Posts tagged political struggle

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Posted 2 years ago

May Day International | NEW: The Academy is the Crisis

jhnbrssndn:

“The institutions themselves are a key part of the problem. The Left must not content itself with fighting a rearguard action merely to mitigate the successive waves of educational neoliberalisation, but must reclaim the university along the lines Chomsky proposed over 40 years ago. We have the opportunity, as the final nail is driven into the coffin of the public university, to reimagine the university, as a space for genuine critical inquiry, liberated from the stifling, deadly embrace of capital. Maybe - and here’s an idea - it could take the defunders at their word, and create new universities, which may look quite unlike the impoverished institutions envisaged by capital, and are quite unencumbered by the existing corrupt, corporate regime that they are now destroying.”

My latest piece for New Left Project.

via jhnbrssndn
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Posted 2 years ago

David Harvey - Nice Day for a Revolution

Why May Day should be a date to stand up and change the system

May Day is the occasion we celebrate the grand achievements of the workers of the world in making our world a far, far better place to live in. There is, unfortunately, not too much to celebrate these days. The past 30 years are littered with battles and skirmishes that have resulted in defeat after defeat for organised labour.

A capitalist class gone rampant has now consolidated its power to command or corrupt almost all the major institutions that regulate the body politic – the political parties (of both left and right), the media, the universities, the law, to say nothing of the repressive state apparatus and international institutions. The democracy of money power now rules. A global plutocracy exerts its will almost everywhere unchallenged.

So what is there to celebrate? We would not, of course, have what we still have now (from pensions to the remnants of reasonable health care and public education) had it not been for the labour movement. But waxing nostalgic over the undoubted achievements and heroism of the past will get us nowhere.

May Day should therefore be about relaunching a revolutionary movement to change the world. The very thought of doing that – even just saying it and writing it down – is as exhilarating as it is astonishing.

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Posted 2 years ago

Now that national news outlets have picked up the story, the student union will be having a press conference today at noon (EST). We were also ordered a pizza by some wonderful people in Madison, Wisconsin in a show of solidarity.

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Posted 2 years ago

NY Times - Students at Rutgers Occupy a Building

These are my friends! They are still in the building at the time of this writing. Given that the newly-elected student government is overwhelmingly affiliated with the student unions, this is quite an excellent way to introduce the new student administration.

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Posted 2 years ago

The rally for which I made a flyer has just become a rally to support the students currently occupying the administration’s office in Old Queens, one of the original campus buildings at Rutgers. My friends in the student union are having a ‘study-in’ to protest the administration’s complicity with the gradual privatization of the university.

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Posted 2 years ago
Another flyer I made for the Rutgers Student Union’s ongoing actions. Zoom

Another flyer I made for the Rutgers Student Union’s ongoing actions.

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Posted 2 years ago

The dogmas are tediously familiar: All multiplicity, decentering, or dispersion is positive, while all unity or homogeneity is suspect; all marginality is creative, while all majorities and consensuses are oppressive; small-scale political action is to be commended, while large-scale, state-centered projects are to be treated with thorough-going skepticism.

This is not the kind of politics that brought down apartheid, upended the neo-Stalinist states of Eastern Europe, or, as I write, has toppled a couple of autocracies in the Arab world. It is rather the expression of post-1970s political deadlock in advanced Western societies—one that then, in a grandly universalizing gesture not unfamiliar in Parisian theory, mistakes itself for the truth. Except that we cannot speak of truth …

Terry Eagleton, “Couples Therapy,” Artforum
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Posted 2 years ago

Walk into Action

I’m thrilled that I know these people personally.

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Posted 2 years ago
There’s an opportunity for a new society to be built on people who are transforming themselves, and who are not just opposing those who oppress them.
Grace Lee Boggs
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Posted 2 years ago
“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto Zoom

“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto