Yet it was the only publication I got at that event which I made a point of skimming while still there, rather than waiting until I got home. And the main reason was that it had two articles on a topic which I have never seen treated in print in print in a leftist publication, yet which occupies a good portion of my daily mental effort: child care. (Please note in fairness that I have not said "never been" but "never seen." Anyone familiar with other treatments of the topic, please link to or cite them.)
I am trying not to get too autobiographical in this project, but I do think it's necessary to state that I think about this a great deal because I have a young daughter. Young enough that the political economy of the issue has a routine impact on my life and hers, and also the fact that my child is a girl colors my thoughts on it: All her non-familial caregivers have, without exception, been women, and when a given occupation is so visibly gendered it cannot but have an effect on her own perceptions of how the world is structured, and how that structure governs her possibilities and horizons.
Why not have this be a routine topic of revolutionary propaganda, alongside such currently routine topics as unions, wars, immigration or access to higher education? Is it that child care is only a particular concern of a "section" of the working class? If anyone made that argument in earnest, then I would have to reply: Bullshit. Not only will most working-class people have to deal with it at some point as parents, but we ought not to overlook that all people--workers, too!--begin lives as children, and live within a horizon that is extensively shaped by the care arrangements they experienced as children. This should be a trivial observation, but it's not: Too many leftists fall prey to the rationalist conceit that their audience consists of disembodied consciousnesses, whose histories, emotions and current interests can and should be placed behind something like what the liberal philosopher John Rawls called "the veil of ignorance."
The adults of a class that would meekly accept, or ignore in favor of supposedly "more important" matters, or worse yet complicitly perpetrate the physical, emotional and intellectual brutalization of its own children would be in no fit state to liberate themselves or anyone else. A struggle for emancipation is a struggle for the future and thus, definitionally, a struggle for the interests of the youngest. And factually, such struggles often begin conceptualized as such. Any "particularization" of the issue of child care presumes, more or less consciously, its privatization as a "family" (read: female) responsibility, and is thus essentially sexist.
So my first reaction to the articles was simply to be happy that they existed. But the two articles were rather varied in their qualities. The first, "Why Unions Are Good for Children," is by Kristin Schall; the second, "Expanding What We Child Care Workers Know About Empowerment," by Susan Dorazio. (I was somewhat disappointed that both authors were women; the de facto delegation of certain topics to women is a common sign of tokenism. It's better than having the issues ignored entirely, but it's not optimal. I'll be most impressed when I see men besides me also raising the question, without being prodded or reminded.)
The thesis of Schall's article is stated clearly in the title and argued relentlessly throughout, backed up with established facts and tight reasoning. To sum up, the early childhood education sector is hardly unionized at all, with low wages, low-to-non-existent standards of training, and long hours, resulting in conditions that are exhausting and burn-out inducing for the staff and dreadful for the children. If that were all there were to it, it would be flawless.
Unfortunately, there is a recurrent thread of elitism in her arguments. She notes with frustration that "it is possible to work in this field possessing only a high school diploma and thus be without even a rudimentary understanding of child development and psychology." She notes that parents able to pay very high fees can place their children in accredited centers that "employ qualified teachers who have studied or are in the process of studying early childhood education." And her proposed solution, that public schools be extended down to infancy, is touted as giving young children "the same benefits of highly qualified teachers that children in kindergarten through 12th grades are afforded."
It is this kind of elitism that has helped set up teachers and their unions as targets for the populist resentment that is being so well deployed by both Democratic and Republican politicians. Its underlying fallacy was obvious to me, and offensive, as it would be to many a working-class person. (And here, I must lapse again into anecdote and autobiography.) Frankly, my mother with her GED, though by no means a flawless caregiver, had a much better "understanding of child development and psychology" than many--no, most--of the "highly qualified teachers" whom I encountered in my K-12 education. While many child care workers need better training--an assertion which as a parent I would readily affirm--her argument is undermined by the presumption that competence, training and formal education are synonyms, a presumption that "is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society." After all, "the educator must himself be educated."
The very notion that such an extension of public schooling is "the simple solution," as Schall presents it, seemingly so sane and realist, is completely abstracted from the very real situation of public schools and teachers under an all-sided political attack. (And that leaves aside the valid question of whether the school as an institution, keeping children and their putative education cloistered away from adult productive activity, is compatible with a socialist understanding of human development.) To attempt to do so under capitalism, with the requisite training, would necessarily divert a tremendous mass of human labor away from value production, i.e., from the activities that make profits for capital. Such an eminently sensible vision is purely utopian if not coupled with any notion of the revolutionary transformation of society as a whole.
Even with a revolution, the care of the very young will remain a knotty, persistent problem, not susceptible to day-after miracles. To transform what, in value terms, is clearly a little appreciated task into one of the highest of shared social responsibilities will require the widespread activation of human personality, and engagement of many who never would have conceived of it as a vocation in that shared labor. And we will hardly have the time or resources to enroll all those people in Master's programs in child psychology. How to make that change? As Karl said, "The materialist doctrine that people are products of circumstances and education, and that, therefore, changed people are products of changed circumstances and changed education, forgets that it is people who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The joining together of the changing of circumstances, and of human activity or self-transformation, can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice." While fighting for key partial gains--unionization, living wages, better training, better working conditions--such struggles can only succeed if made a conscious element of the human self-transformation that can only come through revolutionary practice.
If Schall makes a strong argument for a limited and thus ultimately self-defeating perspective, Dorazio makes a meandering case for what seems like a more global outlook on the problems of child care workers. Addressing her case to fellow child care workers, her argument seems to be that child care workers can learn from activism, and activists can learn from child care workers. But this begs the questions, what kind of child care, and what kind of activism? The recurrent valorization of such phrases as "bottom up", "leaderless group" and "diversity of tactics," makes certain preferences clear. But they are nothing more than that: Preferences. And subjective preferences, as opposed to observation of the ways that leadership is exercised (and abused), established and contested, can only lead to metaphysical nonsense-statements like, "leadership springs from within." No, it is a social relationship, that is structured and conditioned within any given setting by the full range of social relationships that govern our interactions.
Do activists often reproduce and reinforce alienated social relationships that in other contexts we rebel against--or that we would expect and want our own children to chafe against? Yes, and if this is part of the point Dorazio is trying to make, she has one. But this is a phenomenon I have observed at least as often from champions of "bottom up" and "diversity" as from the dreaded "vanguardists."
Indicative of that, she makes several insistent points as to what child care workers "must" do: e.g., "take the time and make the effort to connect with individuals, organizations, and cultural and political projects that offer and model alternatives to the status quo," or "take an active role in the global drive for the creation of, and full participation in, truly democratic systems and structures where human rights and social justice for all workers and communities come first." The hortatory tone is recurrent, and overbearing, and takes little note of the objective conditions that Schall describes so well in her article: That many child care workers work in small home settings, and/or work long hours, with little training and education, and thus little opportunity to take the lead as she so vehemently urges. Misrepresentation of the question of leadership feeds right into evasion of confrontation of the leaderships that do exist in order to prevent the formation of new struggles and alliances. And thereby, the responsibility is turned back where it rests the least easily: On the shoulders of the atomized, individual worker.
Again, the Socialist Party is to be commended for having leaders who consider this to be a worthy topic of consideration. The commendation can only go so far, however, when the solutions proposed lead to dead-end politics.
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