Back to school: our lives against their interests
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The [Spanish] Minister of Education, Isabel Celaá, got carried away on Sunday, August 30th, in an interview with El País while stating: “The benefits of school far outweigh the risks”. Benefits and risks for whom? Well, not for the same people. Throughout the previous wave of the COVID pandemic, at least 50,000 people have died, data that is continuously falsified by the State, which treats us as numbers of a cold statistic that tries to hide, as much as possible, the social and human drama that we are suffering all over the world.
The “new normality” meant the rapid opening of businesses and shops. Tourism had to run at full capacity as an economic lung for the valorization of national capital. The television news opened with the arrival of German tourists and how they are greeted in a new version of Welcome Mr. Marshall!…[1] And this is the meaning of the new normality, of their normality, of the economic normality of capital and its benefits. In the same interview the minister confesses that the school serves not only to teach but also for that the parents are conciliatory, that is, to reproduce the machine of wage labor, a machine that cannot stop. Let’s be clear: the benefits far outweigh the risks. Benefits for the national economy, risks for workers, parents, students… who will get sick and die. Known data, data that are calculated with the cold cynicism of the State, a cynicism that is necessary for its entire world to remain standing.
That is why the determination of many education workers not to return to schools if there is no security for our lives and those of the rest of society is so important. A determination to strike that in Madrid has been torpedoed by all the unions. And we are not surprised. That is the role of the unions. To negotiate with our lives, to adapt them to the demands of capital and the state. Our needs must be submitted to the needs of capitalist normality. And that is what they have done these days by calling off a strike for which there are plenty of reasons: among others the fact that our lives are in danger, that all of us can serve as an example to stop the wheel of a world that produces and reproduces this pandemic.
That is why we think that the initiatives that are emerging for an unlimited strike are so important, and that is why we support it with determination, so that it will organize itself outside of the unions, from the educational centers, through open assemblies in which all the workers, families and students participate and are protagonists in this struggle.
For the unlimited strike!