As the title says. Recently, while looking through some old posts, I came across a rather interesting topic. Some time ago, a forum user called “A Student” engaged in a heated debate with other comrades in the replies nested within his post. In his view, students are a group that has not entered social production. Since they do not participate in social production, their class position cannot be determined, making them an undetermined class—in other words, a class-transcending group.
Which class do students actually belong to? Are they part of the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie, or an “undetermined class”? This has long been a subject of endless debate in many online leftist circles. Several years ago, I also believed that since students did not own the means of production, they therefore belonged to the proletariat. It was only after I encountered genuine Marxism and engaged in ideological struggle that this mistaken view was completely refuted. In response to “A Student’s” position, the other comrades also offered some trenchant rebuttals, which I am reposting here for everyone’s convenience.
10 Likes
The following is the view of “一名学生”:
一名学生:
钱仁零:
Your classmate said that China is half-revisionist and half-socialist; this is complete nonsense. Do you mean that if revisionism were restored in China, or if capitalism were restored, socialism would still have any room to survive? In addition, there are many fabricated terms, such as “conservative leftists” and “China is revisionist.” These are entirely cobbled together and are not things a leftist could possibly say. We must recognize this.
I’m sorry; I’m not sure whether the problem is with my expression or something else. I already said in the post that I and the classmates whom I regard as “leftists” are currently seeking common ground while setting aside differences. Since everyone’s theoretical and practical foundation is not particularly strong, we are currently engaging in extensive discussion while compromising. Differences over ideas and paths are unavoidable. For now, all we can do is accumulate experience and knowledge. After I return to school, I will discuss this issue with them.
(However, I do agree with your criticism of my view that my classmates are so-called leftists. Strictly speaking, students do not belong to any class. By “leftists,” I really do mean people who are relatively opposed to anti-China positions and capitalism, as well as being radical. It was my fault that I did not explain this point in detail in the article.)
一名学生:
Strictly speaking, students neither engage in direct productive labor nor control the means of production. After consulting multiple sources, I found that students in general are not defined as belonging to any particular class, but rather as a transitional social group. Their class composition can only be determined through a specific analysis that also takes into account their family’s economic status, way of life, and so on. Therefore, saying here that they do not belong to any class may of course have resulted from an imprecise expression on my part. Naturally, this is only one viewpoint, and comments, suggestions, or opinions are welcome.
Moreover, I believe that expressing one’s views reasonably is helpful to oneself and others when discussing issues (in public settings, with multiple participants, and so on): incorrect views can be corrected, providing everyone with negative examples and case studies, while correct views can be recognized and theoretical convictions strengthened. Comments and suggestions are likewise welcome.
一名学生:
The point about the problem of consciousness is correct; I forgot to explain this. However, students are certainly not above classes. Classes are determined by relations of production, while being a student is a temporary educational status. It cannot be said that students are already fully part of the petty bourgeoisie. Under the conditions of old China in the modern era, the vast majority of intellectuals and young students did not economically own large amounts of the means of production. Their ideas and ways of life were close to those of the petty bourgeoisie. Moreover, according to the Marxist criteria for class division—namely, whether one owns the means of production and one’s position within relations of production—the primary identity of students is that of people receiving education. Most do not participate in social production on a long-term, stable basis, possess no fixed means of production, and have no stable position as exploiters or exploited. They lack the economic foundation necessary to constitute a class, so they should not be considered an independent class .
一名学生:
There is still a distinction between being above classes and being a transitional group. Being above classes means being completely detached from the interests of all classes, free from the constraints of class positions, and dependent on no class whatsoever. A transitional group, by contrast, refers to a temporary identity at a particular stage of one’s life or social development that does not currently have a stable, fixed class affiliation and will eventually split up and become incorporated into various classes. It can only be said that its class identity is temporarily undetermined.
Rebuttals from other comrades:
vvv:
一名学生:
Strictly speaking, students do not belong to any class. By “the left” I really do mean people who are relatively opposed to Chinese characteristics and capitalism, and who are radical; I failed to explain this point in detail in the article, which was my mistake.)
Students do not belong to no class, either. Making such muddled statements is of no help in conducting correct analysis and thought.
