Showing posts with label lunacharsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lunacharsky. Show all posts

Sunday, January 03, 2016

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

Markin comment:

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspired Beginnings...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...Clash With Hard Realities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retreat

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

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

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

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

Stalinist Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Art and Revolution-Before "Socialist Realism" in the Soviet Union

Markin comment:

The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter 1976-77, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
********
Markin comment on this article:

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

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


Soviet art is linked in the minds of many with an endless and repetitive panorama of heroic factory workers and healthy-looking peasants, basking in the reflected glory of Stalin's fatherland. But the sterile,servile, cynical and unimaginative "art" associated with Stainist totalitarianism is the product of the suppression of a virtual creative explosion which accompanied the revolutionary struggle. During the brief period of democratic proletarian dictatorship between the overthrow of tsarism and its reactionary censorship policies and the institutionalization of "socialist realism" under Stalin, the optimism and unlimited expectations unleashed by the Russian Revolution supported a heady atmosphere of artistic experimentation.

Under capitalism the arts rely for survival on the monied patronage of the leisure class. But although the Soviet state was born in conditions of desperate poverty, its commitment to making art accessible to the masses intersected a profound cultural upheaval which had begun in the 1890's, to produce a surge of creative activity that swept through every area of artistic endeavor.

As the Soviet government was bringing new sources of light and energy to the population through a campaign to spread the use of electricity—leading to a popular definition of communism as "soviet power plus electrification"—it was taken for granted that the revolution would bring light and energy to the intellect as well.

A look at the effects on the arts of the October Revolution illustrates the commitment of the young Bolshevik regime, despite immense material obstacles, to culture. The complex and shifting relationship between artists and the regime also illuminates the high ideals of the best elements of this idiosyncratic petty-bourgeois layer, which sought to associate its creativity with the great liberating revolution.

The Winds of Change

Although there is no direct relationship between political struggle and aesthetic innovation, historically periods of great artistic and cultural ferment have often preceded violent political struggle, as the changing class relations are mirrored in artistic expression. In Russia, dramatic transformations were evident in the arts several decades before the revolution.

At the beginning of the 20th century, after 300 years of existence, the ballet was still regarded as
frivolous entertainment for young aristocrats. The audience regarded the performance as a form of burlesque—where else could one see women so scantily clad? When the young Mikhail Fokin, who was later to introduce innovations which would save ballet from oblivion, questioned a leading dancer on the possibility of artistic renewal of the dance, he was told, "Ballet is pornography, plain and simple."

Young noblemen would sit in the smoking room playing cards and exchanging stories of romantic conquests until an usher announced that one or another "favorite" was due to appear, at which they would rush into the nearly empty theater to cheer loudly for an encore. One went to the theater to hear the soliloquy of a famous actor, to see the (our de force of a renowned ballerina, to hear the high C of a visiting soprano.

The novel concept of ballet as art can be credited to a handful of theatrical geniuses who qualitatively trans¬formed the dance in the first years of the 20th century. They included: C. Stanislavsky of the Moscow Ar; Mikhail Fokin, choreographer of the Imperial Ballet; S. Diaghilev, grand impresario of the Ballets Russes; A. Benois, artist, designer of scenery and costumes and close collaborator of Diaghilev; George Balanchine, choreographer for Diaghilev and pioneer of modern ballet in the West; and Isadora Duncan.


Stanislavsky's role in ending the isolation of the Imperial Ballet cannot be underestimated. He strove to cast away all the artificial and unnatural theatrical conventions which served only to advance the career of individual performers while stifling the art of dance and theater. His ideas focused on the desire to create in art the concept of "truth of life." His costumes and sets were defined to reflect the period of the play and to contribute to the artistic whole. He allowed no interruptions in the mood of the drama and fostered collaboration between different branches of the performing arts to achieve an artistic whole.

