Thursday, September 18, 2014

“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-Founding Conference of the Fourth International-1938

 


 
Markin comment (repost from September 2010 slightly edited):

Several years ago, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call issued during the presidency of the late Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must have been something in the air at the time (maybe caused by these global climatic changes that are hazarding our collective future) because I had  also seen a spade of then recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looked very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course in the 21st century, after over one hundred and fifty years of attempts to create adequate international working-class organizations, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) was appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward. 
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Founding Conference of the

Fourth International

1938


Resolution On Youth

The Capitalist Impasse
1) Capitalism, Whether it be authoritarian or liberal, admits the inability to bring the slightest relief to the misery and sufferings of working class youth. The young want a trade, and when (rarely enough!) it consents to give them one, it is only to chain them the better to a machine which tomorrow will stop and let them starve beside the very riches they have produced. The young want to work, to produce with their hands, to use theft strength, and capitalism offers them the perspective of unemployment or of “the execution of work in conditions other than the normal conditions of production,” according to the excellent hypocritical definition of labor camps by the League of Nations, or of armament production, which engenders destruction rather than improvement. The young want to learn, and the way to culture is barred to them. The young want to live, and the only future offered them is that of dying of hunger or rotting on the barbed wire of a new imperialist war. The young want to create a new world, and they are permitted only to maintain or to consolidate a rotting world that is falling to pieces. The young want to know what tomorrow will be, and capitalism's only reply to them is: “Today you've got to tighten your belt another notch; tomorrow, we'll see . . . . In any case, perhaps you're not going to have any tomorrow.”
Give Youth a Future Give the World a Future
2) That is why youth will rally under the flag of those who bring it a future. Only the Fourth International, because it represents the historical interests of the only class which can reorganize tile world upon new bases, only the Bolshevik-Leninists can promise youth a future in which it can put its abilities to full use. Only they can say to the youth: “Together with you, we want to make a new world, where everyone works and is proud to work well, to know his job down to the smallest details; a world where everyone will eat according to his hunger, for production will be regulated according to the needs of the workers and not those of profit; a world where one must constantly learn, in order the better to subordinate the forces of nature to the will of man; a world where, by ceaselessly extending the domain of the application of science, humanity’s theoretic knowledge will be daily increased; a new world, a new man who can make real all the hopes and powers he bears within him” It is under the banner of a new world and a new humanity that the Fourth International and its youth organizations must go on to win the working class youth; it is under that banner that they will win that youth.
The Struggle for a Future the Struggle for Bread
3) The promise of a better future would be only demagogy if the Bolshevik-Leninists were not fighting for an immediate improvement in the situation of working class youth, if they were not formulating youth’s immediate demands, if they were not spreading word of the necessity for working class youth to fight by class struggle methods for the satisfaction of these demands, and if, through this struggle and on the basis of the experience gained therein, they were not demonstrating to exploited youth that its demands could be finally satisfied only by establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, that the struggle for these demands must be transformed into a struggle for power by means of a struggle for the control and management of the economic system.
We Demand the Right to Work!
4) For the young workers engaged in production the Bolshevik-Leninists put forward slogans with the aim of a) measuring the work done by the young not according to the desire to drag as much profit as possible out of it, but, on the contrary, according to their degree of physical development; b) assuring them of a standard of living equal to that of adults, by that very fact assuring them of economic independence; c) raising their technical qualifications as far as possible; d) against the equal opportunity for young and old to be exploited in, capitalism, setting up their equal rights.
For the young under twenty, they also formulate the following demands:
Reduced working week, with schedules allowing young workers to engage in sports in the open air;
At least one month’s paid vacation per year;
The organizing, by factories, or groups of factories, of training courses, at the bosses’ expense and under workers’ control;
Hours of craft training taken out of the working week, and paid for at regular rates;
Application of the principle “equal pay for equal work” under workers’ control;
The fixing of a minimum living wage for young workers; fixing of the wages of young workers under the control of all the workers taken as a whole;
Prohibition of night work, of overlaborious, unhealthy, or unwholesome tasks; workers’ control over the use of young labor.
Equality for Youth in Social Legislation
All Together for the Struggle!
5) In order to take the defense of their demands into their own hands, the young workers should have the right to choose their own delegates, whose task is above all to draw the attention of the adult delegates and of the workers in general to youth’s specific demands, to tie up the struggle for these particular demands with the struggle for the general demands of the working class. In the same way, in all branches of trade union organizations, union youth commissions must be created and imposed upon the trade union bureaucracy, whose task shall be to study the demands of the youth, and to recruit and educate young workers. The task of the Bolshevik-Leninists is to take the lead in the organization of such commissions.
In order to throw trade union doors wide open to exploited youth, the Bolshevik-Leninists demand the establishment of reduced dues for young workers.
We Want a Trade!
6) In the fight against unemployment the slogans raise the school age, organize apprenticeship, make sense only to the extent that the weight of this must be borne not by the working class but by the big capitalists. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists owe it to themselves to formulate the demands of working class youth in this field as follows:
Prolongation of the school age to 16, with a grant for family support in working class and small farmer families.
Reorganization of the school in cooperation with the factory:
the school should prepare children for life and work; it should weld the youth to the older generations; hence the demand for control by workers’ organizations over technical education.
Reduction of the period of apprenticeship to a maximum of two years.
Forbidding of all work not connected with the actual apprenticeship.
The setting up, at the expense of the bosses, in connection with every business or group of businesses engaged in manufacturing, mining, or trade, of apprentice schools, with an attendance of at least 3 percent of the personnel employed in the business or group of businesses.
Choosing of the instructors by the labor unions.
Control of these schools by a mixed commission of workers’ delegates and delegates of the apprentices themselves.
We Demand Our Right to Live!
7) The task of saving the unemployed youth from misery, despair, and fascist demagogy, of working them back into production and thereby binding them closely to the working class, is a vital task for the future of the proletariat. Revolutionaries must struggle to force capitalism (a) to undertake to work the unemployed youth back into production through the organization of technical education and guidance; (b) to put the unemployed youth back immediately into productive activity; (c) to organize such work not according to semimilitary methods but on the basis of regular wages: Down with labor camps, either voluntary or obligatory!; (d) to furnish youth, which it is throwing into misery, the wherewithal to live. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists put forward the following demands:
Unemployment benefits on the adult scale for all young unemployed, manual or intellectual, immediately upon their finishing school;
Forcing the big bosses to open technical reeducation centers under workers’ control;
Technical reeducation organized according to the needs of production, under the general control of the trade unions and. the congresses of workers’ delegates;
Reopening of the shutdown factories;
Commencement of large-scale public works (hospitals, schools, lowcost housing projects, sports fields, stadiums, swimming pools, electric power stations), paid at trade union scales and under workers’ control from top to bottom.
For Our Brothers on the Farms! 8) The misery of the farm youth is no less than that of the industrial youth. For farm youth the Bolshevik-Leninists formulate the following general demands:
Strict application of all the above named laws and social measures in the country just as in the city;
Suppression of the domestic exploitation of young children;
Particularly strict application of the principle: “Equal pay for equal work";
District organization of technical education at the expense of the big finance capital farm owners;
Healthy food and lodging for young farm workers living in their bosses’ houses;
Cheap credit for small-scale farmers, and especially for small-scale farmers with family responsibilities.
For Our Countryside
9) The industrial and farm youth are the most exploited part of all working class youth. The youth organizations of the Fourth International must draw particular attention to the following demands: Strict application of the principle “Equal pay for equal work!";
An extra day off per month;
The right to voluntary maternity;
A six month leave of absence for maternity;
Maternity grants for young mothers.
Open the Schools and Universities!
10) One of the necessary conditions for the progress of humanity is that large sections of working class youth should have access to culture and science. The Bolshevik-Leninists put forward the following slogans:
Open the schools and universities to all the young who are willing to study.
Free education and support for workers’ and farmers’ sons and daughters. Bread, Books, and Civil Rights for Coolies!
11) In colonial and semi colonial countries, laboring youth are the victims of a double exploitation capitalist and patriarchal. In these, and in imperialist countries, the defense of the demands of the young colonial workers and peasants is the first duty in the fight against imperialism. This fight is carried on around the general slogan: The same rights for colonial youth as for the youth of the imperialist capital city.
Organization of hygiene and similar care in all villages.
Organization of homes for young workers, peasants, and coolies, under the control of labor and nationalist organizations.
Schools for native children; teaching in the native language.
Open the government administration to native language.
Open the government administration to native intellectuals.
Take the necessary financial credits from the war and police budgets and imperialist privileges.
12) The bourgeoisie recognizes working youth’s right to be exploited; but refuses it the right to have anything to say about that exploitation, and deprives it of all political rights; in certain countries it even forbids youth under eighteen to have any political activity whatever. The working class replies to these measures by saying: Whoever has the right to be exploited has also the right to struggle against the system which exploits him. Full political rights to young workers and peasants!
The right to vote beginning at 18, just as much in legislative and municipal elections as in the election of delegates.
Abolition of special laws forbidding youth to engage in political activity.
We Demand Our Right to Happiness!
13) Working class youth’s need for relaxation is utilized by the bourgeoisie either to stupefy it or make it submit to an even tighter discipline. The duty of the working class is to help create a youth that is strong and capable of throwing all its physical and mental strength into the fight against capitalism; to aid it in using what leisure capitalism gives it to learn to understand the world better, in order to be better able to change it. Hence the Bolshevik-Leninists demand:
Free access to all sports fields, stadiums, museums, libraries, theaters, and movies for all young workers and unemployed;
The ordering of their leisure by the young unemployed themselves;
The using of young unemployed intellectuals for the organization of lectures and discussions, etc. on physics, chemistry, mechanics, mathematics, political economy, history of the labor movement, art, literature, etc.;
The establishment of homes open to the working and unemployed youth, where the young will not only have the opportunity to be amused and instructed, but can also study out for themselves the social problems with which they are faced; these homes to be managed by working class youth itself under the supervision of the local trade union organizations.
The Revolutionary program
14) The struggle for these demands cannot be separated from the struggle for the demands of workers as a whole, both employed and unemployed. The final disappearance of unemployment among the youth is closely linked to the disappearance of general unemployment. The struggle for raising the school age and for compulsory technical reeducation is closely linked with the struggle for the sliding scale in wages and in working hours. The straggle to drag out of capitalism those reforms which aim at developing the class consciousness of working youth is closely linked with the struggle for workers’ control of industry and factory committees. The struggle for public works is closely linked with the fight for the expropriation of monopolies, for the nationalization of credit, banks, and key industries. The struggle to smash back all efforts to militarize is closely linked to the struggle against the development of authoritarian state tendencies and against fascism, the struggle for the organization of workers’ militias. It is within the framework of the transitional program of the Fourth International that the present program should be developed and applied. It is under the banner of the proletariat fighting for power that the Fourth International will win the demands of exploited youth.
The International Conference of the Youth of the Fourth International
Lausanne, September 11, 1938

