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New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy 1st Edition Robert Fredona
LUXEMBURG INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN POLITICAL ECONOMY
ROSA LUXEMBURG: A PERMANENT CHALLENGE FOR POLITICAL ECONOMY
On the History and the Present of Luxemburg’s ‘Accumulation of Capital’
Edited by
Judith Dellheim and Frieder Otto Wolf
Luxemburg International Studies on Political Economy
Series Editors
Jan Toporowski
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London, UK
Frieder Otto Wolf
Free University of Berlin Germany
The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is one of the largest political education institutions in Germany today. The Foundation’s book series, Luxemburg International Studies in Political Economy, publishes serious academic studies in political economy, broadly conceived to cover critical research in the social sciences on capitalism, as well as feminist and environmental political economy.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15118
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The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
Foreword
This book has a very specific history, dating back to the year 2011. It began with the idea for a conference to mark the 100th anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s foundational The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism. The discussion of this idea at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation ended with a clear provisional conclusion: that there would be no such conference. The main reason for this decision was to avoid a vulgar reflection of the historical debate surrounding the book, as it was conducted by the German Social Democrats in the year before the beginning of World War I and in the first war years on the one hand, and by the Stalinists on the other hand. Luxemburg’s opponents were much more interested in defaming Rosa Luxemburg’s personality than in discussing her theoretical insights. For those purposes, however, they were able to make use of some real mistakes and weaknesses in Luxemburg’s book. The main point of this ‘treatment’ of Luxemburg by these two groups (and their later, more or less conscious followers) was to misuse Luxemburg for their own political and ideological designs, without truly addressing her theoretical achievements—simply because she was a revolutionary, a co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany, and, ultimately, a murder victim. The Social Democrats made use of Luxemburg’s harsh criticism of the Bolsheviks, while the Stalinists insisted on the fact that her murder had been indirectly caused and condoned by a few Social Democrats.
There were strong concerns among leading members of the foundation that an event returning to a discussion of Accumulation of Capital could turn into a highly ideological confrontation and a mere re-enactment of fruitless historical debates.
Nevertheless, contemporary theoretical and political discussions, both internationally and within the German Left, have brought about a renewal of Luxemburg studies as an attempt to make her impressive theoretical potential accessible to ongoing research and critical discussions. Moreover, her work stands out as a historical example of a Marxist position which had escaped the crippling dichotomy of Stalinism and Social Democracy—comparable to Antonio Gramsci on the Communist, and the ‘Austro-Marxists’ on the Social Democratic side. The growing interest in Luxemburg as a resource for an emancipatory renewal of Marxism as it emerged in the New Left in the 1960s (with its components and echoes both in the East and in the West) has been further strengthened by the growing importance of global and European issues in the real world, as has it been reflected within Left politics.
At the same time, comparison of present-day conjunctures with political constellations similar to some of those existing before World War I has become much more plausible and much more frequently pursued in recent years. This has inevitably brought a renewed relevance to Rosa Luxemburg’s attempts to produce a theoretical reconstruction of such dynamics. Young people in particular, struggling with theory in order to understand the economic background of emerging critical political problems of our times, and of the difficulties of the Left to self-organise in a sustainable way, have raised many questions linked to Rosa Luxemburg’s theoretical achievements.
For Rosa Luxemburg represents a unique combination of political activism, scientific study and teaching. Although she published only a few ‘academic’ books in her lifetime, all of her speeches, articles and brochures are grounded in a deep theoretical understanding of society. Against the backdrop of a traditional liberal-bourgeois education, she was able to see and to feel the main tendencies within modern bourgeois society that continuously undermined both economic and cultural structures. As political activist and intellectual, it was important for her to understand emerging elements in the framework of contradictions of the
capitalist mode of production as the core of bourgeois society. Thus, her criticism of Marx was a consequence of the Marxian scientific approach itself. The understanding of the emergence, resolution and re-emergence of basic contradictions was the key not only to understanding society, but to creating political strategies and to building alliances. Thus, it is impossible to divide the ‘academic’ Accumulation of Capital from the other aspects of her work.
We can confidently state that The Accumulation of Capital is a kind of ‘conclusion’, made by Luxemburg on the basis of experiences in all fields of her activities. The year 1913, when the book was published, saw a change in the mode of rule in Germany, which she connected to the establishment of the property tax as an instrument of financing military expansion. She labelled this a ‘turning point’ and ‘milestone’ in the political development of Germany. In the years preceding she had already written about and spoken out against the dangers posed by war, colonial expansion and the militarisation of society. In Accumulation of Capital she described the scientific background of her own political activities. Luxemburg tried to find answers concerning the mode of reproduction of modern capitalism in the form of imperialism, as well as the driving forces and the resources of its development. In the Marxian tradition, she employed the instrument of critique both of given theoretical doctrines and of reality itself. This approach qualifies the book not only as a theoretical text, but also a textbook for students and politicians alike. Even today, the analysis of the destruction of non-capitalist (or non-capitalised) elements within bourgeois society as a source of accumulation and of the role of the state is an inspiration for both scientists and political activists. But Luxemburg also emphasised that capitalism does not break down automatically. Political activists and the masses must understand the social contradictions and find a historically specific way to solve them. Otherwise the sharpening of contradictions will only deepen the social and political crisis of civilisation. Accordingly, her book is on the one hand a call for using the Marxian approach as a social scientific tool and, on the other hand, a call for action.
This is why many emancipatory and solidarity-oriented partners of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundations both in Germany and especially abroad have asked for an event to be held on occasion of the 100th anniversary
of The Accumulation of Capital, in order to begin a new, constructive debate based on a continuous study of the reflections on Luxemburg’s work as they are emerging in international discussions. The supporters of the conference argued that outside Germany recent discussions on Luxemburg’s work have left behind both the old divisions and also the attempts to instrumentalise her legacy. The contemporary discussion instead refers to and makes use of her inspiring ideas and her research method. Within the international debate, Luxemburg’s legacy is used in a much more broadly minded and productive way.
Inspired by this ongoing international debate, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation chose to issue a call for papers1 entitled ‘100th Anniversary of The Accumulation of Capital: A century-old work remains current, provocative and seminal’.2 This call was published in the beginning of 2013, intending to highlight two dramatic commemoration dates in 2014 which were both connected to the theoretical work and political struggle of Rosa Luxemburg: the start of the Berlin Conference in 1884, with its brutal and blood-stained consequences for the peoples of Africa, and the beginning of the terrible World War I in 1914. The call extended an invitation to an international workshop to be held on 7–9 March 2014, around the birthday of Rosa Luxemburg.
The text began with the following paragraph: ‘A hundred years since the first Berlin edition of The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism, no one needs a commemorative address to introduce the work. The work is still being referred to by scholars, writers and people all around the world who fight for democracy nd justice; for a life of dignity, solidarity and ecological responsibility; and for socialism. Its continued prominence is a tribute to its author, her academic methodology and the topicality of the questions she posed, yet it also demonstrates a corresponding weakness in the modern Left, particularly among socialists.
