Budget Slashers Attack City College of San Francisco-For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!

Workers Vanguard No. 1023	3 May 2013

For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!

Budget Slashers Attack City College of San Francisco

(Young Spartacus pages)

City College of San Francisco (CCSF), one of the few remaining avenues to higher education for its 85,000 predominantly working-class, poor and minority students, is threatened with being shut down. Last July, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) told the college that it would lose accreditation—i.e., face closure—if it did not sufficiently address the commission’s demands for fiscal and structural changes. The ACCJC particularly cited the costs of CCSF’s wages and benefits for the unionized faculty and campus workers. Seizing on the threatened sanction, the campus administration unilaterally imposed an 8.8 percent wage cut and began axing faculty and clerical workers’ jobs, paving the way to slashing more classes and even entire programs. Already, the administration has announced that it plans to close two of CCSF’s nine campus sites.

The ACCJC’s own report makes clear that the accreditation sanction has nothing to do with the quality of education at CCSF. In fact, the report commends “several exemplary models of demonstrated educational quality.” What they object to is that such programs and the unionized faculty who staff the departments haven’t been sufficiently slashed. Their purpose is to streamline programs that educate technicians and other skilled workers as are needed by business and get rid of the rest. Such cuts could potentially target bilingual education, food service and hospitality classes that allow working-class youth to get jobs in SF’s unionized hotel industry, as well as job-training programs for those just released from America’s prison hellholes.

California’s community college system is the largest in the country. For years it had provided working-class and poor youth with their best shot at getting into the elite University of California (UC) system, while offering other such students their only access to any education beyond the increasingly underfunded and decrepit high schools. But having wiped out whole swaths of industry and manufacturing, the American bourgeoisie has for decades been choking off funding for public education, seeing little value in educating youth for whom there are no jobs.

The attacks against CCSF are part of a broad nationwide assault on public schools and teachers unions. And California has led the nation on this score, particularly since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. A tax revolt by white property owners, Prop. 13 cut spending on social programs benefiting black people, minorities and the poor, with schools taking some of the biggest hits. The 2007-08 capitalist economic meltdown sent the budget-slashing, union-busting drive into high gear. Funding for the community college system has been slashed by over $1 billion, a quarter of classes have been cut entirely, and despite the fiction of “free tuition” the fees for classes have risen by an astronomical 255 percent in nine years.

Over the last several months, CCSF students, as well as faculty organized in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have participated in rallies against the attacks on the college. Protests organized by the Save CCSF Coalition, in which the reformist Socialist Organizer (S.O.) plays a leading role, have pleaded with CCSF Chancellor Thelma Scott-Skillman and the Board of Trustees to “reverse all cuts” and “promote equity.” A banner at a February 21 protest demanded “Trustees: Put Us First! We Are S.F. City College!” Fat chance of that! The whole purpose of the Board of Trustees is to enforce the dictates of the capitalist rulers whose interests they represent, and that means bringing down the budget ax. S.O. couples its entreaties to the good offices of the Chancellor with appeals to the bourgeoisie to fork out more tax money to fund education.

The government’s tax code flows from the class and social relations that define racist American capitalism, a system of production for profit based on the exploitation of labor and the brutal subjugation of black people. Look at Proposition A—a property parcel tax intended specifically to provide funds to stop budget cuts and layoffs at CCSF. Recognizing the importance of the school, an overwhelming majority of SF voters supported Prop. A in last November’s elections. But the rulers hold the purse strings. As Chancellor Scott-Skillman and the Board of Trustees made clear, they have no intention of using these funds to “save CCSF.” Rather, they have pledged that money raised under Prop. A will go to building up the college’s financial reserves, while the axing of jobs and classes continues.

There is no lack of money in this rich country that could be used to provide free, quality education for all. But for working people to get their hands on that wealth will require nothing less than socialist revolution to break the power of the bourgeoisie. It is this revolutionary perspective that guides the Spartacus Youth Club, which has intervened into student and labor rallies protesting the closure of CCSF. As a Spartacist speaker declared at a February 21 protest:

“CCSF isn’t going to be saved by appealing to the chancellor or the campus administration, which really exists to serve the capitalist rulers on the campus.... And it isn’t going to be saved by appealing for ‘bridge loans’ to the Democratic Party city administration, which has been cutting wages, benefits and jobs for workers all over the city. Alongside the students, there has to be mobilized the power of the workers, the people who make this city run.... The people who go to school here are the children of working-class people, and working people in this city and the whole Bay Area have an innate interest in fighting to save CCSF. And that fight must be mobilized around the call for free, quality, integrated education for everybody.”

The SYC demands: No tuition, open admissions and a full living stipend for all students! Abolish the Board of Trustees and the administration! Those who work, study and teach at the colleges and universities should run them—for worker/student/teacher control!

Race and Class Privilege in Education

Contrary to the myth that college and university campuses are ivory towers that exist apart from the broader society, the attack on CCSF shows in the realm of higher education the race and class privilege at the core of American capitalism. The whole history of the community college system provides a concrete demonstration that the bourgeoisie seeks to spend on educating poor and working-class youth only what they can realize back in profit through the exploitation of their labor. From the beginning, the conception of such colleges was to provide skilled workers and technicians for industry. They massively grew in the aftermath of World War II, particularly to provide workers for the growing defense industries that had moved to California. Indeed, when these industries faced a labor shortage during the war, California shipyard owners recruited untrained and often semiliterate Southern youth, many of them black, who learned how to read and write and often became skilled apprentices in little more than three months.

