FOR MASS STUDENTS’ AND WORKERS’ ACTIONS
UP TO A PROLONGED GENERAL STRIKE
TO DEFEAT THE ATTACKS ON STATE WORKERS AND WIN OUR DEMANDS!
Flyer distributed at one-day student/faculty/staff strike at University of California at Berkeley on September 24, 2009
The one day general strike called at UC system wide, symbolic though it is, shows the way forward for labor and students. For far too long our leaders, union bureaucrats and politicians alike, have choreographed a dance of conciliation and concessions to place the burden of the collapse of the capitalist system on the backs of the workers, students and the poor. The last thing these leaders want to see is the rank and file of labor uniting with students, organizing inter-union action committees and across job sites and job categories. The philosophy of business unionism practiced by almost the entire trade union leadership of the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win coalition peddle concessions to the workers while collecting our dues, bloating a parasitic bureaucracy and directing our energy into political action supporting the bosses’ political parties, mainly the Democrats. Instead of this dead end class collaborationist policy of our leaders, our unions should be organizing massive strike actions, occupying worksites, smashing the Taft-Hartley barrier to sympathy strikes and organizing our own revolutionary workers’ party to fight for a program that serves the interests of the working class.
A fighting program is needed to unite workers and students to address the concerns of both. Such a program should address both immediate and transitional demands that counterpose solutions which meet the needs of workers to the vacillations and capitulations of the sell out leaders and politicians.
1) No layoffs, no fee increases, no furloughs, no speed-ups, no cuts in programs or classes. Provide enough classes for everyone enrolled.
2) Abolish the Regents! No to fake democratization through general election of the Regents! Only a university system administered by faculty, staff, students and the working class community can create higher education that serves the interest of the working class not the corporate elite who run it and benefit from it now.
FOR STUDENT, FACULTY, STAFF, AND WORKERS’ COMMUNITY CONTROL OF THE UC SYSTEM!
3) FOR OPEN ADMISSIONS AND FREE TUITION WITH STIPENDS FOR THOSE IN NEED! The existing system is not designed to educate the working class. From grade school though university it tracks students by socio-economic class separating the privileged from those destined for low paying dead end jobs and or prison. In a rational economy the highest education achievable by an individual would be valued and promoted. But in the era of capitalist decay higher education and socio-economic advancement is no longer required by the denizens of Wall Street and their corporate shills on the UC BOARD OF REGENTS! For the working class to educate its youth capitalism must die!
4) JOBS FOR ALL! Upon graduation or when one enters the working world until retirement, meaningful creative work that serves humanity and pays for a family must be guaranteed to all workers. Productivity rises and real wages are constantly driven down to protect corporate profits from the ongoing tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The solution to unemployment and the squeeze of workers’ wages is a sliding scale of wages and working hours. 30 hours work for 40 hours’ pay!
5) ABOLISH CALIFORNIA’S INDUSTRIAL PRISON SYSTEM! There has been an inverse curve following the decline in spending on education since the passage of Proposition 13, in 1978, and the rise of the prison population in California. Each prisoner is a direct consequence of the inability of capitalism to provide education and decent jobs! The system is the crime the prisoners are the symptom. Abolish the system and the symptom will disappear.
6) FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE from cradle to grave. The USA is the only advanced industrialized nation which cannot provide health care to all its population. Why? Because the insurance industry has to have its finger in the pie and the Democratic Party is party to this theft. The university can teach all the doctors, nurses and technicians we need. The construction trades can build the clinics and the hospitals! The only thing in the way is the profit system which demands a dollar profit from every illness or death. For our families to have health care, the profit system must die!
7) Nationalize failing industries under workers control without compensation.
8) Stop the two tier system of contracting out permanent positions. Offer all contract workers permanent union university employment.
9) Drive CIA/NSA recruiters out of the universities and break imperialist “intelligence” operatives out of all our Political Science and Foreign Policy departments. End counterinsurgency studies in sociology.
10) Down with Lawrence Livermore, home of US imperialist war machine and a place for US nuclear weapon research for US war! Break all ties with Lawrence/Livermore labs.
11) Defeat all US imperialist forces engaged overseas! For military victory to the anti-imperialist resistance in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! Wars for oil and world domination must end!
12) For a Workers’ Party. To institute the above demands labor and students must break with the Democratic Party and all capitalist parties (Greens, Republicans, American Independent, Libertarian) and build a Workers’ Party based in the trade unions, among the unemployed, the unorganized workers and their allies in the communities of color and the LGBT community. Only a Workers’ Party committed to fighting capitalism by revolutionary means establishing a workers’ government can establish a socialist rational socialist plan that can deliver free and quality education.