TEACHERS NEED A GENERAL STRIKE

On the School, the State and Capital

On Wednesday, November 1, 3,700 teachers with the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) walked out on strike, closing 81 Portland Public Schools (PPS) serving 45,000 students. The historic strike was the first in the unions history. Teachers are fighting for wages that keep up with inflation, adequate planning and preparation time, class caps to manage overcrowding and safe working conditions that address poorly weatherized buildings as well as rat and mold infestations. Throughout the strike, school administration and local politicians have engaged in a blame game, pointing fingers at each other for alleged budget shortfalls while collaborating in their refusal to appropriate funding necessary to meet the teachers’ demands.

Meanwhile a media feeding frenzy has developed in the capitalist press, smearing and vilifying the union at every turn. The depravity of the local school district was on full display when in the context of the recent imperialist bloodbath in the Levant, they likened teachers to “terrorists” in a lawsuit against the union. The district hypocritically justified their use of this bigoted dog-whistle by alleging district representatives were “traumatized” during a demonstration by educators. The naked lap-dog-ism of the bourgeois press is on full display when they circulate such pitiful claims while simultaneously minimizing the material impact and economic violence being perpetrated against educators and students in the form of real wage cuts and deteriorating working conditions. Today the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) is engaged in an economic battle not just against their district administration, but against the State machinery of the capitalist class itself. Unfortunately, despite many more locals of the Oregon Education Association (OEA) existing within the city limits of Portland and the larger Portland metropolitan area, PAT has had to strike alone. As a result, they already have been forced to cut back their original budget demands by $121 million.

The opportunist and boss-linked leadership of the OEA and its parent organization, the National Education Association, comfortable with their cozy relationship with the Democratic Party and reluctant to shake up the status quo, has continued to refuse to seriously consider implementing a state-wide strike strategy that could develop a truly working-class force capable of challenging the regional conglomerates of capitalist class power that converge against teachers striking in major urban areas. Despite the efforts of rank and file educators to stress the importance of such a long-term state-wide strike strategy for several years at state-wide regional assemblies, the union leadership has continued to take the approach of having locals bargain independently of each other on dates that span the entire school year, reflecting a narrow craft union method and a strike strategy that can only produce watered-down deals at best; meanwhile unions such as the UAW have recently called for unified action by unions across the country to set expiration dates to May 1 in preparation of a potentially massive May Day strike in 2028.

Regardless of what the capitalist press, district administrators and local politicians would like us to believe, teachers’ wages do not depend on the “generosity” of “the taxpayers”; nor do they rely on the benevolence of district administrations or local politicians. In reality, the labor of education workers is an indispensable and necessary component of all capitalist economies. Education workers, like all wage laborers, have a fundamentally antagonistic relationship with their employers, the administrators, district boards and the capitalist State itself, as all wage-laborers do. As schools are managed publicly, i.e., by the capitalist State, every teachers’ strike is a strike against the capitalist class as a whole. Accordingly, teachers require the solidarity of the entire working class to join them on the picket lines.

As such, we are calling on OEA to mobilize all locals in the Portland area to join in with their fellow unionists in sympathy and solidarity strikes and to organize walk outs. Ultimately, teachers must dump the old practices of business unionism that have created weak unions prioritizing building report with Democratic Party politicians in favor of a class unionist model which centers solidarity and concrete strike action between locals both inside and outside of the union itself.

The Larger Economic Crisis, the Crisis in Education and the Education Worker Strike Wave

 

The PAT strike is occurring in the context of a wave of larger national teachers’ strikes brought on by a growing global economic crisis and the pauperization of the education profession. In this context, mass class action is the key to victory.

Across the world, the inflationary economic crisis of the past few years has been met with a coordinated offensive against workers’ living standards, organized via the fiscal policies of the Biden administration’s Federal Reserve in the form of interest rate hikes intended to ward of the risks of hyper-inflation by slowing down economic growth and triggering the current recession. This maneuver also had the explicit goal of increasing unemployment, driving up the reserve army of labor, weakening workers’ bargaining power and driving down wages in order to maintain a steady growth of profits for capital. As a result of the deepening social and economic crisis, urban school districts are facing declining enrollment as more affluent families flee to the suburbs, resulting in large swathes of teacher layoffs across the country.

