Review of Thier’s Book “A People’s Guide to Capitalism,” Part One

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I recently participated in a group called No One Is Illegal here in Toronto. The group decided to provide a zoom reading meeting every week to discuss the book A People’s Guide to Capitalism, by Hadas Thier, with many participants not belonging to the group but interested in understanding more about capitalism. We read the book in parts, with each participant taking turns to read out loud a section, with questions to be asked and discussed after each section or difficult part. The group did not finish the book–the number of participants dwindled; it is unlikely that there was much emotional attachment to understanding–despite the participants’ apparent interest in understanding the nature of capitalism. 

I sent along some comments to the group (but not to the other partcipants) in order to provide the group with my understanding of the nature of capitalism–which does not always coincide with Thier’s view. 

The following is what I wrote before the first session: 

Question 1: So far, Ms. Thier, as far as I can tell, has provided a purely negative characterization of capitalism. Is this politically useful, though? If capitalism is so negative, why does it continue to persist and why does it seem so difficult to change into a humane society? Are there no redeeming qualities of capitalism? For example, is there still not innovation and increases in productivity? A cheapening of the prices of certain commodities (despite inflation)? For example, when I worked at a brewery (Carling O’Keefte, which then was bougtht by Molson) in Calgary for around four years, we workers could produce a maximum of 550 bottles of beer per minute, but when I quit we could produce a maximum of 1,400 bottles per minute. What of Marx’s and Engels’ reference to how China was beaten? From the Communist Manifesto: “The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it [the bourgeoisie] batters down all Chinese walls….”

Why do people buy at Walmart (despite leftist misgivings and critiques)?

If we fail to recognize some redeeming features of capitalism, are we not likely to underestimate the difficulty of overcoming its negative features? Alternatively put, are we not to overestimate the ease with which we can overcome capitalism?

The purely negative characterization of capitalism is related to the next question that I have:

Question 2: Does Ms. Thier provide an adequate characterization of Marx’s theory of labour, commodities and money?

To answer that question will require reading at least until the end of chapter three (Money), but my preliminary answer would be: no. I have particular concerns from the section beginning “The Dual Character of a Commodity” I did not say anything at the time since I wanted others to speak. I prefer to provide a written form of my concerns since they are involved and because the written form provided the opportunity to supply a more coherent form for my concerns (and it also may reflect my own limited understanding of the material).

Historical Materialism and the Indirect Production of Human Life

Before I refer to Thier’s text, I will make a preliminary point through a couple of points. From Marcelo Badaro Mattos (2022), The Working Class from Marx to Our Times, page 4:

The author of this work is among those who see these current uses of the term class, as well as efforts to conceptualize class exclusively from phenomena associated with consumption, income, and market, as reductionist, for they limit the class situation to a strictly economic dimension (and circumscribe economic phenomena to the competition of individuals and groups of individuals for income and consumption in the market). Such reductionism prevents the comprehension of social classes in their articulation to the totality of social dynamics.

For this reason, this book privileges another perspective, which identifies classes based on the relationships that men and women, living in society, establish with each other to produce and reproduce themselves socially. These relationships establish limits and pressure the collective behaviour of the class, which raises the need to understand other dimensions of these fundamental social groups, such as their collective conscience and political action. In this way, one can perceive classes, and the conflicts among them, as historically situated processes and relationships, which are decisive for understanding the broader dynamics of social transformation. The theoretical starting point for such a perspective is historical materialism.

There is undoubtedly room for debate about what historical materialism is, but the following is relevant to the discussion of the nature of abstract labour and value. From The German Ideology (Marx-Engels Collected Works, volume 5), page 31:

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life.

Human beings, unlike other animal species, produce their lives indirectly. This is what practically makes human life different from other animal species. Other animal species may rely on occasion on tools to consume (such as chimpanzees, when they use a stick to eat termites), but other animal species do not rely on indirectly producing their lives as do the human species.

Human beings are both animals and more than animals because they produce indirectly their lives. Think of the issue of climate change. What other species could have such impact? Why only the human species? The quick answer would be the use of fossil fuels. However, could any other species use them? Why only the human species? Obviously, the indirect production of their lives hardly explains climate change—and yet it is a necessary condition for such change to occur. No other species, which much more directly produces its own life or lives, could do so.

This indirect production of their lives is not dependent directly on their wills; in order to live, they must indirectly produce their lives, and this indirect production of their lives involves the production of tools (and much later machines).

This indirect production of their lives is what concerns Marx’s theory of commodities and his so-called labour theory of value. It is a question of a relation among the producers rather than a relation among producer and final consumer (and hence a consumer society), at least for much of Marx’s analysis in Capital.

The Substance and the Magnitude of Value Must Be Distinguished: Thier’s “The Dual Character of a Commodity” Section

Turning now to Thier’s text, in the section entitled “The Dual Character of a Commodity,” we read the following (page 37):

The one property that all commodities have in common, and through which their “value” can be determined, is that each is a product of human labor. In Marx’s words: “Despite their motley appearance,” commodities have a common denominator.” Commodities can exchange according to the relative amount of labor-time that it takes to produce them. This basic idea is the core concept behind what’s known as the LABOR THEORY OF VALUE—explained further below.”

I have some issues with this formulation. Firstly, the reference to “relative amount of labor-time” confuses the magnitude of value with the common denominator of value (what Marx called the substance of value). If we want to compare the sizes of things, we assume that they share the same property of being in space. This common property is prior to talking about “the relative amount of” anything. We do not compare the size of apples and the size of their colour.

The same amount of labour time is irrelevant if the social space is different. Thus, when I and my daughter made supper, our labour produced no value despite being labour.

On page 131 of the Penguin edition of Capital, volume 1, we read the following (which was included in only the first German edition):

(Now we know the substance of value. It is labour. We know the measure of its magnitude. It is labour-time. The form, which stamps value as exchange-value, remains to be analysed.)

Value for Marx thus has three aspects: substance, magnitude and form. These should not be confused. The form of value is particular relevant for the quotation on page 32 of Thier’s book, which reads in part:

It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.

The following quote from Marx substantiates this interpretation of the need to distinguish at least the substance of value (abstract or general labour) from its magnitude. From Marx-Engels Collected Works, volume 32, page 330:

If a thing is distant from another, the distance is in fact a relation between the one thing and the other; but at the same time, the distance is something different from this relation between the two things. It is a dimension of space, it is some length which may as well express the distance of two other things besides those compared. But this is not all. If we speak of the distance as a relation between two things, we suppose something “intrinsic”, some “property” of the things themselves, which enables them to be distant from each other. What is the distance between the syllable A and a table? The question would be nonsensical. In speaking of the distance of two things, we speak of their difference in space. Thus we suppose both of them to be contained in space, to be points of space. Thus we equalise them as being both existences of space, and only after having them equalised as aspects of space we distinguish them as different points of space. To belong to space is their unity.

The Substance of Value is Not Just Labour in General, but a Specific Kind of General Labour that Requires an Exchange Process to Be Social Labour

Secondly, it is true that on page 34 Thier writes: “If the defining aspect of commodities is that they are produced for exchange…,” but she does not incorporate the need to exchange in her characterization of the common property of all commodities being products of labour.

Hence, on the one hand, she confuses the determination of the magnitude of the value of commodities with the question of the nature of value as such and, on the other, she fails to incorporate the need for exchange into her characterization of the common property of being labour.

Thier’s Section “Not by Gold or by Silver, but by Labor”

Her quote of David McNally in the section Not by Gold or by Silver, But by Labor on pages 41-42 also is inadequate:

expenditures of the general human capacity to exert muscles, energies and brain cells to create or produce something. Even if all commodities come into being through different acts of concrete labor, they nonetheless all share the property of being products of the generic act of human labor, or what Marx calls abstract labor, i.e., labor as a general power abstracted from all its specific forms.”[emphasis added]

The common property makes it seem as if it was mere human labour that produces value, but this is an inadequate way of putting it.

General or universal labour can be interpreted in a number of ways. One way relates, as we will see, to the nature of money. Human labour as the production of the human species, has the capacity to assume many different forms and is not tied to one particular kind of environment)–unlike other animal species, which lack the general capacity to live in diverse environments. Thomas Hodgskin noted this quality of human laobur in his book (1825) Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital , pages 65-66:

Naturally and individually man is one of the most feeble and destitute of all created animals. His intelligence, however, compensates for his physical inferiority. After he has inherited the knowledge of several generations, and when he lives congregated into great masses, he is enabled by his mental faculties to complete, as it were, the work of nature, and add to his intelligence the physical powers of the lower animals. He directs his course on the waters, he floats in the air, he dives into the bowels of the earth, and all which its surface bears he makes tributary to his use. The gales which threaten at first to blow him from the earth, grind his corn, and waft to him a share in the treasures of the whole world. He creates at his pleasure the devouring element of fire, and checks its progress, so that it destroys only what he has no wish to preserve. He directs the course of the stream, and he sets bounds to the ocean ; in short, he presses all the elements into his service, and makes Nature herself the handmaid to his will. The instruments he uses to do all this, which have been invented by his intelligence to aid his feeble powers, and which are employed by his skill and his hands, ….

A second way of looking at labour at general labour is in terms of the relation of process and product. When we look at the products of human production, all the products are products of human labour, obviously. The products of human labour have the common property of being produced by human beings.

Although abstract labour in some ways captures or includes both of these senses, it is not identical with them, by any means. In other words, even if they both apply or exist, they do not necessarily result in the production of value.

On page 165 of Capital, volume 1, we read the following:

Objects of utility become commodities only because they are the products of the labour of private individuals who work independently of each other.

Labour that operates “independently of each other” is not yet social labour in its operation. Abstract labour is therefore not just general labour or the capacity of the species to produce in various forms and ways, or the common property that simply lies hidden in the beer and other commodities. Rather, abstract labour is labour which is not yet social labour while it is being performed (there are limitations or perhaps complications to this way of putting it, but I leave those aside). Since it is not yet social labour, a further process is required to make it social labour—the exchange process. The exchange process is both internal to the process of producing our lives and external to it. It is internal to it in that labour that is not yet social labour while it is being performed requires as its complement a further process to prove that the labour expended is indeed social labour. This further process, however, occurs outside the production process proper and in that sense is external to the production process.

By the way, at the brewery where I worked in Calgary, the brewery owned the beer store across the street. It was more evident that a further exchange process was required if the beer was to be social labour. (And a further point: some money went missing from the beer store. Two workers were accused of stealing it; they took a lie detector, which they apparently failed. They confessed to having taken the money. They were fired, and the union, despite being a fairly radical union, did nothing about it.)

A Major Omission by Thier: The Double Nature of Labour that Produces Commodities and Its Relevance for the Dynamics of Capitalism

As far as I have read so far, nowhere does Thier mention in a clear way what for Marx was a vital distinction and relation: concrete labour (which produces use values) and abstract labour (which produces value).

I quote from part of one of my published articles (which I also quote on my blog in a post criticizing Jim Stanford’s theory of money as mere purchasing power, in his book Economics for Everyone:

Marx evidently considered that a dual theory of the use of things or a dual theory of labour was central for a critical understanding of capitalist society:

[London], August 24, 1867
The best points in my book are: 1) the two-fold character of labour, according to whether it is expressed in use value or exchange value. (All understanding of the facts depends upon this.) It is emphasised immediately, in the first chapter.

Marx reiterated the importance of the two-fold character of labour for his critique of capitalist society a few months later:

[London], January 8, 1868

It is strange that the fellow [Eugen Duhring] does not sense the three fundamentally
new elements of the book:
. . . 2) That the economists, without exception, have missed the simple point that if the commodity has a double character—use value and exchange value—then the labour represented by the commodity must also have a two-fold character, while the mere analysis of labour as such, as in Smith, Ricardo, etc., is bound to come up everywhere against inexplicable problems. This is, in fact, the whole secret of the critical conception.

It is Marx’s argument that social labour, in the form of abstract human labour, has distinctive characteristics which oppose it to human labour as concrete labour. It is only through being connected to other labours indirectly that it becomes social labour. The concrete labour that is performed has no direct connection to the labour of other people. To put it another way, the material process of life and the social process of life, which form a unity in the case of human beings, since human beings are both material and social beings, is sundered in capitalist society.

This situation can also be expressed in terms of parts and wholes. Each capitalist unit is a part of the total division of labour. However, this part is quite curious. It is a part that does not function as a part qualitatively while human labour is being expended. The labour being performed is not social labour, connected to other human labour and determinate needs. It needs to become a part only after the micro-production process is at an end, if it is to count as a part of the whole.

Since concrete labour is not social labour as it is being performed, and since the latter is not expressed immediately in concrete use-values, the possibility arises that the amount of concrete labour does not translate into the same amount of social labour. This possible non-identity has major implications for the structure of human life: a dynamic quantitative process is built into production. The quantity of labour required to produce output becomes a concern because the mere expenditure of concrete human labour does not necessarily suffice to meet standards set by the general level of productivity in a particular industry. If those standards are not met, the capitalist firm cannot in the long run reproduce itself. For the capitalist firm to survive, an external pressure is brought to bear on producers to meet that standard. The peculiar character of the part of a whole in capitalist production is thus that the quality of functioning as part of total social labour is transformed into a purely quantitative form. The specific quality of social labour in capitalist society is the priority of its quantity over its concrete quality, or abstract labour over concrete labour.

The difference between concrete labour and social labour via the emergence of abstract labour as the substance of value is similar to the splitting of the atom; it releases a lot of energy. When there is a possible divergence between the amount of concrete labour and the amount of social labour expended, then there is a possible pressure to make the concrete labour conform to at least the social average or even be less than the social average—to increase the productivity of labour. Each unit of a commodity produced therefore will have less value (even if the price remains the same due, for example, to higher taxes).

The Form of Value

One of the problems with understanding Marx’s theory is to see that he does one thing in one section of Capital and does something else in another section of Capital, but they are different ways of understanding the same phenomenon.

On page 141 of Capital, volume 1, Marx writes:

If we say that, as values, commodities are simply congealed quantities of human labour, our analysis reduces them, it is true, to the level of abstract value, but does not give them a form of value distinct from their natural forms. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity to another.

The idea that produced commodities are “congealed” or objectified general labour relates to the substance of value, or the what or the nature of value without regard to the way in which it is expressed or appears. The form of appearance of value, which forms the third section of the first chapter of Capital, however, analyses how value is expressed or appears, and it is the way value is expressed or appears that constitutes the “grotesque” nature of commodities, at least initially.

That Marx considers it necessary to distinguish the nature or content of value from its form comes out in the following quote from note 17 on the same page, where Marx criticizes the political economist Samuel Bailey:

  1. The few economists, such as S. Bailey, who have concerned themselves with the analysis of the form of value have been unable to arrive at any result, firstly because they confuse the form of value with value itself….

I will not go into too much detail concerning the form of value, partly because it is complicated, and partly for the purposes of the reading, it is unnecessary. I will merely quote from a post on my blog:

Since the concrete labour performed is not social labour directly but only indirectly, its social nature can only be expressed indirectly–through another, different commodity, in the use value of another commodity. However, merely expressing one commodity, say beer, in another commodity, say in steel, would not express the general social nature of the labour that produces value. To express adequately abstract labour and value, it is necessary that the internal opposition of the commodity between the concrete labour and concrete use value, on the one hand, be completely contrasted with abstract labour and value on the other in an external form–ultimately in money as the unique commodity that has the monopoly power of being able to purchase any commodity. This monopoly power of money necessarily excludes such power attaching to the other commodities.

From Capital, Volume 1, page 161: 

Finally, the last form, C [practically, the money form], gives to the world of commodities a general social relative form of value, because, and in so far as, all commodities except one are thereby excluded from the equivalent form. A single commodity … therefore has the form of direct exchangeability with all other commodities, in other words it has a directly social form because, and in so far as, no other commodity is in this situation. 26

26. It is by no means self-evident that the form of direct and universal exchangeability is an antagonistic form, as inseparable from its opposite, the form of non-direct exchangeability, as the positivity of one pole of a magnet is from the negativity of the other pole. This has allowed the illusion to arise that all commodities can simultaneously be imprinted with the stamp of direct exchangeability, in the same way that it might be imagined that all Catholics can be popes.

This opposition between value and its form can lead to economic crises since commodities that are produced may not be able to be sold, or may only be able to be sold below their value.

Thier’s section “Socially Necessary Labor Time”

We read, on page 44:

The labor theory of value—that a commodity’s value in relation to other commodities is determined by how much labor has gone into producing it—was not a controversial point during Marx’s day. For this reason, he actually spent very little time explaining or defining the concept.

Although Thier points out some differences between Smith’s and Ricardo’s labour theory of value and Marx’s theory, her assertion that Marx “spent very little time explaining or defining the concept” is false as I pointed out above. Marx took pains to distinguish his dual theory of labour from Smith’s and Ricardo’s singular—and ahistorical–labour theory of value, which treated labour throughout history as producing value.

Thier’s section “Generations of Labor”

Since Thier fails to refer to Marx’s distinction between concrete and abstract labour, her references in this section fail to capture one aspect of the significance of the distinction for Marx. This section allegedgly deals with the transfer of previously produced commodities to the value of a commodity. For example, in the brewery where I worked, there was, among other machines, a filler, which filled the bottles with beer. It had a value. But note that Thier, in her characterization of the relation between the value of such machinery and the value of the resulting commodity beer, is formulated in the passive voice and never in the active voice. She writes, on page 46:

But these raw materials and machinery are themselves commodities created by labor. As such, theyall carry their own labor-determined value into the production of a new commodity. Essentially, their value simply gets passed into the value of the table, jetliner, or iPhone. [my emphasis]

Again, on page 47:

The raw materials simply pass on their value into a new product—the table.

Again, on the same page:

That means that each year, the machine transfers about a quarter of its value to the tables that it sands. During its lifespan it will (the capitalists hope) pass its full value into the goods it’s used to produce.

By the time we add in the labor passed on from all the other machinery and rent paid for the factory in which it’s manufactured, its value will be greater still. [my emphases]

The importance of the preservation of the value of already produced commodities (such as the filler) in further produced commodities (such as beer) is important because, if there is to be a surplus of value, the value of already produced commodities must be preserved; otherwise, there may well be no surplus value at all.

Let us now read what Marx wrote. From Capital, volume 1, pages 307-309:

The worker adds fresh value to the material of his labour by expending on it a given amount of additional labour, no matter what the specific content, purpose and technical character of that labour may be. On the other hand, the values of the means of production used up in the process are preserved, and present themselves afresh as constituent parts of the value of the product; the values of the cotton and the spindle, for instance, re-appear again in the value of the yarn. The value of the means of production is therefore preserved by being transferred to the product. This transfer takes place during the conversion of those means into a product, in other words during the labour process. It is mediated through labour. But how is this done?

The worker does not perform two pieces of work simultaneously, one in order to add value to the cotton, the other in order to preserve the value of the means of production, or, what amounts to the same thing, to transfer to the yarn, as product, the value of the cotton on which he works, and part of the value of the spindle with which he works. But by the very act of adding new value he preserves their former values. Since however the addition of new value to the material of his labour, and the preservation of its former value, are two entirely distinct results, it is plain that this twofold nature of the result can be explained only by the twofold nature of his labour; it must at the same time create value through one of its properties and preserve or transfer value through another.

