Capitalist Education Hurts all Workers here ♦ Communist Versus Capitalist Education here ♦
Capitalist Education Hurts All Workers
December 4— In the biggest national strike of the year, 48,000 academic workers are on week four of their strike across the nine-campus University of California (UC) system. These are the workers who teach classes, lead discussion groups, labs, and tutoring sessions, do the bulk of day-to-day research tasks, grade papers and exams, and keep the university running.
A living wage is their major demand. It’s very modest. The average UC academic worker spends more than half their income on rent. Some sleep in their cars, work two or three jobs, take on credit and student loan debt, and/or commute from hours away as year after year they chase the interest on their debts.
Exploitative low wages mean that working-class students, single parents, and disabled students are driven out of higher education. It’s an unspoken feature of all levels of capitalist education that money plays a divisive role.
The University of California has a $152 billion dollar endowment fund. Yet this state-funded institution has created a financial situation that makes it increasingly more difficult for working-class students to work in academia.
Yet, as powerful as it is, it is not money alone that divides the students. From K-12 through graduate school, the very structure of capitalist education isolates them. Knowledge society has accumulated collectively is expressed privately in exams or thesis papers. Step by step, everyday pressures distance the young intellectual worker from the community.
It’s an isolation that hurts us all. Forty-eight thousand strikers organized and unified demanding a living wage is a powerful statement. It would resonate as loud as thunder through the ranks of millions of essential workers who also need that living wage. But the gap between intellectual and manual labor that capitalist education has engineered means the significance of the strike is misunderstood.
“Education,” our pamphlet on Communist Education points out. “is more than schooling.” It’s a statement the present situation clearly supports.
In Berkeley last week, comrades passed out the Red Flag to strikers. The strikers wanted to read about the struggles against austerity capitalism all over the world. Self-critically, we didn’t apply the argument of the pamphlet to the actual conditions of the strikers themselves. We didn’t prepare politically and hadn’t really thought about it. We can do better next time.
The grad students’ resistance to their exploitation by the prestigious UC system entailed exhaustive organizing, training strike captains, creating committees in every department, and teaching workplace leaders how to have organizing conversations. The energy and skills they developed to resist the unlawful and bad faith bargaining by UC are how all workers can and will spread the communist message. We need a fight not for a living wage, but to organize a system based not on the profit margin, but on the needs of each human being.
The exuberance of the graduate students and researchers as they strike against the University is a hopeful foreshadowing of the resistance all workers will feel as we rise up against the capitalist system.
—Comrades in California (USA)
Communist Versus Capitalist Education
The report (last issue) of the student strike in Puerto Rico shows how important young people are in the class struggle. I’d love to know what students in the US, South Africa, and elsewhere thought about it.
The article explains clearly why students and teachers need to teach and learn class consciousness. It suggested, but could have been clearer about, the main contradiction in capitalist schools.
As the article said, young people “really are the school. They are the majority sector in the school community and the axis of the educational system.” But, like workers who don’t own or control the factory where they work, students and even teachers don’t control the schools.
Capitalist schools are part of the capitalist state. That’s why “critical thinking is not stimulated and the struggle for social justice is repressed.” Not because “the capitalist system and its education do not take students seriously.”
They take very seriously that youth are quick to see and hate oppression. That class anger is certainly “something that capitalist education tries to destroy” in its future workers and soldiers.
Class-conscious teachers and students, especially communists, fight a daily battle inside and against the capitalist schools to spread that working-class consciousness.
They fight a system where points, grades, and all the rest exist to divide students and force them to compete. Where capitalist practices reinforce divisive and misleading ideas like individualism, patriotism, nationalism, and reformism.
The capitalist school system cannot exist without working-class students, and students can’t escape the system. Capitalist schooling is a contradiction: a unity and struggle of opposites, with the struggle being primary.
We can only resolve this contradiction by destroying capitalism with a new communist system. That means struggling for communist class consciousness.
Not only to “ensure the seizure of power” but also to guarantee that post-revolutionary society will grow on an entirely different basis. That there will be a real qualitative change that cannot be reversed.
We think that education in communist society will be qualitatively different from today’s capitalist schools in many ways. More learning will take place in connection with work. There is no real separation between “mental” and “manual” labor, and we’ll organize work and society accordingly. No more “degrees” to justify unequal treatment.
We will spend much less time segregated by age and nobody will be pushed along in assembly-line fashion as students are today. No more “tests” and “grades” as we know them. There are better ways to ensure that people have the skills they need to do their work safely and well.
The way we teach and learn in the ICWP today is the seed of communist education. We all teach, we all learn, as we do communist work and strive to do it better. We encourage all to learn about politics, philosophy, science, and more. We invite everyone to write for Red Flag.
I look forward to hearing more about the struggles of students and teachers in Puerto Rico.
—Teacher Comrade in Los Angeles (USA)
Read Our Pamphlet:
Communist Education for a Classless Society
Front page of this issue