The past several decades has seen public schools reorganizing themselves in the image of the corporation. As, the education profession has moved from a largely unregulated craft industry into one that is increasingly standardized and routinized, the workforce has also become proletarianized as the once “middle class” profession sees its wages decline annually. Meanwhile, educators are overseen and managed by ever growing ranks of administrators and bosses set to ensure educational “outcomes” are delivered with factory-like discipline, as teachers are expected to follow mechanistic codes of regulation and documentation.

As a result, education workers in many states have gone on strike in an unprecedented number over the last two years. In Los Angeles last spring, over 30,000 teachers with United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) went on a 3-day strike, quickly winning thanks to the sympathy strikes of 35,000 bus drivers, food service workers, teachers’ aides, special education assistants, custodians and security aides under SEIU Local 99. Just a few months ago, teachers in Camas and Vancouver, Washington also went out on strike at approximately the same time, simultaneously amplifying their power. In all of these strikes it has been shown that when workers organize and strike together, they win together.

The True Value of Education and Teachers’ Wages

 

Teachers exist as wage laborers who perform a requisite role in the modern capitalist production process: the social reproduction of the next generation of labor-power.

“Everything that the working class consumes in order to re-new its strength has a value. Consequently the value of the necessaries of life and the expenses of education represent the value of labor-power. Different kinds of commodities have different values. Different kinds of labor-power, therefore, have different values. The labor-value of a printer has a different value from that of his assistant” (ABC of Communism).

Just as all workers must purchase food and housing to reproduce their daily existence, in contemporary capitalist society public education plays a crucial role in the social reproduction of the next generation of laborers. For the capitalist class to maintain an uninterrupted production of surplus values, the masses of workers must be minimally trained in basic reading skills, mathematical skills, disciplinary routines and indoctrinated into the nationalist histories of their respective states to engender cooperation and participation. This is in order to be productively and profitably employed in the operation and navigation of the ever-complexifying social and technological machinery utilized in modern production processes.

It is the labor of educators which trains the next generation of workers in the necessary skills to operate the means of production currently in existence and produce the material necessities of life for the rest of society.

“The cost of production of simple labor-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum” (Marx, Wage Labor and Capital).

Teachers’ wages are determined on the same basis as all other workers’ are. They are informed by two characteristics: the bare minimum of the total labor-value that goes into the training and material reproduction of the education worker itself, and, on the other hand, the relative degree of organization or capability of education workers to organize themselves in order to increase the purchasing price of their labor-value – in other words, unionization. Thus, teachers are not dependent upon the good graces of politicians who they must lobby to convince of the philanthropy and the morality of their profession in order to get them to appropriate funds out of the good graces of their hearts.

Education Funding

Wages are not set by the philanthropy of the capitalist class’s politicians; neither is the overall funding of the public school system itself. Instead both are informed by the relative demand for educators’ labor-power in the capitalist economy and the prevailing conditions in the labor market.

The bourgeoisie, its press and politicians would like teachers to content themselves to the budgetary “realities” of the capitalist economy. They claim that because the districts only maintain $x amount of tax revenue, and because the schools are only filling y amount of seats, that educators can only possibly receive $x/y in wages. Never mind the fact that the capitalist State dedicates exorbitant amounts of tax dollars to its military for imperialist initiatives, or any other such wasteful endeavor. Since adequate funds for education workers’ wages have not been partitioned within the capitalists State’s budget, we are told, the money for education simply does not exist. Teachers are thus asked to surrender themselves and their material well-being to the bureaucratic taxation regulations of the capitalist State, and its “democratic” process (which has set these rules and regulations completely on its own class terms). We are told that, in order to change our material circumstances, our best choice – the realistic option – is to join the capitalist political parties in their incrementalist maneuverings, to work toward taxation and political reforms that will somehow bring equilibrium to the struggle between labor and capital. This is the safe option for capital, not strikes and generalized class struggle, but rather collaboration between classes.

