Education "reform" is at the top of the "issues" page of the presidential campaign handbills we discover packed in our mailboxes, unsolicited. While the Gore and Bush campaigns express differences over "school choice," vouchers, funding levels, degrees of "federalism," limits of testing, and so on, they share the same underlying dog-eat-dog assumption: that education is about ensuring that your family's children have the best shot at getting ahead in the lifetime struggle of each against all. And they hold in common an even more fundamental, unstated assumption: only the children of the propertied rulers and professional middle classes really need an education--as opposed to mind-deadening "training"--and that, with a few individual exceptions, only those children will receive an education in any meaningful sense.

This pamphlet approaches education from the opposite, working-class point of view--as a social question. As the fight for the transformation of learning into a universal and lifetime activity. It presents education as part of preparing workers and farmers "for the greatest of all battles in the years ahead--the battle to throw off the self-image the rulers teach us, and to recognize that we are capable of taking power and organizing society, as we collectively educate ourselves and learn the exploiters in the process."

Each capitalist candidate and her or his paid promoters in the big-business press wrap proposals for Social Security "reform" in the same assumptions as education "reform." Everything is centered on "looking out for number one."

Gore and Bush present slightly differing views as to how individuals from the middle class or better-off layers of working people can realize a superior return on retirement nest eggs used for speculation in stocks and bonds. Both the Democrats and Republicans, with different emphases, advocate private savings accounts for those individuals who can afford them, plus, in some combination, reduced pension benefits, increased employee taxation, and an older retirement age.  
 
A matter of social solidarity
In contrast, class-conscious workers and labor and farm militants approach Social Security as a matter of social solidarity. The toiling majority in city and countryside, whose labor transforms nature and in the process produces all wealth, have a right to a social wage, not just an individual wage. We have a right to lifetime health care, disability compensation, and a secure retirement. These measures are for all, and thus in the interests of all. We fight to push back the omnipresent "devil take the hindmost" assumptions pervading bourgeois society in order to establish collaborative working-class space--a place for confidence-building.

Schools under capitalism are not institutions of learning but of social control, aimed at reproducing the class relations and privileges of the prevailing order. The deference and obedience the rulers seek to inculcate in the classroom are backed up on the streets by cops' clubs and automatic weapons.

Far more working people are executed by a policeman's bullet, chokehold, or hog-tying than by lethal injection or electrocution, even with the unrelenting climb in state-sanctioned murders since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. Although local, state, and federal governments keep no accurate records on individuals killed by cops, a recent survey based on a search of U.S. newspapers from 1997 alone turned up accounts of some 2,000 deaths at the hands of police and prison guards between 1990 and the opening of 1998--clearly just the tip of the iceberg. (How many unreported killings, to cite just one example, were carried out by la migra--the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service's hated Border Patrol?)

During that same period, 312 people across the United States were killed in prison death chambers. Not only on death row but also in "civil society," the noose still haunts a land for which "Strange Fruit" would be a more appropriate national anthem than the "Star-spangled Banner."

Both Gore and Bush are champions of these weapons of class terror, calling for more cops, restricted rights of appeal and parole, and stiffer penalties, including capital punishment. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Democratic aspirant Clinton made a public spectacle of his return to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, one of four in that state during Clinton's years as governor. Subsequently, the Clinton-Gore administration has been responsible for two major federal laws expanding capital punishment as an instrument of terror: the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act, which made some sixty additional federal offenses punishable by death; and the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (even the name speaks volumes!), which further restricts federal court appeals rights of those in state prisons.

For his part, Bush has presided over 136 prisonhouse state killings during his five years as governor--fully one-fifth of all those in the United States since 1976. A shroud of silence prevents an accounting of how many more working people were killed in that state during those years by Texas Rangers, local police, la migra, sheriffs and their deputies, and rightist thugs--often including the former list in civvies.

State-sanctioned, or state-encouraged, murders on the streets and in the prisons combined, however, still fall far short of the numbers of workers killed each year as a result of the employers' profit-driven speedup, brutal intensification of labor, and lengthening of hours. Both life and limb of workers in the United States are being sacrificed on the altar of sharpening competition for markets among U.S. capitalists, and between them and their rivals worldwide....  
 
Rising working-class resistance
Today, in mid-2000, workers in the United States are in the third year of an accelerated, if still uneven, upturn in resistance to the employers' assaults. The buying power of workers' wages has still not recovered its level of thirty years ago, and the renewed struggles have initially ended more often in standoffs than substantial gains for working people. But where workers stand together and fight, they are demonstrating their capacity to push the employers back, take some ground, and change themselves enough in the process to arrive in better shape for the next battle....

This increasing resistance is bringing together workers fighting the employers' assault on hours and working conditions, and farmers struggling to hold on to the land they till in face of rising indebtedness to the banks, falling prices for their produce from monopoly distributors, and discrimination by federal agencies. It is bringing together a vanguard of working people who are male and female; who speak different tongues; of all skin colors and national origins; from younger and older generations; union and currently nonunion; and with varying levels of formal education. The toilers are speeding up this process as they fight together, side by side--before they agree on many questions, and often with minimal initial ability to speak with one another. These vanguard proletarians, in town and country, are being impelled to consider new ideas, to read more widely, to broaden their scope, to begin expanding the limits of what they previously believed they, and others like themselves, were capable of.  
 
 
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