Class Struggle is on the Rise! How Can Teachers Point the Way Forward?
The U.S. has witnessed an upsurge of working class struggle lately, particularly through the teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kentucky, the charter school strikes Chicago and the Los Angeles and Oakland strikes.
The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) and the Oakland (OEA) teachers’ strikes have been very popular and featured prominently in the press. Both strikes were solid and had broad community support, but just as with many labor battles, the labor misleaderships limited and sold out the strikes as quickly as possible. It is notable that none of these strikes have been physically broken by the cops or National Guard. Neither have the teachers been starved out. As with any struggle, this comes back to leadership, or rather the lack of a class struggle leadership. There is no guarantee of victory in any battle, but a leadership that fights with their hands tied and is ready to concede when the battle is still hard-fought is not likely to win major victories.
The 2012 Chicago Teachers’ (CTU) Strike, following in the wake of the 2011 Wisconsin labor battle, was a precursor to the wave of teachers’ strikes today. But just like with the recent strikes, the Democratic Party and reformist labor leaderships have pushed to reach a settlement when what was called for was to expand the solid strikes to all sectors of the working class, to take the strikes to where they could have and should have gone (see CWG, “Lessons of the Chicago Teachers Strike”). The 2012 CTU, 2019 UTLA and 2019 OEA strikes all had the potential to create a referendum on quality, public education and against privatizations and charter schools, with the voting done by the workers through mass strike actions. It is this kind of victory that would swing the gates wide open to further class struggles and that would start to sweep away the sharp social reaction that has taken hold with the ascendancy of Trump.
The militant January UTLA strike had the mass support of teachers, students, other unions and the community, yet when the dust settled, the resulting agreement stunk. It did not stop charter schools, only achieved extremely minimal reduction of class sizes at best and pay raises that fall behind inflation. The union bureaucracy quickly shoved through a vote on the agreement.
Oakland
Following on the heels of the UTLA strike, the teachers of the Oakland Education Association (OEA) went on strike for 7 days in late February into early March also with demands for big pay raises, a moratorium on school closures, smaller class sizes and more resources. The cost of housing in the Bay Area was a major concern driving the strike.
On March 4th, a day after the contract vote and end of the strike, the “Oakland Unified School District board voted 4-3 on Monday to make $21.75 million in cuts to the district’s budget for the 2019-20 school year” over protest by teachers, students and community members. The board had been stopped from meeting twice earlier by solid picket lines of teachers and community members. The failure to continue with solid pickets at the school board until winning a commitment to keep the schools open was a cold slap in the face of those who fought hard on the picket line and a betrayal of the teachers by the union leadership. The community support of the teachers was based in large part on the teachers commitment to fight the school closures. We say the city will be closing schools and selling off properties to the privatizers in July! This was acquiesced in by OEA leaders.
The Oakland schools district has a history of serious debt. To avoid having their short leash yanked again by state trustees, the local administrators are forced to make cuts. They are the “Kapos of the concentration camp.” The Democratic Party Governor, Democratic majority legislature and State education board call the real shots and are responsible for the public education crisis in California; they can’t seem to find funding when California is flush with millionaires (885,000) and billionaires(144) most of whom they know how to find when it’s time to finance elections but can’t bother shaking their pockets for social need. A workers government based on a mass movement of the working class would go after the capital assets of the billionaire class and their multimillionaire flunkies.
Oakland schools suffer from high turnover, as young hires soon discover they cannot afford to live anywhere nearby. They are the lowest paid teachers in the entire Bay Area of northern California, and their situation has not been improved by the new contract’s 11% raises over four years. This deal was “sweetened” with a 3% signing bonus which does not add on to base pay. This was a bribe for newbie members to vote “yes.”
This is the type of bribe tactic used by State of California mediators over and again. In the 2015 SEIU 1000 contract covering 190,000 workers, a one time cash “bonus” was used to blind the workers to a slightly hidden yet onerous takeback! That take back is a monthly deduction from each state employee’s check–it is the employee’s contribution to their medical pension, this is on top of the medicare contribution and this was part of the budget reform requirements demanded by then-Governor Brown’s austerity regime. The wedge was opened for this takeback when it was first accepted in contacts by State employee units 9 & 10 (engineers and scientists,) represented by PECG and CAPS, which are both run by Blanning and Baker LLC, a private company which also serves as the executive director for the California Young Democrats (official youth wing of the Democratic Party). This type of bribery is a prime example of backroom dealing the labor tops and the Democrats conduct out of sight to impose the crisis of capitalist decay on the rank and file. This take back was imposed undemocratically on the scientists and engineers, the labor aristocracy which does not pay much attention and it was then imposed on the poorly paid mass of state employees who took the sucker punch when it was sweetened with the bribe. BEWARE THE BANDERSNATCH!
