School systems across the globe serve two related purposes: an economic goal of churning out the next generation of workers to exploit, and the political purpose of building loyalty to the capitalist system. The teacher unions worldwide accept this two-fold mission and the attacks on students it requires. These unions are part of the problem, not the solution!

Capitalist school systems are giant sorting mechanisms that absorb, train, rank and spit out millions of young people each year. From the supposedly great school systems of Finland or Shanghai to the pits of racist neglect in Detroit, this relentless labeling and ranking of our youth — each one of whom is brimming with potential — maintains a “tight” labor market at every skill level, from fast food to PhDs. As a result of this forced competition, fear becomes the rule on the job. Fight-back all but vanishes.

Under communism, the masses will be liberated from the terrorizing prospect of unemployment and the drudgery of wage slavery, and also from capitalism’s dream scenario, the “career.” Communist work develops a diverse set of capacities within each individual in its aim to meet society’s needs, with a mix of mental and manual labor for all. It is work motivated by social, not material, incentives.

Communist education means a lifetime of socially meaningful learning, both in and out of the classroom. We have seen glimpses of this kind of work and education when workers held power in Russia and China. It is just the opposite of what now prevails throughout the world.

Education Reform: Why Now?

The bosses’ assault against students and teachers in the United States has reached epic proportions. The capitalists are using standardized curricula and tests for more direct control over what is taught. They attack wages and conditions for school workers even as they blame teachers and their students for the system’s decay. In large and overcrowded urban districts, where students are predominantly black and Latino, dress codes, rigid discipline, and metal detectors are the norm. Students are treated like criminals, with no time off for good behavior.

In this climate, terrorized teachers help the bosses lay an ideological foundation for intensified fascism.  It’s now the norm to intimidate and militarize youth for the inevitable broader wars against the bosses’ surging imperialist rivals like China. The U.S. rulers use the schools to protect their profits and shore up their dominant but declining position in an increasingly competitive world economy. 

Both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, which contain 30 percent of all U.S. union members, have willingly collaborated with the bosses in the new evaluation systems.

The leaders of these organizations are loyal to the capitalists, not to the workers. Writing for the Council of Foreign Relations, finance capital’s most influential think tank, Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice worried that more than 75 percent of U.S. students are unqualified to enter the military.  (Klein is the former chancellor of the New York City public schools; Rice was George W. Bush’s national security adviser.)

As competition heats up with China, Japan, Russia and the European powers, the U.S. needs to be able to field a competent mass army.  The billionaires’ true concern is not quality education, but preparation for imperialist war.  It’s no coincidence that Obama’s education reforms include the reestablishment of Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs at a number of colleges.

Trillions for War, Zero for Schools

The bosses’ economic crisis and the trillions sunk into Afghanistan and Iraq have led to a wave of racist budget cuts and layoffs in public schools throughout the U.S. The results have been devastating. 

• In New York City, the graduation rate hovers around 60 percent. Most graduates require remedial work before they can take college-level courses.

• In Philadelphia, under state stewardship for nearly a decade, district officials estimate it would take until 2123 to get all students up to grade level in reading and math. 

• In Detroit, fire marshals have responded to complaints of kindergarten classes of 53 children. In the upper grades, district rules allow for as many as 61 students per class.

In recent memory, nobody has attacked education workers worse than Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education. Supported by billionaires like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, Obama and Duncan are now pushing for an all-out emphasis on “teacher quality.”

In fact, teacher evaluations are based mostly on student performance in standardized testing, where the margin of error is so high, they are statistically useless. But as the bosses’ political tool, the evaluations are invaluable. They give the rulers easy scapegoats for the failure of their schools: “bad teachers” and the unions that “protect” them.

Strikes: Schools for Communism

Short of revolution, nothing demonstrates the power of the workers like a strike. A strike opens up the potential for teachers’ union members to feel their power and build multi-racial unity of the parents, students, and school workers against the capitalists who control society.  A strike of education workers can be a great opportunity for a militant, united, anti-racist fight against the children’s exploiters who run the school system. Class struggle has erupted in the form of school sit-ins and disrupted policy meetings in New York, Oakland, Kansas City and more over the past year.  

