Class War U becomes Undercommoning

After a long hiatus, Class War University is transforming into a new project called Undercommoning.

In brief, Undercommoning is building a North American network of radical organizers within, against, and beyond the (neo)liberal, (neo)colonial university. It hosts critical discussions and engagements to build solidarity around radical and marginalized forms of knowledge and undercommons-centered power. We aspire to create heterogenous networks that will link disparate geographic locations while also facilitating meaningful relationships around local, place-based organizing.

To kick-off the project, there will be a workshop in Madison, WI on June 4th, 2015, followed by a bigger public launch this summer. For more info, check out the Undercommoning website.

Death of a Zapatista – Neoliberalism’s Assault on Indigenous Autonomy

The Zapatista struggle continues … Subcomandante Marcos ceases to exist …Galeano lives. 

– by Levi Gahman –

… from the mountains of the Mexican Southeast …

On Friday May 2, 2014 an Indigenous Zapatista teacher, Jose Luis Solís López – known by his name ‘in the struggle’ as ‘Compañero Galeano’ – was ambushed and murdered. He was beaten with rocks and clubs, hacked with a machete, shot in the leg and chest, and as he lay on the ground gasping for air – he was executed by a final bullet to the head. The reason he was subjected to this callous violence varies depending upon what account is heard or read. But in truth, he was assassinated because he was Indigenous, because he was a teacher, because he was humble, and more specifically – because he was a Zapatista. And in a contemporary global system of neoliberal production and colonial governance, people like Galeano are deemed to be threats – threats that need to be killed in cold blood and suffer brutal deaths.

 

Galeano

Compañero Galeano

 

The assault on Galeano was also an attempt to antagonize the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) into reacting with violence themselves as retribution for the death of one of their promotores de educación (‘promoters of education’ – what teachers are called in the Zapatista system of horizontal education). The provocation was directly aimed at the EZLN in hopes of prompting them into engaging in armed conflict, which would thereby give the Mexican state reason to retaliate and attack Zapatista communities. However, despite the pain and rage that the Zapatistas are feeling, they continue to release statements calling for peace. And amidst the tears, sorrow, indignation, and sadness they now have due to one of their cherished teachers being slain in broad daylight, they have stated they are not seeking revenge, nor blood, nor vengeance, but rather, they seek justice. 

Continue reading →

Freedom From Education: Decolonial Study for Abolishing the Prison-University Complex


freedom_from_education_metropolis

Against the romanticizing of education, Leftists should recognize alternative regimes of study, as practiced in prison organizing and indigenous peoples’ movements, and participate with them toward dismantling the intertwined regimes of education and carcerality.

– an essay by Abraham Bolish –

Left movements in North America romanticize education in many ways. Calls to “defend public education” emanate from the most radical movements of students, like the ‘Maple Spring’ in Quebec, and teachers, like the social justice-oriented Chicago Teachers Union. In struggles against prisons, with images of the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ and calls for ‘education not incarceration,’ we on the Left often criticize contemporary education as corrupted for disproportionately funneling poor youth of color into the penal regime. Conversely, in organizing around universities, the university has been framed as losing its educational mission and becoming like a prison, an “ivory cage,” which “incarcerates” potentially resistant young people behind walls of debt.

 

This fetishizing of education is a key obstacle to Left movements’ revolutionary goals. Seeing ‘revolution’ as an overturning of a dominant order, a revolutionary movement would need to radically transform all of the regimes composing that order—from the family and work to transportation and prisons. Such a movement is hindered if any one of these regimes is immunized from critique. That is precisely what has happened with the regime of education.

Continue reading →

Excavating Minor Histories: Autonomous publishing for movements – An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis

imaginal_machines

Summary: Stevphen speaks on militant research through collaborative, open process publishing, and on negotiating an ambivalent relationship to the university—appropriating resources while refusing to become the administrator of someone else’s precarity.

[This is Part 2, continued from Part 1 here.]

Continue reading →

What can an open, insurgent publishing body do? – An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis

minor_compositions

Summary: Stevphen Shukaitis, editor of Minor Compositions, talks about the possibilities for open publishing as an experiment and a provocation. Drawing on his book, Imaginal Machines, he reflects on the challenge of resisting the recuperation of radical energies in work. As a professor in a business school, he shares his approach to radical teaching: using traditional materials for subversive ends. 

Continue reading →

Art and Politics against the Colonization of Time: An Interview with Dan S. Wang

caution_poster

 

Printer and writer, Dan S. Wang, talks about his projects that intersect art, politics, and labor—from teaching and public art with college students to anti-war and anti-prison activism, the Mess Hall, and the Compass Group—as collective experiments against individualizing economies of attention. Continue reading →

Organizing, Teaching, Transforming: Higher Ed Struggles within/against/beyond Unions and ‘The University’

 

stfe0401

Nick Hengen Fox, a full-time faculty member at a community college, talks about the connections between successful union organizing and the classroom, radical teaching practice, and what “critical university studies” might look like outside of a university. Continue reading →

Occupying the City with the Social Science Centre – an Interview with Mike Neary

mike_neary

Summary: Professor Mike Neary speaks on the origins, purposes, and tensions of The Social Science Centre, Lincoln in the UK, an alternative form of higher education provision run as a formally constituted co-operative. The Social Science Centre sets itself against the usual colonial relations between universities and communities, seeking to occupy and re-invent the ‘idea of the university’ by producing critical, practical knowledge grounded in the real lives of its members. Neary raises questions about how such projects can create new, sustainable forms of social wealth against and beyond capitalism.

Continue reading →

Against Academic Alibis: The Best Education is the Struggle – An Interview with George Ciccariello-Maher

RALLY AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY AND IN MEMORY OF OSCAR GRANT IN O

Summary: The author of We Created Chávez, George Ciccariello-Maher, draws on his experiences in the “cauldron of resistance” of Oakland, CA to speak on the relations between education, organizing in universities, and struggles against police and prisons. Against academics’ use of alibis, such as ‘changing the world by teaching,’ to legitimize anything they do as a contribution to radical movements, he calls for academics to more clearly distinguish between their jobs and their political work.

Continue reading →

Reanimating Histories of Struggle as Weapons against Neoliberal Individualization – An Interview with Don Kingsbury

we_are_the_crisis

Summary:

Reflecting on the building occupations at UC Santa Cruz in 2009-2010 and cross-pollination between student and worker struggles, Don Kingsbury highlights the need to excavate and reanimate histories of radical movements. Under the conditions of academic precarity, and against the neoliberal privatization of the general intellect, Don calls for turning communities of necessity into communities of resistance.

Continue reading →