universities

These universities spend a lot of money, staff, and actions to say that they are fighting the pandemic. But the treatment displayed for the world is not applied to workers – they need to struggle and organize themselves.

In 2010 the announcement by the Coalition government that university tuition fees would be tripled sparked a wave of student protest. Remaining largely within the confines of the campus, the movement exhausted itself and failed to spread to other sectors. Nine years later, what’s left?

Between 1963 and 1965, Noam Chomsky worked as a consultant on an Air Force project to establish English as an “operational language for command and control.”[1] According to one of his students, who also worked on this project, the military justification for funding this work was “that in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program.”[2]

An account of the “Strasbourg Scandal” of 1966—widely recognized as a precursor to the greater scandal of May 1968—its background, its protagonists, the takeover of the local student union and the origins of the pamphlet, “The Poverty of Student Life…”, the role played by the members of the Situationist International in the affair, particularly Debord and Mustapha Khayati, the humiliating exclusion of the “Garnaultins” in January 1967, and the SI’s subsequent descent into an even more rigid and unapproachable sectarian existence until its dissolution in 1972.