[The
following document is a call-out for a revolutionary youth conference, to be
held in October 2012, sponsored by the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada
(PCR-RCP).]
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
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