Wages for Students, a pamphlet in the form of a blue book, was written and published anonymously by activists linked to the journal Zerowork during student strikes in Massachusetts and New York in the fall of 1975. Deeply influenced by the Wages for Housework Campaign’s analysis of capitalism and emerging in relation to struggles such as Black Power, anticolonial resistance, and the antiwar movements, the authors sought to fight against the role of universities as conceived by capital and its state. The pamphlet debates the strategies of the student movement at the time and denounces the regime of forced unpaid work imposed everyday upon millions of students. Wages for Students was an affront and a campaign against the neoliberalization of the university, at a time when this process was just beginning. Forty years later, the highly profitable business of education not only continues to exploit the unpaid labor of the students, but now also makes them pay for it. Today, when the student debt situation has us all up to our necks, and when students around the world are refusing to continue this collaborationism, we again make this available this booklet “for education against education.”
This new trilingual edition (English, Spanish, and French) includes an introduction by George Caffentzis, Monty Neill, and John Willshire-Carrera alongside the original pamphlet and a transcript of a collective discussion organized by Jakob Jakobsen, Malav Kanuga, Ayreen Anastas, and Rene Gabri, following a public reading of the pamphlet by George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, Cooper Union students, and other members and friends of 16 Beaver in New York City.
About the Authors
Wages for Students was originally authored and published (anonymously) in the fall of 1975 by George Caffentzis, Monty Neill, and John Willshire-Carrera, three activists associated with the journal Zerowork and later with the Midnight Notes Collective.
