The Communists Stand With Your Struggle

In light of the struggles taking place in the universities across Florida, and in particular the FIU walkout on April 13th, 2023, we in the Miami Local Committee of the Communist Workers’ Platform USA declare our wholehearted support for the movement against the full-throttle capitalist reaction passing through the Florida Legislature. We see the urgent need to struggle against policies that seek to stabilize and increase profits by attacking public education under the guise of fighting “indoctrination” in schools.

While the DeSantis administration is taking measures to increase profits in the face of the looming capitalist crisis, one of which is the privatization of public education, they direct attention away from these policies with fear mongering tactics. Through a media campaign aimed at winning over a segment of the workers, the administration has constructed a narrative where public schools indoctrinate kids in “critical race theory,” “gender ideology,” or even in communism!

They mislabel parts of the public education curriculum that highlight the contradictions within capitalism, mostly around racism and gender-based oppression, to set the workers against each other. By sowing distrust in public schools and instructors, the administration is fulfilling its goal of isolating the teachers’ unions, which represent one of the largest unionized workforces in the State of Florida, and paved the way to deal the unions a crippling blow with the banning of dues deductions from teachers’ paychecks.

We see through this cheap trick and call for the students and workers to resist the measures aimed at privatizing education with racial and gender minorities as the convenient scapegoats.

The Ineptitude of the “Progressive” Forces

All the while, we must lay the blame equally on the ineptitude of the Democratic Party and the “progressive” forces that have brought us to this point. By failing to recognize that the reactionary nature of the DeSantis administration stems from the interests of the capitalist class, of capitalism as a whole, they sell the working people of Florida an illusion of a humane capitalism. They engage in inconsequential, performative acts such as state chair Nikki Fried and senate minority leader Lauren Book’s sit-in and arrest on the Florida capitol steps. This resistance theater is not an effective means of initiating a class-based counter-offensive. However, such public performances allow the Democrats to claim the moral high ground while suffering no consequences. Their militant progressive bona fides are verified at the cost of an afternoon sitting outside their office.

The Democratic Party is subject to the same rules and institutional pressures as the Republican Party. Under the bourgeois state, the bourgeois parties cannot be expected to challenge any offensive the capitalist class launches on the working class. Each party fights for the specific interests of whichever faction of the ruling class pays their bills. In fact, the Democratic Party’s own puppet masters are directly invested in the campaign to gut public education. The investment bank Raymond James has plunged $200 million into charter schools in Florida – this same bank has provided millions in donations Democratic politicians’ campaigns like Andrew Gillum, Val Demmings, and Charlie Crist as well as contributions to the Florida Democratic Party.

Furthermore, the organizations affiliated to the Democrats only call for reforms that they have no intention of defending, they cause disillusionment and a turn to cynicism, nihilism, and reaction within the minds of the workers. The trade unions are also complicit. While we oppose legislation aimed against the teachers’ unions, we also condemn the leadership of these unions for failing to prepare the adequate militancy in the union to take on these bills with a mass movement of teachers and their allies.

Reforms can only be won by the revolutionary movement and consolidated by the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class. Without the seizure of power, the capitalist class will always use its state power to roll back all reforms to open the path for more profits. These impotent organizations, tied to the hip of the Democratic Party from the federal to state and local levels, and by extension, the rotten capitalist system, must be converted to organizations for the struggle of the workers and oppressed people against capitalism or brushed aside.

We Need New Organizations for the Struggle

While the capitalist class counts on their own meager ranks and a few thousand mercenaries in the police departments and armed forces to do their bidding, the working class in Florida is millions strong – and in the country, hundreds of millions. There is no force that the capitalists can conjure that could stop millions of people united in the organized struggle for the emancipation of the working class! But without organization, the workers would each be facing the capitalists on their own. To unite these mass struggles, there must be a revolutionary party, the communist party, capable of coordinating the various struggles and uniting them into one proletarian-led movement to overthrow capitalism.

DeSantis and the Florida Republicans are unleashing their blitzkrieg precisely for the reason that they do not believe a counteroffensive is possible. They believe that LGBTQ people, Black Americans, teachers – all the members of the working class in Florida – are dispersed and unguarded. The leadership of trade unions like FEA and the Democratic political machine have given the reactionaries no reason to hesitate.

The definitive solution, then, to the capitalist attacks against LGBTQ people, against public education, against the unions, and against our right to know this history of the heroic struggles of those that came before us, is socialism. The working class must seize power and put an end to private property and exploitation. Only then can a truly democratic system be established where such reactionary policies become unthinkable. Under the socialist system, the workers’ organizations become the deciding factor in all affairs, whether its the unions, the student organizations, the scientific associations, and so on. They are all put together into one harmonious system for the interests of the workers.

However, these organizations under the socialist system do not spring out of nowhere. The task of building these organizations starts today. We must build the mass organizations, such as trade unions, youth organizations, and organizations for the various struggles of oppressed people, and imbue them with the aim of ending the capitalist system. As a necessary part of constructing these organizations, we must also build the communist party in tandem with the mass organizations, uniting the most class conscious , resolute, and fearless leaders of the working class under one program and one organizational center. The sooner we establish these essentials of the class struggle in the United States, the sooner we will see ourselves freed from capitalist exploitation and oppression.