[lbo-talk] MH & DG on university

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Mon Feb 27 05:25:10 PST 2012


ha! that's exactly the kind of thing that Graeber says is no longer thinkable. I agree. Imagine if students ran the university. The outrage! The horror! Imagine if they graded themselves! Imagine if they designed their own courses! A bunch of hippy dippy wackos make up this kind of thing and they are just utopian dreamers. Humans simply aren't capable of this. It can't be done! There'd be no standards! They'd all give themselves As. They'd probably get drunk, get stoned, and get laid all day and all night.

OTOH, prisoners running their own prison was a metaphor Marx might have used for capitalism. What was the famous one someone, Jim F?, once quoted here about the difference between slavery and capitalism, where a slavery must be whipped to work, under capitalism, a work does his own self-whipping.

At 09:27 PM 2/26/2012, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Did anyone read the fascinating material in this post by Chris Sturr?
>
>I had never heard of Walpole, but Chris's remarks on it seem to make it a
>really vital bit of history for any serious leftist.
>
>Carrol
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
>On Behalf Of Chris Sturr
>Sent: Sunday, February 26, 2012 1:18 PM
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] MH & DG on university
>
>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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>
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