BALTIMORE, MD, September 11 — “Stop Bill Gates and the billionaire Gestapo! Support the strike by teachers in Chicago!” This was one of the many chants that rang out as teachers and students rallied outside a public high school here.  

Rally participants were constantly re-energized by the enthusiastic honking of drivers in many of the trucks and cars that passed by, showing solidarity with striking educators in Chicago.

Some participants at the rally liked it so much that they wanted to organize another one at their own school, or have one every day in the same location, or plan a similar strike-support rally outside the Baltimore school headquarters. Working-class solidarity became truly infectious!

PL’ers here have plans to attend these rallies and to present participants communist ideas and how educational genocide — embodied in Race-to-the-Bottom — is rooted in capitalism, a system that needs to be defeated by revolution and replaced with communism.  

Then education will truly be run by and for the working class, not serve the parasitic needs of billionaires like Bill Gates who think the current nine percent of the gross national product that’s spent on education is too much.

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NEW YORK CITY, September 10  — “Chicago Teachers Got It Right, Strike, Strike, Strike!”

“New York City, Chicago, Wisconsin, We Will Fight and We Will Win!”

“Listen Up, CTU, New York City Stands With You!”

These chants echoed loudly when more than 400 teachers and labor supporters rallied in Union Square in support of the Chicago Teachers Union strike. Speakers promised to build support in their schools and workplaces. Led by a banner (see picture) saying “Solidarity With Chicago Teachers Union Local 1,” we then marched to the NYC offices of Democrats for Education Reform, a group that was created and led by billionaire hedge fund managers.  It has attacked Chicago teachers and their union for daring to resist their corporate reform program.

There’s no better reason why the working class needs an international party than the current struggle in Bangladesh where textile workers — 80 percent women — are waging a militant fight against the full force of the Bangladeshi government, local factory owners and international clothing retailers.

The workers make $35 a month, working 12- to 16-hour days, six days a week — barely a dollar a day. European and U.S. companies like Wal-Mart, H&M, Marks & Spencer, Carrefour, Tommy Hilfiger and American Eagle have flocked to Bangladesh to take advantage of the world’s lowest-paid and poorest workers. 

Even Pakistani bosses, who pay workers $50/month, are relocating their factories there. “Labor costs in Bangladesh are cheaper and the workers tend to be more efficient,” said a former textile minister. Electricity costs are lower and, unlike Pakistan, fewer work-days are lost to electricity outages, increasing profits as much as 30 percent. Although China remains number one in global apparel exports (with Bangladesh now second), a recent BBC program reported Chinese manufacturers increasingly moving to Bangladesh. One Chinese textile boss declared that “her” workers, at $500/month, were costing too much; Bangladesh would swell her profits.

Class War

But these bosses and global brands, forever pursuing cheap labor, are discovering that workers will not take all this lying down. They are fighting back. 

Bangladeshi textile workers are demanding wage increases and better, safer working conditions, sparking militant strikes and street protests. In July, a half-million Bangladeshi workers shut down all 350 factories in an industrial zone in Dhaka, the capital. The uprising, sparked by the torture and assassination of Aminul Islam, a well-known union organizer, badly hurt business owners and their international retail clients

Karl-Johan Persson, CEO of H&M, Sweden’s vast clothing retailer — needing to stabilize the situation and fearful of even more violent upheavals — urged Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to increase the minimum wage. He offered to pay more for his garments, 25 percent of which come from Bangladesh.

Hasina’s government, clearly siding with the country’s 5,000 garment bosses who are major political donors, has resisted raising the minimum wage and addressing labor-rights issues. The powerful president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin, said it was “factory owners who were being victimized in some conspiracy,” and “there was no logic for increasing the wages of the workers.”

Two-thirds of Parliament members belong to the country’s three biggest business associations. Thirty factory bosses hold 10% of Parliamentary seats. They’re buying newspapers and TV stations whose news often emphasizes the disruptions caused by protests, not the appalling conditions for workers.

Rulers’ All-out Armed Attacks

The government has used the full power of the state against the militancy of women workers in Bangladesh to intimidate them and crack down on protests. The battle lines are clearly drawn and the government is pulling no punches. 

Ranking officers from the military, the police and intelligence agencies command specially created agencies to monitor garment workers and collect intelligence on activists. The Riot Police charge into demonstrators, beating them with clubs. They fire rubber bullets, turn on powerful water cannons and use tear gas to disperse protestors.