Now how does every worker add fresh labour-time and therefore fresh value? Evidently, only by working productively in a particular way. The spinner adds labour-time by spinning, the weaver by weaving, the smith by forging. But although these operations add labour as such, and therefore new values, it is only through the agency of labour directed to a particular purpose, by means of the spinning, the weaving and the forging respectively, that the means of production, the cotton and the spindle, the yam and the loom, and the iron and the anvil, become constituent elements of the product, of a new use-value.1 The old form of the use-value disappears, but it is taken up again in a new form of use value. We saw, when we were considering the process of creating value, that if a use-value is effectively consumed in the production of a new use-value, the quantity of labour expended to produce the article which has been consumed forms a part of the quantity of labour necessary to produce the new use-value; this portion is therefore labour transferred from the means of production to the new product. Hence the worker preserves the values of the already consumed means of production or transfers them to the product as portions of its value, not by virtue of his additional labour as such, but by virtue of the particular useful character of that labour, by virtue of its specific productive form. Therefore, in so far as labour is productive activity directed to a particular purpose, in so far as it is spinning, weaving or forging, etc., it raises the means of production from the dead merely by entering into contact with them, infuses them with life so that they become factors of the labour process, and combines with them to form new products.

If
the specific productive labour of the worker were not spinning, he could not convert the cotton into yam, and therefore he could not transfer the values of the cotton and spindle to the yarn. Suppose the same worker were to change his trade to that of a joiner, he would still by a day’s labour add value to the material he worked on. We see therefore that the addition of new value takes place not by virtue of his labour being spinning in particular, or joinery in particular, but because it is labour in general, abstract social labour; and we see also that the value added is of a certain definite amount, not because his labour has a particular useful content, but because it lasts for a definite length of time. On the one hand, it is by virtue of its general character as expenditure of human labour power in the abstract that spinning adds new value to the values of the cotton and the spindle; and on the other hand, it is by virtue of its special character as a concrete, useful process that the same labour of spinning both transfers the values of the means of production to the product and preserves them in the product. Hence a twofold result emerges within the same period of time.

By the simple addition of a certain quantity of labour, new value is added, and by the quality of this added labour, the original values of the means of production are preserved in the product. This twofold effect, resulting from the twofold character of labour, appears quite plainly in numerous phenomena.

The transfer of value of already produced value arises through the specific concrete labour and actions of specific, concrete workers. It is they who do this—and not the machinery, and certainly not some passive entity.

Thier’s Section “Money and Fetishism”

Is Thier’s characterization of money and fetishism adequate? I think not.

On page 48,she writes:

If we start from this understanding of value, rather than with a surface appearance of prices, the real character of money loses its mystique. Value—which is just a crystallization of abstract labor—is represented by money.

This tells us nothing about the necessary relationship between the nature of abstract labour and the nature of money. Indeed, she then repeats what many economists who believe in the capitalist system state. She states on the same page:

Thus by being a portable and universal embodiment of value, money simplifies and mediates the process of trading goods.

This presents money as a simple convenient way of engaging in exchange. She repeats the same idea again on the same page:

With money, a producer of bread doesn’t have to go to the marketplace with ten loaves of bread in order to buy a chair. At the same time, a chair maker doesn’t need to exchange her chair for ten loaves of bread if she only wants one today and another loaf later in the week. Money conveniently stores value over time, which its owner can dispense of as he or she sees fit.

She then characterizes money more accurately, but not for the right reason:

Money also conceals the true nature of value, so that when you go to the supermarket, you don’t think you’re trading an equivalent amount of your congealed mass of labor” with someone else’s.

Money does indeed conceal the true nature of value, but this concealment can hardly be reduced only to the lack of understanding that in exchange there is an equivalent amount of congealed labour being exchanged. As I wrote on my blog,

On pages 48 and 49, Thier quotes David Harvey, who presents the relation in exchange between producer and consumer. Why? Is not Marx concerned in the first instance with the relation of producers to each other and only secondarily with the relation between producers and consumers?

On page 49, we read the following:

The process of producing commodities, Marx wrote, “has mastery over man, instead of the opposite.

This is the essence of what Marx dubbed COMMODITY FETISHISM. What other way can you describe the modern worship of every new generation of Apple products than fetishism? We idolize these things that we consider to be outside and external to us, but in fact are our own creations.

Thier confuses two different issues here. Idolization of differnt versions of a specific commodity hardly expresses the essence of commodity fetishism.; this has to do with consumerism (relation of production to consumption) and not a relation of producers to each other. The relation of producers to consumption is a consequence of the kind of relation between producers, but the relation between producers is prior to this logically.

What characterizes more accurately commodity fetishism is, rather, the first sentence .Marx thought that commodity fetishism was linked necessarily to the form of value. From Capital, volume 1, pages 164-165:

Whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity? Clearly, it arises from this form itself. The equality of the kinds of human labour takes on a physical form in the equal objectivity of the products of labour as values; the measure of the expenditure of human labour-power by its duration takes on the form of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour; and finally the relationships between the producers, within which the social characteristics of their labours are manifested, take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour. The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. … I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. As the foregoing analysis has already demonstrated, this fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the labour which produces them.

Relations between producers assumes the form of a relation between things. A specific kind of human relation—a specific kind of producing our lives—appears as a relation between things, and such a relation appears as something natural, and in that form exceeds our capacities to control it. Commodity fetishism goes way beyond idolizing specific kinds of commodities. By introducing such an idea here, Thier does not capture the very strange way in which our way of producing our lives is organized and the more profound consequences of human relations assuming the form of a relation between things.

Furthermore, she does not link the nature of abstract labour and the production of value, on the one hand, and the power of money (and the power of the owner of money) on the other. If abstract labour is labour that is not social labour as it is being performed, then the exchange process as the complimentary process that is required to complete the social process of producing our lives leads to the emergence of one commodity that is immediately exchangeable (convertible) into any other commodity. The power of money to be convertible into any other commodity has as its complement the opposite of a lack of power in all other commodities in being convertible into other forms immediately. This power of money to be immediately convertible into other commodities arises from the nature of abstract labour as labour that is not social as it is being performed. The lack of labours being connected consciously and socially to each other leads to the emergence of money as possessing this power as if by nature. This is the fetishism of money. From Capital, volume 1, pages 168-169:

It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities–the money form – which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly.

Marx elaborates on this further on, on page 187 of Capital, volume 1:

…the thing in which the magnitude of the value of another thing is represented appears to have the equivalent form [the equivalent form is, ultimately, money] independently of this relation, as a social property inherent in its nature. We followed the process by which this false semblance became firmly established, a process which was completed when the universal equivalent form became identified with the natural form of a particular commodity, and thus crystallized into the money-form. What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. The movement through which this process has been mediated vanishes in its own result, leaving no trace behind. Without any initiative on their part, the commodities find their own value-configuration ready to hand, in the form of a physical commodity existing outside but also alongside them. This physical object, gold or silver in its crude state, becomes, immediately on its emergence from the bowels of the earth [earlier, as gold or silver and later, immediately as coming from banks or the government], the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of money. Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. Their own relations of production therefore assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action. This situation is manifested first by the fact that the products of men’s labour universally take on the form of commodities. The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our eyes.

Earlier, on page 161, note 26, as I pointed out above, Marx warned that the power of immediate exchangeability of the universal equivalent (ultimately, money) should not be separated from the lack of that power by all other commodities:

26. It is by no means self-evident that the form of direct and universal exchangeability is an antagonistic form, as inseparable from its opposite, the form of non-direct exchangeability, as the positivity of one pole of a magnet is from the negativity of the other pole. This has allowed the illusion to arise that all commodities can simultaneously be imprinted with the stamp of direct exchangeability, in the same way that it might be imagined that all Catholics can be popes.

By the way, this general power of exchangeability of money has a parallel in the general capacity or power of the human species to engage in various forms of human labour. This species capacity is objectified in a thing—money–and this thing appears to possess this power by nature rather than by the way the production of our lives is organized. Politically, that makes it difficult to conceive of alternative ways of organizing our lives since, on the one hand, the fetishistic way in which we organize our lives in capitalist society appears to be natural and, on the other hand, our own species powers appear and really are not under our control.

Critical Education Articles Placed in the Teacher Staff Lounge While I Was a Teacher, Part Eighteen: The Hidden Curriculum of Learning to Develop a Positive Attitude Towards Being Exploited and Oppressed

This is a continuation of a series of posts on summaries of articles, mainly on education.

When I was a French teacher at Ashern Central School, in Ashern, Manitoba, Canada, I started to place critiques, mainly (although not entirely) of the current school system. At first, I merely printed off the articles, but then I started to provide a summary of the article along with the article. I placed the summaries along with the articles in a binder (and, eventually, binders), and I placed the binder in the staff lounge.

As chair of the Equity and Justice Committee for Lakeshore Teachers’ Association of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS), I also sent the articles and summary to the Ning of the MTS (a ning is “an online platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks”).

As I pointed out in a previous post, it is necessary for the radical left to use every opportunity to question the legitimacy of existing institutions.

The context of the following, if I remember correctly, was the March 8-10 Winnipeg (Manitoba, Canada) Women’s Symposium, entitled Living as an Ally: Individually and Collectively, where Dr. Kryzanowski presented the following on March 9, 2012 (from a brochure of the Conference):

Impacts of Poverty on Marginalized Groups: What Teachers Need to Know!
Dr. Julie Kryzanowski, Saskatoon Regional Health Authority

The significant and troubling health disparities between low-income neighbourhoods and the rest of the city in Saskatoon were a catalyst for action in Saskatoon Health Region. With local health and education partners, the Health Region pursued a program of research to explore the extent of students’ health disparities and address them with evidence-based interventions. Dr. Julie Kryzanowski tells their story and relates how events and experiences in childhood influence health outcomes across the life course –and explains what teachers need to know to make a difference.

I wrote the following for the Ning, and sent it to the executive of Lakeshore Teachers’ Association:

Dr. Kryzanowski, in her presentation to the Women’s Issues Symposium, focused in many ways on child poverty—something which constantly needs to be stressed. However, as part of her presentation, she refers to some things that teachers can do, including increasing “access to early childhood education and postsecondary education for all.”

Although I have argued in another post that child poverty should be a major focus for teachers in general and for those interested in equity and social justice in particular, I have also argued on several occasions that the present school system is hardly an adequate basis or standard for children and adolescents.

Dr. Kyrzanowski does not criticize the current school system but presupposes it.

Rather than reiterating what I have already posted, I will look at the situation from a slightly different angle by summarizing an article by Samule Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “Schools in Capitalist America Revisited.”

This article is itself a reference to the book by Bowles and Gintis, published in 1976, Schooling in Capitalist America. In that book, they argued that there was a correspondence principle between capitalist work practices and the practices that existed in schools.  Social interactions and the reward structure in the capitalist-worker relation are replicated in the social interactions and reward structure of schools.

They update their analysis in this article with econometric analysis (the use of regression equations in particular. Regression equations are formulated by using descriptive statistics to create, for instance, “best fit” equations that can then be used for prediction—inferential statistics).

A thesis of the article is that there is strong correlation between the economic status of one’s parents and one’s own economic status. Since the economic structure is characterized by inequality, schools generally function to reproduce that inequality. Thus, if you know the economic status of a child’s or adolescent’s parents, then you can use that knowledge to predict, fairly accurately, her/his success on the market for workers.

One study shows that a son born into the top decile has a 22 percent chance of attaining that decile whereas a son born in the bottom decile has a 1 percent chance. Furthermore, a son born in the bottom decile has a 19 percent chance of remaining in that decile; a son born in the top decile has no chance of moving to the lowest decile.

Bowles and Gintis do not deny that IQ, as an inheritable trait, has some impact on the probability of success in the market for workers. However, they find that, if IQ were the only determinant of success, then the probability that sons of the richest decile would attain the highest decile of income would only exceed the probability that sons of the poorest decile would attain the highest decile of income would only be 12 percent greater—whereas the statistics show a probability of 16-44 times .

The authors also call into question the view that schools primarily develop cognitive skills that are correlated highly with success in the market for workers. In a survey of 3,000 employers, it was found that the most important reason for hiring was attitude, followed by, in order, communication skills, industry-based skill credentials, years of schooling and academic performance.

In another survey, of those companies that reported a skill shortage, 43 percent indicated that there was a shortage of technical skills—but 62 percent indicated a shortage of employees who had a poor attitude, lacked appropriate personality characteristics and lacked motivation.

A third survey compares the earnings of high-school dropouts who obtained GED qualifications with those without the GED qualification. Despite GED holders generally having higher cognitive skills than high-school dropouts, the GED holders earned only slightly above high-school dropouts. Those who performed the survey hypothesized that the reason for little gains in earning power for GED holders is that the holders send mixed signals to employers; they have the cognitive ability but lack motivation to persevere.  Bowles and Gintis also point out that the conclusions from this survey indicate that “seat work,” or mere attendance, is more important for employers than the curriculum or learning per se. Employers probably tend to treat technical skills with the “wrong attitude” to be more trouble than they are worth to the employers. Socialization at school for subordination of workers’ wills and personalities to employers’ dictates constitutes part of the “hidden curriculum” in schools.

Bowles and Gintis argue that a test for determining whether cognitive skills are that important when compared to such variables as the “hidden curriculum” of socialized subordination to the dictates of employers is a variation in school years attended when cognitive skill is held constant. By comparing a regression equation in which cognitive skill is included and a regression equation in which it is excluded, the ratio of earning differences can be calculated, with variations in schooling with and without changes in cognitive skills. The authors found that variables other than cognitive skills (such as years of schooling and socio-economic status) explained a considerable level of variations in earnings, with cognitive skills accounting for much less of the variation.  Considerable variations in schooling correlated quite highly with years of schooling; substantial cognitive skills did not account for much of the variations in earnings.

On the other hand, personality traits, such as integrity, conscientiousness, industriousness, perseverance and leadership, have a substantial impact on wages and salaries. Curiously, such personality traits have a larger impact than family background.

Other behavioural traits having to do with motivation, such as the degree of trust and belief that a person’s efforts make a substantial difference, have a greater impact on wages and salaries than do cognitive skills.

Bowles and Gintis did find that the interaction of occupational status, gender and behavioural traits did affect wages and salaries. Thus, women in high-status occupations who were considered aggressive experienced a decrease in wages or salaries whereas men who were considered aggressive experienced a substantial increase in wages or salaries. On the other hand, women in low-status occupations who were not considered aggressive experienced a decrease in wages or salaries.

The authors argue, in general, that personality traits rewarded in schools correspond to those traits rewarded at work for an employer (and not simply work—to identify work with work for an employer is to treat capitalist relations at work to be characteristic of all of human relations throughout history). They do recognize, though, that the situation is more complicated than they had presented it in their 1976 book. The reward structure present in the employer-employee relation, they now recognize, competes with other reward structures, such as family membership and citizenship.

What relevance has all this to do with equity and social justice? The formation of the kind of  character or personality is hardly irrelevant to such issues. In the first place, if the hidden curriculum in schools, which moulds children and adolescents (with or without their resistance or cooperation) and accounts to a greater extent than cognitive skills for wages and salaries, then the emphasis on the importance of schooling indirectly (even if unconsciously–the hidden curriculum) in the formation of certain personality traits is justified. Character formation, however, is an ethical question, and ethical questions surely are relevant to equity and social justice issues.

What kind of personality do we want children and adolescents to develop? To develop personalities that enable them to be used by employers without resistance? To be used as instruments for the benefit of employers?

Or do we want children and adolescent to develop personalities that enable them to resist being used as instruments by employers?

In the second place, if children’s and adolescents’ prospects at work are also a function of the economic conditions of their parents, should we not be doing something concrete to negate that situation? Like trying to eliminate childhood poverty?

However, it should be noted that even if child poverty in terms of socio-economic differences were realized, the formation of the kind of character or personality required by employers would still be a problem—except for those who do not question the employer-employee relation.

Dr.  Kryzanowski does not address the fact that there is a market for workers, and the school system is intimately connected to the economic structure.

Those who are interested in equity and social justice, in such a situation, may be contributing to inequity and social justice by being blind to that situation and not taking it into account. The road to hell, after all, is paved with good intentions.

Management Rights in a Spanish Collective Agreement: An Expression of “Free Collective Bargaining” or the Dicatorship of Employers?

There are undoubtedly variations in the rights of workers from country to country, but the fundamental principle of the power of employers as a class is constant. This power is often implicit but also often is expressed more explicitly–even in collective agreements between employers and unions.

For example, the following is taken from the collective agreement for offices between the General Union of Workers (Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT)), the Workers’ Commissions (Comisiones Obreras (CCOO)), and the Madrid Business Confederation (la Confederación Empresarial de Madrid–CEOE) (CEIM)), dated January 1, 2019-December 31, 2021:

page 6 (my rough translation) (the original in Spanish is included afterwards):

Chapter 2–Organization of Work and Functions

Article 8: General Principles

  1. The practical organization of the work, subject to this collective agreement and the current social legislation in force, is the exclusive capacity of the management of the enterprise.

A further clause also expresses the power of the employer in relation to the employees (page 28):

Chapter 10–Code of Conduct

Article 44: Disciplinary Regime 

  1. The capacity to impose discipline corresponds to the management of the enterprise or to persons delegated for that purpose.

Is this an expression of a democratic society? If democracy is a way of life and not just formal voting for political representatives, do such clauses in collective agreements (which are normally superior to non-unionized implicit employment contracts in terms of provisions for workers) express democracy? Or do they express dictatorship–a dictatorial way of life? See, for example, The Money Circuit of Capital or Employers as Dictators, Part One.

Is this a good example of what union reps mean by “free collective bargaining?” “Good contracts?” “Fair contracts?” “Decent work?” What do you think?

Spanish Original

CAPITULO II – ORGANIZACIÓN DEL TRABAJO Y FUNCIONES

Art. 8º.- PRINCIPIOS GENERALES.

1. La organización práctica del trabajo, con sujeción a este Convenio Colectivo y a la
legislación social vigente, es facultad exclusiva de la Dirección de la Empresa.

CAPITULO X – CÓDIGO DE CONDUCTA

Art. 44º.- RÉGIMEN SANCIONADOR.

1. La facultad de imponer las sanciones corresponderá a la dirección de la empresa
o en las personas en quien delegue.

A Worker’s Resistance to the Capitalist Government or State and Its Representatives, Part Twelve

This final post in this series has to do with a long psychological vocational assessment performed by Jeffrey Karp on May 30, 2014. It is 15 pages long. I choose only to select the last few pages since they illustrate the oppressive nature of such assessments.

On page 13, Mr. Karp wrote the following:

Mr. Harris’s psychological test profile highlighted chronic maladjustment. In particular he may be characterized as rigid and over controlled in social situations, withdrawn, antagonistic, likely paranoid, negativistic, moody, overly sensitive, unreliable, and critical. 

On page 14, he wrote: 

The above diagnostic formulation is consistent with Dr. Morier’s (December 18, 2012 and March 28, 2012)….

On the basis of the present assessment any treatment must address Mr. Harris’s paranoid personality and perfectionism; however, resistance to treatment and/or early withdrawal is likely. Nevertheless, further psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy should be attempted.

