LV Education Special Jan 2010

Órgano de la sección simpatizante de la Liga Internacional de los Trabajadores (Cuarta Internacional) en Estados Unidos Paper of the sympathizer section of the International Workers League (Fourth International) in the United States

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No. 05 - Enero de 2010 / January 2010 / Email: vozdelostrabajadores@yahoo.com / lavozdelostrabajadores.co.cc/ www.litci.org / US$ 1 (colaboración / donation)

SPECIAL ON EDUCATION

NO CUTS! NO FEES! Education should be free!

THE STRUGGLE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION IN CALIFORNIA

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: The Movement For Public Education In California November 18th – 20th: The Success of The Coordinated Week of Action Across Public Education The University of California On Strike!

As Our Resistance Expands, So Does The Repression Against Us Chapter 2: Unraveling The Layers of Capitalist Governance The Republicans and Democrats Imposed Severe Cuts To California’s Budget From The UCs To K-12: All Public Education Is Under Attack!

Obama: Where Is The Bailout For Jobs and Education?

The UC Administration’s Ongoing Plan of Privatization Who Is Our Target: The Sacramento vs. UC Administration Debate Chapter 3: Key Political Debates Within Our Movement The Real Meaning of Unity and Solidarity The Objective Basis of Student-Worker Solidarity: Students Are Also Workers Which Way Forward For The Workers In The Movement For Public Education? The Need To Democratize The Unions And To Increase Rank-and-File Mobilization The Need For Democratic Forms of Organization In The Student Movement The Fight Against Racism And Inequality In Public Education The Fight Against Oppression In Our Movement Massive Direct Actions and Occupations Chapter 4: Socialist Perspectives On The Struggle To Defend Public Education Understanding The Larger Situation: The Privatization Of Education, The Budget Crisis, and The Crisis Of Capitalism The Logic of Privatization of Public Education: Starving Capital The Neo-Liberal Capitalist Method: Starving The State Budgets The Solution: Organizing The Starving People!

Organizing Our Resistance and Our Political Power Mobilization pays: we need to keep fighting together!

Increasing and Extending The Self-Mobilization of Students and Workers Everywhere Unifying All the Emerging and Latent Struggles Make March 4th A Day of Strike And Mass Direct Actions The Need For A Political Leadership Annexes The Struggle For Black Liberation In Brazil Students Set Free in Japan

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1) The Movement For Public Education in California

Students and workers challenge budget cuts and fee hikes

Nov. 18th- 20th: The Success of the Coordinated Week of Action Across Public Education

The Nov. 18th through 20th protests launched the second wave of struggle in the UC system. This struggle started on Sept. 24th, when 5,000 students and workers walked-out and rallied and marched against the privatization of public education and social services, and against the general attack on workers and poor and oppressed communities.

This newest wave of protests, which spanned the whole UC system and all sectors of public education, was the first result of the united plan of action we collectively chose at the October 24th Mobilizing Conference to Defend Public Education organized by students and workers at UC Berkeley.

This Conference created, for the first time, the possibility for a unity and coordination of struggle across all sectors and a consciousness of this as a unified fight.

As a result, we were able to hold coordinated protest actions during the week of the UC Regents, CSU Board of Trustees, and K-12 Board of Education meetings to

shut down business as usual. Unlike September 24th, the resistance was widespread, a clear indication of the depth of the anger the budget cuts have provoked.

At Cal State Fresno, students reclaimed their library in protest against cut hours of operation. At SF State, students rallied and held a spirited sit-in style occupation of the administration office. Students at City College of SF organized a several hundred strong march to SF State in solidarity. The Oakland teachers held a week of education on the crisis.

The epicenters of this struggle were in Los Angeles and Long Beach, the sites of the Regents and Trustees meetings, and at UC Berkeley, where we held a historical three-day student and workers strike.

The University of California On Strike!

Across the UC system during these days, thousands of students, workers and faculty mobilized to protest layoffs, furloughs, and the 32% student fee hike, converging on UCLA to shut down the Regents Meeting.

They occupied a building, stopped the meeting three

times, and prevented the Regents from leaving. The vicious UC & LA police arrested 14 people and injured many more. At UCSC, 500 people blocked campus entrances and occupied the administrative and other buildings. And at UC Davis, 52 protesters were arrested during a sit-in, followed by more building occupations.

The grad student instructors and technical and clerical workers at UCB called for a two-day strike.

Students took up the call with a three-day strike and they were joined by a weeklong strike of the Bears Lair food court.

During the strike, thousands of students and workers picketed and rallied on Sproul. Then, we took to the streets, marching to both Berkeley High and the community college. Outside we chanted: “One Struggle!

One Fight! Education Is A Right!”. This demonstration of solidarity made it clear that for us this is a struggle to make education a right, not to preserve it as a privilege. “Whose University?

Your University!”, we told the BCC and Berkeley High students.

On day two of the strike, we held the picket lines, organized an Open University

of workshops and lectures, marched on work-sites and protested cuts to custodial staff by delivering uncollected garbage to the administration’s doorstep. The administration responded with sweeping repression of free speech, using campus police to shut down several planned events and to seize protest banners.

On the third day, after the Regents pushed through the fee hike, students took over Wheeler Hall, demanding the reinstatement of 38 laid-off AFSCME workers, a commitment from the UCB administration to protect Rochdale, a student affordable housing unit, and a fair contract for the Bear’s Lair. The administration responded with an army of police equipped with tear gas, tasers, and rubber bullets.

The administration’s brutal use of police force against protesters and its refusal to address the occupiers’ demands polarized the campus, breaking through the prevailing apathy and rekindling the struggle. The class nature of this fight figured prominently in chants like, “Where’s our Chancellor? In his mansion!”

With the support of thousands of students and workers who threw their bodies

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in front of the army of police battalions, the students held the hall for 12 hours and successfully negotiated to have their charges reduced.

This was a major victory and it showed, beyond a doubt, our strength: the enormous power students and workers have when we act as one.

As Our Resistance Expands, So Does The Repression Against Us

The message we sent with our coordinated actions over these three days couldn’t have been more clear, that we overwhelming reject the project of corporate restructuring of public education and that the efforts of the government, from Obama down to the Schwarzenegger-appointed Regents, to push it through will not got through as easily as they imagined.

The militant worker and student strike, the occupation, and the protest actions across California provoked a new surge in campus mobilizations. At UC Berkeley, the three-day paralyzation of the campus and the severity of the Regents decisions radicalized a whole new layer of students and workers whose level of political consciousness was transformed on the picket lines and in the barricades.

Only days later, UC Berkeley students and community supporters marched on the Oakland courthouse in support of those arrested.

From there, we took over the UC Office of the President to protest the administration’s arrogant refusal to negotiate with protesters.

At Cal State San Francisco, in a major escalation, students took over the Business Building and held it for almost 24 hours with the support of hundreds from across the Bay Area outside. On the picket lines outside the occupation, students held mini General Assemblies to plan for a statewide shutdown on March 4th. More than a dozen students were arrested and the administration refused to address the students’ demands.

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Since the strike days, the UC Berkeley administration´s willingness to employ violence against students and workers has increased dramatically. From the calling out of Homeland Security against planned protests of the Chancellor´s Free Speech Movement commemoration to the early morning arrest of 66 students and community members who we studying and sleeping in Wheeler Hall in the lead-up to finals week, it is clear that they are trying to criminalize our movement.

In fact, by the end of the semester, the administration had made over 100 protestrelated arrests at UC Berkeley alone. As the UC and Schwarzenegger administrations gear up for new levels of repression, even openly making statements against “terrorism” and for students to be “prosecuted under the fullest extent of the law”, we face an urgent need to strengthen our ability to resist.

2) Unraveling The Layers of Capitalist Governance The Republicans and Democrats Imposed Severe Cuts to California’s Budget

Public services, which were won by the working class through years of militant struggle in the 1930’s and 1960’s, are one of the primary targets of the budget cuts. The corporate project of privatizing public services is being planned within the hallways of the California Assembly and the Congress. In the case of public education, which is one of the main public services under attack, the cuts handed down from Sacramento are being implemented by a totally compliant UC administration.

That the California legislature is responsible for

pushing for the privatization of education and other social services by cutting public funding is indisputable. In an unparalleled show of cross-party cooperation in late July, the Democrats and Republicans announced new measures to balance California’s budget that imposed severe cuts on education programs and critical social services, which included massive layoffs, furloughs and the casualization of the labor force.

The plan for implementing the budget cuts was enthusiastically approved by an assembly with a Democratic majority.

