On the proletarians who are studying: Let us fight for what we are!

via: esclarecimientocomunista.blogspot.com (my translation with help)

Comrade: we live in a society that is determined by the permanence and existence of capital and private property, our life revolves around it, to buy and sell, produce and consume, to look for (via all means possible) money.  Without an income, you are nothing, and to do this you will have to sell your force and intelligence for 8, 9 or 10 hours a day to a bourgeois.  School children, students or in general, the sectors that are not working for others, nor being “directly exploited” tend to believe that they do not belong to any social class.  So often we hear that “students are petty bourgeois,” but we need to truly understand our situation, our social status, see what role we play (or will play) in this mercantile society.

Maybe the reason why we  go to the streets to protest, struggling to obtain a stable future, better quality “education”, more “opportunities”, etc. , rather, it is precisely because the life we live does not ensure anything.  One will then belong to the proletarian class.  But who are the proletariat?  Are the workers?  Poor?  Do they live in slums or “invasions”?  The proletarians are all those who do not have a property or business from which to obtain money and therefore we must sell our time and energy to a boss or employer.  In short, we are forced to work, and our work is the basis of this society.  We are not a mere social category, we are a grim reality.  The workplace and society that develops around us alienates and make our lives miserable. We live to ‘earn a living” and the life that ‘we won’ we splurged on the daily struggle to survive without satisfying our true wishes, our needs planned by economists and the State.  Ourselves as proletarians have nothing to do with those ridiculous efforts to “build identity.” Nobody chooses to be proletarian.  One is born proletarian as is born slave, or is proletarianised by the blind forces of the economy; and in both cases there is nothing to be proud of.  And it is precisely this condition of dispossessed, of global developer of the “social wealth” that pushes us to struggle, in protest; for the transformation of this world.

Everything socially is designated by education and culture is intended to produce workers with awareness of citizens, proletarian with the ideology of “free men”, producers with the ideology of “consumers”.  To the children of proletarians who go to primary school, secondary and/or university it is hidden that they are part of the reproduction of class, with them as slave.  At the same time and in parallel, imposed from the child care/kindergarten or the first years of school, the indispensible acceptance discipline of the office, the factory or the supermarket: school discipline and order, working hours, recreation as short suspension between two times of work, to return to the house to recharge their energies to endure more school and then more work.

At the end as students, as part of the proletarian class, we are obliged to repeat the sentence imposed on us by the system: “study to be able to work in what he wants”.  As if it were possible to choose a job outside the logic of the capitalist system.  The entire activity imposed upon called ‘work’, either from the proletarians able to have studied or those who do not, reduces us to the reproduction of this system.  We are obliged to sell ourselves to the employers, to leave our energies, joys, life in the goods, with the money accumulated by the bourgeois at our expense.

 

We must break the mystification that is the “Student Movement” as if the students had their own movement, as if it meant they have their own interests that drive them away, sectorise and divide them from their class brothers.  We hear “students want such a thing or call for such other”… As if they could be students’ own interests and nothing else!  All the ideologies on the originality of the “student movement” express the interests of the ruling class, their desire for that which exists between it and the “proletariat” a category without classes that serve as a social shock absorber.  As if in a time of this life human beings could be reproduced without belonging to any of the classes! As if by the fact of going to university dilutes the membership of a social class!

 

As university students, inevitably we will become a category of slaves of the system; with our studies we have been granted the possibility of access to work that was denied to the rest.  However, our actions as professionals leads without doubt to the increasing subjugation of the rest of the population.  Engineers increase the rate of output per person, reducing the amount of people needed for jobs, increasing unemployment and capital gains.  Doctors will enhance the lifespan of workers, making labour cheaper.  Teachers will form new skilled workers, psychologists make bearable this life of subjugation, journalists will tell you that the best way of thinking is that of the powerful, the philosophers explain your miseries.  Each one of them will spend his salary to buy things that involve the exploitation of others, and thus circularly.

 

Recognise one another as proletarians implies fighting as such.  Recognise the exploitation in our lives, instead of thinking that the exploited live in some other neighbourhood poorer than that of one, do not pass through a matter of selfishness or altruism, but is necessary to be able to build with any other person, the organisation that will enable us to fight for our freedom, not from the superiority of the professional, but from the humility of the mere human.

 

We don’t fight as students (despite the fact that many are going to the college or university) we fight as part of the proletariat.  Our aim is not to win a little more, this fight is not for more money, a change in any politician or to reform the state policies, our struggle is to abolish the social relation of exploitation and domination imposed on us by the world of money and goods.  Our fight is not against lower wages or to work less hours, rather to recuperate what is stolen from us every day and to comprehend our unity with antagonistic interests to those of this system.  There is much to discuss, much more to do.  The way to free ourselves from the shackles imposed by this bourgeois system may only be destroyed with our struggle, with our unity, outside of acronyms, outside labels.  We can only rely on ourselves, the social transformation can not come from above, they have power in their hands, the power to impose a world that is not ours, but feeds on our lives.

 

-Grupo de Esclarecimiento Comunista (Group of Communist Clarification) – G. E. C., July 2011