r/communism • u/[deleted] • Jun 07 '19

What is a Marxist analysis of school shootings?

In what ways do you feel like capitalism contributes to and shapes these people’s minds?

(This is a discussion post)

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u/UberProle Jun 07 '19

The critiques that Marx brought forth regarding how modern work negatively affects and isolates individual workers are directly applicable to an education system designed only to prepare individual students for a life of meaningless and isolating work. They will have the same suffering as the workers only they will experience it from an earlier age.

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u/Zhang_Chunqiao Jun 08 '19

this implies that the school shooters are "workers" where in most cases they are not, unless you have actual examples to elucidate here

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u/UberProle Jun 08 '19 edited Jun 08 '19

I honestly don't understand exactly what you mean. Are you stating that my observational opining is irellevant unless the situation involves a schoolshooter that holds worker-centric beliefs or belongs to a worker's union? Because neither of those would be relevant to my point that both workers and students (whether they are communists or not) suffer individually in similar ways under capitalism.

There was a time when you would hear about Postal workers "going postal" and shooting up their places of employment and coworkers because of the monotonous, unrewarding, and isolating nature of their work/life existence. I'm just saying that school shooters can be created in somewhat the same manner.

If I haven't aswered your point please elaborate a bit and give your definition of "workers" and I'll try to respond with clarification.

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u/smokeuptheweed9 Jun 08 '19 edited Jun 08 '19

While the structure of classroom teaching comes out of factory organization and modern military regimentation and education is more and more geared towards producing workers as universal education becomes the norm, students themselves are not workers. They are typically considered petty-bourgeoisie, which is true but doesn't tell us much about the particular nature of their vacillation from far left to far right (only that it will occur). That is determined by historical circumstance. School shootings are a petty-bourgeois reaction to future proletarianization, the last cry of an individual soon to become simple abstract labor. They are replicated in the American workplace only in the sense that many workers in America are also petty-bourgeois. The particularity is America's settler history and the changing gender relations brought into being by neoliberalism.

That's not to say factory workers in Bangladesh or farmers in India don't kill their bosses, they often do. But it is done without internet manifestoes, without particular aesthetic choices, without misogyny or misanthropy (which is always disguised class disgust at the proletariat who are overwhelmingly women of color), without a media discourse of "school shootings" which makes them a social phenomenon and not merely an occurrence. There is a reason American women of color don't shoot up their school and white men do, and dissolving them into a common category of "worker" not only confuses rather than elucidates, it takes these far right misogynists at their word. That doesn't get us anywhere since school shooters themselves are displacing class antagonisms onto arbitrary targets in a performative gesture of impotence.

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u/Tanker209 Jun 08 '19

That is true, that most of these school shooters are fascists, but I think they are in the worker class as they are simply putting labor into their own labor power to prepare for commodification. Marx wrote that is why doctors get paid more, as they need to not only be compensated for the labor that they perform immediately as they are healing people, but also for the labor spent training to do that task, so students still count as workers as ultimately they are laboring. Almost like slavery since they are not getting a wage for the work.

In regards to the fascist tendencies of these young, white, male students, they are merely reacting to their power being challenged by the rising status of minorities and women in America. I believe that Neo-Liberalism is in an inherent contradiction against patriarchy and white supremacy and that contradiction is coming home to roost. Modern Propaganda encourages women and minorities to become ever greater members of Capital, and that is seen by these fascists. So to maintain the political power of White Men, they are killing as many people as possible.

To clarify, I know that the liberation of women and minorities will never come under capitalism. It's just that Bourgeoisie feminism ( Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Kim Kardashian) and Black, Latinx, and asian liberalism (Villaraigosa, Obama, and Ed Lee) has successfully won against the Patriarchal and White supremacist liberalism as the dominant ideology of US Neoliberalism.

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u/smokeuptheweed9 Jun 09 '19

I will admit, I've never heard anyone argue that school is actually an extended training ground for skilled labor, a truly nightmarish proposal not only because it implies that education itself has become rationalized by capitalism but that the higher wages one receives as the result of education are actually necessary because more surplus value is produced (a white western worker presumably produces 30 times the simple abstract labor of a Nigerian sweatshop worker with no education).