On page 15, he recommended: 

  1. The present assessment provides further support for referral to CAMH or a psychologist in private practice with experience treating Paranoid Personality Disorder.
  2. A psychiatric referral for a medication consultation.
  3. Continued case management to monitor his progress and support greater socialization. A collaborative approach in this regard would be most beneficial.
  4. Mr. Harris may also benefit from taking on volunteer work or coursework (via distance education) as a form of behavioral activation and to promote vocational rehabilitation.
  5. If Mr. Harris paranoia shows signs of amelioration, further vocational rehabilitation may prove warranted (e.g., a psychovocational reassessment and possible retraining or return to work supports).

The assessment is signed by Mr. Karp, with the title “Psychologist” and the following: 

Practice in Clinical, Rehabilitation and Police Psychology

It is interesting that Mr. Karp considers my perfectionism to be a problem. Let us look at some of the factual errors in his assessment (there are many issues in the assessment, but I will confine myself to facts that illustrate the level of accuracy of the reporting:

  1. Page 3:

    Background Information

    Mr. Harris reportedly relocated to Ontario from Winnipeg, Manitoba on August 31, 2014.

    The assessment date is May 30, 2014. It was August 31, 2013, not 2014.

  2. Page 4:

    Mr. Harris is single and has not been in a serious relationship since January 2014.

    I do not remember the exact date, but the last serious relationship was certainly a few years before January 2014 and even January 2013. Where Mr. Karp obtained this date is anyone’s guess.

  3. Page 4:

    Previously, he was in a common law relationship from July 10, 1987 until becoming legally married in November 14, 1996. 

    The marriage was July 10, 1987–and the divorce date was November 14, 1996. 

  4. Page 5:

    [Put into quotes–supposedly quoting me: “I saw an urologist here, Dr. Barkin, and did a cystoscopy. There were no visible signs of cancer in the right kidney, although it’s not functioning.” 

    All my cystoscopies have been to determine whether the bladder cancer that I had in 2009 had returned; Mr. Barkin performed a cystoscopy to determine that. My right kidney suffered damage in 2008 or 2009 because the urine backed up into it due to the bladder cancer tumor. Mr. Barkin had me undergo a scan or, perhaps, an ultrasound (I forget which), to determine renal damage and functioning. The results showed that my right kidney no longer functioned (it had shrunk in size).  

  5. Page 6:

    He [Fred Harris] added: I was falsely accused by Child and Family Services 20 to 25 times.”

    There are two possibilities here. I undoubtedly mentioned that, after having been falsely accused of sexually abusing Francesca for a second time in 1997 and being under investigation by Winnipeg Child and Family Services (WCFS). I contacted the supervisor of Jackie Davidson, the worker for WCFS, who investigated the allegations of sexual abuse; I wanted to know how many times my ex-wife could falsely accuse me of sexually abusing Francesca before It was the supervisor who stated that the WCFS would probably not do anything after 20 to 25 false accusations of sexual abuse. It had nothing to do with “physical abuse.” This is one possibility.

    The second possibility is that Mr. Karp confused my references to the many times that Francesca’s mother had physically abused her (see for example  A Worker’s Resistance to the Capitalist Government or State and Its Representatives, Part Nine) and attributed to me the claim that I was falsely accused of physically abusing Francesca “20 to 25 times.”

  6. Page 12:

    Mr. Jenkins also completed a number of psychometric tests….

    My name is Mr. Harris, not Mr. Jenkins. Although it was probably a secretary who made the mistake–it is Mr. Karp’s report, and it is his responsibility to assure its accuracy.

  7. Page 12:

    This 56-year old male was referred for a psychovocational assessment….

    On page 2, it is accurately reported that I was 57 at the time of the assessment–not 56.

  8. Page 12:

    Conclusions/Opinions
    This 56-year old male

    Same problem 12 as in 7.

Surely, in a professional assessment, you would expect accuracy. But only for those with “perfectionist” tendencies, which are negative qualities, Mr. Karp implies. Scientists, however, know that accuracy is essential for the scientific endeavour. 

I leave the reader to draw her or his own conclusions about the accuracy of Mr. Karp’s psychovocational assessment. 

In any case, it is evident that Mr. Karp’s assessment does not express any perfectionist tendencies. 

Searching on the Web, I found the following ( https://painanddisability.ca/staff-members/jeffrey-karp/):

Dr. Karp is a registered psychologist in the province of Ontario (Certificate #4623). He is duly qualified to practice clinical, rehabilitation, and police psychology, which includes psychological, psycho-vocational, fitness to work, fitness for duty, substance abuse, and psychoeducational assessments. He graduated with a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Adler School of Professional Psychology in 2007 and in 1989 he completed an MA in counseling psychology at Simon Fraser University. He completed an internship in vocational rehabilitation at the University of Wisconsin in 1990.

As a rehabilitation counselor and more recently as a psychologist, Dr. Karp has over 20 years’ experience in rehabilitation, with particular expertise in vocational rehabilitation, disability management, and fitness for work. In the past he has provided assessment and psychotherapeutic support to injured workers in an outpatient hospital-based rehabilitation setting and offered psychological assessments and psychotherapy in private practice.

Dr. Karp has specialized training as a Substance Abuse Expert Evaluator and has completed training through the Forensic Psychology Program of Alliant University in Psychological Pre-Employment Screening and Fitness for Duty in Law Enforcement. He is also a member in good standing of the Ontario Psychological Association and the Society for Police and Criminal Psychology.

When we look at what the Society for Police and Criminal Psychology is, we read the following ( https://www.policepsychology.org/About_SPCP): 

The Society for Police and Criminal Psychology is an eclectic professional organization that encourages the scientific study of police and criminal psychology and the application of scientific knowledge to problems in criminal justice. It focuses on law enforcement, judicial, and corrections elements in criminal justice. Members of the Society study the full range of human behaviors, motivations, and actions within the framework of the criminal justice system.  Consequently, the Society encourages input from psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, lawyers, police officers, corrections personnel, and other professionals concerned with the criminal justice system. 

The Future

The interests of the Society of Police and Criminal Psychology are broad in scope. Our members play many roles in law enforcement and criminal justice and come from all over the world.  We are proud of our inclusive and eclectic philosophy, and believe that through our combined efforts we are well positioned to lead our field in research and the application of practical solutions in police and criminal psychology.  The Society supports the development of Police Psychology as a recognized specialty area, and the development of educational opportunities in the field.

Political Implications

  1. Mr. Slusky, the psychologist in Winnipeg, agreed with the psychiatrist, Dr. Gisele Morier, that I suffered from “paranoid personality disorder.” Mr. Karp did the same. We can expect a network of “professionals” to reinforce each other in judging the mental health of individuals–on the assumption that our society is somehow rational. 
  2. The social-democratic left generally fail to consider the extent to which this network of individuals and professions reinforces the fundamental structure of the power of the class of employers and the associated economic, political and social structures of exploitation and oppression.
  3. The underestimation of the extent to which there exists a network of individuals and professions that serve, ultimately, the interests of the class of employers thereby overestimates the ease with which social change can occur without a decided strategy for addressing such institutional, ideological and individual oppression. 
  4. What is needed is open and systematic critique of such individuals, professions and institutions.
  5. This requires that the radical left discuss such issues and formulate measures and organize to counteract these oppressive individuals, professions and institutions.
  6. It also requires the radical left critique the social-democratic or reformist left since such reformers are blind to the oppressive nature of such institutions. 

Critical Education Articles Placed in the Teacher Staff Lounge While I Was a Teacher, Part Seventeen: The Failure of Micro School Reformism to Address Children’s Poverty

This is a continuation of a series of posts on summaries of articles, mainly on education.

When I was a French teacher at Ashern Central School, in Ashern, Manitoba, Canada, I started to place critiques, mainly (although not entirely) of the current school system. At first, I merely printed off the articles, but then I started to provide a summary of the article along with the article. I placed the summaries along with the articles in a binder (and, eventually, binders), and I placed the binder in the staff lounge.

As chair of the Equity and Justice Committee for Lakeshore Teachers’ Association of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS), I also sent the articles and summary to the Ning of the MTS (a ning is “an online platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks”).

As I pointed out in a previous post, it is necessary for the radical left to use every opportunity to question the legitimacy of existing institutions.

The attached article for the ESJ Ning is prefaced by the following:

Hello everyone,

Attached is another article for the ESJ Ning. I prefaced it with the following:

Bernie Froese-Germain, author of the editorial “Make Child Poverty History? Yes We Can,” argues that there is not an either-or view of child poverty. There are many actions that can be taken in schools to address child poverty without eliminating child poverty altogether.

Froese-Germain then outlines some measures that can be taken in schools to address child poverty without directly attacking child poverty.

This view is typical of many social reformers. Social reformers view the world in terms of the possibility of changing some things while leaving other things intact.

Interestingly enough, the editor refers to a research project on urban poverty and Canadian schools by Ben Levin and Jane Gaskell. I was a research assistant to Ben Levin on that project and eventually withdrew because I judged that such research in fact would not lead to questioning basic causes of poverty and would have minimal impact in addressing the issue of poverty as such and its impact in schools. In fact, I attended a conference in Toronto with Ben Levin, and several academics and school bureaucrats were there as well. My general impression then, as now, is that it was a group of reformers who would never really attack poverty in Canada.

When reading this article, then, I was quite sceptical of its suggestions. Indeed, Froese-Germain relies on another reformist professor—Professor Fiessa, of OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), who argues against the “either-or” viewpoint. The either-or viewpoint is supposedly that either only conditions within the school or conditions outside the school matter; Professor Fiessa undoubtedly considers his viewpoint to be superior to such dichotomous views.

I support one of these views, namely, that conditions outside the school should be the focus of our efforts rather than a focus of what transpires within the school walls. In the first place, suggestions about what to do in schools for the children of poorer parents, without sufficient power from the poor themselves, is merely band aid methods. For instance, I have serious doubts about the contention in the article that early intervention to help children of low-income parents results in “success” (as defined by the current school system, of course) of such children. What probably happens is that such “interventions” become substitutes for addressing the issue of why the parents receive a low income in the first place. The issue of poverty and eliminating it then becomes swept under the rug and never addressed through a frontal assault on it. The “interventions” within school walls in the 1970s in Winnipeg, for instance, have not changed substantially the situation of poverty in inner-city schools in the twenty-first century. Why is that?

In the second place, the author of the article is too optimistic about the ease with which poverty can be eliminated—given the capitalist nature of the economic structure. The economic crisis of 2008 has undoubtedly limited the possibility of eliminating poverty. For example, despite efforts to eliminate child poverty in Ireland, the level of poverty increased from 2008 to 2009 in that country, from 4.2 percent to 5.5 percent (which is still quite low when compared to Canada). Given the economic difficulties that the Irish working class have faced since then, the probability is that the level of poverty has increased even more—while CEOs and other high-end managers receive millions and even billions of dollars, pounds or other currency.

In the third place, of course, something can be done within school walls, but what is done goes around in circles since the issue of poverty takes second place. If poverty did not take second place, then teachers would have to organize, struggle and fight for the abolition of the conditions which tend to reproduce poverty among children. Neither the author, nor Professor Fiessa, on whom he partly relies, refers to the need to engage in struggle and power politics if poverty inside and outside schools is really going to be addressed.

In the fourth place, Professor Fiessa, like so many others, assumes that the general structure of schools is rational and that changes are to be effected that fit within that general structure (Professor Fiessa and the author show no evidence indicating that they question the standard of success as defined by school bureaucrats. Those who do not work for an employer are often stigmatized and treated as second-class citizens. So too in all likelihood are their children.)

Those who wish to focus on changes in school relations would have to show how such changes actually lead to better lives for the poor—without assuming that success is defined in terms of doing well in the present school structure (as so many middle-class researchers do). The implicit assumption of many researchers is that the modern school system constitutes the standard and that supports are to be provided so that the poor can compete on the same level as other children and adolescents of the middle and upper classes. There is little criticism of the standard itself. In other words, reformist teachers really do not critically engage with their environment. They merely want to reproduce the status quo, but they want to make the playing field of competition more equitable and just. Does not critical thinking demand that we question the assumption that the modern school system constitutes the standard for defining educational success?

What is required, then, is a simultaneous focus on poverty and struggle to eliminate it, on the one hand, and a critical approach to the definition of what constitutes school success on the other.

Equity and social justice demands that we do so, does it not? Or are those who are concerned with equity and social justice issues more concerned with the micro issues in school and classroom that will never address the impact of poverty—and class—on children’s life and results in schools?

The Ontario Federation of Labour’s Workers-First Agenda: A Critique: Part Two

Introduction

The first part of this series focused on a critique of the phrase “good jobs and decent work” expressed in the Ontario Federation of Labour’s campaign titled “Building the Fight for a Workers-First Agenda” (https://ofl.ca/event/activist-assembly-2022/). This post will focus on a critique of the phrases “high quality affordable housing” and “health care.” I draw on earlier posts for such critiques.

The so-called radical left here in Toronto rarely engages in any detailed criticism of unions or groups of unions. Quite to the contrary. They either make vague assertions about “the trade-union elite” or the “trade-union bureaucracy” (union bureaucrats or business unions), or they remain silent when faced with the persistent rhetoric that unions use. It is hardly in the interests of the working-class to read merely vague criticisms of unions or to not read anything concerning the limitations of unions or groups of unions.

The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL)

What is the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL)? On its website, we read the following:

WHO WE ARE

Just as workers unite in a union to protect their rights, unions also unite in federations of labour to fight for better working and living conditions. The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) serves as an umbrella group for working people and their unions.

From our inception in 1957, the OFL has grown to represent over one million Ontario workers belonging to more than 1,500 locals from 54 affiliated unions, making us Canada’s largest labour federation. Our strong membership and constant vigilance make us a formidable political voice.

WHAT WE DO

We push for legislative change in every area that affects people’s daily lives. Areas like health, education, workplace safety, minimum wage and other employment standards, human rights, women’s rights, workers’ compensation, and pensions.

We also make regular presentations and submissions to the Ontario government and mount internal and public awareness campaigns to mobilize the kind of political pressure that secures positive change for all workers – whether you belong to a union or not.

To accomplish these goals, we work with affiliated local unions and labour councils across the province. We also partner with other community and social justice organizations to build a fairer and more inclusive society that meets everyone’s needs.

The Ontario Federation of Labour’s Worker’s-First Agenda Campaign

On the above web page, we read:

That means good jobs and decent work for all workers; a $20 minimum wage; high quality affordable housing; accessible and well funded health care, long term care, education, and other public services; justice for Indigenous people and racialized communities; climate justice and a livable planet; and so much more!

These are winnable demands, but only if we fight for them. That’s why we need you to help build the fight for a workers first agenda in our province.

I certainly agree that workers need to fight to create a workers-first agenda. However, I seriously question that what the Ontario Federation of Labour calls a workers’ agenda expresses a full and complete workers’ agenda.

As is usual, I hardly oppose the fight for reforms that benefit workers. However, is what is proposed anything other than the fight for a more humanized form of capitalism? Let us see.

High Quality Affordable Housing

What would be required to actually provide high-quality affordable housing? We are not provided with any guidance over the issue. Admittedly, such high-quality affordable housing would be, in part, a function of the specific town or city for their provision. Generally, either such high quality affordable housing would be provided through private construction by capitalist firms, by the capitalist government, or a combination of the two.

High quality affordable housing also refers to different kinds of housing: rentals or outright buying (through mortgages).

If housing were provided mainly by private firms, then house and condos prices may well rise (as they have in Toronto, Vancouver and other Canadian cities).

But the document probably refers to such high-quality affordable housing being provided by–the capitalist state and rented by tenants (although government-subsidized purchases of houses and condos is also possible).

There is no indication otherwise how such high-quality affordable housing would be provided. The housing would become social housing, managed by the government, with its current oppressive structures. Social housing, even if relatively affordable (rent determined by level of income) hardly need be quality. Indeed, as I pointed out in another post (Exposing the Intolerance and Censorship of Social Democracy, Part One: The Working Class, Housing and the Police):

Immediate Incident as an Occasion for Grassroots Activism

On Good Friday, April 2, 2021, 23 police cruisers showed up at 33 Gabian Way, which is a 19-story building owned by Vila Gaspar Corte Real Inc., or Villa Gaspar Corte Real Non-Profit Housing Inc. (there is some inconsistency in spelling the company).

The building is a combination of rental and social housing, built in 1993. There are 248 residential units. Apparently, the building is linked to Project Esperance, which is a non-profit registered charity. It services 111 units of from one- to three-bedroom units. Rents are geared to income.

as the incident at 33 Gabian Way demonstrates, public housing can be quite oppressive. Evictions can occur in just as brutal fashion as in private housing. The left should not idealize the public sector—which they often do.

The issue of the oppression of tenants in “affordable housing” is not addressed in any way by the OFL. To be a tenant is to automatically be subject to precarious living since there is “an inherent imbalance of power” between tenants and landlords.

The OFL also does not address how the split in the working class between those who own houses and see them as vehicles for rising asset values and those who only rent (from other workers who own houses or condos) is to be addressed. As I wrote in the same post:

Housing, Police and the Working Class

The use of houses as equity among the working class has led to a split within the class in terms of immediate material interests. From Michael Berry, “Housing Provision and Class Relations under Capitalism: Some Implications of Recent Marxist Class Analysis,” in pages 109-121, Housing Studies, Volume 1, Issue 2, pages 115-116:

Income differences are, as has been argued, also internalised within classes. In the case of the working class, for example, higher paid workers in primary jobs are doubly advantaged; they enjoy both higher and more secure wages and a higher probability of: (a) gaining access to owner-occupation; and (b) securing high capital gains from domestic property ownership. Conversely, workers in the secondary job market and those relegated to the reserve army of unemployed are more likely to be denied access to home ownership, or, if allowed access, concentrated in housing submarkets where property values remain relatively stable. Tenancy therefore evolves as a residual tenure category in a dual sense; not only can land supporting rental housing often be converted to more profitable non-residential uses, it evolves as ‘housing of last resort’ for less privileged sections of the working and nonworking population whose low incomes place strict limits on the rental returns to landlords, both factors leading to a degree of underprovision and homelessness.

In summary, working class disunity, associated with unequal access to and benefits from home ownership, and its political expression through various forms of struggle, is part of a wider system of inequality and exploitation. Both forms of advantage to higher paid workers privileged position in the workplace, over and against the immediate interests of other workers. depend on their being able to maintain their privileged position in the workplace, over and against the immediate interests of other workers.

Accessible and Well-funded Health Care

I have already posted on the issue of health in the context of the class power of employers in a series of posts (see for example Working for an Employer May Be Dangerous to Your Health, Part One). I also have addressed the issue in other posts (such as  Health Care: Socialist versus Capitalist Nationalization). I will draw on already posted posts to question whether a well-funded health care system is really possible under an economic, political and social system characterized by the dominance of a class of employers. I will dispense with quotes when it comes to my own comments in previous posts.

