resources for anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian movements on the terrain of universities and beyond
Student Protests in Chile
“Demonstrators try to stop a police vehicle armed with a water cannon, during clashes with riot police near the Chilean Congress where President Sebastian Pinera was delivering his State of the Nation address to the National Congress in Valparaiso, Chile, on May 21, 2011.” (AP Photo/Carlos Vera) via The Atlantic
For a recent article on the privatization of education in Chile, and struggles against it, see: “No to Profit”: Fighting Privatization in Chile
by Lili Loofbourow
“During the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, education, previously considered a public good, was commodified and repackaged as a private investment yielding purely private gains. But since student protests began in 2006, Chileans have been trying to get their education back.”
“I was just always like: the university is fucked up. It’s fucked up over here. Why is it fucked up? Why is it that shit ain’t the way it should be here? Yeah, there’s some stuff here, but obviously there’s stuff in other places too. The point is: it’s fucked up here, how can we think about it in a way to help us organize ourselves to make it better here? We were trying to understand this problematic of our own alienation from our capacity to study – the exploitation of our capacity to study that was manifest as a set of academic products.”
- Fred Moten, “Studying Through the Undercommons” - an interview on ClassWarU
If You Organize, You Always Win
In this interview, Joe Grim Feinberg shares his experiences with a radically democratic union, Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago. Rather than waiting for recognition from the state, they have thrived by getting together as workers, declaring themselves to be a union, and organizing to improve their working conditions. Joe praises the IWW’s strategy of organizing a union for all workers that, if followed consistently, de facto leads to an anti-capitalist approach. Such a strategy faces many limits, as grad students are habituated into academic professionalism, which goes against the idea of industrial unionism. Instead of professionalizing for individual insertion into the capitalist rat race, academics can take pride in what they do through organizing and taking control of the production process. Continue reading
Q: Why do Quebec students pay the lowest tuition in North America?
A: because they fight
![Claudia Bernardi: In the last year, there were several OCCUPATIONS OF THEATERS AND CINEMAS all over Italy. There is a kind of network of independent spaces for culture.
In the past year, there are two examples in Rome that are worth speaking about. The first one is Nuovo Cinema Palazzo, a very old cinema, where the local government recently decided to build a casino there. So, all the population organized—there are even comrades of ESC squatting there, and migrants and even residents of 70, 80 years old, migrants, several artists and care workers. After one year of struggle, occupiers have been recognized as a ‘multitude’ by the same court—as a multitude of people resisting against the casino and as legitimate to take back the place. Now, there are several independent projects: theater, performances, children’s activities, a free room for study—libraries in La Sapienza are open for only three hours a day now, and they are going to be completely closed from September—language courses, spaces for migrants.
It’s really a heterogeneous space and we are creating knowledge about ‘what is an occupation of a cultural space?’ What does it mean to, not only defend culture and to resist the attacks of the government, but to create a new way of the production of culture? That’s the main antidote to the attacks of the government.
The second one is Teatro Valle. It’s the oldest theater in Rome, built in 1727. It was going to be closed, so a group of artists decided to occupy it—developing a common way to build up a common constitution through a large process of definition of new norms to organize and manage the space, affirming theatre as an institution of the common. They are finding out a new way, inside and against the Italian law, to create new norms that legitimate the space as part of ‘commons’ To build up these open spaces, we had several debates to create that status with the lawyer, philosophers, journalists, and all the artists. They wrote this statute that is free and available to be modified on the website, and after months, they are collecting all the advice from people and raising funds to create a foundation. They are producing law “from below” and, at the same time, they are creating anomalous norms that will be available for everybody.
[from “Contaminating the University, Creating Autonomous Knowledge: Occupied Social and Cultural Centers in Italy - an interview with Claudia Bernardi”]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_maww5fDzI61rxc93lo1_r1_500.jpg)
Claudia Bernardi: In the last year, there were several OCCUPATIONS OF THEATERS AND CINEMAS all over Italy. There is a kind of network of independent spaces for culture.
In the past year, there are two examples in Rome that are worth speaking about. The first one is Nuovo Cinema Palazzo, a very old cinema, where the local government recently decided to build a casino there. So, all the population organized—there are even comrades of ESC squatting there, and migrants and even residents of 70, 80 years old, migrants, several artists and care workers. After one year of struggle, occupiers have been recognized as a ‘multitude’ by the same court—as a multitude of people resisting against the casino and as legitimate to take back the place. Now, there are several independent projects: theater, performances, children’s activities, a free room for study—libraries in La Sapienza are open for only three hours a day now, and they are going to be completely closed from September—language courses, spaces for migrants.
It’s really a heterogeneous space and we are creating knowledge about ‘what is an occupation of a cultural space?’ What does it mean to, not only defend culture and to resist the attacks of the government, but to create a new way of the production of culture? That’s the main antidote to the attacks of the government.
The second one is Teatro Valle. It’s the oldest theater in Rome, built in 1727. It was going to be closed, so a group of artists decided to occupy it—developing a common way to build up a common constitution through a large process of definition of new norms to organize and manage the space, affirming theatre as an institution of the common. They are finding out a new way, inside and against the Italian law, to create new norms that legitimate the space as part of ‘commons’ To build up these open spaces, we had several debates to create that status with the lawyer, philosophers, journalists, and all the artists. They wrote this statute that is free and available to be modified on the website, and after months, they are collecting all the advice from people and raising funds to create a foundation. They are producing law “from below” and, at the same time, they are creating anomalous norms that will be available for everybody.
Contaminating the University, Creating Autonomous Knowledge: Occupied Social and Cultural Centers in Italy - An Interview with Claudia Bernardi
Could students in the US pull off a strike like in Montreal?
An Interview with Marianne Garneau
(co-author of “Snapshots of the Student Movement in Montreal”)
Summary:
Against a kind of activist-y, spectacular politics, Marianne Garneau argues that US students and workers can learn from the Quebec model how to organize our power as a class. Quebec students have kept their tuition low because they’ve historically had a vibrant, militant student movement, one that is willing to strike and directly disrupt, and not wait for the leadership of the business unions. The organizing model is to create directly democratic bodies—department-by-department assemblies—that know how to leverage our power to fuck up the business of the people who are screwing us over, whether they’re our educators or our employers.
