by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
Even technical education is divided quite unnaturally and unnecessarily into two branches along class lines. These are the mechanical arts on the one hand and the so-called professions on the other. No one can tell just where the line of division between the two branches should be drawn. No one knows just at what point a carpenter becomes an architect or a building engineer; or at what point a reporter becomes a “journalist” or when a real estate huckster becomes a “realtor.” Obviously, the line of division lies outside of the technical factors involved and concerns itself with something else. Roughly, it depends on whether you are going to use the technical knowledge gained by study to do useful and practical things—to produce wealth—or whether you are going to use it in the exploitation of those who do the useful things. Or it depends on whether you are going to be a wage worker, get a “job” and draw wages; or whether you are going to exploit or direct the exploitation of wage workers; in which latter case you draw a “salary” or fees or profits and hold a “position.” These distinctions have arisen with the advance of bourgeois society. In the earlier stages of capitalism and before, no such divisions existed. Benjamin Franklin never took a formal scientific course leading to a professional degree; Lincoln did not become an “L.L.B.” by reading law as he lay on his stomach before the fireplace by the light of a pine-knot; the inventors whose work revolutionized modern society such as Stephenson, Watt, Ark-wright, Eli Whitney, Blanchard, Elias Howe, Samuel F. B. Morse, Robert Fulton and others were just workers; they had no degrees and were not “professors.” The class lines had not yet been sharply drawn when these did their work. They were members of a revolutionary class that had just come into power and they sprang from the masses of the common people. The necessity of educating them in the mental attitude of the ruling class had not yet developed in the minds of the rising bourgeoisie.
These distinctions of class grew out of the economic division of the people into masters and wage slaves as capitalism developed from the close of the eighteenth century onward. The pioneers of capitalism were revolutionists—an oppressed class. They were not distinguished or distinguishable in their earlier origins from the masses of peasants, artisans and laborers who were victimized, robbed, “plundered, profaned and disinherited” by the feudal nobility against whom they made common revolutionary warfare.
Our early bourgeois idealists thought they were establishing a “natural” society to succeed the social organization founded upon the artificialities of special privilege, birth and aristocratic rank. They asserted with perfectly naive sincerity that “all men are created equal”; that is, equal in the opportunity to engage in trade or business and by cleverness and artfulness, to get the best end of a business dicker. It was the philosophy of glorified huckstering and its avatar was a pushcart peddler exalted to the n-th degree of success. It was quite natural in an age when vast new continents were open to adventures for exploitation and when the individual trader was free to pit his wits against every other individual trader on a fairly even basis, unhampered by the gigantic combinations and mergers of the modern world. It then seemed needful only to rid the world of the feudal laws in restraint of trade to free the world and establish a democracy of opportunity in which only the naturally inferior would fail.
But, as H. M. Hyndman says, “events move faster than minds.” The rise to power of this trading and exploiting class after the revolutionary destruction of the power of the feudal aristocracy, quickly developed the same class divisions and class contradictions that had formerly characterized feudal society. The trading class, formerly repressed, became the dominant class. It soon acquired class consciousness and awareness of the property distinctions that separated it by an immeasurable gulf from the wage workers who created the commodities in which it trafficked. But the ideas and ideology of its origins persisted in its educational system and education was founded upon the fallacy that bourgeois society had established its ideal—equality of opportunity. It persists in that absurd assumption today, when the integration of its capital, the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, with the spread of its dominion across the world have absorbed the formerly undeveloped resources of the earth and left the newer-born generations nothing but the opportunity to become wage slaves to the class which owns and controls the tools of wealth production and all the natural resources of land and minerals. These newer arrivals upon the world scene constitute a distinct class in society. They are the disinherited millions, ever increasing in relative and absolute numbers, who are born without wealth and educated into a social universe in which they have neither property nor the means of acquiring property. They constitute the world proletariat—the masses who have nothing to traffic in but their labor power which they must sell to the owning and employing class for the right to live. To impose upon them an impractical bourgeois education in which the idea of growing rich by engaging in trade and business prevails, when they will never have that opportunity, and when the State itself is devoted to the business of barring them from such an opportunity and fixing their status as wage slaves eternally, is an obvious absurdity. And yet that is just what bourgeois education does.
Industrial Worker, June 13, 1936.
By way of practical illustration, we have selected at random from the hundreds of classified ads in the weekly “Nation” under the heading, “Positions Wanted,” the following three, which are typical of the absurd miseducation for a career in life in which the opportunities are disappearing as the class system in society develops a class crisis:
YOUNG MAN, university senior, competent to tutor in Latin, French, Greek, Music, English, desires position with family for summer. An excellent companion for adults. Drives car well. Box 2368, c/o The Nation.
