"Until society is reorganized so that education is a human activity from the time we are very young until the time we die, there will be no education worthy of working, creating humanity. There will only be the pretensions to education or to technical expertise of a small group of people," Barnes explains.

"The working class cannot begin with how to change things so that youth get a better education. We have to begin with how to transform the values of society, not just the economics...To be meaningful, education has to create the possibilities for society as a whole to advance, instead of reinforcing the exploitation of the majority by the few. Until then, the only 'liberal education' available to any fighter who wants one is political education within the workers movement."

As Barnes notes in a useful introduction that places the topic in the context of the growing working-class resistance taking place today, The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning is an excerpt from a talk given to workers and youth at regional socialist educational conferences in April 1993 in Greensboro, North Carolina, and in Des Moines, Iowa. The talk was incorporated into the book by Barnes titled Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium.

At the Greensboro conference, a packinghouse worker from Pittsburgh asked Barnes what his response would be to students who say, "Why should I go to school, pay $30,000 or whatever before graduating, and then get a job making $7 or $8 an hour, while mine workers, auto workers, and other union members make $12 or $15 an hour? Workers don't have a college education and I do. Why should I support their strike when they make so much money already?"

This was an opportunity to explain a number of questions related to education as class questions--the opposite of how they are obfuscated by capitalist politicians and "opinion molders."  
 
No relation between 'skills' and income
Barnes replied that, despite the mystification promoted by defenders of the status quo, there is no connection between the actual skills taught in college and the income of college graduates, and, secondly, that there is no fixed "income pie" where a group of workers winning higher wages means lower incomes for everybody else.

In footnotes that amplify Barnes's points, the pamphlet cites a statement by Karl Marx in Capital that, in contrast to "other commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element." Wages are determined by what workers, through struggle with the employers, have been able to establish over time as the "socially acceptable minimum standard of living." What labor achieves in defending the worst-off layers of the working class strengthens the entire class.

The portion of the value created by workers beyond what bosses pay out in wages--termed surplus value--is the capitalist's profits, interest, and rent. The propertied owners of industrial, banking, commercial, and landowning capital are driven to maximize their share by reducing workers' wages.

As the pamphlet points out, capitalists also "pay out part of this surplus value to layers of professionals and supervisory personnel whose services in the great majority of cases contribute nothing to production but help maintain and reproduce the class relations, privilege, domination, and rule of the bourgeoisie."

In the introduction, Barnes points to how this unceasing battle between capital and labor over the surplus value is unfolding in some of today's strikes and other working-class struggles. Workers, many of them immigrants, are pressing for more livable wages and for dignity on the job, after an offensive by the employers that has driven down real wages and brutalized working conditions, in some cases to the very limits of human endurance.

Barnes cites one telling example, where the lowest-paid workers in unionized hotels in Minneapolis and St. Paul, who in June waged a strike that shut down most of the major hotels, now make nearly $1.50 more per hour than starting workers on the cut or kill floors of a major union packinghouse in Los Angeles. At the opening of the 1980s, just prior to a major assault by the meatpacking bosses on working conditions and pay, packing house workers' wages had been 13 percent higher on average than those in other manufacturing jobs.

This irreconcilable conflict between capital and labor is what marks education as a class question.

"Schools under capitalism," Barnes points out in the introduction, "are not institutions of learning but of social control, aimed at reproducing the class relations and privileges of the prevailing order. The deference and obedience the rulers seek to inculcate in the classroom are backed up on the streets by cops' clubs and automatic weapons."

Barnes points to the rising number of executions of working people in the United States--both the state-sanctioned kind and the summary executions without a trial by police on the street. He also points to the staggering number of workers killed or maimed on the job as the employers continue to increase productivity through a relentless assault on working conditions.

Under capitalism, education serves to try to instill obedience in working-class youth and teach them that they have no life worth looking forward to. "It is not true", Barnes says, "that the capitalist class needs for workers to be educated; it is a lie. They need for us to be obedient, not to be educated. They need for us to have to work hard to make a living, not to be critical. They need for us to consume all we make each week buying their products. Above all, they need for us to lose any desire over time to broaden our scope and become citizens of the world."

As a result, it is not uncommon for working-class youth to graduate or drop out of high school illiterate. Many workers are illiterate or functionally illiterate but become competent at their jobs. "Do you have to be literate to work on the railroad?" Barnes asks, "In an auto plant?... I don't think so; everything is color-coded, or number-coded. You don't need to be literate. Let alone be educated. Let alone have pride, self-respect, and initiative....That kind of education would be a danger for the rulers."

Literacy tests in industrial jobs such as the railroad, for example, have nothing to do with learning the job itself, which has always been through working with and learning from co-workers. Rather, bosses have used literacy tests on the railroad to weed out workers, especially Black and immigrant workers. These are used to instill craft consciousness among "skilled" workers in order to reinforce divisions within the workforce.

For "the educated," Barnes remarks ironically about those who go on to college, education in class society is meant to give them "a stake in thinking they are going to be different--slightly better off, slightly more white collar--than other people who work all their lives.... They want you to be comfortable supervising, 'orienting,' and testing workers--directly and indirectly. They want to be able to count on you as a stable supporter of the capitalist system. It is not education, it is confusion and corruption."  
 
Education as universal, lifetime activity
This pamphlet approaches education from an opposite, working-class point of view. It explains education as a social, not individual, question and as a struggle by the working class to transform learning into a universal and lifetime activity rather than a way for individuals to try to get ahead under capitalism's "devil take the hindmost" values.

As Barnes notes, the communist approach to education is part of preparing workers and farmers "for the greatest of all battles in the years ahead--the battle to throw off the self-image the rulers teach us, and to recognize that we are capable of taking power and organizing society, as we collectively educate ourselves and learn the exploiters in the process."

From meat packers in St. Paul, Minnesota, who surprised the bosses by winning a rapid union-organizing victory, to farmers who are getting a clearer picture of how the government represents a class of exploiters, many working people engaged in struggles today will find The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning well worth careful study and an aid in their fights.

Get your copy at the nearest Pathfinder bookstore (see directory on page 12) or directly from Pathfinder, 410 West St., New York, NY 10014.

Chris Rayson is a member of the United Transportation Union and works as a switchman in Seattle.