The whole privatization movement in education wants to smash the power of the teachers unions and to destroy decent public wages for workers, be they teachers...



An Interview with Scholar/Author Peter Mclaren

1. How is your work, broadly speaking, informed by Marxist theory?
As a Marxist I look to Marx’s writings and to contemporary Marxist scholars to help analyze the current crisis of capitalism. And within this context I try to understand the history of education, particularly in the United States and in my native Canada, but also educational trends worldwide, as part of the formation of the transnational capitalist class and the transnational capitalist state.
Since 1987,  I have had the opportunity to speak in approximately 30 countries  (many of which I continue to visit, and some which I visit on a regular basis, such as Mexico and Venezuela), to academics, teachers and social activists and in numerous cases to form active alliances.

One of my projects has been to enlarge the scope of critical pedagogy into that of a social movement, a movement that I call “revolutionary critical pedagogy” (after British Marxist, Paula Allman) in order to underline its central aim—to work towards a social universe outside of capitalist value production.  I work in the area of anti-capitalist struggle and in the arena of epistemology, educating against the coloniality of power, and trying to create a pluriversal approach to indigenous knowledges through a critique of Eurocentric knowledge production and through working with subaltern groups who have been victims of European and US imperialism. So I begin with a critique of neoliberal globalization,  financialization, the autonomous functioning of the monetary economy, working-class standards of living being sacrificed at the altar of the enrichment of finance capital, the declining rate of profit (a number of my students at UCLA took classes with Robert Brenner), overaccumulation of capital, and accumulation by dispossession as developed by David Harvey.  But I also work within the analysis of the transnational capitalist class and the development of a global capitalist historical bloc composed of the transnational corporations and financial institutions, the elites that manage the supranational economic planning agencies, major forces in the dominant political parties, media conglomerates, and technocratic elites, as developed by William I. Robinson at UC-Santa Barbara. Here I am specifically interested in how the class practices of a new global ruling class are becoming condensed in an emergent transnational state in which members of the transnational capitalist class have an objective existence above any local territories and polities.

Epistemologically, I am very interested in decolonial pedagogy, and here I am starting to work within a framework  developed by the decolonial school, whose exponents include Enrique Dussel, Ramon Grosfoguel, Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, Nelson Maldonaldo-Torres, and others. Here, I expand the idea of what happened when las Americas were transformed by capital. I try to think of capital as more than the limited sense of an economic logic but as an integrated network of cultural, political and economic process that are all internally related.  We need to account for the complex entanglement of gender, racial, sexual and class hierarchies within global geopolitical, geocultural and geo-economic processes of the modern/colonial world system.

We need  to keep in mind the global racial/gender/sexual hierarchy that emerged with European colonial expansion and that continues to be reproduced in the modern/colonial/capitalist world system.  We are trying to bring this perspective to the Marxist left in Venezuela, and this summer will begin training cadres in the countryside in this decolonial perspective, as part of a project that we organized with the Ministry of Education.  These multiple hierarchies or “heterarchies” are not epiphenomenal to capitalism, but are constitutive of capitalism, when we look at the historical formations that capitalism has taken, especially from the beginning of the conquest of las Americas right up to the present working of the coloniality of power, or the persistence of thinking within Eurocentric perspectives absent actual colonial administrations.

Now it is important when doing this work to keep the eyes on the prize—the abolition of capitalism.   And here I try to remain faithful to Marx’s own writings, his criticism of the presuppositions and premises of classical political economy, and this causes me to be very critical of some of the formations of revolutionary organizations of the past and present.  As Peter Hudis, Kevin Anderson, and other Marxist humanist scholars and activists have pointed out—and which has been supported by my own reading of Marx—Marx did not support control of society by a single state party, he did not endorse authoritarian regimes, nor did he support state control of the economy.  Of course he criticized private property, but he also opposed the notion that economic life should be controlled by the state as in a centrally planned, state-run economy that supposedly counters the anarchy of the deregulated market.  Both of these positions were roundly rejected by Marx as expressions of alienated social relations.  Marx identified the central problem of capitalism as the production of value.  

What is value production?  Well, it is different than the production of wealth.  As Peter Hudis notes, value is wealth computed in monetary terms.  It is the reduction of concrete, living labor—or “doing” directed towards satisfying real human needs—to abstract, alienated labor (the commodification of labor power) that operates to increase value as an end in itself, as in the drive to augment value through the creation of exchange value  (i.e., the exchange of commodities as the universal medium of social interaction as in surplus value production).  Capitalist social relations take on a certain form of value in which human relations take on the form of relations between things.  It is this form that needs to be abolished and this can only be done through the abolition of value production.

Labor in Marx has a two-fold nature—useful labor or concrete labor (purposeful doing or conscious life activity) and abstract or alienated labor (which Marx argued was the substance of both value and surplus value).  These forms of labor are in a dynamic and living antagonistic relationship due to the fact that capitalism requires the worker to sell her labor power to the capitalist for a wage.  John Holloway identifies two forms of struggle here—the struggle of purposeful doing (concrete labor) against abstract labor (the struggle of doing against labor, or the struggle of workers against their own existence as a working class), and the struggle of labor against capital (as in the struggle of the labor movement against capitalist exploitation, i.e., wage labor and capital).  We need to see these two struggles as being related. For instance, I am critical of  labor movements and teachers unions for many reasons. But mostly because they define the struggle as that of labor against capital, when, in fact, they actually support abstract labor, or value production. They believe that value production can be made less exploitative, or  that abstract labor can be reconfigured in less alienated ways. While this might be true in the short run, with redistribution from capital to labor, it will actually exacerbate the crisis of capitalism in the long run.

I am against value production, and believe the only way to create a new society is through the abolition of value production. We can’t tinker with relations of distribution and circulation by bringing them under the control of the state and believe we can create a socialist society. We need to abolish the production relationship itself, or we will create an even greater despotism than the one that exists under free market capitalism. We can’t abolish value production by altering the mechanisms by which surplus value is extracted from the worker.  Real freedom cannot be won in a society governed by exchange value and value production.  Even cooperative, non-statist forms of production will not lead to freedom if they remain tethered to exchange value, money, and value production. Here, workers only become their own exploiters.  As Peter Hudis notes, such cooperatives have eliminated the need for the capitalist but have not eliminated themselves from the capitalist relation itself, a message that I tried to deliver convincingly to factory workers in Argentina, who were part of the occupied factories movement, and who invited me to speak at a recuperated factory in Buenos Aires because they are setting up schools in these ‘recuperated factories.”

2. As a marxist, how would you explain the current state of public education and how would you characterize the latest attempts at school reform?

