CHICAGO, February 4— Sixteen educators were arrested for sitting in at Bank of America.
Members Progressive Labor Party and thousands of school workers, parents, students, and other fighters filled the streets of downtown Chicago to protest a Chicago Public Schools (CPS) announcement of $100 million in new layoffs and pay cuts.
Bank of America is one of the banks that have pocketed a billion dollars from CPS that should have gone to fund the schools. These racist cuts primarily target Teachers’ Assistants, who are among the lowest paid school workers and are mostly Black. However, the brunt of the attack falls on CPS students, who are mostly Black and Latin. They will receive fewer resources, larger classes, and less support in school.
CPS says they’re Broke, Charity for Bankers is a Joke
The cause of these cuts? The racist CPS and the parasitic banks that feed off the working class. Banker and former school board chair David Vitale led CPS into a “toxic swaps” scheme, which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned out of CPS and into banks’ pockets. CPS refuses to take legal measures to get any of this money back, as governmental bodies in other cities have done successfully. They won’t even ask to renegotiate the toxic swaps.
For too long, CPS has made financial deals that benefit banks and corporations at the expense of the city’s mostly Black and Latin students, but lately it has gotten worse. The number one CPS cost is “debt service”, representing billions of dollars in interest paid to banks and bondholders. The capitalist system is rigged this way: the rich pay little in taxes to support public services, and then make millions off the loans that service providers must take out to meet operating expenses.
Attack on One Is an Attack on All
Teachers in the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) have responded to this theft by organizing demonstrations and sit-ins. A key element of the CTU’s strength is its alliance with other sections of the working class: the most recent demonstration involved not only education workers, but also members of several other unions and Black youth from the ongoing fight against racist police murders. The next day, teachers, transit workers, and home care workers distributed a common flyer calling on all workers to fight against state and local cutbacks.
Chicago teachers refuse to stick to demonstrating. In December, the teachers voted to allow leaders of CTU to call a strike, and now it’s only a matter of time until it happens. Union members at many schools don’t want to wait. They are ready to follow the lead of Detroit teachers and organize collective sickdays (see CHALLENGE 2/10).
Strike Against Capitalism
Strikes are an important step in building fightback and class-consciousness, but are limited. In 2012, Chicago teachers went on strike to demand, among many things, no layoffs and funding for smaller class sizes and key programs for students. Only four years later, they are fighting the same fight against the same budget cuts!
Unions also push the illusion that a different politician will make things better, when all politicians actually serve the interests of the capitalist class. “Hey hey, ho, ho, Rahm Emanuel’s got to go” was a popular chant at today’s march. Though Mayor Emanuel is a fierce supporter of the interests of the capitalists, focusing on electing some other capitalist representative obscures the root problem and stops workers from fighting to destroy the system.
Unions and strikes organize to make life minimally better for workers under capitalism, and any gains won through those means can be quickly taken away. When someone has cancer, doctors don’t remove only part of the tumor; it will only grow back! The working class must fight to remove the entire cancer of capitalism and build a system where we can get all of our needs met. To smash racism and build schools that are actually set up for students to prosper, we need to destroy capitalism with a communist revolution.
Only Solution is Communist Revolution
Educators, students, parents, and other workers throughout the city are determined to continue the fight for better schools, but under capitalism, that is a limited fight. The capitalists promote schools that continue racist divisions (Chicago’s schools, as well as others, are as segregated now as 40 years ago) and teach individualism and loyalty to the U.S. government. They prepare students to be good workers or good soldiers or in the most segregated, least wealthy schools, good prisoners. Until the working class runs society, the schools will serve the interests of the rich.
The militant actions will no doubt continue to develop in Chicago and open the door for more workers to learn about Progressive Labor Party and join us in our revolutionary struggle. At the march, hundreds of CHALLENGEs were distributed, and this is only the beginning. As the struggle heats up, we look forward to building the membership of PLP and spreading these ideas widely.