On this day in 1971, the United States Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools. Today also sees the start of a UN Conference on racism. The Socialist position is given below.
One can safely assume that most of the issues discussed openly today are not fundamental to working class interests. They are related to the functioning of capitalism; workers are mistakenly deceived into believing that this should be their concern.
In 1954 a ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States decreed that "quality" education should take place in classrooms that were integrated with children of various ethnic backgrounds and skin colors. The practical application of this decision presented problems because of the segregation of various sections of the population in different neighborhoods.
From this has arisen the question of busing. Workers have be come tremendously concerned on this issue, both in favor and against. Antagonisms have resulted, blacks have been pitted against whites, adults against adults, children against children, and violence has erupted. The police have been kept active, while some members of the legal profession have received welcome business. To the socialist, who refuses to become involved in how best to operate a rotten system, that should be abolished in its totality and not tinkered with, it has been a depressing spectacle of futility. The so-called leaders representing American capitalism are only too delighted to exploit the issue for what it's worth. The working class, once again diverted from the true cause of their problerns, have be come intrigued and entrapped with an issue that, from a socialist approach, is not worth any of the expenditures of effort that it has generated.
The reason that workers live in particular areas is determined largely by their economic ability to afford the housing that they can buy or rent with their wages. Added to this, there has been an historic discrimination and a cruel anti-social racist philosophy practised against certain minority sections of the population. Chief amongst these unfortunate minorities has been of course black people. Over recent years black people have become absorbed more fully into the capitalist system because the ruling class, through their government, have realized that the system operates more efficiently, and more profitably, without discrimination and with the full participation of all members of the working class, irrespective of the pigmentation of their skin or ethnic backgrounds.
Socialists of course are politically color-blind. We could not care less if a worker's skin is black, white, or yellow. What concerns us are the ideas in a worker's head, not the color of his skin, or for that matter the length of his hair. All this is superficial balderdash that in a supposedly enlightened era does not even warrant discussion. Anyone today that still harbors any form of racial prejudice is tragically and socially so terribly ignorant that we might possibly hesitate before investing time debating with them. Socialists do not see society divided into blacks and whites, Gentiles and Jews, or any other ethnic, religious, or national sections; although we are not denying that these categories exist. But to the socialist the true division in society is a division of economic classes - the working class and the capitalist class.
Minds should be focused on the real cause of the so-called busing problem. Why do members of the working class live in poor, segregated neighborhoods and slurns? Why is the quality of education, like the quality of most of the commodities that workers can afford under capitalism, inferior? The answers to both questions have an economic cause. Will either a pro or anti-pro busing attitude remove the poverty of the neighborhoods of the working class or the poverty of the quality of the education? Of course not.
The economics of a class system are the cause of the problerns, and the removal of capitalism is the only solution. Socialism will in all ways unite the human race, and true integration will take place in the fullest sense of the term.
Buses as a means of righting a social wrong, or energies expended in supporting or opposing such a superficial technique to adjust the injustices of capitalist society, are a pitiful waste of time that do not warrant one moment's consideration of a class conscious working class.
The system belongs to the capitalists. Let them solve the problem of how best to run their system. Members of the working class should refuse to become diverted from the main issue - the speedy abolition of the system that produces the prevailing miseries.
Whether children go to school by bus, or whether they walk, or whether they are bused to areas further from their homes, when they finally arrive at school the education that they will receive will have as its prime purpose outfitting them for jobs under capitalism; to become wage slaves in peace time, and potential patriots, ready to die for a country they do not own, in times of war. And modern education takes this form all over the world-in some places to a more horrible degree. Recently I saw films on television of Chinese children from ages 8 to 10 being trained as soldiers with guns and bayonets.
Education under capitalism, whether in state capitalist China or state capitalist Russia, or the United States, or anywhere else in the world, is an education that is biased, prejudiced and prostituted, resulting in children maturing with mistaken ideas on history, economics, the system under which they live, leaders, and war. The "quality" of the education is suited to the interests of the capitalist system.
When these kinds of issues and problems arise, as they invariably do in a continuous and unending stream, there is no reason whatsoever for workers to think that they have to be come involved. There is another alternative. Take the position of the socialist and state:-
"We are not interested in reforming capitalism and we will not concern ourselves with its administration. We will reserve our political energies for the single objective - the achievement of socialism."
(One of fifty essays to be found in 'World Without Wages (Money, Poverty & War!)', Samuel Leight, 1980)
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