Isadora Duncan's first Russian tour in 1905 occurred just as these leaders of the "left" reform current were formulating their criticisms of the ballet and searching for new artistic models. For Fokin, who had dreamed of staging a ballet in the Greek style, Duncan's powerful yet simple performance, in which she was clad simply in a Greek tunic and danced on a green, grass-like rug with simple, graceful movements to the music of Chopin and Schumann, had an overwhelming impact. Her dancing, unfettered by the confines of classical ballet technique, challenged all serious ballet dancers to examine their own concepts of art and aesthetic movement.


Duncan's influence was profound but, as Stanislavsky discovered when he met her in 1908, she was incapable of articulating her methods. She could speak only in mystical and idealistic terms of her concept of the interpenetration of art and life. Moreover, out of a false standard of artistic purity she refused to allow her dancing to be filmed.

The 1905 Revolution, which shook Russian society to its foundations, also jarred the complacency of the Russian ballet. Both Fokin and Anna Pavlova, the world-renowned prima ballerina, were involved in organizing a strike by dancers under the slogan "Freedom of Art," with a program of relatively minor economic and organizational reforms.

Other fields of art demonstrated an equally accelerated rate and heightened exuberance of creative expression. In poetry, new currents sprang up faster than they could be labeled. Symbolism gave way
to futurism, then to acmeism, imagism and a multitude of unclassifiable styles. On the stage, the ensemble work of Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater and the expressionism in Meierhold's theater wrought pro¬found changes in dramatic production.


But of all the art media, music seemed to be the central and determining one. Aleksandr Bloc, one of the greatest poets of the period, spoke of escaping from calendar time to "musical time." The pioneering abstract painter, Vasily Kandinsky, said he considered music the most comprehensive of the arts and the model for all others, while his colleague Chiurlionis called his paintings "sonatas" and his exhibitions "auditions."


In writing, too, a new musical style evolved, and a new form of lyrical narrative called "the symphony" was developed by Andrei Bely. In the theater, Meierhold's emphasis on gesture underscored his belief that "the body, its lines, its harmonic movements, sings as much as do sounds themselves."

Even Lenin, removed as he was from the world of art, confessed to a strong and disturbing attraction to music during this period. In his Days With Lenin, author Maxim Gorky quoted him as saying:

"I know nothing more beautiful than the Appassionata I could hear it every day. It is marvellous, unearthly music. Every time I hear these notes, I think with pride and perhaps childlike naivete, that it is wonderful what man can accomplish. But I cannot listen to music often, it affects my nerves. I want to say amiable stupidities and stroke the heads of the people who can create such beauty in a filthy hell. But today is not the time to stroke people's heads; today hands descend to split skulls open, split them open ruthlessly, although opposition to all violence is our ultimate ideal—it is a hellishly hard task...."


Particularly after the Revolution of 1905, when man artists fled to the West, Russian art developed in a direction that was both more international and more interdisciplinary. One artistic medium seemed to flow into another. Thus futurism, the most radical of the new artistic currents, began in painting and then moved into poetry. The painter M. Vrubel drew much of his inspiration from poetry, while his use of color inspired poetry. The Ballets Russes epitomized this harmonious fusion of the arts, combining the scenic designs of Benois, L. Bakst and N. Roerich, the music of Igor Stravinsky, the dancing of the great Nizhinsky, the choreography of Fokin and the guiding genius of Diaghilev.

This development was sharply checked by the outbreak of war in 1914, which forced Russian art into isolation. During the war even the most avant-garde artists became superpatriots. The futurists, including Maiakovsky, led a patriotic-nationalist movement which elevated Russian primitivism and religious icons to the basis of a great Russian art of the future. Diaghilev and his group, cut off from Russia, toured Europe and the United States with a continually degenerating Ballets Russes. Isadora Duncan became a French patriot on the grounds that France was the preserver of what was best in modern European culture, although she said:

"France is the only country that really understands But I have great hopes for Russia. At this moment she is passing through the growing pains of childhood, but I believe that she is the future for Artists and the Spirit "

The Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution sent shock waves of wild hope and exhilaration through the artistic intelligent¬sia. In his famous poem, "Twelve," written just after the October uprising, Aleksandr Bloc introduces a popular revolutionary song traditionally sung to the accompa¬niment of balalaikas:

"No sound is heard from the city, There is silence in the Nevsky tower. And on the bayonet of the sentry Glistens the midnight moon."

