New York Students Rising host Mass Public Action in Albany to defend Public Education

[RedSonRising]

(Because students are workers too :thumbup1: )

New York Students Rising (NYSR) is a statewide network of SUNY and CUNY students who have dedicated themselves to combating unfair tuition hikes and crippling budget cuts that have eroded many of the necessities of New York's public education system, while enriching the already wealthy elite. Private/Corporate interests have turned many of our campuses into basically free training grounds for the future employees of companies that choose to invest in "profitable" departments, while our social science and liberal arts programs get slashed, harassed, and their participants, silenced. These processes stem from a series of undemocratic models across public university campuses in New York that lay vulnerable to the interests of a predatory class of oppressive decision-makers. Administrators and presidents on campus are making 6 figure salaries, public funding has been eschewed for the "benefits" of private sponsorship on campuses (such as Binghamton, where public funding has gone down to a historic low of 21%), and perhaps the most polarizing act of class warfare of them all on the part of those that control the SUNY/CUNY system is the act of cutting 31 million dollars statewide to the Tuition Assistance Program, and millions more for the Equal Opportunity Program; these cuts will add to the historically shrinking number of students of color on campuses and disadvantaged backgrounds able to access higher education. The percentage of students in the United States ending up at home is not a staggering 80%.

Needless to say, the education system in the United States (not just New York, but California, and other regions of the country) is in absolute crisis, and only a conscious defense of our right to an education can challenge this process from worsening the hierarchies that oppress us in modern capitalist society today. Today, the students are rising up in cohesion with each other and with the help of various other supportive communities of resistance to make our demands heard and to pressure our so-called representatives into giving us control over what is rightfully ours. Support the alternative plan proposed by New York Students Rising in order to save our public higher education system and continue the struggle for a democratization of our basic institutions!

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[Dabrowski]

NYSR is funded by $41,500 from the New York Foundation, an instrument of the biggest Wall Street banks. It exists to channel student unrest over rising tuition, etc. into the Democratic Party, and to serve as a launching pad for careerist student bureaucrats aspiring to be bourgeois politicians.

Also, students as such are not workers, or proletarians to be more precise. Even though many of them might also be workers (and this can be strategically important), as students, no amount of studying, homework, classwork, amounts to selling labor power that creates surplus value that augments capital. Students and public education are a capital expense on the whole bourgeoisie and their state, an expense which, with the defeat of the Soviet Union and the cooptation and suppression of the black civil rights movement, the bourgeoisie wants to downsize. Thus, cutbacks and privatization, and the focus on smaller, whiter "elite" public institutions and dumbed-down job skills training for the rest.

[l'Enfermé]

If anything, history has taught us how effective organized student movements can be.

[RedSonRising]

NYSR is funded by $41,500 from the New York Foundation, an instrument of the biggest Wall Street banks. It exists to channel student unrest over rising tuition, etc. into the Democratic Party, and to serve as a launching pad for careerist student bureaucrats aspiring to be bourgeois politicians.

Also, students as such are not workers, or proletarians to be more precise. Even though many of them might also be workers (and this can be strategically important), as students, no amount of studying, homework, classwork, amounts to selling labor power that creates surplus value that augments capital. Students and public education are a capital expense on the whole bourgeoisie and their state, an expense which, with the defeat of the Soviet Union and the cooptation and suppression of the black civil rights movement, the bourgeoisie wants to downsize. Thus, cutbacks and privatization, and the focus on smaller, whiter "elite" public institutions and dumbed-down job skills training for the rest.

You couldn't be more wrong in your characterization of the network; practically none of the participants in the NYSR student movement are affiliated with, supported of, or disillusioned with the bourgeois Democratic party, and no element of the structure relies on the backing or approval of any state politician. Our biggest partners in coordination have been the local occupy movements, and we have never expressed any support of the capitalist system in principle, nor in practice. Where would you get such an idea? To characterize NYSR as such is ignorant, and to smugly depict them as such with clearly no proper assessment is dishonest reactionary propaganda that weakens the link between oppressed peoples throughout the country and the world who are rising up to defend what is theirs and advance the struggle for a democratization of our workplaces, schools, and institutions.

