Source: Tren Blindado, September 1928 (Vol. I, No. 1), México DF.
Translated by: For Marxists.org by José Acosta,
March 2014.
This Edition: Marxists.org, March 2014.
There is a lot of talk about the "University Reform". The existing uneasiness among the students is responsible for the murmuring of a revolutionary language. In Tren Blindado and public talks we will attempt to develop the social basis for this movement, its historical precedents, fundamental principles and everything else that is necessary for the student multitude to comprehend it as best as possible.
The first thing we need to define is the genuine concept of the university reform. There is a lot of liberal empty talk about the university reform because some of the elements that form this movement belong to the liberal bourgeoisie. But if the reform is going to engage with seriousness and a revolutionary spirit it cannot engage but with a socialist spirit, the only revolutionary spirit of the moment.
The universities, like many other institutions of the present regime, are built to aid and sustain the dominion of the class in power. To believe that intellectuals or educational institutions are not linked with the sociological class division of every society is a naivety of the political myopic. Never has a class sustained an institution, let alone educational institutions, if it does not function in its benefit. It is in the universities, in every educational institution, where the culture of the dominant class is forged and from whence the servants in the broad camp of science that they monopolize are created.
The universities of the modern capitalist countries create lawyers, engineers, technicians of every nature, to serve the economic interest of the ruling class: the capitalist bourgeoisie. It would be a grave error to consider that doctors might represent an exception to this rule. Out of the immense majority of graduated doctors, how many are to serve in institutions of collective benefit and how many are to become individualistic and exploitative bourgeois professionals? The fact that many doctors do not triumph, due to the injustices of the present regime, does not indicate that the aspiration of the professional is otherwise.
With that said, without the need to extend it for anyone that posses a trace of social culture, we believe that the university reform needs to be undertaken with the same general concept of all other reforms within the actual political and economic system. There is no honest socialist that assumes feasible to gradually reform this old society until a brand-new one comes out of it as in the bygone utopias. The first condition to reform a regime - history has always proved it - is the conquering of power by the class bearing such reform. Presently, the proletarian class is the carrier of social reforms. Everything must be in agreement with this objective. But the fact that the final solution is the proletarian social revolution does not entail that we must be foreign to revolutionary reforms since these are not antagonistic concepts.
A socialist concept of the struggle for the improvement of the University is similar to the concept of the proletariat in their action to improve their life conditions. Every advance is not a goal, but a step, to keep ascending, or one more weapon that is taken from the enemy to aid us in defeating him in the "final fight".
We struggle for a university that links itself with the necessities of the oppressed, for a university more useful to science instead of plutocratic castes, for a university where the moral and character of the students is not shaped by the old principle of "magister dixit", nor by the individualism of the republican universities of Latin America or the U.S.A. We want a new University that accomplishes in the cultural field what will be done in the production field by the factories of tomorrow without parasite stockholders nor capitalist exploiters. We know that we will not acquire this immediately. But in the mere struggle for obtaining that aim of the future university we will obtain a double triumph: agitate the conscience of the youth by wining in the educational front against the enemies of working people, as well as proving in front of all honest revolutionaries that the definitive emancipation of culture and its institutions cannot be accomplished without the emancipation of the slaves of modern production, which are, just as much, the unconscious puppets of the comic theater of modern political regimes.