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	Last update Oct 12, 2023
WHAT DISTINGUISHES OUR PARTY – The line running from Marx to Lenin to the foundation of the Third International and the birth of the Communist Party of Italy in Leghorn (Livorno) 1921, and from there to the struggle of the Italian Communist Left against the degeneration in Moscow and to the rejection of popular fronts and coalition of resistance groups – The tough work of restoring the revolutionary doctrine and the party organ, in contact with the working class, outside the realm of personal politics and electoralist manoevrings
Contents: 1. - Gaza War: All parties of the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisie direct their proletarians to the slaughter of a war 2. - Portland Association of Teachers strike is against capitalism! It is time for OEA to take up a State wide strike strategy!

In the 75 years since 1948 – when the Jewish State was born and pan-Arab nationalism suffered a crucial defeat in the Middle East, losing perhaps its last appointment with history – the Palestinian population has suffered deportations, massacres, terror and persecution to no end.

Contributing to this national oppression imposed by the State of Israel were the other States in the region, which exploited the various Palestinian armed organizations for their own power interests, but which, beyond hypocritical proclamations in favor of the "Palestinian cause," did not spare Palestinian refugees persecution and massacres.

In Jordan in September 1970, joint Jordanian and Syrian military forces quelled an uprising resulting in several thousand deaths among Palestinian refugees. In Lebanon in August 1976, Phalangists, with Syrian complicity, killed thousands of Palestinians of all ages in Tel al-Zaatar camp. In 1982, also in Lebanon, phalangists, with the complicity of the occupying Israeli army, massacred thousands of Palestinians in the Sabra neighborhood and the adjoining Shatila refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut.

No one cares about the "Palestinian cause", no one is interested in the destiny of the Palestinian proletariat. Instead, today all governments care about war, which is necessary for all bourgeoisies. But for every war, an issue, a justification, is needed.

The Israeli bourgeoisie will take advantage of the Hamas incursion to justify the imposition by force of internal discipline on all classes, and bloody actions against the Palestinian proletarians.

Hamas, originally a pawn of Israel against the Palestine Liberation Organisation, must maintain its regime of terror on Gaza’s proletarians, first of all by preventing them from escaping from that open-air prison, in objective agreement with Israel and Egypt, since a mass emigration would mean its demise. Meanwhile, the PLO is controlling the West Bank on behalf of Israel and is silent about the fate of its rivals in Gaza.

The result sought by all bourgeoisies will be to provoke a new carnage in preparation for a regional and perhaps general war.

In the present general framework of its extreme rot, world capitalism is ready to unleash deadly weapons to terrorize and subdue millions of proletarians on all sides of the fronts.

We internationalist communists must unveil the real terms of this threat, which is always hidden behind nationalist, democratic, ethnic or religious screens.

We must tell the Palestinian proletarians not to be deceived by their bourgeoisie, sold into the service of regional powers, to immolate themselves as cannon fodder in wars contrary to their interests. We must tell the Israeli Jewish proletarians to fight against their bourgeoisie and against the national oppression of their Palestinian class brothers. We must tell the proletarians in every country not to be entranced by the sirens of propaganda siding with either of the two murderous bourgeoisies in pretended struggle in Palestine and Israel.

The ongoing conflict will be used everywhere by the world bourgeoisie to intimidate the proletariat, to divert it from its vital interests, to justify measures of worsening wages, new sacrifices.

Instead, we communists must tell proletarians that the rejection of war starts for proletarians with the intensification of the trade union struggle for wages and for a decrease in working hours.

The bourgeoisie will not be able to wage its war unless it can convince with its lying propaganda broad layers of the working class. We must counter this propaganda not only by responding with our truths to the lies of the ruling class. We must respond by directing the workers’ struggle to the material needs of the proletariat, a practical experience in which the lies and fallacious arguments of the bourgeoisie and their servants in the workers’ ranks are of little value.

The proletariat in the face of the constant worsening of its living conditions and the horror of capitalism’s catastrophe will give birth to a gigantic season of struggles that will cross seas and borders.

For this new great class war, without quarter, to be victorious, the essential organ of the world working class, the International Communist Party, must be strengthened.

