Reading List

Situationist International:

On the Poverty of Student Life

Roger Gregoire and Fredy Perlman, “Worker-Student Action Committees, Paris May ’68”

Zines:

Beyond Zombie Politics

Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation

University Occupations: France, Greece, NYC

The New School Occupation

Four Theses on the Invisible University

Communique from an Absent Future

Books:

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

 

See also http://weareallfriends-neverbealoneagain.blogspot.com/ for an excellent reading group curriculum

2 Responses to Reading List

  1. A. Lacis says:

    The history of communist engagement with US labor unions written by Judith Stepan-Norris, now the chair of UCI’s Academic Senate, makes excellent, even inspiring, and now ironic reading:

    “Communists and their radical allies in the CIO won responsibility and trust in America’s industrial unions . . . by an insurgent political strategy . . . organizing the unorganized for years before the CIO’s birth, leading workers’ ‘secessions from below’ out of the AFL and into the CIO once it was under way, organizing workers wherever they could and on their own rather than under the tutelage of a CIO organizing committee, and forging coalitions with other cadres of organizers and uniting their forces through amalgamation.

    “These same insurgent practices . . . by producing political variety and organizational diversity, also tended to vitalize the union’s inner life . . . the Communist-led international unions in each of these categories were more likely than their rivals to be highly democratic and far less likely to be oligarchic.

    “For Communists brought with them into the new unions their own radical, homegrown ideas of ‘rank and file power’ . . . which committed them to constitutional forms that limited the concentration of executive power and guaranteed freedom of political association. Their transcendent conception of the mission of unionism and a stubborn willingness to *confront all sorts of public issues, other than the matters supposed to be negotiable* with employers through collective bargaining, continually regenerated controversy . . . and nourished a vibrant democratic political life in the Communist-led unions . . . . This unifying class capacity proved to be *a far more effective counterforce to capital’s power than businesslike conduct and bureaucratically imposed directives and discipline.*”

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