 


As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner-German Poets   

German War Poetry

image
Self-portrait as a Soldier of 1914
by Otto Dix
Contributed by James Nechtman (Landsturm@gnn.com)

Here's some German war poetry in German. These are not the verse of polished poets, that is to say "poets turned soldiers", these poems are the work of front line soldiers, "soldiers turned poets". There's quite a difference between the two art forms. These poems were the soldier's way of coping by expressing their feelings about such topics as fallen comrades and the homeland, which in once sense was so close, but in another, was a million miles away. They may be considered rough by some and lacking in form or content by others, but they do manage to capture the everyday thoughts of the soldier and the mood of the trenches. If anyone out there is more comfortable in their mastery of the German language than I am and would like to translate any of these works, I would be more than happy to create an English language version of this page.
Argonnerwald, um Mitternacht Pionierlied aus dem Weltkrieg, 1915

Argonnerwald, um Mitternacht,
Ein Pionier stand auf der Wacht.
Ein Sternlein hoch am Himmel stand,
Bringt Grüße ihm aus fernem Heimatland.

Und mit dem Spaten in der Hand,
Er vorne in der Sappe stand.
Mit Sehnsucht denkt er an sein Lieb,
Ob er es wohl noch einmal wiedersieht.

Und donnernd dröhnt die Artill'rie,
Wir stehen vor der Infant'rie,
Granaten schlagen bei uns ein,
Der Franzmann will in uns're Stellung 'rein.

Und droht der Feind uns noch so mehr,
Wir Deutschen fürchten ihn nicht mehr.
Und ob er auch so stark mag sein,
In uns're Stellung kommt er doch nocht 'rein.

Der Sturm bricht los! Die Mine kracht!
Der Pionier gleich vorwärts macht.
Bis an den Feind macht er sich ran
Und zündet dann die Handgranate an.

Die Infant'rie steht auf der Wacht,
Bis daß die Handgranate kracht,
Geht dann mit Sturm bis an den Feind,
Mit Hurra bricht sie in die Stellung ein.

Argonnerwald, Argonnerwald,
Ein stiller Friedhof wirst du bald.
In deiner kühlen Erde ruht
So manches tapfere Soldatenblut 





From The Labor History Archives -In The 80th Anniversary Year Of The Great San Francisco, Minneapolis And Toledo General Strikes- Lessons In The History Of Class Struggle 

From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America)- Some Lessons of the Toledo Strike

Frank Jackman comment:

Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”

On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.

Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendants of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.

