5岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰…

(写在前面:美国帝国主义的剥削阶级们为了自己的口袋,把智障人士赶上战场,而傻逼美国粉们还在歌颂这场战争,呵呵。)

大家非常熟悉的《阿甘正传》讲述了有智商障碍的主人公阿甘,一路凭借自己运气和执着克服困难,达成美国梦的故事。

电影中有一部分,讲的是他参加越战,再一次凭借自己奇迹般的运气从枪林弹雨中幸存。

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

电影刻意回避了一个问题,那就是阿甘作为一个智商比常人低很多的人,是通不过美国军队的征兵要求的——士兵的智商被要求在80以上。而阿甘的智商,则远低于平均值,在“慢”一栏内

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

相似的看似与事实矛盾的情节,也在《全金属蛋壳》中出现:一个低智商的新兵蛋子在越战时期应征入伍,最后成为了一个冷血杀手。

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

图:《全金属蛋壳》

当然,你可以说这是电影艺术创作,不用深究。但这些越战电影不约而同地选择描写低智商士兵,就仿佛是在禁忌的边缘,暗示着观众些什么。

如果我告诉你,这些电影其实是基于史实,像阿甘这样低智商的士兵是真实存在的呢?

而他们的命运,则远没有《阿甘正传》里描述的那么美好…

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

时间是1964年。美国总统约翰逊刚刚决定派出地面部队,直接大规模干预越南内战。美国的越南战争,开始了。

而此时摆在美国国防部长麦克纳马拉面前的,是一个巨大的兵源困难:上哪儿找那么多年轻男性,去一个陌生的国家打仗、赴死呢?

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

图:时任美国国防部长麦克纳马拉,越南战争的总指挥

没有人想去越南,美国人都削减了脑袋想要逃避兵役。根据美国征兵规则,大学生、有孩子的父亲可以免服兵役。结果美国大学生数量激增、上不了大学的人就拼命结婚。而找不到伴侣的,就只好装疯、自残,无所不用其极。

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

图:美国大学生数量在60年代激增

国防部最后决定降低征兵要求,逼迫那些智商低于常人的“阿甘”也加入军队。这个项目叫做“十万人计划Project 100000”,意为每年都要强征超过十万名有智力障碍的士兵。

国防部部长麦克纳马拉面对媒体是这么说的:十万人计划是为了拯救这些智商低下的人。这些人现在多半生活在美国各大城市的贫民窟内。军队可以教他们生活的本领,提高他们的智商,让他们为社会所用。

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

图:全金属弹壳

在越南战争期间,十万人计划一共招募到了35万士兵。这些低智商的士兵被分配到了军队的各个部门,与普通士兵一同训练,一同参战。他们被战友统一称为:麦克纳马拉的傻子

这些智力有障碍的士兵到达新兵训练营后,不出所料地什么也学不会。

心理学家N. Gregory Hamilton是一名越战老兵,他的书《麦克纳马拉的傻子》曾经回忆自己在新兵训练营中目睹的无数哭笑不得的场景:

  • 他们不知道怎么扔手榴弹。不论教官和战友怎么教他们把手榴弹扔的高一点,这样才能扔得更远,他们始终直直地把手榴弹扔出去。他们无法理解:为什么要往上扔就扔的更远?

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

  • 他们无法通过射击测验。那时美军为了模拟实战,会用活动靶子,每个射击人员需要反应迅速才可以打中目标。对于大多数智力低下的士兵,他们还没瞄准完,靶子就消失了。事实上,让他们拿枪这件事本身,就够让全连官兵提心吊胆了。

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

无数头脑清醒的指挥官都向上反映:这些人不适合军队,更无法上战场。但那时美军的缺人问题已经到了非常严重的地步,想放走一个人都不行!

就这样,大部分通过十万人计划招募的“阿甘”,都被送往了越南。他们就像赶鸭子上架一样,不知道越南是什么,甚至不知道“战争”是什么…

到战争结束的时候,十万人计划中一共有超过6000名士兵战死,2万多人受伤。他们的伤亡率是别的士兵的三倍。而且这一切都是无谓的伤亡,因为他们根本无法有效战斗。

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

那个时候很多美国将军有这样的想法:他们不需要士兵有多聪明,只要可以服从命令就可以了。但越战的经验证明了:战争非常考验士兵的智力,你必须反应迅速,懂得如何使用各项装备,如何与队友交流配合…

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

这6000战死的士兵中,有一位名叫Robert Bromo。从小到大,所有人都知道他比别人慢,但这种不同并不妨碍他有着幸福的生活。

直到十万人计划把他强行征召。他的父母家人、亲戚姐妹、乃至上级军官都不停地向上反映:他不能打仗,他会害死自己…

他最后还是死在了越南。这让他的家人陷入了无尽的痛苦和愤怒:为什么有钱有势的人可以通过各种办法免服兵役,让Robert替他们打这场他们想仗。

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

除了自己身处险境以外,这些智力低下的士兵还极大地拖累了队友。

根据一名美老兵的描述:

在实战中,如果我们队里有一个智商低下的队友,我们必须时刻防着他不被他误射,而在交战时,我们必须时刻保护他的安全。想象一下派五岁小孩拿着武器上战场,这就是十万人计划所做的事情。

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

《麦克纳马拉的傻子》就记录过这样一件事: 曾经有一名低智商的士兵在越南站岗,这时一位军官返回营地。这时士兵应当检查军官的身份,然后放行。但这位士兵不知道出于什么原因,可能是把对方误判成了敌人,直接开枪,当场击毙了军官

当晚,愤怒的战友谋杀了他。他的尸体,以及凶手至今都没有被找到…

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

在《阿甘正传》中,阿甘到达军营后说,他觉得在军营中生活特别简单:只要听军官的话就可以。军官让做什么就做什么。

阿甘从战场上回来,成了英雄,但那些和他境遇相同,上了战场的士兵,却没有一个人可以一样幸运

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

他们被推上完全应付不了的战场,从开始就没有回来的希望。

在越南战争之后,十万人计划终止。

但这十万冤魂之后,战争机器还在轰鸣,还有无数和一样懵懂的年轻人被推进炮火硝烟。

无人阻止,但他本不应死在那里。

五岁智商就得上战场!美国招了30万低能儿当炮灰……

图:2008年的一篇新闻“他本不应该去伊拉克”,一名智力低下的士兵在伊拉克战死,他在军队里的外号就叫做:弗罗斯特·甘

http://www.wenxuecity.com/news/2018/11/05/7793655.html

Grand theft voting rights(投票权大盗)

(写在前面:美国的政治制度本身就是反民主的。)

AS SOON as it became clear that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes in the 2016 election, he started looking for a pretext to explain his failure to pass the most basic test of democratic legitimacy.

由于很明显唐纳德特朗普在2016年大选中失去了近300万票的大众选票,他开始寻找借口来解释为什么他未能通过对民主合法性的最基本考验。

Trump conjured up the most outrageous and transparent lies to explain his loss, grumbling about widespread voter fraud and blaming “the millions of people who voted illegally” for depriving him of a popular vote victory.

特朗普想出了最令人愤怒和透明的谎言以解释他的损失,他抱怨广泛的选民欺诈行为,并指责“数百万非法投票的人”剥夺了他的大众投票胜利。

But these lies were more than an incurable megalomaniac trying to save face in front of a skeptical world. Soon after his inauguration, Trump moved to act on his lies, creating a commission to “investigate” the nearly non-existent phenomenon of voter fraud.

但这些谎言不仅仅只是一个无法治愈的自大狂试图在怀疑的世界面前挽回面子。 就职典礼后不久,特朗普开始将他的谎言诉诸行动,设立一个委员会以“调查”几乎不存在的选民欺诈现象。

He recruited Kansas Secretary of State and current gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach — a frequent Breitbart contributor with white supremacist ties who also happens to be the Grand Wizard of Republican voter suppression efforts — to lead it.

他招募了堪萨斯州州务卿和现任州长候选人Kris Kobach —一位与白人至上主义发生关系的经常性的Breitbart供稿者,他也恰好是共和党选民压制工作的大巫师—领导者。

Image from SocialistWorker.org

The commission was drowned in lawsuits and forced to disband before it could achieve anything concrete. But it was emblematic of the way in which Trumpian bravado — which on its face can appear to be a stark departure from the more sedate form of traditional Republican statesmanship — corresponds comfortably in practice with well-established conservative policies.

该委员会在诉讼中被淹死,并被迫解散,在其实现具体的任务之前。 但它象征着特朗比的虚张声势—其表面看起来似乎与传统的更为稳重的共和党政治家风格形式相距很远—但在实践中与完善的保守政策相吻合。

The results of the 2016 election were deeply marred by Republican-led voter suppression efforts, and the upcoming 2018 midterms stand to follow much the same pattern.

共和党领导的选民压制努力严重损坏了2016年大选的结果,而即将到来的2018年中期也将遵循相同的模式。

That’s because despite all the advances in voting rights that have been made since the days when only educated, property-owning European males could legally participate in the U.S. political system, the manipulation of laws by the ruling parties to prevent people from participating in the political process remains common today.

这是因为尽管自从只有受过教育的,拥有财产的欧洲男性可以合法参与美国政治系统的日子之后投票权的进步很大,执政党操纵法律以阻止人们参与政治过程在今天仍然很普遍。

Voter suppression is an openly racist and elitist affront to the basic principles of democracy, but though most of today’s overt voter-suppression efforts are the work of Republicans, aimed at depressing turnout by constituencies who traditionally vote Democratic, it’s a mistake to limit the discussion of voter suppression solely to the racist New Jim Crow tactics of the right wing.

选民压制是对基本民主原则的公开的种族主义和精英主义的侮辱,但尽管今天大多数公开的选民压制努力都是共和党人的工作,旨在压制传统上投票给民主党的选民的投票率,但将讨论限制在认为是选民压制仅限于右翼的种族主义的新吉姆·克劳战术是错误的。

Increasing the ability of the public to participate in the democratic process through the ballot box is the goal of all those who wish to fight voter suppression efforts. But this inevitably leads to a whole raft of questions about whether the current system is democratic to begin with.

通过投票箱提高公众参与民主进程的能力是所有希望打击选民压制努力的人的目标。 但这不可避免地导向了一系列关于现行制度是否民主的问题。


TODAY IN Georgia, the Republican-controlled state government has suspended 53,000 pending voter registration applications on the eve of the midterm elections, 70 percent of which belong to African Americans.

今天在佐治亚,共和党控制的州政府在中期选举前夕暂停了53,000份未决的选民登记申请,其中70%属于非洲裔美国人。

This comes on top of a purge, led by current Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, that had nullified the registration of over 1.4 million voters in the state since 2012.

这是由现任共和党州长候选人Brian Kemp领导的一次清洗,导致自2012年以来该州的140多万选民登记无效。

Such voter purges have been common in Republican states for years, facilitated by programs such as Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck, a wildly inaccurate voter-purging system created in Kansas in 2005 by none other than Kobach. Crosscheck is responsible for millions of purged voters to date, and was probably more of a deciding factor in Trump’s 2016 election victory than fake news, Russian hacking and “double voters” combined.

这种选民清洗在共和党各州多年来一直很常见,这得益于Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck等项目,这是2005年堪萨斯州的Kobach创建的一个非常不准确的选民清洗系统。 到目前为止,Crosscheck要对数百万被清除的选民负责,并且可能更像是特朗普2016年大选胜利的决定因素,而不是假新闻,俄罗斯黑客和“双重选民”的总和。

In North Dakota today, a discriminatory voter-ID law threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Native Americans and could determine whether Republicans retain control of the Senate in November.

今天在北达科他州,歧视性的选民身份法可能会剥夺成千上万美国原住民的人权,并可能决定共和党人是否在11月保留对参议院的控制权。

In other states, Republican officials are using similar tactics to target ethnic minorities and the poor in order to ensure that the preferred candidates of the party’s xenophobic, nationalist base are elected to office.

在其他州,共和党官员正在使用类似的策略来针对少数族群和穷人,以确保党内仇外的民族主义基地的首选候选人当选。

There are so many voter suppression tactics in use today that you need an encyclopedia to keep track of them all.

今天有很多选民压制策略在使用,以至于你需要一本百科全书来跟踪它们。

In addition to Crosscheck-style mass purges, there is voter caging, another form of purging whereby partisan operatives create lists of selected groups of voters in order to legally challenge their registration and disqualify them from voting.

除了Crosscheck式的大规模清洗之外,还有选民囚禁,这是另一种形式的清洗,其中党派工作人员创建选定的选民群体名单,以便合法地挑战他们的注册并取消他们的投票资格。

The tactic is a favorite of Republicans going back to at least the 1980s, and is usually done by sending out bulk mailings to left-leaning minority voters. If the mailings are returned as undeliverable, this then serves as evidence that can be used to legally challenge the voter’s registration and purge it.

这种策略是共和党人至少在1980s时就有的最爱,通常是通过向左倾的少数群体选民发送大量邮件来完成的。如果邮件无法送达,则可以作为证据用于合法挑战选民的注册并清除它。

In 2004, Republican operatives in Florida were caught red-handed when an e-mail between officials of the George W. Bush campaign leaked, containing a “caging list” with 1,886 voters on it.

2004年,当乔治·W·布什的竞选官员之间的电子邮件泄露时,佛罗里达州的共和党人员被逮捕,其中包含一份“囚禁名单”,其上有1,886名选民。


IN ADDITION to caging and other overt purging efforts, partisan state governments have been increasingly passing strict voter-ID laws like the one in North Dakota, especially since 2013, when the Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder struck down section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protected the rights of voters in states of the former Confederacy by requiring a federal review of changes to election law in those states.

除了囚禁和其他公开清洗工作外,党派州政府越来越多地通过严格的选民身份法,例如北达科他州的法律,特别是自2013年以来,最高法院判决谢尔比县诉霍尔德案,推翻了第4(b)条 1965年选举权法案,这条法案要求联邦审查这些州选举法的变化来保护前南部各州选民的权利。

Banning people with criminal records from voting, even after they’ve served their sentences, is another tried-and-true voter suppression tactic, operating hand-in-glove with policies designed to criminalize African Americans and other groups — a combination pioneered in the post-Civil War South.

禁止有犯罪记录的人投票,即使他们已经服过刑,也是另一种经过验证的选民压制策略,与旨在将非洲裔美国人和其他群体罪犯化的政策密切配合 —在内战后的南方被率先组合。(罪犯一样有基本人权,包括投票权,而且很多被扔进监狱的根本不是罪犯,而是被Jim Crow残害的受害者。)

This suppression tactic was used to great effect in Florida during the 2000 election, when 58,000 alleged felons had their voter registration purged by Florida’s Republican government, led by then-Gov. Jeb Bush — whose brother George became president thanks to his questionable victory in the state.

在2000年大选期间,这种压制策略在佛罗里达州实现了重大影响,当时58,000名被指控的罪犯被佛罗里达州共和党政府清除,由当时的州长Jeb Bush主导—由于他在州内的可疑胜利,其兄弟乔治成为总统。

As Ari Berman noted in the Nation, a lawsuit filed by the NAACP against the Florida government at that time eventually “turned up 12,000 voters who shouldn’t have been labeled felons. That was 22 times Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.”

正如Ari Berman在Nation指出的那样,当时NAACP对佛罗里达州政府提起的诉讼最终“找到了12,000名不应该被标记为罪犯的选民。这是布什的537票的胜利数的22倍。“

Closing all but one of the polling stations in a minority area is also a tactic that is commonly used by Republicans. In Dodge City, Kansas, Republican state officials recently moved the city’s only polling station outside of the city limits, miles away from the city center, to a place that’s inaccessible by public transportation.

关闭少数人群地区的除一个投票站外的所有投票站也是共和党人常用的策略。在堪萨斯州的道奇城,共和党官员最近将这座城市唯一的投票站搬到了距离市中心数英里的城市范围之外的一个公共交通无法到达的地方。(恶意增加投票成本,真是卑鄙。)

The population of Dodge City is 60 percent Latino, and, as the Kansas ACLU pointed out, the “polling site serves 13,136 voters, making it one of the most burdened polling places in the state of Kansas.”

道奇城的人口的60%是拉美裔,正如堪萨斯州的ACLU指出的那样,“投票站为13,136名选民提供服务,使其成为堪萨斯州负担最重的投票站之一。”


THE RESTRICTION of the right to vote has been an important feature of American elections since the country was founded over 200 years ago.

自这个国家建立后的200多年以来,对投票权的限制一直是美国大选的一个重要特征。

But direct voter suppression is merely one way that the ruling parties limit and control the political process for their own benefit. If our goal is to expand democracy, then we must also examine the other sides of the problem.

但直接的选民压制只是执政党为了自身利益而限制和控制政治进程的一种方式。如果我们的目标是扩大民主,那么我们也必须检查问题的其他方面。

Unjust ballot access laws, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, preserve a repressive two-party system, despite popular support for a viable third party, by unduly restricting who can appear on the ballot.

民主党和共和党都支持的不公正的选票准入法保留了一种压制性的两党制,尽管可见的第三党受到大众支持,谁可以出现在选票上是被过度限制的。

In most states, prospective third parties must expend significant campaign resources to gather large numbers of signatures in order to even have a place on the ballot. In order to maintain their legal status as a party, their candidates must often secure large vote percentages in each election.

在大多数州,有希望的第三党必须花费大量的竞选资源来收集大量签名,以便在选票上占有一席之地。 为了保持其作为政党的法律地位,他们的候选人通常必须在每次选举中获得大的投票比例。

Constitutional structures such as the Electoral College, which was designed to protect the Southern slave aristocracy, intentionally and unfairly skew the balance of electoral power in favor of white, rural Republican voters.

旨在保护南方奴隶主贵族的选举人团等宪法结构有意的和不公平地扭曲了选举权力的平衡,将权力扭向白人和农村的共和党选民。

And then there are the systems of federal congressional representation themselves, which were crafted by and for a wealthy colonial elite under radically different social conditions than those existing today.

此外,还有联邦国会代表制度本身,这些制度是由一个富裕的殖民精英为自己制作的,这些精英生活在与现在完全不同的社会条件下。

In the Senate, because each state, no matter how small, gets two senators, it’s possible for just 17 percent of the U.S. population to elect a Senate majority.

在参议院,由于每个州,无论多么小,都有两位参议员,结果就是17%的美国人口就可以选出参议院多数席位。(这完全就是反民主的!)

And Article V of the Constitution, which governs the amendment process, states that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate,” meaning that the Senate literally cannot be reformed under the current Constitution.

宪法第五条规定了修正程序,该条规定“任何州,未经其同意,都不得在参议院中被剥夺其平等的选举权”,这意味着根据现行宪法,参议院实际上不能被改革。

To describe such a legislature as a “democratic institution” is to achieve a Trumpian magnitude of dishonesty.

将这样的立法机构描述为“民主机构”展现出了特朗比的不诚实程度。

But it’s not only the Senate. The geographical distribution of the population, combined with the Congressional district system, means that the House, too, gives outsized power to rural voters. And because representation in the House and in state legislatures is apportioned through electoral districts drawn by those in power, partisan gerrymandering has been a perpetual tactic used to skew the democratic process.

但不仅仅只有参议院是如此。人口的地理分布与国会地区系统相结合,意味着众议院也为农村选民提供了过大的权力。而且由于众议院和州立法机构的代表权是通过当权者所选择的选区划分的,基于党派利益的扭曲选区是一种用来扭曲民主进程的永久战术。

Just 9 percent of the population selected Trump and Hillary Clinton as the presidential candidates in party primaries in 2016, and Trump won the election with the votes of just 27 percent of eligible voters.

仅有9%的人口选择特朗普和希拉里克林顿作为2016年党内初选的总统候选人,特朗普只获得了27%的合格选民的票数就赢得了大选。

The truth is that majority rule has never existed in the United States, because it is barely even possible under the current system.

事实是多数统治在美国从未存在过,因为在现行制度下几乎不可能实现。

Fixing the American political system and ending the suppression of democracy in all its forms will require nothing less than a revolutionary overhaul that scraps the current Constitution and creates entirely new political structures that are truly democratic.

