The student strike in Quebec has ended, in a rather clear victory. After a seven month-long struggle—the longest of its kind in Quebec history—students have won a cancellation of the proposed tuition hike, a pledge to repeal the infamous Law 78 that had criminalized demonstrations, and the ouster of Premier Jean Charest and his Liberal government.

The strike began officially in February, after the Charest government had announced it would raise tuition by 75 percent over the course of five years. At its height, around 185,000 students were participating,1 recognizable by the red felt squares they wore to symbolize being “carrément dans le rouge,” or squarely in the red, because of the debt they would have to incur with rising tuition rates. The strike formally ended in early September, with the election of a Parti Quebecois minority government promising to concede to the students' main demands, although smaller actions continue, to ensure the government follows through on its commitments, and to continue the broader fight for free education.

An examination of how the Quebec student strike unfolded yields significant practical lessons for how the working class, including students, can effectively organize itself. Students in Quebec demonstrated that our power lies in our ability to mobilize mass collective action, to disrupt the functioning of the institutions that undermine our interests—and that mobilization must come from bottom-up coordination, rather than effective leadership.

Background and the Quebec Historical Context

Like governments around the world, the Charest government had been pursuing an aggressive program of austerity—one announced even before the 2008 financial crisis. Compared to the rest of Canada or the United States, however, Quebec has been slower to implement neoliberal reform, in part because of a social compact struck during the “Quiet Revolution” the province underwent in the 1970s, during which the Francophone majority demanded greater economic equality with the wealthier Anglophone minority, resulting in a sort of New Deal according to which Quebeckers would receive significantly more social services alongside expanded educational opportunities, among other things.

One result was a freezing of tuition at $540 between 1968 and 1990. It rose significantly in the years that followed, but no increase was as significant as that proposed by the Charest government in 2011–12. Throughout this forty-some-year period, Quebec students often took to the streets—eight times since 1968—and their demands went well beyond stalling increases to the cost of their education. They demanded free tuition, democratic administration of the universities, the expansion of francophone instruction and facilities, an increase in bursaries, and the elimination of more stringent aptitude tests.

The Quebec government's latest proposal to raise tuition forms part of its attempt to achieve a new “cultural revolution,” one that would strip away citizens' expectations of social services. Billions of dollars in spending cuts have been proposed, to be compensated for by implementing “user pay” systems. Naturally, this comes alongside massive tax breaks to the wealthy and to corporations over the past ten years.

These cuts affect the entire working-class population of Quebec, but it was the students in the province who were finally able to mount a counteroffensive to the government's austerity plans. Inspired by the history of student protest in the province, as well as by more recent events worldwide like the Arab Spring (the movement in Quebec even came to be known as the “Printemps Érable,” or maple spring), they organized their resistance.

The Beginnings of the Strike, and How It Was Organized

In March 2011, the Quebec government announced its intention to raise tuition fees from $2,168 to $3,793 over the course of five years, beginning in September 2012. By August 2011, a campaign began in earnest insisting the government repeal that plan. It was organized by ASSÉ (pronounced ah-say), the “Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante” (Association for Student Union Solidarity, or Syndicalist Student Solidarity2 ), a federation that unites various student associations across campuses in Quebec. Already in August, ASSÉ was underwriting its opposition to the hike with the threat of organizing a “grève générale illimitée,” or unlimited general strike, among students across the province. The threat, as we now know, turned out to be a credible one, in part because of the particular theoretical and practical orientation of ASSÉ.

ASSÉ stands alongside two other major student federations in Quebec, the FEUQ (Fédération Étudiante Universitaire du Québec), and the FECQ (Fédération Étudiante Collegiale du Québec). These latter two groups are both politically moderate, having ties to the Parti Québecois (PQ), a populist, nationalist party in the province, as well as various trade unions. ASSÉ, on the other hand, is unaffiliated with any such entities, and has an explicitly anti-capitalist (and feminist, and anti-colonial) stance, which means that it recognizes austerity as an assault on the working class by the capitalist class. When ASSÉ announced its opposition to the tuition hike in August of 2011, spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois flatly stated that “What is hiding behind this increase in tuition fees is an attempt to privatize the educational system in Quebec.”3

ASSÉ had been created in 2001 with a decidedly strategic purpose: to learn from the past lessons of Quebec student movements, and determine how best to fight for student interests, against the government, the universities, and whomever else. From these insights it developed a strict position as to how student mobilizations should be organized: bottom-up, using assemblies inclusive of all students, with clear meeting procedure, voting by majority rule. In other words, the reliance would be less on leadership and individual negotiators (as most student unions and trade unions operate), and more on the will of the majority and coordinated mass action.

ASSÉ was able to disseminate this model through the now-famous CLASSE, or the “coalition large” of ASSÉ, an entity organized in December 2011. CLASSE was created to allow department or faculty-level4 student organizations to affiliate with ASSÉ, even if they were already affiliated with the less radical FEUQ and FECQ. CLASSE met regularly, composed of elected, recallable delegates from each member student group, who voted (according to the mandate assigned by their assembly) upon strategy and strike actions, as well as responses to government offers during the course of the strike. Thus, CLASSE was able to disseminate the model of direct, democratic decision-making by stipulating that its member student associations implement the assembly system, and allow that body to be the supreme decision-making entity concerning the strike and negotiations, even above the local union executive. Effectively, this circumvented the existing student union leadership and bureaucracy and placed all control in the hands of the rank and file of students.5

The strike itself officially began in February, with two general assemblies—fine arts students at the Université du Québec à Montreal (UQAM) and sociology graduate students at the Université Laval—voting on the 13th in favour of walking out and doing so the following day. By a few months later, it had grown to approximately 75 percent of the student body. It built momentum by first spreading the strike among more radical departments and faculties, which then encouraged more moderate departments to join. In fact, some departments voted to go on strike but to wait until a certain number of students had also adopted the strike mandate before actually walking out.

Once strike mandates were adopted, they were enforced, in picket lines as acrimonious as those at any workplace.6 Organizers soon learned that it was more effective and less inflammatory to block professors from entering classrooms—who for the most part were sympathetic—than to block fellow students.

Besides the picket lines, students organized manif-actions, or demonstration-actions, against symbolic political and economic targets. These included the Stock Exchange on February 16, and the offices of the CREPUQ (a Quebec-wide university-governing body) on March 7. CLASSE voted to approve such actions but did not organize them itself, leaving this to independent affinity groups. One of the more heady confrontations between the students and the Charest government came on the weekend of May 4–6 outside of a Liberal Party gathering in Victoriaville, a small town about 100 miles from Montreal—a location chosen to avoid protesters. Provincial police acted with tremendous violence, using tear gas, sound grenades, and even rubber bullets, one of which took out a student's eye.

Government Attempts to Repress the Strike

Police violence was consistent throughout the strike, in fact, part of the government's attempt to break the students through sheer repression. Towards that end, it passed the notorious Bill 78 (later: Law 12) on May 18. The emergency law suspended the semester until August, in the hopes of killing the momentum of the strike. It effectively made the strike illegal by declaring that no one was permitted to interfere with a university's provision of education, and legislated students back to school. Even more significantly, it required any public protest of any more than 50 people to obtain police approval by registering their venue or planned march route with the police 24 hours in advance. The law was made enforceable through draconian fines: $1,000–5,000 for individuals, $7,000–35,000 for student or union leaders, and $25,000–125,000 per day for student or labour organizations (doubling in the case of repeated infractions), which were indeed handed out.

The passage of the law was a serious shot across the bow not only of the student strike, but of student and labour unions in general (it included a provision suspending dues checkoff for unions that violated the law). The difference in their respective responses was very telling. CLASSE (after holding emergency meetings, including waiting for individual assemblies to vote on their own responses) not only refused to comply with the law, but announced as much publicly, meeting the government's offensive with a salvo of its own and putting itself at tremendous risk of fines. The labour unions, however, complied with the new law and counseled others to do the same. In fact, union executives responded to CLASSE's call to expand the student strike into a social strike by circulating an internal memo advising locals not to contribute financial assistance to the strikers, nor to organize solidarity actions in other provinces—all in the name of Quebec's national sovereignty, a card often cynically played by political parties in the province as well (CLASSE remained admirably silent on the issue of national sovereignty, instead declaring that its struggles were one with those of young people everywhere).

The strike did expand, however. The non-student population of Quebec found the passage of Bill 78 so offensive that it began joining students in the streets, in what were called “casseroles” marches.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/4284852[/vimeo]

Residents would leave their homes at eight o'clock in the evening, banging on pots and pans to summon neighbours, eventually gathering into a noisy march through the city centre (the practice originated in Chile in the 1970s, in response to food shortages). One such event, on May 22, involved up to half a million people, prompting some to call it “the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.” By then, students had been holding nightly marches for over a month. Involving anywhere from 5,000–25,000 people, they would snake quickly through the downtown area, cheered on by many of the people they passed by, militant but peaceful, despite encountering tear gas, flashbangs and baton charges on the part of the municipal police (the SPVM). The marches were extraordinarily disciplined however, and despite not having marshals, would make decisions (including what direction to take, and how to handle provocations by police) extremely quickly, soberly, and efficiently. The students, and not the police, controlled the streets. Chants were aggressive and creative, criticizing Premier Charest, the police (Police partout, justice nulle part: “police everywhere, justice nowhere”), and Bill 78 (La loi spéciale, on s'en câlice!: “We don't give a fuck about the special law”), and reinforcing the core message that On veut étudier, on ne veut pas s'endetter (“We want to study, not go into debt”).

Negotiations and the Election

With its various tactics, the students had made it clear that it would be impossible for the universities, and the Quebec government, to pursue their strategy of ignoring the strike and conducting “business as usual.” On April 19, after a few months of obstinately refusing to negotiate with students, Education Minister Line Beauchamp invited them to the bargaining table. She attempted to exclude CLASSE on the pretext of the acts of vandalism that had taken place during street protests (arguing feebly that CLASSE had incited them, or at the very least endorsed them). The FEUQ and FECQ, representing their students' express wishes, in turn refused to participate unless CLASSE was included.

The initial government offer was to spread the tuition increases over seven years instead of five, and it was met with contempt by the student population. Negotiations continued, with representatives from the umbrella student associations sometimes bringing offers back to their constituencies for voting, though none was accepted. On May 14, Minister Beauchamp resigned, declaring “I have lost faith that student leaders wish to come to a meaningful conclusion.” She was replaced with Michelle Courchesne, who likewise was unable to convince students to accept a compromise on the matter of a tuition freeze (which was being framed by CLASSE within a larger demand to repeal tuition altogether), the most generous offer coming with an increase in bursaries and the tying of loan repayments to income.

After the semester was suspended, manif-actions continued to be organized, targeting the Grand Prix among other events. With no end to the student crisis in sight, Charest finally announced on August 1 that he would dissolve the Assemblée Nationale and call for an early election, on September 4. Some student associations campaigned on behalf of the Parti Québecois, the more left-leaning Québec Solidaire, or other parties, but CLASSE itself maintained its refusal to affiliate with any political party, declining also to encourage students to vote, instead noting that its interest was in political goals and ideals, including that of free education for all, best achieved through direct action tactics like a strike, rather than at the ballot box.

As the beginning of the new semester neared, students, who had been legislated back to school by Bill 78 (now become Law 12), voted in their assemblies whether to renew the strike mandate. Some chose to return to class, others to stay on strike, and some to revisit the issue once the election results came in. When classes resumed, universities invited riot police into their hallways to enforce Law 12, which had made picketing on university grounds illegal, and an uncanny tableau was painted of students being literally forced into classrooms to learn. UQAM even announced that it would be sending video and photos of striking students to police for prosecution.

As noted, the election resulted in the ouster of Charest's Liberal Party—defeating his expectation that the “silent majority” of Quebecers, wearied by the strike (indeed the students never had a majority of public support for their tuition struggle) would punish the Parti Québecois for having made statements supportive of the students. Instead, the PQ came out ahead in the election, obtaining a plurality, but not majority, of seats in the new provincial Assemblée Nationale, with Charest himself losing his seat to a PQ candidate. PQ leader Pauline Marois immediately announced that her government would drop the planned tuition hike, and repeal Law 12.

Lessons From the Strike

The reaction on the part of students was one of relief and celebration, but not jubilation—after all, this concession was less than the demand for free education. Moreover, having had a taste of how governmental politics works, especially in an era in which austerity is treated as a matter of blind necessity, students seemed to have realized that their struggle will likely never actually be over. Indeed, the Marois government has already declared that it will organize a summit within a few months to address the question of future tuition increases (it would like to tie them to inflation; students oppose this) and the democratic structure of student unions. This indicates that the government understands well how the students were able to consolidate their power and press their demands, and the government will likely be only too eager to undermine the structures of direct, democratic decision-making that CLASSE proliferated. It remains to be seen whether students keep to the strategic lessons taught by the strike.

After all, what was achieved in Quebec came as a direct result of the particular forms of organizing that were deployed. Students were able to force the government's hand, not by working within existing student union channels, but by working around them. Having breezily declared a massive increase in tuition, the government had no intention of negotiating on the matter with the student unions in Quebec, even though the latter legally have some collective bargaining power (albeit with their own universities). Instead, students were able to force the government to the bargaining table, and then force them to repeal the hike, because they successfully disrupted business, from the functioning of the universities, to the city of Montreal, to the government itself.

This model of organizing makes Quebec stand apart from student organizing in both the rest of Canada, and in the United States over the past year. In the rest of Canada, the Canadian Federation of Students (or CFS, the equivalent overarching body to the FECQ / FEUQ / ASSÉ) relies primarily on lobbying politicians and on brief demonstrations and actions, with rather limited success (tuition is on average twice as high elsewhere in Canada than in Quebec). Interestingly, when Ontario students called upon the CFS to bring the strike to their province, some Quebec activists responded with a gentle correction that it could only be brought through popular organizing in the assembly system, not the intervention of the Federation.

Student unions like those in Canada do not exist in the United States, but students in the United States, reinvigorated by Occupy Wall Street, have started organizing in the past year around issues like the accessibility of education and student debt. Thus far, its methods have included non-disruptive peaceful protest, like “days of action” to raise awareness about issues, and more recently the “Free University” organized in New York to coincide with the first anniversary of OWS. But crucially, students in the United States have yet to begin disrupting the functioning of the university or student loan system. Protests at the City University of New York in fall 2011, over a nearly identical tuition hike as that proposed in Quebec, offer an illustrative point of contrast. When the CUNY Board of Trustees met on the proposed hike, it closed the meetings to students, going so far as to cancel classes and lock students out of their own campus. Peaceful protests raged outside for several hours, but the outcome of the meeting was to approve the tuition hike, with no fallout from students afterwards.

Nevertheless, the Quebec student strike did garner the attention of students worldwide, sparking solidarity casseroles marches and the distribution of carrés rouges. It remains to be seen whether students—and, for that matter, workers and community groups—outside of Quebec can learn some practical lessons from the way that strike was organized. To that end, a number of individuals and groups have been writing about Quebec for the past several months, and organizing speaking tours of the organizers involved, and even trainings to disseminate their model. At a time when protests against austerity have been sweeping the globe, the student strike in Quebec stands out as a model for actually effectively resisting that agenda.

For further reading

CLASSE's website in French and English.

Translating the printemps érable, a website translating important documents and news stories about the strike into English.

Facebook page collecting English-language news about the strike.

Anarchopanda pour la gratuité scolaire (Anarchopanda for free education), unofficial mascot of the strike.

Artact Qc, original digital paintings depicting the strike, from an anti-neoliberal perspective.

See also the Twitter hashtag #ggi.

Timeline

• March 2011: Charest government announces plans to raise tuition
• August 2011: ASSÉ threatens to mobilize a student strike if the tuition hike is not repealed
• December 2011: CLASSE forms
• February 13: First votes to strike
• May 6: Protests at Victoriaville with heavy police violence
• May 14: Education Minister Line Beauchamp resigns
• May 18: Bill 78 is passed, pickets are made illegal, protests are restricted, and the university semester is suspended
• May 22: Massive march against Law 78 on the 100th day of the strike, perhaps the “biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history”
• May 31: Govt pulls out of talks
• August 1: Charest announces an early election, to take place the Monday after Labour Day
• September 4: Election takes place, resulting in a PQ victory

• 1Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a spokesperson for CLASSE (see below) claimed in a speech that at its height, the strike had amassed 75 percent of students.
• 2“Syndicat” is the ordinary French term for union, so the adjective “syndicale” can be read either as “syndicalist” or “union” here. ASSÉ is an explicitly syndicalist organization, however.
• 3«Ce qui se cache derrière la hausse des droits de scolarité, c'est une tentative de privatisation du système d'éducation québécois» http://journalmetro.com/actualites/montreal/35723/lasse-menace-de-declencher-une-greve-generale-illimitee/
• 4A “faculty” in Quebec is like a college or division in the United States—the Faculty of Liberal Arts, for example.
• 5Further description of the nuts of bolts of how the strike was organized.
• 6An excellent description of this tension.

A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity) and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts…form the terrain of the “conjunctural” and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise.[1]

Gramsci's oft-cited formulation offers an entry point for an understanding of South Africa—the 'miracle' country as of the year of 2012. South Africa, despite 18 years of majority rule, continues to be one of the most unequal societies on an increasingly unequal planet and is in crisis. Around half the population, mostly black Africans, live below the poverty line.[2] Almost half of all black African households earned below R1670 a month in 2005–06, while only 2 percent of white households fell in that income bracket.[3] South Africa, as of 2011, ranked as the second most unequal country in the world after Namibia—according to the Gini measure.[4] Unemployment consistently hovers unofficially at around 40 percent, and among 18–25 year olds, it is now over 60 percent.[5] Millions of households, despite some improvements still lack access to basic services; the education system still equips blacks for little other than a future as unskilled labor. This is despite the existence of the much lauded “progressive constitution” with a bill of rights which supposedly insures access to basic socio-economic rights.[6] Essentially South Africa is fucking unequal and black African working class and unemployed Africans continue to be the worst off.

This is normality. The unemployment rate in Greece after four years of economic depression and the EU's austerity project has just reached over 25 percent, but South Africa's unofficial unemployment rate is over 40 percent, while 25 percent has been the officially stated figure for almost a decade. What the Marikana massacre marks is the most visible display of the failure of the ruling ANC's hegemonic project and the inability of the forces struggling to conserve the “existing structure” to contain multiple forces emerging from the on-going crisis in South Africa. The ANC, despite its seemingly unchallengeable political supremacy and its political alliance with the 1.8 million strong trade union federation COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and the politically, spiritually and morally, but not financially, bankrupt SACP (South African Communist Party), has been unable to forge a viable social compact with local capital capable of benefiting the majority of South Africa. They've been unable to either create sufficient jobs to combat mass unemployment (over 40 percent) or bring down levels of inequality—which have increased since the bitter demise of apartheid.

The ANC adopted a twofold economic strategy in which policies would be introduced to create a black “national bourgeoisie”[7] to counter the hegemony of white capital both in South African and worldwide and a subsequent “development” program which would be based on attracting foreign capital investment through capital intensive projects, creating favorable business conditions and unleashing domestic capital from the chains of apartheid-era sanctions and regulations. What in fact happened was that the still fetishized foreign investors failed to materialize and domestic capital was free to relocate to the favorable climates of the North. Many of South Africa's largest firms, such as Anglo-American, relocated to the UK while South African capital was freed to pillage the rest of the continent previously closed to it. On the local front, South Africa effectively introduced a self-imposed structural adjustment package under the auspices of the ironically named “GEAR” (Growth Employment and Redistribution) policy introduced in 1996, which saw the privatization of basic services (which the government is constitutionally obliged to provide), rapid cuts in the public sector and the privatization of state owned entities.

Over a million jobs were lost as the much-vaunted foreign capital failed to materialize and domestic capital either moved to the North or reinvested their profits throughout the rest of Africa, while the South African manufacturing sector declined dramatically due to the relaxation of trade tariffs, leading to local industries being forced to compete with India, China and Indonesia, etc., …leading to further job losses. Production in South Africa has been largely overshadowed by the rise of the financial sector and the traditional economic base of “extraction”.[8]

The structural crisis, which reached its height in the 1980s,[9] forced white capital to abandon apartheid as it was perceived to no longer be the most efficient vehicle for capital accumulation. This process began with covert meetings between the captains of South African industry and the ANC leadership in exile and ended in the high drama of CODESA (Convention for A Democratic South Africa).

Those that have benefited most from this transition were white South Africans and white capitalists who saw their international pariah status revoked and the new system slanted to their benefit. A new black middle class and a small black bourgeoisie have also benefited. While the media is flush with lewd reports of their perceived lavish lifestyles, many of those dubbed “black diamonds” by the media rely primarily on their access to credit and white capital's need to display a black superstructure to disguise the continued base of white ownership. Much of this emergent black bourgeoisie has relied on political connections and access to the state as a vehicle of accumulation. A select few, the likes of Patrice Motsepe, have amassed vast fortunes and others, such as the militant ex-chairperson of NUM Cyril Ramaphosa, have made the seamless transition to billionaire status through amassing shares in and board positions in London Mining (Lonmin) and, of course, the franchise owner of McDonalds South Africa. Members of both the Zuma and Mandela families have seen a similar change in fortune over the last few years as well.[10].

As structural unemployment persists and those who are lucky enough to find work find their income unable to keep up with the steep cost of living and large swathes of the country lack access to basic services, a recipe for militant protest arises. South Africa has been described as the protest capital of the world. In the last three years, there has been an average of 2.9 “gatherings” per day resulting in 12,654 “gathering” incidents during 2010–11,[11] although such statistics say little about the actual political character of these protests and it shouldn't necessarily be taken as a sign of the rise of a new counter-hegemonic bloc in the country. Indeed to refer back to Gramsci's formulation, these protests rather indicate the forces emerging in relation to the continuing crisis, which the political forces seeking to preserve the existing structure are unable to overcome. What in effect these political forces stand for, as a whole, remains an open question and the crisis is expressed in the “vocabularies of the local”.

What is clear though is that there is a deep social unrest which has been escalating over the last few years as the government has been either unwilling or unable to craft a program capable of reducing poverty and inequality or cajole white capital into some sort of sustainable social compact à la the East Asian developmental state often promoted as a model for South Africa to emulate. Less has been said about the nature of proletarian insurgency at the work place—violent and militant strikes are a regular feature of South African labor relations, due to a high level of militant consciousness and unionization among the black South African working-class. With union leadership increasingly being co-opted into ANC politicking and formed “working relationships” with capital, workers have been embarking on wildcat strikes to reach their demands—particularly in the mining sector. The rise of independent unions such as AMCU (Association of Mining and Construction workers Union) is a direct response to the inability of established trade unions within COSATU to represent workers interests.

The existing set of labor relations in South Africa has seen the continuation of the apartheid-era two tier model of skilled, mostly white middle and upper income work for a select few, while the majority of blacks find themselves competing over the few jobs available to “low wage” and “unskilled labor,” such as those working at Marikana. The persistence of these labor structures and high unemployment has meant that those with work often have to support large and extended families on their low wages, restricting both the growth of an internal market in South Africa and insuring that most black employed South Africans still live in appalling conditions. This is not a “challenge,” as described by ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe at a recent COSATU conference—this is a crisis, one which has been building for decades.

In the first major industrial action of the year, platinum miners at the Implats mine won a 5,000 rand increase, in the face of state repression and violence. But the last few months have seen the most sustained and militant victorious proletarian struggle since the fragile birth of “liberal democracy” in 1994, following the brutal massacre of 34 workers by police at the Marikana mine owned by the British company Lonmin on the 16th of August. The massacre of these workers occurred in the midst of a wildcat strike brought about by the perceived failure of the dominant mining union NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) to protect the interests of workers. Miners still operate in the same hyper-exploitative extractive sector and within the two-tier labor market which has been both source of South Africa's riches and tragedy for over a 100 years. Men plucked from the former bantustans go up North removed from their friends and family, far removed from their friends and family, to work for as long as 12 hours a day for an average wage, after deductions, of around 4,500 rand a month (around $550). To put this in perspective, Frans Baleni, the chairperson of NUM, earns around 1.4 million rand ($165,000) a year. This is what drove the miners to strike, demanding 12,500 rand a month ($1,512). They downed their tools and embarked on a 6 week strike in which they faced down the power of state and capital.

Reports on the 18th of September suggested a deal had been reached between the miners and Lonmin for a 22 percent salary increase across the board and a 2,000 rand bonus for returning to work. Despite the fact that the miners didn't win their 12,500 rand, this is still a historic victory. The miners, with little or no support from “civil society” or the “left” and a hostile media, managed to face down a state prepared to kill to defend the interests of capital and wrangle a demand still deemed “irrational” by a morally decrepit bunch of hacks and economists (still mostly lily white) who style themselves as the voices of reason in this country. To give an indication of how little this is, rock drillers working at platinum mines in Canada, performing exactly the same job, get paid around $130,000 a year—earning more in a month than a South African miners earns in a year. Reports from miners have suggested the company has been lying about the nature of the increase and is still skiving off money from the workers and, despite the increase, miners on the ground are still dissatisfied with their pay indicating that the saga of Marikana is far from over.[12]

The miners were forced to negotiate as the police had imposed an unofficial state of emergency in the area with the near-full support of the red-baiting, panicked corporate media. They still saw another three people murdered bringing the total death toll to 47. Workers reported that any man on the streets at night in the area was a target for the police and police forcibly dispersed and attacked any attempted gathering while patrolling the streets with armored cars and assault rifles (the same rifles used to shoot down the miners on the 16th of August).[13] Police also raided the hostels and homes of the miners in an attempt to intimidate them the weekend before the deal was reached. Reports indicated they shot several people including the local ANC (African National Congress) councilor who later died from her injuries.[14]

The deal reached at Marikana does not mark the end of the industrial unrest spreading across South Africa's Platinum belt; rather it marks the beginning of what is surely an intensification of proletarian struggle in the mining sector. I say this for reasons other than the continuation of the appalling living conditions present in the communities located in this area.[15] and the low remuneration for miners. What Marikana has shown is the violence which the state is willing to unleash in defense of capital and its allies in the form of NUM. This, as I will discuss later, is part of pattern of increasing violence which has been deployed to break up community and social movement protests. Furthermore, it has shown that it is possible to take on the full force of the state and capital and win. It has inspired miners across the Platinum Belt to fight for a 12,500 minimum wage across the sector. Some reports have even suggested miners in Namibia are considering taking up a similar demand. Finally, it has shown that the established “representatives” of the working-class, in the form of NUM and COSATU, are incapable and unwilling to take up the demands of the workers and unable to provide either a straight condemnation of the massacre or any material aid to the workers. If anything, NUM has been shown to be an agent of both the interests of the ruling Zuma faction within the ANC and the mining industry.

The situation brings to mind Rosa Luxemburg's remarks on the German printers union written in the heady days of 1907:

the classical embodiment of that trade-union policy which prefers peace to struggle, settlement with capitalism to conflict, political neutrality to open support for the Social-Democratic Party, and which, filled with scorn for revolutionary “fanaticism,” sees its ideal in the English type of trade union. It has taken a long time, but now the fruits of such a policy have become obvious to even the most short-sighted of persons.[16]

Gramsci suggests that, as “hegemony” or rule by consent breaks down, direct violence will increasingly be relied on to preserve the established structure. The South African government increased its repressive force and tactics over the last few years,[17] as the police have been militarized beginning with the World Cup. Slogans like “shoot-to-kill” have been taken up by police “generals.” Military ranks have been reintroduced and the number of police shootings rises ever year. Force has been used on a consistent basis to break up community protests and to target social movement activists.

Beginning with the torture of activists from the Landless People's Movement (LPM), becoming more visible with the atttack directed towards the shack-dwellers movement, Abahali baseMjondolo (AbM) at the Kennedy Road settlement in Durban in 2009,[18] and last year in the televised murder of Andreas Tatane by the police in Ficksburg. This suggests that the violence which occurred in Marikana was not an isolated incident; rather it fits in with the character of “political violence” which has become an increasingly visible presence in South Africa.[19] The ANC under Zuma has thrown off much of its socialist and “progressive” trappings despite the craven unconditional backing of this faction by the SACP and elements of COSATU. A masculinist discourse of patriarchal tradition has become the dominant feature of Zuma's attempt to anchor the ANC in something resembling a coherent ideology.[20] While the ANC attempts to make up for its failures through the employment of outright repression, this repression is partially condoned by the anti-working class and reactionary media, as well as fully condoned by the center-right opposition party the Democratic Alliance (DA)—whose support base and political character is largely formed by ex-National Party (NP) voters, despite the DA's liberal pretensions.

Where does that leave the independent South African left? Mostly in a position of increased isolation from working-class struggles. The South African Left has, to an extent, been pursuing what I consider to be a contradictory strategy in relation to COSATU and the SACP—which I will suggest, in effect, are organs of the state in subordination to the ruling party. The independent left has been very careful to not sever its ties with COSATU and elements of the SACP, the reason being the assumption that these organizations form the potential of a revolutionary base which will eventually abandon the ANC due to the ANC's continued support of anti working-class neo-liberal policies. These organizations would then turn to the independent left and a new mass workers party could emerge capable of challenging the hegemony of the ANC. At the same time much of the independent left has attempted to win over social movements and communities to a socialist project. The problems within this strategy are multiple and I will, for the interests of brevity, not delve into all of them. I will instead indentify a few key flaws.