Chicago teachers are leading the way in opposing anti-student education reform with a bold strike authorization vote. A pro-student strike in Chicago would be an important advance in the class struggle. Push the AFT to support a strike in Chicago!  Push a strike in Chicago to unite with students and parents to break the bosses’ laws! Shut the schools and shut them tight!

But in every struggle against racist education reform, teachers must aim for more than a return to schools that perpetuate illiteracy and peddle lies.  Only a communist revolution led by Progressive Labor Party can smash capitalism and organize society for the workers. Only communism can allow students to flourish in schools designed to meet their needs.

Over 30,000 people from around the world have gathered in Washington, DC, for the 19th International AIDS Conference, “Turning the Tide Together.” 

To really turn the tide, PLP’ers in the AIDS movement declare that an anti-racist, communist workers’ revolution is required that includes and unites all parts of the global working class. The capitalist system continually reinforces and reproduces the conditions that cause AIDS and must be destroyed to secure a final victory against AIDS.

HIV And Racism

HIV disproportionately affects poor working class people around the globe, hitting hardest those oppressed by racism, sexism, poverty, and stigma because of sexual orientation and gender identities. In Washington, DC, 12 percent of African-American women live with HIV, and nearly half of young black gay men have HIV.

Many rank-and-file people, scientists and organizations have mobilized against HIV. PLP’ers have fought side by side with masses of people for prevention programs, affordable housing, needle exchanges, testing and treatment for all, and an end to discrimination against, and prosecutions of, drug users and women forced to sell their bodies. Yet the epidemic grows.

We invite you to join the PLP in smashing capitalism and its state and help create a new society without AIDS based on co-operation, equality and collective ownership and sharing of the world’s resources.

Communism Can End the AIDS Epidemic

Capitalists only value workers for the profit to be extracted from them in production and consumption. They make profits by paying as little as possible and employing as few as possible to get the job done.

Millions of workers in the world economy, especially youth, have no jobs — from 52 percent youth unemployment in Spain to 24 percent in Egypt to almost 50 percent of young African-Americans living in Washington, DC’s East-of-the-River neighborhoods. Immigrant workers similarly face intense exploitation worldwide, with low wages and high risks of deportation.

To maintain power, the capitalists and their politicians weaken our unity and militancy by using racism to stereotype and demean black, Latino, Asian and Arab workers in order to divide the entire working class. These stereotypes portray such workers as lazy and criminal. Politicians then use these lies to explain high rates of unemployment and imprisonment of African Americans in the U.S. and justify policies to cut services and benefits.  

The bosses also brand people as immoral, dangerous, abnormal, or inferior to create further divisions. Such stigma pushes shame onto those who are, for example, poor, women, gay or transgender, imprisoned, mentally ill or HIV positive.

At the same time, the bosses’ propaganda encourages the public to view them as not worthy of support. Stigma leads to high rates of HIV and AIDS as workers who are attacked for their conditions or identities are less likely to take care of themselves and their partners. Stigma, prejudice and discrimination are all about power — the power of the ruling class of bankers and corporations to keep people weak and divided. 

Racist and sexist differences must be overcome. When the workers arm themselves with communist politics, there is enough strength to challenge, and overthrow, the bosses!

Capitalism often forces people into situations at high risk for HIV, violence and bad health in general. Some women and undocumented immigrants find no choice but to sell their bodies to support their families or to secure housing. Desperate, depressed workers sometimes self-medicate with illegal drugs, increasing risk as well.

We must unify all our brothers and sisters in the struggle against capitalism, racism and sexism. But the bosses teach us to use other people and only look out for number one. If we fall for this lie, we look at people in a “transactional” way — using friends and others to get what we need for our families and ourselves. Maybe someone sucks up to a boss for a promotion while ignoring the needs of co-workers. Others could trade sex or freedom for a place to stay, food to eat and protection for one’s children.

Communism will drastically change people’s relationships. Communism provides for everyone’s needs and values everyone’s contributions to the building of a new society based on shared ownership of the world’s resources. There is no wage system to create a hierarchy of class differences. Without profit, the working class can plan what to produce based on human needs and solve such problems as housing for all and global warming.

How Can We Win A Communist World?

We need to become part of an anti-racist, revolutionary organization that promotes multiracial unity and militant action — the Progressive Labor Party. We must fight the fascist systems that the rulers impose to solve their crises, and not settle for another capitalist politician.

