Wallace’s showing in the primary elections has proved that busing is a powerful issue in the ‘72 campaign. When the Florida returns were in, Nixon quickly moved to capitalize on voter discontent by proposing legislation that would impose a moratorium on all new court-ordered busing plans. With this move he hopes both to prevent Wallace as a power broker in the electoral college; and to capture some of the labor votes that normally go to the Democrats. The Democrats are clearly in disarray. The much-feared “social issue” threatens to undermine them, as it did in the 1970 campaign, and one-time civil rights advocates find themselves imitating Wallace campaign slogans.

It is clear, however, that the busing of children per se is not the issue. Southern-style segregation has long entailed a systematic and state-supported style of school busing. To be sure, the traditional racial antagonisms play a role, but Wallace touches impulses that go beyond the opposition to busing and the issue of race. There is an elasticity to his rhetoric. If busing will not “stir them up,” then high taxes, “welfare chiselers,” foreign aid and Washington bureaucrats will. Clearly, Wallace is tapping deep reservoirs of unfocused but powerful discontent.

The presence of deep discontent is not surprising. The sixties was a decade of pervasive and sometimes convulsive political conflict. But the ease with which such discontent is channeled by right-wing rhetoric is discomforting. It seems too easy to argue that the reactionary character of the Wallace campaign simply reflects the absence of countervailing left-wing propaganda. very time Wallace attacks high taxes, he simultaneously lashes out at “welfare chiselers.” Every indictment of “Washington bureaucrats” is followed by an attack on “long-haired hippies” and foreign aid. The power of his appeal is a sign of the consistency of his rhetoric. It is too generous to call Wallace a populist – i.e., someone who might unite the ruled against the rulers. His success, reflected in the popular appeal of anti-busing, seems to have more complex roots.

At one level there seem to be no common ties between the hippie and the bureaucrat, the Ford Foundation and the mother. on AFDC, but at a deeper level they flow from the same set of political events. They are all part of the dimensions of social change which threaten the islands of economic and social stability – the small home, the stable family, the secure job – that the “forgotten American” has so tenaciously built up. Youth attacks on morals and the work ethic, the black demand for jobs and housing, the bureaucrat’s insistence on “urban redevelopment” and the Third World’s fight against US imperialism all undermine the “security” the “common man” has achieved at much personal sacrifice. At its roots the Wallace campaign taps not simply discontent, but discontent translated into a resistance to these developing patterns of social .change.

However, such resistance is not of necessity “reactionary.” On the contrary, resistance to arbitrary infringements on people’s freedoms is the precondition for all rebellion –and nothing appears more arbitrary than the decision of a single Federal judge. Similarly, the demand for stability is a natural outgrowth of the desire for sustained patterns .of community living. But the appearance and procession of change within capitalist society can poison discontent and status-quo defense with the_elements of right-wing manipulation and rebellion.

Change in capitalist societies always proceeds unevenly. For every pattern of growth there is one of stagnation. Development is interlocked with under- development and the resulting checkered pattern of losers and gainers unleashes deep communal conflicts. Moreover, in advanced capitalist society, the forces of change spring unplanned from many different points of the global economy, It is the complexity of their interaction, combined with the paucity and per- version of information, that gives social discontent its elastic character, and transforms blacks, hippies, bureaucrats and Vietnamese into seemingly one abstract social force. In this context communal conflicts transcend their strictly material basis and attain a more symbolic if not irrational character.

It is, in fact, this complexity of change that makes class consciousness so difficult to achieve, and false consciousness too common a condition. For example, it is not that the elite can simply use racism to “divide the wing class.” No class can exercise such total and arbitrary control. Rather the complexity of capitalist social reality itself makes such divide-and-conquer techniques possible.

In effect, the national resurgence of the race issue within the context of busing, does reflect real communal conflicts as blacks demand equal acces to housing, jobs and schools. But it would be a mistake to see only this “conflict of interest” dimension. The visceral and elastic character of the busing issue indicates that it has come to symbolize a deeper resistance to the regional, national, and increasingly global dimensions of change impinging on all Americans. Busing as a symbolic issue, manipulated through the elements of right wing rebellion, has exposed the more irrational dimensions of public life. In this context, the sensible elements of public discussion, such as tax rates, muniipal budgets, and the quality of education, often prove irrelevant.

If the busing issue is placed in the context of resistance to change, then those who attack “social planners” and white community demands for “local control” are hardly progressive despite the seemingly “radical” character of the lan- guage they employ. Radicals too quickly assume that similarities in language provide a basis for “link-ups.” Community control theory is progressive only when it combines the right of community self-determination with the needs of the total society. When the language of community control embraces only one side of this equation, i.e., community self-determination, it is usually a mask for the defense of the status quo.

