After decades of decline, the past year has seen a dramatic revival in labor militancy. Public school teachers have been at the forefront of this resurgence, starting with a dramatic wildcat strike in West Virginia in February 2018, then a wave of teacher strikes that swept the nation, moving from red states like Arizona and Oklahoma to blue California and Colorado.

This is not the first time teachers have taken mass, militant labor action in the United States; the 1970s saw a similar strike wave. But today’s strikes have centered antiracist class-struggle demands that unite teachers and school communities, particularly in LA, Oakland, and Chicago; the strikes of the 1970s exacerbated tensions between mostly white teachers and the communities of color they served. Striking teachers have also made clear that public education must be funded by reappropriating the wealth of corporations and the ultrarich, not by higher taxes or benefit cuts to working people.

The legacy of these toxic conflicts was division among working people, who should have been uniting to fight the opening salvos of austerity politics and neoliberal privatization. By the early 1980s, teachers found themselves politically isolated and vulnerable to increasingly aggressive right-wing attacks.