Re: <nettime> Debt Campaign Launch

[navva@earthlink.net]

two tiny remarks in the train of Brian's wonderful, clearly outlined  
explanation of the reasons to support the debt campaign.
Suspension of acquiescence in unjust, indeed, unworkable, rules must  
be part of any movement for change, and the present, mulitifaceted  
movement for change seems likely to be a great one. Every day the  
BBC's (pro) business, fully neoliberal programming is daily,  
frantically, exploring the way to save the global economy from the  
world wide crisis, currently centered in the eurozone but with  
repercussions everywhere. Fiscalization has proved a disastrous move,  
and if we just sit there—if students just sit there—it will be the  
bankers, with their bought politicians, who control the shape of the  
future, the students' future. If the nascent professional-managerial  
class, already toying with emulating Bartleby, is thinking once again  
of  "put[ting] your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels" à la  
the student movement of the 1960s, we should recall that it was a  
protest against the university as a machine for the production of  
knowledge workers that was at the heart of that speech and that  
movement:
> if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of  
> Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell  
> you something -- the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the  
> raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to  
> be --  have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any  
> product! Don't mean -- Don't mean to end up being bought by some  
> clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry,  
> be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!
 only now, you have to pay and pay and pay just to get in the door,  
which as the fabulous Morlock Eloi, whoever that be in real life,  
tells us is Hotel California, or the roach motel for the middle class.
Nothing could strike me as more bizarre than to be looking once again  
back to the student movement of the 1960s, and to St. Savio, for a  
reminder that history is indeed a process in the process of  
unfolding. :-)
but as the Apple dictionary reminds us,

college campuses are often the bellwether of change.

Not in everything, but perhaps in regard to questions of debt refusal  
in an 'advanced' postindustrial economy.
finally, Sascha, there is no point worrying what Fox and friends will  
make of this move; they will make whatever they like of whatever they  
don't like ; witness the charges of rape! pillage! pissing and  
shitting! stinkiness! laziness!
Those, on the other hand, who are capable of mentation might be  
persuaded by the wise words of debt-refusing students and their  
supporters.
-------


finally I would like to ask Brian what the hell you mean by this:

>  to a system that will make them "pay out" until they are just a  
> withered husk of a meaningless life.
which withered husks are those?

martha r



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