FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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LOS ANGELES--A few comrades recently gathered to discuss capitalist and communist education. We reasoned that what we learn, and how we learn it, depends on the mode of production that society is based on. We talked about how capitalist education serves the rulers’ interests. For example, capitalist education promotes individualism and competition. It is used to train society’s future bosses and wage slaves. It does so by using bells and strict schedules, oppressive teacher-student relationships, pushing nationalism, omitting working-class history, and so on.
Next, we all shared our experiences as students under capitalism. We agreed that capitalist education often makes us feel bad about ourselves and feel like we do not have anything but our labor to contribute to society.
Our anger over capitalist education turned into fire when we started talking about how different communist education is. The discussion focused on the idea that the purpose of communist education is to create communists and communist social relations.
“We would be living similar to the Native Americans,” said a young comrade, “where everybody helps one another and takes care of each other.
There will be no schools as we know them today,” said a comrade. “We won’t be getting trained for a profession or a position. We will learn everything like physics, science, and so much more.”
We talked briefly about what it means when we hear that prominent members of the ruling class want to reform education. We talked about how the changes reflect the renewed urgency with which they must get us to pledge loyalty to their system, accept our exploitation, and fight in their wars.
A comrade shared a quote from Lenin that included the idea that “education must train students to be participants in the struggle for emancipation from the exploiters” and that “we would not believe in teaching, training, and education, if they were confined only to the school, and divorced from the storm of life.”
We discussed that mental and manual work must go hand-in-hand and that we must learn theory at the work site for immediate practice. There will be communities where all sorts of learning will take place.
“You’ll get hands-on learning in different areas,” explained a comrade. “We won’t have “experts” either, because communist education will work to ensure that everyone, to the best of their ability, learns to analyze, criticize, and participate in decision making.
We talked about how capitalist education changes to meet the bosses’ needs and communist education will change to meet the changing needs of the international working class. Even as it changes, we can expect that it will always reflect certain principles. We will value communist social relations over technical knowledge or expertise. We must always cultivate equality and cooperation and work to create more and better communists. We must merge mental and manual labor. Communist education is a life-long journey of the study of theory and of the work of putting it into practice.
At one point, the comrade leading the discussion said, “At this very moment, we are practicing communist education! Think about that.”
We talked about how we are arming ourselves to fight for workers’ power, to strengthen our line, and to win other workers to our communist vision. Our communist education, right now, comes from reading Red Flag and other party documents, participating in study-action groups, conferences, summer projects, and reflecting on how we put what we learn into practice!
