My last article in Substance ended with this, “So how do poor and working people end the soldiering, answer the social crises in schools and out? Pivotally positioned in the centripetal organizing point of civic life, school workers must go well beyond the schools to fashion an answer to war, racism, and the relentless attacks on wages, benefits, working conditions, and life itself.”

To reiterate the thoughts that led to that question:

(1) There is an international war of the rich on the poor intensifying every day,

(2) In the U.S., this truly class war appears as an invasion of the world by U.S. elites to win key raw materials, cheap labor, and above all, social control through military might and the predictable divide and rule maneuvers that elites have used for centuries,

(3) Within the U.S., this means an assault on all aspects of life, that is, on conditions of work, on human relationships, on reason itself (rising irrationalism, as in the Intelligent Design movement), and on freedom and creativity (constant surveillance coupled with daily regimentation),

(4) Poor and working people resist these attacks on our lives, as we must, as demonstrated by worker action from the California grocery strike to the Detroit teachers’ wildcat strike,

(5) But the resistance is often thwarted by the betrayals of union leaders, bogus community leaders, quislings, who see their own interests more closely tied to elites than to the rank and file–and consistently not only sell us out, but disorganize, disarm, us,

(6) While no one without a crystal ball can really predict where poor and working class resistance will break out next, or exactly where it will lead, it is reasonable to suggest that the key choke points in U.S. society today are (a) the military, (b) the medical system, and (c) schools, as jobs in these sectors are absolutely pivotal to U.S. society, each is under severe pressure, and none can be really outsourced, unlike industrial work,

(7) It is not possible to say that one choke point is primary over another, i.e., that the military is more important than schools, for example, as one feeds into the other; it is easy to trace a kid’s career from school to a military recruiter to a war and on to a hospital (over 18,000 severely wounded in Iraq so far alone),

(8) Even so, schools play a special role in that, on the one hand, schools hold out a peculiar promise in society, that is, if you do a lot of it you will benefit from the experience–even though the primary role of schools in the U.S. is hardly to fashion critical citizens, and, on the other hand, work in schools still offers more freedom than any other wage-work, as evaporating that freedom may truly be. Furthermore, the majority of people in the U.S. organize their lives around schools, not only for education, but for medical care, social services, friendships, sports, and so on. Since no ruler can rely on force to rule in any society where the majority are tyrannized by the few, the velvet glove of schooling over the iron fist of the military is pivotal,

(9) School workers are therefore centripetally positioned to forge social change in the U.S., though, beleaguered by the current test-frenzy, robbed of their own freedom and skills, driven by the shortage of time that seems inherent to the job,

(10) But passivity is now the main tendency among school workers, i.e., “as long as I am a monk, I’ll toll the bell,” soldiering through the day, allowing racism, opportunism, ignorance, and cowardice appear to be the bywords of the profession to the general public, when the daily struggle to learn in an environment hostile to reason is a notably courageous act. Even so, bogged down in the struggle to maintain a daily life, it is easy to fail to see the relationship of, say, kids’ low test scores and the war in Iraq, to be unable to recognize the relationship of a forthright battle for an ethical daily practice, and the broader fight for a better world where people can lead reasonably free, connected, creative lives.

Let us also review some events from the last two months:

— auto-workers from Delphi demonstrated at the Detroit auto show, picketing both their union and the auto executives, demanding a no-concessions contract.

— New York City transit workers staged a spectacle of a strike, were ordered back to work by their union bosses, then rejected a concessions-based, sellout, contract, by seven votes.

In California, the Oakland “Growing Children,” a charter elementary school principaled by test-resister Susan Harman ,was threatened with closure due to low test scores (meaning, 93 % of the kids are on free lunch), by a superintendent imposed on the Oakland community, yet another superintendent/trainee from the Broad Foundation,

— while at Downer school, test resisters were disciplined and transferred, merely for speaking against the Big Tests, and, as we all know, school workers everywhere are besieged with huge classes, decaying facilities, hungry kids, no supplies, the regimentation of every move in the classroom, and relentless demands for high test scores

— College loan funding was cut by $13 billion,

— Many medical benefits for seniors were privatized. Pensions for auto-workers, airline workers, were gutted, while congress staggered from yet another corruption scandal, and

— Jonathon Kozol released yet another book noticing that U.S. schools are segregated, borrowing the term “apartheid schools,” while Kozol remains utterly muddled as to what to do about it — and California schools were exposed as more segregated than ever by Harvard professor Gary Orfield,

— A teacher strike in Oregon, initially targeting the No Child Left Behind Act, demanding more academic freedom, abandoned that demand in favor of modest wage and benefit increases,

— Gas prices skyrocketed again as the war in Iraq staggered along, the Taliban made a resurgence in Afghanistan—and Israel threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear plants,

— China experienced more worker and peasant uprisings than ever before, over 70,000 on the public record, mostly stemming from the continued enclosure movement that drives peasants from the land only to arrive homeless in big cities, being polluted beyond recognition by the drive for profits.

