Class-based politics is going to make a big comeback in the future given the trends that class relations and economic life generally are following. This doesn’t mean class politics will supersede political, cultural, or ethnic conflict. It will just be another ingredient in the mix. Regrettably, the rising class conflict will also lead to rising calls for expanding the state. Unfortunately, most people, including most self-identified anarchists and libertarians, have no clue concerning the role of the state in centralizing control over wealth and resources.
Category Archives: Education
A Society in Revolt or Under Analysis? Investigating the Dialogue Between 19th-Century Anarchists and Sociologists Reply
By Dana Williams
Anarchism has not had a noticeable impact upon sociology. The two traditions diverged in their interest in society and their relationship to it. This paper contrasts the practitioners or thinkers of one tradition against the other. The analysis shows some strong antagonisms, many instances of close analysis and critique of each other’s perspectives, and a number of friendly and supportive relationships between anarchists and sociologists.
Zaid Jilani BREAKS DOWN: Racial Gap Shrinks, What Does It Mean For Both Parties? Reply
According to the data cited in this, “education” (which is really just a euphemism for social class) is becoming a greater fault line than race and gender. Who would’ve thought?
Journalist, Zaid Jilani, weighs in on analysis of pre-election polls that show “Joe Biden gains among white voters and President Trump makes inroads among Black and Hispanic voters.”
Even More White Lies 6
I don’t get why transracialism can’t be a thing. There is an infinite historical lineage for people leaving one tribe to join another or converting to a new religion. Anarchists, more than anyone else, should be embracing the right to be a transracial person. What would Stirner say? What would Emma say?
Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed
Another week, another unmasking of a white professor allegedly posing as a person of color: this time it’s Kelly Kean Sharp, a scholar of African American history who resigned abruptly Tuesday from her assistant professorship at Furman University.
Like other apparent racial fraudsters before her, Sharp was outed by an anonymous post on Medium. The writer of the post identifies him or herself as having “distantly” known Sharp when she was graduate student at the University of California, Davis. Sharp had never publicly identified as Latinx back then, the writer said, so they were recently puzzled to learn that Sharp had since started referring to herself as Chicana, including on her now-private Twitter profile. According to screenshots included in the post, Sharp has tweeted about her abuela, or grandmother, from Mexico, and posted elsewhere about her “abuela who came to the U.S. during WWII who worked hard so I could become a teacher.”
The writer said they started talking to others who knew Sharp, and these colleagues were similarly “confused.” Some then allegedly asked Sharp about the “newfound identity,” and Sharp allegedly said her grandmother was originally from Mexico. Yet when the scholars looked into that explanation, “we found that Kelly had no grandparents who were born outside of the U.S. or had Hispanic names.”
The Crushing Reality of Zoom School Reply
Oh, please. What about all the kids who are homeschooled for their entire K-12 education and then go straight to college?
By Dan Sinker
Esquire
“Are you muted?”
The first thing my five-year-old learned in kindergarten, set up at a tiny desk in the corner of our dining room, is to always stay muted. It’s probably the wrong thing to teach a child, but not everyone remembers, and then life bleeds in. Zoom school becomes a portal into worlds you never see as a parent making awkward smalltalk at pickup.
You can hear a mom working a job doing collections for medical billing. Call after call.
A dad who calls his sister on speakerphone. They fight most days.
Grandparents asking how long it’s going to take. There are babies wailing.
TVs, so many TVs, an endless buzz of TVs. The weather. The news. Game shows and talk shows.
Are you muted?
School Is Child Slavery Reply
University of Wisconsin graduate student resigns from teaching role, admits she falsely claimed Black identity Reply
Transracialism is apparently becoming a thing. So be it.
By Kaelan Deese
The Hill
A University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) graduate student resigned from a teaching position after they admitted on social media to falsely claiming to be a person of color.
CV Vitolo-Haddad apologized for the claims in two posts on the writer platform Medium last week and and said that they were leaving their post as co-president of the university’s Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA), according to CNN.
