Workers at Community College Fights Racism

BOSTON—Black, Latin and immigrant students from working class families at a small urban community college in Boston are experiencing sharpening racist attack. The U.S. capitalists’ imperialist war machine is taking money away from workers’ education now, and soon it will try to take their lives in the coming imperialist wars. Community colleges, with their disproportionate percentage of Black, Latin and immigrant workers, are on the front line of these imperialist cuts!
Racist Farce of ‘Workforce Development’
College courses that do not serve the bosses’ agenda to train unskilled, obedient workers are considered “inappropriate” and not in alignment with the curriculum at the community college level.
In the U.S., many students come to community colleges to gain entrance to a four-year university in the hopes of achieving the racist capitalist illusion of the “American Dream.” This is a tool of division the bosses used to strengthen apartheid. Workers blame themselves when they can’t overcome the systematic racist, sexist conditions of capitalism. It pacifies them into studying their way out of the working class, instead of organizing against the bosses.
Today, four-year graduates are no longer in great demand and the trend is against encouraging working class students to actively pursue a four-year degree. Nowadays, the meaning of “workforce development” is code for “close the gateway” to the four year colleges and universities. Degree programs that provide access to four-year schools are being starved as budget cuts continue.  
Working class access to public higher education has been decreasing dramatically.  In this small urban community college in Boston, a course in science research was allowed to run with three to five students for individual instruction on science research projects. The program was a highly successful, and produced student winning national academic awards at undergraduate conferences.  Recently, the course was shut down to save money—mainly because it could not meet the college administration’s cutoff of about ten students per section. Students rallied last spring to save this and other courses cut, gathering over 300 signatures in a petition.  A small victory may be that the course may be allowed to run again in the spring of 2016—but the challenge to prepare at least 10 students for the course and maintain high quality instruction with so many students remains.
Internationalizing the Struggle
Historically, the role of the universities and colleges in the U.S. is to serve the ruling class need to maintain social control and to support their imperialist war agenda.  In the 1970s, the urban community colleges were utilized to quell future urban rebellions. They used community colleges to win Black, Latin and white workers the “American Dream” left behind to support capitalism. Today, in face of the challenges to U.S. imperialism, a new agenda has emerged: train working class youth for low-skill, low level manual labor jobs that have little job security and/or require unreasonable work and obedience to the system. This leaves many urban youth struggling with dead-end dreams, low-income jobs, less control over their lives, and open targets for the U.S. military’s recruitment efforts.
Students at this college gained practical experience in this science course, and a chance to develop critical thinking skills to help them achieve a deeper level of learning in the sciences.
Fighting back in organizing an anti-racist student movement is a science too! This year, no education cuts were announced in South Africa, after massive strikes and demonstrations rocked the liberal misleadership on their heels. In Chicago, high school teachers have overwhelmingly voted to authorize another strike against racism, while in New York City and California, students, professors and staff may declare strikes this spring. Capitalism will never educate the majority of workers. We need to unite workers and students together to fight not just these attacks on the ability to learn, but against capitalism itself!