修复美国的政治制度,结束各种形式的对民主的压制,只需要进行革命性的改变,废除现行宪法,创造真正民主的全新的政治结构。

精英大学的肮脏小秘密

(写在前面:资本主义下机会平等不过是个骗局而已。)
我们进步人士崇尚机会、平等主义和多样性。然而,这里是我们的一个肮脏的小秘密:美国一些最自由的堡垒,依赖于一种特权继承制度,它以牺牲几乎所有人的利益为代价,成全富裕的白人。
我说的是精英大学的“校友子女偏好”。这些大学被看作是世界上一些最好的公共物品,但它们操纵招生,偏袒那些在生活中已经享有各种特权的申请者。
一起针对哈佛大学的诉讼案将焦点放在了它的招生政策上,原告认为这些政策伤害了亚裔美国申请人的利益。我不认同这起诉讼,认为这是一项假旗行动,目的是废除针对黑人和拉丁裔学生的平权行动。
但这起官司揭示出一个真正的问题:对校友子女的偏好,以及对大手笔的捐赠者和教职员工子女的照顾。美国绝大多数精英大学为了照顾富裕的、拥有特权的校友子女,对他们系统性地区别对待。如果这还不足以让你的孩子被录取,那就给大学捐个500万美元,这样他们就会重新考虑。
布鲁金斯学会(Brookings Institution)的理查德·里夫斯(Richard Reeves)在他的著作《梦想囤积者》(Dream Hoarders)一书中,对照顾校友子女的做法提出了批评。里夫斯指出,具有讽刺意味的是,在欧洲和世界大部分地区,都没有这样对校友子女赤裸裸的照顾做法,但在所谓人人平等的美国,这一体系却是正式的、成系统的存在。
与自由主义联系如此紧密的机构却欣然接受了一个世袭的贵族体系,这是不是有点虚伪呢?啊,永远不要低估利己之心塑造人们观点的力量。正如里夫斯冷淡地说的那样:“在更接近要害的问题上,美国的自由主义却倾向于减弱。”
我是作为平权行动的受益者来写这篇文章的。我曾是俄勒冈州的一名农场男孩,常春藤盟校偶尔想录取乡下的土包子,所以我充分利用了这一点,写了一篇关于我给羊接种疫苗、摘草莓,以及参加美国未来农民(Future Farmers of America)竞赛的申请文书。
哈佛想用来自田间的乡巴佬来帮助一届新生多元化,所以选择了我。后来,哈佛对我的人生有巨大的影响。我也为几年前得以在哈佛大学校董会服务,并在肯尼迪政府学院(Kennedy School of Government)做访问学者感到自豪。
人们对校友子女能够得到多少好处存在分歧。为目前正在审理的案子提交的材料表明,在一段六年的时间里,申请哈佛的校友子女中有33.6%被录取,而在非校友子女的申请人中,这个比例是5.9%。
七年前,哈佛大学一位名叫迈克尔·赫维茨(Michael Hurwitz)的博士生使用复杂的统计方法发现,如果父母之一是美国30所顶尖大学毕业生的话,子女被这些学校录取的机会增加45个百分点。例如,对某所精英大学来说,如果普通申请者的录取率是20%的话,校友子女申请者被录取的概率上升为65%。
此前,据普林斯顿大学2004年的一项研究估计,顶尖大学的校友子女身份相当于给他们的SAT考试成绩加160分(SAT满分是1600)。
校友子女偏好似乎是20世纪初引入美国的,当时是作为一种把犹太学生拒之门外的方法。值得赞扬的是,包括麻省理工学院在内的一些美国大学——更不用说英国的牛津大学和剑桥大学——没有校友子女偏好。
这些顶尖大学说,校友子女偏好有助于建立一个多代的校友社区,这是一个合乎情理的理由。它们还指出,奖励捐赠者有助于鼓励捐赠,这些捐赠可以用作资助贫困学生的奖学金。
但总的来说,让我忧虑的是,美国一些最好的教育机构把一种改变人生的机会给了那些已经拥有许多优势(从小提琴课、到国际象棋比赛、再到SAT辅导)的孩子们。在此之上,让富裕家庭为得到额外考虑掏钱,用一个专业术语来说,让人恶心。
自由派人士不同意最高法院对“联合公民”(Citizens United)一案做出的允许企业大亨花钱买政治影响的裁决,为什么要允许企业大亨在大学招生上买影响呢?
更广泛地说,机会均等和英才领导体制上哪去了?它们可能是理想,而不是现实,但为什么要在顶尖大学录取上捍卫一种世袭特权和金钱优势的正规制度呢?
“校友子女偏好为一般来说已经过着优越生活的申请者提供了优势,”(哈佛培养的)密歇根大学(University of Michigan)经济学、教育和公共政策教授苏珊·戴纳斯基(Susan Dynarski)说。“这与平权行动背道而驰,平权行动帮助的是那些面临逆境的申请者。少数精英大学积累了大量在税收上有利的捐赠,并利用它们以这种方式来延续特权,这是违背良心的做法。”
更大的问题是,包括五所常春藤盟校在内的38所大学招收的学生中,来自经济层次顶端1%的人,比来自中低层60%的要多。总的来说,来自顶端1%的孩子上常春藤盟校的可能性是来自底端20%的孩子的77倍
当家庭背景已经很重要的时候,美国最好的大学真要让天平向已经拥有特权的孩子倾斜吗?或者允许他们的家庭通过捐款,买来让天平第二次倾斜的机会?
《哈佛深红报》(Harvard Crimson)的学生记者在一篇社论中说:“用最简单的话说,校友子女偏好是错误的做法。这种做法把从拥有更少的人那里拿走的机会,交给那些拥有更多的人。”

也门:能源业工人组建新工会

采访也门道达尔燃气公司工会代表Ahmed Ali Al-Qidani

在遭受道达尔石油公司(TOTAL)和杰富仕安保公司(G4S)这两家跨国企业的无情剥削和掠夺之后,100多名也门工人决定建立一个新的工会组织。

就在9月初进行这次采访的时候,也门多地正发生抗议。三年来无情的罪恶战争涂炭生灵、破坏基础设施,数百万工人和穷人陷入愈来愈严重的经济灾难。

最近也门货币贬值到历史新低,基本商品的价格涨至新高,令已经很可怕的人道主义灾难变本加厉。自2015年来,食品价格平均上涨了68%,凸显了战争带来的经济困境。现在这个国家超过一半的人口失业,大多数公职人员大约两年领不到工资,数百万人饱受饥荒和流行病的摧残。

与此同时,反动的帝国主义势力为了自己的利益,每天都在戕害无辜群众。据联合国披露,沙特和阿联酋对也门主要的货物和援助入境点荷台达港(Hodeidah)的大规模军事行动可能导致“史上最严重的饥荒之一”。特朗普政府最近声称,沙特正在“尽一切努力降低平民伤亡风险”,但实际上沙特政权故意将大规模饥荒作为战争的武器。这再次表明了美帝国主义正是当前这场大屠杀的同谋。

92日开始,内战双方控制的地区均爆发抗议。尽管规模有限,这场抗议运动凸显出我们需要而且能够将全国工人、失业者和穷人团结在斗争之中,提出自己独立的阶级诉求,结束这场野蛮冲突和由各交战方所造成的贫困和饥饿。首先要对抗沙特政权及其西方盟国。他们拥有压倒性的火力,因此对于也门的灾难负有首要责任。

这场斗争须要复苏劳工运动,并寻求国际工人阶级的声援。在这种情况下,创建一个新的战斗性工会具有特别重要的意义。工国委对这个新工会表示敬意,并将跟进报导工会的发展状况,以及TOTALG4S工人长达数年的抗争。

最近,也门道达尔燃气公司于首都萨那(Sana’a)成立。能解释一下这个工会的目标是什么,以及为什么要创建它吗?

这个工会的目标是用一切手段捍卫工人的物质和道德权益,建立工会教育系统、提高工人的学识,并保护工会成员免受任何不公对待。

我们希望争取正义、平等,反对一切歧视,促进和发展我们工会与战斗性的阿拉伯工会和国际工会以及国内外相关工人团体之间的了解和合作。

过去部落领导人企图骑劫我们的斗争,这使我们特别意识到有必要制定团队合作和集体领导的原则。当然,我们也希望推进和协调为TOTAL/G4S工人伸张正义的斗争。

从我个人的角度来看,这个新工会源于我整个工作生涯的经历和斗争。在工作中我遭受了许多不公和歧视,令我意识到我们必须将为所有工人伸张正义的战斗进行到底。

这个新工会有多少成员?

目前我们有150名成员。

你们是否有计划扩大工会规模或与其他部门的工人联系起来?你们和也门工会联合会的关系如何?后者如何帮助你们对抗压榨工人的公司?

也门工会总联合会很大程度上已经瘫痪,他们只是提供“建议和声援”,有时发表一下声明。工人们曾于2016年4月13日在萨那的也门工会总联合会总部门前示威,要求它采取行动支持TOTAL/G4S的工人斗争。尽管一些工会成员也做出了少许努力,但是总联合会不怎么关心我们的斗争,也没采取什么行动,而且最近一段时间几乎什么都没做。

话虽如此,我们的工会还是注册为总联合会的成员。我们希望利用我们的新工会影响也门更广阔的工会运动,并与其他部门的工人建立联系。我们正在讨论将也门国内外的石油业和安保公司的工人和工会联合起来。

你认为你们与TOTALG4S的纠纷仍未解决的主要原因是什么?

主要原因在于这两家公司。更详细地说:

  1. 两家公司以欺骗手段剥夺了工人应有的权益
  2. 公司提出的方案无法满足工人最低限度的权益,因此被工人拒绝
  3. 两家公司的股东多年来一直掠夺本应属于工人的收益,这也导致两家公司就谁应为工人被欠下的所有权益买单而产生分歧
  4. 两家公司大赚也门国难财,然后无视工人的处境和最基本的权利,单方面决定撤资
  5. 一些可疑人物最初对我们的斗争表示同情和支持,但其真实意图随着时间的推移而浮现出来。他们试图利用两家公司的不良形象和我们的斗争所获得的广泛支持捞取好处。

你们的主要诉求是什么?

支付所有工人从雇用之日起直至获得这些权益之日的所有权益,包括未发的薪水、津贴、奖金、加班费、社会和健康保险、斋月补贴、危险工作津贴……此外,我们要求公司补偿被害工人的家属,并赔偿所有工人的一切物质和精神损失。这些公司如果恢复在也门的运营,必须重新雇用原来的工人,否则必须给付适当的遣散费。我们希望透过正规法律程序解决纠纷,并希望国际工会联合会(ITUC)和工国委跟进、监督我们的案件。

目前工人的士气如何?

我们这些工人处于以前从未经历过的非常困难的境地。3年来我们的命运被公司摆布,饱受不公、压迫和忽视。我们的三名同事被无情杀害,他们的家属孤立无援。大多数工人失业,一些人被迫出售家当来维持生计。

大多数公司拒绝雇用我们,因为我们没有正式解雇通知。正因为如此,一些工人为了养活家庭,不得不甘受一家自称G4S的冒牌公司剥削。这家公司用一点点小恩小惠骗工人签署声明放弃所有权益。

日子过得很艰难,但工人们仍然保持着耐心和决心。但我们需要加紧努力,在工人的坚定意志崩溃前尽快解决问题,否则斗争会更加艰难。总之,工人在非常困难的局势中不断斗争。

你对也门目前的战争有何看法?

也门正面临最困难的局面,冲突各方毫无怜悯和人性。我们已经受够了战争,我们完全反对这场战争。这场战争已经摧毁了也门社会,经济崩溃,生活极度困苦。

你认为也门和国际上的劳工运动可以对解决也门正在经历的灾难起到什么作用?

也门的经济危机和工人遭受的欠薪在各个方面都造成严重的影响,包括教育部门、卫生部门以及所有社会服务部门。我认为,发挥劳工运动的作用是至关重要的,它可以透过一切可能的手段帮助工人和那些社会部门,使它们继续开展活动和避免更严重的灾难。

你们认为像工国委这样的组织可以做些什么来帮助你们的斗争,以及帮助也门人民争取更美好的未来?

它们可以促进工人和社区的政治和文化觉醒。特别是因为当前的战争和危机,也门的工人、工会和社区组织普遍缺乏资源,力量薄弱,因此他们比以往任何时候都更需要支持。

工国委在支持工人阶级和人道主义事业方面发挥了重大作用,例如也门的TOTAL/G4S工人斗争。我们一开始也没有预料到他们会提供这么多帮助。工国委无惧重重困难保卫也门工人。

我认为,工国委及其世界各地的支持者有能力激发也门和全世界的工人群众斗争,对抗剥削、种族主义和跨国公司的歧视。不过现在还需要做更多努力来对公司施压,帮助帮助工人发声,令工人的诉求得以满足。

最后,我非常乐观地认为,尽管面临目前的灾难,也门人民必将从战争的废墟中崛起,克服目前的困难,走向更美好的未来。

请接受我们由衷的感谢与敬意。

也门:能源业工人组建新工会

川普上台和美国民主衰退的根源

民主不等於選票,民主不等於選出一個獨裁者。如果人民自己不去做主,那就無所謂民主。

自从唐纳德川普上台之后,不少人惊呼美国民主衰退,而唐纳德川普也的确一直在和极右纳粹勾结,攻击揭露其黑幕的媒体,由着极右纳粹暴力攻击和平示威者(夏洛茨维尔事件),把难民儿童关进铁笼,削减福利对穷人宣战,对性少数人群宣战,最近甚至开始否认跨性别者的存在了!

但川普并不是导致民主衰退的原因。事实上,川普只是民主衰退的结果而已。先来看看2016年美国总统选举的投票率吧:55.7%。除去那些年龄不符合的人,有权投票的人中,有61.4%的人去投票了。也就是说,在所有拥有投票权的人中,只有61.4%的人去投票,也就是说将近40%都没去投票。

这意味着什么?意味着将近40%的人主动放弃了民主这一基本人权!而且这并不是一天两天的事:

从1980到2016,这将近四十年时间里,投票率一直在60%左右浮动。等于说,一直以来都有40%左右的人主动放弃民主这一基本人权。这可不是一个小数目啊。

然后再看一组数据:

可以看到除了1996年和2008年,其他年份民主党和共和党候选人的得票数是非常接近的,即使是1996年和2008年,差距也不过是5%左右。这就造成了一个结果:60%左右的人中的一半左右选出的总统代表了所有人,也就是说,30%左右的人选出的总统代表了所有人,而这种结果根本就是反民主的!

还有一点需要说明的是,川普得票比希拉里少,是美国特有的傻逼选举人制把川普推上了台。不过傻逼选举人制并不是美国民主衰退的主要原因。

接下来再看一个数据:

图中显示,越年老的人投票率越高,而越年轻的人投票率越低,而最年轻的18-29岁的人,投票率基本上不到50%。呵呵,很多政策都会对年轻人的生活产生极大影响,但年轻人却最不想投票。

这些数据要出现在某个新生的民主国家,倒也无可厚非,因为民主本身就需要学习和训练才能掌握,长时间被禁止走路的人一开始走路肯定走不好。可发生在美国这种政党轮替几十回的公认的“老牌成熟民主国家”,就非常奇怪了。

难道说美国人的民主素质不高,公民意识不强?哦,的确没人这么说美国人,但如果同样的数据换成其他某个非白人国家,绝对会有傻逼民逗这么说的,呵呵。当然,这种素质论不过是倒果为因的屁话而已。

那么究竟为什么会变成这样?这还得从现有的代议制民主模式说起。

代议制民主根据选举制度可分为两大模式:比例代表制和最高票当选制。根据政府架构也可分为两大模式:议会制和总统制。排列组合一下,就会发现总共有四种模式:比例代表制+议会制,比例代表制+总统制,最高票当选制+议会制,最高票当选制+总统制。

其中,西欧和北欧的多数国家采用比例代表制+议会制,英国采用最高票当选制+议会制,拉美部分国家采用比例代表制+总统制,美国采用最高票当选制+总统制。

现在具体来看一下这几种制度究竟是怎么回事(以下资料引用自罗伯特道尔的《论民主》,这是一本优秀的科普民主的书籍):

比例代表制:它是在老牌民主國家裡最為常見的選舉制度,其設計目的就是在黨派總體票數比例和黨派在立法機構獲得席位的比例之間建立關聯。例如,一個政黨獲得 53%的票數就會得到 53%的席位。我們通常把這種安排叫作“比例代表制”(proportional representation,PR)。

最高票当选制:英國和美國就是採用了這種選舉制度,每個地區選出一名候選人,而這位候選人由得票最多的人當選。它跟賽馬相似,因此人們就把它叫做“最高票當選制”(first-past-the-post,FPTP)。在美國,像這種安排經常被看作是“相對多數制”(plurality system),因為候選人只要獲得相對多數的選票,而不必是絕对多數(majority),就能贏得選舉的勝利。

比例代表制很好理解,假设有三个政党ABC,A党得票40%,B党和C党都得票30%,那么实际议席就按照4:3:3的比例划分,大至国家级别的国家议会,下至小城市的市议会,都可以这么干。至于选区划分也无所谓了,反正不管如何划分,最终的议席是要根据总得票比例来的(当然前提是完全的比例代表制)。

而最高票当选制就问题很大了。如果按照最高票当选制,那么A党的候选人就会获胜,而B党和C党什么都得不到,但实际上B党和C党的支持者加起来有60%。等于说,60%的人被40%的人代表了。再举一个极端例子:設想一個只有 1000 名成員的小型民主體制,它被平均分成 10 個選區,並從每個選區的 100 人當中選出一名代表進入立法機構。假設,在這個微型的民主體制中,藍黨得了 510 票(51%),紫黨獲得 490 票(49%)。現在我們設想(儘管這種可能性很小)在這個微型的民主體系裡每個黨的支持率平均分佈:剛好每個選區的選票裡,藍黨占 51%,紫黨占 49%。選舉將會是什麼樣呢?藍黨在每個選區都取得了勝利,因而獲得 100%的議席,而對方則一無所獲(見圖 11-1 中的例 1)。可以把這個體系擴大到一個國家,而選區也大幅增加。其結果還是一樣的。也就是说,最高票当选制会造成51:49=1:0的结果,而实际上这两种结果差距极大!

而选区划分也会造成问题:選區劃分(gerrymandering)——或者說純粹出於政治目的而對選區進行劃分——是美國的一個傳統做法。它的名字跟格裡(ElbridgeGerry)有關,他就是我們在前面提到過的美國制憲會議的一個代表。格裡是麻塞諸塞州的民選州長,1812 年為了保住民主黨在州立法機構中的多數席位,他重新劃分了選區。有人發現其中一個選區就像一條 火 蛇 ( salamander ) , — 個 批 評 家 評 論 說 它 更 像 是 一 條 格 裡 蛇(gerrymander)。隨后“gerrymander”這個詞和它的動詞形式“togerrymander”就進入到美國人的詞典裡。当然,今天是共和党经常做这种破事了。

比例代表制下小党派也能获得和得票比例对应的议席,所以实行比例代表制的国家政党数目通常都比较多,边缘人群也倾向于通过支持小党派或索性自己建立新政党来产生政治影响力;而最高票当选制下小党连根毛都得不到,结果就是演变为两个大党轮流坐庄(如果不是如此,那么最高票当选制下的得胜党连代表多数这一最基本的民主要求都做不到了,参见前面的例子),边缘人群只能寄希望于已有的大党。而对于资产阶级来说,是收买两个大党容易还是一个个收买多个政党容易?很明显是前者更容易,而且新血进入大党之后也更容易被影响同化。顺便说一句,有人批评DSA不建党,但在最高票当选制下,建党只能是毛都得不到,DSA选择和民主党候选人联盟,是现有情况下唯一可行的方案。

所以民逗争吵什么“两党制”“多党制”其实傻逼无比,因为两党还是多党本身根本不是制度,而是不同的选举制度造成的结果。最高票当选制下,两个大党轮流坐庄,资产阶级两头下注,结果就是选择哪个党派并没有本质区别。就以美国为例吧,看起来民主党和共和党在很多地方都有分歧,但实际执政时两党的政策相同之处远大于不同之处:共和党削减福利,民主党的克林顿也一样搞狗屁“福利改革”大肆削减福利;共和党站在资本家一边,民主党的奥巴马同样站在资本家一边,镇压占领华尔街运动,镇压抗议祖地和水源被肮脏的石油管道污染的苏族印第安人;共和党支持美国帝国主义,和沙特当盟友,民主党一样支持无人机屠杀阿富汗和巴基斯坦的平民,一样和沙特当盟友;共和党搞大规模监控,民主党一样继续这一政策,如果不是斯诺登揭露真相,美国人民到现在还会被蒙在鼓里。

有人说,至少民主党支持平权,推动了不少平权法案。我只能呵呵。这么说吧,如果你是老板,然后你歧视同性恋者,但平权法案规定你不能因为性取向开除员工或拒绝聘用,你会怎么办?事实是在自由市场环境下你有一万种方法bypass:给同性恋员工穿小鞋,故意找茬,逼员工自己辞职;给同性恋员工低工资,反正你可以强迫员工保密工资,这样员工就根本不知道被歧视;直接找其他借口开除同性恋员工,例如“工作表现不好”,反正标准是你定的,你怎么扯淡都行;直接以“能力不足”为由拒绝聘用同性恋员工,反正聘用决定权在你手上…….

所以你以为在法律上写上“禁止歧视”就能实现平权?Naive!资本主义之下老板拥有独裁权力,这就意味着无数的暗箱操作,你如何防止老板的暗箱操作呢?要根治就必须终结资本主义,实现经济民主;要缓解,那就必须要限制老板的独裁权力,例如老板不能随意开除员工,必须有明确的标准和充足的证据;例如员工工资必须透明,相同岗位必须相同报酬;例如禁止故意找茬(当然实际执行难度很大就是了);例如规定必须雇佣一定比例的同性恋者,或者直接政府给同性恋者提供有尊严的工作。当然,以上这些都是和自由市场直接冲突的,呵呵。

而且民主党的平权法案还有一个问题,就是默认所有少数群体都是中产阶级,所以不需要福利。实际上可能吗?当然不可能了!

