Dismantle the Pipeline
A Review of Susan Anglada Bartley's "A Different Vision: A Revolution Against Racism in Public Education" (Luminare Press)
David Gilbert
Susan Anglada Bartley is a passionate anti-racist educator. Her new book, A
Different Vision, looks at the school-to-prison pipeline as part of a
fundamentally white supremacist education system. The various forms of
exclusion are key--the ways students of color are told they are slow
learners, are tracked away from college preparation courses, and are
disproportionately subjected to harmful forms of discipline. The latter
isn't just a product of cultural misunderstandings with white teachers;
studies show that students of color are treated much more harshly for the
same behaviors as whites. Once students are held out of the classroom,
they're much more likely to fall behind on their work and then drop out. In
the U.S. Black students are 3 times more likely than whites to be suspended
or expelled, which foreshadows the 6 to 1 Black to white incarceration rate
for males. Another school-to-prison pipeline has been built over the past
40 years, for the flow of dollars, as funding for incarceration has
increased at twice the rate of that for education.
I cringed at A Different' Vision's description of how humilation
is a standard technique for keeping students in line. As a teacher at
Franklin High School (FHS) in Portland, Oregon, Anglada Bartley learned how
to move away from that and toward engagement. She realized that especially
as a white teacher, she had to earn the trust of her Black, Latino/a,
Native American, and Asian students which she does in part by being willing
to tell brief stories about her own life. She makes an effort to talk with
students at eye level rather than down to them; she addresses issues
individually rather than dressing students down in front of the class; she
never writes them up for disciplinary punishment. More importantly, she's a
big enough person to learn from her students and to acknowledge that.
Protectionism and Globalization Have the Same Mother: The Crisis of Capital
Celso Beltrami
Beyond the metaphors, Trump's protectionist turn, which is carried out in a
threatening manner and not just aimed at China, constitutes another
turbulent factor, both from an economic point of view and that of
imperialist relations on a world scale. These two aspects reflect two sides
of the same coin, as Trump's economic measures serve an imperialist
strategy aimed at both declared rivals and allies who are applying the
brakes and who would like the embrace of the stars and stripes, which they
have suffered for more than seventy years with varying degrees of
enthusiasm, to be less suffocating. In fact, it is very doubtful that the
custom duties will really be able to protect the entire US economy from
foreign competition. Perhaps they will give a bit of respite to certain
sectors of US manufacturing, like steel or aluminum, but many more will be
hit and the retaliation will fall upon the workforce (but not just on
them), who will probably be the victims of redundancies and worsening
working conditions. As is well-known, after decades of "globalization", it is difficult to
disentangle the chain of value, since the productive process involves so
many states: you just have to look at the "made in" label stuck on goods to
see to what extent their constituent parts are "international". Moreover,
it is no mystery that, for example, the large distribution chain Wal-Mart
has many articles on its shelves which are entirely made in China.
Therefore, "America First" served up in a protectionist sauce threatens to
seriously reduce the enormous advantages that the tax reform launched a few
months ago is generating for American firms. In this regard the mountain of
money given by Trump to his capitalist accomplices is yielding the expected
fruit - far from stimulating investment and therefore jobs in the so-called
real economy, this mountain of money is mostly employed for speculative
purposes, to strengthen financial activities..
Challenging the Music Industry's Commodity Complex
An Interview with Punk-Rock Guerilla, Justin Pearson
Mimi Soltysik
I wish there was an easy answer. For me, what I end up doing, or being
part of, usually stems from my subconscious, or comes from something that
might include elements that I am not initially aware of. It's the
retrospect where I can fully study the outcome of something that I was part
of. I can breathe and dissect it with ease and in peace (with myself). I
think over the years, while everything that happened, tons of weird energy
was exchanged and moved. It made sense to some degree, but it took time to
really see the broader picture or possible understand the magnitude of
something. I'm not sure if that makes sense or not. I suppose, the
simplistic way to answer that part of this question would be that
fortunately things seem to come organically, for the most part. However
with that being said, organically doesn't mean that it's a simplistic way,
or a peaceful experience, or that it comes from a natural space. So moving
into the later part of your question, about the era that we are in, it's
grim in many respects. It's more and more absurd. I feel a great deal more
anxiety than what I felt in recent years. It seems that time might be
running out. I can feel the tension in the air, and smell the shit that is
lingering. But with that being said, I can see new ideas, I feel rad power
from people, and change is being birthed and evoked in a lot of creative
and powerful stuff. Man, this is a massive, massive topic to try to
articulate and nail down in a simple answer. I guess over all, I see things
being polarized. I do think that might be what was and is needed, to avoid
the stagnation that seemed to keep everything at bay. For so long, I could
see that nasty band-aid on everything was gonna fall off eventually. It
sure seems to have fallen.
The Significance of Karl Marx
Chris Wright
The explanatory (and therefore strategic, for revolutionaries)
primacy of class can be established on simple a priori grounds,
quite apart from empirical sociological or historical analysis. One has
only to reflect that access to resources-money, capital, technology-is of
unique importance to life, being key to survival, to a high quality of
life, to political power, to social and cultural influence; and access to
(or control over) resources is determined ultimately by class position,
one's position in the social relations of production. The owner of the
means of production, i.e., the capitalist, has control over more resources
than the person who owns only his labor-power, which means he is better
able to influence the political process (for example by bribing
politicians) and to propagate ideas and values that legitimate his dominant
position and justify the subordination of others. These two broad
categories of owners and workers have opposing interests, most obviously in
the inverse relation between wages and profits. This antagonism of
interests is the "class struggle," a struggle that need not always be
explicit or conscious but is constantly present on an implicit level,
indeed is constitutive of the relationship between capitalist and worker.
The class struggle-that is, the structure and functioning of economic
institutions-can be called the foundation of society, the dynamic around
which society tends to revolve, because, again, it is through class that
institutions and actors acquire the means to influence social life. These simple, commonsense reflections suffice to establish the meaning and
validity of Marx's infamous, "simplistic," "reductionist" contrast between
the economic "base" and the political, cultural, and ideological
"superstructure." Maybe his language here was misleading and metaphorical.
