an anarchist class?!?!?

Yep... I had a chat to a feminist lecturer at my uni recently and even she was saying how shit it was that there is fuck all class analysis discussed anymore. She was saying how in the 70's in Australia you couldn't get a job in a university unless you were a marxist. Now you can't get a job unless you are a post-modernist. It's frustrating as hell that the the sum total of critical analysis has been reduced to the 'isms'. Most uni's now are so far in cahoots with big corporations anyway which ties their hands with regard to subjects and content. My uni has dropped it's Arts and Social Sciences courses completely and with a motto of "university for the real world" it doesn't take much to work out their priorities. They're always bragging about new sponsorships by companies like BP etc. Bastards. Even when political ideologies are discussed within lectures, anarchism is reduced to the most basic individualist defination and the lecturers are often forceful in their reluctance to consider presenting anarchism in any other way when approached. Cocks! Anyway...
all the best.
gregg.

MJ: I also thought that.

Jabberman: About as useful as women's studies has been to the feminists I would say.

From what I can tell, women's studies has served to fortify feminism as accessible only to the privilaged, to water down feminism and to encourage lobbying as the major form of feminism activism. People who are in universities are there to learn how to be managers, bureaucrats, policy makers, politicians, academics and professionals so the feminism that comes out of the women's studies classes is limited by the boundaries imposed by people in those jobs. I think it is a major source of the "feminism is whatever you want it to be" line of thought that demands no fundamental challenge to one's internal patriarchy or one's oppressive role in the world while still allowing self-congratulatory pretensions of one's own feminist nature.

In relation to anarchism, there are too many goddamned anarchist intellectuals as it is, in relation to rest of the movement. If you want to promote anarchism please be strategic and do it somewhere else.

You might be interested in what one anarchist physics prof (also a wobbly) is doing at University of Ottawa: http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/

Possibly teaching anarchism with a grade at a university might be weird, but teaching it in it's coherent revolutionary form and historical context up to and Sincluding now/ future , would probably be beneficial or at least not hurt the movement
Students are people too after all,
they even tend to stir up trouble if they get an idea that demands it ,into their heads.

But having a class like that would be more beneficial out side the official university setting, where people from the community are encoraged to attend
(plus have lots of Q and A not to encorage participation). Exposing people to Ideas of change is always a plus.

I think women studies has done well by feminism to an extent, though it encorages the reformist to confront the reality that their are still problems, then when they try to come up with solutions, they tend to be reformist.
As for the rest who attend womens studies classes they may be inspired to to question, and possibly think about more fundemental changes to end systematic social and economic oppression.

it's better than not having them.

intelectuals aren't a bad thing, they just need to be respectful not condesending, Also they must put their money where their mouth is.

Hell a couple more bell hooks's chomsky's and zinn's chuchill's and alberts wouldn't hurt a bit.

I was actually just picking through Feminism is for Everybody the other day and she had a whole schpeil near he beginning along the lines of what I said (Not exactly mind), which is probably what prompted me to say it. I would quote for you but I have lent the book out... it was in the first two chapters though.

I got this gem from MySpace:

now i feel slightly proud of studying/working at QM

i actually got one lecture on anarchism for a political philosophy module a few years ago, but it was philosophical anarchism, not the political variety.

I took a class my last year at university called 'philosophy and revolution' which completely ignored Marxism and socialism as a broad category and focused exclusively on Anarchism. I was reading this shit anyway so I was fine with that and the prof even took my suggestions for reading material (Kropotkin and Bakunin, and Bookchin but no Proudhon)!

It was ok, I'll admit, and it was cool to get to share my knowledge about this stuff in a setting where everyone was interested in it (as opposed to my getting drunk and spouting off to random people at parties). I learned some stuff too...or at least got a deeper understanding of some of the most influential texts in the tradition.

[rant]

I had some serious hang-ups about the experience, however. The professor seemed more interested in the aesthetics of the experience in a revolutionary situation or society and put absolutely no focus on the sort of experience that would lead to mass revolutionary activity in the first place...he seemed put off by the idea that there is anything good about a mass, shared conciousness and instead focused on 'individuation'. (I've always seen the 'philosophy of revolution' as something more along the lines of, 'shit, we don't have any land yet we require it for our survival...we need to do something to get some land!) Not suprisingly, he is apparently a friend (or at least an aquaintance) of Hakim Bey and is more inclined toward individualist, even mystical perspectives on freedom than the contextual, social freedom of Kropotkin or Bakunin (which, to be fair, he included on my request even though he wouldn't engage me on them to my satisfaction)...we actually started the class with, get this, Max Stirner...which pissed me off.

The strongest memory I have is when I was pointing out that Bakunin not only assumed that labor would be compulsory for all who could work but that there would be formal and inform mechanisms for punishing shirkers ranging from ostracism to the denial of democratic rights...something the professor wouldn't even discuss!!!

Some of my friends are still in school and I checked their catalog for the coming semester and apparently there's a feminist studies/environmental studies class called--get this--'Eco-Feminists and Queer Greens'! No class on socialism, perhaps the largest and most influential mass movement in human history, but there's certainly a class on a handful of insignificant, marginalized tree-huggers who never changed anything. Fantastic!

On another line of bitching, over the past couple months I've met a number of young women who are the daughters of latin american elites studying in the US...they love their social science/feminist studies courses because the professors automatically value their input to a greater degree than other students because of their 'oppression'...apparently class oppression isn't important anymore and there's an impending queer/transexual revolution to overthrow the working-class meat-eating hordes who oppress this new, true revolutionary subject. One of the women even told me she pretends to be bisexual in class and flirts with the professor (a lesbian) in order to improve her grade.

The academy is a crock of shit.

[/rant]