1 Invitation to an international discussion: ‘100th anniversary of The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism: A century-old work remains current, provocative and seminal, http://kapacc.blog.rosalux.de/2013/05/19/100th-anniversary-of-theaccumulation-of-capital-a-contribution-to-an-economic-explanation-of-imperialism-a-centuryold-work-remains-current-provocative-and-eminal/
2 This call was formulated on the occasion of Frieder Otto Wolf’s 70th birthday.
Rosa Luxemburg, one of the most fascinating characters in the struggle for freedom in equality, has radically criticised capitalism’s underlying social relations and capital accumulation, and she has fought equally radically against the resulting outcomes in terms of human oppression and natural destruction. After her murder on 15 January 1919 by her political enemies, her legacy lived on, as it still does today.’
The call focused on three priorities: firstly, to ‘initiate discussion about today’s globalised (financial) capital accumulation, the economy’s increasing financialisation and the main players involved—modern oligarchies of capital. Secondly, it is relevant to examine how the debate on land grabbing has been, or may be used, to support efforts for a social and ecological transformation by local and regional EU, European and global movements/alliances against social and ecological destruction. Thirdly, we ask what lessons can be learned from the fact that a concept which should be subjected to critique is promoted as theoretical, political insight. In this connection methodical and methodological questions are of highest interest, especially the work using mathematic models.’
The call’s resonance far exceeded the expectation of its organisers. The workshop proved to be a powerful and illuminating event.3 During the workshop, participants were guided by two distinct, yet closely linked aims: to make use of Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital as a source of inspiration to deal with contemporary social problems, and to improve one’s own research methodology. The vital aspects of Rosa Luxemburg’s theoretical (and political) heritage for overcoming a dogmatic or orthodox ‘Marxism’ which has crippled Marxist debates (particularly on the Stalinist side) were highlighted and taken up in all of the contributions.
As a result of this successful workshop, the publication of a book (which had been discussed from the outset of the project) has become feasible. This is not conceived as a mere ‘scrapbook’ of conference papers, but rather represents the further discussion and elaboration of conference contributions, in order to help clarify three main theoretical issues: – from whom and from what had Luxemburg taken her inspiration, – who was been inspired by her work and why and to what extent,
3 See also the workshop blog at http://kapacc.blog.rosalux.de/
– what can explain the ongoing worldwide attraction of an apparently failed and tragic politician, who authored a number of books and articles which indisputably include serious theoretical mistakes and contradictions.
These questions can all be considered to be questions of a living methodology, of a method of research and of action, elaborated within real processes of deliberation and action. It has therefore been of central interest to fully understand how Rosa Luxemburg criticised theories, including Marxian ones, while looking for a solution to specific theoretical problems with very specific consequences for political activity. She always sought possibilities of dealing with contradictions within social and political practice, and for possibilities of making use of them in an emancipatory modality. Accordingly, the workshop and the work on this book have focused on the role of Rosa Luxemburg for the development of a dissident, critical strand of socialist thinking—not only historically, but in the present as well.
All of these considerations and developments have been relevant for the choice of texts: James D. White explains Maxim Kovalevsky as ‘a key figure in the history of Marxism’ and how Marx and Luxemburg used his book on the dissolution of communal landownership to explain colonisation by capitalist forces. Paul Zarembka reconstructs value as a concept elaborated by Marx and clarifies how Luxemburg’s concept of the penetration of pre-modern strata of modern society by capitalist accumulation is determined by it. Michael R. Krätke has produced a very comprehensive account of Luxemburg’s critique of Marx and its productive impact in transforming Marx’ reproduction schemes ‘into a cornerstone of Marxian macroeconomics’. Sharing such an approach, Greg Albo argues against an excessively polarised account of Luxemburg’s ‘great book in economics’ and for taking ‘better account of insights on capitalism as a monetary economy’. Doing so proved quite courageous in the Poland of the 1950s and 60s. As Jan Toporowski shows, Tadeusz Kowalik does exactly this: he discovers an ‘important link between the analysis of Marx, in his schemes of reproduction … and the theories of Michal Kalecki (and the Keynesian Revolution in general)’ in Luxemburg’s Accumulation.
In the 1970s, feminists like Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen used Luxemburg’s findings to explain the relation between accumulation of capital and unpaid housework performed by women. Tove Soiland appreciates that and argues that with the relationship between paid and unpaid reproduction labour a new form of the subsumption of subsistence production by capitalist logic has emerged that does not disappear as long as the economy is dominated by an ongoing capitalist mode of production. Such insights can be developed only when research is focused on the everyday lives of real people. Its analysis could help to understand how the ‘silent compulsion’ of capital discovered by Marx and the aggressive essence of finance capital explained by Luxemburg shape the everyday lives of all people. Judith Dellheim analyses this and demonstrates the close interrelationship between financialisation and privatisation processes within pension systems and housing schemes, which is of strategic relevance for actual politics. Hanna K. Szymborska is also interested in financialisation. She discusses the relevance of Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas, as outlined in her Accumulation of Capital, in understanding the shift in the balance of power inspired by the transformation of the financial sectors since the second half of the 20th century. Financialisation, in turn, is a specific kind of Landnahme, 4 driving growth as well as its destructive social and ecological consequences. Klaus Dörre analyses this and illuminates the debate on alternatives. Pursuing a similar theme, Julian Francis Park ‘sets out to establish the relevance of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital for present anti-imperial socialist struggle by studying the historical conditions … of its writing’. Michael Brie shares Park’s interest in the issue. He shows how Third World theoreticians, feminists, ecologists, and the theoreticians of the alter-globalisation movements have reshaped the Luxemburg model in new ways. They all find themselves confronted
4 Translator’s note: Literally translated, Landnahme means land grabbing, land appropriation, or territorial gain (in German: ‘land taking’). It refers to internal as well as external capitalist expansion. The concept of Landnahme espoused, for example, by Klaus Dörre, argues that in the long run capitalist societies cannot reproduce themselves entirely of their own accord. In order to reproduce themselves, they continuously have to occupy and commodify a non-capitalist ‘Other’ (i.e. regions, milieus, groups, activities) in, so to speak, ceaseless repetition of the act of primitive accumulation. Owed to the difficulty of finding a conclusive exact translation, the term Landnahme will be used throughout the book.
with the challenge to understand the structural interrelationships and interlinkages between capitalist accumulation and social reproduction, and by the historical task of finding ways of making their combination and articulation effective for actual political change.
Our many thanks go to the authors Greg Albo, Michael Brie, Klaus Dörre, Michael R. Krätke, Julian Francis Park, Tove Soiland, Hanna K. Szymborska, Jan Toporowski, James D. White, Paul Zarembka, and to our translators and lectors Jan-Peter Herrmann und Loren Balhorn— who have been so fantastically patient. And of course a very special thanks to Rachel Sangster and Gemma Leigh from Palgrave Macmillan.
This book owes its publication within this new series to the initiative of Jan Toporowski in particular. This series, edited in common by Jan Toporowski and Frieder Otto Wolf, seeks to broaden and to deepen the debate on the renewal of a living Marxism. It should help to invite interested people to an ongoing process of renewing Marxist analysis, which shall have a new high point in 2018: the 200th birthday of Karl Marx.
Judith Dellheim Frieder Otto Wolf Lutz Brangsch
7 Luxemburg and the Balance of Power in the
Hanna K. Szymborska
8 A Feminist Approach to Primitive Accumulation
Tove Soiland
9 Limits to Landnahme. Growth Dilemma as Challenge
Klaus Dörre
10 A Critical Reception of Accumulation of Capital
Notes on the Contributors
Greg Albo teaches political economy at York University in Toronto, is co-editor of the annual Socialist Register, and also coordinates the Centre for Social Justice. He has also published widely on the economic crisis, the political economy of Canada, international relations and democratisation.
