Social activism: Black thug violence must stop (with VIDEO)

Corroborated again at G20-Toronto:

In social activism by far the greatest threat of physical violence against persons is POLICE - dressed in black, faces covered, hard to identify, not answering questions, and bashing people about for no apparent reason.

by Denis G. Rancourt


In our PREVIOUS POST we made the obvious and repeatedly established point that the greatest risk of violence against persons at anti-corruption demonstrations is from police.

Not a single person was hurt or threatened by black bloc demonstrators at G20 in Toronto.

The same cannot be said about police behaviour: See the Real News video below.

They don't make it easy to identify the violent officers either. Here is a picture of G20-Toronto cops with no name tags - No way to identify an individual cop who hits you.


And below is a video with the police chief publicly shrugging off criticism with a suggestion that a bashed journalist can file a complaint... The video shows how small the name tag is when there is one, and there ain't no nice big officer number tag ever.

This video shows a series of disturbing scenes where, for no apparent reason, police run down a pedestrian with their horses, take down a deaf man for not following instructions, punch and throw about several peaceful demonstrators, punch a journalist and steal his microphone, throw back the microphone when other journalists move in, and, last but not least, show the police chief lying to justify the horrendous police behaviour in question.



A nice police state atmosphere with little counter protections: "This is what democracy looks like" - to remix a demonstrator's slogan.

This is the kind of police behaviour that changes one's emotional response to a picture of a police cruiser in flames, especially when it has been made clear that there will not be an investigation.

Partial solution for the immediate danger: The black thugs need big visible reflective officer numbers (front and back), with name lists posted to the web, and all the footage from those surveillance cameras made public every time they come onto the streets with clubs.

Safety first!

BREAKING NEWS June 28, 2010:
Conditions of 900 G20-Toronto detainees illegal, immoral and dangerous - rabble.ca

RELATED MATTER:
Where was the CCLA's Nathalie Des Rosiers in all of this? -Filing an injunction to prevent the use of sound canons and doing a press presentation about the injunction... but clubs, horses, "rubber" bullets and gas canisters fired at close range, and irrational police violence, with no investigations in sight for attacked journalist and peaceful protesters are just part of the decor? Will the CCLA demand an investigation?
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Social activism: The violence must stop

In anti-corruption activism by far the greatest documented physical threat to persons is police violence

by Denis G. Rancourt


Never mind property damage to out-of-control corporations, what about actual harm to persons?

Who gets hurt and has their democratic right to protest and civil rights violated?

The protesters do. They get physically corralled, sound cannoned, pepper sprayed, shot at close range with "rubber" bullets, beat to hell with batons, thrown about like rag dolls, tear gassed for just being there, arrested on false pretext, illegally detained, cuffed for hours, and more.

And this is without even analyzing the impact of agent provocateurs, a widespread practice that has not been punished by state prosecutors or denounced by police (HERE).

Sooner or latter the police are going to forcefully cause someone to bang his/her head and die (when they don't kill dissenters and civilians while in custody).

Why the hell doesn't the corporate media report the widespread police violence in proportion to its occurrence...? We need a check and balance on police behaviour.

There is a far greater probability of a person being physically harmed by police at a legitimate demonstration, or being forced through the ordeal of being falsely arrested, than of a person being physically harmed by a 3am lobby fire at a local bank branch.

Let us put the risks to persons and to democracy in perspective.

The Ottawa RBC fire says "pay attention and look at the role of financial institutions in causing misery". The police repression says "activists and critics will not be tolerated".

It is no longer an exaggeration to state that Canada has adopted a police state stance and practice. The police intimidate, interrogate, and round up activists on false charges before high-profile demonstrations, to quash democratic expression, and publicly vilify their targets with outrageous propaganda (HERE).

Those who vehemently call for the suppression of activists are those who most feel the need to defend their deference to authority. They are the slaves by choice who vie for the master's recognition and who insist on being oppressed fairly. They advance that one must earn the privilege of being fairly oppressed.

The rest of us want freedom and democracy, the real deal.
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BREAKING NEWS - June 26, 2010:
Radio interview: Police violence against journalist Jesse Freeston (Real News Network)
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See also these posts about the Dalai Lama and pacifism: HERE.
And this post about hatred: HERE.

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Questioning Foundations of Left Intellectuals

From the Dissident Voice blog:

Questioning Foundations: An Interview with Denis Rancourt

by Michael Barker

"The best piece that DV has published to date."
--bozh, registered blogger at Dissident Voice (#)

Other interviews with Denis Rancourt:

Dismissing Critical Pedagogy by Jesse Freeston

TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Mainstream mindfuck as radical agitator’s protection from self

The reason power does not need to actually kill North American radical agitators is twofold.

First, the agitators themselves have been trained by the system’s brutality: Force will be met with disproportionate and lethal counter force. Ask the summarily executed Black Panther leaders or aboriginal warriors who dare to practice road blocks and land protection.

Second, agitation itself no longer resonates with the victims of the system’s oppression (i.e., with any of us) because the manufactured mental environment that manages collective consciousness and self-image is so completely effective.

The population and mainstream activists have been zombified and channelled towards irrelevant pursuits. Masses, encouraged by corporate media, are asking governments to save us from CO2. Or improve the laws to protect whistleblowers. Or provide Medicare. Or protect us from the next flue epidemic. Or give us a fair competitive environment. Or protect us from foreign economic or terrorist enemies. Or find the cure to cancer (why not death?) And so on.

The problems that attack body and soul are deflected, channelled, and re-cast, or substitute problems are simply fabricated; and we are encouraged to focus on the thus defined “attainable goals,” and we are rewarded for doing so by an also fabricated sense of “community.”

Every class is disconnected from its own oppression and cannot see where it has power and where it can act directly.

Instead, we accommodate ourselves to “the hand that feeds us.”

Instead, we are diverted towards windmills (literally), atmospheric chemistry, the imperceptible effects of environmental toxins (except if you live from poisoned land in which case the problem is your alcoholism), impending epidemics, impending terrorist attacks, impending economic collapse, the crushing public debt, and so on.

The radical agitator has no hold. Nothing she can say, if it does not follow the mainstream, can perturb the victim away from his false perception. There are only the right and left shades of delusion. Nothing else exists. Which side are you on? The anarchist has no moves.

Maybe an example is in order.

Whose problem is an overly large public debt? Simply zero the debt. Or if the lender is the public purse then zero the interest on the public part of the debt. If the result is that private banks will refuse to lend more then the result is that private banks will have lost their instrument of extortion. The state can print its own public money and lend it where needed on a basis of trust. The money will make itself from the labour of the borrower. Money as private debt in a fractional reserve private-bank-run system is the single greatest extortion game on the planet. Kill the banks. Take back and create human-need-based zero-profit public banking. Simple rules suffice: Can’t fund takeovers; can’t fund war; can’t fund non-democratic power grabs. The system can’t push out the individual. Pure and simple.

