Welcome to this edition of These Revolutionary Times. Each Sunday, we focus on a small selection of papers, articles, and essays published in various publicly available sources that reflect political change already happening or that we think ought to happen or ought not to happen in 21st Century America. Our goal is to spur people to read these pieces with an open-minded but critical focus and engage here in an interchange of ideas about the issues raised in them.
“the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. ... This I call the Fetishism ... of commodities.”
Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter One (1867)
“And this life activity [the worker] sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. ... He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labor itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another.”
Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847)
If you are typically inclined, as I am, to skim over the opening quotes in DKos diaries, please, go back and read the above two from Karl Marx first. I will draw heavily on them throughout this edition of TRT. First, a disclaimer: I am not here to defend Marx or Marxism. Personally, I am a sort of Marxist pragmatist; I acknowledge the changes to social organization that have damaged the usefulness of his theories. But I am much more impressed by how much they still explain. The historian Eric Foner once summarized my feelings on the subject of Marx pitch-perfectly:
I tend to eschew labels. Marx is believed to have said: “I am not a Marxist.” In other words: “I don’t want to be assigned to a single school of interpretation.” But no-one can understand history who does not have at least some familiarity with the writings of Marx.
(Italics mine). So while acknowledging significant challenges, today I will focus on three vital, living, hotly contended issues—Housing, Healthcare, and Education—from a Marxian interpretive perspective. In doing so, my aim is to demonstrate the vital importance of viewing things through a materialist lens, i.e. one that sees history as the sum totality of actual relations of people and things as they actually are, not as we might like them to be or imagine they could have been. This is something that I find tends to unite a lot of us at The Political Revolution, as well as in the broader, burgeoning left-wing of the USA, and represents a sort of throwback to the pre-WWII, pre “new left” popular front, before the “labor peace” that was reached in the 60s led to a straying of the left toward idealism in lieu of materialism. Ideals without a strong base in materialist analysis are condemned to remain unrealized, today’s left would increasingly contend.
A brief explanation of the quotes is in order. Please indulge me in a tiny bit of theory. One of the most basic insights of Marx was about the nature of commodities, both what they are and what they do. Simply put, in capitalism, as opposed to feudalism, for e.g., “commodities” differ from “goods traded at [non-capitalist] markets” in the following ways:
- They are not typically traded by the maker of the good (artisan, craftsman, farmer, etc), but rather sold according to their established value of another, universal commodity, namely money.
- The flow of this money commodity is the cause and foundation of all other flows of commodities. There was money before capitalism, but this investment primacy signals the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Capitalists, with surplus value in the form of money to invest, buy commodities in order to sell them for even more money. Think Goldman, Bain Capital, etc. The “masters of the universe” have always been there, in one way or another, since the beginning of capitalism. And just as artisans care about the good they are making, capitalists typically care primarily if not exclusively about making money.
- In this shift, the actual material relations, i.e. labor, geography, history, power relations, etc. that all contribute to the making of a commodity are obscured in its consumption. This is evinced by the phenomenon that when one goes to the grocery store, one does not know where the eggs come from, as they supposedly do in the much rarer instance of the trip to the farmer’s market. This commodity fetish as Marx called it is the result of modern capitalist subjects being required to maintain in their heads, at all times, basically for survival, an encyclopedic knowledge of the monetary values of thousands of commodities, which, Marx argued, displaces from common social knowledge the material relations of their production. The material relations between people, say boss-employee, ends up obscured by the relations between the myriad commodities within the cash nexus. So when we don’t see “the bitter labor dispute that has been roiling for years at Driscoll’s, the world’s largest distributor of berries — the ones you find at Costco, Target, Whole Foods and host of other grocery stories,” but rather just buy and enjoy the berries in ignorant bliss, that is the commodity fetish at work.
- The flows of these commodities are not strictly or even closely determined, as liberal university economics would have us believe, on actual human needs. The causal arrow actually runs the other way as the result of the shift to investor primacy: manufactured desires, created by capitalists looking to invest surplus value for a further profit and use advertising to create needs that can be used to sell products, is actually the main source of “demand” in late capitalism. The show Mad Men on AMC was a perfect demonstration of the historical significance of this medium.