And while you may get as technical as you like in terms of separating students from workers, the fact is that in both the first and third world, the professional job market is as exploitative as it's ever been, and being able to afford higher education is a basic right that academics, revolutionaries, and working class people have to fight for in order to create a space for the political process to continue. The Marxist concept of surplus value you seem so intent on emphasizing (which is an important cornerstone for class-struggle methodology, but not at all an easily definable factor) is created through our historically high student debt of 1 trillion dollars, and eventual employment within the downward trend of competitive wage positions post-graduation. Revolutionary elements of labor and higher education have been combating oppression throughout the 20th century. Today, NYSR expands the narrative beyond what some might erroneously deem "white elite" education and tackles issues of racial oppression, the privatization of a public good, and the accessibility to knowledge and resources for working class people that was all won through reforms made by similarly struggling activists in decades past.

5 CUNY students are arrested daily on average, with some 90% of them being black or Latino. These are real issues of urban working class repression that exists within the context of schools that, as institutions, have become the training grounds for the corporations of tomorrow and centers of militarized security. The space within minority populations learn about their culture, history, and social position within public universities, both SUNY and CUNY, are being cut, while assistance to the poor is being dismantled. And of course, the surrounding population of places like Binghamton and Albany are being gentrified along with NYC, and the workforce that depends on these school systems are becoming more and more regulated.

Is a democratic university institution not a revolutionary goal? Are protecting the gains made by student and labor groups over the past century not in the interests of working class? Are focusing on our local communities through issues of labor, education, job security, not apt ways to politicize a largely dormant working population unaware of the extent of their oppression?

Please read and watch more about what NYSR and other student groups in California and elsewhere in the country are really trying to accomplish through their activism before you write them off as accomplices of the bourgeois "Democratic" party. I hope you can appreciate the points and information I've put forth.

[Dabrowski]

Blah blah blah, follow the money.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

NYSR is funded by $41,500 from the New York Foundation, an instrument of the biggest Wall Street banks. It exists to channel student unrest over rising tuition, etc. into the Democratic Party, and to serve as a launching pad for careerist student bureaucrats aspiring to be bourgeois politicians.

Funding doesn't mean a whole lot when radicals gain traction with the 'rank and file.' Many workers support bourgeois institutions but pull their support and opt for revolutionary approaches when the people in charge begin screwing them over.


Also, students as such are not workers, or proletarians to be more precise. Even though many of them might also be workers (and this can be strategically important), as students, no amount of studying, homework, classwork, amounts to selling labor power that creates surplus value that augments capital. Students and public education are a capital expense on the whole bourgeoisie and their state, an expense which, with the defeat of the Soviet Union and the cooptation and suppression of the black civil rights movement, the bourgeoisie wants to downsize. Thus, cutbacks and privatization, and the focus on smaller, whiter "elite" public institutions and dumbed-down job skills training for the rest.Correct, though consider for a moment that the school system is in many ways similar to the various other complexes in that young people are forced to enter these institutions,against their will,so they can have propaganda shoved down their throats for hours end five days a week. The point I am trying to make is that education is good, but many schools do not care for education but to make money: more students, longer hours=more profits (Surplus value) for those in charge.Meaning, them simply being there positively affects the bourgeoisie.

Kinda off topic, just musing about profit making in bourgeois power circles.

[RedSonRising]

I don't have a retort because I don't actually know what I'm talking about

Very well then.


Funding doesn't mean a whole lot when radicals gain traction with the 'rank and file.' Many workers support bourgeois institutions but pull their support and opt for revolutionary approaches when the people in charge begin screwing them over.

Correct, though consider for a moment that the school system is in many ways similar to the various other complexes in that young people are forced to enter these institutions,against their will,so they can have propaganda shoved down their throats for hours end five days a week. The point I am trying to make is that education is good, but many schools do not care for education but to make money: more students, longer hours=more profits (Surplus value) for those in charge.Meaning, them simply being there positively affects the bourgeoisie.

