Over two weeks in July three major U.S. ruling-class organizations are mounting watershed conventions: the American Federation of Teachers, the Republican National Committee, and the Democratic National Committee. Each represents a ruling-class effort to build a nationalist, racist consensus around the attacks in store for workers and their children in the months and years to come.
The rebels of Ferguson and Baltimore, and now Baton Rouge and St. Paul, have shown the international working class that we have better options than voting and passivity. Militant striking teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, risking their lives to fight for schools their students deserve, point us to another way. Members of Progressive Labor Party are active in these struggles and more, and our call is clear: Workers of the world, unite and fight for communism!
What can the rulers offer our class? Nothing! Instability and terror grip the Middle East (see editorial, page 2). Russian imperialism squares off against NATO in Europe, with both sides resorting to an aggressive nuclear weapon “deterrence” policy last seen during the Cold War. Chinese imperialism makes the shipping lanes of the South China Sea a flashpoint for potential global conflict.
In the wake of racist police murders in Minnesota, Louisiana, Brooklyn and beyond; in light of the swift death U.S. imperialism brings to workers in the Muslim world and the slow death capitalism means for billions across the globe, PLP makes this call to attendees and opposition forces in Minneapolis, Cleveland and Philadelphia:
NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL!
DISRUPT BOSSES’ CONVENTIONS!
DON’T VOTE, REVOLT!
*****
DNC: Dump Clinton
Hillary and Bill Clinton and their allies have fronted for the capitalist bosses’ war on the international working class for two decades. Hillary was her husband’s working partner during his viciously anti-worker administration of the 1990s. (As she once famously said, “We are the president.”) She was an especially vocal advocate for the sexist, racist welfare reform that threw millions of people—disproportionately Black mothers and children—into extreme poverty.
Hillary Clinton also backed the 1994 crime bill, including the “three strikes” rule, that paved the way for mass racist incarceration and expanded the prison industrial complex for privatized slave labor. She dehumanized Black youth in gangs as “super-predators” with “no conscience, no empathy…we have to bring them to heel.” The 100,000 additional cops who flooded U.S. city streets, another provision of the Clinton crime bill, were trained as an occupying army. The recent wave of racist murders by police—lynchings by any other name—are the fruit of that legislation.
Through sanctions and indiscriminate bombings of Iraq, the Clintons slaughtered 500,000 Iraqi children. As U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton enthusiastically backed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to shore up US control over Middle Eastern oil, killing hundreds of thousands more civilians in the process. As Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, she took a lead role in engineering attacks on civilians in Libya and the coup in Honduras that helped make it the murder capital of the world. Now she is leading the charge for a more aggressive U.S. intervention in Syria, a conflict that has already killed hundreds of thousands and left millions on the run.
While Clinton is finance capital’s favored candidate, her bottomless greed and arrogant recklessness are making the bosses nervous. The State Department email scandal—and an ensuing front-page reprimand in the New York Times, the premier capitalist mouthpiece—manifests a grave problem for the ruling class. Clinton inspires so little trust that she may be unable to garner mass support for the wider war U.S. rulers are counting on to save their shaky empire.
Now that Bernie Sanders has capped his “political revolution” by endorsing an arch-imperialist and Wall Street insider, his role as a cynical misleader of honest workers and youth may be nearing an end. In the ultimate exercise of “lesser evil” politics, he’s now asking his followers to trust the liberal bosses to defeat Donald Trump’s gutter racism.
But voting will never smash racism. Nothing short of a communist revolution can accomplish that essential task.
*****
AFT: Teachers, Take the Streets!
In this brutally unequal system, teachers are expected to play a stabilizing role. They are directed to prepare future workers, soldiers and inmates for the U.S. ruling class to use and discard in their drive for maximum profit and imperialist dominion.
When Hillary Clinton visits Minneapolis for the AFT Convention, don’t stand and cheer for an imperialist butcher! Don’t applaud an architect of mass racist incarceration! Teachers must stand with Diamond Reynolds, whose fiancé, Philando Castile, was executed before her eyes—and with her four-year-old daughter in the car’s back seat. We must WALK OUT when Hillary takes the stage and join local protests against racism.