再来说说“亚裔细分”。这事的根源是教育资源严重不足,大批人去争抢稀缺的优秀大学资源,结果导致直接给指标的平权法案被憎恨。实际上,就算没有给指标这事,对稀缺资源的争抢,或者说的更明白一点,竞争,本身就会制造仇恨,你怎么可能不去憎恨一个总是和你抢这个抢那个的人呢?所以资本主义之下人们必然会倾向于相互敌视憎恨,而不是同情互助。

说到竞争再多说几句,如果你发现某人总是和你竞争,那么你有什么应对方法吗?方法1:花大成本提升自己的能力(不一定成功),超过对方;方法2:直接干掉那人,让那人再也无力和你竞争。资本主义辩护士们强调方法1,但很多时候,方法2才是最有效的。当然,对老板来说也是如此,所以资本主义之下黑公关和虚假宣传之类的“下毒竞争”比烂模式是常态。

所以民主党对平权的支持,基本也就是停留在嘴上,目的是骗取少数人群的选票,仅此而已,至于我所说的那些实际方案,其中的主流右派是根本不肯用的。

接下来说说总统制和议会制的区别。在總統制國家裡,行政首腦的選出與立法機關沒有關係,並且憲法賦予了總統很大的權力。在議會制或內閣制國家裡,行政首腦的選舉和撤換都是由議會決定的。很明显,总统虽然是民选,但其上台之后对权力的实行是独裁的,例如唐纳德特朗普随意开除高级行政官员,单独推行政策,这些都根本没经过美国人民的同意。所以,总统制比议会制不民主得多。总统竞选的时候可以随便承诺,反正上台之后老子的权力是独裁的,老子一个承诺都不兑现,你们又能怎样?什么,4年之后不选我了?那有什么关系,老子的总统瘾过了,想推行的政策都推行了,那就行了!

“既然选择哪个党派都没有本质区别,既然候选人能够轻易被资产阶级收买,既然选出的总统根本不兑现承诺,那么我为什么还要去投票?反正我投票选出来的人也根本就不会为我说话。”这就是为什么美国有40%左右的人不去投票,而年轻人对现有制度更失望,所以超过一半的年轻人都不去投票。这就是为什么川普这个垃圾纳粹会上台,因为他竞选的时候说得非常好听,骗到了不少人,而上台之后不兑现又如何?美国人民根本毫无办法。嗯,也不是毫无办法,办法就是废除不合理的最高票当选制与总统制,用比例代表制和议会制取而代之,而根治则需要实现社会主义!

参考资料:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016#cite_note-turnout-1

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2017/05/voting_in_america.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politics/popular-vote-turnout-2016/index.html

http://longlanyu.blogspot.com/2014/04/blog-post_3799.html

https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%BD%E9%80%89%E4%B8%BE%E4%BA%BA%E5%9B%A2

But at least capitalism is free and democratic, right?(但是至少资本主义是自由和民主的,对吧?)

It might seem that way, but genuine freedom and democracy aren’t compatible with capitalism.

看起来似乎如此,但真正的自由和民主与资本主义是不兼容的。

In the United States, many take for granted that freedom and democracy are inextricably connected with capitalism. Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, went so far as to argue that capitalism was a necessary condition for both. It is certainly true that the appearance and spread of capitalism brought with it a tremendous expansion of individual freedoms and, eventually, popular struggles for more democratic forms of political organization. The claim that capitalism fundamentally obstructs both freedom and democracy will then sound strange to many.

在美国,许多人理所当然的认为自由和民主与资本主义是密不可分的。 米尔顿弗里德曼在他的“资本主义与自由”一书中,甚至认为资本主义是实现两者的必要条件。当然,资本主义的出现和传播带来了个人自由的巨大扩张,并最终促进了为更民主的政治组织形式进行的民众斗争。 资本主义从根本上是阻碍自由和民主的说法对许多人来说听起来很奇怪。

To say that capitalism restricts the flourishing of these values is not to argue that capitalism has run counter to freedom and democracy in every instance. Rather, through the functioning of its most basic processes, capitalism generates severe deficits of both freedom and democracy that it can never remedy. Capitalism has promoted the emergence of certain limited forms of freedom and democracy, but it imposes a bow ceiling on their further realization.

要说资本主义限制了这些价值观的蓬勃发展,并不是说资本主义在任何情况下都与自由和民主背道而驰。相反,通过其最基本的进程的运作,资本主义会在自由和民主方面产生严重缺陷,而这些缺陷永远无法被弥补。 资本主义促进了某些有限形式的自由和民主的出现,但它对它们的进一步实现制造了天花板。

At the core of these values is self-determination: the belief that people should be able to decide the conditions of their own lives to the fullest extent possible. When an action by a person affects only that person, then he or she ought to be able to engage in that activity without asking permission from anyone else. This is the context of freedom. But when an action affects the lives of others, then these other people should have a say in the activity.

这些价值观的核心是自决:相信人们应该能够尽可能地决定自己生活的环境。当某人的行为仅影响该人自己时,他或她应该能够在未经其他任何人同意的情况下参与该活动。这是自由的必要条件。但是当一个行动影响他人的生活时,这些其他人应该在活动中有发言权。

This is the context of democracy. In both, the paramount concern is that people retain as much control as possible over the shape their lives will take. In practice, virtually every choice a person makes will have some effect on others. It is impossible for everyone to contribute to every decision that concerns them, and any social system that insisted on such comprehensive democratic participation would impose an unbearable burden on people. What we need, therefore, is a set of rules to distinguish between questions of freedom and those of democracy. In our society, such a distinction is usually made with reference to the boundary between the private and public spheres.

这是民主的必要条件。在这两者中,最重要的是人们对塑造他们的生活所采取的决定保持尽可能多的控制。在实践中,几乎人的每一个选择都会对其他人产生一些影响。 每个人都不可能为涉及他们的每一个决定做出贡献,任何坚持这种完全民主参与的社会制度都会给人们带来无法承受的负担。 因此,我们需要的是一套区分自由问题和民主问题的规则。在我们的社会中,这种区分通常是参考私人领域和公共领域之间的界限。

There is nothing natural or spontaneous about this line between the private and the public; it is forged and maintained by social processes. The tasks entailed by these processes are complex and often contested. The state vigorously enforces some public/private boundaries and leaves others to be upheld or dissolved as social norms. Often the boundary between the public and the private remains fuzzy.

私人和公众之间的这条界线没有任何自然或自发的东西; 它是由社会进程锻造和维护的。这些进程所带来的任务很复杂,而且经常被质疑。 政权大力强制执行一些公共/私人界限,并将其他的作为社会规范予以维护或打击。通常,公共和私人之间的界限仍然很模糊。

In a fully democratic society, the boundary itself is subject to democratic deliberation.Capitalism constructs the boundary between the public and private spheres in a way that constrains the realization of true individual freedom and reduces the scope of meaningful democracy. There are five ways in which this is readily apparent.

在一个完全民主的社会中,边界本身受制于民主审议(我的看法是只要是不践踏别人的人权的事,都是私人领域的事,包括自虐自残自杀)。资本主义以限制实现真正的个人自由和缩小有意义的民主的范围的方式构建公共领域和私人领域之间的界限。 有五种方式可以很明显地显示出这点。

1. “Work or Starve” Isn’t Freedom

“工作或饿死”不是自由

Capitalism is anchored in the private accumulation of wealth and the pursuit of income through the market. The economic inequalities that result from these “private” activities are intrinsic to capitalism and create inequalities in what the philosopher Philippe van Parijs calls “real freedom.”

资本主义以私有财富积累和通过市场追求收入为基础。 这些“私有”活动产生的经济不平等是资本主义所固有的,并且在哲学家Philippe van Parijs所称呼的“真正的自由”中制造了不平等。

Whatever else we might mean by freedom, it must include the ability to say “no.” A wealthy person can freely decide not to work for wages; a poor person without an independent means of livelihood cannot do so easily. But the value of freedom goes deeper than this. It is also the ability to act positively on one’s life plans — to choose not just an answer, but the question itself. The children of wealthy parents can take unpaid internships to advance their careers; the children of poor parents cannot.

无论自由对我们意味着什么,它必须包括说“不”的能力。富人可以自由决定不工作; 没有独立谋生手段的穷人不能轻易做到这一点。但是,自由的价值比这更深。 它也是对一个人的生活计划采取积极行动的能力—不仅只是选择答案,而且选择问题本身。富裕父母的后代可以通过无薪实习来推进自己的职业生涯; 贫穷父母的后代不能。

Capitalism deprives many people of real freedom in this sense. Poverty in the midst of plenty exists because of a direct equation between material resources and the resources needed for self-determination.

在这个意义上,资本主义剥夺了许多人的真正的自由。由于物质资源与自决所需资源之间是直接等价的,很多人都很贫困。

2. Capitalists Decide

资本家们决定一切

The way the boundary between the public and private spheres is drawn in capitalism excludes crucial decisions, which affect large numbers of people, from democratic control. Perhaps the most fundamental right that accompanies private ownership of capital is the right to decide to invest and disinvest strictly on the basis of self-interest.

公共和私人领域之间的边界在资本主义中被划分的方式将影响大量人口的关键决策排除在民主控制之外。也许伴随私人资本所有权的最基本权利是决定严格依据自身利益进行投资和撤资的权利。

A corporation’s decision to move production from one place to another is a private matter, even though it makes a radical impact on the lives of everyone in both places. Even if one argues that this concentration of power in private hands is necessary for the efficient allocation of resources, the exclusion of these kinds of decisions from democratic control unequivocally decimates the capacity for self-determination by all except the owners of capital.

公司决定将生产从一个地方转移到另一个地方是一件私事,尽管它会对这两个地方的每个人的生活产生极大影响。即使有人争辩说私人手中的权力集中对于资源的有效配置是必要的,但将这些决定排除在民主控制之外,明确地毁灭了所有人的自决能力,除了资本所有者。(Job is a right,一个人做自己想要做的工作是一种人权,而私人独裁公司在老板的独裁命令之下肆意转移侵犯了工人的人权。)

3. Nine to Five Is Tyranny

朝九晚五是暴政

Capitalist firms are allowed to be organizedas workplace dictatorships. An essential component of a business owner’s power is the right to tell employees what to do. That is the basis of the employment contract: the job seeker agrees to follow the employer’s orders in exchange for a wage. Of course, an employer is also free to grant workers considerable autonomy, and in some situations this is the profit-maximizing way of organizing work. But such autonomy is given or withheld at the owner’s pleasure. No robust conception of self-determination would allow autonomy to depend on the private preferences of elites.

资本主义公司被允许组织成工作场所独裁。企业主权力的一个关键组成部分是告诉员工做什么的权利。这是雇佣合同的基础:求职者同意遵循雇主的命令以换取工资。当然,雇主也可以自由地给予工人可观的自主权,在某些情况下,这是将利润最大化的组织工作的方式。 但是,给予或拒绝这种自主权取决于老板的心情。没有强有力的自决概念会让自治依赖于精英们的私人偏好。

A defender of capitalism might reply that a worker who doesn’t like the boss’s rule can always quit. But since workers by definition lack an independent means of livelihood, if they quit they will have to look for a new job and, to the extent that the available employment is in capitalist firms, they will still be subject to a boss’s dictates.

一个资本主义的辩护士可能会回答说,不喜欢老板独裁的工人总能选择退出。但是,由于工人的定义是缺乏独立的维生手段,如果他们辞职,他们将不得不寻找新的工作,并且,如果可用的就业是在资本主义公司,他们仍然会受到老板的独裁。

4. Governments Have to Serve the Interests of Private Capitalists

政府不得不服务于私人资本家们的利益

Private control over major investment decisions creates a constant pressure on public authorities to enact rules favorable to the interests of capitalists. The threat of disinvestment and capital mobility is always in the background of public policy discussions, and thus politicians, whatever their ideological orientation, are forced to worry about sustaining a “good business climate.”Democratic values are hollow so long as one class of citizens takes priority over all others.

对重大投资决策的私人控制不断给公共当局施加压力,要求制定有利于资本家利益的规则。 撤资和资本流动的威胁总是在公共政策讨论的背景下,因此政治家们,无论他们的意识形态取向如何,都被迫担心维持“良好的商业环境”。只要有一个阶级的公民优先于其他所有阶级,民主价值观就是空洞的。(所有人一律平等,但资产阶级比其他阶级更平等。)

5. Elites Control the Political System

精英们控制政治系统

Finally, wealthy people have greater access than others to political power. This is the case in all capitalist democracies, although wealth-based inequality of political power is much greater in some countries than in others. The specific mechanisms for this greater access are quite varied: contributions to political campaigns; financing lobbying efforts; elite social networks of various sorts; and outright bribes and other forms of corruption.

最后,富人比其他人更有机会获得政治权力。 所有资本主义民主国家都是如此,尽管在某些国家,基于财富的政治权力不平等要比其他国家严重得多。这种更大机会的具体机制是多种多样的:对政治运动的献金; 资助游说活动; 各种精英社交网络; 和彻头彻尾的贿赂以及其他形式的腐败。(还有对媒体的控制,以及在社交媒体上雇佣水军五毛狗。)

In the United States it is not only wealthy individuals, but also capitalist corporations, that face no meaningful restriction on their ability to deploy private resources for politcal purposes. This differential access to political power voids the most basic principle of democracy.

在美国,不仅有富裕的个人,而且还有资本主义公司,它们的为政治目的部署私有资源的能力没有受到任何有意义的限制。这种对政治权力的不同的获取途径使得最基本的民主原则变得无效。

These consequences are endemic to capitalism as an economic system. This does not mean that they cannot sometimes be mitigated in capitalist societies. In different times and places, many policies have been erected to compensate for capitalism’s deformation of freedom and democracy.

这些后果是资本主义作为经济系统时所特有的。 这并不意味着它们不能有时在资本主义社会中得到缓解。 在不同的时间和地点,已经建立了许多政策来弥补资本主义造成的对自由和民主的扭曲。

Public constraints can be imposed on private investment in ways that erode the rigid boundary between the public and private; a strong public sector and active forms of state investment can weaken the threat of capital mobility; restrictions on the use of private wealth in elections and the public finance of political campaigns can reduce the privileged access of the wealthy to political power; labor law can strengthen the collective power of workers in both the political arena and the workplace; and a wide variety of welfare policies can increase the real freedom of those without access to private wealth.

公共限制可以通过侵蚀公共和私人之间的僵硬边界的方式强加到私人投资上; 强大的公共部门和积极的政府投资形式可以削弱资本流动的威胁; 限制在选举中使用私人财富和增加对政治运动的公共财政支持可以减少富人用来获得政治权力的特权; 劳工法律可以增强工人们在政治舞台和工作场所的集体力量;各种各样的福利政策可以增加那些无法获得私有财富的人的真正的自由。

When the political conditions are right, the anti-democratic and freedom-impeding features of capitalism can be palliated, but they cannot be eliminated. Taming capitalism in this way has been the central objective of the policies advocated by socialists within capitalist economies the world over. But if freedom and democracy are to be fully realized, capitalism must not merely be tamed. It must be overcome.

当政治条件合适时,资本主义的反民主和阻碍自由的特征可以被缓和,但不能被消除。以这种方式驯服资本主义一直是全世界资本主义经济体内的社会主义者所倡导的政策的核心目标。但是,如果要充分实现自由和民主,就不能仅仅驯服资本主义。 资本主义必须被克服。

 

Never a force for good (美军从来不是正义之师)

(写在前面:先是看着西班牙帝国主义的暴行导致几十万古巴人惨死而无动于衷拒绝提供帮助,然后又在革命者快要胜利时宣布干预来摘桃子,美国帝国主义真是无耻啊。)

No struggle for liberation and democracy has ever benefited from U.S. military intervention–because Washington’s wars come at the price of perverting those aims.

没有任何争取自由和民主的斗争从美国的军事干预中获益过—因为华盛顿的战争是以扭曲这些目标为代价的。

THE UNITED States has a history of presenting its motives for military intervention in a good light–spreading democracy, fighting terrorism, deposing unpopular tyrants, protecting civilians and saving lives.

美国一直都有美化其军事干预动机的历史传统—传播民主,打击恐怖主义,推翻不受欢迎的暴君,保护平民和拯救生命。

In each case, the reasons the U.S. has concocted for public consumption to explain its decision to take military action differ substantially from the real aims of the operation.

在每个案例下,美国为公共消费而编造的以解释其采取军事行动的决定的原因都与该行动的真正目的非常不同。

Much can be learned from the way the U.S. behaved toward the Cuban independence movement against Spain in the late 1890s–which culminated in 1898 in the “splendid little war” that made the Philippines and Puerto Rico colonies of the U.S., and Cuba a protectorate.

从1890s后期美国对付对抗西班牙的古巴独立运动的方式可以学到很多东西—最终导致在1898年将菲律宾和波多黎各变成美国殖民地以及古巴成为保护国的“精彩小战争”中达到高潮。


AFTER THE Civil War, the U.S. emerged as a world economic powerhouse–though as a latecomer, its military power, political clout and colonial interests lagged far behind that of the European powers, particularly Britain and France.

在内战之后,美国成为世界经济强国—尽管作为后来者,其军事力量,政治影响力和殖民地利益远远落后于欧洲大国,特别是英国和法国。

As the end of the 19th century approached, the European powers were busy carving up the world into colonies and spheres of influence in an effort to secure sources of raw materials, cheap labor and protected markets. U.S. officials, politicians and business interests began clamoring for a foreign policy that would assert American naval and military power, particularly in the Caribbean, Latin America and the Pacific.

随着19世纪末的临近,欧洲大国们正在忙着将世界划分为殖民地和势力范围,以确保其原材料,廉价劳动力和受保护的市场的来源。美国的官员,政界人士和商业利益集团开始呼吁维护美国海军和军事力量的外交政策,特别是在加勒比海,拉丁美洲和太平洋地区。

“It makes the water come to my mouth when I think of the state of Cuba as one in our family,” wrote Frederick R. Coudert, a leading Wall Street figure, in 1895.

“当我把古巴的状态看作是我们家中的一员时,它会让水进入我的口中,”1895年华尔街主要人物Frederick R. Coudert写道。

A number of American investors were coming to dominate the lucrative Cuban sugar industry, and Cuba was seen as a strategically important island for controlling the Caribbean.

一些美国投资者开始主宰利润丰厚的古巴制糖业,古巴被视为控制加勒比地区的重要战略岛屿。

The famed Cuban revolutionary, José Martí, who had spent some time in the U.S. organizing a movement in exile against Spanish domination, welcomed the political and financial support of U.S. citizens for the Cuban cause.

着名的古巴革命家何塞·马蒂曾在美国组织流亡运动反对西班牙统治,同时欢迎美国公民对古巴事业的政治和财政支持。

But he was suspicious of U.S. designs on the island, writing in his last letter, not long before his death at the hands of his Spanish enemies in 1895: “It is my duty, inasmuch as I realize it and have the spirit to fulfill it–to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with that added weight, upon other lands of our America. All I have done up to now, and shall do hereafter, is to that end.”

但他怀疑美国在岛上的设计,写在他的最后一封信中,这距他在1895年在他的西班牙敌人手中死去不久:“这是我的责任,因为我意识到这一点并且有实现它的精神—通过古巴的独立,防止美国在西印度群岛蔓延,并以此增加的重量落在我们美洲的其他土地上。我迄今为止所做的一切,以及以后所做的一切,都是为了那个终结。“

U.S. soldiers during the Spanish American War
U.S. soldiers during the Spanish American War(美西战争中的美国士兵)

“I have lived inside the monster,” he continued, referring to the U.S., “and know its insides–and my weapon is only the slingshot of David.”

“我一直住在怪物里面,”他继续指着美国说,“并且知道它的内部——而我的武器只有大卫的弹弓。”

The revolutionary war for Cuban independence begun by Martí and his cohorts in 1895 had widespread support in the U.S., fanned in part by the “yellow press” owned by media moguls like William Randolph Hearst, who supported U.S. intervention in Cuba and used his newspapers to press for it.

马丁及其同伙于1895年开始的古巴独立革命战争得到了美国的广泛支持,部分原因是像William Randolph Hearst这样的媒体巨头所拥有的“黄色新闻”,它支持美国对古巴的干预,并利用他的报纸推动这一切。

No doubt, the press had much to work with in making the case against Spain. After the triumphal march of the revolutionary armies through Cuba, Spain put Gen. Valeriano Wyler in charge: he immediately implemented his now infamous reconcentration plan. This decree gave eight days for all inhabitants of Cuba to move into towns occupied by Spanish troops and forbade the transfer of food from one place to another. The policy led to the deaths by disease and starvation of as many as half, and possibly more, of the 500,000 to 600,000 people affected by the transfer policy.

毫无疑问,媒体在制造反对西班牙的事件中做了很多。在革命军队通过古巴的胜利游行之后,西班牙让Valeriano Wyler将军负责:他立即实施了他现在臭名昭著的重新集中计划。 这项法令规定,古巴所有居民都只有八天时间迁入被西班牙军队占领的城镇,并禁止将食物从一个地方转移到另一个地方。 该政策导致受转移政策影响的50万至60万人中多达一半甚至更多的人由于疾病和饥饿死亡。

Throughout the war, however, the U.S. under President Grover Cleveland refused to recognize the Cuban revolutionary armies, and used its powers to prevent the flow of men, arms and supplies to them–in effect, aiding the Spanish. Many commentators at the time wrote of the fact that the revolutionaries could have easily defeated the Spanish before the U.S. invasion if they had been able to purchase munitions, food and medical supplies from America.

然而,在整个战争期间,美国总统格罗弗·克利夫兰拒绝承认古巴革命军队,并利用其权力阻止人员,武器和物资流入他们—这实际上是在帮助西班牙人。 当时许多评论员写道,如果革命者们能够从美国购买弹药,食品和医疗用品,那么在美国入侵之前,这些人可以很容易地击败西班牙人。

Nevertheless, these under-equipped, half-starving armies of guerrilla fighters, never totaling more than 30,000, but ably led by the likes of Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, ran the Spanish ragged and seized control of dozens of towns and most of the countryside. By the time the U.S. made its decision to intervene, it was widely believed that it was only a matter of time before the Spanish were defeated anyway.

