An aggressive new public school teacher-based political movement, with radical policy goals and socialist backing, is helping organized labor conduct educators’ strikes in battleground states that President Donald Trump needs to win in 2020 to stay in office.
Protesters who are part of the #RedForEd movement are demanding, among other things, teacher salary increases, smaller classroom sizes, and an end to taxpayer support for charter schools and private school vouchers.
In February 2018, teachers launched labor actions in Virginia and West Virginia. In April 2018, they followed suit in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. In May 2018, North Carolina was hit.
“Like the Arab Spring” of 2011, the U.S. “education spring” last year “was an explosive wave of protests,” Weiner wrote. “State-wide teacher walkouts seemed to arise out of nowhere, organized in Facebook groups, with demands for increased school funding and political voice for teachers.”
‘A New Political Power’
According to Labor Notes, the #RedForEd movement is the brainchild of Noah Karvelis, 24, a Marxist and music teacher in Littleton, Arizona, who focuses on hip-hop and praises the violent Black Lives Matter movement. Karvelis has volunteered for and given money to the Bernie Sanders campaign, Michael Patrick Leahy wrote at Breitbart News.“We put Red for Ed day on Twitter,” Rebecca Garelli, a math and science teacher in Phoenix, wrote on the Labor Notes website in March 2018.
“We had an event set up on Facebook. I put it on my personal page because I’m friends with everybody I work with. We spread the word on social media. People got it—people showed up in their red shirts. They were taking pictures, showing: ‘here’s my school,’ ‘here’s my school.’ That got people really fired up. And that got people motivated to join the next action— ‘Why I’m Red for Ed’ —on Friday of that same week.”
#RedForEd leader Karvelis makes no effort to conceal his left-wing radicalism.
Karvelis addressed the Socialism 2018 conference organized by a Trotskyist group called the International Socialist Organization in Chicago in July 2018.
“We’ve created an organization now. We have a network of 2,000 leaders who are experienced. They’ve been out on a job action. They’ve organized their campuses. They’ve collected signatures for a ballot initiative,” Karvelis told an estimated 1,800 socialists from across the United States.
“We’ve built a new political power in Arizona and it’s taking control, right now, of the future of the state,” Karvelis said. “We have to build our own political power. We have to build our own organization. We have to stay true to our values. They have to be Democratic.”
Karvelis wrote an article for Progressive Times that was published in February, titled “From Marx to Trump: Labor’s Role in Revolution.”
No Longer Taboo
The socialism that Karvelis and other leaders of #RedForEd support has been in the news lately.“Socialist policies have turned once-wealthy Venezuela into a state of abject poverty and despair,” Trump said. In the United States, “we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country.”
“America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.”
But “socialism” is apparently no longer the dirty word it used to be in America.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, Americans seem to have become more accepting of socialism. As Obama’s first term began, Newsweek ran a cover blaring, “We are all socialists now.” This was an exaggeration, but the point was made that the topic was no longer taboo. Recent polling shows that significant percentages of Democrats and millennials support socialist ideas.
So it’s not all that surprising that socialists are coming out of the proverbial woodwork to support #RedForEd.
To give just one example, in Oakland, California, the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, the nation’s largest Marxist group, is participating in the ongoing public school teachers’ strike there by sending manpower.