Showing posts with label defend public education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label defend public education. Show all posts

Sunday, January 03, 2016

***From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Development of Soviet Educational Policies

Markin comment:

The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 1977, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Markin comment on this article:

Over the past couple of years I have placed as many still relevant social, political, literary, and cultural articles from the journal Women and Revolution as I have been able to find as a source for leftist militants to think about these questions that are not always directly related to our day to day tasks in the class struggle today. I have made some effort into trying to get as many articles about the experiences of the Soviet Union as possible because that experience is, in some senses, our only example of what could have been had things turned out a bit differently back in the early days of the Russian revolution.

A couple of general observations about the tenor of the Soviet-centered articles. First, each article starts with items and ideas that spoke to the promise of the revolution, the things that could or should have been done and that the Bolsheviks raised holy hell to try to accomplish. Second, each article notes that turning inward of the revolution and the erasing of institutions, movements, and currents that surfaced in the revolutionary period and that were slammed in the period of Stalinist degeneration of the late 1920s. Those observations should be etched in the memory or every leftist militant who wants to fight for our communist future so we do better when our chance comes.
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Development of Soviet Educational Policies
by Janis Gerrard


Along with the family and the church, the capitalist educational system serves to perpetuate bourgeois ideology. Expensive private schools and elite institutions of higher learning are for the privileged few. Public schools, on the other hand, stress the skills and discipline necessary to prepare the plebeian masses for their future exploitation.

The Bolshevik Revolution, which had as one of its goals the elimination of the distinction between mental and manual labor, took quite a different approach to education. "Every cook must rule," said Lenin. But in order to rule, one must know how to read and write and think. The illiterate person, he said, stands outside politics.

The Bolshevik Party regarded education as both a pledge to the workers and a necessity for workers democratic rule. An illiterate population, steeped in religious superstition, would be a barrier to socialist development.
At the time that the Bolsheviks seized power, the cultural level of the Russian masses was abysmal. Illiteracy, which was the norm for men, was nearly universal among women. The tsarist school system had catered to the children of the aristocracy and the upper middle classes who were preparing for the professions and government posts. There had been trade-school apprenticeships for a lucky few working-class children, but most children of poor families went to work at an early age.

After the 1905 Revolution, despite the general reaction and repression, there was a slight liberalization in the arts and education. Within the tsarist system a layer of educational reformers came to the fore, many of them Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) and other right-wing reformers, and outside it communists and anarchists set up their own schools and study circles, which taught workers and peasants the basics of literacy and hygiene along with politics. This tradition of popular education was part of the Russian radical heritage which dated back to the work of the Narodniki in the 1870s.

The academic intelligentsia enthusiastically welcomed the February revolution, which freed them from the repressive restrictions of the autocracy. However, in October most of them proved to be as anti-communist as they had been anti-autocratic.

This preponderance of anti-communism in academic circles added to the difficulties of the Soviet Commissariat of Education—Narkompros. The tasks it faced were monumental, and during the critical period of the civil war only those commissariats immediately necessary for the survival of the proletarian dictatorship—the army, the food commissariat, the transport authority— received much in the way of human and financial resources.
Almost immediately after the October Revolution, teachers joined the municipal workers of Petrograd and Moscow in an anti-government strike. Allegedly financed by the Ryanbushinsky banking family, the strikers were able to hold out all through the bitter winter. Threats to fire the teachers were ineffective since they could not be immediately replaced.

Many leaders and members of the All-Russian Teachers Union (VUS) joined the counterrevolutionary Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution, which worked openly for Bolshevik defeat and used the example of the Bolsheviks' unsuccessful negotiations with the striking teachers in its propaganda. V.M. Pozner, an ultra-leftist within Narkompros, led the tiny minority of pro-Bolshevik teachers out of the VUS to form the Union of Teacher Internationalists and argued that the VUS should be forcibly dissolved. One of the main opponents of this position was Nadezhda Krupskaya, who wrote in Izvestiia (July 1918):

"I, like comrades Pozner and Lepeshinsky, wanted to tear VUS from the influence of its present leaders, but I am an old splitter and thought it more appropriate to break up VUS from within. In my opinion it was necessary to persuade all teachers supporting Soviet power...not to leave VUS, but to attend its Congress as delegates, and there form a compact group and develop their programmed to the full. Then it would have been clear what the real strength of the internationalists was...."

—N.K. Krupskaya, quoted in Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightment

The pro-Bolshevik teachers who had left the VUS were not eager to return, preferring the safety of sectarianism to the rigors of struggle. But with the support of Lenin, the "splitters" won against the red unionists and a successful fight was waged inside VUS, resulting in the formation of a broad, independent Union of Workers in Education and Socialist Culture.

Inspired Beginnings...

Despite its shortcomings, Narkompros initially had great authority. Anatol Lunacharsky, the commissar of education, was well-known and greatly admired. During the Bolshevik struggle against the Provisional Government in 1917 his audiences at factories and in the workers' districts regularly numbered in the thousands. His deputy, Krupskaya, was a respected Bolshevik known for her educational work and writing.

From the time the Bolsheviks seized state power they struggled to make education accessible for the first time to the masses. Child labor was abolished and schooling made mandatory for all children between the ages of seven and seventeen. Literacy was made mandatory for everyone through age 50, and a two-hour reduction in the work day was given to those engaged in such study. Tuition was abolished along with all academic titles, tests, degrees and homework. Teachers were subject to dismissal by their pupils. Unfortunately, however, much of this legislation existed only on paper, since the civil war left few funds for its implementation.

Nevertheless, by 1920 about 25,000 schools for literacy had been established, many of them organized by Zhenotdel, the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women. Though placards over the entrances said "Children are the Hope of the World," in fact the whole nation was going to school and learning to read and write. And those who learned also taught. The slogan of the campaign against illiteracy was: "Every literate person trains an illiterate one."

Despite the anti-communism of most professors the universities were kept open, and admission was free to anyone over 16 years of age who could demonstrate literacy. Special departments called rabfaks were also established in the universities to bring workers up to the standard of university entrance.

The early years of Soviet rule witnessed heated theoretical debate on the philosophy and methods of education. Once again V.M. Pozner crossed swords with the Narkompros leadership. Unlike Lunacharsky, he emphasized the replacement of the family by the school commune and a full reintegration of education with life, asserting that labor skills would be taught by "life itself" rather than artificially in a workshpp.

While these concepts were not at odds with Bolshevik ideals, they were unrealistic during a period of "war communism." The imperialist war and then the civil war had left thousands of homeless children roaming the countryside. Under these conditions the skills such children "learned from life" were likely to be lock picking and thievery. Lenin intervened in the controversy to have Lunacharsky's "Declaration on the United Labor School" declared a literary document, which meant that it was no longer subject to alteration. Lenin's implicit support gave the document the edge it needed to defeat Pozner's "Statement on the United Labor School."

...Clash With Hard Realities

While struggling against the threat of ultra-leftists who sought to realize communist ideals in a backward and impoverished country, the Narkompros leadership had also to wage a continual fight against a hardened, right-wing, anti-communist bloc of educators who remained loyal to the defunct Provisional Government, and with short-sighted elements within the Bolshevik party, including many trade unionists, who were most susceptible to the pressure to gear education solely to fill the desperate, immediate need for skilled workers. Narkompros consistently defended a policy of long-term polytechnical education as opposed to early specialization in trade schools and free education as opposed to the reintroduction of tuition fees.

Drawing on the only resources available, Narkompros attempted to supply the Soviet educational system with the facilities of the old, tsarist technical and trade schools During 1918 and 1919 two hundred trade schools were dismantled and destroyed under Narkompros direction—a rash act at a time when skilled workers were desperately needed and before new facilities had actually been created. This put Narkompros in a defensive position against the proponents of monotechnicalism, who were already gathering a "technical lobby" around a proposal for a United Technical School—a system in which only primary education would have a general character. This lobby gained a powerful ally at the end of 1919 in Leon Trotsky's Commission on Labor Conscription.

Trotsky's plan to allow a limited reintroduction of private trade to regenerate the ravaged economy had been rejected. This plan was to be introduced two years later in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP), but during the period when it was temporarily defeated," Trotsky proposed a quasi-military mobilization of labor as the only alternative. An adjunct to this mobilization to ensure the production of qualified workers was educational conscription, with specialized professional training beginning at age 14. The bloc was short-lived, however. The Controversy which arose over Trotsky's proposal centered on the relationship between the state and the trade unions. Trotsky argued that labor conscription necessitated the transformation of trade unions into a disciplined arm of the state. The trade unionists, who made up the bulk of the "technical\ lobby," while supporting educational conscription, opposed the general plan. Lenin sided with the trade unionists on the question of the unions' right to strike and the threatened infringement of trade-union independence, and with the Narkompros leadership in its defense of polytechnicalism.

Narkompros emerged from this struggle victorious but weakened and with the authority of its leadership damaged. The "technical lobby," although temporarily defeated, was strengthened. The general sentiment that Narkompros, whatever its program, had not been able to organize much of anything was close to the truth.

This lack of confidence in Narkompros reached a crisis when an emergency necessitated an unexpected relationship between Narkompros and the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterrevolution, Speculation and Delinquency in Office— otherwise known as the Cheka.
In 1920-the Soviet Union was terrorized by gangs of starving, homeless delinquent youth. Cheka leader Felix Dzerzhinsky proposed that since the Cheka had well-supplied and efficiently operating branches in many areas, it could take on the task of rehabilitating these homeless youth (bespryzornye)—an idea which sent panic through liberal pedagogical circles.

The Cheka proceeded to organize rehabilitation colonies along the lines laid out by Commissar G.F. Grinko of the Ukrainian Narkompros, a long-time foe of the Russian Narkompros' child-centered theories of education. The work was headed by Grinko's protege, Anton Makarenko. Although Makarenko's methods, which included military discipline and hard labor in addition to instruction, were highly unorthodox by Soviet standards, he was successful in rehabilitating seemingly incorrigible delinquents with police records ranging from petty theft to manslaughter.

Each of his collectives was a carefully constructed unit with a built-in stratified, hierarchical and democratic structure calculated to create an atmosphere of intense social pressure to curb the anti-social tendencies of the bespryzornye. Discipline was collective and often self-imposed. Transferred from Narkompros to the Cheka, Makarenko continued to run this operation throughout the 1920's.

Retreat

Under the pressure of the "technical "lobby," Narkompros was forced in 1920 to the conclusion that the shortage of qualified workers made it necessary to temporarily reduce the labor school from nine to seven years and to begin specialized training at age fifteen. This time, even Krupskaya gave in. Since the nine-year school did not exist in any case, except on paper, the real task was to construct the seven-year school.
Narkompros emphasized that this was a regrettable and temporary expedient, and Lenin fought for a reaffirmation of the principle of polytechnical education which he correctly viewed as being in danger during this period of retreat.