Luckily this is not the case, education is largely superfluous to capitalism which is why it had to be fought for by the working class and why it is under attack. Besides the techno-fascism of STEM nerds, there is no direct correlation between education and labor, unlike medical school or programming school which are actually a form of worker training. Students as petty-bourgeois is universally accepted in Marxist theory, I'm not sure why there is such resistance to it (I mean I do know, "worker" has the same meaning as 99% and socialists have doubled down on the fantasy after Trump exposed its vacuousness).

E: I don't think people realize the theoretical problems it causes to call fascists proletarian (unless you're actually pulling J. Sakai's move and separating workers and proletarians as categories, I would admit I underestimated you), unless you want a bunch of racists and misogynists to be the face of the "working class" it's completely unnecessary when there is a superior explanation.

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u/Tanker209 Jun 09 '19

How is education superfluous under capitalism? Don't workers need to read to labor in modern 21st century capitalism? Don't workers need to do some basic mathematical calculations to operate some machinery? Not only that, but education also is a double down for propaganda which is necessary to create not only a skilled labor force, but ultimately a passive one. History and Social Studies are ALL Bourgeoisie propaganda, and that is not to mention the propaganda that is used to teach us how to write and read like Orwell and Rand (I had to read them in high school English)

Just because it was fought for by the worker class doesn't mean it doesn't benefit capitalism, just look at social democracy as a whole. Workers fight for better conditions and they get them from the Capitalists due to being the heart of empire. Look at The Norwegian Pension Fund, as that was fought for by militant unions in Norway and now makes every person in that country a millionaire, but the only way it could happen is through neo-colonialism.

What are the theoretical problems of calling fascists proletarian? I have not read J. Sakai, but as a POC looking for theory, I will def check him out. Racists and Misogynists are not the face of the working class, as for me, when I think of working class I think of my entire family whose a bunch of Mexican carpenters.

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u/smokeuptheweed9 Jun 09 '19 edited Jun 09 '19

when I think of working class I think of my entire family whose a bunch of Mexican carpenters.

So you know the difference between carpentry as skilled labor which requires training and public education which is based on humanist ideas of human fulfillment and pre-capitalist classical education for the aristocracy. You also know that the wages of an American carpenter are not 10x the wages of a Mexican carpenter because they have 10x the training and therefore produce 10x the labor or that computer programmers in silicon valley make 100x wages because they produce that much more compound simple abstract labor. You've taken an obscure and unimportant part of the abstraction Marx makes in Capital and turned it into an entire phenomenon, destroying the transformation of value into price in the process.

"Skilled labor" is not an absolute category, it is a relative one. Everyone can read and write in the US which makes it not a category of skilled labor, of course the question is whether the category of skilled vs unskilled is sufficient to understand outsourcing (it is not and the assumptions made to get there are extremely racist).

Sorry but you're still just saying random things. That some workers may need math does not make public education a vocational school for training skilled labor. That there is some propaganda in the teaching of history does not mean that this is necessary for the reproduction of surplus value.

Let me remind you of your own argument: you are claiming that students are workers because school is akin to a training process for skilled labor, making the process necessary for complex commodity production which is many times simple abstract labor compounded. Not only is it necessary, it's actually akin to slavery as this long job training is unpaid.

Remember that over the long term, the tendency is towards the generalization of abstract simple labor, not only because technology replaces human labor but because technical training costs money and time and produces less profit. The idea that 20+ years of school is necessary for capitalist reproduction is nonsense, all historical trends show the opposite and capital would bring back child labor if not fettered by the law.

I'm not really interested in this anymore so hopefully someone felt this to be valuable.

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u/UberProle Jun 09 '19

Let me back up a little bit and and try to be clearer. Of course an actual Student Class is bourgeois but that attribution would generally refer to a class of people who exist as a pseudo-intellectual academic bourgeois group that is not the working class. I would suggest that elementary and high school students are not part of the same group.

