SF Bay View, “‘People’s Takeover’ of child care centers planned by Oakland Parents Together” (July 26, 2010)

‘People’s takeover’ of child care centers planned by Oakland Parents Together

Oakland Parents Together, SF Bay View [July 26, 2010]

This precious baby is far too young to leave alone when state funding is cut off and her child development center closes, yet her parents can’t feed her unless they can work. What to do? Oakland Parents Together say they’ll keep the centers open with a “people’s takeover”!

Oakland – More than 120 parents and staff members of the Oakland Unified School District’s Child Development Program (CDC) met at Santa Fe Elementary School and unanimously and enthusiastically endorsed a proposal from Oakland Parents Together (OPT) to organize the seven CDC sites slated for closure for a “People’s Takeover – the opposite of a State Takeover – which will keep these sites operating with volunteers until the state of California reinstates the money cut from the CDC budget.” The seven sites are Manzanita, Santa Fe, Piedmont Avenue, Hintel, Sequoia, Golden Gate and Jefferson CDCs. The proposal continued: “It is unacceptable to the people of Oakland that the state budget be balanced on the backs of our babies.”

According to OPT Executive Director Henry Hitz: “We have to draw the line. If we allow these sites to close, they may never open again even if the money is restored.”

Alexandra Kollontai, “Communism and the family”

“Communism and the family”

Alexandra Kollontai

from Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai [1920]

Women’s role in production: its effect upon the family

Will the family continue to exist under communism? Will the family remain in the same form? These questions are troubling many women of the working class and worrying their menfolk as well. Life is changing before our very eyes; old habits and customs are dying out, and the whole life of the proletarian family is developing in a way that is new and unfamiliar and, in the eyes of some, “bizarre”. No wonder that working women are beginning to think these questions over. Another fact that invites attention is that divorce has been made easier in Soviet Russia. The decree of the Council of People’s Commissars issued on 18 December 1917 means that divorce is, no longer a luxury that only the rich can afford; henceforth, a working woman will not have to petition for months or even for years to secure the right to live separately from a husband who beats her and makes her life a misery with his drunkenness and uncouth behaviour. Divorce by mutual agreement now takes no more than a week or two to obtain. Women who are unhappy in their married life welcome this easy divorce. But others, particularly those who are used to looking upon their husband as “breadwinners”, are frightened. They have not yet understood that a woman must accustom herself to seek and find support in the collective and in society, and not from the individual man.

David Hilliard, “Child Development Center”

“Child Development Center”

David Hilliard

from The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Program, 2008. [PDF]

Child Development Center
In the two years since the Child Development Center began, the staff
working with the children have had the unique opportunity of observing
children in their early stages of development in a communal lifestyle and
they have been very conscious of the profound effects it has had on the children’s
development.

Because of the racism that is prevalent in American society, there has been
no previous study of the Black child’s development at what is termed the K pre•
school age and younger. And because communalism is the opposite paragon
of the American family there are no resources to study the development of
children in a communal lifestyle.

Jane Alpert, “Birth of Mother Right”

“Birth of Mother Right”

Jane Alpert

from “Mother Right: A new feminist theory” [1972]

My first year underground was very hard. Expecting to die for the Revolution in a matter of months, I was unprepared to find myself not only alive but living a rather unadventurous and secluded existence less than a year after “disappearing.” I found it increasingly difficult to get along with the friends with whom I was still in touch, especially with the men who were becoming increasingly overbearing and critical of all my actions, as I was growing increasingly sensitive to their interference. Chafing at every restriction, hostile even to the one woman friend I really cared for, I finally decided to take off on my own, reasoning that it couldn’t get much worse. I started to travel and for a few months roamed, almost aimlessly, from one community to another across the country.

First National Chicana Conference, “Workshop resolutions”

“Workshop Resolutions”

First National Chicana Conference [1971]

SEX AND THE CHICANA

We feel that in order to provide an effective measure to correct the many sexual hangups facing the Chicano community the following resolutions should be implemented:

I. Sex is good and healthy for both Chicanos and Chicanas and we must develop this attitude.

II. We should destroy the myth that religion and culture control our sexual lives.

Cindy L’Hirondelle, “Housework Under Capitalism: The Unpaid Labor of Mothers”

“Housework Under Capitalism: The Unpaid Labor of Mothers”
Cindy L’Hirondelle
Off Our Backs,  Jan/Feb 2004

I’ve worked laying sod, painting cars, selling donuts, and flipping burgers. I have also lived and felt the invisibility of being “only a mom.” Nothing compares with the stress of looking after small children, cooking for them and cleaning up after them. Housework gets no recognition, no status, and is the most wearing job I have ever done.

But the subject of household labor is seen as dull, and gets ignored even by progressive groups. Paid work gets recognition; it is “real” work. Yet the most common, exhausting, and tedious work is done for free and is invisible to those who fight against capitalism for social justice. As an anti-capitalist activist, I have attended countless meetings and protests, read stacks of alternative magazines-but I was unaware of the role that domestic labor played in the larger economic picture.