Education is now a sub-sector of the economy. Public education is now on a fast-track towards privatization, it is part of the overall trend of neoliberal globalization, the two central axes being privatization and deregulation, which, by the way,  has been forced upon nation states, especially after Reagan’s crushing defeat of the air traffic controllers and Thatcher’s defeat of the miners who went on strike in the UK in the 1980s. This has led to the current crisis of world capitalism, and yet its policies and practices are precisely those endorsed to an even greater extent by Republicans (and in a softer version by Democrats) today. This is all part of the overall pattern of neoliberal globalization in which The Word Bank (controlled by the United States) and International Monetary Fund has forced national governments to develop economic policies that emphasize economic growth and property rights over social welfare and personal rights.  Market-driven education (the voucherizing of education) has led to today’s corporatization of education and for-profit and corporate-style charter school movement. Education is one of the largest market industries around,  and it is now controlled by hedge-fund managers and bankers and speculators with the support of the Walton Foundation (Walmart gives 50 million a year to the charter school movement).  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation want to close thousands of broken inner-city schools and replace them with charters. And in some cases, for-profit corporations have created nonprofit foundations to obtain charters, and then hire themselves to run the schools.

Hedge fund managers and CEOs become rabid advocates for market reforms which are driven by the desire to create a less expensive teaching force, one that is shackled by narrow-minded test-based accountability measures, and on that has less union power to fight back. Federal education mandates have moved away from supporting equality of access and outcome and have focused instead on cutting back on school funding, on promoting shame and blame policies, on merit pay or on firing school staff, on supporting standardized tests based on common core standards which have little to do with the production of critical, meaningful knowledge and problem-solving, on giving grants to the school “winners” instead of those high-needs students who are most in need of financial assistance, and on corporate control of the curriculum. As Stan Karp has pointed out, the most complete study of charter school performance, by Stanford University, found that only 17 percent of charter schools had better test scores than comparable public schools and more than twice as many did worse. Traditional public schools accept all children, including much larger numbers of high-needs students, whereas charter schools are very selective in who they admit.

Charters – endorsed with enthusiasm by Arnie Duncan – have become the new common sense option for the poor and the dwindling middle-class who want to escape the crumbling, under-funded inner-city schools with failing track records on standardized tests and who can’t afford full-blown private schools (at least for those that can get through the admission requirements and who can afford it as the stipends for charters won’t pay for everything). For those desperately trying to escape the ravages of public schools, especially in decaying urban centers, the world of charters has been presented by Duncan and his ilk as the only feasible option. But the very people who push for charters are those who have spent years driving down public schooling.  If you examine public schooling as part of the logic of neoliberal globalization, you can see that the assault on public education is really just part of the final frontier in a move by corporate America and the transnational capitalist class to privatize all public resources, at least as many as the public permits.

The whole privatization movement in education wants to smash the power of the teachers unions and to destroy decent public wages for workers, be they teachers or other public employees. You have to see this in the context of the larger logic of neoliberal capitalism.

It’s not only the Republicans, but the Democrats, as well,  that support the candidacy of pro-charter candidates for public office, even when they know full well that their selective advocacy avoids the fact that there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones and that a number of their principals have been indicted for embezzlement.

We are told by the state that there is a shortage of professionals in the United States in technology, mathematics, engineering and the sciences.  But in reality there is no shortage of professionals in the United States in these areas.  According to  the World Economic Forum, the US ranks first in the world in global competitiveness and about 6th out of 134 countries in all categories related to these professions and availability of expertise. So if this is the case, why does Obama’s Race to the Top justify its program by claiming the US needs to keep up with the rest of the world?  We already keep up with the rest of the world. We know that students in schools that are well-funded score as well or higher than students from other countries in international tests. But all of this masks the fact that the US has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all the industrialized countries, and we know that children from poor families and that attend underfunded schools score below the international average.

So it is clear that poverty is a problem. And it’s a problem that’s not being addressed because we ignore the fact that we live in a class-based society. We use the term “economically disadvantaged” or “low socioeconomic status” when we should be saying “working class”! When we use the term low socioeconomic status, we naturalize and legitimize inequality and try to rationalize it. In our sociology of education studies, we don’t look to Marx to provide an explanatory framework for poverty, we look instead to Max Weber who frames class more in terms of consumption habits and lifestyle than objective conditions of exploitation. While Weber wrote about the irrational logic of capital, the paradoxes of capitalist rationality and the illusions of progress, he did not exhibit much concern about workers and even defended aspects of capitalism as part of the protestant work ethic. So is it any wonder that when vouchers are proposed, or charter schools, that teachers can easily find a way to rationalize them, too, when the only language they know about class from their teacher education programs is from Weber?


When the commissioner of the New York State Department of Education, David M. Steiner, told critical educator, Henry Giroux , at the Nexus Conference in Amsterdam in 2007 that “social justice promotes hatred. Hatred for the established order” it became clear that the object of attack of many establishment leaders in education is critical thought itself. These thinkers, including Arnie Duncan, support what Giroux calls instrumental and practical classroom methodologies that, especially in the case of African Americans, function as part of a circuit of power that produces the school-to-prison pipeline. Reactionary political values are smuggled under the guise of technical reasoning and remain immune to the criticism that education has succumbed to the idiom of the corporation, to the business ethic of self-interest, to knowledge as a pre-packaged commodity, to the unlimited pursuit of the accumulation of capital, to the notion that progress is measured by the quantitative growth of consumption.

Somewhere around the late 1980s  the output of the affiliates of transnational corporations outside their home countries overtook the volume of world exports of manufactures—and there was a dramatic shift in the ability to shift capital outside of government control. This is reflective of the shift in the nature of the power relationship between the nation state and transnational corporations.  The role of public schools has shifted accordingly.  Schools are not longer preoccupied with cultivating democratic citizens for the nation state (creating the codes for citizenship and transmitting the deep character of the national state by legitimizing the superiority of elite bourgeois culture) but helping the nation state serve the transnational corporations.  Schools themselves are becoming corporate enterprises.  We are training students to become consumer citizens, not democratic citizens.  The future of education is now in the hands of corporate rule as the hedge funds, finance capital and betting on the stock market overdetermine the fate of public schooling.


3. With all the discussion around school reform, it seems that the conversation has been rather limited in its scope. What would you like to see added to the conversation and what affect do you think this would have?

Well, I would like to see a renewed emphasis on fighting poverty as a means of creating more equality of educational opportunity.  The logic of conservative educational critics for years has been that public schools already overspend, that they have failed poor, urban students, and the teachers unions won’t allow bad teachers to be fired, and until we fire the bottom 10 percent of the lowest performing teachers (some school boards are demanding that value added measures on tests should account for 30 percent of teachers’ evaluations, and in some cases 50 percent) our nation will never break out of its sluggish economy and we will not be able to compete economically with other nations.  But it is not a lack of education that creates poverty and economic inequality, it’s a lack of jobs. It’s the very nature of the capitalist system. Successful educational reform can close the achievement gap by increasing the number of working-class and minority students who do well in school, but a good education cannot rescue the majority of children from poverty because there are too many jobs that pay poverty-level wages.  

The ruling classes want to blame poverty on the failure of our education system because it is the community that assumes the burden of paying for schools, whereas it would cost the capitalists more to pay decent wages to workers. I agree with  John Marsh, who in a forthcoming book, Class Divided, makes the case that education should be treated as a political—not a market—phenomenon.  We need social programs and non-educational interventions into the market, whether through redistributive tax rates, massive public works projects, a living wage law, or a renaissance of labor unions.  More workers with college degrees will not stem the rise of low-wage jobs nor will it reduce inequality.  We need to decrease the total number of people living in poverty.  We can’t use educational programs to reduce inequality, because this just won’t work in a capitalist economy, and then when education doesn’t do the trick, when unemployment is rampant and jobs are scarce, then the public educational system can be blamed.