Both liberal and Marxian economists agree that labor is a commodity that workers must sell to their employers on the labor market, and so the purpose of the second Marx quote, about labor as commodity, is to draw out the idea that some goods that we do not typically consider commodities per se, due in part to the commodity fetish and in part to our own idealism, are still commodified, to varying extents across different social classes and forms of government, and subject to the same obscuring of their own material relations of production. Taking labor as commodity as the example, we are conditioned to see the unemployment rate and the average minimum wage as abstract concepts, instead of the sum process of millions of families reproducing, struggling with the system to produce desirable skilled offspring, struggling collectively with the captains of various industries to sell their labor at a more even split of the profit it creates, etc. To the extent that such quasi-commodifiable goods are the source of inalienable human rights, as per, for e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), their very commodification is often a source of political struggle.
Each article I focus on today will highlight a hot-button struggle over one of the rights listed in the UDHR, and the political decision over whether or not to remove the good in question—housing, healthcare, and education—from the cash nexus, or in other words, the struggle to commodify of decommodify each humanly necessary good. The wealth of readily available news of these struggles is nothing if not a testament to the importance of mid-1800s Marx to understanding contemporary American politics.
Landlords, AmIRite? Who wouldn’t want to no longer pay rent? Meanwhile, many without homes wish they could afford such a luxurious land-lord-pest. Indeed, a new study just released by Ben Carson’s HUD found that homelessness rose last year for the first time since the great recession, fueled largely by a housing crisis on the West Coast. That cause is of course one of many, as housing prices in every urban area continue to skyrocket.
Housing can be decommodified/recommodified in many ways, but I will focus on just two: removing it completely from the cash nexus, via public housing, or simply limiting the extent to which it can be used to generate investor profit, via policies such as inclusionary zoning, low income housing tax credits (LIHTC), and rent control.
Since the Robert Moses-inspired Corbusian boom of New Deal, WPA-funded, massive public housing “projects” in urban centers across america, only one public housing system, the first and foremost one, Moses’ baby, remains in anything like its original robust form: New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), which houses upward of 400,000 low income tenants at 30% of their income, even if all they get is public assistance (TANF). All the rest have been more or less torn down after systematic, often racist, neglect, and none ever came close to the scale of NYCHA in the first place. NYCHA has also famously fallen behind on repairs and become odiously neglected.
Some might say this proves that public housing cannot serve as a model for the complete eradication of homelessness, or the significant decommodification of housing as a human right. Others know enough about Robert Moses’ racist planning practices to know that had he been building NYCHA for affluent white people, he would have taken more pains to do it in a way that was sustainable politically. In fact, according to Corbusier’s original designs, the tall, diagonal cross-hatched towers of the US public housing projects, following NYCHA, were never meant to be used for residences at all, but rather for the downtown commercial areas in his modernist model cities. Moses took for granted that no one would know or care about that little detail, leveraged Corbusier’s chic trendiness in order to secure massive funding and warehouse the poor residents of NYC in his giant towering alternate realities instead of their own, which he condemned en masse in order to make way for other projects.
Nevertheless, if you hear anyone argue that homelessness is not a political choice resolvable by the public policy tool of public housing, ask them: what about Finland? Alex Grey, at the World Economic Forum, has a piece entitled Here's how Finland solved its homelessness problem, using almost the exact same rent-subsidization structure as NYCHA, but with a much more humane, practical approach to the human problem of reaching out to and integrating the homeless into the fabric of society:
Here's how Finland solved its homelessness problem
Longterm homeless in Finland as a whole, PAAVO Communities, and Helsinki. Attribution: Housing First
In the last year in the UK, the number of people sleeping rough rose by 7%. In Germany, the last two years saw a 35% increase in the number of homeless while in France, there has been an increase of 50% in the last 11 years.
Except in Finland. There, the number of homeless is steadily decreasing. So what have they been doing differently?
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There can be a number of reasons as to why someone ends up homeless, including sudden job loss or family breakdown, severe substance abuse or mental health problems. But most homelessness policies work on the premise that the homeless person has to sort those problems out first before they can get permanent accommodation.
Finland does the opposite - it gives them a home first. The scheme, introduced in 2007, is called Housing First. It is built on the principle that having a permanent home can make solving health and social problems much easier.
The homeless are given permanent housing on a normal lease. That can range from a self-contained apartment to a housing block with round-the-clock support. Tenants pay rent and are entitled to receive housing benefits. Depending on their income, they may contribute to the cost of the support services they receive. The rest is covered by local government.
Since the scheme started, thousands have benefitted.
Finland, god bless them, has effectively removed enough housing from the cash nexus to significantly decrease longterm homelessness.
