In the aftermath of the failed override vote in South Hadley on April 14th, the Western Massachusetts club of the Communist Party USA expresses its solidarity with the South Hadley Educators’ Association (SHEA), student organizers and anti-austerity forces. We salute the tremendous efforts of the coalition to mobilize working people in defense of public services and ongoing student-led protests. We note the leadership of the student movement throughout the campaign and during April 15th’s high school walkout, in which 95% of students participated. As stated by the SHEA, the struggle has only just begun.
This result comes just on the heels of catastrophic results in Hadley and a narrow, temporary victory in Belchertown, among other recent efforts. At best, these efforts have delayed impending budget crises by a matter of months or years. At worst, they threaten life and limb. Again and again, working people are put on the defensive while private property holds captive our access to essential services.
We cannot resolve the crisis of collapsing services through just overrides, neither through the racist, regressive system of funding services through property taxes. The huge, evolving dimensions of this crisis – intensifying, illegal attacks on federal disbursements by the fascist Trump administration; spiraling costs imposed by our state’s health insurance monopoly; outsourcing of capital projects and unionized public-sector positions to private contractors; declining state aid under neoliberal governments, and so many others – are the natural result of the structure of capitalism that we cannot resolve by bourgeois means.
It is no coincidence that Massachusetts cities and towns are restricted to mainly raising revenues through regressive property taxation, and compelled to fund their services through a tax system with such perverse incentives. Proposition 2½ – a byproduct of Reaganism – further intensifies this crisis, reasserting the dominance of capitalists over the provision of public resources, while offering the override vote as a form of leverage for the most reactionary among them. Before our eyes, successive defeats of override proposals have charted the extreme right’s path to power in Massachusetts, city by city and town by town.
The Western Massachusetts club calls for deepening municipal and statewide anti-austerity coalitions and the development of their unity at every level. We reiterate the urgent necessity for working-class leadership and for the integral contributions of tenant politics in this movement. In resistance to MAGA and for the life and dignity of our class, we will defend funding for public services and organize for the abolition of Proposition 2½ and the progressive overhaul of state and municipal taxation. These efforts will be inseparable from the wider program of the broad anti-monopoly coalition in our state.
-Executive Committee, Western Massachusetts CPUSA
Western Massachusetts CPUSA 