Published: Buffalo Student, Volume 1, Number 2, March 1, 1972.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Cultural Affairs Discussion Group recently held a meeting on “Teaching and Learning in the University,” which was led by a young follower of Chairman Mao. Following are some of the points developed in the discussion.
”The schools and universities are organized and run in the interests of the monopoly capitalist ruling class and are part of the fascist state machine. The governing board at SUNYAB is dominated and controlled by the directors and executives of large industries and financial institutions (in particular the Marine Midland Bank, one of the largest banks in the world.) The universities are used as centers for suppression of our people in several ways. First, every reactionary, obscurantist, anti-scientific idea is spread in the universities. The entire history of our people is distorted. For example, Sociology as taught in the fascist university is specifically for the purpose of mystifying and denying class struggle. Psychology is designed to confuse the relationship between individual consciousness and social being, blame the individual as “abnormal” and to concoct fascist behavioral engineering. Second, students are trained to go against their own experience and the revolutionary aspirations of the American working class and people so as to become narrow and passive specialists who also spread the fascist world view and carry out the various bureaucratic tasks required for maintenance of fascist suppression of our people.
In order to propagate backward ideas the university imposes fascist rules and regulations on students and faculty, opposes free discussion on the content of ideas and their role in suppressing our people, opposes genuine scientific investigation into the world and replaces the scientific method of SEEKING TRUTH FROM FACTS with fascist memorization techniques.
For example: To stop class struggle on the question of China in the world, and in vain hope that the American people will not take up Mao Tsetung Thought, the imperialists have created a “Socialist Countries – China” class. In order to detach the study of China from the experience of living in fascist America today, China is presented as a thing in itself unrelated to anything else. The history of the Chinese revolution is obscured fragmented, abstracted and mystified as if it was 13th century literature. The reactionaries concoct all kinds of slanders against the CPC and Chairman Mao so that they can insidiously and from the sidelines criticize various just policies of the PRC.
The method of the bourgeois China experts and house Marxists serves this reactionary content – an “expert” gives long intellectual discussion and to cover up his lies and slanders calls for subjective discussion, First they view the class as experts vs. blind mice and when any objective question is raised they refuse to take a stand and say “we are blind mice too.” Secondly they always do liberal self-criticism but never change. They merely try and mystify their own stagnation, intellectualism and careerist ambitions and cover over the profound contradiction between studying China to become an expert slanderer of China and of studying to solve the problems of the American working class and people.
What can we learn from and how can we study China?
1) We can learn how the Chinese people overthrew imperialism, bureaucrat capitalism and feudalism under the leadership of the Communist Party of China.
2) How the Chinese people continued revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat by waging the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
3) How the CPC initiated and led the struggle against modern revisionism with the Soviet revisionist renegade cliques at its centre.
4) How the Chinese people, the CPC and Chairman Mao are leading the International United Front Against US imperialism and its accomplices, Soviet social-imperialists and others.
5) Why US imperialism is still the main enemy of the Chinese people and of the world’s people, including the American people.
6) That Mao Tsetung Though is Marxism-Leninism of the era – in which imperialism is heading for total collapse and socialism is advancing toward worldwide victory, and how the American people are applying Mao Tsetung Thought to concrete practice of revolution in this country.
Our method in studying should be to adopt the view that we are all students who can consciously participate in learning from China. In the university this means to create a form in which l) conscious investigation of the real world can take place 2) people sum up through their own experience and 3) goes against the divorcement of theory from practice.