Malott, Curry. "From Mass Education to Mass Incarceration." A History of Education for the Many: From Colonization and Slavery to the Decline of US Imperialism. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 165–174. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350085749.ch-10>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 09:00 UTC. Copyright © Curry Malott 2021. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 10 From Mass Education to Mass Incarceration Introduction: Connection to the Previous Chapter In Chapter 9 we saw the systemic crisis of realization and the mobilization of teachers and activists in response. In the present chapter we explore the expansion of education in the post-Second World War era as capitalism’s labor needs shifted with the continued development of labor-saving technologies, which coincided with the emergence of a new era in mass mobilizations spearheaded by the African American Civil Rights movement and its leaders. New crises of realization develop as the labor-saving technologies eventually render large segments of the US working-class redundant. Unlike previous manifestations of racism designed to either justify the super- exploitation of slavery or maintain a form of the plantation system through prisoner-leasing schemes after Reconstruction, the particular form of “super- predator” anti-Blackness of the post-Second World War mass incarceration era was a response to Black workers especially being expelled from production as a by-product of automation (Puryear 2012). Racist incarceration during Jim Crow functioned to hold African Americans in the South to labor, whereas mass incarceration contemporarily operates to facilitate the removal of the African American community from the labor process. A community not valued for its ability to labor, within the logic of the social universe of capital, is a community discarded and devalued. In this way racism has not only been preserved from previous eras of forced labor, but it has been preserved in an altered, more heinous form (i.e. sublated). It is within this context of rapid technological development and machines replacing workers that we have seen a shift from investing in human development (i.e. education) to investing in digitalization and the prison industrial complex. 166 A History of Education for the Many Critical Role of Capitalism Not only did the aftermath of the Second World War bring vast advances in technology, it also brought a shift in the balance of forces, known as the Cold War. The capitalists were no longer the only world power or the only pole. With the advancement of the Soviet Union and the rise of a block of socialist states, including China, the world was now multi-polar. In response to this global class war or Cold War, the United States established a permanent military industry with state management institutionalized. Political scientists such as Seymour Melman (1970) explained the rising poverty at the time as a direct consequence of resources diverted to maintain this military industrial complex. US capitalists worried that a new economic depression would emerge as the stimulus of the full-employment war economy dissipated. The ruling-class was therefore committed to keeping the price of labor (i.e. wages) suppressed even as productivity increased. So dominant was their position with the only intact industrial infrastructure intact that it accounted for 60 percent of the world’s productive output, but with only 6 percent of the global population. Within this context labor fought back with thousands and thousands of strikes. Franz Schurmann (1972/1995), in an introduction to a collective of writings and speeches by Black Panther Party co-founder and theoretician, Huey P. Newton, constructs a narrative with a slightly different orientation. Schurmann argues that if the US economy had continued to expand as dynamically as it did in the nineteenth century, “Black people would have been absorbed into the ever- expanding industrial labor force” (xvi). Schurmann notes that the predominantly white labor unions, fearing the coming job losses due to automation, kept Brown and Black people out of the unions contributing to racial apartheid in the United States. It is within this context that Schurmann situates the emergence of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. Eugene Puryear (2012) notes that because the manufacturing jobs available to African Americans after the great migration North tended to be on the lowest rung, they were the first to lose their jobs as a result of developments in automation and other labor-saving technologies. The state responded to this shift in production with mass incarceration and the cutting of social services. Suffering from widespread unemployment “huge numbers of African Americans were trapped in either neglected inner-city ‘hoods’ or the cruelties of the prison system” (Puryer 2012: 46). Outlining this scenario in 1966 James Baldwin remains timely: From Mass Education to Mass Incarceration 167 The jobs that Negroes have always held, the lowest jobs, the most menial jobs, are now being destroyed by automation. No remote provision has yet been made to absorb this labor surplus. Furthermore, the Negro’s education, North and South, remains, almost totally, a segregated education, which is but another way of saying that he is taught the habits of inferiority every hour of every day that he lives. The social unrest emerging from this situation is further agitated by the way in which the Black community has always been “policed like occupied territory” as Baldwin describes it. The ultimate function of the police, for Baldwin, is to “keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they serve no other function.” This is why, Baldwin elaborates, that “calls to ‘respect the law,’ always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene.” Heading this call then to “respect the law,” situated “in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.” Enter Police Unions It was within the era of civil rights mobilizations and the escalation of police brutality that police unions were formed. Baldwin summarizes the demands civil rights activists were making of the repressive state: [T]he Police Department investigates itself, quite as though it were answerable only to itself. But it cannot be allowed to be answerable only to itself. It must be made to answer to the community which pays it, and which it is legally sworn to protect. Responding to organizers bringing attention to “the role of police and police violence in defending racism and segregation” the armed wing of the state began forming unions “to give credibility to” its “efforts to protect police officers from police oversight and the criminal investigation of officer misconduct” (Correia &Wall 2018: 163). The consequence has been that: Through collective bargaining, police unions have transformed police violence into a contractually protected condition of their employment. This has had the effect of expanding the right of police to choose when and where to use violence at the same time that it has limited civilian police oversight or criminal investigation of that use of force by police. (164) 168 A History of Education for the Many As the repressive state was continuing its intensification and consolidation or pooling of power, African American communities were also winning concessions in education. Critical Role of Education During and following the Second World War and the recovery from the Great Depression, African Americans continued the struggle for civil rights, including in the area of education. This mass movement, combined with the national liberation struggles spreading through the colonized world following the Russian and then the Chinese revolutions, compelled the Supreme Court to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson in Brown v. Board of Education. To be sure many of the nine white male Supreme Court Justices who voted unanimously in favor of Brown had been in favor of upholding Jim Crow Apartheid. It was therefore not the Supreme Court that dismantled Jim Crow but one of the largest mass movements in US history led by the African American community in the epicenter of Southern apartheid. The contradiction of African American soldiers fighting overseas against fascism for their country then coming home to legalized segregation enforced by the racist terror of the police/KKK was too stark. On their return to the United States African American soldiers had experiences in train terminal diners where they had to eat segregated in kitchens while their German prisoners of war were permitted to dine, smoke, and laugh with the white soldiers in white- only dining rooms. One African American solider, disgusted by the hypocrisy, reflected, I stood on the outside looking on, and I could not help but ask myself these questions: Are these men sworn enemies of this country? Are they not taught to hate and destroy all democratic governments? Are we not American soldiers, sworn to fight for and die if need be for this country? Then why are they treated better than we are? Why are we pushed around like cattle? If we are fighting for the same thing, if we are to die for our country, then why does the Government allow such things to go on? Some of the boys are saying that you will not print this letter. I’m saying that you will. (Yank Magazine 1944) As Black veterans returned from the Second World War they led numerous civil rights campaigns, many involving armed self-defense as a necessity of From Mass Education to Mass Incarceration 169 the context. The fearless military of this struggle rattled the white supremacist economic and state power structure to its core.