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Trotskyist Work in the Trade Unions


by Chris Knox

Part 3 of 4


The Primacy of Politics

After the formation of the Workers Party (WP) through the fusion of the Musteite American Workers Party with the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA) in 1934, the Trotskyists' organizational course took them into the leftward-moving Socialist Party in 1936. After winning a sizeable section of the SP youth they then split off from the Social Democrats to found the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1938. During this period of upsurge, the Trotskyists grew and continued to do trade-union work and other mass work, giving the lie to Stalinist assertions that the Minneapolis strikes of 1934 were the only mass work the Trotskyists ever did. The Trotskyists led mass unemployed leagues, conducted mass defense work and worked in the unions in mining, textiles, auto, food workers, maritime, steel and teamsters, among others. Less spectacular than the Minneapolis strikes perhaps, nevertheless this work was of lasting importance and vital to the building of the revolutionary vanguard in the U.S.
The Trotskyists' policy of broad united fronts continued to play a vital and useful role as long as the bulk of the reactionary AFL bureaucracy fought the establishment of industrial unions. The Workers Party declared its main goal to be the formation of a "national progressive movement" for militant industrial unionism (NewMilitant, January 1935), and the Trotskyists hoped, with good reason, to win the leadership of important sections of the working class by being the most consistent fighters for this minimum but key immediate need of the working class. At the same time they did not hide their socialist politics, in contrast to the Stalinists who attempted to masquerade as simple pro-Roosevelt militants. As much as possible, the Trotskyists operated as open revolutionists. Gerry Allard, CLA member and a leader of the Progressive Miners of America in southern Illinois, addressed the miners about an approaching strike in the following terms:
"Being a Marxist, a revolutionist, it is my opinion that we should militarize the strike, revamp the Women's Auxiliary along the original lines, augment our forces by seeking the organizational support of the powerful unemployed movement in Illinois, seek allies in the rank and file of the United Mine Workers of America, and go forward once again with the same determination that built this union. This is the road of struggle..."
--New Militant, 30 March 1935
Allard went on to appeal to the miners to see their struggle in the broadest possible context, as the impetus for the organization of auto, steel, rubber, etc.

Toledo, 1935: Conflagration in Auto

Following up on the work of the Musteites in the great Auto-Lite strike of 1934, the Workers Party played a key role in a strike at the Toledo Chevrolet transmission plant in 1935, being instrumental in getting GM workers in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Norwood and Atlanta to strike simultaneously. Two Trotskyists, Cochran and Beck, leaders of the Workers Party and Spartacus Youth respectively, were arrested while picketing the Flint, Michigan headquarters of Chevrolet in an attempt to spread the strike into the auto capital (New Militant, 11 May 1935).
The spreading of this strike throughout the GM empire was prevented only by the relative organizational weakness of the Trotskyists and the diligent, strike-breaking efforts of the AFL's appointed head of the auto union, Francis Dillon. Dillon personally headed off a sympathy strike of Buick workers in Detroit and sabotaged the strike at its base in Toledo by threatening to withdraw the local's charter and splitting the strike leadership at the key point, GM agreed to a wage increase and published a stipulation that it would meet with the union leadership, but because of Dillon's treachery there was no signed contract. The workers went back solidly organized and undefeated, however, since the company had the militant 1934 strike in mind and had made no attempt to operate the plant with scabs. It was the first GM strike the company had failed to smash, and was an inspiration for the later auto sit-down strikes which built the UAW and established the CIO.
After the strike, the Workers Party published a critical assessment of the strike leadership of which it had been a part, denouncing sloppiness, lack of attention to details (such as not calling sufficient strike committee meetings) and the "fundamental error" of allowing the daily strike paper, Strike Truth, to be suppressed (New Militant, 18 May 1935). This performance was in sharp constrast to the Minneapolis truckers' strikes the year previous, in which meticulous attention to tactical and organizational details and the hardhitting regular strike daily had been instrumental in achieving the ultimate victory of the strike. At the same time the Trotskyists were able to recruit the most conscious workers to their organization, with the Minneapolis branch of the CLA increasing from 40 to 100 members and close sympathizers during 1934 alone. Many years later, Cannon analyzed the main weakness of the work in Toledo as the failure to consolidate lasting organizational gains. He blamed this on Muste, who was a "good mass worker" but "tended to adapt himself" to the mass movement too much for a Leninist, at the expense of developing firm nuclei "on a programmatic basis for permanent functioning" (History of American Trotskyism).

First Auto Union Caucus Formed

The Workers Party was still working under the disadvantage in Toledo that the revolutionary leadership of the 1934 strike had been brought in from outside the union, thereby lacking sufficiently deep roots to hold the militants together against Dillon's maneuvering in 1935. Today the Marcusite National Caucus of Labor Committees, a group which has not the faintest idea of what it means to organize the working class, lauds precisely this weakness as the hallmark of revolutionary strategy. Their hero Muste soon thereafter abandoned the WP to return to the church. The deficiencies of the Trotskyists' trade-union tactics were not to be found in "overrating the unions" as the NCLC crackpots would have us believe, but in the failure to organize firm class-struggle nuclei "on a programmatic basis for permanent functioning" within the unions. The struggles in Toledo gave birth to the first auto union caucus, the Progressives of UAW Local 18384, but its program was limited to the militant unionism of the broad united fronts the Trotskyists advocated: for industrial unions, reliance on the power of the ranks as opposed to arbitration or government boards, etc. As such, it had the episodic character of a united front and lacked the clear revolutionary political distinctiveness which became crucial after the establishment of industrial unions under reformist leadership in the late 1930's.
Another point made by Cannon in drawing the balance sheet of the Workers Party period should be made elementary reading for the Labor Committee, which fetishizes unemployed organizing. The mass unemployed organizations inherited by the Trotskyists in their fusion with the Musteites were highly unstable:
"We reached thousands of workers through these unemployed organizations. But further experience also taught us an instructive lesson in the field of mass work too. Unemployed organizations can be built and expanded rapidly and it is quite possible for one to get illusory ideas of their stability and revolutionary potentialities. At the very best they are loose and easily scattered formations; they slip through your fingers like sand. The minute the average unemployed worker gets a job, he wants to forget the unemployed organization...."
--History of American Trotskyism

The Making of the Modern Teamsters Union

The most lasting achievement of Trotskyist trade-union work in the 1930's was the transformation of the Teamsters from a localiized, federated, craft union into a large industrial union. In the 1930's, while long-distance trucking was becoming more and more important, the Teamsters union was still limited to local drivers, divided by crafts (ice drivers, milk drivers, etc.) and dependent on local conditions. Based in their stronghold in Minneapolis, the Trotskyists spread industrial unionism throughout the Northwest through the Teamsters. An 11-state campaign led by Farrell Dobbs to organize over-the-road drivers included conquest of the all-important hub of Chicago and established the principle of the uniform area-wide contract. The campaign's achievements were solidified through a major strike struggle centered in Omaha, Nebraska in 1938, which was won through the same skillful organization that had succeeded in Minneapolis. As in Minneapolis, the building of the party went hand-in-hand with the strike, resulting in an SWP branch in Omaha.
Especially in the mid-1930's, the mass work of the Trotskyists was far-reaching and significant out of proportion to their size. Yet the Trotskyists knew they were not yet a real party and could not become a party leading significant sections of the masses in struggle until the centrist and reformist forces blocking the path were removed. It was for this reason that the Trotskyists entered the SP in 1936: the SP was large, included a rapidly-growing left wing (particularly in the youth) and was attracting militant workers who could be won to Trotskyism. The Trotskyists had to defeat sectarians in their own ranks, led by Oehler, who assumed that the party could be built directly, through the orientation of a propaganda group to the masses. The Cannon-led majority of the WP hardly ignored mass work. It was, in fact, an important part of the entry maneuver. While in the Socialist Party the Trotskyists established new trade-union fractions, notably in maritime (principally the Sailors Union of the Pacific) and auto, meanwhile considerably embarrassing the reformist SP leaders by their class-struggle policies. When they emerged from the SP more than doubled in size in 1938, the Trotskyists, though still small, were in a better position than ever to conduct work in the unions.