“So deeply sorry for the ways you are hurting right now because of me,” Vitolo-Haddad said in a post Sept. 6. “I have let guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove. I have let people make assumptions when I should have corrected them.”
Vitolo-Haddad published a second post on Sept. 11, stating they were of southern Italian/Sicilian heritage.
“It was my choice and error to identify any differently,” they wrote.
House of Cards: Can the American University be Saved? Reply
By Daniel Bessner
The Nation
The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the glaring contradictions in American higher education. State research universities are preparing to decrease services in light of anticipated budget shortfalls as small liberal arts colleges teeter on the brink of financial ruin. Meanwhile, Ivy League and other rich universities have refused to dip into their massive endowments and have instead chosen to pursue austerity while increasing tuition—and increasing debt—for their students.
Who Votes, Who Doesn’t, and Why Reply
A study conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2006. Virtually all research on this topic shows that those who don’t vote are most likely to come from disadvantaged sectors and that they don’t vote because they know there is nothing in it for them. “Liberal democracy” is by nature an oligarchical state-capitalist class dictatorship and has been since at least the time of the Roman Republic. Liberal democracy may be preferable to outright dictatorships just as the Roman Republic was preferable to the later Caesarian state cults. But only because there is a wider “circulation of elites” (Mosca). The problem is not people who don’t vote. The problem is people who take the state seriously and actually believe in this stuff.
Philanthropy News
A recent survey of voting patterns conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, in collaboration with the Associated Press, finds large differences among Americans who are not registered to vote, vote only rarely, are intermittent voters, or regular voters. Who Votes, Who Doesn’t, and Why (5 pages, PDF) also suggests that whites, college graduates, the wealthy, and frequent churchgoers are more likely to vote than young people, Hispanics, and citizens with less education and lower incomes.
DOJ Finds Yale DISCRIMINATES Against White And Asian Students Reply
Most people aren’t nuanced enough to recognize that systemic racism against black and brown people can exist in some sectors (like the economy and criminal justice), against white and Asian people in other sectors (like higher education) with both of these happening in the wider context of globalized multicultural technocratic statism and rainbow corporate neoliberalism.
The Disappearing Conservative Professor Reply
This article provides a pretty good overview of the actual role of ideology in higher education. Noam Chomsky created a minor stir sometime back when he argued that universities are actually “far-right” in reply to the usual complaints about universities being dominated by liberal and left ideologues. However, in the context that Chomsky was speaking, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Universities function basically like this: Science and technology departments conduct the research that is necessary for the maintenance of the military-industrial-complex and the high-tech economy. That is particularly true of schools like MIT where Noam spent most of his career.
Business schools and economics departments generally teach from a neoliberal perspective, which reflects the dominant ruling class ideology, the occasional token libertarians, Marxists, or unreconstructed Keynesians notwithstanding. Technical and professional schools are mostly about churning out skilled workers and technocratic managers. It is only in the humanities and liberal arts departments that liberal and left opinion flourishes. Political science and international relations professors tend to be mostly technocratic centrists, mainstream liberals, left-of-center progressives, with a minority of neocons and occasional libertarians. Traditional humanities fields like history tend to be dominated by left-of-center types (the kinds of folks who would be enthusiastic Obama voters). Education, social work, and social sciences departments tend to be further left, often functioning as seminaries for “progressive activists.”
The craziest SJW types tend to be in “fringe” departments that didn’t exist a few decades ago like gender studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, etc. Some English departments, mass communications programs, and art schools have a large number of these types (mostly because many creative types often have far-left political and social views). “Diversity mania” is found in a wide range of fields, including seeming non-ideological ones like healthcare, although this is more about technocratic management than an ideology per se.
By Jon A. Shields
National Affairs
When concerns over the homogeneity of university faculty are raised, conservatives and liberals tend to hunker down into a battle of grievances. Conservatives point to instances of political bias and the need for “real” diversity in higher education, while liberals remind their conservative opponents of the still-low number of minority professors and the importance of their perspectives. It should be possible to overcome this impasse. Both the right and left tend to define diversity too narrowly and inconsistently, and both would benefit from broadening their appreciation for the value of diversity in higher education.
