Native Son

In my honors English class this quarter, we were assigned the book Native Son by Richard Wright. Wright was a member of the Communist Party, and while living in Chicago, edited the Red magazine, Left Front. The book, portraying the plight of a young black man, Bigger Thomas, involves the communist party directly. Bigger, after raping and murdering two women, one black, one white, is put in jail. The Labor Defender's come to his defense. He tries to pin the murder on the communist. Yet nowhere in class are we allowed to discuss principles of communism, even though it is Germain to the subject.

Few people in my class understand what communism really is. When Jan, the Red, was first introduced in the novel, one student actually said, "Fuck that commie bastard." My teacher merely reprimanded him for language. I asked him later why he didn't like communists.

"Those mother fuckin commies are all over in fucking Korea man. And like Russia too. Fucking Soviets. The whole bunch of them. We should just nuke everybody 'cept Canada and the UK."

That was the only answer he could offer me. He hated all communists because the two communist countries he knew had, at one point or another, been at war with the United States. While I admit that the communist theory is in fact flawed, at least I know the reasons why.

I did however, want to do a little bit more research into communism. I went down to Barnes and Noble and subjected myself to many suspicious looks as I asked salespeople to help me find a copy of The Communist Manifesto. It describes the capitalist system as one divided into two classes, the rich, who will remain rich by cheating the proletariat, and the proletariat who will always remain under the rich's thumb. Marx proposed an ideal, a practically Utopian society, and urged the workers of the world to unite.

This proposal was for people to band together, and escape the oppression of the capitalists. He urged them to be able to support themselves through farming and manufacturing as a way to raise human consciousness. That consciousness can then be molded into accepting the new forms of private ownership that the party puts in place. But there still has to be enough for everyone to have an equal share of property. It also says that the capitalist system distances the worker from the work because the worker does not feel involved. They can't even afford to buy the goods that they help produce! The Party goes on to say that the endless line of production and poverty for some, and wealth and prosperity for others has become a destructive force in society. They call for the impoverished people of the country to become conscious of the situation and revolt against it.

In the process of a communist revolution, the state must abolish all private property, and rent land out to public purposes, add a high income tax, get rid of all right of inheritance, confiscate the property of emigrants and rebels, centralize credit back to the state, centralize transportation and communication back to the state, acquire ownership of all production and factories, equalize the liability of all labor, combine the industries of agriculture and manufacture reducing the distinction between country and city, free education for children and abolition of child labor.

This basically gives the state all power, and responsibility to redistribute the wealth back to the people. That lends itself to the growth of corruption. But one of the central, unspoken contingencies of this ideology is that people are inherently good. That everyone can share equally and live communally. Which, unfortunately enough, goes completely against human nature. It is human nature to want. To want more than you have. To want as much or more as your nieghbour.

However, this practice has been applied successfully. There are numerous communes around the country that do not affiliate themselves with the communist party, just believe in sharing and loving ones neighbour.

Now that I have discussed what communism actually is, we can get back to my main point: The ignorance of high school students to the world outside of the United States.

As far as most students are concerned, you're either a democratic nation [a.k.a. the good guys] or a communist [a.k.a. the bad guys]. Socialists, Anarchists, Theocratists, and Monarchists are either disregarded, unknown, or grouped in the communist category. This leads to the whole, them versus me mentality that so many Americans have. The "My way is right, because I'm American, and we're democratic, and we rock at life, and y'all can just go die in a hole" way of thinking.

However, this isn't the average American's fault. It is the government's fault. And before you dismiss the whole bottom half of this otherwise decently written article as a conspiracy theory, at least read my topic sentence, would ya? Thanks.

The American government instituted various laws which dictate how schools get funding. [*AHEM cough cough NCLB cough cough*] The schools get funding by performing well on standardized tests, such as the PSSA, the IOWAS, the TERRA NOVA, or the REGENT. Teachers are then encouraged by the school administrations to cater their curriculum to teach the material which will appear on the aforementioned tests, which mainly consist of math and reading comprehension. This decreases the average American student's exposure to knowledge which they will one day need in the real world.

And why is the government purposely and knowingly depriving the youth of America the knowledge of the sciences, history, and world cultures? Well, I'm not too sure about the science bit, but I have the world cultures bit all figured out. By depriving us of the knowledge of things such as communism and socialism, we will not realize the subtle changes happening in our own government. As our democratic republic slowly sidles into a position of a totalitarian government, we will have no clue what has happened until it its too late. We will wake up one day in an Orwellian society, rubbing sand out of our eyes, and have no clue where we all went so wrong or so blind.