Re: Fwd: What to Think and Do re Organizing

[Marilyn Langlois <langlois-rine@comcast.net>]

Dear Rich,

I agree with your analysis about the need to tie education reform with the
anti-war and anti-capitalism movements, and to articulate what the human
community we want to live in looks like.

I've been doing a lot of solidarity work in and with Haiti lately, and I
highly recommend that you read the article by Jacques Depelchin, a Congolese
friend of mine that was just publised on-line at Pambazuka News, entitled
"Solidarity with Cite Soleil in Haiti".  You can find it at
http://www.pambazuka.org

Need to keep connecting the dots . . . .
Marilyn

> From: Rich Gibson <rgibson@pipeline.com>
> Reply-To: ca-resisters@interversity.org
> Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 11:37:11 -0800
> To: ca-resisters@interversity.org
> Subject: [ca-resisters] Fwd: What to Think and Do re Organizing
> 
> 
>> 
>> 
>> It is good to see people beginning to lay out positions prior to the
>> Fresno gathering, meaning we are taking this moment seriously.
>> 
>> So, let us stake out areas of agreement and disagreement and see
>> where we may, or may not, coalesce.
>> 
>> At the outset, I want to restate my respect for anyone engaged in
>> resistance to the regimentation of schools via regulated curricula
>> and high stakes exams, in beating back the military, and especially
>> those who want to overcome the system of capital that lies behind
>> all that. Disagreement is not disrespect and, so far, many of us
>> have found that friendship over the long haul arches over our differences.
>> 
>> That said, I disagree with those who want to disconnect capitalism,
>> imperialism, war, and the trends in school that capital creates,
>> like the Big Tests and the military recruiters.
>> 
>> I disagree with those who see this US government as anything but a
>> weapon for the rich, and executive committee for the wealthy. Urging
>> people into electoral work, into the courts, etc. merely lends
>> credence and support for a state, a government, that is flatly on
>> the other side, the enemy of the mass of people including most students.
>> 
>> That teachers are largely unaware of the nature of government speaks
>> to their own mis-education, especially in colleges of education, but
>> also to the limited privileges teachers have, like health benefits.
>> 
>> I am interested in building a mass base of class conscious people
>> (who, for example, recognize that the working class and the owning
>> class have only contradiction in common),  people within a caring
>> community, people who are willing to take serious risks and at the
>> same time are willing to see that discipline and organization are
>> necessary to reach into a world where we can live reasonably
>> creative, more or less equitable, free lives. I want people to
>> become less alienated, more responsible for our own histories, if
>> not our birthrights.  I want to get rid of capitalism. That is a
>> pedagogical and practical project.
>> 
>> I put the question to all other reformers: Toward What End? If that
>> question is unanswered, then all that happens is more of the same,
>> perhaps in new forms, running on capital's many treadmills:
>> nationalism, hierarchy, mysticism, racism, sexism, irrationalism,
>> more wars, etc.
>> 
>> Opposition to curricula regimentation, high-stakes exams, child
>> abuse, can only be carried through if it is connected to the source
>> of those problems, to capital and its need for a docile, uninformed,
>> work force and witless military. Winning gentler Big Tests and more
>> "progressive," scripted curricula, without building a base of people
>> opposing capital itself, is not winning. Even abolishing the NCLB
>> (which is not going to happen) without an educational project that
>> takes on capitalism is a hollow victory.
>> 
>> I see work in schools and in the military as central to that work
>> for peace and justice in the de-industrialized US. There are other
>> key places, like the immigrant worker rights movement, but schools
>> and the military are important because they are anchors to daily life.
>> 
>> Any plan of action, tactics, needs to be rooted in a careful
>> examination of our current situation, both in general (an
>> international war of the rich on the poor intensifying, and within
>> that imperialist wars), and in specifics (in San Diego, for example,
>> the heavy presence of the military, the connections of all schooling
>> to the military industry,  and the racist border, etc, or In Detroit
>> the racist collapse of the entire city). The general cannot be split
>> apart from its particularities; they interact.
>> 
>> Of course, there are some answers in history to our current
>> situation, but those answers are very limited, and are especially
>> useful only in our criticism of past movements. Our situation is
>> quite different from what people have faced in the past. We are in
>> the midst of a technologically powerful empire that is not about to
>> give up its domain with a whimper.