This proved once again that both parties represent first and foremost the interest of the corporations and

The July 2009 cuts to the California Budget

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5 the ruling class. These cuts are an open attack on California’s most vulnerable communities: the working class and communities of color. These communities represent the most precarious and exploited labor force and are already suffering disproportionately from layoffs, unemployment and foreclosures.

From the K-12 to the UC: Public Education Is Under Attack!

The budget cuts have given the UC President the perfect opportunity to continue privatizating this public education institution. The public system of the UC is facing once again a budgetary deficit from state funding that comprises between $800 million and $1 billion, but this deficit (which represents less than 3% of the total budget) is the pretext used

by President Yudof to implement pay cuts (4%-10%), furloughs (11 to 26 days), cut funding to the campuses, imposed a systemwide restructuring that has resulted in massive layoffs (600 for UCB alone), and student fee increases (43% since Spring ‘09), while refusing to use the more than $5 billion that the institution has in reserve funds.

The California State Universities and the community college system, however, which do not have billions in reserves and which provide public higher education to more than 3 million students across the state, have felt the effects of the cuts more than the UCs. The CSUs alone enroll 450,000 students are now facing a $584 budget reduction. As a result, CSUs have implemented 10% fee increases plus an additional $672 annually, massive cuts in classes and programs, and an Spring 2010 application freeze, which will reduce enrollment by 40,000 students for the 2010-2011 academic year. Additionally, CSU employees have an imposed 2-day furlough per month and are also facing lay-offs.

There are 110 community colleges in California that offer affordable education to 2.6 million students. With the new cuts to categorical funds ($800 million), which represents between 32% and 62% of the total budget, they will be forced to reduce enrollment by 250,000 students, to cut classes, and raise fees. For example, in the Peralta Community College District, the cuts to programs like Extended Opportunity Programs and Services and Disabled Students and Program Services disproportionately affect the most disadvantaged students.

The largest cuts in public education, however, have been directed to the K-12 system, which is rapidly accelerating towards a privatized education model through the rise of charter schools - a shift that the federal government actively supports. 20,000 K-12 teachers have been laid-off, resulting in the closure of numerous schools and increased class sizes, some of which reach 50 or more students per class in the poor-

est communities.

The California legislature, however, cannot be held solely responsible for the privatization of education and social services.

The logic of privatizating the K-12 educational system was introduced earlier by the Bush administration. They accomplished this through constant cuts in federal funding to public education and through the No Child Left Behind Act, which ties funding to a school’s test performance without regard for the unique challenges that underprivileged communities face. Under the Bush administration, the initial steps towards merit-based pay for teachers were also put in place. The Obama administration has done nothing but continue Bush’s “educational” policy of dual privatization. Obama has ratified the No Child Left Behind Act and is a strong supporter of charter schools, the most recent example being his introduction of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top program which

would effictively make it easier to shut down struggling public schools and turn public K-12 schools into charter schools.

Where Is The Bailout For Jobs And Education?

The most important contradiction of the Obama government is the fact that he continues to spend trillions of dollors on the war and on the very financial corporations that caused the crisis, while a record 20 million people collected unemployment during 2009 and over 5 million families lost their houses.

The total cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan has already exceeded the cost of the Vietnam war, reaching more than $915 billion since it began in 2001. In 2009 alone, the Obama government spent $136 billion funding the war instead of funding education and providing good jobs for the unemployed. Whereas 58% of the federal budget goes to the defense department, only 7% and 5% go to education and health services.

Proposed Discretionary Budget, FY 2009

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Most recently, Obama announced that he would send 30,000 additional soldiers to Afghanistan, for which he is asking an additional $30 billion. Ironically, this money amounts to more than the entire budget deficit in the state of California.

The UC Administration’s Ongoing Plan of Privatization

Though Obama, Schwarzenegger, Yudof, the Regents, and the UC administrators continually push the blame for the budget cuts and the crisis on each other, they are, in fact, one institution with a singular project of privatization.

The UC Regents and UC administration have done nothing to oppose the decrease in state funding over the years. In fact, they continue to create deals with private companies that will fund, control and own university research, as it was the case with the BP deal in August 2007. The deal was imposed over faculty and student objections, forcing some research programs to close that did not suited BP’s interests.

But the privatization process is not only a matter of control over funding; it is also a matter of affordability and employment: the Regents have increased student fees by 209% since 2001, and the UC administration is out-sourcing more and more services to private companies. They already out-sourced part of the cleaning service (which is supposed to be done by public workers) to ABM, and are now doing the same to the campus bus services.

But this is not and accident, UC President Mark Yudof and the UC Regents come from the same social spheres and clearly represent the same class interests. The UC Regents, who are appointed directly by the Governor, are selected from elite investment banking, military profiteering, real estate, and media circles. As their corporate backgrounds suggest, they represent and protect pri-

vate and business interests as well as the Schwarzenegger administration´s program of privatizing public education. Sherry Lansing, for example, is the CEO of Paramount Pictures Motion Picture Group; Judith Hopkinson is the COO of Ameriquest Capital Corporation; Russell Gould is the Senior VP of Wachovia Bank. Richard Blum had been making millions of dollars out of the war through defense contracts with Perini (a company he owns) besides being the former Director of Northwest Airlines Corp.

(1989-2005) and the Vice Chairman of URS Corporation (top defense contractor in the US) from 1975 to 2005, in which he continues to hold 111 000 shares.

Their project is one of transforming the public university into a financial institution in order to make financial and real state speculations, and to generate profit by selling scientific and medical “products” to private interests. The Regents also use their position to make money through the UC. For example, in 2005 URS Corp. was hired to provide “program management services” for the development of a $200 million Southeast Campus Integrated Project, which includes a seismic retrofit of Memorial Stadium and a substantial expansion of the Haas School of Business. UC Regent John Hotchkis’s former company (Hotchkis & Wiley) received in 2004 a $430 million contract to manage UC pension money.

6 But the problem is much deeper than the Regents as individuals. The problem is structural. The “constitutional autonomy” awarded to the UCs in the 1960s made the UC Regents solely accountable to the Governor and not to the people of California, and even less so to those who study and work at the UCs. From the Chancellor to the Regents, the “simple administrators” of our budgets are not really different layers who represent different interests. In fact, they are more like different cogs in the same machine: the ruling classes´ machine for generating profits from our work.

In this sense, the UC will never be a truly public and democratic university until we change its structure of governance and its social content. A public university should not be administered by appointed and corrupt representatives of corporations but by democratically elected representatives of the students and workers of the UC and the state. The fight for a truly public education will also entail the radical transformation of its political structure to ensure the total independence of public institutions from business interests.

Who Is Our Target: The Sacramento vs.

UC Administration Debate

The increasingly urgent question and debate at the center of our movement is: who is the concrete target of our actions and demands?

Several contradictory positions on this question have emerged: the UC administration, along with most of the faculty and the Cal Democrats argue that Sacramento alone is responsible for this crisis.

According to them, the UC administration is making every reasonable effort to preserve the quality and accessibility of the UC system, but their efforts are being undermined by the legislature-imposed cuts. The legislature, they argue should therefore be the target of our anger.

In contrast, all of the UC unions and the majority of the mobilized students argue that the target of our action should be the entire UC administration, from President Yudof and the Regents down to the chancellor.

Finally, a section of the mobilized students argue that we should only confront the most immediate and visible authorities and the direct administrators on each campus, i.e. the Chancellor and the brutal police department he uses to forcefully implement and protect his political project.

Although targeting the actual administration for their role in privatizing the UC system and destroying the UC workforce is indeed necessary – indeed, we must recognize the hypocrisy of all levels of the UC administration when they tell us to redirect our anger towards Sacramento – what this last position ignores is that if we want to win, we

Riot Police attacks students and workers

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7 cannot afford to narrow the political scope of our struggle just to those who are materially enforcing the cuts to public education. The administration is implementing and endorsing the very cuts that the state legislature and federal government have pushed forward through decreased

state and federal funding for public education.

It is essential that we recognize just how interconnected these two forces are. Any position that limits our struggle to simply targeting one of the layers of governance will fail to give us a strong framework for fighting the layoffs, fee

hikes, and cuts. Efforts to counter pose mobilization against the UC administrators against fighting the California Legislature forces us into an artificial binary & obscures the real structures of power we are confronting.

To understand these power structures, we have

to understand the relationship between the Regents, the UC President, and the California Legislature, and whose interests they represent. Each analysis of this relationship between the UC administration and the state is a political position with concrete implications for our struggle.

