It’s (Communist) Party Time!
Lily Yang '21 | Opinions Editor
For most of my life, I considered myself to be a hard conservative, advocating for small government, a capitalist market system, and traditional moral values. But after attending a post-modernist Marxist-feminist literature class at Swarthmore, I realize how wrong I was. The societal elites, with their insidious manipulation of the economy and media, have defined the mainstream and divided society along social identifiers in order to incite internal strife within the working classes. God, how could I have been so stupid and not recognized it sooner?
My anti-establishment theocratic-libertarianism of yesteryear was playing directly into the master-narrative of the neoliberals who commodified my conservative resistance into self-defeating, self-perpetuating nativism. Now, however, I can accept my true calling and, after subscribing to Jacobin, Chapo Trap House, Vox, and Teen Vogue, I know that the only way to unshackle myself from the bourgeoisie is to found Hotchkiss’ own chapter of the Communist Party.
Our flawed system demands a student-led revolution. We, the pallbearers of a generation, the educated precariat, must stand up to the administration and the board of trustees and their liberal conditioning of the student body which is embodied in their Christian Eurocentric heteronormative cisnormative patriarchal Humanities program. Their token inclusion of Marx in Philosophy 250 entirely ignores his masterful attacks on intra-cultural classism, and all other thinkers are white males with the exception of Kate Chopin or Frederick Douglass or Mary Shelley, who are included as token inclusions or, particularly in the case of Chopin or Douglass, are looked at solely through one aspect of their intersectional identities.
Here at Hotchkiss, we entirely ignore the inherent truth that our school requires the discrimination against social and political minorities in order to function. We exist upon the backbones of capital—the exploitation of the proletariat’s labor—accrued by plutocrats and are meant to bow and thank them for their generous gifts of economic bondage and enthralment. Nay, I command. We must sustain ourselves upon the benignant and freely-volunteered labor of the working class by abolishing the now-sixty-thousand-dollar tuition and replacing it with crowdsourced $27 donations from Peruvian lit majors and apiary commune workers.
The snack bar must be abolished. The school has purposefully and premeditatedly made it so that the best food on campus must be purchased with capital. Customary “gifts” of snack bar rations are handed out to those returning lost jackets – a perfect example of the way in which a small amount of the wealth generated by the capitalist system is used as an opiate to lull the masses into acquiescence to said system in service to the bourgeois. Instead, students must organize into autonomous syndicated agrarian labor communes on the Hotchkiss Farm. And, of course, the school must become vegan in order to dispel the capitalist hypnotism that is the eating of animals and animal byproducts—their way of aligning sustenance with the exploitation of supposedly “lesser” creatures.
And lastly, we must seize the means of grade distribution. Private-school-educated white cisgender males are disproportionately benefiting from a culturally biased grading system, publicly displayed in order to artificially divide Hotchkiss into academically-defined social classes. These students then use their privilege to appropriate capital and insert themselves into our rightful institutions (such as Brown and Berkeley and Mount Holyoke). Instead, we need to factor past privilege into grades to compensate for the academic predilection of liberal elitist institutions such as our own.
Join me, Comrades, as we demand a paradigmatic shift at Hotchkiss to class conscious dialectic materialism through a revolution led by the masses. Overthrow the administrative plutocrats – especially Monsieur Bradley and Hotchkiss’ continued legacy of only hiring old white men to lead the liberal elitist institution – overthrow the internally-divisive dogmatic student body elections, and replace the systems with a three-month-long term of rotating collective representatives. Representatives who vote on measures of inter-school policies by a two-thirds majority and domestic policies by a strict majority that can be overruled whereupon the executive officer, elected for the duration of the term by a majority of the collective representatives, dissents. That is what we must strive for, what we must become, to herald the United Syndicated Student Republic of Lakeville. (Renaming the school is essential as well, for Benjamin Hotchkiss himself was but a misogynistic opportunistic industrialist who preyed upon the disenfranchised masses through his leverage within the military-industrial complex)