尽管如此,这些缺乏装备的,半饥饿的游击军队,总共不超过30,000人,但是由MáximoGómez和Antonio Maceo等人干练地领导,赶走了西班牙人并控制了几十个城镇和大部分乡村地区。 当美国决定进行干预时,人们普遍认为,无论如何西班牙人被击败只是时间问题而已。

There was a minority in the Cuban independence movement, such as Tómas Estrada Palma, the delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party stationed in the U.S., who supported some kind of American intervention on the grounds that only the U.S. could establish the conditions for stability and “law and order” necessary for Cuban business interests on the island. In the words of historian Philip Foner, Estrada “came to favor American intervention to prevent the revolution from becoming too revolutionary.”

古巴独立运动中有少数人,例如驻扎在美国的古巴革命党代表Tómas Estrada Palma,他支持某种形式的美国干预,理由是只有美国才能建立古巴岛上的商业利益需要的稳定的环境和“ 法律与秩序“。用历史学家Philip Foner的话说,Estrada“赞成美国的干预,以防止革命变得过于革命。”

This argument that independence would produce chaos–and in particular, a “race war,” which was a code phrase for the dominance of Blacks–was one of the reasons the U.S. justified both non-intervention, and then later, its right to assert control over Cuba.

这种认为独立将产生混乱的论点—特别是“种族战争”,这是对黑人统治的代码短语—是美国合理化不干预的理由之一,后来又成为了对主张对古巴的控制的合理化。

“There are…strong reasons to fear,” wrote Cleveland’s Secretary of State Richard Olney, “that, once Spain were withdrawn from the island, the sold bond of union between the different factions of the insurgents would disappear [and] that a war of races would be precipitated.”

克里夫兰的国务卿 Richard Olney写道:“有……强烈的理由担心,”一旦西班牙退出该岛,叛乱分子不同派别之间的联盟将会消失[和] 种族之战将会爆发。“

But Estrada’s support for U.S. intervention was not the position of the majority, especially those on the ground fighting in Cuba.

但Estrada对美国的干预的支持并不是大多数人的立场,特别是那些在古巴进行实地战斗的人们。

“We do not need any intervention to obtain victory in more or less time,” Antonio Maceo wrote eight months before he was killed, in December 1896, by Wyler’s troops. “Bring Cuba 25,000 to 35,000 rifles and a million bullets…We Cubans do not need any other help.”

“我们不需要任何干预就可以在更长或更短的时间内获得胜利,”Antonio Maceo在1896年12月被西班牙军队杀害前八个月写道。 “给古巴带来25,000至35,000支步枪和100万发子弹……我们古巴人不需要任何其他帮助。”


MACEO’S WORDS were prophetic. President William McKinley, who replaced Cleveland, began planning a war against Spain, not to aid the Cuban independence movement, but to gain hold of Cuba before independence could be achieved.

“MACEO’的言论”是预言性的。取代克利夫兰的总统威廉麦金利开始计划对西班牙进行一场战争,不是为了援助古巴独立运动,而是为了在实现独立之前控制古巴。

The U.S. government was willing to let Spain rule so long as it guaranteed U.S. business interests on the island. When it became clear that Spain was no longer able to do so, that was when the U.S. decided to intervene.

只要西班牙政府保证美国在该岛的商业利益,美国政府就愿意让西班牙统治。 当西班牙再也无法做到这一点时,美国决定进行干预。

The invasion was presented publicly as a humanitarian effort–“for the purposes of extending succor,” in McKinley’s words–though the explosion of the USS Maine off the coast of Havana was also milked to arouse pro-war sentiment.

这次入侵是作为一项人道主义努力公开提出的——“以扩大救助为目标”,用麦金利的话说—虽然哈瓦那沿海的缅因号航空母舰爆炸也被拿来煽动主战情绪。

But as Foner notes, everything known about Cuba at the time pointed to the fact that the rebels’ victory was only delayed by lack of arms. If McKinley was so concerned about the interests of humanity, he need only allow weapons to get to the rebels. However, “such a policy would mean that Cuba would be truly independent–independent of the United States as well as Spain–and this was something that the administration would under no circumstances countenance,” Foner wrote.

但正如Foner所指出的那样,当时所有关于古巴的事情都表明,反抗者的胜利只是因为缺乏武器而被推迟。 如果麦金利如此关心人类的利益,他只需要允许武器到达反抗者手中。 然而,“这样的政策意味着古巴将真正独立—独立于美国和西班牙—这是政府在任何情况下都不会支持的事情,”Foner写道。

McKinley’s April 11 speech to congress announcing war with Spain was fairly explicit in its opposition to Cuban independence: “To commit this country now to the recognition of any particular government in Cuba may subject us to embarrassing conditions of international obligations toward the organization so recognized. In case of intervention, our conduct would be subjected to the approval or disapproval of that government.”

麦金利4月11日向西班牙宣布与西班牙发生战争的演讲在反对古巴独立方面是相当明确的:“现在承诺这个国家对古巴的任何特定政府的承认都可能使我们面临对如此认可的组织的国际义务的尴尬条件。在干预的情况下,我们的行为将受到该政府的允许或不允许的限制。“

Even the way McKinley framed the issue of humanitarian intervention indicated a desire to cut out the revolutionaries from any say in the outcome: “The forcible intervention of the United States as a neutral to stop the war, according to the large dictates of humanity and following many historical precedents where neighboring states have interfered to check the hopeless sacrifices of life by internecine conflicts beyond their borders, is justifiable on rational grounds. It involves, however, hostile constraint upon both the parties to the contest as well to enforce a truce as to guide the eventual settlement.”

甚至麦金利建构人道主义干预议题的方式表明他们希望在结果中切断革命者的任何发言权:“根据人权的大规模的和随之而来的美国的中立的强制干预是用来制止战争的。 许多历史先例表明邻国在干预除边界以外的国际冲突中进行干预以阻止生命的绝望牺牲,这在理性的基础上是合理的。然而,它涉及对敌对各方的限制以及强制执行停战协议作为对最终解决问题的指导。“

The Cubans insisted that without any recognition by the U.S. of Cuba’s independence, they would consider any American invasion a “declaration of war by the United States against Cuban revolutionists.”

古巴人坚持认为,如果美国不承认古巴的独立,他们会认为任何美国入侵都是“美国对古巴革命者们的战争宣告”。

But the revolutionaries were somewhat mollified by the Teller amendment, which stated that the U.S. “hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction or control over said island, except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination when that is accomplished to leave the government and control of the island to its people.”

但是,革命者们在某种程度上通过Teller修正案得到了安抚,该修正案指出美国“特此否认对该岛屿行使主权,管辖权或控制权的任何行动或意图,除非为了维持和平,并宣告其决定独立成功时将政府和对岛的控制权留给岛上的人民。“

This statement proved meaningless when it came to the subsequent invasion and occupation of Cuba.

在随后对古巴的入侵和占领中,这一声明被证明是毫无意义的。

The U.S. was able to land its forces in the southeastern part of Cuba in large part with the help of Cuban revolutionary troops under Gen. Calixto Garcia, which prevented Spanish reinforcements from being able to move toward the area.

美国能够在古巴东南部地区部署其部队,很大程度上是在Calixto Garcia将军指挥的古巴革命军队的帮助下,他阻止了西班牙增援部队向该地区移动。

Despite the indispensable role played by Cuban troops in the U.S. victory, the U.S. press, aided by military officials, began a campaign of slander against the rebels, saying that they were lazy, ineffective and unhelpful–all in attempt to elevate the role of the U.S. as the sole victor in the war.

尽管古巴军队在美国的胜利中发挥了不可或缺的作用,但在军方官员的帮助下,美国媒体开始对反抗者进行诽谤运动,称他们是懒惰,无效和没有帮助的—所有这一切都是为了宣扬美国是战争的唯一胜利者这一角色。

Adding salt to the wound, Gen. William Shafter, the head of the expeditionary forces, did not invite Gen. Garcia or any rebel officers to the official celebration after the city of Santiago de Cuba fell. Indeed, the U.S. allowed the Spanish administrators to continue at their posts, and forbid any Cuban rebels from entering into the town. Garcia was so incensed that he resigned.

在古巴圣地亚哥市被攻下之后,远征军队长William Shafter将军在伤口撒盐,没有邀请Garcia将军或任何反抗军军官参加官方庆祝活动。事实上,美国允许西班牙管理人员继续保持他们的职位,并禁止任何古巴反抗者进入该镇。 Garcia非常愤怒,他辞职了。

The same thing happened in December when the Spanish handed power over to the Americans in Havana. The Cuban popular committees planned a five-day celebration to congratulate the joint Cuban-American victory, complete with a parade of Cuban revolutionary troops. The celebration was canceled by the American general in charge, and Cuban troops were forbidden from entering the city.

同样的事情发生在12月,当时西班牙人将权力交给了哈瓦那的美国人。 古巴人民委员会计划举行为期五天的庆祝活动,祝贺古巴—美国人的共同胜利,并举行古巴革命军队的游行。 庆祝活动被美国的将军负责人取消,古巴军队被禁止进入该城市。


THE U.S. army stayed in Cuba. Under Gen. Leonard Wood, the island was divided up into military districts, each ruled by an officer and policed by a contingent of U.S. troops.

美国军队留在了古巴。 在Leonard Wood将军的统治下,该岛被划分为军区,每个军区由一名军官统治,并由一支美国军队监管。

As a condition for withdrawal (which took place in 1902), Wood insisted that an amendment–known as the Platt Amendment–be written into the Cuban constitution stipulating that the “the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the Treaty of Paris on the United States.”

作为退出的条件(这发生在1902年),Wood持要求将一项修正案—被称为 Platt修正案—写入古巴宪法,规定“美国可以行使干预权,以保护古巴独立,维护一个足以保护生命,财产和个人自由的政府,以及履行巴黎合约规定的美国对古巴的义务。“

In short, the amendment gave the U.S. the right to invade Cuba whenever it wasn’t pleased with developments there. U.S. troops occupied Cuba in 1906, 1909, 1912 and between 1917 and 1923. After that, the U.S. largely protected its interests by backing friendly dictators.

简而言之,该修正案赋予美国入侵古巴的权利,只要它对那里的发展不满意。 美国军队在1906年,1909年,1912年和1917年至1923年之间占领了古巴。此后,美国在很大程度上通过支持友好的独裁者来保护其利益。

There are many important lessons to be drawn from this experience. While no historical parallels are exact, the story of the U.S. in Cuba provides a useful framework for understanding its intervention more than 100 years later in Libya–and stopping us from the facile and historically unjustifiable belief that the world’s biggest, most violent, imperialist powers are capable of exerting military force for the good of humanity.

从这次经历中可以得出许多重要的教训。 虽然没有确切的历史相似之处,但美国在古巴的故事提供了一个有用的框架以用于理解其在100多年后对利比亚的干预—并阻止我们相信世界上最大,最暴力的帝国主义势力有能力为人类的利益使用军事力量这一轻率的和被历史证明是毫无道理的信念。

No revolutionary movement has ever benefited from accepting military intervention from an imperialist power–because such “support” comes at the price of perverting the aims of the movement itself. In the words of Antonio Maceo, “It is better to rise or fall without help than to contract debts of gratitude to a neighbor so powerful.”

任何革命运动都没有从接受帝国主义势力的军事干预中获益——因为这种“支持”的代价是扭曲了运动本身的目标。用Antonio Maceo的话来说,“比起对一个如此强大的邻居充满感激的欠下债务,在没有帮助的情况下崛起或衰落更好。”

https://socialistworker.org/2011/04/05/never-a-force-for-good

A Blueprint for Universal Childhood(一份普世童年的蓝图)

Children deserve to spend their days in the company of peers, having fun, and discovering the world with the help of loving, well-compensated adults.

小孩们应该在同伴的陪伴下度过他们的日子,享受乐趣,并在充满爱心的,被好好补偿的成年人的帮助下探索这个世界。

In September 2017, feeling the first twinges of labor, I walked beyond the ten-block radius my ob-gyn had prescribed me, defying her bed-rest orders for one reason: to tour day-care centers and get my unborn kid on as many wait lists as possible.
2017年9月,感受到了第一批劳动力的痛苦,我走出了我的妇科医生给我规定的十寸半径,因为一个原因违抗了她的卧床休息命令:去日间护理中心,让我未出生的孩子出现在尽可能多的等待名单上。I knew I had to take the risk only because I’d worked for three years on youth and family programs at a high-quality New York nonprofit.

我知道我必须承担风险,这只是因为我在一个高质量的纽约非营利组织为青年和家庭项目工作了三年。

When I’d started in 2012, our preschool had a two-year wait list. By the time I left, the wait list had swelled to almost four years, which meant that most children who had been added to the list never got into the program. We had at least twenty applications for children in utero, and two for children who hadn’t yet been conceived. Sometimes mothers mentioned to me that they’d miscarried, but would like to keep their application open, and did in fact conceive again before receiving an offer of admission. One baby died while on the list.

当我在2012年开始时,我们的幼儿园有两年的等待名单。 当我离开时,等待名单已经膨胀到将近四年,这意味着大多数已被添加到列表中的小孩从未进入该项目。我们在至少有20份还在子宫内的儿童的申请,还有2份尚未怀孕的儿童的申请。有时母亲向我提到他们已经流产,但是希望保持他们的申请公开,并且在收到录取通知之前确实再次怀孕。 一名婴儿在名单上的时候死了。

My program was unusual in that it featured a first-come/first-serve “need blind” admissions process and substantial tuition assistance to families who could prove that they needed it — but its $37,000 a year price tag was all too typical for American childcare.

我的项目的不同寻常之处在于它以先到先得的“支付能力无关”的入学流程为特色,并为能够证明自己需要服务的家庭提供大量学费援助—但每年37,000美元的价格标签对美国儿童抚养来说太典型了。

For the Church, life begins at the moment of conception. For an American baby, life starts much sooner — the moment a parent (almost always a mother) begins to think about how and when she can afford to have a child, and who will care for the child when she returns to work, as the vast majority of parents must do. If she has been in the same job for a year and worked at least 1,250 hours for an employer who also happens to employ at least fifty people within a seventy-five-mile radius of her workplace, then she will be eligible for twelve weeks of unpaid time off and continuation of health benefits under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). She may be able to extend that slightly further with unused sick time — assuming she has any.

对于教会来说,生命始于受孕的那一刻。 对于一个美国婴儿来说,生命开始得更早—在父母(几乎总是母亲)开始思考如何以及何时能够生育小孩,以及在她重返工作岗位时谁将照顾小孩, 绝大多数父母必须这样做。如果她在同一份工作中工作了一年,并且至少为在工作场所七十五英里范围内雇用至少五十人的雇主工作了至少1,250小时,那么她将有资格在家庭医疗休假法(FMLA)下获得十二周的无薪休假和继续享受健康福利。她可能会用未使用的病假稍微延长一点—假设她有。

FMLA is an accommodating piece of legislation passed during the labor-punishing Clinton era, which applies to a little over half of US workers. It was the Democrats’ polite throat-clearing sigh, a gentle nudge in the general direction of our bosses, asking “Please sir, can I have my job back after taking care of my dying daughter?” when working families needed a paid family leave program comparable to the rest of the world’s, and a universal, federally funded childcare program. Since 1985, the majority of mothers of preschool children have participated in the workforce, and in the thirty years since, unprecedented growth in wealth inequality has transformed an urgent need into a moral and economic crisis. Now, as Baby Boomers age and a smaller percentage of the population has young children, there are fewer adult advocates for their needs.

FMLA是惩罚劳工的克劳顿时代通过的一项适应性立法,适用于美国一半以上的工人。这是民主党人礼貌的清醒叹息,在我们老板的大方向上轻轻推动,问道:“先生,在照顾我快要死去的女儿之后,我可以找回工作吗?” 当工人家庭需要带薪的家庭假时,这能与世界其他地区相当的计划,以及由联邦政府资助的全球儿童保育计划相提并论。自1985年以来,大多数学龄前儿童的母亲都进入了劳动力队伍,在此后的三十年里,财富不平等的空前增长将迫切的需求转变为道德和经济危机。 现在,随着婴儿潮一代的长大,拥有小孩的人数比例越来越低,成年人的需求也越来越少。

There is no reason we can’t have nationally subsidized, paid parental leave and childcare today. At present, public spending on early childhood education and care in the United States represents less than 0.5 percent of GDP, less than any OECD country besides Croatia, Latvia, and Turkey.我们没有理由今天不能享受全国性的补贴,带薪育儿假和儿童照料服务。目前,美国的儿童早期教育和护理方面的公共支出不到GDP的0.5%,低于除了克罗地亚,拉脱维亚和土耳其以外的任何OCED国家。

At the time of its bipartisan passage in 1993, the Chamber of Commerce warned that FMLA set a “dangerous precedent,” and John Boehner muttered something about “the light of freedom growing dimmer,” but twenty-five years later, a vast majority of employers report that complying with FMLA is easy and has had a positive or neutral effect on their workplaces. It is the sole non-means-tested federal provision for American families in the first few weeks of their children’s lives. Still, the burden is on parents to obtain doctor’s notes and coordinate it — and even it can hardly be called universal.

在1993年两党通过法案时,商人联合会警告说,FMLA设置了一个“危险的先例”,John Boehner嘀咕着“自由之光越来越暗淡”,但二十五年后,绝大多数雇主报告说遵守FMLA很容易,并且对他们的工作场所产生了积极或中立的影响。在小孩生命的最初几周内,这是美国家庭唯一的免入息审查的联邦供给。尽管如此,父母仍有责任获得医生的记录并进行协调 —甚至它也很难被称为普遍的。

Employers approve, but how has it turned out for families? Many of those who are eligible can’t actually afford to take it. A full quarter of American mothers return to work less than two weeks after giving birth. Marissa Mayer aside, those who return soonest are most likely to be working class. Mothers who do not have housekeepers or nannies are constrained in their parenting choices, such as whether and how to breastfeed, and are more susceptible to depression.

雇主接受了,但对于家庭来说结果如何呢? 许多有资格的人实际上无法负担得起。四分之一的美国母亲在分娩后不到两周就重返工作岗位。除了Marissa Mayer,那些最快回来的人最有可能是工人阶级。没有管家或保姆的母亲在育儿选择方面受到限制,例如是否以及如何进行母乳喂养,以及更容易患上抑郁症。

One factory worker described breaking down in tears of exhaustion while pumping in a parking lot after a twelve-hour shift. The cheerful slogan “breast is best” is more likely to produce heart pangs than an eye-roll in the 88 percent of women who have no paid time off.

一名工厂工人描述了在十二小时轮班后在停车场抽水时,在精疲力竭中崩溃了。在88%没有带薪休假的女性中,令人振奋的口号“乳房是最好的”更容易产生的是心脏痛而不是吸引眼球。

Nurri Latef, an early childhood teacher who I spoke to about her experience returning to school when her son was two months old, says, “I hated it. I felt like I was leaving my child at such a critical bonding time for the two of us, and he was premature. He spent a month in the hospital, so … I was only at home for one month with Nasir before I had to jump back into toddler-teacher mode so I could keep a roof over our heads.” No parent in any job should have to feel this way, but there’s a unique cruelty to forcing women to leave their own children before they feel ready to take care of other people’s children.

Nurri Latef是一位幼儿教师,我和她讨论了她在她的儿子两个月大时回到了学校的经历,“我讨厌它。我觉得我要在我们两个人的关键时期离开我的孩子,这为时过早。他在医院度过了一个月,所以……在我不得不重新回到幼儿教师模式以保住头顶上的瓦片之前,我只在家里待了一个月。“无论做什么工作,没有哪个父母应该遭受这些,但是在她们准备好照顾别人的孩子之前强迫女性离开自己的孩子是一种独特的残忍。

Meanwhile, Apple and Google employees get eighteen weeks of paid leave and backup or on-site day care. Googlers are awarded $500 cash referred to as “Baby Bonding Bucks.” Of course, not every worker shares in the benefits even at these seemingly enlightened firms: tech companies often outsource security, food service, and janitorial work by hiring private contractors, who are not eligible. Overall, about a third of American workers in management and other professional jobs have paid parental leave, while just over 5 percent in service occupations do.

与此同时,Apple和Google的员工获得了18周的带薪休假和帮助或现场日托。Google员工被奖励500美元的现金,这被称为“Baby Bonding Bucks”。当然,并不是每个工人都能分享到这些看似开明的公司的福利:科技公司经常通过雇用私人承包商来外包安全,食品服务和清洁工作,这不容忽视。总的来说,大约三分之一的美国管理和其他专业工作者已经有了带薪育儿假,而服务职业只有5%左右。

Here’s how Julia Roitfeld, the daughter of the editor of French Vogue, describes impending motherhood: “It was like a detox — I ate healthy, I slept a lot, and I didn’t drink. All of my hormones were at the perfect levels. I was super-happy, and I really didn’t give a shit about work. Usually I’m so on top of work, but I was in a little cloud. But in August I thought, ‘Okay, I need to go back to work and start making a living again.’”

以下是French Vogue的编辑的女儿Julia Roitfeld如何描述即将到来的母亲生活:“这就像一个排毒—我吃得健康,我睡了很多,而且我没有喝酒。 我所有的荷尔蒙都处在完美的水平上。我非常高兴,我真的没有对工作嗤之以鼻。 通常我是在工作之上,但我在一点点阴云中。但在八月,我想,“好吧,我需要回去工作并重新开始谋生。“

How long can a parent stay in that “little cloud” and “not give a shit” about the cost of diapers, formula, and rent? That depends both on one’s class and nationality. Brazilian mothers get seventeen weeks of leave to take care of their little ones at their full salary; Canadian parental leave was recently extended from one year to eighteen months at about 55 percent pay; Russia offers mothers twenty-four weeks paid. I could go on. The United States, Papua New Guinea, and Lesotho are the only countries in the world that don’t guarantee all workers paid time off to care for a new child — here, parental leave is a luxury reserved for the rich.