Kinda off topic, just musing about profit making in bourgeois power circles.

I'm glad you can see way education fits into the struggle, and how seeking funding actually works on the ground. Making short-term gains in resource allocation is usually a kind of side-door process that is never easy and often requires creativity that can't rely on simply a soap-box lobby from radical organizations. Hell, if we could get the money so easily, there'd be no reason to organize, would there?

[Dabrowski]

Actually RedSonRising, I do know whereof I post. I don't have to peruse NYSR's promotional website and promotional videos because I've seen it live and in person.

Besides, all your huffing and puffing about the class and racial composition of CUNY students has nothing to do with the funding and politics of NYSR, which is a capitalist-funded clique of student politician "leaders" selected and trained by CUNY Professional Staff Congress union bureaucrats (at all-expenses-paid summer retreats).

The only way to mobilize the power of the working class in the fight for free, integrated, quality public education is through a fight for the political independence of the working class -- against the Democrats and the union bureaucrats who subordinate the workers organizations to this capitalist party. Needless to say, NYSR's reason for existence is to do the opposite: to use students as a grassroots lobbying wing of the Democrats in Albany, and groom talented student demagogues as future Democratic politicians. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

There is a CUNY student group that doesn't accept funds from school administrations, student governments, or capitalist foundations, and has a revolutionary Marxist program. Check out the CUNY Internationalist Clubs at http://www.internationalist.org/revolutiontoc.html

[RedSonRising]

Actually RedSonRising, I do know whereof I post. I don't have to peruse NYSR's promotional website and promotional videos because I've seen it live and in person.

Besides, all your huffing and puffing about the class and racial composition of CUNY students has nothing to do with the funding and politics of NYSR, which is a capitalist-funded clique of student politician "leaders" selected and trained by CUNY Professional Staff Congress union bureaucrats (at all-expenses-paid summer retreats).

The only way to mobilize the power of the working class in the fight for free, integrated, quality public education is through a fight for the political independence of the working class -- against the Democrats and the union bureaucrats who subordinate the workers organizations to this capitalist party. Needless to say, NYSR's reason for existence is to do the opposite: to use students as a grassroots lobbying wing of the Democrats in Albany, and groom talented student demagogues as future Democratic politicians. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

There is a CUNY student group that doesn't accept funds from school administrations, student governments, or capitalist foundations, and has a revolutionary Marxist program. Check out the CUNY Internationalist Clubs at http://www.internationalist.org/revolutiontoc.html

How could you ever assert that the politics of NYSR are unrelated to the racial composition of CUNY schools when it is one of the primary issues of most local CUNY action groups, such as Students United for a Free Cuny? That is a direct link between the forces of privatization and funding of racist security provisions over the priority of the students. These communities are oppressed on multiple levels, and the education system in its present state fully contributes.

It's hard to see how a majority of NYSR participants can be influenced by the formal structures of the Professional Staff Conference's "summer retreats" when the organization has only been active since this past summer; what exactly did you see in person to invoke this generalization? Coordinating with different unions is a strategic choice that different campuses may make within their own student politicization process, and personally, I can assure you that the organizers within NYSR are not acting as lobbyists or creating a careerist path for Democratic Party politics; our mass action was to demand a meeting with Senators and the Governer in order to demand the free, quality, democratic education that you seem to consider valuable as well. Chanting "anticapitalista" and coordinating with local Occupy movements and participating in direct actions that lead to numerous arrests is not the program of institutions or hopeful individuals allied with the Democratic Party. We are not allies of the Board of Trustees, nor the corporate donors that are destroying our curricula.