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

Meanwhile a media feeding frenzy has developed in the capitalist press, smearing and vilifying the union at every turn. The depravity of the local school district was on full display when in the context of the recent imperialist bloodbath in the Levant, they likened teachers to "terrorists" in a lawsuit against the union (https://www.koin.com/news/education/pps-announces-plans-to-file-unfair-labor-charge-after-teachers-union-terrorism/). Hypocritically justifying their use of this bigoted dog-whistle, by alleging district representatives were "traumatized" during a demonstration of educators. The naked lap-dog-ism of the bourgeois press is on full display when they circulate such pitiful claims while simultaneously invisibalizing the material impact and economic violence being perpetuated against educators and students, in the form of real wage cuts and deteriorating working conditions. Today the Portland Association of Teachers is engaged in a battle not just against the administration of their local district but against the State machinery of the capitalist class itself. Unfortunately, despite many more locals of the Oregon Education Association existing within the city limits of Portland and the larger Portland metro area, PAT has had to strike alone. As a result they already have been forced to cut back their original budget demands by $121 million (https://assets.nationbuilder.com/pdxteachers/pages/1926/attachments/original/1700020819/1PAT_PACKAGAGE.pdf?1700020819).

The opportunist and boss-linked leadership of the Oregon Education Association and its parent the National Education Association, comfortable with their cozy relationship with the Democratic Party and reluctant to shake up the status quo, has continued to refuse to seriously consider implementing a State wide strike strategy that could develop a true working class force capable of challenging the regional conglomerates of capitalist class power that converge against teachers striking in major urban areas. Despite the efforts of rank and file educators to stress the importance of such a long-term State wide strike strategy for several years at State wide regional assemblies, the union leadership has continued to take the approach of having locals bargain independently of each other on dates that span the entire school year, reflecting a narrow craft union method & a strike strategy that can only produce watered down deals at best; meanwhile unions such as the UAW have recently called for unified action by unions across the country to set expiration dates to May First in preparation of a massive potential May Day strike in 2028 (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-30/uaw-urges-all-unions-in-us-to-prepare-for-may-day-2028-strikes).

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a result education workers in many States have gone on strike in an unprecedented wave over the last two years. In LA earlier this year, over 30,000 teachers of United Teachers of Los Angeles UTLA went on a three day strike, quickly winning after only a few days thanks to the sympathy strike of 35,000 bus drivers, food-service workers, teacher aides, special-education assistants, custodians and security aides under SEIU Local 99. Just a few months ago teachers in Camas and Vancouver Washington also went out on strike at approximately the same time, simultaneously amplifying their power. In all of these strikes it has been proven that when workers organize and strike together, they win together!

The True Value of Education and Teachers Wages

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

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

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

As it is the labor of educators that train the next generation of workers in the necessary skills to operate the means of production currently in existence and produce the material necessities of life for the rest of society in capitalist economy, it is a fact that for educators as with all workers the true value of their labor, as reflected in their contribution to the total surplus product created by all productive labor employed in society, is always much larger then the share they receive from their employers, the capitalist State, in the form of wages.

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

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

Education Funding

As wages are not set by the philanthropy of capitalist class politicians, neither is the overall funding of public schools itself. Instead both are informed by the relative demand for educators labor-power in capitalist economy and the prevailing conditions in the labor-market.

The bourgeois, its press and politicians would like teachers to content themselves to the budgetary "realities" of capitalist economy. They claim that because the districts only maintain X amount of tax revenue, because the schools are only filling X amount of seats, the educators can only possibly receive X amount of money for wages. Never mind the fact that the capitalist State dedicates exorbitant amount of tax funds to its military for imperialist initiatives, that billions exist for billionaires to spend luxury flights to space and other such wasteful endeavors. Since adequate funds for education workers wages have not been partitioned within the capitalists State we are told the money for education simply does not exist! Teachers thus are asked to surrender themselves and their material well being to the bureaucratic taxation regulations of the capitalist State, and its "democratic" process which has set these rules and regulations completely on its own class terms. We are told that in order to change our material circumstances our best path is to join the capitalist political parties in their incrementalist maneuvering, to work towards taxation and political reforms that will somehow bring equilibrium. We are told this is the appropriate path, not strikes and class struggle. In reality, this is class collaborationism through and through.

The manner in which schools are funded and budgets allocated in the United States has been designed to meet the capitalist class labor demands, and is well known to further the perpetual impoverishment of black and brown workers, trapping many in cycles of poverty and low-paying manual labor. As such, teachers unions should not accept and conform their wage demands to the budgetary "realities" set by the capitalist class on these grounds. In the United States public schools are mostly funded by local property taxes with 90% coming from local and State governments (https://www.epi.org/publication/public-education-funding-in-the-us-needs-an-overhaul/). The local funding of schools in the United States, assists the capitalist class in keeping the cost of education low in poor neighborhoods, where they hope to maintain large labor pools of unskilled workers and correspondingly low wages.

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

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

We can then understand that the labor demands of capital and the industries that exist in particular regions has a deterministic relationship with the funding and quality of education from region to region. Additionally, the relative demand for labor corresponds to overall economic conditions. In times of inflationary periods when the economy is expanding, more workers are needed for employment. In moments of recession, as the economy is contracting and growth is declining, the demand for more workers to fill new positions declines. So too then does the needs for more teachers, despite the fact they do not work in an officially "private" capitalist enterprise but a "public" State institutions, these institutions expose themselves by these dynamics to be completely at the exclusive service of capital and its labor demands. Thus in such periods of recession we tend to see education budgets slashed and teachers laid off in droves, along with the rest of the working class.

