The Enemy Within, by La Ventana Collective

The Enemy Within - by La Ventana collective

The student is a state of being. It is a transitory state. It is a hazing; it is a rehearsal. It is a preparatory stage.

The student is a privileged person in an underprivileged world of suffering, but only because s/he does not recognize her/his own boredom as a form of imprisonment, of torture. The student is not only deadened to reality, s/he is also deprived of the consciousness of her/his own suffering. The student accepts this as “normal,” but it is only the normality of her/his repression that makes the student like the rest of society.

The student lives in a state of protracted infancy because it is the function of the University to train future, docile low-level functionaries. This state of protracted infancy is seen in the classrooms, where students sit quietly in military formation, accepting the nonsense professors spew. The student is there, content and misguided, believing that the classroom is a setting for some privileged and serious learning. Thus the student eagerly accepts the traditional teacher-student relationship.

It is in the University where submissiveness is ingrained ever more easily. Such inculcations formerly had to be forced upon the white-collar workers; now they are easily absorbed and passed along by the mass of future low-level functionaries. Students are being trained for jobs comparable to those of 20th century skilled workers; except, back then, skilled workers never expected promotions.

The student clings to the crumbling prestige of the University, and, in comparison to the former level of general bourgeois culture, the machine-made specialized education is just as profoundly debased at the intellectual level because the modern economic system requires the mass production of uneducated workers who have been rendered incapable of thinking—like domesticated cows.

The University is, in fact, a training ground for future docile, submissive workers. On these training grounds, the student unashamedly lives an overt childish existence. The tighter authority’s chains shackle the student, the freer the student believes s/he is.

The University has become an institution for organizing ignorance; “high culture” disappears at the same rate as the school assembly lines produce professors; professors are scum and most would be jeered at in any high school classroom. But the University student is oblivious to all of this and continues to listen obligingly to the masters; the student consciously suspends all critical judgment so as to wallow in the mystical state of being a student—someone seriously committed to learning serious things—and hopes thereby to learn the latest “truths” and repeat them as her/his original thoughts.

The future revolutionary society will condemn everything that takes place today in lecture halls and classrooms as nothing but noise, verbal pollution. The student is already a very bad joke.

Students live a poor existence. Student poverty—both material and emotional—is more extreme than that of the proletariat’s. However, this poverty is temporary and not comparable with the miserable existence of society’s poor. Because student poverty is only temporary, and because being a student is too temporary and detached from the historical process, the student accepts the poverty without resignation. The student wallows in it, thinking that the approaching future will compensate. However, the student will only discover an endless, inevitable mediocrity.
The student movement is blind to itself because it is detached from the rest of society; it does not understand the forces that push it into action; it cannot connect its struggle to its own life. (The issue is not about incompetent state and school administrators and the severe budget cuts. Recovering funds will not solve the University’s perpetual problems.) The student movement seeks ‘demands’ everywhere, but because students cannot see the absurdity of their own lives and their own imprisonment, they cannot begin to imagine what the struggle is for.

The deaths of students who struggle all over the world for liberation reveal the poverty of the U.S. student movement and the superficiality of its own struggles.

When the real struggle comes, it will be easy to recognize because it will cut through all the bullshit in which the student is trapped. (It knows its objectives. Its tactics are clear. It moves with confidence.)

We begin by killing the enemy within us and within our friends with whom we share our classrooms, homes, and beds. We come together in small bands with those we have learned to trust, occupying everything that represses us, taking back the schools, the streets, our lives.

The function of the student movement must be something other than making demands of the University, but to destroy the existence of the student as a distinct social role and character structure. More eager for grades than knowledge, more eager for a “good” job than to live without dead time, the first enemy of the student is within you.

The student however should not alone be singled out for student passivity is only the most obvious symptom of a general state of affairs where each sector of social life has been subdued by a similar imperialism.

While there are clearly

While there are clearly certain ideas here that are important, I would advise to avoid so many sweeping generalizations.

"On these training grounds, the student unashamedly lives an overt childish existence. The tighter authority’s chains shackle the student, the freer the student believes s/he is."

"The future revolutionary society will condemn everything that takes place today in lecture halls and classrooms as nothing but noise, verbal pollution."

Statements like these need to either be described in more detail or discarded. They are way too general.

I'm too poor for college (or

I'm too poor for college (or not dumb enough to sign a student loan) and I'm all for the current waves of university occupation... However as far as I can figure, this statement is little more than a rehash of "on the poverty of student life." Forty-something years have gone by, what's different this time? And, as you all clearly can see the university is a sick joke, why attend in the first place?

if you're over 24 chances

if you're over 24 chances are FAFSA will pay for you to take community college classes. just a thought, it's what i'm doing... you also might start to get clued in on what is different about the world right now from 40 years ago.

It was a rhetorical

It was a rhetorical question, I meant that, to be effective, the statement maybe shouldn't sound almost the same as one made 40 years ago in a different time and place. And thanks for the tip :)

yeah, it's certainly not as

yeah, it's certainly not as in-depth as "communique from an absent future", which is a much better read on the present student situation in the states.

Read Harry Cleaver's On

Read Harry Cleaver's On Schoolwork and the Struggle Against it @ http://libcom.org/library/harry-cleaver-on-schoolwork-and-the-struggle-against-it-treason-pamphlet

This website is

This website is counterrevolutionary, seriously, it gets as much shit done as a party meeting.

what? how is this website

what? how is this website counter-revolutionary? its an online news source which allows for easy, free access to anarchist info. sure there is a lot of shitty content on this site but the site is largely user sustained and there are a lot of shitty users (like you for example)

you just proved my point

you just proved my point

than you dont have a very

than you dont have a very good point

It's not a party

It's not a party meeting???
That fucker lied to me!!

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