This pamphlet approaches education from the opposite, working-class point of view--as a social question. As the fight for the transformation of learning into a universal and lifetime activity. It presents education as 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."  
 
A matter of social solidarity
Each capitalist candidate and her or his paid promoters in the big-business press wrap proposals for Social Security "reform" in the same assumptions as education "reform." Everything is centered on "looking out for number one."

Gore and Bush present slightly differing views as to how individuals from the middle class or better-off layers of working people can realize a superior return on retirement nest eggs used for speculation in stocks and bonds. Both the Democrats and Republicans, with different emphases, advocate private savings accounts for those individuals who can afford them, plus, in some combination, reduced pension benefits, increased employee taxation, and an older retirement age.

In contrast, class-conscious workers and labor and farm militants approach Social Security as a matter of social solidarity. The toiling majority in city and countryside, whose labor transforms nature and in the process produces all wealth, have a right to a social wage, not just an individual wage. We have a right to lifetime health care, disability compensation, and a secure retirement. These measures are for all, and thus in the interests of all. We fight to push back the omnipresent "devil take the hindmost" assumptions pervading bourgeois society in order to establish collaborative working-class space--a place for confidence-building.

Schools under capitalism 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.  
 
Executions on the street
Far more working people are executed by a policeman's bullet, chokehold, or hog-tying than by lethal injection or electrocution, even with the unrelenting climb in state-sanctioned murders since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. Although local, state, and federal governments keep no accurate records on individuals killed by cops, a recent survey based on a search of U.S. newspapers from 1997 alone turned up accounts of some 2,000 deaths at the hands of police and prison guards between 1990 and the opening of 1998--clearly just the tip of the iceberg. (How many unreported killings, to cite just one example, were carried out by la migra--the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service's hated Border Patrol?)

During that same period, 312 people across the United States were killed in prison death chambers. Not only on death row but also in "civil society," the noose still haunts a land for which "Strange Fruit" would be a more appropriate national anthem than the "Star-spangled Banner."

Both Gore and Bush are champions of these weapons of class terror, calling for more cops, restricted rights of appeal and parole, and stiffer penalties, including capital punishment. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Democratic aspirant Clinton made a public spectacle of his return to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, one of four in that state during Clinton's years as governor. Subsequently, the Clinton-Gore administration has been responsible for two major federal laws expanding capital punishment as an instrument of terror: the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act, which made some sixty additional federal offenses punishable by death; and the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (even the name speaks volumes!), which further restricts federal court appeals rights of those in state prisons.

For his part, Bush has presided over 136 prisonhouse state killings during his five years as governor--fully one-fifth of all those in the United States since 1976. A shroud of silence prevents an accounting of how many more working people were killed in that state during those years by Texas Rangers, local police, la migra, sheriffs and their deputies, and rightist thugs--often including the former list in civvies.  
 

State-sanctioned, or state-encouraged, murders on the streets and in the prisons combined, however, still fall far short of the numbers of workers killed each year as a result of the employers' profit-driven speedup, brutal intensification of labor, and lengthening of hours. Both life and limb of workers in the United States are being sacrificed on the altar of sharpening competition for markets among U.S. capitalists, and between them and their rivals worldwide.

More than 6,000 workers died from fatal injuries at work in 1998, the latest year for which U.S. government statistics are available. Another 50,000 died from job-related illnesses that year. And 5.9 million workers were injured or made sick on the job--including more than 75,000 reported cases of carpal tunnel and other repetitive-motion injuries and more than 250,000 related illnesses. (These "official" figures are grossly understated, moreover, since they are based on uncorroborated employer reports and exclude 21 million federal, state, and local government employees. And every worker in a factory, mine, or field knows how many millions of injuries go unreported due to fear of lost wages, disciplinary action, or other management retaliation.)

As throughout the history of capitalism, the brutal intensification of labor and stretching out of the workday and workweek drive down the hourly wages of the working class, as well. In 1993, when the talk from which this pamphlet is excerpted was given, the working-class movement in the United States was in the initial years of a retreat, after some half a decade of a modest revival in union struggles in the latter 1980s. Real wages on average were still well below what they had been at the opening of the 1970s.

The "union movement has gotten weaker and real wages have been pushed down," the opening paragraphs of the excerpt reprinted here emphasize. "The price of our labor power has been driven down by the bosses." Within limits set by the exploitation of labor by capital under bourgeois social relations, the pamphlet notes, what workers get paid is conditioned by the success of labor, through struggle, in raising the wage level of workers on the lowest rungs of the ladder.  
 
