Once again, a study claims to have discovered a genetic basis for a complex social outcome — in this case, why students succeed or fail in school. Published in the July issue of Developmental Psychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association, this “gene discovery” by lead author Kevin Beaver, a criminology professor at Florida State University, follows a long and racist tradition of attributing genetic causes to alcoholism, intelligence, unemployment, criminality, and even the fear of snakes.
Throughout the history of class society, the ruling class has used religion or pseudo-science to cast exploitation, oppression and injustice as inevitable. The field of genetics, in particular, has been repeatedly hijacked by slave-owners, captains of industry, and Germany’s Third Reich. It’s not surprising that this despicable ideology has emerged once again, this time by capitalists who promote education reform.
True social scientists know that both human behavior and social organization are driven by infinitely complex factors. Beaver, however, claims to have discovered genes (the molecular units of DNA) related to “impulsivity” and “violent tendencies” and thereby “influence” whether an individual will graduate from high school and go on to college.
To create the illusion of legitimacy for their findings, the study gives the genes technical-sounding names: DAT1, DRD2, and DRD4. (By avoiding the more obviously outrageous claim that genes “determine” an outcome, researchers leave themselves an escape route if and when future critics show there is no correlation between such genes and the designated outcomes.
Racism: Bosses’ Tool
The bosses’ use of prestigious journals and big-name academics to legitimize Nazi ideology is nothing new. In 1969, Berkeley Professor Arthur Jensen was invited to submit an article to the Harvard Educational Review to prove that black children fail in schools because of their genes. In the early 1970s, William Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, claimed that the color of people’s skin could tell you how smart they were.
In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray followed suit with The Bell Curve, a best-selling package of racist propaganda, distortions, and lies. Wherever these racist pseudo-scientists showed up to speak, the Progressive Labor Party led thousands of students and faculty to shout them down and prevent them from spreading their poison.
Although racists tend to hide after being attacked in mass struggles, their falsehoods remain alive today. Chief among them is the concept that genes define individual abilities and tendencies. This bogus claim hides the real cause of inequality under capitalism: racist and sexist discrimination. If people’s genes stop them from becoming aeronautical engineers or pediatricians, rotten public schools get a free pass. Using genes to blame the victims is a doubly racist assault on black and Latino children, since it justifies spending less on segregated schools while painting the children as innately unintelligent.
The fundamental illusion may be that genes determine any traits at all. What Genes Can’t Do (2003), by the cell biologist turned philosophy professor, Lenny Moss, shows that the concept of a “gene” is used to mean different things, and that there is no one-to-one correspondence between genes and traits. Indeed, geneticists like Richard Lewontin (The Triple Helix, 2000) have demonstrated that even the concept of a “trait” is ambiguous.
Thus “genes” for “traits” is a double house of cards, though most biologists cling to these illusory fictions. Their field rewards them for doing so. Top academic publications favor conclusions that hide the fact that the profit system decides who is allowed to succeed or fail.
Bosses Attack Students and Teachers
The implications of this academic bias are lethal. Like ancient rulers who used the Bible to trap slaves into accepting their subjugation as part of a larger plan, today’s capitalists use pseudo-science to veil the racist neglect that pervades education. Failed students are portrayed as hopelessly handicapped and beyond help. It is a small step from there to consign such “flawed” segments of the population to joblessness, poverty, and ultimately elimination.
Teachers, often with leadership by members of PLP, have joined with parents and their students in fighting against further cutbacks in school funding and for smaller class sizes. They are also confronting ruling-class schemes to blame teachers for the failures of the bosses’ schools.
These fights must be sharpened to defend black and Latino students from the hopeless feeling that they are doomed to unemployment and prison. While any victories in reform struggles are limited and temporary under capitalism, an unrelenting fight against racism and sexism will help create the working-class unity we need to build toward communist revolution.
Only when the world’s workers — under the leadership of the communist PLP — seize power from the capitalists through revolution, will we rid ourselves of false science, miseducation, racism, sexism, and imperialist war. We need to become millions and millions. Join us.
******
The Rulers’ Bind
The capitalist ruling class has a contradiction on its hands. On the one hand, it needs to slash spending on schools and other services even more to free up funds for its widening imperialist wars. On the other, the schools are so bad that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is complaining that high school graduates are ill-equipped to serve as the bosses’ cannon fodder. In a March 2012 report for the CFR by Joel Klein (former head of New York City’s public schools) and Condoleezza Rice (former Secretary of State under George W. Bush), they warn that the horror that passes for schooling in the U.S. is robbing the ruling class of its needed military might. They don’t care that millions of our children suffer from miseducation. Their sole concern is that the U.S. imperialists’ control of critical resources is in jeopardy.
