Another example of Marx’s relevance today: The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself

Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 15

“The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers. The limits within which the preservation and self-expansion of the value of capital resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great mass of producers can alone move  these limits come continually into conflict with the methods of production employed by capital for its purposes, which drive towards unlimited extension of production, towards production as an end in itself, towards unconditional development of the social productivity of labour. The means  unconditional development of the productive forces of society  comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world-market and is, at the same time, a continual conflict between this its historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production. “

Rouge Forum Update: Sky Falling and More!

[Illustration from Z Magazine]

Dear Friends,

The sky is falling. The good thing, and the bad thing, is we were right about that.

Below is a short synopsis of our current context and reasons why you should plan to be at the Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti, Michigan, May 15 to 17. Bring friends and submit a proposal.

The core issues remain inequality on the one hand and organized resistance on the other hand.

Inequality booms world-wide. In the US productivity went up on a near 90 degree vertical line. But wages remained stagnant, creating classic forms of overproduction (in sum, workers unable to buy products their class produces). Simultaneously, finance capital came to dominate and almost split away from productive capital, allowing the working class to maintain a standard of living by offering endless debt and falsely inflated home values. This is the video, Capitalism Hits the Fan.

Finance companies began to buy on margin inside a massive Ponzi scheme of mortgage securities. Fraud leaped in: Maddoff. Finance capital, became a barrier to itself, as Marx wrote years ago, and now we have real stagnation, banks awash in capital they will not loan, huge companies unable to sell goods, and workers losing jobs by the hundreds of thousands; a downward spiral that appears to have no bottom. GM just announced another 47,000 layoffs; demanded–with Chrysler–a total of about $39 billion from US taxpayers.

The aged millionaire Lady Astor complained bitterly about how finance capital operated. She commented on her 100th birthday, “Everyone became obsessed with money in the 1990’s and went higgledy-piggledy scampering after their fortunes,” she said. “People with money used to often care about the people who had no money. Not always, but often. Now, it is rare to find people with money who care at all about people with no money” (New York Times, March 30, 2002).

We witness the corporate state coming into being, the merger of government, business, and the military. Nearly $3 trillion will go to the banks, another $1-2 trillion to the military soon.

This is, as Foster and Magdoff make clear in their recent Monthly Review book, the Great Financial Crisis, a predicament that cannot be solved for working people within the system of capital. If reforms are to be won, they can only be won by linking immediate reform to profound social change. Every reform will be unsustainable.

Containing populations suffering from inequality will become the prime project of ruling classes everywhere, in schools and out. We have  seen massive demonstrations and strikes in Europe already, often initiated by students and teachers.

The large existing organizations that claim to defend working people and students, like the unions, are absolutely unprepared and unfit to meet this crisis. The UAW agreed to the 47,000 layoffs (having already lost a million members) and more concessions still–when concessions never save jobs, other than bosses’ jobs.

In schools, we can foresee a sharpened effort to eliminate freedom, to sharpen the regimentation of curricula, to impose more sophisticated testing, and more militarization as well (perpetual war is real).

Here is AFT’s President Randy Weingarten demanding more national education standards which will invariably tied to high-stakes exams and married to the Obama project of privatized charters.

Criticism of the anti- war coalition United For Peace and Justice continues to flash around the net. Here is one of the latest if not the most troubling, attacking UFPJ’s leadership for abandoning the fight to prosecute war crimes:

Here are two pieces from Rouge Forum members regarding UFPJ:

http://www.richgibson.com/wheremovement.htm
http://www.richgibson.com/icing.htm

The latest Obama Bailout remains mostly a mystery, a secret. But here is a the simple rough outline that we have seen so far, though it makes little sense as a jobs or people stimulus.

And the quick upshot: White recession, black depression.

It is no stretch to see that we are watching the emergence of fascism, which has never solved the problems it claims to solve. Here is Chris Hedges on Inverted Totalitarianism.

Only the Rouge Forum in the US has, in organized fashion, taken up these issues for a decade and translated research into action. We also forged a culture of friendship and mutual respect, among many differing viewpoints, that many people see as the highlight of the conference. Join us!

And for a moment’s relief—Calvin and Hobbes got it a long time ago.

