"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 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."--from The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform Under Capitalism by Jack Barnes.

Campaigning to get this pamphlet from Pathfinder into the hands of as many working people and youth resisting the assault by the employers and their government and seeking answers to the rationalizations and alien class framework of all politics today is the most important way readers of the Militant can help bring a working-class perspective to thousands over the coming weeks. After the second debate between presidential candidates Albert Gore and George W. Bush, the importance of selling, reading, and studying the pamphlet could not be clearer. Consider these few brief points.

Bush and Gore justified U.S. foreign policy based on "our nation's interests." Both used "our nation" or "we" numerous times when referring to the United States. They talked of Africa, the Mideast, Latin America, and the Caribbean and clicked off a host of U.S. invasions with the arrogant assumption that intervention is their right.

Like their approach to education and Social Security, when it comes to foreign policy the capitalist candidates drive to get working people to start with an assumption of "looking out for number one"--the USA. Bush and Gore are simply explaining the beginning and end of every foreign policy decision by the U.S. government: what is good and in the interests of the capitalist class. They use "our nation" to blur over the fact that there are different social classes in the United States with antagonistic and opposing interests. Their foreign policy is only an extension of the social relations and anti-working-class drive at home. Reading and studying the pamphlet will advance an opposite class approach: that of extending a hand of social solidarity and mutual respect, equality, and collaboration.

Pretending racism and national oppression have not been a cornerstone of the construction of the United States as an imperialist power, both Bush and Gore defended the police and state institutions from charges of systematic racism for such practices as racial profiling with the idea that racism, and lynchings such as that of James Byrd in Texas, are the work of a few bad apples. Both candidates' answer is a federal hate crimes law, which rather than dealing with racism, police brutality, and systematic discrimination simply opens a new assault on democratic rights.

Both returned to education and health care. Bush said his goal is that "every single child in America must be educated, I mean every child." Gore, saying education is his "number one priority," pressed to have "accountability" and required "states to test all students, test schools and school districts, and that...we should go further and require teacher testing and for new teachers also."

The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning points out that each capitalist candidate approaches these questions with assumptions "centered on 'looking out for number one.' " The pamphlet offers a way to break out of the framework permeating all capitalist society, to look at every question as a social question and from the point of view of our class, and to chart, as Barnes writes, a working-class course 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."
 
 
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