It Will Take a Revolution to
Defeat the Attack on Public Education
By Marjorie Stamberg
We print below the text of a talk given by Marjorie at a Class Struggle Education Workers presentation at the Left Forum in New York City on 30 June 2019. It is of continuing urgency today in contrasting the program of class struggle unionism to so-called “social justice unionism,” and for underlining that the only answer to the bipartisan capitalist attack on public education is to fight for socialist revolution.
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| Marjorie Stamberg at Left Forum, 30 June 2019. (Internationalist photo) |
We are living in times of a wholesale attack on public education. Because that’s what the whole “movement” for charter schools is about. That’s what the whole “education reform” business is about – and it is a business, a big business. The capitalist system is decaying – we see it right before our eyes, we see it in our classrooms. As teachers, as education workers, we come right up against this in our struggles. Over and over, we see that the attempts to fight the privatization and charterization of the schools are stymied because those leading the struggles accept the capitalist framework. That goes both for the “mainstream” business union bureaucracy like the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and for the would-be reform caucuses. The stark fact is that to defeat the attacks on public education, as educators committed to the struggle for free, quality, secular, public education for all, we need to broaden our struggle into a revolutionary struggle.
I want to talk about two counterposed tendencies in teacher organizing, and that is the difference between class-struggle unionism and the hollow rhetoric of the so-called “social justice unionism.” Now the social-justice “model” says that in contrast to the present leaderships of the AFT and NEA, you have to take on broader issues – racism, mass incarceration, and so on – but they seek to do that within the limits imposed by the capitalist state, and beholden to the capitalist parties. In contrast, class struggle unionism – what Class Struggle Education Workers stands for – means we necessarily take on that framework, understanding that the questions of teachers rights and a radical pedagogy and public education itself are necessarily part of the struggle against racist American capitalism for which the only solution is a socialist revolution.
That’s why the CSEW participates in struggles in defense of immigrants’ rights, calling for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. We participated in protests against racist lynching, like the murder of Trayvon Martin,[1] where the local reformist union caucus, M.O.R.E. (Movement of Rank-and-File Educators), did not. We in the CSEW have marched in demonstrations against racist police murder, like Eric Garner in Staten Island, where the M.O.R.E. not only did not march, they issued a statement of “solidarity” with … “our brothers and sisters” of the PBA, the fascistic cop “union” – I’m not kidding, they literally did that. So that is shocking fact, which I want to explain.
So in 2018 there was the “red state teachers revolt,” which we talked about at the Left Forum last year.[2] The way that phenomenon was explained in the media, and by much of the left, is that it was a wildcat strike, purely spontaneous, organized through social media, and so on. Well, that wasn’t exactly true, as we explained. In West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, it was organized through the teachers unions. But what was true, is that it wasn’t the union tops who initiated it. The impulse came from the ranks. We said that this was only the first round, and in the next round you’re going come right up against the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. Which is exactly what happened. The recent teacher battles, which started in Chicago in 2012, and broke out this year in Los Angeles and Oakland have been led by the “reform wing” of the labor bureaucracy. What we are talking about here is not the UFT bureaucracy nor the Randi Weingarten leadership of the AFT, it’s the would-be reformers.
Now the UFT, the United Federation of Teachers, where I am a union delegate, is the largest teachers union in the country. It’s run by the Unity Caucus, of Michael Mulgrew – the grand-children of the Cold Warriors Max Shachtman and Al Shanker – which is deeply entrenched and loyal to the most conservative sectors of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. The UFT and AFT have been deeply complicit in the nefarious doings of the “AFL-CIA,”[3] the National Endowment for Democracy,[4] and the like. They were involved in toppling Salvador Allende’s left-wing Unidad Popular government in Chile in 1973.[5] The U.S.’ bankrolling of Solidarność counterrevolution in Poland was done directly through the UFT offices.[6] The UFT was the only major teachers union in the country that did not come out against the Vietnam War.
