FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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LOS ANGELES, Jan. 21—“The American Dream is still possible!” This was the message of a recent Univisión segment about career education programs at West Los Angeles community college.
Vice-President Biden was scheduled to show up at the same school just a few days later to praise its new Bachelor’s degree program in Dental Hygiene and to plug President Obama’s new community college initiative. This plan to make two years of community college “free for everybody who is willing to work for it” pushes the same message.
Sounds good, right? What’s the catch?
It only covers tuition. In California, most low-income students already get fee-waivers. Their big expenses are books and tools, living expenses and transportation. Even with other financial aid, most will have to work as many hours as they can at low-paying jobs. Many will still end up with huge student loan debts.
Most working-class students need more than two years to complete a community college degree. Their K-12 schooling was designed to turn out low-skilled, uninformed, compliant wage-slaves. It can take a year or more before they’re ready for college-level work.
Students would need to maintain a 2.5 (C+) average and attend at least half time. That’s hard when you’re working to support yourself or help your family. One “D” in your first semester could disqualify you.
Students will be discouraged from taking courses “they don’t need,” said California Gov. Jerry Brown. (Translation: courses the capitalists don’t need them to take.) College funding will depend on “data-driven measures.” So all the problems associated with standardized testing in K-12 will now go to college. This is starting already in Minnesota and elsewhere.
But the biggest “catch” is the political cost to the working class. Sure, the program will help some students get a degree and even a job. But it aims to increase our “buy-in” to “achieving the American Dream.”
This is already an obstacle to mobilizing the masses to destroy the capitalist system that enslaves us. We are schooled to believe that “everyone has a chance.” The flip side is that “if you don’t make it, it’s because you’re not willing to work for it.” We’re led to blame ourselves, not the system, and too many of us do that.
These illusions are especially dangerous for the generation that will be called upon to fight the next imperialist war and ramp up production in war industries. Conversely, it’s especially important to the rulers to reinforce these illusions now.
The Lumina Foundation outlined a “First Two Years of College Free” program in 2013. This capitalist outfit made its money from student loan interest. The premise of the report is that a fifty-year Federal effort to promote the “American Dream” through college financial aid has flopped. This has “undermined the national ideal of equal opportunity to succeed and equal rewards for hard work.”
That “ideal” was never a reality, and Lumina knows it. They just worry that we’ll stop believing in it. As the Atlantic Monthly said: “some low-income students may be lured by the simplicity of ‘free.’”
The Atlantic also argues that the plan would “revers[e] the negative effects of socioeconomic segregation in higher education” by encouraging better-off students to attend community college. It cites a 2014 Century Foundation report, Bridging the Higher Education Divide. The unspoken hope is that this would build unity across class lines, cooling off class struggle.
Communism has a different, international ideal. We will work hard so that we can all “succeed” in meeting our needs together, not individually. There will be no monetary “rewards” or special privileges. There will be no “socioeconomic segregation” because there will be no classes.
In communist society, everyone will be encouraged to study languages, science, technology, history, philosophy, the arts and everything else we need or want to know. We need to win high school and college students, and their parents and teachers, to fight for this ideal. Let’s expand the distribution of Red Flag and our pamphlet “Communist Education for a Classless Society.”
The “two years free college” plan also ties community colleges more closely to the capitalists’ labor force needs as they prepare for war. “In an increasingly competitive world economy, America’s economic strength depends upon the education and skills of its workers,” said a White House press release.
Communism will link learning with work, but not so that capitalists can get fat off our labor and fight off the competition. Our next article will talk more about this.