Letters of October 28

Serve Our Students: Organize
I have always loved working with students and have understood that education is a battleground for anti-racism, anti-sexism and other communist ideologies. After all, the classroom is one of the first places where people learn capitalist thinking. Therefore, I thought City Year, an AmeriCorps education program, would be a great way to spend a year. They send teams of about ten young people to under-resourced schools to provide support in math, English, behavior, attendance and after-school programs.
What seemed like an excellent opportunity to work with kids has turned out to be far different. We work nearly 11-hour days, five days a week, without most government holidays. Only half of this time is spent with students. We are not paid a wage, but a monthly stipend of $1000, which is so low that we are expected to apply for food stamps to help make ends meet. This program is great for the education bosses, because rather than hiring full-time teachers who can get benefits and a salary, they can bring in a team of temporary labor.
What has been wearing us down is not even this exploitation. It is what many call the CULTure. City Year enforces a culture of obedience to authority. They exert control of our actions and thoughts through the kind of discourse we are allowed to engage in. It’s like something out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984!
We have relatively no say in who, what or how we teach. We are also subjected to childish time-wasting activities every day. We are treated as juvenile, unimportant and disposable. Some people at the job say that City Year seems more concerned with brand recognition than actually helping students or workers. It is degrading. So many people have quit that some schools are down half their workforce, forcing those remaining to fill in the gaps by increasing the workload of each member.
As bad as it is for the City Year workers, the mainly Black, Latin, and immigrant students are always hurt the most. Every time someone quits, students lose an extra support. Even if workers don’t quit prematurely, these City Year workers have merely three weeks of bogus training and are only there for one year. The high turnover rate and the one-year commitment mean that students lose out on having teachers who gain experience and build strong relationships with them.
Moreover, City Year makes a conscious effort to recruit Black and Latin people who come from the neighborhoods they serve. This builds a blame-the-victim philosophy: “I worked hard and made it out of poverty; you can, too.”
Programs like City Year hurt workers and students. They will never fix what City Year calls the “drop-out crisis.” It is just another way to keep young people busy and make them feel like they are contributing to society. It is just another way to keep people from fighting back. I hope to win co-workers to this outlook and build for what is really going to serve students best: a communist revolution.
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Smash Borders: Embassies First!
The world capitalist countries set up their embassies to maintain their capitalist relations. A U.S. embassy in East Africa is one of the good example that shows how capitalist countries maintain their capitalist relations.
I went to the embassy for visa service but what I observed from the embassy is totally a capitalist business similar to selling drugs. The embassy charges 160 USD per visa! In the embassy, these mostly Black people who could afford the charge asked irrelevant questions so as to demoralize them and anger them.  The counselor uses this as a technique of disqualifying workers from getting visa. And so, they have to make a second payment for the visa application.
In this embassy, more than 70 are called for visa interviews per day and more are disqualified to get the visa. These embassies are open for business, not for the “public service.” The inhumane people full of capitalist spirit, these racists and sexists who call themselves counselors, give this oppressive kind of public office service to people. These kinds of inequalities in the offices will continue until we have a global communist revolution that will result in a world communist government.
It is only through communist revolution that we will end the existence of capitalist embassies. There will be no more borders!
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