Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Comrades,
I don’t want to interrupt the courageous student-led
movement that has educated, agitated, organized, occupied, marched, and
reflected on action in the last several months. This uprising is inspiring.
The March 4th actions and those that went
before gave greater life to the current school workers’ strike in Capistrano
and the coming strike in Oakland as well.
What’s next? I’ll take the course the collective
determines but hope to toss in my two bits.
I offer a link (so nobody will be interrupted that doesn’t
want to be) that asks us all to think twice about why things are as they are,
who we are in relationship to others, what our greatest goals are, and what
might be the strategies and tactics to get there.
The central issue of our time is the rapid rise of
color-coded social and economic inequality coupled to the promise of perpetual
war, this challenged by the potential of mass, class-conscious, resistance.
If the above paragraph is wrong, completely baseless,
then save time, stop reading, as most of what follows flows from it.
What do we want? Well, that may be best left up in the
air but perhaps the notion of a caring community where people can determine
collectively what equality is, what its connection to democracy may be, where
people can live reasonable and free lives because they are not thrown into a
war of all on all, as with capitalism, will do.
Such a world is a long way off. How we get to it is
set up by the question: Why are things as they are?
I see two slogans in use that seem to me to miss the
point: Defend Public Education and Oppose Privatization.
Our core problem is capitalism and its state, the
government, now little more than a corporate state where the rich iron out
their differences, arm their forces, then allow the rest of us to choose which
of them will oppress us more gently.
That means “Public” Education is a myth.
This is capitalist education, segregated mainly by
class, then race, home language, to some degree sex/gender. Capitalist
not-so-public education is stratified into five or six levels ranging from
pre-prison or WalMart schooling (much of Detroit) to pre-clerical worker and
soldier training (parts of South-side San Diego), pre-teacher and social worker
training (many suburbs), and pre-law and pre-doctor training (rich suburbs like
Lajolla, California or Bloomfield Hills, Michigan).
The ruling class sends its children to prestigious
private schools, a la the education of George Bush, Mitt Romney, or, today, the
demagogue Obama’s children.
These segregated systems teach different “facts,”
using different teaching methods. On the whole, most of the system teaches
youth that they cannot grasp and change the world. Indeed, schools teach with
such incoherence and move with such cruelty, many kids learn not to like to
learn. Curiosity, their birthright, is pounded out of them–a terrific
success of capitalist education.
Not-so public schools are really missions for
capitalism and the vast majority of teachers its missionaries. That is true at
every level of schooling. The analogy is nearly perfect.
For the last decade and more, not-so public schooling
was propelled by high-stakes standardized tests which employ a bogus form of
science that deepens segregation as the test measure little more than class,
race, and home language. They’re designed to do that, just as the SAT was first
designed. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~rgibson/SATFascistOrigins.htm
Only a handful of school workers have taken action to
resist this systematic child abuse.
That is not surprising. Teachers do not have a proud
record of resistance–not anywhere. Some school workers, however, can make
a terrific difference. They are seated in the central organizing point of N. American
life today (de-industrialization matters) and they work with youth–often
the people who create change first.
But to want to “Defend Public Education” is to defend
what is, or a myth about what was, and what is has nothing to do with what many of us want to win. Capitalist schools are
only that. It’s all that they can be.
In fact, “Defend Public Education,” only demands that
we deepen the power of the capitalist state, its schools. The demand tells
people the government, the executive committee and the armed weapon of the
rich, might be their pal. It won’t. It leads to schemes like CTA’s effort to
tax working people to pay for the mis-education of their own children–a
ballot measure voted down by a two-thirds majority even though CTA spent nearly
$20 million of dues on it. What CTA managed to do was give more life to the
idea that school workers are enemies of other workers.
On both counts, the role of capital, and the role of
the state, “Defend Public Education,” doesn’t add up.
Rather, “Transform Education,” or “Rescue Education
from the Ruling Classes,” gets to the point.
“Stop Privatization,” doesn’t. Privatization is happening in some areas, but it is
not the main thing going on in schools, not by a long shot. Why would elites
who also control the tax system want to give up a deal where working people pay
to mis-educate their own children? The partial answer is that some wealthy
people, Eli Broad or Bill Gates for example, hope to turn a new kind of profit
off schools and win social control at the same time—but they are small
players in a much bigger game. Old ruling class organizations, the Rockefeller
or Ford Foundation, are not hell-bent on privatization.
Like, “Defend Public Education,” the demand to “Stop
Privatization,” leads people to the myth about not-so-public education and,
again, to empower the capitalist state.
Rather, in schools, as with the current government, we
see the merger of corporate and government interests integrated in nearly
seamless ways. That is why, for example, Walmart is not privatizing Detroit
high schools, but it is taking them over and using them as training centers
(even though there is no Walmart in Detroit). Capitalism commonly trumps
democracy.
