Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee – Toronto
This ain't your Grandpa's communism
Seize the Time! Blaze a Revolutionary Path!
“A single spark can start a prairie fire.” – Mao Zedong
1st National Conference of the Students and Youth: October 2012, Toronto, Canada
Parti communiste révolutionnaire – Revolutionary Communist Party (Canada)
It is Right to Rebel
From the Arab Spring, to the UK riots and the #Occupy movements in
North America, exploited workers and oppressed masses continue taking
the streets. To tackle the economic crisis they created, capitalists and
their lackey governments ruthlessly attack and further impoverish the
majority of working and poor people. While this minority of the rich and
powerful—intent on protecting their obscene profits and lavish
lifestyle—gorges itself on the exploitation and immiseration of workers,
the vast majority of the world’s population must toil for the most
basic necessities to sustain life. “Where there is oppression,” said Mao
Zedong, “there is resistance.”
At the forefront of these popular struggles, youth from the
proletariat and popular classes are rising up against the authority of
the ruling regimes. Radicalized students are leaving their classrooms to
struggle with the masses in the streets.It is not difficult to see why.
In this latest “age of austerity,” young people from these social
strata—who are poor, recent immigrants, undocumented migrants,
racialized, and especially those belonging to the First Nations—face
further deterioration of their life conditions. In an aggressively
imperialist state like Canada, unemployment for those between 15 to 24
years of age is over 17%; that’s more than double the national
unemployment rate! Poor, unemployed and underemployed youth—a
significant portion of what Karl Marx called the “reserve army of
labour”—are criminalized and incarcerated at alarming rates. On or off
the job, our quality of life is miserable. Riots and mass
rebellions—triggered by racist pig murders and brutal state
repression—are the expression of justified rage against this
exploitative and crisis-ridden capitalist system. But to give this
degenerating system the shove it deserves, we must collectively organize
our rage and arm ourselves with revolutionary ideology and politics.
Toward a Unity of Proletarian Youth and Revolutionary Students
In the true words of radical hip-hop crew Dead Prez: “The
same people who control the school system control the prison system, and
the whole social system.” It’s no wonder they say this school shit is a
joke! In Canada, 1 out of 5 teenagers between 15-19 years of age will
drop out of school. The “education”—more accurately, the
indoctrination—system under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie teaches
us servility and obedience to authority, to act and live within very
prescribed (class!) limits, to become dutiful and “flexible” workers for
the interest of the bosses, to serve, to obey, to vote in their sham
elections!
For those of us who reject this bullshit, who wish for an education
that will help break the unending cycle of exploitation and misery, who
want to bring an end to the capitalist system, the PCR-RCP encourages
your contribution to building a revolutionary movement of the
proletarian youth and students this October 2012.
What is a revolutionary student? According to Mao, we judge whether
a youth is revolutionary or not by whether they integrate themselves
with the masses or oppress the common people instead. Our perspective is
that there is no such thing as an independent student “class” with its
own distinct interests. Class permeates the student population as it
does the wider society. As students climb up the ladder of higher
education in search of upward class mobility, the more likely they will
become the trained administrators, bureaucrats, and sentinels for the
capitalist system.
Is our intention to become student politicians or
politicize students? To serve capital or to Serve the People? Our
perspective is that it is very necessary to break with reformism and
social democratic politics dominating the student and labour movements
today. We want to align student struggles with those of young workers on
and off the campuses, young workers who are shuffled into mind-numbing,
back-beaking, low-pay, low-skilled, precarious jobs. Why should
proletarian youth and revolutionary students pursue politics that
ultimately preserve a degenerating political system that is not a direct
expression of our class interests? We should struggle alongside youth
who risk imprisonment by the racist capitalist system, with those who
refuse to submit to bullshit authority and who are destined to fill the
mega prisons in the coming years.
Revolutionary students must align their interests and develop clear
politics to advance the struggles of the proletariat and oppressed
masses toward the only solution that can bring an end to their misery.
As the Quebec students are showing the rest of North America, it is
necessary to “seize the time” and to expand the immediate struggles
against rising costs of higher education and burdensome debt loads to
attacking the economic foundation which gives rise to mass exploitation
and oppression—to ideologically and politically attack the capitalist
system and to mobilize for socialist revolution. We plan to raise hell
and to raise it well.
We therefore invite anti-capitalist young people across the country
who are organizing in high schools, in colleges and universities, who
are employed or unemployed, and who are from the First Nations, to
accumulate our forces and experiences, to develop and organize
collectively in the coming months a plan for revolutionary political
education, education that will be transformed into militant political
action in the class struggle, which will truly make the ruling classes
tremble. For more info contact: seizethetime2012@yahoo.ca
