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Indigenous Student Refusals

Originally published by mediaINDIGENA, an indigenous media site that features “
Aboriginal news, views and creative expression,” and a weekly podcast on current affairs.

This news comes from friends to the north. The Indigenous Students’ Council at the University of Saskatchewan has recently released a scathing criticism of the University’s farce of a reconciliation process. Unveiling the settler-colonial investments of the University, they have outlined how these processes have served more as ways to save face than transform campus life for indigenous students. Moreso, they have made demands for the formation of an Autonomous Indigenous Students Union and for the withdrawal of indigenous participation in administrative & reconciliation efforts. This podcast goes deeper into the issues at stake and an analysis of the context for these struggles. The first 30 minutes of the podcast focuses on the student struggles in particular.

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No Cop Academy Roundup

Cutting Class: Counterinfo for the Ungovernable Generation

Over the past few weeks, two parallel struggles have been developing in Illinois as students & community members have fought back against possibly the worst form of schooling possible: Cop Academies.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel is seeking to invest $95 million into a new police academy on the west side of Chicago. In Chicago, 40 percent of the budget goes to police while the city continues to shut down schools in black and latinx communities. Community members and students have been pushing back, through canvassing, rallies, sit-ins, and speeches to city hall. “No Cop Academy,” was one of the many demands enumerated by the Chicago students who walked out on March 14th. Mayor Emmanuel has encountered protests outside of Chicago as well, with students at Harvard & UCLA protesting his speeches at their schools.

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Educate to Liberate – A Conversation with the Radical Education Department

Cutting Class
Counterinfo for the Ungovernable Generation

Over the next few days, we’ll be publishing pieces to highlight the work of some of the groups participating in the Cutting Class counterinfo network. We hope this will provide some clarity on where our crews are coming from and how that affects the way we have organized this project.

We also hope that these interview questions can provide a template for other autonomous groups to distill a collective understanding of their context and projects. If your crew finds these questions useful, write up a summary of your conversations and send them our way as a form of introduction! Cutting Class can be your platform, and we’d love to publish an interview with your crew and start collaborating—not just around CC but also with any other projects that these introductions might incite!

Today’s featured organization is RED (Radical Education Department), an autonomous collective based in Philadelphia.

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The Fascist University in Neoliberal France: Academic Black Shirts Brutally Assault Student Protestors

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Originally published by Gabriel Rockhill of the Radical Education Department.

Cutting Class Editor Note: Content warning for violent assault and blood.

The definitive version of this article will be published on Monday, March 26, in CounterPunch, and will be re-posted here once it is out.

In scenes reminiscent of Mussolini’s black shirts, a dozen or so militants dressed in black, some wearing ski masks, brutally beat peaceful protesters who were participating in a general assembly while occupying the School of Law and Political Science in Montpellier, France. Armed with Tasers, cudgels with nails, and reinforced punching gloves, the assailants unleashed a bloody assault on the night of March 22, sending three students to the hospital and injuring many more. The security guards at the university stood idly by and watched the beatings, while the police and riot forces remained outside the university and did not enter to prevent the assailants’ attack.

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Looking Back on the California Student Occupation Movement

Originally published by It’s Going Down

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In this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we talk with a participant in the worker-student occupation movement that exploded in California in the fall of 2009 to the spring of 2010. With eyes on the present and the current #NeverAgain walkouts, we discuss the lessons and evolution of the movement that took place in the aftermath of the 2007-8 economic crash and grew in reaction to a proposed 32% increase in tuition costs within the University of California (UC) system.

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Excerpt from “Prisons Are Plantations”

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Anonymously published document. Full document here. Originally spotted on Revolutionary Horizon‘s facebook page.

This is an excerpt from a larger piece, a compilation of interviews with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated folks in Texas, Illinois, and Florida. The full document demonstrates how prisons are extensions of the plantation and recreate the pre-1865 slave codes through unpaid labor, policing, isolation, abuse, and more. This particular excerpt highlights the way schooling operates in the context of the penal system as a tool of control, and how access to education is limited in order to control prisoners. In publishing this, we hope to draw connections between how the University and the Prison operate as two sides of the same coin determining who may access knowledge. We further hope this piece will draw students to adopt a broader perspective in their struggles, to draw connections with prisoner & abolitionist struggles. We won’t add much more analysis, since we think the writing speaks for itself.

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Incite, Conspire, Diversify: A Conversation with Filler PGH

Cutting Class
Counterinfo for the Ungovernable Generation

Over the next few days, we’ll be publishing pieces to highlight the work of some of the groups participating in the Cutting Class counterinfo network. We hope this will provide some clarity on where our crews are coming from and how that affects the way we have organized this project.

We also hope that these interview questions can provide a template for other autonomous groups to distill a collective understanding of their context and projects. If your crew finds these questions useful, write up a summary of your conversations and send them our way as a form of introduction! Cutting Class can be your platform, and we’d love to publish an interview with your crew and start collaborating—not just around CC but also with any other projects that these introductions might incite!

Today’s featured crew is the Filler collective from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Announcing the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking’s Anarchist Summer School, Year 2

Anonymous submission originally posted to It’s Going Down

The following is a call to take part in the second annual and week long, Institute for Advanced Troublemaking summer school, happening in July, in Worcester, MA.

The second annual Institute for Advanced Troublemaking (IAT), a weeklong anarchist theory and action summer school for adults of all ages, kicks off July 21 to 29, 2018, in Worcester, MA.

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