The introduction of the New Economic Policy halted the few advances that Narkompros had achieved. The end of food requisitions and the introduction of the tax in kind meant a drastic reduction in state funds available for education. All departments were urged to take advantage of the limited free market and become self-sufficient. Narkompros, however, had nothing to market but theater tickets and literature. At the same time, costs skyrocketed, since public services such as sewage, electricity, fuel and transportation now cost money. In February and March of 1922 an acute financial crisis led to a large number of Soviet employees being taken off state supply. The number of teachers receiving or even entitled to salaries fell drastically, leading to a wholesale closing of schools.

After reaching a peak of 82,000 in 1921, primary schools were driven down to 49,000 by October 1923. Those schools which did survive the removal of central funding initiated local self-taxation in kind, making teachers directly dependent on the kulaks (rich peasants) for their most immediate needs.

Narkompros initially forbade the reintroduction of tuition fees but was soon forced to allow it as a temporary expedient. Krupskaya called this decision, which once again made education a privilege of those who could afford it, a vulgar retreat from the party program.

Stalinist Education

Many Narkompros members became involved in the oppositional struggle against the rise of Stalinist bureaucratism which followed Lenin's death in 1924. Krupskaya initially fought with the joint opposition but was seduced back into the fold by the ultra-left policies of Stalin's "third period." But although she remained a figurehead in Narkompros, she was stripped of all real influence. Lunacharsky avoided the political struggle, apparently hoping to defend the gains of Narkompros in the arts and education against the general social retrenchment.

Although Narkompros now entered a period of demoralization and relative inactivity, it continued to wage some agitational campaigns. In 1925, the League of the Militant Godless, an organization dedicated to the replacement of superstition with scientific knowledge, was founded with Narkompros support. The campaign to combat illiteracy was also pursued vigorously, despite the inability of schools to accommodate students.
The defeat of the Left Opposition meant the defeat of Leninism. However, in education this void was not immediately filled by Stalinist policies. Instead, the crackpot theories of "pedology" and "spontaneous education" became popular during the middle and late twenties. The adherents of these theories predicted the "withering away of the schools," perhaps in an effort to justify the unfortunate reality—there were not enough schools!

The first All-Union Congress of Pedology boasted 2,500 participants.
From 1929 on, Stalin attempted to give programmatic justification to the temporary and unavoidable retreats in the field of education. The old tsarist educators returned to the classrooms, degrees, titles and pedagogic discipline were reinstituted and the schools again were devoted to instilling labor discipline and servility. A major pedagogic text of the early Stalinist period was entitled I Want to Be Like Stalin!
Stalin found his perfect educational theorist in Makarenko. After his successes in the twenties with the besprizornye, Makarenko could argue in the thirties with the authority of an enlightened and successful pedagogue for militarism, discipline and patriotism. With Makarenko at the head of Stalin's campaign against "pedological perversions," the popular theory served as a straw man to guillotine the whole concept of education for individual development. And since Makarenko's old foes in Narkompros, including Krupskaya and Lunacharsky, were tainted by their association with pedology, the campaign served both as a scapegoat for the failure of early Soviet educational policies and as a screen for the turn from the earlier prevailing approach to education.

In 1940 the imminent danger of a German invasion motivated a switch to quick vocational and military training ranging from six-month factory courses to two-year vocational schools. Tuition fees for education beyond the eighth grade made the factory courses the only real option of the poor. By 1942 vocational schools were introduced for children as young as ten years of age, and military training was instituted.

In 1943, separate education for boys and girls was re-introduced on the grounds that co-education had served its purpose—smashing the vestiges of the tsarist oppression of women. The liberated Soviet woman, it was argued, needed a separate education to better prepare her for her special Work in life—not the least of which was marriage and motherhood.
The contradictions generally inherent in Stalinism were duplicated in the Stalinist educational system. The Stalinist bureaucrats achieved their privileged position by politically expropriating the working class, yet they maintained their rule only by defending collectivized property, which is in the historic interests of the workers. These property forms demand technological and scientific development, which is dependent on individual human creativity possible only in the context of a generally high cultural level. Thus, the Stalinist bureaucracy was forced to return a high proportion of the national surplus to mass education. It created an educational system which supplied necessary scientists and technicians and at the same time indoctrinated the young with a misplaced loyalty to the bureaucracy and its programs.

The self-serving bureaucracy is at times its own worst enemy. Disastrous consequences often result from the attempt to bolster the reactionary program of "socialism in one country" with Utopian, anti-materialist theories. Thus, Lysenko's crackpot genetic theories applied to agriculture led to the destruction of vast tracts of arable land. But Soviet education nevertheless achieved great leaps in science, industry and even sports. In a matter of decades the Soviet Union was transformed from a backward, largely feudal agrarian society to a modern industrial state and a major military power. The appearance of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, and the development of the Soviet nuclear bomb put a spotlight on Soviet education, producing in the U.S. a flood of books with such titles as: What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't, and The Challenge of Soviet Education.

The achievements not only of the USSR but of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and China show what socialized property and centralized education can achieve even without enlightened policies. Only a political revolution based on the program of Lenin and Trotsky, however, will restore intellectual and artistic freedom and unleash the unknown capacities of the human mind. With the victory of the reforged Fourth International, EVERY COOK WILL RULE!

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Forum this Saturday In Boston: Stop the attacks on public education!

Forum this Saturday: Stop the attacks on public education!
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From : Kevin Heaton
Sender : occupy-boston-socialist-discussion@googlegroups.com
Subject : Forum this Saturday: Stop the attacks on public education!
Reply To : occupy-boston-socialist-discussion@googlegroups.com
Tue, Jun 05, 2012 04:41 AM




***Forward Widely***


Don’t let Walmart tell us how to run our public schools:
A community forum responding to the corporate attacks



Saturday June 9th , 2012
10 am - 12 noon



Roxbury Community College
Academic Building Room 121


Increasingly, venture capitalists and deep-pocket
corporate foundations are moving aggressively to
remake our schools in their image.

Join us for a discussion of the Stand for Children
ballot initiative, charter schools, and ways to keep
corporate influence out and keep community
input – and quality – in our public schools.

Co-sponsored by TAG-Boston, Citizens for Public Schools,
Union of Minority Neighborhoods and MA Jobs with Justice

For additional information, contact MA JWJ: 617.524.8778


www.tagboston.org


Light refreshments provided.
Afterwards, march with us in the Pride Parade.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

From The Boston Teachers Union- All Out January 18th-Talk to Teachers Rally at School Committee Meeting-January 18, 2012 - 5:00pm - 6:30pm-26 Court St

Talk to Teachers Rally at School Committee Meeting-January 18, 2012 - 5:00pm - 6:30pm-26 Court St

We have scheduled three days of negotiations to take place in January and early February, after spending two days in December when some – limited – progress was made. However, we will be ratcheting up our attempts to get the city and the school district to make some real movement

We have hired a moving billboard to travel throughout the city to being home our message that we want the district and city to Talk to Teachers so we can conclude the negotiating process that will result in a contract that is good for students, affordable to the city, and fair to our members.

Our billboard will travel all over the city from 1/11 through 1/18, from Readville to Charlestown through Roxbury, from Brighton to Dorchester through Jamaica Plain, and from East Boston to City Hall via the school department.

On January 18th the billboard will spend its day near and around city hall and the school district HQ, as it prepares to meet us at Court St. at 5:00, for a rally outside district headquarters. We are asking our members to rally outside the school committee meeting at 5:00 on Wednesday 1/18, from 5-6:30, for a rally. Our message: Talk to Teachers.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law - by Stephen Lendman

Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law
by Stephen Lendman

Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) 15 Jun 2011
union busting

Wisconsin Supreme Court Reinstates Anti-Union Law - by Stephen Lendman

At the state and federal levels, pro-business/anti-worker rulings are nothing new. US Supreme Court history is rife with them since the 19th century, and no wonder.

From inception, America was always ruled by men, not laws, who lie, connive, misinterpret, and pretty much do what they please for their own self-interest.

In 1787 in Philadelphia, "the people" who mattered most were elitists. America's revolution substituted new management for old. Everything changed but stayed the same under a system establishing illusory democracy at the federal, state and local levels.

Today, all three branches of government prove it's more corrupt, ruthless, and indifferent to fundamental freedoms and human needs than ever, including worker rights to bargain collectively with management on equal terms. Forget it. They're going, going, gone.

Last March, a protracted Senate battle ended when hard-line Republicans violated Wisconsin's open meetings law, requiring 24 hours prior notice for special sessions unless giving it is impossible or impractical.

The epic battle ended along party lines after State Assembly members past Walker's bill 53 - 42, following the Senate voting 18 - 1 with no debate.

At issue was passing an old-fashioned union-busting law with no Democrats present, brazen politicians and corrupted union bosses selling out rank and file members for self-enrichement and privilege, complicit with corporate CEOs.

Besides other draconian provisions, the measure permits collective bargaining only on wage issues before ending them altogether, what's ahead unless stopped.

On May 27, however, Circuit Court Judge Maryann Sumi rescinded Walker's bill, ruling Republican lawmakers violated the state's open meetings law. They promptly appealed to Wisconsin's Supreme Court, needing a decision before June 30, the 2011 - 2013 budget deadline.

Republicans, in fact, warned that without prompt resolution they'd include anti-worker provisions in their budget bill, practically daring the High Court not to accommodate them.

Unsurprisingly, they obliged, reinstating Republican Governor Scott Walker's union-busting measure, clearing the way ahead to strip public employees of all rights, heading them like all US workers for neo-serfdom without collective national action to stop it.

On June 14, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writers Patrick Marley and Don Walker headlined, "Supreme Court reinstates collective bargaining law," saying:

"Acting with unusual speed, the (Court) Tuesday ordered the reinstatement of (Walker's) controversial plan to end most collective bargaining (rights) for tens of thousands of public workers," in clear violation of state law.

Nonetheless, ruling 4 - 3, the Supreme Court said lawmakers were "not subject to the state's open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when it hastily" acted in March.

Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson disagreed, rebuking her colleagues for judicial errors and faulty judgment in a stinging dissent, saying:

The Court unjustifiably "reached a predetermined conclusion not based on the fact(s) and the law, which undermines the majority's ultimate decision."

Majority justices, in fact, "make their own findings of fact, mischaracterize the parties' arguments, misinterpret statutes, minimize (if not eliminate) Wisconsin constitutional guarantees, and misstate case law, appearing to silently overrule case law dating back to at least 1891."

Republicans praised the decision. Democrats said they'd move to amend the state constitution to assure meetings law enforcement, what could take years and only be possible if they have majority powers.

The measure will take effect once Secretary of State Doug La Follette publishes it, what he's certain to do quickly.

The ruling was similar to an Illinois January 27 one when its Supreme Court ruled Rahm Emanuel could run for mayor despite his residence ineligibility according to binding state law since 1818, the year Illinois gained statehood.

