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Workers Vanguard No. 1023
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3 May 2013
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For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!
Budget Slashers Attack City College of San Francisco
(Young Spartacus pages)
City College of San Francisco (CCSF), one of the few remaining
avenues to higher education for its 85,000 predominantly working-class, poor and
minority students, is threatened with being shut down. Last July, the
Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) told the
college that it would lose accreditation—i.e., face closure—if it did not
sufficiently address the commission’s demands for fiscal and structural changes.
The ACCJC particularly cited the costs of CCSF’s wages and benefits for the
unionized faculty and campus workers. Seizing on the threatened sanction, the
campus administration unilaterally imposed an 8.8 percent wage cut and began
axing faculty and clerical workers’ jobs, paving the way to slashing more
classes and even entire programs. Already, the administration has announced that
it plans to close two of CCSF’s nine campus sites.
The ACCJC’s own report makes clear that the accreditation sanction
has nothing to do with the quality of education at CCSF. In fact, the report
commends “several exemplary models of demonstrated educational quality.” What
they object to is that such programs and the unionized faculty who staff the
departments haven’t been sufficiently slashed. Their purpose is to streamline
programs that educate technicians and other skilled workers as are needed by
business and get rid of the rest. Such cuts could potentially target bilingual
education, food service and hospitality classes that allow working-class youth
to get jobs in SF’s unionized hotel industry, as well as job-training programs
for those just released from America’s prison hellholes.
California’s community college system is the largest in the
country. For years it had provided working-class and poor youth with their best
shot at getting into the elite University of California (UC) system, while
offering other such students their only access to any education beyond the
increasingly underfunded and decrepit high schools. But having wiped out whole
swaths of industry and manufacturing, the American bourgeoisie has for decades
been choking off funding for public education, seeing little value in educating
youth for whom there are no jobs.
The attacks against CCSF are part of a broad nationwide assault on
public schools and teachers unions. And California has led the nation on this
score, particularly since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. A tax revolt by
white property owners, Prop. 13 cut spending on social programs benefiting black
people, minorities and the poor, with schools taking some of the biggest hits.
The 2007-08 capitalist economic meltdown sent the budget-slashing, union-busting
drive into high gear. Funding for the community college system has been slashed
by over $1 billion, a quarter of classes have been cut entirely, and despite the
fiction of “free tuition” the fees for classes have risen by an astronomical
255 percent in nine years.
Over the last several months, CCSF students, as well as faculty
organized in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have participated in
rallies against the attacks on the college. Protests organized by the Save CCSF
Coalition, in which the reformist Socialist Organizer (S.O.) plays a leading
role, have pleaded with CCSF Chancellor Thelma Scott-Skillman and the Board of
Trustees to “reverse all cuts” and “promote equity.” A banner at a February 21
protest demanded “Trustees: Put Us First! We Are S.F. City College!” Fat chance
of that! The whole purpose of the Board of Trustees is to enforce the dictates
of the capitalist rulers whose interests they represent, and that means bringing
down the budget ax. S.O. couples its entreaties to the good offices of the
Chancellor with appeals to the bourgeoisie to fork out more tax money to fund
education.
The government’s tax code flows from the class and social relations
that define racist American capitalism, a system of production for profit based
on the exploitation of labor and the brutal subjugation of black people. Look at
Proposition A—a property parcel tax intended specifically to provide funds to
stop budget cuts and layoffs at CCSF. Recognizing the importance of the school,
an overwhelming majority of SF voters supported Prop. A in last November’s
elections. But the rulers hold the purse strings. As Chancellor Scott-Skillman
and the Board of Trustees made clear, they have no intention of using these
funds to “save CCSF.” Rather, they have pledged that money raised under Prop. A
will go to building up the college’s financial reserves, while the axing of jobs
and classes continues.
There is no lack of money in this rich country that could be used
to provide free, quality education for all. But for working people to get their
hands on that wealth will require nothing less than socialist revolution to
break the power of the bourgeoisie. It is this revolutionary perspective that
guides the Spartacus Youth Club, which has intervened into student and labor
rallies protesting the closure of CCSF. As a Spartacist speaker declared at a
February 21 protest:
“CCSF isn’t going to be saved by appealing to the chancellor or
the campus administration, which really exists to serve the capitalist rulers on
the campus.... And it isn’t going to be saved by appealing for ‘bridge loans’ to
the Democratic Party city administration, which has been cutting wages, benefits
and jobs for workers all over the city. Alongside the students, there has to be
mobilized the power of the workers, the people who make this city run.... The
people who go to school here are the children of working-class people, and
working people in this city and the whole Bay Area have an innate interest in
fighting to save CCSF. And that fight must be mobilized around the call for
free, quality, integrated education for everybody.”
The SYC demands: No tuition, open admissions and a full living
stipend for all students! Abolish the Board of Trustees and the administration!
Those who work, study and teach at the colleges and universities should run
them—for worker/student/teacher control!
Race and Class Privilege in Education
Contrary to the myth that college and university campuses are ivory
towers that exist apart from the broader society, the attack on CCSF shows in
the realm of higher education the race and class privilege at the core of
American capitalism. The whole history of the community college system provides
a concrete demonstration that the bourgeoisie seeks to spend on educating poor
and working-class youth only what they can realize back in profit through the
exploitation of their labor. From the beginning, the conception of such colleges
was to provide skilled workers and technicians for industry. They massively grew
in the aftermath of World War II, particularly to provide workers for the
growing defense industries that had moved to California. Indeed, when these
industries faced a labor shortage during the war, California shipyard owners
recruited untrained and often semiliterate Southern youth, many of them black,
who learned how to read and write and often became skilled apprentices in little
more than three months.
Following the war, the GI Bill provided free tuition for those who
had served as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism. Working-class and poor
families thought that their sons and daughters would finally have access to
higher education and a better future. But with enrollment skyrocketing,
including many knocking on the door for entry into the prestigious University of
California system, a committee headed by UC Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr came
up with the Master Plan for Education in 1960. Qualifications for getting into
UC were ramped up to limit enrollment to the top 12 percent of high school
graduates. Meanwhile, the California state colleges, which previously had
largely been teacher-training institutions, became officially recognized as
liberal arts colleges. Qualifications for entry were tightened to apply to only
33 percent of high school graduates as opposed to the previous 50 to 70 percent.
Community and junior colleges were to take and train the rest.
Affirmative action—a limited gain of the civil rights
movement—allowed some access to the UC system for blacks and other minority
youth. But these programs have been destroyed. California was in the vanguard of
the campaign to roll back affirmative action. Moreover, poor, black and
working-class youth were increasingly priced out of the UC market as tuition
skyrocketed. The bourgeoisie increasingly considers the masses of black people
in the inner cities as a “surplus population,” no longer needed as a reserve
army of labor and thus not “worth” providing with even the basic means of
survival, much less education.
As we wrote in early 2010, at a time of massive student and campus
worker protests against tuition hikes, education cuts and job-slashing
attacks:
“We think everyone should have access to the same quality
education available to the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. We call to
nationalize the private universities and for a state-paid living stipend so
working people and the poor can attend. We demand the expansion of remedial
programs for students relegated to inner-city public schools, an end to the
racist ‘tracking’ system in the high schools and their genuine integration,
including through the aggressive implementation of busing. Whether this is
possible or not is in reality determined by the outcome of class and social
struggle. Under capitalism, gains wrested from the ruling class through social
struggle are limited and reversible. As communists, our goal is not what is
possible within the framework of capitalist society, but the revolutionary
overthrow of capitalist class rule and the establishment of a workers state as a
transition to the construction of a classless, egalitarian society where
scarcity has been eliminated and education is the right of all.”
—“ Protests Against Education Cuts and Fee Hikes Sweep California,”
WV No. 950, 15 January 2010
The Dead End of Pressure Politics
Reformist “socialists” perennially peddle the lie that capitalism
can be reformed to serve the interests of the working class and oppressed. To
this end, Socialist Organizer even offers budgetary advice to the bourgeoisie.
In a leaflet titled “Don’t Let the 1% Dismantle CCSF,” which was distributed at
a March 14 protest at SF City Hall, S.O. opines:
“They tell us that there is no money, so we have to cut back or
they will close our school. They are lying. There are many obvious solutions to
CCSF’s and California’s financial woes: taxing the rich, taxing oil extraction,
cutting prison and war funding, and/or amending Prop 13. Cuts are not
inevitable. The school and the state is [sic] facing a priorities
crisis—not a budget crisis” (emphasis in original).
The only “priority” for the bourgeoisie is the maintenance of their
class rule and the protection and expansion of their global imperialist
interests. That will not change short of socialist revolution. S.O. stops short
of even the utopian call that reformists often raise for the capitalist rulers
to end imperialist war. They simply and explicitly accept the capitalist
machinery of repression, only urging that less money be spent on maintaining the
prisons and subjugating peoples around the world.
At the same time, S.O. can talk out of the left side of its mouth,
making a nod in its leaflet to mobilizing the power of organized labor and even
writing that this “requires breaking labor’s subordination to the Democratic
Party.” They acknowledge that “winning free, quality public education for
all…requires eliminating capitalism and replacing it with a socialist society.”
But this is window-dressing for their work on the ground as leaders of the Save
CCSF Coalition.
From the podium at the March 14 rally, the speech by S.O.’s Eric
Blanc had not a scintilla of “socialism.” He complained, “Unfortunately, the
politicians have remained silent up until this moment,” adding that “when our
school is under attack, the responsibility of the people who are elected from
this city is to save our school, not dismantle it.” Indeed, a core demand of the
Coalition is that “San Francisco’s elected representatives must step in” as
allies providing funds and political support to the fight to save CCSF. S.O.
& Co. appeal to Mayor Ed Lee and the Democratic-controlled city
administration—the same capitalist politicians cutting the wages, benefits and
pensions of city workers, including members of SEIU Local 1021, which also
represents CCSF clerical employees.
Thus, like the trade-union bureaucracy, which has long subordinated
labor to the Democratic Party, S.O. serves to channel the protests into the
bourgeois electoral shell game. The idea that the Democrats—the other party of
American capitalist rule—are the allies of the working class and poor has long
served as a key prop for maintaining the system of racist U.S. imperialism.
As the youth auxiliary to the Marxist Spartacist League, the
purpose of the Spartacus Youth Clubs is to win a new generation of students and
youth to the fight to build a revolutionary workers party. Only under the
leadership of such a party can the working class realize its social power and
historic interests as the gravediggers of this system of wage slavery, racial
oppression, poverty and war. The working class must seize state power and
reorganize society on an egalitarian socialist basis, providing for the needs of
the many rather than the profits of a tiny class of exploiters. The essential
precondition for human emancipation from starvation, exploitation, ignorance and
inequality is a planned, socialized economy on a global scale. Only in this way
can the accumulated knowledge and culture of civilization be truly appropriated
by those who are today deprived of the right to quality education.