—A. Bloc, quoted in James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe

Only Bloc changes the last two lines to an exultant: "And there are no more policemen— Rejoice, lads, without need of wine!"

For Fokin and Stanislavsky, the opening of the theaters to audiences composed of factory workers who had last year been peasants and to soldiers who had only yesterday been peasants was the realization o a lifelong aspiration. Batches of tickets were distribute free to the heretofore artistically disfranchised plebe an classes through the Soviets and other worker, organizations.

The new audiences were difficult—to say the least— composed as they were of people unfamiliar with ur¬ban culture in general, not to mention the subtleties of literary and dramatic tradi¬tions. As commissar of war, Trotsky had to teach many of these former peasants to use soap and to clean their weapons. Similarly, Stanis¬lavsky viewed his task as educating them in the conventions of the theater: "... to sit quietly, not to talk, to come to the theater on time, not to smoke, not to eat nuts in public, not to bring food into the theater and eat it there, to dress in [their] best so as to fit more into the atmosphere of beauty that was worshipped in the theater."


In 1921, Anatoly V. Lunacharsky, Soviet minister for education, telegraphed Isa¬dora Duncan: "Come to Moscow, we will give you your school and 1,000 children. You may carry out your ideas on a grand scale." The offer was irresistible, despite the warnings of her friends that cannibalism was rampant and that "four year old children hung by their heels in the butcher shops."

Duncan entered the Soviet Union at a time when many artists were leaving, both for political reasons and to escape the misery and privations of a country ripped apart by civil war. She and her protege Irma Duncan were the first foreign artists to enter the Soviet Union and the last for some time.

Bolshevik Ideals and Harsh Realities

The Bolshevik Ministry of Education and Art— Narkompros—faced enormous difficulties. Lunacharsky was caught in the middle of warring artistic tendencies, all clamoring for official approval. Further¬more, he was crippled, as were all government administrators, by the gap between the ideals and program of the Bolshevik party and the material inability to realize this program under conditions of war, extreme scarcity and national isolation.

The Bolshevik program called for artistic freedom, no state intervention into artistic affairs and no preferential state support for any particular artistic tendency, on the grounds that this would inhibit the development of other tendencies.

Lunacharsky was well aware of the need for political support and material aid from the artistic intelligentsia, realizing how few active artistic sympathizers there were. He was forced again and again to prove his artistic
neutrality both to the artists themselves and to the party.


Despite the extremely difficult conditions under which it was forced to function, Narkompros did manage to keep open the universities and to preserve the public libraries, art collections and museums. It also instituted a network of kindergartens, children's colonies and experimental schools and administered state subsidies to support the arts.

Nevertheless, it seemed that Narkompros could satisfy no one. To give precious resources to the ballet while workers were starving was highly controversial. The exigencies of war communism left little extra for the fundamental restructuring necessary to lift the Russian masses out of centuries of backwardness and cultural poverty.

Narkompros vs. Proletkult

Freed from tsarist persecution, a multitude of artistic tendencies—futurists, confuturists, constructivists, supremacists, primitivists, imagists—surfaced; each with its own manifestoes, journals and organizational animosities. While hailing their new freedom from autocracy, many of these tendencies were suspicious of the Bolsheviks. The Artists' Union, formed in May 1917, held up the banner of artistic freedom like a cross to fend off the suspected Bolshevik threat.

The "left" wing of this Union was dominated by the futurists—self-proclaimed architects of the future "proletarian culture," who argued for a complete break with the past, insisted on a fundamental link between art and technology, introduced technical-industrial terms into their poetry and identified themselves with Bolshevism and internationalism. But futurist leader Maiakovsky, despite his sympathies for the revolutionary proletariat, stood in principle against joining any state body dealing with art. The Artists' Union refused to cooperate with Narkompros even in its campaign to save art treasures from war damage.