The law says only qualified voters who "resided in the municipality at least one year preceding the election or appointment" are eligible to run for office. Although Emanuel didn't qualify, the High Court ruled for him anyway, proving it's not the law that counts (in Illinois, Wisconsin or anywhere in America), it's enough clout to subvert it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

From The Pages Of "Workers Hammer (GB)"-Craven trade union leaders offer Labour cuts as "alternative" to Tory cuts

Workers Hammer No. 214
Spring 2011

Craven trade union leaders offer Labour cuts as "alternative" to Tory cuts

For class struggle to defend public sector jobs!

On 26 March, a massive turnout of up to half a million trade unionists demonstrated in London against the savage budget cuts announced by David Cameron’s government. The demonstration consisted of a sea of trade union banners, representing local council workers, teachers and lecturers, health workers and firefighters — in a show of anger against the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government’s assault on healthcare, social services, pensions and much more. The public sector jobs massacre saw 132,000 jobs lost in 2010, while the overall unemployment figure stands officially at 2.5 million, the highest for 20 years.

Low-paid public sector workers, a high proportion of whom are women and minorities, are the core of the trade union movement today. But rather than a strategy to mobilise that social power for a class-struggle fight to defend jobs, the TUC’s “March for the Alternative” was intended to channel this anger into supporting another Labour government. For the first time in over a dozen years, a trade union demonstration in Britain was addressed by the Labour Party leader. Ed Miliband, who was elected leader last September with the support of the trade unions, intoned on the platform that “there is an alternative”, adding that “there is a need for difficult choices, and some cuts” to reduce the budget deficit, but this government “is going too far and too fast”. For a clue as to what Miliband’s “alternative” might be, one only has to recall that before the last election Labour promised cuts deeper and tougher than under Thatcher.

Deep cuts, fast or slow cuts: these are the “choices” being offered to the working class by the servile trade union bureaucracy. Throughout Europe — from Greece to Ireland and Spain — every capitalist government is trying to force the working class to pay for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — a crisis that was caused by the capitalist system itself. An effective defence of jobs today requires hard class struggle — strike action across the public sector. But the trade union leadership is an obstacle to the kind of fight that is necessary because they too share the political framework expressed by Miliband, that the alternative to “Tory cuts” are Labour government cuts.

The ground for the present devastating public sector cuts was prepared by 13 years of Labour governments that relentlessly attacked jobs, pensions, health and education services; froze pay below inflation and slashed tens of thousands of civil service jobs. And all the while, the union leaderships stood by and refused to lead battles against the Labour government. Recall then FBU leader Andy Gilchrist calling off the firefighters strike in 2002 when it threatened to “hinder” the armed forces preparing to invade Iraq.

Visit any of the public sector unions’ websites and find “alternatives”, not for a fight to beat back the rapacious bourgeoisie but for solving British capitalism’s budget deficit. Unison’s recipe calls for “a 50 per cent tax on bankers’ bonuses” and a “Robin Hood Tax” on bank transactions. The Public and Commercial Services union, which organises civil servants, offers similar counsel to the bourgeois rulers including “We could free up billions of pounds by not renewing Trident.”

The “socialist” outfits who ride Labour’s coattails look to none other than the bold class warriors of the TUC to call a general strike, while cravenly rebuilding illusions in the election of a Labour government. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) runs the National Right to Work coalition, whose slogan is “Break the Con-Dem Coalition!” (read: and replace it with a Labour government). When Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership contest last year, they enthused that his win was “another avenue to bring pressure to bear on Labour to fight” (Socialist Worker, 25 September 2010). In the meantime a poster on their website lists their own recommendations to the capitalist rulers, “Why There’s No Need to Slash Spending”. Cuts can be avoided by taxing the rich, clamping down on tax evaders, and cutting defence spending — the tired, hopeless call of reformists everywhere to reorder the priorities of the capitalists in favour of the working class.

The Socialist Party, after calling for a one-day public sector strike and a 24-hour general strike, go on to showcase their abiding faith in the capitalist state, and Labour, approvingly quoting an article from Labourlist.org: “A cascade of ‘no cuts’ budget decisions by local authorities could be the most effective resistance to the cuts so far”. The Socialist Party continues, “By using their reserves and borrowing powers to avoid making cuts, councils can gain time to build a mass movement in their support”, and “Ed Miliband could promise that an incoming Labour government would write off all local authority debts incurred from avoiding cuts” (Socialism Today, March 2011).

What is necessary to fight against the massacre of public sector jobs and social services is to mobilise the multiethnic working class in a fight for jobs for all, through a shorter work week with no loss in pay, and to undertake union organising to draw into their ranks all of the working class, including its minority and immigrant components. In the course of class struggle, workers must replace the Labourite cringers atop the unions with workers’ leaders who aim to win battles on the picket lines. Striving to forge such a class-struggle leadership of the unions is an integral part of the fight for a multiethnic revolutionary workers party whose aim is no less than doing away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery through socialist revolution.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

From The ISO Website- "International Socialist Review"- Class struggle in Wisconsin

Class struggle in Wisconsin

Weeks of mass demonstrations and solidarity show the U.S. working class is ready to fight, says Phil Gasper

A lot has happened since I wrote my last column for the ISR, about whether mass struggle would return to the United States in the foreseeable future. In response to the question “When will something happen here?” I wrote:

The simple answer is I don’t know when, but the long-term nature of the current economic crisis and the struggles we have seen in other parts of the world in recent months make me quite certain that significant struggles will reemerge in the U.S. sooner that than later.

What most readers probably don’t know is that I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and I wrote those words on the evening of February 11. That was the day that Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was finally forced to resign after 18 days of mass demonstrations. It was also the day that Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker declared war on public sector unions in the state.

What followed was a spectacular demonstration of class struggle in Madison and across Wisconsin, with mass demonstrations reaching over 100,000 people, an occupation of the State Capitol for more than two weeks, sick outs by teachers around the state, and enormous solidarity from all sections of the labor movement, tens of thousands of non-unionized workers, and university, high-school and middle-school students. (Even my seven-year-old son spent days at the Capitol supporting his teachers, marching, and eventually leading chants.)

The protests went hand-in-hand with a remarkable shift in popular consciousness. Madison felt—and still feels—different. The solidarity and energy of the protests created a sense of community that had not existed before. Political conversations took place everywhere—in workplaces, in coffee shops, on buses, in the street. Strangers would stop and join in. At the height of the struggle, the feeling of confidence was palpable.

Why did this take place in Wisconsin? Certainly none of us expected it—me least of all. Although I argued, “objective circumstances will once again produce the potential for mass struggle in the U.S.,” I did not have in mind next Tuesday in my hometown when I wrote those words. All I knew was that after over thirty years of one-sided class war from above in the United States, we were getting closer to the point when there would be a response from below.

The economic boom that followed World War Two, and which sustained the idea of the “American Dream,” came to an end in the early 1970s. The ruling classes around the world went on the offensive, dismantling social programs, privatizing public assets, driving down working class living standards, busting unions, and deregulating the economy—the policies that came to be known as neo-liberalism.

The result was growing inequality and rising profits, but also a return to the boom-bust cycle of the pre-war years, with major global recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, the early 2000s, and finally the financial crash of 2008. Three decades of neo-liberalism has left workers in the US worse off than they were in the 1970s, and has created huge pools of bitterness and misery in other parts of the world. The world economic crisis, accentuated these problems.

Last year, the IMF issued a report warning that high levels of youth unemployment around the world were creating the conditions for political turmoil, uprisings and rebellions. It was predicting events that played out first in Tunisia—which started with a former student, Mohamed Bouazizi, burning himself to death on December 17 after police confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart—and then on a much larger scale in Egypt, resulting in the overthrow of hated dictators in both countries.

The protests in Madison erupted in the wake of the Egyptian revolution, and from the beginning the demonstrators drew parallels between the two, with numerous signs comparing Walker to Mubarak. Even Walker’s Republican ally, U.S. Representative and House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (now busy trying to undermine Medicare and Social Security) told an interviewer, “It’s like Cairo’s moved to Madison these days,” probably unaware that he was implicitly comparing the Governor to a hated dictator.

Of course Wisconsin was not on the verge of revolution, but the comparisons were nevertheless apt. The spirit of mass protest was in the air, and Wisconsin workers took inspiration from the success of their Egyptian counterparts. But beyond that, workers around the world are linked together in a single global economy, which affects us all when it goes into crisis. Soon after the demonstrations in Madison had begun, one activist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square held up a sign that read, “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers—One World, One Pain.”

Wisconsin voted for Obama in the 2008 election, but last November with unemployment still high and disillusionment with the White House’s pro-corporate policies widespread, many Democrats stayed home, allowing Walker to become governor with only about 28 percent of eligible voters supporting him. Republicans also took control of both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature.

Walker ran a low-key campaign, which was thin on specifics, but he nevertheless took his election victory to be a mandate for a radical right-wing agenda, no doubt fueled by his conviction that he is receiving daily instructions from God about what to do. In January he pushed through corporate tax cuts that would cost the state $140 million over the next two years. Then, in February, he used the excuse of a $137 million shortfall in the current budget, to unveil a ‘Budget Repair Bill” that was little more than thinly veiled union busting.

Walker’s bill would strip most public-sector workers of most of their collective bargaining rights, end automatic paycheck deduction to pay dues, force unions to be recertified every year with support not just of the majority who vote, but of the entire bargaining unit. (As many commentators pointed out, if Walker were held to the same standard, he would never have been elected.) In addition, workers would be required to pay significantly more for health care and pensions.

Walker’s attack came straight from a playbook put together by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks, and is part of a national strategy. Only 7.6 percent of U.S. workers in private industry are unionized, but in the public sector the proportion is almost 37 percent. So in the latest phase of their decades long war on the working-class, Republicans have taken aim at public-sector unions—an especially enticing target because these unions provide Democrats with much of their funding at the state and local level. Wisconsin just happened to be the first place where this strategy was unrolled.

“What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy,” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.”

Walker expected to steamroller his proposals through in less than a week, but instead, the frontal attack on unions touched a raw nerve of class anger. On the Tuesday following his announcement, thousands of workers descended on the State Capitol in the center of Madison, joined by thousands of students from the University of Wisconsin, led by unionized graduate teaching assistants.

Part of Walker’s plan was a strategy of divide and conquer, which deliberately exempted firefighters and police from the new rules. But firefighters joined the demonstrations immediately, marching in full uniform and playing bagpipes. Even more surprisingly, off duty police officers also joined the protests, displaying signs saying, “Cops for Labor.” Private sector unions were also involved from the beginning.

Sick outs by Madison teachers were initiated by the rank and file. By Tuesday evening, so many had called in to say that they would not be at work the next day, that the school district cancelled classes. The teachers stayed out for the rest of the week and the following Monday, with union leaders scrambling to catch up, and teachers from other districts around the state joining the action as the week progressed.

The occupation of the Capitol building began on Tuesday night, with hundreds of protesters staying inside demanding to testify before the Joint Finance Committee, which was required to hold hearings on the bill. The occupation was initiated by students, but soon had enthusiastic labor participation, with particular unions designating certain nights for their members to sleep over.

