I tried hitching out to Asheville, but made the mistake of picking a highway still well into Knoxville, and indeed in the "bad" part of town--a police officer had recently been shot by three burglars ("black boys" a local felt compelled to add) very near where my thumb hung aching for more than two hours. Nobody was taking the chance. I opted instead to cross the street, grab local public transit and get back to the Old City. Let Greyhound get me there.
The ride was short, comfortable, friendly and awe-inspiring. Those foothills were the foreplay for the torrid heat of the Smoky Mountains. Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina are a kingdom ruled by stately mountains--smaller than the Alps, Himalayas or Rockies only because they are much older. For a mountain lover the ride through the Smokies is a discourse with the elders of one's beloved class. No reading got done, as the only thing capable of prying my attention from the ineffable scenery was the enlightening conversation of one R---- --an Anglo-French exchange student in Montreal, on her own trans-US romp. We hit it off even before learning we'd both made plans to stay at the same hostel. She was sharp as a razor and with a continental wit that threatens to devastate the weak-minded. Add in a healthy dose of beauty and I nearly fell for her, perhaps I would have if I thought she'd ever stoop to my level. A new friend is better than a temporary lover any day however, and now I know someone in Toulouse.
I'm writing this at an all night coffee shop in Times Square (so you know it is corporate, take a wild guess...) because I'm almost out of money. Paid lodging is an impossible luxury at this point. But I had the cash when I got to Asheville and Bon Paul and Sharky's is worth every dime and then some. Low cost but entirely comfortable, it is run by a laid back and kind-souled staff that live in the old house now let out to travelers from across the world. Hostels engender great deals of friend-making to begin with, but at least this Memorial Day weekend crowd was exceptional. I get the idea that the business itself deserves the credit, and the mountain view from the back patio would pay for itself even without all the warm community. If I'm gushing it is only because Bon Paul and Sharky's is that special. I would say I'm not nearly being kind enough.
After two days there I connected with my first CouchSurfing.com hosts--the friends of what is informally called the "Foti House" in South Asheville. I had made plans to sniff out the rads in Asheville (about as difficult as finding a Mormon in Provo) by checking out the local Earth First! meeting and the Critical Mass bike ride. Neither was necessary as the Foti House is a community of anarchists, revolutionary in its very existence. Its official owner, D----, is an anti-civ Zerzanite with a quiet streak, but his vision has come together with that of his housemates to create a model in collective decision making and sustainable living. Much of their food is rescued from the garbage--either through a spot of dumpster diving or from housemate C----'s health food store job. This is supplemented by a large and growing organic garden made luscious by a solid composting program. Rainwater reclamation is in its early stages but improving, and all the sinks drain to buckets powered by a graywater ditch. This graywater system was my biggest consciousness-raiser as seeing your wastewater and being individually responsible for its disposal demands an unfamiliar level of conservation. You learn to wash dishes, hands and teeth and to shave with very little water. It shames one for the gushing sinkfulls of the past. The house itself is in desperate need of renovations, and with a skilled group of committed partners they are ongoing. E-----, A-----, V-----, A-----, B-----, Z-----, R----- and the others I've already mentioned put the lie to idea that egalitarian and sensible living rooted in human interactions are pipe dreams. The place is a haven and a weapon, it represents a hidden future springing from the lost lessons of our past.
Most of the Foti House crew are also involved in Asheville's best (and methinks only) collectively-owned and operated coffee shop/radical bookstore--Firestorm Cafe. A bit difficult to find, it is worth the hunt (I've forgotten the address) and located in Asheville's spectacular downtown. I was shocked to learn only about 72,000 people live in Asheville, as there is a thriving nightlife and art scene that create a bustling city center. I encountered a great deal of success with my Nobody for President tracts, as there was constant foot traffic. My best spot was right near Malaprops Books--a model independent bookstore. If one is into shopping and not so much into corporate chains Asheville is the spot. Like Knoxville it is largely unbranded--a Subway was as corporate as it got downtown, aside from major commercial banks. Street musicians play everywhere and it is small enough that I walked everywhere (with one gratuitous bus ride, just to see how it went--well). It was so impressive I immediately considered relocating there, if I were not at the beginning of this adventure I would have and when it is over I very well may.