What does this mean in practice? Don’t pay back your loans and don’t let them repo. Cheer on those who have the guts and be there to protect them. Don’t pay your rent and don’t let them turf you. Don’t take any “money rules” bullshit. You work to live. You don’t live to be enslaved by some illegitimate debt or illegitimate ownership. You own the space that you live in. You own the place where you work. We all do. You are nobody’s slave.

The latter radical idea (especially regarding implementation) mostly has no chance. The reader’s allergic reaction to it proves my point.

Even most who agree with the economic analysis will vehemently insist on impossible implementation models: They will recommend either lobbying government to change monetary policy or escape into a fairytale alternative community of alternative currency, like one would escape into a hobby or volunteer work. Those who understand by necessity will steal from the system and use the black market – sane and healthy modes of self-defence.

There are as many examples as there are systems and circumstances of exploitation.

The answer is always to fight back directly where one is personally exploited and oppressed – and that is the most radical idea in the First World middle class, which is why it is never heard and cannot be heard.

When there is a chance it can be heard there is only one response: Kill the messenger.


RELATED LINK:
Academic execution of Denis Rancourt: Kill him!

Creativity for liberation or seclusion

Art and creativity are said to be needed for the human spirit and for human development. These phrases are used by administrations to justify art classes in schools and government-funded art galleries. Beyond the cooptation by society’s management and control apparatuses, what do these phrases mean?

Creativity has meaning only as part of liberation. The first creative acts of walking and language equip us to be active and independent agents in the world. Every effort we make to develop new skills and new messages to be communicated is meant to empower us as agents of influence and change.

Our efforts to have influence in our family, community, peer group, and society, and to have our place, a place of meaningful contribution, and our say, a say that carries, are part of praxis – a cycle of action, reaction, reflection, integration, and more action. Creativity (invention) is involved in action and in reflection and integration. We invent scenarios and imagine the backlash or the rewards; we invent explanations for the unpredicted reactions; we construct an evolving image of our self, including of our place in the world, and we continuously integrate each discovery into this self, and reorganize and redefine as needed.

Creativity is life. Creativity at work is an effort to contribute and to have our personal contributions recognized. It is about influence and being appreciated. Creativity is an experiment in influence and a search for better.

A workplace of obedience to a hierarchy where opinions and ideas are not received but instead instructions are delivered and executed and where it’s all about reading the boss’ mind is a place of death. It is a place where employees are oppressed and transformed into soulless slaves.

Worst is a place of work where you are expected to be “creative” in implementing the imagery from above and where you are expected to celebrate this made-to-measure “creativity” of “advancement” and “success.” This workplace robs you of both your creativity and your outrage at being robed, thereby imbedding you into your own death while plasticizing a smile on your face. How does one escape such a trap?

How does one find one’s self, one’s place? How does one lose a plastic smile? How does one connect with life? One must discover the “authentic rebellion” described by Paulo Freire; rebellion that sparks action and initiates praxis. This is the authentic rebellion at the heart of all social justice movements, at the heart of every liberation. It is the essential ingredient that has been whitewashed out of us by the hierarchical structures that make obedient and plastic-smile students and employees.

* * *

Every instinct and life impulse can be perverted and creativity is no exception. The elite managers of the machine crush us at work and may offer outlets for our impulses and our drives to be: Be creative on your own time. Experience creativity in front of a movie or computer screen. Role play. Fight on the outside. Or simply dull it all away with suspension or canned delirium.

For the privileged: Come to understand that creativity is itself not about personal fulfilment but instead is an amusement, a diversion away from personal agency. Appreciate the arts for the purely aesthetic, purely as vehicles for emotional experiences outside of actual life struggles. Use creativity itself as suspension and seclusion from the world of praxis and risk. Denigrate creativity that is “political.” Keep it pure. Keep it privileged. Keep it about “feelings”; feelings which are stimulated and guided by music, art…

And add the layer that would have us find good via such unadulterated purity. Surely if we all practiced a pure creativity for pleasure all problems would dissolve. If we only loved our neighbours and our bosses oppressive hierarchies would melt away and all people would grow under the bright glow of the arts and heartfelt expressions of love – as has never been witnessed anywhere on the planet in history.

* * *

I prefer the real thing: Creativity in praxis, nucleated by authentic rebellion, and inscribed in a process of liberation. Life is art. Art is death.

Note: See Jeff Schmidt’s practical guide for the professional worker. And be creative.

RELATED LINKS
Essential element is essential…
Mario Savio on student freedom
The Student as Nigger
Education for more anarchy
Gradual change is not progress
Are physicists smart?

Criticism of the Dalai Lama – so positive and forgiving that it hurts!

This blog features several essays that attempt to explain the destructive nature of the “positive” and “progressive” and “educational” movements which are populated by the majority of First World “activists” and “aware” citizens:

Organizing, Coalition Building, Education… as Self-Cooptation?
The Activist Wars
Need To Embrace Hatred
Against Chomsky
More Against Chomsky
Global Warming: Truth or Dare?

These essays attempt to discover the mechanisms by which First World “responsible” lifestyle choices, consumer choices, educational efforts, dialogue initiatives, etc., are counter to authentic anti-oppression efforts.

But a poem can be worth a thousand essays…:


The Ocean of Wisdom *


Ignore the checkpoints and the chains
Sail the rivers of tears
Praise a dream that has given birth
to a million nightmares

We resist from our slums
You resist from the podium
Beloved of Hollywood,
Ocean of Wisdom:
Can liberated celebrities
bring freedom to a people?

David you embrace or Mao
The aboriginals were subjugated
In Hebrew or in Mandarin
The land was appropriated


They’ll hide the sun under your crimson robe
Drown the truth in your words of hope

Go!
Leave my aching land alone!
To Lhasa,
I support your right of return

--
Ehab Lotayef
Montreal, January 23, 2006

* Welcoming the Dalai Lama to the Holy Land. The Dalai Lama is planned to visit Israel in the middle of February to participate in the launch of ceremonies marking 100 years since David Ben Gurion immigrated to Israel.
** We thank poet and activist Ehab Lotayef for allowing the use of his poem.

Organizing, Coalition Building, Education … as Self-Cooptation?

In the work of improving the world what could be wrong with organizing, coalition building, education, community building, and other networking and social strengthening activities?

I argue that as they are practiced in middleclass First World progressive activist and political circles these activities do more harm than good in terms of creating justice, no matter the extent to which the groups are gender and race unbiased and no matter the extent to which the decision-making is horizontal and consensus-based.

I’ve noted this in worker organizations and unionist groups, self-proclaimed anarchist groups, socialist groups, and left-progressive concerned citizen groups.

Hear me out.

