New York, December 13—Workers’ fightback and unity among part-time faculty (PTF), full-time faculty (FTF) and students has won major improvements in wages, job security, and health care for PTF at the New School in New York City. On strike since November 16 – the longest PTF strike in U.S. history -  the PTF’s union announced an agreement that met almost all of the strikers’ demands. Final ratification is slated for December 17.  Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined the PTF picket lines, bringing revolutionary politics into the mix of this class struggle. (see Challenge, 12/14/22).

The New School bosses were exposed during the strike as ruthless exploiters who have no concern for the welfare of students, workers, and faculty. But workers’ determination and solidarity pushed them back! This strike and the bosses’ response demonstrated again how all capitalist institutions, including universities, must be overthrown and workers' power established if we are to have an educational system that serves the global working class, the vast majority of people, rather than the capitalist class.

The New School bosses were forced to meet all of the union’s core demands, including across the board raises, guaranteed annual raises for all five years of the contract, and flat payments of $400 and $800 for out-of-classroom work. For example, a part-time professor teaching a 45-contact hour lecture who currently makes $5,753 will earn $6,475 in 2023, and $7,820 in 2027.They also increased healthcare eligibility and guaranteed that health insurance plans would remain comparable from year to year.

Why did the New School bosses finally cave? Many reasons! The full-time faculty (FTF) held a solidarity strike from the onset of the PTF strike. Parents filed a lawsuit against the university. Students picketed and then occupied the administration building to support their teachers. And the PTF maintained strong picket lines throughout the struggle.

United faculty sees through bosses’ lies
During “negotiations”, the administration lied and threatened teachers and students. They claimed that meeting all the compensation demands from the PTF would lead to a $60 million deficit and tuition would increase by 50 percent. None of these numbers were backed by any transparent budget data and were only issued to scare students and parents who supported the PTF. The administration also threatened to withhold pay and health insurance contributions for any FTF and staff who struck in solidarity, issuing a “work attestation form” for everyone to fill out to prove they are working (i.e., scabbing on the strike) in order to receive pay. This policy, intended to be divisive, backfired.

FTFs fiercely objected to the work attestation form, noting that it contradicted the original core value of the New School, which was founded in 1919 by professors from Columbia University who refused to sign a loyalty oath. The attacks on FTF demonstrated that they too were just wage laborers whose economic security could easily be endangered, like workers in general. Solidarity between FTF and PTF skyrocketed. Some conservative FTFs were quickly marginalized and more radical voices dominated the
FTF solidarity action.

When New School administrators tried to use students to challenge the professional ethics of faculty on strike, the students responded by occupying the University in support of the strike and calling on all professors to honor the picket lines. The students’ occupation is ongoing as we go to press. Despite the union’s announcement of the end of the strike, students are using the momentum from the struggle to oust the President, disband the Board of the Trustees, and freeze tuition for the next few years.  

This success sets a positive precedent for many future academic strikes. This militant solidarity points the way to a revolutionary future if communist ideas of revolution, building the PLP, and intensifying the class struggle gain traction among engaged students and faculty.

Recently, the U.S. Congress came to the aid of the railroad bosses, bankers and Wall St. and voted to impose a contract on 120,000 freight railroad workers in 12 different unions, who are subject to the federal Railway Labor Act (RLA).

President ‘Jim Crow’ Biden, “the most pro-union President in history,” stepped in to make sure that workers didn’t defy the bosses and union leaders with wildcat strikes and job actions. Congress, which can’t seem to agree on anything except war budgets and billions to Ukraine, acted with remarkable speed, proving that despite all their splits and in-fighting, all the politicians can unite on stomping out any threat from the workers.

The capitalists run the government to serve their interests: profit. We need to organize for a communist revolution where the working class runs the government and all society.

Eight unions have voted to ratify the imposed contract, with many workers feeling like this was the best they were going to get knowing that their union leaders were not prepared to take on the government and the bosses. But the four largest unions, representing almost 60 percent of rail workers have, as of this writing, rejected the imposed contract. These union leaders are actually misleaders. They accept capitalism with all its racist and sexist profiteering and laws benefiting the bosses. They don’t organize workers to fight back. But fight back we must with the goal of eventually seizing power for the working class - that’s communism.

CHALLENGE spoke with Windy City, a Black railroad worker in Chicago with 15 years on the job.

CHALLENGE (C) : What are some of the main issues facing railroad workers?

Windy City (WC): Railroaders are mostly concerned about quality of life as it pertains to long hours and lack of employees. We are overworked because of the greed of the bosses. Maybe the #1 issue is "Precision Scheduled Railroading.” It’s like the “just-in-time” method of manufacturing brought to the railroads to further speed us up and get us back to work quicker, driving down costs by firing workers, selling equipment, outsourcing work and more. Instead of knowing you have multiple people in front of you, now you can get called back to work in 15 minutes to fill a train.

Thousands of jobs have been eliminated over the past few years and now the bosses want to run these trains with just one person; that’s their goal. Having no sick days is perhaps the most well-known demand but scheduling and job cuts are there as well. This contract is going to continue to eliminate jobs. It does not address job cuts or make our jobs any safer.