The manner in which schools are funded and budgets allocated in the United States has been designed to meet the capitalist class’s demands of labor, and is well known to further the perpetual impoverishment of black and brown workers, trapping many in cycles of poverty and low-paying or dead-end jobs. Consequently, teachers unions should not accept and conform their wage demands to the budgetary “realities” set by the capitalist class on these grounds. In the United States, public schools are mostly funded by local property taxes, with 10% coming from local and state governments. The local funding of schools in the United States, assists the capitalist class in keeping the cost of education low in poor neighborhoods, where they hope to maintain large labor pools of unskilled workers and correspondingly low wages.

In neighborhoods with low-value property markets, less tax revenue is generated for schools. Thus in areas where low-income, largely unskilled, workers can afford rents or mortgages, schools tend to be underfunded. Inversely, in neighborhoods with expensive housing stock and high property values, schools receive more tax revenue. In this way workers, who can only afford rents in low-income neighborhoods, typically receive substandard education, have lower graduation rates and less access to higher education. Thus these workers have less opportunities to leave their immediate circumstances, to elevate themselves out of manual or “unskilled” labor.

From the perspective of capital there is a good reason to maintain this status quo.

With fewer opportunities, workers are coerced into working for lower wages and to thus fill the ranks of the reserve army of unskilled workers in the labor pool, allowing capitalists to drive down wages even further. This is a trend we can see across the United States. In states where there is well-developed technological and cultural production industries, such as Oregon and California, capital has a demand for the labor of more highly-educated and trained workers, and thus, education tends to receive higher funding; inversely, in rural regions and states where production is oriented around agricultural industries, education tends to be relatively underfunded.

We can then see that capital’s demand for labor has a correlative relationship with the funding and quality of education from region to region. Additionally, the relative demand for labor corresponds to the overall economic conditions of the total economy. In times of inflationary periods – when the economy is expanding – there is higher demand for workers. In periods of recession, as the economy is contracting and growth is declining, the demand for more workers to fill new positions declines. So too does the needs for more teachers, despite the fact they do not work in officially “private” capitalist enterprises but “public”, or state, institutions. The institutions of education expose themselves periods of recession, we tend to see education budgets slashed and teachers laid off in droves along with the rest of the class.

Under the capitalist mode of production, such inequalities can never be fully resolved – despite what the liberal or social democratic reformers would like us to believe. They can only be displaced to different groups of workers because it is on the basis of wage labor’s exploitation that the power of capital is built and it is on the basis of the maintenance of capitalist accumulation that its brutal and murderous State apparatus exists.

 

Portland’s Public School System: On the Model of a Capitalist Enterprise

Portland Public School system, like all modern public school systems, operates and organizes itself on the model of the capitalist enterprise.

As wage laborers, we are alienated from the products of our labor, as it is the capitalist class who own the means of production and its product. Ultimately, we ourselves are objectified and our time and life energies quantified in the form of a numerical value, in money, a value which is subject to the myriad manipulations of the market by the capitalist class. As workers we exist as commodities, our labor power to be bought and sold like eggs, bacon, milk, or bread. As educators, we are involved in the production of a unique commodity, the next generation of labor power. Marx wrote in Capital, Volume I:

“In order to modify the human organism, so that it may acquire skill and handiness in a given branch of industry, and become labor-power of a special kind, a special education or training is requisite, and this, on its part, costs an equivalent in commodities of a greater or less amount. This amount varies according to the more or less complicated character of the labor-power. The expenses of this education (excessively small in the case of ordinary labor-power), enter pro tanto into the total value spent in its production. The value of labor-power resolves itself into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. It therefore varies with the value of these means or with the quantity of labor requisite for their production... the possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labor, in other words labor-power”.

Thus we can understand that public education within the capitalist economy functions as an industry like any other only its commodity is of a special type, that of labor power. Unique in that, unlike any other commodity, it can produce new values by itself becoming exploited labor.

Now we have shown clearly how the modern public school system meets two of our aforementioned criteria for a capitalist enterprise. Let’s explore the third, the reserve fund for capital accumulation.

In all capitalist enterprises there exists a “hoard” or a reserve fund.

“The capitalist must not only form a reserve capital to cushion price fluctuations and enable him to wait for favorable buying and selling conditions. He must accumulate capital in order to extend his production and build technical progress into his productive organism.