Thanks to Faith, Wayne, Amber, Wendy, Victoria, Tommie, Bob, Gina, Adam, Candace, Sharon Ag…., Della, Kathy Young, Bill, Greg, Emily, Don A., Jim B, Dave S, Gil G, Peter M, Vanessa, Molly, Dave S, SL, Bonnie Macintosh, Nancy S, Steve R and Ricky C, Kelly, Beau, and the Old Mole.

All the best and good luck to us, every one.
R

Your Education Matters: Testing and the purposes of education

From the Public Education Advocates network:

FSA testing has increased the discussion of the purposes and value of public education.  You will want to view this program.

Simon Fraser University Professor Paul Shaker hosts a cable program, Your Education Matters. The next program features Paul Shaker with guests, UBC Professor Charles Bingham, and Mike Zlotnik, President of the Charter For Public Education Network.

This program features the purposes and principles of public education and begins with a discussion of the Charter for Public Education principles. It also discusses the attempt to turn education into a market commodity and why that is a mistake. And it closes with a discussion of the FSAs and why that is a mistake.

Given that FSA testing is going on right now, the show is very timely.

It has already aired twice on Shaw TV Cable, which is Channel 4 in the Vancouver area. This same episode will be rebroadcast all through February.

The next four episodes are as follows on Shaw cable (Channel 4 here):

Sunday, February 15, 1:30 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.
Wednesday, February 18, 3:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.

Other episodes can be seen at http://www.youreducationmatters.ca/

Student Protests Sweep Italy

While Americans waste their time discussing what position they’ll be in as they continued to get screwed by the bank bailouts and/or tweaking the reactionary education reform mess of No Child Left Behind students in Italy are saying “NO” to the Berlusconi government’s plan to impose business models on public services such as schools and universities that will see the disappearance of nearly 100,000 teaching positions in the next three years:

This “euthanasia of the universities”, as Gaetano Azzariti, professor of constitutional law at Rome university, calls it, was a political decision, sacrificing teaching and research to sectors of the economy. It means that for a university to hire a new lecturer now, two others have to leave its payroll. And it means more private sector funding in universities and higher tuition fees, leading to increased levels of debt for the poorest students. And on August 28, education minister Mariastella Gelmini presented another executive order, setting out budget cuts and plans to return to single teachers in primary schools (each class is normally taught by several different teachers), meaning a shorter school day for children (and reducing parents’ ability to go out to work). Other measures aimed to revive old practices, such as marks for behavior up to secondary level.

Since the start of the school year in September 2008, a national movement of parents, teachers and students resisting the neoliberal reforms of the Berlusconi government formed under the banner of “Non rubateci il futuro” (Don’t steal our future) and have spawned huge demonstrations and university occupations and general strikes.

“What’s developing is the self-organization of university students and casual workers,” explained Aliocha, a literature student at La Sapienza university who is also a casual in a bank. “Some people combine being casual workers and students or researchers, others are just casual workers. Together with the rank and file unions, we started the October 17 strike, and organized it in workplaces where job insecurity is an everyday reality.”

See Serge Quadruppani’s article at CounterPunch.

NCSS continues to advocate for government mandated high-stakes testing

Despite the research illustrating deleterious effects of high-stakes testing on teaching and learning, the National Council for the Social Studies continues to be an advocate for it.

NCSS, the largest group of social studies education professionals in the world, and it’s state level affiliates, use the perverted logic that the only way to preserve social studies courses in the curriculum is for those courses to be included in mandated high-stakes testing schemes.

The latest example of this perversion of education is in Massachusetts, where the state plans to either eliminate or delay required history and social science exams for 10th graders.

In response, the Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies has started a campaign to the save the tests! And the NCSS Board of Directors has sent an letter to the Mass. Board of Education stressing the importance of implementing the proposed exams as scheduled.

The logic is apparently that state mandated high-stakes exams are a way for governments to show their commitment to social studies. But do we need social studies courses that narrow the curriculum to what is on the exam? That undermine teacher professionalism by turning teachers into clerks for the state, whose job it is to feed students exam answers?

The idea that NCSS’s raison d’être—the promotion of “democratic citizenship”—is advanced by students and teachers willingly participating in a scheme that reduces education to scores is absurd.

