What in the hell …

To produce and maintain intra-class hierarchy. Obviously.

Still, sometimes the rhetoric becomes believable, which leads me to be annoyed with ostensibly contradictory phenomena. For instance, I’m currently at a large university. I helped set up a reading group on Capital v1. There are 16 people or so participating in some fashion, with another 5 or so who have expressed interest but can’t due to scheduling problems. I know of another 5 or so who say they want to take part but are too busy. Today I was briefly at a picket line of a local janitors strike, ran into a lefty guy I know but not well, turns out he knows someone in the Marx reading group which is more school people than serious movement people. Me and lefty got to talking, somehow the group came up, and how there’s some talk of doing a v1 reading group again targeting more movement people. He got super excited, introduced me to some of his comrades and now the wheels are starting to turn. They’re all serious movement people, young-ish, belong to an organization (one of the wrong ones ), haven’t read v1 cuz it’s a stymie-ing book. Why this is not a digression: they went to college, at least one is currently in college. Capital is a super influential book, legitimately canonical even if one is rabidly anti-marxist. And it’s a book that at least a decent-sized handful of people want to actually read. And it’s a book which best read, at least the first time, in a group. And universities ought to teach those sorts of books. So why isn’t it taught? (It is, but only once in a great while.) And here I’ve been all talking bad about autonomous education initiatives, color me hypocritical. And now I’m off to bed, I need at least five hours sleep if I am to properly participate in the production and maintenance of intra-class hierarchy. Insomnia does no good for anyone.