VERSATILE YOUNG MAN, college graduate, would like to make a travel-tour with family, as tutor. Authority on drama, English, French, Latin. Plays piano well, drives any make of car. Charming adult conversationalist, indispensable at the bridge-table. Box 2369, c/o The Nation.
HARVARD LAW STUDENT desires job for summer; experienced chauffeur, lifeguard, swimming instructor, hotel clerk, waiter, and tutor. Anything will do. What have you? Box 2287, c/o The Nation.
An “authority on drama, English, French, Latin. Plays piano well, indispensable at the bridge table,” wants a job driving a car! A “Harvard law student, chauffeur, life guard, swimming instructor, hotel clerk, waiter and tutor” wants a job at anything. “What have you?” Such is education in bourgeois society! Sterile versatility that leads to nothing and nowhere!
The purpose of education is to teach one to understand reality and to adapt one’s self to it in the struggle for existence. Reality and the means of survival are one thing to a worker and quite another to an exploiter of labor; to one who has to make a living with his hands and skill and to another whose purpose in life and means of life are the deception and spoliation of those who labor. The one is a creator; the other is a beast of prey. They have nothing in common—not even a common morality. To instruct the workers in the righteousness of the methods and morality of a system that despoils them and denies them access to the means of life is to defeat the primary object of education. It is to discipline them as victims of a condition that not only does not adapt them to the realities of life, but makes them oblivious to the realities about them which work to their destruction.
Working Class Education
Workers’ education is, of necessity, an education in class consciousness. It is so because the economic structure in which they are born and without adaption to which they can not survive, is owned and controlled by a distinct class—the capitalist class. If the truth is taught to the working class it must reveal to them the character of that function which they perform in the economic structure. It must show them how the economic structure works in all its parts. It must analyze the working of the pitiless machine and reduce to exact measurement the benefits which they as sellers of labor power—their inevitable lot—receive; and what the other class—the ow
ners of the structure—receives. If it does not reveal this it fails to educate at all. It miseducates and deceives. It creates a false concept of the world and of social relationships. It prepares them for helpless exploitation and victimization. If the facts of society are taught to the worker he just inevitably becomes class conscious.
The necessity of class education is imposed upon the working class by the facts of industry. That striving toward life—the will to live—which is inherent in every living cell of life, makes it necessary to educate the workers in matters that are deleterious to their health, detrimental to their lives and restrictive of their chances of survival. The capitalist system or any system in which one class lives at the expense of and by the deliberate exploitation of another, is opposed to the chances of survival of the workers. Their lives are lived at a hazard by the imposition of adverse working and living conditions. Their meager share in the social division of the wealth produced by their labor is insufficient to sustain life. The hazard of existence is increased by their function in the economic structure as workers while that of the owning class is reduced at the expense of the workers. Life insurance and health statistics prove this to be a fact—a reality. To neglect instruction in such vital facts is to miseducate. And to fail to attribute the facts cited to their cause—a class system in society—is to lie by suppression of the truth. That is why education in class consciousness is necessary.
Class systems are not eternal. They are an incident in the history of the human family. Class division is at war with the biological forces that make for race survival. That is why every class system in society has ultimately been overthrown by revolution. That is why the growth of the economic structure, which is a thing distinct and separate from the race itself, has revealed a constant tendency to widen the scope of the ruling class and to embrace an ever widening number of the race. Modern history is a comparatively brief span of years compared to the biological ages. It is a period of some few thousand years as contrasted with the millions of years in which the race was developing from the firstlings of human kind. It emerges at its dawn from a stage of primitive communism in which the individual was supreme. It begins the building of a social economic structure. It gains security of existence by sacrificing individual liberty. But evermore throughout the comparatively brief period in which the economic structure has been in process of evolution, the biological forces have been at war with the class forms. Revolution after revolution has broadened the ruling class lines and admitted an increasing number of the race to opportunity. The slave owning patrician gave way before a more numerous class—the feudal nobility; the feudal nobility in turn was overthrown by a more numerous class—the bourgeoisie; the increasing numbers of the proletariat are challenging the bourgeoisie for control of the economic structure and the class lines have a tendency to broaden and disappear in a final classless society in which the workers will be the only class, embracing the entire human family, with ownership and control of the means of life in the hands of the collectivity. This is the final solution of social problems—industrial democracy.
Passing of Class Systems
The necessity that gave rise to classes in society has passed. The social economic structure is fairly complete. Its capacity to produce wealth has increased to a point where it is more than ample to provide sustenance for all who will work. The masses have been disciplined to use the social machinery socially without coercion. The only anarchic survivals are the ruling class and their parasitic existence. Production has been socialized. It remains only to socialize control of the economic structure and eliminate expropriation.