Resolutions, human rights treaties, NGO activity and voting do not change the class that holds power. Building unity among workers worldwide helps prepare us to take power. Revolutions against ruling classes brought the working class to power for decades in the Soviet Union and China.

While these countries have re-established capitalism and a new exploitative boss class, those earlier revolutions and decades of workers’ power showed our potential to create a new, egalitarian healthy world.

Elections provide no change, only an illusion of power. Liberal politicians like Obama, just like McCain or Romney, serve the bosses, as he demonstrated with bank bailouts, a slap in the face to laid-off, foreclosed workers, annual deportations of 400,000 immigrants, expanded wars, and drone murders. Obama still manages to mislead and pacify people who believe his rhetoric and ignore his policies.

The Progressive Labor Party fights racism and sexism. We build for the overthrow of capitalism and seek to create a communist world. We can only succeed with the dedication and commitment to equality and communist principles by millions of people worldwide.

The struggle against the HIV epidemic already reflects many of these communist principles. Activists have never given up the fight to extend prevention and care to the millions living in the U.S. and other countries. They have embraced people who the capitalists ignore and marginalize.

Such impulses must lead to a commitment to the world’s working class to establish a new system — communism. Join the Progressive Labor Party and help organize a world without AIDS.

NEW YORK CITY, July 6 — PLP rallied today in front of the Paraguayan embassy, in solidarity with the thousands of workers and farmers marching in the capital city of Asuncion. We condemned the parliamentary coup by the big landowners of Paraguay and their U.S. imperialist backers. PLP noted that Fernando Lugo, the ousted president, had never been a friend of the working class despite his progressive rhetoric. It will take communist revolution to change the grinding racist exploitative system in Paraguay, not liberal reform or a version of Hugo Chavez’s “21st century socialism.”

The opportunist Liberal Party and the fascist Colorado Party united to oust President Ferdinand Lugo, a former bishop who campaigned as the friend of farmers and workers. His election four years ago ended a vicious 40-year rule by the landlord-dominated Colorado Party. He was part of the reform movement in Latin America associated with the Bolivarian movement, including the reform leadership of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Brazil.  In response to the coup, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela have recalled their ambassadors and refuse to recognize the new government. The U.S. jumped to support the new regime.

Why a coup? For the ruling class, Lugo was not aggressive enough in fighting a new guerilla movement — Ejercito del Pueblo Paraguayo (EPP) the Paraguayan People’s Army — which has allegedly engaged in bombings, political murders and high profile kidnappings in support of landless peasants in Paraguay. The bosses did not want to hear about any kind of land reform either.

About two weeks ago, farmers occupied the land of a right-wing caudillo (leader) in the town of Curuguaty. The police were sent in to remove the squatters and a gun battle broke out. Sixteen people died including both police and farmers. Lugo was accused of negligence in the deaths and the Liberal Party and Colorado Party seized on the event to launch impeachment proceedings.  Many forget to mention that several years ago under Colorado President Nicanor Duarte Frutos, over 400 died in the Ycua Bolanos Supermarket fire, when the managers locked the doors. 

Battle of Ideas within the Movement

Many leaders, students and workers felt that the “Big Front” (Frente Guazu) of four years ago that brought Lugo to power would deal a blow to the ruling class and mean change, progress and a step towards socialism. For the past seven years, PL’ers have distributed CHALLENGE to many of these activists, trying to spread the message that these reform electoral alliances would inevitably sell out to the oligarchy for a piece of the pie and betray the working class, as has happened. PLP warned that elections in the capitalist system were not the way towards liberation. And so it has come to pass. Lugo did little, if anything, for the working class, yet the bosses were still not satisfied and put in their preferred puppet.

Lugo is vowing to create an alternative government; the people are in the streets and will struggle until presidential elections in April. Then, Lugo’s alliance mostly made up of workers, unions, farmers and several parties including the pro-Chavez PMAS (Party Moving Towards Socialism) are supporting a former journalist and morning talk show host Mario Ferreiro. This candidate only recently claimed to be a socialist, and will undoubtedly follow the same opportunist path as Lugo. 

