anti-intellectualism and the potentials of students

I think Devrim is completely correct when saying the communist definition of class is based neither on a sociological definition or on income and that the fact that many students are poor has nothing to do with it.

On the other hand, the fact that an overwhelming majority of students are coming from working class families, and the fact that again an overwhelming majority students are going to become wage-slaves, let aside the fact that some students are part-time workers anyway, quite clearly puts an overwhelming majority of them in the same class with elements who are proletarian even though they do not have jobs at a specific time, such as unemployed workers, retired workers and to a lesser extent housewives. In an actual struggle of students, their interests lead them to more or less the same proletarian means as the sections mentioned above, such as solidarity, self-organization, mass assemblies, mass discussions, trying to break isolation and so forth. Students are also capable of giving a very strong support to the struggles of wage-slaves in the education sector.

This being said, while I have met a number of very class-conscious students so far personally, I would say the prevalent student mentality tends to be a petty-bourgeois one, filled with lots of illusions. Hence it is unsurprising that leftist activity in universities attempts to mobilize the students behind factions of the bourgeoisie by basing itself on this petty-bourgeois mentality. Opposed to this, communist activity in universities has to challenge this mentality by basing itself on the real situation an overwhelming majority of students are in, emphasizing in their agitations the fact that the overwhelming majority of students are sons and daughters of workers and that the future awaiting them is nothing but becoming wage-slaves themselves.

This is right, but students are in the classes that they are in despite, not because of being students. The ones who have to work, for example, and are also workers in a real sense, have to work because they mostly come from working class families.

The overwhelming majority of students may well be working class, but the number of middle, and upper class people is still higher than within the population as a whole. It is therefore unsurprising that because students are a social group that working class people do come across whereas politicians or directors of multi-national companies aren't, workers have the impression of students being middle class. They are certainly more more middle and upper class people there than in society at large, and even more than in the social environment that most working class people actually mix in.

Devrim

In the UK anyway, 46% of people go into higher education, almost every other person does. The numbers aren't really THAT disproportionate.

I agree. Although universities are popularly seen as breeding grounds for radicalism, there is in fact very little of it amongst students in my experience. Most of my colleagues are either politically apathetic or just non-descript liberals.
I think this is because our school has not been so hard-hit by the cost-effective strategies that have affected other unis. No departments have been merged or closed so far, and the tuition fees are still considerably lower than in the rest of the country (although they technically increased in the last couple of years).

I'm not sure what Leo was getting at exactly, but I would agree that most students are not in fact radicalized in any meaningful sense. If you're talking potential, then I think, as I've already said, that the student condition (unpaid work, overwork, poverty) can radicalize people from various backgrounds, as it has done in the past and continues to do today, but this depends entirely on the situation. Some schools are under significantly greater pressure from gov. bureaucrats, and so students there are forced into action. Other schools are comfortably safe, and so their students tend to ignore the problems of the university as factory of workers.

I think what Devrim was saying is that a football audience is no more homogenous in terms of class background than a body of students. Of course they are not literally alike. Students do work as TAs, RAs, interns and so on, even middle class ones (because they need experience to get a good steady job in the future).

John Sulston, who's written a lot about intellectual property and the co-option of science in the interests of profit, just wrote an article today about the ownership of science and mentions that even those apparently pure 'blue skies' science is ultimately in the interests of business and not the wider society who should have access to its fruits.

That may be so, but not to the same extent and not really in the same way. One is a worker for 40, 50 years, while one is a (grown-up) student for at most around 10 years. The strength of the illusion of students that they will be rich after graduating is comparable not to the possible petty-bourgeois aspiration of most workers, but perhaps to the hope that workers will be in a better place in the afterlife. That at least is my observation based on my experience in the university I attend. How can we discuss positions of students without identifying the prevalent illusions in them?

I think that comment was made in regards to this one: and as such the students relationship to the education sector seems to be as one of consumers. This comment:

I think sums up the real role of the universities and is very true. At least in Turkey, most students don't pay anything other than a symbolic sum to go to university, and in fact there is a number of students (coming from poorer backgrounds, or ones who are very succesful) who instead get paid for going to university. This brings us to the point by Devrim:

I would say that most students are as such because they are working class, since the main function of all educational foundations is training working class boys and girls to be wage-workers, and shaping their mentality accordingly. Today, preparing bourgeois specialists is merely one of the many very minor functions of universities. Although I don really think that middle class exists at all in the marxist sense, the most "middle class" person I met in the university I attend was the son of a governors assistant in a distant town in at the Black Sea coast. Terrified that he won't be able to get work when he graduates with a degree from the subject he was studying, he quit school and is preparing for the exams at the moment once again.

I am not really sure whether the cause of this is the nevertheless tiny amount of students from "middle class" and upper class backgrounds. Such schism, and it exists in different forms in different countries certainly, reminds me more of the old schism between the skilled and unskilled laborers although of course it is not exactly the same. Here, for instance, in my experience the contempt for students comes not in any way as something based on workers' disdain for the "middle class", but as a contempt for students because they are "atheists", "unpatriotic" and even "communists", and hence it is unsurprising that such reaction is coming from the most lumpenized sections of the working class, and is directed against workers who are struggling as well in a similar fashion.