Three or four nights at the Foti House gave way to my last stretch, staying at an elegant apartment Northeast of Downtown with veteran couch surfing hosts C----, B----- and P-----. C----- had had particular success with the couch surfing experiment, as he had commenced a romance with the intoxicating J----- --an artist from Philadelphia--shortly before my arrival. C----'s very apartment was home to Grace Kelly for some months when she once made a film in Asheville. J----- continued the tradition of gentle-souled and unspeakably beautiful women of sublime talent haunting that place. His porch hosts a burgeoning container garden and another mountain view that puts an exclamation point on every sunset.
Asheville represents the culmination of many of this country's greatest themes--natural beauty, kind yet rebellious people, optimism and warm community. It is quite possibly the US' best kept secret and I almost hate to spill the beans. good thing no one really reads this blog. Its bouquet lingers in my nose, and it smells like home. Barring the discovery of somewhere even more exceptionally beautiful, kind, insurgent, engaging and easy after camp, I think I'll flip the Texas flag upside down and make North Carolina my home. No promises, but Asheville struck me like a conversion experience. Only Greyhound's refusal to refund the discounted ticket I had purchased to Maine kept me from lounging there for several more days or weeks.
But refuse they did and so the road stretched forward again--could my recurring dreams come true? Could the World's Capital City be ahead? New York City can destroy you, but I need more calluses on my naivete. Asheville fades as fate comes into view...
Friday, June 6, 2008
Towards an Educational Revolution
There is an excellent chance that you are reading this anarchist nonsense within fifteen miles of a university. Show me a US anarchist, revolutionary or anticapitalist distant from any institution of higher learning, and I will show you a lonely person. Radical communities tend to be huddled around colleges--Austin, Madison, Olympia, Eugene, Berkeley, Boulder and Tucson jump to mind--and radical community centers (bookstores, coffeeshops, etc.) are frequently filled with grad students arguing over Gramsci or paraphrasing Chomsky. Demonstrations against the wars or for other broadly leftist causes bring out young college activists, aging first generation hippies and few else. This analysis will be attacked, but it is impossible to deny that your typical protest is likely to have a far higher education level than the public at large. Right wing propagandists such as David Horowitz or D'nesh D'souza use these facts to suggest that the left controls academia, while endemic corporatization and militarization of virtually all academic research departments puts these retrogrades in a ridiculous light.
It would be far more accurate to suggest that academia controls the left. It is my contention that this is perhaps the most central source of the thorough irrelevance of revolutionary movements in contemporary America. The place of higher education in society, its relationship to individuals and its relationship with revolutionary movements all point to its being a system of control unacceptable for those opposed to authority in all its forms.
Colleges and universities serve two vital functions in upholding systems of authority and control across US society. The first is as a source of authoritarian credentials: a degree serves as a "seal of approval" that grants exclusive access to elite systems. Degrees have no relationship to academic achievement at a societal level, rather they show that the holder had access to tens of thousands of dollars at some point. Whether they worked, borrowed, got money from family, charity or the government is unimportant--all indicate an indebtedness to systems of authority (employers, banks, parents, philanthropy, the state) that marks the holder as sympathetic to the status quo. Academics are less of a selection factor for colleges than wealth: wealthy elites from prestigious schools all go to college, regardless of academic performance in high school. On the other hand, poor and marginalized people from degraded high schools are demanded good grades, only academic elites from these schools go on to seek degrees. When they all get to college they will be repeatedly told that their major is not really that important--employers just want to know they got a degree in something. That the something is so irrelevant belies the fact that the content of one's education is not what counts--after all, a chronic class cutter with a 2.1 has just as much a degree as the valedictorian. What counts is a piece of paper signed by powerful figures in an institution of power to be used as a passkey to future bosses.
The university's second purpose is less discussed: it serves as a source of free labor for powerful interests. Unpaid internships have emerged as a second level of authoritarian weeding out, as the employment opportunties promised with one's degree are dried up without an history of interning. Students who cannot afford to work for free are thus put in a similar spot as those who couldn't afford college in the first place--indeed America's service industry and temp agencies are chock-full of degree holders, many turned away from better jobs because they lack internship slave service to corporate employers. For the public-minded student liberal and conservative political institutions--think tanks, campaigns, consultants and reformist activist causes--scour colleges and universities for well-off interns to develop into the pundits, lawmakers, hacks and do-gooders of tomorrow. As working community involvement in the political process dries up amid repeated betrayals and almost literal anemia, colleges and universities provide greater shares of the grunt-level legwork of electoral politics. Like their corporate patrons they rely on higher education to develop future rulers on the cheap.