Part of the reason that the US is one of the most unequal countries in the world is that we have limited economic rights.  Our main vehicle for economic success is linked to our right to a decent education.  We can’t simply use education as our main economic right. As Marsh argues, we need more economic rights and it is important that they not be tied to education.  Every right we have must have an independent status, such as the right to a useful and remunerative job, the right to adequate food and clothing, the right to a decent education, etc.  Education is seen as a requirement for all the other rights, and it is assumed that once you are given the right to a good education all the other rights will take care of themselves,  But you can’t make these rights dependent upon one another or an outgrowth of one another.  They must remain separate.  The only economic right we can exercise in the US is the right to a good education, and this right has been transformed into the right to a good corporate education.  

Even in 2000, when the unemployment rate in the US fell to 3.9, and the poverty rate fell to 11.3, we had 30 million people living in poverty in this country—and that is approximately the population of Canada.  But, as Marsh reports,  the US does not generate many more poor people than other countries.  European countries achieve lower poverty rates because they provide more social programs aimed at the poor and unemployed.  Without government programs, Sweden would have 26.7 of its population living in poverty, but with their social programs, the poverty rate is 5.3 percent. Sure, education helps some people enter the labor market, and indirectly might create a few more jobs, but what we need are jobs, higher wages, and better redistribution programs. Marsh cites Douglass Willms, a Canadian professor, who found that among children whose parents have identical levels of education, those children who lived in unequal countries performed worse on tests of adult literacy.  Children of parents with college degrees in general perform the same, whether they live in Finland, one of the most equal countries, or the US, one of the most unequal.  But children in the US whose parents only attained high school will perform worse on literacy tests than children in Finland whose parents only attained high school degrees.  This is because economic inequality affects the quality of family life, in areas of health, security, rates of substance abuse, etc.  So yes, we need educational reforms, but we need to reduce inequality and poverty just as much if we want to increase the quality of educational opportunity.

Now of course we don’t stop here—we do what we can to reduce poverty and inequality, but we need to struggle internationally to create a social universe outside of the value form of labor—that is, outside of value production altogether. At least, that should be our long-term goal.

4. What role, if any, do you see the left playing in the future of school reform?
 
Well I believe that the left cannot isolate the current crisis of education from the global crisis of capitalism and  larger struggle against capitalism and the structural necessity of an equitable transition to a zero-growth economy.  We need to take up the task of defining how another socialism or communism is possible and how to take up the transition to these possible alternatives. What will a social universe outside of capital’s value form, outside of value production altogether, look like?  And how do we get there?  David Harvey calls this organizing for the anti-capitalist transition.  We know that capitalism can survive this present crisis and that the costs to the popular majorities will be catastrophic as we will witness increased political repression, militarization, and state violence.

How can the left create a new revolutionary politics that can takes us down the path of organizing social life  in such a way that  augmenting value—through acquiring money—is no longer considered the highest good.  In fact, it is abolished outright.  Harvey argues that we need a co-revolutionary theory derived from an analysis of Marx’s account of how capitalism arose out of feudalism. He notes that social change arises through the dialectical unfolding of relations between what are essentially seven moments—considered as ensembles or assemblages of activities and practices—that  occur within the body politic of capitalism, and these include: technological and organizational forms of production, exchange, and consumption; relations to nature; social relations between people; mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs; labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects; institutional, legal and governmental arrangements; and the conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction. Harvey argues that each of these moments, while marked by tensions and contradictions, are co-dependent and co-evolve in relation to each other.  

The left has a tendency to look at these moments in isolation and focus on just one of them and viewing it as the magic  path to social transformation.  But when capitalism renews itself, it does so by co-evolving all these moments (admittedly, there are many more than seven).  This is how capitalism arose out of feudalism. So the transition from capitalism to socialism or communism must co-evolve in the same way. Our strategic political interventions must move within and across these different moments.  So educators need to look beyond epistemological critique in the classroom. This is why I have been trying to treat revolutionary critical pedagogy as a social movement.  Most educational reform never questions capital as a social relation. When this happens, you might be able to make some progress through reform efforts within capitalism, but likely these will be short lived. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try--we must.  Yes we should not abandon a redistributive socialism but we should keep in mind the larger struggle of developing the path to a social universe without value production.  

Reform and revolution are not mutually exclusive. Dialectics is about mediation, not juxtaposition, so the struggle is not between reform and revolution, but working to reform the system within the larger political optic of anti-capitalist struggle. But we can't just see capitalism in isolation from other dependent hierarchies that are co-constitutive historically with capitalism. Another way of looking at this is from what I call the decolonial Marxist perspective, utilizing some insights from Latin American social theorists, including the work of Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldua, Walter Mignolo and Ramon Grosfoguel.  When we on the left are trying to challenge capitalism, we need to imagine what capitalism was like for an indigenous woman in the Americas, when capitalism arrived in the 15th century.  We must, in other words, shift our geopolitics of knowledge.  What arrived was not just an economic system of capital and labor for the production of commodities to be sold for a profit on the world market.  What arrived was a set of global entangled hierarchies that Grosfoguel calls a European/capitalist/military/Christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male power matrix.


In other words, a global class formation arrived but other hierarchies arrived as well including an international division of labor of core and peripheral countries, an inter-state system of politico-military organization controlled by European males and institutionalized in colonial administrations, a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileged European people over non-European people, a global gender hierarchy that privileged males over females and European patriarchy over other forms of gender relations, a sexual hierarchy that privileged heterosexuals over homosexuals, a spiritual hierarchy that privileged Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities, an epistemic hierarchy that privileged western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western cosmologies, and institutionalized this hierarchy in the global university system, and a linguistic hierarchy between European and non-European languages that privileged European communication technologies as theory and reduced non-European communication to the status of folklore or culture  but not knowledge/theory.  So in adopting an anti-capitalist perspective, teachers need to pay attention to each moment as a part of this entangled global power matrix.  These moments are internally related or co-constitutive “heterarchies”.  So the left can participate in educational reform, but I would argue that it needs to pay attention to all of these moments—but in terms of the transition to an anti-capitalist future and in terms of creating a decolonial approach to knowledge production.  And the left needs to realize that global problems cannot have national solutions. If we are to participate in school reform, it needs to be linked to anti-capitalist struggles, to decolonial  struggles, to critical border thinking that can help us rethink our socialism by thinking with, and not about, indigenous knowledges and epistemologies of subaltern groups. We need a feasible alternative to existing forms of societal organization that reproduce labor’s value form.  And this will require educators who can work with economists, philosophers, rural and urban planners, critical geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, technology specialists, communication experts, social theorists and community activists coming to work together with this aim in mind.

5. As we go through education school, many of us are taught critical pedagogy and method, but it seems that this does not get put into practice once people enter the classroom. What advice do you have for teachers who are working under the restraints of Obama’s Race to the Top program who want to implement critical pedagogy in their classroom?

