Loosely related to this and this, a friend and I have been chatting on occasion about a series of discussion workshops for student leftists, trying to help folks get better at what they want to do. Brainstorm help welcome.
conceptual
Power analysis, strategy/tactics
practical
Effective meetings, follow up
Effective actions
inspirational/agitational
stuff cool student left projects historical
political economy of universities
Notes for an intro to a proposed distribution of copies of Situ pamphlet on the poverty of student life
When I Hear The Phrase Higher Education I Reach For My Revolver
-higher than whom?
-education for what?
-we’re not the only ones reaching for guns - ROTCs, the university industrial complex.
Comment by Nate — April 18, 2007 @ 4:33 am
Conceptual:
Answering the Question “What Is To Be Done?”
Considering Means and Ends
Practical:
Organizing
Maintaining Organization
Extending Organization
Comment by Colin — April 18, 2007 @ 3:03 pm
is there any place for the maoists in the house?
discipline:
what self-discipline means.
discipline in organization
discipline in solidarity
discipline and planning projects
Comment by tzuchien — April 18, 2007 @ 3:34 pm
hey y’all,
Thanks for the comments. Can you put a bit more meat on them bones for me? (Which is not say they’re not nice bones and much appreciated, they are.) As part of or in addition to that I’d be particularly interested in hearing more of your own experiences w/ the student left. You’ve got more experience with that than me. I did stuff in college, but almost nothing except stuff around gender and sexual orientation, which (I think) was more self/internally focused, more “member development” than “win external gains.” There wasn’t much of an activist/left thing outside of those circles where I went to school, so the activist millieu (sp?) - in its specifically student form- isn’t super familiar to me.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — April 18, 2007 @ 3:51 pm
Excerpts that are at least tangentially related. From “Radical Society” v30 #3+4, oct-dec2003.
The issue contains a roundtable called “anticapitalism and academics” with the framing questions “How can theoretical and political issues be addressed in a manner that makes theory relevant to practice? How can radical theory be developed in a manner that avoided vanguardism? How can radical academics become more connected and involved in social movements and struggles” (85).
Stanley Aronowitz says “Bourgeois intellectuals become radicalized, and largely by reading. And what happens as a result is the ones that become radicalized by reading have to figure out “how do I connect myself to the movement?” Historically the way they did that in the communist movement, by and large, was to go into the factories. In the United States there was a big movement to go into the factories, to renounce one’s intellectual tradition - that as a disaster by and large - because after all, they were just bourgeois intellectuals. That’s who they were - mostly you couldn’t change them. Every now and then some of them made out alright either at factories or on ships or other plcaes, but not very often. But more to the point when they become radicalized the typical pattern is, and I think that’s what your question is about (…) is that they think that because they have the capacity for abstraction, that is, to deal in concepts, that their shit’s made out of perfume. And that’s the foundation of vanguardism. Vanguardism is raising to the level of political theory the view that bourgeois intellectuals have their shit made out of perfume. (… ) and so what they have to begin to see themselves as are people who can support and help, can do a lot of different things in activist and popular movements - but they cannot lead those movements. That is the social democratic wet dream. (…) And I think the problem then is to reformulate the relationship between activists and intellectuals (…)so that intellectuals see themselves as people who address the problem of practice from a theoretical perspective. (…) And I don’t use the word academics - because that’s a job you have.” (86)
Michael Hardt says “the question is about the perceived gulf between a kind of theorizing that goes on in academic life and practice in the movements (…) one of the things we have to do is recognize that it’s not that theorizing goes on in one place and practice in another - there’s a lot of theorizing in the movements, there’s a lot of intellectual activity in the movments, and maybe sometimes not recognized as such.” (87)
Luca Casarini adds “the movement of movements are a collective intellectual.” (87)
Jeanette Gabriel’s remarks are awesome and too long to quote. She talks about roleplays about law and courts she uses in discussions with apprentice electricians, worth copying. (88-89)
David Graeber talks about “this weird situation where most academics are writing position papers for vast social movements that don’t actually exist.” (89) He talks about a need “to make [ideas] translatable and something that people can take away” - if said ideas are to be relevant to other people (Graeber’s not claiming an absence of ideas in movements), which requires “to phrase them in language that people don’t have to have taken seven years of grad school to understand (…) otherwise [the idea] becomes attached to you. I think there’s a way that everybody in academia is designed around being a “great thinker” - a sort of “great man” theory of history embodied there (….) We need to move away from that and come up with ideas that aren’t ours - ideas that can freely circulate and be useful for other people. One of the first ways to do that is to make them detachable from yourself, is not to make them so obscure, complex, and ambiguous that they need to constantly refer back to you to even understand what they mean.” (90.)
Stevphen Shukaitis says “Just because one discusses radical ideas or politics within the university system that doesn’t mean that you’ve actually changed the role the university plays in society.” (91)
Comment by Nate — April 18, 2007 @ 4:12 pm
Brain storming is very beneficial to students. This is what they do always in a military school.
Refer to this site to help you more about brainstorming:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorming
Comment by cianlee — June 11, 2007 @ 7:20 am