Lutz Brangsch was born in 1957 in Berlin and worked as a researcher at the Academy of Social Sciences in Berlin. He was employed by the National Executive of the Party of Democratic Socialism from 1990 to 1999 and has worked at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation since then. He has served as a senior research fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Analysis of the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation since 2009, where he specialises in economics, economic and social policy, and democratic theory.
Michael Brie is a social philosopher. He studied in Leningrad and Berlin and works as a researcher at the Institute for Critical Social Analysis of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin. The main topics of his research are the theory and history of socialism, concepts of the socio-ecological transformation of modern societies and strategic questions for the Left in the crisis of neoliberalism. His most recent publications are on Karl Polanyi as a socialist thinker and on Robert Owen. He is editor of the series Beiträge zur kritischen Transformationsforschung, published by VSA, Hamburg.
Judith Dellheim earned her PhD in 1983. She worked as a freelance scientific consultant from 2004 to 2010 and has served as a Senior Researcher at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation since 2011. Her main research interests are concepts of
the socio-ecological transformation of modern societies, the solidarity economy, the political economy of the European Union, and alternative economic policy.
Klaus Dörre is Professor of Sociology at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena (Germany) where he chairs the Department of Labour, Industrial and Economic Sociology. He specialises in the Sociology of Labour as well as industrial and economic sociology. His areas of research include the theory of capitalism, finance capitalism, flexible and precarious employment, and labour relations, among others. He is the current director of the German Research Foundation (DFG) research group ‘Post-Growth Societies’ and a research associate at the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where his research topics include the politics of precarious society and decent work.
Michael R. Krätke is Professor and Chair of Political Economy at the University of Lancaster, UK. He is one of the leading academic experts on Marx’s and Engels’s critique of political economy and on the history of Marxist political economy and has been a collaborator of the new complete edition of the works of Marx and Engels (MEGA2) for many years. He has edited and is still editing unpublished works by Rosa Luxemburg, Otto Bauer, Natalie Moszkowska, Karl Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding. In many articles, published in leading academic journals in several languages, he has dealt with various topics of political economy—from the theory of money to crisis theory and modern public finance. As an economic journalist and leading specialist on world money and finance, he regularly publishes articles on current events in the world economy.
Julian Francis Park tries to write from where race treason, class suicide, and gender abolition might eventually meet. Recently he completed a book length poem entitled Every Breath You Take against literal and figurative policing in Oakland, CA (USA), amid intensifying social contradictions and within the movement to abolish the police. Recent publications include an essay-length review of Fred Moten’s The Feel Trio & Claudia Rankine’s Citizen in Tripwire: a journal of poetics and a long poem on (social) hygiene at a writers’ conference, entitled “Ass Wipe Practice,” in Entropy. He lives in Oakland where he recently got an MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College.
Tove Soiland is a historian concentrating on feminist theory. She lectures at various universities and conducts seminars on feminist economics and political theory for the VPOD trade union in Zürich. She completed her PhD at the University of Zürich in 2008. In 2003 she initiated a major debate on the theo-
retical foundations of gender in the German-speaking world (the so-called ‘Gender-Streit’). In 2009 she authored the theatrical reading of ‘Nehmen Sie Ihr Gender selbst in die Hand, Madam!’ She is a member of the advisory committee of the journal Widerspruch. Beiträge zur sozialistischen Politik. Her current research focus consists of feminist theory and the connection between Francophone psychoanalysis and Marxism. She authored the 2013 entry on ‘Lacanism’ for the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (8/1).
Hanna K. Szymborska is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds. Her research interests lie in the areas of inequality, social justice and the history of economic thought.
Jan Toporowski is Professor of Economics and Finance at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK, and Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Bergamo, Italy. He is the author of Michal Kalecki: An Intellectual Biography: Volume 1, Rendezvous in Cambridge 1899–1939 (London: Palgrave 2013).
James D. White is Professor Emeritus at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He has written on various aspects of the history of revolutionary movements in the Russian Empire and on the history of Marxism. His publications include The Russian Revolution: A Short History (1994), Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism (1996) and Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution (2001). He has also published articles on modern Russian, Chinese and Baltic history in journals including Europe–Asia Studies, Revolutionary Russia, the Slavonic and East European Review and Research in Political Economy. He is currently working on an intellectual biography of Alexander Bogdanov.
Frieder Otto Wolf is Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. Born in Kiel, Germany in 1943, between 1962 and 1966 he studied philosophy and political science (at Kiel, Paris, and Edinburgh). He has been a lecturer in Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin since 1973, and became Honorary Professor in 2007. Active in European politics as a member of the German Green Party from 1984 to 1999 and member of the European Parliament from 1994 to 1999. He has served as Fellow at the Research Institute of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation Member since 2013 and sits on the advisory boards of Das Argument, Historical Materialism, and Cosmopolitiques, Écologie et Politique.
Notable publications include Die neue Wissenschaft des Thomas Hobbes (1969), Radikale Philosophie (2002) and Arbeitsglück (2005). He co-edited Das Kapital
neu lesen (2006). His English-language contributions have appeared in New Left Review, Socialist Register, and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
Paul Zarembka is Professor of Economics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has served as general editor of Research in Political Economy, an annual series based upon the class analysis of society, since 1977. One of his main research projects has been to conceptualise the meaning of ‘accumulation of capital’ within the Marxist tradition, including Luxemburg’s understanding. He has also edited The Hidden History of 9/11, which undermines the US government’s narrative concerning responsibility for September 11th, beginning with its utter failure to establish that the alleged hijackers were even on board the four planes. On the activism side, he has been president and is currently grievance officer for academics in his union.
List of Figures
Fig. 10.1 Capital accumulation in Marx
Fig. 10.2 Capital accumulation in Luxemburg
Fig. 10.3 Capital accumulation in Amin, inter alia
Fig. 10.4 Capital accumulation according to Werlhof, Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen
Fig. 10.5 Capital accumulation in financial capitalism (the current debate)
Fig. 10.6 Subsumption of social reproduction under capital accumulation
List of Tables
Table 11.1 Components of the ecological footprint per capita in Hamburg and Germany 2007 317
Table 11.2 BlackRock’s shares in the 30 DAX companies 323
Table 11.3 Housing portfolio transactions starting at 10,000 residential units 2010 to 2013 326
1
On the Historical Conditions of Accumulation
Julian Francis Park
In 1903, twenty years after the death of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg published an essay on the ‘Stagnation and Progress of Marxism’. This should serve as a guide to our return to The Accumulation of Capital on the centennial anniversary of its publication. In ‘Stagnation’, Luxemburg notes that despite the publication of the second and third volumes of Marx’s Capital, in 1885 and 1894 respectively, political agitation and Marxist doctrine in Germany and elsewhere had been popularised on the basis of the incomplete conclusions of Volume I. As she writes regarding the second and third volumes – and as we today might extend to her Accumulation of Capital – ‘the splendid new weapon rusts unused’ except amongst ‘the restricted circles of the experts’. Rather than concluding that Marx’s last elaborations were inflexible, or that the movement’s intellectual talents were insufficient, Luxemburg argues that ‘our needs are not yet adequate for the utilization of Marx’s ideas’ and that only as
J.F. Park ( )
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proletarian struggle encounters new practical problems will we return to the rusting weaponry (Luxemburg 1903).