Workers show capacity to resist
Today, in mid-2000, workers in the United States are in the third year of an accelerated, if still uneven, upturn in resistance to the employers' assaults. The buying power of workers' wages has still not recovered its level of thirty years ago, and the renewed struggles have initially ended more often in standoffs than substantial gains for working people. But where workers stand together and fight, they are demonstrating their capacity to push the employers back, take some ground, and change themselves enough in the process to arrive in better shape for the next battle.

As this pamphlet was being prepared for publication, a powerful example of such resistance exploded in South St. Paul, Minnesota. On June 1, 2000, packinghouse workers at Dakota Premium Foods carried out a seven-hour sit-down strike against the company's cranking up the speed of the production line all the way from the kill and cut through packaging. By the end of the day, plant management agreed, among other things, to slow the line, permit workers' representatives to monitor line speed, and stop forcing injured workers to stay on the job. That very same day, these workers at Dakota Premium, the majority of them immigrants from Mexico, launched an organizing drive to bring in United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 789. The results of this initial effort to win a majority for union representation will be decided by a vote in late July.

At about the same time, also in the Twin Cities, more than 400 members of Teamsters Local 792 struck the Pepsi Bottling Group over health and pension benefits and management's wage offer. Strikers are deploying roving pickets that follow trucks that leave the plant driven by management, and then picket outlets where deliveries are being made. Pepsi has hired some 100 Huffmeister Security thugs in an effort to intimidate the Teamsters, who remain on strike as this is written.

Simultaneously, some 1,500 housekeepers, dishwashers, cooks, and other members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union Local 17 in the Twin Cities organized a strike beginning June 16 that over a two-week period shut down services at seven of nine major hotels in the bargaining unit. The strikers--the majority immigrants from Bosnia, Somalia, and various countries in Latin America--won substantial wage increases and other employer concessions.

Underlining the point made at the opening of this pamphlet about the determination of wage levels, the lowest-paid workers in these unionized hotels in Minneapolis and St. Paul will now make nearly a $1.50 more per hour than starting workers on the cut or kill floors of a major union packinghouse in Los Angeles. That's quite a turnaround from the situation even a few years ago. What's more, at the opening of the 1980s, just prior to a major assault by the meatpacking bosses on working conditions and pay, packinghouse workers' wages were 13 percent higher on average than those in other manufacturing jobs.  
 
Coal miners fight concession demands
Some 530 United Mine Workers (UMWA) members are currently on strike at two Western mines owned by the Pittsburg and Midway Coal Co. (P&M), a division of Chevron. Members of UMWA Local 1332 at the McKinley mine in Tse Bonito, New Mexico, 90 percent of whom are members of the Navajo nation, are fighting a company assault on overtime pay, while members of UMWA Local 1307 in Kemmerer, Wyoming, are resisting management efforts to impose a twelve-hour workday, seven days a week, with no overtime pay for weekends. P&M is demanding concessions on medical and pension benefits from workers at both mines.

Fights such as these, whatever their initial outcomes, are shattering myths about the working class and labor movement in the United States promoted by the bosses and their media pitchmen over the past decade and echoed by middle-class radicals as a rationalization of their own political, and individual, course of life and work.

What about the self-serving and reactionary notion that immigrants are a barrier to unionization, hired and permitted to stay in the country by the bosses in order to divide the workforce and turn the shopfloor into an atomized Tower of Babel? These workers are showing in practice, to the horror of the employers, that they are not only Mexican, Somali, or Chinese, but are also part of the U.S. working class--"American workers," if you please--fighting shoulder to shoulder with fellow packinghouse workers, sewing machine operators, hotel employees, construction workers, auto assemblers, janitors, and many other U.S.-born workers who are African-American or whose skin color happens to be classified as "white."

How fares the illusion of the coal operators and their class brethren that the UMWA, long looked to as an example by other fighting workers and unionists, is now on its last legs? That is belied not only by strikes and other miners' resistance on both sides of the Mississippi over the past couple years. It also ignores the beginnings of a social movement building in coal communities across the United States today to defend federally-guaranteed health care benefits won through decades of union battles. UMWA-initiated rallies in Alabama, Utah, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Indiana--and a national demonstration of 8,000 in Washington, D.C., on May 17-- have mobilized thousands of working and retired miners, family members, high school students, and others.