The underlying question is: Why have school?
Let us be clear from the outset: The education agenda
is a war agenda. It is a class war agenda and an empire’s war agenda. It is an
attack on both life and reason itself.
Capitalist schools are huge markets (49 million
kids–about _ of them draft eligible in the next five years), 5 million
unionized teachers and their salaries, architects, booksellers, buses, food
courts, etc). The dollar influences every breath of life in school. It is a
multi-billion dollar enterprise.
Schools do some skill training (literacy,
math–history is mostly abolished) that may or may not be liberating
(fascist Germany and Japan were highly literate societies).
Schools do a lot of ideological
training–promoting nationalism and racism: the Pledge of Allegiance
fetish to the fact that US school are as segregated as they were in 1954 at the
time of the Brown vs Board of Education case. Real segregation does not
overwhelm a multi-culturalism class—usually a veneer for nationalism
anyway.
Schools warehouse kids: babysit. They serve as a
massive tax funded service to corporations that don’t pay their share. The
warehouse factor becomes obvious when you consider the incredible amounts of
time wasted in school.
Schools create the next generation of workers, as
described above. Since the economic trajectory in the US is, for the vast
majority of people, down–schools not only train people for bad jobs (the
idea of teaching people to become citizens to participate in a democracy has
vanished from school discourse) but they tamp down the expectations of youth so
they won’t want good jobs—Walmart seems like a good deal. Detroit has
four high schools, publicly funded, devoted to Walmart training. No kidding.
Schools fashion Hope: real and false. On one hand it is clear that societies
where Hope is foreclosed foster the potential of mass uprisings: France in the
summer of 1968 is a good example--uprisings starting in school and quickly
involving the working classes nearly overthrew the government. Real hope might
be found in showing kids we can comprehend and change the world, collectively,
and teaching them how. Ask, “Why are things as they are?” every day. Or, in
demonstrating that we are responsible for our own histories, but not our
birthrights. False hope might be the typical school hype: Anyone can make it,
all you must do is work hard. Nonsense. Inheritance is, more than ever, the key
to understanding that.
Capitalist schools is, in the main, aimed at students.
That’s one of many reasons students need to play key roles in organizing education
resistance. Capitalist schooling is not a job bank for school workers.
Capitalist schooling mixes a real elite need for
social control with profiteering. In many cases, social control through
schooling will trump profits, if only briefly.
What are the Key Things Happening in School
Today?
The Race to the Top (Ratt)program engendered by the
demagogue, Obama, and his education “czar” Arne Duncan is nothing but the Bush,
No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), thrown into hyper-speed. These are its parts.
*Standardization. The regimentation of the curricula and teaching
methods, what people come to know and how they come to know it via, for
example, reading or history standards. How these standards came to be is a good
question, and the presenter should know the answer. The fact that the Ratt and
NCLB are both bi-partisan projects supported by the majority of Democrats and
Republicans who now insist in a national curriculum (unthinkable even ten years
ago) demonstrates the nature of class rule through government.
*High Stakes Testing. Always racist, always anti-working class,
measuring little but parental income, race, and subservience, behind a mask of
science and equality. Those familiar with Marx’s Labor Theory of Value will
find a useful analogy. A pretense of equality is established. Every child
arrives to take the same test and, presumably, if they work hard they will win.
But what of the kid arriving hungry, or angry, or abused, in a room with no
heat?
*Merit
Pay. Rooted in student test scores, this will assault school workers in poorer
districts first, only to prove the old adage, “an injury to one only goes
before an injury to all.”
This is like the “fair day’s work for a fair days’ pay,” myth of
capitalism which throws the mass of people into ruthless competition for jobs,
then never pays the full value of labor–thus the origins of profits. Each
fashions an appearance of equality, and an essence of deepening inequality.
*Militarization. Since the September 11 2001, the military invaded
schools with a vengeance. Their relentless recruiting is, not surprisingly,
running along class lines, enforcing he economic draft, demonstrating that
there is an inequitable schools-to-war pipeline. This is true, especially, in
militarized California where much of the university systems is devoted to the
military, intelligence agencies, etc., but it is true throughout the US.
*Privatization. This is a distant fourth, for reasons described above,
but the reality of the privatization of New Orleans, as elites moved fast to
wipe out poverty by vanishing the poor, cannot be ignored.
*Obama
now promotes “National Service” which appears to be a planned syphon to strain
off middle class resistance to the potential of a draft.
*Fear.
*Layoffs, cutbacks in libraries, books, supplies, etc. The working class
in the US has been attacked piecemeal, the weakest hit first and hardest but
others always to follow. First, the mental institutions were closed, throwing
people on the street. Next, the welfare system was attacked. Then came air
traffic controllers, industrial workers of all sorts.
