On August 26, the Seattle Education Association, which represents over 5900 education professionals throughout the city of Seattle, voted with 91% of members in favor to authorize a strike. The authorization vote followed hundreds of hours of negotiations spread over more than 20 bargaining sessions between Seattle Public Schools and SEA, after which SPS agreed to only around 12% of SEA’s demands. Workers will go on strike on September 2, the intended first day of the upcoming school year, if an agreement is not reached by then.

At the heart of SEA’s proposals is the understanding that education professionals’ working conditions are inextricably linked to students’ learning environments and outcomes. SEA’s core demands are:

Protect Special Education. SEA is fighting the district’s proposal to combine programs and cut support staffing, which would push even more onto educators already carrying too much.

Fair pay, especially for paraprofessionals and office professionals. Many SPS paraprofessionals earn below what HUD calls “very low income” for Seattle. One job should be enough!

Curb pressurization. Smaller class sizes, smaller case loads, and an end to the constant addition of duties beyond teaching.

These demands, if met, will mean students receive the effective instruction they need, while enabling staff to focus on education rather than making ends meet or doing paperwork.

Beyond these core demands, SEA is fighting for stronger protections for immigrants and LGBTQ+ members, professional autonomy, commitments around AI, and more.

Funding issues being used to push austerity agenda on Seattle schools

The district, headed up by brand-new Sup. Ben Shuldiner, is using the budget deficit as a pretext to drastically cut professional autonomy in the workplace and make sweeping austerity-based changes to the structure of schools. The budget deficit is real: Washington’s state funding for public education has declined from 52% to 43.2%, while structural obstacles like an insufficient funding formula and a state cap on how much local levies can collect have contributed to a budget deficit of about $75-87 million.

Inadequate state funding alone did not cause the deficit, though. The district’s management of its $1.3 billion annual budget has also contributed to the problem, as evidenced by administrative bloat and opaque “other” category in the budget, amont other questionable financial practices. The new superintendent himself is paid more than $400,000 annually.

A few years ago, the Seattle School Board tried to close 20 schools in response to the budget deficit and faced significant backlash. This is why they hired Shuldiner: he did the same cost-cutting in the Lansing, Michigan school district. His proposals are bad, but he was brought in by the board specifically to implement an austerity agenda. Austerity imposed for the sake of reducing the deficit will not address the issues of living wages for paraprofessionals and office workers, hard caps on class sizes/case loads, more support for multi-language learners and special education students, and respect for professional autonomy.

No matter which party is in office, federal ed policies hurt students and educators

The chasm between student needs and government policies and funding is emblematic of larger trends occurring across the nation. In the 2000s, the Bush administration used the punitive No Child Left Behind policy to defund already under-resourced schools. The 2009 Race to the Top grant program under Obama offered a carrot to promote slightly different neoliberal education reforms; in 2015, the Obama administration replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which dramatically reduced the role of the federal government in public education, further exacerbating inequities between states. The second Trump administration’s Educational Choice for Children Act, passed last July, financially incentivizes parents to donate and send their children to private schools, siphoning billions away from public schools, while moving to dismantle the Dept. of Education.

These decades of austerity and neoliberal education reform under the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have pushed our public education system to the brink and forced education unions to respond. In February 2018, roughly 20,000 members of American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association chapters across all 55 school districts in West Virginia staged a historic strike that lasted nearly two weeks and secured significant wins for workers and students. The strike in West Virginia sparked a wave of similar struggles in states throughout the nation over the following year. More recently, SEA staged a strike in 2022, and this past February, educators in San Francisco went on strike for the first time in fifty years. In authorizing this most recent strike, SEA joins the continuing resurgence of educators using the power of their labor to fight for the welfare of their students.

We applaud and stand in solidarity with the members of SEA as they campaign for their students. That being said, that education professionals in this country are forced to go on strike at all, while the government endlessly funds ICE and the military, is an indictment of the profit-driven capitalist system we live under. A worker-run socialist government would necessarily recognize the importance of, and accordingly provide for, a robust public education system. Under socialism, education professionals would have the resources they need to dedicate all their time and energy to giving their students the education they deserve.

While Black August is coming to a close, the fight for Black liberation rages on. Seeing the representation of Black faces in high places does not diminish the plight of Black Americans. That’s because the entire system is rigged against Black working class people – and no matter who is in the White House, the symptoms do not get any better. For Black liberation to become a reality, the entire system must fall!