That is Unity Caucus, that is the UFT bureaucracy. Right now, the Unity Caucus is palpably gleeful because of the demise of their main internal opponent, the MORE caucus which has pretty much disappeared off the map with the collective political suicide of the International Socialist Organization, the ISO, which was a left-wing social-democratic group that was deeply involved in the reform wing of the bureaucracy that led the strikes in Chicago back in 2012, and L.A. and Oakland this year. The leadership in those strikes was from caucuses which had previously been opposition caucuses who got into power. And once they got into power they behave the same way as the bureaucrats they ousted.
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| Flier for the 30 June 2019 CSEW event at the Left Forum. |
They are the out-bureaucrats fighting to get in. They just wanted a more militant leadership based on the same politics. They are the same animal as the rest of the labor bureaucracy – keep labor in line for the Democrats. Because the Democratic Party does not have its own apparatus. When it comes to an election campaign, who is going door to door, knocking on doors? It is the teachers’ unions. Last election for Hillary [2016] – the UFT sent buses to Pennsylvania to canvas. They didn’t have to do it in NYC because New York votes Democratic anyway. The UFT tops are deeply entwined with the Democratic Party.
Randi Weingarten, who is president of the AFT, and was president of the UFT, is part of the so-called “1 percent.” She makes over $500 K a year. She’s a member of the Democratic Party National Committee, and she also receives a housing allowance, literally for her house in D.C., in addition to her house in the Hamptons. So she is a classic representative of the labor bureaucracy, which is a petty-bourgeois layer, a parasitic layer which rests on top of the workers’ organization and congenitally seeks to subordinate it to management. They seek “peaceful coexistence.” They are what Daniel De Leon called the “labor lieutenants of capital.”
Since before the turn of the 21st century we have seen the attacks on teachers front and center in the politics of this country. And the attacks are being waged by both Republicans and Democrats. Bush had the NCLB (No Child Left Behind, which many called “No Vendor Left Behind”), and Obama had RTTP (Race to the Top). The content of these were the same, they were the business model of education, and it had grotesque effects on students and teachers. They want to turn children into commodities, to link teacher evaluations to standardized tests, to replace public education with charter schools, which are private schools based on public money.
This came to a head with Bush’s Education Secretary, Ron Paige, who actually called teachers unions terrorist organizations; who after Hurricane Katrina seized on the destruction of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward and other historic African-American districts to effect the total privatization of New Orleans schools. We saw this in the racist attacks over the so-called “cheating scandal” in the Atlanta schools. We have written extensively on this at our Class Struggle Education Workers Blogspot site and in Marxism & Education: see” New Orleans Schools: Test Lab for War on Public Education”[7] and “How Racism Cheated Atlanta’s Black Teachers and Students.”[8] These pieces were written by Mark Lance and Charlie Brover.
So, what is the strategy to fight all this in the teachers’ unions?
In opposing the entrenched labor bureaucracy, the reformist wing embraced what they call “social justice” unionism. But despite the rhetoric, it cannot carry out social justice, as it is wedded to the capitalist system.
In our union the clash with the reformists came before the M.O.R.E. was actually founded, when there was a discussion of what kind of opposition we need in the UFT. In 2008, we had a big demo in front of Tweed Courthouse, the headquarters of the DOE, to defend the ATRs [those educators placed in the Absent Teacher Reserve]. These were the teachers who had been pushed out of their classrooms with the frenetic closing of the schools. This demo, which we initiated, was during the Obama election campaign, I was a speaker for CSEW, and I said Barack Obama was as bad as his opponent (Mitt Romney) as they were both capitalist politicians.[9] I said a caucus must be independent of the Democrats and must draw the class line. The reformists went ballistic, saying “you can’t talk about that at a union demo.” Basically, these groups are for pressure politics, pressure on the Democrats, that is.
They went on through several reincarnations to form the M.O.R.E. in New York which was modeled on Chicago C.O.R.E. (Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators), which struck Chicago schools in 2012. That was a massive strike, and ended with a contract that gained nothing. We wrote “Strike was Hugh, Settlement Sucked.” The House of Delegates voted it down, and the C.O.R.E. bureaucracy shoved it down their throats.[10] Jesse Sharkey, of the ISO ran that union as its vice president. Last year he was elected president of the Chicago Teachers Union, and reportedly quietly resigned from the ISO a few months before the group as whole imploded. But under C.O.R.E., the CTU regularly supported Democratic Party candidates, including endorsing Barack Obama.