What Obama’s Race to the Top program is doing is essentially increasing the privatization and corporatization of education in such a way that results in the re-socialization  of the perceptions of  the popular majorities into the dominant legitimizing myths of US capitalism.  The NEA and the AFT overwhelmingly accept neoliberal capitalism and so are not interested in long term structural transformation or a re-scaling of power from the bourgeoisie and private managerial elite to those toiling in the barrios.  The school system is not obligated to prepare students for anything more than the lowest-level jobs.   Our regressive tax structure is never challenged. US representative democracy is never questioned, or ever compared to or contrasted with participatory democracy, which emphasizes the social, political, economic and cultural aspects of human agency based on human rights, or direct democracy, which focuses on popular control of the means of production and organization by workers councils.  The focus is on teaching to the test, which occupies itself with technocratic problem solving and technocratic knowledge but does not produce meaningful knowledge, knowledge grounded in contexts that require critical analysis and a philosophy of praxis, and an ethics of social justice.

What is taught in today’s schools is technocratic knowledge or technical problem solving—means-ends thinking. What is missing is meaningful knowledge, that is, the ability to make moral and ethical choices and to interpret and critique.  What is missing is intellectual engagement.  Schools train students to become consumers. In a world facing ecosystemic breakdown, we clearly need to approach teaching through the optic of an ecosocialist pedagogy grounded in the notion of sustainability and as socialists we need to recognize that socialist developmentalism has often co-opted indigenous movements. Clearly we need to bring to our teaching practices a pedagogy of looking beyond Western/Euro/US-centric ways of knowing the world that are based on capitalist wastefulness and a lack of regard for the planet, in order to consider alternative and oppositional ways of thinking about and acting toward/against the imperialism of free-market neoliberal capital.

I am talking about seeking solidarity with non-dominant groups—in particular silenced groups, marginalized groups, indigenous groups-- in the bringing together the collective imaginaries of all peoples who seek freedom from necessity and dignity for themselves and their communities by denying epistemologies of empire and the destructive and genocidal practices of Western imperial regimes and their fraudulent narratives of historical innocence. We need different perspectives of justice, rights and social change and we must take up indigenous perspectives but in ways that do not exploit indigenous peoples in the process. In other words, I am talking about challenging our conceptions about modernity, and our European-based epistemologies in order to affirm the epistemic rights of the racially devalued. This means challenging the colonial matrix of power grounded in phylogenetic and ontogenetic Western theories. Critical pedagogy gives us critical distance in examining our own epistemological and ontological formation, but not too much distance that we cannot slay the hydra-headed beast of capital and its razor-toothed companions—racism,  sexism, imperialism, colonialism.

But how do you fight against oppression from the classroom when teachers and students are both evaluated in standardized tests that are making a lot of money for the companies who are producing and developing the tests. Standardized tests are a form of social control, that keep students from exploring their own experiences through epistemological approaches grounded in critical reflexivity.
Education should be grounded in a non-capitalist decolonial intercultural dialogue. The engine for this change is a commitment to the oppressed, to marginalized and subaltern groups.  This commitment does not come with critical consciousness.  In other words,  critical consciousness is not the root or precondition of commitment to revolutionary struggle but the product of such a commitment.

An individual does not have to be critically self-conscious in order to struggle.  It is in the very act of struggling that individuals become critically self-conscious and aware. Critically informed political identities do not motivate revolutionary action but rather develop as a logic consequence of such action. So I often ask my students to join a community group, a social movement, and in their act of struggling alongside and with their group, they will develop critical consciousness which can be augmented by reading and examining texts.  But how can teachers use this approach in public school arenas?  Teachers will need to educate their communities about the crisis of education, to try to get the parents on their side. Teachers will need the parents as allies against repressive administrations.  They need to educate their communities about the dangers of charter schools, how charter promoters pump money into charters to prove they are better than public schools, how charter are undermining teachers unions and the quality of teaching, and how underfunded public schools often result in poor quality education and how this then is used as another excuse to further gut  public school funding.

Sarah Knopp, a Los Angeles teacher, talks about the practice of whipsawing, which has to do with the process of destroying unions by subcontracting to create lots of small workplaces—in place of large, highly unionized ones—so that when workers in smaller, spun-off shops get inferior contracts, those contracts are used to pressure workers in bigger plants to accept similar concessions.  We need to show the community that charter schools are a stepping stone to privatization and that corporate funding depletes state funds and that publicly funded schools are a basic right. Teachers need to create organizations dedicated to fighting standardized testing. They can’t do this alone, working in their respective schools. They need to form larger communities of struggle. And they need to educate their communities about socialism as an alternative to capitalist society and capitalist schools.

6. Teachers agency comes up against limitations of structural inequality. What are the limits on what a teacher can do? What can a teacher do to break through those limits?

Here I draw on my work in Venezuela in support of the Bolivarian revolution.  I am currently working with the Ministry of Education to train cadres of decolonial Marxists.  The idea is that we need a revolution in our structures of knowledge, and in our political roles as educators.  For instance, we could learn a great deal from the term buen vivir (sumac kawsay), a term that comes from the indigenous peoples of the Andean region, and the Aymara people in particular, that refers to harmony and equilibrium among men and women, among different communities, and among human beings and the natural environment. We also need new technological and scientific knowledges to develop alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, and to resist the academic repression we are experiencing in our schools and universities when we bring the language of Marx to bear on helping us to solve the current crisis of capitalism.

While educational transformation is a necessary and not sufficient struggle for creating a new social universe outside of the value form of labor, we need a new geopolitics of knowledge guided by an anti-capitalist imperative  in order to play our part as teachers and cultural workers. The challenge for us is how to recreate the state from the bottom up, while working towards the long-term goal of socialist transformation.  The debates we encounter are usually between those who believe in taking state power, such as the Chavistas, and the anti-statist autonomists and anarchists, and often the Zapatistas are cited here as the alternative to follow.  Again, I don’t think it is an either-or choice. I appreciate the “andar preguntando” (asking we walk) of the Zapatistas to the “andar predicando” (walking we tell) of the standard recitation and repeat approach of conventional pedagogy.  But I also believe that we need to struggle to rebuild the state from the bottom up as a step towards eventually doing away with the state altogether.  

We certainly need state control over the distribution of the surplus in order to diminish inequalities but the old Keynesian model is no longer sufficient in this time of neoliberal capitalism and we need new forms of left statism, created from the bottom up using participatory democracy and direct democracy as potential models.   I agree with John Holloway that revolution is not about destroying capitalism but refusing to create it.  There are ways we can stop producing capitalism now, such as creating public gardens, fighting against corporate control of the schools, protesting the G8, etc.  Saying “Ya Basta” in the face of education cutbacks.  Struggling against pro-profit charters—“Que se vayan todos”!  But I also believe we need a coherent philosophy of praxis linked to an epistemological revolution that can incorporate and negotiate both indigenous and westernized knowledges that contest the paradogmas of western colonial rationality (what Anibal Quijano calls the” coloniality of power” or “patron de poder colonial” ) and open up strategic spaces for engaging with new conceptualizations of living in Pachamama,  

My position is that we need a subjective praxis connected with a philosophy of liberation that is able to illuminate the content of a post-capitalist society and project a path to a totally new society by making convincing arguments that it is possible to resolve the contradiction between alienation and freedom.  The key here is that our forms of organizing society must be consistent with our philosophy of liberation. We need obviously to prioritize human development, and search for new epistemological frameworks and refuse to continue to participate in epistemicide, or the silencing and destruction of indigenous ways of understanding and negotiating the world.  Not all of us can use the political language of socialism.  Speaking at a high school outside of Medellin, Colombia, a few years ago, I learned that the military had earlier attacked the community with helicopters, a tank, artillery and troops, and the paramilitary, and while the teachers had asked me to speak at their school, they rejected my language of socialist struggle because it put them and their students at risk for their lives. They created their own language of critical pedagogy.  We need a pluriversal approach to critical pedagogy—there is no one universal approach.  Teachers will develop these approaches in their communities according to the contextual specificity of their struggles, their commitment to the oppressed, and their commitment creating a post-capitalist future.