Following the war, the GI Bill provided free tuition for those who had served as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism. Working-class and poor families thought that their sons and daughters would finally have access to higher education and a better future. But with enrollment skyrocketing, including many knocking on the door for entry into the prestigious University of California system, a committee headed by UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr came up with the Master Plan for Education in 1960. Qualifications for getting into UC were ramped up to limit enrollment to the top 12 percent of high school graduates. Meanwhile, the California state colleges, which previously had largely been teacher-training institutions, became officially recognized as liberal arts colleges. Qualifications for entry were tightened to apply to only 33 percent of high school graduates as opposed to the previous 50 to 70 percent. Community and junior colleges were to take and train the rest.

Affirmative action—a limited gain of the civil rights movement—allowed some access to the UC system for blacks and other minority youth. But these programs have been destroyed. California was in the vanguard of the campaign to roll back affirmative action. Moreover, poor, black and working-class youth were increasingly priced out of the UC market as tuition skyrocketed. The bourgeoisie increasingly considers the masses of black people in the inner cities as a “surplus population,” no longer needed as a reserve army of labor and thus not “worth” providing with even the basic means of survival, much less education.

As we wrote in early 2010, at a time of massive student and campus worker protests against tuition hikes, education cuts and job-slashing attacks:

“We think everyone should have access to the same quality education available to the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. We call to nationalize the private universities and for a state-paid living stipend so working people and the poor can attend. We demand the expansion of remedial programs for students relegated to inner-city public schools, an end to the racist ‘tracking’ system in the high schools and their genuine integration, including through the aggressive implementation of busing. Whether this is possible or not is in reality determined by the outcome of class and social struggle. Under capitalism, gains wrested from the ruling class through social struggle are limited and reversible. As communists, our goal is not what is possible within the framework of capitalist society, but the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist class rule and the establishment of a workers state as a transition to the construction of a classless, egalitarian society where scarcity has been eliminated and education is the right of all.”

—“ Protests Against Education Cuts and Fee Hikes Sweep California,” WV No. 950, 15 January 2010

The Dead End of Pressure Politics

Reformist “socialists” perennially peddle the lie that capitalism can be reformed to serve the interests of the working class and oppressed. To this end, Socialist Organizer even offers budgetary advice to the bourgeoisie. In a leaflet titled “Don’t Let the 1% Dismantle CCSF,” which was distributed at a March 14 protest at SF City Hall, S.O. opines:

“They tell us that there is no money, so we have to cut back or they will close our school. They are lying. There are many obvious solutions to CCSF’s and California’s financial woes: taxing the rich, taxing oil extraction, cutting prison and war funding, and/or amending Prop 13. Cuts are not inevitable. The school and the state is [sic] facing a priorities crisis—not a budget crisis” (emphasis in original).

The only “priority” for the bourgeoisie is the maintenance of their class rule and the protection and expansion of their global imperialist interests. That will not change short of socialist revolution. S.O. stops short of even the utopian call that reformists often raise for the capitalist rulers to end imperialist war. They simply and explicitly accept the capitalist machinery of repression, only urging that less money be spent on maintaining the prisons and subjugating peoples around the world.

At the same time, S.O. can talk out of the left side of its mouth, making a nod in its leaflet to mobilizing the power of organized labor and even writing that this “requires breaking labor’s subordination to the Democratic Party.” They acknowledge that “winning free, quality public education for all…requires eliminating capitalism and replacing it with a socialist society.” But this is window-dressing for their work on the ground as leaders of the Save CCSF Coalition.

From the podium at the March 14 rally, the speech by S.O.’s Eric Blanc had not a scintilla of “socialism.” He complained, “Unfortunately, the politicians have remained silent up until this moment,” adding that “when our school is under attack, the responsibility of the people who are elected from this city is to save our school, not dismantle it.” Indeed, a core demand of the Coalition is that “San Francisco’s elected representatives must step in” as allies providing funds and political support to the fight to save CCSF. S.O. & Co. appeal to Mayor Ed Lee and the Democratic-controlled city administration—the same capitalist politicians cutting the wages, benefits and pensions of city workers, including members of SEIU Local 1021, which also represents CCSF clerical employees.

Thus, like the trade-union bureaucracy, which has long subordinated labor to the Democratic Party, S.O. serves to channel the protests into the bourgeois electoral shell game. The idea that the Democrats—the other party of American capitalist rule—are the allies of the working class and poor has long served as a key prop for maintaining the system of racist U.S. imperialism.

As the youth auxiliary to the Marxist Spartacist League, the purpose of the Spartacus Youth Clubs is to win a new generation of students and youth to the fight to build a revolutionary workers party. Only under the leadership of such a party can the working class realize its social power and historic interests as the gravediggers of this system of wage slavery, racial oppression, poverty and war. The working class must seize state power and reorganize society on an egalitarian socialist basis, providing for the needs of the many rather than the profits of a tiny class of exploiters. The essential precondition for human emancipation from starvation, exploitation, ignorance and inequality is a planned, socialized economy on a global scale. Only in this way can the accumulated knowledge and culture of civilization be truly appropriated by those who are today deprived of the right to quality education.