More than one hundred young activists, based in a dozen countries, attended an international youth conference “Youth Say No to Conscription and the Attack on Education” initiated by Communist Liberation, a component of the anti-capitalist united front organization ANTARSYA in Greece.
Coordinated from Athens, the October 25 Zoom meeting heard vivid reports from the front lines of student rebellions against police repression which seeks to contain protests against systematic under-funding of public education. Four young members of Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed, two of whom also belong to Socialist Action, attended. Plans are underway for an international anti-war action on November 21-22. One of the resolutions adopted by the conference is immediately below...
Resolution on education
We have entered a period of wars and global political instability, during which capitalist blocs collide for global hegemony and the maximization of their profits at the expense of the working class’s needs. Youth is targeted by bourgeois governments, called upon to become cannon fodder for the capitalists, while simultaneously witnessing its educational rights and employment prospects continuously deteriorating. Education at all levels constitutes a central domain for bourgeois policy, as it becomes a massive field of profitability and, through it, the labor force required by the job market in each given period is shaped—both in terms of its knowledge and qualifications, as well as its consciousness and ideology.
Despite individual differences, an all-out attack following unified directions is being attempted in all countries, starting from school and extending to university and all technical and vocational education structures. These directions are those of capital, the OECD, and the EU, and can be categorized as follows:
Commercialization and privatization of education. Knowledge and education are transformed from a social good into a commodity and a field of profitability for capital. Rapid growth of private education, establishment of private schools and universities, imposition and increase of tuition fees.
Underfunding and degradation of public educational structures. Privatization goes hand in hand with the complete shrinking of state expenditure for public education, creating massive deficiencies in infrastructure, teaching staff, as well as quality nutrition and housing, thereby shifting the cost onto pupils, students, and parents themselves.
Subordination of education to market needs. Education is fully subordinated to the needs of capitalist profitability at the expense of comprehensive education and the cultivation of critical thinking. Vocational and technical education is increasingly transformed into a mechanism for supplying employers with cheap and flexible labour, while students are exposed to precarious and unsafe working conditions in the name of training. Instead of qualitative education, “disposable” training prevails, while corporate groups determine administration, research, and curricula.
Precarization of educational labour. Teachers, researchers and university workers face increasing workloads, insecure employment, performance pressures and declining real wages, while academic production is subordinated to competition, rankings and market priorities.
Massive increase of class barriers in education. Access to education becomes a privilege for fewer and fewer people, while children of the working-class strata are pushed out of the educational system. Schools are turned into examination treadmills, while the evaluation of school units and universities categorizes them through class filters.
Sharpening of authoritarianism and repression of struggles. The bourgeoisie and governments seek to suppress the struggles that break out by criminalizing student union action, imposing police rule, and repressing student mobilizations.
Ideological control over education. Governments increasingly use schools and universities to impose religious, sexist, nationalist, authoritarian and chauvinist ideologies, restricting scientific and critical education.
Linking universities with the war industry. The war economy and war preparation transform universities into producers of war research and war technology, with a characteristic example being the EU, which allocates tens of billions of euros within the framework of ReArm Europe in this direction. Dozens of universities collaborate with the murderer-state of Israel, producing technology used in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
All the above demonstrate that education acquires strategic importance for capital, and therefore constitutes a crucial field of political conflict for revolutionary forces internationally. In defiance of governments, youth is in the streets fighting for its life and prospect. Through general assemblies, mobilizations, strikes, occupations of schools and universities, demanding public education, increased funding, quality and affordable nutrition and housing, freedom of political and student union action, knowledge and research for society and not for war!
The struggle for an education that serves our needs can only succeed if it is linked with broader social problems and stands alongside the labor movement. The attack has a class character and lies at the core of bourgeois politics; hence, the answer can only be given through joint alignment with student unions and the labor movement in the struggle against war, poverty, capitalist profitability, fascism, and sexism. Through the common struggle of pupils, students, teachers, and workers against the common attack!
For revolutionary and anti-capitalist forces, internationalist struggle and joint initiatives in the field of education can reveal the character of the attack and contribute to the resurgence and success of the struggles.
Public and free education at all levels for everyone, without class and educational barriers!
End of state-subsidized private schooling and privatization: expropriation of the private education network and integration of its human and material resources into the public system.
Increase in funding for education. Money for education, not for military armaments!
Quality and affordable nutrition and housing for everyone without exclusions!
Research for working-class needs, not for profits and war! No cooperation of universities with NATO and the murderer-state of Israel!
Hands off trade union and political freedoms police out of educational spaces! Fascists out of universities! Abolition of career evaluation and school grade mechanisms that punish political participation by students.
Abolition of the unpaid labor of internships! Permanent and stable employment for all, securing all labor and social security rights!
Development of critical thinking, well-rounded oversight of academic subjects against historical revisionism and against academy as “exam factory.
Against the intensification of education! For a humane pace of study and learning!