Communist presentation!

[flabbergaster]

Hi,
I've been a lurker for quite a while, but now I need your help!

I've got a presentation to do on Communism in a group and I'm looking for some ideas of how I could approach this or advice in general. The presentation is pretty liberal as in it can be presented in various ways (powerpoint, engaging class, handouts etc)

Here's the details comrades:

Learning objectives
1. To understand how communist regimes control their societies.
2. To understand how communists win support for their rule.
3. To identify the problems which communists face in trying to implement their ideas.

Task
As an underground cell of the Communist Party, you are charged with preparing a plan to take over the University during the revolution (which is imminent). You may assume that you will have the backing of sufficient forces to eliminate any active resistance to your rule, and should focus on how you intend to run the university [Learning objectives 1 and 2]. In the seminar you should brief your fellow-students upon the plan for no more that 15-20 minutes.

You may wish to consider:
1. What posts in the University you would include in the Party's nomenklatura system.
2. How you would reorganise the Students' Union.
3. How you would reorganise the admission of students, teaching and research.
4. How you would build support for Communist rule amongst students and staff.

Within seven days of the seminar you must each submit a secret written report to me which identifies the problems likely to arise in running the university on communist principles, drawing upon the experience of the USSR, and explains how you would counter them [Learning objective 3].

[Inithias]

Originally posted by flabbergaster@October 27, 2007 06:11 pm
Hi,
I've been a lurker for quite a while, but now I need your help!

I've got a presentation to do on Communism in a group and I'm looking for some ideas of how I could approach this or advice in general. The presentation is pretty liberal as in it can be presented in various ways (powerpoint, engaging class, handouts etc)

Here's the details comrades:

Learning objectives
1. To understand how communist regimes control their societies.
2. To understand how communists win support for their rule.
3. To identify the problems which communists face in trying to implement their ideas.

Task
As an underground cell of the Communist Party, you are charged with preparing a plan to take over the University during the revolution (which is imminent). You may assume that you will have the backing of sufficient forces to eliminate any active resistance to your rule, and should focus on how you intend to run the university [Learning objectives 1 and 2]. In the seminar you should brief your fellow-students upon the plan for no more that 15-20 minutes.

You may wish to consider:
1. What posts in the University you would include in the Party's nomenklatura system.
2. How you would reorganise the Students' Union.
3. How you would reorganise the admission of students, teaching and research.
4. How you would build support for Communist rule amongst students and staff.

Within seven days of the seminar you must each submit a secret written report to me which identifies the problems likely to arise in running the university on communist principles, drawing upon the experience of the USSR, and explains how you would counter them [Learning objective 3].

lurker ? and now you want us to help you ? gtfo ! xD :P
naaah j/k

[AmbitiousHedonism]

Wow, that sounds like a pretty cool project for a class.

Do your own fucking project, though! C'mon man, have fun and go ape-shit with this.

[Forward Union]

Originally posted by flabbergaster@October 27, 2007 06:11 pm
1. To understand how communist regimes control their societies.

Communist Regimes have never existed, and in such a society there would be no form of hierarchical control. As state and government would be abolished and replaced with a free system of workers assemblies.

2. To understand how communists win support for their rule.

Communists don't intend to rule they intend to facilitate workers self-organisation. This would be directly democratic and involve the destruction of all top down rule.

3. To identify the problems which communists face in trying to implement their ideas.

There are thousands. It's a contentious subject with thousands of conflicting articles written by various communists all over the world. It's a matter of debate within our movement.

The classics are, divisions in the working class such as racism, sexism and homophobia. The fact that the working class often doesn't recognise itself as such. Fascism, and of course, the mechanisms of state, police, military, and Leninists.

As an underground cell of the Communist Party, you are charged with preparing a plan to take over the University during the revolution (which is imminent). You may assume that you will have the backing of sufficient forces to eliminate any active resistance to your rule, and should focus on how you intend to run the university [Learning objectives 1 and 2]. In the seminar you should brief your fellow-students upon the plan for no more that 15-20 minutes.

Well, im not sure how you want to set about taking over the university but once you have done so, you should abolish all positions of authority. All decisions should be made by a democratic workers assembly in the main hall, involving all students and teachers. Certain people can be mandated with tasks, but can never hold authority over the workers councils.

The only people this plan should be secret to are fascists, Bolsheviks and the police.

Within seven days of the seminar you must each submit a secret written report to me which identifies the problems likely to arise in running the university on communist principles, drawing upon the experience of the USSR, and explains how you would counter them

The biggest threat is bolshevism.