3) Key Political Debates Within Our Movement The militant worker and student occupation and strike against the corporate restructuring of public education provoked a new surge in campus mobilization by radicalizing a whole new layer of activists. This radicalization had concrete effects in the elevated level of political discussion and in the emergence of many new political debates as a result of the expansion of our struggle. The outcome of these debates will shape the future of this movement.

The Real Meaning of Unity and Solidarity

One of the main gains of the movement is the affirmation in practice of the principle of unity & solidarity between students & workers. It is important to remember that when we began this struggle, the multiple campus unions were divided, with each focusing exclusively on the concerns of their sector of the UC labor force. Similarly, students as such did not have a space to organize against the cuts independent of their affiliation with any preexisting student group, and this space needed to be created. But in order to fight against fee hikes, layoffs, privatization and racism, it is necessary to unite in a broader, stronger movement that will fight for a program addressing these demands. The only way to build a stronger movement is by building concrete unity between students and workers, not just with statements of support, but through a shared political project and by fighting side

Students and workers unity is critical

by side in united and collectively planned actions.

The role of SWAT, and later of the Workers Caucus, has been prominent in materializing both the unity of the students and the workers and the unity among the workers. The biggest evidence of this unity was visible during the three days of worker strikes (9/24, 10/18 and 10/19) where hundreds of students joined workers’ picket lines, and then on November 20th, where 2,000 students and workers linked arms in solidarity with the Wheeler 43 occupiers and refused to leave the campus until their comrades were liberated.

But these visible demonstrations of solidarity are the result of the invis-

ible work of educating the workforce and the students.

In this sense, the Physical Education lecturers gave the strongest demonstration of and lesson in worker solidarity last spring when they led a remarkable fight grounded in both rankand-file self-organization and student mobilization against impending layoffs by refusing to accept a single layoff in their unit.

The administration tried to break the lecturers’ solidarity by imposing a 50% cut in their appointments and by issuing layoff notices to them only a few months later, but the Physical Education lecturers of the university demonstrated their moral and political strength and gave a concrete mean-

ing to ILWU’s “An injury to one, is an injury to all.”

It is also crucial for the struggle to organize unity in action and solidarity among all the students. We need to overcome the existing divisions between students of color and other student organizers, just as it is essential that we acknowledge and try to address the other divisions that our oppressive society and university reproduce. All working class and middle class students are hit by the attacks, even if some groups are disproportionately affected.

Students must recognize not only that students of color and underrepresented groups are disproportionately affected by the cuts on campus, but that

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their communities are continuously excluded from the public education system and marginalized in all the public institutions. The extension of the struggle beyond the walls of the UCs, to include CSUs, community colleges and, above all, K-12, is therefore a necessity of the struggle.

Nevertheless, this unity and solidarity cannot be constituted through dialogue and discussion alone. It can only be concretely built around a common program of struggle that will allow all students and workers to see the demands of the exploited, the most oppressed, and the excluded as their demands as well, and to be able to fight side by side against a common enemy.

The Objective Basis of Student-Worker Solidarity: Students Are Also Workers

As this historical movement to defend public education develops, the participation and the leadership of the workers becomes an increasing critical issue. The reality is that the unity and self-organization of the best union activists has been overshadowed by the vitality and radicality of the student movement. The movement for public education is a giant with two main legs -- the student leg and the worker leg -- but we need to reinforce and continue building the second one.

It is therefore necessary (though it will be a challenge) to address the diversity of social conditions -- workers and students, and studentworkers -- in order to base our political strategy of organization and mobilization in material reality.

We need to go beyond the abstraction of the “student” and identify both what unites and what divides the student body. The common condition of students who seek an affordable and quality education unites all students as such, but the differences of their social condition divides them, and they are also divided by relations of oppression. These differences of social condi-

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Protesters in front of occupied building in SFSU

tion are very likely to remain a major obstacle in achieving full student unity on campus: our respective class positions and social backgrounds usually determine our willingness to fight against privatization of public services and against union busting.

If unity through academic status has been one of the most powerful forces of student mobilization in history: the Free Speech Movement in 1962, more radical movements have emerged from within campus class struggle and the fight against oppression, like the Third World Liberation Front Strike in 1969. The emergence of class struggle on campus will gather the ones that “cannot afford” not to fight back against the attacks of the administration and will strengthen the solidarity of these students and studentworkers with the rest of the workers on campus.

To this end, we should not ignore one of the most powerful tendencies of contemporary capitalism: the increasing proletarization of the student body. The majority of students are increasingly becoming student-workers, and student debt has doubled in the last 10 years, which forces students to enter the labor market right after they graduate to pay the debt back. This phenomenon is polarizing the students in relation to workers in society: they are beginning to realize more and more that

their identity as students is at best transitional, and at worst, intermittent: they are all workers in the process of training, most of them working already.

It is thus essential that students recognize the necessity of their unconditional support for workers both on and off campus as the rank-and-file mobilize their numbers. Students will become wage-earners, and it is clear that deteriorating working conditions and the violation of the rights of one part of the workforce is a mortal blow to the working class as a whole. The centrality of workers in this struggle must be recovered. The real mobilization of workers should not be replaced by the mobilization of the students in support of the workers. Students must help to agitate, mobilize, and work with the rankand-file as the rank-andfile organize themselves instead of taking action in the name of or for the sake of the workers.

Which Way Forward For The Workers in The Movement For Public Education?

The Need To Democratize The Unions and To Increase Rank-andFile Mobilization

In order to organize the rank-and-file workers in this struggle, workers must organize themselves by agitating and mobilizing the rankand-file workforce inside ev-

ery union. But workers will not get involved if they are unable to create democratic spaces or democratic methods of organizing. Union activists took the lead by forming the Workers Caucus at the beginning of the Fall semester that was intended to be a space for real workers democracy and involvement of the rank-and-file. This was a good start but the reality is that the massive and democratic mobilization of the workers in this struggle is still a goal we need to keep fighting for, given that the WC has not managed to involve a significant number of rank-and-file workers beyond the ones who created it.

The majority of the rankand-file workers on our campuses have not had the opportunity to be a part of either democratic discussions or democratic decisionmaking, both of which are essential to fight back the pay-cuts and layoffs. To the contrary, most of the union leaders have made decisions regarding whether or not to accept furloughs without calling massive meetings of the membership to discuss the situation with them and decide together. The result of this has been frustration and demoralization for many workers who had the furloughs imposed by the UC administration sometimes in collaboration with the unions, and who now are facing lay-offs. In order to stop and reverse lay-offs and furloughs, workers need to force the discussion in their

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9 unions and among their coworkers of a concrete plan of action that will seriously mobilize to stop the attacks.

We need to promote holding open union meetings regularly so the rankand-file workers can decide the steps of their mobilization themselves and have a real voice in the content and the procedures of the meetings. The experience of the Graduate Students who, given the total absence of their union in this fight, created and developed the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) as a form of democratic selforganization is an example and a gain of the movement.

The GSOC regularly organized between 50 and 300 graduate student employees in a democratic fashion and organized 3 days of strike. We also need to produce more literature written by workers for workers, like flyers and bulletins to educate and agitate.

A militant and democratic worker leadership at both the campus level and the level of the whole movement must be developed in order to oppose bureaucratic or collaborationist forces, and to offer a visible alternative for workers who want to fight in truly democratic organizations. As this fight is been extended to public workers and other fighting sectors, there is an increasing need for alternative rank-and-file leadership. Spaces such as the Workers Caucus at UCB  and the local and

regional March 4th committees should be as open and democratic as possible, where there is more of a rank-and-file presence and voice. This will only be possible if we do the painstaking work with the rank-andfile in every union in order to mobilize a real base.

The Need For Democratic Forms of Organization In The Student Movement

Another gain of the movement has been the creation and conservation of the General Assemblies or Mass Meetings, which provide an independent space for the democratic self-organization of students and workers. This very issue has been a crucial debate in the student movement. Why are such spaces necessary?

Open spaces where students and workers can discuss and coordinate their struggles do not currently exist in the university, where the formal or bourgeois forms of democracy such as the ASUC or the Graduate Assembly are the only voice of “representation” available to the students. These bodies are used to speak in the name of the students, but do not actually allow the participation of the nonelected students. They conduct “discussions” using bureaucratic rules (such as Robert rules) that exclude any possible debate. Rather than participating in the “bourgeois democracy” offered by these oppressive institutions, we need to de-

Students and workers interrupt Regents ' meeting in UCLA

velop real “workers’ democracy”: a democracy of workers and students created by the workers and students themselves. Ultimately, this is the kind of democracy we are fighting for not only in our university (democratizing the Regents, the curriculum, etc.), but in our society, where the workers decide and organize all the aspects of the social and economic life in a democratic fashion.