“In order to accumulate capital he must first withdraw in money-form from circulation a part of the surplus-value which he obtained from that circulation, and must hoard it until it has increased sufficiently for the extension of his old business or the opening of a side-line. So long as the formation of the hoard continues, it does not increase the demand of the capitalist. The money is immobilized. It does not withdraw from the commodity market any equivalent in commodities for the money equivalent withdrawn from it for commodities supplied” (Marx, Capital, Volume II).

PPS maintain a reserve fund, the “contingencies” and “unappropriated funds”, in their annual budget. As the district brags in many of their communications, they have carefully guarded this reserve, growing hoarding more year after year, just as any good corporate executive would brag about the growth of their annual profit margins. For them, expending these funds on teachers’ wages is an horrendous prospect, because the funds, are only to accumulate in advance of the future expansion of their enterprise. The funds are intended to remain out of circulation and productive use, to sit stagnant as a growing reserve, only to be accessed when economic circumstances align. In short, it operates as a fund for the accumulation of capital, an essential feature of any capitalist enterprise.

The ongoing clash between the union and the district is largely to do with the district’s attempt to protect and extend its reserve fund. The district would like to defend its ability to accumulate capital at the expense of its workers, as is the nature of all capitalist enterprises. The use of the funds to raise the existing workers’ wages to minimize the effects of inflation and for the additional wage funds needed to implement class-size caps would not constitute an advance of the enterprise, it would not create more revenue for the enterprise, and so the district must fight tooth and nail against such proposals. While the district’s “contingencies” fund is allegedly designated for “emergencies” they argue that the various social crises which have occurred over the last three years, a pandemic which took the lives of over a million workers and massive inflation which has seen costs of living skyrocket, do not qualify as an emergency.

The battle here of the union against the employer is the same for workers everywhere who are fighting against increasing exploitation and misery, against the capitalist drive towards profit and surplus-value accumulation. While the district claims workers must accept pittance wages to maintain the district’s reserve fund, for workers to accept such a premise would only mean to shield the broader capitalist class from having to appropriate more funding through their State apparatus in order to keep the district afloat in subsequent annual budgets. It would mean to accept the logic of the necessity of capital accumulation at the expense of the living standards of the working class, to advance the priority of profits over the wages of the working class, to lead the working class to accept its self-sacrifice on the alter of the almighty powers of the regime of capital itself.

Despite the panic bells the district and capital’s lackeys would like to ring, they simply cannot and will not allow a major public school district to completely collapse and dissolve; despite their veiled threats, the labor of educators is instrumental to all modern production processes.

 

In Education, There is No “Community” Interest

Public education under capitalism will always have one goal: to serve the interests of capital at the expense of the workers.

“The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class…

“The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie” (The Communist Manifesto).

Public education began to take root in the wake of the civil war in the United States. The working-class masses of the period had made free public education its rally cry and its implementation was a concession by the ruling classes to quell working class discontent and put it under its control as the industrial army of the proletariat began to come onto the historical stage in ever greater numbers; however, far from being class-neutral “community” institutions, public education was created in the image of the bourgeois world to extend its class domination. Schools became institutions to discipline the human body, to elicit new “skills” needed for modern production such as time management, adherence to a schedule, focus and routine. They become a space to socialize workers into the values and worldview of the bourgeoisie – one of shallow individualism, crude chauvinism and merciless exploitation.

“The more cultured the bourgeois State, the more subtly it lied when declaring that schools could stand above politics and serve society as a whole. In fact the schools were turned into nothing but an instrument of the class rule of the bourgeoisie. They were thoroughly imbued with the bourgeois caste spirit. Their purpose was to supply the capitalists with obedient lackeys and able workers….We say that our work in the sphere of education is part of the struggle for overthrowing the bourgeoisie. We publicly declare that education divorced from life and politics is lies and hypocrisy.

“The bourgeoisie themselves, who advocated this principle, made their own bourgeois politics the cornerstone of the school system, and tried to reduce schooling to the training of docile and efficient servants of the bourgeoisie, to reduce even universal education from top to bottom to the training of docile and efficient servants of the bourgeoisie, of slaves and tools of capital. They never gave a thought to making the school a means of developing the human personality” (Lenin, Speech at the Second All-Russia Congress Of Internationalist Teachers, 1919).