The first and most obvious flaw is that these goals lead to a contradiction in terms of prioritizing struggles, the SACP in particular,[21] and elements of COSATU adopt a paranoid authoritarian stance towards protest and politics located outside of the ruling alliance and are often complicit as evidenced by Marikana in state repression often directed towards movements and communities which the left is trying to “win” over. In this, the left has to prioritize supporting local struggles and movements or maintaining their ties, unofficial or official, with “the ANC-aligned Left.” Often some of the most vocal “left” critics of the ANC maintain cozy relationships with the likes of the odious Blade Ndzimande, Jeremy Cronin and others or even consult for the state. This further hampers the ability of the left to build working and sustainable connections with communities in struggle and has resulted in a tendency to attempt to channel local struggles towards the “real” enemies of neo-liberalism and the World Bank at the expense of the local contradictions which gave rise to these struggles in the first place. In response to Marikana, elements of the left have expressed support for the striking workers but, at the same time, limited their actual material support so as not to alienate COSATU, which has adopted a shameful and cowardly position towards the massacre and who has increasingly prioritized factional politics within the ANC over the material interests of workers.[22]

This contradictory policy has alienated much of the independent left from local struggles and has further hampered the ability of the independent left to establish zones of counter-power and powerful movements capable of challenging the hegemony of the ANC. The origins of this problematic position lay in both the age-old left tradition of fetishizing the state as the source of all progressive change. The state is treated as an instrument which, if only the right people were in charge, would be capable of bringing about transformative change. The result is a general immobility of the left if the conditions are not right for the revolution or the seizure of state power, this leads to inertia and is one of the primary reasons for what has been an observable decline in the power and ideas of the left following 1994. This is closely linked to the demobilization of the mass movements and grassroots locales of counter-power which emerged in the 1980s for a variety of reasons including a widespread faith in the ANC's ability to bring about transformative change in South Africa and the ANC leadership's, upon returning from exile, attempt to monopolize their power within the wider democratic movement at the expense of the leaders which emerged from domestic mass struggles.

The second problem with the left's position is in the changing character of the South African black proletariat and their relation to COSATU. Marikana marks a point of departure or rupture if you like within these relations. It is fair to assert that leadership of COSATU has been incorporated into the ANC. Many have made the transition between union leadership positions and government posts. COSATU as an organization intervened directly in internal ANC politics to help Zuma unseat the then president Mbeki and bring Zuma to power. Since then, COSATU has found itself prioritizing ANC politics at the expense of the interests of workers. Combine this with the precarious state of the mining industry in South Africa. The South African gold industry is in its last days, as gold reserves, historically the foundation of the South African economy, decline. And platinum prices continue to drop. This is the real reason for the intensification of extractive mining practices, without workers being compensated for the added risk with any rise in wages. The wave of wildcat strikes has since moved into the gold sector and has seen 40 percent of gold production in the country shut down[23] as workers, inspired by Marikana, have taken up the 12,500 minimum wage demand[24]; this demand has been taken up by workers in the neighbouring country of Namibia and workers in the transport sector which has seen 20,000 workers go on strike.

Unions like NUM have responded to this by forming close relationships to the companies such as Lonmin and Anglo-American, in which NUM has agreed to keep a check on workers' demands and negotiate gradual increases in return for favourable treatment and business links between ex-NUM leaders like Cyril Ramaphosa and Marcel Golding; furthermore NUM's investment wing (standing at R 2 billion) has even invested in the mining sector. This, combined with unions' continued attachment to the ANC which has pursued, as indicated earlier, a rather orthodox neo-liberal line since coming to power, has in effect resulted in an antagonism displayed most clearly at Marikana between a union leadership increasingly removed from the shop floor unable and unwilling to represent the interests of workers.

This antagonism has led to the wave of wildcat strikes coming to its first point of rupture at Marikana; workers here are in effect forced to become an autonomous force in order to secure their interests,[25], through unsanctioned militant action. As unions and the ANC continue to fail to support workers in their demands for a living wage, working-class action will continue to take on such autonomous character united in hostility both to capital and organs of state power in the form of unions such as NUM and local ANC branches.[26] As the state is unable to provide some sort of solution to the organic crisis present in South Africa, repression will be relied on to contain industrial action and community protest. Marikana has shown that in order for workers achieve their demands, they need to operate autonomously from their union representatives, Marikana has inspired a wave of other wildcat strikes in the mining sector which don't seem to be fading out. In this, class conciousness on the shop floor appears to be emerging, despite the SACP's pathetic attempts to claim that the actions at Marikana were led by some sort of third middle class force,[27] which doped up the miners on muti and was aligned to the forces of imperialism and the bogeyman of expelled ANCYL (African National Congress Youth League) president Julius Malema.[28] They also absurdly charged that these strikes were a result of a “lack of class consciousness.”[29]

It is from this recognition of the increasingly autonomous nature of the South African proletariat that any sort of left strategy should emerge from Marikana. I can't claim to have all the answers but two things stand out. First, there is a need for the left to abandon the COSATU leadership as working partners[30] and instead attempt to build working relations and provide material aid to workers at the shop floor. The second lesson is for the need to build fortresses of counter-power at a distance from the state; instead of NGOs, legalistic tactics and insular debate, we need to create zones which show the possibility of challenging the hegemony of the ANC. We need to invest in culture, in alternate radio stations, in new publications, in communities in drawing on South African's history of grassroots militancy and civic organizations. An insurgent movement, capable of challenging the structure of a country in crisis, needs to abandon the politics of mediating the masses' interests and instead focus on building zones in which a revolutionary future can be glimpsed. Now is not the time to talk about the “armed seizure of state power,” but that does not mean we can sit back and wait.

Notes

[1] Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, New York: International Press (1971), p. 178. ↩
[2] Hein Marais, Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy of Change, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press (2011), p. 203. ↩
[3] Marais, ibid. ↩
[4] World Bank, 2011. ↩
[5] Youth unemployment: South Africa’s ticking bomb. ↩
[6] Constitution of South Africa. ↩
[7] See Fanon's prescient condemnation and critique of the “national bourgeoisie” in The Wretched of the Earth. ↩
[8] I base this account on Marais's outstanding Pushed to the Limit. ↩
[9] See Gelb, “Making Sense of the Crisis,” Transformations (1987), p. 5. ↩
[10] “Aurora’s Zuma must be held to account for mine debacle,” Times Live, January 13, 2012. ↩
[11] Protests and Police Statistics in South Africa: Some Commentary. ↩
[12] Lonmin miners crack under pressure. ↩
[13] Lonmin miners crack under pressure. ↩
[14] Marikana’s theatre of the absurd claims another life. ↩
[15] Unsafe House, Unsafe Job? The foul truth about living conditions at Marikana. ↩
[16] The Two Methods of Trade-Union Policy. ↩
[17] The South African Police Service and the Public Order War ↩
[18] See Kerry Chance, The Work of Violence: A timeline of Armed Attacks at Kennedy Road (2010). ↩
[19] See Jane Duncan, Dissent Under Jacob Zuma (2011), unpublished. ↩
[20] Facing Reality. ↩
[21] See Dale T. McKinley. ↩
[22] See Cosatu Congress: Vavi’s time of reckoning, and the elusive “Lula moment” and Cosatu Congress: Allies talk about Marikana and the enemies of the struggle ↩
[23] Strike contagion shuts down 40% of SA gold. ↩
[24] First poll results known. ↩
[25] I take this understanding of the autonomy of the working class loosely from the Italian autonomia theoretical tradition, although the theoretical tendency emerged in a vastly different socio-political context with its description of the emergence of the “mass worker” in the Keynesian Planner states within the 1960s and 1970s. I find it provides a useful starting point in Negri's 'concept of the “self-valorization of the working-class (see “Worker's Party Against Work,” in Books for Burning, London: Verso (1973, 2005), pp. 74–77) referring to the working class's ability to define itself as a class outside of the logic of the state and capital. ↩
[26] It remains to be seen whether workers will abandon the ANC in the absence of any realistic alternatives either in the form of the parliamentary opposition or the extra-parliamentary left. ↩
[27] Cosatu Congress: Allies talk about Marikana and the enemies of the struggle. ↩
[28] Malema has perhaps been the only prominent political actor in the country to display any sort of support for the miners in the form of both his unique brand of rhetoric—think Hugo Chavez meets Kanye West and the form material and legal aid. Malema has been accused rightly of using Marikana to hit back at his nemesis, President Zuma, and has faced both death threats and threats of arrest from reactionary white formations and the state. Despite his opportunism, he has shown up the cowardice of the ruling alliance in their response to Marikana. ↩
[29] Politicsweb. ↩
[30] Mangaung Versus Marikana: COSATU Chooses Sides. ↩

Note to the Reader: The following was written at the request of a west coast comrade after he attended the August 2012 “Everything for Everyone” conference in Seattle, at which many members of the “soft Maoist” Kasama current were present. It is a bare-bones history of Maoism which does not bring to bear a full “left communist” viewpoint, leaving out for the example the sharp debates on possible alliances with the “nationalist bourgeoisie” in the colonial and semi-colonial world at the first three congresses of the Communist International. It was written primarily to provide a critical-historical background on Maoism for a young generation of militants who might be just discovering it. —LG.

Maoism was part of a broader movement in the twentieth century of what might be called “bourgeois revolutions with red flags,” as in Vietnam or North Korea.

To understand this, it is important to see that Maoism was one important result of the defeat of the world revolutionary wave in 30 countries (including China itself) which occurred in the years after World War I. The major defeat was in Germany (1918–1921), followed by the defeat of the Russian Revolution (1921 and thereafter), culminating in Stalinism.

Maoism is a variant of Stalinism.1

The first phase of this defeat, where Mao and China are concerned, took place in the years 1925–1927, during which the small but very strategically located Chinese working class was increasingly radicalized in a wave of strikes. This defeat closed the 1917–1927 cycle of post–World War I worker struggles, which included (in addition to Germany and Russia) mass strikes in Britain, workers councils in northern Italy, vast ferment and strikes in Spain, the “rice riots” in Japan, a general strike in Seattle, and many other confrontations.

By 1925–1927, Stalin controlled the Communist Third International (Comintern). From the beginning of the 1920s, Russian advisors worked closely with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) of the bourgeois revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, (leader of the 1911 overthrow of the Manchu dynasty) and with the small but important Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1921.

The Third International provided political and military aid to the KMT, which was taken over by Chiang kai-shek (future dictator of Taiwan after 1949); the Comintern in the early to mid-1920s viewed the KMT as a “progressive anti-imperialist” force. Many Chinese Communists actually joined the KMT in these years, some secretly, some openly.

Soviet foreign policy in the mid-1920s involved an internal faction fight between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky's policy (whatever its flaws, and there were many) was for world revolution as the only solution to the isolation of the Soviet Union. Stalin replied with the slogan “Socialism in One Country,” an aberration unheard of until that time in the internationalist Marxist tradition. Stalin in this period was allied with the right opposition leader Nikolai Bukharin against Trotsky; Soviet and Third International policy reflected this alliance in a “right turn” to strong support for bourgeois nationalism abroad. Chiang kai-shek himself was an honorary member of the Third International Executive Board in this period. The Third International advocated strong support for Chiang's KMT in its campaign against the “warlords” closely allied with the landowning gentry.

It is important to understand that in these same years, Mao Zedong (who was not yet the central leader of the party) criticized this policy from the right, advocating an even closer alliance between the CCP and the KMT.

In the spring of 1927, Chiang kai-shek turned against the CCP and the radicalized working class, massacring thousands of workers and CCP militants in Shanghai and Canton (now known in the West by its actual Chinese name Guangzhou), who had been completely disarmed by the Comintern's support for the KMT.2 This massacre ended the CCP's relationship with the Chinese working class and opened the way for Mao to rise to top leadership by the early 1930s.

The next phase of the CCP was the so-called “Third Period” of the Comintern, which was launched in part in response to the debacle in China. In the Soviet Union, Stalin turned on the Bukharinist “right” (there was in reality no one more reactionary than Stalin) after having finished off the Trotskyist left.3 The Third Period, which lasted from 1928 to 1934, was a period of “ultra-left” adventurism around the world. In China as well as in a number of other colonial and semi-colonial countries, the Third Period involved the slogan of “soviets everywhere.” Not a bad slogan in itself, but its practical, voluntarist implementation was a series of disastrous, isolated uprisings in China and Vietnam in 1930 which were totally out of synch with local conditions, and which led to bloody defeats everywhere.

It was in the recovery from these defeats that Mao became the top leader of the CCP, and began the “Long March” to Yan'an (in remote northwestern China) which became a central Maoist myth, and reoriented the CCP to the Chinese peasantry, a much more numerous social class but not, in Marxist terms, a revolutionary class4 (though it could be an ally of the working-class revolution, as in Russia during the 1917–1921 Civil War).

Japan had invaded Manchuria (northeast China) in 1931 and the CCP from then until the Japanese defeat at the end of World War II was involved in a three-way struggle with the KMT and the Japanese.

After the Third Period policy led to the triumph of Hitler in Germany (where the Communist Party had attacked the “social fascist” Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the “main enemy,” and even worked with the Nazis against the Social Democrats in strikes), the Comintern in 1935 shifted its line again to the “Popular Front,” which meant alliances with “bourgeois democratic” forces against fascism. Throughout the colonial and semi-colonial world, the Communist Parties completely dropped their previous anti-colonial struggle and threw themselves into support for the Western bourgeois democracies. In Vietnam and Algeria, for example, they supported the “democratic” French colonial power. In Spain, they uncritically supported the Republic in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, during which they helped the Republic crush the anarchists (who had two million members), the independent left POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista, a “centrist” party denounced at the time as “Trotskyist”) and the Trotskyists themselves. These latter forces had taken over the factories in northeastern Spain and established agrarian communes in the countryside. The Republic and the Communists crushed them all, and then lost the Civil War to Franco.

In China, the Popular Front meant, for the CCP, supporting Chiang kai-shek (who, it will be recalled, had massacred thousands of workers eight years earlier) against Japan.

In the Yan'an refuge of the CCP in these years and through World War II, Mao consolidated his control over the party. His notorious hatchet man Kang Sheng helped him root out any opposition or potential rivals with slanderous rumors, show trials and executions. One memorable case was that of Wang Shiwei. He was a committed Communist and had translated parts of Marx's Capital into Chinese. Mao and Kang set him up and put him through several show trials, breaking him and driving him out of the party. (He was finally executed when the CCP left Yan'an in 1947 in the last phase of the civil war against Chiang kai-shek.)

Mao's peasant army conquered all of China by 1949. The Chinese working class, which had been the party's base until 1927, played absolutely no role in this supposed “socialist revolution.” The one-time “progressive nationalist” Kuomintang was totally discredited as it became the party of the landed gentry, full of corruption, responsible for runaway inflation, and commanded by officers more interested in enriching themselves than fighting either the Japanese (before 1945) or the CCP.

The first phase of Mao's rule was from 1949 to 1957. He made no secret of the fact that the new regime was based on the “bloc of four classes” and was carrying out a bourgeois nationalist revolution. It was essentially the program of the bourgeois nationalist Sun Yat-Sen from 25 years earlier. The corrupt landowning gentry was expropriated and eliminated.

But it is important to remember that “land to the peasants” and the expropriation of the pre-capitalist landholders are the bourgeois revolution, as they have been since the French Revolution of 1789. The regime for this reason was genuinely popular and many overseas Chinese who were not Communists returned to help rebuild the country. Some “progressive capitalists” were retained to continue running their factories. After the chaos of the previous 30 years, this stabilization was a breath of fresh air. The People's Liberation Army also intervened in the Korean War to help Kim il-sung fight the United States and the United Nations forces. But it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that the Korean War was part of a war between the two Cold War blocs, and that what Kim implemented in North Korea after 1953 was another Stalinist “bourgeois revolution with red flags” based on land to the peasants. (North Korea went on to become the first proletarian hereditary monarchy, now in its third incarnation.)

We also have to see the Chinese Revolution in international context. Stalinism (and Maoism is, as mentioned earlier, a variant of Stalinism) emerged from World War II stronger than ever, having appropriated all of eastern Europe, winning in China, on its way to power in (North) Korea and Vietnam, and had huge prestige in struggles around the colonial and semi-colonial world (which was renamed the Third World as the Cold War divided the globe into two antagonistic blocs centered on the United States and the Soviet Union).

There is no question that Mao and the CCP were somewhat independent of Stalin and the Soviet Union. They were their own type of Stalinists. They were also a million miles from the power of soviets and workers' councils that had initially characterized the Russian and German Revolutions, on which basis the Comintern was originally founded in 1919. That is a thorny question that is too complex to be unraveled here. But from 1949 until the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, the Soviet Union sent thousands of technicians and advisors to China, and trained thousands more Chinese cadre in Soviet universities and institutes, as had been the case since the 1920s. The “model” established in power in the 1950s was essentially the Soviet model, adapted to a country with an even more overwhelming peasant majority than was the case in Russia.

World Stalinism was rocked in 1956 by a series of events: the Hungarian Revolution, in which the working class again established workers' councils before it was crushed by Russian intervention; the Polish “October,” in which a worker revolt brought to power a “reformed” Stalinist leadership. These uprisings were preceded by Khruschev's speech to the twentieth Congress of world Communist Parties, in which he revealed many of Stalin's crimes, including the massacre of between five to ten million peasants during the collectivizations of the early 1930s. There were many crimes he did not mention, since he was too implicated in them, and the purpose of his speech was to salvage the Stalinist bureaucracy while disavowing Stalin himself. This was the beginning of “peaceful co-existence” between the Soviet bloc and the West, but the revelations of Stalin's crimes and the worker revolts in eastern Europe (following the 1953 worker uprising in East Germany) were the beginning of the end of the Stalinist myth. Bitterly disillusioned militants all over the world walked out of Communist Parties, after finding out that they had devoted decades of their lives to a lie.

Khruschev's 1956 speech is often referred to by later Maoists as the triumph of “revisionism” in the Soviet Union. The word “revisionism” is itself ideology run amok, since the main thing that was being “revised” was Stalinist terror, which the Maoists and Marxist-Leninists by implication consider to be the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” There were between 10 and 20 million people in forced labor camps in the Soviet Union in 1956, and presumably their release (for those who survived years of slave labor, often at the Arctic Circle) was part of “revisionism.” For the Maoists, the Khruschev speech is often also identified with the “restoration of capitalism,” showing how superficial their “Marxism” is, with the existence of capitalism being based not on any analysis of real social relationships but on the ideology of this or that leader.

Khruschev's speech was not well received by Mao and the leaders of the CCP, whose own regimented rule of China was becoming increasingly unpopular.5 Thus the regime launched a new phase, called the “Hundred Flowers” campaign, in which the “bourgeois intellectuals” who had rallied to the regime, recoiling from the brutality of the KMT, were invited to “let a hundred flowers bloom” and openly voice their criticisms.

The outpouring of criticism was of such an unexpected volume that it was quickly shut down by Mao and the CCP, who began to characterize the Hundred Flowers campaign as “letting the snakes out of their holes” in order to “smash” them once and for all. Many critics were arrested and sent off to forced labor camps.

Internationally, however, Maoism began to become an international tendency, becoming attractive to some people who had left the pro-Soviet Communist Parties after Khrushchev's speech. This was a hard-core ultra-Stalinist minority (who felt, for example, that their own country's CP had not supported the Soviet invasion to crush the Hungarian Revolution forcefully enough). By the early 1960s, in the United States, Europe and around the Third World, these currents would become the “Marxist-Leninist” parties aligned with China against both the United States and Soviet “social imperialism.”

In China itself, the regime needed to shift gears after the disaster of the Hundred Flowers period. There was growing tension at the top levels of the CCP between Mao and the more Soviet-influenced technocratic bureaucrats, who were focused on building up heavy industry. This was the factional situation that led to the “Cultural Revolution” that erupted in 1965.

Therefore Mao launched the country in 1958 on the so-called “Great Leap Forward,” in which Soviet-style heavy industry was to be replaced by enlisting peasants in small industrial “backyard” production everywhere. The peasants were forced into the “People's Communes” and set to work to catch up with the economic level of the capitalist West in 10–15 years. Everywhere pots, pans and utensils as well as family heirlooms were melted down for backyard small kilns to produce steel, at killing paces of work. The result was a huge drain of peasant labor away from raising crops, leading to famine by 1960–1961 in which an estimated 10–20 million people starved to death.6

The debacle of the Great Leap Forward was also a terrible blow to Mao's standing within the CCP. It represented an extreme form of the kind of voluntarism, at the expense of real material conditions, which had always characterized Mao's thinking, as summed up in his famous line about “painting portraits on the blank page of the people” (some Marxist!).7 The Soviet-influenced technocrats around Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping basically kicked Mao upstairs into a symbolic figurehead, too important to purge outright but stripped of all real power. Thus the battle lines were drawn for what became, a few years later, the “Cultural Revolution.”

The “Cultural Revolution” was Mao's attempt at a comeback.8 It was a factional struggle at the top level of the CCP in which millions of university and high school students were mobilized everywhere to attack “revisionism” and return Mao to real power. But this factional struggle, and the previous marginalization of Mao that lay behind it, was hardly advertised as the real reason for this process in which tens of thousands of people were killed and millions of lives were wrecked.9 China was thrown into ideology run amok on a scale arguably even greater than under Stalin at the peak of his power. Millions of educated people suspected of “revisionism” (or merely the victims of some personal feud), including technicians and scientists, were sent off to the countryside (“rustification”) to “learn from the peasants,” which in reality involved them in crushing forced labor in which many were worked to death. “Politics was in command,” with party ideologues and not surgeons, in charge of medical operations in Chinese hospitals—with predictable consequences. Schools were closed for three years in the cities—though not in the countryside (19660–1969)—while young people from universities and high schools ran around the country humiliating and sometimes killing people designated by the Maoist faction as a “revisionist” and a “Liu Shaoqi capitalist roader” (Liu Shaoqi himself died of illness in prison). The economy was wrecked. In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping (who also performed hard rural labor during these years) returned to power, Chinese agricultural production per capita was no higher than it had been in 1949.

In such a situation, where revisionist rule was to be replaced by “people's power,” things got out of hand with some currents who took Mao's slogan “It is right to rebel” a bit too far, and began to question the whole nature of CCP rule since 1949. In these cases, as in the “Shanghai Commune” of early 1967, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had to step in against an independent formation that included radicalized workers. The PLA was in fact one of the main “winners” of the Cultural Revolution, for its role in stamping out currents that became a third force against both the “capitalist roaders” and the Maoists.

(During all this, Kang Sheng, the hatchet man of Yan'an, returned to power and helped vilify, oust and sometimes execute Mao's factional opponents, as he had done the first time around.)

Perhaps the most interesting case of things “going too far,” along with the brief Shanghai Commune, before the army marched in, was the Shengwulian current in Mao's own Hunan province. There, workers and students who had gone through the whole process produced a series of documents that became famous throughout China, analyzing the country as being under the control of a “new bureaucratic ruling class.” While the Shengwulian militants disguised their viewpoint with bows to the “thought of Mao tse-tung” and “Marxism-Leninism,” their texts were read throughout China, and at the top levels of the party itself, where they were clearly recognized for what they were: a fundamental challenge to both factions in power. They were mercilessly crushed.10

Further interesting critiques to emerge from the years of the Cultural Revolution were those written by Yu Luoke, at the time an apprentice worker and, later, the manifesto of Wei Jingsheng, a 28-year-old electrician at the Beijing Zoo on the “Democracy Wall” in Beijing in 1978. Yu's text was, like Shengwulian's, diffused and read all over China. It was a critique of the Cultural Revolution's “bloodline” definition of “class” by family background and political reliability, rather than by one's relationship to the means of production. Yu was executed for his troubles in 1970. The Democracy Wall, which was supposed to accompany Deng Xiaoping's return to power, also got out of hand and was suppressed in 1979.

Mao's faction re-emerged triumphant by 1969. This included his wife, Jiang Qing, and three other co-factioneers who would be arrested and deposed as the “Gang of Four”11 shortly after Mao's death in 1976.12 This victory, it is often overlooked, coincided with the beginning of Mao's quiet outreach to the United States as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. There was active but local combat between Chinese and Soviet forces along their mutual border in 1969 and, as a result, Mao banned all transit of Soviet material support to North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, a ban which remained in effect until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Mao received US President Nixon in Beijing in early 1972, while the United States was raining bombs on North Vietnam.

This turn was hardly the first instance of a conservative foreign policy at the expense of movements and countries outside China. Already in 1965, the Chinese regime, based on its prestige as the center of “Marxist-Leninist” opposition to Soviet “revisionism” after the Sino-Soviet split, had encouraged the powerful Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) into a close alliance with Indonesia's populist-nationalist leader, Sukarno. It was an exact repeat of the CCP's alliance with Chiang kai-shek in 1927, and it ended the same way, in a bloodbath in which 600,000 PKI members and sympathizers were killed in fall 1965 in a military coup, planned with the help of US advisers and academics. Beijing said nothing about the massacre until 1967 (when it complained that the Chinese embassy in Jakarta had been stoned during the events). In 1971, China also openly applauded the bloody suppression of the Trotskyist student movement in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In the same year, it supported (together with the United States and against Soviet ally India), Pakistani dictator Yaya Khan, who oversaw massive repression in Bangladesh when that country (previously part of Pakistan) declared independence.

In 1971, another bizarre turn in domestic policy also took place, echoing Mao's fascination with ancient dynastic court intrigue. Up to that point, Lin Biao had been openly designated as Mao's successor. The Maoist press abroad, as well as the French intelligentsia which at the time was decidedly pro-Maoist, trumpeted the same line. Suddenly Lin Biao disappeared from public view, and in late 1971 it was learned that he, too, supposedly Mao's closest confidant for years, had been a capitalist roader and a deep-cover KMT agent all along. According to the official story, Lin had commandeered a military plane and fled toward the Soviet border; the plane had crashed in Mongolia, killing him and all aboard.13 For months, western Maoists denounced this account, published in the world press, as a pure bourgeois fabrication, including what Simon Leys characterized as the “most important pro-Maoist daily newspaper in the West,” the very high tone Le Monde (Paris), whose Beijing correspondent was a Maoist devotee. Then, when the Chinese government itself confirmed the story, the Western Maoists turned on a dime and howled with the wolves against Lin Biao. Simon Leys remarked that these fervent believers had transformed the old Chinese proverb “Don't beat a dog after it has fallen into the water” into “Don't beat a dog until it has fallen into the water.”

This was merely the beginning of the bizarre turn of Maoist world strategy and Chinese foreign policy. The “main enemy” and “greater danger” was no longer the world imperialism centered in the United States, but Soviet “social imperialism.” Thus, when US-backed Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Chilean government of Salvador Allende in 1973, China immediately recognized Pinochet and hailed the coup. When South African troops invaded Angola in 1975 after Angolan independence under the pro-Soviet MPLA, China backed South Africa. During the Portuguese Revolution of 1974–75, the Maoist forces there reached out to the far right. Maoist currents throughout western Europe called for the strengthening of NATO against the Soviet threat. China supported Philippine dictator Fernando Marcos in his attempt to crush the Maoist guerrilla movements in that country.

Maoism had had a certain serious impact on New Left forces in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unraveling the factional differences among these groups would take us too far afield, and most of them had faded away by the 1980s. But “Maoism,” as interpreted in different ways, was important in Germany, Italy, France and the United States. Some groups, such as the ultra-Stalinist Progressive Labor Party in the United States, saw the writing on the wall as early as 1969 and broke with China in that year. Most of these groups were characterized by Stalinist thuggery against opponents, and occasionally among themselves.14 Their influence was as diffuse as it was pernicious; ca. 1975, there were hundreds of “Marxist-Leninist” study groups around the United States, and hundreds of cadre had entered the factories to organize the working class. By the mid-1970s, three main Maoist groups had emerged as dominant in the US left: the Revolutionary Union (RU) under Bob Avakian (later renamed the RCP), the October League (OL) under Mike Klonsky, and the Communist Labor Party (CLP). To really understand some of the differences between them, one needed to know their relationship to the old “revisionist” Communist Party USA. The more moderate groups, such as the October League, hearkened back to Earl Browder's leadership during the Popular Front years. More hard-line groups, such as the CLP, looked to the more openly Stalinist William Z. Foster. These and other smaller groups fought ideological battles over the proper attitude to take toward Enver Hoxha's Albania, which for some (after China's pro-US turn) remained, for them, the sole truly “Marxist-Leninist” country in the world. One small group trumpeted the “Three 3's: Third International/Third Period/Third World.”

In Germany, New Left Maoism was on the ascendant after 1968, a process which it gingerly termed the “positive overcoming of the anti-authoritarian movement” of that year. A major current was the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), which fought against the much larger DKP (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, the pro-Soviet party, which itself still barely accounted for 1 percent of the vote in German elections). Out of the KPD came a multitude of smaller “K-Gruppen,” with poetic names such as KPD-ML Rote Heimat (Red Homeland, with distinct populist overtones of “soil”). Only the DKP had any influence in the working class, with its infiltration of the trade unions; it was content to sit back after 1972 when the Social Democratic government of Willy Brandt issued its “radical decree” and came down hard on the K-Gruppen, much as the Italian Communist Party (PCI), with 25 percent of the vote in the 1976 elections, not only sat back while the Italian government criminalized the entire far left as “terrorists”; it actively helped the government in the suppression of the far left after the Red Brigades kidnapped and executed the right-wing politician Aldo Moro in spring 1978, as he was on his way to sign the “historical compromise” which would have allowed the PCI to join the Christian Democrats in a grand coalition.