If the activism – the action to improve society by reducing injustice – is the actual organizing, coalition building, education, community building, etc., itself, then it cannot be effective and it cannot be sustainable. If we add components of resistance such as letters to politicians, petitions, demonstrations, civil disobedience, and direct actions aimed at harming oppressive power structures in fighting for justice for any chosen cause, then it remains ineffective and unsustainable.

All of these forms of activism are deficient in the main ingredient: The ingredient with which we have lost touch; the ingredient that has been made invisible by the energetically managed and fabricated mental and physical environment of the modern First World middleclass.

The same artificial environment that separates us from ourselves in order that we function as expected in the mainstream, or that causes us to hide in secluded outposts or oases, also separates us from the main ingredient that would make our activism potent.

The missing element is the individual fighting her own oppression. The missing ingredient is the fighting spirit of the individual in authentic rebellion against her own oppression, in its deepest and most insidious forms.

All activism must be rooted in individuals who fight their own oppressions – who fight by kicking and pushing, knowing there will be a backlash. Every spontaneous act of self-defence is the start of a cycle of action, reaction, reflection, learning, outreach, more-action – a cycle of praxis – and each such cycle and the cycles within cycles are the steps to liberation.

Solidarity has no meaning outside of fighting a common oppressor at comparable levels of risk. Ineffectively agreeing to be of the opinion that such or such a cause is worthy of “support” is not solidarity. The only place of risk is in fighting one’s oppressor. Risk, like change, lives at home – not in the self but at home.

My oppressor is my boss at work, my teacher at school, the system that keeps me obedient and politically powerless. Since I cannot exert the free influence on my environment, on my community, that my nature craves, I am oppressed.

If you, like most slaves, do not see your oppression or refuse to legitimize it enough to fight it, then you are of use only to the slave master, the same master that runs the financial and corporate global exploitation and enforcement machine.

Citizens that liberate themselves are not easily manipulated and naturally practice their influence rather than allow themselves to be managed. These are the people that help make the world sane.

So many fallacies have been pushed into our heads in order to displace this basic truth; that against a hierarchical structure of dominance there is no gain without a fight – the fight against the structure at one’s point of attachment to it.

For example, we have the fallacy of the “critical mass”, as a model mechanism for social change. Let us examine this. The critical mass is a concept from nuclear physics. It is the limit mass of a radioactive isotope beyond which there will be a spontaneous nuclear chain reaction, a nuclear explosion. The well-meaning progressive activist postulates that with a sufficient mass of opinion on a given issue there will be a spontaneous change in government policy or law regarding the issue. One problem is that opinion is not action. One needs the right isotope before one can speak of a critical mass. The right isotope is one that is radioactive, that is throwing punches and thereby stirring others to throw punches. Without the right element, it’s just a mass. Another problem is that power does not care about public opinion, except when that opinion reflects a potential for rebellion.

This leads to a second example: The fallacy that big demonstrations cause change. In periods of change (workers rights, civil rights) there were both demonstrations and change but this does not imply that demonstrations cause change. These periods of change were characterized by oppressed people demonstrating that they were prepared to fight their oppression. The demonstrations were demonstrations of resolve and determination and daring and were accompanied by radical wings that were not insignificant. Modern organizers that just want the numbers out to show that they have voter leverage and that measure success in numbers of weekend protesters out in “solidarity” with some “cause” totally miss the point.

The First World middleclass individual is on Ritalin or some equivalent and is an accepting slave or an alternative lifestyle seeker. That is no basis for people power.

The job of the activist, at this low point in the struggle for the First World, is to be an authentic rebel, to fight the bastards from where you are at, at the point of your strongest connection to the economy, at the place where you have the most power – at work, at school.

Feel the backlash; then you will have something to organize about! Others will join you. Many will attempt to silence and normalize you. You can’t know who your friends are until you show yourself. You can’t know what power is like until it has acted against you. You can’t know freedom without liberation. You can’t be in solidarity without crossing that line.

Next, let us re-examine the organizing, coalition building, education … of the title. If we accept my proposal of a missing essential ingredient, then these activities are not even components of an effective activism because there is no activism without the missing essential ingredient. These activities are not in themselves activism (i.e., a fight for justice).

Worse, when actuated in the absence of the missing essential ingredient these activities mask that there is a missing ingredient and habituate the actor to acting outside of activism. These activities practiced without the essence provided by the missing ingredient re-enforce the false notion that they are activism in themselves; that they serve to help create more justice. They re-enforce zero-risk and low-risk self-worth-seeking and survivor-guilt-alleviation movements that serve only to accommodate one to one’s slavery, in the company of other well-adjusted slaves. Accommodating to a power structure of exploitation is not a sustainable activity, let alone sustainable activism. We need to be against the structure; we wish to flatten it, not climb it.

In addition, the practitioners of the organize-educate masquerade falsely identify individual or group expressions of authentic rebellion as “counter-productive”, “negative”, “miss-guided”, etc., and often go so far as to accuse the rebellious elements of sabotage with accusations such as “you will get them very angry and they will shut us down”, “you will give us bad media coverage”, “you will turn away potential supporters”, “you unnecessarily put us all at risk”, etc.

The practitioners of the masquerade correctly view the rebellious elements as threats against the masquerade. It is a fatal threat to one’s self-image to have to consider that one’s adopted mission is a lie, a waste, and part of the system’s resistance to change towards justice; that one’s community for good is based on self-preservation within the power structure not a fight against the power structure.

If you are not fighting the power structure and its keepers then you are not in solidarity with all those who are oppressed, displaced, starved, and murdered by the power structure. Expressing an opinion via petition or demonstration does not cut it on its own in circumstances where this expression is not an element of a real fight with significant likely consequences for both change and backlash.

Specialized First World organizers, coalition builders, and educators, like all such specialized components of First World civil society, can only be of use in the efforts towards justice to the extent that they (1) engage in fighting their own oppression in their own places of work and life; (2) recognize, support, and join the essential element, the rebel fighter fighting her own oppression in her family and community, at work, at school, and in societal organizations; and (3) are vehement in not tolerating the oppression of and attacks against authentic rebels fighting their own oppression.

The indoctrination of actors is so deep. How many times have we heard an authentic rebel being denigrated with “He is just fighting his own personal battle – He is not objectively fighting for the cause we have adopted – He does this for his own personal gain”? On the contrary, the rare fighting individuals being denigrated in this way are onto something: Liberation.

To sever the personal involvement of fighting one’s own oppression from campaigns in support of social justice causes is to sever the essential source of political motivation from the social actor. Individuals engaged in the process of their own liberation do not burn out and do not need workshops about the meaning of solidarity.

First World organizers, coalition builders, and educators, have transformed themselves into victims managing burnout, managers of slaves, and experts in putting the cart before the horse – in the hope that the horse will not be seen or needed. If we don’t have authentic rebels throwing punches then there is no movement. If we don’t understand Paulo Freire’s mantra that “you can only fight your own oppression,” then we are enablers of the power structure.