如果父母在尿布,配方奶粉和租金的成本方面停留在“小小的阴云”和“什么都不给”,他们能维持多久? 这取决于一个人的阶级和国籍。 巴西母亲得到17周的假期,以全薪照顾他们的小孩; 加拿大育儿假最近从一年延长到十八个月,薪酬约为55%; 俄罗斯为母亲提供二十四周的报酬。我可以继续 。美国,巴布亚新几内亚和莱索托是世界上唯一不保证所有工人都有时间照顾新生儿的国家—在这里,育儿假是为富人保留的奢侈品。

At the same time we thrust new parents back into the labor market, we also insist that they comparison shop for childcare in a country with no national standards for quality, accessibility or safety. Nearly 11 million children, including over half of children below the age of one, spend an average of twenty-seven hours a week in some kind of childcare setting, yet the burden is on individual parents to assess the risks and benefits of a confusing, unaccountable, generally private system pieced together state by state for the care of our littlest and most vulnerable children. In essence, giving birth or adopting a child in America means you also take on the job of government regulator. It’s an impossible task, with occasionally tragic consequences.

与此同时,我们将新父母扔回劳动力市场,我们也坚持他们在一个没有国家级别的质量,可获得性或安全的标准的国家比较购买儿童照料服务。 近一千万儿童,包括超过一半的一岁以下儿童,平均每周在某种儿童照料环境中度过二十七小时,但让个体父母去负担评估风险和好处是令人迷惑的,不负责任的,通常是由国家将私人系统拼凑在一起来照顾我们最小的和最脆弱的小孩。本质上来说,在美国生育或收养小孩意味着你也要接手政府监管机构的工作。这是一项不可能完成的任务,偶尔会产生悲剧性的后果。

In 2013, a day-care worker in Mississippi handed a ten-week-old baby boy over to his father at pickup time without noticing that the child’s skin was blue and he was unresponsive. The father directed the staff to call 911 while he performed CPR — none of the staff knew how — and his son was finally rushed to the emergency room, where he died. After an investigation, the state concluded that the childcare center met all legal requirements for operation. It remains open.

2013年,密西西比州的一名日托工作人员在接送时间将一名10周大的男婴交给他的父亲,却没有注意到孩子的皮肤是蓝色的并且他没有反应。当父亲指示工作人员拨打911时,他进行CPR—没有一个工作人员知道如何做—他的儿子最后被送往急诊室,在那里他去世了。经过调查,该州得出结论,儿童照料中心符合所有法律要求。 它仍然开放。

In 2014, Kellie Rynn Martin suffocated at the age of three months in a day-care center run out of a middle-class suburban home in South Carolina, where her mother suspects she was put to sleep in a bassinet with a blanket or even another infant. When forensics searched the house, they found fourteen children playing “the quiet game” in the eighty-five-degree basement under the supervision of the owner’s daughter. In an interview, Martin’s mother stressed that the day-care owner’s home had appeared clean and the owner appeared competent when she toured the program only a few weeks earlier.

2014年,Kellie Rynn Martin在南卡罗来纳州一个中产阶级郊区住宅中运营的一个日托中心里窒息了,在那里她的母亲怀疑她是被毯子包裹然后被丢在摇篮里或者甚至是和另一个婴儿一起。 当法医搜查这所房子时,他们发现有十四个小孩在主人的女儿的监视下,在八十五度(这是华氏温标,换算成摄氏温度是29.4度)的地下室玩“安静游戏”。 在一次采访中,Martin的母亲强调说日托所有者的房子看起来很干净,而且主人在几周前她参观这个项目时表现得很有竞争力。

On March 22, 2016, three infants died in three different unlicensed and illegally operating day-care programs in Connecticut, one from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), another from an overdose of Benadryl, and the third from a blunt injury to the head. One of the providers had had her license revoked by the state the previous year for failure to comply with safety regulations — and yet continued to operate her center. The Connecticut assistant child advocate Faith Vos Winkel blamed parents, telling the Hartford Courant that they have ample opportunities to find licensed providers through the Office of Early Childhood’s website and the 211 Infoline.

2016年3月22日,三个婴儿在康涅狄格州的三个不同的无证和非法经营的日托项目中死亡,一个是因为婴儿猝死综合症(SIDS),另一个是因为被使用了过量的镇静剂,第三个是因为头部的钝伤。其中一家供应商因前一年因未遵守安全规定而被政府吊销许可证—但仍继续经营其中心。 康涅狄格州助理儿童权利倡导者Faith Vos Winkel指责家长,告诉Hartford Courant他们有充分的机会通过早期儿童办公室的网站和211 Infoline找到有执照的提供者。(明明是政府失职,由着奸商无证经营,却指责家长?那么是不是买到假货了也是因为消费者没有自带质检实验室?)

The death rate of children enrolled in home-based day care — which is far more likely to be unlicensed than a center-based program — is twelve times that of center-based care. But home-based and unlicensed childcare is simply more plentiful and affordable. Licensed childcare centers are either geographically or financially out of reach for the majority of families.

参加以家庭为基础的日托护理的儿童的死亡率——比基于中心的护理计划更可能没有执照—是基于中心的护理的12倍。 但是,以家庭为基础的无证儿童保育服务更加多且可承担。有执照的托儿中心在地理上或经济上都不适合大多数家庭。

Nearly half of American children under five live in areas where the demand for openings in childcare centers surpasses availability. (Spots for infants and toddlers in childcare centers are even more limited than those for three-to-four year olds, since the low teacher-to-child ratio necessary to ensure safety also make them difficult to profit from.) Where licensed, high-quality care is available, individual families shoulder most of the cost — and it is often prohibitively expensive.

近五分之一的五岁以下的美国儿童生活在对开放的儿童保育中心的需求超过供应的地区。 (儿童保育中心的为婴儿和幼儿的提供服务的机构甚至比为三到四岁儿童提供服务的机构更有限,因为确保安全所需的低教师—儿童比也使他们难以从中获利。)当有执照的,高质量的照料服务可以获得时,个人家庭承担了大部分费用—而且往往极其昂贵。

Nationally, the average cost of tuition at a childcare center is over $10,000 per year — nearly 20 percent of the median household income. In the majority of states, childcare costs more than college tuition. Because it is largely private, our system is deeply inefficient, placing parents in competition against each other for coveted spots, instead of allowing them to negotiate prices collectively. Families in the United States spend 25.6 percent of their income on childcare, compared to an OEDC average of 13 percent, while getting significantly lower quality care.

在全国范围内,儿童保育中心的平均学费每年超过10,000美元—几乎占家庭收入中位数的20%。在大多数州,儿童保育费用高于大学学费。 因为它主要是私人的,所以我们的系统效率非常低,让父母相互竞争以争夺令人垂涎的地方,而不是让他们集体谈判价格。 美国的家庭将其收入的25.6%用于托儿服务,而OEDC国家的平均数据为13%,同时获得的护理质量显着降低。

Further, the grossly inadequate twelve weeks of job protection offered by FMLA means that many American children start day care at the exact time that the risk of dying from SIDS is highest: two to three months of age. Experts theorize that the reason why day-care deaths often happen in the first week or so that a child attends a new program is because children whose parents practice safe sleep practices at home are especially susceptible to SIDS when they are moved to unsafe sleep environments.

此外,FMLA提供的十二周工作保护严重不足意味着许多美国儿童在SIDS死亡风险最高的确切时间开始日托:两到三个月大。专家推测,日托死亡经常发生在小孩参加新项目的第一周左右是因为父母在家中实行安全睡眠操作的小孩在被转移到不安全的睡眠环境时特别容易感染SIDS。

Derek Dodd relied on the recommendation of a friend when looking for childcare for his eleven-week-old son. But despite having been cited by the Department of Health just ten days earlier for unsafe sleep practices, the home-based provider “put our child in an unbuckled car seat on the floor, swaddled, where he wiggled down until he lost his airway and suffocated to death.” The baby was left unmonitored for two hours behind a closet door before the provider checked on him and found him blue.

Derek Dodd在为十一周大的儿子寻找托儿所时依赖了朋友的推荐。 但是,尽管在十天之前因为不安全的睡眠习惯而被卫生部提及,但基于家庭的服务提供者“把我们的孩子放在地板上的一个未扣紧的汽车座椅上,被包裹着,一直抽搐,直到他失去呼吸并窒息。”在服务提供者检查他并发现他是蓝色的之前,婴儿被丢在衣柜门后面两小时没人照看。

Amber Scorah, whose son died on his first day in an unlicensed program in New York City, writes, “It’s possible that even in a different system, Karl still might not have lived a day longer; but had he been with me, where I wanted him, I wouldn’t be sitting here, living with the nearly incapacitating anguish of a question that has no answer.” Neither family wanted their child to be in day care so young — both were refused additional unpaid leave by their employers, and could not afford to quit.

Amber Scorah的儿子在纽约市一个无执照项目的第一天死了,他写道:“即使在不同的系统中,卡尔仍然可能不会再活一天; 但如果他和我在一起,我想要他,我就不会坐在这里,和一个没有答案的问题生活在一起,这是一种几乎无能为力的痛苦生活。“两个家庭都不希望他们的孩子在如此年幼的时候被交给日托机构—他们的雇主拒绝了额外的无薪假,他们也无力退出。

Simply put, the deaths of these children must be counted as casualties of capitalism, an economic system which prioritizes profit over human life, especially those who do not yet add tangible value to the societies in which they live.

简而言之,这些儿童的死亡必须被视为资本主义的牺牲品,资本主义是一种利润优先而非人类生活的经济体系,特别是那些尚未为其所生活的社会增加有形的价值的人。

It’s easy to imagine negligent and abusive providers as monsters, but childcare is an exceptionally difficult job, demanding patience, creativity, compassion, self-control, and sometimes, selflessness. To consistently provide safe, quality care requires serious social investment in the well-being of children. For the most part, childcare workers and day-care directors devote an extraordinary amount of time and energy to filling in the immense gaps left by lack of federal guidance, funding, and support. The first year I worked as a teacher, I subsisted entirely on Red Bull and smoked-turkey slices I kept in my purse, so I could use the twenty-five minutes students were given for lunch to talk to them about things other than “content.” I do not know a single teacher who hasn’t routinely given up lunch breaks or taken work home to do into the wee hours of the morning, after putting their own kids to bed.

将疏忽和虐待的服务提供者视为怪物很容易,但儿童照料是一项异常艰巨的工作,需要耐心,创造力,同情心,自我控制,有时甚至是无私。 为了始终如一地提供安全,优质的护理,需要对儿童的福祉进行认真的社会投资。 在大多数情况下,儿童照料工作者和日托主任投入了大量的时间和精力来填补由于缺乏联邦指导,资金和支持而留下的巨大空白。我作为一名教师工作的第一年中,我完全依靠红牛和存放在我的包里的烟熏火鸡切片,所以我可以利用二十五分钟的学生午饭时间与他们谈论“内容“以外的事情。 我不认识一位老师在自己的小孩上床睡觉之后,没有经常放弃午休或将工作带回家做到凌晨。

It’s a hell of a lot to demand of people making $20,320 a year, the national median wage for early childhood teachers, which is below the poverty threshold for a family of four. These working-class women and men are increasingly being required to pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets for college classes and state exams, while receiving wages far lower than the value they are providing — and lower than those of teachers who work with older kids. In essence, we are subsidizing our current system of early childhood education on their backs. It’s unfair, and it leads to high turnover — which can be dangerous. It’s also inefficient: there is a strong and well-documented relationship between higher teacher salaries and higher childcare program quality.

对于年收入20,320美元的人来说,这是一个很大的问题,这是全国幼儿教师的工资中位数,低于一个四口之家的贫困线。 这些工人阶级的女性和男性越来越多地被要求自费支付数千美元用于大学课程和州考试,同时获得的工资远低于他们提供的价值—并且低于和年龄较大的小孩一起的教师的工资。从本质上讲,我们正在补贴我们目前的幼儿教育制度。这是不公平的,它导致高流动率—这可能是危险的。这也是效率低下的:更高的教师工资与更高的儿童照料项目质量之间存在着明确的且记录良好的关联。

Yet all human beings are fallible, which is why we need consistent federal regulations in place for the protection of both children and the day-care workers who care for them. Systems like those used effectively in the community-based early childcare center I ran are critical to ensure that no child experiences the tragic negligence endured by Dodd’s son.

然而,所有人都是会犯错误的,这就是为什么我们需要一致的联邦法规来保护儿童和那些照顾儿童们的日托工作者。 在我所运作的以社区为基础的早期儿童照料中心有效使用的系统对于确保没有小孩经历Dodd的儿子所遭受的悲惨疏忽至关重要。

Our infant/toddler classroom consisted of ten children cared for by four teachers, who supported each other and kept each other responsible with extraordinary grace and effort in a demanding job. Every single teacher was trained annually in CPR and safe sleep practices, even though it meant closing the school for a couple days a year. We hired two substitute teachers who showed up every day to enable us to meet the child/teacher ratios suggested by experts, even when teachers were out sick. The presence of a program director and assistant director — as well as regular unannounced visits from the state — ensured that teachers followed guidelines at all times. Infant/toddler teachers kept a log (as required by New York state law) in which teachers initialed that they had checked on a baby in its sleep every fifteen minutes. The inspectors always examined the logs when they came to visit.

我们的婴儿/幼儿教室由十名由四名教师照顾的儿童组成,这些教师们互相支持,并在一份要求很高的工作中保持彼此的非凡的优雅和努力。每年都有一名教师接受过心肺复苏和安全睡眠训练,尽管这意味着每年会关闭学校几天。 我们聘请了两名代课教师,他们每天都出现,以便我们能够达到专家建议的儿童/教师比例,即使教师生病了。项目主任和助理主任的出席—以及政府的定期暗访—确保教师始终遵循指导方针。 婴儿/幼儿教师保留了一份记录(按照纽约州法律的要求),教师们每隔十五分钟就会在检查一个在睡眠中的婴儿。检查员在访问时总是会检查日志。

Unfortunately — and contrary to the suggestion of Connecticut’s assistant child advocate — even regulated childcare in America is not uniformly high quality. In a recent report on childcare quality and oversight of regulated centers compiled by the advocacy organization Child Care Aware of America, not one state earned an “A.” The only program to earn a “B” was the Department of Defense’s, which is run by the federal government. Ten, including New York, earned a “C,” twenty-one states earned a “D,” and nineteen failed.

不幸的是—与康涅狄格州助理儿童倡导者的建议相反—即使在美国受到监管的儿童照料服务也不是一贯的高质量。在最近由倡导组织Child Care Aware of America编制的关于儿童照料质量和监管中心的监督质量的报告中,没有一个州获得“A”。唯一获得“B”的项目是国防部的,该项目由联邦政府运作。包括纽约在内的十个州获得了“C”,二十一个州获得了“D”,十九个州失败了。

It was a simple survey: the organization used fifteen basic benchmarks representing research-backed criteria. It revealed that only thirty-one states plus the dod require a fingerprint check for childcare center staff, and just twenty-three require a check of the sex-offender registry. Thirty states plus the dod inspect centers two or more times per year, but nine states do not require any type of annual inspection. Only sixteen states addressed each of ten basic health and safety requirements recommended by pediatric experts in their licensing requirements. Just thirty-nine states in the wealthiest country in the world even have a program that rates the quality of day-care centers.

这是一项简单的调查:该组织使用了十五个代表了基于研究的标准的基础标准。据透露,只有三十一个州加上dod需要对儿童照料中心的工作人员进行指纹检查,而只有二十三个州需要在性犯罪者登记处进行检查。30个州加上dod每年两次或更多次检查中心,但9个州不要求任何类型的年检。 只有十六个州要求了儿科专家在许可要求方面建议的十项基本健康和安全要求。世界上最富有的国家中只有三十九个州甚至有一个项目来评估日托中心的质量。

Privatized Care

被私有化的照料服务

No wonder day care has a bad name in this country. But why do we fault the idea itself, rather than the well-documented failures in executing it?

难怪日托在这个国家有一个坏名声。 但是,为什么我们责怪这个想法本身,而不是在执行它时有效记录失败?

When a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) study found a link between long hours in day care and behavioral problems, some headlines crowed with perverse joy, “Sorry Working Moms, Daycare is Bad For Your Kid.” The New York Times took a more concerned tone (“Poor Behavior is Linked to Time in Daycare”), and then there was the gleeful, literary, “A generation of ‘little savages’ raised in nurseries as daycare is linked to aggression in toddlers.”

当国家儿童健康与人类发展研究所(NICHD)的一项研究发现长时间的日间照料与行为问题之间存在联系时,一些头条新闻中充满了不正常的喜悦,“抱歉工作妈妈,日托对你的孩子不好。”纽约时报采取了更为关注的语气(“不良行为与日托时间相关联”),然后有一种欢乐的文学修饰,“托儿所养育了一代’小野人’,日托与幼儿的侵略有关。”

What few reporters stopped to mention was that the quality of childcare is an essential piece of the puzzle. It was children in low-quality care who experienced behavioral problems later in life — and even those problems seemed to disappear over time. In fact, by middle school, researchers were able to detect little difference between kids who went to day care and those who didn’t. Not a single one wrote about the fact that the percentage of childcare-center classes observed by the NICHD meeting guidelines for adult-to-child ratio was 36 percent for children aged six months, 20 percent for children aged 1.5 years, and 26 percent for children aged 2 years.

几乎没有记者提到,儿童照料的质量是这个难题的关键部分之一。被低质量护理的小孩在以后的生活中经历过行为问题—甚至那些似乎随着时间的推移而消失的问题。事实上,通过初中,研究人员能够发现去日托的小孩与没有上过日托的小孩之间的区别很小。没有一个人写过这样一个事实,即NICHD观察的儿童照料中心课程中的达到指导标准的成人与儿童比例的对于6个月的儿童为36%,对于1.5岁的儿童为20%,对于2岁儿童为26%。

More significantly, and equally underreported: family characteristics such as income and access to “emotionally supportive and cognitively rich” environments where “mothers experienced little psychological distress” — in other words, social class — were far more predictive of developmental outcomes than who cared for a child and for how long. And of course, no one questioned the long hours parents put in at work, which necessitated those long hours logged by kids at day-care centers in the first place.

更重要的,同样不被报道的是:家庭特征,如收入和获得“情感支持和认知丰富”的环境,其中“母亲经历过很少的心理困扰” —换句话说,社会阶级—比谁照顾儿童和照顾多久更对发展结果具有预测性。当然,没有人质疑父母的工作时间太长,这决定了日托中心记录下了这些关于儿童的长时间工作。

Well, not exactly no one. The Norwegians were on it. In a study of 75,000 children, researchers from the United States and Norway not only found zero link between childcare and behavioral problems, but noticed that when they examined their sample using the same methods as the NICHD researchers, their own results were skewed as well. “Norway takes a very different approach to childcare than we do in the United States and that may play a role in our findings,” one of the report’s authors delicately noted.

好吧,不是完全没有人。 挪威人做了。 在一项针对75,000名儿童的研究中,来自美国和挪威的研究人员不仅发现儿童照料与行为问题之间没有任何联系,而且注意到当这些人使用与NICHD的研究人员相同的方法检查这些样本时,这些人自己的结果也是有偏差的。 “挪威对儿童照料的态度与我们在美国采取的方式截然不同,这可能在我们的研究结果中发挥作用,”该报告的一位作者明确指出。

Children are legally entitled to early childhood care in Norway, like most advanced capitalist countries. Where childcare programs are seen as a universal right, austerity measures cannot erode them into oblivion as has happened with the means-tested Head Start program in the United States.

与大多数进步资本主义国家一样,儿童在挪威依法有权享受幼儿照料。 在将儿童照料项目视为普世人权的情况下,紧缩措施不能像美国的经过经济状况调查的“头部启动”计划那样将儿童照料项目扔进湮灭中。

Congress doesn’t hesitate to use the full power of the state to force fathers to pay child support. Child protective services commonly takes unsupervised children into custody and deems them “abandoned” — which happened recently to a South Carolina mother who could not afford the cost of summer camp and left her nine-year-old daughter to play in a park while she worked at a local McDonald’s. (The mother was jailed.) Already this year, a Chicago mother has been arrested for allowing her children to walk to the Dollar Store alone while she was at work — as well as for allowing her family to live in “deplorable conditions.” In other words, for being poor.

国会毫不犹豫地利用政府的全部权力迫使父亲支付子女抚养费。儿童照料服务通常将无人监管的儿童拘留并认为他们“被遗弃”—这最近发生在南卡罗来纳州的一位母亲身上,她无力承担夏令营的费用,并让她九岁的女儿在她在当地的麦当劳工作时在公园里玩耍。(母亲被判入狱。)今年,一名芝加哥母亲因为允许她的孩子在她工作期间独自走到美元商店而被捕—以及允许她的家人生活在“悲惨的环境中”。 换句话说,因为穷。(把被剥削压迫的人扔进监狱,资本主义,呵呵。)

Meanwhile, the federal government owes practically nothing to children younger than five or any child outside of the school year. The result of this system is clear: young children in America are more likely to live in poverty than any other age group.