7. Many parents, particularly working-class parents, seem to have bought in to the rhetoric of “choice and competition,” “academic rigor,” and “achievement” and the idea that school should be more academic earlier. What ideas would you offer parents when thinking about the quality of their children’s education that might counter the ideas they are being offered by the mainstream debate?

Yes, working-class parents often want for their children the kind of education that the children in Beverly Hills are getting. You can’t blame them for that. They believe that education is the only vehicle available to them and its really a question of the kind of teachers they are able to hire at their neighborhood public school.  They have bought into the notion of meritocracy and the capitalist propaganda that charters are the best option for their children.  They often don’t realize that for-profit charters have less public accountability and transparency requirements than public schools.  That charter proponents are those behind the shame and blame policies of the Obama administration,  behind the weakening of teachers bargaining rights, behind the giving of  grants to the “winners” instead of those high-needs students who are most in need of financial assistance.  I do know some very successful neighborhood charters, but the charter school movement in general is destructive of what remains of public schooling.

Public schools accept all children, including much larger numbers of high-needs students. The move to privatize education can be traced as far as the World Bank and transnational efforts to weaken teachers unions and create international standards to put students globally into a lock-step with the needs of transnational capitalism, and the directives of the transnational capitalist class.  But at the same time, we need to face the ugly reality that as cities are becoming more segregated, schools are resegregating and racially tracking students, with students of color denied equal access to educational resources, healthy school environments, and higher learning.  

Parents can be allies in fighting the current assaults on education that can be traced to the deregulatory policies of free marketization,  the neoliberal religiosity of corporate intermarriage and the corporatist managerialist assault on the welfare state that took place during the 1980s and 1990s and that brought about low public expenditures and the hovering up of state subsidies and support back to capital.   I was part of the new left in the 1960s, and part of the problem is that we dropped the ball as far as labor issues were concerned, as we focused more on issues of civil rights.  We need to pick up that ball again and run with it, while maintaining our defense of civil rights, many of which are in the process of being rolled back to a frightening degree. Parents must be invited into our meetings, into our community struggles, into our broad alliances in which single-issue politics gives way to understanding how the major struggles of our day are struggles that are all ‘entangled’ and have a transnational reach.  


Academic rigor is of course an issue,  but rigor can lead to rigormortis.  The issue is critical thinking with revolutionary intent. Presenting students with various languages through which they can help to gain some critical purchase on their experiences.  Those languages are restrictive, passive languages.  You find it in universities, too. Teaching classical economics and rational choice theory, and leaving our a Marxist critique of political economy won’t get us out of the current crisis of capitalism.  Ideas have effects, and so do pedagogies. A truly transformative pedagogy takes students experiences seriously, challenges those experiences without taking away the voice or agency of the student, and is undertaken with the overall purpose of transforming the world in the interests of making it less oppressive, less exploitative.  Academic approaches to knowledge are often based on a passive approach to learning. What we need is an active theory of knowledge production and pedagogies that can produce the knowledge/action needed to create alternative futures for ourselves and the world in which we live and labor.

Peter McLaren is Professor, School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author and editor of forty-five books, and his writings have been translated into twenty languages. Teachers and activists in Mexico have created La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogia Critica and the Instituto Peter McLaren, and La Catedra Peter McLaren has been established at the Bolivarian University, Caracas, Venezuela. An international panel of educators named the fifth edition of McLaren's Life in Schools as one of the most significant books wrtten in the field of education. In the fall, he will take up a new position as Professor, School of Critical Studies in Education, Faculty of Education, University of Auckland, New Zealand.  He is the author of Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution, Capitalists and Conquerors, and Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire (with Nathalia Jaramillo).


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The core of the economic problems in America lies in the fact that 5% of the population controls 85% of the wealth.





by Billy Wharton, co-chair, Socialist Party USA

Mistakes are the portals of discovery. ~ James Joyce

Remember January 2009? Big banks were teetering on the edge of collapse, millions were thrown onto the unemployment lines and a new President carried the promise of relief, greater rights for working people and a new immigration policy. How far we have come from then. The Obama Administration has failed to provide a serious jobs plan, has lavished public money on Big Banks, created a clunker Healthcare reform and has failed to deliver on immigration. These mistakes have had real consequences for poor and working people throughout the country – we live with them everyday.

In one sense, politicians are not really the problem. The core of the economic problems in America lies in the fact that 5% of the population controls 85% of the wealth. This richest 5% will take any measure to protect its wealth – even if it means ruining the lives of millions of Americans. As a result, we need politics that will get at the 85% of the wealth and to put it to work creating a better future for us all. We need politicians that are brave enough to declare independence from the rich and who have ideas capable of confronting this deep inequality.

America needs more than the piecemeal jobs bills Obama has put forward as part of his public relations push before the 2012 elections. Poor and working class people need a permanent full employment economy. The right to a job should be a civil right. There is plenty of infrastructure to build, plenty of classrooms that need teachers, plenty of environmental cleanup that needs to be done and a seemingly endless supply of creative people who should be put to work. We can show that we have learned from the mistakes of the last four years by employing democratic socialist economics to rebuild our economy from the bottom up.

And socialism is all about using democracy to reclaim the 85% of the wealth currently held by the richest 5%. The history of giveaways to the rich goes deeper than the Obama Administration. Taxation on the highest earners has declined from a rate of around 90% in the 1960's to 35% percent today. Corporate tax rates have had a similar decline, from 50% in the 60s to around 30% today. Some big corporations like General Electric did not even pay taxes last year! These tax breaks for the rich have driven necessary public programs to the brink of bankruptcy. Socialism will deliver an economic bill of justice to the rich.

Socialism is about more than just good policies. It is about removing the chains from working people. Just as all people should have access to a job, all workers should have the right to form a union to collectively bargain with private and public employers. Obama’s refusal to live up to his promise to pass the Employee Free Choice Act – which would allow for workers to more easily organize unions - is, perhaps, the administration’s greatest betrayal of working people.

Democratic Socialism is based on the notion that democracy is a really good idea - so good, that we want to run things like the economy democratically. It is not too late for poor and working class people to discover that economic democracy offers a way out of this seemingly endless economic crisis. Working together, we can re-shape the world. So, on this Labor Day, we struggle against the current wave of budget cuts and protest against the domination of the richest 5%, Wall Street and the banks, but we are also keeping our eyes on the prize – a future organized around democratic socialist ideas that offer real hope for jobs, peace and freedom.

