CALIFORNIA — The fight against racist budget cuts is heating up in schools and colleges.  Students are growing angrier and more committed to standing up to police attacks. They are open to see that its not just bad management. Capitalism and its inevitable imperialist wars are to blame. Many are questioning a system that cuts education, health care and jobs for wider imperialist war and bailing out banks.

Union leaders and some students are trying to divert mass anger into an electoral campaign to reform the California budget process.  The liberal Vasconcellos project draws student activists to ally with “legislative, business and community leaders.”  In contrast, PLP’ers in mass organizations are building a worker-student-soldier alliance for class struggle and revolution:  “Strike against a system that can’t meet our needs and has to be destroyed!”

The call for mass action on Thursday, March 4, is spreading across the U.S.  “Save education!”  But only the Progressive Labor Party is asking the critical questions: Not only education “for whom?” but also education “for what?”

Education Conforms to
Bosses’ Needs

Public education in California has shifted rapidly to meet the bosses’ changing military and economic needs.  In the 1930s, teachers were sent to Civilian Conservation Corps camps to organize evening high schools.  Adult education grew to include 10% of California adults, providing a safety valve in an era of mass unemployment.  

During World War II, nearly a million California workers were trained for jobs in war industry.  In the 1950s, K-12 education was reorganized with a vocational- technical emphasis to serve the bosses’ need for workers with new skills.  During the economic slump of the early 1990s, K-12 shifted to college-prep, leaving “career-technical education” mainly to the community colleges.  

We are now seeing another seismic shift as the bosses prepare for World War III.  Today, as U.S. imperialism is in decline, the bosses are pushing education for the next war. But this system of mis-education, even if well-funded, can never serve the needs of the working class. 

‘Master Plan’ For Education Serves The Capitalist Masters

The California Master Plan for Higher Education (1960) responded directly to sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union after Sputnik (the first satellite, launched into space by the Soviet Union in 1957).  The “first-tier” University of California was expanded mainly for war research.  For example, atom-bomb scientist Herbert York was called from Livermore Laboratory into President Eisenhower’s new Science Advisory Committee in 1957, and then to the Pentagon.  Three years later he became the first chancellor of the new UC-Irvine campus, building it up with new federal funds from NASA and DARPA (Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency).

The California State University system became “tier two,” training teachers and social workers as well as cops and others whom the bosses are fighting to win to keep the rapidly-expanding working-class in California under their control.  However, angry students in the California State University (CSU) system now facing huge cuts are fighting back. More are eager to talk about the link between the cuts, imperialist war, capitalism and communist revolution.

The “third-tier” junior colleges “guaranteed” access to higher education for everyone in what was then a 90% white population, promoting the cold-war ideology of capitalist “freedom” and “opportunity.”  New colleges (including LA Southwest and West LA Colleges) opened after the Watts rebellion, with increasing numbers of black and Latino workers filling jobs in California’s growing economy. Yet the system remained racist to the core.  “It was a sorting system for human capital management in an open society,” according to CSU Northridge provost Harold Hellenbrand. The current racist cuts are heavily affecting the schools that the majority of black and Latino students attend.

Imperialism And Ideology in
Higher Education

Today’s budget crisis — an aspect of the general crisis of capitalism — allows the capitalist class to reshape education to meet its needs as it prepares for intensified global competition and, increasingly, wider war.   Colleges starved for funds are rushing to qualify for new federal funds that are specifically directed toward workforce development. Most students will increasingly be pushed into job-training programs tailored for the employers, including some in defense aerospace. PLP has the opportunity to reach out to students in these programs with the revolutionary fight to end racist exploitation.

We shouldn’t be nostalgic for “liberal arts” programs, which serve mainly to push the bosses’ ideology. Education under capitalism teaches some useful skills and a lot of illusions! Working-class
students are made to feel that if they don’t succeed they have only themselves to blame, while the system is stacked against them. Many struggle valiantly to maintain full-time status (needed to qualify for financial aid) while working 30, 40, or more hours a week to support themselves and often their families. But more students are joining with PLP to fight against these attacks, and to join the lifelong struggle to get rid of the system based on racism, exploitation and war.

As we fight the current round of devastating budget cuts our job isn’t to “restore the luster” of capitalist education (LA Times, 12/28/09) but to fight for communist revolution that will, for the first time, let us create the educational system we need.