This huge and militant response led all 14 Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate to leave the state on the third day of the protests, depriving Republicans of a quorum necessary to pass Walker’s bill. For nearly three weeks the legislature was gridlocked. In response to threats of layoffs, the South Central Federation of Labor passed a resolution saying that it would support a general strike. Others pointed out that the budget deficit would disappear if corporations and the wealthy paid their fair share of taxes.

The mood to escalate action was there, but union leaders were terrified of things going too far. From the beginning most said they would accept the economic concessions contained in Walker’s bill in exchange for the preservation of collective bargaining and other union rights, sacrificing their members’ paychecks to defend their own positions.

After the teachers returned to work, union officials were unwilling to call more job actions, and instead starting channeling resources into recall campaigns against eight GOP senators. This allowed Walker to wind down the occupation by slowly making access to the Capitol more difficult. Rallies continued outside, but on March 9, in a legislative maneuver, the Senate detached the anti-union sections from the rest of Walker’s bill and voted to pass them without the Democrats present.

The result was a huge and spontaneous outburst of anger around the city. Several thousand of us retook the State Capitol in the early evening, climbing through windows and pushing past cops, who eventually gave up trying to stop people from entering. The mood was electric, and the many teachers who had joined the occupation were waiting for word from their union to walk off the job again the next day. If that had happened, other workers might have joined them.

But instead of calling its members out, leaders of the teachers’ union urged them to go to work. As a result the battalions of organized labor were absent from the Capitol the next morning. The occupation succeeded in delaying the state Assembly from voting for several hours, but the cops eventually cleared people out, and the bill passed there too. Walker signed it the following day.

The passage of the bill represented a significant and unnecessary defeat. Even though, as I write this, it has not been enacted because of legal challenges, unions have rushed to sign new contracts or renegotiate existing ones, giving Walker what he wanted on health care and pensions. Once the focus had shifted from the state to the local level, the choice became one between concessions and layoffs. But the unions wanted to sign contracts covering the next few years, in the hope that Walker cannot void existing agreements.

Labor leaders hope that by the time existing contracts expire Democrats will once again be in control of state government. It is certainly possible that enough of the recalls will be successful to give Democrats a majority in the senate, and Walker himself may well be removed from office next year (Recall Walker bumper stickers are everywhere, and his poll ratings have dropped dramatically). But replacing Republicans with Democrats won’t be enough.

While the Democrats don’t want to destroy the unions, they want to co-opt them to push through their own austerity plans. Their defense of collective bargaining is that it is no barrier to forcing workers to accept concessions. What is needed is a mobilization from below to fight cutbacks proposed by either party.

Meanwhile, Walker and the Republicans are already planning further attacks. The two-year budget currently being debated will include massive cuts to education and health care, and Walker also hopes to copy legislation already passed in Michigan that would give him the power to dismiss local governments that are deemed to be insolvent, replace them with an appointed auditor, void union contracts, and impose more harsh cuts.

But the struggle that began in February has shifted consciousness dramatically. Wisconsin’s workers are still groping towards the kind of organizations that will be needed to respond to the continued attacks, but it is unlikely that they will take any of this sitting down. The same is true across the country. The next five or ten years in the United States is not going to look like the last twenty or thirty years, when class war from the top met little response from below. Instead, it’s going to look a lot more like the last few months in Wisconsin.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Phil Gasper is the editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Haymarket Books, 2005) and a member of the ISR editorial board.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Wisconsin: For a General Strike Now!- From The Internationalist Group

Markin comment:

Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!


Wisconsin: For a General Strike Now!-by Internationalist Group

Email: internationalistgroup (nospam) msn.com (unverified!)
Phone: 212-460-0983
Address: Box 3321 Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008 USA 15 Mar 2011
A law challenging the very existence unions of government workers has just been rammed through the legislature in Wisconsin. In addition, wages have been slashed by up to 10 percent to make up for cuts to health insurance and pensions. The labor movement and workers nationwide and internationally are vividly aware of the stakes. There has been a lot of talk in the last three weeks about a general strike. The Wisconsin South Central Labor Federation even voted to authorize one. But now that the moment of truth has arrived, the union bureaucrats have gotten cold feet. They are doing everything to prevent strike action and instead to divert anger at this vicious law into a drive to recall Republican senators, to be replaced by Democrats, whose “alternative” budget bill would also have drastically slashed wages and benefits. There should be no delay: this is the hour for powerful labor action. A general strike is needed to shut down Wisconsin now!
Defeat Governor’s Legislative Coup d’État
Wisconsin: For a General Strike Now!
Break with the Democrats, Republicans and All Capitalist Parties!
Build a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

A law challenging the very existence unions of government workers has just been rammed through the legislature in Wisconsin. In addition, wages have been slashed by up to 10 percent to make up for cuts to health insurance and pensions. The labor movement and workers nationwide and internationally are vividly aware of the stakes. There has been a lot of talk in the last three weeks about a general strike. The Wisconsin South Central Labor Federation even voted to authorize one. But now that the moment of truth has arrived, the union bureaucrats have gotten cold feet. They are doing everything to prevent strike action and instead to divert anger at this vicious law into a drive to recall Republican senators. To be replaced by whom? The Democrats’ “alternative” budget bill would also have drastically slashed wages and benefits.

We have said from the outset that “It will take nothing less than a statewide general strike to defeat labor hater Walker.” But we warned , “union leaders block militant action as they chain workers to the Democrats” (The Internationalist leaflet, 18 February). There should be no delay: this is the hour for powerful labor action. For a general strike to shut down Wisconsin now!

When Governor Scott Walker announced on February 11 a bill to eliminate collective bargaining rights for almost all state, county and municipal employees, except for the Wisconsin State Patrol and firefighters, it was a blatant attempt to destroy public-sector unions. Using a phony state “fiscal crisis” as an excuse, its intent was to rip up a half-century of workers’ hard-won rights. Walker and his Republican cohorts tried to ram this draconian union-busting law through the state legislature in a matter of a couple days, declaring an end to hearings of the joint finance committee after only a few hours. But the working people of Wisconsin reacted angrily and massively, taking to the streets in huge numbers to emphatically demand, “Kill the Bill!”

Walker’s position, as one commentator put it, was “my way or the highway” – so the Democratic state senators took him at his word and drove off to Illinois, depriving the governor of the enhanced quorum required to vote on fiscal bills. As thousands of protesters occupied the state Capitol for more than two weeks and tens of thousands repeatedly protested outside (more than 100,000 ringing the square on three Saturdays running), the wannabe Duce of Madison was stymied, and increasingly frustrated. Sending police across the state line to kidnap legislators was ruled out. He admittedly considered sending provocateurs into the protests, but dropped that for tactical reasons. Finally on Wednesday, March 9 the governor decided he had had enough of democratic niceties and proceeded to carry out what can only be called legislative coup d’état.

Walker had aides take scissors to slice out the budgetary provisions of the bill, hoping to do away with the need for a “superquorum” (while also eliminating the supposed reason for such draconian action). The Senate majority leader then called a vote on less than two hours notice, and at 6 p.m. held a hurried Senate-Assembly conference committee that lasted only a few minutes. Moments later, the Senate gaveled through the excised “budget repair” bill by an 18-1 vote with no Democrats present. On Thursday, the Assembly dutifully voted the anti-labor, and on Friday the governor signed it, hoping to cancel union rights with a stroke of a pen. But the issue will not be decided by parliamentary sleight of hand – workers’ rights can only be won and defended through hard class struggle on the streets and in the plants.

Working people and defenders of democratic rights in Wisconsin are ready and willing to fight. The minute word leaked about the plan to drum the bill through the Senate, people headed to the Capitol in droves to try and stop this outrage. The Wisconsin State Journal (10 March) headlined the next day: “Thousands Storm Capitol As GOP Takes Action.” The article described the pandemonium:

“Thousands of protesters rushed to the state Capitol Wednesday night, forcing their way through doors, crawling through windows and jamming corridors, as word spread of hastily called votes on Gov. Scott Walker's controversial bill limiting collective bargaining rights for public workers….

“Shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the locked King Street entrance to the Capitol, chanting ‘Break down the door!’ and ‘General strike!’

“Moments later, police ceded control of the State Street doors and allowed the crowd to surge inside, joining thousands who had already gathered in the Capitol to protest the votes….

“At one point, officials estimated up to 7,000 people had spilled into the Capitol, some coming through doors and windows opened from the inside, including one legislative office and several bathrooms. Some door knobs and door handles were removed….”

Union officials issued angry statements: Marty Beil, executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, said that the governor and his cronies had turned Wisconsin into a “banana republic.” Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, said that “Senate Republicans have exercised the nuclear option to ram through their bill attacking Wisconsin's working families in the dark of night.” But when it comes to labor action, it’s a different story. Even as protesters were chanting “general strike” while trying to break down the doors of the Capitol, the union tops were preaching caution.

The next day the Wisconsin State Journal (11 March) reported, “‘General strike’ has been one of the chants that resounded through the Capitol during massive protests Wednesday and Thursday after the Legislature passed a bill that would remove bargaining rights for about 175,000 workers and create major obstacles to basic operations for unions representing teachers, state workers and local government employees.” But, the paper said, “Union leaders say the Republicans' fast-track passage of the bill has fueled strike talk, but for now most are urging legal measures such as recall of Republican legislators as a way to repeal the law.”

Teachers are a main target of Walker’s law. Even though enough Madison teachers called in sick four school days to shut down the schools, and many others around the state did likewise so they could join the protests at the Capitol, Wisconsin State Education Association Council president Mary Bell urged her union’s 98,000 members not to walk out. Instead, the Madison teachers union, MTI, concentrated on negotiating a concessionary contract with the local school board before Walker’s new law kicks in. The agreement, which would extend the contract through mid-2013, would take an estimated $3,900 annually out of the pay check of the average teacher, amounting to a 7.35% wage cut.

A number of other contracts have been extended, some until 2014, but those covering 39,000 state workers expire today (March 13), because two Democratic senators voted against them (one was later rewarded by Walker with a plum state government job). Currently the union tops are pushing to recall Republican legislators, and various legal actions. Suits have been announced charging that Walker violated the state law on open meetings, since the public was excluded from the Senate vote; the conference committee and Senate vote violated a provision of the state Constitution requiring 24 hours notice before a vote by a government body. The Madison district attorney says he is investigating, etc. But at most such tactics would only delay the law.

Usually when union leaders want to drag their heels and head off militant action, they put the blame on the membership, saying the ranks aren’t ready. Certainly, to undertake a general strike in this country that hasn’t seen one in more than 60 years would take a lot of guts and gumption. But of all the times in recent memory, right now, as workers stand to lose thousands of dollars in wages and any semblance of job security, is when they are most likely to take such a bold step. And many are ready. “General strike” was once again a frequent chant among the 150,000 trade-unionists and supporters (including quite a few from neighboring and far-away states) who filled Capitol Square and all the way down State Street on Saturday

Talk of a general strike has not just been whistling in the wind. On February 21 the South Central Labor Federation voted that “SCFL endorses a general strike, possibly for the day Walker signs his budget repair bill.” At the same time it set up an education committee to prepare materials for union locals about how to fight “this naked class war waged upon us.” A history professor at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN), Peter Rachleff, prepared a brief history of general strikes, pointing to the 1886 May Day struggles for the eight-hour work day. In Milwaukee, the governor called out the National Guard to squelch a strike that shut down virtually every factory in the city (as Walker threatens to do today), killing seven strikers. Thus serious preparation for a strike should include organizing workers defense guards.