Aside from its place in society, academia has an oppressive impact on human individuals. Most immediately this comes in the form of debt. The prospect of a $100,000 or more commitment is an enormous burden for almost every college family. As education costs have soared financial aid sources have become more and more ineffective at financing higher education for millions. The result is that all but the wealthiest students leave college with thousands of dollars in debt. This effectively limits the choices available to college graduates; even if their degree weren't solely an authoritarian credential, it would be a sort of secular fatwa: submit or be crushed. Acclimated for borrow-and-spend financial ethics, college students are a chief market for credit card companies. Using "free" t-shirts, trips or other trinkets as a lure they snooker naive students into taking on even more debt--they are often given access to students by the academic institutions themselves. The oppression of commercial debt needs to explanation to any adult, but the debt culture of higher education takes a dark turn when a credit crisis strikes. Universities are now debt-financed and as credit becomes tighter, so will access to a college education.
Colleges and universities are also typically dehumanizing. The schools where most university students get their degrees (state schools) exist on too large a scale to treat their participants as humans--a school with 30,000 students, 20,000 staff and 3,000 faculty and tens of thousands of alumni must thus necessarily be oppressive. Few institutions feature quite the jungle of bureaucracy the typical college offers. Rigid rules written by cranky committees of institutional climbers create narrow paths for college students. The grade system, professor/student dichotomy and pedagogical style are also more fit for robots than human individuals. The problems with each of these are well-discussed elsewhere, but melting down the infinitely varied and complex process of learning to a four tone scale or paying money to have an authority figure talk at you are necessarily oppressive. They both discourage or at best fail to recognize individual distinction aside from exceptional adherence to or abstention from the approved path. Administration sees students as numbers, faculty see them as potential acolytes, students see one another as competitors or sexual objects if they aren't drinking buddies. The culture of higher education is one not fit for individual humans.
Higher education's place in elite society as a vital organ for its continued survival and its function as a devourer of human dignity should mark it as a special target for elimination by self-described revolutionary movements. Instead it is their only real bastion of respect in the contemporary US. This is a primary legacy of the revolutionary moment in the 1960s. The two most noted organizations of this time (as I see it) were the Black Panthers and the Students for a Democratic Society. The former were smashed by state force, but the second formed the basis for a dramatic shift in the left. Prior to the 1960s revolutionary movements were closely associated with working communities: anarchists, communists and socialists were centered in labor unions (the Pullman Union, IWW, CIO, Western Federation of Miners), urban slums or farming centers (Kansas and Oklahoma were both notorious for their radicals). The SDS marked the first time that the US left found itself most comfortable and powerful in such elite contexts. Coincident with this shift came the rise of the "New Left," a broad school distinguished by skepticism of old dogmas--Marxism, syndicalism, etc.--and an application of postmodern and existentialist thought to left concerns. As valuable as many insights of the New Left proved to be, its main bequeath was a left dialog riddled with jargon, steeped in obscurantist rhetoric and completely inaccessible to the uneducated, unsophisticated or uninitiated (and hardly more discernible to much of the rest). As the SDS moved revolutionary action away from oppressed communities, the New Left divorced revolutionary thought from the discourse of these same working communities.
This has made US revolutionaries both marginalized and useless. By ensuring that one bust be in or near a college (read: with money) to hear or understand revolutionary messages, it has made the left paternalistic--far more than it was even before the 60s. College kids seeking to "save the world" come off to oppressed people as paternalistic adventurers, giving demagogues and reactionaries a strategic place to demonize revolutionary movements from. Lacking space for real change as they remain distant from oppressed groups and not able to perceive the stakes of stagnation because of their privilege, college activism remains comfortably trapped in the absolutely ineffective political tools of 60s activism: big marches, sit-ins, production of serially failing rags and so on. In fact the most effective tools of 60s action--occupations, property sabotage and humorous spectacle--are largely jettisoned by campus radicals. They are replaced with wholly unjustified faith in technological innovations like cell phones and the internet still largely outside the budget of the poor (or of too low a quality to be useful in those communities).
