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?
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.
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.
Many thanks, comrade. Will definitely check it out!