LEON TROTSKY DISCOVERS A NATION AT RISK.

These are interesting times, when the World Socialist Web Site makes common cause with traditionalists taking on the "1619 Project" being shopped by the woke desk at New York's Times.  Last week, the site characterized the Times defense of the project as "desperate."  It gets more interesting when you work through the usual class-struggle-dialectic-stuff to read this.

No doubt it is true that American students know little about slavery and its centrality to the Civil War. But this speaks to a larger crisis of historical consciousness. The public schools, starved of funding, have shifted limited resources away from social studies and the arts to “practical” pursuits, a process pushed forward by Barack Obama, who said in office that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” The same shifting of resources away from history has taken place at the universities. There were over 19 million Americans enrolled in college in 2017, but only 24,255 graduated with degrees in history—a 33 percent decline since 2001—while 381,000 degrees were awarded to business majors.

Under these conditions, is it really any wonder that high school seniors know little about the causes of the Civil War or even precisely when it took place? But what share of American high school and college graduates can explain the causes of either World War I or World War II, or even correctly identify the years during which these wars were fought? What percentage of American students could state with even approximate accuracy the years of the American involvement in Vietnam, let alone explain the reasons underlying its intervention?

The lack of knowledge is even greater when it comes to the subject that is virtually absent from public discussion in the United States: the history of the working masses and the class struggle that they have waged against American capitalism. This is a subject that involves the fate of the vast majority of the population, including the countless millions of impoverished immigrants who arrived on the shores of America and then fought to “raise the dignity of labor,” to use an old phrase. This history finds not the slightest echo in the 1619 Project, which does not acknowledge the existence of class struggle in the United States.

There is plenty of oppression and suffering in the history of what John Brown called “this guilty land” to go around. The United States has long been the country with the most powerful and ruthless capitalist class on the planet. Before that it was home to the richest and most powerful slave owning class. But the explosive development of industrial capitalism in the aftermath of the Civil War gave rise to the most polyglot working class. Under these conditions the great challenge confronting the socialist movement has always been to unite workers across innumerable racial, national, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and regional barriers to confront their common antagonists.

Yes, that concludes with more of the class-struggle-dialectic stuff.  But why might "don't know much about history" be more than a line in a song mocking the studious?  Even with Howard Freakin' Zinn in the curriculum? Might it be that the traditional arts and humanities and mathematics have been slighted for a long time, and with disastrous effect, despite how well-intentioned those changes have been?