Currently, among the students opposing internet addiction schools, there is a sad and angry prevailing attitude. Some students, although opposed to internet addiction schools and even having been sent there by feudal parents themselves, merely oppose these schools as a problem caused by a bourgeoisie willing to do anything for profit, without tracing back to the fact that these schools can operate because Confucianism dominates China. They believe that many feudal parents have been deceived by these internet addiction schools or that the educational methods are wrong, and they themselves still love their children. On one hand, this shows that students lack social practice and have an unclear understanding of Confucianism; on the other hand, it also shows that most children do not have the so-called “moral corruption,” “deliberately opposing their parents,” or “must be beaten” as slandered by middle-class and feudal parents. They are far from being so corrupt. Even when oppressed by feudal parents to the point of suffering great mental and physical harm, they still hold small-bourgeois illusions about their parents, while feudal parents use the most brutal means—beating, insulting, deceiving, and slandering their children, even children oppressed by parents worldwide. Take the situation in internet addiction schools as an example: many children, after being locked up by their parents, try to write letters to their parents to ask for help, but the parents use excuses like “travel” or “elderly person is ill,” exploiting the children’s desire to repair family relations or attachment to the elderly, deceiving the children into being sent in. I can’t think of any words to describe such tactics—only that feudal parents are truly shameless in slandering their children.
Some students’ mindset of whitewashing feudal parents can also be understood through the lens of the love-above-all mentality of most petty-bourgeois women in capitalist society. These students depend more deeply on their parents in daily life, and spiritually, their parents are the people they contact most often. Only by relying on their parents can they survive in capitalist society, at least growing up with the ability to live independently. This practice leads them to fantasize about maintaining parental support through family affection, even when oppressed by their parents and asked to succeed through opportunism, they interpret this as “for their own good.” Just as most women cannot survive in capitalist society without dependence on a man and seek personal liberation through love, most students are in similar situations, even worse because an adult woman can eventually leave a man and live independently for a while, or find another “good” man. However, students still in the academic system cannot leave their parents’ support even for a day, nor can they change parents due to their parents’ brutal oppression. Moreover, most students fundamentally lack direct exploitation of others in practice; even children from bourgeois families do not participate in exploiting workers—they are still petty bourgeois, which fosters their petty-bourgeois concept of family affection.
Parents, on the other hand, are different. Whether they are feudal parents in China influenced heavily by Confucian ideas or parents in Western imperialist countries pressured by mass protests and more restrained democratic systems, fundamentally, they are oppressors within private family ownership. They raise children not out of affection but to ensure their private property has suitable heirs, selling their daughters for high bride prices or forming alliances with the husband’s family. Their social and economic status is undoubtedly much higher than that of their children, similar to how men generally have higher economic status than women. Parents’ needs for their children are not urgent, just as men’s needs for a family slave or sexual tool are not urgent. The disparity in economic status between parents and children makes their relationship fundamentally unequal. In traditional families, the oppression of children by parents is almost inevitable, and raising children is inevitably for personal gain. In such oppressive practices, parents become increasingly morally corrupt. If the parents are from a relatively wealthy bourgeois class, it is even worse—they will go to any lengths, including sending children to internet addiction schools, to treat their children as complete tools for opportunism. This private family system not only causes severe harm to many children but also plays a role in dividing the masses. Even the proletariat, because of their oppressive status within the family, can become morally corrupt; when oppressed by capitalists, they may weaken due to the interests of small individual families, as wives and children become their private property, and they even fantasize about using their children to improve their economic status through opportunism, which is undoubtedly very harmful to revolution. The proletariat may seem to achieve “liberation” within the family through private ownership—becoming oppressors themselves—but this prevents their own liberation because such relationships are always rooted in private ownership. To retain these benefits, they must preserve capitalism; oppressors cannot and will not achieve their own liberation.
To oppose internet addiction schools, one should not only condemn the moral corruption of certain capitalists or feudal parents but also condemn Confucianism, condemn private ownership, and condemn the entire capitalist system. It is precisely private ownership and the emergence of individual families that have turned family affection into naked利益交换 (interest exchange), and private small families that make parental oppression of children inevitable, leading to the appearance of internet addiction schools. As long as capitalism exists, there will be a continuous stream of parents who treat their children as opportunistic tools. With such parents’ demand to enslave children, even if internet addiction schools are suppressed, they will repeatedly resurface. Only by overthrowing capitalism can the foundation of internet addiction schools—the oppression of children by parents in private family ownership—be destroyed.
? Although, in terms of severity, it’s not as extreme.