Educational workers have traditionally been one of the most active and energetic sectors in revolutionary and progressive struggles throughout the history of capitalism. From Latin America to Africa, China to the Soviet Union, educators have been over-represented in the ranks of revolutionaries compared to other petty bourgeois professions for a variety of reasons. In our own country, class-conscious and revolutionary educators helped organize workers and community members in areas like Harlem, and controlled trade union locals in cities like Philadelphia and New York City until they were crushed by the Second Red Scare. On the other hand there is a contradiction here: as educational workers are public employees and agents of social reproduction, they can also be some of the primary perpetrators and enforcers of ruling-class social policy and politics. What is clearly needed then is a genuine attempt to outline what a class-conscious educators movement would look like in the US, and how we could go about constituting it.

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