What is your oppression?

RELATED ARTICLES - LINKS
The Activist Wars
Activism and Risk - Life Beyond Altruism
Means and Freire
Need To Embrace Hatred
Against Chomsky
More Against Chomsky
Anarchism as Cooptation

The Activist Wars

Activist wars about tactics – Not just a question of effectiveness
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Why do activists fight? What are the circumstances of the most widespread and vicious fights between white First World activists (of all colours) who are supposedly against the same injustices and supposedly fighting the same system of exploitation?
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I have seen the biggest disagreements arise regarding differences in tactics. If the activists are all fighting the same oppressor, all pushing in the same direction, then why should they have such visceral confrontations about methods?
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Generally speaking, those who propose more direct and higher risk approaches are told that they “put the movement at risk,” “are counterproductive,” “will give us bad press,” “will turn sympathisers and contributors to the illusive ‘critical mass’ away,” etc. Significant energy is expended confining and normalizing those elements that would be more bold.
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The independent minded are told to subject themselves to the consensus decisions of majority groups, to “show solidarity,” and to “respect what others are trying to achieve.”
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All of this is contrary to the anarchic spirit of exploration, vital impulse, and diversity of tactics. All of this is contrary to the millennial traditions of celebrating the bravest and supporting those who elect to push harder.
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I have come to believe that the majority of organized First World activists prize their security in numbers and in imposed low-risk behaviours more than they are driven to actually fight the oppressor.
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The radicals are seen not only as not fitting in but they also represent a critique of mainstream ineffective protest and of low-risk cooperative behaviour mainly aimed at guilt alleviation and mutual comforting. Such a critique, even if not verbalized, cannot be tolerated. This critique is deeply threatening to self-image and to the main evasion tactic of talking loudly and in large coordinated numbers to the wind.
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Tactics are the expression in action of the activist model. And the two main competing First World models are: (1) the dominant model that low-risk expression if it involves sufficient numbers is the best lever for “progress,” and (2) the minority model that fighting the oppressor means fighting the oppressor, inflicting disabling damage, and thereby necessarily implying a backlash or adjustment and an associated risk.
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So differences in tactics, along this divide, give rise to significant disagreements and often cause break ups. These differences in tactics are at the heart of self-image and worldview, of how the activist perceives her place and purpose. They are tied to the activist’s beliefs about finding meaning.
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Activist wars in across-class oppression
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This is all well known and has been written about often enough, but now consider a special variety of this dynamic – one that arises when middle class First World activists fight the oppressor of an underprivileged group living on the same territory (e.g. aboriginals) or in a distant land (e.g., Palestinians).
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Occasionally, a member of the middle class activist community recognizes that the same oppressor acts in her immediate work or school environment, in the place where her own livelihood and liberation are at stake and decides to directly fight the oppressor (or one of its many tentacles) in her work or school environment, using necessarily high-risk tactics that involve trying to reduce the oppressor’s undemocratic and concentrated power in the work or school environment.
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If this driven activist on the road to liberation claims solidarity with the underprivileged group and draws attention to the across-class character of the oppression by suggesting that we need to actually fight the bastards where we are and where we have power, then that is going too far. The majority middle class weekend and after-work low-risk consensus-seeking activists who fight for the underprivileged simply flip out.
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Corporate media coverage of ineffective actions is allowed whereas media coverage of actions that threaten power is generally not. And media ties the activist to the broad community with its social norms and opinions, which in turn protect the individual resistor from indiscriminate and disproportionate applications of power, such that media-share, media-strategy, and media-use are often at the core of the conflict between activists. And our driven workplace activist is “subverting media away from the dying underprivileged children…”
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The accusations are almost comically predictable: “You are using the underprivileged for your own selfish means, for your own promotion…” “You are privileged; you can therefore not be oppressed.” “How dare you compare their suffering to yours; these people are being killed.”
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The protectors of low-risk activism call upon the obviously extreme suffering of the distant group targeted for aid via critical mass leverage, in order to argue that they need not actually fight anyone. They focus their efforts to eliminate this threat to their cultist belief in action at a distance via multiple filters as the most they can do.
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Their contributions may arguably be important and the nurtured consciousness of First World civil society may arguably play a role in frustrating expressions of war and genocide in non-First-World-middle-class jurisdictions, but the point here is that any suggestion that they are not doing everything they can or that they need to do more that would involve an actual fight with consequences and casualties will not be tolerated.
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An activist from their own privileged class that actually takes the battle personally into the halls of the economic system that sustains the oppression, and is necessarily not polite and suitably restrained in doing so, must be killed, or at least defamed, isolated, and neutralized.
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It’s a mobbing with the full intellectual pretext mill backing of university-bred feminist theory and progressive liberal rationalization. It’s ugly; the finest expression of fear and ignorance that mainstream First World activism can provide.
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Today’s North American mainstream progressive liberal low-risk consensus-seeking hobby activists are possibly the greatest barrier to First World liberation (and whole-world sanity); since the radicals that are neutralized rather than projected and multiplied are the main connections to liberation.
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RELATED POSTS
Activism and Risk
Against Chomsky
Means and Freire
Embracing Hatred
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RESPONSE FROM THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION PARTY:
Open Letter to Denis Rancourt: Harsh Words for the Ex-Professor
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OTHER RELATED EXAMPLES:
Why Norman Finkelstein dropped out of the Gaza Freedom March

Anarchism as cooptation

Education vs Praxis.
See this critique and the comments... [LINK]
When it's called anarchism is it anarchism?

Since the above Ottawa Indy Media link no longer works, here is the original article (newly posted on September 18, 2010):

Anarchism as Co-optation
A critique of Cindy Milstein’s “education for freedom”

by Denis G. Rancourt
November 9, 2007
(Originally posted on Ottawa Indy Media)

Cindy Milstein (co-organizer of the annual Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies, member of the Free Society Collective and Black Sheep Books collective; Montpelier, Vermont) gave the Wednesday unScooling Oppression conference plenary talk entitled “Education for Freedom” in Ottawa.

Milstein’s talk upset many anarchists in the audience because her described approach to social justice activism appeared to be counter to anarchism principles while claiming to be grounded in the anarchist tradition.

Milstein wholly endorsed the mainstream idea that change is to a large degree driven and informed by education, that we need to educate ourselves and interact with the community in communicating our discoveries and proposals as key effective steps in catalyzing consciousness and activism. All of Milstein’s many examples were of this type.

By contrast, anarchists, such as Erico Malatesta that Milstein cites, embody the notion that the primordial catalyst for change is the act itself of resistance and defiance against one’s oppressors, that only such acts involving significant personal risk can inform one of the true nature of the oppression, and that any education devoid of a high-risk direct action component is theorizing in a vacuum, typically a vacuum that can only be sustained in highly privileged circles.

