The Occupy Wall Street Movement and opposition caucuses organized a conference to bring together teachers and students who are angry at capitalism’s many attacks on education. The conference took place in The Center for Worker Education and PLP members did their best to give the participants a communist education. PL students and teachers were very vocal in the conference’s many different discussion groups.
The unionists, liberals, and well-meaning workers all looked to the union, a pawn of capitalist rulers, to fight racism and create an education system that could meet the needs of the working class. They are ultimately wrong since education under capitalism must serve the bosses’ needs, which conflict with the needs of the working class. The ruling class needs a patriotic, loyal working class to passively accept its attacks and fight its imperialist wars, so it can remain the world’s superpower. Workers’ need a society where we make all of the decisions based on our needs to develop as full human beings collectively. That is communism.
Union Helps Resegregate Schools
One participant pointed out that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) was actually a backlash against integration in the ‘60’s and is now helping to resegregate the schools. Unions walk the contradiction of appearing to fight the bosses while selling out the workers.
The need to fight racism was brought up continually throughout the conference. A PL’er pointed out that contemporary racism isn’t about who perpetuated the action, but who is affected by the outcome. He said the bosses love to use puppets like Obama to carry out their racist attacks on the working class. The Party brought up the need to fight racism through multi-racial unity in opposition to fragmented forms of black or Latino nationalism or the Community Control of a People’s Board of Education that pushed the poison of multi-class unity.
A PL’er also reviewed the history of the UFT. Agreeing with another speaker who challenged the anti-communist attack on the USSR, he said that without the Soviet Union, the working class had lost its beacon at the time when the Soviets were leaders of the international working class. He also pointed out that the union is made up of workers. “Look around” he said, “You’re all workers and you’re here.” Workers’ power is needed to confront the UFT misleaders at the next delegate assembly and create a wildcat strike on the next professional development day (when only teachers come to school). These types of actions are needed to learn how to fight the bosses as a class. They also provide more opportunities to expose the bosses’ democracy sham, when they use the cops and courts to attack workers’ struggles.
School with No Books
One participant taught in a Bronx school that claimed to be a college prep academy, yet it had no books. She is a technology teacher, but they had closed the computer labs for three years because three computers were stolen. The administration said that books were old and passé and that students should use the Internet instead, while keeping the computer lab closed. Only under capitalism could this kind of racist hypocrisy exist.
Such conferences create the opportunity for Party growth. As we participate in them, we can struggle to advance our communist politics. A new anti-racist caucus was established there, but we have to be in it to win it. We need to struggle with those workers around us to go to conferences like this and bring the need to struggle back to our workplaces. No union will liberate us from capitalism, let alone an anti-racist caucus in a union that’s playing ostrich. Only building the PLP to fight the wholesale attack on our class’s education will eventually give the working class the learning that it really needs.