This increasing resistance is bringing together workers fighting the employers' assault on hours and working conditions, and farmers struggling to hold on to the land they till in face of rising indebtedness to the banks, falling prices for their produce from monopoly distributors, and discrimination by federal agencies. It is bringing together a vanguard of working people who are male and female; who speak different tongues; of all skin colors and national origins; from younger and older generations; union and currently nonunion; and with varying levels of formal education. The toilers are speeding up this process as they fight together, side-by-side--before they agree on many questions, and often with minimal initial ability to speak with one another. These vanguard proletarians, in town and country, are being impelled to consider new ideas, to read more widely, to broaden their scope, to begin expanding the limits of what they previously believed they, and others like themselves, were capable of.

It is to these labor and farmer militants, and the revolutionary-minded youth drawn to their line of march, that this pamphlet is directed.  
 

The talk on "Capitalism's Deadly World Disorder," from which the following question and response are drawn, was prepared for regional socialist educational conferences held in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Des Moines, Iowa, in April 1993. The conferences featured reports that highlighted the interrelationship between the class struggle in the United States and the battle being waged by working people in Cuba to defend their revolutionary government during the difficult years following the abrupt end of favorable trade and aid relations with the former Soviet Union coupled with stepped-up economic aggression by the United States government.

At the Greensboro gathering, workers and youth participated from Pennsylvania to Florida, and from Texas to Washington, D.C. During the discussion period, Gerardo Sánchez, a packinghouse worker from Pittsburgh, asked the question that led to the answer developed in the pages that follow. Less than a year earlier, before moving to Pennsylvania, Sánchez had worked at the plant in South St. Paul, Minnesota, that later became Dakota Premium Foods. He was there during a period when the UFCW lost an employer-promoted decertification vote in the plant after failing to secure a contract.

The issues raised by Sánchez were not ones that had been addressed in the talk, and I had no notes or clippings with me related to them. But the fraud of education under capitalism, and especially the revolutionary transformation of learning by the working class, are questions that have been with the communist workers movement since its origins, and I had thought about them and listened to other veteran Marxists who had thought about them over the years.  
 
Hypocrisy of capitalist education
At the conclusion of the discussion period, I was pleased when two long-time teachers from North Carolina who were in the audience, the parents of a young socialist, approached me to say how much they appreciated the answer. Neither of them was active in the workers movement, much less a communist, and both were highly dedicated to their work. But they told me that the more effort they had put into trying to impart learning and habits of study to their students over the decades, the more they had become convinced of the hypocrisy and failure of the education system as it currently exists. What I had explained rang true to them, even if from a very different life perspective than mine.

Six years later, in early 1999, the Greensboro talk plus four others from mid-1992 through December 1998 were collected and published by Pathfinder Press under the title, Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. It is a companion to The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions, first published in 1981 and reissued in a second, expanded edition in 1994.

In March 2000 Mary-Alice Waters and I spoke at a West Coast meeting in San Francisco celebrating some new steps forward by the Socialist Workers Party as well as the growing interest in Pathfinder books--first and foremost, those such as the ones noted above dealing with changes in the working class and class struggle in the United States--that had been shown by participants in what has now become an annual international book fair in Havana, Cuba. During the reception that preceded the program, Harry Ring--a veteran of the communist movement, with more than sixty years of unbroken activity--made a point of seeking us out. He said he knew we were loaded with political responsibilities, and, since that wasn't about to change, he urged me to put other things aside for a few days sometime soon to prepare this excerpt from Capitalism's World Disorder as a pamphlet that could be sold widely to working people and youth. I can't say for sure that this effort would never have been made if it weren't for an insistent suggestion from this longtime worker-bolshevik. But it certainly would not have reached fruition so soon.

A short time later, Robin Maisel, a veteran of some thirty-five years in the communist movement, expanded Harry's campaign. He sent a letter proposing that this and several other sections of Capitalism's World Disorder be turned into pamphlets that could be inexpensively produced and broadly circulated. Robin, a member of the team of almost 200 supporters of the Socialist Workers Party who have taken on the task of preparing every single Pathfinder title in digital form so they can be kept in print at less cost, utilizing the most advanced computer-to-plate technology now being run by Pathfinder's print shop, offered to take the lead in working with other party supporters to raise the funds for this particular publishing project. That pushed it over the line, and we got to work preparing this pamphlet--simultaneously in English, Spanish, and French.

We hope readers benefit from the results of the initiative taken by these two stalwart pamphleteers of the revolutionary workers movement.

Jack Barnes 
July 12, 2000  
 
 
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