C: What’s the makeup of the workforce?

WC: I would have to guess the railroad is about 30 to 40 percent Black workers, mostly in the cities. Many workers are from rural areas, and many are pro-Trumpers. They understand that we work in an industry that is heavily regulated by the federal government. A lot of workers are approaching 20 years in the industry, and may soon be eligible for retirement or disability. We have a lot of health issues.
A lot of older workers are holding on to get back pay and bonuses. Then they will be coming out.

C: How do the workers feel about the government imposing a contract on them? What has been the role of the union leadership?

WC: Most workers knew that this was probably going to happen. The union leaders have been transparent about how the government would use the Railway Labor Act to prevent a strike. We were never seriously prepared or mobilized to shut down the industry, let alone defy the U.S. government. In a certain sense, the union leadership used the government to impose a contract that they could not get us to ratify on their own.

C: What have discussions with your coworkers been like?

WC: We have discussed how Biden could issue an executive order for paid sick days, but he has not. We know we are going to get a contract that will lead to further cutbacks and higher profits for the bosses. They are hoping a big raise will get us to swallow these worsening conditions, but many current workers will not be around long enough to see the next contract.

C: Do you think you can show this issue of CHALLENGE with this interview to some of your coworkers and introduce them to Progressive Labor Party?  

WC: Our workforce is so thin and so spread out, sometimes I go weeks without seeing the same people. So, it's hard to have real discussions and build that trust, but I'm always on the lookout. Sure, I’ll take a few.

The following is part five of a seven-part series reprinted and lightly edited from the communist newspaper Daily Worker in September-October, 1932, written by famous communist Mike Gold. The series was titled, “Negro Reds of Chicago.”

Workers here are referred to as Black instead of the original “Negro” to reflect our antiracist principles as well as the linguistic shifts that occurred over decades of antiracist class struggle.

Communists have a long history of fighting against racist attacks on our class. One such fight was against landlords and evictions. In the early 1930s, amid Jim Crow segregation, a Great Depression with record unemployment levels that sank the working class—particularly Black workers living in the urban industrial core—into deeper poverty and despair, the Communist Party in the U.S. (CPUSA) was fighting for revolution inside U.S. borders. This period was a golden age of class-conscious fightback when communist ideas were popular and gripped the imaginations of the working class. Under the leadership of the CPUSA, workers organized militant housing councils, tenant unions that led bold actions that weakened the power of profit gluttonous landlords.

Today our class is in a different period marked by increasing volatility. We are choked by record-high inflation, rent hikes, food price gouging compounded by stagnant wages, high unemployment, and an eviction crisis worsened by a still-raging global pandemic. Though the CPUSA is a shell of its former self, decaying into a toothless, reformist party, its history provides valuable lessons for us today.

This series highlights this antiracist revolutionary fightback and contains kernels of working-class wisdom.

In past issues “Reds vs. Evictions” covered the story of Claude Lightfoot, a communist activist and author who, like so many communists before and after him, was brutalized by the klan in blue for fighting against racism. In this issue’s edition we look at how another Black worker was ultimately able to see through the bosses’ nationalist and religious dead ends, realizing his true path was in joining the Communist Party, and being embedded in working class fightback.

No liberation in religion
Leonidas MacDonald was a Mohammedan only a few years ago. He joined that sect, which finds a fertile field for proselytes among the Chicago Black workers, after he had become disillusioned with the Garvey movement and the Christian religion. There are several Arabian and American gentlemen in Chicago who have made quite a racket out of this Mohammed. But MacDonald took it seriously; once he fasted 40 days.

“It appealed to me on race grounds,” he said. “I had seen so much of the brutality and hypocrisy of white Christians. Mohammed was colored, and I thought maybe it was more fitting for us to follow him. Anyway, I can’t tell what I expected, but one day I started to read the Koran. It was the same old bible bunk – Adam and Eve and the rest of it. I quit about a month after I had finished studying the Koran.”

He was ever searching for a way out for his suffering Black race. Tall, lean, humorous, always neat but out at the elbows and knees, MacDonald is one of those born intellectuals who come out of the working class. Some betray it, sell out to the capitalists, others are loyal to their class and lead the fight for freedom.

Son of the working class
Born in Jackson, Tenn., in 1897, MacDonald’s father was a railroad brakeman earning $38 a month, “swell money, big money”, and there were eight children. The parents were ambitious to give all their brood a first-class education. But Leonidas went to school for only two years. Then the inevitable proletarian tragedy. The father was killed; the child was left with a large family.

He was six feet tall at the age of fifteen, and tried to join the army, but was rejected because he was Black.

He drifted north, working in all the southern states, then came to Chicago in 1916 and held a swell foreman’s job. The war came and he volunteered. He served in the 39th Infantry, a Black regiment attached to the 10th French Army. He went through the battles of Soissons, Metz, the Argonne, and was wounded and invalided home.

He was mustered out in July, 1919, year of the race riots in Chicago. These made a deep impression on him: killed some of his orthodox faith in Christ, and roused his race consciousness.

