Education in the Name of Social Transformation - Teaching Workers by MICHAEL D. YATES
Karl Marx’s famous dictum sums up my teaching philosophy: “The
philosophers of the world have only interpreted the world in various
ways; the point is to change it.” As I came to see it, Marx had
uncovered the inner workings of our society, showing both how it
functioned and why it had to be transcended if human beings were to gain
control over their lives and labor. Disseminating these ideas could
help speed the process of human liberation. From a college classroom, I
thought that I could not only interpret the world, I could indeed change
it.
Thinking is one thing; the trick is bringing thoughts to life. How,
actually, does a person be a radical teacher? How, for example, can
students be shown the superior insights of Marxian economics in classes
that have always been taught from the traditional or neoclassical
perspective—taught, in fact, as if the neoclassical theory developed by
Adam Smith and his progeny is the gospel truth? My college expected me
to teach students the “principles” of economics: that people act
selfishly and independently of one another, that this self-centeredness
generates socially desirable outcomes. And further, that
capitalism, in which we, in fact, do act out of self-interest, is
therefore the best possible economic system. Had I refused to do this
and taught only Marxian economics, I doubt I could have kept my job.
My students were mostly the children of factory workers, miners, and
other laborers, just the young people I wanted to reach and move to
action. However, nearly all of them were hostile to radical
perspectives, having been taught that such views were un-American. Their
animosity was sometimes palpable, especially when I pointed out the
many things they did not know about our country’s unsavory relationships
with the rest of the world. A retired Marine told me that, after we
watched a particularly radical film about U.S. imperialism, he wanted to
come down the aisle and strangle me.
My own timidity also made it difficult for me to advocate
revolutionary ideas. The neoclassical way of thinking has a strong hold
on those who have taken the time to learn it. It is elegant, precise,
mathematical. I was half afraid that the neoclassical theory would prove
capable of addressing the questions that I believed only radical
economics could answer. I gave it a legitimacy it didn’t deserve.
So I proceeded in a cautious manner, focusing at first on what
economists call “market failures.” These occur when the egotistic
pursuits of the market’s buyers and sellers do not lead to socially
desirable results. An example is ecological destruction. In a “free”
market, companies have strong incentives to wreak havoc on nature.
Because it is often costless for them to pollute, that is what they do,
shifting the damage caused by their production onto others, who suffer
higher health expenses, foul air, and dirty water. Since the market does
not respond to our need for a livable environment, it fails socially,
making it necessary for the government to compel the polluters to behave
in a publicly responsible way. Discussions of market failures allowed
me to show my students that a capitalist economic system has to be
regulated by the government if it is to satisfy human needs.
The problem with this tactic was that it led to a liberal and not a
radical advocacy. My growing hostility to capitalism demanded more than a
liberal critique. My next strategy was to pit the neoclassical and the
radical theories directly against one another. I pointed out that
economists did not agree on what made capitalist economies tick. I
explained the neoclassical theory as objectively as possible. I then
used the market failures to develop a criticism of mainstream economics,
especially the notion that the government is a neutral entity that acts
to regulate the market to the benefit of society as a whole. Once I
suggested that the weight of money in politics made this unlikely, it
was easy to switch gears and enter into an examination of Marxian
economics.
This comparison approach also proved unsatisfactory. The neoclassical
theory is difficult for students to learn, so I had to spend too many
hours analyzing it, leaving not enough time for the radical model.
Therefore, I did two things. I simply stopped teaching the neoclassical
mainstays, called micro and macro- economics, freeing me to develop new
courses. This was possible because I now had tenure and was the senior
teacher in my division. I taught the Political Economy of Latin America,
a subject amenable to a radical analysis and one in which there is a
large body of literature rooted in the political economy of Marx. I also
developed a set of courses in labor relations built on the supposition
that there is an inherent conflict between employees and their
employers, rooted in the nature of our economic system. In these
classes, the only theoretical constructs employed were those of Marx and
his modern adherents.
For a decade, teaching radical economic ideas pleased me, but then
disillusion set in. In the early 1980s, the steel mills in Johnstown,
Pennsylvania, where I taught, began to close. Workers were forced to
leave the area, and as a result, my working class students disappeared.
Teaching kids who were the first in their families to attend college, as
I had been, had made my efforts seem worthwhile. I got along well with
them, even those who disagreed with me. I managed to radicalize some.
