Student-parent-worker unity wins, more fights ahead

New Jersey, July 5—Liberal fascist school bosses rehired a communist teacher after recognizing the growing support for that teacher. In mid-May, a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member was fired from the school where they teach, supposedly due to performance issues and budget cuts. In a community meeting organized to build fightback, the teacher’s co-worker stated: “There is possibly no other teacher that the staff and the kids like more, and the administrators like less.” The antiracist, pro-student and worker solidarity this teacher represents in this school emboldened the community to win back the job of this communist fighter! This fight also helped to strengthen the confidence that the teacher had in himself to build for a lifetime in the working class.
Students, parents, and co-workers take the lead
As word spread of the firing, many co-workers and students were adamant that the school needed this comrade. A former student who has consistently received CHALLENGE wrote a petition which received 44 signatures. A co-worker took the initiative to encourage several of her students, some of whom had been the comrade’s students in the previous school year, to sign up to speak at the school board meeting at the end of May. This inspired the comrade to encourage several current students of their own as well as a couple of education workers from across the city to do the same. A parent, who has had CHALLENGE placed in her storefront since the pandemic, hosted a community meeting where a multiracial group of youth, parents, co-workers and community members showed up to plan further action during the last week of school.
Throughout this struggle many people shared wisdom regarding the way the capitalist education system had attacked them in the past. They shared lessons learned from the ways they fought back. In response to the growing fight back and a letter written by the teacher and fellow PL’ers, being self critical of the ways the teachers could perform better while also citing the pandemic and huge class sizes as a reason for difficulty in delivering data and lesson plans, the bosses decided to bring the teacher back.
Capitalist schools in decay, communities need to fight back!
This teacher was essentially fired for insubordination. The administrators forced students to remain outside in freezing temperatures while waiting for underpaid security guards to show and  process them into the school building. This teacher was accused of allowing potentially dangerous kids into the building, therefore putting everyone else’s life in danger. Our kids are not dangerous - this is the racist lie the bosses repeat over and over again. The real danger that threatens the lives of everyone in this and all school buildings is capitalism. A profit system where bosses abandon whole schools and the communities they serve when those particular kids and their families are no longer the most profitable to exploit. The resulting lack of resources leads school bosses to ramp up racist and sexist mistrust between staff and students, rather than compassion and community building.
Letting those students in and listening to them in the mornings allowed this teacher to deepen their understanding of who those kids really were and to build a working class culture of trust. It is this type of communist working class culture that the school community wanted to defend and the school administration wanted to get rid of.
Big Fascists mislead schools better than Small Fascists
The conditions of the school that fired this comrade reflect the main direction that Big Fascists (international finance capitalists, see GLOSSARY, page 6)  have for the future of the international working class. This school is oftentimes the last stop for Black students whose needs and struggles have been ignored at all other schools in the city. It is also the landing spot for many undocumented students displaced by U.S. capitalists’ search for cheap labor and imperialist profits in Latin America and the Caribbean. The families of this overall student population are exposed to racist and sexist treatment in housing, health care, and employment. The super-oppression experienced by these students and their families translates into a higher workload for the education workers who struggle to educate while the material needs of students are not being met.
It also encourages chronic staff shortages from teachers, guidance counselors, social workers, security guards, to teacher's aides who cannot bear the alienation.
The response of U.S. Small Fascist (domestic capitalists, see GLOSSARY, page 6) Republicans to contain the crises of capitalism reflected in these school conditions is to promote erasing the history of U.S. ruling class racist terror and working class antiracist heroism, and criminalizing education workers for encouraging youth to embrace the diversity within the working class. The leadership of U.S. Big Fascist Democrats, from Biden to the Mayor all the way down to the Principal of this particular school, who attacked our comrade, is a lot more dangerous for workers and youth to follow. Being Black, Latin, gay or liberal, all they preach about is phoney antiracism and the need for diversity. Yet, they use the tool of identity politics to fool some into thinking they are on our side. Then they lie that “they are doing the best that they can'' hoping to pacify our anger and stop us from organizing against the system they serve.
Fight to build communist consciousness
Worldwide, workers and students in schools under capitalism have the potential to help expose the sharpening divisions that weaken Big and Small Fascists’ ability to conceal their attacks against our class and turn it into a communist revolution. Turning that potential into reality depends on the level of confidence we build in the working class. This happens when we fight, in small and large ways- as workers and youth with communist ideas - against the racist and sexist super-exploitation, divisions and attacks that weaken our class. Working class conscious fightback emboldens the masses that are increasingly linking their fight with the vision of PLP. This fightback gives everyone more confidence that one day we will smash capitalism with a system run by us for us, communism.