烽火Flame:
First of all, let us make one point clear: the petty bourgeoisie refers to the class engaged in small-scale production, or one that exploits a small number of hired workers, but whose main income consists of returns from its own labor. This class mainly includes “self-employed peasants, handicraft workers, members of the petty intellectual stratum——students, primary and secondary school teachers, minor clerks, minor office workers, small lawyers, small merchants, and so on” [121] .
Furthermore, when you speak of opposition to Chinese characteristics and capitalism, you must also analyze the standpoint from which this opposition is undertaken: do they simply want to climb upward themselves, or are they opposed to hierarchical oppression and exploitation?
FallWind:
一名学生:
Strictly speaking, students neither engage in direct productive labor nor control the means of production. After consulting various sources, I found that students generally are not defined as belonging to any class, but rather as a transitional social group. Moreover, their class composition can only be determined through a concrete analysis that takes into account their family’s economic status, way of life, and so on. So when I said here that they do not belong to any class, it may of course have been due to an error in my wording. Naturally, this is only one opinion; if you have any objections, suggestions, or views, please feel free to point them out.
Your statement is incorrect. To say that students are not defined as belonging to any class—isn’t that to say that students are above class? But how could social relations above class exist in a class society?
Of course, the vast majority of students do not engage in production, or even if a small minority of them do, this remains an extremely secondary aspect—just as many intellectual workers, on the surface, do not possess any means of production and live on their own wages—but can they therefore be considered proletarians? I am afraid not.
To determine which class a person belongs to, one must look not only at their position in production, but also at their position ideologically. The vast majority of Chinese students do not engage in production in the first place; voluntarily or involuntarily, they are supported by their families while engaging in so-called study—which is in fact the rote-learning activity of opportunism—in bourgeois institutions of higher learning. In their daily lives, they do not engage in labor; in practice, they are separated from the broad masses of working people, especially the proletariat; and ideologically, they consciously or unconsciously identify with the bourgeois worldview, treating knowledge as capital and seeking personal liberation and an “happy” good life in which they can enrich themselves individually.
Seen this way, students as a stratum do not have any independent worldview of their own. They are ruled by bourgeois ideology and spontaneously identify with the system of private ownership. At most, they only want to make some minor reforms to the capitalist system—such people are precisely the petty bourgeoisie.
As one comrade above posted, Chairman Mao pointed out long ago in his analysis of the classes in Chinese society: “The petty bourgeoisie. Self-employed peasants[7], handicraft workers, the petty intellectual stratum—students, primary and secondary school teachers, minor clerks, minor office workers, small lawyers, small merchants, and so on—all belong to this category.”
This is also why the association always emphasizes that students, intellectual workers, and intellectuals should be proletarianized. Because practice determines cognition, if the petty bourgeoisie do not transform their own thinking, they cannot ultimately and firmly move onto the same front as the proletariat through spontaneity alone.
FallWind:
There are students from proletarian families, and there are students from bourgeois families. However, students from proletarian families, insofar as they are students, do not yet need—or, in the main, do not need—to support themselves through wage labor. As for students from bourgeois families, apart from a few who have already become involved in managing their family’s or company’s business affairs, as well as some whose worldview has become completely bourgeois, who spend their days indulging in licentious pleasures and take pleasure in oppressing others, in practice many of them still belong to the petty bourgeoisie. Human beings are the sum total of all social relations; there is no such thing in this world as a transitional group above class.
薪火:
What you are saying is the view of the student group produced by the beautiful education of bourgeois society and by education under such a society. You say that students are people receiving an education, but education itself has a class character; the education under Chinese revisionism exists to train successors to the bourgeoisie, or its lackeys and slaves. And your Marxist classification of classes is also vulgarized and oversimplified: “Because people occupy different positions within certain relations of production, have different relationships to the means of production, play different roles in the social organization of labor, and consequently receive their shares of social wealth in different ways and amounts, they are divided into different social groups, that is, classes. People’s relationship to the means of production is the principal basis for dividing classes; it determines their position within the relations of production. Lenin said: ‘Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.’” Students indeed do not directly possess the means of production, but their economic position is parasitic: they live by consuming the surplus value extracted from their families, or by their families from workers. Their economic foundation is undoubtedly stably exploitative in nature, and this determines their position as a propertied class. Thus, in order to maintain this kind of life after entering society upon graduation, these students will desperately engage in opportunism so that they can become genuine exploiters. Therefore, students are indeed not a separate class, and no one has said that they are a separate class; but at the present stage, this group belongs to the ranks of the propertied classes as described above and is a member of the petty bourgeoisie.
