Wages for Students. Wages for Students
what Detroit then was for autoworkers.
Nor was the time of origin surprising in terms of the conjunctures of both theory and history. The authors were all involved with a journal titled Zerowork. The journal’s theoretical approach was a synthesis of the “workerist” perspective (coming from Italy) and the Wages for Housework Campaign initiated in 1972 by the International Feminist Collective. The workerist perspective had its roots in the struggles of factory workers in the industrial belt stretching from Los Angeles through Detroit to Turin, while Wages for Housework had its roots in the struggles of unwaged women demanding a wage for their housework, including the struggle for “welfare rights” in the United States.
By the time Wages for Students was written, a theoretical awareness of the fact that “the social” is a particular type of factory had already emerged. Through these theoretical conjunctures, the terrain was prepared for the seeds of a new thinking about students’ work as well. Along with these theoretical and political influences there was the impact of the change in the role of the universities as conceived by capital and its state.
It had been an axiom of state politics in the 1950s and 1960s that universities served to increase the productivity of the work force and social discipline as vehicles for upward mobility, as well as to sponsor research that would generate new commodities and methods of production. Thus, until the late 1960s both capitalists and workers considered education a “common good.” But in the wake of intense student struggle in the 1960s—for free speech, civil rights, women’s rights, and against the draft, the Vietnam war, and the use of universities for military research—there was a decisive change in the capitalist class’ attitude to university education.
The nation-wide student strike against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the killings of students by soldiers and police at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970 marked a decisive turning point in this respect. The new capitalist consensus was that, instead of producing a reliable and skillful labor force for factories, offices, and the military, the U.S. universities (so recently “cleansed” of leftist professors in the McCarthyist purges of the 1950s and early 1960s) were spawning masses of anti-imperialist and anticapitalist graduates. Absurdly, these rebels were subsidized by state and federal taxes levied in part on corporations. This had to stop. By the 1970s, state authorities and corporations were demanding that “conflict-ridden” campuses be defunded and students be forced to pay for their own education—which was no longer hailed as a common good.
We did not know, at the time, how to name the change, but we were aware of a shift to what would soon be called the “neoliberal” university, where education becomes a commodity a student buys, an investment she makes in her future, and the institution itself is modeled on a corporation.
This neoliberalization of the university was just beginning in 1975. Wages for Students described and satirized this shift.
At the time of the pamphlet’s writing, the authors were also participants in the change that was taking place in the student movement. After being engaged for years with “political issues,” like racism in university admissions policy or military recruitment on campus, by the late 1970s students were becoming concerned with “economistic issues.”
Demonstrations protesting the defunding of universities, the increase of tuition fees, and the reduction of student aid (scholarships and grants) became commonplace on campuses. In retrospect, we see that this new student mobilization was trying to stop the neoliberalization of the U.S. university system. Wages for Students offered a language, a vocabulary to this new student movement. Instead of describing students as consumers or micro-entrepreneurs, investing in their future, it called them workers. Against the escalation of tuition fees, it called for “wages for schoolwork.”
Wages for Students was not only a “think piece” or an act of intellectual provocation, though surely it was both. With comrades in the Zerowork circle, among others, Wages for Students activists proselytized in universities throughout the Northeast.
The first stage of this political work was to bring the Wages for Schoolwork perspective to students’ attention. We launched the idea in Left conferences and student meetings. We wrote fliers, distributed bumper-stickers, participated in campus demonstrations, and presented in the classrooms of sympathetic professors. We rejected devising schemes to determine “how much” and “to whom” these wages should be paid. The goal was to create Wages for Students chapters in the universities and build a network that would, for a start, change the discourse of the Left (which was in places hostile to the demand) and what remained of the student movement.
The Wages for Students Campaign took its model from the work of the Wages for Housework Campaign in the U.S., that by the mid 1970s was reaching its organizational zenith. Much of its political organizing was directed against the attack on women on welfare, at the time justified in the name of the “fiscal crisis.” The Campaign called “welfare” the first “wages for housework.”
Wages for Students learned from this expansion of the wage and sought to apply it to students. Just as the Wages for Housework Campaign saw “welfare benefits” as the first form of wages for housework, Wages for Students activists saw the many forms of student financial aid as first forms of wages for students. We joined demonstrations and organized protests against the cuts to this “aid” which they depicted as a “wage.” This campaign, in some places, brought together diverse sectors of the working class, from welfare mothers and community activists to graduate students, many of whom gained access to the university through the civil rights struggles of this period. We understood that although wages for schoolwork, like many other struggles for higher wages, was not in itself a revolutionary demand, putting an end to unwaged labor in all its forms would destabilize, indeed terminate, the capitalist system since so much surplus value is generated by it.
As organizers, we also understood that getting paid a wage for schoolwork would provide us with additional power to alternatively refuse more of the other daily work imposed on us by capital, including the work required to “afford” being put to work in school. Work that denied us time to think, create, share and care for one another. As those organizing for wages for housework, we understood that getting paid for schoolwork would ultimately give students greater power to refuse the work imposed on them by capital.
It is clear, in retrospect, that U.S. capital and its state understood that the expansion and inclusivity of the wage that Wages for Housework and Wages for Students promoted was a political threat to the system. It is no accident that many of the neoliberal reforms of the last thirty years have been attacks on welfare rights and free access to university education; and that these attacks have been carried through by both Democrats and Republicans, along with cuts to the wages and benefits of the employed.
Wages for Students, as a demand, came at an ill-starred time when capital’s strategists in the U.S. were abandoning the Keynesian policy of subsuming wage struggles to capital’s development plans. Thus, instead of wages for students, we have had a tremendous increase in tuition fees (500% between 1985 and the present). The result is that today the average student debtor has a loan debt of nearly $30,000, and the total student loan debt is more than $1.1 trillion. Instead of obtaining wages for students, students in the U.S. have been paying to work at universities and to train themselves for future exploitation.
It is, of course, gratifying to see, forty years after its publication, a renewed interest in what might appear a countercurrent footnote to the neoliberal reform of the university. Of what use can this pamphlet be now for a student movement that is again on the move from Chile to Quebec and many U.S. cities in between? The movements themselves must decide. How this new generation of students will respond to the pamphlet will provide useful political knowledge for us all.
Already we can see, however, that Wages for Students can serve at least one purpose. By showing that students are workers and what they do in the universities is not “consuming” a commodity called “higher education,” the pamphlet empowers the struggle against student debt. It establishes that it is not the students who owe to the universities, the government, and the banks a huge amount of money. It is these institutions that should be paying students as they—and more importantly capital—thrive on unpaid student