In one of his few prison notes on the writings of Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci claims that these conclusions in the ‘Stagnation and Progress of Marxism’ are a form of historical mysticism insofar as they ‘present an abstract formulation of the fact to be explained as an explanation of the fact itself’. Nonetheless, Gramsci acknowledges that there is a kernel of truth in them that must be dialectically developed. One articulation of this development is that the stagnation of Marxist theory comes from the historical necessity of Marxist orthodoxy’s alliance with undialectical –that is, positivist – materialisms ‘in order to combat the residues of the pre-capitalist world that still exist among the popular masses’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 392). And yet from the perspective of the totality, Gramsci’s development seems to merely elevate Luxemburg’s alleged abstraction to a higher level. For the claim that dialectical materialism expresses itself less dialectically out of the practical necessities of the ideological struggle to educate the masses reifies as necessary one set of mediations between proletarian class consciousness and so-called pre-capitalist consciousness. Admittedly, Gramsci poses his solution more concretely only a few pages later – the stagnation of Marxism, the dilution of the dialectical element of its materialism, would only ever be completely resolved when the petit bourgeois character of the Marxist intelligentsia was overcome by the emergence of an organically proletarian intelligentsia. Succinctly: ‘Only after the creation of the new State does the cultural problem impose itself in all its complexity and tend towards a coherent solution’; prior to this solution, Marxism can at best be a ‘critico-polemical’ ‘romanticism’ (Gramsci 1971, pp. 397–8). Ironically, this is more or less the same solution that Luxemburg herself prescribes for the stagnation of Marxism: as she writes, ‘The working class will not be in a position to create a science and an art of its own until it has been fully emancipated from its present class position’ (Luxemburg 1903). Given the difference between the abstractions of Luxemburg and Gramsci and the nature of their concrete solutions, the mediation of their contradiction demands discovery. If Luxemburg’s abstract formulation on the one hand is referring to the inadequacy of historical needs for Capital, Volumes II and III, and Gramsci’s on the other is affirming that dialectical materialism necessarily
becomes diluted in order to win over the masses, then the historical intersection of the two explanations is the emergence of opportunistic socialism and its growing influence in the Second International. The classic text addressing the problem of opportunism is Luxemburg’s own Social Reform or Revolution, published in 1899. Already in her critique of Eduard Bernstein’s articles on the ‘Problems of Socialism’ for German Social Democracy, Luxemburg outlines an historical tendency largely responsible for the stagnation of Marxism, and thereby indicates the conditions for its resolution. According to Luxemburg, opportunism emerges (with Bernstein as its flag bearer) as the ideology of the petit bourgeois elements of the party seeking to replace the struggle for social reforms from being the means of Social Democracy to being the goal itself – that is, abandoning the aim of social revolution. According to this ideology, the collapse of capitalism becomes improbable because of its increasing adaptability and variation – in other words, general crises tend to disappear and segments of the proletariat are integrated into the middle class, while the most egregious proletarian conditions are ameliorated by the trade-union struggle (Luxemburg 1899, pp. 129–31). Thus, the growth of opportunism in the Second International implies that only the Marxian problem of capitalist exploitation, formulated most rigorously in Capital, Volume I is of concern. The dialectical twists of surplus value on its path to realisation through expanded reproduction and into the tendency of the rate of profit to fall leading the totality toward greater and greater crises, as discussed in Volumes II and III, have little to offer for petit bourgeois socialism – as Luxemburg puts it, ‘Bernstein’s theory of adaptation is nothing but a theoretical generalization of the conception of the individual capitalist’ (Luxemburg 1899, p. 145). Furthermore, Bernstein’s claim to popularise socialism by shifting its concern from the relations between capital and labour to those between rich and poor abandons the analysis of the structure of productive relations for the superstructure of property relations – moving from the dialectical basis of scientific socialism to that of utopian socialism (Luxemburg 1899, p. 148). Indeed, Bernstein attacks the dialectic itself (Luxemburg 1899, p. 162). But to consign the second and third volumes of Capital to the dustbin of history is to discard the scientific unity of theory and practice that transforms proletarian consciousness of the exploitative basis of capitalism and the tendency
towards generalised crises into the necessity of social revolution. Thus opportunism teaches us that the nexus of Luxemburg and Gramsci’s abstract formulations concerning the stagnation of Marxism find the conditions of their concrete solution in the historical necessity of preserving the fundamentally proletarian revolutionary character of the socialist struggle even before the conquest of political power. What at first seemed like a question of Marxist theory was already coinciding with the necessities of proletarian revolutionary practice – of keeping particular social reformist means of struggle subordinate to the universal ends of revolution.
In History and Class Consciousness (1971) Georg Lukács argues that Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital is one of two books of its era that mark the ‘theoretical rebirth of Marxism’ (p. 35). To understand this assertion in its fullness we must conceive of The Accumulation of Capital as depicting the concrete totality of capitalism from the proletarian revolutionary perspective of the conditions of its overthrow. In other words, not only does it scrape the rust off of the weaponry contained in volumes II and III of Capital, it puts them to use as historically necessary theoretical weapons for new historical conditions of the practice of class war. This rust removal has not been without controversy, neither in its time nor since then. The controversy has mostly centred on several aspects of two sides of the dialectic of the argument in Luxemburg’s book: on the one hand, that Marx’s scheme of expanded reproduction in Capital, Volume II, cannot explain the actual, historical accumulation of capital since it includes only capitalists and workers, neither of whom (as a class) can be the purchasers within the totality of capitalist society necessary to realise surplus value and thus accumulate it as capital. This necessitates the sale of surplus product to non-capitalist social strata, particularly in the form of imperialism. On the other hand, insofar as capitalism tends toward universality, while simultaneously depending on the destruction of non-capitalist social organisations, the elimination of this dependency is guaranteed, bringing its end all the more near (Luxemburg 1913, p. 332).
Ernest Mandel will be our first guide to these controversies. In his introduction to the second volume of Capital, Mandel addresses Luxemburg’s argument on three levels, moving from the most abstract to the most concrete. His first point is that it is methodologically incorrect to pose
the matter of reproduction on an expanded scale in terms of the totality of capital, since it is really only a problem for the competitive relations of many capitals. The second level considers the discontinuity of accumulation as a process, that is, whether full realisation of surplus value can be modelled using the schemes in a purely capitalist context – a context that Luxemburg did not think possible. Nonetheless, the ridiculousness of those who claim that the scheme itself proves that there is no limit to capital accumulation is made clear by the regularity of crises throughout the history of capitalism. At the third level of actual historical capital accumulation, Mandel maintains the essential correctness of Luxemburg (Mandel 1978, pp. 66–8).