Seeking answers
MacDonald had been working for years as a butcher in the Chicago stockyards when Marcus Garvey came to town. The man swept him off his feet; he was ready for this message, and soon became an active speaker and organizer at night, rising to the position of Colonel in Garvey’s fantastic empire.

Whatever the crimes and mistakes of this misleader Garvey, I learned a lot about organization from him,” says MacDonald, “I could see, too, that all this talk of returning to Africa was a false solution. Liberia was a slave-holding colony controlled by the United States government. The rest of Africa was owned by other white imperialists. We were as enslaved in Chicago as we could hope to be there; we would have to fight for our freedom in the place we lived.

It was then that MacDonald joined the Mohammedans. When that failed to satisfy his clear, hungry mind, he felt lost, bewildered. In his bewilderment he took to the soapbox and every night, after his day’s work, he talked to the south side crowds. He was thinking aloud, trying to find his way.

One night some heckler shouted at him, “You talk like one of those damn reds.”

“Do I?” Mac answered in amazement, “Do I? If  so, I am going to study the matter, and see whether I am red.”

This taunt opened his eyes to the work of the Unemployed Councils. Now he first began to see the mass funerals, the demonstrations of the Reds. He began to discover Lenin and Marx. It all beat on him like a cloudburst – the new world, the new world was being born again in another proletarian mind.

Quoted Mac: “If the white man suffers, the Black man always is made to suffer twice as hard.” That is proving true in this depression.

“But where did Oscar De Priest the Black landlord fit in? He wasn’t suffering, he was causing Black workers to suffer. Class interests were stronger than race.”

Home at Last
MacDonald flung himself into the Unemployed Council work – a fine speaker and able organizer. He spoke at the hunger march at the stockyards. Four cops surrounded him. He was arrested often, he studied and grew. In August 1931, he joined the Communist Party.

My doubts were stilled; now I knew where I belonged. I came to my home, where I shall live and die. Yes, comrade, I found the Party at last. But it was through much struggle, many struggles and illusions. This is the crooked path that life takes.

Dominican Republic officials: gutter racists
Al Jazeera, 11/24/22–Authorities in the Dominican Republic have rounded up thousands of Haitian migrants — and anyone who looks like they could be from Haiti — and deported them to a country in the grips of deadly gang violence and instability, advocates say. The forced removals, which rights groups say have escalated this month, have drawn international criticism and calls for restraint amid reports that unaccompanied children, pregnant women and other vulnerable people are being deported.

Some deportees have never set foot in Haiti…Dominican police and armed forces are detaining Haitians in the streets as well as “all those who look like Haitians.” More than 20,000 people had been deported in a nine-day period this month…including some Dominican citizens with Haitian ancestry.

An official source with knowledge of the matter…approximately 40,000 people will be sent from the Dominican Republic to Haiti in November. That is in addition to the 60,000 who were deported in the past months…UNICEF said an estimated 1,800 unaccompanied minors were expelled from the country this year alone, a number the Dominican Republic denies.“These deportations have resulted in the separation of families. People with valid documents have been deported, people who were born here in the Dominican Republic have been deported, ...These aren’t deportations. It’s persecution based on race.”

European imperialists revise plan to rob workers in Africa
Der Spiegel, 11/11–Starting next year, a consortium led by BP [British Petroleum] is to begin extracting natural gas here on the border between Senegal and Mauritania…Extraction is planned to continue for 30 years, with the profits being divided up between the energy giants BP and Kosmos, and between the governments of Senegal and Mauritania…Processes that normally take years must be completed within just a few months in order to meet European demand as rapidly as possible and to profit from the high global prices...German Chancellor Olaf Scholz …noted…It is sensible…to "intensely pursue" cooperation in gas exploitation. Berlin is currently under pressure to quickly find alternatives to Russian natural gas, and the West African country is more than happy to jump into the breach…The mood marks a significant shift from last year, when European governments were singing the praises of the potential in Africa for renewable energies and warning against the exploitation of oil and gas.

Elon Musk joins the ranks of military contractors
CNBC, 12/5/22–Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expanding its Starlink satellite technology into military applications with a new business line called Starshield. Starshield is likely to further tap the company’s biggest U.S. government customer – the Pentagon – which already represents a high-value buyer of SpaceX’s launches and has shown significant interest in the capabilities of Starlink. Few details are available about the intended scope and capabilities of Starshield. On its website, SpaceX said the system will have “an initial focus” on three areas: Imagery, communications and “hosted payloads” – the third of which effectively offers government customers the company’s satellite bus (the body of the spacecraft) as a flexible platform. The Pentagon has already made clear that it’s willing to spend heavily to have companies build out next-generation satellite capabilities.

Academic study shows capitalist control of state policies
Cambridge University Press, 9/18/14–Who governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S. citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless? …it can loosely be divided into four families of theories: Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism—Majoritarian Pluralism, in which the interests of all citizens are more or less equally represented, and Biased Pluralism, in which corporations, business associations, and professional groups predominate. Each of these perspectives makes different predictions about the independent influence upon U.S. policy making of four sets of actors: the Average Citizen or “median voter,” Economic Elites, and Mass-based or Business-oriented Interest Groups or industries.

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.