>> 
>> This is not the British Empire (which went out with fewer bangs but
>> plenty of massacres in Africa) that had the US to hide behind and
>> manipulate. It is not Germany in the thirties when people could look
>> to the USSR or the US. It is not Japan in the thirties when people
>> could look to the Chinese Red Army. It is not the US mired in
>> Vietnam in the sixties; the Iraqis are not the sane peasant
>> nationalists of Vietnam. Rome did not have the Bomb.
>> 
>> While there are some similarities to our context in the past, we are
>> mainly in a unique, and very difficult, position. The emergence of
>> fascism in the US as a popular movement is quite real (80 million
>> Christian fundamentalists, a historically illiterate population, a
>> culture industry thriving on the "300," misogyny, racism, the
>> celebration of violence, coupled with nationalism and the direct
>> rule of the rich).
>> 
>> The civil rights movement and the freedom schools of the 50's and
>> 60's are good examples of both what can be done, and what should not
>> be done. After all, the civil rights movement, as Bob Moses honestly
>> portrays in Radical Equations, was easily diverted from a mass
>> movement for jobs, against racism, to a voting rights project
>> directed by foundation grants. While it would not be hard to find a
>> dozen movements that turned out to be what they claimed to set out
>> to oppose, surely the US civil rights movement would be one of them.
>> All those movements, from the Soviets to the civil rights movement,
>> lost sight of the project of going beyond, transcending, the
>> inequality and exploitation that capital requires. Why do that again?
>> 
>> ACORN today is little more than a Rockefeller Foundation
>> diversion--hardly an exemplary movement.
>> 
>> Myles Horton was, I think, more honest. I suspect he would argue
>> that we must connect the particularities of people's lives today
>> with the larger realities, like war and the emergence of fascism. Or
>> perhaps not. It is hard to tell, Myles Horton was a reformer, above
>> all, but he was not blind to his surroundings, and he was usually
>> surrounded by Marxists of one kind or another. What are the social
>> conditions that might change Myles from a reformer to one who wants
>> to transcend the system of capital? Well, maybe the reality of the
>> brink of WWIII, financial collapse, the eradication of civil
>> liberties, the clear exposure of all governments as corrupt,
>> violent, unable to serve the need of masses of people, and
>> impervious to reformist change.
>> 
>> Jean Anyon's work has been pivotal in understanding education
>> policy. Her comment that "doing school reform without doing social
>> and economic reform in communities is like washing the air on one
>> side of a screen door," stands as a lighthouse for beginning any
>> discussion about education reform. Her political economy of the
>> Newark schools was path-breaking. But her hopeless thought in
>> "Ghetto Schooling," that the only way out of the schools/community
>> crisis is for the rich to give up their money makes no sense---as it
>> is the result of a failure to really critique capitalism and its
>> transformation. The rich are not going to give up their money, and
>> they are far less positioned to do that than they were in the
>> 1960's, when the US was still an ascendant capitalist nation. Now
>> the US is in rapid decline, badly positioned against imperialist
>> rivals like China.
>> 
>> What is possible in Newark and Detroit and elsewhere is that people
>> are positioned so they must fight to live, as in the California
>> Grocery Strike, in the Detroit teachers' wildcats, the student
>> walkouts against this war, and the massive Mayday strike last year.
>> 
>> At issue is whether people will be able to make sense of the fights
>> they must make, or will they make the same errors and lose, again?
>> That is a question of education and organization.
>> 
>> Organizing 101 is not merely listening to people and synthesizing
>> their problems as social, not merely individual, problems; but also
>> having a sense of where you want to go, and being able and unafraid
>> to communicate that. A good part of the reluctance to talk about
>> capitalism is the fear that people will either not understand, or be
>> scared off by it, that they have to be walked through to the reality
>> of capital on baby steps.
>> 
>> That's not true in my experience. This process of one-step-at-a-time
>> teaching and learning surely seems odd when it comes from people
>> steeped in Whole Language, ie, a desire to withhold the real Whole
>> (capitalism) from people in order to walk them through a process
>> (sound out the parts of the social system but never view the whole
>> of it) which it is assumed they cannot understand in discussions or in
>> reading.
>> 
>> The idea of hiding one's politics (if that is the case, and if it is
>> not, then just what are one's politics?) is commonplace on the left.
>> To make a small leap, it winds up with the people who need to know
>> about left politics not knowing, and the people who do not need to
>> know, like the cops, knowing all about it. Such was the CPUSA, the
>> SWP, and many others.