Such educational projects, even if they apply horizontal decision making and are inclusive, gender balanced, class conscious, etc., are nonetheless privileged and sophisticated forms of sticking one’s head in the sand. Creating a near-ideal community for mutual support is not activism in itself.

It is only a way of satisfying one’s basic needs for food, water, shelter, love, and community connections, but it does not satisfy one’s need for political agency to truly control one’s life as a citizen of the World. And it does not bring one in solidarity with those at the bottom of the capitalist project.

Only fighting one’s oppressors with the intensity required to be effective will put one at significant risk and only such actions and their backlash can inform one of the true nature of the exploitative instruments of oppression that feed on us all to remove our humanity and maximize profits, interest extortion, and control.

We need to stop thinking of education as a beginning or as a necessary first step. In our society, institutional education and alternative educations that mimic institutional forms by venerating education are instruments of co-optation that neutralize activism by intellectualizing consciousness.

Praxis is action and reflection as equals. Any actor contemplating resistance and its real consequences will be motivated to learn as much as possible about the situation and to perceive reality as clearly as possible. This learning will integrate all backlashes and responses and is not afforded the luxury of intellectualization or mental experimentation into a distant future of idealized possibilities.

Privilege-preserving intellectuals should have the honesty of recognizing their stances and should not use the cover of anarchism in their quests to create nurturing community devoid of the anarchist thrust to demolish dominant hierarchical structures.

(Photo: Cindy Milstein as negative.)

Data in the study “Against Chomsky”

In a previous post entitled “Against Chomsky”, I presented the thesis (developed by Foucault) that Chomsky has avoided significant risk by not taking on his own institution and that he has thereby effectively served power. >>>
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As Chomsky himself puts it, virtually all intellectuals serve power, including all the left liberal types that are not conscious of their servitude: video-LINK.
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Chomsky reacted to my thesis, as can be seen in the July 27, 2008, comment to the above post, by offering no counter arguments or supporting examples and stated only that I offered no facts that could be checked. (Is not the record of Chomsky’s actions and writings something that can be checked?)
..
Below is some new data in relation to the thesis that Chomsky mostly serves power. It is an email exchange between physics student Joseph Hickey and Noam Chomsky. In this exchange, Chomsky contrasts my approach of “academic squatting” with how he viewed his own activism course at MIT.
..
Chomsky states “But I did it on my own time, as it should be done. It would simply be kicking my colleagues in the face to insist on doing it within their department.” This position is aligned with that of Stanley Fish whose recent book against academic freedom is entitled “Save the World on Your Own Time.”
..
On one hand Chomsky advances that economic resources and therefore institutions should be democratically controlled (e.g., in Understanding Power), but on the other hand Chomsky confuses academic normalcy and professional elitism with the collegial governance myth of that most hierarchical of corporations – the university.
..
The university executive has complete legal authority on all maters. All committees and councils are purely consultative. Aided by the training that is the tenure track; ass kissing rules. There are no shareholders to contend with and government oversight is mitigated by corporate independence masquerading as “academic freedom.”
..
Getting along with one’s colleagues, in a closed society where virtually no one uses one’s tenure, is what Chomsky advocates. How will the university become more democratic if it is not challenged at its economic heart – in the allocation of resources? How will the university serve people if it is not democratic?
..
Chomsky sees the dissident only in terms of the dissident’s ideas and writes: “Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support. But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they're likely to be kicked out. The standard thing, though, is that they won't make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young—they'll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line. So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it's not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that's how they got there. And that's pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools—that's the basic story of how it operates, I think.” LINK
..
Obedient radical professors serve power by making everything about ideas – nothing is occupation or defiance of the physical time-and-space (and grades-and-credits) curriculum. The student is exposed to radical analysis while being constrained in time and place; and the constraints extend into the future via monetary debt and ideological investment and isolation.
..
Chomsky has the most power where he has the strongest tie with the economy, at MIT, in his position as Institute Professor. If you’re not resisting, chances are you’re serving power.
..
..
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joseph Hickey
Date: Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 11:25 PM
Subject: Fwd: Academic Freedom in Ottawa, Canada (letter to Chomsky)
To:

Dear Prof. Chomsky,

Further to our correspondence of one month ago, Professor Rancourt has been fired by the University of Ottawa for the reason of giving high grades in one course he taught one year ago. He was fired on March 31, 2009, and now an on-line petition for his reinstatement has been created.

Rancourt has made a public statement regarding his dismissal at: http://rancourt.academicfreedom.ca/component/content/article/25.html

There is now an on-line petition at: http://rancourt.academicfreedom.ca/component/petitions/?view=petition&id=4

I'm sending you this e-mail in the hope that you will be able to add your name to this protest.

Sincerely,
Joseph Hickey

p.s: official University of Ottawa statements:

firing: http://www.media.uottawa.ca/mediaroom/news-details_1654.html
suspension: http://www.media.uottawa.ca/mediaroom/news-details_1610.html
..
..
..
On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 11:16 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote: .. I've read the written material you sent. I don't have time to watch videos, I'm afraid. .. As far as I understand, Rancourt was suspended because of his grading decisions. If that is correct, then I would sign a statement protesting that. .. Much of the rest frankly seems to me childish posturing. For example, I taught courses for 25 years at MIT on activism, much of the course devoted to bringing in activists from the community to describe what they were doing. But I did it on my own time, as it should be done. It would simply be kicking my colleagues in the face to insist on doing it within their department. From what I've seen here, his "activism" is confined to the university. I'm afraid that doesn't impress me. Not only my own, but that of academic friends and colleagues, goes far beyond that, in character, risk, international scope, etc. .. As for Fish, I'm afraid that's not a recommendation. .. Noam Chomsky ..
..
..
----- Original Message -----
From: Joseph Hickey
To: Noam Chomsky
Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 10:55 PM
Subject: Re: Academic Freedom in Ottawa, Canada
..
Hi again Prof. Chomsky,

Thanks for getting back to me. Let me make one more bid for your attention.

1) Not many dissident tenured profs get fired for political reasons in North America. A strong supporter of Rancourt's case, who knows the background well, is your former MIT colleague David F. Noble. Here's a video of him and Rancourt giving a talk together at UofT in January, following Rancourt's suspension:
http://vimeo.com/3060115

Physicist and author of "Disciplined Minds", Jeff Schmidt, who I believe you supported, is also a strong supporter of Rancourt. His letter is not yet up on academicfreedom.ca, unfortunately, but I could send it to you.

