Ask a young communist operating in our present society as to how they feel about recruiting people to join the Young Communist league of South Africa? The response will be like this, “Ours is a beautiful organisation which has gained fame for most of the good things that it has done and for the best things that it seeks to attain in future…” Ask them to continue answering the question and not to talk about what the organisation has done, but about recruitment, they will tell you that it’s difficult, and then ask me why?
It came as a great shock to me when we (as the Young Communist League) tried to recruit someone for our organisation, bra! The young lady said she was scared of communists.
This type of response indicates the dangers of capitalism quite clearly. It is not surprising, as we know that capitalism is based on promoting consumerism and fracturing society into classes of exploiters and the exploited. Because it controls the media, capitalism is able to naturalise its evils while painting communism as a threat to many people, even those that are not beneficiaries of capital.
From this kind of response, it becomes clear that capitalism is a system based on deception and wise lies that lure even the highly educated people. For me that lady is indeed highly educated, but as Lenin said in a capitalist society, the only education that you will ever get is that which deceives people into ignoring other ideals that are contra to it.
Our education system is mainly centred on capitalism and this means you only get to learn about Marxism when it is criticised or provided as a criticism to the dominant mode of production and distribution. In almost every sociological textbook in Universities, Marxist-Leninist ideals are only referred to when the dominant mode is being criticised.
I tell you, if you could ask someone studying economics about Marx or Lenin, they would never know them even though Marx and Lenin wrote a lot on economics. Even if you go to the economics sections in every university library you will find Marx, Engels and Lenin’s works in this section, but still the only people you will get to learn about are Adam Smith and David Ricardo who were liberal economists. For me, having a degree in economics means having a degree in liberal economics as it ignores other schools of thought.
A degree in economics would require knowledge of economics which will span across the ideological spectrum. This mean people will have to know what Marxism, neo-liberalism and other schools of thought argue on economics and this should not be inclined to one school of thought and the others presented as its critiques. That’s why we are proposing for the inclusion of Marxist-Leninism in the education curriculum but more specifically in an economics degree.
By this we will be able to end fears that people may have against Socialism and Communism.
This will also help us a lot in terms of recruitment; honestly I am tired of explaining the whole literature of Marxism before a person can fill a form of the YCL. I am also tired of having to convince him or her about the relevancy of socialism and communism today before the required R5 is payed. What do you think?
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
