories, garment sweatshops and open air markets.
At that time, Sir Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts — the British Union of Fascists (BUF) — was by far the largest fascist grouping of many that were growing in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. They had close ties to Hitler. Moseley’s group sent committed fascists into the East End to beat up and terrorize Jews. They wanted to divide the Jews from all the other immigrant groups. They labeled Jews “tyrants of international banking.” On the streets, fascists would scream “kill the kikes” and “get rid of the yids.” Amid a severe depression, Moseley’s movement was growing among the unemployed, white collar workers and small businessmen.
Ruling Class Funds the Fascists
A lot of Britain’s upper and ruling class funded the BUF. Some of Britain’s big newspapers — the Daily Mail, Evening News and Sunday Dispatch — promoted it. Even the recently crowned King (Edward VIII) had wealthy fascist friends in Britain, France and Germany. The police often turned a blind eye to the fascists’ beatings of Jews. Communists and trade unionists — many themselves Jews — led the attack on the fascists in the streets.
Moseley decided to show his strength by marching 10,000 uniformed Blackshirts and thousands of supporters directly through the Jewish/Irish neighborhood. Police Commissioner Sir Philip Game ordered his cops to “support the march.”
October 4th dawned bright and sunny. Ten thousand police were assigned to protect Mosley’s fascists. The official Jewish leadership advised workers to stay indoors and not show aggressiveness to them. But up to 500,000 people from the East End and other parts of London came to stop the fascist march. Mass and individual acts of heroism flooded the streets of the East End. The names of Cable Street, Gardener’s Corner and Aldgate joined the list of great working-class battles.
At Mile End (an East End street), a woman marched shouting, “They shall not pass!” and headed towards Aldgate. By the time she reached it thousands were following her. At Cable Street, jeering and singing crowds tried to breach the wall of cops to get at the fascists. The police attacked using nightsticks while mounted police charged the crowd. The horses stumbled from children hurling marbles under their hoofs and bursting bags of pepper under their noses. Women threw the contents of chamber pots from windows. The Nazis screamed, “The yids, the yids. We gotta get rid of the yids.” But the people chanted, “They will not pass!”
The masses erected barricades. A truck was turned on its side to block the street; old mattresses, bricks and pushcarts were thrown on top. An Irish anti-fascist bus driver drove his double-decker bus across the road, forming a barricade between the police and the anti-fascists. It was later pushed on its side. Red flags hung from windows. The army of fascists demanded the police escort them through the masses of people.
At Cable Street the massive wall of people held their ground and only retreated to pick up bricks or bottles to throw at the cops and fascists. Soon wounded police, fascists and protesters were carried off. The anti-fascist forces were so aggressive that a myth grew declaring that the police had surrendered to the crowd. One recently married young electrician who was hit in the face with a nightstick would talk about it proudly 30 years later.
Bearded Jews, Irish Dockers Unite
The fascists were under a constant hail of bricks, bottles and stones. As the crowd continued to fight, over 100 anti-fascist fighters were arrested, but still the police could not move the masses who held the cops within a vise grip. One demonstrator was moved to tears seeing bearded Jews and Irish dockworkers standing together to stop Moseley, saying “I shall never forget that as long as I live!”
At 4:15 the Police Commissioner canceled the BUF’s right to march. But now the police had to save them from being killed by the crowd. They surrendered Cable Street and attempted to escape two blocks away to Gardener’s Corner where they could leave the East End. The BUF hastily turned at Gardener’s Corner, but the anti-fascists — waiting for them — shouted, “Get them!” and crashed through police lines. They then chased the fascists out of London’s East End.
Later that night an elderly woman asked a bandaged fighter if he had been at that day’s battle. Fearing her disapproval, he denied being there. To his surprise and joy she said, “A curse on you that you did not fight this day.” To him it sounded like a Shakespearian quotation.
For days people celebrated throughout London. The fascists continued to try to organize, but now much of the ruling classes withdrew their open support (many began to view Hitler as a rival imperialist threat) and it was clear that workers wouldn’t be easily won to fascism. In early December, Edward VIII abdicated, having been king for only 10 months. The official story stated he left “to be with the woman he loved,” but among the working class it was common knowledge that he was forced out because of his open fascist ties.
From this battle we can see the working class should never give in to nationalist leaders. Both Jewish and Irish community and religious leaders tried to convince the masses not to fight the fascists, fearful of “causing more problems.” But if the fascists had not been fought at Cable Street, they would have been a much stronger ally of Hitler inside Britain during World War II.
The constant communist-led, anti-fascist organizing over many years led to the understanding and empowerment of the working class.
Dare to struggle — dare to win!

References
Benewick, R.: “A Study of British Fascism, Political Violence and Public Order.” The Penguin Press, London 1969.
Hutt, A.: “British Trade Unionism — A Short History.” International Publishers, New York 1953.
Ratner, R.: “The 50th Anniversay of the Battle of Cable Street.” Spotlight Magazine, October 1986.
Rudkin, W.A.: “The Growth of Fascism in Great Britain.” George Allen and Unwin, London, 1935.
Shermer, D.: “Blackshirts: Fascism in Britain.” Ballantine Press, New York, 1971.
Thomson, D.: “England in the 20th Century.” Penguin, Baltimore, 1965.
Walvin, J.: “Passage to Britain.” Penguin, Harmonsworth, Middlesex, 1984.