Liars and Fools
The CTU should be heroes. Why do so many people treat them like goats?
The war between capital and labor is actually quite easily explained, at least in terms of its motivations. The bosses want the working class to do as much labor as possible for as little pay as possible, while the working class itself wants to do as little labor as possible for as much pay as possible. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that capital’s ultimate goal is the reinstitution of slavery by other means and other names, while labor’s ultimate goal is to establish some kind of freedom for themselves – in many ways, the only true freedom there is.
Why overcoming false consciousness is so frustratingly difficult, though, is that many people who should be otherwise easy to enlist in the class struggle are often unaware – sometimes unintentionally, due to the capitalist propaganda we are fed every day of our lives, and sometimes deliberately, due to a wide range of factors – that they are participants in that struggle, or even that it is taking place. It is our duty as organizers to reach the former group through political education, but the latter group grows in numbers by the day, closing its doors and windows to block out the sounds of a war whose stakes and intensity grow higher all the time.
2022 in America is a strange time and place to discuss what phase of capitalism we are truly living under. Looking at the desperation and irrationality of the economic system has led many leftists to characterize this as some variety of latter-day capitalism, suggesting it is a system of societal organization that is in its waning phase; some even call this a post-capitalist period. There are many indicators that would seem to confirm this belief: the outsourcing of manufacturing overseas and the rise of the service economy; the uncountable tax shelters with which the rich hide their wealth; the rise of money pits like cryptocurrency, NFTs, and venture capital; and the proliferation of endowments, NGOs, and charities that do little but provide a safe haven for accumulated profit. These all suggest that we are no longer innovating, or even producing, and that the ownership class realizes at some level that the game is up and all that remains is to preserve what they have at all costs until the end.
On the other hand, life today can very much look like capitalism at the peak of its ascendence, a moment where capitalism realism – the perception that our system is so natural as to be inevitable and that it is nearly unthinkable to even articulate an alternative, let alone bring one into being – is our default view of society. Viewed through this lens, capitalism isn’t dying; it’s mere steps away from its final and irrevocable victory. Why else are companies sharpening their knives at the mere suggestion of unionism? Why else have worker’s rights been degraded to the point of disappearing altogether? Why else have millions been ensnared in the trap of the gig economy, with government and the private sector working together to ensure that millions more workers will be caught up in laws that define then as little more than chattel, with no more rights than a horse or a bucket?
This is why the conflict between the Chicago Teacher’s Union and the Chicago Public Schools (led by our city’s dismal failure of a mayor, Lori Lightfoot) is of oversized importance at this moment. Similar clashes are taking place elsewhere in the country, but Chicago’s is especially relevant for a number of reasons. Public schools are heavily unionized in most of the country; the CTU is a notoriously militant union, having been galvanized by a period of several decades in which they successfully resisted the neoliberal predations of the city government; teaching is one of the few professions which most Americans agree is both necessary and good; and, particularly since the defunding of other public services has shunted everything from medical care to social work into the laps of teachers, schools cannot be as easily starved and discarded as other public services without protest.
Because of these factors, the most recent clash between Lightfoot – a toady posing as a bully, and a natural-born fink who has spent much of her career sucking up to forces that utterly despise her – and the CTU is one the forces of neoliberalism are determined not to lose. Lightfoot has already raised the ire of the CTU over and over again, and if she intends to run again*, her candidacy will almost certainly not survive another strike. The CTU has won a number of key victories, withstood repeated assaults on its structure, funding, and even existence, and most of all, has inspired unions in other cities to follow its lead and refuse to be cowed into submission by profit-seekers and tax evaders. If it can be broken, a blow arguably as decisive as the breaking of the PATCO strike by Ronald Reagan will be dealt against unions at a time when workers are organizing more aggressively than they have since the 1970s. Supporting the struggle of the CTU is a crucial test for workers in America.
Unfortunately, we’re failing it. The forces of reaction are issuing propaganda updates as often as their lickspittles in the media can crank them out, and they are managing to convince many people – most especially bourgeois parents with children in the public school system – that the teachers’ union is irrational, greedy, destructive, and haughty, and should be brought low as a punishing lesson about hubris and overreach. This propaganda asserts with no evidence that distance learning is poisoning the minds of our children. It insists with no regard for truth that teachers are pampered, overpaid, lazy, and privileged. It claims without deference to lived reality that the schools are already safe, that there is no risk of worsening the COVID pandemic by insisting on in-person learning, and that, regardless, there is no money to fix anything anyway.
It should go without saying that these are all lies, but we live in the times we live in, so it will not go without saying. These are all lies. They are complete, top-down fabrications by neoliberal politicians and the millionaires and billionaires they serve, and they are intended to do only one thing: Weaken support for teachers’ unions across the country, so that they can be broken, murdered, and buried, like so many private-sector unions before them. Everyone who believes these flagrant falsehoods does a disservice to their children, puts the lie to their high-minded rhetoric about the importance of education, and most of all, furthers the division between capital and labor by placing them in a protected category, aligned with the former against the latter, that will not be respected and will only weaken them in the end.
There is one reason and one reason alone that the forces of reaction are determined to wreck the CTU. It is because the CTU is one of the most successful and determined elements of the working class, and it has successfully stood up against the impoverishment and marginalization of its membership at the behest of the obscenely wealthy. What they are trying to do to the teachers, they will do to everyone else who isn’t them. Just as they no longer need the workers, so too will they soon no longer need the bourgeois, and the gap between rich and poor, already vaster than it has ever been, will become an uncrossable chasm.
The people who are trusting in this propaganda without question will soon learn that the neoliberal establishment, which seeks to reduce every human interaction to a market exchange of profit and loss, thinks of them in exactly the same way they think of the teachers. They, too, will one day be subject to lies about what they do and how they do it. Their motivation will be questioned, their methods will be vilified, and what benefits and salary they managed to accumulate will be reduced to mere subsistence. Any attempts they make to organized will be brutally crushed. What they do will slowly be de-professionalized; the standards of their occupations will be eroded; their labor will be belittled, and their protections will be stripped away. It is as inevitable as the tide, and they are forsaking, for a momentary convenience, a solidarity without which they will suffer the same fate.
This is not alarmist hysteria from a blinkered Marxist. This is an indisputable fact, discoverable by even a cursory examination of American history, provable by the lest investigation into the arc of every segment of the economy. Do these people think that their professions will be immune to the wage-to-cost disparities that have bled other professions dry? Do they believe that their bosses will never ask them to work in hazardous conditions with minimal to no safety measures, putting themselves and their families at peril? Do they imagine that they, unlike every other category of person who has nothing to sell but their labor, will fall on the winning side when the bosses decide how to split up the profits? If so, they will find themselves in the same position as a hog at slaughter time.
Whether the capitalist class is readying a sword to swing down, decapitating the working class forever and ensuring its own final triumph, or it is prepared to fall on that sword as its years of rule crumble to ruin, they still hold all the power. Everything it does should be understood as an attempt to hold onto that power, and all of its blather about morals and fairness and responsibility as nothing more than the propaganda of a ruling class that cares about none of those things. It’s called a class war because it is a brutal struggle that means life or death for those who fight it; in this war, the Chicago Teachers’ Union is a band of heroes who anyone who doesn’t sympathize with the enemy would praise and support cavil. And just because the people attacking it don’t think they’re fighting that war doesn’t mean that they won’t end up as casualties.
To me, they are heroes, but, like Snot, America won't let me play.