The Revolutionary Communist Organisation extends its full solidarity with the teachers taking strike action today. The Australian state, and the NSW state liberal government in particular, has been waging a despicable war on public education, and thus upon the working class. Whilst the elite schools of the bourgeoisie and parasitic landowners are over funded to the tune of $130 million, the state has pledged to reduce public school funding by over $750 million for the next four years.
Teachers are faced with 60 hour weeks- with many more spent preparing for work at home, unmanageable classroom sizes, intense casualisation and a wage renumeration lagging over three percent behind the inflation rate. As a result, the Teachers Federation reports that over 70% of teachers are reconsidering their future in education, teachers want to teach but they are being ground down by the capitalist state! All the while the NSW education secretary takes home over half a million yearly and MP’s are inflating their salaries under the rightist Perottet NSW government. This squeeze on teachers conditions is an attempt to extract more labour from both staff and students, and cheapen the cost of social reproduction in an epoch of capitalist decline. As usual it is the vast labouring mass of the proletariat that suffers under the inevitable decline in education as a consequence of this rapacious attack on public schools and their teachers. It is under this circumstance that teachers have taken action!
The NSW Teachers Federation decision to go on a 24 hour strike has been the result of the tireless organising work and demands of the union rank and file - we communists commend these comrades. The RCO encourages future rank and file labour militancy in education to build a radical teachers movement across Australia that is able to wield the strike weapon in defence of teachers, students and their families. Only the proletarian movement of teachers, students and workers can fight for a full and social education in the pursuit of the free development of human beings!
Under capitalism, education is a means for the reproduction of class relations, and a tool of labour discipline - but only through organising for worker and student power can we overthrow this system. The RCO calls for the further social organisation of teachers and proletarians in league to fight against the abuses of the state and their bourgeois interests!
It is high time for the socialisation and democratisation of education! Break capitalist ideological hegemony! For the integration of education with social life!
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