Letters of December 11

The Common Core: Capitalism Blames the Victim
I recently attended a PLP study group of teachers where we talk about U.S. education reform and World War III.  Most of our discussion centered on the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS), which reinforces capitalist ideology. When it comes to education under capitalism, ideology is the name of the game. The ruling class needs a working class capable of producing for their needs and fighting their wars. They need us to have  enough rudimentary skills to do work that is profitable, they need another smaller group to be more advanced to handle their complex tasks, and then they need a subset of “intellectual” workers to produce the ideology capitalism requires to exist — racism and sexism.
The Common Core reinforces and intensifies racism in the United States. It unilaterally posits a group of standards that are out of reach of the disgusting amount of resources that the bourgeoisie is willing to spend on educating us, and then they blame students for not meeting them and teachers for not getting their students to reach them.
Capitalism lives to blame the victim for their own victimization by obscuring the actual process of that victimization. The intense systemic oppression that the working class is under due to capitalism’s non-stop crisis is not a factor in the assessment of the CCLS. This is primarily an attack on the students and secondarily an attack on the teachers. Black and Latino workers who are hyper-exploited under capitalism are feeling the brunt of the CCLS. Meanwhile, the ruling class and its puppets, including the union leadership, mouth the lie that it is racist to oppose the CCLS. These lying, deceitful parasites and their labor lieutenants, are obscuring that capitalism’s brutal exploitation, where students may not even have food at home, is the real reason why public education isn’t meeting the needs of a declining U.S. imperialism.
The CCLS is being opposed from the right, liberals and the left, but they are not pointing out that it is primarily an ideological weapon that will be used to prepare the workers in the U.S. for the next round of imperialist wars and eventually World War III.
Communists in the PLP stress the ideological aspects of the CCLS and that the liberal wing of the ruling class is the real danger to the working class and the development of fascism. We must oppose the CCLS and counterpoise a clear vision of an education system that actually meets the needs of workers. That education system is only possible under Communism.
Red Teacher
Shining A Light on A Public Hell
My visit to the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting was the best in years because of the energy and good politics of a group of young professionals. They established a campus organization called Radical Public Health at my university to bring active anti-racist politics into that otherwise buttoned-down academic setting. They raised issues that almost none of the faculty was mentioning in their courses, issues that have a huge impact on people’s health. Over the past year, their meetings, forums, speaker panels and film screenings have raised issues like mass incarceration, war and homelessness. These events shined a light on what they call “neoliberalism” causing a “public hell” for most people. I would simply call these things the hell of capitalism.
I teamed up with a few of my young colleagues, along with friends in the Black Caucus of Health Workers and with some PLP health fighters to produce a session at the annual meeting showing the devastating impact on health caused by mass incarceration. It is no surprise that locking up millions of working-class people for minor non-violent offenses, the vast majority of them black or Latino, would widen the already big gap in mortality between whites and these groups.
While preparing for and presenting our talks at this national meeting, these young people honed their skills at introducing complex, politically-charged material to an audience of health professionals. More important, doing this project over several months together enabled us to strengthen our ties and have more in-depth conversations about capitalism and how to eliminate it.
I wish I could say that my young friends are ready to talk about revolution. Part of the “dark night” we talk about in PLP is the illusion among most of our dedicated, principled anti-racist friends that revolutionary social change is no longer a possibility. A longer-range political outlook, measured in decades, not months or years, can make talk of revolution into more of a plausible theory and less of a pipedream.
But many friends cling to the hope that some sort of gradual, peaceful process can get us to a future society without racism, sexism and exploitation. History shows clearly that this is the pipedream. Our job is convincing our friends to look historical reality in the face and accept the need for a disciplined revolutionary party. Nothing else has ever successfully taken power from the vicious overlords of public hell.
Doc Com
Why Workers Can Never ‘Buy Back’ What They Produce
I liked the New York City election article in CHALLENGE (11/13) that explained why DeBlasio, like Obama, can never serve workers’ needs over the profit needs of their capitalist employers.
However, the article contained a false theory about the cause of capitalist crises. It stated, “Communists know that capitalism contains a basic contradiction: Workers don’t earn enough in wages to afford the products they produce.”
First, union “leaders” and liberal politicians have put forward this anti-communist “buy-back” theory to support their position that through higher wages capitalism can be reformed to benefit the working class.
Second, besides commodities, a big chunk of what workers produce is the means of production (factories) and the largest portion is the military (50 percent of the present budget) which is used to oppress them. No amount of wage increases could ever allow workers to “buy back” these products.
Third, production for markets and profits rather than for society’s needs (called the anarchy of capitalist production) is what creates regularly occurring crises of overproduction in the midst of scarcity and falling rates of profit.
In the 1930s, every capitalist country in the world was ravaged by deep cuts in production and massive unemployment. But in the Soviet Union, production increased and unemployment was almost non-existent. Under the then-communist Bolshevik Party, production was planned to meet the needs of the working class (including preparing to meet the Nazi invasion), not to maximize profits.
The anarchy of capitalist production and bosses’ rivalries produce unemployment, crises and wars which also serve them by wiping out decades of workers’ gains. Only when communist revolution overthrows this murderous profit system and the means of production is based on workers’ power will our needs be met.
A Comrade