2) Rancourt's case was on the front page of the Globe and Mail and has had ample media coverage:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090206.wprof06/BNStory/National/home

Stanley Fish's blog for the New York Times was about him 2 weeks in a row:
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/the-two-languages-of-academic-freedom/

3) All the media, letters, links to video, and background information is very well organized on the website:
http://www.academicfreedom.ca/

4) You may have seen Rancourt's spirited critique of Noam Chomsky, in which he describes the well-known dissident writer as a "non-activist intellectual engaged in analytical penetration of the monster":
http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2008/07/against-chomsky.html

Thanks for your time,
Sincerely,
Joseph Hickey
..
..
..
On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote: .. It looks from your letter as though protest is in order, but to proceed I'd have to work through the background, and I'm afraid I'm just not in a position to do that. I'm deluged with similar requests. Each requires inquiry. Sometimes I've been able to work it into a very demanding schedule, but usually not, I'm afraid. I don't like to take a public stand on factual matters without serious investigation. And this case I never even heard of before you wrote. .. Noam Chomsky ..
..
..
----- Original Message -----
From: Joseph Hickey (by way of Noam Chomsky )
To: Noam Chomsky
Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 5:12 PM
Subject: Academic Freedom in Ottawa, Canada

Hi Professor Chomsky,

I'd like to let you know about a (in my opinion) riveting academic freedom struggle that's currently underway at the University of Ottawa. Tenured physics professor Denis Rancourt has worked at the university for 22 years, and is now about to be dismissed because of the way he graded a fourth-year quantum mechanics course that he taught one year ago. In the course, he gave all students the mark of A+ (highest possible mark) on the first day of class, so as to remove grades from the students' learning experience in that class. On Dec. 10, 2008, Rancourt was placed on academic suspension, and barred from coming onto campus. In January, he was arrested when he came to campus to host a weekly film night that he's been hosting for the past 3 years or so.

Of course there's a lot more to the story.. Rancourt runs a blog that is very critical of the UofO: www.uofowatch.blogspot.com and that has, among other things, exposed falsification of documents by the upper administration of the university.

Several of his students have become quite vocal in their criticism of the university, e.g. www.uofovoice.blogspot.com

Rancourt also voices his pro-Palestine anti-Israel views, and believes that new President Allan Rock (former Liberal star-politician and cabinet minister under Jean Chretien, ambassador to the U.N. under Paul Martin) has connections to the Israel lobby, and that this is one of the reasons he is being dismissed.

I'm telling you all this because Prof. Rancourt is collecting support letters from academics outside of the university. They letters collected so far have been posted here: http://www.academicfreedom.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55&Itemid=62

This website, www.academicfreedom.ca contains much background information on the Rancourt saga.

I am one of Rancourt's physics graduate students. Upon Rancourt's suspension, all of his graduate students were told that they must find new supervisors. Two other students and I have pursued legal action against the university and the Dean of Science and the Dean of Graduate Studies over breach of contract and misfeasance in public office: http://www.vimeo.com/3372672 in this video, President Allan Rock evades justice for approx. 10 minutes as we follow him down Laurier street, attempting to serve him, as chief representative of the university, with our legal claim.

Thank you for reading this,
I hope you are well,
and I'd like to say thanks for all the precious reading material you've put out into this twisted world of ours!

Sincerely,
Joseph Hickey (M.Sc. student, physics, University of Ottawa, Canada)

Plato as the post-60s student: Rancourt’s only chance?

This article was first published in the print edition of the CAUCUS, the political science students’ magazine at the University of Ottawa. The print version on the back page of the Spring 2009 issue of the CAUCUS looks like THIS (alternative LINK). It was written before I was fired on March 31, 2009, from my position as Full and tenured physics professor at the University of Ottawa. My statement about my dismissal is posted HERE.


Plato as the post-60s student: Rancourt’s only chance?
..
By Denis G. Rancourt
February 2009
..
My case (as best documented at http://academicfreedom.ca/) leaves few conscious students indifferent. Students either vehemently want me to go away or care about my case and side with me against the administration. Both reactions are based on an understanding of the facts. Students who oppose me understand that I threaten their comfort in aspiring to integrate the system. Students who side with me understand that I fight with them against our common oppressor – institutional hierarchy, administrative control of our lives, and undemocratic rule.
..
I am gambling that a meaningless life of servitude is not enough for some of us, irrespective of the perks and brown nosed social status. I am gambling that enough students and citizens want to be in charge of their lives, want to own their personal influence on the community and society, want a full political dimension outside of management by manufactured representation. I am gambling my profession on it.
..
A meaningless life of servitude was not enough on campuses in the 60s. In the 60s students fought and won. They repealed in loco parentis. They defeated trespass laws to win freedom of speech. They won representatives on every committee and council up to and including the Senate and Board. In the 60s students kicked ass because they wanted to be alive rather than be treated like barn animals watching PowerPoint presentations. YouTube “Mario Savio” to open a small window into what the 60s were: “Beneath the cobblestones there is the beach” meant something.
..
Then there was the long sleep as increasingly globalized and corporatized universities clawed back the gains with codes of conduct, ever increasing tests and deadlines, ever increasing tuition fees, professors hired for their corporate ties, politician presidents, etc. And, now, trespass to property is back and used against student demonstrators across the country – UBC, U of T, York, Ottawa…
..
Now the admin tells the SFUO who the student reps on committees can and cannot be and the SFUO lies down and dies because it doesn’t stand for anything. Student unions are now federations and associations that manage services and educational campaigns rather than being the cutting edges of student power that they could be. SFUO executives could start with one simple rule: “No more secret meetings with the admin behind closed doors. Period.” Everything open, recorded, and transparent.
..
On the professorial side, it’s a measure of the state of affairs, of the present state of academic freedom, when a university administration judges that it can fire a full and tenured dissident professor using a pretext as bold as high grades in one course. My case is one that all university administrations are following with interest: “Can we now cleanse the campus of dissidents and radicals?” Welcome to Sterile U where all the answers are in the PowerPoint slides, where discourse is forbidden, and where that is not in the syllabus.
..
So-called radical professors who promote radical thinking are the top-end neutralizers of activist students. They teach that the pen is mightier than the sword, and that problems are solved by good ideas, and other such nonsense that distances the service intellectuals of tomorrow from anything that would threaten power. My practice is one of liberation, not one of constructing mental prisons for the castrated priests who will serve hierarchies. I am an anarchist. I seek to press the pyramid down into a more horizontal shape, by any means, starting in the classroom.
..
In the classroom, I give up my power by giving up the grade. The only way to precipitate independent thinking is to give freedom. Students who are preoccupied with reading my mind or with regurgitating on command for a grade distance themselves from themselves; from even the most basic ability to know when they don’t understand something. It is to remove a student’s humanity to reduce him/her to a trained parrot and to an obedient slave, no matter how “progressive” the ideas are.
..
Go to academicfreedom.ca and read the more than 75 letters from former students about my pedagogical experiments and the impacts on students’ lives. Then contrast these testimonies with the administration’s zeal to fire me. It doesn’t make any sense – until you recognize that it’s not about education. It’s about control, external power, class privilege, and an emperor who has no clothes.
..
Like Socrates, I’ve worked hard for my hemlock. Plato watched and was silent but Plato had not seen the 60s. What part will you play? Start your education: Reject the syllabus.
..
[Oh, and do sign the on-line petition.]