The strike of 30,000 school teachers and education workers in Chicago is the necessary response to the attacks that students, teachers and parents have been facing for years. It’s significant that the strike is happening in Chicago, which is the Ground Zero for fascist “educational reform.” That has the full support of the democrats and AFT president Randi Weingarten. The charter school movement, school closings, increased testing and “data driven” teaching, the new evaluation measures, and the budget cuts have all been forced on the mostly black and Latino school population. This is clearly racist. But the working class is pushing back against these attacks in a way that we haven’t seen in 25 years.
“School Reform” Is about Control, Not Education!
These endless changes forced down the throats of students and teachers nationwide are more about disciplining us than education. Obama and Duncan’s Race to the Top and the drive towards standardized curriculum and testing is part of the bosses move to win the hearts and minds of our students to fight in their expanding imperialist wars. School reform in Chicago has shown it’s racist nature from the mass firings of veteran black teachers from schools that our students never deserved, discipline policies that force our students out of school and the hiring of young white teachers into schools that are still setup for failure.
Many of the reforms involve micro managing what teachers do while giving them less and less support, supplies, etc. Obama’s team of Rahm and Duncan has shown their true colors in the dismantling of public education and their attacks on the labor movement. The ruling class in this country wants to use these reforms to crush the spirit of teachers and control the schools for the needs of the capitalists.
Money for War, No Money for Schools!
These attacks are necessary in a system that is based on the wealth of a few and the exploitation of the many, CAPITALISM. So, while thousands of anti-racist teachers take to the street fighting for decent schools, dignity and the respect that education workers deserve billions have been spent on imperialist wars. From Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan to propping up US military bases all over the world. As long as the bosses are in power, we will face continous wars for profit –only a revolution for communism, workers power, can bring us the changes we need!
(More on the history of communists in the labor movement in next leaflet-Volume 3.)
- Information
Chicago Teachers STRIKE against Apartheid Edcuation
- Information
- 10 September 2012 76 hits
STRIKE AGAINST CAPITALISM!!
The Chicago teachers’ strike is a fight back against the racist conditions (overcrowded classes, segregated schools, etc.) our children face every day. Strikes allow workers to feel the power that we have as a class to stop the bosses in their tracks. The liberal Democrats, Obama and Duncan are leading the racist attacks on students and teachers in the U.S. with their “Race to the Top”. The anti-racist fight that 26,000 Chicago school workers are waging is an inspiration to workers around the world, like the striking Lonmin miners in Marikana, South Africa.
SAME ENEMY, SAME FIGHT! WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!!
For better wages, working and living conditions the black mine workers have shut down the world’s third largest platinum mine. Our working class sisters and brothers in South Africa are waging a strike against the mine owners and the racist liberal African National Congress (ANC). The response of the liberal black led ANC to these workers demands was the racist police massacre of 8 miners on August 8th and 34 striking miners on August 16th.
SMASH APARTHEID EDUCATION WITH COMMUNIST REVOLUTION!!
Chicago school workers are fighting for the schools our children deserve, as workers in South Africa are fighting for the lives they deserve. The fact remains that capitalism can never provide the quality of life our class deserves. The liberals Obama, Duncan, Emmanuel & Co. just like the ANC politicians are doing the bidding of their billionaire masters. These liberals are leading the racist attacks on workers from the U.S. to South Africa. To get the lives that our class deserves we must fight to take state power away from the bosses and their puppet politicians. The working class (more than 99%) produces EVERYTHING of value in the world, yet the ruling class (less than 1%) controls it all. Under communism racism would have no place in our society. Communism, unlike capitalism, needs unity not division of our class. A communist society will utilize the potential in all workers and students to build the world the international working class deserves.
JOIN PLP!! FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!!
- Information
South Africa Massacre, U.S. Election Circus Expose Futility of Voting
- Information
- 05 September 2012 72 hits
As the Republican and Democratic Party convention circuses play out in the U.S., the recent massacre in South Africa (see page 8) shows the electoral system’s utter antagonism to the working class. On August 16, black and white police officers of the “freely elected” ANC (African National Congress) government shot dead 34 black miners striking at the Marikana platinum mine. “In the majority of cases, the bullet exited the body through the chest, suggesting the men were shot in the back while running away” (Independent, London, 8/30/12). To make matters worse, ANC regime prosecutors have charged 270 survivors of the massacre with murder, even though cops did the shooting. This has been withdrawn “provisonally” due to mass outrage.
The workers died because the politicians commanding the cops serve capitalists. No politician can successfully run for office without financial and media support from one faction of bosses or another. South Africa’s first “democratic elections” in 1994 ended apartheid (legalized segregation and oppression of black people) but ushered in exploitation with a new face. The ANC, like Obama, presides over the same racist profit system which existed in the period before black presidents in South Africa and the U.S.
At the polls, the openly racist, pro-apartheid Dutch-rooted Afrikaner wing of South African bosses lost its once supreme authority. ANC leader Nelson Mandela — who supported capitalism — gained the presidency with both a groundswell of first-time black voters and the backing of the ultra-rich Oppenheimer family. The latter owned the lion’s share of the country’s gold, diamond and platinum mines and had opposed apartheid while promoting black labor unions. Oppenheimer wanted to end nation-wide rebellion and a worldwide boycott to obtain labor peace and foreign investment. The liberal Oppenheimer clan had strong ties to British and U.S. banks, with one of its firms sporting the name Anglo-American.