The CUNY Internationalist groups seem to be doing good work coordinating with local workers and fighting for free education and produce good literature, but NYSR does not shy away from varying tendencies within the group. I know of Trotskyists, Anarchists, and a variety of Marxists that are all participating within this movement to attain precisely what you're saying. Advocating for the overthrow of the capitalist state is all well and good, I would love to see it as much as the next revolutionary leftist, but when you're trying to politicize local students who have been politically alienated all their lives and lack any sort of proactive consciousness, focusing on tangible issues and relating them to the broader social structure through a lens of class struggle in a gradual, subtle way is more effective than declaring a unified Marxist tendency of the bat with no context. NYSR encompasses a state-wide network that not only involves CUNY, but the SUNY and community-college campuses as well, making it a united front defending and trying to advance democratic public education. We are more powerful this way.

Pressuring the state to give into short-term demands that help the long-term struggle for working class liberation and free education is not the equivalent of relying on the bourgeoisie for support (which would be a contradiction anyway). You can keep highlighting our funds from the New York Foundation (which come with no political strings attached and are used to help compensate working class organizers) all you want, but it makes our goals no less revolutionary and our social actions no less relevant to working class students and oppressed communities. We are not allies of the administration, nor the democratic party, nor the ruling class leeches that are privatizing our education, and our demands & actions have proved as such.

[Dabrowski]

Not much more to say about this heap of blatherous indignation from RSR -- which nevertheless confirms all my points about NYSR. He admits the organization wouldn't exist without thousands of dollars in Rockefeller money, he admits the upstate summer "retreat" for student "leaders" chaperoned by bureaucrat operatives, and despite a generous heaping of pseudo-leftist blatherosity, admits that the great Albany "action" was just another photo-op stunt, the same sort of harmless stunt that every other nonprofit lobbying outfit pulls every day of the week in every state capitol in the U.S.

You may think there's no strings attached, but Rockefeller ain't gonna pay you, and the union bureaucrats won't help you, to fight for socialist revolution, or to oppose the capitalist system in any meaningful way (providing photo ops for "progressive" politicians to pose as defenders of public education doesn't count). So there may be all sorts of "socialists" in NYSR as you say, but there sure aren't any Trotskyists, because Trotskyists have principles and aren't sellout phonies.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

The only way to mobilize the power of the working class in the fight for free, integrated, quality public education is through a fight for the political independence of the working class

That is not the only way. Such will be the ultimate goal but as RSR has said it takes gradual steps to bring alienated students into activity. Tangible results that are seen immediately are to be used as a stepping stone to grander, more radical, objectives. The liberation of the working class and students cannot happen by repeating leftist demands and expecting your peers to sympathize with your wishes.


-- against the Democrats and the union bureaucrats who subordinate the workers organizations to this capitalist party. Needless to say, NYSR's reason for existence is to do the opposite: to use students as a grassroots lobbying wing of the Democrats in Albany, and groom talented student demagogues as future Democratic politicians. This is the function of all public, bourgeois institutions-schools, the workplace, social centers, etc. As said before radicals should not shy away from activity within bourgeois funded groups if it means radicalizing the students there. You are making the mistake that just because something is funded by the bourgeoisie, which is most of society, than it is automatically fighting for the bourgeoisie's demands.Such simply isn't true as politics go deeper than that.

[RedSonRising]

Not much more to say about this heap of blatherous indignation from RSR -- which nevertheless confirms all my points about NYSR. He admits the organization wouldn't exist without thousands of dollars in Rockefeller money, he admits the upstate summer "retreat" for student "leaders" chaperoned by bureaucrat operatives, and despite a generous heaping of pseudo-leftist blatherosity, admits that the great Albany "action" was just another photo-op stunt, the same sort of harmless stunt that every other nonprofit lobbying outfit pulls every day of the week in every state capitol in the U.S.

You may think there's no strings attached, but Rockefeller ain't gonna pay you, and the union bureaucrats won't help you, to fight for socialist revolution, or to oppose the capitalist system in any meaningful way (providing photo ops for "progressive" politicians to pose as defenders of public education doesn't count). So there may be all sorts of "socialists" in NYSR as you say, but there sure aren't any Trotskyists, because Trotskyists have principles and aren't sellout phonies.