The Issue of Public or Nationalized Health Care

Health care even in a nationalized context can easily be an expression of oppression and exploitation. The idealization of nationalization often goes hand in hand with an argument  that we need to extend public services in health and education (as Sam Gindin, former research director for the Canadian Auto Union (CAW, now Unifor, the largest Canadian private-sector union)  has argued). However, nationalized health care can easily become an oppressive experience for workers (as well as patients). From Barbara Briggs (1984), “Abolishing a Medical Hierarchy: The Struggle for Socialist Primary Health Care,” pages 83-88, in the journal Critical Social Policy, volume 4, issue #12, page 87:

GPs AND SOCIALISM

Socialists have traditionally argued for state control of key areas of the economy and of the provision of welfare services such as health and education. Socialist health workers have argued for general practitioners to become salaried employees of the Area Health Authorities, along with the ’ancillary workers’, instead of continuing to enjoy the independent self-employed status that they insisted on to protect their status when the NHS [National Health Service of the United Kingdom] was set up.

But the NHS, the largest employer in the country, has shared with nationalised industries the failure to demonstrate any evidence of ’belonging to the people’: because of the backing of the state it has proved a ruthless and powerful employer, keeping the wages of unskilled and many skilled workers also at uniquely low levels; time and again, union members seeking improvements in pay and amelioration of very poor working conditions have been defeated. Nor has the NHS shown any kind of effective accountability to its users. Public spending constraints have hit the NHS not only by causing a decline in working conditions and in the services provided, but also by imposing even more centralised planning priorities based on the need to save money whatever the cost.

This situation likely characterizes the Canadian public health-care system as well.

Health Care Versus Health Services

In the context of the class power of employers, health care is impossible. Rather, what is provided is health services. From Bob Brecher (1997), (pages 217-225), “What Would a Socialist Health Service Look Like?,” in the journal Health Care Analysis,  volume 5, issue #3, page 221:

Service’ implies server and served; consultant and client; provider and consumer. But none of these describes the sort of relationship between carer and person carefd for that the two principles outlined suggest. To take the example of the NHS again: despite the intentions of its founders, it was the connotations of service–by turn beneficently providing for patients and ‘servicing’ them as though they were objects–which helped provide amply justified dissatisfactions with the resultant shortcomings of the NHS treatment: and these have been used to undermine its founding principles. The combination of professional paternalism, especially in respect of senior doctors; an inability or unwillingness to treat people rather than their symptoms; and an attitude of ‘servicing’ and being ‘serviced’ all helped alienate people from what was supposed to be ‘our’ NHS, enabling successive conservative governments to turn what was at its inception at least a ‘social’ health service into an expliictly anti-socialist one. … these are not accidents of the British context: such terms and the attitudes and mores they describe are inimical to a socialist structure, based as that must be on considerations of equity and respect.

It is important to emphasize, as Brecher points out, that the assumption that nationalization is somehow socialist without further ado itself contributes to the Conservative backlash and the emergence of neoliberalism. By indulging the social-democratic or social-reformist left, with their talk of “decent work,” “fair contracts,” “fair share of taxes,” “$15 Minimum Wage and Fairness,” and the like, the so-called radicals have in reality contributed to the neoliberal backlash. What is needed is not indulgence of such talk, but continuous critique of such talk. What is needed is a critical attitude towards the so-called “left” and its associated idealized institutions.

Does the OFL provide such a critical attitude? Not at all. It assumes that health care (rather than health service) is possible in the context of the domination of a class of employers. On the other hand, its standard is really health service rather than health care; its standards in this area, like in so many other areas, is quite low. But that applies in general to social democracy or social reformism.

Health Services Provided Fail to Meet Health-Care Needs

The OFL fails to address the issue of the relation between health care and prevention of sickness, injury and disease. In a socialist society, health care would still be important. From  Calum Paton (1997),  (pages 205-216), “Necessary Condtions For A Socialist Health Service,” in Health Care Anal., volume 5, page 209:

A socialist health service in a non-socialist society may be forced to stress care and rescue rather than prevention, health maintenance or the promotion of better health and more equal health status. Nevertheless this may be an important role. Even in a utopian society of perfect health promotion and prevention, people are more likely to die of more complex comorbidities at a later stage in the life cycle. The concept of substitute mortality and morbidity is useful here. 5 As a result simplistic trade-offs which suggest that ‘the more primary care there is, the less secondary care will be necessary’, are unlikely to be true either in the here and now or in the perfect society.

To be cared for with dignity, and to suffer with dignity and to die with dignity–these would all be important aspects of socialist health care.

The OFL also excludes a major issue dealing with health: its prevention. It ignores entirely the need to consider the prevention of disease, injury and sickness in the first place. What are the social conditions that increase the likelihood that a person would become a patient in the first place? Undoubtedly, as we become old, we will likely become patients at some stage in our lives–there is no getting around this fact. However, there are social determinants of health as well, and consequently becoming a patient is also often a function of social conditions.

In a socialist society, prevention would be a major focus of social policy and would deal with addressing the social determinants of health problems, ranging from health problems linked to the workplace to health problems linked to other environmental conditions, including food processing.

Today, though, many social determinants are largely ignored in favour of focusing on servicing those already sick. Consider breast cancer. It arises in many instances from environmental conditions, and yet most money is allocated to servicing those already inflicted with the disease rather than with preventing it from arising in the first place. From Faye Wachs (2007), (pages 929-931), “Review. Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy. By Samantha King,” in Gender & Society, volume 21, number 6 (December), pages 930-931:

Recent studies reveal that simply removing known carcinogens from products and our environment could prevent thousands of cases annually (Brody et al. 2007). However, funding for such research is limited, while the monies for identifying and curing existing cases is the focus of most efforts. Indeed, many of the companies that fund survivorship continue to use known carcinogens in their products. King points to the fact that despite increased awareness, rates of breast cancer have increased from 1 in 22 in the 1940s to 1 in 7 in 2004. Even if one considers women’s increasing longevity, this still indicates an increase in the prevalence of breast cancer. Moreover, structural factors that affect risk and survivorship, such as socioeconomic status, remain woefully understudied.

Personally, the issue of cancer research funding versus caring for cancer patients hits home. In March 2009, I was diagnosed with invasive bladder cancer, and in June 2010 I was informed that I had a 60 percent chance of dying in the next five years (it never happened, of course). The extent of “inquiry” into why I had cancer was a sheet of paper when I was admitted into the hospital for surgery. Two questions related to the causes of the cancer were: Did I smoke? And did I or had I worked in areas that might contribute to cancer. Nothing more. Of course, scientific research is much more extensive and hardly limited to inquiry into specific personal cases. I did find, however, that no qualitative inquiry into possible causes of cancer indicated a lack of a certain kind of cancer research in the area.

Even worse, in December 2015, I was diagnosed with rectal cancer. In 2016, I asked the doctor why I had cancer again. His answer was: “Bad luck.”

Like the doctor, I suspect that the OFL neglects the wider picture of a society dominated by a class of employers.

The Division of Labour and the Silence of the OFL Social-Reformist or Social-Democratic Left

Related to the issue of a lack of perception of the wider picture is the OFL’s lack of reference to the hiearchical division of labour within the health field. Such a division itself has health implications:

One highly useful example from the empirical literature that illustrates the effects of process alienation is that of Whitehall I and Whitehall II studies of Whitehall civil servants (Marmot et al., 1997, 1999). Forbes and Wainwright (2001, p. 810) have commented, but do not develop further, that the evidence and results from the studies appear ‘to be directly related to the Marxian concepts of alienation and exploitation’. The research has identified that among civil servants of differing ranks there are decidedly different experiences of health that appear to relate to how much control a worker has in their workplace. Looking more squarely at the studies a picture of how process alienation is at play can be established. In both studies, there is a clear social gradient in mortality (Marmot et al., 1984) and morbidity (Marmot et al., 1991). In these studies we see how a worker’s health is affected by the extent of their control (examples being, choosing what to do at work, in planning, or in deciding work speed) within their working environment (Bosma et al., 1997), and how on a variety of measures the health, whether physical (for men and women) or mental (mainly for men), is influenced by the position or rank that they hold within the organization (Martikainen et al., 1999). This chimes very much with the alienation that arises out of the labour process where ‘[i]nstead of developing the potential inherent in man’s powers, capitalist labour consumes these powers without replenishing them, burns them up as if they were a fuel, and leaves the individual worker that much poorer’ (Ollman, 1976, p. 137).

It is unlikely that the OFL has ever inquired into reasons why a hierarchy of skilled and less skilled workers arises in the first place; such a hierarchy has advantages from the point of view of the class of employers. Charles Babbage (a pioneer in developing some principles of computer construction in the nineteenth century), published a book in 1832 titled On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, where he pointed out a major advantage for such a hierarchy. From Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, pages 79-80:

In “On the Division of Labour,” Chapter XIX of his On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, the first edition of which was published in 1832, Babbage noted that “the most important and influential cause [of savings from the division of labor] has been altogether unnoticed.” He recapitulates the classic arguments of William Petty, Adam Smith, and the other political economists, quotes from Smith the passage reproduced above about the “three different circumstances” of the division of labor which add to the productivity of labor, and continues:

Now, although all these are important causes, and each has its influence on the result; yet it appears to me, that any explanation of the cheapness of manufactured articles, as consequent upon the division of labour, would be incomplete if the following principle were omitted to be stated.

That the master manufacturer, by dividing the work to be executed into different processes, each requiring different degrees ef skill or ef farce, can purchase exactly that precise quantity ef both which is necessary for each process; whereas, if the whole work were executed by one workman, that person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and sufficient strength to execute the most laborious, ef the operations into which the art is divided. 13

Of course, there may be other explanations of a hierarchical division of labour than the allocation of diverse skills to different individuals for the purpose of cheapening the total wage bill, but this process undoubtedly forms part of the reason why there exists a hierarchical division of labour.

Some workers in that hierarchical division of labour may, on the other hand, be more autonomous than others. Doctors may, for example, be formally employees at hospitals, but their monopoly of certain skills may give them much more autonomy than other employees. Some or even many may form part of the middle class, but other employees in the hierarchy at work have less autonomy–such as nurses, nurses’ aids, food workers and custodians. Greater autonomy at one pole often entails less autonomy (greater oppression) at the other pole. The OFL says nothing about this situation.

Social democrats in various spheres of society (such as the economy, education, health and unions) generally assume the legitimacy of the hierarchical division of labour in society; the OFL likely does so as well. They seek reforms within such hierarchy–rather than challenging such a hierarchy in the first place.

Conclusion

The OFL, like many social-democratic or social-reformist organizations, likely engages in rhetoric when it uses such phrases as “high quality affordable housing” or “accessible and well-funded health care.” Its reference to housing likely refers to public housing in one form or another–which can be just as oppressive as housing funded through mortgages or the paying of rent. Its reference to health care likely refers to health services rather than health care, and it neglects the need to shift some health-care priorities to prevention rather than care. Furthermore, it is silent over the hierarchical (dictatorial) division of labour, which itself has health implications.

Is there any surprise that the right has gained support from some sections of the working class when the social-democratic or social-reformist left fail to address the oppressive nature of public services, or when it fails to criticize the inadequate nature of the current form of public services?

What do you think?

Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The Real Assumption of Some Bureaucratic Tribunals, Part Six

It is supposed to be a fundamental principle of criminal law that a person is presumed innocent until proven otherwise by the State (government). This is the ideology or the rhetoric (which much of the left have swallowed). The reality is otherwise. In reality, the administrative apparatus of various organizations of the government and semi-governmental organizations assume that you are guilty first and that you have to prove your innocence; otherwise, you suffer negative consequences.

An example is the requirements that the Ontario College of Teachers imposed on me in order for me to qualify as a teacher in the province of Ontario after I moved from the province of Manitoba. To qualify as a teacher in Ontario, you must gain the approval of the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT). The OCT website explains what this organization does:

ABOUT THE COLLEGE

The Ontario College of Teachers licenses, governs and regulates the Ontario teaching profession in the public interest.

Teachers who work in publicly funded schools in Ontario must be certified to teach in the province and be members of the College.

The College:

  • sets ethical standards and standards of practice
  • issues teaching certificates and may suspend or revoke them
  • accredits teacher education programs and courses
  • investigates and hears complaints about members

The College is accountable to the public for how it carries out its responsibilities.

You can find the qualifications, credentials and current status of every College member at Find a Teacher.

The College is governed by a 37-member Council.

  • 23 members of the College are elected by their peers
  • 14 members are appointed by the provincial government.

To qualify as a teacher in Ontario, among other things, you have to answer a questionnaire. On the questionnaire, there are questions concerning arrest–and since I was arrested by the RCMP (the Royal Canadian Mounted Police)  (but never convicted), I was obliged to prove my innocence in various ways.

I needed to provide three references from professionals who knew of the circumstances surrounding my arrest and my teaching. 

The following is a letter by one of my references to the Ontario College of Teachers.

From : Wyndstone Circle, East St Paul, MB R2E 0L8 , September 9, 2014

To: Linda Zaks-Walker , Director of Membership Services , Ontario College of Teachers

To Whom It May Concern:

This letter is written in reference to Dr. Fred Harris for whom I am pleased to provide a letter of recommendation. I have known Fred since 2008, the year we both signed permanent Lakeshore School Division contracts with assignments at Ashern Central School involving Fred as Senior French teacher and myself in Special Education with a focus on “At-Risk” high school students. During the period of time Fred was at Ashern, I also found myself teaching Senior Art in the classroom adjacent to Fred. During that period of time , we made a practice of going for tea afterschool once a week at the Bake Shop. That context together with occasional attendance at the same Professional Development workshops provides a basis for the requested response in areas beyond the normal scope of pedagogical reference, as does my general background in teaching, administration, and special education from 1965-1997 when I first retired after 32 years of teaching senior high, with 27 of those years as K-XII School Principal and the final 6 years involving K-XII Special Education as well.

As a person, Fred has always presented as one genuinely interested in the well-being of others. As a teacher, Fred worked diligently to provide appropriate learning activities for his students; he adapted and individualized work as needed; and his classroom was made available through noon hours for those wishing a quiet spot or extra help. His relationship with students and staff was professional in all contexts of which I am aware. He challenged students and staff alike to examine issues of importance and encouraged debate to the degree possible in their respective spheres. He is a temperate man and I have not know him to raise his voice or lose his temper. He displayed commendable patience with some of the more challenging students in our school, and this was especially so in the context of presenting French instruction to many students at ACS who historically had no interest in taking the course in the first place and tended to bemoan the fact that an easier non-french option was denied them by parental or administrative fiat.

As a teacher, Fred was intensely interested in the learning process and he came to understand it profoundly as to application of John Dewey precepts . This produced a teaching stance that involves reflecting on matters of educational importance through every planning process , seeking clarification from our “movers and shakers”, and presenting relevant issues for staff discussion. The fact that average teachers were on a different pedagogical page surprised Fred but did not discourage him. At all times, I found Fred thoughtful, open-minded, ready to share, temperate in his responses, unafraid to question , and welcoming of all thoughtful response.

While this writer intends the foregoing as commendation, it will come as no surprise to administrators that the pro-active professional attributes Fred displays are not universally admired. During Fred’s tenure at Ashern Central School , the Principalship changed three times in four years, bringing with it in each case truly dynamic change throughout the system and also within the subjective filters through which teacher performance may be viewed. It is fair to say that Fred’s current unemployment status relates in significant ways to that change. It no doubt relates also to the imposition of intensive supervision on Fred, even as he faced a life-threatening struggle to overcome cancer. During medical absences throughout this time, Fred’s preparation for substitutes was formidable, and at school on a daily basis, Fred demonstrated amazing resilience in fulfilling teacher duties .

Neither staff, students, nor the public-at-large have knowledge of the personal family problems Fred was facing during this time. During our once- weekly “tea” break over the years, I became privy to most of the circumstances that provided further grist for Fred’s stress mill. Then at the time when matters came to a head with SCFS and RCMP action occasioning Fred’s discreet absence from school, he shared with me antecedent documents that clarified for me the chronology of prior events and specific actions Fred had taken to have the WCFS recognize and address the incidents of Francesca’s physical abuse by her mother. Since then, my only contact with Fred has been via telephone and e-mail conversation but, on that basis, I consider myself reasonably up-to-speed on Francesca’s on-going relationship with her parents and the chronology of Fred’s dealings with WCFS and the RCMP.

Based on all of the foregoing, the following personal observations, questions, and recommendations accrue:

  • In all of the school contexts of which I am aware, Fred has presented himself as a very professional , hard-working teacher very much in command of whatever curriculum be put before him. He would not describe himself as a “ fun teacher ” and being liked was for him much less a priority than having students meet curriculum outcomes at the highest standard possible for each individual. At different times, both Fred and I had occasion to do some teaching at the Alf Cuthbert School in Moosehorn, a K-VIII facility with historically high levels of community support and outstanding student attainment. Teachers like Fred thrive in that kind of school environment and are well regarded by staff and students alike and at Ashern Central School ( the receiving school for Moosehorn high school students ), this relationship continues across all contexts. It should be noted that ACS presents unique challenges to all teachers as they endeavor to engage students from thirteen disparate communities, almost all of whom are at significant disconnect from the school. In the context of the French courses Fred found himself teaching, engagement of students and achieving home support proves most difficult and indeed nigh onto impossible if for any reason a teacher finds himself on what I call “the dumb list”. That is the general circumstance in which Fred found himself while facing a regime of clinical teacher evaluation at a time of extreme health vulnerability. His resignation was no doubt a personal health necessity. Given an opportunity to teach again elsewhere, do I believe Fred could be a worthy candidate? My considered opinion is “Yes” , and I profoundly hope he gets that opportunity.

  • Throughout the period of time I have known Fred, addressing daughter Francesca’s needs lay at the heart of Fred’s family focus. That he loved and cared for her was always clear. That Francesca carried emotional and behavioral baggage with her wherever she went was also clear, be it in the contexts of living separately with mum, dad, extended family including her mother’s aunt and cousin, or in foster home placement. From what I understand, events which explain Francesca’s behavior may include sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend and the pattern of physical abuse by her mother which became cause for reference to WCFS by Fred. From what I also understand, systemic failure by WCFS and the RCMP to satisfactorily acknowledge and address Francesca’s abuse also occurred, and Fred’s written efforts to take these organizations to task through letters sent severally to The Minister of Justice, the Minister of Education, and the Premier himself no doubt proved counterproductive . Given Fred’s background as a Marxist scholar and his predisposition to characterize CFS actions as fascist, systemic responses by CFS and RCMP directed at Fred were immediate when Francesca indulged in what I would take to be learned behaviors which involve lashing out physically and playing abuse cards as a means of precipitating change in her home circumstance. Do I believe that Fred would act physically towards Francesca in any manner beyond necessary physical restraint? No. Do I believe there was any substance to the charges directed at Fred in the first instance and then while Francesca was living unhappily with Fred at Ashern? No, and the fact that charges only appear but to disappear confirms that opinion. Does an abusive father continue to express his love for his daughter? Not usually. Advocate that her need be met for a systemic admission that she has indeed been abused by her mother? Not forseeably. Follow with great interest Francesca’s progress while in foster care while she then completed high school at Morwena’s private school? No. As a relatively poor man, take his daughter on a two month trip to Guatemala? No. And finally, continue to follow with love and great interest as his daughter takes her place in the world of work and independence? No. Based on my background knowledge of Fred and every bit of gut instinct, my answer to all these questions is “No”. From everything I have been able to see and interpret, Fred actions towards Francesca are those of a loving , concerned, and responsible parent.

  • Surely, Fred’s present quest to return to teaching in Ontario needs to be given a fair opportunity. He has lots to offer and hopefully a long life ahead of him to contribute meaningfully towards student equity and a world where there is greater social justice for all.