AGAINST CHOMSKY

AGAINST CHOMSKY
by Denis G. Rancourt
.
Chomsky invites us to peer into the functioning of the superpower and provides analyses and predictive descriptions of complex societal phenomena such as war, the US military economy, and continental-scale corporate predation. Using institutional and media and geopolitical analyses, Chomsky illustrates golden rules such as that an organization will never work against itself and unravels relationships between domestic interests, class divisions, and global pillaging.
.
As a professor at MIT, is Chomsky an exception to the rule or does Chomsky work for the man?
.

Chomsky once challenged the US war machine at its root and went to jail for his activism, an activism tied to a strong campus anti-war movement. But after jail and after Vietnam, Chomsky became a non-activist intellectual engaged in analytical penetration of the monster.
.

In debating Chomsky in 1971, Foucault stated [1]:
.

“One knows … that the university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. … It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”
.

Chomsky, from his position of power within MIT, has not done this. One can say that that is a question of personal choice; that one needs to “choose one’s battles”. But is this choice informed, in terms of action that creates justice – which liberates, rather than reinforces the murderous machine that Chomsky describes?
.

No, it is not. Chomsky feeds our need for truth by providing analysis, an intellectual framework that resides in inaction. Chomsky appeases First World cerebral wanderers by giving them their fix, thereby locking them into either cynicism or a non-ending quest to mentalize it all while being disconnected from any real battle. Chomsky feeds the false notion that one can understand the world and one’s place in it and oneself by reading books.
.

While this may not be Chomsky’s intent, it is clear that the great majority of Chomsky readers have never put themselves at significant risk by confronting the madness that rules our lives and that is destroying every region of the planet. It is clear that most Chomsky readers don’t read Chomsky as part of a necessary reflection within a high-risk activist battle, within a praxis of change [2, 3, 4].
.

Among activist readers Chomsky mainly serves to deepen the pathological pacifism of neutralized mainstream movements. This is mainly because almost all First World activists are of the latter variety [4] but Chomsky does not challenge us to step out. Instead, Chomsky feeds the disconnected and ailing trapped intellectual, the lost soul who has been socialized to study as a “first step” rather than to first feel and stand based on primordial impulse.
.

Education as a “first step” constrains us to study and precludes action until an “understanding” is sufficiently complete, in a manner not unlike compulsory and self-imposed schooling as a holding pattern. When one cannot perceive or will not fight one’s own oppression [5] and when the problem is taken to be the intractable entire planet and the systems of exploitation that occupy it, the “first step” is a non-ending self-trapped cycle of intellectual isolation in which the brain is severed from the heart; the heart that is defined by solidarity in battle and in shared risk and shared consequences, and by inter-dependence.
.

The same scientific method that has alienated us from nature and from our own selves also defines the framework in which we interpret the new world and our place in it [6]. It is a cold framework of measured consequences, weighed counter pressures, and legalistic morality, without the liberating impulse.
.

Chomsky is very careful to not provide any examples of how individuals can free themselves. At most, the prescription is to “organize” [7]: Organizing as a “first step”, leaving out the individual’s primordial quest for freedom to influence. The individual’s impulse to free herself must be constrained behind organizing and education, to the extent that the realities of “survival” permit. Anarchy as anarchism, not anarchy from anarchy [8].
.

In reality, one must first act. The world cannot be correctly perceived from involuntary observation and thought. Only knowledge from action allows one to realistically evaluate the proposals of others. Action, reaction, communication, reflection, action… There is a natural sequence that cannot be adulterated without separating us from ourselves.
.

The intellectual as mentalizer is a service intellectual [2, 9], just as surely as cerebral wanderers are trapped intellectuals. Only through action have I come to understand Chomsky and his place in the world. Let’s move on.
.

.

References cited:
.

[1] Chomsky-Foucault debate, 1971.
[2] Gradual Change is Not Progress.
[3] Activism and Risk.
[4] Churchill, Ward. Pacifism as Pathology. 1998.
[5] Friere, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970.
[6] Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. 1964.
[7] Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. 2002. (P.R. Mitchell and J. Schoeffel, eds.)
[8] Chomsky, Noam. Chomsky on Anarchism. 1969. (2005, AK Press)
[9] Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual. 1994.

Follow Up and Supporting Post:
Data in the study "Against Chomsky"

Recommended Reading: To know yourself and your place in the world…?

[For students of all specialized disciplines, including physics.]



INTRODUCTION – READING IS NOT THE ANSWER

We have obvious biological drives to feed ourselves, seek physical shelter, and reproduce. And it is in our natures to both compete and cooperate, to both hate and feel compassion. We adapt these drives and tendencies to our circumstances and to social and physical realities, while being guided and misguided by our individual psychologies that are in turn products of our environments and accidents of our developments.

We are also political beings. We want agency and influence. We need some control over our place in the world. And on this front, there is a divide between those who feel and believe the world is just and is close to ideal in terms of what is practical and those who believe the world is unjust and far from a more just world that is possible; those who feel that they can accept their place in society and cooperate to ameliorate their circumstances and those who feel that present structures are unacceptable and should be fought and dismantled.

These are two end-points and there is every variety and deception in-between that varies in time and place and from person to person. But nonetheless they are bimodal attractors in that, at a given time and place, we tend to adopt predominantly one interpretation or the other. Fight or flight? Friend or foe? Safe or dangerous? There are many such bimodal attractors that determine our survival choices.

Just or unjust? Liveable and stable or wrong and dangerous? Am I being oppressed or respected? Am I being used and coerced or given my due and appreciated? As worker, student, mother, child, citizen of the Third or First Worlds…?

Our fundamental beliefs about the extent to which and the ways in which the present “order” is just and sane are what predominantly distinguish us as political beings. These will determine whether we are liberals, conservatives, socialists, or anarchists, in our hearts.

And these beliefs are constantly managed and groomed by the First World trillion-dollar-a-year industry that fabricates our mental environment. So, even if you must medicate yourself with alcohol, consumerism, and entertainment, the aim is that you come to believe that this is an acceptable life, that the rewards make it meaningful, and that to fight against it is futile.

Which brings us to the question of a reading list: One might conclude that education is the answer and that independent and alternative information can lead to political development and more justice. I don’t believe this. Education as a first step, practiced on oneself from a position of having integrated mainstream compliance, is inaction and self co-optation.

One’s justice-injustice world view, one’s anti-authoritarian stance, one’s defiance, and one’s solidarity with the oppressed, are determined by the deep experiences of growing human; involving contacts with life and death, struggles won and lost, facing danger, taking risks, and acting to change one’s place in the world (family, cooperative, community, society).

