Teachers at a Sacremento elementary school have voted to work 3 extra weeks this year for free (25 minutes extra per day), in an effort to raise test scores.
Rich Gibson explains why this is a wrong-headed idea:
“Our commodity is these children, and it’s every day and right now and every moment counts,”she said.
In pacified areas, people become instruments of their own oppression.
So, test scores, which measure parental income, race, subservience, and to a limited extent, nationality, measure the worth of the commodity, a child, in which the teacher invests time, and hence to be a more valuable commodity as a teacher, the logic would be that more time would mean more value, by its very nature. So, we shall see what kind of human value this piece-work investment yields. Maybe they will get a raise.
It is an interesting play on the creation of surplus value, which, at base, is this (from Ollman):
The capitalist buys the worker’s labor power, as any other commodity, and puts it to work for eight or more hours a day. However, workers can make in, say, five hours products which are the equivalent of their wages. In the remaining three or more hours an amount of wealth is produced which remains in the hands of the capitalist. The capitalists’ control over this surplus is the basis of their power over the workers and the rest of society. Marx’s labor theory of value also provides a detailed account of the struggle between capitalists and workers over the size of the surplus value, with the capitalists trying to extend the length of the working day, speed up the pace of work, etc., while the workers organize to protect themselves. Because of the competition among capitalists, workers are constantly being replaced by machinery, enabling and requiring capitalists to extract ever greater amounts of surplus value from the workers who remain.
Paradoxically, the amount of surplus value is also the source of capitalism’s greatest weakness. Because only part of their product is returned to them as wages, the workers cannot buy a large portion of the consumables that they produce. Under pressure from the constant growth of the total product, the capitalists periodically fail to find new markets to take up the slack. This leads to crises of “overproduction”, capitalism’s classic contradiction, in which people are forced to live on too little because they produce too much.
Here’s a more complete explanation from Ollman, along with a nice cartoon that sums it up.
When teachers adopt the language of the market, children as commodities, and students as they grow begin to see themselves as shoppers, not students, only those who have an interest in unreason, and inhumanity will make gains. Well, those people, and union bosses…..
The myth of capital is that the worker shows up on a job, and makes a fair exchange, money for labor. What lies behind that myth is that most people are born with no capital, while a relative few own and hold power, so the exchange is not fair at all, in that the worker will starve without work, on the one hand, and the worker will never get paid the full value of his or her labor, on the other hand. Moreover, force and violence in the form of the state will be used against workers who resist—all in the name of democracy.
The above was, after all, a democratic process, was it not? The union approved it, the teachers begged for it. The bosses and press love it.
I wonder if the kids–the commodity– got to vote on this……
best r
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