  • My hope is that those adjudicating the case for Fred’s admission to teaching in Ontario will recognize from my words that the baggage with which Fred must presently travel in his career quest appears to have been packed prejudicially . This letter comes to you from one who retired for the second time in June ,2014 at the age of 71, having enjoyed almost every moment of what-has-been a distinguished 38 year career ! During the course of it, I have had occasion to both hire and fire teachers, and the views I offer herein represent , without prejudice, a deeply considered opinion in regard to Fred’s candidacy for consideration .

Yours sincerely,

R.Glen Langton

A Principal’s Evaluation of My Teaching Basic French, or: How to Oppress a Worker Through Performance Evaluation, Part Five

The following is the fifth of several posts that provide a verbatim reply (with a somewhat different order) to a “clinical evaluation” (a performance evaluation of my teaching) made by the principal of Ashern Central School (Ashern, Manitoba, Canada), Neil MacNeil, in the fall of 2011 when I was teaching grades 6, 7 and 8 French.

I provided Mr. MacNeil’s assessment grade by grade in separate posts, followed by my reflections (response). In other words, the performance evaluation of the three grades is distributed over three posts.

The previous post referred to the first area of peformance evaluation criteria (Domain I, Professional Responsibilities), with Mr. MacNeil’s comments and my reflections (response).

This post deals with the performance evaluation criteria of Domain II (Educational Environments), with Mr. MacNeil’s comments and my reflections (response).

Two further posts will follow in the future that include performance criteria for Domain III (Teaching and Learning) and Domain IV (Professional Relationships),  Mr. MacNeil’s comments and my reflections (responses).

The radical left should expose both what management does and how it does it. Discussion of the situation that various kinds of employees face need to be openly discussed, but to do that it is necessary to expose, in a transparent way, managerial behaviour.

Some of my responses will make sense only in conjunction with my responses in earlier posts (such as when I refer to something that I mentioned “above.” I invite the reader to read earlier posts in this series to better understand the context.

Lakeshore School Division

Teacher Clinical Evaluation Report

Teacher: Fred Harris
School: Ashern Central School
Subject/Grade: MY French; ELA Trans. Focus 30S; SY Support

The teacher and administrator will review Administrative Regulations and Procedures Evaluation Process-Professional Staff (2.3)

Domain 2: Educational Environments

2a. Creating an environment of respect and rapport

2b. Establishing a culture for learning

2c. Establishing and maintaining classroom procedures

2d. Managing student behaviour

2e. Organization of physical space

Administrator’s Comments

Grade 6 French is being taught in the grade 6 classroom. Grades 7 and 8 French are being taught in a classroom provided to Fred at the beginning of the second quarter (mid-November). Fred has been encouraged by me to make the classroom an engaging and invigorating environment for students, and some suggestions were provided to him a month ago, especially in terms of keeping the room organized. At this point, he has put 8 – 10 posters up on bulletin boards in the room, although these are not well situated for use by students, nor have they been seen to be utilized by students during the observations. Some older posters (e.g. a written alphabet) and a map continue to be present at the front of the room. There are tables arrayed across the front of the room, in front of the whiteboard. These appear to impede Fred when he writes on the whiteboard, and would block any shorter students from being able to do so (although that has not happened). There is a variety of materials scattered across these tables, elsewhere in the room, and on Fred’s desk which usually appear to be disorganized and scattered. This lack of organization has been previously identified by both Fred and previous administrators as something requiring remediation, as far back as three years ago.

Students did not demonstrate any significant respect for, nor rapport with Fred during observed lessons. There were many instances where Fred seemed to be striving for their attention and interest, and they would instead seem to ignore or actively disrupt what he was doing. Students will put their heads down, doodle, speak with one another, and otherwise indicate a lack of interest in the lesson. Fred will often respond by telling students to pay attention and/or to cease the behaviour indicating their lack of engagement. They will respond either by completely ignoring the request, or complying for a moment and then quickly resuming the behaviour. e.g. Lifting their head from the desk, and then putting it down again in a few seconds. Stopping their doodling, and then resuming when Fred turns around. Getting up and walking around the class, and then continuing as though they haven’t heard Fred tell them to sit down again, as Fred goes back to trying to continue with the lesson.

After three months of French classes, many students still come to class without their binders or other resources. Fred has remonstrated with them, but the situation continues. Other procedures appear to be enforced/reinforced sporadically, and students have not yet learned to follow them. For example, Fred will at times tell students that they must raise their hands to speak, and at other times allow them to speak without doing so. He will tell them that they must not interrupt him, but sometimes respond to their comments or questions when they do interrupt him without insisting upon not doing so. As we have discussed appropriate methods of establishing classroom routines and managing student behaviours, Fred has alternately maintained that he believes he is doing an appropriate job of doing so, and that he needs to become a better disciplinarian. In any event, Fred has indicated that these negative behaviours are a result of not having been “hard enough” on the students, and has not observed that the behaviours are a result of any want on his part in terms of generating and maintaining appropriate student engagement in the subject. At the end of each observed class, there was no summation of the class’s learning during the period, and students moved on to other activities or preparing for recess while ignoring Fred’s last words about what might happen next class (said in a low voice while he was walking out of the room).

Teacher’s Reflections

Re: “Grade 6 French is being taught in the grade 6 classroom. Grades 7 and 8 French are being taught in a classroom provided to Fred at the beginning of the second quarter (mid-November). Fred has been encouraged by me to make the classroom an engaging and invigorating environment for students, and some suggestions were provided to him a month ago, especially in terms of keeping the room organized. At this point, he has put 8 – 10 posters up on bulletin boards in the room, although these are not well situated for use by students, nor have they been seen to be utilized by students during the observations. Some older posters (e.g. a written alphabet) and a map continue to be present at the front of the room. There are tables arrayed across the front of the room, in front of the whiteboard. These appear to impede Fred when he writes on the whiteboard, and would block any shorter students from being able to do so (although that has not happened). There is a variety of materials scattered across these tables, elsewhere in the room, and on Fred’s desk which usually appear to be disorganized and scattered. This lack of organization has been previously identified by both Fred and previous administrators as something requiring remediation, as far back as three years ago.”

This is true. I have since addressed the immediate issue of the tables by separating them somewhat. It organization will be a continuous work in progress for me.

Re: “Students did not demonstrate any significant respect for, nor rapport with Fred during observed lessons. There were many instances where Fred seemed to be striving for their attention and interest, and they would instead seem to ignore or actively disrupt what he was doing. Students will put their heads down, doodle, speak with one another, and otherwise indicate a lack of interest in the lesson. Fred will often respond by telling students to pay attention and/or to cease the behaviour indicating their lack of engagement. They will respond either by completely ignoring the request, or complying for a moment and then quickly resuming the behaviour. e.g. Lifting their head from the desk, and then putting it down again in a few seconds. Stopping their doodling, and then resuming when Fred turns around. Getting up and walking around the class, and then continuing as though they haven’t heard Fred tell them to sit down again, as Fred goes back to trying to continue with the lesson.”

I was unaware of certain misbehaviours—as I indicated above. The administrator abstracts from the judgement of the previous teacher of the grade 6 class as well as the teacher who was present during the observation. Some in the grade 7 class did not pay attention, but many asked questions and raised their hand to do so. The grade 8 class, on the other hand, is indeed disengaged. As I have said, I am trying to address that issue.

As for respect—it is earned, not imposed. True respect emerges through sharing in common goals and concerns. It is a process that takes time—especially when children live in impoverished conditions and may have a difficult time trusting adults—as many students in the grade 6 class probably do.

I indeed made a major error in accepting the behaviour of certain students in French in the past; however, I think there is a difference between shenanigans (throwing a paper airplane) and insulting a teacher. I have learned that certain behaviours by children are disrespectful and require firm measures that I am working to further develop and employ as a more mutually respectful classroom.

Re: “After three months of French classes, many students still come to class without their binders or other resources. Fred has remonstrated with them, but the situation continues.”

The use of the adverb “still” implies that the students have persistently not come to class with their binders. Some, at the beginning of the school year, did not come with needed supplies, so I instituted a system of detention. That stopped for awhile. Since some did not bring their binders to class (the change of rooms might have been a factor), I reminded them to do so. The administrator, as usual, interpreted the situation in the most negative light possible.

Re: “Other procedures appear to be enforced/reinforced sporadically, and students have not yet learned to follow them. For example, Fred will at times tell students that they must raise their hands to speak, and at other times allow them to speak without doing so. He will tell them that they must not interrupt him, but sometimes respond to their comments or questions when they do interrupt him without insisting upon not doing so.”

I admit that I might have to be more consistent in this area, but as I indicated above, a rigid adherence to rules seems to be counterproductive. Furthermore, if I tried to “insist upon adherence to the rules,” the administrator would probably criticize me for that as well—as he did above.

Re: “As we have discussed appropriate methods of establishing classroom routines and managing student behaviours, Fred has alternately maintained that he believes he is doing an appropriate job of doing so, and that he needs to become a better disciplinarian.”

The administrator did suggest, constructively, that I differentiate instruction for one student in grade 7. When I asked him for other suggestions about other situations, he stated that it was the responsibility of the teacher to come up with a solution.

Re: “In any event, Fred has indicated that these negative behaviours are a result of not having been “hard enough” on the students, and has not observed that the behaviours are a result of any want on his part in terms of generating and maintaining appropriate student engagement in the subject.”

I did believe that the methods I was trying to use were “higher order” methods of learning. If there are other, superior methods that can be recommended, I am willing to try them. I certainly see the need to adapt my pedagogy in the case of the grade 8s.

My reference to not being “hard enough” is simply a recognition that sometimes I have not established or followed rules when I should have done so.

Re: “At the end of each observed class, there was no summation of the class’s learning during the period, and students moved on to other activities or preparing for recess while ignoring Fred’s last words about what might happen next class (said in a low voice while he was walking out of the room).”

That is a useful observation. I should sum up the lesson and be more firm before the end of the class.

Socialism, What It May Look Like: The Series

I have written a number of posts as series rather than just one long post. This is due to a number of reasons. To work out a view requires elaboration and time, and posting as a series permits such elaboration over a longer period of time. Also, I have many interests (which correspond in part to my own experiences as an oppressed and exploited worker, oppressed father and so forth).

However, I thought it may be useful to some readers to string series that I may not expand further into one long post in order to present more content on the same theme. I will not edit the series to make it more like one long essay; readers can pick and choose the posts that interest them.

I will probably do this with various other series on this blog.

Socialism, Part One: What It May Look Like

“My wife asked me what other kind of society could we live than the one we are living now. I suspect that most people have the same kind of question. It is difficult to imagine another kind of life than the life that we have experienced all our lives.

There are, of course, no magic answers. The answers will be experimental, with some failures and some successes, and not in ideal circumstances, of course.

However, some ideas can still be provided about some possible ways of living that provide an alternative vision–a vision so obviously lacking among the so-called left these days.

Tony Smith, in his book Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account (2006. Boston: Brill), provides a description of some aspects of a possible future kind of society. He borrows his model largely from David Schweichart’s model of economic democracy in After Capitalism (2002) (which I have not read). He adds three modifications of his own.

I will cut and paste short pieces from this work. He paints various aspects of a socialist society that need to be incorporated into a socialist society. There are undoubtedly other aspects, and his own account may have to be modified.

I will not pursue the topic week after week after week until the topic is exhausted since there are other topics which I consider relevant–above all a critique of the power of the class of employers, but also a critique of the social-reformist left and the so-called radical left that do not question the power of employers as a class.

From Smith’s book, page 303:

The model Schweickart defends has the following essential elements:

(i) Production and distribution are primarily undertaken within worker
collectives. Workers are not hired as wage-labourers by capital; they instead
join worker collectives as fellow members. There is a basic right to employment,
with state enterprises providing jobs for those unable to find positions in
collectives.

This condition is to initiate a reduction in economic coercion as an essential move towards an increase in economic and individual freedom.

There is, of course, a possible problem of increased inefficiency, but Smith addresses this issue in further democratic socialist measures.

 Socialism, Part Two: What It May Look Like

The following is a continuation of an earlier post (Socialism, Part One: What It May Look Like) about the nature of socialism–which is a solution to problems that capitalism, characterized by the domination of a class of employers, cannot solve. Socialism is not something that emerges from a utopian view independently of the nature of capitalism but requires a critical approach to capitalism.

In the following, Tony Smith elaborates on the democratic nature of the workplace, which is subject to control not only by the workers at the particular workplace electing managers but also by certain community organizations that represent specific community interests. From  Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account (2006. Boston: Brill), page 303:

(ii) Managers of worker collectives are democratically accountable to those
over whom they exercise authority, either through direct elections or through
appointment by a workers’ council that is itself directly elected. These
enterprises are required to have representatives from a range of social
movements (environmental groups, consumer groups, feminist groups, and
so on) on their boards of directors, accountable to those movements.

What do you think of such proposals? How do they relate to democracy? To the lack of democracy in your life? Do you think that such proposals are worth fighting for?

Socialism, Part Three: What It May Look Like, or Visions of a Better Kind of Society Without Employers

The following is a continuation of an earlier post (Socialism, Part Two: What It May Look Like) about the nature of socialism–which is a solution to problems that capitalism, characterized by the domination of a class of employers, cannot solve. Socialism is not something that emerges from a utopian view independently of the nature of capitalism but requires a critical approach to capitalism.

In the following, Michael Perelman contrasts what many people experience in their lives: their own contrast between an activity which they enjoy doing and their experience working for an employer, which they often enough find to be draining.

From Michael Perelman, The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011),

Just What Is Work?

To understand the potential for transforming the economy, consider a simple example that does not require much of a stretch of the imagination. Just think of the enormous contrast between farm work for wages and gardening as a hobby. Farm work is considered to be so abhorrent in the United States that we regularly hear that only foreign-born workers are willing to perform it. Supposedly, upstanding citizens of the United States would never subject themselves to the life of a farm worker for poverty wages.

While farm labor may be among the hardest, most dangerous work in our society, many people regard gardening as a pleasant diversion. While the United Farm Workers Union represents mostly downtrodden workers, a good number of wealthy people are proud affiliates of their blue-blood garden clubs. Over and above the time they spend in their gardens, many gardeners enthusiastically devote considerable leisure time to conversing or reading in order to become better gardeners. In addition, many gardeners also willingly spend substantial sums for equipment and supplies to use in their gardens.

What, then, is the underlying difference between farm work and gardening? Farm work typically entails hard physical labor, but many gardeners also exert themselves in their gardens. The difference lies in the context of gardening. Gardeners, unlike farm workers, freely choose to be gardeners. During the time they work in their gardens, they want to be gardening. Nobody tells them what to do. Gardeners are producing for themselves rather than for someone else who will benefit from their work.

As the psychologist John Neulinger says: “Everyone knows the difference between doing something because one has to and doing something because one wants to.”43 We should also keep in mind that society respects gardeners. Our newspapers regularly print features of interest to gardeners. Some even have special sections to appeal to their affluent gardening readers. All the while, the lives of farm workers pass virtually unnoticed. In our society, farm work is never “respectable” work; well-to-do families would not approve of their children becoming farm workers.

Of course, gardeners are not entirely free to follow their whims. The rhythms of the seasons and the sudden shifts in the weather dictate some of what the gardeners do, but gardeners generally accept these demands beforehand. …

As suggested earlier, the key to the Procrustean trap is not the threat of physical force but rather the inability to imagine anything outside of the constrained present circumstances. The willingness to take seriously Margaret Thatcher’s preposterous claim—“There is no alternative”—perfectly sums up this state of mind.

A writer for Bloomberg.com reminisced about Thatcher’s Procrustean destructive success:

Of course, it’s possible to change a society and to drag it into the global economic monoculture. Mrs. Thatcher showed how: Break up collectives and make people feel a little bit more alone in the world. Cut a few holes in the social safety net. Raise the status of money-making, and lower the status of every other activity. Stop giving knighthoods to artists and start giving them to department-store moguls. Stop listening to intellectuals and start listening to entrepreneurs and financiers.
Stick to the plan long enough and the people who are good at making money acquire huge sums and, along with them, power. In time, they become the culture’s dominant voice. And they love you for it.46

Thatcher’s scheme actually worked. Her acolytes were so convinced that the mere utterance of Thatcher’s acronym TINA seemed sufficient to cut off any debate with skeptics.

The social-democratic or social-reformist left in Toronto certainly has reinforced the TINA principle. The so-called radical left, by keeping silent out of fear of becoming isolated, themselves becomes part of the social-democratic left. They, like the social-reformist left, provide no real alternative vision to the oppressive and exploitative nature of work characteristic of the power of employers as a class.

In fact, through their silence and their lack of criticism, they contribute to the perpetuation of class rule. They are, practically, social reformists who will never go beyond the existing class system despite their rhetoric of class struggle and struggle from below.

Socialism, Part Four: What It May Look Like, or Visions of a Better Kind of Society Without Employers


The following is a continuation of previous posts on the possible nature of socialism that excludes the power of employers as a class.

In the following, Tony Smith elaborates on the democratic nature of the workplace, which is subject to control not only by the workers at the particular workplace electing managers but also by certain community organizations that represent specific community interests. From Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account (2006. Boston: Brill), page 303:

(iii) Worker collectives produce public goods, inputs into the production process, or final consumption goods. Funds for the first are directly allocated to collectives by the relevant planning agencies (see below). The latter two categories of products are offered for sale in producer and consumer markets. In Schweickart’s view, attempts to centrally plan all inputs and outputs in a top-down fashion are simply not feasible, at least not in a complex and dynamic economy. But it does not follow that capitalist market societies are the only acceptable forms of economic organisation. It is possible to imagine a feasible and normatively attractive society combining markets with the socialisation of the means of production, that is, a society making use of producer and consumer markets after abolishing both capital markets and
labour markets.

In addition to the elimination of a market for workers and management of work enterprises being accountable to work councils and community councils, capital markets in the sense of an investment process owned by a minority would no longer exist. There would, nonetheless, be markets that produced means of production and markets that produced consumption goods. For example, at the brewery where I worked, the workers who produced the soaker or the filler that the brewery workers used would be subject to competition from other workers who produce soakers or fillers. Workers in the brewery would be subject to competition from workers in other breweries.

Unfortunately, Smith does not elaborate much on what he means by the abolition of capital markets. His reference to David Schweickart’s work Against Capitalism, however, gives a clue to what he means. Schweikart has the following to say (page 172):

First, we issue a decree abolishing all enterprise obligations to pay interest or stock dividends to private individuals or private institutions.

This decree will need no enforcement, since enterprises are not going to insist on paying what they are no longer legally obligated to pay.

But Schweickart sees a flaw in the abolition of all capital markets, at least immediately (page 173):

6.3.2 Once More, This Time with Feeling (for the Stockholders)

Too Simple? Of course. The above is not meant to be a realistic scenario. Above all, it fails to take into account the fact that millions of ordinary citizens (not only capitalists) have resources tied up in the financial markets. People with savings accounts or holdings in stocks and bonds have been counting on their dividend and interest checks. (Nearly half of all American households have direct or indirect holdings in the stock market, mostly in pension plans.) Eliminating all dividend and interest income-which is what Radical Quick does-will not strike these fellow citizens as a welcome reform. Let us run through our story again, this time complicating it to take into account their legitimate concerns.