Reading independent and alternative information can serve either side and does not create justice fighters on its own. But it is an invaluable source of inspiration and aid-in-reflection for the developing activists who already know things are wrong.

At best, reading powerful material can momentarily destabilize the indoctrinated individual, thereby creating opportunities for action.

Action, its results and any backlash, is what educates. Breaking the rules informs us of the true nature of the system that imprisons us, something we cannot learn from books. This in-turn allows us to decode the great writers that spoke from the trenches, from experience. It allows us to see writers for what they are, on the justice-injustice divide.

Therefore, my first recommendation is about this divide, as expressed in the intellectual. True intellectuals who are freedom fighters versus service intellectuals who serve power:

Representations of the Intellectual
...by Edward W. Said, 1994
(Vintage Books edition, 1996)

A related essay is:
Gradual Change is Not Progress
...by dgr

The rest of my recommendations are divided into two themes: (1) Anarchist writers and anarchism as the most advanced political theory, consistent with human liberation from oppression and exploitation, and (2) independent analyses of the world and its societal structures – how things work and how they got that way.


ANARCHISM – IF YOU FEEL IT

Virtually all the true intellectuals identified by Said and by whoever cares to enumerate them are and were anarchists, in that they believed in the liberated human spirit, liberated from all oppressive structures and all institutions not directly mandated by democratic consensus.

If you know in your gut that things are wrong and if your reaction is to want to fight it rather than accept it to hopefully transform it incrementally, then read about anarchism; read the anarchists. There are usually no courses on anarchism on university campuses. Find the anarchists (Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, Erico Malatesta, Emile Pouget, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Georges Sorel, and many many others) on the web (see links below) and in libraries and read them.

The anarchists, like the Paris students of May 1968, call on us to “live instead of devising a lingering death.” And life is risk: “Sous les pavés il y a la plage.” (May’68 student slogan)

Many of the greatest intellectuals of our time have declared themselves anarchists and have adopted anarchist ideals (see: Chomsky on Anarchism, Barry Pateman, AK Press, 2005).

I recommend a small book that is one of my favourites:

Anarchy
...by Erico Malatesta, 1891
(translation by Vernon Richards, Freedon Press, 1974, 1994)

(Note: A bad translation is available on the web but the Richards translation makes all the difference!)

Compare it to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ brilliant The Communist Manifesto first published in 1848. These are two small essay-length books but rarely are pages so densely packed with powerful ideas. The dissonances with modern mainstream mass media spin are striking. Minds at work…! This comparison allows one to clearly discern socialist-communist models from anarchist thought.

For those wishing to situate their activism and modern activism in the broadest possible historical context of world views and defining ideologies, I recommend David Noble’s “pocket book”:

Beyond The Promised Land: The Movement and The Myth
...by David F. Noble, 2005
(Between the Lines, Toronto, 2005)

It puts anarchism in its rightful place and shows that history does not simply repeat itself…

We are all students and we are all teachers. The anarchist educator par excellence is Paulo Freire, the father of critical pedagogy. I recommend his book:

Pedagogy of the Oppressed
...by Paulo Freire, 1970
(Continuum, NY, 2005)

This is a very difficult read. I think one cannot understand or know how to apply this work without a critical mass of fighting and organizing experience. But don’t give up.

Some great anarchism stuff and resources and networks on the web:

http://www.panarchy.org/

http://www.panarchy.org/kropotkin/1905.eng.html

http://www.panarchy.org/kropotkin/1896.eng.html

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/ANARCHIST_ARCHIVES/index.html

http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/index.html

http://www.dis.org/daver/anarchism/index.html

http://www.dis.org/daver/anarchism/kropotkin/atty.html

http://eng.anarchopedia.org/Main_Page

http://www.spunk.org/index.html

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/


UNDERSTANDING POWER – KNOWING THE WORLD

Among salaried employees, there is a difference between labourers and workers on the one hand and professionals and managers on the other. The first can simply be forced to obey, using job loss and working conditions as tools of oppression, whereas the latter must obey and adopt the employer’s ideology. That is why we have universities and professional and graduate schools.

My first recommendation in this section is for all who have been and continue to be subjected to a university education:

Disciplined Minds: A critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering systems that shapes their lives
...by physicist Jeff Schmidt, 2001
(Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2001, http://disciplinedminds.com/)

It’s about knowing the system that shaped/shapes you.

Next, you probably want to read an independent history of how America (the US and Canada) got to somewhat recognise civil rights, workers rights, freedom of expressed, and other such nuisances to people in power. I recommend:

A People’s History of the United States
...by Howard Zinn, 1980
(Perennial Classics, 2003)

And what about genocide? What about Canada’s dirty hidden genocide? You probably want to know about the continental-scale crime against humanity perpetrated by Canadian (and US) society. Therefore read:

A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present
...by Ward Churchhill, 1997
(City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1997)

Finally, on the theme of understanding the world, one should introduce oneself to Chomsky. The most complete and readable Chomsky reader I have found is:

Understanding Power: The indispensable Chomsky
...edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, 2002
(The New Press, NY, 2002)

And you probably want to know something about feminism, especially if it did not occur to you as a particularly important “ism”. A wonderful introduction to feminism, in the broader context of class struggles, is provided by bell hooks (bell hooks does not capitalize her name):

Feminism is for Everybody
...by bell hooks, 2000
(South End Press, Cambridge MA, 2000)

***

Such are some bits and pieces that might distract you from the forced ingurgitation of your specialized program of study…? May your discomfort grow and be amplified. May you be deeply perturbed and inspired to act. Or may these writings inform your actions and nurture your mid-action reflections. Otherwise, it’s wasted.

Advice to academic squatters

Many teachers in North America and around the world are considering academic squatting and are contacting Activist Teacher for advice and solidarity. Here’s the advice.

Do it! Stop grading and squat. Anarchism works. It’s not about alternative schools. It’s about taking charge of your life to transform society. Change necessitates confrontation.

Can you do it within a logical/legal framework of system legitimacy? Or are you prepared to risk the lot for sanity’s sake?

It’s not about educating with information.

Critical pedagogy is not about the message. All that info about war, economics, etc. is just a MASSAGE for those who think rather than do, if it's not accompanied by action that involves confrontation and personal risk.

Critical pedagogy is praxis. Its practitioners need to be fighting oppression, not just becoming "informed" about it. And the battle needs to be local and against one's own oppression rather than transferred in order to avoid immediate risk. The backlash is what informs you and your resistance is what builds you. What is your oppression?

Action-risk-backlash-solidarity-reflection-outreach-more-action...

Take the plunge. Don’t do it halfway or gradually. Others will join you.

Student’s version: Practice academic hijacking.