NJ principal calls pro-police flag ‘racist’, angry parent joins ‘Tucker’ Reply
Schools are essentially prisons for children and adolescents serving a 12-year sentence for the crime of having been born. Consequently, I would support the right of school kids to display any kind of flag they wish. An American flag, a Confederate flag, a Blue Lives Matter flag, a Black Power flag, a Rainbow flag, an Aztlan flag, the Christian flag, an Israeli flag, the Islamic crescent, or a flag depicting a hammer and sickle, fasces, swastika or anarchist “circle A” symbol. Fuck schools.
Kim Tries to Convince Right Wingers To Cancel Student Debt Reply
Universities, corporations, tech companies, banks, and media conglomerates should all be considered agencies or branches of government, just like Congress or the Division of Motor Vehicles. The Bill of Rights should apply to all of these institutions and organizations.
Un
The Truth About Critical Methods | James Lindsay Reply
James Lindsay on the theology of the new theocracy. The two most important things that are happening in the developed world at the present time are the re-feudalization of class relations and the growth of totalitarian humanism as the self-legitimating ideology of the rising ruling class. Just as neo-feudalism is reinstating the kinds of class societies that existed in the premodern world, totalitarian humanism is resurrecting premodern caste systems based on ascribed status, but within the technocratic framework of modern totalitarianism. The principal differences between totalitarian humanism and the 20th-century models of totalitarianism are two things: 1) the commercial values of capitalism require a certain degree of cultural openness that is not possible in a Stalinist type of system (hence, “soft totalitarianism” rather than “hard totalitarianism”) and 2) contemporary methods of propaganda and ideological control are far more sophisticated than those of 20th-century totalitarians, more Edward Bernays than Joseph Goebbels.
Bret Weinstein’s DarkHorse Podcast – Black Intellectual Roundtable Reply
Fox News CALLS OUT Betsy Devos Attack On School Funding Reply
The right-wing of the ruling class is fracturing. The neoliberal/neocon right clearly wants to purge the Trumpist insurgency within their own class.
An Economist Looks at 90: Tom Sowell on Charter Schools and Their Enemies Reply
This is an interesting discussion of education.
Nothing Succeeds Like Secession: Suggested Demands for CHOP From a Friendly Panarchist Ally Reply
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
I have always been fascinated by secessionist movements. It goes back to my childhood love of maps, flags and geography. I use to spend hours poring over atlases and fixating on the strange autonomous zones that only existed inside fluid borders drawn in dotted lines. Strange places no American ever spoke of, with exotic names like Transnistria, Gaza, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Western Sahara. I would eventually grow into a commie, Third World, war nerd who fastidiously followed and supported these esoteric independence movements from afar.
Protesters ask for name changes and end to racism at Hanover County Public Schools Reply
Portland superintendent says he’s ‘discontinuing’ presence of armed police officers in schools Reply
Portland Public Schools will no longer have city police officers patrol the halls of its nine high schools, nor will the other two school districts inside Portland city limits.
Portland Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero on Thursday announced that the state’s largest school district is “discontinuing the regular presence of school resource officers.” He said the district, which didn’t pay for the police officers, intends to increase spending on social workers, counselors and culturally specific supports for students.
Minneapolis Public Schools terminates contract with Police Department over George Floyd’s death Reply
Fragmentation between the educationist and law enforcement wings of the managerial class. Interesting.
By Ryan Faircloth Star Tribune
Minneapolis Public Schools has severed its decadeslong relationship with the city’s police department in response to the death of George Floyd in police custody.
The school board voted unanimously Tuesday to terminate the MPD’s contract to provide school resource officers. The district will cease further negotiations with the department and Superintendent Ed Graff must come up with a new plan for school safety by the board’s Aug. 18 meeting.
School? “Hell, No, We Won’t Go!” Reply
It seems like it would be best to just forget about the whole school thing for now.