Harriet Fraad, “Children as an exploited class”

“Children as an exploited class”

Harriet Fraad

excerpt from Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order. 1994.

Transformation of our system of private child rearing to a system of public services would be costly and require government action. It could address some of the problems of inequity while providing top quality child care. It is precisely because social responsibility for child rearing could accomplish these goals that it encounters right-wing opposition. Although Americans generally cringe when discussing collective kitchens, they generally embrace the collective kitchens of McDonald’s and the rest of the monumentally profitable fast food industry. Although the idea of collective noncommodity child care is anathema to many, quality child care centers are so attractive that they must turn away many of their applicants.

COLLECTIVE, COMMUNAL CHILD CARE

What would collective child care mean? It would mean a different organization of society with children’s care shifted from the individual shoulders of parents to collectively shared public child care facilities. Ingenious and varied possibilities for communal child rearing have been developing since the 19th century (Hayden 1985). To implement these kinds of child rearing strategies on a national scale would require a revolutionary transformation of our society, which does not seem imminent. However, at this moment there are transitional forms such as parenting centers, group homes, after-school, weekend and summer camps, and neighborhood family counseling centers. None of these services would have to be mandatory. They are so desperately needed that I am convinced they would be sought after and fiercely defend once established on a voluntary basis.

For children this could mean the beginning of a change from being a serf, isolated and dependent on the care of whomever bore them, to full personhood. In class terms, it could mean a transition from household serfdom to full citizenship in a communal household setting. At present, the only possibility for children’s liberation from oppressive homes occurs if their parents recognize their own inability to care and voluntarily bear the social stigma of relinquishing them to what are often inadequate state agencies or inadequate relatives.

Center for the Study of Childcare Employment, “Working for worthy wages: The child care compensation movement, 1970-2001″

“Working for worthy wages: The child care compensation movement, 1970-2001”

Marcy Whitebook, Center for the Study of Childcare Employment, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley (2002)

View the full report here.

Introduction
In 2001 and 2002, over $100 million dollars will be spent to augment the earnings
of child care teachers and providers across the United States. These financial rewards
will come in the form of annual stipends, health insurance coverage, and, for a small
number, targeted, sustained pay increases.  Driven in part by a robust economy in the late
1990s, combined with a growing demand for child care services and a shortage of trained
child care workers, many states, including California, Illinois, New York, North Carolina,
Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin, have initiated or expanded publicly-funded
programs focused on building a more skilled and stable child care workforce.  Initiatives
are also being developed in Connecticut, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri and Pennsylvania.
Additionally, workers in Head Start, Department of Defense and some pre-kindergarten
early childhood programs are benefiting from salary enhancements built into those
delivery systems (Whitebook & Eichberg, 2002; Montilla, Twombly & De Vita, 2001).
While most child care teachers and providers continue to earn poverty-level
wages, and many beneficiaries of the above-mentioned compensation initiatives still are
woefully underpaid, there is little argument within the child care field, and a slowly
dawning awareness among policy makers, that improved services for young children in
the U.S. require better compensation for the child care workforce.  This level of
acknowledgment was not present a decade ago, even within the child care community.  In
many communities, the focus is not on whether to raise wages, but on how best to do so,
and a great deal of experimentation and debate is underway (Whitebook & Eichberg,
2002).

Philip J. Kain, “Marx, Housework and Alienation”

“Marx, Housework, and Alienation”
Philip J. Kain
Hypatia vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1993)

For different feminist theorists, housework and child rearing are viewed in very
different ways. I argue that Marx gives us the categories that allow us to see why
housework and child care can be both a paradigm of unalienated labor and also involve
the greatest oppression. In developing this argument, a distinction is made between
alienation and oppression and the conditions are discussed under which unalienated
housework can become oppressive or can become alienated.

bell hooks, “Revolutionary parenting”

“Revolutionary Parenting”

bell hooks

excerpt from Feminist theory: from margin to center. [1984]

During the early stages of contemporary women’s liberation movement, feminist analyses of motherhood reflected the race and class biases of participants. Some white middle class, college-educated women argued that motherhood was a serious obstacle to women’s liberation, a trap confining women to the home, keeping them tied to cleaning, cooking, and child care. Others simply identified motherhood and childrearing as the locus of women’s oppression. Had black women voiced their views on motherhood, it would not have been named a serious obstacle to our freedom as women. Racism, availability of jobs, lack of skills or education and a number of other issues would have been at the top of the list – but not motherhood. Black women would not have said motherhood prevented us from entering the world of paid work because we have always worked. From slavery to the present day black women have worked outside the home, in the fields, in the factories, in the laundries, in the homes of others. That work gave meager financial compensation and often interfered with or prevented effective parenting. Historically, black women have identified work in the context of family as humanizing labor, work that affirms their identity as women, as human beings showing love and care, the very gestures of humanity white supremacist ideology claimed black people were incapable of expressing. In contrast to labor done in a caring environment inside the home, labor outside the home was most often seen as stressful, degrading, and dehumanizing.