薪火:
There is also no such thing as a state in which one’s class character remains undetermined. You are distorting Marxism into a view of it as a speculative discipline detached from reality. The primary nature of human beings is social, and in a class society it is class nature. From the moment a person is born, they live the life of a particular class, and class practice determines their worldview. Once they have a worldview, their subjective agency leads them to participate in broader social activities; through interacting with different social class groups, they in turn change their worldview. Thus, in the long term, a person’s own class position can change, but over a relatively short period—or, in other words, at every single moment—a person’s class character is determined.
jqr:
The idea of a transitional group is absurd. Chairman Mao explicitly stated in his analysis of the classes in China that students are petty bourgeois.
“A Student” uses “arguments” provided by AI to refute other comrades:
一名学生:
I looked up some additional information. I strongly agree with points such as the nonexistence of an undetermined class character, the class nature of human beings in class society, class practice determining one’s worldview, consciousness having an active反作用, and taking a dialectical view of class position. Of course, I would also like to point out some issues that I believe exist,
1. Confusing “objectively dependent class origin” and “an independent class identity” . Students belong to the group not engaged in labor , do not themselves participate in socialized material production, and do not possess independent means of production, so they cannot constitute an independent class and can only survive by relying on the class attributes of their families. “Class character is determined at every moment” presupposes that individuals possess an independent and stable class identity, but students have no independent class position of their own; they only have a dependent class origin.
Ignoring the fact that students’ positions are undetermined and that they display vacillating ideological characteristics. The core characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie (most students belong to the petty intellectual stratum) is that their class position is unstable , repeatedly shifting between proletarian and bourgeois ideologies. Although their objective economic origin remains fixed in the short term, students’ subjective class positions clearly exhibit transitional, ambiguous, and undetermined characteristics. One cannot simplistically sever the relationship between economic status and ideological consciousness.
Therefore, if we are speaking only of objective economic class affiliation , there is no state of being undetermined; but from the perspective of subjective ideological position, a state of undetermined class character objectively exists.
一名学生:
Moreover, the strict definition of the exploiting class (the bourgeoisie) is: to personally own the means of production and live by appropriating the surplus labor of others without compensation . But students themselves do not own any means of production , do not participate in the distribution of production, and do not directly exploit workers. If exploitation exists within a family, that is the class attribute of the family owners ; it cannot simply be transferred to or equated with the student’s own class identity. The petty bourgeoisie inherently possesses a dual character: it both yearns for property and, because it is oppressed, possesses revolutionary qualities. Students from worker and peasant families, as well as students from poor families, can absolutely accept Marxism and establish a proletarian standpoint. Not everyone naturally yearns for exploitation. Confusing “family class origin” with “one’s own class position” wrongly defines the exploitative nature of the family as the student’s “propertied-class position.” Socialist education, ideological and political education, and social practice can transform petty-bourgeois private-property ideology; one cannot completely deny the possibility of ideological transformation.
(There were also comments about AI interspersed throughout. This makes it clear which side “A Student” tends to favor.)
jqr:
Did you investigate the information using an AI developed by an AI company under capitalism? Chairman Mao explicitly said that students are petty bourgeois, and so many people above have already analyzed why. Why have you not answered anyone’s question about why students remain petty bourgeois even though they do not engage in productive activity, and instead thrown out a pile of inexplicable sources and rambled incoherently? What exactly do you mean?
一名学生:
First, regarding the first issue: I am sorry, but I could not find an AI invented by the proletariat. I consulted both domestic and foreign AIs for comparison. If there were a communist AI, I believe I would use it to investigate the issue. However, the essence of AI is still the collection and accumulation of data (although I do not rule out other factors), so it is only normal for errors to occur.
