What Student Resistance Must Fight For?

·      Free and Universal Education funded by the State!

·      An End to Bureaucratic Control of Campuses!

·      Abolition of all formalism in Education- Classrooms and Attendance!

·      Steep raise in expenditure on public education and health with simultaneous slashing of expenditure on military, armaments and bureaucratic extravagance!

Fee hike by the authorities in JNU has met a backlash by students. A determined resistance has come up, whose driving force are students. This resistance is already finding its echo on various campuses all over the country.

Bourgeois state has come down heavily upon the student opposition. Peaceful demonstration of the students was brutally lathicharged by the police without any provocation from the demonstrators and with no warning from the police.    

Workers’ Socialist Party, wholeheartedly supports this resistance and its aims and appeals to all sections of the society to support it. We severely condemn the police repression upon the student demonstration.

This movement, poses a direct challenge to the regime of austerity being forced upon the working people as the state under big corporate, beats the retreat from all expenditure in public welfare. It has great latent potential, surfacing slowly now, to shake-up the neo-liberal regime of capitalism to its hilt.

In the movement, we find reflected the aspirations and demands of different sections of the society. While the rich and elite stand for total privatisation of education and support the move to withdraw all state funding and subsidies, working and toiling people demand fully state funded, free and universal education. Between the two, stand innumerable layers of middle class that suffocated by the tightening noose of austerity around their neck, demand ‘affordable education’ and oppose the ‘hike’ in fee structures. These layers, are still hostile to the demand of free education and in fact agree with the elite and its state that education must not go free and universal, rather it must remain ‘affordable’ for them.

Working people and the students hailing from their ranks, must fight for realisation of their class slogan- “Free and Universal Education”. They must oppose all attempts to impose the slogans like ‘affordable education’ or restrict it to opposition to hikes only.

Making education free of the fetters of parental dependence, the state funded education would not only liberate parents of the personal burden of education, but above all would liberate the younger generations from the baggage of moral and material influence of the old.

We must demand an end to all profiteering in Education- i.e immeidate abolition of all private schools, colleges and universities.

Besides free education, we must demand abolition of all formal, classroom education and requirement of attendance etc. as in the advanced age of technology, as they have become not only otiose but a burden upon the students that exhausts their time and energy for no useful purpose at all.

We must demand an end to all bureaucratic controls of the campuses from outside that must include immediate abolition of all posts like that of Vice-Chancellor and its substitution by the elected committee of students and teachers.

Crisis ridden capitalism, already disabled to deliver anything, is fast dismantling its welfare state and consequently all social spending. Mass opposition to its reactionary austerity programs must thus develop into a combined, decisive assault of all working people upon capitalism and its state. While opposing the fee hike, we must link this opposition to overall fight against all profiteering, that is integral to capitalism, and the efforts of the capitalist elite and its state to monopolise education.

We must underscore that the governments in all capitalist countries while generously spending on corporate bailouts and military sector even amidst the crisis, are continuously slashing budgets in social spending for education and health while simultaneously. We must oppose it tooth and nail. We must oppose all cuts in social welfare sector.

Having outlived its existence, capitalism is completely steamed out and can deliver nothing to us. Neither it is left with capacity nor it has any will to render anything to the working people. Only a socialist state- ‘The Government of Workers and Toilers’- can ensure free and universal education. Let’s fight for it!

The Resistance must Demand:

      ·       Free and Universal Education!

      ·       State funding for Education and sustenance Allowances for students!

      ·       Steep Rise in Expenditure on Mass Education and Public Health!

      ·       Slashing of Military Expenditure and no Bailouts for Corporates!

      ·       An End to Bureaucratic Control of Campuses!

      ·       Abolition of all formal Education, above all the classrooms and attendance requirements!

      ·    End to all Profiteering in Education- Takeover of all private educational institutions-
      Schools, Colleges and Universities- by the State!

Workers’ Socialist Party

(A Section of the Movement of Fourth International)

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Contact: 9810081383