[flabbergaster]

Inithias and AmbitiousHedonism, I was just looking for some pointers (not exactly the most criminal thing to do seeing as there is many ideas going round here) - I'm not asking to go into intimate details of how it would be done! Even at that it would require me to understand it!


William, I profoundly agree with all that you have said. I would regularly argue back to people who claim communism to be a "failed experiment"; just look at Soviet Union, with the fact that it wasn't a "pure" communist state. That this requires a classless society, and that any sort of top-down control can't work with it, which is a trait of all these so-called communist states. Many people just don't seem to realise what communism is - but in a way it makes for common usage. This reinforces what you said lastly -to abolish all positions of authority. This would lead to a community that isn't dictated to, but something the majority population democratically can rule.

[MarxSchmarx]

1. What posts in the University you would include in the Party's nomenklatura system.
2. How you would reorganise the Students' Union.
3. How you would reorganise the admission of students, teaching and research.
4. How you would build support for Communist rule amongst students and staff.

1. There will be no such thing.

2. The current collaborationist leadership will be sent to Antarctica for "re-education."
3. All students that want to study there will be admitted. We can make it easy to enter, hard to graduate. More professors will be hired to fit this demand. Research is trickier but here are five points worth noting:
a. research should focus on a pressing social need (civil engineering and public health) rather than scoring big-money grants (aerospace engineering and balding cures)
b. No corporate funded research on the corporation's product. No military-funded research.
c. Collaboration between experts (e.g. Manhattan project) instead of competition for grants
d. Everything generated by research is open source and in the public domain.
e. Humanities research should be for the instead of narrow specialists. For example, texts or murals should be scanned and digitalized and available to all on easily usable websites.

4. Create soviets organized by department/major, and for large majors assign soviets based on alphabetized last name. Each soviet selects different delegates to different university wide committees. Committee proposals are voted on by soviets. Thus everyone has a vested interest and voice in this collective effort working out.

As an aside, the university administration will be converted to facilitators of the soviets. The current system of deans, rectors, chancellors, etc... will be liquidated.

[kasama-rl]

Here is one way to approach it.....


The RCP,USA has detailed descriptions of what they see the future society would be like (socialist society in transition to communi8sm, after the overthrow of capitalism.)


http://revcom.us/margorp/progtoc-e.htm

Two parts are particularly relevent:

One is on "Consolidating the New Proletarian Power, Developing Radically New Institutions"

http://revcom.us/margorp/a-consol-e.htm

Another is on Art, Science, Education, Sports, and the Challenge of Creating A Whole New Superstructure in Socialist Society

http://revcom.us/margorp/a-artscien.htm

* * * * * * * * *

Here is the section on education per se (sorry about the odd ? instead of "):

EDUCATION

Education under capitalism is a system of savage inequalities�a system that reproduces inequality. Children in poor communities go to inferior schools with overcrowded classrooms, poorly paid teachers, and lack of materials. For many kids, schools are little more than prisons where the only aim is to maintain control, and students are subjected to armed police, metal detectors, searches, and abuse. The learning process is molded by tests that discriminate against the poor and the oppressed nationalities. In the affluent schools, education is marked by the pursuit of grades and rewards, self-seeking competition, and elitism.

�English Only� policies, and the cutting of affirmative action and programs for African-American and Chicano studies, reinforce national oppression. The spread of religion, fundamentalist morality, and irrational doctrine is increasingly part of the school atmosphere. The increasing promotion of reactionary family values along with unscientific genetic theories regarding differences between men and women�and, to say the least, no serious commitment to equality and emancipation for women�combine to produce hostile and oppressive relations between boys and girls from an early age.

Education under capitalism is not about training new generations in critical thinking. And it is not about training people to know and change the world, to do away with injustice, ignorance, and poverty. Capitalist education is education in capitalism and its outlook�and the idea that these principles and the society they serve cannot be surpassed.

Such an educational process turns history and reality upside down, portraying the history of humanity as a history of �great men,� where geniuses, monarchs, presidents�exploiters and oppressors�are heroes and �role models.� It justifies the most unspeakable acts of imperialist war and plunder. It blots out the class content of all important events and actions in history and the world today. People are trained in all kinds of unscientific thinking about the world and all kinds of nonsense and poison about American society as a model of �freedom and democracy.�

Completely revolutionizing education in theory and practice is a crucial question for the proletariat.

Upon seizing power, the proletariat will immediately take up the need to overcome illiteracy and the lack of even basic education among broad masses in this country. The educational system will be changed at its foundation and the scientific, revolutionary outlook and method of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM) will be applied to guide education in every aspect.

