Schools? Prisons. Work? Prison. Traffic? Prison. DMV? Prison. Internet? Prison. Popeyes? Prison. The self? Prison.
Wait it's all prison? 🌍👨🚀
Always has been 🔫👨🚀
Dear god... I am the prison
Racks slide I have no choice but to abolish myself
Sometimes I feel that the Chinese have put us all in a concentration camp. A concentration camp called life
Adrian Zenz
This is a silly question to ask when there are literal cops in public schools.
It's not a silly question to ask when teachers are talking about how much they "love our SROs, they've been so helpful."
You think they wanna be shot? I'd be "nice" to the fat assholes that carry a gun around my workplace too.
I did see a lot of this when BLM was going on, a couple cities temporarily banned SROs, and the comments were filled with “my mom is a teacher and loves the SRO” and “i worked part time at a school and the SRO was sooo helpful and cool!”
Not sure if it was an Astroturf or if Americans really are that servile and cucked
I guess there's a lot of teachers out there but the ones I know uniformly think the SROs always make everything worse when they show up.
Back when I was in highschool (at the beginning) I went though an edgy atheist phase. While it was an improvement over the homophobic evangelical christian shit I was raised up on, it wasn't great at all lol
Is this not a bit? They have "larper" in their display name, and the profile pic is a Max Stirner doge over an anarcho-communist flag, obviously contradictory tendencies.
I guess there is a meaningful difference, prison guards tend to be more violent, but the job is the same: regulate behavior to create good workers in both the short and long term.
Prison guards aren't trying to create "good workers" the way schools are designed to. Prisons are designed to create lifelong criminals who can be trapped and enslaved forever, for profit.
I'd agree that heavy reforms are needed, but my issue is that I struggle to understand how a new school system would be that much radically different from the current one so as to necessitate demolishing the current system and building an entirely new one.
Depends on how broad your definition of school is. I'll give you the short answer now then come back.
I want social changes that would make schools as a place separate from the rest of life make less sense.
If I had money and a kid I'd send them to a "democratic school."
So, one of the Marxist ideas that appeals the most to me is the idea that we can do away with the division of labor and approach productive activity as something we do to express our humanity rather than through jobs and houswifery and the like.
With the end of the gendered division of labor, the nuclear family and the public / private dichotomy falls away.
At present, one of the core features of school is that it props up the public / private dichotomy. It takes care of children while parents work. As a private school teacher, I see this first hand. During the pandemic, parents dont care about the quality of education I'm giving anymore, just that I'm able to take their children where public schools won't. My job is, in their eyes, essentially to allow them to keep their public and private lives separate.
I'd also like to see jobs-as-years-long-specializations go out the window. This isn't a utopian proposition. Stalin wanted to teach every citizen multiple trades so they could move between different kinds of work freely. Under capitalism I've been (in the past few years) a house painter, a clerk, a mountaineering guide, a dog walker and a teacher. There's no reason I couldn't move between those roles freely except for the way the division of labor pidgeonholes people.
So without a division of labor, parents are freed up to look after their children. They're also freed up to participate in more parts of the world. Maybe you teach your kid to read and share a book with them in the morning, then in the afternoon you leave them with your uncle and several other children to just play. He takes them to overpass that's been converted into a greenway to forage for yucca and prickly pear while you go do a volunteer shift at the desalination plant.
Then you head to a mess hall to eat a meal with your soviet and extended family, then finally you all head to a general assembly where your child participates as a full participant.
To sort of ground this vision in the real world, I'll approach it from a couple angles:
From a class struggle angle, we need to get students to think of themselves as future workers and organize around that. This is already reality in parts of France, where university and highschool students regularly go on strike. There's even social theory about this, for example Vaneigm's "On the Poverty of Student Life." And Perlman's "Worker Student Action Committees." Organizing students in an oppositional relationship to their schools is how you move towards abolishing school.
Despite Engles' valid criticisms of the utopian movement, I think utopianism has value in expanding our imaginary for what's possible from a communist future and helps us break from capitalist subjectivity a little. So, from a more utopian angle: I'd like to see more deschooling / homeschooling, with government funding for folks to do it on their own terms so long as they're not teaching weird religious shit. I'd like to see public funding for "democratic / salsbury schools." I'd like to see a push to decommodify everything, from mass participation in buy nothing groups to library socialism to public housing, etc. And a willingness to include children in adult projects as equal participants.
Why does Foucault suck? I know some people who are/were obsessed with him.
For me, I think his whole idea of governmentality got appropriated by other scholars in some really poor ways because only part of his lectures on it were published for a long time. But also don't really like it to begin with, he saw neoliberalism in a very weird way that was positive kinda, IDK interpretations of Foucault are super varied. He does offer important questions though that Marxists (or Leninists anyway) need to consider more than I think they have in the past, as a big part of what he says is that forms of power will always reproduce themselves, even if we were to seize state power and attempt to re-make society. Again of course if you ask 10 different people what Foucault meant you'll also get 10 different answers. Been thinking about it because he came up in a book on cybernetic governmentality (a concept I don't the author made a good case for) in the soviet union I had to read for a class.
Here's one answer dealing with neoliberalism:
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/09/michel-foucault-neoliberalism-friedrich-hayek-milton-friedman-gary-becker-minoritarian-governments
He has a point, but you know you have failed when you have to make that point in such an absurd, leading way
Teachers actually get in trouble for sexually assaulting students, unlike prison guards, are you kidding me?