This is what “social justice unionism” means in practice, and we just saw the same thing in Los Angeles and Oakland. They say they are on the side of the oppressed black and Latin population, yet all of these “reform” caucuses act exactly like the bureaucracies they’ve replaced, and sometimes they’re worse. Before the 2012 strike, Chicago CORE had a fancy brochure, laying out how they would stop the closing schools. I have it here. But when it came down to the wire, they went for a lousy contract that didn’t stop the closing of a single school. Recently in L.A., you had the same scenario. The UTLA published a fancy brochure, which I also have here. And they had a really big strike. But the settlement didn’t stop the charters, they just got the school board to write a hypocritical letter calling for a moratorium on increasing charters.[11]
The reason these reform bureaucrats gave in both cases for not even fighting during the strikes on the issues they used to build community support beforehand was the same. They said that “under the law of collective bargaining” we can’t bring up these issues during the strike. Well, screw their law, as Marxists we know that the law is a reflection of the class forces. Mexican teachers know that, as they have waged militant strikes against the same kind of privatizing education “reforms” we face in this country. And to wage those struggles they have gone directly up against the capitalist state, like in Oaxaca in 2016, where I was present at the time teaching there.[12] But in this country, to return to the topic, the reform “social justice” bureaucrats like the business unionism old-line bureaucrats bow to the bosses’ law. They use these issues like closing schools, and charter schools to dress up their credentials and come back with crumbs.
In New York, it came to a head over the police choke-hold murder of Eric Garner, in 2014 for the “crime” of allegedly selling “loosies” on the street corner in Staten Island. That in itself is a story: why would it be a crime to sell single cigarettes? But. in fact, he was not selling loosies that day. And today, five years later, this is the first time killer cop Daniel Pantaleo has even had to put his face in a court room, and not even a real court, only an “internal review” by the Police Department. No criminal charges were brought against this murderer, only an “internal review” and that only happened because the Garner family did not stop fighting for one minute, even after Eric’s daughter Erica suffered a heart attack and died after her refusal to be silenced. The verdict in this review is still pending.[13]
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Well, in August of 2014, when Eric Garner was killed, there was protest march called to go to Staten Island, called by Al Sharpton. The UFT leadership went on the march, and M.O.R.E. not only did not go on the march, thus putting them to the right of the UFT bureaucracy, they issued a statement in solidarity with “the brothers and sisters of the PBA” – the near or crypto fascists PBA or whatever you want to call them. Many of M.O.R.E.’s own members were horrified by this, and went on the march on their own. So that was pretty much the end of the claim to “social justice unionism.” We went on the march with our signs and wrote to the MORE website and other social media and other outlets to draw the lessons of this. [14]
Trotsky said the unions are increasingly integrated into the state. He wrote that they faced a choice: the unions can only end up being the secondary instruments for the suppression of labor, or become instruments of the revolutionary mobilization of the proletariat. That’s what we face today. And in the case of education unions, it is deeply connected to the role of public education in capitalist society.
As Marx wrote in The German Ideology in 1847, one year before he wrote the Manifesto:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class, which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production.”
It's important to understand the limits of education reform under capitalism. We defend public education against attacks by the privatizers who would like to abolish it. But the system itself is run in the service of capital. To fundamentally change it, you have to get rid of capitalism, of production for profit.
Now there is a long history of education reforms, Montessori, Paolo Freire, John Dewey, others who were not able to carry out reforms under capitalism. Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote extensively on this question. She, of course, was a Bolshevik cadre, a teacher, whose work laid the basis for early Soviet education, as well as being the companion of Lenin. And she studied all of the people doing ground breaking work on this question. She wrote a whole book about this, called Public Education and Democracy,[15] I have it here, a photocopy, in Russian. And she looked at all the reformers – Montessori, John Dewey, and so on -- because they were organizing to make a revolution, to take power. And then they did, in October 1917. But speaking to educators the next year, Krupskaya made a fundamental point: if you want to have socialist education, you have to first have a socialist revolution, not the other way around:
“Socialist schools are conceivable only in specific social conditions, for they are made socialist not by the fact that they are directed by socialists, but by the fact that their objectives correspond to the needs of a socialist society….