The cycle of poverty is a never-ending, self-fulfilling prophecy under the capitalist system. When communities don’t have an adequate tax base or political influence, then critical programs are not properly funded. When critical programs aren’t properly funded, educational, environmental and health outcomes are all predictably worsened. Impoverished communities, then, become even easier for governmental bodies to neglect as “a lost cause”.

Black communities entered 2026 facing the same economic inequalities that have plagued Black communities for generations — higher unemployment, lower wages, and a persistent racial wealth gap.

In July 2026, Black unemployment stood at 6.3%, compared with 3.6% for white workers. Black full-time workers earned a median of $1,029 per week in the second quarter of 2026, roughly 19% less than the $1,268 median for white workers.

The latest data shows that the median Black family holds just $44,900 in wealth, compared with $285,000 for the median white family.

That we see more Black people represented in higher positions of power today does not diminish the grave reality of widespread poverty and disinvestment that Black working class people are experiencing.

In fact, this disparity can be used as a means of further criminalizing Black communities. Black communities experience higher levels of policing, but all the research shows that police don’t actually solve crime. They end up perpetrating the crime of mass incarceration instead. While Black people make up only 13% of the U.S. population, they represent nearly 40% of the prison population, further contributing to the deterioration of Black communities.

The entire system is rigged against Black working class people – and no matter who is in the White House, the symptoms do not get any better.

Throughout the history of this country, the struggle of the Black community for equality and democracy has been the main engine of progress.

The overarching goal of the Trump administration is to undo that progress and plunge the country into a new era where there are no limits on the power of the rich and corporations to exploit the people and destroy the planet. Even if he focuses his racist rhetoric against other targets, like immigrants from Latin America, at the core of Trump’s agenda is an all-out assault on Black people.

Trump’s second term has brought a direct assault on Black communities and the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. His administration has dismantled federal DEI and affirmative-action programs, gutted offices responsible for enforcing workplace civil rights, and pushed the Justice Department to abandon or dismiss investigations into police departments accused of unconstitutional treatment of Black communities while rolling back federal oversight. At the same time, the administration has taken positions against expanding Black voting power under the Voting Rights Act and is pushing new restrictions on mail-in voting that threaten to make voting harder for millions.

Trump’s 2025 budget law cuts Medicaid and SNAP, programs millions of working-class Black families depend on, while shifting resources toward tax cuts, policing, immigration enforcement, and the military. The administration is also shrinking the federal workforce and dismantling programs designed to address racial discrimination, threatening jobs and protections for Black workers. These policies make clear that Trump’s agenda is not simply about rolling back “DEI” — it is about dismantling the public institutions and protections that working people have fought for, while leaving Black communities to bear the greatest costs.

But just because Trump wants to push through racist policies, doesn’t mean he’ll be able to get away with it.

Racist injustice against Black people is so persistent in the U.S. not solely because of personal attitudes and prejudices. Racism is an essential tool used by the billionaires who rule this country and the powerful institutions they control to cement their domination over society.

White supremacy allows the ruling class to grow even richer by exploiting Black workers especially intensely — with slavery as the most extreme example upon which the country was built. And further, racism divides working people, helping the elite maintain their political power. If Black people are demonized and presented as the source of social problems, then the millionaires and billionaires who are actually to blame get let off the hook.

Through courageous struggle, there have been periods of historic progress towards Black freedom. But whenever that struggle slows down, the natural tendency of the system is to roll back that progress. Take affirmative action for instance — the Black liberation movement of the 1960s won affirmative action programs nationwide, but starting in 1978 the courts gradually restricted these policies before ending them altogether.

For decades, the vast majority of Black voters have supported Democratic Party politicians, only to have those politicians abandon the interests of the Black community as soon as they take office.

No matter how many Black politicians are elected, or how many Black people are in positions of prominence in economic and cultural institutions, conditions for the working class majority of the Black community never change — or even get worse.

The problem is at the roots: this country is ruled by a tiny handful of billionaires, and decisions are made to maximize profits for those billionaires. White supremacy persists because it is in their interests for it to persist. But the grinding oppression and inequality Black communities are subjected to would be totally at odds with the goals of a society ruled by the working class, where decisions are made to meet the needs of the people and the planet.