It appeared, from the massive participation on the picket lines and regular rallies at noon and concerted efforts to unite teachers and community at school board meetings, that the tide was turning in favor of the teachers. At rallies confidence was high. The militancy of the strikers was displayed when they pushed through the doors of the State Building and flooded into the lobby. Would this be the ghost of Wisconsin reawakened? Unfortunately for the strikers it was not…no sooner did the mass of 3000 strikers push their way through the front door than they paraded out the back door. No intention to occupy the State Building here. No intention to force the mediators into open negotiations in front of the community. Why not? Because the leadership could talk the talk, “revolution” was on their lips at the mass rally, but they could not walk the walk; they walked the teachers out the back door and into a one step forward two steps back contract. Furthemore, the union “labor leaders” were policing the picket lines to make sure that picket lines were exclusively “informational,” as defined by laws they have made a living acquiescing in. We say PICKET LINES MEAN DON’T CROSS! No entry, no delivery, no business as usual! No one teaches the members this lesson, and most of the ostensible left would not give the pickets the benefit of this labor movement traditional understanding, exactly for fear of alienating the “leaders” they were so busy tailing after!
“Leaders” called off the strike as soon as the “mediator” got them an offer of pennies over the national pattern for public employees. Who is this mediator and how was he foisted on the members and the city?
Tony Thurmond is the State education Superintendent of Public Instruction. He talks a tremendous program that is music to reformist ears. However, California Thurmond stated, is ranked 46th nationally for spending per pupil and nowhere in this Democrat’s program do you see any suggestion of where the funds are supposed to come from. He wouldn’t have his job if he suggested getting the monies where they are. He would not even be the Democrat candidate for dog catcher if did!
In California, the infamous Jarvis Gann Tax revolt foisted Prop 13 on educational resources and it gives the Democrats the excuse to keep California ranked 46th in school spending. New York state spent twice as much per pupil as California in 2016, a fact that can’t be explained away by cost of living. Who sold the voters this “3rd rail” law and why do the Democrats treat it like constitutional holy writ? In the Bay Area it was Chevron, and in Southern California it was the defense industry interests. And why won’t they repeal it? Because the Democrats are a main party of Capital, the class enemy of the workers and the oppressed.
It was the California Democratic Party who anointed and the California Teachers Association that supported Tony Thurmond for superintendent against Marshall Tuck. Here you see the problem in a nutshell: you have a labor leadership that is state integrated via their Democratic Party membership, and so much so that they can fairly be defined as Democrats and incidentally marked as elected union officials. They don’t fight the state when it uses local evidence of malfeasance and waste to excuse the fiscal ‘necessity’ to close public schools. They don’t fight privatization either, taking their cue from Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT, who accepts Charter Schools and just wishes she could organize them. In conditions where “leaders” lose whole schools in return for pattern trade agreements, such “organizing” is just a pursuit of increased dues checkoff.
Decaying Capitalism Seeks to Jettison and Privatize Public Education
Public education in America is largely overhead for Capital today and not needed for youth that have dwindling job prospects as the precariat. In capitalist America it is the schools in the inner cities and the Black and Brown communities that suffer the most. In racially segregated America, where property taxes fund local schools, it is not the more affluent schools in the white suburbs that face hardships. Desegregation and integrated busing has largely been a dead issue since the late 1970’s. Since that time schools nationally have become MORE segregated, and the rise of charter schools is only part of this. Redistricting and rezoning, as in self-described “social democrat” DeBlasio’s New York have also served racist real estate interests, pricing black and brown residents out of their traditional neighborhoods to make way for luxury high rises and corporate towers to draw yuppies from across the continent to pay the new rents. Big landlords and even mainstream tv business broadcasting have complained of a post-2008 “stagnant” NYC real estate market, which just means they envy the Bay Area rates! We say we need an all-out battle with those who would strip our kids of their right to public education! For victory for our kids and future generations, whose very existence is not in Capital’s plans, we need a workers’ government!
