The key issue I am trying to resolve is how students relate to capitalism. Students are not a fundamental social group bound up in the mode of production in the same sense as the proletariat and bourgeoisie. Students are not a separate class with a distinct relation to the means of production but rather students are an amalgam of different social classes. All elements of class society — the working class, the lumpenproletariat, the capitalists — are all present and accounted for in the education system.
Like society at large the majority of students belong to the working class. Students exert their labor-power in the form of studies in order to fulfill future labor-power quotas. This bulk of students are the heart of the student movement against capitalism. However, students are not as cohesive as the working class due to their temporal nature and their side-by-side coexistence with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois students. The path to student self-consciousness and anti-capitalist action is riddled with psychological roadblocks.
After over a decade of education, students fall into a deep-sinking nihilism. This nihilism is not an acute onset but an accumulation of educational failures, desublimation of diversity and individuality, regimentation of social learning, and herd treatment. But in the quiet night of indifference their beats the heart of the student rebel filled with the fiery passion of unfulfilled desire. There, the kernel of the movement, the prairie spark resides waiting to be ignited.