In France, Maoism never had the clout of the much larger main Trotskyist parties (Lutte Ouvriere, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire and the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, all of which are still around today, in the latter two cases under different names). Most of the Maoist “Marxist-Leninist” groups had been discredited by their manipulative role during the May–June 1968 general strike, such as one which marched to the barricades on the night of the most serious street fighting (pitting thousands of people against thousands of cops), announced that the whole thing was a government provocation, and urged everyone to go home, as they themselves proceeded to do. But in the spring of 1970, one small ultra-Stalinist and ultra-militant Maoist group, the Gauche Proletarienne (Proletarian Left), momentarily recruited Jean-Paul Sartre to its defense when the government banned it, following some spectacular militant interventions around the country. Sartre, who had over the previous 20 years been successively pro-Soviet, pro-Cuba and then pro-China, saved the GP from extinction, but it collapsed of its own ideological frenzy shortly thereafter. (It notably produced two particularly cretinous neo-liberal ideologues after 1977, Bernard-Henry Levi and Andre Glucksmann, as well as Serge July, editor-in-chief of the now very respectable daily Liberation, which began as the newspaper of the GP.) Former French Maoists turned up in the strangest places, such as Roland Castro, a fire-eating Maoist in 1968, who became an intimate of Socialist President Francois Mitterand, and was appointed to a leading technocratic position.

Maoism in Britain again had next to no influence, whereas both the Trotskyist Socialist Labor League (SLL) and the IS (later SWP), at their 1970s peaks, had thousands of members and a serious presence in the working class.

In Japan, finally, the most advanced capitalist country in Asia, Maoism (as in Britain and in France), had no chance against the large, sophisticated New Left groups in the militant Zengakuren, which not only had no time for Maoism but not even for Trotskyism, and which characterized both the Soviet Union and China as “state capitalist.” (Only the small underground, pro-North Korean “Red Army” could in any way have been characterized as Maoist.)

In 1976, as mentioned earlier, the Maoist Gang of Four, who up to Mao's death had been at the pinnacle of state power, were arrested, jailed and never heard from again, as the “revisionists” headed by Deng Xiaoping returned to power and prepared to launch China on the road to “market socialism,” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” beginning in 1978.

This bizarre ideological period finally ended in 1978–79, when China, now firmly an ally of the United States, attacked Vietnam and was rudely pushed back by the Vietnamese army under General Giap (of Dien Bien Phu fame). Vietnam, still allied with the Soviet Union, had occupied Cambodia to oust the pro-Maoist Khmer Rouge, who had taken over the country in 1975 and who went on to kill upward of one million people. In response to China's attack on Vietnam, the Soviet Union threatened to attack China. For any remaining Western Maoists at this point, the consternation was palpable.

As elsewhere in different forms, the Maoists in the United States did not go quietly into that dark night. Many of those who went into industry or otherwise colonized working-class communities rose to positions of influence in the trade union bureaucracy, such as Bill Fletcher of the Freedom Road group, who was briefly a top aide to John Sweeney when the latter took over the AFL-CIO in 1995. Mike Klonsky of the October League traveled to China in 1976 to be anointed as the official liaison to the Chinese regime after the fall of the Gang of Four, but that did not prevent the OL from fading away. The RCP sent colonizers to West Virginia mining towns, where they were involved in some wildcat strikes (some of those strikes, however, were against teaching Darwin in the schools). The RCP also supported ROAR, the racist anti-busing coalition, during the crisis in Boston in 1975. Bob Avakian, in 1978, with four other RCP members, rushed the podium when Deng Xiaoping appeared at a press conference in Washington with Jimmy Carter to consummate the US-China alliance; they were charged with multiple felonies and Avakian remains in exile in Paris to this day. In 1984 and 1988,15 Maoists of different stripes were deeply involved in Jesse Jackson's run for the presidency, giving rise in 1984 after Jackson lost out to the “Marxist-Leninists for Mondale” phenomenon.

Members of the Communist Workers Party (CWP) suffered a worse fate, when in 1979 members of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina (where they had organized in several textile towns) fired on their rally, killing five of them. But during Occupy Oakland in the fall of 2011, it emerged that no less than Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, as well as some of her key advisors, and high-level members of the Alameda County Labor Council, were former members of the selfsame CWP.

More recently, former members of the RCP who had their fill of Avakian's cult of personality formed the Kasama network, which now has a much larger, if more diffuse influence, at least on the internet.

On a world scale, Maoists recently joined a coalition government in Nepal, and various groups, some reaching back to the 1960s or even earlier, continue to be active in the Philippines. The Indian Naxalites, who were stone Maoists in the 1970s before they were crushed by Indira Gandhi, have made something of a comeback in poor rural areas. The Shining Path group in Peru, which was similarly crushed by Fujimori, has made a steady comeback there, openly referring to such groups as the Cambodian Khmer Rouge as a model.

To conclude, it is important to consider the post-1978 fate of Maoism in China itself.

For the regime which, since 1978, has overseen nearly 35 years of virtually uninterrupted and unprecedented economic growth, averaging close to 10 percent per year over decades, with the methods of “market socialism,” Mao Zedong remains an indispensable icon of the ruling ideology. In officialese, Mao was “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong.” The “wrong” part usually means the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, although serious discussion and research on those events remains largely if not wholly taboo.

As a result, a rose-tinted nostalgic view of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution has become de rigeur in the so-called Chinese New Left.16 There have even been echoes of Maoism in the recent fall of top-level bureaucrat Bo Xilai, former strongman of Chongqing with a decidedly populist style which led some of his opponents to warn of the dangers of a “new Cultural Revolution.” Given the impossibility, in China, of frank public discussion of the entirety of Mao's years in power (and before), and the small fragments of information available to the young generations about those years, it is hardly surprising that currents opposing the appalling spread of social inequality and insecurity since 1978 would turn back to that mythical past. This hardly makes such a turn less reactionary and dangerous. Everything that happened after 1978 had its origins in the nature of the regime before 1978. There was no “counter-revolution,” still less a transformation of the previously existing social relations of production. Once again, Maoism reveals its highly idealist and voluntarist conception of politics by a focus on the ideology of top leaders, as it previously did with Khruschev's 1956 speech and thaw. China from 1949 to 1978 was preparing the China of 1978 to the present. Even those pointing to the “shattering of the iron rice bowl,” the No. 1 ideological underpinning of the old regime, ignore the practice of significant casualized labor in the industrial centers in the 1950s and 1960s. Until a true “new left” in China seriously rethinks the place of Maoism in the larger context of the history of the Marxist movement, and particularly its origins in Stalinism and not in the true, defeated world proletarian moment of 1917–1921, it is doomed to reproduce, in China as in different parts of the developing world, either grotesque copies of Maoism's periodic ultra-Stalinism (as in Peru) or to be the force that prepares the coming of “market socialism” by destroying the pre-capitalist forms of agriculture and engaging in forced, autarchic industrialization until Western, or Japanese and Korean, or (why not?) Chinese capital17 arrives to allow the full emergence of capitalism.

Originally posted: October 15, 2012 at Insurgent Notes

• 1The term “Stalinism” is used here throughout to describe a new form of class rule by a bureaucratic elite that, in different times and different situations, fought against pre-capitalist social formations (as in China) or against Western capitalism. Some, myself included, see Stalinism as “state capitalism”; a smaller number, influenced by the theory of Max Schactman, see it as “bureaucratic collectivism.” Orthodox Trotskyists call Stalinist regimes “deformed workers' states”; the Bordigists simply call it “capitalism.” Marxist-Leninists see such regimes as…socialism. This is a huge debate which has taken place ever since the 1920s but one could do worse than read Walter Daum's The Life and Death of Stalinism, which, while defending a variant of the Trotskyist view, argues that the Soviet Union and all its “offspring” were state capitalist. Outside those countries where a Stalinist regime has state power, I use the term “Stalinist” to describe those forces which are fighting to establish one, or apologists for one or another version of “real existing socialism.”
• 2All this is recounted in detail in Harold Isaac's book The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, first published in 1934 and republished many times since. Readers should be cautioned that Isaacs, a Trotskyist when he wrote the book, later became a “State Department socialist” and toned down the book with each reprint, but later editions still tell the essential story.
• 3These three factions arose after Lenin's death in 1924: the Trotskyist left advocating export of the revolution and an intense industrialization policy based on strong extraction of a surplus from the peasantry; Bukharin argued for “socialism at a snail's pace” with a much laxer attitude toward petty producer capitalism by the peasants, and Stalin “wavering” in between. On this, see the review of the book of John Marot in the current issue of IN.
• 4To put it in a nutshell: the historical trajectory of peasants under pre-capitalist conditions has shown itself in most cases to be toward private small-plot cultivation. In such conditions, as in Russia, they can be the allies of a proletarian revolution, in which the “democratic tasks” of socialist revolution by the workers combine with those of the bourgeois revolution (land to the peasants). There is a bourgeois mode of production (capitalism), there is a transition to the communist mode of production in which the working class is the ruling class (socialism); there is no “peasant mode of production,” which limits the historical role of peasants to being allies of one dominant class or another.
• 5See for example Ygael Gluckstein's early book Mao's China (1955), particularly the chapter entitled “The Regimentation of the Working Class.” Gluckstein (who later became better known under his pseudonym Tony Cliff, leader of the British International Socialists and then renamed the Socialist Workers' Party) was the first person to systematically analyze China as a form of state capitalism.
• 6Some estimates run as high as 35 million. Past a certain point, the exact figures are not so important as the unmitigated disaster caused by the policy.
• 7Apparently neither Mao nor any other member of the CCP had read Marx at the time of its founding in 1921. They emerged out of the many ideological influences current in East Asia before World War I: socialism (vaguely understood), anarchism, Tolstoyan pacificism, and Henry Georgism, among others. “Voluntarism” as the term is used here refers to such episodes as the Great Leap Forward, or the (above-mentioned) characterization of the Soviet bloc as “capitalist” based on Khruschev's speech, or the (more idealist) definition of class in the Cultural Revolution not by an individual's relation to the means of production but by their family background or “revisionist” ideas. For background on the voluntarist ideologies current at the time of the founding of the CCP, cf. Maurice Meisner, Li ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism; on Mao's voluntarism inherited from his early reading of Kant, cf. Frederic Wakeman, History and will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung's Thought
• 8The most important analysis of the Cultural Revolution in these terms is Simon Leys's Chairman Mao's New Clothes, published in French in 1969 and translated into English a few years later. Leys also wrote brilliant books on the cultural desert created by Maoism in power, both before and after the Cultural Revolution: Chinese Shadows, The Burning Forest, and Broken Images. His work is required reading for anyone nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution today.
• 9Some flavor of these events is described by the liberal academic Song Yongyi. His book on the massacres of the Cultural Revolution is unfortunately only in French and in Chinese. He also edited an Encyclopedia of the Cultural Revolution which is dry and academic.
• 10For Shengwulian's most important statement (1968) see their text “Whither China?”
• 11The Gang of Four came to be seen as the leaders of the Cultural Revolution towards its end. The original central organ that was directing things both openly and behind the scenes was comprised of 10 people. Among these were Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Li and others.
• 12Once again, the books of Simon Leys, cited above, are all beautiful portraits of the ideological and cultural climate in China up to 1976. One curious book, to be read with caution but useful nonetheless, is by Dr. Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994). Li was Mao's personal physician from 1956 to 1976 and lived most of those years in the elite Beijing compound with other top party personnel, and traveled with Mao wherever he went. The English translation of the book was greeted with media-driven sensationalist focus on accounts of Mao's voracious sexual appetite for beautiful young women, which actually makes up a minor theme. Its real interest is the portrait of the comings and goings of the top CCP leaderships during the last 20 years of Mao's life, their rises and their downfalls. It also recounts Mao's deep reading in Chinese dynastic history, the so-called “24 dynastic histories” covering the years 221 BC–1644 AD. Mao's fascination was above all with court intrigue. According to Li, he had the greatest admiration for some of the “most ruthless and cruel” emperors, such as Qin Shihuangdi (221–206 BC), who founded the short-lived Qin dynasty. Qin ordered the infamous “Burning of the Books” and executed many Confucian scholars (p. 122). Another favorite was the Emperor Sui Yangdi (604–618), who ordered the building of the Grand Canal by massive conscripted labor, during which thousands died.
• 13But another account surfaced, of which an English translation was published in 1983: Yao Ming-Le, The Conspiracy and Death of Lin Biao. It purports to be a pseudonymous account written by a high-ranking CCP member who was assigned to develop the cover story of Lin's flight and death. According to Yao, a struggle to the death between Mao and Lin had been underway, and Lin was plotting a coup to overthrow and kill Mao. The plot was discovered, and Lin Biao was arrested and executed. No less a skeptic of sources coming out of China than Simon Leys, in his book The Burning Forest, argues that Yao's account agrees with other known facts
• 14For a full account, see Max Elbaum's book Revolution in the Air, which purports to see these groups as the “best and the brightest” to emerge from the American 60s. For a short course, see my polemical review of Elbaum, “Didn't See The Same Movie.”
• 15This foray into Democratic Party politics is enthusiastically recounted in Max Elbaum's book cited above.
• 16See the article of Lance Carter on the Chinese New Left in Insurgent Notes No. 1.
• 17Chinese investment in Africa in recent years, aimed first of all at the procurement of raw materials, has taken on serious dimensions; already some African leaders are warning of a “new colonialism.” On the level of high comedy, Western leaders have the effrontery to solemnly warn China “not to exploit Africa's natural resources.”

IN Editors' Note: As part of our attempt to have the widest possible coverage of global struggles, we publish below an article translated from the Portuguese-Brazilian website Passa Palavra. The article deals with the systematic, pervasive web of containment of social struggles and class conflict developed by the Brazilian Workers' Party (Partido do Trabalho, or PT) over decades, beginning in the 1980s, and culminating in its ten years in state power since 2002, first under Lula (2002–2010) and now under Dilma Rousseff (2010–). IN readers familiar with similar modes of integration in the United States and elsewhere will agree that the American NGOs (for example) are nothing in comparison to the webs of control of the PT, now strengthened by a decade with state power at a national level in Latin America's biggest economy.

Passa Palavra Editors' Note: The dissatisfaction that has come to the fore recently inside the social movements has to be explained in a very broad context. This context must be probed and analyzed, in order to turn it around, before it is too late.

I exaggerate a bit, but Lula1 seems to command a broader consensus than Jesus. 94 percent of the people approve of him or say that his government is OK.


—Gilmar Mauro

Sectors of the working class, as for example Forca Sindical2 , which did not support Lula, are now supporting Dilma3 . Religious movements did not support Lula, but are now supporting Dilma. These popular forces, in the current government, are bigger and more substantial.


—João Pedro Stédile

1.

The ruling classes, politicians as well as bosses and corporate officers, try to hide the mechanisms of power. They cannot hide repression, because one of the characteristics of police action is to be very visible. But the police and the courts often help to conceal other, much more efficacious and discreet mechanisms of power. And we on the far left frequently help bolster this illusion, when we mourn or celebrate the victims and when we denounce those immediately responsible for the repression, but we forget to break through the deep and silent web of interests which underlies the violence of institutions.

In capitalism, the mechanisms of domination are hardly external to the working class, as is the case with the police and the courts. These mechanisms of domination also permeate the working class from within, notably through political parties and the unions. Contrary to what people often imagine, the ruling classes are on more solid ground when they have at their service governments in which parties of the left are hegemonic. If these parties are well rooted in the working class, it becomes much easier to carry out the measures required for the development of capitalism. In the two centuries of the history of capitalism, and in all countries without exception, this is a general rule: capitalism renews itself and develops by appropriating for itself movements originating on the left, taking them over for its own ends. The examples are public knowledge, for anyone who wishes to study them, and they should be a secret for no one.

It has been verified—and recent years provide numerous examples—that left-wing parties succeed better than those of the right in accelerating the development of capitalism and in implementing measures that are onerous for the majority of the population. This happens because left-wing parties have at their disposal more mechanisms of domination within the working class and, moreover, because they need to rely on repression less than right-wing parties.

In the same way, when trade-union bureaucracies assume positions in the government, it is much easier for the government to get the working class to accept capitalist measures or even to stir up enthusiasm for these measures in a significant part of the class. Unions tied to governments in this way fulfill a very important function because they can launch movements and strikes and, afterwards, can present as partial gains exactly those measures which the ruling groups and companies intend to push through. Workers are thereby transformed into an active agent in the modernization of capitalism.

2.

Since the election of October 2002, Brazil provides a good example of a government acting through mechanisms internal to the working class, above and beyond the usual repression. Much of the discussion in recent months about the evolution of the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra) (MST) and other social movements would be clearer if it were discussed in this perspective.

In contemporary Brazil, the two main mechanisms of domination within the working class are the unions and the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT).

The entry of the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) and Forca Sindical4 into the government constitutes a factor of enormous importance. There are few countries in the world in which the capitalists can directly guide the unions through government ministries.

It is clear that this entry compromises the combative appearance of the CUT, but this does not mean that those trade unions still in the opposition are able to develop a more combative platform. One factor explaining this is the opposition unions' preservation of the same hierarchical and bureaucratized structure, remote from the rank-and-file, as that of the unions allied with the government. In particular, they continue the capitalist management of considerable union funds and other holdings, which prevent them from transforming themselves into effective fighting organizations.

Unions today are becoming—not only in Brazil but throughout the world—large capitalist investors. In Brazil, the unions mobilize more than 600,000,000 reals5 an year merely from union dues. This figure has to be further multiplied if we take account of the numerous mechanisms of compulsory contributions the unions use. To these in turn we have to add the colossal amounts accumulated and invested in pension funds. These figures are neither visible to the public, nor to union members, nor even to most union leaders. What the unions lose on one hand in mobilizing capacity, they gain on the other hand in economic power, and from this viewpoint there is no difference between the CUT and the unions in opposition. This explains a recent episode in the steelworkers union in Sao José dos Campos (State of Sao Paolo), an entity affiliated with the Central Sindical e Popular– Conlutas,6 which used typical management methods to contain a work stoppage by its own staff. But this is far from being a unique case.

The transformation of the unions into capitalist investors—at times large investors—helps fan internal rivalries, which helps explain the fiasco of the unification attempted by Conlutas and the Intersindical7 in June 2010.

It is in this way that the trade-union elements in the government extend their power through supposedly oppositional unions.

The PT is another mechanism of domination capable of permeating the working class and immobilizing it or even pulling it into the government camp. It is clear that the PT became an almost exclusively electoral machine years ago, cut off from any rank-and-file militancy. But this is not why the far-left oppositional parties failed to develop any significant presence. One of the most regrettable results of this situation was the sum total of votes obtained by the Socialism and Freedom Party (Partido Socialismo e Libertade or PSOL), the Unified Socialist Workers Party (Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores, or PSTU), the Brazilian Communist Party (Partido Comunista Brasileiro or PCB) and the Party of the Workers' Cause (Partido de Causa Operaria or PCO) in the first round of the presidential elections in October 2010. These four parties, added together, received exactly 1.0 percent of the votes cast.

This situation explains why the PT has numerous and varied channels of political penetration of the working class, particularly because its organizational structure permits the existence of factions. In this way, while the government continues to move ahead in the development of Brazilian capitalism and neo-imperialism, tendencies further to the left continue to form within the PT, as occurred in December 2011 with the founding of the Popular Socialist Left (Esquerda Popular Socialista). This kind of maneuver, repeated over time, is interesting. The evolution of the government creates the motive for the formation of new tendencies, but this evolution does not prevent these tendencies from staying within the same political framework as that laid down by the government. It is like a current which is constantly forming more and more links to its left, but which is always pulling them back to the right. In this way, through the PT as a whole and, in particular, through its left-wing tendencies, the capitalists maintain and reinforce their political penetration of the working class.

This penetration is further consolidated when the PT appears as an instrument of struggle in smaller cities, without traditions of social or left-wing militancy, whereby these struggles are subordinated to the logic and the schema of the PT in larger cities.

If we look at things in a certain detail, we see that the far-left organizations exist in the large cities and in their peripheries, but that their presence in smaller cities, cut off from the large metropolitan areas, is practically nil, and exists thanks to ties with rank-and-file and mass movements such as the MST. In places where even the MST does not exist, it is the PT which makes up the left, and which leads the rank-and-file movements. In this way the mechanisms of capitalist domination not only penetrate the working class, but proliferate and consolidate themselves at various levels.

In these locales, where the mode of exploitation and submission of workers is realized in more backward forms, including illegal ones, and where repression is carried out on the margins of the state and with an extreme degree of violence, the PT became a refuge for a majority of the people fighting against local ruling forces, especially where the Church did not already play this role; in places where it did, the PT became more and more allied with it.

Once affiliated with a mass party, every militant, however cut off from the major centers, winds up being partially linked to the national processes of struggle. The mediation of the PT, which takes place through the “political formation” of these militants in the “PT way of doing things” (which over time has been transformed into the “PT way of governing”) includes knowledge of and respect for modern institutions (from labor laws to civil rights to the electoral system) in all those sectors which have come to be called “civil society,” and also in what we call social classes.

This formation by the party also occurs as people learn about various types of social struggles. And where, before, there was no trade union, or at least no modern union adept at negotiations, one comes into being. The same thing happens in places where there had been no real electoral disputes. Where the youth or minorities are not organized and do not understand themselves in these terms, this possibility emerges, and develops from there. Once that occurs, the spread of nuclei of the landless movement (mainly those of the MST) in locales where the struggle for land takes place in naked form merely flows from that. This new stage of struggle, organized through the social movements, is already emerging in many places and is integrated with the PT.

This dynamic in the construction of the country's working class gives the impression in many places—primarily those most cut off from the major centers—that the PT is the most left-wing organization. Their formation by the PT allows many workers to give shape to their demands, and allows many other workers to feel more protected when confronting the local conservative elites. On the other hand, thanks to the PT's formation of militants, direct confrontation between antagonistic classes ceases, and with this new phase, conciliation emerges as the main alternative. All this took place well before the Lula government, and become worse when the PT came to power nationally.

With this arrival in state power, what changed was not the strategy of the PT, but the party's ability to impose an electoral logic on social movements which were previously in the orbit of the unions. Henceforth, by its control of the state machinery and with its legitimacy in the world of business, the PT became more capable of guaranteeing payoffs to those who supported it. In this way, in slightly more than 20 years, workers, subjugated by backward forms of exploitation and confrontation with local elites, became electoral instruments through the mediation of the social movements.

The pragmatism necessary for electoral politics not only changes the way in which militants see themselves and see their struggles: it pulls people away from grassroots work and integrates them into campaign machines. Social struggles wind up not only having a problem of self-conception, but they suffer from a lack of militants who can give continuity to projects they previously thought of as central. If we add this to the development of the country's productive forces, currently intensifying labor in the agrarian sector and thereby even further reducing the need for human labor in the small and medium-size cities closest to agricultural zones (and thus responsible for a large percentage of labor migration,8 ) we have the real picture of how struggles in the countryside are being attenuated.

Once they have entered the party and have adapted to its respective municipal organizations, the new militants are almost forced to link up with the group of state deputy X, of federal deputy Y, and of senator Z, on pain of political ostracism. These compulsory links demand from the militant more loyalty to the parliamentary group than to the social base which formed him or her as such. Any concrete political activity (agitation, candidacies) has to pass muster with these obligatory connections. The latter are, in general, much more rigid than previous local alliances and more stable than those realized with figures of the center or the right in the political framework existing before the militant's involvement with the PT. In general, the musical chairs in positions of power, as choreographed by the center and the right, implies the rotation of allies, whereas these compulsory affinities with a leftist label hinders, when it does not prevent, ebbs and flows with other political currents. That is why all the rival political groups fall apart and reconstitute themselves under new names in these locales, whereas the militants of the PT, because they do not have the motives for those adopting this or that label, are thus closer to people who once engaged in fierce opposition, and they remain bound to the party, giving it stability and continuous growth.

This is how the mechanisms of domination penetrate not only the working class, but also proliferate and consolidate at different levels, including different sources of information and media-cultural collectives which attempt to be the ideological expression of this work in progress.

3.

This is the framework for an analysis of the recent evolution of the social movements, and specifically of the MST. The mobilization of these movements to vote for Dilma in the second round of the 2010 elections seemed to have marked an important turn, signaling their clear entry into the orbit of the government. Be that as it may, this evolution corresponds to deeper tendencies, because the MST is forming alliances with the government not only at the federal but also at the state level and, given the traditions of clientelism in the countryside, the endorsement of Dilma and of other PT candidates by national leaders of the MST points to difficulties in getting beyond this framework.

In the local settlements9 of the MST, undergoing structural problems (as indicated above) as they were at the time of the electoral campaigns of 2005, the majority of militants left to work for the candidacies of various left-wing politicians, particularly those of the PT. However, because politics abhors a vacuum, the lack of rank-and-file work in the settlements allowed the growth there of evangelicals10 not sharing the movement's ideology, and leading to a sharp division within the settlement itself. Four years later, the division was still there and, in the new electoral cycle, the situation repeated itself, further complicated by a division between militants working for the PT and others working for the PSOL. When lessons are not learned, it means that the problem lies at the root.

The situation in Bahia illustrates the effects of this root problem. Bahia is the state where the MST has the highest number of encampments and where the state leadership is completely tied to the state government of the PT. Further, thanks to regional coordination such as those in the southwestern part of Bahia (Vitória da Conquista and environs), the MST adopted an immobilist posture tied to local electoral concerns, rather than shaking up the political conjuncture (one that is more important than elections) with direct actions against the latifundias.

The problem proliferates. In Paraná, the MST leadership made an electoral pact with the candidate of the Democratic Labor Party (Partido Democrático Trabalhista, or PDT), Osmar Dias, brother of Álvaro Dias of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (Partido da Social-Democracia Brasileira, or PSDB), a member of one of the largest landowning families in the state. At the same time, in the encampments and settlements, left-wing parties, such as the PSTU or the PSOL, were denied entry.

Confronted with this proliferation of events, it is impossible to explain each case as a special one; they are rather a tendency in a general evolution.

In the analysis presented here, we have to highlight the role played by the chief minister of the General Secretary of the President of the Republic, Gilberto Carvalho.11 The Weekly Conjuncture: Balance Sheet of One Year of the Dilma Rousseff Government, published by the Center for Research and Support for Workers (CEPAT), states that Gilberto Carvalho has primary responsibility for the negotiations and good relations established between the Dilma government and the various social movements during the year 2011.12 Carvalho's profile in actions and in administering conflicts is highly conciliatory, such that he is respected and considered to be the legitimate interlocutor of the social movements in their relations with the Federal government. As evidence of Carvalho's role, the CEPAT emphasizes that the chief minister “was present at the debates which voted on the minimum wage and on the incidents of the Jirau rebellion; he was the flack catcher in the Belo Monte debate; he tirelessly met with trade unionists, as well as with commissions and all kinds of movements and was, on one hand, a ‘bridge’ between the demands of the social movements and the executive branch and was, on the other hand, a spokesperson for the government's positions.”13

Gilberto Carvalho himself, in an interview with the magazine Valor Econômico, explains even better Dilma's intentions when she appointed him to the post: “She had a very simple conversation with me. She said: ‘Gilbertinho, I need you because I want someone who can inform me about the reality of the social movements, their demands, their failings, the crises; someone who can sensitize me to this suffering of the people, someone who tells the truth. I never want to be deceived.’”14 Carvalho also pointed out that “every ministry is in dialogue with the social movements. My arena has no monopoly of these contacts, but it is where, shall we say, this dialogue is organized. It began with the question of the minimum wage, when I held meetings with the top levels of the unions.”15 But it is not merely the union leaderships who fall within the networks of the chief minister. “Also included are the so-called popular movements, such as the MST, the indigenous, the blacks, the gays and the lesbians, in short, all forms of organization in society, including the NGOs and the churches.”16

In the same interview, Gilberto Carvalho also comments on Dilma's statement about the MST where the president says that while the MST is an ally, she will not permit or open any dialogue about invasions of public buildings and productive farms. “What you can never imagine is any criminalization of this movement by the government. There is no margin of error for this. We are going to try to convince the comrades that dialogue is very important. We cannot dialogue while making ourselves the accomplices of any illegality. We will never retreat from this position.”17 Carvalho recognizes that conflicts are not going away, but at the same time he explains the stance of the government toward them: “Actions will happen, they can happen, but then people have to pull back. We are not militants, this is not a political party; this is a government. You can't always do what you want. You have to act within parameters. This is what the president's statement means.”18

When, at the beginning of this article, we mentioned the mechanisms of domination which permeate the working class, this is precisely what we were thinking about. Minister Gilberto Carvalho is one of the most important cogs in these mechanisms and his conciliatory stance has obvious echoes in the social movements. We should recall that none other than Carvalho himself announced the gains of the day of struggle, August 27, 2011, on the site of the MST itself. Watch the video of Minister Carvalho's speech in the encampment of Via Campesina, in which he said to the landless rural laborers: “We are a government whose doors are always open, because the government belongs to you. And the country depends fundamentally on your labor, so we can continue being a country which produces food, and which also produces generosity in people's hearts, as we move toward a truly fraternal and egalitarian society.”

What would we say about a boss who made a speech to a union, congratulating them on the success of a strike by workers in his factory?

But the issue is not merely Minister Gilberto Carvalho. Although José Dirceu stayed on the sidelines in recent years, his political importance never declined and it is thus significant that he participated in important meetings with the MST leadership of the state of Sao Paolo in the first months of 2011. But recently, José Dirceu, from behind the scenes, helped create a new left-wing tendency in the PT, the Popular Socialist Left (Esquerda Popular Socialista), linked to social movements, at the same time that its constitutive assembly was meeting in the MST's Florestan Fernandes National School. Governing will be difficult, so the PT and the MST will be more closely linked.