CIO Victories Pose Question of Politics

The rise of the CIO through the massive struggles of 1936-37 transformed the labor movement and altered the terms of class struggle in favor of the workers. The organized workers were in a better position to resist the onslaughts of capitalism; however, the new unions were controlled by a bureaucratic layer which shared the pro-capitalist, class-collaborationist politics of the old AFL bureaucracy. Having reluctantly presided over the militant struggles which established the CIO, these new bureaucrats desired nothing more than to establish "normal" trade-union relations with the capitalists, gain influence in capitalist politics, etc. As inter-imperialist war drew closer, the ruling class was gradually forced to temporarily lay aside its attempt to destroy the unions and accept the coalition which the bureaucracy readily offered. Thus the trade-union bureaucracy was qualitatively expanded and consolidated as the chief agency for disciplining the work force, replacing for the most part the Pinkertons and bloody strikebreaking as the principal means of capitalist rule in the hitherto unorganized mass production industries. This process was completed during the Second World War, when the ruling class allowed the completion of union organizing in key areas in exchange for full partnership of the trade-union bureaucracy in the imperialist war effort (the no-strike pledge, endorsement of the anti-labor wage controls, strikebreaking, etc.).
Besides displacing organization of the unorganized as the key immediate issue, this transformation placed the question of politics in the foreground. The industrial unions had been built, but they alone were clearly insufficient to deal with the outstanding social questions--unemployment, war, etc.--which determined the conditions under which they struggled. With the renewal of depression conditions in mid-1937-38, accompanied by increased employer resistance to union demands, opposition to Roosevelt burgeoned and mass sentiment for a labor party developed, expressed through such agencies as Labor's Non-Partisan Political League (LNPL), the CIO political arm and the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota. In order to head off this movement, the bureaucracy invented the myth of Roosevelt as a "friend of labor" and used the Stalinist Communist Party, closely integrated into the CIO bureaucracy, to pass off this warmed-over Gompers policy as a "working-class" strategy--the popular front. The CP unceremoniously dropped its earlier calls for a labor party.

The Trotskyist Transitional Program

The primary task of revolutionists in the labor movement had shifted, therefore, from leading the struggle for industrial unions to providing a political pole of opposition to the class-collaborationist bureaucracy. The Transitional Program ("Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International"), adopted by the SWP in 1938, was written by Trotsky largely to provide the basis for such a struggle. It contained demands designed to meet the immediate felt needs and problems of the workers ("wages, unemployment, working conditions, approaching war and fascism) with alternatives leading directly to a struggle against the capitalist system itself: a sliding scale of wages and hours, workers control of industry, expropriation of industry without compensation, workers militias, etc. Most importantly, the program proposed transitional organizational forms and measures designed to advance the workers' ability to struggle for these demands and to provide the basis for the overthrow of capitalism: factory committees, Soviets, arming of the proletariat and workers and farmers government (as a popular designation of the dictatorship of the proletariat). Also in 1938, Trotsky urged his American followers to enter formations such as the LNPL and fight for a labor party based on the trade unions, armed with the Transitional Program as the political alternative to the class collaborationism of the Stalinists and trade-union bureaucrats. This reversed the Trotskyists' earlier position of opposing the call for a labor party on the grounds that the utterly reactionary character of the Gompersite labor bureaucracy could allow the organizing of mass industrial unions directly under the leadership of the revolutionary party. This would have effectively bypassed the need for the transitional demand of a labor party. With the organization of the CIO on the basis of militant trade-union reformism, the balance of power between the revolutionaries and the labor bureaucrats was shifted in favor of the latter. But as the strike struggles achieved the original goal of union organization, and as Roosevelt's policies led to economic downturn, the newly organized and highly combative rank and file of the CIO unions began to come into direct political conflict with their pro-Roosevelt leaders. The call for a labor party became a crucial programmatic weapon to mobilize a class-struggle opposition to the Lewis bureaucracy.
Though politically armed to meet the new situation, the American Trotskyists nevertheless failed to find a consistent form of expression for their program within the unions. While they propagandized for the Transitional Program, in their press and conducted campaigns for specific demands such as workers defense guards, labor party, struggle against approaching war, etc., their day-to-day trade-union work continued on the old basis of united fronts around immediate issues. As the organization of the unions proceeded and the opposition of the bureaucracy to organizing industrial unions receded, this united-front policy turned into a bloc around simple trade-union militancy with "whole sections of the non-Stalinist, "progressive" trade-union bureaucracy. Criticism of these bureaucrats tended to take the form of pushing for consistent trade-union militancy rather than building a revolutionary political alternative, so that when the "progressive" bureaucracy lined up with Roosevelt for war in 1940, an embarrassing lack of political distinction between the Trotskyists in the trade unions and these "progressives" was revealed.
The Northwest Organizer, the newspaper of the Minneapolis Teamsters Joint Council, was written by the Trotskyists, who led Local 574. SWP trade-union work in the 1930's relied too much on broad united fronts for immediate demands. Trotsky commented: "You propose a trade union policy, not a Bolshevik policy....I notice that in the Northwest Organizer this is true...The danger--a terrible danger--is adaptation to the pro-Rooseveltian trade unionists."
The course of events in the Northwest Teamsters was a graphic example. For two years after the 1934 strikes in Minneapolis, the Tobin leadership of the Teamsters International continued to try to smash the Trotskyist leadership of Local 574, using red-baiting, gangsters and a rival local. Then a subtle shift began to occur. As the Trotskyists spread out, building support for the campaign to organize the over-the-road drivers, more and more bureaucrats became won over, including the key leader in Chicago, whose adherence went a long way toward ensuring the success of the campaign. Finally, by the time of the 1938 Omaha strike, Tobin himself began actively cooperating, even supporting the organizing drive against his old allies who still sought to preserve the local power of the Joint Councils at the expense of modernization, and appointing Farrell Dobbs International Organizer.
The 1936-37 strike struggles had finally rendered pure craft unionism obsolete even within the AFL, and old-line craft unionists began to tail the CIO both in order to enhance their organizational power and because the bourgeoisie itself was less resistant and more willing to accept organization of the workers in exchange for the use of the bureaucracy as its labor lieutenant. Throughout the entire area of Dobbs' 11-state campaign, the only serious challenge mounted by the bosses was in Omaha.
The united front to organize the over-the-road drivers was not wrong, but the Trotskyists lacked the means to distinguish themselves politically from the bureaucracy. This could have been done through a caucus based on the Transitional Program. The Northwest Organizer was founded in 1935 as the organ of a pan-union caucus formation, the Northwest Labor Unity Conference, but the NLUC's program was limited to militant, class-struggle union organizing, under the slogan, "All workers into the unions and all unions into the struggle." Eventually the Northwest Organizer became the organ of the Minneapolis Teamsters Joint Council and the NLUC lapsed, since its oppositional role was liquidated. When Tobin began to line up behind the war effort, the Trotskyists in Minneapolis opposed the war and won over the Central Labor Union, but they lacked the basis for a factional struggle in the union as a whole that a political caucus orientation might have provided. Dobbs simply submitted his resignation as organizer in 1940, without waging a political fight. A few years later, Tobin finally was able to crush the Trotskyist leadership in Minneapolis, with the aid of the government's first Smith Act anti-communist trial of the leading militants.