Rouge Forum Update: Educators vs Bankster, Justice vs War and more…..

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil page is updated. That’s also the place where you’ll find the call for proposals for the Rouge Forum Conference, May 15 to 17, at Eastern Michigan University.

The deadline for articles for the Rouge Forum News is March 1. Schools, k through universities, face massive cuts. What’s going on in your area?  Send articles, cartoons, photos, etc to Adam Renner: arenner@bellarmine.edu

Spread the word. NO CONCESSIONS. Concessions are like giving blood to sharks. It only makes bosses want more (look at the United Auto Workers). Not one step back. In fact, we want MORE. We know the bosses are weak. We want a shorter work week with no cut in pay. No Layoffs. Add another shift, cut class size. No evictions. Free health care for all. Tax the rich. Free wireless everywhere. Stop high stakes exams. Recruiters off the campuses. Academic freedom for students and teachers. (and you can make up some of your own, I am sure).

Take a look at the Rouge Forum blog and join in the discussion. If we can get that going, we can demonstrate the collective nature of our problems, which have few if any individual solutions, and share information about what people are doing.

Who will get what in the “what about ME?” scramble for bailout money this time? Much of that will be set up by who paid who what. Last time the Tarp recipients spent $144 million on lobbyists.  Send a check when you write congress or Obama.

The Iraq war is far from over; war in Afghanistan is expanding. The anti-war movement is split, never met the potential represented by the mass outpouring of opposition to the Iraq invasion. Still, it appears that the biggest anti-war actions will be on March 21, the sixth anniversary of the invasion (really 3/19), in cities all over the US. Here is Tom Ricks, “The Iraq war is not over,” although corporate media still cannot spell O-I-L.

Juan Cole believes Obama may have to delay his Afghan surge as the US supply routes are cut

Resistance rises world wide, if we in the US do not see a lot of it. The French general strike most recently demonstrated that students and school workers can indeed initiate and lead struggle for social justice. Here is an update from Italy.

The UTLA test boycott is still on. Let’s spread this idea and expand it to ALL the high-stakes exams.  Friends in Fresno are preparing to make presentations to their school board for just that purpose.

Gilbert Gonzalez is working on a video on the Bracero Program. He’d like some help. This is a teaser video.

Here is an opportunity to make some international connections:

American Councils for Education: Seeking Fellowship Placements
The American Councils for Education, in association with the U.S. Department of State, is seeking to place five young professionals in non-governmental internships across the country during the fall 2009 intern season (September-December).? Prospective interns will be arriving in the United States in mid-August under the auspices of the federally funded Legislative Education and Practice program (LEAP) and will be ready to report to work in early September. LEAP Fellows are dedicated public servants between 23 and 33 years of age from Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey. They are college -educated (many have advanced degrees in law or international studies), speak fluent English, have had previous U.S.-based experience, and are eager to learn how Americans address rule of law, civil society, work in advocacy, infrastructure, energy, human rights, and related topics, so that they may better their own societies. Interns will be available to work a full-time schedule and will be fully supported by American Councils and the U.S. Department of States in terms of compensation, health insurance, etc. To learn more, please contact RaeJean Stokes at 202-833-7522 or via email at: leap@americancouncils.org

Thanks to Joe B and C, Amber, Donna, Sharyn, Erin, B and N, Bob, Susan O and H, Gene, Patrick, Harold, Bonnie, Kathy, Angie, Ravi, Bill, A and G, Karen C, Willie Himebaugh, Chuck R, Tom T, and Wayne.

Down the banks and
Up the Rebels.

best

r

The Obamagoge and Capital vs The People

The Obamagoge and Capital vs The People
By Rich Gibson

19 million US homes stand vacant today. 600,000 people lost jobs in December, 2 million in all of 2008. The layoff rate only accelerates. Soon, public services will founder and homes will be re-valued, taxes unpaid. Every bit of this is coded with the sharpest end of many sticks aimed at those who were born with the least–but encompassing everyone who must work to live. It’s a whirlwind that is not going to end soon. In schools, we will see more and more kids homeless or moved by foreclosures, more hungry, sleepy kids, more incoherent delinquency, made reasonable only by a grasp of social circumstances.