“Since socialist schools could not be viable institutions in a capitalist system, they could at best only be interesting pedagogical experiments…. For the physiognomy of public schools was determined by the ruling class, the class of the bourgeoisie, and the objectives that it set were altogether different. In organizing the school system the bourgeoisie proceeded from its own interests and from the desire to ensure its own class domination rather than from the interests of individuals and of society.”[16]
I want to make one more important point. And that is, what’s important for us as educators, school is where race and class come together.
This year, 7 black students got accepted into Stuyvesant High School for the upcoming school year. Last year, 10 black students got accepted. The year before 13. At Bronx Science, 12 black students got in, down from 25 last year. Brooklyn Tech is not doing much better. This year out of a huge freshman class of 1,825, there will be 95 black students (5.2%) and 117 Latino (6.4 %). In 1989 Black and Latin students were 51 percent of the student body.
When the figure came out of only seven black students getting into Stuyvesant, there was an uproar. So Mayor De Blasio had to do something. Now it’s a commonplace that the mayor, who is in thrall to the real estate industry, has actually done nothing on his so-called “progressive” agenda. He ran for office against the charters and when “Evil Eva” Moskowitz of the Success Academy fought him, he pulled back. He’s done absolutely nothing even in liberal terms to solve the catastrophe of homelessness in New York City: Out of more than a million kids in the NYC school system, 114,000 kids are homeless in NYC—that is more than one out of every 10. And it gets worse every year.
So in terms of New York’s segregated schools, which in 2014 were declared (in the UCLA study[17]) the most segregated in the country, De Blasio backed a bill in New York State legislature to get rid of the admissions tests for Stuyvesant. Of course, the bill went down in flames in Albany, because the liberal Democrats who run Albany now oppose the desegregation plans as “too divisive.” And, in fact, the segregation has gotten way worse since 1954 when the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education which codified that “Separate is not equal.”
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| While liberals and most of the left have effectively turned their backs on school integration, the CSEW continues to fight for high quality, integrated public schools for all. Above: 18 May 2021 protest outside Stuyvesant High School, one of New York’s elite schools, where barely 1% of students are black, then and now. (Photo: Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times) |
So we have an enormous social struggle ahead of us. Our position, as the CSEW, in terms of the “elite” high schools, is that there shouldn’t be any. Abolish the [Regents] test because to ace it, for the most part you need your parents to spend several thousand dollars a year from the age of six, you spend your entire childhood weekends sitting at Kaplan or the other test prep schools preparing for it. Every school in the city should offer a high quality curriculum, rather than having competition at limited places for the “elite” schools. But of course the question of school segregation is far more that – it is connected to the whole fabric of this racist capitalist society. We need to restore open admission free tuition at CUNY.[18] We need to abolish student debt.
But the question comes down to leadership. Because all the social conditions are in our favor for the struggle.< In education, the parents are with the teachers. For 40 years in NYC, the black community was separated and pitted against the teachers union. This is no longer the case. We see this desire for united struggle playing out again and again, in L.A., in Oakland, in West Virginia, in New York. The charters are in trouble. Like to refer you to the very important article in the Washington Post, May 30 by Jack Schneider, “School’s Out—Charters were supposed to save public education.< Why are Americans turning against them?”
But to answer that question, why, I again refer you to Marxism and Education, series of articles on this including, “Free Market Racism: Segregated Schools, Gentrified Neighborhoods” and “‘American Apartheid’ by Design,” which is Charlie Brover’s review of Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America (2017).