Well good luck organizing your principled Trotskyists into agitating for an immediate socialist revolution with no widely politicized student or worker populations, but it's not going to help repeal NY-SUNY 20/20 or concretely affect educational institutions the way NYSR is organizing to do.

[RedSonRising]

SKQKM-_rrrE

[KurtFF8]

There is a CUNY student group that doesn't accept funds from school administrations, student governments, or capitalist foundations, and has a revolutionary Marxist program. Check out the CUNY Internationalist Clubs at http://www.internationalist.org/revolutiontoc.html

This is what all of this "criticism" from Dabrowski is about: "no, my group is more left than your group!"

Most of what was said by Dabrowski was mud slinging and "name calling" instead of substantive criticism of tactics and purpose of NYSR.

I suppose there's a reason that Dabrowski is one of the few active non-restricted members to have negative reputation on RevLeft

[La Guaneña]

The students are the children of the working class, and also the future working class. The only effective student organizations are the ones that understand this and fight to integrate student and worker struggles, and to direct education to the working class even inside Capitalism, as a way of debilitating the mechanism of production of a cheap, qualified but un-educated labour force.

[MustCrushCapitalism]

I'm quite interested in this. Doesn't sound like all that revolutionary of an organization though. However I'm fairly likely to be going to a SUNY school in just almost 2 years.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I'm quite interested in this. Doesn't sound like all that revolutionary of an organization though. However I'm fairly likely to be going to a SUNY school in just almost 2 years.

You should have a talk with RedSonRising than and discuss the finer points of support/membership. :)

[[email protected]]

This reminds me of the People's Front of Judea argument from Life of Brian. . .


You're all against tuition cuts? OK. Does it matter why? Start with the issue. I'm a diehard union guy. When I was organizing, I never looked to exclude a single person who was pro-union e.g. the larger platform or even people who had something they agreed with.


Dabrowski, read Alinsky. You know what else, read W.Z. Foster's History of the Communist Party in the United States.


I don't think you get how this works. You can be an armchair revolutionary and claim no one's "Marxist" or "Maoist" or "Mickey Mouseist" or whatever idealized ideology you follow or you can do a basic study of history and realize the involvement of revolutionary groups with mainstream groups in abolition (look at Weydemeyer and the Germans organizing for Lincoln), the NLU, the IWW, tec.


Also, what more, on a theory level, you're off too. Good job misreading the the Communist Manifesto itself which talks of fighting "with the bourgeosie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way." (CM, Chapter IV)

[Tim Finnegan]

Also, students as such are not workers, or proletarians to be more precise. Even though many of them might also be workers (and this can be strategically important), as students, no amount of studying, homework, classwork, amounts to selling labor power that creates surplus value that augments capital. Students and public education are a capital expense on the whole bourgeoisie and their state, an expense which, with the defeat of the Soviet Union and the cooptation and suppression of the black civil rights movement, the bourgeoisie wants to downsize. Thus, cutbacks and privatization, and the focus on smaller, whiter "elite" public institutions and dumbed-down job skills training for the rest.
Are you at all familiar with the concept of the "social factory", as found in autonomist theory? They would argue that at least some students in late capitalism represent a variant of the "socialised worker", their destiny as white-collar proletarians placing them in a de facto wage-relationship with capital in general, even if they do not possess such a relationship with any particular instance of capital. Something like a "social apprenticeship", you might say, the necessary reproduction of white collar labour displaced from any particular firm onto society as a whole. They represent an expense for the bourgeoisie state on paper, but the reality is more complex, because the reproduction of white collar labour is a necessary process, and one which somebody is going to have to pay for regardless. It's only to the extent that higher education does not serve that purpose that it represents an net expense for capital- which is why it is precisely those elements that the knights of austerity are most enthusiastic about hacking away.

The question, of course, is which students represent this "socialised worker", and the extent that prospective future employment can be seen to determine immediate class-status, and that's not to which there are any easy answers. (Speaking purely anecdotely, it often seems that those students who are almost out-and-out workers are the most likely to realise their status as socialised workers.)