Workers and farmers must stand by the line that no socialist alliance with capitalists will bring workers in Paraguaya the bread and freedom they need.  Only communist revolution can move the working class forward with the complete destruction of the capitalist system — no trace of wages, capitalist electoral circuses, Bolivarian alliances, or ties to the bosses of China, Russia, the European Union or MERCOSUR (the South American bloc).  Building PLP in Paraguay and fighting uncompromisingly for a communist workers’ state can succeed in our genuine liberation from capitalism and imperialism.

PARIS, July 11 — France’s new Socialist government has lost no time changing from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. New austerity measures will come hard and fast in dealing with capitalism’s crisis which essentially will be to tax the workers — suffering a 17.3 percent unemployment rate — to help the rich. A combination of tax hikes mainly on the working class, wage freezes, pension cuts and reducing employer contributions to the social security system all will help the bosses maintain profits and competitiveness. And the union leaders will play a leading role in selling this to the working class.

Taxes, Cuts Hit Workers

One of newly elected President François Hollande’s main advisors said, “We can’t wait any longer…. We have to strike hard right from this summer, when the law rectifying the 2012 budget is voted; and this autumn, when the 2013 budget is voted….to drive home the nail by increasing taxes and really cutting expenditures.” 

Between now and 2013 the government must come up with 40 billion euros (USD $50 billion) to keep France’s promise to the European Union to bring the budget deficit down to 3%. On July 4, 7.2 billion euros (USD $9 billion) in additional taxes were announced, 53 percent of which will fall on households.

In 2013, the government plans to increase the generalized social contribution (CSG) from its present 7.5 percent by another two to four percent. Rich and poor pay the same rate to the CSG — which finances the social security system — so workers will pay several hundred additional euros annually in CSG. All this increases the income gap between rich and poor, increasing the power of the capitalist class.

This tax increase could generate 20 to 40 billion euros in revenues, reducing the government budget deficit and ensuring that France can pay back its $87.9 billion sovereign debt to the capitalists — with interest.

Meanwhile, reducing employer contributions to worker’s social security means taxpayers (mainly workers) will make up the difference via the CSG tax. French bosses will use this cut in labor cost in two ways: a combination of lowering the cost of production, increasing their competitiveness on the world market and increasing their rate of profit.

President Hollande is “reconsidering” his pre-election promise to raise the income tax rate on millionaires, which probably means junking it.

Still, all this won’t be enough to reduce the government budget deficit, leading to more budget cuts in 2014-2017. The Socialists will continue the freeze on government expenditures (except for financing the sovereign debt and retirement pensions).

Freeze Wages, More Layoffs

Other foreseeable measures include a freeze on government workers’ wages and on government financing of universities, research institutes and the unemployment agency and layoffs of government workers, resulting in “blood on the walls of the ministries” said one minister.

The Socialists also intend to cut pensions. The last two “reforms” raised the retirement age. Only 60% of workers aged 55-59 are actually working. Raising the retirement age for many workers means increasing the time they spend on unemployment or welfare before they retire, and lowering the pension they get when actually retiring.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis continues unabated. In May, 17.3% of the active population was unemployed or underemployed, including part-timers looking for full-time work and other categories of the jobless. This falls most heavily on immigrant black and Arab workers from Africa who, because of racist discrimination, suffer even lower wages and higher joblessness.

In this dire situation, the sellout union leaders will be fronting for the ruling class, selling the austerity to the working class.  “We’re on a new course!” exclaimed Bernard Thibault, leader of the CGT, France’s largest union. All the union misleaders are struggling for a place on the government bandwagon. (The Socialists made a show of listening to the union leaders but carefully avoid discussion of any unpopular measures.)

Union Hacks Dance to Bosses’ Tune

Different union leaders were assigned the role of “officially” putting forward Socialist proposals, especially increasing the CSG tax as the “only acceptable way to go.” In payment, they’ll get two carrots: Union officials will be paid to sit on the newly created General Commissariat for Forecasting, and union officials who are government employees will get a civil service promotion when they retire from union activity.

The whole capitalist election circus has enabled French bosses to continue to impose their policies. Indeed, with their “popular mandate” and the support of the union hacks, the “lesser-evil” Socialists can push through austerity measures even more severe than the worn-out Sarkozy government could ever have done.

Austerity policies and tax hikes are inevitable under capitalism, which staggers from one crisis of over-production to another. For workers, communist revolution is the only road to a decent life.