***
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"Is Capitalism Doomed?" His answer: maybe




by Rick Wolff

19 August 2011 - Standard & Poor's downgrades US debt, stock markets gyrate around the world, Sarkozy and Merkel perform yet another empty summit, the Chinese and Japanese economies look worrisome. Serious commentators worry about global recession, another global banking collapse, eurozone dissolution and austerity programs that only make matters worse. Nouriel Roubini, famed professor at NYU's Stern School of Business asks this month, "Is Capitalism Doomed?" His answer: maybe [4].

The crisis of capitalism that erupted in mid-2007 now enters its fifth year. It grew out of excessive debts of US households and enterprises (especially financial enterprises) that their underlying incomes and wealth could not sustain. Key to the crisis was real wage stagnation since the mid-1970s. As the cost of the American Dream kept rising while real wages did not, households borrowed (mortgages, credit cards, student and car loans). Debts accumulated on the basis of stagnant real wages. That unsustainable credit bubble blew in 2007. Nothing since has significantly relieved or alleviated that basic contradiction. With high unemployment, total wage incomes have fallen and little extra credit will flow to already over-indebted workers. The crisis deepens as US demand remains hobbled.

Since the 1970s, banks, insurance companies and hedge funds invented new speculations on the rising debts of US households (asset-backed securities, credit default swaps etc.). Those financial speculations were even more profitable than the soaring profits of non-financial corporations that could keep their workers' real wages flat even as rising productivity delivered ever more product per worker to those corporations. Huge speculative profits prompted financiers to borrow in a self-reinforcing spiral ever further removed from the household debts on which it was based. When that base collapsed as millions of US workers could not longer sustain their debts, so, too, did the financial speculations built upon it.

The wealth and power accumulated by the financial industry since the 1970s secured massive government-funded bailouts after the crisis hit. Recoveries were underway for banks, insurance companies and larger bankrupt corporations by mid-2009. But no recoveries were provided for real wages, declining job benefits, excess household debts, falling public services - nor for the unemployed or the foreclosed.

By bailing out their private financial industries, the US and other governments took over (nationalized) that sector's bad debts and soured speculations. Governments borrowed to do that, thereby adding massively to national debts. "Recovery" for the financial markets bypassed the mass of people. Economically depressed working classes and increasingly indebted states now combine to unravel even the financiers' recovery.

Truthout doesn’t take corporate funding - this lets us do the brave, independent reporting that makes us unique. Please support this work by making a tax-deductible donation today - just click here to donate. [5]

The trail of failed economic policies undermining a dysfunctional capitalism displays multiple absurdities. Rising household debt had combined with stagnant wages by 2007 to collapse the US housing market, raise unemployment, freeze credit, cripple state and local finances, and so on. As demand for goods and services shrank fast, businesses and the rich stopped investing in production. Their investable funds were idled and that only aggravated the crisis. The self-regulating, efficient capitalist market system proved to be the myth its critics had mocked. However, the market system did spread the US crisis quickly to Europe and beyond.

As the crisis flared in 2008, governments unfroze credit markets by pouring money into tottering banks and insurance companies. Governments printed and created new money to pay for part of these policies; to cover the other part, governments borrowed. The governments' creditors included the banks and insurance companies they had bailed out. Governments also borrowed from the companies and rich individuals who had withheld investing in the production of goods and services and had, thereby, worsened the crisis. The absurdities of such "economic policies" (and their gross injustice) invite grim laughter if only to keep from crying.

But wait, the costly absurdities thicken. Banks and other financial companies that lent to governments got worried about fast-rising national debt levels. The US situation was especially worrisome and culminated in Standard & Poor's downgrade this month. After all, Washington had enjoyed budget surpluses in the 1990s. But then, the last decade's massive Bush tax cuts, multiple wars and then the post-2007 bailouts exploded the US national debt. Politicians who voted for all those budget-busting actions now use the resulting national debt to justify cutting government spending on the mass of people.

Creditors know from history that governments invite political trouble with high and rising debt levels. The interest costs on national debt risk diverting tax revenues to satisfy creditors rather than to provide public services to tax payers. After four years of economic crisis, populations may not accept reduced government services while more of their taxes flow in interest payments to the banks, insurance companies, and other financial enterprises they blame for the crisis. They may revolt when leaders cut pensions, health insurance etc. "because our nation must reduce its budget deficits and debt."

Those risks drove rating companies to downgrade the debts of ever more "advanced industrial countries." Downgrades signify the historic dangers of this global capitalist crisis. They reflect the absurdities and contradictions of the ineffective, trickle-down policies pursued by governments since 2007.

Across Europe and the US, all sorts of campaigns seek to prevent or deflect awareness of this systemic crisis of capitalism (when its politics and economics undermine more than reinforce one another). Some aim to redefine the crisis in nationalist terms. For example, the German working class is prompted to blame economic difficulties and/or its government's austerity policies on the Greek and Portuguese working classes and/or their governments' social welfare programs. Other campaigns discover other scapegoats: "the financial industry," "the bankers," or still more narrowly, the "central bank" are candidates. Texas Governor Perry, now running for president, narrowed scapegoating down to one man, the Federal Reserve chairman.

Another diversion from seeing this as a systemic crisis of capitalism asserts that large "emerging" economies - China, India, Brazil, and so on - are escaping or even reversing the crisis. However, their profound dependence on trade and capital flows with the US and Europe should dispel fantasies about their independent development or super-fantasies that their development will revive the US and Europe. Ever more of this crisis' victims are recognizing the historical roots and systemic contradictions deepening it. Demands for change, organized and disorganized, superficial and systemic, keep building, albeit unevenly, around the world.

from Truth Out

Links:
[1] http://www.truth-out.org/print/5298
[2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/5298
[3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/42931449@N07/5299199423/
[4] http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/roubini41/English
[5] https://members.truth-out.org/donate
[6] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail
[7] http://www.truth-out.org/content/richard-d-wolff
[8] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160



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Thousands of nurses and supporters descended on their local Congressional offices nationwide Thursday, demanding that Wall Street pay...



by Mischa Gaus

September 2, 2011 - Thousands of nurses and supporters descended on their local Congressional offices nationwide Thursday, demanding Wall Street pay for the crisis it created. In Boston, a town crier in colonial dress read an indictment of Wall Street’s sins against the country. Photo: NNU.

Thousands of nurses and supporters descended on their local Congressional offices nationwide Thursday, demanding that Wall Street pay for the crisis it created.

The 60 protests in 21 states targeted both Democrats and Republicans, with austerity champions like Eric Cantor of Virginia and Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota singled out for special attention. A blockade outside Cantor’s office forced his staffers to meet with a delegation, a request they had repeatedly refused.

Soup kitchens outside Congressional offices highlighted the devastation wrought by the economy’s collapse and worsened when politicians rip into social programs. Hundreds lined up outside Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco office to receive a meal.

