Marxist Student Has Capitalist Parents

Tom Lehman uswa12 at Lorainccc.edu
Wed Mar 29 10:35:39 PST 2000


Once or twice a week I get a little faxed update from George Becker called a "Message From Pittsburgh." George hits on the highlights of what's happening around the country of interest to Steelworkers. For example, on 3/26/00 George says, Students associated with United Students Against Sweatshops are beginning demonstrations, rallies, hunger strikes and sit-ins on 23 major college campuses around the country over the next few weeks. The actions are designed to highlight the plight of exploited workers and get their universities to withdraw from the FLA, a government-industry partnership that has been giving the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" to companies which continue to produce their products in sweatshops around the world...George goes on to mention more details about these actions...and then he talks about the students at Purdue and their involvement with the Steelworkers in Indiana. George in the past has highlighted various student organizations at other colleges & universities and asked that we support and be involved in their activities, and that we are aware of their brave actions on behalf of working people around the world.

Tom Lehman

Chris Doss wrote:


> I found this amusing--from The Onion.
>
> LAWRENCE, KS--Chad Briggs, a radical Marxist and University of Kansas
> junior, has capitalist parents, campus sources reported Monday.
>
> "The proletariat will rise up, and the state will wither
> away, " said Briggs, 20, who grew up in the bourgeois
> suburban enclave of Deerfield, IL, before renouncing his
> exploitative capitalist ties during the first semester of his
> sophomore year. "Only when the workers control the
> means of production will a truly classless society emerge."
>
> Briggs said he spent the first 18 years of his life under
> the oppressive thumb of his father, investment banker
> Richard Briggs, and his mother, elementary-school
> teacher Judith Briggs, members of the reigning bourgeois
> elite.
>
> "For years, much like the oppressed St. Petersburg
> factory worker of 1918, I was controlled by the ruling
> class," Briggs said. "The people who owned the house I
> lived in told me when to come to the table for supper,
> when to do my chores, and when to be home on Saturday
> nights. They even controlled the means of transportation,
> giving me the keys to their Ford Taurus when and only
> when they saw fit."
>
> Briggs said his parents still control him, as all capitalist
> running-dogs do the masses, using their payment of his rent and tuition as a
> means of influencing which courses he takes.
>
> "I was talking to my father on the phone the other night, and he
> questioned my enrollment in a film class on the works of Woody Allen,"
> Briggs said. "He said, 'This is what I'm spending $21,000 a year on? For you
> to watch Woody Allen movies?' Even here in college, hundreds of miles from
> my capitalist oppressors, they still hold sway over me. Until the day I am
> loosed from their chains, I shall not truly be free."
>
> Committed to fomenting glorious proletarian revolution, Briggs
> recently quit his 10-hour-a-week coffee-shop job to become co-chair of the
> radical campus socialist group UPRISE (University Program for Revolutionary
> Integration of a Socialist Economy). Like many
> other steps Briggs has taken toward establishing a dictatorship of the
> proletariat, his joining UPRISE was strongly opposed by his parents.
>
> "My parents don't understand that social order based on class division
> sows the seeds of its own destruction," said Briggs, who witnessed class
> division and worker exploitation first-hand
> during a Spring Break trip to Cancun, Mexico. "They just want me to go to
> business school and make lots of money like my sister Debbie."
>
> "Then again,"Briggs said, "why should I care what they think? I don't
> want to end up like them. All they care about is buying this boat or
> starting that retirement fund, or trying to convince me to
> get a Lumina instead of the Jeep I want. It's like Marx wrote in The
> Communist Manifesto, 'The history of all hitherto existing society is the
> history of class struggles.'"
>
> Briggs' girlfriend, Jenny Elsinger, is one of the original founders of
> UPRISE and the person responsible for introducing him to the group. Before
> meeting Elsinger in September 1997, Briggs
> said he knew almost nothing of the woes of workers and their lack of control
> over the means of production and distribution.
>
> "Before the Revolutionary Year 1997, I was pretty much like the rest
> of the campus bourgeoisie," said Briggs, stapling copies of the latest issue
> of the UPRISE newsletter, From Below! "I was preoccupied with fraternity
> rush, football games and getting into B-school. I've
> grown up fast, though, now that I've had a taste of the real world through
> my involvement with UPRISE."
>
> Next Friday, Briggs said, the bourgeois and proletarian classes will
> clash violently, when his parents come to campus for Parents' Weekend.
>
> "There's always fighting when my parents come to visit, and this time
> will be no different," Briggs said. "They'll tell me to clean up my hair.
> They'll tell me to move out of the co-op. They'll tell
> me to stop fooling around with 'this Communist nonsense.' It is as
> inevitable as the victory of the workers' revolution."
>
> "My parents think this is just a 'phase' I'm going through," Briggs
> said. "Well, I'll tell you what's a phase--the ownership's control of the
> proletariat. Now, there's a temporary phase."
> ______________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list