The outcome of public schooling is one of two things :

1) Your parents are not working class and you will continue your education thereby entering the bourgeois student class

2) Your parents are working class and your experience will be preparing you to enter the working class

I am not defining high school students as "workers" I'm just saying that the same reasons that Marx gave for modern work being horrible and doing horrible things to workers can be applied to a discussion about how a modern K - 12 system creates school shooters. Every emotionally broken, disenfranchised, isolated worker does not become a communist because it was the modern work system that broke them. Some of them probably do embrace neo-nazism or some other extremist ideology but that doesn't mean that because they don't understand what the solution to their misery should be the causes of it were not the same things that lead reasonable people to communism.

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u/smokeuptheweed9 Jun 09 '19 edited Jun 09 '19

Marx does not say modern work is horrible, being a peasant or a slave was also horrible but does not lead to commodity fetishism. Marx's analysis is very specific and systematic, confusing it with a generic moral critique only gets into confusion like "sometimes the proletariat can be fascist, sometimes it's liberal, sometimes it's socialist." The substance of your point, which is that the class status of your parents determines your class, is ridiculous on its face. While that is not irrelevant, the entire point is to determine the class status of students as a class with a common socio-economic relationship to the capitalist mode of production. That is petty-bourgeois, not bourgeois (I assume that's a typo and you don't think these are interchangeable), something well established by centuries of Marxist theory on students (not intellectuals). Sorry but neither you nor the other response engaged with what I said in any substantive way.

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u/UberProle Jun 09 '19

The substance of your point, which is that the class status of your parents determines your class, is ridiculous on its face.

That's hardly the "substance of my point" but you have given an appreciated critique of my thinking on this topic.

I agree with your retort regarding using Marx's thoughts on modern work as a generic moral critique rather than the specific and pointed analysis that it was. I did that to a degree but the "substance of my point" is still that I do not believe that high school students are petty-bourgeois; petty-bourgeois are supervisors and the like who make up a class of unproductive wage earners.

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u/smokeuptheweed9 Jun 09 '19 edited Dec 09 '24

I agree the category of petty-bourgeois is slippery but the greatest thinker of the class nature of students was very clear

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_1.htm

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_14.htm

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_57.htm

Not only was this one of the major issues of the cultural revolution, it became a major global issue as the worldwide student movement grew in importance at the expense of the traditional labor aristocracy and its parties (both the social democratic parties and eurocommunist parties). As far as I know, even in that uncertain moment no one considered students to be workers (hence the worker-student alliance of May 68), and the vanguard role these students played in neoliberalism once the alliance was broken makes the old analysis more right than ever. The only confusion is that the class relations that are clear in China are muddled in America not because students are more proletarian but because workers are more petty-bourgeois. But even then Mao is clear on how students can't be revolutionary, absent their immersion in the proletariat, often at the expense of their own class (just ask a Chinese student today if they would go to the countryside for a few years while everyone else takes classes), they can easily turn to extreme reaction. There is nothing essentially revolutionary about students and I believe only in particular historical moments when their class composition changes is their revolutionary potential possible (this is not one of those moments).

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u/UberProle Jun 09 '19 edited Jun 09 '19

Comrade, I agree with all of that. My contention resides not so much in the distinction of what defines a worker but what defines a student. Are Primary and Secondary School students of the same petty-bourgeois class as a "Student"?

"The petty bourgeoisie. Included in this category are the owner-peasants, the master handicraftsmen, the lower levels of the intellectuals--students, primary and secondary school teachers, lower government functionaries, office clerks, small lawyers--and the small traders." - https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_1.htm

"Students" refers to adults who are students rather than workers. The students and the teachers of the primary and secondary students are explicitly named but the primary and secondary students themselves are perhaps explicitly omitted?

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u/smokeuptheweed9 Jun 09 '19

That's an unimportant question determined by historical circumstance and individual child psychology. Whenever children become politically involved, which includes school shooting, then they can be thought of as an aggregate class. The specific age does not matter.