In the absence of real democratic bodies -- bodies that are public, open to all students, and where all students can talk, vote, debate and organize -- the movement cannot fully develop or will develop in very undemocratic ways, where official, secret or small, unrepresentative groups talk, act and negotiate in the name of the students. The only way to increase our base of mobilization is to involve a growing number of students in the discussion and planning of our actions.

If we choose to defend these democratic space as a necessary principle of organization, we also have the responsibility of addressing the legitimate concerns or criticisms of the students and workers who participate in them.

The General Assemblies and Mass Meetings have had a fluctuating level of participation, but this is relatively normal because these spaces emerge out of and for the struggle, which makes them contingent on the evolution of the mobilization. If there sometimes has been a lack of outreach and diffusion of the meeting times and locations, it is due in part to the administration’s decision to constantly obstruct our attempts to create a space for democratic organizing. Yet we also need to make a concerted effort to ensure that the GAs or Mass Meetings are as inclusive as possible for working students, workers and students of color by shortening the length of the meetings, recognizing the centrality of their demands and concerns to the movement, and fully incorporating those demands and concerns into the movement.

Some have criticized the GAs for not being action-oriented. The first assemblies had to address the multitude of problems regarding the lack of student unity within the emerging movement, and this often came at the expense of organizing GA-led actions during our first month of struggle. But it is also important not to counterpose the democratic process of organizing the movement (the process by which political points, actions and demands are discussed and voted on) with the organization of specific actions. There are several forms of “action” (actions that are different from occupations), which need to be organized democratically; in this sense, the GA’s have take action.

We need to remember that the GA voted on and organized, with the workers and the GSOC, the two major mobilization events on September 24th and November 18th and 19th. The strike and the walkout have, along with the occupation on November 20th, been the most radical and popular actions of the movement, and were organized through GAs. Moreover, the GA voted on and played a central role in organizing the October 24th Mobilizing Conference to Defend Public Education -- a conference that drew close to 800 teachers, workers, parents, and students from across all sectors of public education and that has since turned into a state-wide, nationwide, and international call to mobilize for a day of strikes and actions for public education on March 4th.

The Fight Against Racism And Inequality In Public Education

From the outset, one of the most significant and definitive challenges this movement has faced is how to fight the most immediate attack - that of the budget cuts - while not limiting ourselves to the defensive position of only struggling to “save public education”, or worse, to “save our universi-

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ty.” In many ways, what this comes down to is the challenge of understanding the social function of the university and, thus, our struggle as one that is embedded in society and subject to all of the contradictions that characterize society.

The reality is that the existing system of public education is, and has been since its inception, deeply exclusionary and racist. As UCB Labor Center Director Michael Reich explains, “Education is instrumental in the legitimization of inequality and its transmission from one generation to the next.” This inequality is not specific only to the educational system, it is entrenched in all the aspects of our society (especially in the segregation of the labor force and criminalization of youth), but it is reproduced everyday by the educational institutions.

The reality is that the very content of what is taught in class and the way it is taught also contribute to racial and other forms of oppression (gender, sexuality, nationality). This takes the form both of the constant reproduction of racist ideology in the curriculum and also of the very blatant everyday racism of some professors, often directed at their own students, in the classroom. Take for instance the experience of an undocumented student whose professor suggests that “illegals” should all be jailed and deported and that we should put landmines along the US/Mexico border. Incidents like these are a daily ccurrance and are even considered within the bounds of appropriate in academia.

This is why students of color have been fighting for the Third World College at UC Berkeley in 1969, and for Ethnic Studies departments in 1968 at SFSU and more recently in San Francisco high schools.

Racism, though, is not only a “cultural” or “epistemological” problem, it is truly rooted in the material social reality, and this is why it is linked to class. To reduce the fight against rac-

ism to a fight against “racist theories” is a political reduction that abandons the fight to smash institutional and economic structures that produce and reproduce segregation and exclusion, and that sustain all the racist epistemologies and cultural constructions. We can see that in how the current economic crisis is materially affecting the communities of color in a disproportionate way: in December 2009, while the nationwide unemployment rate was 10.2%, it was of 15.7% for blacks, and 13.1% for Latinos. And the same inequalities are repeated in the foreclosure rates (New York Times, Nov. 16th 2009).

If we focus on education, we can see this dynamic clearly in the K-12 sector, where working class students of color are sent to the most underfunded and underresourced schools. These schools consistently have the highest drop out rates in the district, and many send more students to the military or prison than they do to the university. The result is a segregation in the education system where quality public schools and public education in general are barely accessible for students of color. As an example, in 2001, only 14% of the Latino students of the San Diego Unified School district where elligible for college (UC, CSU), while

10 they constituted 39% of the population. The same happened with African-American students: they constituted 16% of the population but only 8% were elligible.

(Still Separate, Still Unequal, A look to Racial Inequality in California Schools 47 years after Brown v.

Board of Education, May 2001) Is this coincidental? Is it the fault of the students or their families?

No, the problem is structural.The overall state spending in the prison system has increased by 126% from 1984 to 2004. More concretely: since 1985, the California government has built 20 prisons but only one new CSU and UC campus.

The priorities of the current Governor are quite clear, instead of funding public education he continues the criminalization of working class youth, that in California is primarily youth of color: “It has been projected that over the next five years the state’s budget for locking up people will rise by 9 percent annually compared with its spending on higher education which will rise only by 5 percent. By the 2012-2013 fiscal year $15.4 billion will be spent on incarcerating Californians as compared with $15.3 billion spent on educating them.”

(SF Chronicle, May 29 2007) While in the K-12 sector, racial oppression operates primarily through multiple forms of marginalization, it is maintained in the higher education system through exclusion. The 1960 Master Plan of Education laid out California’s system of higher education. It created three tiers of higher education that would give all students access to some form of higher education, regardless of their economic or class background. The UC would be the most elite strata, guaranteeing admission to

the top 12.5% of graduating high school students; it was followed by the CSU, which would admit the top 1/3rd; and finally, the community colleges, which would be open to all students and residents. Students enrolled in community colleges would then have the opportunity to transfer into a CSU or a UC to earn a bachelor’s degree.

Although the threetiered system was designed with the intention of making public higher education accessible to all residents of California, there were serious problems with its original structure. Notably, there was never any pretense of affording unrestricted university access to all graduating high school students; in fact, only the top 1/3rd were to have access. While the rest would be able to transfer to the university once completing basic coursework at community colleges, only a small percentage ended up doing so. Indeed, the kind of education offered at the community colleges and even at the state schools was fundamentally different from that offered at the UC and did not necessarily prepare their students to continue their education at the university successfully. Ultimately, each tier was specifically designed to serve a different sector of the future workforce, thereby recreating and preserving the existing economic, class and labor divisions and exclusions within higher education from the onset.

Since its inception, the Master Plan has been revised as the state’s changing labor needs have necessitated the expansion or contraction of each labor pool. As Roger Freeman, who served as education advisor to Nixon, remarked with alarm during one of these revealing periods of tinkering, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat [working class]. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education.” For this reason, there has been a strong push from the ruling class towards privatization in the last decades, particularly in

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11 the UC sector.

Most recently, the structure of California´s higher education has been revised through the passage of Prop.

209. By ending affirmative action, that is an historic gain of the Civil Rights Movement, Prop. 209 significantly decreased access to higher education for the majority of working class youth who are yellow, black, and brown, to the point that today only 17% of the students of the UC Berkeley are from underrepresented groups (Latino, Native-American, African-American), while they are 26% in Stanford (SF Chronicle, January 14, 2010).

These are only the most obvious manifestations of the racist nature of the higher education system. Oppression is perpetuated on multiple, reinforcing planes, including the curriculum, the division of labor, gender, job stability, and funding for programs and resources.

The Fight Against Oppression In Our Movement

Our movement emerged within the racist and exclusionary framework of the education system. As a result, it of course finds itself locked in the same divisions as the institutions that frame its existence, divisions that benefit those institutions at the expense of our movement.

These divisions are such that, while we began this movement united around the superficially shared position of being students, we have, since the beginning, been divided materially along racial, gender, and class lines.

