On WALTER
Dear readers, I'll be spending the next academic year in New York City as part of my sabbatical. If you're in NYC and want to meet up email me!
The prologue above is sort of related to the rest of this post, which is about an experience I had in New York recently. I was visiting a very old friend, someone I've known since we went to summer camp together in the early 1990s. We've kept in touch over the years and always take an interest in what the other is doing, which is usually some mixture of political-economic-social work. But my friend works in the private sector, in business, with a sort of rare socialist-ish consciousness that I've always appreciated and has given me perspective on capitalism generally.
During my recent visit he showed me his newest venture and it really got me thinking.
WALTER
The business is called Working and Learning Together Electronics Recycling (WALTER). It's a small business that provides electronics recycling services to businesses and individuals. You know all those monitors, laptops, ipods, ipads, headphones, cables, charging cords, phones, and other electronic detritus that piles up when technologies change or people move and leave stuff behind? What happens to all those old cell phones and office phones, the power cords, the wires? Usually they go to the dump, but my friend's business recycles these for their useful parts, like chips and semiconductors, selling them to manufacturers so they can be reused, and disposing of any resultant waste, which he says is very little.
But that's just the electronics recycling part of it. There's an educational part too. The business itself is part of a network of businesses, seeded by a French nonprofit called ATD Fourth World that, for more than four decades, has taken a unique approach to the private sector. Started by priests in the liberation theology tradition, the basic idea, as my friend explained it to me, is to spend years living with poor communities and figuring out, in a participatory way, what kind of needs and capacities exist or could exist--what people can do and what they need, whatever their circumstances--and start businesses consistent with those needs and capacities.
So someone from ATD Fourth World lives in a place where people are hard hit by the injustices of social structure for awhile, like five or six years, getting to know them. Through a long process of planning meetings, the people in that place come up with a business proposal, which ATD Fourth World then helps to finance and set up.
One such person lived like a priest in Brownsville, Brooklyn and the proposal they worked on was electronics recycling--but specifically to employ young men who've dealt with the carceral system. These guys have records and wouldn't be able to get jobs elsewhere due to punitive policies around felony and employment. But they may have also 'fallen out' of the workforce other ways too, having not gone to school or failed out or dropped out or whatever.
The purpose of this workplace is to teach these people what it means to be in the workplace: having a job, keeping the job, etc. It's what school was supposed to do--reproduce the capitalist relations of production by instruction in how to work for a living--but using the division labor itself.
Primary reproduction
My friend is the head of WALTER. He sees himself as teaching work generally as much as managing the specific work of electronics recycling. I toured the factory in Brownsville where WALTER is located, met some of the workers, and got a sense of the dynamics of this business and its overall project
What to make of it? I'm pretty sure that education reproduces relations of production--it maintains the continuity of dominant ways that people have their hands on the means of production by instructing people in how to have their hands on it, whether exploited workers or managers and goons bossing them around or exploiters profiting from their surplus value.
This process--education--is generally not a great thing if the relations of production aren't great. It's not great that education as such has to be in the service of preparing people to be 'productive members of society' when the society they're being prepared to be productive members of is unjust. Capitalist education, for example.
But that's when people are 'succeeding' in the structure. There's another not great aspect of capitalist education: when people don't 'succeed' in it and drop out of school, for instance. In this case, they don't even get the opportunity to learn to be exploited and find a place in the division of labor. They 'fall through the cracks' in the structure, not getting its so-called benefits.
What's worse, to 'succeed' in a structure that gets you ready to be exploited or to 'fail' in that structure and not be exploited at all, without other reliable and safe means of securing the meager resources you might within that structure? It's a dead end so many face in the US, which comes with its racist and colonial and ableist and gendered multiple oppressions.
WALTER is an interesting institution because it seeks to 'educate' those who've had the fall-through-the-cracks experience by employing them directly. Rather than more classes, credits, or promoting other kinds of traditional studenting at educational institutions that prepare people for the division of labor, WALTER makes the division of labor itself the educational institution, skipping that step. It's what some marxists call primary reproduction: the kind of learning you do at the point of production itself rather than a point of reproduction, like an outside institution such as school, which would be secondary reproduction.
Typically, this sort of reproduction is like on-the-job training programs or internships or apprenticeships. But WALTER is none of these. It's just a job, but a job that's also supposed to teach you about having a job so that you can keep that job and other jobs in the future.
Skipping the belittlement?
There's something inherently diminutive about traditional educational institutions that must at least partly come from the fact that they're outside the point of production. Students are "still learning" and "not in the real world" and get treated as such. It's belittling to be a student and I think we all know that this kind of belittlement has a hard kernel of injustice in it. Aside from small exceptions, school is a largely authoritarian place whose discipline is oriented precisely to form people to fit into the existing social structure and its division of labor, no matter how nominally free that structure pretends to be. (Rousseau famously said that we must be forced to be free.)
WALTER skirts that belittlement, which is cool. Like every educational institution, it's preparing people to be exploited. But at least it's paying its 'students' to learn by actually having them work and getting right to the point of the whole capitalist education thing. Its education in exploitation comes from direct exploitation, primary reproduction rather than secondary reproduction, which doesn't feel right in one way because exploitation is bad, but, in another way, it feels okay: what's the immediate alternative for these young men of Brownsville? Gun violence, police brutality, incarceration, debt? If the Democratic Socialists of America had the ability to hire people, then that'd certainly be best. But in the absence of that?
Because it's my friend's initiative I couldn't help feeling good about WALTER, but my analysis also lends to critiques of it. In the socialist world of my dreams, we have something like what Nadezdha Krupskaya, lead pedagogue of the Russian revolution, called polytechnic education where everyone gets equal training in intellectual and manual labor, fulfilling the material needs of the whole working class through whatever work, but also, included in that concept of work, getting time and space to dwell in the pleasures of thought, poetry, feeling, learning, and studying. Ultimately this is a preparation to own and control the means of production with everyone else in society rather than work the means of production, employed by other people that control and own them. WALTER's doing the second one obviously and not the first, but no school can really do the first (except maybe some of the schools in Mondragon, Spain?): we're still living in this racial capitalism of ours and we have to do stuff to address its injustices.
Independently of whether WALTER addresses those injustices or perpetuates them or both or neither, it's certainly a fascinating case study of education in racial capitalism.