Featured Image: Demonstrators in Philadelphia park during 2020 mass uprisings against racism and police brutality. Credit: Amistad Law Project.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/45041279

Stolen from r/Marxism_Memes

Thumbnail is Marx's manuscript for The German Ideology. Summary below is a compilation of my notes I wrote when reading Materialism and the Dialectical Method by Maurice Cornforth, along with general knowledge from reading various Marxist authors.

Often times, Marxists use the term "material conditions," and "dialectics." What does this mean? Why do Marxists care so much about material conditions? The answer is that Marxists seek materialist explanations for observed processes as opposed to idealist, and do so dialectically, as opposed to metaphysically. In other words, Marxists apply dialectical analysis to find materialist explanations for phenomena. Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the proletariat as a class, and serves as the most vital ideological tool for overthrowing capitalism.

In order to understand dialectical materialism, we need to understand its component parts, materialism and dialectics, and their historical predecessors, idealism and metaphysics.

Idealism

Idealism is, in short, to put ideas prior to matter. Idealism has been used by feudal lords to justify their position above the serfs, forming the ideological basis for feudalism. The 3 major assertions of idealism are as follows:

1. Idealism asserts that the material world is dependent on the spiritual

2. Idealism asserts that spirit, or mind, or idea, can and does exist in separation from matter. (The most extreme form of this assertion is subjective idealism, which asserts that matter does not exist at all but is pure illusion.)

3. Idealism asserts that there exists a realm of the mysterious and unknowable, "above," or "beyond," or "behind" what can be ascertained and known by perception, experience, and science.

Early Materialism

Common idealist arguments are appealing to a supernatural "human nature," or "good vs. evil" explanations for processes. Materialism arose over time, as people grew to understand the world more deeply, and especially as a tool to overthrow the feudal aristocracy that justified its existence via the church. In other words, materialism rose to help the bourgeoisie. The 3 basic teachings of materialism as counterposed to idealism are:

1. Materialism teaches that the world is by its very nature material, that everything which exists comes into being on the basis of material causes, arises and develops in accordance with the laws of motion of matter.

2. Materialism teaches that matter is objective reality existing outside and independent of the mind; and that far from the mental existing in separation from the material, everything mental or spiritual is a product of material processes.

3. Materialism teaches that the world and its laws are fully knowable, and that while much may not be known there is nothing which is by nature unknowable.

Shortcomings of Metaphysical Materialism

The type of materialism that overthrew the feudal lords was still underdeveloped, and metaphysical. The bourgeoisie needed an explanation for why the feudal lords were illegitimate, but still needed to support their own static, permanent rule. This was called mechanistic materialism, for the bourgeois scientists saw the world as a grand machine repeating simple motions forever. Mechanistic materialism, therefore, makes certain dogmatic assumptions:

1. That the world consists of permanent and stable things or particles, with definite, fixed properties;

2. That the particles of matter are by nature inert and no change ever happens except by the action of some external cause;

3. That all motion, all change can be reduced to the mechanical interaction of the separate particles of matter;

4. That each particle has its own fixed nature independent of everything else, and that the relationships between separate things are merely external relationships.

Moving from Metaphysics to Dialectics

This, of course, has proven false. History did not end with the dissolution of the USSR, despite what modern mechanistic materialists claim. Mechanistic materialism relies on metaphysics, seeing everything as a static abstraction, devoid of its context. It has no explanation for how new qualities emerge, and ultimately fell to idealism to explain the "first mover," ie "God." Dialectical materialism holds instead:

1. The world is not a complex of things but of processes;

2. That matter is inseperable from motion;

3. That the motion of matter comprehends an infinite diversity of forms which arise one from another and pass into one another;

4. That things exist not as separate individual units but in essential relation and interconnection.

Dialectical Materialism

This became remarkable for the proletariat, as it sees nothing as static, and therefore marks the eventual downfall of the bourgeoisie. Putting it all together, we get the following:

1. Dialectical materialism understands the world, not as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which all things go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away.

In other words, when analyzing events and contextualizing them, we must always viee them as a struggle between the rising and the falling, the old and the new, for example the concentration of capital in markets and the rise in socialize labor.

2. Dialectical materialism considers that matter is always in motion, that motion is the mode of existence of matter, so that there can no more be matter without motion than motion without matter. Motion does not have to be impressed upon matter by some outside force, but above all it is necessary to look for the inner impulses of development, the self-motion, inherent in all processes.

In other words, all movement is a result of contradiction. Your foot presses on the Earth, and the Earth presses back on you.