Katie Oppenheim of the Michigan Nurses Association joined a group that served a meal in Jackson. When the nurses attempted to talk with Republican Tim Walberg, the receptionist would speak with them only from behind her bulletproof glass.

“This is one more fight among many in the country to convince corporate America we will not back down,” said Oppenheim, who chairs the professional nurse council at the University of Michigan health system.

Tax Wall Street

National Nurses United led the demonstrations, the latest leg of the union’s campaign for a “Main Street Contract.” The nurses are calling on politicians to enact the contract in order to stimulate the economy and get people back to work. Its centerpiece is a half-percent federal tax on Wall Street transactions, which the union says could generate up to $350 billion a year. (Stock and bond transfers and derivative trading would be targeted; common transactions like 401k contributions would not.)

“This is a sales tax on the business Wall Street does,” said NNU co-president Jean Ross. “It would disincentivize the extreme gambling they do.”

The union sees that money as a down payment on all kind of priorities: keeping millions of people in their homes, funding schools, restoring environmental protections, providing Medicare for all, and bolstering Social Security.

The figure would also represent about a quarter of the savings the Congressional debt-cutting “Super Committee” is charged with reaching.

The idea is popular overseas, already in place in 15 countries and likely to spread further. Conservative governments in both France and Germany have signaled they will propose it to the European Union this month.

Thursday’s protests pointed out one reason why members of both parties in the U.S. are more interested in tightening belts around working people’s already-thin waistlines than they are in taxing Wall Street: Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan and Colorado Democrat Michael Bennett have both taken $2.4 million in contributions from Wall Street since 2000, for instance.

In Boston, a town crier in colonial dress turned heads in a busy downtown square as he read an indictment of Wall Street’s sins against the country, surrounded by nurses in their Massachusetts Nurses Associations scrubs.

Betsy Prescott, a nurse at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston, said the attention-grabbing tactics are an effective part of a larger education strategy. She cited the California nurses’ Queen Meg campaign, which sent a regal actor out to dog ex-Ebay CEO Meg Whitman when she ran for governor last year. The actions reframed Whitman’s run as a coronation she was attempting to purchase with her millions (she lost).

NNU secretary Martha Kuhl, who is locked in a long fight against health care concessions along with fellow nurses at Oakland’s Childrens hospital, said the nationwide actions help answer critics who say, “I’m suffering, why shouldn’t you?”

“Instead, we can say, let’s stand up together,” Kuhl said. “Everybody deserves what’s in our Main Street Contract.”

Prescott said she joined the protest because the woes are too big to ignore: Her hospital is laying off transporters who move patients to and from units, while it’s hiring into its corporate offices. Pleading poverty, Massachusetts is considering limiting elderly patients’ access to hospital beds. And a family friend is foregoing breast cancer medication because she can’t afford it.

“If we expect to be able to do our job, taking care of the sick and sending them home to get better, we have to heal the society,” Ross said.

from Labor Noteshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif



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a policy needs to be formed and adhered to for people banned from visiting public housing to be allowed back



Traveling the Internet I happened upon Housing- lets get serious! by Brandon Collins, an poorly written but interesting piece, not without some insight.

I certainly could agree with the basic principle, that every person has the right to live in safe home that they can afford.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

But what really hit me was a peripheral demand, seemingly out of the blue, and not supported by any previous argument:

-a policy needs to be formed and adhered to for people banned from visiting public housing to be allowed back.

What people? When were they banned? And, for what given reason?

If they were banned to keep them from associating with residents, I could certainly agree.

If they were banned to keep them from disturbing the residents, then I would be siding with the residents.

The previous blanket statement that I object to has all the ear-marks of pandering to some special interest.

This assumption could have been avoided by simply providing more information.

Thanks,
Dave



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A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future.



Alright you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,

A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote:

"The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people."

— Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University
Barcelona, Spain

The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.

The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.

On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand?

The most exciting candidate that we've heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it.

This demand seems to capture the current national mood because cleaning up corruption in Washington is something all Americans, right and left, yearn for and can stand behind. If we hang in there, 20,000-strong, week after week against every police and National Guard effort to expel us from Wall Street, it would be impossible for Obama to ignore us. Our government would be forced to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations.

This could be the beginning of a whole new social dynamic in America, a step beyond the Tea Party movement, where, instead of being caught helpless by the current power structure, we the people start getting what we want whether it be the dismantling of half the 1,000 military bases America has around the world to the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act or a three strikes and you're out law for corporate criminals. Beginning from one simple demand – a presidential commission to separate money from politics – we start setting the agenda for a new America.

Post a comment and help each other zero in on what our one demand will be. And then let's screw up our courage, pack our tents and head to Wall Street with a vengeance September 17.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

Endorsed by the Socialist Party of New Jersey and the Socialist Party of New York City




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Many Americans are currently a class of slaves that labor unwittingly for the benefit of their masters.


by George Damasevitz

Slavery- back in style

By the time they are in 6th grade, most Americans have been taught that slavery was abolished in the US. A closer look at the US economy today can challenge that lesson and persuade us otherwise.


Many Americans are currently a class of slaves that labor unwittingly for the benefit of their masters. These toiling people are very talented, productive and hard working. Among their numbers are liberals, conservatives, democrats, republicans, soldiers, pacifists and a host of others. They all enjoy liberty and will fight to maintain it. Yet none of these people will ever truly reap the rewards of their efforts. They will be shackled to a life of unrelenting taxation and economic oppression at the hands of their corporate owned government. Their legacy will be an huge deficit to be paid by their children and grandchildren, to say nothing of the needless deaths caused by senseless military actions.

These slaves are called the middle class and they are subjugated by capitalism. The burden they bear is enormous. They are financing war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. They are paying for bailouts for insurance companies and Wall Street billionaires. They make regular payments from their paychecks into a fund pay for their retirement and medical care. And yet they allow their sticky-fingered slave-masters to funnel the fruits of their labors into their own pockets. The slaves of the middle class need to work ever harder to finance the profligate lifestyles of the wealthy.

Those who argue that government spending should be tamed have taken the first step connecting the many dots that form the complete picture. Reckless government expenditures for wars of convenience to capitalism are as much a threat to our economic well-being as any enemy, real or imagined. Spending for valuable services however, must not be curtailed. This includes Medicare and Social Security on which many citizens depend. To abridge these programs in the interest of budget balancing is to tighten the shackles on American slaves even further.

In principle, capitalism should afford many economic opportunities to every citizen. But over the years, it has morphed into a system of slavery in which many citizens have been ensnared.

Some Americans have embraced capitalism because they are told that it affords choice as a distinct advantage over other economic systems. Choice of television channels and soft drinks seem to be all that is left of meaningful choices. Choice of how to spend tax dollars is not within our power. Even choice of politicians is like a deciding between Coke and Pepsi: they’re both corporate run, bad for you, overpriced and taste pretty much the same.

The only invisible hand of capitalism at work right now is the one choking the middle class. It is time to abolish slavery once again.