与此同时,联邦政府几乎没有对五岁以下的孩子或学龄以外的任何孩子付过任何责任。该系统的结果很明确:美国的儿童比任何其他年龄组的人更容易生活在贫困中。

In contrast to Europe, where unions agitated for and won comprehensive, federally subsidized social programs, the weakness of unions in the United States meant that the only social programs on offer here were those offered by bourgeois nongovernmental institutions. Instead of solidarity, the poor got sympathy; progressives were more concerned about vagrants running wild in the streets than they were about the suffering kids experienced as laborers in factories.

与工会凶猛的争取并赢得了全面的联邦补贴社会项目的欧洲相反的是,美国工会的衰弱意味着这里提供的唯一社会项目是资产阶级的非政府机构提供的。与团结相反的是,穷人得到了同情; 进步右派们更关心在街头狂奔的流浪者,而不是在工厂工作的童工遭受的苦难。

The plight of mothers whose children were taken from them in Chicago and South Carolina is an echo from a time when “child savers” rounded up children off the streets and forcibly sent them away to labor on western farms on “orphan trains,” whether or not they already had homes. In the nineteenth century, poverty was viewed as a contagious disease, and being poor was justification for having your children taken from you.

在芝加哥和南卡罗来纳州的被带走孩子的母亲的困境是从“儿童拯救者”围捕街头儿童并强迫他们通过“孤儿列车”去西部农场工作的时代的回音,无论这些小孩是不是已经有了家。在十九世纪,贫穷被视为一种传染病,而贫穷是让你的孩子从你身边被带走的理由。

This viewpoint began to shift in the 1970s when Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have provided federally funded, universal childcare and education. But conservatives echoed Progressive-era private charitable organizations in their objections: Nixon vetoed the bill, coming down on the side of “the family-centered approach” rather than committing “the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches.” Nixon continued the conservative viewpoint of earlier reformers like Lydia Maria Child, sentimentalizing mothers, while denying them economic support.

这种观点在1970s开始转变,当时国会通过了“综合儿童发展法案”,该法案将提供联邦政府资助的普世儿童照料和教育。 但是,保守派反对进步时代,主张私人慈善组织:尼克松否决了该法案,采取了“以家庭为中心的方法”,而不是将“国民政府的巨大道德权威置于公众的一边。 “尼克松继续比如Lydia Maria Child这样的早期改革者的保守观点,对母亲情感化,同时拒绝对她们提供经济支持。

In the famous “kitchen table” debate, in which he debated Khrushchev while they toured a model American suburban home, Nixon points to a dishwasher, “built in thousands of units” because, “In America, we like to make life easier for women.” Khrushchev shuts down this line of thinking with a simple, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under communism.… We build firmly, we build for our children and grandchildren.” Actually, that’s the point, Nixon responds: consumption drives the economy. But, says Khrushchev, “In Russia, all you have to do to get a house is to be born in the Soviet Union. You are entitled to housing. In America, if you don’t have a dollar, you have a right to choose between sleeping in a house or on the pavement.”

在着名的“厨房餐桌”辩论中,尼克松在他们参观模范美国郊区住宅时和赫鲁晓夫进行了辩论,尼克松指向洗碗机,“这建造了数千个单元”,因为“在美国,我们希望让女性的生活更轻松。 “赫鲁晓夫用一种简单的方式关闭了这种思路,”在共产主义下,你们资本主义的女性态度不会发生……我们坚定地建设,我们为子孙后代建设。“实际上,这是关键所在,尼克松的回应是:消费驱动经济。但是,赫鲁晓夫说,“在俄罗斯,你为了得到住房所要做的就是在苏联出生。你有权获得住房。在美国,如果你没有美元,你有权选择在房子里睡觉或在人行道上睡觉。“(赫鲁晓夫说美国说对了,但他并没有在苏联做到这一点。)

Most women took on work outside the home in the 1970s not because their values had changed, but because it became economically necessary to do so. But mainstream feminists did little to challenge the idea that having children is an individual choice, which must be paid for individually. In contrast to Europe, where women’s emancipation was spearheaded by workers, many liberal American second-wavers ignored or were openly hostile to mothers. Little urban zines called them “oppressors”; others viewed them as retrograde traditionalists or bad role models for their kids.

在1970s,大多数女性在家外工作并不是因为她们的价值观发生了变化,而是因为经济上有必要这样做。 但是,主流女权主义者几乎没有挑战这样的想法,即生孩子是个人选择,必须被单独支付。与女性的解放是由工人带头的欧洲相比,许多自由派的美国第二波人士忽视或公开对母亲怀有敌意。 小城市的杂志们称她们为“压迫者”; 其他人认为她们是逆行的传统主义者或小孩们的坏榜样。

Wages for Housework, an international campaign which was far more grounded in economic demands and challenging the family wage than say, Ms. magazine, brought visibility to cooking, cleaning, and caring for children as labor and sparked debate. But it failed to successfully transform itself into a broad working-class movement. Mainstream Americans were never forced to reckon with the fundamental reason women are devalued and discriminated against in the public workplace, or stuck at home: we are the presumed primary caregivers of children. Whether we plan on having children or not, until we live in a country with adequate social provisions, we will walk into any job interview with the weight of the expectation that we will one day become less productive workers or leave the workforce altogether.

争取家务劳动的工资是一项国际运动,它更多地基于经济需求和挑战家庭工资,而不是像杂志女士那样,将烹饪,清洁和照顾孩子变得可见,作为劳动和激发辩论。但它未能成功地转变为广泛的工人阶级运动。 主流美国人从未被迫考虑女性在公共场所的被贬值和歧视,或被困在家中的根本原因:我们是被假定的儿童的主要照顾者。无论我们是否计划生育小孩,在我们生活在一个有充分社会条件的国家之前,我们都会参加任何面试,期望我们有朝一日会成为生产力较低的工人或完全离开劳动力队伍。

Some American feminists even shared Nixon’s predilection for constructing private solutions to collective problems. They may not have been moving to suburban houses and stroking their dishwashers fondly while thanking the free market, but they did retreat into private enclaves, founding parent cooperatives on college campuses with volunteer schedules that were doable for artists and the self-employed, but not for the vast majority of parents with full-time work schedules. While these programs may have been personally necessary, they were certainly not political — and access to them was limited by race and class.

一些美国女权主义者甚至认为尼克松偏爱建立私人解决集体问题的方法。 他们可能没有搬到郊区的房子,并且在感谢自由市场的同时深情地抚摸他们的洗碗机,但是他们确实撤退到了私人飞地,在大学校园里建立了家长合作社,其中志愿者时间表对艺术家和自雇职业者来说是可行的,但不是针对绝大多数有全职工作的家长的。 虽然这些计划可能对个人来说是必要的,但它们肯定不是政治性的—而且对他们的采纳受到种族和阶级的限制。

Historian Christine Stansell quotes one woman whose son was enrolled in a feminist center: “one Black mother did join the group,” but left “because she didn’t feel at ease with the other mothers who seemed like hippies to her.” If, as Stansell writes, hostility towards motherhood was “a white woman’s sentiment,” obliviousness to the pressing need for subsidized day care was a rich woman’s privilege.

历史学家Christine Stansell引用了一位女人,她的儿子参加了一个女权主义中心:“一位黑人母亲确实加入了该组织”,但是“因为她对其他看起来像嬉皮士的母亲感到不安。而离开。”如果, 正如Stansell 所写,对母亲的敌意是“白人女性的情绪”,那么将补贴日托的迫切需要的遗忘是富裕女性的特权。

Recollecting that heady time, Ellen Willis writes in an essay about finding a nanny for her daughter, “as feminist activists we, along with the thousands of other young, childless women who dominated the movement, had of course understood that sexual equality required a new system of child-rearing, but the issue remained abstract, unconnected with our most urgent needs; as mothers in the political vacuum of the eighties, along with millions of working parents, we pursue our individual solutions as best we can. The political has devolved into the personal with a vengeance.”

回忆起那段令人兴奋的时光,Ellen Willis写了一篇关于为女儿寻找保姆的文章,“作为女权主义活动者,我们和成千上万的其他年轻无子女的女性一起主宰这一运动,性别平等需要一个新的养育儿童的制度,但这个问题仍然是抽象的,与我们最紧迫的需求无关; 作为八十年代政治真空中的母亲,以及数百万工人父母,我们尽最大努力追求个性化的解决方案。 政治已经转变为个人的报复。“

How to Build a Public Day-Care System

如何建立一个公共日托系统

Today, Americans are finally beginning to understand that our seemingly personal struggles in finding childcare are actually a political problem. Universal childcare is wildly popular among the entire electorate, regardless of political affiliation, and people are willing to pay for it. At least 70 percent of Americans favor using federal money to make sure high-quality preschool education programs are available for every child in America. Eighty-two percent say mothers and 69 percent say fathers should receive paid family leave upon the birth of a child.

今天,美国人终于开始明白,我们在寻找儿童照料服务方面看似是个人的斗争,实际上是一个政治问题。普世儿童照料服务在整个选民中广受欢迎,无论其政治派别如何,人们愿意为此付钱。至少有70%的美国人倾向于使用联邦资金来确保为美国的每个儿童提供高质量的学前教育课程。82%的人说母亲和69%的人说父亲应该在孩子出生时领受带薪的育儿假。

It’s certainly feasible. We’ve done it before when it became necessary to prevent working-class revolt or to go to war. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) opened “emergency” nurseries in 1933 under the control of local and state agencies (and sometimes, the public school system) through the Federal Emergency Relief Agency. Their explicit function was to serve first as a jobs program for teachers, nutritionists, janitors, and nurses, and second, to educate children. The women who became teachers observed profound improvements in those they taught, such as the disappearance of a stutter in one child, as well as their own lives (“I never knew before that it was fun to work,” historian Barbara Beatty quotes one staff member exclaiming). Enrollment by race reflected the general population at the time, but because it was primarily working-class families who used them, the stigma of the schools as anti-poverty measures meant that most of them did not endure beyond the Depression, despite the best efforts of many.

这当然是可行的。我们之前已经完成了它,以防止工人阶级的暴动或开战。工程进展管理局(WPA)于1933年在地方和州机构(有时是公立学校系统)的控制下通过联邦紧急救济局开设了“紧急”托儿所。它们的明确功能是首先为教师,营养师,门卫和护士提供就业计划,其次是教育儿童。成为教师的女性观察到他们所教导的人的明显的进步,例如一个儿童的口吃的消失,以及他们自己的生活(“我以前从未知道工作很有趣”,历史学家Barbara Beatty引用一名工作人员的感叹)。基于种族入学反映了当时的一般人口,但由于主要是工人阶级家庭使用它们,将学校作为反贫困措施的耻辱意味着尽管做出了最大的努力,但大多数学校并没有在大萧条之后被继续保持。

When women flocked to factory jobs during World War II, the federal government approved funding for 3,102 childcare centers under the Lanham Act. These programs were even better than the centers, with teachers trying out various responsive pedagogical approaches, and administrators ensuring that teachers and families worked together to ensure the happiness and success of the children enrolled. They hoped the schools would serve as models for a free, public, universal early childhood education program that could continue after the war, but the government shuttered it when men returned from overseas and took back their jobs. Beatty records one government official justifying the closures: “To some it connotes an inability to care for one’s own; to some it has a vague incompatibility with the traditional idea of the American home; to others it has a taint of socialism.”

当第二次世界大战期间女性蜂拥到工厂工作时,联邦政府根据“兰哈姆法案”批准了3,102个儿童照料中心的资金。这些项目甚至比中心更好,教师尝试各种启发式教学方法,管理人员确保教师和家庭共同努力以确保入学儿童的幸福和成功。 他们希望这些成为免费,公开,普世的早期儿童教育项目的模板的学校能在战争之后继续存在,但是当男性从海外归来并收回工作时,政府就关闭了它。 Beatty记录了一位政府官员合理化关闭的理由:“对一些人来说,它意味着无法照顾自己; 对某些人来说,它与美国家庭的传统观念模糊不清; 对其他人来说,它有一种社会主义的污点。“

More recently, we have the example of the military’s childcare centers — consistently the highest-rated program in the United States — and the only non-means-tested program that is federally subsidized and regulated. In the 1980s, when a report found that Department of Defense centers were failing to meet safety codes, Congress took action, passing the Military Child Care Act, which raised teacher salaries and provided funding for increased training, subsidized tuition, and rigorous and quarterly inspections — assessing teacher qualifications and pedagogical approaches as well as health and safety.

最近,我们举了军队儿童照料中心的例子—一直是在美国评价最高的项目—也是联邦政府补贴和监管的唯一经过非经济状况调查的计划。 在1980s,当一份报告发现国防部中心未能达到安全法规时,国会采取了行动,通过了“军事育儿法”,该法提高了教师工资,并为增加培训,补贴学费以及为严格的季度检查提供资金—以评估教师资格和教学方法以及健康和安全。

A parent I spoke to with two children in a DOD childcare center told me that she initially chose the program based on its cost. Her family falls into the highest bracket of its sliding tuition scale and pays $600 per month per child, below the national average and far below the average for the area where she lives. She was also drawn to its reliable coverage: the program operates year-round, Monday-Friday, from 6 am to 6 pm, and is only closed on federal holidays — unheard of in the world of early childhood care. But above and beyond these practical benefits, she’s come to appreciate the experience, skill, and communicativeness of the teachers. They keep portfolios of her children’s work, and discuss developmental milestones they’ve reached in regular conferences. One teacher is so beloved by the children that they “erupt into joyful shouting” when she arrives to the classroom.

我在国防部儿童照料中心与一个拥有两个小孩的家长交谈时告诉我,她最初根据费用选择了该计划。她的家庭成为其滑动的学费规模的最高级别,每个孩子每月支付600美元,低于全国平均水平,远低于她所居住地区的平均水平。 她也被宣传其可靠的报道所吸引:该计划全年开放,周一至周五,早上6点至下午6点,并且仅在联邦假期时关闭—在儿童照料领域闻所未闻。 但除了这些实际的好处之外,她还欣赏老师们的经验,技巧和交际能力。他们保留了小孩的工作组合,并讨论了他们在常规会议中达到的发展里程碑。 一位老师深受小孩们的喜爱,当她到达教室时,小孩们“爆发出快乐的喊叫”。

Teachers provide daily reports of children’s activities, which are developmentally appropriate and play-based, and the school has a nutritionist who coordinates meals with whole grains, vegetables, and healthy snacks like hummus.

教师每天都会提供有关儿童活动的报告,这些活动在发展方面是合适的,基于游戏,学校里有一名营养师,他们用全麦,蔬菜和例如鹰嘴豆泥的健康零食协调膳食。

If we can offer this high-quality, affordable program to military families, why can’t we offer it to all families? Aside from the benefits to her children’s well-being and her family’s finances, the parent notes:

如果我们能够为军人家庭提供这种高质量的,价格合理的计划,为什么我们不能将它提供给所有家庭呢? 除了对儿童的幸福和家庭财务的好处外,家长还指出:

It has drastically improved my mental health and marital health, which I didn’t foresee. I am no longer losing sleep or spending the same mental energy coordinating not just my own work schedule but my children’s care schedule also. I’m not constantly wondering whether I need to choose between my job and my family.

它大大改善了我的心理健康和婚姻健康,这是我没有预见到的。我不再失眠或花费同样的心理能量以配合不仅仅是我自己的工作时间表,还有儿童的照顾时间表。我不是经常想知道我是否需要在工作和家庭之间做出选择。

She also adds, if paid parental leave and universal childcare were available nationally, “I’d probably be pregnant with a third child.”

她还补充说,如果在全国范围内有带薪育儿假和全民托儿服务,“我可能会怀有第三个孩子。”

New York provides an interesting case study of what can happen to teachers’ working conditions — and children’s learning conditions — when early childhood programs are integrated into the public education system. Recently, the state-subsidized, free, universal pre-K system went from serving a tiny number of families, to being open to all families in New York. In the next few years, coverage will expand to include all of the city’s three year olds, rich or poor. Now, certified early childhood educators can share in the higher wages, benefits, and collective bargaining powers of unionized K-12 educators, which has led to an exodus from lower-paying private or nonprofit community centers to the public system. Program directors at lower-paying private schools have accused the Department of Education of “poaching” employees.

纽约提供了一个有趣的案例研究,说明了当幼儿教育计划融入公共教育系统时,教师的工作条件——儿童的学习条件会发生什么变化。最近,政府补贴的,免费的,普遍的学前教育系统从为少数家庭服务,到向纽约的所有家庭开放。 在接下来的几年里,覆盖范围将扩大到包括所有城市的三岁儿童,无论贫富。现在,经过认证的幼儿教育工作者可以分享和组合工会的K-12教育工作者相同的更高工资,福利和集体谈判能力,从而从低薪私人或非营利社区中心迁移到公共系统。低薪私立学校的项目负责人指责教育部“偷猎”员工。

What if this happened on a national level? I asked Nurri if and how America’s early childcare could improve. “It will take some backbone,” she said. “We need to ask more questions and not be afraid to defend ourselves respectfully and professionally without fear of losing our jobs. The more educators become aware of how powerful we are, the more we can band together and fight for fair and equal wages, emergent curriculums, and make access to receiving certifications and degrees more accessible to employees. We need to feel like our work matters to people and makes a difference.”

如果这发生在全国范围内怎么办? 我问Nurri美国早期儿童照料服务是否需要改善以及如何改善。 “这需要一些支柱,”她说。 “我们需要提出更多问题,不要害怕在尊重和专业方面为自己辩护,不必担心失去工作。意识到我们有多么强大的教育工作者越多,我们就越能团结一致并争取公平和平等的工资和紧急课程,并使员工更容易获得接受证书和学位。 我们需要觉得我们的工作对人们很重要并且有所作为。“

Banding together is key. Recently, when parents at one NYC childcare center advocated for an increase in wages for their children’s teachers, the center warned them that tuition would rise — an obvious attempt to divide the interests of the parents and teachers once they united against management.

联合在一起是关键。 最近,当一个纽约市儿童照料中心的家长们主张增加孩子教师的工资时,该中心警告他们学费会上升—这显然一旦他们团结起来反对管理就分裂父母和老师的利益的企图。

History reveals that paid parental leave and universal childcare will not be won on the basis of liberal appeals to fairness, equal opportunity for women, or demands for a more diverse elite — and that Sheryl Sandberg’s benefits do not trickle down to factory workers, garbage collectors, and the nannies and early childhood workers whose underpaid labor keeps our society running. Corporations may offer these benefits to attract highly educated and skilled workers, but they will not provide them for all workers at the expense of their bottom line. By definition, capitalism seeks to maximize profit, not the quality of life of workers.

历史表明,带薪育儿假和普世儿童照料不会在自由派诉求公平,女性机会均等或要求更多元化的精英的基础上被赢得——而且Sheryl Sandberg的好处不会渗透给工厂工人,垃圾收集者以及那些用过低的工资使得我们的社会保持运转的保姆和幼儿工人。公司可以提供这些好处来吸引受过高等教育的和技术熟练的工人,但他们不会以牺牲自己的利润为代价为所有工人提供这些福利。 根据定义,资本主义寻求最大化利润,而不是工人的生活质量。

But having a child is not just a personal choice — it’s a matter of reproducing the species. It is not an act of selfishness that one should pay for, but an act of optimism and investment in society. Until the United States can do what the rest of the world has done and commit its vast resources to child welfare, the ties that bind families together will be as tenuous as their employment status.

但生孩子不仅仅是一个个人选择—这是一个再生产这一物种的问题。 这不是人们应该为之自己付出成本的自私行为,而是一种乐观的表现和对社会的投资。 除非在美国能够做到世界其他地方所做的事情并将其巨大的资源用于儿童福利之前,将家庭联系在一起的关系将与其就业状况一样脆弱。

It doesn’t matter whether early childhood education would make the American economy stronger. What matters is that we need it. Parents need to know that their children are safe and happy while they’re at work, without spending a fortune. They deserve to enjoy their children, not lie awake at night worrying about how to afford them. And children deserve to spend their days in the company of peers, having fun, and discovering the world with the help of loving, well-compensated adults.

幼儿教育是否会使美国经济更加强大并不重要。 重要的是我们需要它。 家长们需要知道孩子们在家长工作时是安全的和快乐的,不用花钱。他们应该享受他们的小孩,而不是在晚上醒着担心如何负担他们。小孩们应该在同伴的陪伴下度过他们的日子,享受乐趣,并在充满爱心,得到良好补偿的成年人的帮助下发现这个世界。

Some liberals try to justify the expense of childcare as a social program that will save us money down the line. Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania notes on his website that early childhood education is “critical to our nation’s economic strength.” Invest in children today, exploit them as toothless workers with no collective bargaining tomorrow.

一些自由主义者试图用将会节省金钱作为对儿童保育费用作为一项社会项目的合理化。宾夕法尼亚州的参议员Bob Casey在他的网站上指出,幼儿教育“对我们国家的经济实力至关重要。”今天投资于儿童,将他们剥削为明天不会进行集体谈判的无牙工人。

This is a mistake. Evidence abounds that redistribution is a far more effective way of reducing poverty and improving academic outcomes for children from low-income families than childhood education.

这是个错误。 有证据表明,与儿童教育相比,再分配是减少贫困和改善低收入家庭儿童的学业成果的一种更有效的方法。

And when education is seen as compensatory — when it is directed at poor children and intended to make up for the inadequacies of a child’s background — it becomes a thing that we do to children, which must be quantified, rather than a lifelong process that they get to be part of. These types of programs teach children that they are beneficiaries, not citizens, and they have no place in a democracy.

