Coping with ignorance

To be honest, fuck 'em. Use it as an opportunity to develop your own arguments, but don't worry about persuading them. And don't feel that you have to defend an entire movement and tradition with all its contradictions and fallings out just because you're the only anarchist in the class.

It's a generalisation, but once people have got to the point when they're arguing politics in a classroom, their minds are made up and the process of university education is going to do everything it can to keep those minds closed. They'll either arrive at a critique themselves, independantly of what's happening in the class room, or they won't - it's not your job to persuade them.

It's just not worth putting any energy into, save it for the class war!

Welcome to the boards. I went to the uni, and our politics course was full of knobs going on and on about meritocracy, how both capitalism achieves the best in collective and individual freedom and strange comments about black people.

I would try not to rant, but ask them if they have acknowledged the ideas of the globalisation movement at all? If they havent how can they come they have formed opinoins on the matter, if they have, slate them for not having a clue.

Good post Laz

The thing is though, as incorrect or irrelevant as comments such as:

maybe, attitudes like these are and will continue to be a major stumbling block in "recruiting" people into revolutionary activity. I mean it's not as simple as telling everyone how wrong they are and how you have all the answers. Maybe it's not your fellow students who were misguided, but the anti-globalisation "movement" itself.

Er, yeah but while that may be an objective for a demonstration, it doesn't actually achieve or change anything. That's not an objective for a social movement (like winning a 35 hour week, stopping the war or stopping the pfi of the underground might be, say)

what ever you say about summit protests, they sure warm your heart, especially when spiced up with a nice sea of red and black flags. This pic from the ongoing summit protests in Argentina:

from bbc:

golly, all those pretty flags!

maybe the problem is that these sort of ideas seem a little removed from reality when you're discussing them in a classroom. i'm also doing english in college, and i kinda feel that student politics are irrelevant. this is not because the decisions don't impact upon us; they clearly do, it's because they are made by union hacks, well removed from our everyday student lives. the same can be said for the summit style protest, it doesn't look at the very real exploitation that happens in our everyday lives. It seems strange that we would ever think that we have to travel to fight capitalism...

maybe if you're interested in trying to change student apathy you should look at the way in which students are oppressed in their everyday lives. if your college is anything like mine, sexism is a big issue, and you could try to argue on that topic, rather than simply saying that an anarchist society would be far nicer. another issue is obviously fees, rent etc. to be honest, i think that using summit protests as an example really does anarchism a disfavour. The protests were symbolic, and had their uses in terms of bringing issues to the fore, but if make poverty history shows us anything its that anti-globalisation is not radical by definition.

I kind of agree, in my experience that sort of reaction always seem to be a response to what is percieved (rightly or wrongly) as a negative moralistic stand i.e. I'm really moral cos I don't do x,y,z - is it actually unreasonable for someone to presume that someone who they think sees the world like that will on some level infer the immorality of people who do do x,y,z?

students today. quite extraordinary. its interesting to compare things now (i'm a mature student doing a politics course) and when i was first at college in the early 80's - miner's strike n all that. in some respects things weren't that different (still lots of apathy, altho then dressed up in new romantic clothing) - but there were people interested in socialist (for want of a better word) ideas than now. the vocal students in my classes are tories (as in signed up members) or proponents of free market capitalism. this is good cos it challenges my shaky 'lefty' ideas, but its a bit of a culture shock.

you are clearly a man/woman out of time.

now in my day, it used to be all fields round here...

i have a comrade from thessaloniki who's doing her final year in dentistry ( that's right, a real, live greek, and she's amazing!) the students in her class drive her mad cos apparently they're all into being rich and stuff.

my sociology courses are full of more or less typical sociology students, 'hmm isn't it terrible, all these bad things happening in the world' but they're about as radical as a teacup. there's a fair few anarchos among the foreign students and a load of people who are pretty close. sociology is a bollox subject, more about writing pointless articles in journals then developing any form of critical thought. i think people are afraid of saying 'capitalism'. in fact, academia is bloody pointless, self important bullshit. burn it to the ground i say.

(don't get a lot of opportunity to talk politics in my heidegger course )

I was in tech in the late eighties and reckon, that while you have a point, that a lot of the interest in socialism congealed around a hatred of Thatcher - when she went a lot of the focus dissipated because a lot of folk just saw getting rid of her as the priority, or even only point of their activism. I've witnessed the drudge of annual protests against cutting the dole and housing benefit for students, against fees, for a living grant... and all that seems to change is that fewer and fewer students turn out to indulge in chants of "insert current UK PM Out, Out, Out" and leave it up to the hacks in the NUS/USI to sort it by writing to MPs and beefing up their Cv's. Student 'politics' truely is in a sorry state.

But while I reckon more tories a open about it these days I do find it strange that as more working class people get into universities that some form of interest in 'socialism' isn't developing.

Probably because interest in socialism isn't very high among the working class these days. And weren't the Oxbridge Communist Parties always pretty big?