Schweickart, realistically, recognizes that workers have investments in capital markets and hence are in some ways tied to such markets. His solution is to imagine a situation where at least the key corporations, due to the circumstances of a crisis, would be subject to elimination from capital markets (pages 173-174):

Let me first set the stage a little more fully than I did with Radical Quick. Let us suppose that a genuine counterproject to capitalism has developed, and that, gradually gaining in strength, it has been able to elect a leftist government that has put most of the reforms outlined earlier in this chapter on the table and has secured the passage of some of them. Suppose investors decide they’ve had enough and begin cashing in their stock holdings. A stock-market crash ensues. In reaction, the citizenry decide that they too have had enough-and give their leftist government an even stronger mandate to take full responsibility for an economy now tumbling into crisis.

Our new government declares a bank holiday, pending reorganization (as Roosevelt did following his election in 1932). All publicly traded corporations are declared to be worker-controlled. Note: This control extends only to corporations, not to small businesses or even to privately held capitalist firms. It is decided that it will be sufficient  to redefine property rights only in those firms for which ownership has already been largely separated from management. (With the “commanding heights” of the economy now democratized, most other firms can be expected to come under increased pressure from their own workers, over time, to follow suit.)

The exact way in which capital markets would be reduced and eventually abolished would vary across time and place, depending on circumstances.

As I have emphasized throughout this blog, though, it is much less likely that workers will be receptive to a call for the elimination of capital markets and markets for workers unless they find the situation to be unfair. The ideology of the social-reformist left consistently makes reference to fairness within the limits of the employer-employee relation. We need to break with such ideology if we are to initiate such a process without having to respond erratically when a crisis hits.

Or are there alternatives? What do you think?

Socialism, Part Five: What It May Look Like, or Visions of a Better Kind of Society Without Employers


The following is a continuation of previous posts on the possible nature of socialism that excludes the power of employers as a class.

In the following, Tony Smith elaborates on the right of use by workers of the places, machinery and so forth where they work, but with the local community being the owner of local resources (and regional and national communities being the owners of regional and national enterprises of regional or national scope). From Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account (2006. Boston: Brill), page 304:

(iv) Workers in enterprises are granted use rights to facilities and other
means of production. But ultimate ownership rights remain with the local
community. Workers cannot use their enterprise as a cash cow and then walk
away; they have a legal duty to maintain the value of the community’s
investments. If sufficient depreciation funds cannot be appropriated from
revenues to maintain the value of these investments, it is the responsibility
of community banks to shut down an enterprise. Once depreciated funds
have been deducted, the remainder of the revenues from public allocations
or sales in consumer/producer markets (apart from the taxes to be considered
below) are then distributed among the members of the collective according
to formulae set by the democratically accountable management

Since the workers are the trustees of the workplaces and not their owners, each year, the workers in the sector that produces either consumer goods for the market or the raw material, machines and so forth required to produce both themselves and consumer goods, have to set aside a certain amount of the proceeds from sales to purchase worn out means of production. The workers must also include in that depreciation fund a fund for repairs.

Workers have a responsibility to the present community and to future communities to maintain the general conditions for the continued livelihood of the community. This means that any cooperative that fails to maintain the value of the means of production must be closed down, and workers in such cooperatives must find work in another, more viable cooperative.

The sales revenue will be distributed generally into three parts: (1) the depreciation fund, (2) a tax on capital assets (which will be explained in another post), and a residual of what is called profits, to be distributed to the members of the cooperative as their personal income according to distribution rules created by themselves. (There also may be income tax and consumption tax, but I will not address that).


Socialism, Part Six: What It May Look Like, or Visions of a Better Kind of Society Without Employers

The following is a continuation of previous posts on the possible nature of socialism that excludes the power of employers as a class.

In the following, Tony Smith elaborates on the capital-assets tax, which is the basis for the generation of new investment and the supply of public goods. From Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account (2006. Boston: Brill), pages 304-305:



(v) The origin of funds for new investment and public goods is a flat tax
on the non-labour assets of all enterprises.16 In Schweickart’s proposal, the
rate of this tax is initially set by a democratically elected legislature, operating
on the national level. This legislature also decides on the appropriate division
of revenues between funding for national public goods and funds that are
allocated to democratically elected regional and local legislative bodies. Each
of these assemblies, in turn, must also decide upon the level of funding for
public goods to be supplied in the relevant geographical area vis-à-vis the
level of funds set aside for distribution to the level below it. These legislative
bodies can also set aside a percentage of funds for investment in areas of
pressing social needs.


(vi) After all decisions have been made regarding the general level of new
investment and the order of social priorities, and after funds required for
public goods on the national, regional, and local levels have been allocated, the remaining revenues are distributed to local communities on a per capita
basis (at least this should be the presumption in the absence of compelling
reasons to do otherwise, such as the need to temporarily favour historically
disadvantaged regions). Community banks would then undertake the actual
allocation of new investment funds to worker collectives. The boards of
directors of these banks would include representatives of a broad range of
social groups affected by the banks’ decisions. New enterprises would be
formed, and existing ones expanded, through allocations by community banks
rather than private capital markets.


The capital-assets tax assumes that the workers have right of use of most of the means of production of our lives (there may be some room for independent businesses, but they do not form the bulk of economic activity). If they do, then instead of new investment being derived from the private decisions of boards of directors of corporations, it is derived from a democratically-elected national legislature which sets the rate of the capital-assets tax.

There are two general aspects to the tax (like any tax): the flow from a source to the government and the flow of the tax to institutions. The source is the capital assets used by democratic worker cooperatives. It is a flat-rate tax based on the value of the means of production that is applied to capital assets used by workers.

The flow of the revenue generated by the tax to people only arises after deductions from revenue required for investment in projects at the national level. Once this has been deducted, then the revenue is distributed to the regional communities on a perc capita (per person) basis; the regional democratic bodies which in turn allocate investment funds for investment in projects at the regional level. The remainder is then allocated to the local community via public banks, likewise on a per capita (per person) basis.

This principle of distribution of the revenue generated from the capital-assets tax on a per capita basis means that, in areas where there is a concentration of means of production relative to the number of people who live in the area, the outflow of taxes paid will be relatively greater than the inflow of revenue from taxes when compared to areas where the concentration of means of production is relatively smaller.

The capital-assets tax is to replace interest and dividend payments. As noted in the previous post on this topic, since many workers in the more industrialized capitalist countries have at least some investments in the stock market or hold bonds, GICs, and so forth and, furthermore, pension funds are generally linked to investment, a policy that at one sweep sought to abolish interest and dividend payments may well be opposed by the working class, initially. Consequently, some form of transitional program may be necessary, one where interest and dividend payments are gradually phased out, or one where compensation for nationalization occurs. In any case, the ultimate goal is to abolish interest and dividend payments and replace them with a flat capital-assets tax.

Socialism, Part Seven: What It May Look Like, or Visions of a Better Kind of Society Without Employers

The following is a continuation of previous posts on the possible nature of socialism that excludes the power of employers as a class.

In the following, Tony Smith elaborates on the criteria to be used in the distribution of the flat-rate capital-assets tax, which is the basis for the generation of new investment (and which was outlined in the last post on this topic). From Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account (2006. Boston: Brill), page 305:

(vii) When allocating investment funds for new worker collectives and the
expansion of existing ones, community banks must take three main questions
into account. Is there likely to be sufficient demand for the output of the given
enterprise for it to maintain the value of the community’s investment and
provide adequate income for its members? Will the investment provide stable
employment? And is the investment consistent with the set of social priorities
democratically affirmed on the national, regional and local levels? Extensive
external financial and social audits can be regularly imposed on all enterprises
and community banks to assess their performances in terms of these criteria.
These independent social audits are a crucial component of the socialist version
of the principle of transparency, institutionalising a level of accountability
and transparency far beyond the limited neoliberal version of the principle.17
Community banks can then be ranked on the basis of the results of these
audits. The level of income of the staff of a particular bank, and the amount
of funds allocated to this bank for distribution in the future, are determined
by the bank’s place in this ranking.

The distribution of investment funds to existing and new worker collectives through community banks would be controlled by taking into account:

  1. Whether the level of demand would likely be sufficient to not only maintain the value of the means of production (machinery, buildings and so forth) but to ensure a reasonable income for the working members of the cooperative.
  2. Whether the investment would result in unemployment of the members, or would there be sufficient work for all members (without jeopardizing efficiency, presumably).
  3. Whether the investment would result in effects that contribute to the realization of plans democratically decided on at the local, regional and national levels.

To ensure that these criteria for lending to worker cooperatives via public banks were satisfied, social audits could be carried out systematically and transparently. Since the revenue of workers in public banks would be a function of their success in extending loans based on the three criteria (and subject to social audits), workers in public banks would be motivated to more likely extend loans to worker cooperatives that were most likely to meet these three criteria.

Socialism, Part Eight: What It May Look Like, or Visions of a Better Kind of Society Without Employers

This is a continuation of earlier posts on the subject of the nature of socialism–a society that aims at the abolition of the power of employers as a class and the initial appropriation of the necessary requirements for us to control our lives as a collectivity and as individuals.

In the following, Tony Smith elaborates on some kinds of relations that may emerge between a nation that is socialist and other nations (whether socialist or not). From Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account (2006. Boston: Brill), pages 305-306:

(viii) In Schweickart’s model, there are no markets for capital assets, and
so there will be no capital flight in the form of cross-border investments in
capital assets. There will also be little foreign direct investment, since worker
collectives are unlikely to outsource their own jobs, and community banks
are assessed according to the extent they create employment in their own
communities. But there will still be trade across borders. For a period of time,
this may include trade with regions that have not institutionalised a version of economic democracy. In such circumstances, regions committed to socialist
globalisation should follow the principle of fair trade rather than ‘free’ trade.
To ensure that this occurs, Schweickart calls for a ‘social tariff’.18 If oppressive
labour practices hold down wage levels in a given region, the prices of imports
from that region will be raised to what they would have been had worker
income been comparable to the level prevailing in the importing country. A
social tariff will also be imposed to compensate for a lack of adequate spending
on the environment, worker health and safety, or social welfare in the exporting
nation. The revenues collected by this tariff will then be distributed to the
groups in the exporting country with the best record of effectively implementing
anti-poverty programmes, whether or not they are agencies of the government

There will little if any flow of capital investment beyond the borders of the socialist nation (hence little or no capital flight); workers are unlikely to invest abroad rather than locally since this would result in loss of employment. Furthermore, community banks would prevent such investment through its enforcement of the criteria of employment creation (see previous post).

It is possible that trade between socialist and non-socialist nations would still occur. In trade between a socialist nation and a capitalist nation, the socialist nation would create a social tariff, imposing it to prevent unfair competition on the basis of capitalist ways of producing wealth (such as reduced wages or lack of health and safety measures).

This social tariff, rather than being used for the benefit of the socialist workers and community members, would flow back to workers in the non-socialist world as an expression of solidarity with them via agencies or organizations of the exporting non-capitalist country that have proven to be effective enforcers of anti-poverty measures in the non-capitalist country.

Smith adds three other measures that have an international focus: (1) the creation of international monetary clearing units, which would serve as world money that would function, among other things, to ensure that excessive trade imbalances would not arise, especially for the more vulnerable parts of the world economy; (2) a global representative assembly that would legislate and oversee issues between nations in a much more democratic manner than the current United Nations model; and, finally, (3) a democratically accountable international planning agency that would ensure equitable investment funding for the provision of international public goods, distributed according to the number of people (per capita), with provisions for exceptions on the basis of past historical biases of economic development.

All these measures refer to what has come to be known as “market socialism.” Such a system, if democratically organized, would likely not only be more efficient than a capitalist economy but definitely superior in terms of ethics. However, before addressing that issue in further posts, I will, in a future post, consider whether the idea of market socialism is an adequate model for a future society without capitalism, or whether it leaves out of consideration some essential aspects that need to be considered if we are to resolve our social problems on this planet.

Socialism, Part Nine: An Inadequate Conception of the Nature of Freedom and Necessity, or Free Time and Necessary Time, Part One

The class formal principle of employers–that workers receive from society what they contribute (contradicted at a practical level through systematic exploitation of workers necessarily in a capitalist context–that is why it is a formal principle that contradicts reality–see  for example The Rate of Exploitation of Workers at Magna International Inc., One of the Largest Private Employers in Toronto, Part One) would be realized in a socialist society on average since exploitation of one class by another would be eliminated. However, the principle of relating individual life to labour is still a bourgeois or capitalist principle that needs to targeted because it still reduces human beings to merely one criterion–labour. From  Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, pages 86-87 of Marx-Engels Collected Works, volume 24):

Hence, equal right here is still in principle bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange only exists on the average and not in the individual case.

In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly encumbered by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour. But one man is superior to another physically or mentally and so supplies more labour in the same time, or can work for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal  abour. It recognises no class distinctions, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognises the unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity of the workers as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right by its nature can exist only as the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable by an equal standard only insofar as they are made subject to an equal criterion, are taken from a certain side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Besides, one worker is married, another not; one has more children than another, etc., etc. Thus, given an equal amount of work done, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, etc. To avoid all these defects, right would have to be unequal rather than equal.

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birthpangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development which this determines.

Neither Tony Smith nor Schweickart, both advocates of market socialism, refer to this. For Schweickart at least, any elimination of the market economy will lead to various negative effects, such as authoritarian conditions. Sam Gindin, similarly, does not take into consideration the inadequacy of markets as an expression of human freedom.

This model so far is a market-socialist model. Rather than conceiving it as a definitive model of how future society will work, however, we should consider it as a transition society that may last for longer than Marx thought but, nonetheless, is itself inadequate.

This inadequacy can be seen in the omission by Smith and Schweickart of any consideration of the need to transform the division of labour. In Schweickart’s book, for example, there is no discussion at all of the division of labour. If we are to live in a full life, though, we need to reduce or eliminate the gap between labour that is predominantly physical and labour that is predominantly intellectual.

Another aspect over which both Smith and Schweickart are silent is the implication for human beings if prices are to continue to exist. Schweickart does not directly address the question, but his assumption that prices will always exist fails to address the problem of the continued valuation of objects ultimately in terms of labour. Marx’s theory of exploitation is not just a critique of exploitation but a critique of the form of exploitation–through the mediation of relations between objects instead of a conscious connection with other human beings. Human beings, via ultimately money, are related to each other via objectified labour measured externally as money.

Market socialism may well be needed for some time, but it is inadequate as a form of society for human beings. At first, it is necessary to create a society where the reality of labour time being the measure of human wealth corresponds to the principle of determination by labour time: what workers contribute to society and what they receive from it do not differ quantitatively (workers are not exploited).

However, the principle of the life process is still based on one principle–labour and its measure, time. The human life process, however, is much more than this process, and the need for human beings will be to surpass this principle and to break the link between contribution and the flow of goods and services based on that contribution.

Now, let us listen to a person who claims to aim at realistic socialism–Sam Gindin, head of the Toronto Labour Committee (and former research director for the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) (now Unifor). Mr. Gindin implies that, due to what he calls scarcity, we will always need a market form of socialism:

Scarcity — the need to make choices between alternative uses of labor time and resources — is unlikely to end outside of utopian fantasies because popular demands, even when transformed into collective/socialist demands, are remarkably elastic: they can continue to grow. Think especially of better health care, more and richer education, greater care for the aged, the expansion of art and of cultural spaces — all of which require labor time and generally also complementary material goods. That is, they demand choices.

Furthermore, the calculation of scarcity can in particular not ignore leisure, with leisure representing the “realm of freedom.” Even if we produced enough of what we wanted, as long as some of that labor isn’t completely voluntary but instrumental, then effective scarcity of either labor time or the good/service remains. Workers may even like their jobs and see them as a source of creative expression and satisfaction, but as long as they’d periodically prefer to not show up or leave early, some further inducement is needed to offset the sacrifice of providing those labor hours. That inducement is a measure of the persistence of effective scarcity. And once scarcity is acknowledged as an inherent and essentially permanent frame in the restructuring of society, the question of structured incentives becomes paramount. This is not just a matter of motivating adequate hours of work, but of affecting its intensity and quality, and influencing where that work is best applied (i.e., determining society’s overall division of labor).

Mr. Gindin, it is clear, identifies the need to make choices of “labour time and resources” with scarcity. There is an identity between the need to make choices in the realm of labour and the continued existence of scarcity. 

The counterpart of this is the implicit denial of the need to make choices in “leisure,” which is identified with the “realm of freedom.” Mr. Gindin, of course, fails to justify this identity and fails as well to explore the nature of “leisure.” 

Mr. Gindin follows neoclassical economics (which justifies capitalism in various ways) by arguing that “scarcity” in the abstract (eternally or forever, without qualification) characterizes human life. Consider the following quotation from a typical textbook on neoclassical (or capitalist) economics (Steven A. Greenlaw, Timothy Taylor, Principles of Microeconomics, page 8:

Economics is the study of how humans make decisions in the face of scarcity. These can be individual decisions, family decisions, business decisions or societal decisions. If you look around carefully, you will see that scarcity is a fact of life. Scarcity means that human wants for goods, services and resources exceed what is available. Resources, such as labor, tools, land, and raw materials are necessary to produce the goods and services we want but they exist in limited supply. Of course, the ultimate scarce resource is time- everyone, rich or poor, has just 24 hours in the day to try to acquire the goods they want. At any point in time, there is only a finite amount of resources available.

People live in a world of scarcity: that is, they can’t have all the time, money, possessions, and experiences they wish.

Mr. Gindin argues, then, that scarcity arises objectively when there are alternative possibilities that exist for the use of resources and labour time. Choices must be made, and the choices necessarily involve the realization of some projects and the exclusion of others. We can never have our cake and eat it simultaneously.

This idea seems valid, and yet it is really superficial. Mr. Gindin practically wants to ridicule those who believe that work can be itself a realm of freedom–despite the need to make choices and despite the need to engage in the production of food, shelter, clothing, health care, education and so forth. To be realistic for Mr. Gindin is to believe in the necessity of drudgery throughout human history. What else does he mean when he writes “And once scarcity is acknowledged as an inherent and essentially permanent frame in the restructuring of society, the question of incentives becomes paramount.”

Mr. Gindin’s implicit assumption is that all incentives are external or instrumental in nature. There is, for this social democrat, no such thing as an intrinsic incentive (or motivation). Such an assumption needs to be questioned.

Rather than addressing the issue of scarcity (pure necessity for Mr. Gindin) directly, let us look at the so-called opposite realm of leisure (pure freedom for Mr. Gindin).

He claims that leisure is somehow the “realm of freedom.” What leisure is that? Leisure is a concept that is purely non-instrumental, it would seem, for Mr. Gindin. All leisure.

As an aside: Mr. Gindin borrows his concepts from current experiences and then generalizes them throughout history. Thus, leisure in the current context of work life characterized by the power of employers using people as things for their own ends is often a compensation for the drudgery of such daily life. Such an uncritical use of the concept of leisure will be addressed in another post.

Thus, Mr. Gindin separates completely labour and leisure. Leisure is purely non-instrumental, and labour can be to a certain extent enjoyable but, ultimately, is tainted with instrumentality by its very nature. Since leisure is identified with the “realm of freedom” and non-instrumentality, and labour is tainted with instrumentality by its very nature, scarcity must arise by necessity since workers by their very nature would prefer leisure (freedom) over work (necessity and instrumentality). To engage in work, workers must be externally motivated to do so (since their default mode is to prefer leisure (pure freedom) over work (pure necessity).

