There should have been little surprise that the May 21st “Rapture” kooks were able to claim such a prominent place in the minds of so many New Yorkers. Sure, everyone understood that it wasn’t actually going to be judgment day. However, given the severity of the current round of budget cuts, it was hard not to feel as though some sort of apocalypse was actually underway, an economic one, if not one of the spiritual type. And, if the rapture was meant to welcome the “saved” to heaven, the budget cuts are designed to further extend the grip of the rich over New York City. The rest of us be damned – especially if we are not able to develop a political movement capable of providing a real challenge to the budget cutters.
Which Cut is the Deepest?
These cuts really do live up to the maxim that there is no more fat to be cut just bone. Take the public library system. Under assault by budget cutting politicians for years, the system reached a tipping point this week. The $199 million in cuts being handed down by Mayor Michael Bloomberg will result in 1,500 staff layoffs and will further reduce already shortened library hours. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that Queens’s library branches will freeze the purchasing of new titles. Readers will be left to peruse the annals of the past or head out to one of the local Barnes and Noble branches that are increasingly acting as privatized spaces for the consumption of the marketable written word.
Simultaneously, the very instinct to read may be diminished further as neoliberal privatization marches forward in the education system. Charter schools are at the forefront of this effort, stripping resources and draining the brightest young people away from the public education system. For charter school mavens such as Harlem Children Zone’s Geoffrey Canada, the economic crisis of 2008 translated into a golden opportunity to rapidly expand his privatization effort. Canada and other charter school owners mobilized Federal and local political influence to open the floodgates for new charters and to further disable the public education system.
The firing of 6,000 teachers is just the beginning of the problems public education students and their parents will face. The announcement of cuts in funding to special education programs threatens to transform schools into little more than holding cells – one part in an institutional chain that leads directly into the prison industrial complex. Special Ed classes are slated to increase in size by 20% starting next year as a result of targeted cuts. High schools with separate Special Ed classes will increase from 12 students per class to 15 and those that place Special Ed students in regular classes will have to add 12 students per class instead of 10. These cuts will reduce the quality of instruction for those students who need it most and are certain to further demoralize teachers by pushing their tasks away from education and towards the disciplinary measures needed to keep order in crowded classrooms.
And the mainstream public education system is not the only target of the cuts. Adult Literacy and English for Speakers of Other Languages programs also face steep reductions in funding. Funding lines provided by the Department of Youth and Community Development are slated to be reduced by 50%, depriving many of the City’s community based GED and English Language programs of public funding. The result will be either the closure or reduction of offerings by these programs and the even deeper reliance on private sector funding. The abandonment of Adult Education by the public sector means that private philanthropic institutions will be able to further dictate the content and form of these programs. Much like their counterparts in the public education and public library systems, these vitals programs will become appendages to the broader ideological effort to place the logic of privatization and market-based evaluations at the center of society.
Strange Bedfellows
There has, of course, been a response that has produced some previously unlikely coalitions. The largest came on May 12th as a broad coalition of community organizations joined forces with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) to organize a demonstration against the budget cuts that attracted more than 15,000 people. What made this demonstration different was the fact that the organizers proposed a clear target to plug the hole in the budget – Wall Street and the Banks. All told, more than 100 teachers opened street corner “classrooms” during the demonstration to send a unified message to protesters – “We must make the banks pay.” Proposals to make the finance sector pay its full tax bill were enthusiastically endorsed on May 12th and stand as a demand with the potential for popular support among all those who rely on public programs and services. The idea that mainstream unions and community organizations heavily reliant on private sector financing through foundations grants, would make such proposals would have been considered ludicrous just a year earlier.
Equally unexpected is the resistance put up by normally politically guarded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Long separated from their radical contributions to the push for Civil Rights in the 1950s and 60s, the NAACP is now barely relevant to activist groups seeking to make social change. Yet, the rights group took the courageous step of a joining a lawsuit that aims to block 19 charter schools from “co-locating” themselves inside buildings currently operated by public schools. Co-location has been a key strategy employed by the charters as a means to squeeze out publicly operated competitors. The NAACP, as well as the UFT, understands this process as a part of the systematic miseducation of public school students, especially students of color.
