http://themilitant.com/2016/8025/802502.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 25 July 11, 2016
(In Review, front page)
A book about the capacity of workers
Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege and Learning Under
Capitalism,
by Jack Barnes, 111 pages. Pathfinder Press, 2016.
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BY MARK THOMPSON
This is a book about us — working people — and our capacity to organize
and to learn, to transform ourselves and all social and human relations
as we fight to end capitalist rule and establish workers power.
It is also a book about them — those who rule and the millions of
privileged, well-paid professionals who administer their state power and
its institutions over us — and why they continually discount our
abilities and worth.
As the author, Jack Barnes, explains, that’s “the greatest of all
battles in the years ahead” for the working class — the battle to throw
off this image of ourselves that the rulers teach us.
Numbering just over 100 pages this book is highly accessible. It
contains three articles by Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist
Workers Party, taken from talks and reports he gave to large public
audiences between 1993 and 2009. More recent information has been
incorporated into the text to make the articles more up-to-date and useful.
The reader will find a wealth of material that helps better understand
the world we live in and the political and economic conflicts and
battles we are living through. More importantly, it offers a perspective
for how to act as part of a fighting working-class movement.
Outbursts portraying working people as “uneducated trash” have been a
feature of numerous articles in the media over recent months. What
underlies this, explains Steve Clark in the book’s introduction, is
“fear that exists at the highest levels of government … about what’s
building up among working people” in response to capitalism’s
“slow-burning global depression.”
Barnes notes that the bosses also see “the potentially explosive
consequences of what is happening in the world capitalist economy,
including the effects of the employers’ ‘successes’ in downsizing and
cost cutting.”
Barnes explains that the problems we face are rooted in the capitalist
system. Far from working people being worthless, it is our “social labor
that makes possible all civilization and the advance of culture,” he
says. “Through our labor, the working class, in this country and
worldwide, produces more than enough wealth to provide education, health
care, housing, and retirement to every human being on earth, for a
lifetime.”
Not only that, but “we’re capable of taking power and reorganizing
society,” Barnes says. To do that we need to come to see our own worth
and to “begin to transform ourselves and strengthen bonds of human
solidarity” as we build a working-class movement to confront capitalist
rule.
The book looks at the sharpening class inequalities in the United States
and the rise of a high-earning, “self-designated ‘enlightened
meritocracy,’” a “social layer of middle-class professionals,
technocrats, managers and academics” numbering in the “millions, if not
tens of millions.”
This is a bourgeois layer “in its class interests, its values, its world
outlook — in who it serves. But it’s not a section of the capitalist
class,” nor is it on the road to become that, Barnes explains. It is
“largely divorced from the production process” and has “a parasitic
existence.”
To rationalize their privileged status and wealth, the meritocracy has
become a leading voice in support of capitalism and its values and its
demonization of the working class.
This layer holds that their “brightness” and “quickness,” Barnes says,
“give them the right to make decisions, to administer and ‘regulate’
society for the bourgeoisie.” As the concentration of powers in the
executive branch of the imperialist state has increased, they have
become an ever-greater weight in centralized government bureaucracies,
with ever-more invasive powers over our daily lives.
Barnes also looks at the function of education under capitalism. Its
purpose is not to educate, he explains, but to give “certain privileged
social layers a license to a higher income” while for workers it teaches
“us to be obedient,” to “become units of production.” For learning to be
a lifetime experience requires that society is reorganized, first “to
get rid of the capitalist state and use the workers state to begin
transforming humanity, to begin building human solidarity,” he says. “I
cannot think of a better reason to make a socialist revolution,”
emphasizes Barnes.
This is a book that all workers should buy and read, and then help to
get copies into the hands of friends, co-workers and others.
Related articles:
‘Socialist Workers Party is your party’
Actively introducing the party to thousands
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