The SCFL educational materials include a “how to” guide on strike preparations by Dan La Botz of Labor Notes on the series of “Days of Action” in various cities in Ontario in 1995-98. Like many one-day “general strikes” in Europe, these were not real general strikes which pose a contest for power, over which class shall rule, but rather a series of labor demonstrations whose ultimate purpose was to moderate the anti-labor policies of the provincial government of Tory (Conservative) premier Mike Harris. La Botz doesn’t mention that they failed to do that. But even if they had brought down Harris, what was the alternative: the discredited labor-backed New Democratic Party? The NDP was voted out of office after imposing a wage freeze and curtailing bargaining rights of public sector workers?

This underlines that a general strike is ultimately and inevitably political. Many in Wisconsin portray the battle as one against the Republican governor and legislators and reactionary forces such as the Tea Party movement and Americans for Prosperity, the political action committee of Charles and David Koch, millionaire funders of ultra-rightist outfits who were Walker’s biggest financial backers. The toilet paper kings (Koch Industries owns the Georgia-Pacific paper company) are sinister for sure, but the far right are not the only ones going after labor these days. In New York state, a liberal Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, got elected on a union-bashing platform and is demanding $450 million in givebacks while threatening 10,000 layoffs. And nationally Barack Obama has imposed a wage freeze on federal workers while spearheading attacks on teachers, even supporting the firing of an entire district teaching staff in Rhode Island.

Illusions in the Democratic Party are a big problem in Wisconsin. As a result of their grandstand play of decamping to Rockford, Illinois, the 14 Democratic senators were hailed by the protesters demonstrating against Walker’s union-busting bill. On Saturday, when they returned to Madison, supporters chanted “Fab(ulous) 14, our heroes.” They then paraded in a line around the Capitol with senators and the crowd chanting “thank you” to each other. State Assembly Democrats sported their orange T-shirts claiming to support Wisconsin working families. But for all their phony “friend of labor” rhetoric, the Democrats were prepared to vote for all the budget cuts the governor wanted. They only want to preserve the unions’ bargaining rights (and dues check-off), because labor is a key source of funds for this capitalist party.

Just about every left-wing and self-proclaimed socialist group in the country has written about the events in Wisconsin, which are the biggest upsurge in labor struggle in decades in the U.S. Mostly it is just cheerleading, ducking the key issue of the Democrats. In 20 articles on Wisconsin, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a Stalinoid-reformist outfit, assiduously avoiding taking on the Democratic Party. Its main activity in Wisconsin was circulating a petition to “tax the rich,” lending credence to Walker’s talk of a budget deficit. (While claiming there was a $137 million budget shortfall this year, right after taking office he legislated $140 million in tax breaks for businesses, banks and industry.)

The problem is not lack of money – right now the Federal Reserve is funneling tens of billions of dollars to the banks at essentially 0% interest, not to mention the trillions they gave to Wall Street for the “bailout” and hundreds of billions paid to business under the “stimulus” bill. It is not the job of revolutionaries to give helpful hints to the bosses’ government about its budget priorities and how to finance them. We have nothing against taxing the rich, but a “millionaires tax” will not do a thing to defend working people. To think that it would is to promote illusions that the capitalist pols would spend money on education, workers pensions, health care if only they had the dough. We need to mobilize our power to defeat the attacks on working people, poor, oppressed minorities and other victims of capital.

The social-democratic International Socialist Organization (ISO), one of the biggest pushers of the “tax the rich” nostrum, just published an editorial, titled “Now is the time to fight.” But according to the ISO, a general strike is not the way. It argues that “given the low level of strike activity in the last decade, and the overall decline of the labor movement over the past 30 years,” therefore “calling for a general strike – no matter how enthusiastically it is received – is unlikely to get very far.” Its alternative is to “build union activity in the workplaces” by “organizing pickets before work or noontime marches to other unionized workplaces.” In other words, do anything but don’t strike during working hours. So here the ISO, is actively aiding the sellout bureaucrats in suppressing calls for militant union action.

Another group, the Workers Socialist Web Site, which also goes under the name of the Socialist Equality Party (WSWS/SEP), takes a somewhat different tack. The WSWS chimes in on the need for a general strike, and criticizes the Democrats and union bureaucrats for trying to squelch struggle. But in numerous articles, while referring to Walker’s “anti-worker” law, it never mentions the fact that this is union-busting legislation. The reason why not is simple: the WSWS opposes unions as inherently bourgeois. They support scabbing, and tell workers not to vote for unions in union recognition votes. These scab socialists try to hide this fact by denouncing the bureaucrats, who have hamstrung workers’ struggle for decades. But the unions remain workers organizations, even though they are betrayed by the union misleaders who tie them to the capitalist parties, principally the Democrats.

That is why it is necessary to build a class-struggle opposition in the unions, to oust the pro-capitalist bureaucrats and break with the Democrats and bourgeois politics overall. The Wisconsin union-busting law, by outlawing collective bargaining for government workers aims at destroying public sector unions. Following the decimation of many private sector unions over the last three decades, these are the mainstay of what is left of the labor movement. Walker & Co. would certainly make impossible the class-collaboration policies of business unionists who are willing to sacrifice all sorts of union gains as long as they get to negotiate the sellout. Class-struggle unionists do not call for or rely on such mechanisms as a dues check-off, precisely because the government and the bosses can use it as a weapon to cripple labor by cutting off its finances. But we oppose anti-union attacks as an assault of workers’ rights and gains.

A statewide general strike is urgently needed in Wisconsin, and the time is now. To win against all the union-bashers, it is necessary to promote the political independence of the workers movement and break with both Democrats and Republicans, the partner parties of American capitalism, as well as minor bourgeois parties such as the Greens and sundry reformists (of which the social-democratic NDP in Canada is an extreme example) who only seek to modify the workings of the capitalist system rather than bringing it down. Thus the Internationalist Group, in calling for a general strike in Wisconsin links this to the need to build a class-struggle workers party to lead the fight for a workers government and socialist revolution. ■

Just ask 100,000 people!A Perfect Day in Madison, Wisconsin-By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2011

Just ask 100,000 people!A Perfect Day in Madison, Wisconsin

By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2011

[This is the third of Paul Beckett's reports from Madison for The Rag Blog.]

MADISON, Wisconsin -- Saturday, March 12, 2011. The wind off the frozen lakes was often 20 miles an hour (or more) and from the north. Windchills were in the 20s. It was mainly cloudy. Here and there, old snow and ice remained, and where there was no ice, the Wisconsin Capitol grounds had been trampled into a slippery, muddy morass. And it was beautiful!

Absolutely unprecedented crowds gathered for a whole day of protest events. Police estimates were 100,000 (but exact estimates are impossible). The crowd filled the Capitol square streets, sidewalks and what once were lawns, and then flowed down State Street and Wisconsin Avenue.

This time, a powerful sound system was in place and you could hear the speeches from far out in the crowd. In fact, you could hear them twice as the sound reflected off the taller buildings.

The breadth of social groups protesting Governor Scott Walker’s “union-busting” and public service-cutting Budget Repair Bill was truly awesome. The private sector unions were there (often with major leadership figures). The public service unions (AFSCME and the teachers unions) were there. The firemen, policemen and prison staff were there. Teachers and workers had come from Michigan, where things are also bad.


Farmers staged a tractor parade during the massive Madison protest. Photo by Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog.

Farmers came in, protesting the planned cutbacks in the Medicaid-based programs on which so many of them depend. Late in the morning a tractor parade pushed through the already-dense crowds, festooned with anti-Walker signs (many of them referring to the animal waste that is so familiar to farmers).

But the dominant impression one got was just of PEOPLE: all kinds of people, from all over Wisconsin, unaffiliated, unorganized. Just people. A feeling of complete like-mindedness and shared values and interests linked 100,000 people together.

Thank you, Scott Walker.

By 3 p.m., when the main program began, no one could move. The 14 Democratic senators who had decamped to Illinois to thwart passage of Walker’s bill were welcomed back. Each gave a speech to tumultuous applause and chants of “Thank you! Thank you!” They had not, in fact, stopped the bill. But they had provided almost three weeks for understanding -- and protest -- to develop


Photo by Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog.

Also, the holdout of the “Fab 14” ultimately forced the Walker camp to “pass” their bill in an abrupt night-time procedure that was full of parliamentary improprieties, and perhaps downright illegal.

The speakers (besides the 14, they included Jesse Jackson, Tony Shalhoub, and Susan Sarandon) noted that now the battle continues, but the battlefield changes.

Suits are already being brought to challenge the legality of the law in the courts.

More important in the longer run are the recall campaigns . While “Recall Walker” was a constant theme in signs and chants, under Wisconsin law that effort can not begin until next year. But petitions against eight Republican Senators have been filed, with May 2 deadlines for completion. There was an enormous sense of energy for these yesterday.

Meanwhile, a Utah-based anti-immigration group has already invaded Wisconsin (it is perfectly legal, it seems) to organize recalls against members of the Democratic “Fab 14” who got so much thanks and appreciation yesterday.

Control of the Wisconsin Senate will be determined during the coming summer by the outcome of these efforts.

Those who participated Saturday went home elated and politically energized in a way that few of us have been for some time. But all understood, as well, that Saturday did not mark the end of a battle, but its beginning. It will be a long battle for the future of Wisconsin, and no one can be sure of the outcome. And Wisconsin, in turn, clearly is just one battleground in the broader struggle for the country’s future.

[Dr. Paul Beckett lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at beckettpa@gmail.com.]

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Massachusetts is Wisconsin Public Employee Unions Country- Boston, Massachusetts State House Rally, Tuesday February 22, 2011,4:00-6:00PM –The Lines Are Draw-All Out In Support Of The Wisconsin Public Employee Unions-Hands Off All Our Public Employee Unions!

Click on the headline to link to an announcement of a labor-centered rally at the Massachusetts State House on Tuesday February 22, 2011 in support of the beleaguered Wisconsin State Public Employee Unions.

Markin comment:

Sometimes politics, our working class-oriented politics, is a no-brainer. This occasion is one of those times. The lines are drawn very visibly now with the yahoos of the Tea Party movement entering the fray. “Which side are you on?” is the question of the hour. All out in support of the Wisconsin Public Employee Unions!
*******
Repost from American Left History


Friday, February 18, 2011


Victory To The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions!- Hands Off The Unions! -Hands Off The Democratic Legislators

Markin comment:

I suppose we all knew that it would come to this. Probably the last serious bastion of organized labor-the public employees unions are starting to face the onslaught of governmental attempts to break those collective bargaining agreements, crying budgetary crisis- the heart of any union operation. With the demise of the industrial unions (representing less than ten percent cent of the workforce in the wake of the deindustrialization of America) the public employee union became the obvious target in the bosses' relentless struggle to break any collective working agreements. Wisconsin, as all sides agree, is the tip of the iceberg and will be closely watched by other states (and the federal government).

On the question of the Democratic legislators who have left the state (at least as of today, February 18, 2011), to avoid voting on the proposals. While it is unusual for those of us who consider themselves communist labor militants to demand hands off for this crowd under normal circumstances in this case we are duty-bound to defend their action. Stay the hell out of Wisconsin until this blows over. A good idea would be to put workers on the borders to make sure the State Police don't try to force them back. Okay. Strange times that we live in, strange indeed.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Massachusetts is Wisconsin Public Employee Unions Country- Boston, Massachusetts State House Rally, Tuesday February 22, 2011,4:00-6:00PM –The Lines Are Draw-All Out In Support Of The Wisconsin Public Employee Unions-Hands Off All Our Public Employee Unions!

Click on the headline to link to an announcement of a labor rally at the Massachusetts State House on Tuesday February 22, 2011 in support of the beleaguered Wisconsin State Public Employee Unions.

Markin comment:

Sometimes politics, our working class-oriented politics, is a no-brainer. This occasion is one of those times. The lines are drawn very visibly now with the yahoos of the Tea Party movement entering the fray. “Which side are you on?” is the question of the hour. All out in support of the Wisconsin Public Employee Unions!
*******
Repost from American Left History


Friday, February 18, 2011


Victory To The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions!- Hands Off The Unions! -Hands Off The Democratic Legislators

Markin comment:

I suppose we all knew that it would come to this. Probably the last serious bastion of organized labor-the public employees unions are starting to face the onslaught of governmental attempts to break those collective bargaining agreements, crying budgetary crisis- the heart of any union operation. With the demise of the industrial unions (representing less than ten percent cent of the workforce in the wake of the deindustrialization of America) the public employee union became the obvious target in the bosses' relentless struggle to break any collective working agreements. Wisconsin, as all sides agree, is the tip of the iceberg and will be closely watched by other states (and the federal government).

On the question of the Democratic legislators who have left the state (at least as of today, February 18, 2011), to avoid voting on the proposals. While it is unusual for those of us who consider themselves communist labor militants to demand hands off for this crowd under normal circumstances in this case we are duty-bound to defend their action. Stay the hell out of Wisconsin until this blows over. A good idea would be to put workers on the borders to make sure the State Police don't try to force them back. Okay. Strange times that we live in, strange indeed.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Massachusetts is Wisconsin Public Employee Unions Country- Boston, Massachusetts State House Rally, Tuesday February 22, 2011,4:00-6:00PM –The Lines Are Draw-All Out In Support Of The Wisconsin Public Employee Unions-Hands Off All Our Public Employee Unions!

Click on the headline to link to an announcement of a labor-centered rally at the Massachusetts State House on Tuesday February 22, 2011 in support of the beleaguered Wisconsin State Public Employee Unions.

Markin comment:

Sometimes politics, our working class-oriented politics, is a no-brainer. This occasion is one of those times. The lines are drawn very visibly now with the yahoos of the Tea Party movement entering the fray. “Which side are you on?” is the question of the hour. All out in support of the Wisconsin Public Employee Unions!
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Repost from American Left History


Friday, February 18, 2011


Victory To The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions!- Hands Off The Unions! -Hands Off The Democratic Legislators

Markin comment:

I suppose we all knew that it would come to this. Probably the last serious bastion of organized labor-the public employees unions are starting to face the onslaught of governmental attempts to break those collective bargaining agreements, crying budgetary crisis- the heart of any union operation. With the demise of the industrial unions (representing less than ten percent cent of the workforce in the wake of the deindustrialization of America) the public employee union became the obvious target in the bosses' relentless struggle to break any collective working agreements. Wisconsin, as all sides agree, is the tip of the iceberg and will be closely watched by other states (and the federal government).

On the question of the Democratic legislators who have left the state (at least as of today, February 18, 2011), to avoid voting on the proposals. While it is unusual for those of us who consider themselves communist labor militants to demand hands off for this crowd under normal circumstances in this case we are duty-bound to defend their action. Stay the hell out of Wisconsin until this blows over. A good idea would be to put workers on the borders to make sure the State Police don't try to force them back. Okay. Strange times that we live in, strange indeed.

The Lines Are Drawn- A "Civil War" Is Brewing In Wisconsin- All Out In Support Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions! Hands Off Our Unions!

Click on the headline to link to a The New York Times analysis from one of the authoritative voices of the capitalists on the stakes in the Wisconsin public workers unions struggle now raging.

Markin comment:Sometimes politics, our working class-oriented politics, is a no-brainer. This occasion is one of those times. The lines are drawn very visibly now with the yahoos of the Tea Party movement entering the fray. “Which side are you on?” is the question of the hour. All out in support of the Wisconsin Public Employee Unions!
******
Repost from American Left History

Friday, February 18, 2011

Victory To The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions!- Hands Off The Unions! -Hands Off The Democratic Legislators

Markin comment:

I suppose we all knew that it would come to this. Probably the last serious bastion of organized labor-the public employees unions are starting to face the onslaught of governmental attempts to break those collective bargaining agreements, crying budgetary crisis- the heart of any union operation. With the demise of the industrial unions (representing less than ten percent cent of the workforce in the wake of the deindustrialization of America) the public employee union became the obvious target in the bosses' relentless struggle to break any collective working agreements. Wisconsin, as all sides agree, is the tip of the iceberg and will be closely watched by other states (and the federal government).

On the question of the Democratic legislators who have left the state (at least as of today, February 18, 2011), to avoid voting on the proposals. While it is unusual for those of us who consider themselves communist labor militants to demand hands off for this crowd under normal circumstances in this case we are duty-bound to defend their action. Stay the hell out of Wisconsin until this blows over. A good idea would be to put workers on the borders to make sure the State Police don't try to force them back. Okay. Strange times that we live in, strange indeed.

Monday, November 01, 2010

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Obama’s War on Public Education-Defend the Teachers Unions!-For Free Quality Integrated Education for All!

Markin comment:

This timely article goes very well with today's entry from the archives of Women and Revolution on Soviet Educational Policy.
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Workers Vanguard No. 967
22 October 2010

Defend the Teachers Unions!
Obama’s War on Public Education
For Free Quality Integrated Education for All!
(Young Spartacus pages)

Under Democratic president Barack Obama’s administration, “school reform” amounts to a massive assault on public education carried out through brass-knuckle attacks on teachers unions. Revamped federal funding rules turn the screws on schools described as failing, shuttering classrooms in ghettos and barrios nationwide, and give a green light for a proliferation of privately run charter schools. From Los Angeles and Chicago to New York City and Washington, D.C., Obama & Co. have made the Bush gang’s policies look like child’s play.

For decades, the arrogant U.S. imperialist rulers have starved education of funding. With fewer and fewer industrial jobs, America’s racist capitalist rulers see little value in paying union wages to educate working-class, black and immigrant youth. The high school graduation rate in the U.S. is below 70 percent; in urban centers including Los Angeles, it falls below 50 percent. U.S. students rank 35th internationally in math, between Azerbaijan and Croatia, and 29th in science, between Latvia and Lithuania—countries many Americans cannot identify on a map. The ruling class cynically blames the teachers unions for this woeful state of affairs as it guns for the wage gains, benefits and job protections that come with a union job.

The Race to the Top program, the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s “reform,” has been described as No Child Left Behind part two, after the plan pushed by late Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush. Obama’s scheme pitted cash-strapped state school systems against each other in a competition for $4.35 billion in funding—almost 10 percent of the federal budget for education. When the states’ applications were judged, the most weight was given to commitments to eliminate teacher seniority and tenure. Aiming to have “no child left untested,” rewards were also based on states’ plans to track student test scores. Among other things, this is a setup for victimizing individual teachers whose classes don’t measure up well, particularly threatening those in the poorest school districts.

The Education Department has classified as many as 5,000 schools as failing. One reform that might actually improve them—adequate funding—is not what the administration has in mind. “We can’t spend our way out of it,” Obama told the Today show (27 September), which is rather piquant coming from a man who saw through the $700 billion bank bailout. In order for school districts to qualify for funding under Obama’s School Turnaround program, they have to do one of the following to “failing” schools: close them; have a charter take them over; fire the principal and entire staff and rehire no more than half; or fire the principal, lengthen the school day and implement other onerous changes. This all spells a direct attack on the teachers unions, as Obama made clear in March when he endorsed the firing of the entire staff at Rhode Island’s Central Falls High School (see “Labor: Fight Union Busting Attack on Rhode Island Teachers!” WV No. 954, 12 March).

The government’s campaign to cripple the teachers unions is part of a broad attack on public employees. With the erosion of industry and the acquiescence of the pro-capitalist labor tops to the proliferation of non-union shops, public employees now, for the first time, make up the majority of union members in the U.S. (Many of these are cops who, as the hired guns of the capitalists, should have no place in the unions.) The two national teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), represent about a quarter of all union members nationally, with 4.6 million members.

Like capitalist governments in Europe and elsewhere, American federal, state and local governments, under both Democrats and Republicans, have seized on the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression to slash payrolls and extract massive concessions—from working hours to pensions. Some 60,000 school employees were laid off last year, and many more have already lost their jobs this school year as the bourgeoisie further cuts spending for education. Thirty-eight of the 100 largest school districts have instituted wage freezes and another ten have cut wages. The ruling class sees teachers unions as potential obstacles to slashing public education budgets. A big reason it has been able to push through its attacks on education and other services is the decades-long decline in labor struggle, overseen by a miserable trade-union “leadership” that serves as the bourgeoisie’s lieutenants inside the labor movement.

The working class, black people and other minorities have a vital interest in defending public workers unions and fighting against the attacks on social services, including the bourgeoisie’s attempt to turn back the clock on universal, integrated, secular public education. We oppose charter schools because they are an attack on the democratic right to public education and provide an opening for religious groups to get government funds to run schools, and contribute as well to furthering school segregation. The drive to expand charter schools underlines the link between racial oppression, union-busting and the promotion of religious obscurantism.

Like the fight for decent health care, the battle for quality education, including bilingual instruction, for the working class and the black and Latino poor requires hard struggle against the capitalist class, a tiny handful of people whose obscene wealth is gained from exploiting labor and whose rule is reinforced by racial and other forms of social oppression. The money and resources exist for massive construction of schools, hospitals and other infrastructure gutted by the profit-bloated capitalists. To seize that wealth requires breaking the power of the bourgeoisie through socialist revolution.

