Chicago: teachers go on strike

From Kasama:

Chicago: the Strike is On

By Rich Gibson
 
The Chicago school workers’ strike is on. It is a real class war that must be won.

Enrolling about 400,000 students, with about 22,000 school workers, Chicago is the third largest district in the country, segregated as it may be. Chicago schools are the centripetal organizing point of city life–as is true now of most of de-industrialized North American life.

The Chicago Teachers Union is Local One, the first, of the American Federation of Teachers, the smaller and more urban of U.S. teacher unions.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, one of President Obama’s best friends, appoints the school board. He did, anointing some of the richest people in the city along with an army of Broad Foundation mercenaries like a recent transfer from the collapsed Detroit system, Barbara Byrd Bennett.

There is a direct line from the Chicago fight-back to the ruling elites of the US and the competing needs of each side.

History moves faster now. As it does, keeping the social context of this battle is key, if difficult, as the fighting on the ground develops.

This is a mass, class conscious movement, not merely for wages, benefits, and working conditions, but against the combined powers of a united ruling class (the rich, their political poodles from both parties and all their weapons–courts, cops, deceit, hunger and more). This ruling class finalized the emergence of a corporate state, fascism, with the bank and auto bailouts, setting in motion new circumstances which must set up interrogation of strike tactics and strategies–but also grand strategy. In the long run, for what?

This is a fight against barbarism. It is a combat against the destruction of reason itself.

... full story at Kasama.