New School Year-Taking Our Education in Our Hands here ♦ Work-Why Its Better Than a Job here ♦
Oakland students protest cop murder of Tyre Nichols, 2023
New School Year: Taking Our Education into Our Own Hands
LOS ANGELES (USA), August 2—Students going back to school are facing a lot of things that they don’t have much control over. But last year, a group of students here learned how to take matters in their own hands. With a growing understanding of systemic problems and strength in numbers, they organized a student strike. It’s important that they keep up the momentum and develop their understanding even more.
From organizing a walkout to changing the world, you need a plan. Especially since the capitalist ruling class has a plan for students, now and after they graduate. Whether it is selling their labor or fighting in their wars, the bosses know what they want for these youth. The students need to develop their own plans.
Earlier this year, school workers, supported by teachers, students, and parents, took to the streets in a three-day strike for better working conditions and a better wage. As we speak, hotel workers and Hollywood actors and writers are on the picket lines. Other workers from various industries are sure to follow. The summer of picketing is on. This means further opportunities to win these workers to our fight for a better, more equitable world.
Part of the ruling-class strategy to weaken our class is to divide workers and to get us fighting among ourselves. We have previously written about the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP). They say they want to “address inequalities in access to resources for Black students and to build their leadership qualities.”
They’re acting as if working-class youth don’t all suffer inequalities and exploitation under capitalism. We know racism is real. We know that the capitalist ruling class uses it to great effect to divide — and to super-exploit — workers.
At best, programs like BSAP temporarily ease the pain of capitalism’s systemic problems, but they don’t cure the disease. At worst, they divide students and school workers. They keep us from joining together to fight for a long-term solution—to rip capitalism out by its bloody roots! The answer is working-class unity, not identity politics.
Small, consistent, changes can lead to big changes. Students organizing with their friends to fight against the rulers’ attacks. Reading and studying Red Flag. Distributing it to friends, family, and other workers. Bringing communist ideas to mass mobilizations and protests. Joining ICWP and recruiting others. All of this will bring the communist revolution closer.
The ruling class has their plans for students in education. But students are already showing great promise in their abilities to not fall into their trap.
Capitalist schools are set up to prepare students for the capitalist workplace. That means a lot of wage slaves, some planners and administrators, and a few leaders. Communists know everyone can learn how to work and plan and give leadership to the working class—in the revolutionary struggle and in the communist world we will build.
Students are future workers and soldiers. They will be crucial to the communist revolution we need. We encourage students to continue developing politically and reading Red Flag and join the fight for a communist future for all.
WORK – Why It’s Better than a Job
SINCE THE BEGINNING, work has been our distinguishing human feature. In planning, organizing, and doing it, humankind developed language, consciousness, and science. Work fulfills and liberates us.
Yet, under capitalism, work becomes a job. The job is owned by someone (a capitalist or a capitalist state) and a wage is attached to the job. While a job might house and feed us, it also demoralizes us.
By making us beg for jobs, capitalists instill servility. By making us compete for them, they divide us. By locking us out of planning and design, they belittle us. By controlling the tempo and rhythm, they endanger our health. And by organizing production for their needs alone, they keep us impoverished.
THAT’S NOT ALL. When an economic crisis erupts, capitalists intensify their attacks.
Millions are denied jobs and left to starve. Others are forced to work for welfare or as prison labor. Millions more are killed in wars or herded into refugee camps as the capitalists fight among themselves for control of the world’s jobs and markets.
For all this, capitalists earn our disgust and anger. That is why periods of economic crises and wars raise the opportunity for communist revolution and liberation.
ALONGSIDE OPPORTUNITIES, DOUBTS ARISE. Are workers capable of planning, organizing, and running modern society? After all, the socialism of the Chinese and Russian revolutions led back to capitalism.
Communists enter this fight confidently. We can learn from the mistakes of the past. The mass of working people, who create everything of value, can learn how to manage and distribute it.
As we see it, one of the biggest mistakes of socialist revolutions was keeping the wage system. They modified it. They should have abolished it.
THIS IS THE FIRST OF A SERIES which sets out to show how dependency on the wage system sabotages our desires for a healthy, share-and-share-alike life. It satisfies only the capitalist’s need for profits.
A communist system, on the other hand, organized around work, will satisfy our complex, interlocking, and ever-expanding social needs.
Stone Age Tools: Developed Without Wages or Profits for Social Needs
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