Luxemburg’s most important contemporary critic was Otto Bauer. By rewriting Marx’s reproduction schemes so as to include elements only elaborated in the third volume of Capital such as the comparatively faster development of Department I, the rising organic composition of capital, the falling rate of profit and the rising mass of profit, Bauer produces a formula that claims to economico-theoretically demonstrate Bernstein’s earlier conclusions. As Luxemburg summarised in her Anti-Critique, Bauer depicts capitalist production as capable of acting ‘without restriction [schrankenlos] as its own consumer’ and thereby becomes ‘(objectively) unrestricted [schrankenlos] once capitalist production has built a sufficient market for itself.’ Bauer’s conception thus renders the crises created by capitalism’s tendency to exceed the limits of its market incomprehensible, thereby eliminating an understanding of the objective tendencies out of which proletarian consciousness and class struggle emerges and grows – in other words eliminating the scientific basis of the necessity of socialist revolution (Luxemburg 1921, 374–5). Lukács’s defence of Luxemburg is particularly indicative with regard to Bauer, as Lukács points to the exclusively methodological usefulness of Marx’s schematised purely capitalist society. Marx’s positing of a society consisting of only capitalists and workers is an attempt to clarify, as he writes in Volume II, that the ‘conditions for the normal course of reproduction, whether simple or on an expanded scale… turn into an equal number of conditions for an abnormal course’ and thus necessitate ‘possibilities of crisis, since, on the basis of the spontaneous pattern of this production, this balance is itself an accident’ (Marx 1885, p. 571). But Marx’s hypothetical society
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greater public service rendered under the Wirt scheme. Chicago has one of the most elaborate systems of recreation parks and fieldhouses in the country. Yet in a district only one fortieth the size of the Chicago district, one Gary school, providing for both children and adults, gave indoor gymnasium work to three times as many people; shower-baths to one third as many; outdoor gymnasium to an equal number; the use of swimming-pools to half as many; use of the assembly halls to four times as many; and to as many, the use of clubrooms and reading-rooms. Thus, in educating the child’s body, and giving him space to grow and play, the Wirt school enormously increased the opportunities of every one in the district, old and young, to secure the same advantages.
The ideal Wirt school plant, such as the Emerson School in Gary, in its open space of ten acres, besides its playground filled with apparatus, has gardens, tennis courts, ball fields, running tracks, and handball courts. For the younger children there are wading-pools and sandpits. One field is arranged so that it may be flooded in winter for skating. There are two acres of school-gardens, and a cluster of cages and houses for the animals of the school zoo. The outdoor equipment is, in other words, on the scale of a college or a wealthy private school which can afford spacious grounds and provision for every athletic sport. The Gary schools are, however, public schools, and these facilities are open to all the children of all ages and all the time.
THE SWIMMING-POOL AT THE FROEBEL SCHOOL
It is customary for our newer high schools to have gymnasiums, but the common school is rarely provided for. In the Wirt school, the common school shares, of course, in the extensive gymnasium equipment. The Emerson School has two gymnasiums, one for boys and one for girls. It has also a large swimming-pool.
The Froebel School has two gymnasiums and two swimmingpools. The Jefferson School has a large gymnasium, though only the common school is provided for in the Jefferson. The other Gary schools all have gymnasiums proportionate to their size. In the new school plants it is intended to build pergolas about the inner court which will contain open-air classrooms and additional outdoor gymnasium space. Nothing is omitted which will provide the right physical conditions for the child’s growth and development from his earliest years.
Coming to the school-building itself, we find in the Emerson and Froebel Schools architectural creations of unusual beauty and impressiveness. The school-building is built around a great court, with broad halls as wide as streets, and well lighted from the court. These broad halls serve not only as the school streets for the constant passage of the children between their work, but also as centers for the “application” work, or for informal study. They are so wide that all confusion is avoided, and they suggest to the visitor that they serve the school community in the same way that the agora or forum did the ancient city. In the Emerson School the beginning of an art gallery has been made. It suggests the idea that just as the schools ought to absorb the playgrounds, so they ought to absorb the museums and galleries. Pictures and objects of art and interest become unreal and artificial when immured in isolated museums, which can be visited only at special times and with effort. They should be at hand in the school, fertilizing and beautifying every moment of its daily life. The artistic sense can be cultivated only by bringing children into contact daily and almost unconsciously with beautiful things. The schools themselves must be art galleries, and these fine corridors of the Wirt school indicate the way by which a wholly new orientation is to be given to our public galleries by using them as adjuncts to the education of children.
Similarly with museums. The teaching of the Gary schools, based fundamentally on concrete things and processes, needs to be constantly in touch with the objects which it is our custom to store in dead museums. The school museum is an essential feature of the Wirt school. The Wirt plan does not contemplate the taking of children docilely about to visit museums, as some progressive teachers are doing. It contemplates bringing the museums into the schools, so that the children can know the treasures and live with them and learn about them.
And similarly with libraries. Mr. Wirt believes that the school may do the work of the public library much more efficiently and much more economically than the library can itself do it. He has shown in Gary that in a school branch of the public library, library maintenance and circulation cost per book circulation is only about five per cent of
the cost in the main library, while the life of the book circulated in sets under the control of the teachers is ten times that of the usual circulation book in the library. In both the Emerson and Froebel Schools there is a branch of the public library, under a library assistant. Children use the library as a part of their regular work under the supervision of the assistant and teachers. All sorts of stereoscopic pictures, photographs, collections of pictures, atlases, etc., can thus be provided, which would be impossible for the classroom. The library becomes the storehouse of the knowledge of the school, and the children learn to recognize it as such. Again, the library is already an important feature of many of the newer high schools throughout the country. In the Wirt school, however, all the elementary classes use it also.
The Wirt school contemplates bringing all the cultural resources of the community to bear on the school. It makes the school the proper and natural depository for whatever the community has to offer in artistic interest or intellectual resource. Like most of the features of the Wirt plan, this consolidation of gallery, museum, and library in the school is as economically efficient as it is educationally valuable.
A word must be said about the auditorium. Few schools have assembly rooms like that in the Froebel School in Gary, with its stage large enough for a full-sized basketball game or athletic contest. The unique rôle of the auditorium in the Wirt school will be described in the next chapter. It assists materially in educating the whole child by giving him opportunities for public expression before the school community.
The classrooms in the ideal Wirt school are much more attractive than the ordinary classrooms, far less formal and far less crowded. In some of them the old-fashioned school desk and seat have been retained, largely, according to Mr Wirt, to meet the prejudice of the parents. Owing to the frequent change and movement of classes, however, this peculiarly flagrant instrument of educational perversity does little harm. Many of the lower grades have a desk, made in the school, which is a kind of workbench. These desks have vises attached, and loose tops, which can be readily replaced when soiled or worn out. The seat is a four-legged stool, which can be pushed
out of the way when the child is using his desk for a workbench. On occasion the children can take up their stools and desktops and go off to work in the halls or garden. Such a room is an ideal classroom, with its hint of the workshop and its lack of rigidity. In the history room in the Emerson School are broad tables that can be used for map-drawing. The idea is to give to each classroom the physical setting and the furniture which will best enable a particular kind of work to be done there. The result is that the classrooms of the Wirt schools have a character of their own, quite different from the colorless and depressing effect of the ordinary classroom. They are not merely rooms where children study together and tamely recite, but essentially workshops where children do interesting things with their minds, just as in the shops they do interesting things with their hands. The history room is a real history laboratory. Maps and charts made by the pupils cover the walls, magazines lie about, pictures and books overflow the tables. The visitor realizes that he is in a room saturated with history, past and present. It is easier to learn in a room where everything appeals to the imagination.