当教育被认为是补偿性的—当它针对贫困儿童并且旨在弥补儿童背景的不足时—我们对儿童做了一件必须被量化的事情,而不是他们成为其中一部分的终身过程。 这些类型的项目教育儿童们是受益者,而不是公民,儿童们在民主中没有地位。

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/a-blueprint-for-universal-childhood

It’s Okay to Have Children(生小孩是没问题的)

写在前面:资本主义一边一毛不拔导致广大想生小孩的穷人生不起小孩,一边又无耻的以没有小孩为由攻击性少数,真是恶心。想生的生不起,不想生的被逼着生,一边是卖不出去的鬼城,一边是住不起房的人民,被扭曲的社会。

Instead of challenging the pressures that capitalism puts on child-rearing, liberals surrender to it.

自由主义者没有挑战资本主义对抚养儿童造成的压力,而是向它投降了。

Having kids is bad for the environment.

生小孩对环境有害。

Or is it the deficit? Or wait, no, it’s selfish because the world has gone to hell. Whichever one you choose, the important thing to remember is that, according to a growing number of liberals, reproducing the species is the equivalent of buying a McMansion and running the A/C with all the windows open.

或者是亏损? 或者等等,不,这是自私的,因为这个世界已经成为地狱了。无论你选择哪一个,重要的是要记住,根据越来越多的自由主义者,再生产这一物种相当于购买奢华豪宅并在所有窗户打开的情况下运行空调。

Or maybe having babies is more like, say, pouring the concrete on an illegal Israeli settlement? “The egoism of child-bearing is like the egoism of colonizing a country,” says the narrator of Sheila Heti’s critically acclaimed novel Motherhood. “How assaulted I feel when I hear that a person has had three children, four, five, more. . . . It feels greedy, overbearing, rude.”

或者,也许生下婴儿更像是将混凝土倒在非法的以色列定居点上? “生育的利己主义就像殖民一个国家的利己主义一样,”Sheila Heti的广受好评的小说“母亲”的叙述者说道。 “当我听说一个人有三个孩子,四个,五个,甚至更多时,我感觉是被侮辱…….感觉贪婪,咄咄逼人,粗鲁。“

In the Guardian alone, the past two years have seen headlines such as “Would you give up having children to save the planet? Meet the couples who have”; “Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children”; “‘It’s the breaking of a taboo’: the parents who regret having children,” “Want to save your marriage? Don’t have kids.” In the New York Times, “No Children Because of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It.” At Business Insider, “7 reasons people shouldn’t have children, according to science.” And this new logic is quickly making its way through liberal culture writ large: “Feminist funnywoman Caitlin Moran says the planet doesn’t need your babies.

仅在卫报中,过去两年中就出现了诸如“你会放弃生小孩以拯救地球吗? 看看那些这么做的家庭“; “想要反抗气候变化? 少生小孩“; “’这是打破禁忌’:后悔生小孩的父母,”“想要挽救你的婚姻? 别生小孩。“在纽约时报,”因气候变化而不要小孩? 一些人正在考虑它。“在商业内幕”,根据科学,人们不应该生小孩的7个理由。“这种新的逻辑正在迅速通过自由主义文化变大:”女权主义者滑稽女人Caitlin Moran 说这个星球不需要你的宝宝。“

It’s hard not to get the message. Yet it seems to be falling on deaf ears.

很难不看到相关消息。 但它似乎被置若罔闻。

According to a recent CDC study, the gap between the number of children American women want to have and the number they’re likely to have “has risen to the highest level in forty years.” The number of women who want a child in the future has only increased since 2002. And the only age group that’s seen a slight uptick in fertility rates are women between forty and forty-four.

根据美国疾病预防控制中心最近的一项研究,美国女性想要拥有的小孩数量与她们可能实际拥有的孩子数量之间的差距“已经上升到四十年来的最高水平。” 自2002年以来,未来想要有小孩的女性数量一直在增长。而同时生育率略有上升的唯一年龄组是四十岁至四十四岁的女性。

“Americans are improving their ability to avoid unwanted pregnancies far faster than they are improving the ability to achieve desired pregnancy,” as the New York Times put it. With the most expensive health care in the world (and tens of millions still uninsured), decades of stagnant wages, and skyrocketing education and housing costs, having kids has never been so expensive. The Department of Agriculture estimates that it’ll cost an average of $233,000 to raise a child born in 2015 through her seventeenth birthday — and that doesn’t even include college tuition, another uniquely American exorbitance. More and more, bringing a child into the world is a dream many simply can’t afford.

“正如”纽约时报“所说,”美国人正在提高的他们避免意外怀孕的能力远远超过他们提高实现想要的怀孕的能力“。由于世界上最昂贵的医疗保险(数千万人仍然没有保险),几十年停滞的工资,以及暴涨的教育和住房成本,生小孩从未变得如此昂贵。 农业部估计,在2015年养育一名孩子到她的17岁生日,平均花费为233,000美元—这甚至不包括大学学费,这是另一种独特的美国式高等教育。越来越多的人发现带一个小孩进入这个世界是一个许多人根本无法承担的梦想。

It’s here in this misanthropic anti-natalism that liberalism finds an ally in conservatism. The Brookings Institute put deferring parenthood as one of their “Three Simple Rules Poor Teens Should Follow to Join the Middle Class.” It’s a line no different than what we’ve heard from conservatives like George Will for decades now: you’re poor because of the immoral choices you’ve made.

正是在这种讨厌人类的反生育主义中,自由主义在保守主义中找到了盟友。 布鲁金斯学会把延迟父母身份作为他们的“贫困青少年应该遵循以加入中产阶级的三个简单规则”之一。这与我们几十年来从像George Will这样的保守派所听到的没有什么不同:你穷是因为你做出的不道德的选择。

It recalls the unabashedly racist mid-1990s campaign when both Republicans and the Clinton administration joined together to denounce the scourge of “unwed teen mothers” as a mortal threat to children’s health and family values — “a bedrock issue of character and personal responsibility,” as Clinton’s own 1994 proposal put it. At the time, another set of Democrats went even further and attempted to include a provision that denied all food stamp benefits and Aid to Families with Dependent Children to unwed mothers (and their children) under age twenty-one.

它让我们回忆起1990s中期的一场毫不掩饰的种族主义运动,当时共和党和克林顿政府联合起来谴责“未婚青少年母亲”的祸害,声称这是对儿童健康和家庭价值观的致命威胁—“一个关于性格和个人责任的基石问题”,正如克林顿自己在1994年提出的那样。当时,另一组民主党人甚至走得更远,并试图将一项禁止所有食品券福利和援助有需要抚养的儿童的家庭的条款包括未满21岁的未婚母亲(及其子女)。

Despite the fearmongering over these supposedly shameful and selfish young mothers, these women were in fact making the best decisions for their families. Dr Arline T. Geronimus has argued that, contra both conservative and liberal shaming of “poor teen moms,” the choice of low-income women to have children at a young age represents a logical decision when faced with the constraints of being poor in America:

尽管有着对这些被认为是可耻的和自私的年轻母亲的恐惧,但这些女性实际上是为了家人做出最好的决定。 Arline T. Geronimus博士认为,和对“贫穷的青少年妈妈”的保守主义和自由主义羞辱相反的是,低收入女性选择在年轻时生育小孩,在面对成为美国穷人之后所遇到的限制时,是一个合乎逻辑的决定。:

If she finds employment, the wages and benefits she can command may not offset the costs of being a working mother. She cannot expect maternity leave; nor is accessible or affordable day care available that would free her from reliance on kin for childcare once she does return to work . . . her greatest chance of long-term labor force attachment will be if her children’s pre-school years coincide with her years of peak access to social and practical support provided by relatively healthy kin.

如果她找到工作,她所能获得的工资和补贴可能无法抵消作为工作母亲的成本。 她不能指望产假; 并且无法获得负担得起的一旦她重返工作岗位就可以帮她从对亲属的依赖中摆脱出来的日间儿童照料….. 她小孩的学前时期是她最需要社会的和来自亲属的实际的支持的时期。(后面这段是意译的,直译意思太别扭)

With this enormous gap between the desires of women and the grueling realities of being a working-class mother in America, what could possibly explain so many liberals’ strange new anti-natalism?

由于女性的愿望与在美国成为工人阶级母亲的艰苦现实之间存在巨大差距,有什么能够解释这么多自由主义者的奇怪的新反生育主义?

Even in France, long known for their generous natalist welfare state, their new thirty-five-year-old minister for gender equality is signaling a willingness to rewrite commitments to mothers down to threadbare American levels. “I always notice the energy and the volunteerism that exist in America,” France’s Marlène Schiappa recently told the New Yorker. “Regarding the place of women, the reflex in France is to say, ‘What’s the state going to do for me?’” Quelle horreur!

即使在长期以其慷慨的生育福利国家闻名的法国,他们的新的三十五岁的性别平等部长也表示愿意重写对母亲的承诺,将其降到美国的水平。 “我总是注意到美国存在的能量和志愿精神,”法国的MarlèneSchiappa最近告诉纽约客。 “关于女性的地位,法国的反应就是说,’国家要为我做什么?’”这真恐怖!

Diminished horizons, lowered expectations, and doing more with less — this is the twenty-first-century liberal program for the toiling masses. In other words, it’s a continuation of liberalism’s forty-year program of austerity, a result of its total abandonment of the trade union movement. A decent living, a home of your own, and a comfy retirement — a meager share in our society’s immense collective wealth — are all long-abandoned promises. Now, apparently, so is having kids.

减少视野,降低期望,用更少的钱做更多的事— 这是二十一世纪的为劳苦大众设计的自由主义计划。换句话说,这是自由主义四十年紧缩计划的延续,这是其彻底放弃工会运动的结果。一个体面的生活,一个属于你自己的家,一个舒适的退休生活—一份我们社会中的巨大的集体财富中的微薄份额—都是长期被抛弃的承诺。现在,显然,生小孩也是如此。

More and more, liberalism finds itself unable to imagine any way out of the hell of life on the margins in 2018. Instead, they’ve begun to see their role as something like moral sentinels: piously observing and managing the collapse. It’s a liberal-left that no longer believes it can change the world and instead, in the words of Adolph Reed, finds its most important mission in simply “bearing witness to suffering.” They either believe a mass political challenge to capital and climate collapse is impossible, or simply undesirable. Either way, their answer is the same — not a revived labor movement but a new moralism of austerity and self-sacrifice.

自由主义越来越多地发现自己无法想象在2018年边缘人群摆脱地狱生活的任何出路。相反,他们开始将自己的角色视为道德哨兵:虔诚地观察和管理崩溃。 这是一个自由主义的左派,他不再相信它可以改变世界,相反的是,用Adolph Reed的话来说,发现其最重要的任务就是“见证痛苦。”他们要么相信对资本和气候崩溃的大规模政治挑战是不可能的,或者只是不想要的。无论哪种方式,他们的答案都是一样的 —不是复兴工人运动,而是紧缩和自我牺牲的新道德主义。

That inevitably means asking women to adapt to the logic of raising children under the dictates of the market instead of challenging those strictures. “Lean In” and call it victory.

这不可避免地意味着要求女性适应在市场独裁下抚养小孩的逻辑,而不是挑战那些刁难。“屈服它”并称这为胜利。

It’s an attitude that would have bewildered men and women alike in East Germany. Women in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had both a robust welfare state to help them raise children — free daycare started just weeks after a child’s birth and included breakfast and lunch — as well as a much higher workforce participation rate. Abortion was legalized in 1972, years before West Germany. For women in the East, divorce too was quick, easy, and cost nothing. They were also more likely to feel confident in their physical appearance and reported higher rates of sexual satisfaction than their cousins in the West. For all its political authoritarianism, the ability to raise kids in the GDR didn’t hinge on the ability to keep a nuclear family together.

这种态度让东德的男人和女人都感到困惑。 德意志民主共和国(GDR)的女性有一个强大的福利国家来帮助她们抚养孩子—在孩子出生后几周开始提供免费日间照料服务,包括早餐和午餐—以及更高的劳动力参与率。 堕胎在1972年合法化,比西德早几年。对于东德女性来说,离婚既快捷又简单,而且不需要任何费用。她们也更可能对自己的外貌充满信心,并且报告显示性满意度高于她们在西方的堂兄妹。对于其所有政治威权主义而言,在德意志民主共和国抚养子女的能力并不取决于将核心家庭聚集在一起的能力。

Now, in a unified Germany, daycare openings are expensive and competitive, with a national shortage of 120,000 nursery workers — all low-paid work, of course. In the East, birth rates plunged immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet today, women in the eastern half of the country still have children significantly younger than their western sisters and boast a smaller pay gap between men — in the western half of the country, that gap is comparable to ours in the United States.

现在,在一个统一的德国,日间照料是昂贵的和竞争激烈的,全国短缺12万名托儿工人—当然,所有低薪工作都是如此。在东部,柏林墙倒塌后,出生率立即暴跌。 然而今天,该国东部地区的女性仍在比西部姐妹年轻得多时生小孩,并且与男性之间的薪酬差距更小—在该国西半部,这一差距与我们在美国的差距相当。

Today, the only nations that come close to East Germany’s commitment to providing women this kind of freedom are the countries where the organized working classes have made successful incursions against capitalism’s imperatives. Dutch women — not “Lean In” American women — are, according to studies, the happiest in the world. And hardly any of them work full time. Thanks to trade union mobilization, their working class won the ability to prioritize their freedom over any “duty” to the job market or husbands.

今天,接近东德致力于为女性提供的这种自由的唯一国家是有组织的工人阶级成功对抗了资本主义的关键的国家。根据研究,荷兰女性—不是“屈服它”的美国女性—是世界上最幸福的女性。几乎没有任何一个人全职工作。 由于工会动员,她们的工人阶级赢得了将自由优先于对工作市场或丈夫的任何“义务”的能力。

Here, then, we have the root of liberalism’s newfound anti-natalism — the very logic of capital. Capitalism needs new workers and consumers; it just doesn’t want to pay for their upbringing. Those costs, in the logic of capital, should be passed off onto the individual and the household.

在这里,我们拥有自由主义新发现的反生育主义的根源—资本的逻辑。资本主义需要新的工人和消费者; 它只是不想为他们的增长付出代价。在资本逻辑中,这些成本应该被转嫁给个人和家庭。

Which is why today in the United States, the FBI and ICE are called in to prevent baby formula theft — locking it behind glass cases in the grocery store is preferable to simply socializing it and distributing it for free. Instead of the state providing collectively for the upbringing of children, our police literally chase down biological fathers to collect child support. In this view, it’s better to coerce a nuclear family into staying together than for the state to collectively provide childcare, education, and health care services to parents and their children. It’s shotgun marriage as public policy.

这就是为什么今天在美国,FBI和ICE被要求防止婴儿配方奶粉被盗—将它锁在杂货店的玻璃柜后面,比简单的社会化和免费分发它更可取。我们的警察实际上是追捕亲生父亲以收集儿童抚养费,而不是政府集体提供儿童抚养。在这种观点中,最好是强迫核心家庭待在一起,而不是政府集体为父母及其小孩提供儿童照料,教育和医疗保障服务。 它瞄准婚姻作为公共政策。

We’ve gone from the conservative postwar view of women as dutiful baby-factories, to telling them that they should delay pregnancy as long as it takes for them to get a career off the ground and build their brand — possibly forever. While reproductive medicine is currently making enormous strides, in vitro fertilization (IVF), ovulation-enhancing medicines, egg storage, and artificial insemination are prohibitively expensive. Without a truly universal health care system, these scientific advances will always be reserved for the affluent.

我们已经从保守的把女性当作孝顺的婴儿工厂的战后观点,变成告诉她们应该延迟怀孕,只要他们能够实现职业生涯并建立自己的品牌—这可能永远也不会实现。 虽然生殖医学目前正在取得巨大进步,但体外受精(IVF),促排卵药物,卵子储存和人工授精都非常昂贵。如果没有一个真正普适的医疗保障系统,这些科学进步将总是被留给富人。

Asking women to wait to have kids until they have launched a career and saved up enough money is just the obverse of commanding women to stay at home and make babies for their husbands. Both ask women to defer not to their desires, but to an all-powerful abstraction: the market, the environment, patriarchy, or even a twisted faux feminism.

要求女性等到直到她们开始了职业生涯并节省了足够的钱才能生小孩,这只是和要求女性留在家里为丈夫生孩子互为镜像。两者都要求女性不要追求自己的愿望,而是服从一种全能的抽象:市场,环境,父权制,甚至是扭曲的人造女权主义。

It’s important for those of us in the professional classes to remember that, for the vast majority of working people, the labor market is not a potential site of self-realization and never will be. Instead, it’s a brutal arena where you’re forced to trade a third of your life in order to survive. In 2018, a “do what you love” career is far out of reach for all but the affluent. What the professional classes will never understand — both conservatives who shame young single mothers or liberals who demand that women defer parenthood until they can afford Baby Bjorn — is just how rewarding child-rearing is for those who are under no delusions that capitalism will ever provide validation.

对于我们这些处在专业阶级的人来说,重要的是要记住,对于绝大多数工人来说,劳动力市场不是一个进行自我实现的潜在场所,而且永远不会。相反,它是一个暴虐的竞技场,你为了生存而被迫交易你生命的三分之一。在2018年,除了富豪之外,所有人都无法实现“做你喜欢做的事”。专业阶级永远无法理解—保守派羞辱年轻的单身母亲或自由主义者要求女性推迟父母身份直到她们能够负担得起养育小孩—这只是在鼓励这种想法:儿童抚养只适合那些没有幻想资本主义会提供帮助的人。

How can we ever win a program that socializes the costs of bringing children into the world if so many liberals still see the desire to have kids as something like a timeshare in Vegas — a costly, foolish, and tacky investment mostly for the rubes? Instead of parroting this gross and misanthropic politics, we should demand that capital stop shirking off the costs of childhood onto workers and instead socialize them — free Finnish baby boxes and a Medicare for All program that covers not only all prenatal and pediatric care, but that makes IVF a right and not a luxury. A program that hires and trains hundreds of thousands to work in high-quality state day cares. The only way we’re going to get any of this is through a revived labor movement — not creepy (and inevitably racist) “population control” thinkpieces.

如果有这么多自由主义者仍然把想要小孩的愿望看做是像拉斯维加斯的分时度假一样的事,那么我们怎么能够赢得一个社会化将孩子带入世界的成本的计划—这对于无知者们来说是一项昂贵,愚蠢和俗气的投资?与重复这个恶心的和敌视人类的政策相反,我们应该要求资本停止将照顾儿童的成本转移到工人身上—免费的芬兰婴儿用品盒和全民医保计划不仅涵盖了所有产前和儿科护理,而且还使IVF成为人权而非奢侈品。 这项计划雇用并培训数十万人在高质量的国立日间照料机构中工作。我们要做到这一点的唯一方法是通过复兴劳工运动—而不是令人毛骨悚然的(并且不可避免地是种族主义)的“人口控制”思想。

Why shouldn’t a twenty-something be able to have a kid and still have the freedom to embark on a career? Why shouldn’t a young single mother be able to go to college while leaving her child safely in the care of the state? And why should she need to find or “keep” a relationship with a man just to be able to provide for her kids?

为什么一个二十几岁的人不能拥有一个小孩并且仍然可以自由地开始职业生涯? 为什么一个年轻的单身母亲不能上大学,同时让孩子安全地被政府照顾? 为什么她需要找到或“保持”与一个男人的关系才能为她的孩子提供服务?

A true freedom for women would mean the ability to walk away from the false choice of “babies, education, or career?” altogether. Right now, however, only the affluent can truly have it all.

真正的女性自由意味着能够完全摆脱“婴儿,教育或职业?”的错误选择。 然而,现在只有富豪才能真正拥有这一切。

That’s anything but just.

这不公正。

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/its-okay-to-have-children

A hero for their class, not for ours(一个他们阶级的英雄,不是我们的)

SINCE ARIZONA Sen. John McCain’s death, the American political establishment has staged a succession of patriotic and militarist commemorations of his life that implicitly attack the billionaire bigot in the White House, Donald Trump, who was told not to attend any of them.

自从亚利桑那州参议员约翰麦凯恩去世以来,美国的政治机构已经举行了一系列爱国主义和军国主义的生涯纪念活动,这些活动暗中攻击了白宫里的亿万富翁流氓,唐纳德特朗普,他被告知不要加入他们中的任何一个。

McCain planned these events in collaboration with other leaders of both parties to send a political message.

麦凯恩与两个政党的其他领导人合作策划了这些活动,以发出政治信息。

Their goal was to not only to rebuke Trump, but to celebrate the old order in Washington — the so-called “Washington consensus,” where the U.S. government presided over neoliberal globalization through diplomacy and a system of alliances, while reserving the right to use unilateral force against “rogue states” that buck American dictates.

他们的目标不仅是要谴责特朗普,而且要庆祝华盛顿的旧秩序 – 即所谓的“华盛顿共识”,美国政府通过外交和联盟制度主导新自由主义全球化,同时保留对那些反对美国的独裁的“流氓国家”使用单方面力量的权利。

Trump’s hard-right politics, economic nationalism, attacks on the FBI and CIA, and undermining of various U.S. alliances are a challenge to this consensus. His slogan of “Making America Great Again” by putting “America First” has disrupted political and trade relations with almost every state in the world, whether or not they are a U.S. ally or enemy.

特朗普的硬右翼政治,经济民族主义,对联邦调查局和中央情报局的攻击,以及对各种美国的联盟的破坏都是对这一共识的挑战。 他的口号“让美国再次伟大”通过“把美国放到第一位”,已经破坏了与世界上几乎每个国家的政治和贸易关系,无论他们是否是美国的盟友或敌人。

Thus, at each ceremony for McCain, from Arizona to Washington, D.C., a Who’s Who of ruling-class politicians, from Barack Obama to George W. Bush, took the opportunity to celebrate McCain as a hero willing to buck his own party, take supposedly principled positions and stand up to Trump.