This marginalization is a function of the movements' uselessness. The hope in technologies differentially available in terms of class is only one source of distance from dispossessed people. To begin, campus organizations necessarily exclude the uneducated. Unlettered laborers and illiterate farmers have overthrown more governments and fought more revolutionary battles than the educated weekend warriors. But even if college activists open their organizations to the community at large the preference for educated types can be intimidating for those who may not read well or write much more than their name--let alone those who can't speak English. Also, the selection pressures for college are racially biased: quality of one's high school, functionality of one's family (according to White norms), test scores and essays along with access to financing. There are two results of this: campus revolutionary organizations (and as a result the left generally) are overwhelmingly White or Asian and those that aren't tend to be tied down to liberal identity politics. Poor communities of color have no use for one and know all too well the dreadfulness of the other. Even if the college address of these organizations didn't discourage poor people from getting involved, the foreign culture or patronization of college activism probably would.
Finally, the elitism and bourgeois obsession with pragmatism among college students leads the campus left into the worst left elements. Authoritarian parties like the Workers World Party (behind International ANSWER), the Maoist RCP (World Can't Wait), the Trotskyist intrigues of the ISO or colonialist perspectives of the Greens all ensure that a great deal of left energy in its academic ghetto is wasted on anachronistic institutions of repression. This tendency towards the party left both marginalizes and renders ineffective the left simultaneously.
There is, as you can guess, a quick solution to this problem--leftists and revolutionaries should drop out of college or resign their faculty positions. Universities are as elite as any corporation, as hierarchical as the military and at least as necessary for the survival of capitalism as organized religion. Yet dissidents who would never work for a multinational, enlist or confess in any church hurry to defend their place in academia. Their most frequent claim is that they have more "freedom" to do their activism work because of an academic job. But this freedom is obtained at the price of oppression for their students, and this freedom renders that same activism far less effective. Better to struggle and suffer in a less prestigious, lower paying, more rigorous line of work and have less time for activism than to have hours and hours to spend rebelling as a well-paid, well-rested elite.
This solution is highly unlikely to happen, and perhaps it is arrogant or unrealistic to ask people to quit the jobs they've trained their whole lives for. Another path is for university-based revolutionaries to focus on destroying the higher education system as we know it, replacing it with institutions that would be revolutionary centers of inclusion. Imagine if instead of places where people with appropriate prior education paid thousands of dollars a semester to take a limited number of required classes where they were lectured in pursuit of a degree universities were places where anybody of any age or education paid small fees to use libraries, laboratories, tutors, researchers or other resources to educate themselves and then become teachers in their own right. Instead of exclusive, they would be inclusive. Instead of expensive, they would be affordable for virtually anyone. Instead of narrow and dictated they would have infinite variety. And instead of being about having those authoritarian credentials they would be about learning, growing and sharing our unique knowledge in order to create stronger, smarter and more beautiful communties. Dropping out is a viable solution (one taken by this author); a quick solution. A revolution in pedagogy would be a generational struggle, but could provide the foundation for a broader revolution in society. Where the anarcho-syndicalists saw productive power as the jumping off point for a revolution in an industrial society, perhaps "anarcho-pedagogialists" will use educational power as the springboard. It is at least worth trying.
It cannot be denied that higher education is a system of control, that universities are centers of oppression and that the students and faculties of our colleges are invested in the destruction of human freedom--not the least their own. What to do about this situation is vital for the future of the left, and the solutions could provide new venues for global upheaval of power relations. Please use email and comments to discuss the implications and inspirations you may come upon. Direct action solutions offer a multitude of options, one of them may save our lives.
It would be far more accurate to suggest that academia controls the left. It is my contention that this is perhaps the most central source of the thorough irrelevance of revolutionary movements in contemporary America. The place of higher education in society, its relationship to individuals and its relationship with revolutionary movements all point to its being a system of control unacceptable for those opposed to authority in all its forms.
Colleges and universities serve two vital functions in upholding systems of authority and control across US society. The first is as a source of authoritarian credentials: a degree serves as a "seal of approval" that grants exclusive access to elite systems. Degrees have no relationship to academic achievement at a societal level, rather they show that the holder had access to tens of thousands of dollars at some point. Whether they worked, borrowed, got money from family, charity or the government is unimportant--all indicate an indebtedness to systems of authority (employers, banks, parents, philanthropy, the state) that marks the holder as sympathetic to the status quo. Academics are less of a selection factor for colleges than wealth: wealthy elites from prestigious schools all go to college, regardless of academic performance in high school. On the other hand, poor and marginalized people from degraded high schools are demanded good grades, only academic elites from these schools go on to seek degrees. When they all get to college they will be repeatedly told that their major is not really that important--employers just want to know they got a degree in something. That the something is so irrelevant belies the fact that the content of one's education is not what counts--after all, a chronic class cutter with a 2.1 has just as much a degree as the valedictorian. What counts is a piece of paper signed by powerful figures in an institution of power to be used as a passkey to future bosses.