>> 
>> I agree with Kathy Emery (whose book with Susan Ohanian says nearly
>> all that needs to be said about capitalism and education) in that we
>> need to build close personal ties with people, real principled
>> friendships, especially anti-racist friendships, and that the
>> Education Roundtable petition is a good starting point for
>> organizing. It can, as we have seen, expose the absolutely corrupt
>> leadership of the NEA and AFT, for example.
>> 
>> The petition does not, however, ask people to take control over
>> their own lives, to be truly class conscious. Instead, it asks
>> others (corrupt politicians on the Gates' payroll for example) to
>> act for us and, at the end of the day, that will not happen. Nor is
>> it an especially good idea to have an mass of education school grads
>> writing the national curriculum, especially not when more than 90
>> percent of them are white and middle class. There is not going to be
>> a good national curriculum until there is sufficient strife to cause
>> an elite retreat, as in the sixties when the curriculum got briefly
>> interesting. In the absence of a social movement, of organization:
>> nothing. Power only bends to power.
>> 
>> The US ruling class is not going to be voted out of the Iraq oil
>> fields and it is not going to be petitioned out of the school
>> mind-fields, the pipelines for wars, militarism, and voluntary
>> nationalist servitude.
>> 
>> It is possible that civil strife will hasten the retreat of the
>> empire, in schools and out. Surely the invasion of Detroit by the
>> 82nd Airbourne, recalled from Vietnam in 1967 to fight Americans,
>> would be a good historical example. Thousands of jobs, indeed tens
>> of thousands of jobs, were won as a result of that uprising.
>> 
>> Even so, however, this situation today is much different, the
>> empire's rulers much more desperate and even more ruthless because
>> of that. Witness what was done to New Orleans when racism merely
>> connected to nature. Imagine what would happen if Detroit went up
>> again. It might. For black people in the US, the situation is
>> already nearly intolerable. What will educators do?
>> 
>> There are debates about how organizing is done. One can seek the
>> lowest common denominator of complaints that an organizer finds in a
>> community, build a centrist base around that, and see where it goes.
>> This, however, abandons a broader outlook and typically winds up
>> with, at best, very short term effects, a la Alinsky.
>> 
>> The better way to organize is to organize the left, find the more
>> antiracist, more militant, more internationalist, more dedicated
>> people, organize them and have this left move the center.
>> 
>> Boycotts of the tests and driving military recruiters off
>> campuses--all that has already happened without sophisticated
>> structures and lines of communications---though surely it would be
>> better if those elements were in place, and if we could successfully
>> link the boycotts to freedom schooling on or off campuses.
>> 
>> Test boycotts, or driving military recruiters off campuses, do not
>> happen because they are simply announced, but are the product of
>> many factors, including working with parents and students over time,
>> walking door to door in communities,  building reputations, taking
>> smaller actions like demanding toilet paper and books in Detroit or
>> exposing the recruiters' lies in San Diego. But any action at some
>> point requires some one to get it going, and far too few teachers
>> have been willing to gird up the courage to halt what is obviously
>> child abuse.
>> 
>> Teachers do not have to be missionaries for capitalism, and schools
>> its churches. School workers have far more freedom than most other
>> workers. Self-censorship, however, remains powerful in schools where
>> freedom is typically overwhelmed by (often unwarranted) fear; a real
>> inversion of any educational effort.
>> 
>> Teachers now participate in the oppression of kids, and themselves,
>> as we see wages and benefits attached to test scores---as we
>> predicted a decade ago. Part of the reason for that is that thinking
>> teachers have few people to talk to, are isolated, and they know
>> they do not have the power to defend putting real critical thinking
>> into classroom reality. Isolation and fear can be answered by organization.
>> 
>> The Rouge Forum is the only organization in the US that has not only
>> linked capitalism, war, and schooling, but has also led conferences
>> that include school workers, profs, k-12 nd university students,
>> parents, community and cultural activists, and rank and file labor
>> leaders---and led test boycotts, massive walkouts against the war,
>> helped organize demonstrations against the wars and racism. Take a
>> look at the recent Rouge Forum conference in Detroit
>> http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/%7Ergibson/rouge_forum/EducationActionPostConferenc
>> e.htm
>> 
>> There are many voices inside the Rouge Forum: Democrats, anarchists,
>> libertarians, marxists, Greens, four troops in Iraq, profs in the UK
>> and South Africa, teachers in the Caribbean, students from the US
>> now in Oaxaca, unaligned students and teachers, etc.