In the spirit of acknowledging a grain of truth to the statement that “we are not Denmark Finland,” I would argue that among the most politically viable means of decommodifying housing, reducing rent seeking on land and the purely predatory nature of housing as commodity, etc. is the huge basket of policies, also dating back to the New Deal era by and large, which I will call rent control. There are live, active and viable campaigns to bring about real rent control, such as the one in Chicago aimed at eliminating the city’s statutory ban on the policy. Writing for Jacobin, Tanner Howard has the story with this great headline and lede—The Right to Rent Control: Last month, voters and organizers in Chicago mobilized against Illinois’ rent-control ban — a first step in stemming the city’s affordable-housing crisis.
The Right to Rent Control
Milwaukee Avenue near Logan Square, Chicago, 1993. Phillip Capper / Wikimedia
On March 20, voters in nine Chicago wards were faced with a simple question at the end of their ballot: “Should the state repeal the ban on rent control?”
Such a simple query belies the intense amount of organizing that has galvanized housing activists and changed the debate around Chicago’s housing problems. After more than a year of fighting to get the measure on the ballot, the outcome of the vote speaks to the frustration many people feel about rising housing costs in Chicago: 75 percent of voters supported the measure.
It was a remarkable success, built on thousands of hours of volunteer phone banking, canvassing, and signature gathering. Though rent control remains illegal in the city, organizers have changed the terms of the debate and laid the groundwork for future battles for housing justice in our communities.
Time to Lift the Ban
The measure emerged thanks to the Lift the Ban coalition, a collection of twenty neighborhood organizations and citywide housing-justice groups that collaborated to get the measure on the ballot and ensure its success. The coalition was home to several neighborhood organizations in communities that have been severely impacted by displacement.
Take, for example, Albany Park, a neighborhood on the city’s Northwest side. Long one of the city’s most affordable, ethnically diverse neighborhoods, with dozens of languages spoken in its public schools, Albany Park has seen costs skyrocket in recent years. At the center of these changes is the developer Ron Abrams, whose company Silver Properties now owns more than fifteen buildings in the neighborhood. The developer has repeatedly given entire buildings thirty-day eviction notices, often in the middle of winter, pushingundocumented immigrant families out while doubling rents for new tenants.
In that neighborhood, organizers involved with 33rd Ward Working Families and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) collaborated to knock doors, distribute flyers, and inform their neighbors of the measure. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of DSA.) As a canvasser, I spoke with plenty of people who supported rent control because they’d seen firsthand what happens when landlords have too much power.
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Of course, according to the logic of commodity fetishization, the idea of the free market not being able to deliver enough of a basic human good to meet demand, and the decommodification of that good actually increasing its supply/demand efficiency, is so counter to the prevailing capitalist wisdom that we could almost predict the most liberal of elites, such as Mother Jones Editor in Chief Clara Jeffrey, tweeting things like the following:
Are there any good arguments for rent control? I highly suggest this one, from Jake Blumgart, writing in the Pacific Standard:
IN DEFENSE OF RENT CONTROL
Rent control has long been criticized by economists, but the list of theoretical harms often aren't observable in reality. With a lack of serious public housing funding, the policy may be one of the best, and cheapest, ways to protect low-income families.
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“The argument for rent control should be distinguished from the argument for affordability per-se,” says Joshua Mason, an economics professor at Roosevelt University. “The real goal of rent control is protecting the moral rights of occupancy. Long-term tenants who contributed to this being a desirable place to live have a legitimate interest in staying in their apartments. If we think that income diverse, stable neighborhoods, where people are not forced to move every few years, [are worth preserving] then we collectively have an interest in stabilizing the neighborhood.”
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The common critique, elucidated in Krugman’s [2000 NYT] column, is that regulating rents on some housing units will drive up rents on those that are not controlled, while resulting in less new housing development because real estate interests are disinclined to build if they can’t be guaranteed market rate returns. According to this logic, housing stability for older residents should not take precedence over the ability of new residents to move to a highly desirable community. And, as the argument often goes, building more market rate housing creates more affordable housing eventually. (Maybe in some places, but not in tight markets like Silicon Valley and New York.)
“I SHOULD NOTE THAT MANY OF THESE FINDINGS CAME AS A SURPRISE TO ME. WHEN I FIRST JOINED THE RENT GUIDELINES BOARD STAFF IN 1987, I BELIEVED THAT RENT REGULATIONS IN NEW YORK CITY PROBABLY DID HAVE SOME LONG‐TERM HARMFUL EFFECTS. I WAS PROVEN WRONG.”
