Students

When addressing the important question of scale--"how big or broad do we really need to be in order to start calling some shots in a meaningful way"--some of us on the left are fond of approvingly paraphrasing Lenin's idea that "politics is millions." ["Politics begin where millions of men and women are; where there are not thousands, but millions."]

This is a truism that few would contest, but it's also a good reminder of the real mammoth task at hand. Before we can realize the "another world" that so many will be imagining in Detroit next week, we have to think about what it will take to get there. When I think about this, I envision millions of people who identify with social movements and are directly engaged by them. We would be able to recognize this phenomenon in the conversations of strangers at a bar, the lyrics of pop songs, a politicization of sports, and so on. These people are from all walks of life and carry eclectic, diverse, and often contradictory political positions. The left is there, but only as a midwife to the struggle--leading by example and careful not to undermine its influence by mandating political orthodoxy on an array of points for every campaign or by exhibiting insensitivity to cultural and religious traditions that may have reactionary elements about them (as well as radical potential, in some cases).

It's official. Georgia has now joined the many other states experiencing an upsurge of student activism against budget cuts threatening the very nature of public higher education. On March 15, over 500 students from across the state rallied at the Capitol to demand that profound cuts, including an up to 50% fee hike and up to 4,000 layoffs of campus workers, be utterly abandoned and that new taxes be instituted to fund the public sector. From Dalton and Carrolton, to Savannah and Valdosta, students pledged to start branches of an emerging grassroots coalition, "Georgia Students for Public Higher Education" (http://www.gsphe.tk). The rally culminated with an electric mass meeting, where hundreds of students remained to discuss their ideas for "next steps" by bullhorn, making it clear that the fight was only beginning...

Photo courtesy of Josh D Weiss Photography

(For more photos, check out Caitie's slideshow here.)

I’m writing this while recovering from a good, long, and successful day on the picket lines at UC Santa Cruz, where, over the course of the day, more than a thousand students, workers, and teachers

The Movement to End Israeli Apartheid-Georgia (MEIA-G) kicked off the first day of Israeli Apartheid Week on Monday by packing a l

When occupations, strikes, and major protests are in progress, the best way to follow them from afar is often through Twitter or Facebook. If you're on twitter, you can follow the following lists:

ca-education-struggle list - maintained by a (G)SOC supporter

cacrisis list, maintained by Angus Johnston, a student movement historian who also writes the studentactivism.net blog

Twitter hashtags are also a useful tool for following what's going on in the movement moment-by-moment. If you're logged into Twitter you can click on this search and save it for yourself. If you've been hiding so far under a rock that you don't have a Twitter account, here's a collection of hashtag searches in a very readable format. (You will have to refresh periodically.)

For daily writeups, movement strategy, and analysis, it's time to move past Twitter into the wilds of the blogosphere.

Below is a piece written for the emerging movement against fee hikes and budget cuts at Georgia State University in Atlanta. This version has been modified for the Solidarity webzine.

In California today, we are facing an onslaught of austerity capitalism in the form of privatization / private accumulation, funding cuts, and neoliberal prioritization that effects public goods in

I was happy to see the new front page on global warming.

This month, two Korean men under heat from the law have made the news by taking their own lives, against a backdrop of social unease and anti-government feeling.