Much the same applies to the recent fascination with ethnicity, a fascination that has developed parallel with, and sometimes been synonomous with, the community control movement. The resurgence of ethnic consciousness would appear strange if one considers that the real basis for ethnic culture in America – the peasant-based cultures of Europe – have long ago been eroded by the process of modernization. But this resurgence has different roots. Ethnicity reappears as a tool of job defense at a time when public service jobs are being restructured and municipal budgets are being cut back. Thus in New York, Irish Power means defense of the police; Jewish Power, Jewish monopolization of the teachers’ union; and Black Power, black control of anti-poverty money. In effect, both community control and ethnicity are too often mystifications for vested interest politics.

Because the issue of busing is complex and integrates many strands of social conflict, it is a bit pretentious to propose a fixed “line” on busing. We can, however, clarify some of the issues of integration-segregation and “quality education” that might assist in the development of a clearer orientation toward busing.

Integration is no longera code-word for radical and liberal sensibilities. With the realization that strictly legal maneuvers would not overcome the structural resistances to equality of opportunity, black leaders were correct to point out that more militant action, based on the accumulation of black power, was essentail. But this should not imply that when forces for integration can be effectively combined, integration is itseif no longer worth pursuing. In fact. from a long term perspective, integration furthers the welfare of both black and white children, and undermines the divide-and-conquer techniques of the ruling elites.

Studies show that the performance of black chil- dren improves in integrated schools. But contrary to recent academic propaganda, “racial” theories of intelligence do not explain this result. Rather the answer lies in the impoverished self-image that a degraded urban environment forces upon the black child. A child’s image of himself is ultimately a function of the environment that socializes him – of the MATERIAL basis that structures his experiences. When a black child enters an integrated school, he not only experiences a new environment, but cor-respondingly discovers his own untapped potentials.

This does not imply that in one fell swoop integration can solve the problems of race relations. To believe this is to fall into that dreamland of liberalism in which social pacification is achieved with the passage of a few laws. In fact in the initial stages of integration, the black child’s discovery of his own potential is matched by a sense of rage over his own previous deprivations. Thus integration often leads to severe racial conflict. But in the process the black child draws on the elements of his own experiences and background to help him understand his white environment. In effect, black power will not be an artificial evocation of Africanisms, but rather a tool for the authentic, active and conflict-ridden process of integration. Integration must mean conflict. The deadweight of racism lies too deep in the pyschic structures of America’s children. Theirs is the burden of overcoming America’s past. But in the process of conflict and struggle they can arrive at new and higher patterns of integration that will defy all divisionary techniques of the elites. By viewing integration as a process of conflict rather than as one of social-pacification, we can understand its progressive potential.

Finally, underlying all educational conflict there rests the issue of the quality of education itself. The educational crisis has been with us for some time. “Johnny could not read” since the 1950’s. But recently there have appeared not only the stan- dard problems of reading and writing, but an increas- ing collapse of discipline in the school.

This collapse reflects the ambiguity of schooling itself. Schooling is a training ground for work, but also a reservation to keep youth off the labor market. Increases in the years of schooling and the number of students reflect changes or increases in skill requirements for jobs, and the rowjng inability of capitalism to provide work for everyone. It is the proportion or ratio between these two functions that determines the orderliness and functionality of schooling. There is evidence that in the last fifty years the problem of employment expansion has become the central contradiction of American capitalism. During this period schools have provided less and less of the skills and training of the work-a-day world, exhibiting the deterioration implicit in a system of capitalistically determined job creation.

The burden on youth is thus two-fold. Not only must they bear the oppressive rating and control systems, but increasingly such systems appear in a social vacuum without justification. In this context, quality education can hardly mean, as some parents often tell us, learning the inherited structure of skills, for they bear little resemblance to job opportunities. Nor, as others often suggest, is quality education conditional upon a concerted attack on discipline. Rather we suggest that quality education must flow from an orientation that transcends both the past and present. If youth is to struggle for its right to learning and education, it must develop a sense of the structure of revolutionary, future-oriented skills, i.e., skills that transcend the modes of work and divisions of labor that flow from the deteriorating system of market-determined jobs, skills that can be part of a consciously and democratically planned society in which the implicit productive and intellectual potential can be realized. The mind can only boggle at such a project, and no suggestion can be made here as to the nature of such learning. But if the young are to shape their future, if they are to engage in effective social conflict, then black and white youth will have to come together to take the full measure of their powers and the strengths of their vision.