But a comprehensive review of literature by New York housing lawyer Timothy Collins found that the received wisdom regarding rent regulations is overly simplistic—partially because hard ceilings on rents are often imagined, while the reality is more often (as in New York’s case) a more measured approach meant to discourage landlords from dramatically raising rents and displacing tenants.
Collins argues that New York’s two largest building booms took place during times of strict rent controls: the 1920s and the post-war period between 1947 and 1965. (He is not arguing that the regulations provoked the building, just that they didn’t restrain it in the same way strict zoning codes did in the mid-1960s.)
“New York’s moderate rent regulations have had few, if any, of the negative side effects so confidently predicted by industry advocates,” Collins writes. “More important, rent regulations have been the single greatest source of affordable housing for middle‐ and low‐income households. I should note that many of these findings came as a surprise to me. When I first joined the Rent Guidelines Board staff in 1987, I believed that rent regulations in New York City probably did have some long‐term harmful effects. I was proven wrong.”
Outside the city, one economist found that housing construction in New Jersey fell by 52 percent in cities that enacted rent control regulations in the early 1970s—but fell 88 percent in those that didn’t. The policy also did not affect the landlords’ desire to keep their properties in good condition. One study from 1988 found that “there is no basis for economists' strongly-held belief that rent control leads to worse maintenance.”
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“Rent regulation is a response to the power imbalance between landlords and tenants, which creates an opportunity for landlords to exploit tenants that certainly exists in tight market cities like New York,” says Tom Waters, housing and policy analyst for the Community Service Society of New York. “And one of the most important benefits of rent regulation in New York City is that organizers can go and form tenant associations and have tenants withhold rent in order to deal with leaks or problems like that. If the landlord had the power to evict everyone who complains it would be a lot harder to do that.”
Will rent regulation be a serious part of the policy discussion again? Its return faces significant headwinds. Some states with competitive housing markets—like Massachusetts—have long ago banned such policies.
Yes, and now, thanks to a burgeoning new left, Chicago has just unbanned them by ballot initiative. Will other places follow suit?
Note that among Clara Jeffery’s above-favored alternatives to decommodification of housing through rent control was the voucherization of rent. This is a sort of subset of the massive, top-down movement by the capitalist class toward a universal basic income to be used to purchase the positive human rights that are currently too expensive on the private market, chief among them health care. Along with a modicum of responsible entertainment, of course.
Political Scientist Charles Murray is perhaps the most influential thinker in the UBI movement. And he too wants to essentially voucherize healthcare by making its purchase a mandatory prerequisite for receiving UBI, but mandate treating everyone in this class as a single pool in order to avoid the high-risk pool phenomenon. But as George Mason Economist Bryan Caplan argues, this is not a silver bullet for the crisis in healthcare, even if it were politically achievable:
UBI and Health Care: What's Wrong With Murray's Approach
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On the surface, it's ingenious. Most UBI advocates exclude health care because health insurance premiums vary tremendously from person to person. But if health insurers have to charge a uniform premium, this problem seems to go away. Averaging over everyone, premiums would be well below Murray's proposed UBI of $10,000 per year. Everyone could therefore afford to comply with the mandate. Maybe you shouldn't even call it a "mandate"; it's just a rule you have to follow to collect your UBI.
The problem: As long as health insurance remains private and competitive, health insurers compete on quality as well as price.* Since their elderly and sick customers are losing ventures, there's an obvious incentive to selectively cut their quality so they take their business elsewhere. In Murray's world, no insurer wants to be known as a geriatric specialist. Instead, prudence urges them to lavish services on the young and healthy. Physical fitness programs. Free contraception, delivered by drone for no extra charge. That kind of thing.
How severe would the problem be? Very. The cost of insuring a 91-year-old is far higher than the cost of insuring a 21-year-old. If the law forces firms to charge both the same rate, firms will desperately search for ways to repel the aged and attract the young. Blasting "today's hottest music" over the P.A. system is only the beginning.
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How might the commodity fetish lead Murray to see otherwise? Precisely because in forgetting about the material relations that are constantly at work in the for-profit insurance industry, mainly the profit motive and its incentive to avoid care, in favor of an idealized, simplified version of health insurance as a commodity that one purchases on the market and which obeys basic microeconomic rules about insurance, he commits an error that would result in exacerbating those very same relations.