Some of the first steps of a workers government in America would be hundreds of billions for public education in the inner cities and the Black and Brown communities along with many more trillions for housing, jobs, healthcare, infrastructure, transportation and community services and the right and ability for people to live where they want without facing racist police or white supremacist terror.
Tailing the Labor Bureaucracy
Reformist socialist organizations have alibi-ed the bureaucracy’s betrayal rather than “swimming against the stream” and telling the truth to the workers. Socialist Alternative (Soc Alt), which is the American section of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) and Kshama Sawant’s organization, claimed the Oakland teachers strike was a “Victory Filled With Lessons”. Soc. Alt. claims that once the tentative agreement was presented the leadership and strategy necessary to win was not there ready to put into action. Instead of calling to replace the sellout leaders, the lesson they provide though is that the labor misleaders made mistakes in not being slicker about how they push through the rotten agreements:
“After announcing the TA, the OEA leadership said people could stay and picket the School Board if they wanted but that it was no longer an official union picket. This felt to many teachers, parents, and SEIU’s classified members as politically expedient for OEA and not consistent with the strong and fighting message of solidarity with classified workers and against all cuts to education espoused by OEA leadership throughout the strike. In the union’s press conference announcing the TA, OEA leadership presented the TA as a clear victory and wasn’t clear enough that nothing was a done deal until the membership voted on it. Also, in general, calling off picket lines before a deal is ratified makes continuing the strike much harder if the deal is rejected by the membership.
The unrolling of the TA in this manner created understandable anger and frustration among many OEA members. It would have been better for OEA leadership to admit openly that increases in support staff, decreases in class size, and language around school closures were not as strong as they would have liked, but laying out a concrete reasoning for why they felt this was the best that could be won from this strike. That would have created a better atmosphere for discussion and debate about the TA and would have undercut any feelings of betrayal felt by a sizable portion of members.
…..
Socialist Alternative feels that the decision of the leadership to accept the TA when they did, call off pickets, and promote the TA as essentially a done deal was a mistake.”
Soc. Alt. of course had to qualify the victory because 42% of the OEA ranks voted to reject the agreement. Soc. Alt. went on to explain “What’s Next for the Fight for Public Education in Oakland”, which basically means the real fight starts sometime in the future. This is the same hogwash that the CTU bureaucrats talked up with the 2012 Chicago strike. Of course workers are going to learn lessons from any struggle, but we need some big wins and it’s long past time that labor starts playing hardball, and beginning with a leadership determined to win. The Oakland Unified School District board certainly showed Soc. Alt. what was next when they voted for nearly $22 million in cuts the day after the agreement was approved and the strike ended.
More defeatism: Soc. Alt. presents the school board elections as the path to advancing the interests of the working poor and their children’s educations. This is utopian optimism in the reformability of the institutions of the capitalist state. The school board exists not to meet the needs of the students but to impose the capitalist austerity on the districts. This may not be what you learn in civics class but it is the reality as it has unfolded in late capitalism. The neo-liberalism of the commodification of all things and in particular public institutions is imposed via the school boards who allow the disintegration of the district with for-profit charters that drain the public coffers. The only way to wrench educational resources from the capitalist overlords is by mass struggle and united region and statewide strikes. The Oakland teachers on the tail of LA and in the foreshadow of other districts could have opened up cross district actions like Kentucky and West Virginia but in California we have a “progressive” labor leadership totally tied to the Democratic Party and it does its damndest to keep the cork in the bottle! At least until the doors to the back room are secured and the upstarts are locked out!
“School Board elections are coming up in 2020. Based on the momentum from this strike and the mass support it garnered, the OEA should run a slate of independent candidates for the School Board who are committed to dismantling the district’s plans and willing to undo the top-down priorities and approach of the Board.”
Soc. Alt. also gives the thumbs up to “The moratorium on school closures won by the strike [ed. that] was a step in the right direction” which is a toothless letter from the Oakland Unified School District board (the ones on the other side of the picket lines from the workers) to Democratic Party Governor Newsom to stop new charters.
Soc. Alt., like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), tries to differentiate between the “establishment” or “corporate” Democrats as they ramp up for the 2020 elections. Soc. Alt. did not (officially) endorse Bernie Sanders in 2016 even as they built his rallies, so they could present plausible deniability for anyone who critiqued their class collaboration. But in 2020, it is all for one, and all for the social imperialist, Democrat Bernie! For their part, DSA simply has to have their leadership rubber stamp the Sanders endorsement on March 21st.
