NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2009
Essay
Childcare and Marx's vision of the future
by Beth Sandner and Urszula Wislanka
This article is based on a discussion at the Institute for Critical Study of Society in Oakland during an International Women's Day Celebration on March 8, 2009.
California's budget crisis occasioned draconian cuts in funding for education and social services, including services for children. Of the $15.5 billion in budget cuts, K-12 schools took the biggest hit, $6 billion; universities $2.8 billion; medical services $1.3 billion; plus almost another billion from in-home support services and children's health insurance programs. The present crisis calls for revisiting Marx on many fronts, but especially what he considered the most fundamental way we reproduce our humanity: the man/woman relation and the social endeavor of raising children. For capitalism, what counts as real is only what produces value. Education and healthcare, whole areas of life, are of concern to capitalism only as an "expense," which it seeks to minimize. Since the dawn of capitalism, women are noticed as "contributing" only when they become a source of direct exploitation.
In the chapter on "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry" in Capital, Vol. I, Marx describes how capitalists intensified extraction of surplus labor within a given working day by revolutionizing production, by introducing machinery: "The labour of women and children was...the first thing sought for by capitalists who used machinery."
Women who enter the paid workforce receive lower wages. Women with children earn even less, and fields caring for children--which are largely made up of women workers--are among the lowest paid. It is symbolic of what is valued: women's work when it is entirely outside the market is unnoticed and unpaid; as it is brought into the market, it is lower-paid. Childcare workers' pay hovers at minimum wage. Yet women with very young children are increasingly in the workforce. Before World War II, 25% of mothers with young children worked outside the home, reaching 77% in 2000. U.S. government policies on welfare by 2008 forced 75% of single mothers to work!
These increased numbers mean fewer adults at home to share in the care of young children or to be in the neighborhood to create a loose network of support for children. In numbers greater than ever, families are depending on paid care for their children. EDUCATION AS EXPENSE TO BE MINIMIZED?
We see increased commodification of childcare today. Quality care for children depends on relationships. Yet maintaining profit in the childcare industry, as in any other, depends on cutting labor costs--forcing low wages. That leads to high turnover, disrupting successful relationships. Labor costs are also reduced through higher ratios of children to adults, also preventing nurturing relationships. Some of the fastest growing childcare businesses in the 1980s and 1990s were childcare chains: KinderCare, La Petite Academy and others.
Whether a value-creating activity or not, for capitalism education and care of children are only an expense to be minimized. Marx's chapter on machinery denounces the "intellectual desolation" of workers' children. Where schools were mandated, capitalists provided a semblance of education, by counting hours in a "school room" often staffed by illiterate "teachers," which substituted for actual education.
In many places Marx derides what passed for education: the classroom setting, the anointing of knowledge as a special privilege, passing through examinations, etc. As the opposite of stunting growth, he poses development of the whole human being:
"That monstrosity, the disposable working population held in reserve, in misery, for the changing requirements of capitalist exploitation, must be replaced by the individual...available for the different kinds of labor...the partially developed individual, who is the bearer of one specialized social function, must be replaced by a totally developed individual..." (Capital, Vol. I, p. 618).
How is such an individual to develop? The struggle for care and education of our children has always been the struggle of workers and has achieved most when the workers' movement is at its peak. Public education and work rules for families and children are part of the battleground of class struggle: on one side schools serve as "child care" while parents are at work, on another they are fought for as rights by and for people who never before had access to formal education. STRUGGLES FOR EDUCATION IN THE U.S.
The first big leap in public education was during post-Civil War Reconstruction, which brought free public education to the South. The struggle for rights and access to schooling continued in 1903 when Mother Jones led a caravan of striking children from the textile mills of Lexington, Pa., to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York, calling for an end to child labor and the provision of schools. Still, industrialists who opposed child labor reform laws viewed it as "foolish to give certain classes of children an education and an opportunity to develop, because they are designed by God and nature to be of a lower order" (Felix Adler, "Child Labor in the United States and Its Great Attendant Evils," Annals of the American Academy, 25:554).