Now, teachers are among the last people in the US with
collective bargaining contracts, predictable wages, some due process rights,
limited on the job freedom, and health benefits. That an injury to one, as with
industrial workers, only goes before an injury to all is a lesson educators
have taken a long time to learn. Education workers are next.
School workers are likely to fight back, as we see now
in Capistrano and Oakland, Ca, because they must, to live. At issue is whether
educators make sense of why they must fight back, the rule of capital and its
relentless wars of all on all, or they take the narrow, unionite, stance and
fight only for school workers, at base attacking the rest of the ruling class,
as the CTA ballot measure above indicates.
School reform in the absence of radical economic and
social reform (which demands a social movement) will not work. It is like
washing the air on one side of a screen door as my friend Jean Anyon has
demonstrated for a decade. But that is the claim of all education elites who
are, on the face of it, either dishonest or stupid.
How can we fight back? I suggest we must connect
reason to passion, passion to ethics, ethics to organization, and organization
to direct action. For an extension: http://richgibson.com/edagenda_waragenda.html
But, specifically what can we do?
It’s is terrific that Capistrano and Oakland are going
out. As an aside, this is not the best time to strike. The districts will not
lose money because of these strikes. Best time to strike is during high-stakes
exams or at the beginning of the year when all can be fully prepared.
Without a crystal ball, it’s hard to foresee how long
Capistrano holds out. In that Capistrano is positioned so that they are being
watched by both school workers and bosses all over the US, it's important to
back them. The clearest way to do that is to not only send them a note, but
send them real money--unless you can go join the picket line; better still.
Here is a link for donations http://www.cuea.org/indexAlt.htm
Even $5 dollars is a concrete way to say to the school workers that they are
not alone.
Capistrano should be followed out on strike by Oakland
on April 29: http://oaklandea.com/
Over
time, it is difficult to defend school strikes from scabs (and internal
betrayal). In some areas, like Crestwood, Michigan, scabbing and betrayal
combined to wipe out an entire teaching force that courageously went on strike,
then was told by their union bosses they would "win in court," while
at the same time the union hacks told the rank and file that the school grounds
were too big to really enforce a picket line (despite the fact that dozens of
non-teachers joined the lines and held them fairly strong). The Crestwood
teachers let the scabs in, and lost in court. Many of them never taught again.
What
can we learn? The courts are not a place where these fights can be settled successfully.
Scabbing cannot be tolerated. Union tops cannot be trusted. Direct mass action
is key.
One way to stop scabs is to seize buildings. Teachers
have keys to the buildings. They buildings are fairly
comfortable places. People can bring the school workers food, etc. There are
valuable things inside those buildings that bosses don't want destroyed. It's
difficult for cops to go in and drag people out of buildings. With cell phones,
etc, communication with the outside is easy. Other people can picket outside
seized buildings, protecting those inside.
An
extension on this tactic is to "reverse strike," that is, to seize
the building and invite students inside to conduct real classes, not the daily
rubbish that is capitalist schooling, but real education that examines why
things are as they are. This is
real Freedom Schooling. Why is society offering youth perpetual war and
meaningless jobs, or no jobs at all? What can be done about that?
It is even more difficult for cops (one armed wing of
the ruling class which never goes and hits
superintendents on the head for provoking a school worker strike) to attack
educators conducting classes with students.
The unions are unfit to meet the crisis at hand. Even
if the unions were led by honest people, and they are not,
unionism cannot produce the class-wide solidarity we must initiate on our own.
For an extension on US unionism (of which I was a part for a long time): http://richgibson.com/USUnionism.html
This
is a job action primer I wrote some time ago with several other people while
working for NEA locals. Since several of us wrote it, it's far more restrained
than I am, and it's a bit dated, but it might be helpful for those who are
taking up the idea of fighting back in serious way. This little template is no
substitute for a concrete grasp of real local, national, and international
conditions, nor a substitute for the trusting personal relations that must be
developed before and during a job action. Again, this is a fight not a chat.
Those who do not want to fight only prepare others for losing. (http://richgibson.com/JOBACTIO.html)
The core issue of our time is the reality of the
promise of endless war coupled to booming color-coded
inequality--met by the potential of mass, active, class conscious resistance.
If the happy possibility of a mass resistance is to
break out, I hope it combines the true passion of the ethics
and call for equality and freedom we outlined with the analytical tools of
political economy and the study of things and people as they change:
dialectical materialism. People can become whole, joyous, and free within a
resistance movement that is making sense of the crux of current conditions and
that seeks to change the world.
Everything is at hand for a full rearrangement of the
social relations of daily life. Let us get to the real task
connecting Reason to Power, to Ethics, to Passion, to Organization and Action.
Good luck to us, every one.
Rich Gibson for the Rouge Forum
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