Combating Education’s Shock Doctrineers

Guest post by Dr Danny Weil

(In this final of 6 guest posts, Weil describes the need for direct action in fighting Wall Street’s effort to end public education as we know it.)

The shock doctrineers have moved stealth like, quickly and quietly, under the auspices of democratic change, crisis and benevolent largess clothed in frothy rhetoric when in fact their aims are malevolent and their largess the result of looted monies from both worker exploitation, in the case of say, Bill Gates, and/or debt income in the case of Lumina and Sallie Mae (http://www.minyanville.com/business-news/politics-and-regulation/articles/SLM-NNI-CIT-Sallie-Mae-SLM/5/31/2012/id/41365).

They have used religious reactionaries who do not even want knowledge of the human body to be taught to students, let alone critical thinking/reasoning, to drum up support for their plans and herd the masses under the guise of faith-based charity and similar schemes (http://www.dailycensored.com/high-school-teacher-in-idaho-under-investigation-for-saying-vagina-during-anatomy-lesson-and-encouraging-critical-thinking-on-climate-change/).

If students, faculty, working people, the disabled and indeed the majority of us who seek to create school as a ‘home for the mind’, are to beat them at their offensive game, then we must wake up and see how they operate.  This will take meticulous and arduous critical analysis for they far outnumber us in both capital to assure their plans are put in place, and access to the microphone of a deracinated culture from which they operate, celebrate and broadcast their rancid strategies.  And they are moving fast now, not just here in the US but all over the world (http://www.dailycensored.com/lumina-foundation-pushing-privatization-of-education-in-mexico/).

They are smart, ruthless and own the armed forces and the police who work to assure there will be no resistance to their plans.

Simply signing petitions, writing letters to corporate newspapers or calling on corporate democrats to step up to the plate and such, will never work.  In fact, it is a strategy that is playing right into the neo-enclosure colonist’s hands, for this is the exertion that the new Masters want the working class to engage in – to come to the throne with petitions, handwringing and pleas while the masters yawn, host large country club dinners to create more havoc, secretly bivouac in fancy hotels to launch new neo-enclosure plans and move quickly across the terrain, saddled up with a lynch posse for anything public, be it schools or hospitals.

No, now is the time to create working class and community ties that can then be harnessed to the development of class-based organization and development of political parties and massive resistance.  Only with direct action can we hope to win.  For as Chris Hedges and other notable scholars and activists have noted, liberalism is dead and I would add, it is the real problem.

Only a mobilized class-conscious-left has the chance to take on these hoaksters and hustlers who seek to reduce humanity to robotization and create the oppressive Brave New World where we become “Insolvent Green’.  Getting rid of the road dogs, the surplus population no longer needed under capitalism, is their goal and they will use any force to accomplish it for they know angry and class-conscious masses are the biggest threat to their dominance.

Once again, the plans for the wholesale privatization of education and elimination of educational opportunities for American students, is clear in the Lumina report, of which there are many:

If we are to create an environment that can stand up to these disastrous “shock doctrineers” in an Age of Irrationality and an environment of ignorance, we must understand how social class works and what is in store for all of us if we fail.  This means understanding how the bankrupt and debt ridden capitalist class operates maliciously worldwide to seed and then harvest a new world of both manipulation and repression.  Without a clear understanding of the historical as it exists in the present moment, we will find our contemporary life littered with a growing surplus population that must be manipulated and eventually repressed — a future owned and harnessed by ‘them’.

This then is our mission: education, mobilization and tying our understanding and our wakening lives to clear organizational goals that stand up to the farce being perpetrated in the name of freedom.

City College of San Francisco is in progression and their efforts are a site for growing resistance and understanding.  Now is the time to turn up the volume, organize communities of power and enlightenment and begin the long, arduous march towards creating a better world.  We either accomplish this feat, or we enter the new Digital Dark Ages.

photo credit: Son of Groucho via photopin cc

Reposted from Daily Censored

Dr. Danny Weil is an investigative journalist, author and public interest attorney who practiced public interest law for more than twenty years and has been published in a case of first impression in California . He now lives in Ecuador .