Hey comrades,
had this topic with someone recently and think it’s quite an interesting one so I’d love to hear your takes on this:
Essentially what’s the role or what can the role of the intelligencia and students be in the struggle?
Historically they’ve played quite an important role. Just look at the '68 movement in Germany and the wider student unrests in Europe in the late 60s and 70s. At the time they certainly played a major part in the revolutionary struggle. This reputation of the revolutionary/rebelling student and university as incubators for revolutionary thought and organiszing has lingered to this day, even though it’s far from the truth in the west.
Just looking at this sector of society from a materialist POV is quite interesting. Students are in a weird and unique position in society in that they’re often one of the most exploited and poor demographics. Today they’re mostly in crazy debt, most of them have to work particularily bad jobs to survive university. Universities themselves are increasingly exploiting the labour of students to finance themselves. Jobs after university nowadays often don’t guarantee anything above a dead average wage, certainly often earning much less than even traditional trades. At the same time they are naturally among the most educated people in society, still often have much more opportunity to organize and familiarize themselves with revolutionary thought.
Yet, they’re undoubtedly in a strange limbo of both priviledge and overexploitation. They tend to be from fairly bourgeois backgrounds and even the more exploited ones often think of themselves not as belonging to the working-class people they often work with, but more of a temporarily embarassed petty-bourgeois. This, nowadays, makes for a strangely poor, miserable, student body that doesn’t really have a grand, bright, rich future looming, but is also entirely without class consciousness and often extremely apolitical beyond the current radlib topic of the day. Eg trying to organize students in the peace movement is a fools errand. They don’t give flying fuck. 100bn for the army while education is crumbling and shutting down classes to save energy costs? Whatever.
So what to do? Is this demographic just a lost cause for now or are there ways to build class consciousness among them specifically and to organize this important part of the youth?
The bourgeois university system is divided between public and private bourgeois institutions. The public institutions are designed to mass produce “intelligentsia” so that no worker’s skills are monopolized. These institutions pumped out millions of CS and data science grads to saturate the labor market in fin-tech for instance. The private institutions exist to reproduce the bourgeois class itself. This divide doesn’t mean the public intelligentsia is very class conscious, even if their destination is ultimately the working class. These institutions still reproduce white supremacy and the Settler system. People in these institutions from oppressed backgrounds are the most excitable to our cause, those in debt, those on scholarship.
As you can see from the Tiananmen protests, even students reared through a Socialist education system can develop feelings of superiority, we must combat combat this attitude to the fullest.
Also this Lenin piece, How to Organize Competition?: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/dec/25.htm
I probably should’ve mentioned that I’m writing as a German and much of what you said is a bit different in the particular expression here. We have ‘free’, public universities. Private institutions do exist, but are generally not as prestigious. We don’t really have “elite” unis. As such these distinctions aren’t quite as obvious here. The dynamic is principally the same, but on a much less pronounced level.
People in these institutions from oppressed backgrounds are the most excitable to our cause, those in debt, those on scholarship.
Very true and nowadays unfortunately that part is substantial in the student body. As I said, many students even here are - at least temporarily - among the poorest, most exploited people in society and most of them ultimately just headed for a regular as working class future.
The question is how to build class consciousness in this particular context. Unions sometimes still have uni-groups and depending on the university they might be more or less active, but they’re definitely much too weak to organize the student body more broadly. Former student unions/alliances like the SDS and MSB Spartakus don’t really exist in their former shape anymore. They barely exist at all and struggle for relevancy.
Really wondering what a good strategy to work and organize among this demographic would be, because I struggle to even imagine where to start.
Also this Lenin piece, How to Organize Competition?
Many thanks, comrade. Will definitely check it out!
Writing from the perspective of the US since OP is German. This comment is broken into spoilers because it is quite long, but it is a specific case study into a bourgeois university. If you would like references for anything contained within, please ask.
About universities reproducing the bourgeoisie
As the other comment states, the private institutions (I attend an Ivy League institution) exist to reproduce the bourgeoisie. In fact, my university (and employer and landlord) is not only a university but also makes money by investing its endowment (so by being part of the financial bourgeoisie) and from real estate – it actually owns two-thirds of the buildings in the neighborhood and displaced an entire other (mostly Black) neighborhood for expansion using the power of the state (yet another example of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).