It is illusions in the Democratic Party that repeatedly limits, diverts, derails and outright defeats struggle. The labor struggle in Wisconsin in 2011 was not defeated on the streets and in the workplaces by the National Guard or the strikebreaking cops, but because the sentiment for a general strike was overwhelmed by illusions in the Democratic Party and the Recall election promoted as the path forward. The Democratic Party is a political party of the bosses, just like the Republican Party. They may have different methods and policies for maintaining class rule, but they will and do defend and advance the class interests of Capital. The working class and oppressed need our own fighting workers/labor party based on a class struggle program of Transitional demands that point the way forward to workers power!
The reformists of DSA and its mouthpiece Jacobin also declared the Oakland strike a victory as Eric Blanc makes a similar argument that struggle in-and-of-itself is the main victory. In “Why Oakland’s Striking Teachers Won”, he goes on to state that “Strikes are necessary — but they aren’t enough on their own. The types of systematic transformations envisioned by OEA, UTLA, and educators across the United States will require directly confronting the billionaires on a political level….” which is true, there needs to be a political fight. Except that it is the whole capitalist system that needs to be fought on a political level through class struggle politics. More importantly, in the hands of the DSA, fighting on the political level means supporting Sanders, with liberal Democrats and/or DSA members running as “Green New Deal” liberals. DSA is not talking about an independent working class movement or a working class party; just like labor fakers before them, they tell us the Democratic Party is the workers’ party and we just have to take it back. The DSA is principally an undemocratic public relations appendage of the Democrat leadership for the containment and suppression of radicalization.
The CWG stands for building a fighting workers’ labor party and uniting workers, oppressed and youth behind a revolutionary political program to abolish the wage system! To further the struggle and win, the OEA and other local unions need to introduce into the labor movement a class struggle leadership that relies on class struggle methods. To win the labor movement needs a transitional program and militant tactics such as those introduced in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters-led General Strike by a labor vanguard that built the unions and which fought to break from the Democrats and fought for a workers/labor party. Today more than ever Labor must break from the Democrats.In order to win we must have our political independence, otherwise “friends” like Thurmond and Newsom will shut us down again just when the iron is hot and we are ready to strike the final blow.
No to school closings and privatization!
For free, quality public education for all from day care to graduate school!
For open admissions and a student stipend! Abolish all student debt!
Guarantee jobs after graduation!
Demilitarize the schools! Police out of the schools. End the school to jail pipeline. Massive resources investments into deprived communities!
Substandard education achievement is not the fault of the individual student but of bourgeois-individualist philosophy!
End bullying by administrators and the schoolyard thugs!
For worker/teacher/staff/student self-defense!
Abolish PAR reviews. For teacher/parent review councils.
More lessons, less standardized testing!
Abolish for-profit Charters! Organize unorganized Charter Teachers! Abolish Teach for America which converts young teachers into uncertified SCABS used to break the union!
Make the capitalists pay! Nationalize the private schools and charter schools under workers control without compensation! Seize their endowments! For worker, student, faculty and community control of public education!
Unite the struggle with the broader working class! None of these demands can be won without a united multi-racial working class struggle to defend all social gains, such as education, and extend them via jobs for all! For a 30 hour workweek at 40 hours pay to spread the work around! For a living wage at the prevailing union rate, including guaranteed pensions that can’t be taken away!
Free quality healthcare for all! For socialized medicine to include free abortion on demand and full reproductive services! Equal pay for equal work! Free quality 24-hour childcare! For fully paid maternity leave!
For free, quality housing for all! For workers expropriation of the landlords!
Defend immigrant rights! Make schools ICE free zones! For mass labor, black and brown mobilizations to stop ICE and Border Patrol raids and deportations! For immediate full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No to English-only bigotry! Same work, same contract across borders! For joint Canadian, American, Mexican and Central American labor struggle!
Build for the indefinite general strike to implement these demands! The only illegal strike is the one that loses! Smash all anti-labor laws through struggle! Spread each and every strike city-wide, region-wide and nationwide! No crossing picket lines!
Build a class struggle leadership of our unions! No political blocs with the Democratic Party! Break with all the capitalist parties: Democrats, Republicans and Greens! Build a fighting workers/labor party to fight for a workers government based on workers councils and a workers militia!
For a rational, centrally-planned socialist economy based on human needs, not profits!
For species survival, build a new revolutionary workers international that unites all workers against the imperialist powers! For world socialism!