The university's second purpose is less discussed: it serves as a source of free labor for powerful interests. Unpaid internships have emerged as a second level of authoritarian weeding out, as the employment opportunties promised with one's degree are dried up without an history of interning. Students who cannot afford to work for free are thus put in a similar spot as those who couldn't afford college in the first place--indeed America's service industry and temp agencies are chock-full of degree holders, many turned away from better jobs because they lack internship slave service to corporate employers. For the public-minded student liberal and conservative political institutions--think tanks, campaigns, consultants and reformist activist causes--scour colleges and universities for well-off interns to develop into the pundits, lawmakers, hacks and do-gooders of tomorrow. As working community involvement in the political process dries up amid repeated betrayals and almost literal anemia, colleges and universities provide greater shares of the grunt-level legwork of electoral politics. Like their corporate patrons they rely on higher education to develop future rulers on the cheap.
Aside from its place in society, academia has an oppressive impact on human individuals. Most immediately this comes in the form of debt. The prospect of a $100,000 or more commitment is an enormous burden for almost every college family. As education costs have soared financial aid sources have become more and more ineffective at financing higher education for millions. The result is that all but the wealthiest students leave college with thousands of dollars in debt. This effectively limits the choices available to college graduates; even if their degree weren't solely an authoritarian credential, it would be a sort of secular fatwa: submit or be crushed. Acclimated for borrow-and-spend financial ethics, college students are a chief market for credit card companies. Using "free" t-shirts, trips or other trinkets as a lure they snooker naive students into taking on even more debt--they are often given access to students by the academic institutions themselves. The oppression of commercial debt needs to explanation to any adult, but the debt culture of higher education takes a dark turn when a credit crisis strikes. Universities are now debt-financed and as credit becomes tighter, so will access to a college education.
Colleges and universities are also typically dehumanizing. The schools where most university students get their degrees (state schools) exist on too large a scale to treat their participants as humans--a school with 30,000 students, 20,000 staff and 3,000 faculty and tens of thousands of alumni must thus necessarily be oppressive. Few institutions feature quite the jungle of bureaucracy the typical college offers. Rigid rules written by cranky committees of institutional climbers create narrow paths for college students. The grade system, professor/student dichotomy and pedagogical style are also more fit for robots than human individuals. The problems with each of these are well-discussed elsewhere, but melting down the infinitely varied and complex process of learning to a four tone scale or paying money to have an authority figure talk at you are necessarily oppressive. They both discourage or at best fail to recognize individual distinction aside from exceptional adherence to or abstention from the approved path. Administration sees students as numbers, faculty see them as potential acolytes, students see one another as competitors or sexual objects if they aren't drinking buddies. The culture of higher education is one not fit for individual humans.
Higher education's place in elite society as a vital organ for its continued survival and its function as a devourer of human dignity should mark it as a special target for elimination by self-described revolutionary movements. Instead it is their only real bastion of respect in the contemporary US. This is a primary legacy of the revolutionary moment in the 1960s. The two most noted organizations of this time (as I see it) were the Black Panthers and the Students for a Democratic Society. The former were smashed by state force, but the second formed the basis for a dramatic shift in the left. Prior to the 1960s revolutionary movements were closely associated with working communities: anarchists, communists and socialists were centered in labor unions (the Pullman Union, IWW, CIO, Western Federation of Miners), urban slums or farming centers (Kansas and Oklahoma were both notorious for their radicals). The SDS marked the first time that the US left found itself most comfortable and powerful in such elite contexts. Coincident with this shift came the rise of the "New Left," a broad school distinguished by skepticism of old dogmas--Marxism, syndicalism, etc.--and an application of postmodern and existentialist thought to left concerns. As valuable as many insights of the New Left proved to be, its main bequeath was a left dialog riddled with jargon, steeped in obscurantist rhetoric and completely inaccessible to the uneducated, unsophisticated or uninitiated (and hardly more discernible to much of the rest). As the SDS moved revolutionary action away from oppressed communities, the New Left divorced revolutionary thought from the discourse of these same working communities.