Mr. Wirt says that you never can tell when a child is learning. The time that he makes progress is not necessarily the recitation time. It is the constant impingement of impressions that really educates him, and it is this that the intellectual side of the Wirt school is skillfully designed to cultivate. Music and expression and drawing are taught, not in regular classrooms, but in special studios, which are genuine studios equipped with all the facilities to impress upon the child with what seriousness these things are taken in the Wirt school. Art tends to mean much more to a child brought up in such a school, because he works at it in an impressive environment.
The science laboratories for botany, zoölogy, chemistry, physics, are not only well-equipped laboratories, but workshops as well. The botany room in the Gary school has a large conservatory of vines and plants at the end; the zoölogy room has a menagerie of small pets, fowls and birds, guinea-pigs and rabbits. The physics rooms are in contact with a machine room where automobiles and other machines illustrate the practical application of scientific principles. Everywhere the attempt is made to give a dramatic and practical
physical setting to the work and study, so that the child may be learning all the time by suggestion and imitation. And everywhere the attempt is made to show that no one activity is any more important than any other. Each activity represents one side of that whole child to educate whom this school plant has been built.
The manual and industrial work is, of course, an essential feature of the Wirt school. The shops are much more extensive than is customary in even the most progressive public school, or even in the special trade school. The Emerson School in Gary has, for instance, a carpentry-shop, cabinet-shop, paint-shop, foundry, forge, machineshop, printery, sheet-metal shop, electrical shop, sewing-room, and cooking- and dining-rooms, all admirably equipped as regular shops, and not merely as manual-training rooms. The Froebel School has, besides these shops, a plumbing-shop, a laundry, a shoemakingshop and a pottery-shop. In the smaller schools several shops are combined into one, as at the Jefferson, though the work done is just as genuine as at the ideal plant. The number of shops, or the variety of work, is, as we shall see in the next chapter, limited only by the services which the school demands in the way of repairing or enhancing its physical facilities.
When we have mentioned the room for commercial studies, the supply-store, the kindergartens and nurseries, the draughting-rooms, indoor playrooms, teachers’ room, conservatory, doctor’s room and dental clinic, offices, etc., our survey of the school plant is complete. The arrangement of rooms itself, however, is very significant. As we pass around the second floor of the Froebel School, for instance, we meet, in this order, pottery-shop, laundry, freehand drawing-room, two classrooms, physics laboratory, music and expression studios, conservatory, two classrooms, botany laboratory, and four more classrooms. The shops are not segregated in the basement, but the children in their various activities work side by side. Classrooms are placed next to laboratories, and shops next to studios, in order to impress the pupil with the unity of the program, and in order that the younger pupils may have constantly before their eyes an inviting future and opportunity. All the rooms, moreover, have glass doors, and the shops have windows, so that the children, passing through
the halls, may look in and see others at work at unfamiliar tasks. In this way their curiosity is likely to be aroused and the ambition to work at these interesting activities in which they see the older children engaged.
In this juxtaposition of the various activities, therefore, the child has impressed upon him that school life is a unity in breadth, just as the combining of the elementary and secondary school impresses him with the fact that his school life is a unity in length. No opportunity is lost to touch his imagination and excite his curiosity. The school plant itself, in its mere arrangement and construction, it will thus be seen, serves a very important educational purpose. The careful detail with which this has been worked out in these ideal school plants of Gary makes the Wirt school in its physical aspect something very much more significant than a mere collection of facilities. Those facilities fit into one another according to a very comprehensive plan. They form organs of a genuine school life, which educates the whole child.
This fourfold division of study and recitation facilities, studio, workshop, and laboratory facilities, auditorium facilities, and application and play facilities, is essential to the working of the Wirt plan. Where the ideal school plant is impossible, this fourfold plan may yet be possible. As has been said, the greatest triumph of the Wirt plan in Gary is, perhaps, the Jefferson School, a building of conventional style, which had been erected before Mr. Wirt came to Gary. It was an ordinary school-building with ten classrooms and auditorium, but no other facilities. By turning the spacious attic into a gymnasium, by transforming five of the classrooms into music and art studios and nature-study laboratories, by building a general jackof-all-trades workshop around the engine- and boiler-room in the cellar, by building a domestic-science kitchen in an unused corner, putting lockers into wasted space, and by equipping the playground with apparatus, Mr. Wirt succeeded in transforming an ordinary school-building, whose prototype may be found in almost any town in the land, into a full-fledged, varied, and smoothly running Wirt school. The reorganization of schools in New York City and other places has been done by Mr. Wirt along similar lines.[1]
1. See appendix for detailed description of reorganization of twelve New York schools.
Where, in most cases, a mere rearrangement of classrooms and the institution of shops and laboratories will transform a school, in others special annexes are necessary. These can be built usually, however, at comparatively small cost. The use of portable houses by the smaller schools of Gary has enabled the small wayside “district school,” hitherto confined entirely to study and recitation, to transform itself into a genuine Wirt school, with its fourfold work and study. Shop, auditorium, and laboratory and studio can be provided in the form of small portable houses, and the capacity of the school as well as its facilities can thus be greatly increased.
III
WORK, STUDY, AND PLAY: THE SCHOOL AS A COMMUNITY
T Gary school represents not merely the old public school with certain added modern features, but a definite reorganization. Its aim is to form, with its well-balanced facilities of work, study, and play, a genuine children’s community, where the children’s normal healthy interests are centered, and where they learn, in Professor Dewey’s phrase, “by doing the things that have meaning to them as children.” The Gary school aims to meet the comparative failure of the public school to-day to care for the city child. It tries to take the place of the old household and rural community life which provided for our forefathers the practical education of which the city child in his daily life is deprived to-day.
The full significance of the Gary plan can scarcely be understood unless it is seen against this background. “It is impossible,” says Professor Dewey, “to exaggerate the amount of mental and moral training secured by our forefathers in the course of the ordinary pursuits of life. They were engaged in subduing a new country Industry was at a premium, and instead of being of a routine nature pioneer conditions required initiative, ingenuity, and pluck.... Production had not yet been concentrated in factories in congested
centers, but was distributed through villages.... The occupations of daily life engaged the imagination and enforced knowledge of natural materials and processes.... Children had the discipline that came from sharing in useful activities.... Under such conditions the schools could hardly have done better than devote themselves to books.... But conditions changed, and school materials and methods did not change to keep pace. Population shifted to urban centers. Production became a mass affair carried on in big factories, instead of a household affair.... Industry was no longer a local or neighborhood concern. Manufacturing was split up into a very great variety of separate processes through the economies incident upon extreme division of labor.... The machine worker, unlike the older hand worker, is following blindly the intelligence of others instead of his own knowledge of materials, tools and processes.... Children have lost the moral and practical discipline that once came from sharing in the round of home duties. For a large number there is little alternative, especially in large cities, between irksome child labor and demoralizing child idleness.”