Unfortunately, the college began to replace the locals with middle-class
teenagers from the Pittsburgh suburbs. They seemed to me like alien
beings, so unconcerned with learning that they appeared proud of their
ignorance. To make matters worse, the student revolt of the 1960s had
generated a counterattack by the leaders of business (who dominate the
schools to a degree seldom examined or understood) and government. The
humanities and social sciences began to lose ground to career-oriented
fields of study; soon, business and technical programs proliferated.
These changes, which coincided with the collapse of the post-Second
World War economic boom, created understandable fears among young
people, who were easily persuaded to view education as an investment in
their “human capital,” and major in something practical.
Disinterested students and a reactionary political situation on
campuses made me wonder what useful purpose teaching undergraduates
served. Perhaps advocating radical ideas in college classrooms was not a
radical act. It would not push the society toward greater
egalitarianism and more control over the economy by ordinary people.
Certainly, creating a new world was the furthest thing from my students’
minds. Nothing I could say would change them very dramatically.
Compounding matters was the growing match between a much more
conservative ideological climate and the recently hired faculty. Most
were too cowed by authority and fearful that dissent would impact their
careers negatively to do anything except keep their noses to the
grindstone. A few said they would make trouble once they got tenure, but
none ever did.
Economic necessity compelled me to continue teaching, but conscience
forced me to do more. I had never confined myself solely to the
classroom; I had helped the maintenance and custodial workers at my
college to form a labor union and tried valiantly to get the faculty to
follow suit. However, now the campus was not enough, so in 1980, I began
educating working people, in a Labor Studies program at Penn State
University. The first classes were held in Johnstown, but eventually, I
taught throughout Western Pennsylvania and occasionally in Ohio, with
venues in union halls, schools, and motels. Classes were noncredit,
typically meeting for three hours on a weekday evening. My students did
every kind of work: steelworkers, postal clerks, mail carriers, oil
workers, chemical plant laborers, autoworkers, coal miners, secretaries,
librarians school teachers, firefighters, nurses, plumbers, operating
engineers, bricklayers, carpenters, machinists, glass workers, and many
more.
These early forays into worker education soon led to others. Sometime
in the late 1990s, I was asked to teach a class in a graduate (Masters)
program at the University of Massachusetts, one aimed at union members,
mainly officers and staff persons. Then, in 2001, I left my college
teaching job, and Karen and I began an itinerant life, moving around the
United States. However, labor education remained a part of my work.
Besides the graduate class, I taught in an undergraduate Labor Studies
program in Manhattan and online labor courses for a community college
and several universities. Today, I only do the MA class, each January
for two weeks. I abandoned the online work when it stopped being devoted
solely to labor-oriented students or came to be used as a way to
exploit cheap labor and get rid of regular classroom faculty.
There are many things I have enjoyed about labor education. The
students often have been like the people with whom I grew up; the older
students sometimes reminded me of my father and his factory workmates.
All of them have had job experience and so understood work better than
my college students. When I talk about the labor law or unemployment,
they bring interesting personal experiences to the discussions. What I
teach has immediate practical relevance to them, and I can use this to
get them to understand more complex and abstract economic and political
ideas. For example, I once taught collective bargaining to a group of
men working in a plant that made air conditioners. They had been forced
by their international union to make concessions during the term of
their collective bargaining agreement. They videotaped the classes and
showed the tapes to co-workers. Then they ran a slate of candidates in
their local union elections and won office. Using what they had learned,
they successfully negotiated the return of the wages and benefits they
had been compelled to concede. One of the new officers went on to get a
masters’ degree in labor relations and then taught in the same program
in which I had worked. These classes sometimes have been catalysts for
the rebuilding of long dormant local labor movements, and they have
raised the consciousness of the students.
Although many of my early worker students had not graduated from
college and were often rank-and-file union members, they grasped radical
ideas more quickly and deeply than did my college pupils. This is
because these had a greater usefulness to them, and they perceived the
arguments through the lenses of working people’s eyes. Two examples come
to mind. In a class in labor economics, we were discussing the
differences between the neoclassical and the Keynesian theories of
unemployment. After two three-hour classes, one of the students wrote a
prize-winning essay on the subject for his local union newspaper. In a
class in labor law, we were examining the Fourth Amendment to the
Constitution in the context of employee drug testing. At my college,
most students took it for granted that employers have the right to
randomly drug test employees. They had been so thoroughly indoctrinated
that they did not think of the issue in terms of civil liberties. The
workers, on the other hand, argued vehemently against drug testing under
any circumstances. Most of them said that they would refuse, as a
matter of principle, to be tested.