Under capitalism such inequalities can never be fully resolved despite what liberal or social democratic reformers would like us to believe. They can only be displaced to different groups of workers farther or closer away on the world scale, because it is on the basis of wage labor exploitation that the power of capital is built and its is the maintenance of the social basis of capitalist accumulation that its brutal and murderous State apparatus exists to guarantee domestically and abroad.

PPS As Capitalist Enterprise

Portland Public Schools as all modern public schools, operates and organizes itself on the model of the capitalist enterprise. In all capitalist enterprises a few basic characteristics are to be found, the purchase of labor power by the employer, commodity production, and the creation of a reserve fund for capital accumulation.

As wage laborers, we are alienated from the product of our labor, as it is the capitalist class who own the means of production and the final product. Ultimately, we ourselves are objectified and our time and life energies quantified in the form of a numerical value of money. A value which is subject to the myriad of market manipulations of the capitalist class. As such, as workers we exist as commodities, our labor time to be bought and sold like eggs, bacon, milk, or bread. As educators, we are involved in the production of a unique commodity, the next generation of labor-power. According to Marx in Capital Volume 1

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

Thus we can understand public education within the capitalist economy functions as an industry like any other involved in the production of the commodities, only its commodity is of a special type, that of labor-power. Special in the Marxist sense in that unlike any other commodity it can produce new value by itself becoming exploited labor. Now we have shown clearly how the modern public school system meets two of our aforementioned criteria for a capitalist enterprise. Lets explore the third of the reserve fund for capital accumulation.

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

«The capitalist must not only form a reserve capital to cushion price fluctuations and enable him to wait for favorable buying and selling conditions. He must accumulate capital in order to extend his production and build technical progress into his productive organism.
«In order to accumulate capital he must first withdraw in money-form from circulation a part of the surplus-value which he obtained from that circulation, and must hoard it until it has increased sufficiently for the extension of his old business or the opening of a side-line. So long as the formation of the hoard continues, it does not increase the demand of the capitalist. The money is immobilized. It does not withdraw from the commodity market any equivalent in commodities for the money equivalent withdrawn from it for commodities supplied» (Marx, “Capital”, Volume 2).

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

The ongoing clash between the union and the district is largely in regards to the districts attempt to protect and extend its reserve fund. In short is about the defense of its enterprise in accumulating capital at the workers expense, as is the nature of all capitalist enterprises. The of the funds to increase the existing workers wages to keep up with inflation and for the additional wage funds needed to implement class caps would not constitute an advance of the enterprise, it would not create more revenue for the enterprise, and so the district must fight tooth and nail against such proposals. While the districts "contingencies" fund is allegedly designated for "emergencies" they argue that the various social crisis which as occurred over three years, a pandemic which took the lives of over a million workers and a massive inflation which has seen costs of living skyrockets does not qualify as an emergency.

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

Despite the panic the district and other capitalist politicians would like us to believe, they simply cannot and will not allow a major public school district to completely collapse and dissolve as we have already demonstrated, despite their veiled threats, the labor of educators is necessary labor to all modern production processes.

In Education There is No "Community" Interest.

Public education under capitalism will always have one ends, serving the interests of capital at the expense of the working class.

«The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class...
«The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie» (“The Communist Manifesto”).

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

“The more cultured the bourgeois State, the more subtly it lied when declaring that schools could stand above politics and serve society as a whole. In fact the schools were turned into nothing but an instrument of the class rule of the bourgeoisie. They were thoroughly imbued with the bourgeois caste spirit. Their purpose was to supply the capitalists with obedient lackeys and able workers…We say that our work in the sphere of education is part of the struggle for overthrowing the bourgeoisie. We publicly declare that education divorced from life and politics is lies and hypocrisy
«The bourgeoisie themselves, who advocated this principle, made their own bourgeois politics the cornerstone of the school system, and tried to reduce schooling to the training of docile and efficient servants of the bourgeoisie, to reduce even universal education from top to bottom to the training of docile and efficient servants of the bourgeoisie, of slaves and tools of capital. They never gave a thought to making the school a means of developing the human personality» (Lenin, Speech at the Second All-Russia Congress Of Internationalist Teachers).

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

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

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

PAT Strike is a Strike of the Entire Working Class!

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

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

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

ITS TIME FOR OEA TO TAKE UP A STATE WIDE STRIKE STRATEGY!

TEACHERS NEED A GENERAL STRIKE!

LETS STRIKE, LETS FIGHT, WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!