SAN FRANCISCO, March 29 — Capitalism thrives when the workers think of themselves just as individuals. But when workers view themselves as a class, that the struggles of one person or group are more similar than different from others, and that an attack against one worker is an attack against our class — then the capitalists see this as a potential danger for their class.
Last month transit workers at this city’s MUNI Railway joined riders at meetings and a march against fare increases for youth and seniors. Oakland’s AC Transit and MUNI drivers also joined forces in March 4 walkouts and rallies with students and teachers fighting education cuts.
Amid one of the biggest service cutbacks in AC Transit history, and with increasing threats of wage and benefit cuts facing workers in the upcoming contract, five drivers in a union caucus joined a campaign for free bus passes for Oakland youth. While AC Transit workers in Amalgamated Transit Union Local 192 are oppressed by killer schedules that stress out and injure many workers, we are not as oppressed as Oakland’s public school children and their parents:
• Ninety percent of these youth qualify for the federal free lunch program because their parents’ incomes are so low;
• Twenty-six hundred of the city’s 38,000 students don’t make it to school every day;
• Fifty percent don’t graduate from high school; the vast majority are black, Latino and Asian children, making them victims of racist attacks.
PLP views this as a campaign in which workers can sharpen their class consciousness. Transit workers uniting with students and teachers will give us many opportunities. In one meeting’s workshop with parents, teachers and transit workers, black, Latino and Asian youth said they had to spend lunch money on bus fare and vice versa.
Once more workers and youth begin to see that capitalism as a system must put wars for oil and bailouts of finance capital ahead of the basic needs of workers and youth, we’re on the road to developing more communists.
Besides many opportunities in this struggle, there are also risks. It’s being organized by Genesis, a church-based organization connected to the Gamaliel Foundation which backed Barack Obama.
On the one hand, Genesis recently organized a multi-racial campaign with BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) and AC Transit workers and community groups to successfully stop a $550 million driverless rail connector from BART to the Oakland Airport; $70 million in stimulus money went back to Bay Area bus and rail operators. Genesis argued that the “Connector” discriminated against workers, especially black and Latino workers.
However, they’ve asked the liberal, ruling-class-funded San Francisco Foundation for $40,000 to financially support the Free Bus Pass campaign.
The SF and Gamaliel foundations want us to think capitalism can be reformed by lobbying and community pressure. But, in essence, these same forces and their White House buddies are expanding war and fascist oppression worldwide every day.
PLP has a better idea. While growing class consciousness will give the capitalists more trouble carrying out their plans, only communist revolution can eliminate the profit system and its wage slavery that breeds racism, inequality and war. March On May Day!