[Dabrowski]

You're all against tuition cuts? OK. Does it matter why? Start with the issue. I'm a diehard union guy. When I was organizing, I never looked to exclude a single person who was pro-union e.g. the larger platform or even people who had something they agreed with.

[I assume by "against tuition cuts" you mean "against tuition hikes"?] Well the Democrats are for tuition hikes just like they're for racist cops, union busting and imperialist war. Because they are a party for the bourgeoisie and that is what the bourgeoisie needs.


Also, what more, on a theory level, you're off too. Good job misreading the the Communist Manifesto itself which talks of fighting "with the bourgeosie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way." (CM, Chapter IV)

Show me where the Democrats are acting in a revolutionary way.

The Republicans did once -- but that ended almost 150 years ago. The party of slavery and the KKK never was "revolutionary" and never will be.


Are you at all familiar with the concept of the "social factory", as found in autonomist theory?

That theory is crap and everything you write is ridiculous crap.

Anyone who thinks a classroom is like a factory has had the privilege of never being in a factory for more than a minute. You are an idiot.

[Left Leanings]

I wish the students every success in their campaign and protests.

In the UK, at one time, students didn't have to pay tuition fees at all. These were met by the local education authority, cos the principle of free education was accepted and practiced.

Then came Thatcher, with her student loans for maintenance/subsistence.

Then came Labour's Tony Blair, who not only did away with student grants altogether, but abolished free education by introducing a full-on system of loans to cover tuition fees.

Keep going, comrades! :thumbup1:

[Tim Finnegan]

That theory is crap and everything you write is ridiculous crap.

Anyone who thinks a classroom is like a factory has had the privilege of never being in a factory for more than a minute. You are an idiot.
I really did not expect that kind of response. :blink:

[nizan]

Fuck your education is empowerment bullshit, education is alienation, nothing more. You indulge in a dying prestige for a role in a bureaucratic spectacle deserving of nothing beyond contempt.

If the student is a stoical slave, than it can only be said that the university intellectual of the industrial commodity-education structure is the inverse to this project; amounting to a slave to modern production not only willing, but enthralled, with the prospect of their service to the power of the spectacle. In much the same way that the lower tier of the bureaucratic superstructure is safely distributed throughout the industrial storage project seen in the disperse organization of suburbia, separated from everything which exists beyond their role as the spectator of labor and consumption, the producer of ideology is rooted to the same unconscious trends expressed in the fabricated desires of socially dreamed necessity.

[RedBen]

Fuck your education is empowerment bullshit, education is alienation, nothing more. You indulge in a dying prestige for a role in a bureaucratic spectacle deserving of nothing beyond contempt.

If the student is a stoical slave, than it can only be said that the university intellectual of the industrial commodity-education structure is the inverse to this project; amounting to a slave to modern production not only willing, but enthralled, with the prospect of their service to the power of the spectacle. In much the same way that the lower tier of the bureaucratic superstructure is safely distributed throughout the industrial storage project seen in the disperse organization of suburbia, separated from everything which exists beyond their role as the spectator of labor and consumption, the producer of ideology is rooted to the same unconscious trends expressed in the fabricated desires of socially dreamed necessity.
hate to break it to you jack ass, everything you take for granted from the internet, to the computer you're typing on, to the car or bus you ride is a result of education. then again, i'm sure your "fuck society's rules maaaan!" attitude is all you will ever need and you can survive without the luxuries. you a snake eater? if you're not a survivalist and a very good one at that you wouldn't last real long. your heating/ventilation/air conditioning, electricity ect all come from engineers, doctors, scientists and technicians with education, the same for medical procedures and medicines. but i'm sure in all your nonconformist ways you never needed a doctor, a mechanic, a prepared meal, this whole "education is wrong maaaaaan" attitude is insane. you learn type in english by yourself???? no need for math? no need for science or physics maaaaaan? do you get water from a tap maaaaaaaaan? someone had to design a pump system and water system for that maaaaaaaaan.:rolleyes: