[lbo-talk] blog post: Radical Labor Education, Part I

MICHAEL YATES mikedjyates at msn.com
Mon Dec 27 07:10:53 PST 2010


Full at http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2010/12/27/radical-labor-education-part-i/

"We are on our way to Amherst, Massachusetts, where I will be teaching a two-week course in labor economics to labor union brothers and sisters. I have been a labor educator for thirty years. I have taught working people, mostly union leaders and members, a wide variety of courses in all kinds of settings. I have taught economics to auto workers in eight-hour seminars held in motel conference rooms, collective bargaining to local workers throughout Western Pennsylvania in six weekly three-hour classes meeting in smoky union halls, labor economics to union leaders in an MA program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and online classes at other colleges and universities.

The labor education I embrace is "radical." My goal is to help students grasp the nature of our political economy, to see it as one riven by class conflict, driven by the exploitation of wage labor by the capitalist class, and in need of radical transformation. By radical transformation I mean a movement toward an economic system based upon cooperative production, democratic decision-making, egalitarian distribution, and a thorough reorganization of work relationships— in a word, socialism." . . .



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