Organized workers and African Americans, through continued demands for access, brought federal funding into early childhood care during the Depression and Civil Rights Movement. Federal funding was provided for early childhood care in World War II to allow the increase of women in the workforce. Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 reflected the struggle, with the victorious ruling stating, "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," but without any promise for equal funding. The 1960s War on Poverty initiated Head Start, until the Obama administration the only time since WWII that funds have been dedicated to young children. Many victories have been won in the form of concessions from the state, which mediates social conflicts in order to preserve capitalism. Capitalism, however, dismantles workers' gains on the basis of changing needs of producing value. Today's reality proves that we need to abolish capitalism and its state in order to achieve a society in which individuals can fully develop. Recently, a grassroots group of early childhood teachers and providers in California raised three demands:
1) Increased pay and benefits. Childcare will not be a decent place for children if this work is not valued.
2) More opportunities for professional development and coursework that meets their needs. Working people are ongoing learners who want opportunity to enhance their knowledge.
3) Early childhood teachers must be included at the table when decisions are being made, and they are fighting to have a say over their work. They are fighting against being totally alienated from their labor.
EDUCATION IN THE FUTURE? Marx had a distinctive perspective on the future of education. When labor is no longer alienated, education will be integral to life from start to finish as part of the development of the whole human being. Or as Marx put it in the chapter on machinery: "... the education of the future...will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labor with instruction and gymnastics...as the only method of producing fully developed human beings" (Capital, Vol. I, p. 614).
Understanding and promoting the importance of care for children is part of the struggle to hold on to our humanity. At stake is what is fundamental and human in the parent/child relationship. Marx said the relation between man and woman "reveals the extent to which man's natural behavior has become human...the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being." We read this to mean that what is specifically human is not the biological imperative of creating the next generation but what we make of that material necessity through our explicitly social relations. Traditional women's work, caring for each other, our elderly and our children--these ideas and possibilities are caught up in the work and thought of childcare workers as they struggle to keep that work human. They address the question now of what is human labor.
When commodification takes over the way childcare is socialized, it risks de-personalizing deep personal relationships. At the same time it holds the promise of making the problem more visible, putting into the public sphere the importance of the care and socialization of our children. Now some of this takes the form of the educational adequacy movements that can drag you into the muck of proving through testing, standards, and credentials, that what you are doing "works." Early childhood teachers have fought to keep social and emotional development included in the standards, and to limit reliance on testing; they push for curricula that teachers have control over and for funding to improve the lives and work conditions of the people taking care of children. CHILDCARE AND REVOLUTION
Women as women, not just as proletarians who happen to be female, have consistently raised this aspect of capitalism's inhumanity. Women have been at the forefront of every revolution. Fighting for issues that women raise as women is crucial to the next revolution's success in making a new beginning in human development after capitalism. Childcare workers experience a contradiction: is their purpose educating children for the needs of capital or is it the development of the whole human being? Resolving the contradiction in their work can set afoot a new human being.
The heart of the struggle is overcoming the commodity fetish. It means new human relations in production, which under capitalism are social relations between things--commodities and capital. Without overthrowing capitalism's alienated labor there is no escape from commodification. The question it raises is, what kind of labor replaces it? Women are challenging now what labor means when it is not the alienated labor under capitalism. What is human labor? The issues women keep bringing up of care and education are one way to visualize the opposite of alienated labor even before the revolution, as the future we want to create.
In the Critique of the Gotha Program Marx talks about the transition to a new society. He says: "Before [the part of the total product to serve as means of consumption] is divided among the individuals, there has to be deducted again, from it...that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops."
Childcare providers' demands may seem to be very modest. But these issues have been part of every revolutionary movement since the Paris Commune and probably before. Marx spoke to their aspirations by envisioning a totally new beginning when we no longer separate the development of "productive forces" from "the all-around development of the individual."
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