Wages for Students

Оглавление

Wages for Students. Wages for Students

Introduction to the Present Edition

Wages for Students (A pamphlet in the form of a blue book, 1975)

Wages for Debts, Students for Borrowers, Life for …*

Introducción a la presente edición

Sueldo para Estudiantes (Un panfleto en la forma de un cuaderno celeste, 1975)

Sueldo para los deudores, estudiantes para los prestamistas, vida para …*

Introduction à la présente édition

Des salaires pour les étudiants (Un pamphlet sous la forme d’un livre bleu, 1975)

Des salaires aux dettes, des étudiants aux emprunteurs, de la vie à …*

Отрывок из книги

WAGES FOR STUDENTS was written and published anonymously during student strikes in Massachusetts and New York in the fall of 1975 by three activists associated with the journal Zerowork.

SUELDO PARA ESTUDIANTES fue escrito y publicado de manera anónima por tres activistas vinculados a la revista Zerowork durante las huelgas estudiantiles en Massachusetts y Nueva York en el otoño de 1975.

.....

It is obvious to every student that this “investment good” attempt to make you see the wisdom of working for free or even paying to work in school is a phoney. So it is getting harder and harder to convince anyone to shell out money for schooling on the basis of the fairy tale of you as profit making corporation. So now both sides of the economists’ claim collapse, but in the midst of this debacle school-work gets a new defender from what might seem to be a surprising quarter: the Left.

The “socialist” teacher and the “revolutionary” student have become the staunchest defenders of the public university against “budget cut-backs” and the like. Why? Their story goes something like this: education leads to the ability to make more and broader connections in your social situation, in a word, education makes you more conscious. Since the public universities open up the possibility of having a highly educated working class, these universities make it possible for the working class to become more class conscious; further, a more conscious working class will pay less attention to the merely “economistic” demands for more money and less work, and pay more attention to the political task of “building socialism.” This logic gives the Left both an explanation of the university crisis—capital is afraid of the highly conscious working class that the university was beginning to spawn—and a demand: more schoolwork and not less! So in the name of political consciousness and socialism these leftists intensify schoolwork (which is just wageless work) and frown upon student demands for less of it as capitalistic backsliding. At a time when all the usual defenses of the free work done at schools are being exposed, the Left now seizes the time as its chance to lead the working class out if its “materialistic” sleep to its higher mission: the making of socialistic society.

.....