This has made US revolutionaries both marginalized and useless. By ensuring that one bust be in or near a college (read: with money) to hear or understand revolutionary messages, it has made the left paternalistic--far more than it was even before the 60s. College kids seeking to "save the world" come off to oppressed people as paternalistic adventurers, giving demagogues and reactionaries a strategic place to demonize revolutionary movements from. Lacking space for real change as they remain distant from oppressed groups and not able to perceive the stakes of stagnation because of their privilege, college activism remains comfortably trapped in the absolutely ineffective political tools of 60s activism: big marches, sit-ins, production of serially failing rags and so on. In fact the most effective tools of 60s action--occupations, property sabotage and humorous spectacle--are largely jettisoned by campus radicals. They are replaced with wholly unjustified faith in technological innovations like cell phones and the internet still largely outside the budget of the poor (or of too low a quality to be useful in those communities).
This marginalization is a function of the movements' uselessness. The hope in technologies differentially available in terms of class is only one source of distance from dispossessed people. To begin, campus organizations necessarily exclude the uneducated. Unlettered laborers and illiterate farmers have overthrown more governments and fought more revolutionary battles than the educated weekend warriors. But even if college activists open their organizations to the community at large the preference for educated types can be intimidating for those who may not read well or write much more than their name--let alone those who can't speak English. Also, the selection pressures for college are racially biased: quality of one's high school, functionality of one's family (according to White norms), test scores and essays along with access to financing. There are two results of this: campus revolutionary organizations (and as a result the left generally) are overwhelmingly White or Asian and those that aren't tend to be tied down to liberal identity politics. Poor communities of color have no use for one and know all too well the dreadfulness of the other. Even if the college address of these organizations didn't discourage poor people from getting involved, the foreign culture or patronization of college activism probably would.
Finally, the elitism and bourgeois obsession with pragmatism among college students leads the campus left into the worst left elements. Authoritarian parties like the Workers World Party (behind International ANSWER), the Maoist RCP (World Can't Wait), the Trotskyist intrigues of the ISO or colonialist perspectives of the Greens all ensure that a great deal of left energy in its academic ghetto is wasted on anachronistic institutions of repression. This tendency towards the party left both marginalizes and renders ineffective the left simultaneously.
There is, as you can guess, a quick solution to this problem--leftists and revolutionaries should drop out of college or resign their faculty positions. Universities are as elite as any corporation, as hierarchical as the military and at least as necessary for the survival of capitalism as organized religion. Yet dissidents who would never work for a multinational, enlist or confess in any church hurry to defend their place in academia. Their most frequent claim is that they have more "freedom" to do their activism work because of an academic job. But this freedom is obtained at the price of oppression for their students, and this freedom renders that same activism far less effective. Better to struggle and suffer in a less prestigious, lower paying, more rigorous line of work and have less time for activism than to have hours and hours to spend rebelling as a well-paid, well-rested elite.
This solution is highly unlikely to happen, and perhaps it is arrogant or unrealistic to ask people to quit the jobs they've trained their whole lives for. Another path is for university-based revolutionaries to focus on destroying the higher education system as we know it, replacing it with institutions that would be revolutionary centers of inclusion. Imagine if instead of places where people with appropriate prior education paid thousands of dollars a semester to take a limited number of required classes where they were lectured in pursuit of a degree universities were places where anybody of any age or education paid small fees to use libraries, laboratories, tutors, researchers or other resources to educate themselves and then become teachers in their own right. Instead of exclusive, they would be inclusive. Instead of expensive, they would be affordable for virtually anyone. Instead of narrow and dictated they would have infinite variety. And instead of being about having those authoritarian credentials they would be about learning, growing and sharing our unique knowledge in order to create stronger, smarter and more beautiful communties. Dropping out is a viable solution (one taken by this author); a quick solution. A revolution in pedagogy would be a generational struggle, but could provide the foundation for a broader revolution in society. Where the anarcho-syndicalists saw productive power as the jumping off point for a revolution in an industrial society, perhaps "anarcho-pedagogialists" will use educational power as the springboard. It is at least worth trying.
It cannot be denied that higher education is a system of control, that universities are centers of oppression and that the students and faculties of our colleges are invested in the destruction of human freedom--not the least their own. What to do about this situation is vital for the future of the left, and the solutions could provide new venues for global upheaval of power relations. Please use email and comments to discuss the implications and inspirations you may come upon. Direct action solutions offer a multitude of options, one of them may save our lives.
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