Mr. Gindin’s assumption concerning the so-called identity of leisure with the realm of freedom and a lack of instrumentality is questionable. Many so-called leisure activities have an instrumental aspect to them. For example, I “leisurely” drove my daughter, Francesca, to the Royal Tyrrell Museum summer camp in Alberta some time ago, from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (about a distance of 1,300 kilometers). It took a “leisurely” time of around 18 hours (stopping along the way for lunch and supper). For me, the activity was stressful though enjoyable (when compared to working for an employer) since Francesca was with me. The leisure activity of driving, though, was instrumental since it was a means to the end of developing my daughter’s capacities–that was the real end.

I had a choice to make in whether I was going to ask Francesca whether she wanted to go to the camp at all and, given that choice, what means I would use to achieve that goal. 

It cannot be said that the act of driving the car was secondary to the end of developing her capacities in a certain direction since she could not do so without attending the camp. The act of driving the car, though instrumental, was an essential condition for achieving that end (of course, it was not the only means by which to achieve that end–taking a plane, bus or train were possible alternatives). Furthermore, the end of developing Francesca’s capacities motivated me to drive for long periods of time in the first place, so the end itself formed an instrumental aspect of my activity of driving the car–it formed an ideal or motivating aspect of the physical aspect of driving the car.

My drive to Drumheller was thus instrumental for Francesca, my daughter, despite being a leisure activity. I had to make choices, of course. I could have taken a bus with her. We could have flown. The goal of the trip, for me, though constrained by certain means, was non-instrumental as an ultimately intrinsic end and yet was instrumental, ideally, in guiding my own activity in the present (driving the car towards Drumheller, Alberta, where the Royal Tyrrell Museum is located). I had an internal incentive or intrinsic incentive.

Of course, human life is finite, but who would deny that? However, Mr. Gindin draws false conclusions from that fact not only in relation to leisure but also to “education” and “art.” These issues will be dealt with in another post or posts.

Mr. Gindin’s assumption, then, that leisure is the pure realm of freedom is simple nonsense. Mr. Gindin’s hidden assumption of the mutual exclusion of instrumentality and intrinsic ends–that they are separate–remains an unproven assumption.

But some may say that this is an example from the realm of leisure (which does not exclude the realm of necessity despite Mr. Gindin’s implicit assertion to the contrary). What of the realm of work? Does it need external incentives because alternatives arise and choices must be made?

In a follow-up post, I will shift to Mr. Gindin’s opposite view concerning work. Since leisure is supposedly the pure realm of freedom that lacks instrumentality, work, according to Mr. Gindin, if in any way instrumental (which it must be for Mr. Gindin), involves a lack of freedom, which is expressed in the concept of scarcity and thus requires external or extrinsic motivation. Just as leisure is supposed to be the pure realm of freedom, so too the realm of work is supposed to be always tainted by the realm of necessity. 

This issue has to do with the two main divisions of labour: academic or intellectual and practical (or manual or physical). I referred briefly to such a division when I provided a critique of such a division in schools and the school curriculum (see Critical Education Articles Placed in the Teacher Staff Lounge While I Was a Teacher, Part Three). 

(As an aside: Mr. Gindin probably follows his colleague, Leo Panitch (they wrote a book together), in rejecting (without understanding) Marx’s so-called labour theory of value (really a theory of commodities and capital). (I attended Mr. Panitch’s class on globalization in the winter of 2014. Mr. Panitch explicitly stated that he considered Marx to have taken a wrong turn in Capital, especially Marx’s use of some of the dialectic of the German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, who, among other things, argued for the need to reconcile opposite relations, such as freedom and necessity)


Socialism, Part Nine: Inadequate Conception of the Nature of Freedom and Necessity, or Free Time and Necessary Time, Part Two

This is a continuation of a previous post.

In a previous post, I criticized Mr. Gindin’s view that leisure is the pure realm of freedom. (Sam Gindin is (or was) head of the Toronto Labour Committee and former research director for the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) (now Unifor)). In this post, I will criticize his view that work, being a world of necessity, requires external incentives.

Let us look at part of a previous quote from Mr. Gindin’s writing on socialism:

Furthermore, the calculation of scarcity can in particular not ignore leisure, with leisure representing the “realm of freedom.” Even if we produced enough of what we wanted, as long as some of that labor isn’t completely voluntary but instrumental, then effective scarcity of either labor time or the good/service remains. Workers may even like their jobs and see them as a source of creative expression and satisfaction, but as long as they’d periodically prefer to not show up or leave early, some further inducement is needed to offset the sacrifice of providing those labor hours. That inducement is a measure of the persistence of effective scarcity. And once scarcity is acknowledged as an inherent and essentially permanent frame in the restructuring of society, the question of structured incentives becomes paramount. This is not just a matter of motivating adequate hours of work, but of affecting its intensity and quality, and influencing where that work is best applied (i.e., determining society’s overall division of labor).

Mr. Gindin’s superficial imagination leads him to apply the current poverty of work relations, implicitly, as the standard for determining the so-called “realm of necessity.” Like leisure, which is supposed to be the pure realm of freedom, he separates freedom and necessity at work.

Consider my work at the brewery in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. When I worked at the brewery, we were obliged to work to produce not only beer, but beer for the market, and not only for the market but for the ultimate goal of more profit. We were things to be used by the employer (see https://theabolitionary.ca/the-money-circuit-of-capital/).

The riveting of material production to the goal of profit as the ultimate goal prevents workers who produce beer from reorganizing their lives both inside and outside the brewery in such a way that they can integrate their working lives with other aspects of the process of producing beer. For example, at the brewery in Calgary, there was a chemist who probably, among other things, tested the quality and properties of the beer being produced (being “only a bottling worker,” I really did not understand what the chemist did when I worked at the brewery).

Mr. Gindin tips his hand by referring to “scarcity” as somehow requiring incentives. He fails to explore what is meant by “incentives,” but implicitly assumes that all incentives are external and cannot be internal to the process which produces beer–a mechanical materialist point of view.

Under a socialist way of life, initially, workers would produce beer for others via the market. Even at this stage, here is no reason why workers could not begin to integrate a study of chemistry with the production of beer. The same could be said of the mechanics, physics and mathematics of beer production. For example, the filler–a machine for the filling of beer bottles rotated in a circular motion, with spouts attached to the machine. The velocity of rotation, the speed of the incoming bottles and so forth could be calculated and adjusted to attain certain specific rates of output and qualities of beer production (rather than being externally specified by managers as the representatives of employers).

John Dewey, an American philosopher of education, pointed out somewhere that there is no such thing as a purely biological human experience, a purely mathematical human experience, a purely physical human experience and so forth. Human experience is all those aspects and more. The apparently most mundane human act or experience contains a rich variety of potentially worthwhile pursuits that can be analyzed and pursued in ever greater depth and breadth. The production of beer can be integrated into the study of chemistry, physics, mechanics, biology, mathematics, history, geography and other sciences. Despite beer production being instrumental for the production of beer as a consumer good, it could be the point of departure for the infinite expansion of the capacities of workers who produce beer–with the only limit being their own capacities for the pursuit of such sciences and the finite period of time in which they live on this planet before dying. Workers could thus freely expand their intellectual and physical horizons even when they produce beer.

Mr. Gindin’s superficial separation of freedom and necessity at work, like his superficial separation of freedom and necessity during leisure hours (as pointed out in the previous post), leads him to false conclusions concerning the nature of work in a socialist society. This should not surprise anyone.

Mr. Gindin’s false conclusions concerning the nature of the relationship of freedom and necessity under socialism go beyond the issue of leisure and work. He claims the following in relation to education and art, among other areas of human life:

Scarcity — the need to make choices between alternative uses of labor time and resources — is unlikely to end outside of utopian fantasies because popular demands, even when transformed into collective/socialist demands, are remarkably elastic: they can continue to grow. Think especially of better health care, more and richer education, greater care for the aged, the expansion of art and of cultural spaces — all of which require labor time and generally also complementary material goods. That is, they demand choices.

In another post, I will show that Mr. Gindin’s reference to “more and richer education” can integrate–contrary to Mr. Gindin’s mechancial separation of the two–both elements of necessity and freedom. I may also address in a future post his claim that the demand for the expansion of art somehow involves the separation of necessity and freedom.


Socialism, Part Nine: Inadequate Conception of the Nature of Freedom and Necessity, or Free Time and Necessary Time, Part Three: Education

This is a continuation of a previous post.

In a previous post, I pointed out that Mr. Gindin claimed that the expansion of educational services would involve scarcity and therefore would require external or extrinsic motivation of some sort. (Mr,. Gindin is head of the Toronto Labour Committee and former research director for the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) (now Unifor) union.

Let us look at part of a previous quote from Mr. Gindin’s writing on socialism:

Furthermore, the calculation of scarcity can in particular not ignore leisure, with leisure representing the “realm of freedom.” Even if we produced enough of what we wanted, as long as some of that labor isn’t completely voluntary but instrumental, then effective scarcity of either labor time or the good/service remains. Workers may even like their jobs and see them as a source of creative expression and satisfaction, but as long as they’d periodically prefer to not show up or leave early, some further inducement is needed to offset the sacrifice of providing those labor hours. That inducement is a measure of the persistence of effective scarcity. And once scarcity is acknowledged as an inherent and essentially permanent frame in the restructuring of society, the question of structured incentives becomes paramount. This is not just a matter of motivating adequate hours of work, but of affecting its intensity and quality, and influencing where that work is best applied (i.e., determining society’s overall division of labor).

Mr. Gindin’s use of “scarcity” is meant to show that he is being realistic. He claims the following:

Scarcity — the need to make choices between alternative uses of labor time and resources — is unlikely to end outside of utopian fantasies because popular demands, even when transformed into collective/socialist demands, are remarkably elastic: they can continue to grow. Think especially of better health care, more and richer education,

Mr. Gindin prides himself on being realistic (his reference to “utopian fantasies” is meant to show this). In reality, he is a most conservative “socialist” (really a social democrat) who operates in terms of the capitalist economy and its social institutions.

He converts the relation between necessity and freedom in a socialist society into a false relation of mutual exclusivity. Thus, for him in the educational sphere an expansion of educational services necessarily leads to a diminution of resources in other areas. If, however, freedom and necessity are united and reinforce each other in the educational sphere and in other spheres (an internal relation of freedom to necessity), there need not arise such a diminution since human activity in other areas will, in turn, be enriched.

Mr. Gindin does not explore how educational institutions may change under a socialist system and how this might effect the relationship between necessity and freedom both in work and outside work.

John Dewey, an American philosopher of education, certainly did not believe that education excluded either necessity or freedom. Operating between 1896 and 1904 in Chicago, the University Laboratory School (commonly known as the Dewey School) used the common needs or common necessities of most of humanity for food, clothing and shelter as the point of development for children’s physical, intellectual, emotional, ethical and aesthetic development. By having children try to produce food, clothing and shelter in various historical epochs through the occupations associated with these needs, Dewey hoped to bridge the gap between intellectual and physical life that deeply divided American capitalist society.

Children started with purposes that they understood (the need or necessity for food, clothing and shelter) and were to come to understand the natural and social roots of varying the means for satisfying such common needs or common necessities.

Of course, the need for food and shelter (and, in most environments, the need for clothing), are given by the natural conditions of humans as living beings. They did not choose these conditions. However, through varying the means used by diverse historical societies, children can gradually come to learn about the potentialities of the natural world in diverse geographical areas and the diverse means by which human beings have come to produce their own lives. They learn increasingly how to control their own basic lives by experiencing diverse environments and diverse means by which to address problems associated with the satisfaction of the basic needs or necessities.

What of the learning of science? Does learning how to produce our basic necessities exclude the learning of science? Is there some sort of opposition between learning how to produce such basic necessities and the need to make choices about the learning of science? Does learning how to produce basic necessities in various environments involve a waste of time since the time could be spent learning about science? Mr. Gindin, with his false dichotomy of identifying the need to make choices with scarcity, would probably consider it necessary to choose between the learning how to produce the basic necessities and learning science.

Dewey, however, did not believe that learning how to produce the basic necessities and learning science were mutually exclusive. Human beings naturally focus on ends since they are living beings; means are secondary to the ends of life. Dewey repeats in a number of works his contention that human beings naturally are more concerned with ends than with means: “For men are customarily more concerned with the consequences, the “ends” or fruits of activity, than with the operations by means of which they are instituted” (Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1938/1986, page 253). However, consideration of means is just as essential to the life process.

If intelligent action (which is what education needs to develop) involves the coordination and means and ends, then education needs to have children learn to shift from their concern or interest or natural proclivity towards ends to a concern with the conditions for the creation of those  ends and the coordination of the two.

Through engagement with the occupations linked to basic needs or necessities, the child gradually becomes conscious of the steps  required a as well as the material means necessary for the basic ends to be achieved. A shift in attitude gradually emerges, as means and their perfection become more important—but always-in relation to the end to be achieved.

The shifts from ends to means and their eventual coordinate relation can lead to the habit of ensuring that the ends desired are placed in the broader context of the means required to achieve them, and the choice of means to achieve ends be placed in the wider context of the total process of their impact on oneself and others.

A shift from concern from ends to means as a temporary end in itself can thus form the basis for the development of science.

Analytic categories characteristic of the diverse sciences are to emerge gradually. For
instance, the study of chemistry emerged from the process of cooking as well as from the metallurgical processes associated with the basic occupations. Similarly, physics emerged from the processes of production and use of tools.

The basic occupations  provide a bridge between common-sense inquiry and scientific inquiry. Without such a bridge, science would remain vague and would likely be resisted. Moreover, hose who do tend towards an interest in scientific work as such would likely become remote from the concerns of the common person, and would fail to understand how science is, ultimately, instrumental to-the human life process.

On the other hand-, the common, person could fail to appreciate how science can enrich her life and how it does affect her life in the modern epoch. For instance, Dewey mentions how metallurgical operations performed by human beings to transform metals into something useful resulted in the identification of about half a dozen metals (Logic: The Theory of Inquiry). By abstracting from the immediate relation between human beings and substances of the Earth, science has enabled human beings to identify over 60 metals. Through scientific inquiry, differentiation of metals and their diverse uses have expanded substantially in a relatively short period of time. The common person needs to understand the, need, (or scientific inquiry in relation to the limitations of common-sense inquiry as the scientist needs to understand that scientific inquiry may be an end for her but instrumental for many people.

The point of this is to show that the allocation of resources to the expansion of educational services need not entail some sort of “scarcity” merely because the allocation of resources to schools entails the non-allocation of resources in other areas. The allocation of resources in one area can result in the transformation of individuals into individuals with expanded horizons. The expansion of horizon can, in turn, lead to enhancement of experiences in other areas in a qualitative feedback loop that enhances the totality of live experiences.

As long as the resources allocated to schools involve the enrichment of both the living and social nature of human beings in a coherent fashion (taking into account both their nature as living beings and as social beings), the allocation of resources need not involve some sort of limit to other social activities; the necessity of producing food, clothing and shelter can lead to an expanded horizon and thereby to enhanced freedom.

Schools, if they contribute to the growth of children, would form one of many institutions that would contribute to the qualitative enhancement of our lives as individuals and as social individuals in a unique way.

An analogy may help. Look at your own body. You need your own kidneys in order to clean your blood of impurities and excrete them in the form of urine.  The energy allocated to this function limits the energy that can be allocated to your other organs. However, your other organs should not have all your energy allocated to them; there must be a balance between the allocation of your total energy to the diverse organs and their functions, with some organs requiring more energy, others less, depending on a number of circumstances (level of current activity, age, gender and so forth). Merely because each organ has a limited amount of energy and resources allocated to it does not mean that there is some sort of “scarcity” of energy and resources. Your freedom to move about in an effective–and graceful–manner depends on the varying allocation of resources and energy to diverse parts of the body.

If schools develop individuals who can appreciate the continuity (and difference) between their common-sense experiences and scientific experience, the resources allocated to it will feed back into other institutions in a coherent fashion.

Furthermore, individual children will gradually discover what unique contributions they can make to others, and they will come to appreciate the unique contributions of others to their lives.

This process of receiving something unique from others and contributing something unique to others defines the nature of true individuality. True individuality means the impossibility of substitution of function. Individuality is not only unique existentially—all existences are unique–but also functionally; structure and function meld into each other. Means and ends become one unique event that persists as unique in its actualization.

Modern human relations need to “capture” individual variations since modern human nature can advance only through such variations. These variations are unique. From John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916/2004, page 96):

… he [Plato) had no perception of’ the uniqueness of individuals. … There being no recognition that each individual constitutes his own class, there could be no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable.

Plato also did not recognize that stability or harmony could arise through unique changes. From Democracy and Education, page 97:

But it is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, his incommensurability with others, and consequently not recognizing that a society might change and yet be stable, his [Plato’s] doctrine of limited powers and classes came in net effect to the idea of the subordination of individuality.

The emergence of distinct .or unique individuals arises from the process of acting
within a social environment; individuality is an achievement and not a presupposition. From John Dewey (1922), Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology, page 84:

This fact is accentuated and made fundamental by the fact of infancy— the fact
that each human being begins life completely dependent upon others. The net outcome accordingly is that what can be called distinctively individual in behavior
and mind is not, contrary to traditional theory, an original datum.

The development of a unique function and the reception of unique functions from others constitutes an essential element of freedom, and the development of such unique functions can only arise in conjunction with the realm of necessity and not apart from it. From Jan Kandiyali (2017), pages 833-839, “Marx on the Compatibility of Freedom and Necessity: A Reply to David James,”  European Journal of Philosophy, volume 25, page 837:

The key point is that Marx is describing a communist society as one in which individuals achieve self‐realization through labour—by helping others to satisfy their needs. Thus, … Marx claims that in non‐alienated production, I would enjoy an individual expression of life during production and in knowing my personality to be manifest in the product I create. However, … Marx emphasizes how my production satisfies another’s need, and how that production for another contributes to my own, as well as the other’s, self‐realization. Thus, when you consume my product, I experience the enjoyment of knowing that my activity has satisfied your need. Because I have satisfied your need, you recognize me as the ‘completion’ of your essential nature. And finally, because I recognize that you appreciate my production for you, my cognizance of your appreciation completes my self‐realization.

What I want to emphasize is that this account of self‐realization through labour that meets the needs of others, labour that characterizes production in a communist society, involves a distinctive conception of the relationship between freedom and necessity. According to this conception, freedom is not merely compatible with necessity. Rather, the necessity of labour is part of the explanation for why labour is a free and self‐realizing activity. For it is only in labour that ‘I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need’, and it is only when I have satisfied another’s need that I can be recognized as completing another’s ‘essential nature’.

Mr. Gindin, with his talk of scarcity, has a mechanical conception of human nature and of human relations. It is a conception which splits human beings into beings of necessity (beings of nature) and beings of freedom (social beings).

This mechanical conception if human nature and human relations is shared by his colleague, Herman Rosenfeld (see Reform Versus Abolition of the Police, Part Five: More Philosophical Considerations). There seems to be a pattern emerging here: social democrats or social reformers view other people and human relations as external to each other–like ping pong balls rather than living and breathing beings with the capacity to engage in conscious and organized self-change.