As a movement, our challenge is then to confront these contradictions directly and openly. However, how to go about confronting them has been less clear. What form this fight against oppression and exclusion should take continues to be a central debate within our movement, and it has been clear since the beginning of the struggle that, just as it is in society, this is and will continue to be a daily and ongoing fight within the movement.

On the one hand, there is a small but vocal portion of

the Left who have consciously tried to marginalize this discussion, arguing that such debates are artificial and, even, petit bourgeois. This section has fought against discussing oppression because, for them, it is irrelevant in the fight for public education.

This position is emblematic of the problematic history of sectors of the Left with regard to addressing oppression. The central premise of the argument is that discussions of racial oppression are counter-productive, divisive, and irrelevant. This has an historical explanation: the persecution and defeat of Left organization in this country has manage to isolate some of them from the real working class, that in California is mainly constituted of communities of color, where the experience of racial and gender oppression is a daily reality and a definitive experience.

This premise has been conclusively proven wrong by the experience of those involved in the struggle. In fact, it is these discussions that have reinforced and expanded our movement by elevating the political consciousness of those involved, strengthening our program of resistance, and giving birth to new structures of organization, such as the Critical Representation Committee and the Third World Assembly. It is as a direct result of these crucial discussions that we have made central to our organizing a understanding that this is a fight to restructure the entire racist and exclusionary education system,

that we must extend this fight to every sector to get to the heart of the problem. We have begun and will continue to expand our outreach efforts into communities of color, local high schools and community organizations, and other sectors of public education, realizing that education is being used to institutionalize class and labor divisions.

On the other hand, a section of the organized students of color on campus, who have helped play an important role in pushing this debate to the fore, have reached the conclusion that racial divisions make impossible a unified, democratic, mass movement.

Instead, they argue, students of color must act separately, maintaining the isolation that has helped defeat the fight against oppression time and again.

This policy, which was based on important initial critiques, transforms the fight against oppression from a collective one against its systematic structures to an individual one against its individual manifestations (for example, in the ignorance of the average white middle class student to issues affecting students of color). In the process, it fails to recognize both whose interests are best served by keeping us divided in this struggle and the enormous possibility and potential this movement has to push forward the fight against oppression. The reality is that the cuts are affecting all working class students, even if they are affecting students of color in a disproportionate way. The possibility to orga-

nize then a massive movement against the cuts and against racial, gender and class inequalities in our institutions has an objective base that we cannot ignore.

What is clear is that an awareness of and a fight against structural oppression within our movement will not emerge spontaneously, specifically because we live and operate within an oppressive society. It can only emerge out of an organized fight led by the oppressed, the students and workers of color, on the basis of a concrete political program that does not just break down the barriers to access, but that fundamentally transforms the structure of public education.

Our engagement with these debates within the movement has, in reality, pushed forward the mobilization of students of color.

Our first conclusion was on the need to create and cultivate open, democratic spaces for the self-organization of students of color, as no such spaces existed within the campus political culture.

We began this work first with the formation of the Critical Representation Committee, which was formed by the General Assembly. The Critical Representation Committee took the initial steps towards forming a fighting program against oppression by drafting a list of initial demands to present to the General Assembly (which then ratified the demands), and by leading a General Assembly session that specifically addressed the question of oppression.

Critical Representation Committee Demands Immediate Demands: - Reverse Proposition 209 and increase enrollment of underrepresented groups - Force the UC administration to take a position of non-cooperation with both ICE and the police on issues of immigration regarding students and workers - Guaranteed free child care for all workers and students with children - Access to financial aid for AB 540 students and higher education as a path to citizenship

Long Term Demands: - A federal system of K-12 public education where funding is based on number of students - End the No Child Left Behind Act - Papers for all undocumented students and workers - Cap the salaries of all top UC executives at no more than 3X the lowest-paid UC worker - Reverse Proposition 13 as it applies to commercial properties and institute progressive taxation

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This project has been further developed and pushed forward through the formation of the Third World Assembly. The TWA draws on the historical legacy of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), the organization that led the Ethnic Studies strikes of 1968-69 at SF State and UC Berkeley.

It seeks to reassess, update, and actualize the decolonial project of TWLF, an organization deeply tied to the decolonial struggles unfolding across the Third World at the time, and to the fight for self-determination for colonized peoples within the United States. While we honor and hope to carry forward these legacies, we base our struggle in a materialist understanding of the realities of racism today and in a realistic assessment of the successes and failures of those who came before us.

The Third World Assembly understands that the strongest and most consequential decolonial program to fight racism within the United States today is an anti-imperialist one. What this would mean concretely is having an internationalist understanding of our struggle that incorporates the fights against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to remove all the US troops from Latin America, to end NAFTA, CAFTA, Plan Mexico, Plan Colombia, and Plan Puebla-Panama, and to open the border and give papers to all. It also means defending the right to selfdetermination for Puerto Rico, Hawaii, First Nations, and all oppressed communities. The aim of the TWA is

to be a democratic space to organize students of color on campus to fight against inequality in the current educational system not only in the UCs, but starting in the K-12 and community colleges. It has then the orientation of building links with the community, specially with high school students and teachers who are currently massive cuts and privatization through the extension of charter schools.

One of the remaining weaknesses of our fight against oppression in our movement is that the debate has remained too student-centered. We need to address racial oppression also among the workforce on campus, specially with AFSCME local 3299, where the workforce is divided accross racial lines (white, black, Latino, Chinese and Filipino workers) but united accross class lines thanks to the constant efforts of the union. We still have a lot to learn about all the discussions, workshops and ideas the union activists have found to fight racism, making every sector of the workforce aware of the history and nature of the oppressed ethnicity of the other one. If we manage to involve more the workers of color in the debate, this will radicalize our political perspectives and give us a real base to work with the community.

Massive direct action and occupations

Since the November 20th occupation, a discussion over the role of occupations has become in-

12 creasingly present in our movement. What is for sure is that the only way we can fightback the cuts and win our demands is to take action. Workers and students need to organize themselves to show the real power they have in society through massive action. The discussion we need to have, then, is what are the different actions we need to organize in order to win.

To win our demands, we need to build for militant direct actions that polarize our society, showing the the real social contradictions and the urgency of action. But these actions also need to materialize our real strength, our actions are then more powerfull when they are massive, mobilizing a critical number of students and workers (massive strikes, sit-ins and occupations of workplaces). Only through these tactics can we paralyze the university, can we bring our workplaces to a halt.

Mass radical actions, when they emerge out of open, democratic discussion, have the potential to play another very important role, which is in helping transform peoples´consciousness and make a qualitative step forward in the struggle.

However, this radicalization only occurs when people can actively and fundamentally take part in the action. That is to say, it does not happen through people just observing others who take action, even if these others take action on their behalf. At the same time, we need to understand that for people to become involved and take

action, they must already have an initial level of political consciousness. To see the relationship between theory and practice in any other way would be a misunderstanding of how consciousness develops.

This is why, to build for decisive massive actions that will make it possible to win our demands, we need to educate, radicalize and organize a large number of students and workers through other forms of protest (teach-ins, townhalls, rallies, marches, study-ins, etc). Our actions need to mobilize more students who are not yet organized. We need to change the general consciousness of our campuses and schools so that, when we vote to take polarizing actions, the majority of students and workers will not only recognize the legitimacy of such militant actions but also feel strong enough to take them.

Occupations change the balance of class forces by giving the occupiers a space they can use to bargain over. This was the case in the strike in Ssangyong (South Korea), where workers occupied for 77 days with clear demands against the layoffs. They constitute also, when they are done by the majority of workers and students, a collective social experiment of an alternative organization of society. This is what happened when argentinian workers occupied their factories to make them work again.

Under the slogan “Ocupar, Resistir, Producir”, they managed to restart the production to serve the community and other fighting sectors of the working class and rehired unemployed workers to fight the crisis.

Many of these cooperatives introduced equal pay and abolished all the management hierarchy: the means and goals of production was decided in daily democratic assemblies.

However, some argue that occupations alone, no matter who participates in them, are a revolutionary act of “reclaiming space”, therefore no demands are

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13 needed, and there is no need either to involve more students in the process of taking action, because their only existance “radicalizes student consciousness”. In this case, occupations that are seen as a goal in itself, separate from the development of our movement, and appear to be isolated actions that do not result in an increased participation or radicalization of student and workers consciousness.

What radicalizes consciouness is the collective decision (that can be planned or sponatenous) of taking action against the attacks, and the solidarity in the resistance to the repression. This is what happened on Nov. 20th with the more than 2,000 students and workers holding their arms surrounding Wheeler Hall.