>> 
>> The leadership of the Rouge Forum is shifting to younger people and
>> a more open, transparent, structure is under discussion.
>> 
>> We have organized people across the divisive boundaries of union
>> membership, race, age, occupation, and nation. We created a
>> community where educators can meet with others who share similar,
>> intelligent, views---and where passionate debate is mediated by friendship.
>> 
>> We have conducted action-research about the US unions, especially
>> the school unions, and demonstrated how the organizations are
>> structurally incapable of meeting the crisis at hand (dividing
>> people more than uniting them), why it is their leadership is
>> completely corrupt (bribed by the high salaries, more than $450,000,
>> that imperialism offers them in exchange for promoting the
>> nationalist idea that school workers, politicians, and the US
>> Chamber of Commerce have common interests), and most importantly, we
>> helped people work inside the unions, and out, for justice and peace.
>> 
>> We have led strikes in schools and supported strikers (like the
>> California Grocery strikers) outside schools. We recognize that
>> without the working class, a schools-based movement cannot sustain
>> itself. But students can surely initiate resistance, as can school
>> workers, especially when hope is eradicated from schooling: France, 1968.
>> 
>> With an "injury to one only goes before an injury to all," outlook,
>> we have learned how to defend our friends (as the unions surely will
>> not) on the job and off. Our collective, online and in person, has
>> helped school workers keep their ideals and still teach.
>> 
>> We already have a more than a decade of experience of how that can
>> be done. We have also offered self-criticism about where we went
>> wrong. We have joined a variety of community groups in coalitions
>> against the war and in developing real, practical, strategic plans.
>> http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~rgibson/strategicplanningSD.htm
>> 
>> We have attempted to link test boycotts with freedom schooling, with
>> only a little success.
>> 
>> We've had fun, using guerrilla theater to disrupt the workings of
>> the Testistos, organized regular social gatherings around films and
>> books, promoted artists and musicians in the movement.
>> 
>> We have researched the tests, the scripted curricula, and published
>> extensively in books, the popular press, and academic journals. Our
>> web page gets 32,000 "hits" a month and serves as a useful research
>> tool (www.rougeforum.org).
>> 
>> We have supported Substance News, edited by George Schmidt, as a
>> central voice for education and community activists, a voice of our
>> own. We can never rely on the good graces of the corporate press.
>> 
>> We continue to work in many community based groups. Many if not most
>> of us recognize that coalitions that seek to combat a ruthless enemy
>> that has a centralized command system can be shattered like glass
>> under pressure and will not prevail; nor do we support the
>> identity-politics movements that reduce social movements to the
>> lowest denominators of human life, divided along lines of nation,
>> sex/gender, etc. We recognize the need to fight racism and to
>> demolish the divisions among us, before they are used to demolish us.
>> 
>> We struggled to combat the individualism and careerism that is
>> endemic in the academy and among middle class school workers,
>> resulting in a fear of organization and, hence, more powerlessness.
>> 
>> The founders of the Rouge Forum have demonstrated in practice that
>> we are not out to be somebody, to become icons, but rather we have
>> sacrificed to collectively do something important. We recognize that
>> organizing is always humbling.
>> 
>> There is room in the Rouge Forum for nearly any educator, student,
>> community or cultural activist, and parent who wants to find a place
>> where they can exert the creativity they cannot exercise in other
>> parts of life, and where what we do actually counts.
>> 
>> You are welcome to join us. Just email rgibson@pipeline.com
>> 
>> Should the US choose to attack Iran, and many indications are there
>> that say the ruling class will as they must have that oil and
>> regional control
>> (http://www.umich.edu/~twod/writing/z_iran_28apr06c-wkg.pdf) , then
>> our situation will probably change dramatically, with an even more
>> rapid attack on civil liberties coupled with sharpened economic
>> assaults on life in schools and at work, that is, a draft becomes
>> more likely, freedoms to teach or organize on campuses will
>> diminish, wages and health benefits come under attack, as the war
>> costs come home. That could lead to a profound economic crisis, or
>> not, and it could also rachet up propaganda for a fascist mass movement.
>> 
>> Such is our current situation.
>> 
>> There is a story about a frog in a well who became an expert on what
>> it believed was all of the sky. Our current context demands an
>> organization that can see a larger sky than the one viewed from the
>> bottom of a well.
>> 
>> All the best, r
>> 
> 
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