In this regard, in counterpoint to certain analyses by some sectors of the left, Luiz Dulci—who, as secretary general of the President of the Republic during the Lula government,19 was Gilberto Carvalho's predecessor—gives an interesting diagnosis of the results of both popular demands and those of Brazil's civil society. “Some of the most massive demonstrations of the last 20 years took place precisely during Lula's government, but news coverage almost always blacked them out or downplayed them, perhaps because they called into question, in practice, the (supposed) ebb of social movements and the (non-existent) ties between civil society and the state.”20 Far from throwing in the towel or being co-opted, the social movements were, in Dulci's opinion, fundamental for the strengthening of governability and legitimation during Lula's terms in office. “To prove this, we have only to remember the three marches of the working class, promoted by the central leaderships of the unions, with 40,000–50,000 people each, or the ‘Cries from the Land’ (Gritos da Terra) organized annually by the Contag (National Confederation of Agricultural Workers—Confederacao Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura); the national encampments of the MST, the splendid ‘daisy marches’ which turned out 30,000 peasants from all over Brazil on the Esplanada dos Ministerios, not to mention the days of struggle of the youth, the mobilizations of feminists and of black people and the immense ‘Gay Parades’ taking place in various Brazilian state capitals.”21

Defending this “democratic management method,” Luiz Dulci means that all these actions described above “already constitute, in practice, a real national system of participative democracy.”22 To drive home the breadth of such practice, Dulci emphasizes: “Policies of development, for generating employment and profits, for social inclusion, health, education, the environment, the youth, social security, women's rights, racial equality, and the democratization of culture, among many others, were discussed in 63 national conferences which directly mobilized, at various stages, more than 4.5 million people in roughly 5000 Brazilian municipalities. These policies are permanently funded and guaranteed by councils on social participation which today exist in every ministry.”23

What Luiz Dulci is describing, with names and numbers, is the web of relationships emanating from the capitalist center and infiltrating and diffusing themselves in the working class. Police clubs are the visible expression of these politics, drawing the line beyond which workers may not go. Those paths open to workers are different ones, set off by tighter and tighter links between the social movements and the government. And these links are not only political.

They are also economic.

“A noteworthy example of this new form of governing,” in the opinion of Luiz Dulci, “is the Annual Harvest Plan for Family Agriculture, which increased the financing of the sector from 2.5 billion to 15 billion reals, and which is promoting an authentic revolution in small-scale Brazilian agriculture, benefiting three million families (about twelve million people), giving them an economic weight and a political strength they never had. It suffices to point out that, currently, 70 percent of the total food consumed comes from family agriculture. This leap of almost 600 percent in financing is concretized through technical assistance, by agricultural insurance, by guaranteed prices and by the food acquisition program.”24 It should be pointed out that the Harvest Plan was not a unilateral initiative of the Federal government. According to Dulci, as he reaffirmed this new participational-institutional method, the “Harvest Plan was developed by the government together with the main entities of the sector—the National Federation of Agricultural Workers (Federacao Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura, or Contag), the National Federation of Workers in Family Agriculture (Federacao Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura Familiar, or Fetraf), the Movement of Small-Scale Farmers (Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultures, or MPA), and the Movement of Rural Landless Workers (MST)—in the National Council of Food Security.”25

But the amounts and sourcing of financing are vaster and more numerous than Luiz Dulci has indicated.

On one hand, the National Program for the Strengthening of Family Agriculture (PRONAF) quadrupled between the crop years of 2002–2003 and 2006–2007, rising to 10 billion reals. The resources designated for the National Program of Education in the Agrarian Reform (PRONERA) and its partnerships with universities and public technical schools rose from an annual average of 10 million reals in 2003 to 35.4 million reals over the next four years. Nonetheless, these figures should be compared to the market turnover of large-scale agriculture, which is seven times larger than peasant and family agriculture: 231.5 billion reals for agribusiness and 32.8 billion reals for family agriculture in the harvests of 2003–2004 and 2007–2008.

In this respect as well, we should note that, according to the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), “in 2009, the bank strengthened its contact with social movements in the areas of agricultural and cattle production as well as with environmental groups. In this sense, a dialogue was established for the support of cooperatives and the landless workers—which has been done in partnership with the Bank of Brazil through its business strategy for Sustainable Regional Development (DRS) and the Bank of Brazil Foundation (FBB).”26

But the economic links are not being established only with governmental institutions.

The deeper involvement of the MST and its financial resources has been accompanied by a deeper involvement with corporations.

Recently, various departments of the economic technocracy have announced that “Fibria, formed in the fusion between Votorantim and Aracruz, is planning to announce, in three months, a project for a settlement of 1,300 families. The partner in this agreement is the Movement of Landless Workers (MST), the very same group that three years ago destroyed the center for GM foods in Aracruz, in Guaíba.” But, curiously, “iFibria received the leaders of the MST in August at its annual strategy meeting.” We might note that this news was announced in the business press, which workers do not read, but not on the site of the MST, which gives out information in a, shall we say, rather selective form.

Fibria's project of building a settlement of ten thousand hectares in the interior of the state of Bahia involves partnerships, in addition to the MST, with INCRA27 and with the state government of Bahia. Moreover, the campaign of the governor of Bahia, Jaques Wagner, was financed by Fibria itself. According to the president of Fibria's administrative council, José Luciano Penido, the settlement will be based on family agriculture and will have a focus on education. “We want to teach the young people in the MST how to use science and education, to dismantle an unnecessary antagonism,” he declared. But who will learn more from whom?

This is not a unique case. In Bahia as well, the MST is pushing settlements to integrate themselves into programs of Petrobras,28 on a monoculture basis, to produce castor for biodiesel fuel.

The dissatisfaction revealed recently within the social movements, of which the resignation letter of 51 militants from organizations such as the MST was not the only, more or less public, example, has to be explained in a very large context. This is the context which must be taken apart and analyzed, to attempt to counter it, before, as usual, it is too late.

Postscript: Further on the State and the Social Movements

February 27, 2012

Passa Palavra Editor's Note: The state of Sao Paolo published information confirming the analysis we made in the above article, justifying our worst prognoses.

On February 5th of this year, Passa Palavra published the above article “The State and Social Movements,” in which we made an analysis of the principal political and economic mechanisms used by the governments of Lula and Dilma, or those even used directly by banks and large corporations, to involve the social movements in the activities of the government and to advance the modernization of Brazilian capitalism.

Curiously, the most flagrant material we put forward in the article, showing the acceptance of this orientation by the current leadership of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) was not questioned in any commentaries, nor were there even any manifestations of outrage. It seems that the long-term relationship established between the MST leadership and the head of the General Secretary of the President of the Republic, Gilberto Carvalho, is accepted as a natural one, as are the relationships established between the MST leadership and the corporations of several large economic groups. That these facts could pass without comment indicates the degree of demoralization to which social struggles have sunk.

On February 26th, the newspaper O Estado de S. Paolo published a curious news item, signed by Alana Rizzo, which confirms our analysis and unfortunately our worst prognoses. “Watch out for the collateral effects of urban conflicts during the election year,” the newspaper says; “the Planalto Palace29 unleashed an operation to detect the ‘hot’ areas scattered around the country and to hook up with the local community leaders. This mapping lists 192 conflicts by apartment block, but the focus is on the three states where the opposition is in power and which have PT members or militants of the Communist Party in leadership positions in popular movements: Sao Paolo, Minas and Goiás.”

Evoking the concern raised in Brasilia over the violent events in Pinheirinho,30 the journalist reveals that the office of the President of the Republic ordered the Coordination for Prevention and Mediation of Conflicts over Land, under the aegis of the national secretary for Housing, Ines Magalhaes, to present a report on the “potential areas of conflict: and ‘areas which are ready to become new sources of tension,’ focusing on the ‘fuse’ of the ‘red zone,’ i.e., a radicalization of the occupations planned by the movements.”

Explaining with more precision, the journalist writes: “The government requested an overview with the profile of families, social leaders and the land question in the locales of the invasions. Analyses were also made of every occupation and of the possibilities for intervention.” And, after indicating that the “report was presented to the General Secretariat of the President, headed by the minister Gilberto Carvalho and the main official responsible for dialogue with the social movements,” the news item clarifies something confirming the analysis presented in “State and Social Movements.” “Internally,” the journalist writes, “the Presidential Palace says it is watching the conflicts from afar to avoid political discussion. But the plan of the government is to act in real time with the movements.” It was to make this action “in real time” possible that the PT and Gilberto Carvalho, over a long period, have developed close ties with the leaders of these movements.

Finally, the journalist indicates that “one of the most critical areas on the list is in the (state of) Minas, with 14 registered cases of urban land disputes,” and she cites as an example the community of Dandara, in Belo Horizonte, where an occupation will have lasted three years by April 2012. After having told the journalist that “we are worried about the outrage which took place in Pinheirinho,” Fray Gilvander Moreira, one of the leaders of this community, and an advisor to the Pastoral Land Commission and to the MST, added: “A large part of the PT wants its own candidate (in Belo Horizonte) and supports the community. Dandera could be the tipping point for the election in Minas.” That a three-year occupation and the effects of a possible massacre can be measured by their electoral consequences says a great deal of the state at which social struggles have arrived.

• 1Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, steelworker militant of the 1980s, and a major figure in the rise of the Brazilian Workers Party (Partido do Trabalho, or PT) who was elected president of Brazil in 2002 (following three earlier failed attempts) and who remained in office until 2010.
• 2A Brazilian trade union.
• 3Dilma Rousseff, also of the PT, who was elected president of Brazil in 2010.
• 4These are the two main trade union federations in Brazil.
• 5At this writing, the dollar–real exchange rate is $1=2.3 reals.
• 6Translator's note: another minority union federation which broke away from the dominant CUT and which is not in the government.
• 7Another minority left-wing union in Brazil.
• 8The population and GDP of medium-sized cities are growing more than in the rest of Brazil. Cf. IPEA.
• 9The MST over decades has occupied land, sometimes unused, sometimes under cultivation by the big landholders, demanding its redistribution. The outcomes vary according to a complex balance of forces, but the MST's national impact in Brazil has been huge. See the MST's web site.
• 10“Evangelicals” refers to Protestant fundamentalist groups, hostile to the left, which have been making inroads in previously Catholic populations in different parts of Latin America for decades.
• 11Gilberto Carvalho is an historic member of the PT, which he joined at its founding. His active trajectory on the left was tied to grassroots movements of the Catholic Church, inspired by liberation theology. He began his career as a militant in the group Pastoral Operária. After belonging to the national steering committee of that organization, Carvalho had an important role in trade-union and party development, as the secretary general of the PT for a number of years. Worthy of note, for the later influence of this experience for his role as interlocutor with the popular movements, was Carvalho's activity as coordinator at the Cajamar Institute for Education, a school for union cadre formation created by the CUT and the PT.
• 12The Weekly Conjuncture: Balance Sheet of One Year of the Dilma Roussef Government, Centro de Pesquisa e Apoio aos Trabalhadores (CEPAT) and the Instituto Humanistas Unisinos, December 2011.
• 13Ibid.
• 14“Dilma has a different style, but it's the same line,” Valor Econômico, Feb. 22 2011.
• 15Ibid.
• 16Ibid.
• 17Ibid.
• 18Ibid.
• 19Luiz Soares Dulci is an outstanding figure in the PT. In addition to serving as head of the General Secretariat of the President of the Republic, Dulci was one of the main coordinators of the electoral campaign of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002. Having been a militant in Convergência Socialista during the military dictatorship, he was a founding member of the CUT. He was always present among the leading national cadre of the PT, and had an important trade-union activity among teachers and played a key role in the trade-union school of the CUT in Belo Horizonte (state of Minas Gerais). He was also a Federal deputy and participated in two terms of office when the PT controlled the city of Belo Horizonte. His main role during Lula's two terms was in strengthening the dialogue of the Federal government with social organizations and movements.
• 20Luiz Soares Dulci, «Participação e mudança social no governo Lula», in Emir Sader and Marco Aurélio Garcia (eds), Brasil: Entre o Passado e o Futuro, São Paulo: Boitempo, 2010, p. 144.
• 21Luiz Soares Dulci, op. cit. p. 136.
• 22Luiz Soares Dulci, op. cit. p. 136.
• 23Ibid.
• 24Ibid.
• 25Ibid.
• 26BNDES,
  href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250512222529/http://www.bndes.gov.br/SiteBNDES/bndes/bndes_en/Institucional/The_BNDES_in_Numbers/Annual_Report/annual_report2009.html">Annual Report 2009, Rio de Janeiro: BNDES, 2010, p. 20.
• 27Instituto Nacional de Colonizacao e Reforma Agraria (National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform), a government agency dealing with the land problem in Brazil.
• 28Petrobras is Brazil's nationalized oil company.
• 29The building in Brasilia housing the offices of Brazil's president.
• 30Translator's Note: Pinheirinho is the site of a land occupation which was violently terminated by military police in September 2011.

Introduction

A few months ago, a participant in a listserv that I belong to posted a proposal for “A Day without Teachers” in solidarity with the members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) who subsequently went on strike for seven days in September. See my article on the strike in this issue. For what it's worth, I don't think that anything ever came of the proposal. Nonetheless, its sentiments deserve scrutiny.

He quoted from a Call for that Day:

The situation in public education as it stands is intolerable and is only getting worse.

The carefully planned attacks by the ruling class to defund, deskill, and privatize our education system have resulted in the avalanche of attacks we face on a daily basis. Massive budget cutbacks, exploding class sizes, media vilification, testing mania, school shut downs and charter school expansion, destruction of tenure and seniority, packaged curriculum, and on and on.

Both Republicans and Democrats serve this agenda and while so called “education reformers” use racial justice for their public relations, in truth their policies only increase the oppressive inequities facing our children, parents, and communities.

Make no mistake. We must choose between watching the promise of our children silenced or joining a massive resurgence to fight against these attacks and for a transformed educational system worth fighting for. One that delivers quality education for all. And that choice is upon us.

This fall, teachers in Chicago are being pushed into a corner they can't survive without fighting-a 29 percent increase in their work day and the replacement of standard raises by financial favoritism, essentially ending the union itself.

This struggle is of crucial importance, signaling the fate of teachers for the country as a whole. Chicago is home to the third largest teacher's union in the country and a President of the United States seeking reelection this fall. Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's ruthless Mayor who is out to destroy the union, is Obama's former Chief of Staff.

If Chicago loses this struggle, so do we. The Chicago Teacher's Union is preparing to strike. But to win they need the world behind them. If we want quality education for all, we need the Chicago Teachers to win this showdown.

That is what “A Day Without A Teacher” is all about. Like the millions of immigrants who refused to work on May 1st, 2006. Like the thousands of Madison teachers whose courage showed people across this rich nation what is possible if teachers take collective action for the well being of all.

We all face struggles like what is happening in Chicago. Only by acting together can we reverse the tide. Another education is possible. A Day Without A Teacher is the first step in making it so.

Stand with Chicago when they need it!

Quality Education for All!

In response to that post and some other comments on the list, I wrote the following (which has been slightly edited for this article):

I'd suggest that we stop thinking of teachers as a special case and enlarge the discussion and debate way beyond them—their "specialness" doesn't help them or the rest of us as much as it might seem.

Let me start with tenure. If tenure is understood as protection for the teacher/faculty worker from harassment and possible firing for the expression of views about work and the world (in other words, political positions) and from harassment or firing for reasons other than political views, I think we should reconsider the special treatment that teachers and college faculty members enjoy as compared to virtually all other members of the working class. The only defensible position is to demand protection from firing for all workers. But that should not be understood as demanding protection from what I would suggest amounts to “scabbing” on fellow workers by acts that inflict harm on the children of and members of the working class. In this instance, I want to define “scabbing” as the opposite of solidarity.

Tenure effectively provides teachers and college faculty with protection from another quite serious challenge to their continued work—that is the possibility/likelihood/certainty that they are not effectively educating the overwhelmingly working-class students in their schools and colleges. Whether viewed from the perspective of students' (and parents') everyday experiences in schools and colleges or from the perspective of the long-term trends in student learning, it is evident that there is a lot going on that's deeply harmful to the children of workers and workers themselves. While teachers and college faculty do not deserve all of the blame, they must be prepared to take a lot of the responsibility. I think they should define their relationship to their students as an obligation of social solidarity. But not very many do so—even those ostensibly on the left.

The most ostensibly “militant” faculty union in NYC is the one at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University, a private non-profit college that enrolls an overwhelmingly working-class student body. The tuition charges are not comparable to those of elite private colleges but it is close to $15,000 a year for full-time undergraduates—an amount that most students can only afford by taking out student loans. Those students clearly expect that it's worth the money. But the six-year graduation rate at the University is about 18 percent. But, so far as I know, the union has never said a word about that scandalous figure nor discussed what it might do to change things. Indeed, I'd be willing to bet that many of the faculty members don't even know what the graduation rate is). The tuition costs for baccalaureate degree students at the public CUNY colleges are much lower—about $5,000 a year for full-time study and, at some of them, the graduation rates are quite a bit higher but not all that good. In a particularly outrageous case, Medgar Evers College which enrolls an almost entirely black student population, the most recent six year graduation rate (as reported to the federal government) is 11 percent. Once again, the CUNY faculty union (the Professional Staff Congress), with a classic soft-left leadership, says nothing about it or about its members' responsibilities.

The question of teacher and union responsibility for school failure must be taken seriously. While teacher union leaders have often expressed their support for the best possible education for students, it is clear that their primary concern has been to secure and maintain sufficient improvements in wages, benefits and working conditions to obtain enough support from members to allow for their re-election. The best illustration of how this works is the Unity Caucus of the UFT in New York City, the caucus that Al Shanker established—in part to thwart the Communist Party remnants in the city's teaching force and in part to forge a caucus that could be relied upon to provide support for the election campaigns of favored candidates in municipal and state elections). To this day, the Unity Caucus remains the base of support for Michael Mulgrew, the UFT president, and Randi Weingarten, now the AFT president.

Beyond the narrow focus of the leaders, it is also often the case that rank and file groups within teacher unions emphasize their determination to obtain even better wages, benefits and working conditions but infrequently address the needs or concerns of students and parents—other than to claim that if teachers get a better deal, students will benefit. Perhaps the classic instance of these claims is the one that smaller class sizes will lead to improved student achievement. In all likelihood, most students would benefit from the greater attention made possible by smaller numbers but there is no guarantee that a teacher will know how to pay productive attention or how best to promote learning. The quality of the teaching always matters. However, as opposed to the mindless preoccupation with measuring and evaluating the performance of individual teachers, I believe that teaching quality needs to be understood and supported as part of a process of collaborative work among all the teachers and other staff in a school. That, in turn, requires a collective commitment to the well-being and development of the students that a school enrolls. Once again, however, that collective commitment cannot be taken for granted. The profound cleavages between school staffs and students/parents in NYC (and I would imagine most other cities) are the results of multiple complex interactions in classrooms, cafeterias, hallways, parent meetings, etc. More than anything, there is a frequent, and often justified, perception by students and parents that many of the people who work in the schools do not care especially much for the students—I should emphasize that not all such perceptions are necessarily accurate but there is enough substance to them that they cannot and should not be discounted.

The coincidence of reductions in school budgets and the prevalence of school closings with attacks on teachers and teacher unions can make it appear that teachers and students/parents have unproblematic common interests. I don't think that is the case. If and when the establishment and preservation of union power requires opposition to the demands of community residents, so be it! This was the case in the 1968 NYC strikes.1 Indeed, I believe that teacher union power in New York City was built on the basis of the defeat of the black community—as was the power of the police union built on the basis of the defeat of a referendum on a civilian review board in 1966. It's worth noting that the new and improved UFT/AFT leadership seldom mentions the union's actions in that epochal battle. Instead, they have learned to simultaneously play to both their own members and to parents.

In 1968, I was a college student supporter of community control and believed that such community control would lead to better schools. I increasingly believe that community control would not have led to better educational outcomes. Nor do I think that most of the commonly advocated strategies will do so. Indeed, one of the most striking things about just about everything that's happened in schools over the last fifty-seven years (since the 1954 Brown decision) is how little things have changed for the better. In fact, I think you could make a case that they've gotten worse—in spite of all sorts of things that should have made things better—like the end of legal segregation, the requirement that children with disabilities be provided an appropriate education and the requirement that English language learners be identified and offered meaningful choices leading to English language proficiency.

My guess is that, in virtually every medium to large-sized city in the United States, the following is true—

1. black and Hispanic students graduate from high school at significantly lower rates than their white and Asian counterparts;
2. students identified as having special needs hardly graduate at all (other than the children of prosperous families who seek special needs labels as a strategy for extra time for their children on high-stakes tests such as the SAT);
3. large numbers of children born into non–English speaking families living in the United States and consistently attending elementary and middle schools wind up in high schools not yet proficient in English—because they have been relegated to fairly dreadful ESL or bilingual education programs;
4. a large majority of high school graduates are not especially well-prepared for college.

As I wrote in my “Rethinking Educational Failure” article in Insurgent Notes #3, I think there is a powerful relationship between the overall decline in the social economy of many communities and the somewhat paradoxical hanging on to education as a way out and a more or less simultaneous disinvestment of the time and energy needed for substantial learning.

The establishment of a new type of solidarity relationship between the people who work in educational institutions should be at the front and center of all of our efforts. Bonds of solidarity between teachers and the members of the communities they work in (however those communities might be defined) must be built on the basis of a willingness to confront the ways in which the normal workings of schools and unions and the normal ways that teachers interact with students and parents are part of the problems that students and parents face.

I would also suggest that the obligations of social solidarity are not limited to education workers. I think they also extend to healthcare workers and to all those workers whose quality of work performance has the potential to protect or hurt fellow workers—I'm thinking of workers such as airline mechanics, railroad workers, pharmaceutical technicians, food safety inspectors and many more. I believe that workers need to actively take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. I realize, of course, that this is treacherous territory—as convincingly demonstrated by the writings posted on Disparaged CNA. Bosses of every stripe will not hesitate to play the responsibility card when they insist that individuals work harder and longer. I have no easy answers to offer other than to suggest that the issues need to be confronted.

One way that they might be confronted is through the establishment of joint worker–working class organizations where the issues could be brought forward and struggled over. Jack Gerson, a retired Oakland school teacher and an activist in Occupy Oakland and Occupy Education in Oakland, wrote separately about his article on Longview published in Insurgent Notes #5:

I should say here—but probably won't try to shoehorn it into this article—that the Occupy movement has gotten me to think more about something I had been toying with already: namely, that the "labor left's" rank and file caucus approach is the wrong framework. I don't know if you're familiar with the debate around this in the IS [the predecessor of the ISO, Solidarity and the League for a Revolutionary Party, —JG] in 1969–71, but at the time several of us were counter-posing "struggle groups" to "rank and file caucuses." The difference was that struggle groups would take up more than just workplace and work-related issues, and would be open to community members who weren't working at the union's work sites. Basically, I think of them now as pre–workers' councils type formations. As it happens, the collapse of the mass movements removed most opportunities to connect rank and file organizing with mass work around broad social issues, and "struggle groups" disappeared from the discourse. Rank and file caucuses won that debate in practice, but they've just been incubators for "progressive" bureaucrats and secondary reform leadership. I think that the Occupy movement presents the chance to build those pre–workers' council type formations, and we should jump on it. I'm working with some others in trying to build the Occupy Oakland education committee (including some from Advance the Struggle; some parents organizing against school closures; some afterschool workers; a few teachers), and that's the conception I have in mind.

At around the same time that Jack was talking about, I was a member of a group called the Taxi Rank and File Coalition in New York. I was actively recruited by the IS but never joined—mostly for reasons having to do with its insistence on democratic reforms of the union and taking over the unions. Over time, the Rank and File Coalition became a very different kind of rank and file group—so much so that one CP stalwart used to call us "rank and infantile." There's now a web page which includes all our newspapers, some history and other documents. We never used Jack's language but I think we were inspired by some of the same concerns. In any case, it's long past time for us to break out of old models and do something new.

In that regard, I'd urge everyone on this list to read Mike Staudenmaier's new history of the Sojourner Truth Organization, Truth and Revolution—especially the section on what Mike describes as the “first period” of intensive workplace activity.2

I got a lot of responses to the post within the list and after I circulated it beyond the listserv—mostly positive but also mostly saying that I needed to talk more about the difference between my argument and “teacher bashing.” A number of people also cited evidence of teachers they knew who were, in their minds, exceptionally dedicated to their work, especially caring in their relationships with children and working under increasingly worse conditions—typified by significant growth in class sizes and by layoffs prompted by school district budget shortfalls. I'm going to try to respond to those concerns.

Since my post was mostly focused on the responsibilities of teachers as members of the working class, I didn't say anything about the array of antagonists that teachers and their unions are facing. I therefore will try to capture what I think are the essential elements of what has clearly become a nationwide effort to frame education “reform.” That framework enjoys the support of opportunistic politicians, appropriately maligned hedge fund philanthropists, ego-inflated Ivy Leaguers and powerful foundations, but elements of it are also supported by many individuals that find the state of the schools to be pretty deplorable.3 It's not easy to sort out the casts of characters or the different implications of different “reforms,” but we need to know what we want to be for and what against.

I also hope to extend the scope of my argument to include criticisms of other dimensions of what I'll suggest can be called “ordinary” left perspectives on education—by which I mean a set of convictions and positions that are more or less held in common by social democrats, Trotskyists (of all varieties), Stalinists, Maoists (once again of all varieties), anarchists (of at least some varieties) and left communists (by which I mean anti-state Marxists of all varieties). I hope I haven't left anyone out.4 Let me take on the ordinary leftists first.

On Ordinary Leftism

I'd suggest that, the common “ordinary” perspectives are the following:

1. More or less automatic insistence that teachers (and other education workers) and teacher unions bear little, or no, responsibility, for the failures of public education;
2. Unqualified support for “better” contracts regarding wages, benefits and working conditions;
3. Assumption that better contracts will lead to better educations for students;
4. Support for more militant union action on behalf of members;
5. Opposition to standardization of curriculum or teaching approaches;
6. Opposition to high-stakes testing for assessing student learning or evaluating teachers;
7. Opposition to extensive test prep in classroom instruction;
8. Opposition to the closing of failing schools;
9. Opposition to the establishment of charter schools;
10. Advocacy for more resources for education as the primary remedy for educational inequity (frequently linked to a set of arguments about the adverse effects of poverty on children's school achievement).5

These common positions are then situated within a range of other political views regarding the nature of trade unions, the character of the union leaderships, matters of union democracy and relationships with the Democratic Party. Even then, however, I would suggest that the commonality is much more substantial than are the differences. Furthermore, with the possible exception of the need for militant action, the commonly held views are all but indistinguishable from those of the two national teacher unions (the AFT and the NEA) and their local affiliates. I want to suggest that “rank and file” opposition to bureaucratic or un-democratic local or national organizations of teachers should not be a sufficient condition for support of rank and file organizing among teachers. Teachers may very well be being screwed by their leaders but insurgent groups need to commit to something other than “We don't want to be screwed anymore!” In that context, let's look at what's been going on among rank and file educators.

Recently, several teacher groups in New York City have coalesced in the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE). Here's their self-description:

• We believe our strength lies with our members, organized into strong chapters. This requires an active effort to educate our membership about how their union works, and involve them in democratically determining its direction. We believe in social justice unionism.
• We fight for equitable public education and against racism in the schools. Building an alliance of students, parents and community members is a key part of our strategy. The UFT must fight for our members and our students. Our working conditions are our students learning conditions.

The onslaught of high-stakes testing, privatization, weakening or elimination of job protections, school closings and charter co-locations threatens the very existence of public education as we know it. Unionized teachers in particular have been singled out for demonization. The strategy put forth by our union leadership to take on these challenges is inadequate. UFT officials rely primarily on lobbying, media blitzes and procedural lawsuits. When occasional mobilizations are called, they are organized without a long-term plan for escalating actions or increased membership involvement. The union leadership takes a concessionary stance in order to maintain its “seat at the table” with politicians and corporate forces like Bill Gates, who turn around and attack teachers and the union at every opportunity. Union leadership then sells serious concessions to the members as victories claiming—“It could have been worse.”

Some of the key policy failures of the UFT leadership:

• Supporting mayoral control even in the face of the devastating impact
• A weak stand against closing schools
• A compromising position on charter schools and co-locations
• Giving up on the fight to reduce class size
• The acceptance of rating teachers based on high-stakes tests
• Agreeing to merit pay even though every single study shows the failure of this policy
• Steadily deteriorating working conditions and power in the workplace
• Erosion of job security and tenure protections
• A one-party undemocratic system that shuts out the voices of the members

We need something different. A union that fights for the rights of students, teachers and communities.

A union that fights for racial and economic justice inside and outside our schools.

The group has tried to be explicit about its desired relationship with the larger community:

MORE believes that the UFT can play a crucial role in rebuilding the social movements necessary to halt the onslaught of school closings, budget cuts, and test-driven curricula and teacher evaluations. These attacks are destroying our working conditions and our students' learning conditions. Students in lower income schools and in communities of color have been hit hardest of all. A MORE leadership will trade union members as organizers all over the city. We will work with parent and student activists to build a city-wide movement for a vision of school reform based on well-funded schools, equal access for all, and democratic governance of our schools. Finally we will mobilize a movement to reverse the transformation of our schools into test prep factories. The Mulgrew/Unity leaders often speak the right words and have their pictures taken with parent and civil rights leaders. But they have made no effort to build the kind of bottom-up mobilization needed to turn the tide in our favor.

The New York group has apparently established close ties with the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) which is now leading the Chicago Teachers Union. The Caucus's web page suggests that it is committed to building alliances between educators and communities:

The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) is a group of dedicated teachers, retirees, Paraprofessional School Related Personnel (PSRPs), parents, community members and other champions of public education. We fight for equitable public education and hope to improve the Chicago Teacher's Union (CTU) so that it fights both on behalf of its members and on behalf of Chicago's students.

Its web page lists a number of education reform and community organizations as allies.

