[lbo-talk] MH & DG on university

Chris Sturr sturr at dollarsandsense.org
Sun Feb 26 11:18:26 PST 2012


A report from the field about the idea of free, non-credit-bearing higher ed and/or political education (this is partly a follow up to what Nathan said about OWS's efforts/plans): Some of us involved with Occupy Boston's "Free School University" have organized the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series here, which has had a great roster of speakers--including Bruno Bosteels, Victor Wallis, Fred Magdoff, Noam Chomsky, Rick Wolff, Avi Chomsky, Noel Ignatiev, Elaine Bernard, Vijay Prashad, Manny Ness, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz--and this is in addition to the series of teach-ins I organized by Boston-area left economists, including Juliet Schor, Arjun Jayadev, John Miller and Arthur MacEwan from D&S, and many others (videos of most of the HZMLS talks/teach-ins are online, here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5CC33755D87209BF).

The HZMLS folks decided in December that this spring and summer we want to move beyond ad hoc teach-ins and talks by left academics and try to have a broader selection of political education offerings, including a full-fledged summer school. But we think it's crucial to find out what people--the broad constituencies Occupy needs to be reaching out to--would want if they could have courses in anything--what topics/subjects, and what teaching/learning methods. Not everyone wants a Gramsci reading group (as cool as that would be); some people might want math literacy, or how to deal with your boss (as someone pointed out earlier in this thread), or bicycle repair, or who knows what.

So, both to make sure we keep active over the winter and also as way of publicizing our intent on having broad course offerings in the spring and summer *and* gathering information on what kinds of topics and methods people want, we have started a film/discussion series called "OccupyFilm," with the first theme being "Occupied Peoples | People's Occupations." We figure films are pretty accessible, and facilitated discussion of precedents for the Occupy movement will be a start at political education. Our first film was "Left on Pearl," about the 1973 takeover of 888 Memorial Drive in Cambridge by feminists to create a women's center. The second film was the astounding "3,000 Years and Life," about the 1973 prisoner takeover of Walpole Prison (the prisoners' union took charge of running the prison for *three months* when the guards went on strike to protest a black, progressive Commissioner of Corrections, appointed, incidentally, by a Republican governor). For both events we had 50-60 people, most of whom, I would say, had had no exposure to Occupy before. For both events there were participants in the original "occupations" present to answer questions and provide context. Here's a link to the flyers about both events: http://zinnlectures.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/occupy-film-series-to-start/. (I designed the flyers. :) )

The Walpole story, btw, gives an interesting twist on the discussion in this same thread of whether free public higher ed under capitalism is like having a prison library. The prisoners at Walpole, led by their *union* (how shocked would most people be to hear that there was a state-wide prisoners' union that negotiated with the prison administrators over living and working conditions?) reformed how the prison school was run, so that it better met prisoners' needs; they took over the prison kitchen and ran it without bosses, cooperatively; violence in the prison declined to almost nothing, and there was cooperation between white, black, and Latino prisoners; they brought in hundreds of outside observers to show what they had been able to do, and to dispel lies that the authorities (who were hoping the prisoners would riot to justify crushing the rebellion) were trying to spread. How this relates to the earlier mention of prison in this thread: prison and prison libraries are not just metaphors. A radical prison movement in the early 1970s, when there were 1/10th the number of prisoners there are today and 1/8th the rate of incarceration, involved solidarity between highly organized and politicized prisoners and outside activists, and pushed the idea that 9/10th of the people in prison didn't belong there, and when they were in prison they were capable of conducting their own affairs with dignity and without the need for guards or bosses. The rebellion at Walpole was a demonstration project for this point of view, and as such it had to be crushed, as it was, and then its history had to be buried, as it was. For more information about this episode, check out Jamie Bissonette's book *When the Prisoners Ran Walpole* (South End Press). (Jamie was also at our screening, in addition to Bobby Dellelo, who spent 50 years in Walpole and was the president of the prisoners' union at the time of the rebellion.)

Any suggestions for more films for our series would be greatly appreciated. I would like to show films that aren't well known or screened that often, so although something like *The Take*, about the factory takeovers in Argentina, would fit in great, that one has been shown so much that we'd rather find other films that people haven't had access to.

-- -- Chris Sturr Editor, *Dollars & Sense* 29 Winter St. Boston, Mass. 02108 phone: 617-447-2177, ext. 205 fax: 617-447-2179 email: sturr at dollarsandsense.org



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