The burgeoning student debt crisis is perhaps the largest cause of the burgeoning, “old left” movement, particularly among American millennials. But there is another extremely powerful movement in favor of privatization in the form of charter schools. While yes, charters are technically free to those lucky enough to win the right to attend them in the lottery, they create a two-tiered public education system that resembles the US university system, where higher education is scarcely still considered a human right. And unlike private universities, which displaced free public universities decades ago, charters are just beginning to take root. I would argue that as they do, the size and primary education-share of student household debt in America will balloon accordingly, even as education rates continue to decline, all a function of the “commodification” of education.
But education is one human right that people typically understand as such. One of the biggest explosions in charters came in New Orleans post-Katrina, which Naomi Klein has famously highlighted as an example of what she calls “disaster capitalism” in her classic book The Shock Doctrine, i.e. the tendency for a flurry of privatization policies to be pushed through after a disaster. A similar phenomenon happened in Detroit when its bankruptcy forced it to accept a state-imposed receivership wherein it was essentially “managed” by a private consultancy in order to “trim fat”. And it’s happening again, she finds, this time in post-Maria Puerto Rico:
The battle for paradise
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The day before I walked through that portal in Orocovis, Gov. Ricardo Rosselló delivered a televised address from behind his desk, flanked by the flags of the United States and Puerto Rico. “While overcoming adversity, we also find great opportunities to build a new Puerto Rico,” he announced. The first step was to be the immediate privatization of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, known as PREPA, one of the largest public power providers in the United States and, despite its billions of dollars in debt, the one that brings in the most revenue.
“We will sell PREPA’s assets to the companies that will transform the power generation system into a modern, efficient, and less costly system for our people,” Rosselló said.
It turned out to be the first shot in a machine-gun loaded with such announcements. Two days later, the slick, TV-friendly young governor unveiled his long-awaited “fiscal plan,” which included closing more than 300 schools and shutting down more than two-thirds of the island government’s executive-branch entities, going from a total of 115 to just 35. As Kate Aronoff reported for The Intercept, this “amounts to a deconstruction of the island’s administrative state” (so it’s no surprise that Rosselló has many admirers in Trump’s Washington).
A week after that, the governor went on television again and unveiled a plan to crack open the education system to privately run charter schools and private school vouchers — moves Puerto Rico’s teachers and parents have successfully resisted several times before.
This is a phenomenon I have called the “shock doctrine,” and it is playing out in Puerto Rico in the most naked form seen since New Orleans’s public school system and much of its low-income housing were dismantled in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while the city was still largely empty of its residents. And Puerto Rico’s education secretary, the former management consultant Julia Keleher, makes no secret of where she is drawing inspiration from. One month after Maria, she tweeted that New Orleans should be a “point of reference,” and “we should not underestimate the damage or the opportunity to create new, better schools.”
Central to a shock doctrine strategy is speed — pushing a flurry of radical changes through so quickly it’s virtually impossible to keep up. So, for instance, while most of the meager media attention has focused on Rosselló’s privatization plans, an equally significant attack on regulations and independent oversight — laid out in his fiscal plan — has gone largely under the radar.
And the process is far from complete. There is a great deal of talk about more privatizations to come: highways, bridges, ports, ferries, water systems, national parks, and other conservation areas. Manuel Laboy, Puerto Rico’s secretary of economic development and commerce, told The Intercept that electricity is just the beginning. “We do expect that similar things will happen in other infrastructure sectors. It could be full privatization; it could be a true P3 [public-private partnerships] model.”
Despite the radical nature of these plans, the response from Puerto Rican society has been somewhat muted. No large-scale protests greeted the first wave of Rosselló’s rapid-fire announcements. No strikes in response to his plans to radically contract the state and roll back pensions. No uprisings against the Puertopians flooding into the island to build their libertarian dream state.
“People’s expectations for the government had already been very much whittled down.”
Yet Puerto Rico has a deep history of popular resistance and some very radical trade unions. So what is going on? The first thing to understand is that Puerto Ricans are not experiencing one extreme dose of the shock doctrine, but two or even three of them, all layered on top of one another — a new and terrifying hybridization of the strategy that makes it particularly challenging to resist.
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So how did this work out for New Orleans and Detroit? As Beth Sondel and Joseph L. Boselovic have written in an important, two part series for Jacobin, the answer is NOT GOOD:
“No Excuses” in New Orleans
It’s been a decade since New Orleans' post-Katrina charter school experiment began. The results have been devastating.