We will eliminate the tracking system�where elite students, mainly from the privileged classes, are selected and groomed for positions of leadership and authority, while the broad ranks of the proletariat and oppressed nationalities are �tracked� into lower tier jobs or left to find some desperate hustle. This is a system which makes a principle out of the division between mental and manual labor and serves to perpetuate this division of labor and class divisions generally.

The educational policies and practices of the new socialist society will play an important part in overcoming these divisions.

Students will be led to develop knowledge�to be creative and innovative�in all fields from technical and scientific to artistic and cultural. Education will challenge the students to develop critical thinking and will promote, and train the masses in, a scientific outlook, most fundamentally the scientific world outlook and method of dialectical materialism.

From the start, the educational system of the proletarian state will combine rather than separate mental and manual labor, preparing the new generation to carry out and integrate the two. Edu�ca�tion will be carried out in close connection with the work and activities of the masses as a whole�in workplaces, neighborhoods, farms, and rural areas�so that students and teachers and other leaders in educational institutions gain a real and overall understanding of how society runs and how the proletariat and formerly op�pressed masses are transforming society.

Self-seeking competition will no longer be a guiding principle of education�the standard will be for knowledge and initiative to strengthen the common good.

The whole idea of blind obedience to authority will be criticized. Teachers and others responsible for giving leadership in education will be leaders but not people �whose word is law.� The socialist educational system will work to break down the divisions between professional educators and students�and the masses of people in general.

Educational policy will aim to bring up successors to the proletarian revolution. The students will be educated in the principles and spirit of MLM�including its scientific, critical struggle for the truth, its challenging of tradition and the force of habit and its daring to rebel against reactionary authority, even those claiming the mantle of Marxism itself. Stu�dents, teachers, and administrators will be led to take part, together with the masses, in the ideological battle between Marxism and bourgeois reactionary philos�ophy in various forms throughout society.

The new educational system will expose, criticize, and repudiate all the lies and distortions of the bourgeoisie, especially its propaganda and miseducation that promote white supremacy and male supremacy and chauvinist hostility toward the rest of the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples and nations of the world.

Proletarian internationalism will be a major focus of education, giving people a profound understanding of the reality that the proletariat and masses of people worldwide have a common interest and objective in overthrowing imperialism and uprooting all exploitation and oppression.

Students will be educated in the real history of the oppressed peoples and nations inside and outside the country, and the oppression of women in class society, so that they will gain a deep understanding of the concrete effects of national oppression, the oppression of women, and similar crimes of capitalism�and whose interests are served by this inequality and the ideologies of racism and chauvinism.

Representatives of the masses, including workers and oppressed peoples from other countries, will be invited into the classrooms to give the students a living understanding of these questions, and the students will go out among the workers, formerly oppressed nationalities, women and other masses and hold discussions and struggle with them on these decisive questions.

At the same time as the socialist educational system enables and challenges students to develop critical and creative thinking, and to become expert in various fields, it will work to break down the separation between the broad masses as a whole and the students, especially those full-time students who are enrolled in universities and similar institutions of advanced learning and specialization.

One important role of these institutions will be to train intellectuals and experts in various fields from among the ranks of the masses. This will be part of a process of breaking the domination over these spheres by intellectuals trained�not only technically but ideologically�in the old society. But from the very beginning, and increasingly, the socialist educational system will take concrete steps to combat the tendency for such students to be fashioned into an �elite� standing above and lording it over the masses.

As soon as possible, in tempo with the consolidation of power by the proletariat and its first major victories in establishing control over and undertaking the socialist transformation of the economy, the policy will be adopted of sending all high school graduates to work in the rural areas, in factories and other workplaces, or in some cases into the revolutionary armed forces. Some will stay and work among the masses; others will, after a time, go on to other work or to colleges and universities.

Students who attend colleges and universities will be chosen from among the masses�including older people as well as youth. The criteria for admission to colleges will be based first and above all on demonstrated devotion to the revolutionary cause of the international proletariat, broadness of mind and a critical and revolutionary spirit�as determined through discussion among the masses under the leadership of the Party.

At the same time as students, including those in universities, are brought into closer connection with the masses, colleges will be increasingly established and will function in close connection with the workplaces and neighborhoods, with special attention to the rural areas. Some part-time colleges will be directly connected with workplaces. Specialists in art, science, education, foreign affairs and so on will take part in the higher education of workers.

This kind of education will enable the workers to master different fields on a deep level and will develop worker/intellectuals who can play a leading role in society in all spheres. And, at the same time, it will be another important step in breaking down the ivory tower atmosphere of colleges and in overcoming inequalities in society as a whole.