The discussion, then, on the possibilities for and necessity of occupations needs to be done within the framework of the goals of our movement. First, we need to build for a degree of consciousness and militancy on campus that will allow us to organize massive and popular occupations. Second, we need to organize the occupations as democratically as possible.

It is inevitable that some technical aspects of the occupation, such as exactly when and where, will have to remain secret for reasons of security. At the same time, we need urgently to make the critical difference between the “political decision” of an occupation and the “technical organization” of it. Occupations should be democratically decided by the majority of the movement up to and including the demands and the conditions of the possible negotiations.

What we need then, is to convince the majority of the students mobilized against the cuts that the way forward is not in lobying the legislature but in organizing massive strikes and occupations with the workers (not in their name) to paralyse our schools and universities until our demands are heard.

4) Socialist Perspectives on The Struggle to Defend Public Education Understanding the Larger Situation: The Privatization of Education, The Budget Crisis, And The Crisis of Capitalism

In order to have an accurate understanding of what is happening, we need to be able to connect the attack we are facing across public education with this accelerated plan of privatization, with the budget crisis in the majority of the U.S. (44 of the states of the country are in structural deficit”), and with the ongoing financial and economic crisis.

Even if these phenomena appear separated, they express the inherent contradictions of the global economic system that is capitalism / imperialism. All of these issues are therefore related and it is not an accident if one triggers the other.

The Logic of Privatization of Public Education: Starving Capital

The project of privatization of public education (and other social services) is not new, and is not specific to the United States. All of the countries that have public educations systems are facing harsh attacks. In Europe, the project of privatization of higher education was decided in 1999 with the Bolonia Declaration and in 2001 with the Lisboa Strategy. The privatization of this public good is being unevenly applied, as evidenced by the strong resistance of European students to the loss of affordable and quality education. Since 2005, there have been a series of mobilizations in different countries that have managed to slow or stop some aspects or measures of this global project.

The privatization of public services is, in the long run, the only way forward for a capitalist economic system that cannot manage to recover its profit rate. Since 1948, the profit rate in the United States has been declining.

Although it went through a

small upsurge in the 80’s and again in 2000, overall it is following a pattern of decline.

This is due to the inherent contradictions of the capitalist mode of production that make it increasingly difficult to make the same amount of profit, due to the increasing costs of the means of production and to competition.

The turn to neo-liberalism in the late 80s, illustrated by Reagan in the United States and Thatcher in the UK, put an end to the “Keynesian model” that promoted public spending as a way to stimulate the economy and increase the productivity. This model saw its limitations after the economic crisis of 1973. Since then, one of the new strategies for increasing profit has been the privatization of publiclyowned companies and public services (higher education, in particular). The second strategy has been to diminish the power of the unions and attack wages, as Reagan did in August 1981 when he fired the 11,000 striking traffic control-

lers and crushed their union.

The third characteristic of neo-liberal capitalism has taken the form of tax cuts for the rich and financial corporations. Corporate taxes represented 28% of the total tax revenue in 1950; they represent only 7% today.

The Neo-Liberal Capitalist Method: Starving The State Budgets

The only way to privatize public services is to create the appearance that the state or the federal government cannot “afford” them anymore. Since the Reagan era, the states who fund the majority of these services have been kept in permanent “strategic deficits.” They wait for opportunities when they can present decisions to cut public services as “necessary” because of budget deficits, and then they privatize these services. This has being happening over the past few years and was accelerated by the disastrous cuts in 2009.

California's Budget Reality

The Federal Government is completely compliant with this project. Obama refused in May 2009 a second stimulus package that would have bailed out California (along with other states) and allowed them to avoid the harsh cuts and the massive layoffs that resulted from their deficit. Instead, he forced Gov. Schwarzenegger to make “hard

choices” (Schwarzenegger, of course, was very happy with this situation). Obama agreed to bail out the financial corporations ($3.5 trillion) and to continue funding the war in Iraq and Afghanistan ($915 billion since 2001), but he refuses to listen to and address the needs of the students and workers of California and of the rest of the country.

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Profits of Major Financial Corporations (2008-2009)

The Solution: Organizing The People!

What we are seeing today is, therefore, the collapse of a whole economic system.

But what appears to us to be an objective problem of the capitalist system is, for the working class (99% of the population), a subjective and political problem, because this system can only continue to destroy our lives as long as the political power remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The need to mobilize to stop these attacks of the bourgeoisie (attacks that occur through fee hikes, cuts, furloughs, war) is accompanied by the need for the working class to organize to show its political power and take power back from the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Organizing Our Resistance and Our Political Power Mobilization pays: we need to keep fighting together!

Proof that the independent and democratic mobilization of students and workers pays back can be found in a statement in which the governor’s chief of staff cites last semester’s massive wave of student protest as the “tipping point” that led Schwarzenegger to propose a “new model” for higher education.

Indeed, the Gov, recently proposed raising public spending for the UCs and CSUs from the actual 7.5% to 10% of the total California budget (note that it was 13% in 1970), and in turn, cap the prison budget at 7% (currently 11% of the total CA budget).

If this announcement is a victory in the sense that it recognizes the strength of

our movement and our collective power, it is also (and primarily) an attempt to coopt and divide the movement for public education.

First, we are not fighting for a random increase of funding, but for an increase that will match our needs and that will not be implemented at the expense of other public workers and individuals. The “cuts” to “prison spending” will result in the increasing private control over the prison system, which not only threaten the detainees’ human rights, but will negatively impact the professional educators and other social public workers who work in the prison system by further casualizing the labor system. Privatization of the prison system will result in outsourcing state-run facilities (with guards, doctors, teachers and other employees) to private companies.

What we are opposing is the growth of the prison system as a racist model that continues to criminalize the youth, perpetuates the exploitation and oppression of poor communities of color, and fails to fight unemployment.

The governor’s proposal to increase funding to higher education does not satisfy the needs and demands of the UCs and CSUs, and is furthermore an attempt to isolate the “elite institutions” from the rest of the public education system, leaving K-12 and the community colleges without adequate resources.

How can we talk about “higher public education” if we do not have a decent primary and secondary education?

We must refuse this attempt to placate and divide the movement: we fight together, we stay together!

Extending the Mobilization And Solidarity of Students and Workers Everywhere

We first need to focus on increasing the agitation and mobilization of the students and workers in every school or workplace that is affected by the cuts. In this sense, the regional and city-based March 4th strike/ actions committees have a key role to play by taking on this outreach effort.

In order to build a base for March 4th and the continuation of our struggle, we need to be able to involve more and more students and workers in the democratic process of organizing the movement. Therefore, our efforts to outreach and agitate should bring new people to the general assemblies, mass meetings, building meeting, union meetings, etc. Wherever these spaces do not exist, we need to create them.

Unifying All the Emerging and Latent Struggles

We must unify all the emerging struggles inside every sector of public education. K-12 teachers are being attacked across the state. The United Teachers of Richmond are losing their health-care benefits and are facing unprecedented increases in class sizes.

Meanwhile, their union leadership is actively promoting the charterization of the school district and went so far as to forcibly ratify a regressive contract by manipulating the vote counting process. In Oakland, many schools are closing, and in Los Angeles, the school district was ready to give away 250 schools in the district to

charters. Due to the mobilization of the rank-and-file UTLA members, however, only 37 were charterized.

These struggles are deeply connected to the fight we face in public higher education, and as such, must be linked to the mobilizations across the CCs, UCs and CSUs. The failure of union leadership to organize the fight against the budget crisis and cuts can also be seen in the struggles of public workers outside of the education sector. Rank-and-file members of SEIU Local 1000 authorized a call for a strike in the summer when the cuts were made public, but instead of organizing a united action of the workers, the union leadership preferred to “lobby” the legislature to negotiate to reduce the layoffs.

In light of the lack of union leadership, rank-and-file members have taken it upon themselves to fight for their rights. Throughout the month of December, hundreds of prison teachers protested the layoffs of 1,000 prison educators and the elimination of more than 30 vocational programs in state prisons. The same happened with SEIU 1021, which represents over 54 000 public workers (city and county workers, healthcare and social services) in Northern California, when the rank-and-file managed twice to vote down a tentative contract agreement that included layoffs before the leadership eventually imposed the contract.

In order to coordinate these struggles across the different sectors of California and to determine a common program of action, United Public Workers for Action has called for a Public Workers Mobilizing Conference Saturday February 20th in San Francisco.

Make March 4th A Day of Strike And Mass Direct Actions

The October 24th Conference voted to organize a statewide day of strike and actions on March 4th. We must make March 4th a day of mass direct action where we can show the power of the work-

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15 ing class when it is organized and taking action. If we, the majority of workers and students, are the ones who make this society work, we should also be the ones making the political decisions. By withholding our labor and stopping business as usual, we can show our strength!

Therefore, it will not enough to pass resolutions inside union locals or to give our flyers and post posters in workplaces and streets. We need to find the people who want to fight and organize the rank-and-file workers so they can democratically decide which actions they want to take. We must argue for and defend the necessity of the strike, but it is equally, if not more, important to organize and respect the democratic decision of the rank-and file, even if it results in other forms of action. We should involve the majority of the workers and students who want to fight and make this day OUR day of mass direct action. Agitation on the day of, or the day before, March 4th will not build a base for a real movement.

It is essential that we get the maximum of people involved in the process of organizing for March 4th.

The Need For A Political Leadership

For this movement to succeed, we must also provide an alternative political leadership for the workers who want to fight, especially inside their unions. This fight is inseparable from the political fight in our unions for workers democracy, the end of staff privileges and the independence of working class organizations from bourgeois

parties, such as Democrats and Republicans.

We also need to be able to organize the non-unionized workers and to develop a democratic base of organization for students, unemployed workers and community members who want to fight. We believe that in this acute crisis, the process of mobilization and struggle will change the political consciousness of many through the experience and understanding of the inherent inequalities and contradictions of US imperialism. But our task is not only to show this contradiction to the fighting masses, it is also to transform the situation: we must fight for the political power necessary to change this system.

The bourgeoisie has its own leadership that is in government and is ruling the state for the interest of the corporations. The working class, though, has no strong political organization, either in the U.S. or in the rest of the world, with which to defend its interests and abolish class society.

Our party, La Voz De Los Trabajadores (Worker’s Voice), a sympathizing section of the LIT-CI (International Workers LeagueFourth International), is committed in building a revolutionary socialist organization to fight for the emancipation of the working class.

We know, however, that we cannot do this work alone, and we do not pretend to be doing it. This is why we are working towards regrouping the left revolutionary forces in this country and on an international level (trotskysts or not) on the basis of a political and programmatic discussion among the militant organizations and individuals that fight with us. We want to rebuild the Fourth International, founded by all the revolutionaries that split with Stalinism in 1938, because we believe that the party of the working class under a globalized imperialist economy should also be an international party that fights for socialism with worker’s democracy. If you want to help us in this task, join us! =

Who We Are La Voz De Los Trabajadores is a revolutionary socialist organization. We are the sympathizing organization of the International Workers League (LIT-CI) in the United States. Rooted in the struggles of the immigrant working class & the fight for militant, democratic trade unions and other workers’ and people’s organizations that defend the principle of class independence, La Voz De Los Trabajadores emerged in the California in 2008.

We are fighting to build a revolutionary party with mass influence to advance the interests & elevate the political consciousness of exploited & oppressed communities. Our goal is to mobilize the working class to take power through a socialist workers’ government. As workers, we understand that our ability to effectively organize to fight for our class interests is directly linked to our ability to construct strong, multi-racial, proletarian organizations capable of giving theoretical & political coordination to our struggles.

We reject capitalist parties like the Democrats, the Republicans & the Green Party whose political project not only openly protects business interests at the expense of workers but is also actively undermining & oppressing our communities. President Obama, whose overwhelming base of support was the working class & communities of color, is no different. Since taking office, he has presided over the greatest transfer of wealth from the working class to the financial elite in history, has continued the militarization of the border & the persecution of immigrants, & has extended some of the most repressive legislation from the Bush & Clinton regimes, including the Defense of Marriage Act, the Patriot Act, & the No Child Left Behind Act. Further, the Democrats & Republicans are leading an imperialist offensive around the world & are continuing the occupations of Iraq & Afghanistan. We see that only with a revolutionary workers´party can we fight oppression & exploitation.

We understand the United States as both an imperialist & colonial power. We defend the right to self-determination for colonized peoples both within this country & internationally, including Native Americans & the people of Puerto Rico. We are deeply proud to join the long trajectory of anti-racist struggle in the United States. As W.E.B. Du Bois said, “The emancipation of [humanity] is the emancipation of labor & the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, & black.”

The struggle for a revolutionary party in the US is inseparable from the struggle for a revolutionary international party.

That is the heritage of Marx, Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The International organization which La Voz is a sympathizer organization is grounded in the Morenist tradition, which is a Trotskyist current born in Latin America. Our origins & experience of struggle in Latin America, far from the centers of world power, frame our understanding of the fight against global imperialism & the recolonization of the Americas. We call for the reconstruction of a democratically-centralized Fourth International as the organ of the international proletarian struggle for socialism.=

Join La Voz de Los Trabajadores!

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LOADING... Demands!

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The Struggle For Black Liberation In Brazil There is an increasing anger among workers. In many unions opposition caucuses emerge. A member gave us this brief interview on the general situation. There is an increasing anger among workers. In many unions opposition caucuses

LA VOZ - We are speaking to you from UC Berkeley a university known for its history of resistance to oppression and for the defense of civil rights. Our struggle today is the continuation of these struggles. We know, from your repeated participation in the World Social Forum, that you research and have been active in the fight against oppression in Brazil, as well. So, first of all, could you please introduce yourself to our readers?

I am a university professor (of History, Communications and Arts) in a private institution in Brazil and, since the beginning of the 1980’s I’ve been involved in political movements. Being black and poor – living in a “cortiço” in a city of the ABC Area, in São Paulo (the same region where the strikes and struggles emerged that led to the formation of PT and CUT , the movements that overthrew the dictatorship) – I began, first, to organize in the Catholic church, the “pueblistas”, by this time. Afterwards, a number of issues, including the fact that I am also a gay man, distanced me from the church and I got involved in one of the many socialist groups of the time, the “Convergência Socialista”, a Marxist-Trotskyist organization that was one of the founders of the Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores – Unificado, in which I am still a member and an organizer, of both the black and the gay caucuses. Besides that, I usually write in the party’s weekly newspaper.

LA VOZ - This kind of approach, which combines the demands of the oppressed and a socialist perspective is not so common today, neither inside the race and gender movements, nor inside the socialist organizations themselves. How do you explain the perspective of PSTU? First it is not a tradition only of PSTU. Some other groups and parties are still acting in this perspective.

Even if we are a minority in the movement, I think that we are just continuing a tradition which is the “real” tradition of the struggle against oppression, the one that says that there is no way of fighting oppression, discrimination or any kind of prejudice without fighting the ones who benefit from it.

In the Brazilian situation, by the end of the 1970’s, this approach was a kind of natural thing for most of us. To fight for any kind of freedom (racial, political,

emerge. A member gave us this brief interview on the general situation. There is an increasing anger among workers. In many unions opposition caucuses emerge. A member gave us this brief interview on the general situation.

Conlutas Contingent in Black Consciousness Day in Brazil

sexual, etc.) we had to fight against the dictatorship and everything that it meant (imperialism’s support for all dictatorships in Latin America, the profits bankers and business owners obtained under the dictators, the means of communication which served them, etc, etc.) So, fortunately, it became “natural” to see posters with social and economical demands among the rallies promoted by those sectors and vice-versa.

I remember two beautiful examples of this “mixture”. In July of ‘78, the first public rally promoted by the Black Movement (if the mention of racism was forbidden by the militaries) put together, in front of the CityTheater, in São Paulo, gays, lesbians, fighting against homophobic violence and housewives demanding decrease of the prices.

At the beginning of the 80’s, it was amazing to see tens of thousands of metal workers, on strike, on as assembly led by Lula (the current president of Brazil) welcoming with respect and joy a group of

about 50 gays and lesbians which went to the soccer stadium where the rally was happening with a banner written: “homosexuals support the struggle of the metal workers”.

LA VOZ -Why do you think this “tradition” is so minoritarian today?

In our analysis, it has to do with the advances of neo-liberalism and its ideology. In Brazil, basically, most of the groups were co-opted by the so-called “democratic and popular” governments, becoming part of them, and defending their policies. And, by no means, was it an accident.

I really think the groups that abandoned this tradition of struggle, besides the honest intentions of their members, are taking the movement into a dead-end. History has already taught us about that.