But what do all these professions of concern for the community amount when it comes to real demands and action? Recently, the CTU published a report titled The Schools Chicago's Students Deserve, which it asserts is based on research. There is not a word in the recommendations about the need to change what's going on in classrooms and schools every day. What's really astounding about the report, although not surprising, is that it completely neglects the findings of what is perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of school improvement ever done in the United States—an analysis that was completed on the basis of twenty years of empirical data from Chicago's public elementary schools by researchers associated with the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research housed at the University of Chicago.6

The authors concluded that:

Students' academic learning occurs principally in classrooms as students interact with teachers around subject matter. How we organize and operate a school has a major effect on the instructional exchanges in its classrooms. Put simply, whether classroom learning proceeds depends in large measure on how the school as a social context supports teaching and sustains student engagement. Through our research, we identified five organizational features of schools that interact with life inside classrooms and are essential to advancing student achievement.

The five essential components for school success were:

• Effective leaders: The principal works with teachers to implement a clear and strategic vision for school success.
• Collaborative teachers: The staff is committed to the school, receives strong professional development, and works together to improve the school.
• Involved families: The entire school staff builds strong relationships with families and communities to support learning.
• Supportive environment: The school is safe and orderly. Teachers have high expectations for students. Students are supported by their teachers and peers.
• Ambitious instruction: Classes are academically demanding and engage students by emphasizing the application of knowledge.

I realize that this is the kind of language that readers of radical political journals are inclined to meet with glazed eyes and suspicious brains but I want to suggest that readers avoid doing that and imagine, if those supports are essential to improving education, what kinds of recommendations and demands rank and file educators should be making to get schools to move in that direction?

What is most noteworthy about their findings is that they move the discussion about good teaching away from individual teachers in their own classrooms. Instead, good teaching is the result of a complex inter-play of values, practices and supports. Interestingly enough, the most fervent defenders of teachers and the most biting of critics share a preoccupation with the individual teacher. The defenders insist upon the need for the teacher to be free of constraints that interfere with his/her imaginative engagement with students and object to proposals that teacher quality be evaluated since good teaching really can't be measured. The critics insist that what the individual teacher does or does not do is the make or break factor in student learning and therefore are preoccupied with the development of measures to assess the “value added” by each teacher all alone. Either view is a fiction; children learn in complex environments where the contribution of any particular teacher is more or less significant.

There are some unusually charismatic teachers but they offer little in the way of helpful models for most teachers. In a somewhat different context, the recently deceased poet Adrienne Rich, described the influence of Mina Shaughnessy on writing teachers at the City College of New York in the late 1960s/early 1970s:

By personal example, Mina taught many of us that teaching is not charisma, or inspiration, but careful preparation and hard work. That impressionistic and histrionic methods were a waste of a student's time, that a romantic pedagogy cannot take the place of a truly accurate identification. She managed to convey all of this without preaching or admonishing, by the kinds of examples she brought to staff meetings, by her own presence which became, for me at least, a kind of personified intellectual conscience, and, above all, by her respect, untinged by white liberal romanticism, for the minds of the young women and men with whom we were working.

The authors argue that trusting relationships among the school staff and between the staff and parents and children are essential preconditions for good schools. Many of the essential elements reflect the importance of social cohesion within the institution. Such bonds of trust and cohesion can only be developed within environments that are humane for all involved.

For the most part, urban public schools do not come close to the kinds of internal organization that's needed to sustain good teaching and significant learning. Furthermore, some, probably many, have become toxic environments where there is little likelihood that things might become much better.

As a result most kids are going to schools that are not providing them with much of an education. This is so much the case that we need to take seriously the question if there is public education to be defended. The education that children receive in the public schools of prosperous suburbs or the gentrified neighborhoods of many cities or in the more or less elite schools based upon examinations (such as Stuyvesant High School in New York) has very little to do with the public education that most city kids, kids in poor suburbs and in many rural areas are getting. And there's some evidence that things are getting more unequal.

The responsibility for the sorry state of affairs can be distributed across many different constituencies—corporation-dominated policy makers, politicians of all varieties, school district leaders, principals who have little idea about what they're doing and teachers. In this article, I am mostly interested in the teachers since I'm interested in highlighting the ways in which they contribute to the existing state of affairs and the ways in which they might come to break away from the practices that yield the results we have. I am especially interested in encouraging teachers to rethink the relationship between intentionality and responsibility.

Nicole Pepperell has some useful ideas about this:

…actions can have multiple layers of consequence. Some layers are immediate and easy to perceive, so that most social actors will have some awareness of their responsibility for effecting these immediate consequences that follow from their actions. Some layers, however, are much more indirect and downstream—and may depend on the tandem performance by many other social actors of the same, of other kinds, of social practices.

…

Marx thinks the complexity of the aggregate process generates so many sticking points—so much experiential flypaper—on which competing theories can get stuck. When stuck, theories fixate on a certain level of consequence, but lose the ability to keep track of other levels. Sometimes, as with vulgar political economy, this can be apologistic and self-serving: it can be in the interests of a particular observer to attend to certain consequences of their actions, but not others. Sometimes it can be closer to a socially-instituted optical illusion: some consequences can be incredibly difficult to see, because other aspects of our social experience are more prominent, and tend to deflect the eye in a different direction.

…This isn't to say that it's impossible for people to understand what they are contributing to, but that it's easier for many participants to focus on the immediate consequences of their actions—interacting with colleagues, earning a wage, holding down a “respectable” position in society—than on the indirect and aggregate effects which rely on the tandem performance of many other people. It's easy to rationalise that withholding one small contribution will in any event have little impact on the end result. And, if the impact of withholding your own contribution is so small, the calculus of how much risk to take on, for that small impact, becomes more difficult for those who confront it.

…We are each of us participants in immediate actions that are not on their face harmful—and may even be, on a local level, morally beneficial. Our actions have consequences, however, beyond this immediate and easily-perceptible layer of experience. Combined with the actions of others, in a complex global network, we make our small contributions to what, in some cases, are horrific end results. How do we think our responsibility for these downstream consequences? What sorts of institutions would be required to prevent this sort of blind, senseless, thoughtless causation of a rolling juggernaut of human tragedy?7

When the normal operations of schools results in widespread failure, we have no alternative but to disrupt those normal operations. Teachers and organized groups need to break with the regularities and routines within their schools and within school systems which reproduce educational failure and inequality. That's not what the Chicago Teachers Union did when it went on strike and it's not what the MORE group in New York is about. Both groups leave those regularities and routines securely in place. I'd suggest that teachers should join with interested parents and other community members to scrutinize every single aspect of what does and does not go on in their schools and school districts and determine the extent to which it contributes to failure and inequality (regardless of what it was intended to do) and once they have done so, that they refuse to go along and develop strategies to bring the evidence and their determination to refuse to the attention of all involved, especially students and parents and be prepared to make common cause with them not only on the occasion of big events like school closings and teacher strikes, but on an everyday basis—which is where the most damage is being done to children.

Some of the school-level matters I can think of offhand are the following: student and teacher schedules, planning and preparation activities, diagnostic assessments, class placements, referrals to special education, school behavior rules, discipline procedures, curriculum and instruction (down to the everyday details), instructional materials, and homework. At the school system level, they would include the role of seniority in layoffs and assignments to schools, intra-district inequities in school funding (as reflected for example in the use of formulas to determine the number of “positions” a school gets, without regard to the costs of those positions) and, as I'll explore a bit more below, the enrollment patterns in selective schools. I do want to emphasize, though, that teachers should not become preoccupied with the problems imposed through contracts and district policies since too often a preoccupation with even genuine problems imposed from the outside can obscure what's close at hand.

Let me close this section with a word about money. I have no doubt that education (along with childcare, healthcare and elder care, as well as other human needs) should have far more resources devoted to it. But, unlike many, I do not think that austerity has been introduced as a nationwide ruling class strategy. In fact, average per capita spending (in current dollars) on public education in the United States steadily increased from $5,001 in 1992 to $10,615 in 2010. The last two years may have changed that pattern but not in ways that would fundamentally alter my point.

The national average does obscure significant state to state differences with some states spending less than $8,000 per student and others spending more than $16,000 in 2009–2010. In addition, there are significant differences between districts. In Illinois, Chicago spent $11,596 per student but the suburban Palatine Township High School District spent $17,213. But the difference expenditure levels don't always correspond to what we might expect. In 2009–2010, New York City spent $19,597 per student but Half Hollow Hills, a wealthy Long Island district, only spent $19,020. (The current New York City school budget exceeds $20 billion.) In many cases, school expenditures are financed by real estate taxes and it is likely that budgets in some places have been severely impacted by the foreclosure crisis and other decreases in revenues for cities and states but that same thing is not true in other cases. In addition, per capita averages are misleading because they collapse the costs for very expensive items (such as special education) with expenditures for less expensive ones.

So, what's the point of all this? Simply put, I don't believe that it's helpful for teachers and their unions to avoid taking responsibility for what goes on in schools by claiming that the failures are due to funding cuts. Funding cuts matter a great deal in some situations and not very much at all in others. That observation has nothing at all to do with the need to fight against budget cuts and, more importantly, budget inequities.

Beneath the Surface of Education Reform

In 2009, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago issued a report entitled “Still Left Behind: Student Learning in Chicago's Public Schools.”8 It presented clear evidence that, in spite of numerous claims to the contrary by the school system, almost two decades of reform efforts in that city had not produced much in the way of improved achievement. It also presented what might be considered the standard message for what was needed to change things for the better:

The vested interests have no incentive to publicize the reality [of the poor performance of the schools, —JG]. If the real state of affairs were widely known, perhaps the pressures would grow for fundamental reform—including a tough-minded system for evaluating teachers and principals, and dismissing those who do not perform, getting rid of the entire tenure system, taking results into account in setting teacher compensation and bonuses, and the broad outsourcing of the management of failing schools to independent organizations through charters and contracts.

…

We cannot change the fact that some CPS students start school at a disadvantage. But we can change the fact that Chicago's schools do too little to overcome that disadvantage. Although there are many superb principals and teachers working for CPS, too many of Chicago's schools have too few excellent teachers. Chicago should offer school families more and better choices. Established charter schools, according to CPS reviews, consistently perform better than the “comparison” schools their students would otherwise have attended. On May 31, 2009, the Illinois legislature increased the legislative cap on Chicago charter schools from 30 to 70. It also authorized 35 “contract” schools, which likewise operate with greater autonomy and flexibility. All these charter and contract schools—both the established ones and the new ones—need buildings; they also need adequate funding, which should be no less than the per-pupil funding received by traditional Chicago public schools.

We end where we began. Until all Chicago's school families have school choices that include more innovative charter or contract schools, “equal opportunity” for them will be only a slogan.

Let me take up just some of the issues associated with the standard prescriptions: 1) school choice; 2) charter schools; 3) high-stakes testing; 4) teacher evaluations; and 5) business model education management.

School Choice

The NYC public school system has perhaps done the most to expand school choice. By way of example, the system now has more than 400 high schools and admission to the overwhelming majority of them is open to any student entering high school. Of those 400 or so schools, more than half are relatively new—mostly small. Many of them were opened to replace large failed schools. The somewhat frantic pace of school closings and new school openings has had mixed results. The graduation rate has improved but only a small minority of high school graduates is considered to be ready for college.

The efficacy of choice hinges on the availability of enough good schools to choose from and on the degree of selectivity that's applied in admissions decisions to the more successful schools. In a 2011 New York Times column, Michael Winerip reported that children graduating from the fifth grade of PS 24 in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn seldom gained admission to District 15's most successful middle schools. Of 110 graduates, only five were admitted to MS 51, perhaps the district's most high achieving school, while 36 were admitted to IS 136, a nearby consistently low-performing school. And the patterns of inequity within District 15 are magnified in other districts across the city.

Perhaps the single worse example of such inequities is the profile of students admitted to the city's exam high schools. Black and Hispanic students combined comprise about 70 percent of the total population in the city's schools. But at Stuyvesant High School, one of eight schools that admit students on the basis of a special exam taken in 8th grade, only 2 percent of the incoming ninth graders this year were black and only 3.5 percent were Hispanic. The percentages at the other seven exam schools are a bit better but still dreadful. In spite of significant exposure of the situation, going back more than fifteen years, nothing effective has been done to change the situation and even modest proposals are shouted down.[refRecently, the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a complaint with the US Department of Education alleging that the composition of the student bodies violated civil rights laws.][/ref] A revelation of the thinking of the current leadership of the city's Department of Education regarding the significance of the issue came about when they decided to force Brooklyn Latin, a school for high achievers where initially admission was not based on the exam, to adopt the exam instead of a more holistic admissions process which had yielded a much more representative student body.

Expanding choices in the city's schools has effectively resulted in expanded choices for two somewhat discrete populations (determined by an inter-play between neighborhoods, wealth, race and ethnicity) and more inequity. But the city's charter schools, in some ways, represent a countervailing development because they do, to some extent, represent meaningful choices made by parents.

Charter Schools

New York City now has about 160 charter schools, not quite 10 percent of the total number of public schools in the city. They enroll approximately 5 percent of the city's public school children. All but six of the charter schools are operated by non-profit organizations and state law prohibits any new charter schools being operated by profit-making entities. (To be sure, the difference between profit-making and not-for-profit means less than some might think when the chief executives of some not-for-profit charter operators earn salaries approaching $400,000. On the other hand, we might be tempted to say the same thing about the difference between a company and a union when Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, makes $493,859 a year.)

Charter schools receive the same per capita funding as the city's regular district schools. The teachers in most of them are not unionized but there is no bar to union organization—teachers in fifteen of them are in the UFT. Admission to the charter schools is by lottery open to any interested family. There are preferences given to siblings of children already in a school and to residents of the local community school district. But there are no academic requirements for admission. Charter schools are disproportionately located in local school districts with the worst performing regular schools. Two high-performing districts in Queens have no charter schools.

In Harlem, 20 percent of children are now attending charter schools. While parents of young children in Harlem have no choice about the zoned school their children will attend, no one is forcing the Harlem parents to send their kids to a charter school. In all likelihood, they decided to apply to a charter because they hoped their children would get a better education than they would have in the school they otherwise would have had to attend. Whether charter schools deliver on that promise is a separate matter—about which more below. But, for the moment, I want to suggest that a blanket opposition to charter schools simply does not take seriously the disappointments and fears of the parents of black and Hispanic children. If a charter school represents a real alternative to the educational dead ends of existing district schools, we must be prepared to make common cause with the parents who simply want something better for their children.9

It's important to recognize that a lot of parents are attracted to charter schools because of their deep fears and mistrust about the regular schools. Put simply, I think they're desperate for something that will be good for their kids. I don't think it's so different from the way that a good number of black parents use Catholic schools here in NYC (I'm not sure about elsewhere)—even though they are not Catholic.

Mentioning Catholic schools reminded me that I've often thought that some charters are quite a bit like Catholic schools used to be—with lots of memorization and learning to follow exact procedures, along with strictly enforced arbitrary rules, routines and punishments. By way of example, when I was in elementary school, we would have to draw a pencil margin down the right hand side of the loose leaf paper and were not allowed to write beyond the margin. If we did, we had to do the assignment over again. If one or more of us appeared to be misbehaving (whatever that meant), we would either have to sit at our desks with our hands on our heads for endless minutes or write "punish lessons" consisting of things like "I must be good in school" 1,000 times. We were also subject to some degree of corporal punishment—although in elementary school, it was more the fear of the "spanking machine" in the closet outside the principal's office more than any real pain. In high school, it was something else—the single best teacher I ever had (for geometry, physics and religion) used to slap misbehavers on the face to the point that I thought they would collapse. I never misbehaved in his class although I did manage to be expelled from a tenth grade world history class and forced to kneel outside the classroom door when I challenged the teacher (who was mostly a high-powered basketball coach) about his allegation that blacks in American cities were awaiting a call from Moscow to move in and kill all the whites. But enough nostalgia!

But not quite enough! While the Catholic schools of fifty years ago, or those of today, were or are hardly models of enlightened educational practice, they were and are something else—they are examples of schooling built on mutual trust—parents have a deep-seated confidence that the schools will do right by their kids. In eight years of grammar school (as it was called back then), I don't believe my parents ever attended a parent-teacher conference. There was no need for such an event—the nuns, mostly, knew what they were doing and my responsibility was to do what they said—even when one or more of the teachers had not a clue about what they were doing. My point is that the social cohesion of the school mattered a great deal more than the efficacy of individual teachers. It may well be that some of my classmates from those distant years have a different take on this subject. Fortunately, they're not likely to be readers of this journal. If they are, I'd be pleasantly surprised—even if they disagree with me.

Because charter schools are freed from many of the institutionalized regularities of the larger school system, it is somewhat easier for them to achieve various kinds of social cohesion—not all of them so enlightened. A friend here in New York has made a provocative argument about the significance of various traditions of “uplift” within the African-American community (including the legacy of Booker T. Washington) that have been tapped into by what we might consider the charter school movement. He has suggested that charters should be attacked for the political values they embrace. I think his suggestion is a really exciting one. Although I've known about the ways in which some, perhaps many, charter schools attempt to indoctrinate their students, I never thought of connecting it to the Booker T. Washington legacy.10

Perhaps the flagship of charter schools across the country are the KIPP schools—the Knowledge is Power Program. KIPP is the brainchild of David Levin and Michael Feinberg, two Ivy Leaguers and Teach for America members. Their defining mottos are “be nice, work hard” and “there are no shortcuts.” Jim Horn has described their approach:

…Feinberg and Levin seem to have created a steroid and manic version of the traditional classroom. They combine this vision with ongoing psychological interventions intended to breed an unwavering positive outlook among students. The energetic and bureaucracy-busting reformers also borrowed from the inimitable Harriet Ball, whose teaching style offers a culturally-sensitive mashup of gospel, hip-hop and Schoolhouse Rock, which, no doubt, loses some of its effect and charm in the hands of the white TFA teachers that KIPP has recruited since the early days in Houston. It was one of Harriet Ball's chants….that inspired the name, Knowledge is Power Program:

You gotta read, baby, read.

You gotta read, baby, read.

The more you read, the more you know.

Cause knowledge is power,

Power is money, and

I want it.

The “psychological interventions” used to instill “character” are based on the work of Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania who's a prominent exponent of the power of positive thinking. His ideas have been made use of by the CIA to prepare people for torturing terrorism suspects and by the Army to convince damaged soldiers that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be taken care of by happy thoughts. Put simply, KIPP's character education is behavior modification and political indoctrination.

In a report released last year, the KIPP folks acknowledged that they had not been as successful in preparing their graduates for college as they had hoped and, while promising to improve their academic approach, mostly concentrated on buckling down even more on "character development." I believe that the fact of the matter is that they have no coherent academic approach other than a series of gimmicks to inculcate student compliance in drill-like activities. While many charter schools share these kinds of approaches with KIPP (see the book titled Sweating the Small Stuff), not all do. Some have quite sound educational visions and would never imagine treating kids as KIPP does. Similarly, some charters appear to be quite successful in comparison to regular district schools but many others appear to be no better and even worse.

There is another objectionable thing that some charters, including KIPP, do—they exclude kids who they come to believe will not be successful—meaning they will not do well on state tests. Apparently at one point Geoffrey Canada from the Harlem Children's Zone simply dismissed an entire class of students from his charter school for this reason.

Therefore, we need to develop campaigns against charter schools that are not so much opposed to their status as charters but, instead, to their educational/political goals, their failures, and their exclusionary practices. In fact, we should adopt the same approach to regular public schools. This would allow us to make common cause with parents who are simply trying to do well by their kids and raise larger issues about the purposes of education. And furthermore, if we're in favor of closing down lousy charter schools, we should be in favor of closing down lousy regular district schools.

Standardized Tests and Teacher Evaluations

The increasingly widespread use of test results for high-stakes decisions represents a mostly awful development. Most standardized tests are not nearly as carefully designed as their makers, mostly big publishing companies like Pearson, claim. They are also “teachable,” by which I mean that, when similar tests are used year after year (and they often are since that's the simplest way for the testing companies to promote the “reliability” of the tests), schools and teachers can narrowly craft their instruction around the expected form and content of the test items rather than more broadly around the content and skills that the test is ostensibly intended to sample. When the future employment of teachers and principals, as well as the future existence of a school, is at stake, many cannot resist the short-term advantage of test prep as a dominant instructional strategy. The truth of the matter is that such test prep models are not nearly as effective in producing high scores, presumably reflecting high levels of student achievement, as would be the use of high quality curriculum and sophisticated instruction. But far too many teachers and schools don't necessarily know how to recognize the difference and, if they were freed from the shadow of mandated testing, they might very well use approaches that are not especially more thoughtful than “drill and kill” test prep.

Most of the current approaches to teacher evaluation rely on standardized test scores for a set percent of a teacher's overall rating (in Chicago, it's now 25 percent). The balance of the rating is determined by student achievement on school-made measures, formal observations of teachers in classrooms and a review of other aspects of teachers' involvement in the life of the school (such as participation in planning teams). However, the use of test scores has dominated the discussion. In part this is because most states and local districts are making much ado about the use of “value-added” measurements in what they claim is an effort to level the playing field and not to penalize teachers who work with less successful students. In spite of a lot of razzle-dazzle, the claims by the proponents of “value-added” approaches seem to be flimsy ones—so much so that they have led John Ewing, a prominent mathematician and the President of Math for America, to accuse the proponents of “Mathematical Intimidation.”11

I confess that I don't have an easy prescription to offer. I do believe that teachers should be active participants in scrutinizing their own work and that they need to be especially careful not to become comfortable with their own assumptions about how good they are. One important step would be for schools, with the involvement of teachers and parents (and possibly students in the upper grades), to adopt what could be called “protocols of practice” that describe what the different dimensions of effective teaching look like and to expect that all teachers will conform their practices to those protocols.12 Lest I be misunderstood, I am not suggesting that every school be left to its own devices. There are a number of very thoughtful models for this kind of work and they should be used as starting points.13 This is not so different from the situation in medicine where the treatments for most illnesses are rather precisely described and prescribed. Thus, if someone is apparently having a heart attack or asthma attack, doctors and other medical personnel are expected to do what has been prescribed rather than to go it alone. To the best of my knowledge, few doctors or nurses complain about being told what to do. Such an approach clearly does not eliminate bad practices from medicine but they all but certainly make it better than what it would be otherwise.

If this approach was used, I think it would then be incumbent for the teachers in a school to engage in collective “self-enforcement” of the agreed upon practices.

Business Model Education

Recently, Will Johnson, a New York City teacher wrote an analysis of what's going on in schools which suggested that “lean production” models were a key element.14 His article is well worth reading so I'll let it speak for itself. However, I'd also like to mention that there's a bit of a witches' brew of ideas that inform the thinking of people like Joel Klein in New York and J.C. Brizard in Chicago. Two of the most prominent of the influencers are William Ouchi from UCLA and Clayton Christensen from the Harvard Business School. Christensen is especially important as the theoretician of “disruptive innovation,” which ostensibly explains the success of products like the iPhone. His somewhat naïve views on education are presented in a much more soft-sounding version than that used by the tough talkers like Rahm Emmanuel. But they nonetheless lead to great mischief in schools. By way of example, Christensen writes:

Every student learns in a different way. This idea—that students have very different learning needs—is one of the cornerstones of this book. A key step towards making school intrinsically motivating is to customize an education to match the way each child best learns. As we explain in our first chapter, schools' interdependent architecture forces them to standardize the way that they teach and test. Standardization clashes with the need for customization in learning. To introduce customization, schools need to move away from the monolithic instruction of batches of students toward a modular student-centric approach using software as an important delivery vehicle [emphasis added].

It's evident that the software is intended to take the place of the teacher, thereby providing increased income flows to the hardware and software makers, and eliminating any semblance of craft from the work of teaching—but all couched in the best of intentions.

What all of the “business model” approaches have in common is a conviction that the quality of the thinking involved in making good schools matters not very much at all.

On Teaching and Teachers

Let me begin by writing about some of what I know about and think about teachers. I don't want to do a song and dance about it but I spent more than thirty years teaching in and developing education programs—I taught in New York City's jails, in adult literacy and GED programs, in college writing classes and in a graduate program in literacy. I developed programs to prepare students without high school diplomas to earn a GED credential and go on to college (most recently, a full-time program for sixteen to eighteen year olds in the Bronx, called CUNY Prep). I oversaw the development of programs that provided secondary school students with opportunities to take college courses. I initiated the development of a project that brought together high school and college teachers in a collaborative seminar series to improve writing instruction at both levels. And during my last few years at CUNY, I was responsible for overseeing the development of a Teacher Academy, a multi-campus program to prepare math and science teachers for New York City's public schools. In the course of doing that, I worked closely with many faculty members and school teachers to design courses and other learning experiences for the undergraduate students in the program.

In none of those instances did I ever “bash” a teacher—in spite of numerous occasions when I saw teachers not being especially knowledgeable, thoughtful, considerate or effective. In fact, my basic response to seeing not such good teaching was to try to understand all of the surrounding factors that contributed to it and, in some ways, to give the teacher the benefit of the doubt that the circumstances were more to blame than either he or she was. But that was not always the case.

All too often people are inclined to make somewhat intuitive positive judgments about the quality of teaching without really knowing that much about good teaching. It's not so different from what I have done when I'm in situations that I don't really understand that much—like hospitals. Over the years, for example, when members of our family have been hospitalized, I've tended to judge the quality of nursing care by fairly simple indicators—do the nurses come quickly when you ask; do they seem responsive when someone needs something; are they considerate? On those measures, I've often thought that the quality of nursing care was quite good—unless and until I spoke to my wife, now a nurse for almost forty years. She would point out to me, over and over again (sadly, we spent a lot of time in hospitals), the more or less egregious errors that had been committed—errors that often could have had serious consequences—which I had not even noticed. As a nurse, she had no interest in nurse bashing. But as a daughter, sister and mother, and especially as a nurse, she had a great deal of interest in making sure that the care was as good as it needed to be.

I'm also the father and father-in-law of two teachers in New York City. I have seen close up how they are physically and emotionally exhausted by their work. As a result, I have little sympathy for the simple-minded slogans advanced by mindless, but hedge-fund endowed, reformers, such as “It's not about the adults. It's about the kids.” If the adults can't sustain themselves and don't receive the consistent support they need, then it's not going to be about the children either. I realize that I'm trying to navigate a delicate balance—teachers must be much better at teaching and they must be responsible for what they do but they also need to be understood and supported.

I'd like to try to pull back the veil on the quality of teaching so that we might have more informed discussions about when it's right to defend teachers and when we need to do something else. Let me begin by pointing out that asserting that teachers “care” about their students doesn't really have much to do with knowing how good they are at teaching. Caring certainly is a helpful precondition but it's not anywhere near enough.

A wise educational philosopher, Eleanor Duckworth, observed that “Teaching is helping people learn, and you have not taught if people have not learned. Teaching is not telling” (emphasis added). Unfortunately, the wisdom embodied in those brief sentences is not frequently enough evident in much teaching. In fact, many, probably most, teachers have an exactly contrary view—“I can't understand why they didn't learn it. I covered it.” In a really reprehensible version, it comes out as “I can't believe they're so stupid.” The fact of the matter is that most teachers have what might be considered a “common sense” understanding of how people learn. They more or less think that if you explain something carefully enough and if you provide interesting examples, students should get it.

Fortunately, even from the contributions of mainstream education research, we can do much better than that. In a 2005 publication titled How Students Learn: History, Mathematics and Science in the Classroom from the National Research Council, the authors reported that research had yielded the following key principles:

• Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.
• To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.
• A “meta-cognitive” approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them.15

While I think that all three principles are very important, I want to focus on the first—students' preconceptions about how the world works. While the authors of the report were interested in preconceptions about math, science and social studies, I think that the insight can be extended beyond the boundaries of those subject areas. Children whose school experiences have been unsuccessful develop their own understandings of what has been going wrong. In many ways, they believe that they indeed failed, that it was their own fault for not attending more regularly, or not paying attention more carefully, or not doing homework more diligently. But they also recognize the ways in which their teachers and others in the schools didn't seem to be paying all that much attention or doing much about their steady progress backwards.16 And to return to the basics, these same students don't read, write or do math very well. Unlike those who have never been to school, they have acquired some very confused and counter-productive notions of what reading, writing and math consist of. But that's not all.

Charles Payne has written extensively about race and public schools and I think we need to take his observations very seriously:

…Chicago schools used to frequently invite me to do Black History Month presentations, and an easy way to do that was to show some footage about the civil rights movement from the PBS television series Eyes on the Prize and use that as the basis of a conversation. When middle school and junior high students watched demonstrations with dogs being sicced on people and people being fire hosed and clubbed by police, a very common reaction, perhaps the dominant one, was to decide the demonstrators were at fault for taking it. It was easier for some students to identify with the police doing the whipping than with the demonstrators being whipped. The demonstrators had to be punks: “If I were back there then…” Young people in whose names the movement was waged could not identify with it.

….

…History confronts children of color as an accusation—they were slaves or peasants or the militarily defeated or the colonized; Sambo or Dumb Pancho; they were the least intelligent, the wetbacks and the illegals, the poorest, the worst educated, or perhaps, most damningly, they just weren't there; they don't come into the picture. (And “contributionist” history—“Look what minorities have contributed!”—is probably not the way to answer this.)

At the same time, as much as anyone else, youth from stigmatized groups can see the “evidence” of collective underachievement all about them—the poverty, the troubled neighborhoods, the absent fathers, the academic failure, their own constant exposure to violence, real and symbolic. Nothing about being in a subordinate group automatically gives them deep insight into the contemporary forces reproducing inequality. Like many majority group members, they may not have sufficient historical or sociological understanding to explain those failures in any way other than some kind of collective deficiency—or to just not think about them.