Second, regarding my question, I did not correctly understand the comrades’ challenges and questions and answered the wrong point. I replied to this in the same thread under Comrade “Fenghuo”; you can go there and take a look.
jqr:
What a diplomatic way of putting it. I believe that this is not actually a matter of misunderstanding: students’ class character is quite clear. People who truly become workers after being students can see the differences between the lifestyles and ways of thinking of students and workers very clearly. Only narrow-minded petty-bourgeois intellectuals would agree with the notion that students are a category beyond class, without class.
I already told you that Chairman Mao explicitly pointed out in “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” that students are petty bourgeois. You still refuse to accept it and instead use a capitalist AI search to challenge the basis of Chairman Mao’s argument. Is this really just a matter of using AI?
Finally, this is Comrade FenghuoFlame’s reply to “A Student’s” views:
烽火Flame:
一名学生:
I looked up some additional information. I strongly agree with points such as the nonexistence of an undetermined class character, the class nature of human beings in class society, class practice determining one’s worldview, consciousness having an active反作用, and taking a dialectical view of class position. Of course, I would also like to point out some issues that I believe exist,
1. Confusing “objectively dependent class origin” and “an independent class identity” . Students belong to the group not engaged in labor , do not themselves participate in socialized material production, and do not possess independent means of production, so they cannot constitute an independent class and can only survive by relying on the class attributes of their families. “Class character is determined at every moment” presupposes that individuals possess an independent and stable class identity, but students have no independent class position of their own; they only have a dependent class origin.
Ignoring the fact that students’ positions are undetermined and that they display vacillating ideological characteristics. The core characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie (most students belong to the petty intellectual stratum) is that their class position is unstable , repeatedly shifting between proletarian and bourgeois ideologies. Although their objective economic origin remains fixed in the short term, students’ subjective class positions clearly exhibit transitional, ambiguous, and undetermined characteristics. One cannot simplistically sever the relationship between economic status and ideological consciousness.
Therefore, if we are speaking only of objective economic class affiliation , there is no state of being undetermined; but from the perspective of subjective ideological position, a state of undetermined class character objectively exists.
一名学生:
Moreover, the strict definition of the exploiting class (the bourgeoisie) is: to personally own the means of production and live by appropriating the surplus labor of others without compensation . But students themselves do not own any means of production , do not participate in the distribution of production, and do not directly exploit workers. If exploitation exists within a family, that is the class attribute of the family owners ; it cannot simply be transferred to or equated with the student’s own class identity. The petty bourgeoisie inherently possesses a dual character: it both yearns for property and, because it is oppressed, possesses revolutionary qualities. Students from worker and peasant families, as well as students from poor families, can absolutely accept Marxism and establish a proletarian standpoint. Not everyone naturally yearns for exploitation. Confusing “family class origin” with “one’s own class position” wrongly defines the exploitative nature of the family as the student’s “propertied-class position.” Socialist education, ideological and political education, and social practice can transform petty-bourgeois private-property ideology; one cannot completely deny the possibility of ideological transformation.
You say that “students themselves do not own any means of production and do not participate in the distribution of production,” speaking as though you want to prove that students exist outside the Three Realms and beyond the Five Elements.
Then let me ask you a question: in a class society, what class do people who do not participate in production yet are able to survive belong to? Isn’t the answer obvious?
Following your logic, family members of the industrial bourgeoisie would not be bourgeois either, even if they lived by consuming surplus value. Going further, neither the commercial bourgeoisie nor the loan-finance bourgeoisie could be considered bourgeois, because they do not control the “means of production.”
No one has said that a student’s family origin determines their class position; that is obviously a fallacy. What we have always said is that students themselves are petty bourgeois. This is jointly determined by characteristics such as their free, undisciplined, and isolated way of life, as well as their economic parasitism. Although they do not participate in the production of capitalist society, they are nevertheless the reserve corps of the spiritual aristocracy: first, they live on other people’s support; second, they intend to sell their knowledge to the capitalist’s purse, treating their knowledge as capital and competing with other students for knowledge-capital. That is the petty bourgeoisie.
Also, stop using that AI of yours to explain Marxist questions you have never actually understood. You are only making a fool of yourself.
If anyone has anything to add about their understanding of students as a social group, feel free to share it in the comments.