The Rapid Action Battalion, a new paramilitary force, carries out vigilante attacks known as “crossfire” killings, and intimidates workers while patrolling factory floors. Before Aminul Islam was found tortured and murdered in April, he reported being threatened by the Rapid Action Battalion. 

His assassination, which is still “under investigation,” has spawned an international campaign by labor activists demanding justice in his case and a process in which workers, government and local and international textile bosses can negotiate wages and working conditions.

Even Hillary Clinton, visiting Dhaka in May — the first visit by a U.S. Secretary of State in nine years — has called for a “fair wage.” The Obama administration’s concern over labor rebellion underscores Bangladesh’s geo-political importance as a regional ally in southern Asia and a U.S. foreign policy “pivot” to the Asia Pacific. Clinton’s visit is expected to lead to joint military exercises and exchanges involving counterterrorism and security. 

U.S. companies like energy giants Chevron and ConocoPhillips, have huge investments in Bangladesh. Chevron supplies half the country’s natural gas, while ConocoPhillips has recently signed agreements to explore for gas and oil reserves in the Bay of Bengal.

‘Fair Wage’ Impossible Under Capitalism

Given that U.S. and British banks and international lending agencies hold the purse strings, the Bangladeshi government, under pressure to stabilize the country, may well offer what they would call a “fair wage” to the textile workers.

What would that mean? Would these bosses be prepared to pay enough so the women — many of whom are their families’ sole breadwinners — rise out of abject poverty, work 8-hour days, get holiday pay, health care and schooling for their children? Expecting bosses to give up their profits and negotiate even this kind of increase is fanciful. Presenting it as a solution, as the labor activists are doing, is misleading these workers about capitalism’s true nature. Under this system, production is solely for the bosses’ profit, not to benefit workers, whose exploitation is the source of those profits.

Any loss capitalists may take paying more to one set of workers will be passed on to other workers. H&M will pay its workers in Europe and the U.S. less, and raise the price of its goods — or surf the world for a cheaper labor force as the Pakistani bosses have done. Sixty thousand workers in Pakistan have lost their jobs since textile manufacturers moved to Bangladesh and neither they nor the Pakistani government plan to compensate workers for job losses. 

PLP declares that for workers to be free in one place workers need to be free everywhere. And that means fighting for a communist society where production is based on the needs of the working class. Workers in Bangladesh need to turn their fight for an illusory “fair” wage into a fight for communism, joining PLP to build an international working-class party: one class, one party, one fight.

Marikana, South Africa, September 19 — Strikes by thousands of miners have spread across the northern mining areas. They’re reacting to the August 16 police massacre at the Lonmin platinum mine and supporting the 3,000 miners who wildcatted on August 8. The striking rock drillers have now won an increase from $500/month to $1385/month. 

However, the walkout still includes 15,000 gold miners, six other Anglo-American platinum mines, the world’s top producer, and chrome miners. There have also been protests at Eskon Holdings, producers of 90 percent of the country’s energy.

On September 12, 3,000 miners marched to the original mine at Marikana. Their strike has cost the bosses a half billion dollars in lost output (Chicago Tribune, 9/17).

The sellout National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) signed an agreement with Lonmin, which is meaningless since the strikers rejected the paltry 16 percent “increase” and are holding out for their original demand: a doubling and tripling of wages to $1,500 a month (Reuters, 9/17). The NUM is allied with the governing African National Congress (ANC) which the striking minors quit to join the militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union.

Cops raided a striking miners’ hostel, seizing spears, machetes and other weapons and arrested 38. The cops later dispersed protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas. When the cops dragged off a pro-miners speaker expelled by the ANC, miners pelted them with stones.

The Wall Street Journal reported (9/13) that the military was put on alert because they feared soldiers who had struck in 2009 for higher wages may support the miners. The Journal also reported (9/17) that 800 miners had suffered deaths last year.

This massive miners’ rebellion has exposed the fact that racist apartheid still rules South Africa, under a capitalism enforced by a tiny black elite allied with the white-owned corporations. The law the ANC government used to indict the strikers was passed under the old apartheid system. And the massacre mirrored all the brutalities of the past Nazi regime. 

The miners have set a striking example for the international working class, of the need to take up arms to fight the capitalist ruling classes’ state apparatus arrayed against them.  What is needed is communist leadership to turn this class war into a war for communist revolution. This is what the Progressive Labor Party is fighting for around the world.

Once again, a study claims to have discovered a genetic basis for a complex social outcome — in this case, why students succeed or fail in school. Published in the July issue of Developmental Psychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association, this “gene discovery” by lead author Kevin Beaver, a criminology professor at Florida State University, follows a long and racist tradition of attributing genetic causes to alcoholism, intelligence, unemployment, criminality, and even the fear of snakes.  