The Two-Class Party

The bloc with "progressive" trade-unionists was reflected politically in the Trotskyists' orientation to the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, with which most of the local trade unions were affiliated. Left-leaning FLP supporters were an important component of the Trotskyists' united front. In 1929, the excellent document, Platform of the Communist Opposition, had pointed out:
"The organization of two classes in one party, a Farmer-Labor Party, must be rejected in principle in favor of the separate organization of the workers, and the formation of a political alliance with the poor farmers under the leadership of the former. The opportunist errors of the [Communist] Party comrades in the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota and other states [in 1924] flowed inevitably from and were secondary to the basically false policy of a two-class party, in which the farmer and worker are ostensibly on an 'equal basis,' but where in reality the petty-bourgeois ideology of the former actually dominates."
--Militant, 15 February 1929
Written by the American Trotskyists, this statement thus carried forth in hard political terms the criticisms made by Trotsky of the Pepper leadership of the CP in 1924. Pepper had blithely made a fundamental revision of Marxism in order to tail the radical farmers of the FLP into the third capitalist party movement of LaFolette. The Minneapolis Trotskyists, however, failed to implement this policy in their orientation to the FLP. In 1935 they critically supported the FLP candidate for mayor of Minneapolis (despite the current Workers Party position against labor party formations), and in 1938 they supported FLP Governor Benson in the primaries as well as in the general election, without in either case mentioning the need for the "separate organization of the workers." The SWP's September 1938 program for the FLP endorses the adherence of both mass workers' and mass farmers' organizations to the FLP and complains only of the inordinate power of the ward clubs, through which the Stalinists eventually wielded the dominant influence in the FLP. This necessarily blurred the SWP's campaign for a working-class labor party based on the Transitional Program, since in their program for the FLP they were forced to emphasize demands for the petty-bourgeois farmers (loans, easing tax burdens, etc.) which watered down the working-class content of their program and was the inevitable result of the petty-bourgeois nature of the FLP as a two-class party. While not politically fatal in itself, this lack of clarity was a reflection of an accommodationist bloc with the left wing of the trade-union bureaucracy.
Furthermore, the Trotskyists compounded their inflexible united-front trade-union tactics with an over-reaction to Stalinism. The 1938 SWP trade-union resolution stated categorically:
"While always expanding our program independently and maintaining our right of criticism, our Party in a certain sense supports the 'lesser evil' within the unions. The Stalinists are the main enemy.... We unite with all serious elements to exclude the Stalinists from control of the unions."
--Socialist Appeal, 26 November 1938
The Stalinist CP, many times larger than the Trotskyists, was indeed a key political enemy in the unions. Having shifted to the right from a destructive policy of self-isolation during the "Third Period" (1929-35), the CP had become intimate advisers to the CIO bureaucracy and hard right-wingers in the unions, doing whatever possible to crush and expel the Trotskyists. Its main aim was to preserve links to the liberals and the collaboration of the labor movement with Roosevelt and U.S. imperialism. The CP participated directly in the bourgeoisie's attempt to militarize the labor movement for the war. Thus in maritime, while, the CP and its allies were busy weakening the 1936 West Coast longshore strike, wrecking the militant Maritime Federation of the Pacific and giving backhanded support to the government's' effort to break the seamen's union hiring halls through the Copeland Act, the Trotskyists made a correct united-front bloc with the militant but "anti-political" Lundberg leadership of the SUP.
Nevertheless, the determination of the SWP to unite with the politically undefined "all serious elements" against the Stalinists in all cases reflected trade-union adaptationism. The SWP's reasoning was that, unlike standard trade-union reformists, the Stalinists were the agency of an alien force outside the unions--the bureaucratic ruling elite of the Soviet Union--and therefore willing to destroy the unions to achieve their ends. This was an implicit "third campist" denial of Stalinism as a tendency within the labor movement. That the Trotskyists never drew this logical conclusion from their position and pulled back from it later did not prevent them from falling into errors as a result of it even while the CP was at its worst during the popular-front period (1935-39).
The worst such error was the SWP's "auto crisis" which peaked in January 1939. The UAW was a key battleground between Trotskyists, Stalinists and social democrats in the CIO. Wielding power with a bureaucratic heavy hand, UAW President Homer Martin, a left-leaning trade-union reformist, went so far in his battle against the Stalinists that he eventually lost all authority. To the left of the Stalinists on some issues, he was at base reactionary and made a concerted effort to smash wildcat strikes. The SWP, however, extended critical support to Martin to stop the Stalinists. The crisis came while Cannon was in Europe following the founding conference of the Fourth International in Fall 1938. The SWP Political Committee was being run by Shachtman and Burnham, who were soon to draw the full conclusions from their Stalinophobia and lead a faction out of the SWP (in 1940) denying that the Soviet Union was any kind of workers state and refusing to defend it, and likewise denying that the Stalinists were a tendency within the workers movement. With their own measure of bureaucratic highhandedness, Shachtman and Burnham tried to ram a pro-Martin policy down the throats of the auto fraction in 1938 just as Martin was leading a rump convention of the UAW out of the CIO, back into the AFL and eventually to oblivion. The bulk of the auto union dumped Martin and held its own pro-CIO convention. The SWP had to do an abrupt and embarrassing about-face entailing two issues of Socialist Appeal which contradicted each other, for which Shachtman and Burnham refused to acknowledge responsibility.
During the Hitler-Stalin Pact period (1939-41), the beginning of World War II, a general reversal of positions took place. Reflecting Stalin's deal with Hitler and turn away from the earlier alliance with France, Britain and the U.S., the CP conducted a grudging but definite turn to the left, denouncing the "imperialist" war, alienating its liberal allies and reinvigorating its working-class base. The "progressive" trade unionists with whom the Trotskyists had been blocking on trade-union issues meanwhile became central in the pro-war, patriotic lineup. As a result of this switch, in discussions between the SWP leadership and Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, all the inadequacies of the Trotskyists' trade-union work then became manifest (see "Discussions with Trotsky," in his Writing 1939-40). "The Stalinists are the problem," pointed out Cannon: "By their change in line they dealt us a heavy blow. We were forging ahead when they made the switch, paralyzing our work." Despite this damaging admission, the SWP leaders were opposed to a policy of maneuver to take advantage of the new situation. Trotsky proposed critical support to the CP candidates in the 1940 elections. He had to reiterate that this was theoretically possible, since the Stalinists had made a sharp, though temporary, left turn and were just as much part of the labor movement as the equally reactionary forces in the unions with whom the Trotskyists had until then been blocking. The SWP leaders objected, saying that it would disrupt the work in the trade unions, in which what were admittedly blocs at the top with "progressives" had been necessary in order for a small force of revolutionists to come forward and begin political work in the unions. Criticizing his followers for lack of initiative, Trotsky went to the core of the problem:
"I believe we have the critical point very clear. We are in a block with the so-called progressives--not only fakers but honest rank and file. Yes, they are honest and progressive but from time to time they vote for Roosevelt--once in four years. This is decisive. You propose a trade union policy, not a Bolshevik policy. Bolshevik policies begin outside the unions....You are afraid to become compromised in the eyes of the Rooseveltian trade-unionists."
To the American leaders' protestations that their forces were too small to preserve an independent course, Trotsky said, "Our real role is that of third competitor," distinct from both Stalinists and "progressives," stating that his proposal for maneuver "presupposes that we are an independent party." Thus the discussions uncovered the fact that the Trotskyists' lack of an independent political pole in the unions, distinct from episodic blocs and united fronts around immediate issues, had compromised their general ability to maneuver and their independence as a party. They had become over-identified with their bloc partners.
In his report of these discussion to the party, Cannon agreed with most of Trotsky's points in some revealing passages, while continuing to oppose the proposal for critical support to the CP in the elections:
"...our work in the trade unions up till now has been largely a day-to-day affair based upon the daily problems and has lacked a general political orientation and perspective. This has tended to blur the distinction between us and pure and simple trade unionists. In many cases, at times, they appeared to be one with us. It was fair weather and good fellows were together....
"Then all of a sudden, this whole peaceful routine Of the trade union movement is disrupted by overpowering issues of war, patriotism, the national elections, etc. And these trade unionists, who looked so good in ordinary times, are all turning up as patriots and Rooseveltians."
--Socialist Appeal, 10 October 1940
Thus the primacy of politics in trade-union work had snuck up on the SWP and clubbed it over the head. The problem had not been caused by lack of a principled struggle for the program, nor primarily by blocs which were unprincipled in character. Criticism of bureaucratic allies in the public press had sometimes been weak, but the SWP had vigorously struggled in the public domain for its program, while raising key agitational demands in the unions. The main lack had been a consistent pole, in the unions, for the struggle for the Transitional Program and against the bureaucracy in all its manifestations, i.e., a struggle for revolutionary leadership of and in the unions. Instead of developing such caucus formations as the Progressives of the UAW and the Northwest Labor Unity Conference into political formations in opposition to the bureaucracy, as the early Communists' Trade Union Educational League had been, the Trotskyists allowed these formations to be limited politically to the character of united fronts: episodic alliances based on immediate issues. As such, not only did they not last, but the Trotskyists themselves, in the unions, became politically identified almost exclusively through these united fronts, rather than through the struggle to build the vanguard party.
Size was not a factor, since in some, ways the problem was at its worst where the Trotskyists were strongest, in the Northwest Teamsters. Rather, the SWP demonstrated a lack of flexibility of tactics and an unwillingness to upset its policy of continual blocs with "progressive" trade unionists on day-today issues by a hard, political drive for power based on revolutionary answers to the larger issues. But the larger issues dominated the day-to-day issues, and as imperialist world war drew closer the Trotskyists had to pay the price of isolation for their earlier failure to appear as an independent force in the unions. Unfortunately, they were unable to absorb the lessons of this period sufficiently to prevent the repetition of these characteristic errors. The Trotskyists continued, especially after World War II, to rely on a policy of united fronts on trade-union issues, rather than the construction of political formations within the unions-caucuses to mount a comprehensive fight for a full revolutionary program.