Let me give you an example. Here in Brazil, for instance, we fought during the 70’s and 80’s to transform the 20th of November in our “National Con-

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sciousness Day”, to honor Zumbi dos Palmares, the leader of our main quilombo, who was killed on that day, in 1695. The bourgeois governments and the dictators, in particular, had imposed the 13th of May (the day abolition was signed, in 1888, when only 5% of the black population was still under slavery) as “our official day”. Changing the date meant, for us, by that time, to change the “significance” and the “meaning” of what we wanted to celebrated.

The 13th of May meant to “accept” the freedom which was given by the system (false, partial and marked by racism).To fight for the 20th of November meant to reaffirm the freedom we want: the same one that allowed the quilombos to shelter not only runaway slaves, but also indigenous and white people running away from the Inquisition.

This freedom gave them, for more than a hundred years , conditions to live decently because going against the logics of the Colonial System, as a document from the time attests, “they produced everything collectively and divide the production according the needs of each one”.

LA VOZ -Do you see any similarities in the debates between the Black Movement in Brazil and in the United States?

Of course. Besides the many divergences we have with their methods, we think that many of the groups organized in the 1960’s had this perspective. In the LGBT movement we could quote the “Gay Liberation Front”. In the black movement,The Black Panthers, of course, and also Malcolm X, who, by the end of the life said something which is a kind of “slogan” for the movement I belong to: “there is no capitalism without racism”. Capitalism didn’t“invent” racism, but, certainly the oppression and over-exploitation of black

18 (or non-white) people was fundamental to building and developing the system.

LA VOZ -You said that you were accused of being “racist” because you were trying to organize black people. It’s weird, isn’t it?

Very weird, but typical in a country that was convinced of living in a “racial democracy”. Some of you have probably heard about Gilberto Freyre (author of “Casa Grande & Senzala”) who, though he didn’t actually create it, popularized the concept. Basically the idea has to do with the authoritarian ideology of the Vargas period (in the 1930’s) when the “elite” tried to create a concept of “brasilianidade”, that denies all the differences: sexual, racial, of class etc.The damages provoked by it are still enormous.

Just to give an example: in the last census, in 2000, only 6.2% of the population declared themselves “black”; about 39% said they were “pardo” (“dirty”) instead. This lack of identity – absurd to a point where, in Salvador (in the state of Bahia), the “black capital” of Brasil only 13.3% of the people recognize themselves as black, when we know that they are, at least, 80% of the population. So part of our job is to build this identity, which means recovering the history of black people (which was “deleted” from our school books), our culture and traditions.

LA VOZ - How do you take these discussions to the different struggles?

Let me give you two different examples. When I was in undergrad school (I studied History and have a masters in Cinema and Communication Sciences, in the University of São Paulo), in 1988, we organized the “Center of Black Consciousciness” at USP. By that time the country was “cel-

ebrating” the centenary of Abolition and we used the date to discuss how far black people were from the university. By then (and it is still about the same), only 2% of the university students were non-white. Through the Center, we organized a prep school to help black people to enter the university. As you can see, it’s a totally “reformist” proposal, based in a kind of “affirmative action” with the intention of helping black people to compete with the most prepared ones. At the same time, nevertheless, we developed a number of political interventions, denouncing racism and the structure that didn’t allow black people to get in to university. To do so, we allied ourselves with the University Labor Union, the Student Government and any other sector that wanted to fight back, in an independent way (in relation to the bourgeois organizations and the capitalist ones) with us.This led us to introduce, in the country, in a public way, the debate about “cotas” and a number of other issues. But overall, it allowed us to discuss with hundreds of young people the need for political organization and the question of racism itself (as the Center was accused of being “racist” by trying to organize, primarily, black people.)

That’s the way we act. We try to link, as the Marxist George Novack, used to say, “the reformist demands of the oppressed” with a revolutionary perspective. This is why it is so important to have black caucuses (and for all the other oppressed sectors) inside revolutionary organizations, like the Secretaria de Negros e Negras of the PSTU, but also in all working class organizations like unions like the “Movimento Quilombo Raça e Classe”, created inside Conlutas, which I also belong to. =

Brazilian socialists visit Haiti against the occupation

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Japan

Students Set Free!

Eight students were imprisoned for a protest led by Zengakuren in Tokyo, at Hosei University. They were charged with trespassing and held for eight months. Finally, in December, they were set free.

Zengakuren (All Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations) was formed just after WWII as a national federation of inclusive autonomous students’ bodies under the initiative of militant students. In full opposition to Japanese imperialism, Zengakuren has always fought against the militarization,

LA VOZ - What is the situation in the universities in Japan?

All public education is undergoing a process of privatization. Fees skyrocketed. It is around 8 million yens (around US$ 80.000) for a 4 years course. The subsidies for Low Income students have been subjected to budget cuts. Paying back even subsidies is increasingly difficult due to higher interest rates and job scarcity. The race for the available jobs increases competition among students. While students and workers are living these difficulties, the Regents lost a lot of money in derivatives ...

LA VOZ - Why are you a “provisional” president of Zengakuren?

Oda-san, our president, is in jail.The Regents and Government resort to repression as a first offen-

imperialist aggressions, and US bases scattered all over Japan.

It also supported workers’ struggles like the campaign against the privatization of Japan Railways and the Sanrizuka peasants fighting land expropriation by Narita Airport. Recently, they sent a message of solidarity to California Students and Workers struggling against the Budget Cuts.

Sakano Yohei, student of philosophy in Sophia University in Tokyo, and provisional president of Zengakuren, gave us a brief interview on the situation in Japan.

sive against students organizing. I, myself, have been in jail three times. The first time for 44 days in 2007. The last one for 23 days for taking part in a 1500 strong rally in Hosei University. Mr Masuda, the President, is a well-known follower of Margaret Thatcher. He wants to destroy student unity in order to attack public education and scientific research. Students are not allowed to pass out leaflets or hold any protest. Since 2006, 112 students were arrested on Hosei campus for their independent political as well as cultural activities.

LA VOZ - When did you join Zengakuren?

On August 15th, 2007, I joined a protest held by Zengakuren in front of Yasukuni shrine, the symbol of Japanese Imperialism. Since then, I have supported Zengakuren´s efforts to fight back priva-

tization. Hosei University is symbolic. It used to be a university for the working class, and played an important role as a fortress of Japanese student movement. And many professors supported Marxist ideas. Now it is the prison university, it is a model of privatization. Zengakuren is also involved in other struggles going on in Tohoku, Kyoto, Toyama, Hiroshima Universities for dorms and other issues.

LA VOZ - Do you want to send a message to California students?

We learned about the fight for public education in California. It is inspiring. Their struggle is our struggle. Zengakuren sent a message of solidarity. We hope we can make the connections to fight together. =

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National Call for March 4 Strike and Day of Action to Defend Public Education

By The California Coordinating Committee

Teachers march in LA. Let's make it national

California has recently seen a massive movement erupt in defense of public education — but layoffs, fee hikes, cuts, and the resegregation of public education are attacks taking place throughout the country. A nationwide resistance movement is needed.

We call on all students, workers, teachers, parents, and their organizations and communities across the country to massively mobilize for a Strike and Day of Action in Defense of Public Education on March 4, 2010.

Education cuts are attacks against all of us, particularly in working-class communities and communities of color.

The politicians and ad-

ministrators say there is no money for education and social services. They say that “there is no alternative” to the cuts. But if there’s money for wars, bank bailouts, and prisons, why is there no money for public education?

We can beat back the cuts if we unite students, workers, and teachers across all sectors of public education — Pre K-12, adult education, community colleges, and state-funded universities.

We appeal to the leaders of the trade union movement to support and organize strikes and/or mass actions on March 4. The weight of workers and students united in strikes and mobilizations would shift the balance of

forces entirely against the current agenda of cuts and make victory possible.

Building a powerful movement to defend public education will, in turn, advance the struggle in defense of all public-sector workers and services and will be an inspiration to all those fighting against the wars, for immigrants rights, in defense of jobs, for single-payer health care, and other progressive causes.

Why March 4? On October 24, 2009 more than 800 students, workers, and teachers converged at UC Berkeley at the Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. This massive meeting brought together representatives from

over 100 different schools, unions, and organizations from all across California and from all sectors of public education. After hours of open collective discussion, the participants voted democratically, as their main decision, to call for a Strike and Day of Action on March 4, 2010. All schools, unions and organizations are free to choose their specific demands and tactics — such as strikes, rallies, walkouts, occupations, sit-ins, teach-ins, etc. — as well as the duration of such actions.

Let’s make March 4 an historic turning point in the struggle against the cuts, layoffs, fee hikes, and the re-segregation of public education. =