For their trouble, NAACP became the target of a 2,000 person strong counter-protest organized by the previously mentioned Canada and other charter school owners. The demonstration was meant to show that the privatizers not only have the ear of powerful political allies like Bloomberg, but are able to mobilize popular support for their schemes. Strange days indeed, and a good reminder that radicals aiming to combat the cuts will need to clear through right-wing ideological lessons that have, after decades without opposition, claimed a space inside of popular common sense.
This makes the efforts of groups such as the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM) even more important. The recent release of their counter-documentary The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman stands as the clearest response the ideological assault of well-heeled school privatizers. Using the voices of rank-and-file teachers and public school parents, the film systematically dismantles arguments presented in the generously financed 2010 “documentary” Waiting for Superman. The Inconvenient Truth is still searching for a larger audience, confined, as yet, to circles of parents, activists and radicals who draw on it for energy to fight back against the privatizers.
What’s Missing? Moving Beyond Just Protest
The one piece that is noticeably absent from New York politics is any sense of broader goals for the future – an idea or ideas that move beyond just the defense of public institutions ravaged by decades of cuts and well past one-off taxation measures taken against banks and the wealthy. The lack of political vision comes as a consequence of the bankruptcy of liberal politics in the City, as liberals converted themselves into pro-market neoliberal politicians and left poor and working class people to fend for themselves.
The one political project still able to present alternative ideas is socialism. Or, more specifically, democratic socialism, a political philosophy that places human needs at the center of society and an economic system that calls for democracy as a fundamental principle of economic decision making. Both of these notions offer concrete political proposals badly needed by politics in the City, especially in this moment of budget cutting. Socialism has the ability to operate in two moments simultaneously – as a call for defense and resistance as well as a source for ideas about a democratic future.
But, socialism has been absent from New York politics for quite some time. This was evident in a recent article in the New York Times that examined three socialist groups – my own Socialist Party USA, the Democratic Socialists of America and the Communist Party USA – and could only marvel that each had managed to develop a web presence, missing the larger point about the critical need for a socialist inspired vision of the future to counter the bleak prospects for life offered by capitalism. Without ideas about how society might be transformed to place the great wealth generated by working people at the service of human development, the politics of protest and resistance will remain trapped in contexts created by capitalism itself.
More simply put, Democratic Socialism offers ideas that match the needs of the very people being targeted by the budget cutters. Where the privatizers see opportunities to open new markets, socialists understand the need for universal human rights to things like education, jobs and housing. While unionized workers are demonized as obstacles to balancing budgets, socialists seek to transcend unions by moving toward a system of democratic planning through worker and public ownership of business. And while corporations attempt to impose managerial discipline on classroom teachers and discipline students through testing, socialists see the bright possibilities for creating empowering classrooms guided by input and control exercised by teachers, parents and students. Socialism can help a protest movement shift from defensive measures to offensive proposals for a democratic society.
Overall, socialists strive for a world where, to borrow the words of the recently deceased Gil Scot-Heron, things like the “rapture” stunt “will no longer be so damn relevant.” Mobilizing the instinct to resist and combining this with the real needs and desires of regular New Yorkers can create a space for a new kind of democratic socialist politics. A politics of the heart as well as the mind, created through the political activity of poor and working class New Yorkers. A political force able to provide answers to the privatizers, the Bankers and the charter school owners. A political project whose absence from the New York City landscape has produced dire economic consequences.
***
Billy Wharton is a writer, activist and the editor of the Socialist WebZine. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the NYC Indypendent, Spectrezine and the Monthly Review Zine. He can be reached at whartonbilly@gmail.com. Become a FAN on Facebook.
Comments