Education U.S.A.— Separate and Unequal

Education in capitalist America is class- and race-biased from top to bottom. From public education’s earliest days in the industrial revolution of the 19th century, when class bells and the structure of the school day were used to facilitate the transition from the family farm into the factory, education has been crafted to meet the needs of the capitalist class. Ruling-class offspring are guaranteed places at expensive private schools and universities. In addition, the bourgeoisie needs a layer of educated technicians, professionals, managers and ideologues. The last serious effort to promote science education in this country was after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Fear of a Soviet lead in military technology led President Eisenhower to demand a billion-dollar program to improve science education in American schools and to sign the National Defense Education Act in 1958.

A certain level of education is also necessary for industrial labor. During World War II, when there was a labor shortage and the bourgeoisie needed workers for war industries, California shipyard owners recruited untrained and often semiliterate Southerners, black as well as white, who learned to read and write, and often became skilled apprentices in little more than three months. During the war, the G.E.D. program was initiated to prepare returning servicemen who lacked a high school diploma to take jobs. It was expanded in 1963 for the general population.

While black workers have been a key component of the workforce in industry, they have also typically been the “last hired and first fired.” And after the bosses took the wrecking ball to steel mills and auto plants in the North and Midwest, the government saw little need for the overhead expense of educating those whose labor power was no longer needed. As a result, the children of black workers in particular have been treated more and more as an expendable population. The financial titans’ interest in “education reform” has nothing to do with the welfare of the poor, black and working-class kids penned up in decrepit, underfunded schools. For these kids, it’s all about pushing union-free schools where longer days and a longer academic year can be required to cultivate obedient wage slaves (if needed) and foot soldiers for the American empire.

In capitalist America, which was founded on black slavery, the black population forms a specially oppressed caste stigmatized because of skin color. Separate never has been and never can be equal. Whether it is run by Barack Obama or anyone else, the capitalist system is racist to its core—from segregated housing and schools to unemployment, cop terror and mass incarceration in the name of the “war on drugs.” While closing schools and hospitals, the capitalist rulers have seen fit to pay for the “overhead expense” of prison construction, on a massive scale. Poor black youth are offered the “choice” of facing death on the streets, including at the hands of the racist cops, enrolling in U.S. imperialism’s wars and occupations, expecting time in jail, or, for some, a minimum-wage job.

Minority students in segregated schools across America confront conditions more suitable for a police state than for a place of study: metal detectors, video cameras, strict hall and truancy monitoring by security guards, drug testing, locker searches. “Zero tolerance” policies have led to tens of thousands of arrests for such “crimes” as pushing, tardiness and using spitballs. Cities hire school security out of local police forces, which carry out murderous racist terror on the streets. The nearly 5,000 “School Safety Agents” and 200 armed police on duty in New York City public schools constitute the tenth-largest police force in the country. This is an “education” system that essentially treats minority youth as future criminals. The schools serve to reinforce the isolation of black youth in a society where 28 percent of black men are destined to spend time behind bars.

In his 2005 book The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Jonathan Kozol, an award-winning author and former Boston public school teacher, cites a study by Harvard professor Gary Orfield that powerfully documents the growing segregation of public education. Five decades after the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling that overturned formal legal segregation of public schools, Northern schools are more segregated than those in the Deep South. More than two million black and Latino students attend what Kozol calls “apartheid schools,” in which 99 to 100 percent of students are non-white. During the 1990s, the proportion of black students who attended majority white schools decreased to a level lower than in any year since 1968. The Supreme Court’s 2007 decision throwing out school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville gave official sanction to those seeking to overturn some 1,000 remaining integration plans across the country.

Bilingual education has also been under steady attack. In California in 1998, racist Proposition 227 required replacing bilingual programs with sink-or-swim “English immersion” classes. As we wrote in “Down With ‘English Only’ Racism!” (WV No. 688, 10 April 1998): “Those with the ability to become bilingual on their own due to privileged circumstances—e.g., those with access to private tutoring, or who come from educated households—are deemed to be an asset to the country. The rest, often from impoverished, rural families where no one is literate in any language, are to be used as superexploited, terrorized and preferably illiterate unskilled labor.”

Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

It has taken tumultuous, even revolutionary struggle to extend the right to education to black people in America. It took a bloody Civil War to uproot the slave system, under which teaching slaves to read was a crime. Most of the first Southern free public schools were established following the Civil War during Radical Reconstruction, the turbulent decade of Southern interracial bourgeois democracy carried out by the freedmen and their white allies and protected by Union Army troops, many of whom were formerly enslaved. A literacy rate that was around 5 percent for black people in the 1860s rose to 40 percent in 1890. As symbols of measures toward black equality, schools were often targets of Ku Klux Klan terror.

With the Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South, black people were left at the mercy of former slaveowners, now backed by Northern capital, and their murderous nightriders. Funding for black education was slashed and Jim Crow segregation eventually became the law in the South, leaving its imprint in the North as well. Nonetheless, black teachers continued to struggle against enormous hardship to operate schools for black children. In the segregated Northern ghettos that emerged following the Great Migration of black Americans to industrial centers in the early 20th century, separate and unequal schools for blacks became facts of life linked to segregation in housing.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s took up the fight against segregated and inferior schools, contributing to the end of de jure segregation in the South. But under the leadership of liberals like Martin Luther King, who looked to the capitalist Democratic Party, the courts and the government, that movement could not end the de facto segregation of black people, North and South, which is rooted in the capitalist system.

Starting in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, massive “white flight” to private and suburban schools reinforced segregation. A crucial turning point came in the mid 1970s, when school busing was ordered in Boston—a minimal attempt to integrate its public schools. The busing plan touched off a virulent racist reaction as mobs stoned school buses carrying black kids. The court-ordered plan was limited to neighborhoods like South Boston, one of the poorest white areas in the U.S. outside of Appalachia, and the black Roxbury ghetto. Liberal Massachusetts Congressmen, for their part, made sure that nobody was bused out to the relatively privileged suburban schools, further fueling the racist frenzy. The Spartacist League called to defend the busing plan and extend it to the suburbs. We agitated for the integrated labor movement—meatpackers, bus drivers, teachers and others—to organize labor/black defense of the bused black schoolchildren.

In Boston, the liberals caved in to the racist mobs, ushering in decades of attacks on school desegregation nationwide. Even tokenistic affirmative action programs in higher education have been drastically curtailed, to the point that they barely exist outside of some elite universities. Today’s education reformers have adopted the racist code word “school choice,” which, in the period of the civil rights movement, meant allowing white students to attend all-white public schools and creating all-white private academies, aided by state grants to students’ families. Foreshadowing the policies pursued by George W. Bush and Barack Obama was the school voucher system, which also served to perpetuate racist discrimination.

A defining trait of the race and class inequality woven into the fiber of the U.S. public school system is the role of local taxes in education funding. The wealth or poverty of a particular school district essentially determines the quality of its schools. Predominantly white suburban schools often spend twice what urban school districts do and three times what poorer rural areas spend. And when they find government funding insufficient, donors in wealthier areas shell out the cash for reading specialists, music and arts, science labs and computers as well as the extracurricular field trips and activities that make for a quality learning environment.

Decades ago, the Spartacus Youth League, forerunner to today’s Spartacus Youth Clubs, explained:

“As socialists, we oppose all class-biased and racially discriminatory privileges in educational opportunity. Thus, we are opposed to educational funding based on local property taxes. Instead, we call for all public schools to be funded at the national level. In addition, all social services—from welfare to health care—should be federally funded.”

—“Public Education: Separate and Unequal,” Young Spartacus No. 52, March 1977

The Spartacist League/SYCs fight to extend the right to education to the university level, demanding open admissions, no tuition, a state-paid living stipend for students and the nationalization of private universities.

The fight for equality in education must also include a struggle against the wretched condition in the ghettos and barrios and in impoverished rural areas as well. How can you be expected to study when you’re homeless or hungry, when your families live in fear of immigration raids or are stuck in overcrowded, rat-infested projects?

While fighting against discrimination and segregation in schools and housing, we understand that racial oppression cannot be rooted out short of the revolutionary overturn of the capitalist system. Like winning jobs for all, eradicating race and class bias in education, so that everyone can have access to the quality education that the children of the bourgeoisie get, requires the working class taking power. The road to black liberation and the emancipation of all the oppressed lies in the fight for an egalitarian socialist society, where production is organized to serve human need, not the capitalists’ bottom line.

Laissez-Faire Schools Disaster

Some of America’s biggest billionaires and venture capitalists have joined with the bourgeois press and Democratic Party hacks in a propaganda offensive aimed at pushing through anti-union school “reform.” The moneybags include hedge-fund managers tied to Joe Williams, whose political action committee Democrats for Education Reform was set up to push charter schools, as well as the foundations of Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, union-busting Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and Eli Broad, who got his billions in housing, insurance and savings rackets.

For these capitalist profiteers, the crux of education reform is the application of “free market” principles. This scheme dates back to the 1950s and right-wing economist and longtime University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman. Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” gained notoriety by serving as economic advisers to the CIA-backed Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew the popular-front government of Salvador Allende in 1973 and massacred 30,000 workers, peasants and leftists, and imprisoned and tortured thousands more. Once he retired from the University of Chicago, Friedman wrote Free to Choose, a playbook for market-based reform, including privatized schooling, and became an adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

Today’s “Chicago Boys”—Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and their pals—share Friedman’s ideological commitment to “free market” education, embracing privatization, tying funding to test scores and ending union protections like tenure for teachers. An early implementer of this union-busting program was Diane Ravitch, an influential historian and education policy wonk who served in the Bush Senior and Clinton administrations. Ravitch has since had second thoughts. From the standpoint of wanting to further America’s national interests, Ravitch’s book The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) laments how the laissez-faire market approach of what she calls “the billionaire boys’ club” has gutted government-run education.

As Ravitch documents, turning out higher test scores has become the top priority for financially shaky schools, taking over the school day and spilling over into weekend classes and extra tutoring. Jonathan Kozol aptly describes how “inner-city kids are being trained to give prescripted answers and to acquiesce in their subordinate position in society” (Huffington Post, 10 September 2007). Another result is the large-scale falsification of test scores.

The drive to improve test scores or face the ax also puts pressure on schools to get rid of their lowest-scoring students. This process has been expedited by the closing of large “failing” schools and the opening of small facilities in their place, with the lowest-scoring students shunted off to resource-starved and decrepit schools apart from better-scoring students. What we said about Bush Senior’s education reforms is as much the point today: “Just test rich and poor ‘equally,’ and when the poor flunk, well then, that supposedly proves the ruling class shouldn’t waste its money on the swelling ranks of the underclass” (“Education U.S.A.—Separate and Unequal,” WV No. 544, 7 February 1992).

The Charter School Onslaught

The keystone of the current “reform” package is the mushrooming of charter schools. While part of local school systems, charters are privately owned and operated outfits that take money away from existing public schools and are exempt from Department of Education regulations, as well as from any union contract carried over from the school systems. Some are explicitly operated as money-making ventures, and some are religion-based schools in everything but name.