Both the past as imagined and the present as experienced [emphasis added] suggest, indirectly, as if whispered, that there may be something wrong with Blacks and Latinos. On top of that, often irrespective of their class background, children of color have to negotiate their way through institutional contexts that are anything but welcoming—the stores and malls where it looks like you're being followed, the hassling from police, the harsh and punitive nature of many schools. Data from the U.S. Department of Education, for example, shows that Black students are three and a half times more likely to be suspended than white students…. Previous studies have shown that Black and Hispanic students receive harsher punishments for the same offenses…and that this differential treatment is noticed by students and teachers and attributed to racism, although white students and teachers perceived racial disparity in discipline as unintentional or unconscious, [while] students of color saw it as conscious and deliberate, arguing that teachers often apply classroom rules and guidelines arbitrarily to exercise control, or to remove students whom they do not like.…

It shouldn't be surprising, then, if Black and Latino youth start off with a sense of being behind, of having something to prove that others don't. They respond as young people will, by creating, from the cultural materials around them, their own counter-narratives of worth, among them narratives that center on personal style, toughness, and aggressive masculinity and that create symbolic distance between themselves and previous generations. Without guidance and support, youth will create some counter-narratives that are useful, but also some that undermine their own development, that discourage them from taking advantage of such opportunities as they do have.

….Much of the national discourse is simply in denial about the difficult developmental terrain facing too many youngsters from socially marginalized communities. The way we continue to scratch our heads about achievement gaps is itself one form of denial; the presumption in many such discussions is that we're giving children what they need to succeed and they are still failing for some mysterious reason. A corollary denial is the idea that all would be well if we could just raise test scores. Of course, that is important, but children may be wrestling with issues that are much more fundamental. And when they get help with that, there is reason to believe that some of the narrowly academic issues wither.

…

….education for liberation becomes increasingly important. I use that term to mean those forms of education that are intended to help people think more critically about the social forces that shape our lives and think more confidently about their ability to react against those forces. It can take a variety of forms…—consciousness-raising groups, Freedom Schools, Afro-centric schools, Native American survival schools, Black Panther Liberation Schools. I have focused on race and ethnicity, but young people are also enmeshed in taken-for-granted narratives about gender, poverty, sexuality, and the operation of power in society. I suspect the groups that are doing the most effective work are moving on multiple fronts, as learning to think critically in one area facilitates thinking critically in others.

A heart-wrenching tale with a bit of an encouraging ending!17

Concluding Thoughts

Payne is acutely aware that the beliefs and practices of the young people he wrote about have been developed in the context of the catastrophic deindustrialization in Chicago. Young people there were among the first to come to grips with what is now widely recognized as the “no future” facing young people across the globe. Despair is in plentiful supply and hope is scarce. Is there a way that an alternative educational vision might enable young people to develop “an optimism of the will and a pessimism of the intellect?”

I think it's possible to imagine and fight for an education that enables young people to prepare themselves for the challenges of living in and changing the world—without being guilty of the substitution of one form of indoctrination for another. These concluding thoughts are mostly about high school students—they would need to be significantly modified for elementary or middle school children.

What is needed is not an approach to education that further fossilizes old identities but rather one which nourishes the cultivation of new ones—with new notions of possibility and responsibility. Educators can prepare their students for changed circumstances by establishing situations, within and without formal school settings, for individuals to expand their own political capacities. Those capacities include the ability to understand the relationship between personal action and social consequence, the ability to understand other points of view, the ability to articulate one's own ideas to various audiences as well as the ability to work with others to achieve agreed upon goals.

Let me make clear that I am not talking about political propaganda or indoctrination. Indeed, I specifically reject that kind of approach. Instead, I think we would be better served by creating opportunities for students to imagine themselves acting in different ways than they might be accustomed to. At the same time, I realize that this approach has its risks. There are ways in which many young people might imagine themselves acting that will dismay and frighten their elders. I see no way around that issue. There are choices to be made—either we continue with things as they are and bear the consequences or we attempt to create a different future—a course that will undoubtedly be more dangerous for those who step forward.

Resistance and accommodation co-exist in the minds and hearts of many young people and cynical resignation is often the resolution. I believe that the ambivalence has to be addressed directly.

Enough for now!

• 1For an account of the events of that year, including the role of powerful city elites and the Ford Foundation in supporting community control, see Jerold Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, Yale University Press, 2002.
• 2This issue of Insurgent Notes includes a symposium on Staudenmaier's book.
• 3See Steve Brill's Class Warfare for an especially groveling account of the millionaires and their supplicants who dominate much of the policy conversation.
• 4I should note that I had the good fortune, over the course of thirty-plus years in education, to work with many people (mostly, but not only, at the City University of New York) who considered themselves to be on the left, of a broad range of political loyalties, who shared very little of the “ordinary” perspective. I should also note that I worked with lots of other people who had no leftish views but who were similarly dedicated to students' education. In addition, I had numerous interactions with educators on the left who had virtually no interest in ever thinking seriously about their or their colleagues' responsibility for good teaching or the achievement of their students. I haven't read Dante for a long time and my guess is that he didn't have a place in hell for such people. I don't have the poetic skills to describe the place they deserve but I do want to make sure that it's in hell. My views have been deeply shaped by my experiences with all of these people but none bears any responsibility for them.
• 5This is an article for another day but it's really quite extraordinary that when Michael Harrington, the prominent social democrat, published The Other America in 1963, his description of poverty at that time, the popular reaction was first, disbelief, and second, sympathy for a campaign to end poverty. Thus came about Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Here we are, almost fifty years later, and the most radical of popular voices in education circles call only for “dealing with” the effects of poverty on children's achievement. Without being too obvious about it, dealing with the effects of poverty mostly results in more jobs for people who are not poor (although some may have been poor); the end of poverty means ending the need for “dealing with” poverty.
• 6Anthony S. Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart Luppescu, and John Q. Easton, Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2010).
• 7See “Banality and the Fetish: Reflections on Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.”
• 8The Civic Committee can best be described as the public voice of the local ruling class.
• 9For a very recent account of what’s happening with charter schools in Harlem, see “Harlem Schools See High Student Turnover.”
• 10See Jim Horn, “The KULT of KIPP: An Essay Review”, education review: a journal of book reviews (Volume 12, Number 3, March 5, 2009), for a further exploration of the similarities to the Hampton Model promoted by Booker T. Washington.
• 11John Ewing, “Mathematical Intimidation: Driven by the Data,” Notices of the AMS (May 2011). The AMS is the American Mathematical Society.
• 12One essential issue to take up is the extent of time devoted to testing, separate and apart from the use of test results. Children are being tested so often in some districts and states that it effectively is resulting in the same loss of time for learning as students being absent from school.
• 13The frameworks most commonly recommended for teacher observations are quite good in this regard.
• 14“Lean Production: What’s Really Hurting Public Education.” Johnson, who had been a contributor to Labor Notes, appears to be developing an interesting new position on teachers and education.
• 15I should mention that these key learning principles should be of special relevance to political activists who would like to engage others in serious conversations about the state of the world and the need for action.
• 16For a really painful description of what these experiences are like, read Beth Fertig’s Why Can’t U Teach Me 2 Read? (FSG Books, 2009).
• 17Charles Payne is a professor at the University of Chicago. He’s also the author of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. I believe though, that he has spent most of his attention on education issues.

Most readers of this journal will have read accounts of the spirited strike by Chicago's public school teachers in September and will have learned that the generally accepted view is that the strike represented a significant victory for the teachers and even for the working class as a whole.1 For me, it depends on what counts as a victory. It appears that Chicago's teachers managed to secure modest pay increases, that largely mimic prior contracts in terms of the distribution of the increases among teachers with more or less years of experience and more or fewer credentials, and that they held off many of what they saw as the most serious threats to their security and their everyday independence.2 They also bloodied the nose of perhaps the most despicable politician ever to hold office in a major city in the United States—but I don't want to be quoted about degrees of despicability in a land with so many contenders.

My guess is that, for many, the union's apparently successful defense counts as a victory. But suppose the standard for victory is a different one—the standard of increased unity across the working class. In that case, the judgment is not so clear. In the case of public schools in the United States, increased unity across the working class can only be achieved by the elimination of the miserable inequities in how schools are funded, how enrollment in schools is determined, how children are taught, and how much students learn. It does not appear that the “victory” in Chicago did much of anything towards reaching those goals.

The Celebration

Let me begin by citing just a few characteristic examples of the celebrations of the strike and the “victory” from across the political spectrum.

Socialist Worker:

There was the unforgettable Day One, when tens of thousands of red-shirted members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and supporters swarmed downtown, shutting down traffic around the Board of Education headquarters and City Hall in what a local radio news reporter aptly called "an older and more polite version of Occupy Chicago."

In truth, it wasn't all that polite, either, if you happened to read the handmade placards and hear the chants directed at Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who began targeting Chicago teachers months before he took office.

Then Day Two—another day, another mass march. After picket duty at schools in every neighborhood of the city in the morning, teachers again swept downtown, this time turning stately Buckingham Fountain on the lakefront into the site of an open-air union rally that conjured the spirit of famous Chicago labor battles of the past.

The following day came the three big demonstrations at high schools on the South and West Sides, in neighborhoods populated predominately by African Americans and Latinos. The hot late-summer sun didn't deter teachers or neighborhood residents who cheered them on.

And the excitement wasn't limited to the big protests. Anyone who walked the picket lines at neighborhood schools experienced not just the impressive solidarity among teachers, but the groundswell of support for the CTU among parents and the wider community. Those wearing a red T-shirt from the CTU or the Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign were routinely stopped and thanked on the street, while getting friendly honks and waves from passing cars.

Diane Ravitch (a prominent critic of current “reform” efforts):

Why did they strike? After 17 years of reform and disrespect, they were fed up with the bullying. They were tired of the non-educators and politicians telling them how to teach and imposing their remedies. Reform after reform, and children in Chicago still don't have the rich curriculum, the facilities, and the social services they need.

They were sick of the incessant school closings. They were sick of seeing charter schools open that get wildly uneven results yet are praised to the skies by Arne Duncan and now Rahm Emanuel. They knew that the charter schools are non-union and that the Mayor will use them to break the union.

In the end, the union pitted itself against Rahm Emanuel, Arne Duncan, Chicago's business and civic leadership, and the Race to the Top. It took on the most powerful forces in the city, and yes, even President Obama, who remained neutral.

And by taking a stand, by uniting to resist the power elite, these teachers discovered they were strong. They had been downtrodden and disrespected, but no longer. They put on their red T-shirts and commanded the attention of the nation and the admiration of millions of teachers. Powerless no more, they showed that unity made them strong. 98 percent voted to authorize the strike, and 98 percent voted to end it.

…

The strike is one of the few weapons available to the powerless. Without the union, the teachers would have been ignored, and the politicians would be free to keep on reforming them again and again and again.

The strike transformed the teachers from powerless to powerful.

The teachers said, “Enough is enough. With us, not to us.”

Regardless of the terms of the contract, the teachers won.

Teachers for Social Justice:

In this strike, so much more was won than a contract. After 17 punishing years of corporate, neoliberal policies, Chicago teachers stood up, and they stood up for the whole country. This courageous strike was born of a new kind of teacher unionism—democratic, activist, allied with parents, and fighting not only for fair compensation but for a richer, more humane and just education.

Lois Weiner:

The reform leadership of the CTU has shown teachers that for their professional knowledge to be respected, they must fight for it to be so. Try as the media did to cast the strike as being a traditional labor dispute about salary, they couldn't make a convincing case to Chicago parents. Because of the union's morally-essential (and strategically-sound) embedding of economic demands in a framework for truly improving the schools, parents understood that teachers were on the side of their children.

…

…this strike has changed the political equation, not only here in the US but internationally. With the exception of Finland and North Korea, schools are being privatized and curriculum reduced to preparation for standardized tests, globally. This is an international project to make schooling serve the interests of transnational corporations. Chicago teachers have shown that a union leadership with a vision and courage, one that empowers its members, can turn back some of the most pernicious elements of this global project.

One telling aspect of the strike is that the media and the politicians totally missed what was brewing. The story actually began when the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) organized school by school and swept the old guard out of office. Their program was precisely the one on which this strike was waged.

…

…. What Chicago teachers have shown the world is that teachers unions have the potential to lead a movement that will take back our schools. On this Karen Lewis was wrong: Chicago teachers did change the world in their struggle for this contract.

Not so fast!

I believe that many, perhaps most, of the members of the union acted in good faith when they insisted that they were striking on behalf of their students. But the agreement that ended the strike does not appear to have anything to contribute to the realization of those promises. As one despondent teacher wrote in the days after the deal was being finalized:

Like so many other schools out there, at our school we have been doing everything-plus-beyond-beyond possible on the front lines of this strike—the continuation of a natural thing for all of us as we work daily in CPS.

We have done all that we can (and more) that has been asked of us by CTU leadership for this one week and prior and in so doing have drawn in many parents and students and neighbors.

The CTU members at my school who have gotten back to me (quite a few) have told me not to vote for a contract that I have not been able to read and digest on such short notice; in fact, on principle a few have told me to just vote NO already. They will NOT appreciate going back into the school just to read the fine print and need to start the process all over again by voting NO when it gets to them, but they will. They are willing to keep going right now, and there will be resentment if the House of Delegates votes in favor of something that goes to the membership with far less than what expectations have promised from our massive rallies and turnouts across the city.

I am speaking for myself, but I think I can state a theme for the schools on the southeast side on the whole, judging by a Friday area rally organized by Sue Garza: "ONE DAY LONGER! ONE DAY STRONGER!" I predict that the southeast side schools will NOT vote for a weak or too compromised contract and will be extremely disappointed if one is presented after all of this or somehow such a proposal actually passes for a working contract. This is an understatement.

To CORE and CTU leadership:

NOTE: I am writing this as a CTU member and delegate with zero information from a House of Delegates meeting that was supposed to be about updates to contract negotiations (of which there was little to none) with an agenda listing Q & A that had no A in the actual meeting.

It's like this. There are issues across the city that we have made catch fire via our CTU signs and chants and rallies. If we only get something for ourselves in this contract now, that will be shameful. The following must be declared by CTU to be NON-NEGOTIABLES before any contract is ratified (or even presented to the HoD): class size, wrap-around services, standardized tests, and school closures. (And we need to add small parts of the longer school day in there.) THERE IS NO DIGNITY IN WALKING BACK INTO OUR SCHOOLS WITHOUT ANY CONTRACT LANGUAGE ON THESE ISSUES over which we have rallied others out there (students, parents, community members, and strangers at gas stations in Indiana for crying out loud) to fight for with us.

Please, don't tell me these are not legal items for contract negotiation. WE CAN DO THIS. We know we won't "get everything." But we should hold strong for MORE than stopping this strike this weekend would probably get us. Ten years from now, will one or two more weeks (or more) have mattered in this fight, if you are someone who is thinking that we can't face it any more right now? "Short term pain for long term gain." Deferred gratification. That stuff we try to instill in our students on a daily basis. If this results in only "more money for the employees" then we will be seen as the hoodwinking snake oil peddlers of all time. I can hear it already: "They were only in it for themselves from the start." "Look how they only got something for themselves but nothing else for anyone else after all that." "What about 'Children First' for the CTU?"

Zupan posted those words on Substance in the days between a first House of Delegates meeting where delegates refused to approve the tentative deal and a second meeting several days later where they did. Although she has written at least one other article for Substance since, it is not clear if she still has the same sense of outrage that the “victory” of the union came with no comparable victory for the city's public school students.3 It is clear from all accounts that I have read that the strike enjoyed widespread and even enthusiastic support in the working class neighborhoods of the city. Furthermore, that support had a lot to do with the city negotiators giving up as much as they gave.

So what's the deal?

The leadership of the CTU is in the hands of members of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE). The Caucus's web page suggests that it is committed to building alliances between educators and communities:

The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) is a group of dedicated teachers, retirees, Paraprofessional School Related Personnel (PSRPs), parents, community members and other champions of public education. We fight for equitable public education and hope to improve the Chicago Teacher's Union (CTU) so that it fights both on behalf of its members and on behalf of Chicago's students.

It's admirable that CORE asserts that it wants the union to fight on behalf of the union's members and on behalf of their students. It's certainly much better than the United Federation of Teachers' position in New York City in 1968 where it more or less said that it didn't care about the students, it only cared about its members (although even then the union insisted that smaller class sizes—and more union members—was exactly what was needed). But is the CORE promise much better at the end of the day than the UFT's callous indifference?

Months before the September strike, the CTU published a report titled The Schools Chicago's Students Deserve, which it asserted was based on research. The report's recommendations were the following:

1. Recognize That Class Size Matters: Drastically reduce class size. We currently have one of the largest class sizes in the state. This greatly inhibits the ability of our students to learn and thrive.
2. Educate The Whole Child: Invest to ensure that all schools have recess and physical education equipment, healthy food offerings, and classes in art, theater, dance, and music in every school. Offer world languages and a variety of subject choices. Provide every school with a library and assign the commensurate number of librarians to staff them.
3. Create More Robust Wrap-around Services: The Chicago Public Schools system (CPS) is far behind recommended staffing levels suggested by national professional associations. The number of school counselors, nurses, social workers, and psychologists must increase dramatically to serve Chicago's population of low-income students. Additionally, students who cannot afford transportation costs need free fares.
4. Address Inequities In Our System: Students and their families recognize the apartheid-like system managed by CPS. It denies resources to the neediest schools, uses discipline policies with a disproportionate harm on students of color, and enacts policies that increase the concentrations of students in high poverty and racially segregated schools.
5. Help Students Get Off To A Good Start: We need to provide age-appropriate (not test-driven) education in the early grades. All students should have access to pre-kindergarten and to full-day kindergarten.
6. Respect And Develop The Professionals: Teachers need salaries comparable to others with their education and experience. They need time to adequately plan their lessons and collaborate with colleagues, as well as the autonomy and shared decision-making to encourage professional judgment. CPS needs to hire more teaching assistants so that no students fall through the cracks.
7. Teach All Students: We need stronger commitments to address the disparities that exist due to our lack of robust programs for emergent bilingual students and services for students faced with a variety of special needs.
8. Provide Quality School Facilities: No more leaky roofs, asbestos-lined bathrooms, or windows that refuse to shut. Students need to be taught in facilities that are well-maintained and show respect for those who work and go to school there.
9. Partner With Parents: Parents are an integral part of a child's education. They need to be encouraged and helped in that role.
10. Fully Fund Education: A country and city that can afford to take care of its affluent citizens can afford to take care of those on the other end of the income scale. There is no excuse for denying students the essential services they deserve.

Let's take this apart. With the exception of numbers 4, 8 and 9, all of the recommendations come down to a request for more resources (meaning more money)—resources that would, for the most part, benefit current and future members of the CTU. (But let's keep in mind numbers 4, 8 and 9 to see how well they fared in the agreement that ended the strike.) In the meantime, let's note that there is not a word in the recommendations about the need to change what's going on in classrooms and schools every day that might actually help Chicago's kids to learn.

What Got Negotiated?

The CTU leadership released this account of how the negotiations were going on August 22nd:

With time running short the CTU and the BOARD are still far apart.

After a successful mass rally, a 90 percent strike vote, and a favorable Fact Finder's Report, the Board signed an “Interim Agreement” on July 23, 2012 in which they promised to limit instructional time to 296 minutes in Elementary School and 251 minutes in High School. They also promised to hire extra teachers from a pool of displaced CTU members in order to properly staff the schools. However, our experience in Track E, where school has been back since August 6th, has shown us that many principals have not received adequate positions to operate a “Better Day.” Teachers are being asked to work through lunch and preps, keep students in class during 'recess,' and fill the day with 'club-time' and other non-instructional activity. This means it is more important than ever to win a contract that defends three (3) key priorities:

1. A “Better” Day—with Art, Music, World Language, Physical Education and other services like counseling anchored by contract language that assures prep and break time, limits on teaching load, and limits on duties.
2. Job Security—in the form of guarantees that the Board will conduct future hiring from a pool of displaced members before making new hires, as well as an appeal process and other protections against unfair evaluation.
3. Fair compensation—we deserve a fair raise for work that will be more stressful and challenging. In addition, we seek to protect our salary schedule (steps) and keep out merit pay, insurance premium hikes, and changes to our accumulation of sick days that undercut our benefits.

The following summary is intended to provide a snapshot of what is “on the table” as of August 22, 2012.

• Duration: The Board is proposing a 4 year contract. The Union is proposing a 2 year contract.
• Pay: The Board is proposing raises of 2 percent, 2 percent, and 2 percent with a 2 percent increase in the 4th year dependent on the adoption of merit pay. The Board is proposing to freeze steps for the duration of the contract. The Union's last proposal was made during fact finding for 19 percent and 3 percent.
• Evaluation: The Board is proposing to implement a plan in which student test scores and surveys will eventually be 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation (by year 5). The Union is proposing a lower cap on “Student Growth Measures,” revisions to the “cut scores” that determine ratings (i.e., how many points are required for a proficient rating) as well as an appeal process.
• Working Conditions/Structure of Day: The Board is proposing to do away with 18 separate articles in the contract that relate to details of our work day such as our class load, our breaks, and the nature of our work assignments. These include Article 4 (Elementary School), 5 (Middle School), 6 (High School), 7 (Elementary School Counselors), 9 (PSRPs), etc. The Union is proposing language that would guarantee that the Board follow their promises on prep time, staffing, and breaks.
• Class Size: The Board is proposing that it continue following its current policy. The Union is seeking to lower class sizes and make class size subject to effective enforcement.
• Job Security: The Board has not yet agreed to place language for a 'hiring pool' in our contract. We are also seeking protection of PSRPs' work.

In addition, we remain concerned about the Board's plans to lengthen the school year, push for changes to our pension (which is controlled by the legislature) and close community schools while opening charters.

Interestingly enough, although the summary still leads with the demand for “a better school day,” there were no issues “on the table” that relate to that demand.

Essentials of New Contract

After the strike dust had settled, these are the highlights of the new contract as CTU saw them.4

• Term: Three Years, 3 percent, 2 percent, 2 percent with an option for a 4th year @ 3 percent raise if Union accepts. Eliminate “wage reopener” 47-2.2.
• Maintain PSRPs annual salary table. PSRPs get 4 percent (2 percent COLA and 2 percent “adjustment”) in year 1. Years 2 and 3 the same as teachers.
• Steps and Lanes: full value of steps are preserved, but increases raises for mid-level steps and steps 14, 15 and 16. Lanes are preserved. No merit pay.
• Benefits: Health Care benefits preserved at current levels with no increase in rates or co-pays. Wellness program.
• School Calendar: 175 full student attendance days; 6 half days; 7 full PD days; 6 half days; 2 report card pickup days (non-student attendance)=190 days total. 8 holidays; 10 days of vacation. We WILL make up the 7 days lost to strike.

This contract campaign began in the November of 2011, and concluded with a 7-day strike. This fight produced many wins—rom the right to appeal a rating, to language that gives teachers control over our own lesson plan format. Equally important, we stopped many harmful “reforms.” The district was forced to give up on merit pay, forced to accept steps, made to abandon a 7hr 40 minute teacher day, and gave ground on test-based evaluation. In fact, the Board began the bargaining process by proposing to cut our contract to just 30 pages. Despite the strike and broad public support there were some cuts that we could not stop, such as the move to a longer day and year, the elimination of Pension Enhancement (PEP), and stiffer penalties for low ratings.

Our schools still face a variety of threats—from understaffing and overtesting to charter competition and outright closure. While no contract can solve every problem, our Union is more united and in better position to face future challenges than it has been for many years. The provisions in this tentative agreement create new rights for CTU members and represent a step in the direction of a more assertive union that fights for good schools and good working conditions for our members.

Good for students AND teachers

• Forces Board to hire 512 additional “specials” teachers—art, music, phys ed etc. and create a plan to recruit “racially diverse candidates.”
• Stands up to testing hype: Evaluation formula won't fall below 70 percent “teacher practice” and allows teachers a neutral appeal of a rating;
• Creates an anti-bullying provision;
• Provides for teachers to get textbooks on day 1; clinicians to get adequate workspace
• Provides for $250 supplies reimbursement
• Board commits to hire nurses and social workers if it gets new revenue
• Establishes a 'workload' committee that will investigate Clinicians, Counselors, and Special Ed workloads
• Improves Teachers, Clinicians and PSRPs work lives
• Strengthens PPCs
• Guarantees lunch, daily preparation periods for clinicians and counselors
• New Right: 'just cause' discipline and mediation/arbitration in discipline cases; eliminates unpaid suspensions
• Paperwork reduction language—new paperwork shall be accompanied by a corresponding reduction of existing paperwork.
• Language that prohibits retaliation for asserting contract rights, including using benefits.

PSRPs

• Clerks will work three additional days with pay to prepare the office before school starts
• School clerks will be provided training in Kronos, attendance systems, and internal accounts during work hours.
• The Board shall not reclassify a Teacher Assistant to a Special Education Classroom Assistant who does not perform diapering and feeding
• 2013–14: Board will adopt a new evaluation plan for PSRPs in conjunction with the CTU—will form a PSRP Evaluation Committee
• Maintain Appendix I for PSRPs.

Recall/Layoff

• Creates “CPS Hiring List”—at least 1/2 of all CPS hires must be displaced members.
• 10 months “true recall” to same school if position opens.
• Teachers “follow students” in closing, phase-out, and consolidation.
• Cuts layoff benefits to ½ former level (5 months RTP, 5 months Cadre for school closings, school actions.)
• Lay-off order (law in rest of state)=Unit, Certification, Unsats, PAT's by rating tier, Tenured Needs Improvement (<250, then >250) then all other tenured teachers by seniority.

Evaluation

• Limits CPS to 70 percent “teacher practice”/30 percent “student growth”—the minimum by state law.
• First year will be “no harmful consequences” for tenured teachers
• New Right: appeal rating to Neutral.
• 2 consecutive annual ratings of “Needs Improvement” without improvement becomes an Unsat. Improvement in either overall score OR teacher practice component is safe.

• Creates a “Clinicians Article”
• Clinicians workspace provisions for locking file cabinets, private space, etc.
• Special education teachers shall be provided time to meet with clinicians and other teachers during prep periods to discuss professional matters.
• In-service will be provided for those teachers and paras responsible for working with students with autism.
• Principals shall ensure that special education teachers are not assigned any duties not related to school special education services. Disputes about this may be brought to the PPC.

Workload

• Applies to all members who serve students with disabilities. Board-Union committee will design a workload plan by January 1, 2013. Members will be able to take complaints about workload size to the committee. The committee will have access to $500,000 to help alleviate large workloads.
• Members shall not be required to exceed case loads, class sizes, limits on ratios of students with disabilities to general education students and limits on ratios of students with disabilities to teachers and PSRPs as required under law.
• IEP meetings scheduled before or after school must be paid at hourly rate of pay.
• Test protocols and supplies will be provided for all SLPs and SLPPs.
• Maintained class size provisions from prior Agreement. Did not get enforceability, but did increase the funding for the Class Size Monitoring Panel.
• Added a parent LSC representative to Class Size Monitoring Panel. As the panel visits schools with class size issues, they must invite a Parent LSC rep to be a part of the process.

Wellness program

• Members must participate in Wellness program or face a $600 per covered member per year penalty ($50 per month).
• Wellness Plan administrators must follow all HIPPA laws and will not share individual member information with CPS. Aggregate data may be collected to help the LMCC make decisions.
• Members will not be penalized for health outcomes, only for nonparticipation. Members will be notified/warned before they are penalized for non-participation.
• Maternity benefits provided through Short Term Disability program.
• Paternity leave shall be modeled after the City of Chicago's paternity leave plan.

Pension pickup of 7 percent will be maintained.

Sick Days

• Old sick day banks are protected and can be used as they have always been used. They can be cashed out upon retirement.
• All employees will begin accruing a new sick bank, that accumulates up to 40 days totals. Cannot be cashed out, but may be used for pension service credits at retirement.
• Every employee now receives Short Term Disability (STD) benefits which can be utilized after the use of the sick days received that year: 100 percent pay first 30 days; 80 percent pay days 31-60; 60 percent pay days 61-90
• May be used for personal illness or maternity leave.
• Sick days may be used to supplement STD benefits to receive 100 percent pay.

Please read the above carefully. Other than the “victory” of hiring more special teachers (who would be dues-paying union members) and the “possibility” of hiring additional nurses and social workers (who would also be dues-paying union members), every item refers to the preservation of existing benefits, protecting existing working conditions and increasing salaries.5 There is not one thing to do with the needs and well-being of the kids that go to the public schools of Chicago. And points 4,8 and 9 from The Schools Chicago's Students Deserve are nowhere to be found.

The CTU, though, made sure that it thanked parents for being on its side during the strike. See the message to parents on the union web page.

How Well Do the Chicago Public Schools Do?

To place all this in context, let's see how well the Chicago Public Schools are doing and whether the parents of the children who go to those schools should have much to be thankful for.

Easy question—they are about as bad as money can buy. And nothing seems to make a difference. Over the course of the last two decades, the Chicago school system has been treated to a series of major “reforms.” Unfortunately, none seems to have made all that much of a difference.

• Graduation rates for nineteen year olds have improved from 48 percent for kids entering high school in 1991 to 66 percent for those entering in 2005; high school test scores have risen a bit so more students are graduating without a decline in average academic performance.
• Math scores have improved incrementally in the elementary/middle grades, while elementary/middle grade reading scores have remained fairly flat for two decades.
• State standards are pretty low. Therefore, “eighth grade students at the very top of the 'meets' category have only about a 60 percent chance” of being ready for college.
• Racial gaps in achievement have steadily increased, with White students making more progress than Latino students, and African American students falling behind all other groups. In 2010, only half of African-American male students had graduated.
• Despite progress, the vast majority of CPS students are at academic achievement levels that are far below what they need to graduate ready for college.6

I am fully aware of how deeply flawed the various measures of student achievement are but I would suggest that the results shed light on a quite awful reality. And the victory in Chicago is unlikely to do much to change that awful reality.