Beginning in 2002, Philando was a cafeteria worker in the St. Paul public schools. He was a strong and positive force in his school community, knowing all 530 students at J.J. Hill Montessori School by name and their particular dietary needs (Vox, 7/8). This is the workingman taken from us. There can be NO BUSINESS AS USUAL in the face of racist police murder.
Meanwhile, the AFT leadership has been complicit in a decades-long pattern of deepening segregation. In 2010, union president Randi Weingarten embraced Bill Gates, the apostle of a charter school movement that has intensified this segregation. Recently, the AFT has signed on to data-driven education reforms that ramp up stress and stigma for students, parents and teachers alike.
While union hacks have devised increasingly elaborate stratagems to sell out students and teachers to reformist billionaires, education workers in PLP have taken up the task of organizing parents, students and teachers to turn racist attacks on our schools into their opposite. An injury to one is an injury to all! We are building the multiracial unity we will need to unite the working class and overthrow capitalism—the source of our exploitation—once and for all. We seek to sustain the communist traditions pioneered by Cuban masses who, in 1961, suspended high school and fanned out to the countryside to defeat illiteracy. Or the Chinese youth who, in 1966, launched a Cultural Revolution (later betrayed by Mao) to push their society forward to communism. Or the Bolsheviks who smashed sexist prohibitions against women’s access to basic and higher education after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
More of the same isn’t working; we need communism! AFT delegates: Keep an eye out for CHALLENGE supplements, and check www.plp.org. We need your help in distributing our literature among your colleagues back home.
*****
RNC: It’s Capitalism’s Fault
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, is blatantly racist and sexist. He is the favored candidate of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi sympathizers the world over, from Louisiana’s David Duke to France’s Marine Le Pen.
Disaffected workers misled by Trump are being pitted against Black, Latin, Muslim and immigrant workers. These divisions are pervasive in the U.S., from education to housing to employment. (See antiracistbattle at Trump fundraiser on page 3).
Trump’s gutter politics flow naturally from a long history of racist policies and pronouncements by both Republicans and Democrats. They date back to the Declaration of Independence—a document, as a scholar of American history recently noted in the New York Times, that voiced the Founding Fathers’ fears of rebellious Black slaves and “merciless Indian savages.” Voting against Trump does nothing to challenge or disrupt that history.
The finance capital bosses whom both Trump and Hillary Clinton represent—ExxonMobil, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase—use their media to keep workers invested in a bought-and-paid-for political process. If anything, Trump has helped the main wing of the
ruling class by marginalizing the Tea Party movement and more domestic-oriented
capitalists like the Koch Brothers.
Taking heed of Trump’s volatility, which could be bad for business, the bosses’ newspapers, websites and talking heads are doing all they can to lead anti-racist workers into the arms of Hillary Clinton. But a vote for either of these candidates stands in absolute contradiction to workers’ class interests.
Fortunately, we have a better choice than dead-end electoral politics: mass anti-racist class struggle and the Progressive Labor Party.
*****
The surprising success of Trump and Sanders reflects workers’ outrage at perpetual mass unemployment and the grotesque inequalities of U.S. capitalism. Meanwhile, AFT members are left to pick up the pieces of a devastated society in segregated, overcrowded, underfunded urban schools. Capitalism is a proven failure, and all workers—and their innocent children—pay the price.
The DNC and RNC are both controlled by the main wing of the U.S. ruling class. Their conventions are rigged to select presidential candidates who will be willing and able to lead the U.S. into global inter-imperialist war. Teachers are expected to push nationalist ideology while staffing an educational apparatus that sorts children into a small group with a future and a larger group without one. If teachers fail to fight back against the racist, anti-child, anti-worker agenda of the Weingarten leadership, conditions can only get worse.
Our opportunity to break with these misleaders is ever present. We must seize the time! Our class needs communism, a classless society. Our class needs leaders like the teacher-rebels in Oaxaca, not the warmongers, racists and illusion-peddlers who will top the Democratic and Republican party tickets this fall.
Join PLP to unite with a movement that will liberate the working class once and for all from capitalist exploitation and war.