An Anti-Fascist Boeing Worker Asks
Poster from the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: “Develop and strengthen the Marxist theoretical team in the struggle”
SEATTLE (USA)— “You should have been a teacher in the schools,” a Boeing Red Flag distributer suggested to a comrade.
After a moment’s thought, the comrade replied, “But this is what we aim for in communism: to center learning around the shop floor.”
On a small scale, that’s what has been happening. Boeing workers have been educating themselves on everything from aerodynamics (in relation to the 737 max crashes), to the history of fascism. Most importantly, they are learning how the theory and practice of communism relate to the issues of the day. Our party and Red Flag have been in the thick of these discussions.
A new friend, a vocal fighter against creeping fascism, even dared to question the worth of elite universities. Like many of us, she just learned the name Renaud Camus. He’s infamous for writing “The Great Replacement.”
This book-length diatribe rails against the influx of Muslim immigrants from northern and sub-Saharan Africa into Europe. Camus demands that white European women have more babies, lest Europe be overrun by “lesser races.” This fascist tract has spread around the world, justifying everything from punitive immigration policies and laws to fascist murder.
Camus graduated from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), having studied law, philosophy and political science.
This is not the first time Sciences Po has produced fascists. During World War II, its faculty filled key positions in the Nazi-puppet Vichy government. Petain, the head of the puppet regime, sat on the school’s board of directors. Sciences Po nazified its curriculum after kicking out Jews and communists.
Sciences Po is considered one of the top three Western universities to train political and administrative elites. It counts among its graduates 32 heads of state, 3 directors of the International Monetary Fund, 40 CEOs of the top 100 companies on the Euronext Paris, and 7 out of 8 of the last French presidents, including the present one, Macron.
When this information hit the shop floor, it led to many debates about education, in particular “higher” education.
Our friend was appalled when she learned of Camus’ scholastic history. “What good do these elite universities do, anyway?” she asked.
A Boeing worker got into a debate with a young man about this topic at the May Day march. The young man argued that we need political, administrative and scientific elites to defeat the class enemy. This line of reasoning is particularly troublesome since the ruling class media blames the rise in xenophobia, sexism and racism on the “uneducated” working class.
Education, like everything else, is a political class question. Universities don’t sit above the fray. Communists must eliminate elites and the elite institutions that underpin them.
When we discussed this May Day debate on the shop floor, Boeing workers rejected the idea that progress must be led by elites. To the contrary, students need to be drawn closer to workers, not segregated from the working class in universities. Nobody should be confined to classrooms for extended periods of time, separate from work and workers. It fosters elitism.
Opening up universities to more working class students can’t solve the problem either. Why would we want to subject these students to the bosses’ elitist ideology? But that is precisely what open admissions reforms do.
Will such a hard line turn off students? Several party members had some higher education. A crucial factor in winning them to communism was maintaining connections to the working class through political struggle.
Communism will produce the most learned population in the history of humankind. It will do so by centering education around work and the working class. Learning will be a life-long endeavor, not pigeon-holed into university classrooms.
This article is part of an ongoing discussion within the International Communist Workers’ Party and with our friends about what education will look after a communist revolution. We encourage more debate on this topic: in particular, where Party members and friends are working with young people in schools, churches, etc. Our pamphlet Communist Education for a Classless Society can be found at icwpredflag.org/epe.pdf. We look forward to more letters and articles on the subject.
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