The Gary school is an organized attempt to restore this natural education, adapt it to modern demands, and thus avoid these alternatives so disastrous for the future of the child and the quality of the coming generation. By making the public school as much as possible a self-sustaining child community, Superintendent Wirt believes that all the benefits of this older education can be attained. “We cannot,” he says, “trust the other social institutions to remedy the defects. Not more than one quarter of the urban children attend Sunday-School regularly. This makes an average of only two minutes a day for all the days and all the children. In fact, church, Sunday-School, public library, public playgrounds, Y.M.C.A., Boy Scouts, and all other child-welfare agencies do not occupy the time of all the children of a city for more than an average of ten minutes a day. The practical effect of this is that the streets and alleys and the cheap theaters and other commercialized places of amusement have the children for over five hours a day. The cities are not fit places for the rearing of children, because, as a rule, the streets and alleys have twice the time for educating the children in the wrong
direction that the school, church, library, and playground have for educating them in the right direction.”
This is the justification for extending the Gary school day to eight hours and limiting vacations. This is the plan which gives ample time for the intensive use of the remarkable school plant described in the preceding chapter. For in place of using for the special work and play activities a part of the already too few regular school hours per year, the Gary school secures additional time for these activities by appropriating the now worse than wasted “street-and-alley time” of the masses of city children. Saturday school, vacation school, even an all-year school, are features of the Gary plan which carry out this principle of providing a school life for the children for as long a time as they can be induced and encouraged to continue it. The Gary school deliberately seeks to employ and satisfy the children’s time with wholesome and interesting activity.
It aims not only to organize the daily life of the child for the greater part of his time, but it seeks to provide for him in a self-sustaining community. This means that all the work and study converge upon the school life. The things that are done in the Gary school contribute to the usefulness, the beauty, or the interest of the school community. The Gary school is built on the sound psychological theory that only such work as has meaning in the life of the school, as lived by the children themselves then and there, will be really learned and assimilated. The school is not only to be a “preparation for life”: it is to be a life itself, as the old household was a life itself. “The idea that children should study exclusively for eight years, and then work exclusively for the rest of their life,” says Superintendent Wirt, “is really a new idea in civilization. The criticism of the modern public school is directed almost entirely at the helplessness of children who are attempting to enter industrial and commercial life from this exclusive study period of eight, twelve, or sixteen years in the schools, and at the fact that the school is not able to get more than half its children beyond the sixth grade of the common school. Formerly the school plus the home and small shop educated the child. The small shop has been generally eliminated and the home has lost most of its former opportunities. A much greater part of the
education of the child must be assumed by the school of the present generation. In place of the school, home, and shop, we have the school and the city street educating the great masses of children. The school must do what the school, home, and small shop formerly did together.”
The idea of making the school a self-sustaining community is worked out in the Gary school in the most comprehensive form. The manual-training and industrial shops, for instance, are actually the shops for the school community, and their work goes largely toward the upkeep of the school plant. Vocational training in the Gary school means that whatever work is necessary in the way of repairing, conserving, beautifying, or enhancing the school facilities is done by the pupils themselves. The school, like the old-time industrial home and community, has a large amount of real work that is now being done and must always be done in connection with the equipment of its buildings, grounds, laboratories, shops, etc. The large, lavishly equipped Gary school plants require a force of mechanics to keep them in repair. The usual way of doing this would be to hire outside labor at considerable expense to do the necessary work during school vacations. The Gary schools, on the other hand, which have no long vacations, employ a permanent force of mechanics, and keep them continuously employed throughout the year. Regular union artisans, chosen because of their character, intelligence, and teaching ability, are engaged by the building departments of the school plant. There are carpenters, cabinet-makers, painters, plumbers, sheet-metal workers, engineers, printers, electricians, machinists, foundrymen, etc., sufficient to meet the needs of the schools. This great variety of equipment and maintenance work provides manual activity of a truly educative sort suitable to every stage of the child’s development. The shops of these workmen become the regular manual and industrial training shops of the school. The children work with the artisans in much the same way as old-time apprentices, though, of course, for only a fraction of their time. Just as the child formerly participated in the industrial activities of the household, so now he participates in the real industrial activities of his school. The school artisans, and the nurses, school dentist, and physician, landscape gardener, architect, and draftsman,
accountant, storekeeper, office force, lunch-room manager, designer, dress-maker, milliner, all take the place of the father and mother and older brothers and sisters in the old-time, self-sustaining, practically educative household. The children receive all the benefits of doing real work that must be done and of participating in their own school business. And they have the benefit of a completely modern equipment resembling in detail the machinery and processes which they will find when they go out into the larger social community.
In this novel scheme the Gary schools seem to have experienced little difficulty. Superintendent Wirt says that when you have provided a plant where the children may live a complete life eight hours a day in work, study, and play, it is the simplest thing imaginable to permit the children in the workshops, under the direction and with the help of well-trained men and women, to assume the responsibility for the maintenance of the school plant. There can be no exploitation of the children, for masters and pupils are permitted to do only enough work to balance the wages of the masters and the cost of materials. The teacher-workmen would be doing the work whether the children assisted or not. They earn their salaries by their repair and construction work, and the children who desire it get an admirably practical vocational training almost without additional cost to the city. The great expense is avoided of special shop equipment, such as the usual industrial high school or special trade school has for its industrial courses, which are, moreover, wholly unproductive. And the school is able to offer a much greater variety of trades than even the special trade school: for a school plant like the Gary institution will demand for its equipment and maintenance almost every staple trade, industrial and domestic, with the attendant educational opportunities for both boy and girl.
Manual work takes on quite a new meaning when it becomes, as in the Gary schools, productive work for the school community. It is no longer a question of each child doing his “practice” work, his stereotyped “stunt,” in which he soon loses interest. The boys in the Gary carpenter-shop are making desks and tables for the classrooms, cabinets and stools for the laboratories, or bookracks for the library. In the paint-shop they are staining and finishing them; or
they are at work on the woodwork of the building, painting or varnishing. The electricians must care for motors, bells, etc., and there is always opportunity for teaching winding, motor construction, and wiring. Plumbing must be installed and kept in repair. Many parts of the plant call for the sheet-metal worker. Foundry and machine workers require in turn a pattern-making shop and draftsmen to furnish plans and specifications. The engineer of the heating, lighting, and ventilating plant gives lessons in firing and in the care of boilers. The printing-shop does all the printing work for the schools, —blanks, forms, reports, charts, etc., besides the illustrated brochures which the pupils of the various departments issue. In the Froebel School there is even a demand for a pottery shop, where the children often discover artistic talent in making the necessary clay utensils for the school. The number and character of the school shops is limited only by the needs of the school community. One year the shoeless condition of some of the children set a demand for a shoe shop, in which old shoes were made over into wearable new ones.
The visitor to the Gary school finds everywhere little groups of busy children, absorbedly interested, working on the different needs of the school, under kindly and intelligent teacher-workmen. He finds that there is enough real work in the school plant to keep occupied for his hour or more a day every child who is interested in manual work—and most children are—or who desires to become familiar with a trade. Such work is highly educational, and it is not drudgery. It is not specialized, nor is it segregated from the academic studies. The industrial work for both boys and girls is an integral part of the school life in which every one who cares for a rounded education must participate in some form or other.
THE PRINTING-SHOP AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL
There is not a department which does not contribute in some way to the school community life. The caretakers of the grounds are under the supervision of the botany and zoölogy (nature-study) departments. The children work with them in taking charge of and caring for the gardens, lawns, trees, and shrubs. The botany classes care also for the school conservatory and for the smaller experimental conservatory in the botany laboratory. The zoölogy classes have charge of the school zoo as well as the collection of pets in the zoölogy room. Even the drawing classes contribute, the mechanical-drawing pupils in preparing plans for the industrial work and construction, the art classes in decorating the friezes of their room or in designing details for the building.
