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Seize the Time! Blaze a Revolutionary Path!
Partisan #29 • October
26, 2012
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.
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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