So in closing, a final quote from Leon Trotsky. Leon Trotsky was writing an essay when he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940. It was posthumously published under the title “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay.” He wrote there:
“Trade unions in the present epoch cannot simply be the organs of democracy as they were in the epoch of free capitalism. And they can no longer remain politically neutral, or limit themselves to securing the daily needs of the working class. They can no longer be reformist because objective conditions leave no room for any serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of the workers and for obstructing the revolution, or the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”
A lot of groups that claim to be Trotskyist occasionally make reference to Trotsky’s essay, but it is just a ritual mention. We take it seriously, because history has shown that he was right. And we just saw that again in Los Angeles and Oakland. There can be no reformist unionism, because there can’t be any serious reforms. To fight against the destruction of public education, the only way to go forward is to fight for a revolution. And to do that you need class-struggle leadership. That is the mission of CSEW to forge a class-struggle tendency in the education unions to oust the pro-capitalist bureaucracy so that the unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. ■
[1] On 26 February 2012, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black youth was walking back to the house where he was staying with his father and his fiancée in a gated community in Florida when he was fatally shot in the chest by a vigilante. The wanton murder set off huge protests nationwide. A year and a half later, the murderer was acquitted of any charges. See “Lynch Law U.S.A.: State Defends Murderer of Trayvon Martin,” The Internationalist special issue, May 2012.
[2] See “Lessons of the Teachers Revolt,” in Marxism & Education No. 5, Summer 2018.
[3] While the domestically the AFL-CIO is a labor federation, its international operations have always been an adjunct of, and largely financed by, U.S. intelligence and other government agencies. This was notoriously the case with the AIFLD (American Institute for Free Labor Development) and continues today with the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, earning it the sobriquet “AFL-CIA” in wide sectors of the labor movement in Latin America.
[4] For years the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency secretly financed anti-communist opposition movements, cultural associations (like the Congress for Cultural Freedom), student groups and unions as part of its Cold War against the Soviet Union. When this was exposed in the mid-1960s, the U.S. government set up the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to continue, more or less openly, the subversive activity previously sponsored by the CIA.
[5] The AFT and UFT were involved in the 11 September 1973 coup d’état that overthrew the left-wing popular front government in Chile, including through the International Federation of Free Teachers Unions and an operative who was made the AFT’s director of international relations shortly after the coup as the AFT applied for its first AIFLD grant.
[6] The UFT was a main conduit for sending CIA money to the Solidarność “union” in Poland. See “Marjorie Stamberg: Revolutionary Trotskyist, Marxist Educator, A Leader of Struggles for All the Oppressed,” in this issue of Marxism & Education.
[7] March 2016 CSEW supplement reprinted in Marxism & Education No. 5.
[8] Available on the CSEW blog, https://edworkersunite.blogspot.com.
[9] See “After November 24…,” in this issue of Marxism & Education.
[10] See The Internationalist special issue, November-December 2012.
[11] See “Powerful L.A. Teachers Strike Was Betrayed in Settlement,” in CSEW Supplement, “Teachers Strikes Shake California” (February 2019)
[12] See “Mexican Teachers Strike of 2016: The Struggle Continues,” in Marxism & Education No. 5 (Summer 2018).
[13] Daniel Pantaleo was fired in August 2019.
[14] See “CSEW at Staten Island marches in solidarity with family of Eric Garner, murdered by NYPD” and “Open Letter to M.O.R.E. by CSEW Member and UFT Delegate,” on the Class Struggle Education Workers blog, https://edworkersunite.blogspot.com.
[15] See excerpt in The Internationalist Special Supplement, Marxism and the Battle Over Education 2nd edition, January 2008.
[16] N. Krupskaya, “Concerning the Question of Socialist Schools,” in Ibid.
[17] See J. Kucsera and Gary Orfield, “New York State's Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction and a Damaged Future” (March 2014), from The Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
[18] See “Smash Racist Purge of CUNY – Fight for Open Admissions, Free Tuition!” in Marxism and the Battle Over Education.
Class Struggle Education Workers is an organization, fraternally linked to the Internationalist Group, of union and non-unionized activists in all aspects of education fighting for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here. The struggle for students’ and educators’ rights, and mobilization against the genocidal war on the Palestinians continues. If you are interested in joining these efforts, contact the CSEW at cs_edworkers@hotmail.com.