Domestic science in the Gary school is not taught as a separate “subject.” It means the practical operation of the school lunch-room under the direction of an instructor and a cook assistant. The domestic-science room is a real kitchen, dining-room, and pantry in
which the daily lunch is prepared and served to such teachers and pupils as desire it. The domestic-science work for the girls then consists of nothing but this daily service, older and younger girls coöperating with cook and teacher. The salary of the assistant is paid out of the profits of the lunch-room. Since the food is sold, all expenses for supplies are charged to the lunch department. The sewing-room is operated on a similar plan. The instructor has as assistants a practical dress-maker, laundress, and milliner. Their salaries and all materials used are paid for from the savings made by doing the necessary laundry and needlework for the school. Both cooking and sewing departments are therefore self-sustaining school-community shops. The school board makes no appropriations for the support of the lunch-room, dressmaking, laundry, and millinery departments other than the salaries of the two head teachers. All bills are paid directly by the department managers, and no accounts are kept by the school board. The other shops are selfsupporting in the sense that the ordinary appropriations for painting, cabinet-work, electrical work, plumbing, printing, etc. (which would have to be paid anyway), generally pay the salaries of the teacherworkmen and the costs of the material. The ideal attainment would be to make the shops all self-sustaining school-community shops.
The work of all these shops requires elaborate systems of accounting. All this work is taken charge of by the instructors and pupils of the commercial departments of the school. The work the children do in the shops is computed on the basis of regular union wages for the particular trade, and they are “paid” in imitation checks, upon which their standing in the course is based. For these payments the commercial pupils manage a regular school banking system, with savings accounts, etc. They also have charge, under the instructors’ supervision, of all the regular accounting and secretarial work for the school administration. Thus their bookkeeping, stenography, and typewriting contribute directly to the needs of the school. The commercial pupils also take care of the ordering and distribution of supplies. Some of these, such as the coal and cement used in the schools, are in turn tested by the chemistry classes in their laboratory to see whether they come up to specifications. The school “store” is as important a feature of the
school community as the school “bank,” and the commercial pupils take turns in “keeping” it. The criticism that the pupils are incompetent to handle all these matters is met by the obvious consideration that the school cannot afford to graduate pupils in accounting and secretarial work who cannot perform these functions efficiently for themselves and their school. At present, it should be mentioned, these departments are said not to be self-supporting, in the way that the domestic-science shops are.
If the school is to be the children’s community, there must be some place of general assembly, some forum or theater where the school may take stock of itself. This is provided in the “auditorium,” one of the original and essential features of the Gary plan. “Auditorium,” to which a daily hour is given, is devoted to purposes different from the religious exercises, declamations, and moral homilies common to the “opening exercises” of the ordinary school. It does not even open the day, for the Gary program makes it necessary for the “auditorium” hour to come at periods throughout the day, differing for different classes. The aim is to make it an occasion where anything that is happening of peculiar interest in any part of the school may be dramatically brought to the attention of the rest of the school. In the Gary school, each child goes to “auditorium” for a full hour each day, and listens to a program contributed by pupils or teachers or outside visitors. There is always choral singing; there may be instrumental or phonograph music besides. Lantern-slides and motion-pictures are often shown. There may be talks by the special teachers about their work. The child may see there gymnastic exhibitions,—as has been said, the stage at the Froebel School is so large that a full-sized basketball game may be played upon it before the audience,—folkdancing, or dramatic dialogues and little plays written by the pupils themselves about interesting things in their study or reading. There may be debates on school issues. What is to be presented in “auditorium” is limited only by the imagination and expressiveness of teachers and children. The teachers in turn have the responsibility of arranging the program, in coöperation with their pupils. Children of widely different ages are sent together to the “auditorium” hour, so that the younger may have their curiosity stimulated about the work
of classes that they perhaps have not yet reached, and so that the older may lose that snobbery of age which often causes so much unhappiness in childhood, and tends to fill the adult mind with delusions about the young. This plan, therefore, makes for sympathy between the pupils, makes each child familiar with the activities of the whole school, and prevents that unfortunate segregation and confinement of the ordinary school. Besides being able to look into the various rooms through the glass doors, the child in the Gary school has an opportunity of seeing in “auditorium” in dramatic form the life of his school. The influence of this “auditorium” hour upon the school work, particularly the academic work, can hardly fail to be marked, for it directly motivates all the studies. It is a sort of communal “application” activity. History and literature take on a new meaning, because the material may be studied now always in the light of its possible presentation to the rest of the school in dramatic and intelligent form. Many schools use the dramatic sense to vitalize these studies, but no other school provides so definite and regular a focus, and so constant and interested an audience for the products of such a vitalization. The “auditorium” in the Gary school seems to be a genuine school-community theater, an inevitable and integral part of the school life.
In the words of Superintendent Wirt, the Gary school aims to be a “clearing-house for children’s activities.” The ideal is to render the school community as self-sustaining and self-stimulating as possible. Whatever the school cannot itself contribute to the education of the child, it may find in the institutions of the surrounding community Any outside agency which provides wholesome activities for children becomes then a sort of extension of the school. Children in the Gary school are permitted to go out from their play or “auditorium” hour to do special work at home, take private music or art lessons, visit the Y.M.C.A., settlement or neighborhood house, attend the Boy Scouts or Camp-Fire Girls, or receive religious instruction in the churches. This outside work is then ranked as an integral part of the school work.
It is this community coöperation which has particularly roused the interest of religious educators. It suggests to many of them a solution
of the problems of religious education, and of separate denominational schools. Religion does not enter the Gary school in any form, not even in Bible reading and prayer. But children may go out, for one hour a day, two, three, or even four times a week, to classes in religious instruction, privately organized and supported by the various churches of the city. To meet the situation in Gary, the churches have in some instances engaged special instructors for these classes in religion. The Presbyterian, Methodist, and Christian churches are said to have united in engaging a teacher at a relatively high salary Such coöperation not only insures the services of welltrained and liberal teachers, but must necessarily banish sectarian dogmatism from the teaching. In Gary, the Baptist, Roman Catholic, and Hebrew churches, besides the Y.M.C.A., are said to be giving this special instruction. In the Jefferson School more than half the children attend these classes at the churches. This feature of the Gary plan is one of the most interesting, and perhaps has the most far-reaching possibilities, in the way of transforming religious instruction in this country. This plan is characteristic of a school which seeks to meet the demands of the individual child, and to make everything in the community which is truly educational, or which, for any reason, parents and children believe to be genuinely educational, contribute to the life of the school community.
Since the other institutions have the same privileges as the churches, they are all given the opportunity in this plan of enlarging their effective resources. City schools which wish to adopt the Gary plan, but lack the ideal school plant or the varied facilities, may often avail themselves of the gymnasium, pools, playgrounds, etc., of near-by Y.M.C.A. or settlement houses, and use the public library and public playground, and thus acquire, by systematic coöperation with these other agencies, an effectively working Gary school. This plan has been adopted with great success in the case of the New York schools, a number of which are in the course of adopting the Gary plan, or many features of it. Their experience has shown that, by making the school a “clearing-house for children’s activities,” the social resources of all these communal institutions are vastly increased.