Charter schools increase racial segregation and class inequality in education and also serve as a tool to smash unions. As a rule, charter schools are opened in the poorest and most segregated parts of cities, often on public school grounds. The better-off white suburban schools remain untouched. Usually, the new schools are even more segregated than the ones they replace. According to a February 2010 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, nearly three out of four black charter school students attend “intensely segregated” schools where 90 percent or more of the students are minorities. This is two times higher than the rate at regular public schools.

The proliferation of charter schools has certainly done nothing to integrate schools in Chicago, long known as “Segregation City.” Before landing in Washington, Arne Duncan ran the Chicago public school system from 2001 to 2008. By his own account, he oversaw the closing of some 60 schools, primarily in black and Latino neighborhoods, and the expansion of charter and military schools.

It says a lot that the Obama administration has taken the dilapidated and segregated Chicago system as a national model. Only about half of its students graduate high school; the rate is even lower for black male students. In a city that is nearly 40 percent white, white students make up just 8 percent of public school students, and a third of the public schools have not even one single white student enrolled. In 2009, the capitalist courts ended the 1980 consent decree that provided whatever shreds of integration existed in Chicago public schools, primarily in the magnet and selective schools. The decree imposed by the federal government has now been deemed unnecessary because the “vestiges of discrimination” have been eliminated “to the extent practicable”!

From 2004, when Duncan brought out his Renaissance 2010 education blueprint, to the present, over 80 Chicago public schools, largely in minority neighborhoods, have been shut down and replaced with smaller schools—about two-thirds of them charter schools. Charters now comprise 10 percent of the city school system, and almost all are non-union. The system’s current “CEO” (the actual title), ex-cop and former Chicago Transit Authority president Ron Huberman, has continued Duncan’s “turnaround schools” plan, under which all teachers and staff at “low-performing” schools are fired and replaced by much younger, less experienced teachers who receive far lower wages. Across the country, idealistic young college graduates, mainly white, are being recruited and given a pro forma training course for exactly this purpose by Teach for America and the New Teacher Project, which are supported by the Gates, Broad and Walton foundations. Many new hires burn out quickly—in Chicago it’s common that they don’t even get through their first school year.

Many black and Latino parents turn to charter schools hoping that they provide an alternative to the decaying inner-city public schools. Schools like Harlem Success Academy are touted as miracle stories, where the black-white “achievement gap” is supposed to be a thing of the past and “behavior problems” are rooted out (including through its “kindergarten boot camp”!). In order to raise standardized test scores, Harlem Success spends hundreds of thousands every year to recruit the students it wants while pressuring those who score low to transfer elsewhere. It offers no teachers of English as a Second Language and no classes for students with disabilities. Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Harlem Success, coldly told one teacher, “The school is not a social service agency” (New York magazine, 25 April).

Belying the hype over such “successful” charters lies a stark fact: charter schools do not even measure up to public schools. According to a 2009 Stanford University study, 46 percent of charter schools perform comparably to public schools—and 37 percent perform significantly worse. Examples of financial skimming and haywire accounting abound. Of the 64 schools in Los Angeles that have had their charters revoked, almost all were accused of financial or administrative mismanagement.

Charter schools represent a major erosion of the separation of church and state supposedly enshrined in the Constitution. A case in point is Chicago, where the parochial school system is already the largest in the world and has long functioned as an escape from integration for white families. Sister Mary Paul McCaughey, superintendent of Chicago Catholic Schools, recently announced that a number of their schools may be converted into charters. In Washington, D.C., seven low-performing Catholic schools became charters on archdiocese property, which, like all church property, is exempt from taxation. We oppose government funding for any religious institution, including schools, and fight as well against any encroachment of religious teaching into the public schools, such as the attempt to promote “intelligent design” at the expense of teaching the fact of evolution.

In a chilling sign of how the administration’s “reform” schemes will further depress the quality of education, earlier this year Education Secretary Arne Duncan ghoulishly declared that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans”! The racist rulers viewed the unfolding disaster of Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to “change the demographics” of New Orleans—i.e., get rid of impoverished blacks. In addition to terrorizing the black population, boarding up public housing and axing social services, this meant gutting public education. One of black Democratic mayor Ray Nagin’s first acts after the floodwaters drained was to fire all 8,000 unionized schoolteachers in an all-out drive to replace public schools with charters. Two-thirds of the city’s children are now enrolled in charter schools.

Obscenely, the Brookings Institution think tank has declared that Haiti should follow the New Orleans model, which, it opines, shows how “a fundamentally different education system can be built in the wake of a disaster.” Nothing is being rebuilt as the desperately impoverished Haitian masses continue to groan under imperialist subjugation, carried out through the UN occupation force supplemented by U.S. National Guardsmen.

Before the earthquake, the vast majority of schools in Haiti were private, and more than half of school-age children did not attend school. Next door in the Dominican Republic, free public elementary education is well-established in the cities, although less so in the rural areas. The contrasting results are stark: the literacy rate in the Dominican Republic is 85 percent; in Haiti it’s 53 percent. Even so, the situation in the neocolonial Dominican Republic pales in comparison to that in Cuba, a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Since the overthrow of capitalist rule in 1960-61, Cuba has achieved one of the highest literacy rates in the world—higher than the U.S.—as well as the highest doctor-patient ratio.

The War on Teachers Unions

America’s capitalist rulers and their media mouthpieces are seeking to manipulate justified anger over the state of public education to bolster their attacks on overworked and underpaid teachers and their unions. Obama & Co. seek to reverse gains for teachers, whose unions grew substantially through a series of labor struggles in the 1950s and ’60s. Before that, they had little protection against meager salaries, political favoritism, domineering principals and sex discrimination against a mostly female workforce.

In mid August, the Los Angeles Times, which for over a century has specialized in bashing unions, ran a series of attack pieces on the United Teachers of Los Angeles. The paper published a database rating some 6,000 elementary school teachers by the test scores of their students, promoting this as a tool for firing teachers—an approach endorsed by both Arne Duncan and Democratic California Education Secretary Bonnie Reiss. This witchhunt has since been implicated in the suicide of Rigoberto Ruelas, a dedicated teacher from an impoverished district in South Los Angeles where students scored lower on tests than those in more affluent neighborhoods.

In many public schools, if students get any education at all, it is testament to the dedication of poorly paid teachers who struggle against cutbacks, decaying facilities and increased administration meddling. With the government refusing to shell out for the most basic classroom materials, some teachers spend thousands of dollars of their own money on school supplies.

There is plenty of anger among the membership of the teachers unions over the attacks on their wages and job protections, and over the state of public education. In California, the Oakland Education Association went out on April 29 for a one-day strike against wage freezes, although its members continue to work without a contract. On October 14, Baltimore teachers voted down a contract that would have effectively gutted seniority. But the unions are saddled with a leadership that acts as labor statesmen for the capitalist government, willingly offering up greater concessions from their members in the name of “sacrificing for the kids.”

The union tops’ class collaborationism is all the more blatant with the Democratic Party, which they falsely promote as the friend of labor and the oppressed, running things. In the last 30 years, the teachers unions have shelled out nearly $57.4 million to bourgeois politicians in federal elections alone, 95 percent of that to Democrats. Ten percent of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 2008 were teachers union members. Under Obama, the Democratic Party has put itself in the front lines of the anti-teacher offensive. Republican Congressman John Kline pointed out (New York Times, 1 September) that many of Obama and Duncan’s ideas have been pushed by Republicans for years. The union tops’ support for the Democrats makes their realization possible. As the Times reported, Kline told Duncan, “Arne, only you can do that.... You’re the secretary of education for a Democratic president.”

AFT president Randi Weingarten, formerly the head of NYC’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT), exemplifies the role the labor bureaucracy plays as the bosses’ cops inside the unions. Weingarten’s mentor, longtime AFT head Albert Shanker, was a raving anti-Communist who acted as one of U.S. imperialism’s main labor agents in its drive to smash militant unions and suppress left-wing parties around the world during the anti-Soviet Cold War. Weingarten backs charter schools and various types of “performance pay,” in line with Obama’s calls for “more accountability” from teachers. No wonder that Duncan told the New York Times Magazine (19 September), “I’m a big fan of Randi’s.” This, to say the least, is not the opinion of AFT members who booed and heckled her at a May union meeting in Detroit. Weingarten’s successor at the UFT, Michael Mulgrew, has played his part by agreeing to link teachers’ evaluations to standardized test scores and to make it easier to fire teachers whom administrators deem “incompetent.”

We Need a Workers Party!

In our articles denouncing Obama’s vaunted health care package—a gift to the bankers and insurance companies—we made the point that if the labor movement fought for free, universal, quality health care, it would have broad support among the population, helping to revitalize the trade unions in this country. Similarly, if the teachers unions waged some class struggle in support of free, quality education for all, they would find allies in millions of working-class, black and Latino families. When teachers unions have gone on strike in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Oakland, they have won support in the ghettos and barrios. To mobilize the unions in such struggle requires fighting against the class collaborationism of the labor bureaucracy, which places its reliance on phony “friends” in the bourgeois government.

In the same camp as the labor sellouts, the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) complained in an article by Gillian Russom in International Socialist Review (May-June 2010): “Education should be at the center of a national debate on social priorities, led by a president who promised ‘change.’ Instead, the economic crisis is being used by the White House to dramatically accelerate a neoliberal agenda for education.” This is simply the language of disappointed suitors, as seen in an exchange among ISO leaders over just how low to bow before the imperialist Commander-in-Chief, whose election the ISO hailed (see article, page 2). Earlier, the ISO’s Socialist Worker (2 November 2009) offered that a “real ‘Race to the Top’ program” could “start by taking the largely taxpayer-funded $23 billion in bonuses that Goldman Sachs is giving out this year, and put that money toward giving nearly 6 million families that $4,000 income supplement.” Or, as Oliver Twist begged, “Please, Sir, I want some more.”

The labor bureaucracy and the reformist left seek to obscure the understanding that this is a capitalist government, whose purpose, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels instructed over 150 years ago, is to be the executive committee of the ruling class as a whole. Following the years of George W. Bush, the Obama administration was put into office to provide a much-needed facelift for U.S. imperialism in order to further its predatory interests abroad and grind down the working class, blacks and immigrants at home. While handing out billions to bankers and auto bosses, Obama has appealed to everyone else to embrace a “spirit of sacrifice.” Meanwhile, he repeats the disgusting tirade that crumbling schools and poverty are “no excuses” for the black masses and that “hardships will just make you stronger.” Enough! We say: Break with the Democrats! For a workers party that fights for a workers government!

After escaping slavery and educating himself as a fighter in the left wing of the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass observed that, in the eyes of the slaveholders, to educate a man “would forever unfit him to be a slave.” The logic of this statement remains unchanged a century and a half later. To give all people the means to attain their full creative potential requires overturning the present social order, based on the exploitation of labor, vicious racial oppression and grinding poverty. Only after a multiracial workers party leads the proletariat, at the head of all the oppressed, in overthrowing the decaying capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society will mankind be freed of the fetters of scarcity and want, and real human history will begin.