The men and women in the MA program do have college degrees, and they
are typically union officers or staff persons. I encourage them to take
what they have learned and teach their members. Unions have done a
woeful job of educating the rank-and-file, not least because union
leaders often fear an educated membership that might turn against them.
Here again, there have been successes. Students have organized classes
in their union locals; one offered a bilingual course so that
Spanish-speaking immigrant laborers could attend, and another prepared
labor history sessions for newly-apprenticed carpenters in Manhattan.
All of this is not to say that my worker students have been perfect.
Far from it. They have been subjected to the same kind of conservative
advocacy from family, media, teachers, and employers to which all of us
have been exposed. Racism, sexism, and homophobia have reared their ugly
heads. Not all have been happy with my radical views, although there
has been a remarkable transformation over the past two decades in the
willingness and eagerness with which almost all have entertained—and
many have embraced—a radical analysis of capitalism.
Teaching workers has been education as I envisioned it when I first
entered the classroom forty-four years ago: students coming to class
voluntarily, enthusiastically participated in their learning, and then
going out to apply what they have learned to their lives. They
appreciate my commitment to teaching; applause and gifts at the end of a
course have been common. And I found that these were students from whom
I could learn new things as well. My labor education classes have
inspired me to write several books, all of which are aimed at the
general working public. Through these, I have made contact with
working-class groups around the country and have had the opportunity to
give talks, conduct seminars, and help in union-organizing campaigns. I
often get requests from working people asking for my help in legal or
economic matters. Nothing comparable happened in my college classes.
The best thing about teaching workers is that I have not had to abide
or feel pressured by the canons of academe. I have not had to worry
that my students will not know what is expected of them when they take
intermediate-level courses. Each labor class is self-contained, with no
prerequisites. I do not have to maintain a false air of objectivity. I
do not have to say, for example, that economists disagree about how
capitalism works; instead, I can say what I believe, forthrightly, that
the neoclassical theory represents the economics of the employing class
and that the attempt to make it into something else, a set of universal
truths, is propaganda. I can posit a radical explanation of capitalism.
This has been invariably well received, even when in 1980s Johnstown, I
had to call Marx’s analysis of capitalism the “workers’ theory” to avoid
charges of being a communist. The idea that profits arise out of the
unpaid “surplus” labor time of workers resonates because it fits with
the actual work experiences of the students; it helps them to understand
what they are, what forces and persons are responsible for their
circumstances, and what they might do to combat them. Similarly, when I
begin a discussion of our labor power as a commodity, we soon enough
conclude that to our employers we are mere costs of production, to be
minimized by whatever means necessary. It is but a short step to have
everyone agree that workplaces are war zones and that only collective
struggle has any chance of victory. In the worker classrooms, we can
openly address such matters, and I can be the radical advocate I think I
must be.
In the college classroom, I taught as I did because the college was
structured so that a more honest and direct approach was impossible.
Academe, by its nature, limits, constrains, absorbs, or punishes direct
radicalism. And if it does allow some radical advocacy, the “higher
learning” is so far removed from the lives of working people that this
is bound to have little social impact. It will not help to move society
in an egalitarian and democratic direction. Worker education, on the
other hand, offers much greater possibilities, precisely because it is
directly connected to the lives of the working class majority, who, in
the end, must be the moving force of social transformation.
I don’t know how much longer I will be a labor educator. It is hard,
time-consuming, and mentally and physically draining work. Guilt has
probably kept me at it these past few years. There is an extraordinary
shortage of people trained in economics who could effectively teach the
working class. And among those few who could, hardly anyone wants to do
so. I have urged radicals to teach workers whenever an opportunity
presents itself. My pleas have been met always with a deafening silence.
We hear a lot these days of the rise of a new core of young left-wing
intellectuals, well educated, attuned to Marx, and alienated from
bourgeois society. It is to be hoped that they will not only advocate
for radical change in their magazines, blogs, and essays, but will
embrace the working class, embed themselves in it and write and act, for
workers, with workers, as workers, educating those who toil as they
educate themselves. We all do what we can to make a better world. But
those with knowledge have a duty to spread the word directly to those
without whose struggles no such world will ever come to be. I have tried
my best. Maybe now it is time for those younger and more energetic to
take my place.
Michael D. Yates is the Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press. He can be reached at mikedjyates@msn.com. He welcomes comments.
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