As part of reproducing the bourgeoisie, they reproduce bourgeois ideology and pass this down to their students. My university actually has an entire institution which is essentially a neoconservative think tank (which may or may not also function as a private NED) and another one dedicated to advancing the cause of US imperialism in the former USSR that pumps out what is essentially Nazi Ukrainian propaganda and actually has its own “independent” news outlet that is funded by the NED, the UK Foreign Office, and Google, among other bourgeois institutions. There is another initiative of the university which used to be headed by the current Director of National Intelligence (who used to be deputy director of the CIA before being employed by the university) which I suspect is a private USAID, but I don’t have any evidence for that.
Since there was a recent uproar over a certain member of what used to be the Tibetan aristocracy, I would like to note that he was invited to my university in 2007 and his profile contains lie after lie demonizing the Chinese government and its policies in the 1951-1959 period;
Any revolution in the US will have to think long and hard about whether it can turn elite private institutions into proletarian ones or whether it will just have to seize all of their assets and abolish them. In addition, anti-imperialist movements in other countries must repatriate their scholars, build up their own educational systems, and diminish the prestige factor for American universities (especially for doctorates, where western universities have basically a death grip on prestige). For example, the fact that many Chinese academics are returning to China and that Chinese universities are rising in prestige is a positive development.
About the students
Being an Ivy League institution, the students (undergrads) themselves of course come from bourgeois backgrounds (or at least are thoroughly indoctrinated with bourgeois ideology), and in fact clamored for Hillary Clinton to give a speech at the previous graduation where she received an honorary degree. (Hillary will actually be teaching a course here in the fall about what it was like to overthrow foreign governments and force them to adopt neoliberal economic policies – or at least that would be the topic if she is honest). I don’t interact with undergraduates very much, so this may not be accurate.
The undergraduate population did organize enough to vote (nonbinding) to boycott the Zionist entity, to which the response of the administration was to say that BDS was basically equivalent to Nazism (at least this is in an official statement put out by the president of the university). Of course, there are even liberals who support BDS and the official BDS organization in the US seems to be vaguely liberal Zionist, so this doesn’t say much. Undergraduates have supported other liberal causes in the past, but this is the extent of their political engagement for the most part.
Most of the graduate students here are Masters students who pay an insane amount of money to attend. A large percentage of them are foreign (primarily Chinese) and come from wealthy families (who can afford the insane cost). Of those I have interacted with, they are either apolitical or liberal, which lines up with their probably bourgeois backgrounds.
I don’t think the entire population of students is completely irredeemable though. There is at least a segment of the grad students who do have at least some minimal class consciousness, and the graduate student worker (mostly PhD students) population is unionized after going on strike twice and blocking all of the entrances to the university. It is unclear how many students actually went on strike and participated in picketing or other organizing activities, and if I had to guess, most of the strikers still have petty-bourgeois sensibilities and political ideologies. I would say that those graduate student workers facing significant financial precarity are the only population in Ivy League universities who can be radicalized since the undergrads generally come from either bourgeois or labor aristocratic backgrounds.
About the faculty (this is how I will interpret intelligentsia)
Unfortunately, we received next to no support from the faculty, even those who are supposedly “progressive” (goes to show how meaningless that term is), although there were some postdocs who seem to have some consciousness. If they are not apolitical, (permanent) faculty overwhelmingly have petty-bourgeois and pro-imperialist sensibilities, but the only evidence I have for this is one blog post by a faculty member in my department defending the virtues of liberal “democracy” (and talking about how he would like to impose it on the entire planet) and calling any anti-west sentiment “Russian trolls” and also overhearing political conversations that faculty have. I would say that almost all faculty with permanent positions in bourgeois universities are basically irredeemable.
I should note that in my field, almost all PhD students and faculty come from relatively bourgeois backgrounds (one sacrifices a potentially significant income by attending graduate school). In other subjects, it may be easier to radicalize faculty, but during the strike, students in other departments also reported their faculty being very reactionary.