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In New Orleans, charters have almost entirely replaced traditional public schools; in Detroit, about half the schools are charters. Both cases show the perils of privatization and the way in which elites manipulate crises to transform social goods.
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...while some schools were successful in fighting to re-open following Katrina and a few neighborhood and community-based groups have been granted charters, these have been the exceptions. Even proponents of the post-Katrina reforms admit that the current system is segregated and not serving students equitably.Whereas the black middle class comprised the majority of teachers and staff prior to Katrina, the schools of the moment are overwhelmingly operated and staffed by younger, non-local, white teachers with limited training and even less experience.
This is because the reforms have been and continue to be made possible by a network of corporate-sponsored non-profits, incubators, and start-ups. Central to this constellation is Teach For America (TFA) — the controversial organization that recruits college graduates, the vast majority of whom have not studied education, to train for five weeks and then teach for two years in low-income schools.
In the months after Katrina, TFA tripled in size in the region and has continued to grow in each subsequent year. While TFA has announced plans to scale back in the upcoming school year, according to their records, there are 400 TFA corps members and 830 alumni in the area. Many TFA alumni hold powerful leadership positions, including State Superintendent John White, members of local school boards, and over thirty principals.
TFA corps members work primarily in “No Excuses” charter schools, premised on the assertion that poverty must not be used as an excuse for low performance. Instead, “No Excuses” advocates argue that high-poverty schools can be high-achieving when school leaders are given autonomy from the bureaucratic constraints of districts and commit to, among other things, an extended day, data-driven instruction, and strictly enforced behavioral expectations. KIPP, the flagship “No Excuses” school, and many others, were founded by, heavily staffed by, and are formally affiliated with, TFA.
Extensive observational research one of us conducted (Sondel) in two of these “No Excuses” schools (an elementary KIPP school and a locally based middle school modeled after KIPP) provides evidence that assessment data is no longer the proxy for educational quality but has in fact become the purpose of schooling itself.
At both schools, as is the case in many “No Excuses” charters in New Orleans, the principals were white males, under the age of thirty, and TFA alumni. TFA corps members and alumni also constituted five of the six collective administrators and over 60 percent of the instructional staff.
With few exceptions, the curriculum was characterized by a narrow interpretation of state standards at the expense of all other material. Students rarely learned local history or current events. Instead, science and social studies were relegated to ancillary classes in the elementary school and reduced to the accumulation of vocabulary and lists of facts at the middle school. Teachers stopped introducing new material a month prior to state assessments in order to begin review.
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At the middle school, stars matured into fake money that students could use to buy access to brass band and spoken word performances. When they were not compliant, or did not have enough money to attend the weekly celebration, they were sent to the “behavior intervention room,” where they were expected to copy a piece of text word for word on lined paper. One particular afternoon, the text in question was Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
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Yet this pedagogy is far from justice-based or reflective of the radical ambitions of the Civil Rights Movement. Instead, this type of schooling extinguishes young people’s passion for learning and potentially pushes out those who fail to or are unwilling to comply. At best, the “No Excuses” approach attempts to develop within students the compliant dispositions necessary to accept and work within the status quo.
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The logic of neoliberal educational reform in New Orleans and across the country seeks to provide simple and convenient solutions instead of directly addressing the much more complex issues of poverty and historical inequality in American society. When we look beyond standardized test scores, the development of youth becomes a much more complex phenomena that requires us to engage meaningfully in issues and policies related to poverty, health, housing, and crime in addition to education.
Emphasis mine. Thank you for taking the time to read this far. I both thank and applaud you. And please, go out there and resist. I will try to be around in the comments to answer questions/take abuse, but my wife and I have just purchased a shiny new commodity of our own, a Subaru Forester, which I have no idea and could never even conceive of the material relations that went into producing, and we want to use it to get out of the city and into the mountains on this, our day off.
Action Items!
1. Support your local tenants union! They have all sorts of great ideas! Washington State: tenantsunion.org/… NYC: Tenants and Neighbors is a great group to donate to or volunteer with.
2. Resist more generally with the Resistance! calendar: www.resistancecalendar.org
3. March for Science, Apr 14: https://www.marchforscience.com/
4. Earth Day, Apr 22: https://www.earthday.org/
5. Consider supporting Beto O’rourke in his campaign to unseat Ted Cruz; he REALLY has a chance!
