NEW YORK CITY, March 30 — The 2015 communist school was like every PLP communist school in that it provided an opportunity to learn from and to teach each other. But this year was special because it may have been our youngest in terms of the ages of those who attended. The school was mostly comprised of elementary, junior, and high school students. We learned the most from these students that weekend.
After hearing a criticism from them about their group’s conversation being too simple, we struggled to improve it, to add to the content and analysis of the group. This goes to show that we should leave no one out of the revolutionary struggle and should not limit our organizing — we need the entire working class. Every worker and youth is able to understand communism. The school was an inspirational event for all (see letters on page 6).
The first night everyone naturally came together in the way only comrades do. And even when an issue arose regarding a certain bourgeois card game which some students were playing — and unsurprisingly had extremely terrible politics — the problem was highlighted, the criticism was made and the students switched to another game which was just as fun. Problem solving with communists is an efficient affair.
The next morning the collective came into action; the breakfast crew woke up before everyone else and made a delicious meal. After that, like clockwork, the cleanup crew tidied up. The communist school is an affirmation of the value of collective living, a small look into what the world we are fighting for might look like.
The first workshop discussed was the basics of capitalism, but in particular the mechanisms of surplus value as well as the ways that bosses divide workers against each other. The group transformed into an envelope factory. Four comrades transformed into envelope workers and the rest of us, save two bosses, were unemployed, watching the terrible game of capitalism unfold. The “bosses” stole the labor value of every worker, exploited all of them and paid back in wages only the smallest percentage of the actual value that was produced. Furthermore the bosses also paid Black and women workers less, refused to pay undocumented workers at all and fired anyone who was dissatisfied with their wage, replacing them with someone from the crowd of unemployed.
After the workshop, which discussed the likeness and difference of slavery and wage slavery, two high school students taught us about the crisis of overproduction. Some important things that arose were that in order for capitalists to survive they must both exploit workers as much as possible and sell as much as possible. The problem for the bosses is that they sell mainly to workers, who are the very ones they exploit and many can’t afford the very products they produce. This leads to a crisis of overproduction, leading to factory closings and mass layoffs.
A concept arising from the discussion that followed was of the redefinition of “necessity.” Capitalists are constantly wasting workers’ creative minds, creating new things for us to waste our money on.  They change how society works around these things in order to make them seem like a necessity. For example, smart phones: they are ridiculously expensive but everyone has one and society has been so tightly wound around their existence that it’s difficult to function without one. Smartphones are made to be indispensable for workers, the bosses design them to break or become obsolete to impel people buy the next model. A larger example of the push to subordinate the working class to the needs of the capitalists: in the 1950s, the rulers built the suburbs and the interstate highway system to make cars an even greater necessity for workers.
After lunch, we went into the more hopeful and inspiring portion of the day: envisioning what communism will look like. We redefined the concepts of family, education, art, culture and the destruction of race and gender roles. We also envision what it would take to defend the revolution. We learned that education would involve everyone, both students and teachers, healthcare will be based on preventative measures and art and culture would be more communal and public. Ultimately the world would be a much more beautiful and collective place; every comrade would take care of each other.
Everyone at this school was reminded of why we’re fighting for communism, why we’ve dedicated our lives to the struggle against capitalism. The liberation of the working class, and the fight for a dictatorship of the proletariat is a fight for a better world, a world that prioritizes human life. This communist school reignited us with an understanding of what we have to overcome and imparted a vision for what the future could hold. We all have something to contribute to the fight against oppression and we all will add to the vision of communism. But it won’t happen unless we unite and fight, so join us and fight for communism!