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***In The Time Of The Book-Burnings-Brain Percival’s The Book Thief  



http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/The-Book-Thief_poster.jpg

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

The Book Thief, Geoffrey Rush, Emma Watson, Sophie Nelisse, directed by Brian Percival, 2013  

When one thinks about Nazi Germany and books in the late 1930s and 1940s one almost always thinks about those frenzied crowds of ordinary citizens, flames flickering in their faces to create an even  more disturbing picture,  hovering over a bonfire as a group, maybe the Nazi youth, or some local SS troops keep adding book fuel to the fire. Tossing all those Jew books, those Enlightenment books, those modernist books to the fires as if an idea once planted can be burned out in such a way. And of course in the film under review, the adaptation from the book, The Book Thief, there is just such scene. But that is only prologue here because what this film is about, or one of the things that it is about, is “stealing” books in order to learn more about the world, or just for the pleasure of reading.   

The plotline here is pretty straight forward once you get past the fact that the grim reaper is the narrator of this one, a narrator who will unfortunately have plenty of close-at hand business before the story is done between the round-up of the local Jews, the deaths of soldiers on the various fronts, and the retaliation bombings by the Allies later in the film. But what interests Brother Death is this one story, this story of a young illiterate orphan girl, Liesel, whose mother, a communist, another group targeted for extinction by the Nazis, has to leave her behind. Leaves her with foster parents, Hans (a good guy from the beginning) and Rosa (who starts out as a grump but warms up to Liesel over time). The main problem early on is for Hans to teach Liesel how to read and thus opening up her universe during the “night of the long knives.”           

Along the way Liesel meets a neighborhood boy, Rudy, and they become fast friends just at that awkward boy meets girl stage with all the puppy love stuff thrown in. During the film Liesel and Rudy become close, close enough for Liesel to eventually tell Rudy about a young Jewish man who Hans and Rosa are hiding in order to repay an old debt (and who is forced to leave after a couple of years in the basement as the authorities start looking for air-raid shelters and whom Liesel will meet again after the war since he survived); who takes Rudy on her adventures to the mayor’s house to “steal” books for her reading pleasure; and helps him overcome the fears of the air-raid shelters when the Allies start their bombing runs to break the German civilian population’s support for Hitler by telling stories. In the end though Brother Death works in strange ways since everybody who Liesel cared about, her foster-parents, Rudy, and other neighborhood people, were killed in an miscalculated bombing attack toward the end of the war. As the film closes and Brother Death sums up his work, work eventually including Liesel who lived to be 90 and to have prospered after the war moving to New York City, he is still baffled by the human experiment. As are we I would add.