3. Dialectical materialism understands the motion of matter as comprehending all changes and processes in the universe, from mere changes of place right to thinking. It recognizes, therefore, the infinite diversity of the forms of motion of matter from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher.

In other words, dialectical materialism recognizes that development exists as a change of quantity into quality. Addition or subtraction gives way to qualitative change. A balloon is filled with air, until at a given point it pops due to pressure buildup. Water goes from liquid to gas at its boiling point, and back into liquid when cooling down to said point.

4. Dialectical materialism considers that, in the manifold processes taking place in the universe, things come into being, change and pass out of being, not as separate individual units, but in essential relation and interconnection, so that they cannot be understood each separately and by itself but only in their relation and interconnection.

In other words, everything is connected, and must be analyzed in context to truly understand it. A worker isn't just an individual, but instead part of a social class of many workers. Wages are not something invented brand new every time, but instead are set by societal standards, controlled by the ruling capitalist class.

Conclusion

Karl Marx created dialectical materialism by turning Hegel's idealist dialectic into a materialist one. Then, he applied it to the progression of society, creating historical materialism. By analyzing social structures and progress as a dialectical process based in materialism, we can learn from history and analyze where it's going. This is scientific socialism in progress. Human thought is shaped by our social experience, forming class consciousness and ideology. How we produce and distribute determines our ways of thinking.

Socialism and communism also have their own contradictions as well, and just because we progress on to socialism does not mean we cannot fall back to capitalism. The dialectical materialist world outlook understands that nothing is static, and there is always new contradiction and new movement from that.

If you keep these in mind, you can do your own dialectical materialist analysis. Always seek explanations based on the material, not the ideal, and always do so by contextualizing the processes, analyzing their contradictions, the unity and struggle of opposing tendencies. Quantitative changes lead to qualitative development, and progresses as a result of the conflict or struggle of opposite tendencies. There's much more to dialectical materialism, but this should help serve as a simple overview!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43729189

Stolen from r/marxism_memes

• 1936: The Rights the U.S. Still Won't Guarantee - Lady Izdihar (3 min 51 sex)

• Constitution of the Soviet Union - 8th All-Union Congress of Soviets

• This Soviet World / (Audiobook) - Anna Louise Strong (1936)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43728612

Stolen from r/Marxism_memes

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43726548

Stolen from r/Marxism_memes

[...]That the method employed in Das Kapital has been little understood, is shown by the various conceptions, contradictory one to another, that have been formed of it.

Thus the Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that, on the one hand, I treat economics metaphysically, and on the other hand — imagine! — confine myself to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing receipts [4] (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future. In answer to the reproach in re metaphysics, Professor Sieber has it:

In so far as it deals with actual theory, the method of Marx is the deductive method of the whole English school, a school whose failings and virtues are common to the best theoretic economists.

M. Block — Les Théoriciens du Socialisme en Allemagne. Extrait du Journal des Economistes, Juillet et Août 1872 — makes the discovery that my method is analytic and says: "Par cet ouvrage M. Marx se classe parmi les esprits analytiques les plus éminents." ["By this work, Mr. Marx ranks among the most eminent analytical minds."] German reviews, of course, shriek out at “Hegelian sophistics.” The European Messenger of St. Petersburg in an article dealing exclusively with the method of Das Kapital (May number, 1872, pp. 427–436), finds my method of inquiry severely realistic, but my method of presentation, unfortunately, German-dialectical. It says:

At first sight, if the judgment is based on the external form of the presentation of the subject, Marx is the most ideal of ideal philosophers, always in the German, i.e., the bad sense of the word. But in point of fact he is infinitely more realistic than all his forerunners in the work of economic criticism. He can in no sense be called an idealist.

I cannot answer the writer better than by aid of a few extracts from his own criticism, which may interest some of my readers to whom the Russian original is inaccessible.

After a quotation from the preface to my Criticism of Political Economy, Berlin, 1859, pp. IV–VII, where I discuss the materialistic basis of my method, the writer goes on:

The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. ... If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own. ... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ... With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx’s book has.

Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?

Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of Das Kapital, it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Ἐπίγονοι [Epigones — Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire.

• Afterward to the Second German Edition of Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx, 1873

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10368210

Credit: https://youtube.com/post/UgkxH5MfKu0iw011O64mQEl8xTfVdgH8afdc

From a video by Lady Izdihar, linked above! Great explanation of revolutionary theory and the utility of formalized parties.