It may be that the new bonds forged between teachers and parents and other community residents during the strike will create new opportunities. But we'll have to wait to see. Don't drink the champagne yet! It might be spiked.

• 1One, not so significant, opposing view was expressed by the Socialist Equity Party, but that was mostly a reflection of more-Trotskyist-than-thou squabbles with the International Socialist Organization, which plays a prominent role in the Chicago Teachers Union leadership.
• 2Alone among the commentators, George Schmidt has highlighted the importance of negotiations over the “Management Rights” clause. It appears that the CTU did quite well in preserving the existing contract language which does include some restrictions on management prerogatives. What is noteworthy is how little attention the CTU leaders paid publicly to this issue. Perhaps they were concerned that it would shed too much light on how concerned they were to protect teacher prerogatives within the existing state of the schools.
• 3It is noteworthy that Substance strongly supported approval of the contract. Indeed, one of its editors made the motion to approve at the second House of Delegates meeting. From the account in Substance: “But the questions had barely begun when the associate delegate from Steinmetz High School, Sharon Schmidt (Substance editor) asked if a motion were in order. When Karen Lewis responded that it was, Schmidt read from the agenda proposed by the leadership: ‘The Officers recommend that the Chicago Teachers Union suspend the ongoing strike at the close of this House of Delegates meeting. The strike, picketing, and job actions will cease, and Chicago Teachers Union members will return to work on Wednesday, September 19, 2012.’”
• 4The fundamentally bureaucratic character of the language is striking. David Graeber has discussed the violence of bureaucracy. I think it would be especially valuable if we could better understand the relationship between the bureaucratic violence perpetrated by the Chicago Public Schools and the street violence that endangers so many of Chicago’s young people. See David Graeber, “Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity.”
• 5To the best of my knowledge, the agreement to hire more “special” teachers was already in place before the strike.
• 6These are the findings of researchers at the Consortium on Chicago School Research. See “Trends in Chicago’s Schools across Three Eras of Reform: Summary of Key Findings.”

In May of this year, AK Press published Michael Staudenmaier's Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986. Sojourner Truth Organization was most often known as and spoken of as STO.

Insurgent Notes invited members of STO that we were able to contact and individuals of organization that we knew had been influenced by one or more of the aspects of STO's theory or practice to respond to a series of questions:

For STO members:

1. What aspects of the STO history do you think that MS most accurately captured and which aspects, if any, do you think that he might have missed?

2. What do you think are the lessons of the history of STO for today's revolutionaries, including those of you who still consider yourselves as such?
3. What else, if anything, would you like to say about the organization or the book?

For those who have been influenced by the organization:

1. What aspects of the history, as presented by MS, were most surprising and why?

2. What do you think are the lessons of the history of STO for today's revolutionaries?

3. What would you have liked to learn more about?

Not surprisingly, our respondents didn't always answer the questions we asked. But what they wrote is well worth reading. We look forward to further discussions on the book and on the politics of the Sojourner Truth Organization.

We have arranged the submissions of STO members more or less in the order of their entry into the organization. The comments of non-members are not organized in any special fashion.

Originally posted: October 15, 2012 at Insurgent Notes

Eric Leif Davin has noticed something important about the American working class during the 1930s—that its support of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, and the New Deal involved a generational transformation with consequences for decades to come. With data drawn from the steel and mining towns of Pennsylvania, Davin shows the huge surge in votes that gave the electoral system a new tilt. Immigrants and the children of immigrants were the majorities in all the largest cities during that decade, comprising one-third of the nation's population. These were the people that the Democratic Party drew into its fold. The new voters were southern and eastern European by background and overwhelmingly Roman Catholic by persuasion, and this too shaped the nature of the electorate in unique ways.

Davin is especially astute in how he links voter participation to legislative changes that altered the balance of power between employers and employees. It was the change in voting patterns, he points out, and not the largesse of the Democratic Party leadership that was the precipitating factor. With the rush of these same voters into the newly-formed unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the mid-1930s, electoral participation and unionisation became intrinsically linked (just as their decoupling is a more recent phenomenon). The Democratic Party morphed into America's de facto labor party.

In a few brief but important passages in Crucible of Freedom, Davin describes the measures enacted by the newly-configured Democratic establishment. Local administrations inaugurated a long list of needed and overdue reforms, reinforced on the statewide level wherever the Democrats were similarly elected. They outrightly abolished the legal basis for corporations to maintain separate police forces, barred local police from serving as strikebreakers, appointed former union officials to leadership positions within the local and state police forces, and approved unemployment benefits for strikers. These measures complemented and reinforced other legislation that restructured the taxation system, expanded the legal definition of civil rights, banned company stores, and enacted anti-sweatshop legislation. Together they had a profound effect on the success or failure of the workplace organizing drives that otherwise faced merciless opposition from employers in terms of dismissals, blacklists, evictions from company housing, intimidation by thugs and strikebreakers, and arbitrary arrests. Electoral success led directly to a renewed boost in unionization campaigns.

Davin attributes great significance to these developments, but his focus on voter participation rates and voting patterns gets lost in an awkward advocacy of a “workers' democracy” that he claims dominated the mid-twentieth century United States. On the one hand, he describes the New Deal as a period in which “extreme class consciousness, class solidarity, and class conflict dominated the domestic scene and American politics.”1 In other words, he places the working class's new-found politicization at the center of the profound social and economic struggles then swirling throughout American society. This focus alone makes Crucible of Freedom a noteworthy achievement.

But there is the repeated recourse to a working class triumphalism that leads Davin to distort the historical record in some places and ignore it in others. Davin claims, for instance, that the greatest achievement for workers was “their creation of a society promising a democratisation of labor-capital relations, a more equal chance to prosper, economic security, political rights for workers, and respect for ethnic Americans.” But should we take Davin's claim seriously? Was the “promise” of better treatment all that workers wanted? Was this “a truly radical departure from the past and a genuine reform,” as he expresses it?2 Davin claims that “the workers, in fact, won their struggle of the 1930s. And what they brought forth in the Fifties was exactly the kind of society for which they so militantly fought.”3

What irks Davin greatly is the failure of left-wing commentators to appreciate fully the political and economic achievements of the working class. For Davin, “left intellectuals, enamored as they were, and are, with marxist ideology, misunderstood, and continue to misunderstand, the nature of this working class ideology of revolt.”4 That the working class focused its radicalism on the electoral system has long perplexed left commentators. The question most posed by the left critics is why the working class never moved beyond this vision. The ongoing deterioration of living conditions during the Great Depression, the near-absolute disappearance of employment possibilities, the widespread evictions from farmland and tenements, the mass migration from the countryside into the urban slums, the collapse of the privately-financed welfare system, and the sense of dislocation and bewilderment that defined reality led the population to embrace the state as the savior of the economy at a time when parts of the bourgeoisie saw the stabilisation of economic competition and a guaranteed minimum existence for the working population as key to the regeneration of a capitalist normalcy.

In critical places throughout Crucible of Freedom, Davin might have strengthened his argument about working class achievement. Roosevelt, for instance, had only lukewarmly encouraged the unions at first and does not deserve credit for their development. Unionisation represented a fallback position for the Democrats after the National Recovery Act was declared illegal by the ever-conservative judiciary. Both the NRA and unions aimed at similar economic effects, even if the means to bring this about were different. The NRA created uniform business conditions in each industrial and commercial sector through the use of formal price- and output-fixing agreements. Such measures eliminated the downward spiral that accompanied the price-cutting and cut-throat competition that otherwise typified the depressionary circumstances and blocked a recovery. Widespread unionisation accomplished the same goals by creating identical wage rates and working conditions throughout an entire economic sphere. Unions could do what the judiciary would not allow the government to do. Such were the vicissitudes of the capitalist world.

Other aspects of the New Deal, however, speak to the peripheral nature of the working class within the New Deal constellation and contradict Davin's assertions to the contrary. Public works projects provided employment and a regular income, but most were make-work programs that offered little in the form of skills actually useful in the private sector. Jobs in road building and land clearance led nowhere and this at a time when employers already required huge inputs of machines, raw materials, and productive facilities per worker. The New Deal eliminated much of the extreme poverty that characterised the early 1930s, but its programs provided incomes that were pegged at a survival minimum. The special and often short-lived projects in the creative arts employed very few people despite the attention these programs received. They were hardly an outlet for the broad masses of the unemployed. Even programs like social security and disability insurance, while better than nothing, only guaranteed a minimal existence. Many of the measures implemented by the New Deal were not intended to benefit workers at all, but rather the middle and upper classes. Transportation facilities like airports and roadways were not for workers, who during the 1930s still depended on railroads and tramways for their mobility. Power plants, dams, and other major installations had economic development as a prime motive, not the direct and immediate relief of the destitute. The street-by-street infrastructure projects like electrical wiring and water pipes that benefitted consumers followed much later.

Davin never quite comes to terms with the actual character of the CIO unions as working class organizations. The CIO unions were from the start ambivalent about working class initiative and self-determination. For all the militance of the sit-down strikes in 1936–37, including the street battles with police, thugs, and National Guardsmen, the elaborate food supply networks for the striking workers, the supplementary picketing by the unemployed, the strike committees and massive demonstrations, there was also an air of passivity that functioned against the strikers. Once inside a workplace, no attempt was made to bring production under worker control, nor it seems was this idea ever broached. From the iconic photos of that era, it looks as if workers sat around and played cards, appearing at the factory windows every so often in order to wave the American flag and show just how patriotic they remained. At every juncture, authority was wrested from the democratically-elected strike committees and vested instead in appointed union officials. If the CIO was identified with working class militance, it was also synonymous with the pacification of that same working class. The CIO openly proclaimed its intent to replace the collusion between large corporations and local governments by interjecting itself into this equation. The right to organize and bargain collectively was the key to its success, and this is precisely what New Deal legislation guaranteed.

Meanwhile Davin points to the new surge in union membership and strikewave at the end of the 1930s that defied the directives issued by the CIO leadership as examples of the ongoing combativeness of the working class and its ability to influence economic and political policy. Be that as it may, these same years were also characterised by ongoing purges within the union movement of its most active and independent members—leftists, left-leaning locals, and left-wing unions alike. Workers also witnessed the replacement of elected union officials by appointed ones, automatic collection of dues and payment of shop steward salaries by the employers, no-strike pledges, and the transformation of the union movement into “business” unions that confined their attention to wage rates and working conditions and amassed huge treasuries whose preservation became a goal in and of themselves. To deal with the two million strikers in defense-related industries, the Democratic Party began to use the military as a strike-breaking tool, with CIO officials coordinating their own activities with soldiers and politicians alike. Nor does Davin mention that many strikes were fought not for higher wages and less-brutalising working conditions but for the sole purpose of union recognition (just as the recent demonstrations in Michigan and elsewhere, in which the unions proclaimed their readiness to help cut wages and benefits, were an attempt to save the union bureaucracies).

The working class could not control its own organizations, neither during the sit-down strikes nor during the 1945–46 strike wave—the largest the country had ever experienced. Likewise, it could not dominate the political environment into which it had emerged as a significant factor. Already in the late 1930s the Democratic Party placed palpable limits on the ability of the unions to dictate candidates and electoral platforms. Davin spends considerable time plotting the fortunes of David Lawrence as mayor of Pittsburgh and governor of Pennsylvania, who Davin holds responsible for the loss of union influence. But behind Lawrence stood an entire political establishment. The unions were a third member of the coalition that comprised the Democratic Party, alongside the race-oriented “Dixiecrats” of the southern states and the corrupt urban-based political machines throughout the industrialised states of the northeast, midwest, and west. The influx of new voters from the working class enclaves intensified still further the urban/non-urban divide that already characterised the political see-saw between the two major political parties. In the steel and mining districts on which Davin concentrates, the Republican Party's vote remained constant between 1930 and 1936, whereas the Democratic vote tripled. The strikewave and sitdowns provoked a rightward shift among the swing voters within the middle classes. Minimizing the visibility and importance of union influence within the Democratic Party became a necessity in the face of this electoral drift nationally, lest parts of the Democratic coalition float away.

If, as Davin says, “the class war in America reached its peak in 1948, with the electoral class cleavage reaching the highest levels ever recorded,” the working class's role within the political environment had by then changed dramatically.5 Rather than influencing policy, working class voters became a “taken-for-granted” group within the Democratic Party. What emerges slowly in Crucible of Freedom is an image of a working class that has fierce and closely-held allegiances but which also has a profound inability to move beyond its pre-existing attachments to the Democratic Party, unions, and the Catholic Church. Union members continued to vote Democratic for the next several decades, tempted neither by the left-leaning Henry Wallace nor the race-hater Strom Thurmond. Nor would the attempts at intimidation during the anti-communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s change voting patterns, as if the working class was oblivious to the mangling to which the political and managerial elites subjected themselves.

Politics became its own jobs engine, with the CIO finally discovering what the German Social Democrats had figured out nearly a half-century before. Because of their importance to the Democratic Party, the unions were well-positioned to enter the reshuffled system of political patronage. Some of the union officials who catapulted into positions in the various government bureaucracies are highlighted in the many, often redundant, interviews conducted by Davin for this book. They were beneficiaries of the so-called “spoils system” that remains a feature of the political world. During the New Deal, jobs could be found within the various social welfare programs like the Works Progress Administration, the workmen's compensation bureaucracy, the fleet of labor department inspectors, and in municipal employment agencies like the fire and police departments, the judiciary, boards of education, and town halls in general. The trade union elite is the perspective from which Davin interprets these decades, letting slip at one point that the working class was a “motley crew of the oppressed, which comprised not only ethnics of all types, but women as well as men, blacks as well as whites.”6

An ethnic community, Davin explains, “provided almost everything a person required, from cradle to grave, making most travel outside the neighborhood unnecessary.”7 Such communities depended on long-term job stability for its members, precisely what Davin attributes to the New Deal reorganization of society. A prime example was the Homestead factory complex, where during the 1950s, 4,000 of the 10,000 employees were father-son combinations. “To express class solidarity with your fellow workers,”he clarifies, “did not mean embracing strangers. It meant expressing solidarity with your father, your uncles, your brothers, and your fellow Poles or paesani.”8 In other words, workers functioned as ethnics at home and at work but as citizens at the polling places, a bifurcated sense of the world that typifies the working class as inward-looking, self-protective, and fixated on the institutions that promised to maintain the status quo. To be treated fairly, Davin tells us, is all that workers ever wanted. Why they never asked for more, goes unaddressed.

Race and gender inequality are the Achilles heels of Davin's analysis, dynamics he neither satisfactorily probes nor explains. What kind of class solidarity only included white men? Were the households of white union members less vehement in their indoctrination of children, less prone to consider epithets, negative comments, and aggressive physical posturing as normal behavior? Did they invite the black playmates of their children into their homes? Spend time chit-chatting with the parents of these playmates? Refuse to participate in the informal networks of realtors, bankers, and home owners that enforced strict codes of residential segregation? Object to the taunts and physical violence to which Negro and Puerto Rican males were subject when they strayed into white neighborhoods? And what about the near-universal harassment of working women? Were CIO members less prone to it? Were CIO households more loosely structured and less restrictive for female members?

If working class households tended to be more progressive because of their voting patterns and union membership, as Davin suggests, how was this manifested? There is good reason to think that a sizable portion of the working class prided itself on its “enlightened” views. But here as elsewhere, Davin has left a huge gap, despite the many interviews he conducted for this book. That African-Americans joined the unions and also voted Democratic, Davin argues, is a testament to the latent progressiveness within these institutions. Nonetheless, the New Deal era of the 1930s–1960s was also a time when the white working class forged its identity in opposition to its black and Latino workmates. That women lived in a still-other bifurcated world also needs exploration. The women that Davin mentions who supported the CIO were also excluded from virtually all levels of governance, even of their own unions. How does all this fit together—class solidarity, racial enmity, and gender discrimination—into a coherent understanding of working class intentionality and behavior, an absence not just in Davin's book but in most other historically-oriented accounts of the working class as well?

Crucible of Freedom ends on a false note: “out of the crucible of the industrial heartland, these nameless workers democratised large sectors of the economy. These despised 'foreigners' brought political democracy to large portions of the country.”9 The New Deal, pace Davin, laid the basis for the progressive movements that unfolded decades later. That may be so, but the legacy of the New Deal coalition was part of the reason that new social upheavals like the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements were needed. Davin has produced a history of the working class all-too-eager to tell us that everything would have been alright, if only the world had stopped changing. That it hadn't already changed enough is a theme he blames leftists for having the temerity to even suggest.

• 1Davin, p. 1.
• 2Ibid., p. 404.
• 3Ibid., p. 5.
• 4Ibid., p. 11.
• 5Ibid., p. 340.
• 6Ibid., p. 127.
• 7Ibid., p.46.
• 8Ibid., p. 47.
• 9Ibid., p. 406.

This is a very important book, one of the very few books published since 1991 on the “Russian Question” that will compel people (this reviewer included), long wedded to different characterizations of the post-1917 or post-1929 Soviet regime, to think through their commitments.

Those people most set for a rethink are those (not including this reviewer) committed to variants of “orthodox Trotskyism.” John Marot upends a lot of views long held to be commonplace. Among the most important are Marx's and Lenin's respective assertions (Marx ca. 1880, Lenin in his 1899 Development of Capitalism in Russia), that Tsarist Russia was irreversibly capitalist. Marot, to the contrary, argues that Russia up to 1917 was feudal, and thereafter, up to Stalin's 1929 assault on the peasantry, it was a petty-producer economy with a household agriculture (where 85 percent of the population was employed) working not for a market but for private domestic consumption.

Assessments to the contrary, holding that the Russian countryside was capitalist already in Marx's lifetime, were put forth in the latter's correspondence with the Populists, after he initially, based on a long study of Russian agriculture, had concluded that the Russian peasant commune (or mir, or obschina) was alive and well, even mentioning it in the 1882 preface to a new edition of the Communist Manifesto as the possible point of departure for a direct transition to communism. Shortly thereafter, Marx reversed himself and said it was too late: capitalism had triumphed in the Russian countryside, and Russia was condemned, like all capitalist countries before it, to the bloody road of capitalist accumulation. As he had written in the famous letter to Vera Zasulich “If Russia follows the path that it took after 1861,1 it will miss the greatest chance to leap over all the fatal alternatives of the capitalist regime that history has ever offered to a people. Like all other countries, it will have to submit to the inexorable laws of that system.”

For Marot, however, the state-dominated agricultural exports starting in the 1880s did not make the Russian countryside capitalist either, as they were based on taxation-in-kind of the peasantry and designed to pay for imports of military hardware and industrial goods. He denies the capitalist character of the industrial sector under the Tsarist regime, seeing it rather as a kind of command economy aimed above all at military procurement.

Lenin's The Origins of Capitalism in Russia is also wrong-headed, according to Marot, similarly missing the domestic/household character of peasant production, and conjuring up a stratification of peasants from kulaks to poor peasants which, in Marot's view, was a myth that missed the deeper unity among all strata of peasants in their commitment to the peasant way of life. For Marot, what changed in the countryside after 1917 was the liquidation of the manorial estates of the landlords, when the peasants finally got all the land, and embarked (after the Civil War and the famines and, until Stalin's collectivizations), on a sort of golden age of the Russian peasantry.

Marot also thinks that all 1920s factions of the Bolshevik Party, the Trotskyist left, the Bukharinist right, and the Stalinist center, failed to understand this household, non-market driven nature of peasant production in the Russian countryside, and that hence all 1920s industrialization policies based on that misunderstanding were doomed to fail. Somewhat like Amadeo Bordiga, but in a very different way, Marot sees the Stalinist counter-revolution coming not from the party-class relationship in urban industry but from the post-1929 forced collectivization of agriculture.

The politically-charged conclusion of Marot, with contemporary implications for the considerable number of remaining Trotskyists, is that Trotsky facilitated the triumph of Stalin by his wrong-headed view that the “main danger” of “capitalist restoration” was the Bukharinist right, thereby situating the most dangerous counter-revolutionary of all, Stalin, in a mythical “center.” It is hard to see how anyone, after Marot's demonstration (in chapter 2 of his book) of where Trotsky's analysis led strategically and tactically during the 20s (i.e., in Marot's critique of Cliff's portrait of Trotsky in this period), can remain an “orthodox Trotskyist.” This also echoes Bordiga, by the way, who had the same assessment of the factions of the 20s. This belief that Stalinism was a “center” between Trotsky and Bukharin is carried into politics even today, wherever Trotskyist groups survive. Most powerfully, Marot shows how the great majority of the Trotskyist “left opposition” signed on to Stalin's program in the late 20s. (A number of people of productivist inclinations still profess that kind of Preobrazhensky-Deutscherite “critical support” for Stalinism.) Finally, he shows how Trotsky himself, though he never capitulated politically, only started really talking about “workers' democracy” in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) and how his orientation was always top-heavy, oriented to factional struggle within the party, and not to the ongoing “anti-Stalinist” activity of the working class under the NEP.

Marot, for the record, holds the “bureaucratic collectivist” analysis of the Stalinist phenomenon, a stance which moreover seems to flow from his argument that Russia was not capitalist either before or after 1917.

My problem with Marot's book (and I will not be discussing the latter chapters on Bogdanov) is in his silence about the events leading up to 1921 in which the soviets and workers' councils—the heart of any meaningful workers' democracy coming out of the November revolution—were destroyed. Anton Ciliga's remarkable book The Russian Enigma echoes Marot's view of Trotsky's excessive focus on the intra-party faction fights, to the neglect of the ferment in the working class itself during the 1920s. Ciliga shows how, in the Siberian concentration camp where he was held from 1930 to 1932, the Trotskyist prisoners had exactly that same attitude; they had their bags packed, expecting to be recalled to Moscow any day when the factional tide shifted, and they treated all the other political prisoners—anarchists, Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks—with the same arrogance they had shown them when in power. They, too, were solely oriented to what was happening “at the top” and utterly detached from any resistance from below. Ciliga points out how the workers in Petrograd were angered when Trotsky's autobiography, My Life, appeared in 1930 and they found the same intra-party preoccupations there, to the neglect of the broader working class.

Marot writes about the general Bolshevik agreement among all three factions during NEP on the need to preserve the worker-peasant alliance and to promote a “democratic,” non-coercive solution to the peasant question. This factional situation was thrown into disarray in 1927–28 by two successive bad harvests, which gave Stalin his opportunity. He destroyed the Bukharinist right with the help of the Trotskyist capitulationists, who missed their last chance, which would have been an alliance with Bukharin against Stalin.

These people, amounting to most of the key figures in the left opposition except for Trotsky himself, argued that Stalin was implementing much of the left program, so why not support him against the dangers of “capitalist restoration” represented by Bukharin?

With their false sense of where the “restorationist danger” lay, they paid a very high price when Stalin turned on them as well.

But one must ask: what exactly was “democratic” about a country where, after 1921, there was no legal opposition, and which did not even permit factions in the ruling party itself? Marot doesn't openly quarrel with recent works by writers such as Simon Pirani which argue that the soviets and workers' councils were dead by 1921; he merely does not take up the question. If there was any democracy—a debate about policy with real power to back it up—to speak of in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, it was exercised by a numerically tiny group of people holding fragile state power above a sea of 150 million workers and above all peasants with no direct influence in their debates.

I have no quarrel (in Marot's critique, in chapter 3, of the a-political or anti-political new social historians) with either the idea that the October Revolution was not a coup d'etat or (in chapter 4) with the idea that party organization, and not some amorphous social movement, was central in influencing the social debate between February and October 1917, or finally with Marot's critique of the (at best) a-historical Social Democratic and Menshevik argument that the Bolsheviks should not have seized power, predicated as their strategy was on the indispensable revolution in the western heartland of capitalism. As Rosa Luxemburg tirelessly pointed out in the last months of her life, the German Social Democrats did everything in their power to prevent the international extension of the revolution and guaranteed that the Russian Revolution would be strangled in isolation.

I am not so sanguine, however, about Marot's denial of Russian particularism relative to the world ferment from 1917–1921. Russia was, after all, the “weak link” if there ever was one, as theorized in the Marx-Trotsky concept of permanent revolution (Germany in 1848, Russia in 1917). There is first of all the question, posed ever since then, of why the revolutionary left currents in the West (with the exception of the Dutch council communists), did not establish political organizations independent of Social Democracy well before 1914; one thinks first of all of Rosa Luxemburg. (Typical Trotskyist carping on this point quietly ignores the fact that Lenin supported Kautsky right up to August 1914, whereas Luxemburg had seen through him by 1911.) There is the question of Luxemburg's and Trotsky's (Our Tasks, Report of the Siberian Delegation) critiques of Lenin before 1905. Lenin's role was undoubtedly brilliant at Zimmerwald and in the April Theses. But what about after the seizure of power? What about the testimonies of figures such as Victor Serge or Max Eastman? What of Lenin's refusal to allow working-class factions after the Civil War, as demanded by the impeccably Bolshevik Workers' Group or the Democratic Centralists? What of the anti-working class repression starting in 1918 detailed by historians such as Nicholas Werth, not to mention the suppression of the independent soviets and workers' councils in 1920–21 detailed by Berkman and Goldman? What of Eastman's description of the military and police presence surrounding the site of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922, something like the police crowd control in Giuliani's New York, where no ordinary worker or peasant could come near the premises? What of the treatment of Makhno after his forces helped the Red Army defeat the Whites? What of the arrogance of the Bolshevik delegation to Kronstadt in March 1921, that tipped the Kronstadt soviet, which was prepared to negotiate, into open revolt against the regime? What of the frantic carrot-and-stick tactics of the party to quell the February–March strikes in Petrograd just before the Kronstadt uprising, of which Kronstadt can be seen as an extension? What of the party's inability to use Red Army units in Petrograd, deemed unreliable, against Kronstadt, and machine guns established in the rear of the charge across the ice to shoot deserters? What of Lenin's speech to the 10th Party Congress (March 1921) in which he said “the Russian proletariat has ceased to exist” and Shliapnikov shouted from the floor “So you exercise a dictatorship in the name of a class which no longer exists!”

I therefore question Marot's attempt downplay the events of 1917–1921 and to focus on those after 1927–1928 in pinpointing the counter-revolution. There is no question that there is a “qualitatative leap” after the latter date. But wasn't the Bolshevik regime that emerged from the Civil War, and which presided over the NEP at the very least a police state? We might recall Lenin's and Dzerzhinsky's special inquiry into the excesses of the Cheka: they were horrified. Or the Cheka officer, interviewed by Victor Serge after he had ordered the shooting of anarchists who had already been amnestied: “Lenin and Trotsky can indulge in all the sentimentalism they want—my job is to eradicate counter-revolution!”

There remains the question of Soviet foreign policy. The 1917 strategy of the Bolsheviks was unquestionably: foment world revolution to save soviet power. Yet there is hardly a foreign policy decision after 1917 that remains uncontroversial, in terms of when the Soviet regime itself started acting like a nation-state with national interests to defend, at the expense of the world revolution. Historical analysis has not yet given adequate attention to Trotsky's secret memo of 1920 to Lenin, Zinoviev et al:

All information on the situation in Khiva, in Persia, in Bukhara and in Afghanistan confirm the fact that a Soviet revolution in these countries is going to cause us major difficulties at the present time… Until the situation in the West is stabilized and until our industries and transport systems have improved, a Soviet expansion in the east could prove to be no less dangerous than a war in the West…a potential Soviet revolution in the east is today to our advantage principally as an important element in diplomatic relations with England. From this I conclude that: 1) in the east we should devote ourselves to political and educational work…and at the same time advise all possible caution in actions calculated to require our military support, or which might require it; 2) we have to continue by all possible channels at our disposal to arrive at an understanding with England about the east.2

Is it wrong to see in the March 1921 conjuncture, of Kronstadt—the defeat of the March Action in Germany—the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement—and the NEP as the end of the revolutionary phase, on a world scale?

To conclude: I must say, in all fairness, that to dwell excessively on the domestic and international dimensions of Soviet power from 1917 to 1921 is to divert attention from the real focus of Marot's book and to criticize him for not treating subjects he did not intend to write about. His singular contribution is, as stated at the outset, to have re-posed the whole question of Russian and then Soviet agriculture in a new way, and to have demonstrated in detail how the Trotskyist left opposition fell on its face in its preference for Stalin over Bukharin, a preference that still colors the political judgment of “orthodox Trotskyism” where it persists to this day.

• 1The year of the tepid, but much-trumpeted, Tsarist land reform.
• 2From Jan M. Meijer (org.), The Trotsky Papers, 1917–1922, 2 vols., London, The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1964, 1971, vol. II, page 209. See also my article “Socialism in One Country” Before Stalin, and the Origins of Reactionary “Anti-Imperialism”: The Case of Turkey, 1917–1925” (2009).

Introduction

For the ruling classes, “austerity” is a preferred approach, along with the casualization of employment, “bailouts” for the “commanding heights” of the capitalist system (i.e., the FIRE sector, major corporations, the automotive industry, etc.) and other ways, for weathering out the economic crisis that began five years ago and reducing the cost of variable capital as a whole in order to realize more surplus value. Prominent examples of austerity as the policy of first resort include the decisions of the governments of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Spain to accept the structural adjustment terms which Germany and France, the leading member nation-states of the European Union, have set forth. Not surprisingly, opposition to austerity in Europe has been fierce. North America has not been devoid of unrest either. Two examples from North America, which originated in the United States, include the Wisconsin protests and Occupy Wall Street. However, for the purposes of this book review, the events in Wisconsin are the main focus.

