File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1998/avant-garde.9811, message 47


Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 23:13:00 -0500 (EST)
From: Michael Dean Benton <benton-AT-BGNet.bgsu.edu>
To: mbenton723-AT-aol.com
Subject: MARXIST STUDENT HAS CAPITALIST PARENTS (fwd)




---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 18:12:07 -0800 (PST)
From: A Spectacle <situationist-AT-lists.nothingness.org>
To: situationist-AT-lists.nothingness.org
Subject: MARXIST STUDENT HAS CAPITALIST PARENTS

Yeah, yeah, you've probably seen it already, but this is from the
latest Onion and it made me chuckle.

rebunk


MARXIST STUDENT HAS CAPITALIST PARENTS

                                                                      
                 LAWRENCE, KS--Chad Briggs, a radical Marxist and
University of
                                                                      
           Kansas junior, has capitalist parents, campus sources
reported
                                                                      
           Monday. 

                                                                      
                 "The proletariat will rise up, and the state will
wither away, " said
                                                                      
           Briggs, 20, who grew up in the bourgeois suburban enclave
of Deerfield,
                                                                      
           IL, before renouncing his exploitative capitalist ties
during the first
                                                                      
           semester of his sophomore year. "Only when the workers
control the
                                                                      
           means of production will a truly classless society emerge." 

                                                                      
                 Briggs said he spent the first 18 years of his life
under the
                                                                      
           oppressive thumb of his father, investment banker Richard
Briggs, and
                                                                      
           his mother, elementary-school teacher Judith Briggs,
members of the
                                                                      
           reigning bourgeois elite. 

                                                                      
                 "For years, much like the oppressed St. Petersburg
factory worker
                                                                      
           of 1918, I was controlled by the ruling class," Briggs
said. "The people
                                                                      
           who owned the house I lived in told me when to come to the
table for
                                                                      
           supper, when to do my chores, and when to be home on Saturday
                                                                      
           nights. They even controlled the means of transportation,
giving me the
                                                                      
           keys to their Ford Taurus when and only when they saw fit." 

                                                                      
                 Briggs said his parents still control him, as all
capitalist running-dogs
                                                                      
           do the masses, using their payment of his rent and tuition
as a means of
                                                                      
           influencing which courses he takes. 

                                                                      
                 "I was talking to my father on the phone the other
night, and he
                                                                      
           questioned my enrollment in a film class on the works of
Woody
                                                                      
           Allen," Briggs said. "He said, 'This is what I'm spending
$21,000 a year
on? For you to watch Woody Allen movies?' Even here in college,
hundreds of miles from my capitalist oppressors, they
still hold sway over me. Until the day I am loosed from their chains,
I shall not truly be free." 

      Committed to fomenting glorious proletarian revolution, Briggs
recently quit his 10-hour-a-week coffee-shop job to
become co-chair of the radical campus socialist group UPRISE
(University Program for Revolutionary Integration of a
Socialist Economy). Like many other steps Briggs has taken toward
establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, his
joining UPRISE was strongly opposed by his parents. 

      "My parents don't understand that social order based on class
division sows the seeds of its own destruction," said
Briggs, who witnessed class division and worker exploitation
first-hand during a Spring Break trip to Cancun, Mexico.
"They just want me to go to business school and make lots of money
like my sister Debbie." 

      "Then again,"Briggs said, "why should I care what they think? I
don't want to end up like them. All they care about is
buying this boat or starting that retirement fund, or trying to
convince me to get a Lumina instead of the Jeep I want. It's
like Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, 'The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles.'" 

      Briggs' girlfriend, Jenny Elsinger, is one of the original
founders of UPRISE and the person responsible for introducing
him to the group. Before meeting Elsinger in September 1997, Briggs
said he knew almost nothing of the woes of workers
and their lack of control over the means of production and
distribution. 

      "Before the Revolutionary Year 1997, I was pretty much like the
rest of the campus bourgeoisie," said Briggs, stapling
copies of the latest issue of the UPRISE newsletter, From Below! "I
was preoccupied with fraternity rush, football games
and getting into B-school. I've grown up fast, though, now that I've
had a taste of the real world through my involvement
with UPRISE." 

      Next Friday, Briggs said, the bourgeois and proletarian classes
will clash violently, when his parents come to campus
for Parents' Weekend. 

      "There's always fighting when my parents come to visit, and this
time will be no different," Briggs said. "They'll tell me
to clean up my hair. They'll tell me to move out of the co-op. They'll
tell me to stop fooling around with 'this Communist
nonsense.' It is as inevitable as the victory of the workers'
revolution." 

      "My parents think this is just a 'phase' I'm going through,"
Briggs said. "Well, I'll tell you what's a phase--the
ownership's control of the proletariat. Now, there's a temporary phase."




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