All these events are but folds in the same cloth. They have the same source; a very real crisis of capital around the world, intense imperial competition, and the class war noted above. We do not have to live this way. Change is possible, both a massive change of mind about the ways we wish to live, and change in the ways we resist. In sum, what is it that we need to know, and how do we need to come to know it, in order to be free — a pedagogical and practical question of life and death.

Resistance to the assaults, however, is piecemeal, none designed to counter the whole of the problem, rather, framed to oppose its parts, its appearances. Even the best school worker unions (and few locals can be considered worthy of the name union) address only their members’ issues (as that is where their money comes from), when school workers desperately need the leadership and knowledge of parents, kids, and community people. As such, the resistance will lose, stripped of its ability to take the strategic initiative, defending one well-deserving martyr after the next, as elites are able to play with foresight on their game-board.

So, what to do? I think there are three interrelated things the resistance must take up: Organization, ethics, and direct action — all drawn from a very careful examination of concrete conditions. This month I will focus on organization and direct action.

Justice Demands New Forms of Organization

The unions, the common community organizations, like the PTA, etc., are structurally unable, and strategically unfit, to meet this crisis. They are structurally unfit since they divide people far more than they unite them (along lines of job, craft, race, industry, sex and nation), and their internal leadership has a stake in preserving these divisions—in order to preserve their own priviliged positions.

They are strategically unfit because they have no desire, no plan, and no potential, to take on a transformational role in the crisis, that is, they all want to preserve the system that created crises. For example, every major union in the U.S., and the school worker unions, openly declares that they will subordinate their own members interests to the interest of the “nation,” i.e., that they will support imperial wars, wage and benefit cuts, concessions, in order to preserve the system itself—abandoning the idea that people form unions because, above all, workers and bosses have contradictory interests.

It follows that new kinds of organizations must be grown. These organizations must structurally be designed to cross false boundaries of nation, race, sex/gender, language, dis-ability, and so on, to unite people as a social class, to do research on existing conditions, and to be sufficiently action oriented to make the research meaningful — and in order to base further investigations on the lessons of social action.

Organization helps to combat the opportunism that is rampant in the work force, in schools and out. Opportunism is chasing the carrot, selecting the interests of a few and pitting that against the interests of the many. Opportunism pops up in an infinite variety of ways: from abandoning solidarity with other school workers in order to win a slim benefit for ones self, to administering, without complaint, the Big Tests that torment schools, to ignoring the military recruiters (vampires) on campus, to allowing the school system to be sold to a soda company to poison the kids for profits, to aligning the curricula to dishonest state standards. Organization can limit opportunism if it holds people to account, through discussion, struggle, and collective social action. Moreover, organization across boundaries can demonstrate the commonalities of our daily problems, to show their common source, a profit system which alienates all from all, and to give us a collective look at how we might join to solve those problems.

With that kind of structural shift, in schools for example uniting teachers, other education workers, kids (who are usually the activists in social change), parents, and community people, a basis is set for some kind of activity–and the possibility of defending dissidents under attack, solidarity won through the practical knowledge that an injury to one really does just precede an injury to all.

Direct Action is the key for these kinds of organizations in the foreseeable future as Direct Action transforms not only immediate situations (as in high stakes tests), but it also calls upon people to define themselves, as we are what we do, and to change themselves and others as we collectively learn from the actions we take. Direct action is supremely democratic as it tests leaders in full view of others, and demands that leaders take the same risks, or more, than everyone else.

Direct action is vastly superior to legislative or legal action as what is won can be defended over time, and it calls on people to take responsibility for their own lives, rather than searching for others to be conscious and active for us.

In schools, over time, the tactical goal of direct action is the control of work places and communities, not for merely community control, but in order to spread the action to other areas. Let the working people and students, who do the work, hold the reins.

In the immediate future, Direct Action could be aimed at any number of problems, from walkouts and boycotts aimed at high stakes tests, to picketing homes of oppressive bosses, to wildcat strikes, to filing freedom of information requests to demand open release of all rewards made for the many grants that are used to impose discipline on schooling, to cheerful activity like hoot-ins at school board meetings, to leafleting against recruiters, to pouring coke down the drain, or whistle-outs at corporate board meetings, and so on. The point is to involve peoples’ bodies in bold creative action against the empire, for freedom and equality—even if the group is very small.

So far, we have addressed some key trends in school and society, suggested that organization and direct action are key to transforming not only the situation we face, but ourselves, and even pointed to some possible actions—to stop the soldiering and help foment change.

The Rouge Forum and Substance both serve as discussion centers where we can gain and test ideas about organization and action—and perhaps new organizations will grow from that.

Next month, we will address the relationship of means and ends—organizational ethics and the question: Toward What End? And, the following month, we will return to where we began, with a piece on the key trends in school and society — and how to analyze and change them.

Rich Gibson, teaches at San Diego State University. He is a co-founder of the Rouge Forum (www.rougeforum.org), serves on the board of Substance, and is the author of, “How Do I Keep My Ideals and Still Teach?” now available through Heinneman online, free.