 

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Public Education Under Nationwide Assault
California Ruling Pits Minorities Against Teachers Unions


Workers Vanguard No. 1051
 


5 September 2014
 
Public Education Under Nationwide Assault
California Ruling Pits Minorities Against Teachers Unions
 
On June 10, the State Superior Court in Los Angeles ruled in Vergara v. State of California that laws codifying teacher seniority and job protections discriminate against poor and minority students, who the court claimed are more likely to be taught by incompetent teachers. Hypocritically blaming teachers for the failings of the grossly underfunded, segregated and blatantly unequal public school system, the Vergara suit was a ploy to pit black people and Latinos against the unions. This blow to the teachers unions is the latest in a years-long offensive carried out by both Democrats and Republicans. Since the ruling, two similar lawsuits have been filed in New York, with others in the works in Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota and Tennessee. In California, Democratic governor Jerry Brown has appealed the ruling; teachers unions have announced their intention to appeal as well.
The fight to defend union jobs and working conditions for teachers goes hand in hand with the fight for quality, integrated education. But instead of mobilizing on this basis, which would win wide support from working people and the black masses, the California teachers union tops have played into the anti-union smear campaign, joining with Governor Brown’s efforts to “streamline” the firing process. The California Teachers Association even praised Brown for signing AB 215, a state law expediting the process of firing teachers accused of “egregious misconduct.” The allegiance of the labor officialdom to the capitalist Democratic Party is a recipe for defeat.
The woeful state of public education is a searing indictment of racist American capitalism, which is incapable of meeting the basic needs of the exploited and oppressed. It will take socialist revolution to sweep away this rotten system and usher in a society that provides decent jobs, quality education and other necessities for everyone.
The following presentation, given by comrade Reuben Samuels at a Bay Area Spartacist League meeting in late June, has been edited for publication.
*   *   *
I joined the Spartacist League amidst the 1968 New York City teachers strike. As Mayor John Lindsay slashed the school budget, he pitted the barrios, ghettos and black teachers against the mainly white and disproportionately Jewish teachers union through a scam called “community control.” Devised by the Ford Foundation, the Lindsay administration and the federal Office of Economic Opportunity—which ran Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty”—the “community control” scam broke up the administration of New York public schools into at least 30 independent, community-based school boards. Each board would set its own budget, pitting community against community in a relentless competition over shrinking resources. And each would have the right to hire and fire, thereby breaking the collective bargaining power of the citywide United Federation of Teachers under Albert Shanker.
The teachers strike was provoked when the newly minted school administrator of the mostly black Ocean Hill-Brownsville district summarily fired 13 teachers. One teacher was fired for allegedly losing control over his class; it was claimed students were even throwing chairs at one another. Upon review, however, it was demonstrated that the chairs were bolted to the floor.
An unholy alliance of civil rights and black nationalist leaders, the “old” left and the New Left, and the liberal establishment united to break the strike, crossing picket lines and setting up so-called “liberation schools.” As you can surmise from “Beware Liberal Union-Busters!”, our ’68 strike leaflet [reprinted in WV No. 956, 9 April 2010], we were uniquely unpopular for defending the strike while denouncing the Shanker leadership. The union leaders’ narrow-minded “business union” approach and callous indifference to the plight of minority youth undermined the strike, isolated the union and further fueled racial polarization. No wonder a character in Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) quips that civilization was destroyed when “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”
Separate and Unequal
Today, American public education is more segregated than any time since the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Project coined the term “apartheid schools” to describe schools with 1 percent or less white student enrollment. In Chicago one-half of schools meet this criterion. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, roughly 30 percent of Latinos attend schools in which whites make up 1 percent or less of enrollment.
Prior to large-scale deindustrialization in this country, back when American capitalism required more of an educated workforce, California ranked among the top ten states in per-student expenditure. Student academic performance was reputed to be excellent. In 1978, the state’s Proposition 13 ballot initiative put a cap on the property taxes used to fund public schools. Prop 13 represented a racist backlash by homeowners against having their taxes fund social programs particularly benefiting poor people and minorities. Today, California ranks 39th in per-pupil spending. Adjusted for cost of living, California ranks 46th. In math and English skills, the state’s fourth- and eighth-graders rank between 42nd and 47th.
Between 2008 and 2013, the K-12 student-per-teacher ratio in the “Golden State” increased from 21-to-1 to 25-to-1, the highest in the nation—the national average being 15-to-1. An important measure of public education resources is the student-to-librarian ratio. In California in 2011-12, that ratio was 7,374 students for every librarian, also the highest in the nation. The Oakland Unified School District only funds two full-time and two part-time librarians for 37,000 students. As a consequence, one-third of Oakland’s school libraries have been shut down.
In California, 80 percent of students graduate from high school. But just 63 percent of Oakland Unified students graduate, including only 51 percent of black males. With concentrations of black men literally locked up and out of the labor force, unemployment levels among black youth resemble those of young people in Spain, Italy and Greece. A 2009 Northeastern University study found that across the country on any given day, nearly one out of four black male dropouts were in prison or jail, as opposed to one out of 14 non-black males.
Twenty-three percent of California students are English learners, also the highest rate in the nation. Los Angeles Unified not only has more English learners than any other school district—about one-third of its 600,000 students—but more than 80 percent of its students live in poverty. Twenty percent will have dropped out by senior year.
Anti-Union Assault on Public Education
The background to the court decision in Vergara v. California is the increasing privatization of public education along with systemic racial segregation. Quality schools prepare the exceptional and the wealthy for Stanford while urban holding pens prepare poor black and Latino students for Pelican Bay state prison. Nobody is talking about privatizing schools in Palo Alto, although Silicon Valley is the cockpit of the privateers.
Privatization is a way for the capitalist government to slash the cost of educating poor and minority youth. But for individual capitalists, there is money to be made. K-12 education in America is a $500 billion-plus market. Including higher ed and career training, the education sector represents 9 percent of the U.S. GDP, more than either energy or technology.
Why is Silicon Valley the cockpit of education privatization? Testing, text books, teaching apps and software are growth industries. Replace teachers with iPads and apps, and you can test, direct and monitor what the little devils are doing every minute of the day. The Silicon Valley-based Rocketship chain of charter schools says it saves half a million dollars a year by using fewer teachers, replacing them with non-certified instructors at $15 per hour. These instructors monitor up to 130 kids at a time in cubicles in the schools’ computer labs. L.A. Unified has no money to fix crumbling schools or to hire enough teachers at a decent salary, but it found money to give every student an iPad.
Teachers unions are the biggest obstacle to privatization. So the Bush and Obama administrations teamed up with philanthropists like the Gates Foundation, Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and Walmart’s Walton Family Foundation to bust or eviscerate teachers unions under the watchword of “reform.” Rocketship shows one way to replace teachers with Walmart-style associates, Teach for America another. That program recruits students from elite universities for a brief passage through ghetto schools.
What does school “reform” look like on the ground? In 2004, Oakland launched a “small schools” campaign backed, in part, by a $9.5 million Gates Foundation grant. The city closed a dozen large schools and opened 48 small ones in their place. Fremont High, one of Oakland’s worst-performing schools, with 1,862 students, was broken into five high schools. Result: an exponential increase in administrative bureaucracy and costs, no noticeable change in academic performance. In 2009, after spending $2 billion on its “small schools” experiment, with poor and minority students as guinea pigs, Gates admitted failure.
In 2013, then-superintendent Tony Smith reconsolidated Oakland’s three worst high schools, including Fremont, turning them into—you guessed it—“community schools.” This meant firing all the teachers, who could only be selectively hired back as “teachers on special assignment” with eleven-month contracts that had to be renewed annually. One teacher “reconsolidated” out of a job was Oakland Unified veteran Michael Jackson. He had put in 27 years at Fremont, founding its Media Academy in 1986, a bright spot in those fenced-in grounds of concentrated desolation. One Media Academy student told the lively campus newspaper Green and Gold (12 June 2013) that even before she got to Fremont “my sisters and her friends were talking about Jackson and how he bailed a student out of jail so he could walk the stage.” Jackson was close to retirement anyway, but now he was forced out, gone.
The L.A. schools also experimented with a variation of Smith’s “community schools.” In 2008, L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat and former teachers union organizer, spearheaded the “Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.” Under this initiative, eleven poorly resourced public schools were placed in a “turnaround” program. All school staff were fired and told to reapply for their jobs. Typical was Markham Middle School in Watts, which replaced its veteran teachers with “Teach for America” freshmen. The following year, the “Terminator” governor Arnold Schwarzenegger cut education funding by some $10 billion, resulting in the loss of more than 2,000 L.A. teachers. Markham saw a 72 percent reduction in teaching staff. The following school year, these vacancies were covered by a rotating pool of substitutes.
In response, the Southern California ACLU recruited students from three of L.A.’s poorest middle schools, including Markham, as plaintiffs for a 2010 lawsuit, Reed v. State of California. In the name of protecting students’ rights to equal and adequate public education, the suit targeted teacher seniority, blaming the policy of “last hired, first fired” for the disproportionate impact of the 2009 layoffs on the poorest schools. As if shredding seniority would attract better teachers to under-resourced ghetto and barrio schools! Rather than fighting layoffs or fighting for more resources for poor schools and their teachers, the ACLU attacked the teachers.
The Vergara Cabal
The Vergara suit expanded Reed and took it statewide. Aimed at five provisions of the California Education Code governing teacher job protection and seniority, Vergara argued that by making the firing of “grossly ineffective teachers” difficult, these laws made the concentration of bad teachers at poor and minority schools inevitable, thereby violating the constitutional right of students attending those schools to equal access to quality education.
Let’s be clear. California teachers do not have tenure as you might understand it—lifetime employment. During a two-year probation period, teachers can be fired without cause; after two years, a cause must be given and is subject to review by an arbiter, just as in any union job and many non-union jobs. This provides certified teachers with partial protection against arbitrary firings for such things as skin pigment, sexual orientation, political views or criticizing the administration.
Vergara was initiated in 2010 by Silicon Valley fiber optics entrepreneur David Welch and his nonprofit Students Matter. The defendants were Governor Brown and his state superintendent of public instruction, Tom Torlakson. The two state teachers unions, the California Teachers Association and California Federation of Teachers, joined the suit as codefendants so they would have standing.
Welch, who has no background in education or education policy, modeled his Students Matter on Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst. During her brief tenure as Washington, D.C., schools chancellor, Rhee trashed union rights for teachers. The high-pressure, teach-to-the-test regime she imposed generated a correspondingly massive cheating scandal before she was run out of town. Students Matter supporters include not only Rhee’s StudentsFirst but also the California Charter Schools Association, Oakland’s Tony Smith and Los Angeles Unified superintendent John Deasy. Deasy, a former deputy director at the Gates Foundation, was both plaintiff and defendant in the Vergara suit.
In L.A., Deasy implemented the so-called Value-Added Model (VAM) for assessing teachers based on test scores. VAM comes straight out of corporate American culture à la Silicon Valley. There employees are assessed on how much “value” each contributes to the bottom line. Every year the bottom 5 percent are cut, stimulating performance through cutthroat competition. Nothing succeeds like fear itself. During the Vergara trial, Deasy denied any connection between student performance and poverty. “I believe the statistics correlate,” he said, “but I don’t believe in causality.”
In an article on VAM titled “The Harm Behind the Hype,” Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond explained: “Test scores largely reflect whom a teacher teaches, not how well they teach. In particular, teachers show lower gains when they have large numbers of new English-learners and students with disabilities than when they teach other students. This is true even when statistical methods are used to ‘control’ for student characteristics” (Education Weekly, 5 March 2012). Bottom line: The most precise determinant of student success is the student’s zip code.
Misinformation Campaign
The Vergara suit originally recruited three white and five Latino students as plaintiffs. (A black student was only added later.) The three white plaintiffs and one Latina did not testify or make any submissions at all. Education writer Alan Singer reported in the Huffington Post (24 August): “The father of one of the white students is president of a coffee and tea company with between $10 and $25 million in annual revenue and over fifty employees. The father of the second white student is vice-president of Wilshire Associates, an investment management company. The parents of the third white student are wealthy real estate developers specializing in the affluent Encino market.” Such were the (silent) spokesmen for the dispossessed and downtrodden.
Beatriz and Elizabeth Vergara, after whom the suit is named, both attended a “pilot school” in L.A. that is free to fire teachers at the end of the school year for any reason. Plaintiffs Monterroza and Martinez both attended charter schools that do not recognize teacher seniority or job protection. One teacher accused by the suit of being very bad was Pasadena’s 2013 teacher of the year, a 2011 Pasadena Educational Foundation grant recipient and a 2008 recipient of the Star of Education Award from the NAACP’s Altadena chapter. Another teacher had never received a negative evaluation in her 28-year career.
The defendants made a number of motions challenging whether the plaintiffs had any legal standing whatsoever, i.e., whether they could demonstrate personal harm from teacher seniority and job protection. The unions complacently thought that the case would be thrown out. Instead, higher courts threw out the challenges. The case went to trial in January. Judge Rolf Treu of the California Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles, obscenely citing Brown v. Board of Education, ruled:
“Evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of grossly ineffective teachers on students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.... There is also no dispute that there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms.”
How did Judge Treu uncover the shocking “number of grossly ineffective teachers?” The ruling declared: “Dr. Berliner, an expert called by State Defendants, testified that 1-3% of teachers in California are grossly ineffective. Given that the evidence showed roughly 275,000 active teachers in this state, the extrapolated number of grossly ineffective teachers ranges from 2,750 to 8,250.” But Berliner told the Los Angeles Daily News (13 June): “I never said that.” He added, “I’m on record as saying I’ve visited hundreds of classrooms and I’ve never seen a ‘grossly ineffective teacher’.” Berliner had testified about flaws in VAM. Asked to estimate the percentage of teachers who might fall into VAM’s low-performance category for four straight years, he guessed it was 1 to 3 percent. The Daily News reported, “He was alarmed, he said, when he read the ruling and saw how his ‘guesstimate’ was used.”
If you hadn’t heard of the Vergara case, despite its importance, don’t blame yourself. The California Teachers Association and California Federation of Teachers have done nothing to take the case out of the courtroom and into the streets, except a modest protest in L.A. on the day of the decision. Instead, their response to the decision is to appeal to the very courts that denied their earlier motions. In contrast, the union-busters and school-privateers behind Students Matter have not restricted their cause to the courthouse. They went public with a high-powered PR campaign, and are going national.
The two national teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, represent about a quarter of all union members nationally, with 4.6 million members. No wonder this bastion of unionization has been in the crosshairs of Wall Street and the White House. Despite their numbers, teachers alone wield little social power. But as we argued in “Beware Liberal Union Busters!”, teachers can and must be a bridge between the communities they serve, especially the ghettos and barrios, and organized labor in this country.
One last point: The kids locked up in classrooms seven hours a day, nine months a year for 12-13 years, are our future. What happens to them there affects the transmission of culture, science and history to the next generation, or lack thereof.