Mr. Gindin also has a mechanical view of the relation of art in a socialist society since it, too, is restricted by “scarcity.” A critical analysis of such a view will be posted in the future.

Socialism, Part Nine: Inadequate Conception of the Nature of Freedom and Necessity, or Free Time and Necessary Time, Part Four: Art

This is the conclusion of a series of previous posts on the subject.

In a previous post, I criticized Mr. Gindin’s claim that the expansion of educational services would involve scarcity and therefore would require external or extrinsic motivation of some sort. (Mr,. Gindin is (or was) head of the Toronto Labour Committee and former research director for the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) (now Unifor) union. See Socialism, Part Ten: Inadequate Conception of the Nature of Freedom and Necessity, or Free Time and Necessary Time, Part Three: Education.

Let us look at part of a previous quote from Mr. Gindin’s writing on socialism:

Furthermore, the calculation of scarcity can in particular not ignore leisure, with leisure representing the “realm of freedom.” Even if we produced enough of what we wanted, as long as some of that labor isn’t completely voluntary but instrumental, then effective scarcity of either labor time or the good/service remains. Workers may even like their jobs and see them as a source of creative expression and satisfaction, but as long as they’d periodically prefer to not show up or leave early, some further inducement is needed to offset the sacrifice of providing those labor hours. That inducement is a measure of the persistence of effective scarcity. And once scarcity is acknowledged as an inherent and essentially permanent frame in the restructuring of society, the question of structured incentives becomes paramount. This is not just a matter of motivating adequate hours of work, but of affecting its intensity and quality, and influencing where that work is best applied (i.e., determining society’s overall division of labor).

Mr. Gindin’s use of “scarcity” is meant to show that he is being realistic. However, just as Mr. Gindin does not criticize the particular form of education in modern society, he does not consider the limitations of the particular form of art in modern society. He writes the following:

Scarcity — the need to make choices between alternative uses of labor time and resources — is unlikely to end outside of utopian fantasies because popular demands, even when transformed into collective/socialist demands, are remarkably elastic: they can continue to grow. Think especially of … the expansion of art and of cultural spaces — all of which require labor time and generally also complementary material goods. That is, they demand choices.

Mr. Gindin seems to consider the “expansion of art and cultural spaces” in purely quantitative terms. The existing “art and cultural spaces” are supposed to be “expanded” rather than qualitatively transformed. Given the specific class nature of modern society dominated by a class of employers and the general class nature of human history after the agricultural revolution, the view that art and culture needs mere expansion rather than qualitative transformation reflects an impoverished view of the nature of socialist society. If socialist society is characterized by the abolition of classes, and classes involve exploitation and oppression, then the nature and development of art and culture should accordingly change qualitatively.

The issue can be approached from different angles. One issue is the question of the form of art (something which Mr. Gindin does not even adddress). John Dewey’s philosophy of art can aid us in understanding the limitations of Mr. Gindin’s characterization of “scarcity” and art in a socialist society.
Dewey points out that the form of modern art is isolated from common human experience. It is this isolated form itself that prevents a proper understanding of the nature of art as a refined development of common-sense human experience. From John Dewey (1934), Art as Experience , pages 3-4:

BY ONE of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theory depends has become an obstruction to theory about them. For one reason, these works are products that exist externally and physically. In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience. Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding. In addition, the very perfection of some of these products, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions that get in the way of fresh insight. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life experience.

When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience. Mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations. It is the business of those who are concerned with the theory of the earth, geographers and geologists, to make this fact evident in its various implications., The theorist who would deal philosophically with fine art has a like task to accomplish.

If one is willing to grant this position, even if only by way of temporary experiment, he will see that there follows a conclusion at first sight surprising. In order to understand the meaning of artistic products, we have to forget them for a time, to turn aside from them and have recourse to the ordinary forces and conditions of experience that we do not usually regard as esthetic. We must arrive at the theory of art by means of a detour. For theory is concerned with understanding, insight, not without exclamations of admiration, and stimulation of that emotional out burst often called appreciation. It is quite possible to enjoy flowers in their colored form and delicate fragrance without knowing any thing about plants theoretically. But if one sets out to understand the flowering of plants, he is committed to finding out something about the interactions of soil, air, water and sunlight that condition the growth of plants.

The isolation of art from ordinary human experience distorts an understanding of the nature of art. Such a distortion is like a mirror, in which we only see the reflection offered to us and not the background material (and social) conditions for the mirror to function as a mirror. From Thomas Nail (2020), Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism, page 149-150:

A mirror is something that reflects almost all the light that it receives within a certain limited frame. A mirror, however, also actively changes the light it receives and limits the range of light returned based on the limits of its frame. The danger of the mirror, as the myth of Narcissus reminds us, is mistaking the mirror for nothing other than the image it reflects. The mirror is thus a tricky kind of object because it so easily conceals its own quality, use- value, or sensuous materiality: the frame, the tain (silver backing), as well as the agency of light itself. Narcissus dies because he mistakes the sensuous agency of nature (water, light, air) as nothing other than himself.

The isolation of art in a socialist society from the rest of human experience would proceed to break down as the power of the class of employers was superseded and as the objectified power of workers is abolished and the human life process comes under the workers’ and the diverse communities’ control.

Mr. Gindin simply ignores any qualitative transformation of art and culture and refers to the (quantitative) expansion of arts and culture–as if the integration of the domain of art with other domains of life would not in itself involve “an expansion of art and culture.” Mr. Gindin fails to see that the modern art form itself expresses oppressive conditions, where art is relegated to an isolated activity by a relative minority. He succumbs to the ideology of the mirror, seeing only the reflected form of the alienated art form as a permanent form that merely requires–“mechanical” elements rather than organic elements that grow from the common source of human daily life experience.

Art in modern capitalist society would undergo a qualitative change–it would be freed of the exploitative and oppressive conditions that give rise to it as something separate and divorced from everyday living and working. From Piotr Hoffmann (1982), The Anatomy of Idealism: Passivity and Activity in Kant, Hegel and Marx, page 98:

In effect, since human labor is guided by conception and imagination, the Marxian “architect” from Capital is always capable of embodying in the material an original vision of things; he can tear the veil of banality and commonplace which stifles the potential of our sensibility. Needless to say, according to Marx this aesthetic potential of human senses must be stifled and repressed under the prevailing conditions of commodity production and of alienation of labor in general. 54 But it is the same conditions – the increasing sophistication of the labor-process – which both create the new potential of human senses and needs and repress its emerging claims and requirements. Indeed the whole process of labor, such as we know it in its past and present form, has that double, paradoxical function: at the same time that it creates those new and higher qualities of human life it also represses them by creating a mode of human intercourse which prevents their realization. “Certainly, labor obtains its measure from outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But [ …] this overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity [ …] the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits – hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labor. ” It is in

Grundrisse, not in

Pans Manuscripts, that Marx writes these words. His intention couldn’t be clearer: labor is not only a response to need and dependency upon external objects, but a truly creative and (as Marx put it) “liberating” process through which man gives a higher form to his life-activity, a form where his senses, needs and tastes become refined and stripped of their crude utilitarian functions.

In societies before the emergence of capitalism, art was not as divorced from daily life as it is now. Art forms were closely related to utility and daily living, with art expressing more, initially, an assumed magical function related to survival than some sort of separate form expressing emotion and aesthetic refinement. From Arnold Hauser (1951), The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, page 3:

When the Palaeolithic artist painted an animal on the rock, he produced a real animal. For him the world of fiction and pictures, the sphere of art and mere imitation, was not yet a special province of its own, different and separate from empirical reality; he did not as yet confront the two different spheres, but saw in one the direct, undifferentiated continuation of the other. He will have had the same attitude to art as Lévy- Bruhl’s Sioux Red Indian, who said of a research worker whom he saw preparing sketches: ‘I know that this man has put many of our bisons into his book. I was there when he did it, and since then we have had no bisons.’ The conception of this sphere of art as a direct continuation of ordinary reality never disappears completely despite the later predominance of a conception of art as something opposed to reality.

Later on, emotional expression and aesthetic concerns emerged with the development of agriculture. Here art and aesthetics (the appreciation of art from the side of consumption) now became somewhat divorced from daily life–with the emergence of class society. Religious rite took the place of magic. However, even then the degree of separation of art from daily life characteristic of modern capitalist society, with art appearing to be a separate realm from the realm of human life and its self-reproduction, was much less. In feudal society, for example, production and consumption were not as separated since they were still closely linked to daily life and utility. Page 93:

‘Urban economy’ in the sense of Buecher’s theory of economic stages signifies, in contrast to the earlier production for own use, a production for the customer, that is, of goods that are not consumed in, the economic unit in which they are produced. It is distinguished from the following stage of ‘national economy’ in that exchange of goods still takes the ‘direct’ form—i.e. the goods go direct from the producing to the consuming unit, production as a rule not being for stock or the free market, but to the direct order of definite customers personally acquainted with the producer. We are thus at the first stage of the separation of production from consumption, but still far removed from the completely abstract method of modern production by which goods have to pass through a whole series of hands before they reach the consumer. This difference of principle between the medieval ‘town economy’ and the modern ‘national economy’ still remains, even when we pass from Buecher’s ‘ideal type’ of town economy to the actual historical facts; for although pure production to order never existed by itself, the relationship between the tradesman and consumer in the Middle Ages was far closer than nowadays; the producer was not yet faced with a completely unknown and indefinite market as he was later. These characteristics of the ‘urban’ way of production showed themselves in medieval art in a greater independence of the artist, on the one hand, as compared with the artist of Romanesque times, but, on the other hand, in a complete absence of that modern phenomenon, the unappreciated artist working in a total vacuum of estrangement from the public and remoteness from actuality.

The abolition of classes in a socialist society, undoubtedly, would revolutionize the relation between art and daily life–just as the agricultural revolution and the emergence of class societies also revolutionized the relation between art and daily life. The abolition of classes would mean that even in work relations there would be the possibility of expressing ourselves without exploitation and oppression preventing us from doing so. The relation between freedom and necessity would change accordingly. There would be a qualitative change in the nature of art as it became integrated into the daily lives of individuals–but this time on a higher, more refined plane than earlier.

Mr. Gindin, though, just sees “an expansion of art”–undoubtedly in purely quantitative terms. He has an impoverished view of the nature of a socialist society and the relation between freedom and necessity in a socialist society.

A Worker’s Resistance to the Capitalist Government or State and Its Representatives, Part Eleven, Or: How Psychologists Cannot Deal with the Oppressive Experiences of the Working Class

Introduction

This is a continuation of previous posts.

I went on sick leave in February 2012 after having been a French teacher for Lakeshore School Division in Ashern, Manitoba, Canada, for three and a half years. (For details of my decision to go on sick leave, see A Worker’s Resistance to the Capitalist Government or State and Its Representatives, Part Eight  and  A Worker’s Resistance to the Capitalist Government or State and Its Representatives, Part Nine). 

In order to receive at first short-term disability benefits and then long-term disability benefits provided by the Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS), if the issue is not purely physical, it is presumably necessary to be subject to psychiatric evaluation and then psychological “care” (provided the psychiatrist furnishes an assessment, I assume, that justifies not being able to work for an employer). To receive such benefits, the worker must “agree” to both the evaluation and the care. 

But what is the Manitoba Teachers’ Society? Its Facebook page indicates the following:

About

The Manitoba Teachers’ Society is the collective bargaining and professional development organization for all of Manitoba’s 15,000 public school teachers.

Additional information

Founded in 1919, the Society provides assistance to local associations in collective bargaining, offers professional development workshops and lobbies government on legislation that affects education, students and teachers.

As well, MTS provides a range of wellness services including the Disability Benefits Plan and Educator Assistance Program.

It also provides publication services for teacher organizations such as Special Area Groups and publishes the teachers’ newsletter, the annual handbook, annual report and an extensive range of brochures and other handbooks

MTS is thus not a union as such, but it is more like a union of unions; it provides services to specific teachers’ associaitons and, through them, to the members of the specific teachers’ association. 

Under the terms of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society Disability Benefits Plan, I had to be under the “care” of a psychologist; in Winnipeg (where I lived at the time), I was under the “care” of Alan Slusky, a clinical psychologist. In my last post, I quoted one of Mr. Alan Slusky’s summaries of his psychological assessment (see A Worker’s Resistance to the Capitalist Government or State and Its Representatives, Part Ten) and indicated how I felt oppressed by his “care.”

In part to escape Mr. Slusky’s oppressive “care,” I moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, at the end of August, 2013. I was still subject to control by a psychologist, this time by Silvina Galperin. Of course, I had little choice over whether I was to receive “therapy” or not.

From One Oppressive Situation to Another Oppressive Situation

Ms. Galperin, like Alan Slusky and Degen Gene (another psychologist whom I did voluntarily see while I was still working as a teacher under the Employee Assistance Plan of MTS due to the great level of oppression to which I was subject–see A Worker’s Resistance to the Capitalist Government or State and Its Representatives, Part Eight) also used “cognitive behavioural therapy” (CBT, or mindfulness) to try to “cure” me of my oppositional ways. It did not work.

I quote Ms. Galperin’s initial assessment below:

October 8th, 2014

Mr. Harris attended 5 sessions of psychotherapy with this writer. His first session was on August 29, 2014 and his last session was on September 29, 2014. He attended all the schedules sessions.

On mental status exam, Mr. Harris is a 57 year-old man of slight build appearing younger than his stated age. He wore loose clothes. His facial expression was sad and his posture slouched. He appeared tired. He made infrequent eye contact with this therapist and kept his eyes half closed. His attitude was open and cooperative with the interviewer but showed an oppositional approach towards society in general. Speech was slow and volume low, at times difficult to understand due to blurred speech. Orientation for person, place and time was unremarkable. He presented as moderately depressed. There was no indication of suicidal intent.

Mr. Harris reported feelings of disappointment, loss of interest or pleasure in normal activities, irritability, frustration even over small matters, sleep disturbances, tiredness and lack of energy, so that even small tasks seemed to demand a big effort for him. He explained that he requires resting and taking naps during the day due to lack of energy. He also explained that he suffers from anxiety and takes medication for a heart-related condition. Physical symptoms of anxiety included wobbliness in legs, heart racing, feelings of choking, difficulty breathing, abdominal discomfort and numbness or tingling. 

Mr. Harris had a very difficult childhood. His father was alcoholic and his mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and intermittently living in and out of psychiatric hospitals for several years. Mr. Harris witnessed at the age of 5 years old, men taking his mother out of their home in a straightjacket, which was very traumatic. He lives with his father, who was violent and disciplined him and his brother physically and using the belt. 

He reported that he worried about our society functioning and believes that all the employers exploit their employees. The client presented an emotional state of frustration and discontent, fixating on situations where he became involved with the legal system, the RCMP, his ex-wife, the Children Aid Society, and health-care professionals with whom he got involved. He feels that all these people betrayed him and therefore cannot trust in this system. Mr. Harris argued that he is a fervent Marxist and that for him Marxism is the only acceptable societal structure for humanity. 

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth Edition (DSM-5) Mr. Harris meets the diagnostic criteria for Major Depressive Disorder and Other Specified Anxiety Disorder. 

Mr. Harris does not believe in the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy model. He explained that his years in university studying philosophy shaped him to question every theoretical concept. He wrote several pages challenging numerous parts of the book Feeling Good by David Burns, a widely accepted volume used by psychologists. He used a philosophical method to question each concept.

Goals for treatment included teaching Mr. Harris techniques to cope with his depression, anxiety and to challenge his generalized mistrustful beliefs about people. As the client manifested that he does not agree with the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy theory, the initial approach has been to allow the client to talk about his past difficulties, his current situation and to offer strategies to deal with specific concerns. Mr. Harris reported that talking about his difficulties with this therapist helped him to process his angst and sorrows. 

Dr. Silvina Galperin, C. Psych.

I engaged in criticism of the psychological approach by sending her some of my articles and, by coincidence, writing something that is relevant to the Covid pandemic:

Since you indicated that the article was too long, I am sending a shorter article—it is almost finished. It is part of my volunteering.

I have also rethought the issue of the report. I would like a copy of the report via email as soon as possible.

Since the issue of compassion came up, I thought that the issue of the ebola crisis would be relevant. According to the Saturday Toronto Star, the WHO reacted too slowly to the crisis because of budget cuts. Such budget cuts are endemic to the neoliberal onslaught. How many people have died needlessly because of such cuts? Where is the compassion of the ruling class and the politicians? Where is the compassion of those who talk about compassion but are blind about the need to struggle if compassion is to be really realized in this world?

Time to put Ebola into perspective (page WD3):

“But lost in the debate is something central to the future. According to many experts, the Ebola outbreak has been an entirely ‘avoidable’ crisis that can largely be traced to the impact of budget cuts. It was made possible by a series of brutal [interesting adjective] reductions—supported by the world’s industrialized [re: industrialized capitalist] countries], including Canada—to the UN’s main health organization, effectively preventing it from responding to the outbreak earlier. In addition, several countries (including Canada) cut budgets to national health institutes, which have delayed research for a vaccine.”

Typical of psychologists is how they try to reduce the concerns of individuals to purely “individual” issues. My experiences as a father are simply an extension of the common experiences of many people throughout the world.

Dewey, by the way, originally published a work on psychology (1887), when philosophy and psychology were very close. He branched out into educational philosophy (mathematical education, 1895; Dewey School, 1896-1904, How We Think (1910), Democracy and Education (1916)), logic (a work in 1903 and his magnum opus Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), ethics (1908 and revised 1932), naturalistic metaphysics (Experience and Nature, 1925), politics (Public and its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry  (1927), art and aesthetics (Art as Experience, epistemology and linguistics (The Knowing and the Known (1949). Compared to what I have observed about the capacities, judgements and ethics of psychiatrists and psychologists, Dewey, despite his ultimately reformist position, stands far above them, theoretically and practically.

Fred

Ms. Galperin talked about compassion and forgiveness in one of the sessions. Here is my response:

Attached is the finished article from the draft.

With respect to compassion and forgiveness. Some facts (from Robert Albritton’s  Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity):

1. Every 30 minutes there are 360 pre-school children will die of starvation and malnutrition–about 6 million pre-school children a year.
2. The news media are generally silent about this [as are most intellectuals and other professionals].
3. What the media does report is how rising food prices are good for business in general and investment in particular.

I fail to see where the compassion exists in ignoring such statistics. The term “compassion” is, to the contrary, often used to cloak such facts. I also fail to see where “forgiveness” comes into play. To forgive such needless deaths is to be complacent about the conditions that persistently lead to such deaths.

Fred

Or again, another email:

Attached is something that I sent my 20-year old daughter some time ago. It pertains to the distribution of land in the department (equivalent to a province administratively) where Francesca studied Spanish (Antigua is the city where she studied).

The issue is: why is the distribution of land so skewed? Where is the “compassion” of people? Of the ruling class? Where is their “forgiveness”? How many people suffer because of such distribution? How many die?

Fred

Conclusion

Ms. Galperin had no answers to my questions–her training had prevented her from dealing with such facts. Her CBT or “mindfulness” approach itself could not deal with such human experiences. 

This “care” that could not deal at all with the actual oppressive experiences of the majority of people in this world–is it not just another form of oppression under the guise of “care?” 

What do you think?