During the previous year, 2011, one of the more prominent attempts in the drive toward austerity in the United States began when Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin decided, as one way among other methods, to strip public sector unions of collective bargaining rights. The consequence was a wave of massive social and political protest as the working class in Wisconsin took to the streets in opposition to Walker and his agenda. The resultant uproar took on national and international dimensions as support rapidly grew for the uprising and Walker's authority faced serious challenges from the working class. However, the working-class challenge to austerity became dented and appropriated when the AFL-CIO, with the involvement of the Democrats, funneled the uprising into “official” political-legal channels by merely subjecting Walker to a recall.1 Walker won the recall, thus successfully fending off a weakened uprising and remaining in a position to continue with his policies.2 Tellingly, although the early months of the Wisconsin saga attracted much public attention, less attention was paid to the aftermath. This marked decrease in attention to the events in Wisconsin from the last year to the present one speaks volumes as to the demobilization and defeat of the working class, to say nothing of the decision by trade union bureaucrats and Democratic Party politicians to subject Walker to a recall.

The initial attention toward Wisconsin came from various parts of society, including organizations and media outlets associated with “the left” (generally speaking); Monthly Review Press, for instance, published Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back in the early months of this year, 2012, prior to the recall victory by Walker. This volume, a collection of articles, was edited by Michael D. Yates, a retired professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, a labor educator, an associate editor of Monthly Review magazine, and the editorial director of Monthly Review Press.

Wisconsin Uprising

Wisconsin Uprising, consisting of sixteen essays by different contributors and divided into three sections, provides a compact take on the upheaval. The general approach of the book is helpful for activists and organizers who are on “the left.” But the question to ask here is: Which left? Given that most of the contributors have trade unionist and/or “soft” Trotskyist backgrounds (i.e., Solidarity and the International Socialist Organization) and the political worldview of Monthly Review, the book is of interest to those associated with the left wing of devalorization.3 Certainly for left communists, Wisconsin Uprising is, at best and at most, merely a discussion among trade union bureaucrats who aspire to be more “progressive,” “principled,” and “democratic,” and Leninists who still think of day-to-day trade union organizing work as a way to “take over” unions as vehicles for working-class revolution (the application of the vanguard party leadership model of political organizing to workplaces). Nonetheless the book is important and relevant for any reader (or any reader based in North America) because it provides, however limited, a glimpse of the potential for the Wisconsin uprising to spread and contribute to a wider working class rebellion. However the very real possibilities of cooption, demobilization, and thus defeat by “mainstream” trade union and political institutions such as the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party and by political currents associated with the left wing of devalorization exist as well. By mid-2012, a few months ago as of this writing, co-option by the former reached its actual and logical conclusion: the defeat of the Wisconsin uprising.

First section of the book: The events in Wisconsin

The first section, made up of five chapters, provides an “on-the-ground” perspective that also takes into account the political-economic aspects of the situation in Wisconsin. Since Walker won the recall, the book begins to have a dated feeling with this section. Certainly in hindsight, an essay titled “A New American Workers' Movement Has Begun,” by Dan La Botz, a founding member of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and a member of Solidarity, appears to be overconfident in terms of the spirit of its title. Content-wise, La Botz argues that the working-class revolt in Wisconsin qualitatively differs from previous worker rebellions.

The new movement that has arisen does not focus on the usual issues of collective bargaining—working conditions, wages, and benefits—but focuses rather on the political and programmatic issues usually taken up by political parties: the very right of workers to collective bargaining, the priorities of state budgets, and the tax system that funds these budgets. The new labor movement, because it has begun in the public sector, will not be so much about the process of class struggle as it will be about how class struggle finds a voice through political program.4

Premature statements about a new labor movement aside, La Botz does not really broach the issues of working-class struggles beyond “bread and butter” labor issues and “mainstream” political matters and their relevance to any new labor movement that may take shape due to the Wisconsin struggle. With regard to the former, “working conditions, wages, and benefits” were, as La Botz notes, not the main focus of the public sector workers' protest in Wisconsin; the “very right” of collective bargaining is something that even, at least one would think, a business union would fight to keep. Likewise for the latter, so far as political programs are concerned, state budgeting priorities and taxation policies are important issues that have a concrete, everyday significance. Yet attempts by “rank and file” workers to critically tackle the central roles of the state and money in capitalism as an organic part of the discussions on budgeting and tax policies would indicate a major step forward in the development of a revolutionary consciousness.

Also, the essays by Connor Donegan and Andrew Sernatinger, who are both also members of Solidarity, provide eyewitness sketches of the protests while grounding those descriptions in political-economic terms. Donegan, a graduate student of human geography at the University of British Columbia, places the uprising in the context of the economic crisis, which he terms the “Great Recession.”5 So far as theoretical perspectives go, Donegan refers to Andre Gunder Frank, a leading world-systems theorist during the mid-to-late twentieth century and a contributor to Monthly Review (Monthly Review Press has republished two of his books in its “MRP Classics” series) and attributes the causes of the crisis to an over-accumulation of capital (and the resultant stagnation).6 Sernatinger, in turn, who is a contributor to publications such as Against the Current, Socialism and Democracy, and Labor Notes, observes that there were two waves of austerity in 2008 and 2011 and also attributes the crisis to capital over-accumulation.7

To state the obvious, both analyses by Donegan and Sernatinger point to an interpretation of the economic crisis that is based on “monopoly capital” theory. Likewise, “monopoly capital” theory is the bedrock of Monthly Review's politics. In its broad strokes, “monopoly capital” theory discounts the notion of working class revolutions in the advanced capitalist nation-states. Instead, the working classes in the advanced capitalist nation-states are “labor aristocracies” beholden to capitalism and imperialism and thus all revolutionary prospects lie in the peripheral “Third World.” Monthly Review itself staked out such “Third Worldist” political positions by expressing uncritical sympathy and support for Stalinist movements and regimes throughout the world, especially during the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet at roughly the same time, working-class revolts occurred in the advanced capitalist nation-states, including France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the United States—revolts which occurred outside of trade unions and political parties (whether mainstream or Leninist) and which had little or nothing to do with nation-state formation and primitive accumulation in the “Third World.”8 In terms of the latter, a few examples include China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The Chinese transition from Stalinist state capitalism (which Monthly Review considered to be “socialism”) to neo-liberal capitalism has merely brought forth much hand-wringing from Monthly Review.9 Additionally, the renewed and empowered significance of the FIRE sector due to the neo-liberal capitalist transformation has compelled Monthly Review in recent years to modify its “monopoly capital” theory by taking into account finance (thus renaming its theory “monopoly-finance capital theory”); however, there has been no fundamental re-interpretation, much less critique. Although Donegan and Sernatinger only briefly touch on capital over-accumulation and thus do not extensively write about the relationship of that specific concept with the rest of “monopoly capital” theory, it is worth noting that the formulation and use of “monopoly capital” theory prevents Monthly Review's editors and contributors from taking up a truly communist perspective on working-class uprisings in general and the Wisconsin uprising in particular.

Second section: Lessons from Wisconsin

The second section, the briefest with only three chapters, deals with what trade union and “left” (again, broadly speaking) organizers and activists can take away from the Wisconsin uprising. These “lessons” are mostly relevant to “mainstream” “left-liberal”/social-democratic politics in North America or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world. That said, many of the political lessons discussed in this section are those with which trade unionists, social democrats, and perhaps even Leninists can agree with or at least not disagree with. Yet even so, one of the suggestions by Jane Slaughter and Mark Brenner, both associated with Labor Notes, a left-bureaucratic trade unionist journal, “Workers will fight for even a boring business union,” is dubious, to say the least.10 Additionally, it contradicts another one of their propositions, “Bottom-up unions are needed now more than ever.”11 Hypothetically speaking, certainly people involved in a left political network or organization such as the Industrial Workers of the World would agree, although the IWW also would not consider bottom-up union organizing to be consistent with merely fighting and settling for a “boring business union” that simply has no interest in class struggle and the end of capitalism.

Stephanie Luce, a professor at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute of the City University of New York, provides a set of five annotated theses that are also rather lukewarm. For instance, one of her theses, “Hold politicians accountable from the left,” presupposes the robust existence of both a social-democratic left and a trade union movement that can in fact hold “left” politicians accountable for developing and enforcing proposed policies.12 Neither exist, which effectively amount to a thesis that is devoid of current and practical political significance. If both did in fact exist, then at least there would be the possibility of achieving more “breathing space” via effective reforms, even though the danger of cooption by the state and capital is still a likely possibility.13

Rand Wilson, a onetime Working Families Party candidate and an organizer involved with trade union institutions such as the Communications Workers of America, the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO and SEIU and pro-Democratic initiatives such as Jobs with Justice, and Steve Early, a journalist and former trade union official with the Communications Workers of America, propose “union survival strategies in open shop America” by arguing that the experience of public sector worker unionization in the southern United States offers examples for public sector trade unionists and workers in Wisconsin to learn from.14 The core idea they propose is that “workers must definitely shed their past role as ‘clients’ or passive consumers of union services. In workplaces without a union (or agency) shop and collective bargaining as it was practiced for decades, they must take ownership of their own organizations and return them to their workplace roots […]”15 The moralistic wording (i.e., workers as “passive consumers” of union services) notwithstanding, one wonders, with good reason, as to whether the method of “taking ownership” of workers' organizations so as to return these entities to their “workplace roots” can have any applicability outside of the public sector. In public sector workplaces, the strategy probably has considerable potential and there is no harm in trying, but what can this organizing approach possibly mean for most workers who have “flexible” and/or temporary employment and who do not have workplaces to speak of and labor organizations to turn to in light of the retrogressive process that has taken place at a high speed under the neo-liberal variant of capitalism? At best, Wilson and Early's proposal amounts to a suggestion for a renewed defense effort that will only help a part of the working class.

Third section: Making Wisconsin relevant

The third section, which is the most extensive portion, attempts to broaden and deepen the significance of Wisconsin by touching on other struggles in North America which concern the trade union movement. The intention is to draw connections between the Wisconsin uprising and those other struggles, although the result has been a rather scattered section. As is the case with the previous two sections of the book, the third section contains points of view and arguments that, again, hardly anybody associated with the “progressive” currents of the trade union movement and the left wing of devalorization would disagree with, thus pointing to the possibility of a “democratic” and/or “populist” politics “of the left.” For instance, Elly Leary's chapter, which is a reprint (with an “up-to-date” foreword) of an article that appeared in the June 2005 magazine issue of Monthly Review, touches on the need for a working-class challenge to white supremacy, which is practically a consensus position on the contemporary US left.16 Michael Zweig, likewise, writes about the relationship between the “organized labor” movement and the antiwar movement, thus sketching out some possibilities for a new left anti-imperialist politics that would have a working-class component. David Bacon weighs in on possible opportunities for cooperation between the undocumented immigrants' movement and the workers' movement. There is absolutely no question about the need for “the left” (again, generally speaking) to oppose white supremacy, war, and the various efforts to repress undocumented immigrants. Yet there is also the important question as to whether these are struggles are fundamentally within or against capitalism.17

Finally, Fernando Gapasin, an AFL-CIO official and co-author with Bill Fletcher, Jr. (a former member of the Maoist-oriented Freedom Road Socialist Organization and an advocate of Barack Obama) of the book Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (2008/2009), argues for the importance for working class communities of solidarity, which can be interpreted as a call for the revival of the classical workers' movement and its legacy (p. 266). Gapasin's chapter also brings forth a left-Rousseauist perspective on class, a perspective that essentially reifies class as opposed to advocating the abolition of class.18

A Few General Concluding Thoughts

As mentioned before,the political and theoretical limitations of Wisconsin Uprising prevent the book from being of serious interest to left communists, especially since none of the contributors seriously question the effectiveness and appropriateness of the party and union models as models for orienting and organizing the working class toward anti-capitalist revolutionary goals (i.e., communism, which presupposes the abolition of the state, capital, the value-form, commodity production and exchange, money, and all socioeconomic distinctions). This book could have benefited more from a more extensive account of the political-economic context, especially the current and ongoing economic crisis. Although Donegan and Sernatinger do take into account the crisis, they do not give very extensive treatments. But out of fairness, the need to keep the focus on Wisconsin was probably the first priority. But again, Wisconsin Uprising should still be of passing interest for the reader in terms of understanding the concrete issues related to Wisconsin, so long as the reader keeps in mind two aforementioned caveats: the contributors' political perspectives are grounded in the left wing of devalorization and it has a dated feeling because of Walker's recall victory.

• 1See this article, “How the Wisconsin Uprising Got Hijacked,” by Andy Kroll, which originally appeared on the TomDispatch website and later in Mother Jones magazine, for a concrete analysis from a mainstream social-democratic perspective.
• 2See this weblog entry, “Walker's victory, un-sugarcoated,” by Doug Henwood for a concrete analysis.
• 3The “left wing of devalorization” refers to the development of “progressive” or “left” politics based on giving the working class a “voice” in its own exploitation, marginalization, and expulsion within capitalism. Capitalism is, fundamentally, a system of self-valorization (M–C–M’)—its main objective is capitalist accumulation, the realization of surplus value in its monetary form. Realized surplus value returns to the M–C–M’ circuit, thus contributing to social reproduction (here, Marx's models of simple reproduction and expanded reproduction are relevant). In order to realize more surplus value, the reduction of necessary labor time becomes a priority for the capitalist class. Means of producing relative surplus value (i.e., new machinery, new methods of organizing work, etc.) assist in the reduction of necessary labor time, thus allowing the capitalist class greater opportunities to realize more surplus value in total. However, so far as the working class is concerned, the reduction of necessary labor time leads to less secure employment. Furthermore, commodities, now produced and available in greater quantities, become cheaper. Thus, the reduction of necessary labor time via the introduction of means of producing relative surplus value is also a process of devalorization. Thus, politically, the “left wing of devalorization” “represents” the working class by allowing the class to negotiate with or acquiesce to the conditions of capital and the state and to become more pliant vis-à-vis the workings of capitalism. See Loren Goldner's The Remaking of the American Working Class for a more detailed discussion.
• 4Wisconsin Uprising, p. 87.
• 5Ibid., p 30.
• 6Ibid., pp. 39–43.
• 7Ibid., pp. 47–48.
• 8See Loren Goldner's review of Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (2002), “Didn't See the Same Movie,” and “The Universality of Marx” in New Politics in 1989.
• 9As exemplified by a couple of books on China which Monthly Review Press published: The Great Reversal (1990) by William Hinton; Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of "Market Socialism" (1996) by Robert Weil; and China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle (2005) by Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett.
• 10Ibid., p. 147.
• 11Ibid., p. 148.
• 12Ibid., pp. 160–163.
• 13On the issue of the potential helpfulness of reforms, see this interview with Michael Heinrich. Furthermore, Heinrich's book Kritik der politischen Ökonomie: Eine Einführung (2002) was recently published in English by Monthly Review Press.
• 14Ibid., pp. 125, 136–137.
• 15Ibid., p. 137.
• 16Ibid., pp. 175–178.
• 17Even some employers within the food processing and distribution sectors of the US economy are in favor of allowing undocumented immigrants to apply for “legalized” statuses whereas other employers within these same sectors and other sectors cynically and opportunistically threaten undocumented immigrant-background workers with deportation. See page 53 of “The Hands That Feed Us” (2012).
• 18See also “Telling the Truth About Class,” an essay by G.M. Tamas that appeared in Socialist Register 2006.

Now that both the protests have long since come and gone and the official historians have written down the histories of the protests in Wisconsin, it is important to take stock of how those very individuals and organizations that were key in roping workers into the failed electoral recall effort against Governor Walker now lay blame for the failure squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic Party. Some speak of the need for unions to be free from the political dominance of the ruling bourgeois Democratic Party. The factions of bourgeois reformism now speak of the Democratic Party as though it were a foreign entity rather than the very party they were supporting through the height of the protests.

The mood in the union local offices was one of panic, and frenzied activity to catch up with the working class while the class reacted by shutting down and walking out of schools and state workplaces across the state. They were literally rushing off to the State Capitol building to catch up to the workers that had taken it over. Shortly after this came the “assistance” provided by the Democratic Party apparatus, in the form of celebrities, portable toilets and electoral politics. The unions were playing their role as “transmission belts” [Lenin] only to more capitalist class dominance and the destruction of a workers' movement.

The breakdown in the old social compact came when the outgoing state Democratic Party governor allowed the American Federation of State Clerical and Municipal Employees/Wisconsin State Employees Union contract to expire, effectively handing the contract over to the new incoming governor in full knowledge that he would kill it. The very leftists who claimed to believe in “revolutionary leadership” and rank-and-file radicalism tail-ended the leadership of the Democratic Party faction of the bourgeoisie. The consciousness of workers was not articulated enough to break from the Democratic Party. It was the loudest voices on the left that had supported this party and its institutions of defeat.

If it were not for the tireless efforts of the Democratic Party and the unions, things would've spun out of control very quickly. The left, that is the dominant strands of bourgeois reformism on the ground, today blame the Democratic Party and whitewash their own role in the defeat. Socialist Action called for a statewide strike with their direct model being the public sector workers strike in Ontario in 1993.

Of course, the Ontario strike in 1993 lasted five weeks and was sold out in the end by the unions leading it. For most bourgeois reformists, the problem is one of union bureaucrats and bad leadership. On the very highest level, the bourgeoisie runs the unions. They can't just be reformed out of power; otherwise such a thing would've been accomplished long before now.

The AFSCME and the AFT at the national level committed themselves to silencing all talk of strikes. This was the command from the top of the union down to the local shop stewards and no amount of rank-and-file radicalism at the local level would've changed that. In the end the best answer AFSCME had to the pay cuts was to distribute a pamphlet to members on financial management in tough times. The decertification votes threatened by the Walker regime were answered by AFSCME's own voluntary decertification.

The local Occupy movement never got many people as the electoral activity had consumed everything. Eventually the Occupy encampment was shunted off into the empty car dealership lot on the east side of Madison. In the end they were unceremoniously removed once the local authorities decided on what they wanted to do with that particular piece of real estate.

Now that the protests are a distant memory, those who had sown illusions in electoral politics and unions are faced with the ruins of their own political program that was based on unions and electoral politics. For workers the ballot box was a political coffin and the unions were their gravediggers.

Once the next round of state government elections is over, there will probably be attempts to lower the financial burden associated with a state pension system that is still solvent for now. Thus future struggles are already set to arise so the challenge goes out to all revolutionaries to better coordinate our mutual efforts and make ourselves heard.

The following is a letter from a Mexican comrade. For another writing project, I wrote him to ask about the specifics of the “neo-liberal” phase of capitalism in Mexico since the 1970s, and the role in it of Carlos Salinas, as Mexican president from 1988 to 1994, and subsequently. Despite the letter format, footnotes are added to explain references that may not be clear to readers outside Mexico.
—LG

Carlos Salinas (de Gortari) is an evil genius of the generation of Menem–Fujimori–Salinas1 ; I think he was more subtle. Recently, speaking to the press, he said, with his usual cynicism: “I'm going to have to see a plastic surgeon to get this smile off my face,” referring to the PRI2 triumph at the polls in July.

To this day, he continues to dominate the destiny of Mexico, now that the PRI has "returned" with Salinas. The presidential election was controlled by drug money, through the wholesale purchase of votes among the most wretched and degraded parts of the population, in exchange for food in supermarkets and building materials, by threats, and by the corporate control of the unions, of businesses, of government offices, of the army and the police, and/or just by outright theft of ballot boxes, and the absolute domination of TV and of the companies engaged in false electoral “polls.” The "left" (which we cannot even call “social democratic”, because that would be too radical) has re-negotiated for control of the country in tradeoffs for positions in the PRI government and in areas of influence (such as Mexico City, governed by the PRD,3 with Marcelo Ebrard, a former comrade of Salinas)… leaving the "hopes" of "the people" in AMLO (popular tag of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the PRD), a leader who seems to be a religious symbol…

Salinas has been the leading "revolutionary" of Mexican neo-liberalism. During the period of his predecessor, Miguel de la Madrid (1983–88), Salinas and his group were the ideologues and engineers of the country as it emerged from the ruins of the debt crisis of the 80s and during the “neo-liberal” PRI periods (de la Madrid / Salinas / Zedillo) and the two PAN4 presidencies (Fox / Calderon).5 It was a bi-partisan government ordered by Washington, during which there were three electoral frauds against the nationalist / populist / “anti neo-liberal” presidential candidates: in 1988 against Cardenas6 ; in 2006 against AMLO; in 2012 once again against AMLO. This is why the official left calls the neo-liberal governments the “PRIAN” (PRI+PAN) regime. Nonetheless, the various dispersed groups of the radical left include the party of the official left (PRD) inside the same system responsible for neo-liberalism: PRI-PAN-PRD. On the latter party, we should add that, although opportunism and cretinism have led the PRD to betray its political leader (AMLO), which gave the party national relevance, both the PRD and AMLO represented the same reformist and nationalist left which has been superseded by history and by world events. This left, whose leaders mainly come from the PRI as well as from the old Stalinist and socialist parties, has spent a good part of its energies wiping out any notion of class struggle and world capitalist crisis in its doctrine and its political platform (to the extent that they have one). They continue being the same dogmatists they always were, except that now they knock themselves out trying to touch the moon from a treetop: they make no mention of the crisis which is rocking the developed capitalist world, but on the other hand fall all over themselves not to get involved with strikes.

The elections of 1994 and 2000 did not require massive fraud (only minor fraud, which perhaps should not be called fraud, but perhaps traditional controls); the population was convinced by the campaign of "fear" and, in 2000, by the euphoria of the end of PRI and of "democratic change" with the arrival of the PAN government. The 2012 election was a combination of the above-mentioned corporate fraud of Mafia controls carried out at the top. Nonetheless, to be faithful to reality, we have to recognize that large sections of the population voted for the PRI, influenced by a kind of nostalgia for the PRI governments (the state party regime that governed the country for 75 years); these sectors of the population share the false hope that, with the return of the PRI, “social peace” will return, with the argument that the PRI will know how to negotiate with the drug cartels. On this point we have to underscore the seamless ideological triumph of capitalism, since individualism, cynicism and opportunism have become the dominant personal and political praxis.

Thus, the 30 years between 1982 and 2012 constitute one single period, achieved through the PRI-PAN alliance, by both selective and mass disappearances of people, electoral fraud, a generational change in the arrival of youth with no future and who have adapted to a degraded situation, by changes in the curricula of schools, eliminating historical consciousness (even in its bourgeois, constitutional, liberal, nationalist, etc., forms), by the effects of the fall of the USSR and the demise of socialism as a political reference, and by the buying of the opposition and finally by corporate control of the entire state apparatus to make a functional and profitable "neo-liberalism" (hence my reluctance to use the term). For example, the reduction of the economic variable “wages” was achieved in less time than it took with the Pinochet regime, through an active (or, better said, repressive) participation of the state, in coordination with the unions, all in order to make Mexico an international maquiladora7 center.

The trade liberalization policy, aimed at attracting foreign investment, as well as privatization, were introduced by de la Madrid in 1982 in order to pay off foreign debt after the fall of oil prices crashed the country into insolvency; the IMF and World Bank imposed their unhinged privatization program and Mexico's entry into the GATT.8 Nevertheless, Mexico was, for a moment, in one of the strongest positions in its history on the world stage: it was the debtor that could destroy the global financial system if it declared a moratorium on payments. But the miserable Mexican bourgeoisie, under the thumb of the United States, chose instead to boycott other debtor countries and OPEC. The Mexican bourgeoisie chose to take the crumbs of the masters with its servile attitude, and it was apparently Salinas who pulled this off: the debt arrangements (the so-called Brady bonds9 ) and the “NAFTA”10 label, which took Mexico out of Latin America and into "North America" and the First World.

It was a business plan but one resulting in no investment. The plan aimed at attracting investment, and domestic industry was shattered; the countryside expelled millions of peasants who went to work in US agriculture, creating a safety valve by leaving the country with fewer people unemployed, and by sending back dollars to their villages. This phenomenon achieved a magnitude that exceeded the amount of foreign direct investment and which was only slightly less than the income from oil exports. In other words, the agricultural proletariat subsidized the failed neo-liberal experiment of the white and mestizo Mexican bourgeoisie, which has always hated its people, both as proletarians and by their race. The country was polarized in every way, by social class, by region and by city.

Investment created export poles and growing economic sectors, while entire other sectors, effectively the majority, collapsed. The Salinas myth was sustained by the massive entry of fly-by-night capital which created a fictitious expansion and won over the middle classes, sections of the labor aristocracy and even all those people who, contrary to the principles of historical materialism, give more credence to what they are told by tradition, by the Church and by TV than they do to the obvious reality of their own screaming hunger pangs.

Salinas called it a Chinese model, namely economic reform without political reform, or at least a gradual political reform which would make possible a smooth transition to the alternation of parties in power, as it was worked out with the PAN, in order to avoid a Soviet suicide of the Gorbachev type. In fact, many of Salinas's cadres had been Maoists in their youth, another irony of history. But NAFTA was also the result of a gigantic geopolitical movement set in motion by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which greatly frightened Salinas and his team, because they saw Russia, China and the countries of Eastern Europe as new competitors.

Salinas wagered on radicalizing and then anchoring his neo-liberalism by proposing, or better still, begging the United States to give him NAFTA. This came down to the Mexican bourgeoisie begging the United States to expand its own domination of the continent. The American bourgeoisie compared NAFTA with the Louisiana Purchase.11 (Al Gore dixit).

Picking up the thread of this chaotic letter, it was on a night of insomnia and anxiety in Davos (Switzerland) where, every year, the political leaders of the bourgeoisie meet, that Salinas, at midnight, awakened his advisors to make up a plan by the next day and to pressure the US representatives to obtain NAFTA. The recent events around the fall of the Iron Curtain became a spur to Mexican politics. Mexico was claiming in this way to buy life insurance, throwing itself at the master's feet. This was amplified by the ties between the Bush and Salinas families, a point on which the Mexican Larouchites are certainly right, since they have always denounced the pact between Bush and Salinas as a pact of the mafia drug cartel.

Thus time has, on one hand, shown up the “dynamic” Salinista leaders for what they are, and on the other hand it showed that Mexico had in fact not purchased a life insurance policy. NAFTA was a pact with a declining hegemon; world capitalist competition intensified virulently (in a short time, China displaced Mexico as a US trading partner and Chinese workers turned out to be even cheaper than Mexican workers!); the fly-by-night capital fled in 1994 not because of the Zapatista rebellion, nor because of the assassination of Colosio,12 the presidential candidate, but simply because the Federal Reserve Bank raised interest rates; in this way, in one year, Salinista splendor went up in smoke; there was a settling of accounts, but the “Salinista-neo-liberal” model was in place.

In addition, there was a strengthening of the economic sector which offered the country growth and a political solution via a low-intensity civil war: the narco-traffic and the “war on drugs,” a way of carrying out genocide on the unemployed youth who were unable to find a way out by emigrating to the United States and so found it in the narco-traffic; it was also a way of spreading fear in the population and murdering any political opposition behind the smokescreen of generalized violence and the lucrative traffic in weaponry which American companies provide in shops all along the border, for the convenience of the mafias and the Mexican para-military groups.

A beautiful story, isn't it? It's so beautiful that I'm crying writing these lines (and this is no literary metaphor), buried as I feel in the worst kind of impotence and personal and political frustration. I've told you this many times, but now I'm saying it, speaking not for myself but for all those young people in the 132 movement,13 the Mexican “indignants” who never went into the streets until this year, and for whom I feel the greatest respect and admiration; I don't care, for now, that they are neither communists nor anything close. I'm telling you about a rage drowned in impotence, a pain and fear which is not just mine, but that of many Mexicans. I can't go on with this letter and I really feel very bad: what the future holds for Mexico is an inferno.

A hug!

• 1Carlos Menem was the president of Argentina championing neo-liberalism in the 1990s; Alberto Fujimoro was president of Peru in the same period doing the same thing, while crushing the Shining Path guerrillas.
• 2Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the party which ruled Mexico as a virtual one-party state from 1930 to 2000.
• 3Partido Revolucionario Democratico, the official “left” opposition, headed by former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (“AMLO”), against which serious vote fraud was carried out in both 2006 and 2012.
• 4Partido de Accion Nacional, a perennial also-ran for decades as a right opposition to the PRI, finally had its moment with the neo-liberal era and ruled for 12 years, from 2000 to 2012.
• 5Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon, the two PAN presidents from 2000 to 2012.
• 6Cuauhtémoc Cardenas, PRD candidate for president in 1988 and the son of Lazaro Cardenas, the famous left-populist president from 1934 to 1940, who built Mexico's corporatist system. The 1988 election was widely believed to have been stolen from Cardenas by the PRI.
• 7The maquiladoras are factories built right along the US border, with special tax status, a precarious fly-by-night existence, and horrendous working conditions enforced by thugs, for easy access to the US market.
• 8General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, established after World War II to bring down tariff barriers to international trade; it was renamed the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the 1990s.
  
• 9“Brady bonds” were created by the US official Nicholas Brady to convert uncollectible Latin American debt into long-term bonds, to calm creditors during the post-1982 Latin American credit crisis.
• 10The North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico, pushed through the US Congress in 1993 by Bill Clinton.
• 11Cf. on this the book of John Fernandez-Saxe, La compra-venta de Mejico (The Sell-Off of Mexico). Fernandez-Saxe is a spokesman for oil nationalism, and of course, a bourgeois.
• 12Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, the PRI presidential candidate in 1994 who was assassinated during the electoral campaign and replaced by Eduardo Zedillo. Colosio had made a widely-publicized speech criticizing the policies of his PRI predecessor, Carlos Salinas, and Salinas was widely believed to be behind the assassination, though he was never convicted.
• 13The “YoSoy132” (“I am 132”) movement, made up mainly of students, erupted in Mexico during the May electoral campaign, calling for a democratization of the mass media and denouncing the mediatized imposition of Enrique Peña Nieto as the winner of the election.