Lenin, whose aesthetic tastes were relatively conser¬vative, personally disliked the flamboyant public spectacles, bright yellow shirts and painted faces in which the futurists delighted and was infuriated when they painted the trees in front of the Kremlin bright colors for a May Day celebration.

Lunacharsky and Trotsky were more sympathetic to avant-garde and experimental trends but also felt a commitment to the preservation of artistic tradition. It was disgraceful, said Trotsky, to approach the "cultural heritage" of the past with nihilistic contempt. The working class had to take possession of that heritage and guard it. Above all, they strove to maintain an even-handed policy of official toleration and even encour¬agement with regard to all artistic tendencies. None¬theless, the government was always suspected by the traditionalists of favoritism toward the futurists, espe¬cially when the futurists, after splitting from the Artists' Union, had obtained a position within the graphic arts department of Narkpmpros by offering their services for the production of propaganda posters.

The most organized expression of radicalism in the arts was the Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) organiza¬tion, whose founder was Aleksandr Malinovsky,known as Bogdanov. Bogdanov means "god-gifted" and accurately reflects the image which this individual had of his own importance.

Although Bogdanov had been a member of the Bolshevik party until his expulsion in 1909, he believed that the key to the future lay not in the tranformation of economic relationships through class struggle and socialist revolution but in the technology and ideology which was already being created by the proletariat. He also argued that the destructive conflicts of the past would never be resolved without the creation of anew, socially oriented religion, which he called "empirio-monism." Bogdanov's idealism was attacked by Lenin in Materialism and Empiric-Criticism.

The theoretical basis of Bogdanov's Proletkult was the belief (originally supported by Lunacharsky) that
artists, under the direction of an organization similar to a trade union, which was to protect the interests of the proletariat in the cultural sphere, should create a "proletarian culture" which would substitute for the decadent, class-biased and therefore dangerous bour¬geois culture. "Proletarian culture" would become a weapon of the oppressed in the class struggle. Proletkult saw nothing of value in the old bourgeois culture, which, its adherents argued, must be immedi¬ately destroyed. The refutation of this idea of "proletarian culture" was succinctly summarized by Trotsky in the preface of Literature and Revolution:

"It is fundamentally wrong to oppose proletarian to bourgeois culture and art. Proletarian culture and art will never exist. The proletarian regime is temporary and transitory. Our revolution derives its historic significance and moral greatness from the fact that it lays the foundations for a classless society and for the first truly universal culture."

What is more, argued Trotsky, the historic destiny of the proletariat does not leave it enough time to develop a new culture. Whereas the bourgeois way of life developed organically over several centuries, the proletarian dictatorship will be measured in years or decades, and its duration will be filled with savage class struggles. "We are still soldiers on the march," he said. "Our epoch is not the epoch of a new culture. We can only force open the gate to it."


Although Lenin believed the concepts of Proletkult to be un-Marxist and unmaterialist, he refrained initially from intervening against it on the grounds that it was not the role of the party to take positions on questions of art and culture. But Proletkcult's attempts to create a new culture under the conditions of war communism proved dangerous. The discovery that Narkompros' budget for the arts was larger than its budget for education and that the special rations which had been granted technical specialists had been extended to artists prompted Lenin late in 1920 to support Lunacharsky's demand that the hitherto freewheeling Proletkult be subordinated to Narkompros.


The immediate cultural necessity, he argued, was to raise the level of the Russian masses—to help them acquire the level of competency that the petty-bourgeoisie had taken for granted: literacy, simple arithmetic, hygiene. But the avant-garde artists of Proletkult disdained such mundane tasks. Lenin characterized them as "parasites...escapees from the bourgeois intelligentsia" who were looking for a playground in the institutions desperately needed by the workers.

Lenin was supported in his struggle against Proletkult by both Lunacharsky, who believed that proletarian culture was possible but not imminent, and Trotsky. Trotsky agreed with Lenin on the philosophical aspects of proletarian culture as well as the immediate priorities of raising the level of culture for the masses but disagreed with Lenin's evaluation of avant-garde experimentation and was particularly sympathetic to the futurists.

The real strength of Proletkult is demonstrated by the fact that after deciding in 1919 that the organization represented a danger, it took the Bolsheviks two years to achieve its subordination to Narkompros. Proletkult was also censured for its claim to have brought about "immediate socialism" in the cultural sphere, a "proletarian culture" totally emancipated from the bourgeois past. It is instructive that throughout this fight Lenin never resorted to censorship. Freedom of expression for all except active counterrevolutionaries was a fiercely guarded principle during Lenin's lifetime.

Degeneration, Defection, Death.

The New Economic Policy (NEP) initiated in 1921 meant a loosening up in most areas, but coinciding asit did with the end of the Proletkult fight and the reorganization and trimming down of Narkompros, it hit the arts like an austerity program. It was all Lunacharsky could do to salvage subsidies for the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Ballets, the Academic Theater and the Moscow Art Theater. He almost lost on the ballet, which Lenin ordered closed because of its "negligible artistic value" and high cost of mainte¬nance; He managed to keep the Bolshoi open, after the Council of Trade Unions ordered it closed, only by arguing that the theater was needed for congresses and state functions. Other theaters maintained themselves by selling tickets to those who could afford them and distributing a small number to trade unions and schools at half price. The Proletkult Theater and the Isadora Duncan School maintained their premises but were told to support themselves through performances. Duncan, with 40 students and a staff to support, went on a pan-Soviet tour, which was artistically successful, but after the expenses of the orchestra and transportation were settled, she had little left with which to maintain her school. Her next tour to Central Asia was so financially disastrous that she decided that if she must go back to dancing for money she should go to a country that had some—the United States. But al¬though her concerts in the U.S. were sold out, she was banned in Boston and other cities for "inflammatory Communist dancing" and oratory.


The degeneration of the revolution after 1924 and the insidious entrenchment of the Stalinist bureaucracy was reflected in the arts. In the ballet, experimentation with themes of class struggle began to be booed off the stage. George Balanchine was publicly criticized for his experiments with pantomime, which were character¬ized as a break with "artistic tradition." In 1924 he and his whole company defected and joined Diaghilev in Paris—the first in a long line of Soviet ballet dancers to defect.

In 1925 the poet Esenin, Isadora Duncan's estranged husband, committed suicide. Although ostensibly an apolitical act, this suicide, like Balanchine's defection, started a trend among artists. In fact, the self-destruction of poets associated with "drunkenness and bohemian influences" created a new Russian word— "Esenism." These suicides represented the inability of a certain layer of artists either to submit to the growing bureaucracy or to fight it.

In 1929 Lunacharsky resigned his post as commissar of education. In the same year, Maiakovsky wrote "The Bedbug" and "The Washhouse," skillful, satirical plays exposing the bureaucracy. The public criticism of these works was brutal. He was allowed no reply and was hounded until he finally recanted. But although in a poem of capitulation he promised to write one hundred party books and publish them in the official party press, he was never to write anything again. In 1930 he shot himself.

In 1935 Maiakovsky was proclaimed a national hero by Stalin. Russian school children were compelled to memorize his poems; posthumous awards were bestowed; a subway station was named in his honor. One understands that when a subway station is dedicated to a martyred poet by his persecutors the time for debating questions of aesthetics, style and freedom is past." (Boldface by Markin)

Monday, November 01, 2010

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

Markin comment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education U.S.A.— Separate and Unequal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laissez-Faire Schools Disaster

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

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

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

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

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

The Charter School Onslaught

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The War on Teachers Unions

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Need a Workers Party!

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

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Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.

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Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great French writer Marcel Proust. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.

*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky- On Maxim Gorky

Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.

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Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.

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Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great British writer George Bernard Shaw. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.

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Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great Russian writer Dostoevsky. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Opposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.

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Click on title to link to the Anatol Lunacharsky Internet Archive's copy of his essay on the great Russian writer Pushkin. Lunacharsky may have been a 'soft' Bolshevik and conciliatory toward Stalin, when the deal went down and the Russian Left Oppposition was defeated, but he certainly has some interesting and thoughtful insights on the "culture wars" of his day.