The One who I named The Obamagogue seeks to use Keynesian measures to solve the waterfall of economic collapse and lost wars. Keynes was an elitist and an active racist who despised working people, who thought only the most favored should rule, but he sought to save capitalism. The myth is that he did.

He didn’t. Henry Morganthau, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury recognized that in the late thirties when he wrote that all that Keynesian spending had done little or nothing.

What ended the Great Depression was WW 2. Capitalism loves outright destruction. Thrives on that kind of chaos, and as an utterly fickle system, goes off and lets who ever wins at a given moment ride it.

What The Obamgogue’s spending will do is to bring out the lowest forms of opportunism in every sector of society which will, in effect, be saying, “what about ME!” That is why we see, right now, the AFL-CIO backing the most reactionary of the bailout measures, US protectionism.
It is also why we see the California Teachers Association leadership demanding a 1% sales tax hike, the most regressive of all taxes which will hit poor people hard, abandoning school workers’ most valuable allies, parents of children who need those educators the most.

So far, depending on which source one likes, maybe a trillion dollars has been doled out or will be doled out to the banksters by their procurers, the politicians.

That number will double, and another one or two trillion will go to the wars, which the US is going to lose (Afghans drove 300,000 Soviet troops out of their country, with help from the US—are we to think the Russians and Chinese don’t remember?).
There is, as Chalmers Johnson (author of Nemesis) insists, a relationship between imperialist expenditures and the economic collapse, something that few economists are willing to recognize, just as few Obamagogueites in education are not willing to admit that schools and capitalism exist in a relationship.

Arne Duncan is no mistake. He will intensify the three pronged project of most schooling: more curricula regimentation to regulate what is taught and how it is taught, to use high stakes tests to sort kids, and to deepen the militarization of schools. Where privatization is serviceable, Duncan will back privatization. Where he can get the working class to pay, through their taxes, for the mis-education of our children, he will do that. Arne Duncan leads, not public schools, but capitalist schools. Those who did not foresee this before The Obamagogue came to power should see it now, and say so.

Those who now claim The Obamagogue “betrayed them,” after a year of supporting his demagogic campaign and contributing to what only can be called national hysteria, should own up to the fact that their entire method of analysis was wrong, that they betrayed hundreds, maybe thousands of people themselves, and issue a self criticism about exactly why they got things completely wrong.

Is it not odd that nobody in power suggests that the way to halt foreclosures and keep the economy afloat is to just direct-pay people’s mortgages for a time certain, if they can prove they cannot pay?

But that is not how capitalist democracy, which is not democracy but an executive committee of the rich ruling behind populist rhetoric, bearing the same connection to democracy that the Pope does to, “do unto others,” works. Such a mortgage program would send up howls about “personal responsibility,” “welfare queens,” “socialism,” that were not sent up when the banksters began the robbery that continues today behind capital’s new sword and shield: The Obamagogue.

In education, a similar ploy might work. If we are to measure kids’ worth by test scores, and thus the wealth and health of the nation, why not just give the kids the test on the first day of school and simply work on it the rest of the year until everyone passes? But that would be cheating, eh?

But, beyond tongue in cheek measures, what is needed is a mass movement of resistance, rank and filers throwing off the bogus mis-leaders who steer struggle away from direct action, real resistors promoting test boycotts and freedom schools, and driving the Empire’s recruiters from campuses; in communities moving families right back into homes they are evicted from, at work places—no concessions, none, not one step back, in fact we want MORE and we will fight to get it, seizing plants, schools and properties; in the military, simply standing down, walking away from the wars for oil and profits; in sum, against the system of capital itself as it has obviously failed miserably everywhere in the world.

If we do not fight back, we will only see sharpened depression and war. Indeed the depth of that will be determined by the amount of resistance. Besides, the only way to be a truly whole person today, to be more than a loyal servant of Empire, is to protest and to join with like-minded people who, organized, can form a movement to win.

The Rouge Forum Conference is May 14 to 17 in Ypsilanti Michigan, Eastern Michigan U. You are welcome to submit a proposal or just come and join us.

http://www.rougeforumconference.com