Capitalist, ANC Alliance Pulled the Trigger
“Mandela and [family patriarch Harry] Oppenheimer became close before Mandela’s presidency and would grow even closer: After Mandela’s election, Oppenheimer frequently hosted him at his luxurious estate. Mandela was also known to bring De Beers [an Oppenheimer-owned diamond company] representatives on foreign trips” (New Republic, 12/18/07). Under Mandela and his successors, South Africa’s state apparatus (including the police) became integrated but now took orders from liberal U.S.- and British-backed mine barons instead of the Afrikaners.
It was this alliance of politicians and corporations, inseparable from the profit system, that pulled the triggers in Marikana. Workers at the mine, owned by British-based Lonmin, had joined the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), which opposed the ANC. They were demanding, along with wage hikes, nationalization of the industry. But early last year, “Anglo-American Plc’s Chief Executive Officer Cynthia Carroll said nationalization of mining assets in South Africa, which has the world’s largest mineral reserves, would be ‘the road to ruin’” (Bloomberg News, 2/8/11).
Oppenheimer-founded Anglo demanded a full inquiry from current president Jacob Zuma. He heads the ANC, which has consistently enjoyed the false legitimacy of 60-plus percent majorities at the polls. Guess what happened? In less than a year, “a study commissioned by the ruling African National Congress recommended against the policy, saying nationalization would be an ‘economic disaster’” (Bloomberg, 2/7/12).
However, nationalization is just another type of bosses’ tool to deceive workers into believing that a different set of profit-making bosses can serve workers’ needs.
Big Oil/Wall Street Control Both Parties
Back in the U.S., the factions for whom racist capitalist butchers Obama and Romney toil make South African bosses look tame. The Big Oil/Wall Street imperialists steering Obama need to control the Middle East’s oil and gas supply routes and are gearing up for a likely clash with China over them. One U.S. drone strike for the benefit of Exxon Mobil and JP Morgan matches the Marikana body count. Obama’s Libya adventure, against Chinese and Russian influence, wiped out a thousand times more working-class lives.
Romney’s official foreign policy literature puts him in the same “World War III with China” camp as Obama. But billionaire pro-Israel fanatic Sheldon Adelson tops the GOP’s donor list, to the tune of a $100 million campaign pledge. If Adelson’s camp prevails and Romney becomes commander-in-chief, a U.S. or Israeli (or joint) strike against Iran could be accelerated.
Voting A Death-Trap for Workers
For workers from the U.S. to South Africa and across the globe, voting is worse than futile. It legitimizes capitalists’ killing of our sisters and brothers with a stamp of popular approval. The only route to effective change lies in building towards destroying the profit system and replacing it with true workers’ rule, when the international working class holds state power under one party.
That can only be achieved when Progressive Labor Party members win workers and youth in the shops, schools, military and all the other capitalist-led mass organizations to join the PLP.
This will create a mass party capable of smashing the bosses’ state with communist revolution.
CHICAGO, September 3 — At least 10,000 Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) members and supporters attended a Labor Day rally here, followed by a march around City Hall and to the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) offices. Chanting, “the workers, united, will never be divided” and “we’re going to beat back the bosses’ attack.” Participants were enthusiastic and feeling their power. On August 30th, CTU’s House of Delegates had voted unanimously to strike on September 10. Speaker after speaker rose to report members at their schools were ready to strike. This developed after months of CPS insults and attacks on students and educators, followed by rallies, marches, informational pickets and outreach to parents and community by CTU members.
The situation is ripe with possibility, but without communist politics, these workers in struggle can turn cynical. This is because the ruling class has only begun to attack education workers and our students. We will not be able to beat back all the attacks, no matter how militantly we fight. As long as the capitalists are running things the workers will be left behind.
The capitalists’ plans for our students include war, low-wage jobs or unemployment and a tightening of restrictions to prevent fight-back. The implementation of Common Core State Standards, gives the bosses free reign to impose national standards with no opposition from local teachers. The proliferation of charter schools and online “learning” are all aimed at busting the teachers’ unions. These reforms help the capitalists carry out their plans, no matter how many slogans they develop claiming this is all to benefit the students.
All of the rally speakers represented labor unions. One speaker was from the FOP, Fraternal Order of Police. Teachers should not be uniting with the cops who brutalize their students!
The ruling-class attacks hit black and Latino students the hardest, and is the reason education “reforms” are pushed the hardest in urban areas. Chicago, whose public school students are only 8% white, is a test in many ways. Workers around the world have sent messages of support and millions are rooting for a successful strike. Whatever gains may be won, will be temporary as long as the capitalists continue to rule. The role of Progressive Labor Party in spreading its message of communism in this strike will be heard worldwide.