因此,在每一个为了纪念麦凯恩而举行的仪式上,从亚利桑那州到华盛顿特区,统治阶级政客的名人堂,从巴拉克奥巴马到乔治W.布什,都借此机会赞美麦凯恩,作为一个愿意为自己的政党效力的英雄, 据称是有原则的立场,并与特朗普敌对。

At the Washington commemoration, Obama declared, in an obvious reference to Trump: “So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult, in phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It’s a politics that pretends to be brave, but in fact is born of fear. John called us to be bigger than that. He called us to be better than that.”

在华盛顿纪念活动中,奥巴马明确提到了特朗普:“我们的政治,我们的公共生活,我们的公共话语,看起来都很小,吝啬和琐碎,贩卖轰炸和侮辱,虚假的争议和制造的愤怒。 这是一种假装勇敢,但实际上是出于恐惧的政治。 约翰呼吁我们比那更大。 他呼吁我们做得更好。“

Many liberal commentators followed this lead, seeing the funeral tour as the long-awaited birth of bipartisan opposition to Trump. Writing in the New Yorker, Susan Glasser even called it “a meeting of the Resistance, under vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows.”

许多自由派评论家都遵循这一主张,将葬礼看作期待已久的两党联合反对特朗普的诞生。 Susan Glasser在“纽约客”中写道,甚至称其为“一场抵抗运动的会议,在拱形天花板和彩色玻璃窗下。”

But McCain’s political positions and legacy are the opposite of everything claimed by his eulogists, as Mehdi Hassan (at the Intercept), Tom Bramble (for Red Flag and Socialist Worker) and Branko Marcetic (at Jacobin) have amply documented. Certainly, they offer no basis for galvanizing the resistance to Trump.

但麦凯恩的政治立场和遗产与他的赞颂者所声称的一切相反,正如Mehdi Hassan(在Intercept),Tom Bramble(在Red Flag 和 Socialist Worker)和Branko Marcetic(在Jacobin)的充分记录。 当然,他们没有提供激励抵抗特朗普的基础。


DESPITE THE many tributes to his military service, McCain was no war hero, but a war criminal. He started his career bombing the people of Vietnam and followed it up as a mouthpiece for the Pentagon in the Senate, ramming through massive defense expenditures and supporting every U.S. military operation, right up through Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen today.

尽管许多人对他的服兵役表示敬意,麦凯恩不是战争英雄,而是战争罪犯。 他的职业生涯开始于轰炸越南人民,并随后成为五角大楼在参议院的喉舌,通过大规模的国防开支,支持美国的每一次军事行动,直到阿富汗,伊拉克和今天的也门。

He infamously bastardized a Beach Boys song, turning it into a call for the U.S. to bomb Iran. And he despised any and all opponents of the U.S. military machine, going so far as to call Medea Benjamin and Code Pink activists “low life scum” for protesting war criminal Henry Kissinger.

他臭名昭著的污染了海滩男孩这首歌曲,将其变成了美国轰炸伊朗的号召。而且他鄙视所有反对美国军事机器的人,甚至称抗议战争罪犯亨利基辛格的Medea Benjamin和Code Pink活动者为“低等败类”。

McCain was also a devoted representative of capital and enemy of workers in the Senate. Like other politicians before him, he got caught fleecing working-class people who lost their retirement savings when the savings-and-loan industry collapsed in the 1980s.

麦凯恩也是参议院里的资本和工人的敌人的忠实代表。与他之前的其他政治家一样,他在1980s时储蓄和贷款业崩溃时,被发现搜刮了那些失去退休储蓄的工人阶级人民。

McCain survived this scandal, but he never stopped serving the bosses, ending his career by supporting Trump’s tax cut for the rich. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce gave him an 80 percent grade on his voting record, while the AFL-CIO ranked him at 16 percent over his Senate career.

麦凯恩在这场丑闻中幸免于难,但他从未停止为老板服务,通过支持特朗普对富人的减税来结束他的职业生涯。 不出所料,美国商会在他的投票记录中给了他80%的评分,而AFL-CIO对他的参议院职业生涯评分为16%。

Like most fellow Republicans, McCain had a long history of bigoted statements and positions. He repeatedly used the racist term “gooks” to describe Vietnamese, opposed divestment and sanctions against apartheid South Africa, voted against Martin Luther King Day becoming a national holiday, supported a ban on abortion and verbally unleashed his temper on his own wife in the crudest misogynist language imaginable.

像大多数共和党人一样,麦凯恩有着悠久的狂信的声明和立场。 他多次用种族主义术语“gooks”来描述越南人,反对撤资和对种族隔离的南非进行制裁,投票反对马丁路德金日成为国定假日,支持禁止堕胎,并口头上用可以想象的厌恶女性的语言对他自己的妻子发脾气。

Even McCain’s opposition to Trump is exaggerated. Despite his sometimes sharp disagreements with Trump, McCain is responsible for helping open the way for him when he pandered to the Republican right by selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008.

甚至麦凯恩对特朗普的反对也被夸大了。 尽管他与特朗普有时会产生尖锐的分歧,但麦凯恩在2008年选择Sarah Palin作为他的竞选搭档时,在帮助特朗普开道进入共和党右翼内是有责任的。

And even though McCain and Trump traded shots over the past two years, McCain voted for Trump-supported legislation 83 percent of the time in the Senate.

即使麦凯恩和特朗普在过去两年中相互敌对,麦凯恩在参议院的83%的时间里都投票支持特朗普支持的立法。

His most famous moment of actual opposition to the Trump regime was his vote that doomed Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in July 2017. But he undermined this action with his support for a provision in last year’s tax-cut legislation that further gutted Obamacare by ending the individual mandate without any mechanism to replace it.

他最有名的地反对特朗普政权的那一刻是他的投票毁灭了共和党人在2017年7月废除“可负担医疗法案”的企图。但他支持去年减税立法中的一项规定,通过结束个人授权而没有任何机制来取代它进一步扼杀了奥巴马保障,从而破坏了这一行动。


BACK IN 2008, when McCain ran for president against Barack Obama, his reactionary record led liberal Democrats and many on the left to describe him as the greatest threat to peace, justice and democracy yet.

回到2008年,当麦凯恩与巴拉克•奥巴马竞争总统时,他的保守记录导致自由派民主党人和左派将他描述为对和平,正义和民主的最大威胁。

But all that has been flushed down the memory hole in the many tributes to him since his death.

但自从他去世以来,许多向他致敬的人的记忆中所有这一切都被冲刷掉了。

The Democratic and Republican Party establishments have more in common than differences, and they both defend a wretched status quo. For readers of this website, it’s not surprising when McCain is praised by the likes of Obama, Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer.

民主党和共和党的机构有更多的共同而不是不同,它们都捍卫了一种悲惨的现状。 对于本网站的读者来说,麦凯恩受到奥巴马,乔拜登或Chuck Schumer等人的称赞并不奇怪。

But what was shocking was to read statements from socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that echoed the same themes. Sanders, the senator from Vermont and 2016 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, called McCain “an American hero, a man of decency and a friend of mine,” while Ocasio-Cortez, the surprise primary winner for a congressional seat from New York City, tweeted praise for his legacy as “an unparalleled example of human decency and American service” and for his friendship with the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy.

但令人震惊的是阅读社会主义者伯尼·桑德斯和Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez的声明,这些声明呼应了同样的主题。来自佛蒙特州的参议员和2016年民主党总统候选人候选人桑德斯称麦凯恩是“一个美国英雄,一个体面的人和我的朋友之一”,而Ocasio-Cortez,纽约市国会席位的令人惊讶的初选赢家,在推特上称赞他的遗产是“人类尊严和美国服务的无与伦比的榜样”以及他与已故民主党参议员特德肯尼迪的友谊。

Not only are these statements praising McCain groundless, but they do nothing to challenge — as socialists must — the patriotism and militarism that is being celebrated as a “lesser evil” to Trump among liberals and the Democratic Party.

这些声明不仅在毫无根据的赞扬麦凯恩,而且他们没有采取任何措施来挑战—作为社会主义者所必须的—爱国主义和军国主义在自由主义者和民主党中被称为相对于特朗普的“较小的邪恶”。

Was this simply a matter of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez issuing a standard statement on the death of another politician? In a critical article in The Call, Joe Allen argues that the root of their mistake was falling into adoption of ritual expressions of condolence.

这只是桑德斯和Ocasio-Cortez关于另一位政治家死亡的标准声明吗? 在The Call中的一篇重要文章中,Joe Allen争论说他们错误的根源在于陷入了对哀悼的仪式性表达中。

By contrast, journalist Arun Gupta argues that their praise for McCain flows from their participation in the Democratic Party, where “the gravitational force of the media, lobbyists and Democratic Party honchos will pull them ever closer to elites.”

相比之下,记者Arun Gupta认为,他们对麦凯恩的赞扬源于他们参与民主党的活动,“媒体的引力,游说者和民主党的荣誉将把他们推向更接近精英”。

Gupta makes the case that there is a logic of accommodation at work: “In all likelihood, as soon as Ocasio-Cortez won, Sanders and other political insiders told her, “You must ‘moderate’ to win. If you don’t, elites will destroy you. You will never get elected to Congress.”

Gupta认为工作中存在着适应性逻辑:“很有可能,一旦Ocasio-Cortez获胜,桑德斯和其他政治内部人士告诉她,”你必须’温和’才能获胜。 如果你不这样做,精英们会摧毁你。 你永远不会被选入国会。“


THE LIBERAL establishment denounced McCain as the very incarnation of the “greater evil” in 2008. Now he is seen as an ally in defending the good old days of Washington bipartisanship against Trump.

自由派在2008年谴责麦凯恩是“更大的邪恶”的化身。现在,他被视为华盛顿两党同盟对抗特朗普,捍卫美好旧日时光的盟友。

Nothing could be worse for the resistance to Trump than to accept the idea that the alternative to him and his right-wing agenda is the bipartisan U.S. political establishment and its two capitalist parties.

对抵抗特朗普来说,没有什么比选择两党美国政治机构及其两个资本主义政党的观点更糟糕,除了接受他和他的右翼议程之外。

Both the Republicans and Democrats are responsible for precipitating the rise of Trump and Trumpism. Their “Washington consensus” immiserated workers at home and abroad, deepened institutionalized oppression, led the U.S. into unending wars for global domination and drove the world economy into the Great Recession.

共和党人和民主党人都对促成特朗普和特朗普主义的崛起负有责任。 他们的“华盛顿共识”使国内外的工人受到伤害,加剧了制度化的压迫,导致美国陷入无休止的全球统治战争中,并推动世界经济陷入大衰退。

Trump and the new right — encouraged by McCain when he selected Palin as his running mate — took advantage of the real crises in our world to put forward reactionary solutions. Trump was able to win because the Democrats ran the very embodiment of the neoliberal status quo against him: Hillary “America is already great” Clinton.

特朗普和新右派—被麦凯恩选择佩林作为竞选伙伴所鼓舞—利用我们世界真正的危机来提出保守的解决方案。特朗普之所以能够获胜,是因为民主党人用可见的新自由主义现状反对他:希拉里“美国已经很伟大了”克林顿。

Now, watching the commemorations for McCain, there was no question that members of both parties wanted to use the flag-waving to rally support for a different brand of nationalism to Trump’s. As The New York Times described it: “The two-and-a-half-hour ceremony blended the majesty of the officially designated national house of prayer, the discipline of his cherished Naval Academy and the unabashed, unapologetic patriotism of a Fourth of July fireworks display.”

现在,看看为麦凯恩举办的纪念活动,毫无疑问两党成员都希望利用这一旗帜来支持和特朗普的品牌所不同的民族主义品牌。正如纽约时报所描述的那样:“两个半小时的仪式融合了官方指定的国家祈祷殿堂的威严,他珍视的海军学院的纪律以及七月四日烟火表演中展现的毫不掩饰的,毫无歉意的爱国主义精神。 ”

Daughter Megan McCain took advantage of this atmosphere to resuscitate Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan: “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”

他的女儿梅根麦凯恩利用这种气氛来复苏希拉里克林顿的竞选口号:“约翰麦凯恩的美国没有必要再次变得伟大,因为美国总是伟大的。”

Socialists ask: For whom has America ever been great? Certainly, it has been a great ride for the rulers of America, from the slaveholders and architects of Native genocide who founded the nation to today’s robber barons like Jeff Bezos.

社会主义者问:谁的美国已经很伟大了? 当然,对于美国的统治者们来说,这是一个伟大的旅程,从建立国家时对原住民的种族灭绝的奴隶主和建筑师到今天像杰夫贝佐斯这样的强盗贵族。

But the same can’t be said for the exploited workers and oppressed peoples who have paid for this wealth in blood, sweat and tears. Even more obviously, America has never been great for the countries it has occupied and bombed, beginning with the Philippines in 1898 and extending to “war on terror” of the 21st century.

但对于那些以血,汗和眼泪为这笔财富付出代价的被剥削的工人和被压迫的人民来说,情况并非如此。更为明显的是,从1898年的菲律宾开始到21世纪的“反恐战争”,对于那些被它所占领和轰炸的国家来说,美国从未伟大过。

As in every country, the American ruling class has always used patriotism to bind workers and the oppressed to them — to encourage the idea that U.S. workers have more in common with their bosses and political leaders than with the people of countries that are deemed to be enemies of America.

和其他所有国家一样,美国的统治阶级一直利用爱国主义将工人和压迫他们或她们的人捆绑在一起—鼓励这种观点,即美国工人与他们的老板和政治领袖有更多共同点而不是那些被认为是美国的敌人的国家的人民。


THUS, AT the heart of socialism is internationalism: the idea that the international working class has a common interest of opposing their own rulers in every country.

因此,社会主义的核心是国际主义:一个这样的观点,即国际工人阶级拥有一个共同利益:在每个国家反对他们或她们自己的统治者。

For Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez to call McCain “an American hero” and praise his “American service” compromises this fundamental cornerstone of socialism.

桑德斯和Ocasio-Cortez称麦凯恩为“美国英雄”并称赞他的“美国服务”破坏了这一社会主义的基本基石。

The rejection of nationalist fealty is all the more important given the intensifying inter-imperial rivalries taking place today — most importantly with China, but also with Russia and regional powers like Iran.

鉴于今天发生的帝国主义之间的激烈争斗—最重要的是与中国的争斗,以及与俄罗斯和像伊朗这样的地区大国的争斗,拒绝民族主义崇拜更加重要。

Trump has obviously used nationalism to whip up support for his confrontations with those powers, but the party leaders of both the Democrats and Republicans do exactly the same. McCain made an art of that during his decades of beating the drums of war, and far from dissenting, the Democratic Party has always been a devoted servant of U.S. imperialism.

特朗普显然煽动民族主义来发动支持他与这些大国的对抗,但民主党和共和党的党派领导人也是这么做的。 麦凯恩在几十年中创造了一种打响战鼓的艺术,并且离异议很远,民主党一直是美国帝国主义的忠实仆人。

Today, Trump often finds more support for his policies toward China among Democrats than Republicans.

今天,特朗普经常发现民主党人对他对中国的政策的支持度比共和党人更高。

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, echoed Trump’s talking points in praising the administration’s imposition of new tariffs: “China takes total advantage of the United States. They steal our intellectual property using cyber theft…China will bark back. But they need us more than we need them — President Trump is right about that — and we should be strong. So I thought what he did on China is right.”

例如,参议院少数派领袖Chuck Schumer,在赞扬政府实施新的关税时重复了特朗普的谈话要点:“中国完全在利用美国的优势。 他们利用网络窃取窃取了我们的知识产权……中国将咬回来。但他们需要我们超过我们需要他们—特朗普总统是对的—我们应该坚强。所以我认为他对中国所做的是对的。“

On Russia, the Democrats have staked out an even more hawkish position than Trump, using alleged interference in the 2016 election to whip up the conflicts. In general, their criticism of Trump is that he has upset the U.S. imperialist alliance structure, compromising relationships with states like Canada and Germany.

对俄罗斯,民主党人比特朗普更加强硬,使用据称对2016年大选的干涉来煽动冲突。 总的来说,他们对特朗普的批评是,他打乱了美国帝国主义的联盟结构,破坏了与加拿大和德国等国家的关系。

In this regard, Sanders falls short of where socialists need to stand.

在这方面,桑德斯没有做到社会主义者所需要坚持的。

By comparison to other officeholders in Washington, including many liberal Democrats, Sanders has voiced greater opposition to national chauvinism and imperialist policies. His comments are often a welcome contrast to the hawkish Democratic Party leadership.

与华盛顿的其他公职人员(包括许多自由民主党人)相比,桑德斯表达了对国家沙文主义和帝国主义政策的更大反对。 他的言论常常与鹰派民主党领导层形成鲜明对比。

But his record is not consistently anti-imperialist. Sanders supported Bill Clinton’s war on Serbia in 1999, voted in favor of Bush’s war in Afghanistan and cast a “yes” vote on many military budgets, including those that funded the Iraq War. Sanders is also an endorser of boondoggle military program in his home state: the basing of the F-35 fighter at the airport in Burlington.

但他的记录并非始终是反帝国主义的。 桑德斯支持比尔克林顿发动的1999年对塞尔维亚的战争,投票支持布什在阿富汗的战争,并对许多军事预算投了赞成票,包括那些资助伊拉克战争的预算。桑德斯也是他所在州的军事计划的代言人:伯灵顿机场的F-35战斗机基地。

On trade issues, Sanders has lined up with Trump’s trade protectionism, tweeting, “I strongly support imposing penalties on countries like China, Russia, South Korea and Vietnam to stop illegal dumping of steel and aluminum.”

在贸易问题上,桑德斯已经与特朗普的贸易保护主义联系在一起,他发推文说:“我强烈支持对中国,俄罗斯,韩国和越南等国家实施处罚,以阻止非法倾销钢铁和铝。”

His position echoes the labor movement’s support for protectionism over many years, which has disastrously deflected attention from the real culprits for U.S. poverty and job losses — the American bosses who laid off workers in the U.S. and super-exploited them internationally — by making workers taking “American jobs” in other countries into the “enemy.”

多年来,他的立场与劳工运动对保护主义的支持相呼应,这种做法灾难性的摧毁了对美国的贫困和失业的真正罪魁祸首的关注—美国老板在解雇了美国的工人并在国际上超级剥削他们—通过让工人接受 “美国的工作”陷入了其他国家的“敌人”手中。


ALL THIS is important background for understanding the controversy over Sanders’ and Ocasio-Cortez’s statements honoring McCain. They are more than a ritual — the ideas they represent should be confronted and challenged by the left.

所有这些都是了解桑德斯和Ocasio-Cortez关于纪念麦凯恩的声明的争议的重要背景。 它们不仅仅是一种仪式—它们所代表的思想应该被左派们对抗和挑战。

By contrast, Seattle City Councilor and Socialist Alternative member Kshama Sawant sent a very different message with her statement on McCain:

相比之下,西雅图市议员和”社会主义选择“成员Kshama Sawant在她对麦凯恩的发言中发出了一个非常不同的信息:

A politician’s legacy is a political not personal question. An enthusiastic supporter of every imperialist war while in office, John McCain shares responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths. To whitewash that is to disrespect those who died in Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere…Not to mention the countless working people’s lives damaged by McCain’s support, as a Senator, for brutal neoliberal social and economic policies in the United States. Our solidarity belongs with the millions of families suffering under such policies here and abroad.

政治家的遗产是一个政治问题而非个人问题。 作为每一次帝国主义战争的热情支持者,约翰麦凯恩共享了对数十万人死亡所负有的责任。 粉饰这些是不尊重那些在伊拉克,阿富汗和其他地方死亡的人……更不用说麦凯恩作为参议员支持美国野蛮的新自由主义社会和经济政策而损害了无数劳动人民的生活。我们的团结属于数百万受国内外此类政策影响的家庭。

The new socialist left should follow this example in challenging McCain as a lesser evil and protesting the supposedly kinder, gentler form of imperialism put forward by the bipartisan establishment against Trump’s version.

新的社会主义左派应该效仿这一榜样,挑战将麦凯恩视为一种较小的罪恶的观点,并抗议两党为了对抗特朗普的版本所提出的更为温和,更绅士的帝国主义形式。

We should argue for an entirely different kind of politics and strategy, one of working class independence from both capitalist parties, international solidarity with workers and oppressed people around the world, and opposition across the board to U.S. imperialism as, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, the “greatest purveyor of violence in our world today.”

我们应该争论一种完全不同的政治和战略,一种是工人阶级独立于两个资本主义政党,和世界各地的工人们和被压迫的人民进行国际团结,以及全面反对美国帝国主义。 用马丁路德金的话来说,“今天世界上最大的暴力传播者”。

The resistance to Trump — in all its forms, from the Women’s Marches to Black Lives Matter, to the immigrant rights movement, to the teachers’ strike wave — can’t take its lead from the eulogies at McCain’s funeral, but from a left-wing politics that opposes all forms of exploitation, oppression and injustice.

对特朗普的抵抗 – 在所有的形式中,从妇女游行到黑人的命也是命,到移民权利运动,到教师的罢工浪潮—都不能从麦凯恩葬礼上的颂词中得到指引,而是从反对一切形式的剥削,压迫和不公正的左派政治中得到指引。

https://socialistworker.org/2018/09/04/a-hero-for-their-class-not-for-ours