Workers’ education comprehends this outline. Its purpose is to teach the facts of industry instead of the slave morality of the bourgeois schools. Its technical training is to develop technique for the co-ordination of the productive forces in production for use and not for the maintenance of a useless class of capitalist parasites. It is to render education a vital, living, needful thing that makes for human survival instead of suppression. It is to develop the spirit of freedom and democracy without which the race can make no progress.
The I.W.W. is engaged in this task because it is one of the necessary functions in working class progress. It is the light-bearer of modern democracy—industrial democracy. It is, like every progressive force in society, opposed by the class antagonisms of an outworn system of ruling class education in “social control.” It is devoted to realism and scientific truth. It is opposed to class fictions and illusions. It is purely materialistic. Its purpose is to strip the social structure of all its traditional myths and lay its structure and its workings bare. It is to train the working class mind and hand to freedom from ruling class control and exploitation—to enable the working class to master the world and control it in the interest of mankind. It is to enable them to “build the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”
To accomplish this it carries on its work of education by the means that lie at hand—through its papers, pamphlets, lecture bureaus, and through its first established college, the Work Peoples College of Duluth. But more potent still is the education it carries on at the point of production, on the job.
7
Nothing is known about the Mrs. Mary Atterbury who wrote the satiric piece “Depression Hits Robinson Crusoe’s Island.” It was published in the Industrial Worker (February 9, 1932).
DEPRESSION HITS ROBINSON CRUSOE’S ISLAND
By MRS. MARY ATTERBURY
“Friday,” said Robinson Crusoe, “I’m sorry, I fear I must lay you off.”
“What do you mean, Master?”
“Why, you know there’s a big surplus of last year’s crop. I don’t need you to plant another this year. I’ve got enough goatskin coats to last me a lifetime. My house needs no repairs. I can gather turtle eggs myself. There’s an overproduction. When I need you I will send for you. You needn’t wait around here.”
“That’s all right, Master, I’ll plant my own crop, build up my own hut and gather all the eggs and nuts I want myself. I’ll get along fine.”
“Where will you do all this, Friday?”
“Here on this island.”
“This island belongs to me, you know. I cant allow you to do that. When you can’t pay me anything I need I might as well not own it.”
“Then I’ll build a canoe and fish in the ocean. You don’t own that.”
“That’s all right, provided you don’t use any of my trees for your canoe, or build it on my land, or use my beach for a landing place, and do your fishing far enough away so you don’t interfere with my riparian rights.”
“I never thought of that, Master. I can do without a boat, though. I can swim over to that rock and fish there and gather sea-gull eggs.”
“No you won’t, Friday. The rock is mine. I own riparian rights.”
“What shall I do, Master?”
“That’s your problem, Friday. You’re a free man, and you know about rugged individualism being maintained here.”
“I guess I’ll starve, Master. May I stay here until I do? Or shall I swim beyond your riparian rights and drown or starve there?”
“I’ve thought of something, Friday. I don’t like to carry my garbage down to the shore each day. You may stay and do that. Then whatever is left of it, after my dog and cat have fed, you may eat. You’re in luck.”
“Thank you, Master. That is true charity.”
“One more thing, Friday. This island is over-populated. Fifty percent of the people are unemployed. We are undergoing a severe depression, and there is no way that I can see to end it. No one but a charlatan would say that he could. So keep a lookout and let no one land here to settle. And if any ship comes don’t let them land any goods of any kind. You must be protected against foreign labor. Conditions are fundamentally sound, though. And prosperity is just around the corner.”
8
One of the feature columns of the Industrial Worker for many years was a column by T-Bone Slim (Matt
Valentine Huhta), which was headed, simply, “T-Bone Slim Discusses” Fred Thompson, one of the former editors of the Industrial Worker, described how T-Bone Slim went about putting together his columns: “He regularly kept a pad in his pocket—not a notebook, but a pad on which he wrote his inspirations in a fine script that editors gave to the printer without typing or editing. There usually was no continuity to his columns. They consisted of items as he jotted them down…. He was fond of unusual twists that could be given to words. He ran a feud with the Hearst front page columnist, Arthur Brisbane, and out of that feud came two of T-Bone s most favored expressions—’brisbanalities,’ and ‘Arthur Twistbrain.’
“He was largely a ‘loner,’ hoboeing alone, rustling a job alone, and often seeking and getting the kind of job that kept him by himself, such as barge captain which he was for many seasons in the New York City port. This was not because he was unsocial—he periodically sought and enjoyed company and conversation or listening to the sound of people talking. But I think that he had a sort of built-in recording system for it, and liked to spend ten hours reviewing and digesting these sounds for every hour spent picking them up.”
This example of T-Bone Slim’s many columns was titled “T-Bone Slim Discusses the Big Potato” and was printed in the Industrial Worker (July 12, 1932).