I think that the numbers are disproportionate. I would imagine that if you looked at a breakdown, more children from upper and middle class backgrounds go to university as a percentage than children from working class backgrounds. The amount of people who go in total isn't really relevant to the proportion. If you compare it to the sort of people who you usually meet though and not the general population, I think it would be shockingly disproportionate.

In the UK for example:

So, the number of students from private schools at university is 100% higher than children who go to public schools. I would call that disproportionate in itself without comparing it to the people you meet in normal social situations. For example, I think I have only ever met (knowingly) two people who went to public school in the UK.

Devrim

Well obviosuly, and that figure is exactly what you'd expect if only half of the population as a whole go to uni but most independently educated pupils do go.
But you're talking about a time when university is no longer the mark of a priveleged elite.

yep, in Belfast I'd never met anyone who'd been to private school, including 8yrs at Queens University.
It was only through english anarchism did I might anyone who went to private school

Well your 'personal observations' are pretty worthless.
My 'personal observations', since we're indulging spurious anecdotes that make generalisations about entire students bodies, was that the majority of students I'd met had no illusions about ever being rich, and most were bracing themselves for mindless admin jobs and call centre work, which for about 9out of 10 of my friends became a reality.

I did go to the uni with the highest levels of part time work (both in terms of relative student numbers and hours-worked) of any UK uni - so we're talking about a student body where two-thirds had no choice but to work to support themselves during their studies (read: training).

I don't see why. Students from private schools take up double their proportion of the population, not half. Therefore they are double their proportion in the general population. This means that 93% of students go to state schools, though they make up only 73% of the university population (14% from private schools and 13% from abroad). The proportion of students state schools is clearly higher compared to their percentage in society as a whole.

Yes, sure. That doesn't mean that what I say isn't true though.

yep, in Belfast I'd never met anyone who'd been to private school, including 8yrs at Queens University.
It was only through english anarchism did I might anyone who went to private school

Yeah, both the people I met were in Class War when I lived in London.

Devrim

This has been my experience also. I thought what Leo meant by illusions was simply the sort of optimistic liberalism (of the Obama voter variety) that a lot of students just on because they're not really interested in politics. But it is ridiculous to say that most students entertain the illusion that they will become rich upon finishing their studies. I for one am willfully embarking on several more years of academic training knowing that there is zero guarantee that I'll be able to find a position in higher education after I graduate. And the debt just keeps piling up.

Devrim math fail.
It is exactly what you'd expect if half the general population go to uni, but most private school students go to uni - it should be roughly double their representation in teh genral population. Disproportionate yes, but not in the sense that you or Leo are implying, ie that 'uni students' as a whole are anything but working class.
My point was that even still, teh vast, vast majority of uni students were not privately educated, nor rich, nor do they have illusions that they will ever be rich. I get the impression you have a slight chip on your shouldetr about having not gone to uni yourslef.
Most uni students know full well they will work shit temp jobs, call centres and soul-destroying admin work for the rest of their lives.

Devrim, is a student's class determined by his relationship to the means of production, or his 'background'. You can't have it both ways. Either the scions of the ruling class become proletarian for a while at university, or else class is determined by ones culture and income and not by ones material relationship to the means of production.

Saying that students are 'consumers of education' tells you nothing about their class. It merely tells you their relationship to the means of subsistence; not to the means of production (obviously that division isn't cut and dried, but for theory's sake let's pretend it is). I think that the conditions of student life actually imply a position of being 'cut off' from the means of production, that is, of being proletarian. Obviously, there are some exceptions, which is why I think ToJ was right to criticise my earlier generalisation on this topic, though he did it for the wrong reasons.

Comparing students to children based on their dependence on others (parents, the state, banks, credit card companies or whatever) misses the point entirely. Children are not proletarians, because they do not have the freedom of bourgeois society - they aren't allowed to buy and sell, to work, and so on. Students, on the other hand, have that freedom, and can therefore be considered as part of the same class as all dispossessed people, except in certain rare but important cases when they are also functioning capitalists.

The desire of the ruling class of putting their children through university, which is very real, is very much like the ideological desire of a boss that his son, on entering his business, should start at the bottom and be allowed to work his way up, rather than being given a cushy position in management right away. The son is very likely to get preferential treatment, and is virtually assured of his return to the ruling class in a few years, and so will probably continue to think of himself as part of this class, but nevertheless his material relationship to his family's capital has altered, briefly, during his position as a low-ranking employee.

~J.