So long as the capitalist class maintains its class dictatorship, there will be no “progress” in education; the school system itself cannot break out from under the prevailing conditions that define the totality of the present society. Public education is not designed on the basis of meeting human needs; instead, it has been designed first and foremost to meet the demands for labor required by capitalist production. Ultimately capitalism is not a system which exists in a neutral “community” somehow outside the conflict of classes. Administration, as the managers of the public school enterprise, have the role of managing this production process as cheaply and efficiently as possible while driving wages down and keeping them there.

While education workers themselves may aspire to contribute to the development of full and well-rounded, conscious and ethical youth with a bright future ahead of them, this hope is consistently slashed by budget deficiencies and curriculum mandates that prioritize the demands of the labor market, while education workers are pushed to the point of mental and physical exhaustion due to the exploitative nature of the prevailing economic and social system. Meanwhile the larger social crisis brought forth by this decaying mode of production has a deep impact on children in regards to escalating levels of traumatic experiences that come with increasing material immiseration of the working class, increased isolation, depression and other mental health challenges that come from the dissolution of the social fabric as capitalist social relations creep into all aspects of life. The deepening drug epidemic and the anguish of global imperialist wars are only a few of the daily realities children and families are navigating.

Educators are at the front line of the social crisis and thus, they have a duty to working class families, to educate themselves on the concrete reality of class struggle, abandoning the rose color glasses of class collaborationism and the education system as a “community” institution where workers and bosses have an illusory common interest. Such notions can only do harm by perpetuating an insidious lie about the true nature of social life under capitalism. The experiences of trauma, exploitation and oppression that the most disadvantaged students experience is often the result of the decrepit class society we live in. As educators we of course seek to end all these conditions to empower our students with the tools of knowledge of themselves and the world around them. To feed students lies would be to do them a disservice. It is in appealing to the wider working class that teachers’ struggles will succeed, and it’s on these grounds that we seek to transform our working conditions, for ourselves and for the working-class families we serve, as fellow proletarians.

 

A Strike for PAT is a Strike for the Entire Working Class!

We again call on the OEA to mobilize its locals to take sympathy strike actions with PAT, be it through organized walk-outs or unfair labor practice pickets based on present disputes. Additionally, we call on all classified education-worker unions in the area to join with teachers and do the same. Beyond combating an isolated school board, PAT are striking against the capitalist class itself and are entering into a confrontation with a whole array of forces that require broader solidarity of the working class in the region in order to win. We, the International Communist Party, point to the need for a general strike of workers across the Portland metropolitan area to join Portland teachers on the picket lines. Beyond this, we echo the calls of the UAW for workers’ unions to begin aligning their contract expiration dates to May 1 in anticipation of a potential general strike in 2028.

The larger economic crisis unfolding and the prevailing crisis in education have created conditions for a nation-wide strike wave. From Los Angeles, California to Vancouver, Washington to the “Red for Ed” movement in the American South, teachers’ strikes have been winning where they have the broad solidarity of both licensed and classified education workers that strike together, and where teachers’ unions in multiple districts have come out on the picket lines at the same time. These are important lessons for OEA to consider in the navigation of the Portland teachers’ strike if educators want to walk away with the best deal possible. The manner in which education workers’ wages are set and pubic education funded is all conditioned by class society. Capitalism has made education in its own image: an industry for producing workers for the labor market, instead of a “community” institution dedicated to enriching and improving the lives of future generations. Despite education workers’ best efforts, the system continues to fail students and educators alike, as at its core it is designed to be exploitative and can ultimately only deliver results on the basis of capitalist economy and profit, not human need.

Education workers must recognize the real class antagonisms that prevail in the education system and generalized throughout class society. They must link arms with their fellow educators and the wider working class whose children they aim to serve, toward the goal of ending the rotten exploitative system that brings so much harm and destruction to the world. First they must work to reforge a class unionist movement, dumping the old defeatist practices of business unionism in favor of a type of union movement that recognizes the class nature of society and organizes itself around wide-spread, mass strike action of the entire working class.

- ITS TIME FOR OEA TO TAKE UP A STATE-WIDE STRIKE STRATEGY!
- TEACHERS NEED A GENERAL STRIKE!
- LET’S STRIKE, LET’S FIGHT, WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!