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“we salute the hundreds of thousands of Chileans who have mobilized across the country to show their will and their hope to build a new, different Chile.”



by Dr Victor Figueroa Clark

Thursday, 01 September 2011 - The National Strike of 24th-25th August was celebrated as a great success by the President of the Chilean Workers United Central (CUT) trade union federation, Arturo Martinez. In a statement Mr Martinez said “we salute the hundreds of thousands of Chileans who have mobilized across the country to show their will and their hope to build a new, different Chile.” The National Strike was called to push for deep changes to Chile’s Constitution which would allow reforms to education, healthcare, labor laws and the economy.

The strike affected over 90 towns and cities the length of the country, with demonstrations, road blockades, human chains, concerts and cultural activities, public meetings and the famous ‘cacerolazos’ - the banging of pots and pans to show discontent which were a feature of the struggle against Pinochet.

As in those dark years the Chilean government has met social mobilization with brutality and slander. The Minister of Interior has threatened to re-introduce martial law, and the government and its supporters have abused the leaders of the demonstrations, repeatedly calling the demonstrators subversives and accusing them of fomenting disorder. Some government supporters have been even less measured, showing how near to the surface the Pinochet legacy of the Chilean right is. One functionary tweeted that Camila Vallejos, the leader of the students’ union ought to be killed, the Intendant of the 8th Region (a member of Opus Dei) even ridiculously declared that the demonstrations were the result of too many children being born out of wedlock.

During the strike police resorted to the old tactics of repression. In Macul, Santiago, a 16 year-old boy, Manuel Gutierrez was shot in the chest. With two friends he had gone out to observe the bonfires and barricades built in his neighborhood. A police truck drove by, the window opened, three shots were heard and Manuel fell to the ground crying “I’m hit!” He later died in hospital from the wound to his chest. His family has called for justice but the Carabineros are denying any participation and hence refusing an investigation. Human rights groups have condemned this move to cover up the crime. In another area of the city police tear-gassed a postal workers union branch office full of local people, forcing them to flee and putting one old lady in hospital.

In another case, Cristian Andrade Cardenas, a student in the port city of Valparaiso, was brutally tortured by police. Seized off the street by a squad of 10 Carabineros, he was forced into a police bus where the police began to beat him severely, jumping on his face, arms and torso, beating him with batons and punching him repeatedly. They then squeezed lemon juice into the open cuts on his face before forcing him to inhale tear gas. They also threatened to rape his mother. He was released after being forced to sign a false declaration stating that he had assaulted a police officer. At the same time, demonstrators in the city discovered suspected a police infiltrator amongst them when he began throwing stones at police. When the crowd tried to detain him, the man fled and took refuge with police guarding the Chilean Congress. The incident was filmed and the opposition are asking the police to help identify the man.

In the same city another student was threatened by police simply for carrying the flag of the Chilean Communist Party, which has once more, as in the years of the dictatorship, borne the brunt of the ire and desperation of an establishment that has lost control. In parliament, right wing deputies Cristián Monckeberg and Víctor Pérez, accused the Communist Party of inciting public disorder, an accusation that could see the Party’s deputies barred under a law dating back to the Pinochet era. Meanwhile, in Santiago police special forces raided the house of a Communist Mayor in the neighborhood of Pedro Aguirre Cerda at 1.30am. According to Mayor Claudina Nuñez, her door was broken down, her nephew was beaten, and when neighbors came out to protest they were also attacked, including a 78 year-old woman who was beaten to the ground and knocked unconscious. The incident was filmed.

These abuses are reminders that the legacy of the dictatorship were never properly dealt with by the governments of the Concertacion. This Christian Democrat and Socialist Party coalition accepted Pinochet’s 1980 Constitution (the rejection of which had until the late 1980s been a central demand of the opposition) in return for a severely limited democracy. This, among other features, included impunity for human rights abuses committed under the dictatorship. Indeed there are 800 cases open against agents of the dictatorship, but so far only 71 have resulted in a sentence, meaning that most of the crimes of that period still go unpunished.

This was the message of human rights groups when recently greeting the results of the second Valech Report which cataloged thousands of new cases of abuses, accepting 9,800 of them, including 30 new cases of people disappeared or executed. Lorena Pizarro, the President of the Association of Relatives of the Disappeared said that the measure recognizes “victims but not perpetrators” and that despite the compensation provided by the state, justice would be the only true compensation for the victims. One wonders how many more victims might come forward if the country’s institutions were not so heavily permeated by the dictatorship’s noxious legacy.

The recent demonstrations have shown how the legacy of the Pinochet era remains especially strongly entrenched in the police and the armed forces. Following the return to a very limited democracy in 1990, there was no purge of Pinochet supporters, or of those who had committed human rights abuses from either of these institutions. The officers now at the top of both were trained and forged in the years of the dictatorship, and their attitudes towards social protest conditioned in a period when violence was routinely applied against the defenseless population. Despite measures taken to reform training programs under the Concertacion governments, unfortunately the police remain an instrument of repression, conditioned to see demonstrators as subversives rather than citizens exercising their right to protest. This view is clearly shared by the current government, much as it tries to hide its connections to the past.

The Piñera government currently has a 21% approval rating, and has been severely criticized for its failure to look after the victims of the 2010 earthquake which has plunged at least half a million Chileans into poverty and homelessness. It has also failed to consider long-standing concerns such as the list of points presented to the government by the CUT in June 2010. This intransigent position and the ever more obvious injustices of Chilean society, have exacerbated the social tensions caused by the government’s continual rejection of negotiations with the social movements. This opposition has now galvanized around the reform of the country’s severely restrictive Constitution, a position that has terrified the current government, which is scrabbling around for a response. The government initially cataloged the strike as a complete failure, and yet has now agreed to meet with representatives of the protest movement in order to negotiate. However,
whilst welcoming this change in position, the opposition understandably remains skeptical as to the government’s good faith.

It is hard to see how the ‘Chilean model’ can survive the present situation. The governing coalition includes the UDI, the party of Pinochetismo, and an ardent defender of the socio-economic legacy of the dictatorship. Even the more moderate elements of the government are aware that their economic position is completely dependent on the maintenance of an exporting economy with weak labor organization. This economic model is only sustainable under a limited democracy. This limits the government’s scope for flexibility in dealing with an opposition united around the desire for profound changes to the legal and institutional framework that underpins this economic model.

Worryingly for the government and for supporters of Pinochet’s model, even the more centrist parties historically linked to the Concertacion are now beginning to jump ship, opening talks with the leaders of the opposition. This shows just how far the opposition have advanced in creating a common perception that the entire social, economic and constitutional structure must be reformed in order to create a new Chile governed by democracy and social justice.



from Upside Down World

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...they wanted to demonstrate the strength of their burgeoning movement and inspire improvements in their working conditions.


On September 5, 1882, some 10,000 workers assembled in New York City to participate in America's first Labor Day parade. After marching from City Hall, past reviewing stands in Union Square, and then uptown to 42nd Street, the workers and their families gathered in Wendel's Elm Park for a picnic, concert, and speeches. This first Labor Day celebration was eagerly organized and executed by New York’s Central Labor Union, an umbrella group made up of representatives from many local unions. Debate continues to this day as to who originated the idea of a workers' holiday, but it definitely emerged from the ranks of organized labor at a time when they wanted to demonstrate the strength of their burgeoning movement and inspire improvements in their working conditions.

from Library of Congress
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