Throughout the history of class society, the ruling class has used religion or pseudo-science to cast exploitation, oppression and injustice as inevitable. The field of genetics, in particular, has been repeatedly hijacked by slave-owners, captains of industry, and Germany’s Third Reich.  It’s not surprising that this despicable ideology has emerged once again, this time by capitalists who promote education reform.  

True social scientists know that both human behavior and social organization are driven by infinitely complex factors.  Beaver, however, claims to have discovered genes (the molecular units of DNA) related to “impulsivity” and “violent tendencies” and thereby “influence” whether an individual will graduate from high school and go on to college.

To create the illusion of legitimacy for their findings, the study gives the genes technical-sounding names: DAT1, DRD2, and DRD4. (By avoiding the more obviously outrageous claim that genes “determine” an outcome, researchers leave themselves an escape route if and when future critics show there is no correlation between such genes and the designated outcomes.

Racism: Bosses’ Tool 

The bosses’ use of prestigious journals and big-name academics to legitimize Nazi ideology is nothing new. In 1969, Berkeley Professor Arthur Jensen was invited to submit an article to the Harvard Educational Review to prove that black children fail in schools because of their genes. In the early 1970s, William Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, claimed that the color of people’s skin could tell you how smart they were.

In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray followed suit with The Bell Curve, a best-selling package of racist propaganda, distortions, and lies. Wherever these racist pseudo-scientists showed up to speak, the Progressive Labor Party led thousands of students and faculty to shout them down and prevent them from spreading their poison.

Although racists tend to hide after being attacked in mass struggles, their falsehoods remain alive today. Chief among them is the concept that genes define individual abilities and tendencies. This bogus claim hides the real cause of inequality under capitalism: racist and sexist discrimination. If people’s genes stop them from becoming aeronautical engineers or pediatricians, rotten public schools get a free pass. Using genes to blame the victims is a doubly racist assault on black and Latino children, since it justifies spending less on segregated schools while painting the children as innately unintelligent.

The fundamental illusion may be that genes determine any traits at all. What Genes Can’t Do (2003), by the cell biologist turned philosophy professor, Lenny Moss, shows that the concept of a “gene” is used to mean different things, and that there is no one-to-one correspondence between genes and traits.  Indeed, geneticists like Richard Lewontin (The Triple Helix, 2000) have demonstrated that even the concept of a “trait” is ambiguous.

Thus “genes” for “traits” is a double house of cards, though most biologists cling to these illusory fictions. Their field rewards them for doing so. Top academic publications favor conclusions that hide the fact that the profit system decides who is allowed to succeed or fail.

Bosses Attack Students and Teachers

The implications of this academic bias are lethal. Like ancient rulers who used the Bible to trap slaves into accepting their subjugation as part of a larger plan, today’s capitalists use pseudo-science to veil the racist neglect that pervades education. Failed students are portrayed as hopelessly handicapped and beyond help. It is a small step from there to consign such “flawed” segments of the population to joblessness, poverty, and ultimately elimination.  

Teachers, often with leadership by members of PLP, have joined with parents and their students in fighting against further cutbacks in school funding and for smaller class sizes. They are also confronting ruling-class schemes to blame teachers for the failures of the bosses’ schools. 

These fights must be sharpened to defend black and Latino students from the hopeless feeling that they are doomed to unemployment and prison. While any victories in reform struggles are limited and temporary under capitalism, an unrelenting fight against racism and sexism will help create the working-class unity we need to build toward communist revolution. 

Only when the world’s workers — under the leadership of the communist PLP — seize power from the capitalists through revolution, will we rid ourselves of false science, miseducation, racism, sexism, and imperialist war.  We need to become millions and millions. Join us.

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The Rulers’ Bind 

The capitalist ruling class has a contradiction on its hands.  On the one hand, it needs to slash spending on schools and other services even more to free up funds for its widening imperialist wars.  On the other, the schools are so bad that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is complaining that high school graduates are ill-equipped to serve as the bosses’ cannon fodder.  In a March 2012 report for the CFR by Joel Klein (former head of New York City’s public schools) and Condoleezza Rice (former Secretary of State under George W. Bush), they warn that the horror that passes for schooling in the U.S. is robbing the ruling class of its needed military might. They don’t care that millions of our children suffer from miseducation.  Their sole concern is that the U.S. imperialists’ control of critical resources is in jeopardy.