Hundreds Sit In at UCLA
LOS ANGELES, March 4 — Today several hundred students rallied and sat in at UCLA’s administration building, backing the state-wide March 4th day of action against education cut-backs. Leading up to March 4, discussion within the student groups organizing for it exposed the cuts to the state budget and public education as being essentially racist, since they disproportionately affect low-income working-class black and Latino students the most.
These cuts in public education were linked to the U.S. ruling class’s need to devote hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out its financial system and for imperialist wars that mass murder our working-class brothers and sisters in the Middle East and Central Asia. A speaker at the main rally declared, “A capitalist system that bails out the banks and funds imperialist wars for oil” must be destroyed!
The same speaker also said the state cuts writing and retention programs on university campuses while exempting military research labs like U.C. Berkley’s Lawrence Livermore Lab and UCLA’s School of Engineering Center of Innovating Nano-science for Defense. Therefore, students must realize when defending “public education” against privatization that public universities are also an essential part of the U.S. imperialist infrastructure.
The struggle to explain the racist nature of the cuts impelled two young black women to speak at a teach-in (during the sit-in held just outside the Chancellor’s office) about the need to build multi-racial unity against racist attacks on working-class black and Latino students. These comments were especially important in lieu of the student fraternity at UC San Diego that recently held a sarcastically-themed “Black History Month” party in which it celebrated racist portrayals of black people. Soon afterwards a noose was hung from a tree, further highlighting the racism existing on public university campuses.
Today there were also efforts to occupy buildings, a popular tactic lately at California universities. But the sit-in at the administration lasted longer than expected, so no buildings were occupied. However, these events have contained confused politics that don’t clearly explain the purpose of occupations. This time there were many discussions at several meetings analyzing the university’s role in supporting imperialism and capitalism by generating racist ideology and war research.
Students concluded that strategic occupations of buildings conducting such research would disrupt the university’s ability to produce for war and fascism while also making a political statement about the tie-in between the cuts and imperialist war. PL’ers are active within this movement to win students to see that the only solution to the crisis-caused cutbacks is to smash capitalism and fight for communist revolution.
Much has been learned in organizing the March 4 events. Mobilizations of students and workers are positive, but fulfilling their revolutionary potential can only occur through consistent ideological struggle for a communist analysis of the racist nature of capitalism and its natural connection to imperialism. PLP’s effort to organize students to fight back must be oriented to see the limits of reform and the ultimate need for communist revolution. J
H.S. Students Stand Ground, Lead Walkout
LOS ANGELES, March 4 — At 7:15 A.M., about 100 teachers, staff and students rallied today in front of the high school where I work as a part of a national call to action to protest budget cuts in education. We carried signs, chanted and distributed information to parents.
The majority of the teachers in our school district have wanted to strike since the end of the last school year. Last year we lost almost 3,000 teachers and more than 1,500 staff positions to mass layoffs district-wide. Consequently, class sizes have increased, counselors have more students to program, school office staff had their workloads doubled, janitorial duties became impossible, the classrooms have been left dirty and school supplies have long since been used up without being replaced.
The teachers and staff at the school sites are
angry, but the union has repeatedly backed down from confronting the district. They keep repeating that “We have to work together in order to deal with the results of the current economic crisis.” In the schools that means we must accept the cuts, take on an impossible workload and watch our students suffer while the district bureaucrats spend money on million-dollar security systems and “consultants.”
It’s always the same story under capitalism. The working class must work harder with fewer resources while the rich bosses get richer. If we ask for support, they hire someone to “research” how to make us work even harder with still less resources. All this is heaped on an overwhelmingly black, Latino and Asian student population suffering these racist cuts while hundreds of billions are spent on Obama’s imperialist Mid-East and Asian wars — in which they hope to use these youth to kill and die to maintain their oil empire.
8:00 A.M. — As the teachers and staff walked back into school to begin the school day, many
students stayed outside to continue the rally. They were organized and motivated, even marching through the school buildings convincing other students to walk out of class to join them in a rally and march. The teachers were so proud!
The administrators, security and police harassed the students as they demonstrated, but they stood their ground and refused to return to class until the end of second period. Even though the school itself wasn’t shut down, it really taught them a lot of
lessons. They learned how to organize and what to expect from the state apparatus when they start fighting back. Many of my students returned to class energized and confident that “next time will be even better.”
3:00 P.M. — Many students and teachers were inspired by the morning’s events, but it was difficult convincing anyone from my school — in the city’s southern section — to travel all the way downtown to march with the colleges and unions. More than 5,000 people demonstrated that day throughout the city.
I’m continuing the struggle with my coworkers and students by working to build a worker-student alliance with the staff on campus and other workers from transit and industry. We will build on the actions and bring into this struggle the ideas of communism: class consciousness, working-class power and the
urgent need for revolution.
Red Teacher