I am studying history

In the US, as far as I'm aware, you get a full scholarship (which includes working as a TA or RA) if you get accepted into the graduate program at one of the top universities. Not many universities are able to follow this model though, due to lack of funds; at my uni only the top 4 PhD applicants receive funding from the school (although there are a couple of government scholarships you can apply for).
The problem is, if somehow you don't manage to get into a top name university, your chances of obtaining a post as a lecturer or researcher in academia (which is what you've been training for after all) dramatically decrease. One of my profs was just telling me recently how the UWO (University of Western Ontario) has fallen behind in the rankings even though it has excellent lecturers, so I should probably not apply there.
Scholarships are not impossible to obtain in most cases, that is true, but the competitiveness of this system that favors Ivy League elitism, means that very few of the many talented and bright graduate students that I know will earn a living out of doing what they're training for.
The path just gets narrower and narrower the further up you move on the academic hierarchy (but that is true for any qualified white collar job ultimately).

Oh of course, I did not say that most students were petty-bourgeois themselves!

Yes, this is an important point in my opinion. The first point actually also is, I'd say more or less the basic way the working class at least in Turkey looks at education in general and students in particular.

I am looking forward to seeing more and more examples of the second point.

Obviously that was a cliché example, but the point I made was that most students do not see themselves as wage-slaves in the future.

Well, kudos to the realism of your friends then, what can I say?

OK, but that is not the case everywhere, a situation like that should not be generalized. I know lots of people in my university: only two people other than myself works a part-time job, and I know one who used to work a part time job but quit. That, on the other hand, is a situation radically different from that which the graduate students are in where basically all of whom are workers and I presume most of whom are aware of it.

Uh... the first point I made on this thread was that an overwhelming majority of university students are proletarians.

I am not sure what your point is here. That backs up what I was saying.

No, I think the majority of students are obviously working class. I don't think that you can generalise to students as a whole though because some obviously aren't. To put it simply, their class status is not dependent on them being students.

I think that it isn't the case at all. I think that most students are working class, and wouldn't bring it up for discussion. Although I think that there are some negative things that can be picked up in that environment, like in other environments, I wouldn't sneer at students as a group.

I think though that when this is brought up, as it often is, it tends to be by students who in some way feel removed from the working class, and are trying to justify themselves to themselves.

It isn't something that I would at all dwell on usually, like those ridiculous things when people used to say that teachers weren't working class.

None of this means though that for many working class people who do go to university, (and aren't involved in the anarchist movement ) it is an environment that has a very different social composition than those they are used to, where they do meet people who for example have been to public school, and it is understandable what impression people pick up from that

.

What I said was that the communist view of class is based on the relationship t the means of production, and that students relationship to the means of production, as consumers, is not something to make a class analysis on. That doesn't mean that it is based upon 'culture', but more their direct relationship to the means of production, one of dependence, on somebody else's relationship to it. We could, if you want, call this background.

Devrim

Students' source of income is not their relationship to production. How do you work that one out exactly? How is their relationship of dependence, in terms of their consumption, a production relationship?

Their almost universal relationship to the means of production is one of dispossession.

~J.

Because, at least in this country ,students prime source of income is their parents. The relationship to the means of production is a dependent one upon somebody else, who themselves has a relationship to it.

Devrim

You should not be quick to extrapolate this to everywhere else in the world though. In this country for example, the prime source of income for a lot of full-time students, if not most, is a combination of work, government loans (not exactly income since you have to pay it back), small bursaries (if you meet certain conditions) and help from the family. It is most certainly not a clear one-way dependent relationship.
It is also a bit reductionist to say that since fully dependent students don't have an actual direct relationship to the means of production, they're not "proper working class" even if their parents are.
The school is a place where you do a lot of unpaid (intellectual) work, often for the sole reason of training for a future job. The student has two alternatives: either they drop out and get a less well-paid job, or stay in school and continue training for a better-paid (and intellectually more rewarding) job. So basically they either choose to be a worker, or they choose to be a worker-in training who nonetheless works, without receiving compensation. I fail to see how this clearly puts them outside the class of people who have no choice but to sell their labour to survive.

I am not claiming that students are outside the working class. Nor would I say that people unable to work and who are supported by their families are by necessity. What I am saying is that not all students are working class, and that students aren't working class as a body. Being a student itself is not what defines their class.

Devrim

Surely your source of income is not your relationship to the means of production. The two aren't unconnected, but I have always taken the essential detail to be whether or not you own and/or manage capital.

~J.

I agree with BLJ here. That may be the case in Turkey, but in the UK I would think most students main sources of income are a combination of casual work, and loans which they must pay back from wages in the future.

That's certainly the case for almost everyone I know who went to university.

Your point about people who went to private school also does not say anything about anyone's class in terms of relationship to the means of production. As posted above, 7% of the UK population went to private school - most of those people are the children of wage workers. Predominantly quite well-paid wage workers, sure, like the children of teachers, IT workers, etc

Of course, banks and the state are also ruling-class institutions, so being dependent on them for ones income is not meaningfully different from being dependent on ruling-class parents.

~J.

But what of the student whose father lives, for example, on income from large shear holdings, and who supports her? Surely her relationship is one of dependence on an owner of capital. As such I think that fact that she may be a student isn't the telling point.

For those who are casual workers, they obviously are working class, but again this is not determined by their status as students, but by their status as workers.

I don't think that UK public schools pupils are mostly the children of teachers or the equivalent.

Devrim