By Redd
As the world’s volcano of proletarian revolution is soon to start brewing within the intensifying global crisis of fractured imperialism, we must urgently study our tasks to formulate new methods to liberate our oppressed youth comrades from the ashes of imperialism into a prosperous and inevitable epoch of international socialist construction, so what is to be done encompassing the radical question of youth economic independence today?
Material Conditions for Unpaid Students
As the school year of 2024-2025 reaches its finality, continuing the alienating cycle of the bourgeois mode of education, the mentality of students continues to deteriorate from once empowering attitudes towards learning to its refinement of the mindset of an exploited masses. With the substitution of ‘progressive’ discipline, silencing in place of a whip, the memorization-centric assignments in place of plantation harvests all expected to be completed within a time-frame, your future is held hostage to the ruling classes of today, such as the administrative bureaucracy. They propagate a rotten apple of grade ‘meritocracy,’ assessing your human ‘value’ based on the value of your grade, systematically engaging in the embryonic production of a ‘commodity’ by the coercive brainwashing of students to than perform a micro unequal exchange of their resources like labor power in future as the ‘model worker’ for a slave-wage, dividing the student masses from honor roll to ‘failures’ in order to prevent solidarity from curtailing competition.
Yet in retrospect, students aren’t even compensated for their labor while contributing socially useful labor by learning how to operate their society, thus applying it’s methodology in the future as labor’s descendants. This, alongside grade chauvinism, reinforces the contradictions between students human desires and alienative, administrative pressures. Free education, however, is inherently a progressive stance to be advocated by organized Marxists in semi-colonial countries, where education is so undervalued to restrict any working class student ineligible to pay its subscription.
This only reproduces the unequal contradiction between the youth and elders, who are molded to be dependent on elder’s income instead of developing relations of income self sufficiency for the youthful masses, as relations of blackmail and coercion into submission are untameable since they are classified to only ‘unproductive’ labor further degrading fundamental respect for the youth, as without compensation no leverage in negotiation can be considered without being rendered as a ‘entitled’ or ‘spoiled’ proposal engraving the youth as a servant who ‘speaks when spoken to’ and ‘be seen not heard’, just like our woman comrades in the past who obtained the rights to work, being able to obtain wages in their labor to empower themselves in the name of gender equality since before that they were shackled in the dungeons of a man’s castle as an instrument for his lust and domestic slave.
Rational Program for Student Wages Under Socialism
A new rational programme must resolve these primary contradictions transpiring between administration and students, and youth and elders in relation to the wage question. For emancipation is interconnected to this demand to smash the barricades to their liberation struggles, insofar being only spontaneous not class organized to act as a necessary step to attain rightful victories in the inevitable battlefield, the student wage programme will be organized not by bourgeois reformist ideals of a “high grade = high pay” nor “low grade = low pay”, which only permeates the breed of a new student aristocracy amongst the students who’ll individually boast as ‘superior’ accumulating profits, while alienating low grade students as ’backwards,’ reversing any progress socialism has towards combating petit bourgeois tendencies, which are being cultivated within the hearts and minds of students breeding consequences of darwinistic individualism in the future, only legitimizing the revisionists with ‘sympathetic’ support amongst the proletariat, these opportunistic fallacies will have no institutionalized position in schools, which are an important institution in the superstructure intended to reproduce socialist relations not capitalist property relations, and the correct socialist pedagogy concerning labor knowledge in proletarian education showcasing it as a component of the productive forces.
Instead students are to be compensated according to their study power alone in question of principle, which determines the students mental ability given to schoolwork according to their mental labor, for we compensate students for their efforts in self-discipline according to the difficulty of the certain subject, when cultivating themselves to be smarter in time to collectively contribute for the development of socialist civilization later on in life molding communistic values, not petit bourgeois values, with compensation reviving the downtrodden spirits of demoralized students as formerly unproductive slaves to a new strata of learning workers engraving a sense of optimism into their futures. While simultaneously studying subjects now bloodlined to the material world like factory operational work producing new proletarian specialists in spheres of labor, while also teaching them financial literacy despite socialist ideology promoting an elimination of poverty, the student masses still require education on cost-savings and its reliability through the process of direct experience naturally giving wisdom during the most convenient season of youthfulness.
Answering the reactionary rebuffs of this newly proposed programme in a short letter, which commonly revolve around ‘youth overspending’ in their philistine justifications to terminate the programme over a couple bad apples in the tree, may be addressed with observing the tendencies of a specific student in school to convene if a student has entitlement, and needs rectification before getting their compensation, which will be frozen by the school to enclose any primitive accumulation by the parents inclined to exploit their child’s labor, and even if that student cannot be identified that student will naturally learn a brutal way when not having any savings to accumulate for luxuries or sustenance in the future, a second reactionary rebuff ‘government spending’ which will be supplemented by the bourgeoisie reigns of surplus value not hefty taxation on the masses, however concerning ultra ’lefts’ and a branch of communists who are misinformed that ‘student wages produce capitalist relations’ is incorrect for the influence of bourgeois right exists temporarily as ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution’ is a tenant under socialism only withering away in the coming lower, higher stages of communism, and using it’s ultra-left expression you can apply that the oppressed masses of the world shouldn’t strike for higher wages to afford their means of sustenance to survive within the bourgeois dictatorship.
Comrade Redd is a Chicana student and communist passionate about youth activism. She has contributed to Maoism For The Masses since 2024.