Representatives of the masses will be organized to take part, together with teachers, educational personnel, and representatives of the students, in leading the schools and struggling to see that these principles and methods of the socialist educational system are upheld and actually implemented.

Overall, the struggle to revolutionize the educational system will be a crucial battleground in the new socialist society, exactly because education plays such a critical role in serving and perpetuating one kind of system or another.

As in other areas of the superstructure, the proletariat will have to wage a protracted and intense fight against the forces of reaction, tradition, and habit. It must do this if it is to establish and develop an educational system that furthers socialist transformation and the transition to communism and trains, in theory and practice, successive generations of class-conscious activists in the great movement of the international proletariat. Thus, while the students will be led to master all fields, from technical and scientific to artistic and cultural, a continual battle must be waged for this to be under the guidance of Marxism and in the interests of the proletariat. Therefore their principal subject will be the class struggle�proletarian revolution.
They have a section on

[kasama-rl]

On some specific questions:

1. What posts in the University you would include in the Party's nomenklatura system.

Clearly a revolutionary society would not have a nomenklatura. And the (rather late) emergence of that system in the USSR happened in conjuncture with its departure from the revolutionary road.

2. How you would reorganise the Students' Union.

Clearly, such organizations would be part of the new revolutionary system in universities. But inevitably within a rev process there will also be mass revolutionary student organizations that emerge. so its not like the old organizations (student unions, fraternities, faculty associations, etc) simply exists as they did before.

communists say "when revolution has its day, people see things in a different way." In other words, the day after a revolutionary seizure of power, everything looks different and people widely act and think differently -- though this is hardly a simple or linear process.

3. How you would reorganise the admission of students, teaching and research.

Clearly oppressed people (including youth from among the previously oppressed) will arrive on campuses in a new way -- not just as students but as teachers, and as revolutionary activists playing a key role in the direction of change on campus.

The rcp's programme says:

"We will eliminate the tracking system -- where elite students, mainly from the privileged classes, are selected and groomed for positions of leadership and authority, while the broad ranks of the proletariat and oppressed nationalities are "tracked" into lower tier jobs or left to find some desperate hustle. This is a system which makes a principle out of the division between mental and manual labor and serves to perpetuate this division of labor and class divisions generally."


4. How you would build support for Communist rule amongst students and staff.

Liberation builds support. Change. Elimination of the oppression of women. Ending the teaching of reactionary ideas and traditions. Breaking down the barriers between mental and manual, between professor and student, between campus and community.

Also, a point others have made: The very idea of "communist rule" is a little odd, and reflects anti-communist assumptions.

To make revolution, clearly large numbers of people need to support a seizure of power, and they will be led by revolutionary organizations. But this is a new form of rule by the PEOPLE, the first time the people REALLY rule in their interests.

[AmbitiousHedonism]

I didn't mean to sound mean, just teasing.

If I was given this assignment I'd turn the university into a base of operations for subversion. The entire institution would be a factory for training guerrillas, making simple explosives, money laundering to purchase weapons, propaganda, free food & sports programs for the neighborhoods around the school. Maybe it'd produce copious amounts of LSD in the organic chem lab.

The Student Union would be an "open & democratic" forum for discussing university problems, but it would be used to identify dissenters. There'd have to be public executions of former members of certain student groups -- College Republicans, Evangelical Christians, Frats & Sororities (only select ones though).

There would be no visible hierarchy or officialdom, but soldiers & police would be all over the place. Anonymous flyers and electronic messages would be sent to students & faculty to direct the activity of the university.

The first target after consolidation should be city government.

[Janus]

Interesting class you're taking.

Most of the questions seem to be oriented around your specific school but for question #3, I would definitely include support for some sort of affirmative action based on economic class rather than race.

[Killer Enigma]

Originally posted by kasama-rl@October 31, 2007 04:55 pm
Clearly a revolutionary society would not have a nomenklatura. And the (rather late) emergence of that system in the USSR happened in conjuncture with its departure from the revolutionary road.

--

Clearly, such organizations would be part of the new revolutionary system in universities. But inevitably within a rev process there will also be mass revolutionary student organizations that emerge. so its not like the old organizations (student unions, fraternities, faculty associations, etc) simply exists as they did before.

--

Clearly oppressed people (including youth from among the previously oppressed) will arrive on campuses in a new way -- not just as students but as teachers, and as revolutionary activists playing a key role in the direction of change on campus.

--

To make revolution, clearly large numbers of people need to support a seizure of power, and they will be led by revolutionary organizations. But this is a new form of rule by the PEOPLE, the first time the people REALLY rule in their interests.

That clear, huh?