MILITANT EDUCATION WITHIN INTERNATIONALIST STRUGGLES
★★★
A POLITICAL STUDY SERIES
Organized across 5 sessions, this study group engages with historical and current case studies of internationalist struggles and their varying relationships to militant education as a strategy for waging revolution. Together we aim to develop an understanding of a wide range of tactics for studying and educating militantly, and to explore how young people and their adult comrades can practically apply these lessons to their own organizing as insurgent youth/workers.
SESSION 1: Mass Literacy and Militant Pedagogy
Saturday, January 16th, 10 am - 11:30am PST
This session will explore how building mass literacy and the organized commitment to revolutionary text remains a necessary tactic of militant education, past and present. We will also learn about and attempt to define the fundamental characteristics and goals of militant education. Proposed collaborators include the Thomas Sankara Centre (Burkina Faso). Tentative study materials include readings on the Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade (Nicaragua).
SESSION 2: Youth Struggle as Class Struggle
Saturday, January 30th, 10 am - 11:30am PST
This session will explore the relationship between youth militancy and the building of working class power. We will be drawing from contemporary and historical case studies of young people's attempts to organize in solidarity and alongside workers, taking their struggles out of the classroom and into the streets. Proposed collaborators include the Southern Youth Solidarity Network (United States). Tentative study materials include readings on the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College (Mexico).
SESSION 3: Building Militant Consciousness Against Counter Insurgency
Saturday, February 13th, 10 am - 11:30am PST
This session will explore the concept of "psychic intrusions"– or the war empire wages on our minds/consciousness by regulating our emotions, feelings, and sense of self– and how militant education might take shape in the form of "psychic militancy." We'll investigate what it might mean to 'raise consciousness,' explore how the colonial state weaponizes affect towards psychological warfare, and identify how psychic intrusions both surface in and shape our struggles/everyday lives. Proposed collaborators include Lara Sheehi, author of From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. Tentative study materials include readings by Frantz Fanon and Jonathan Jackson.
SESSION 4: Land as Our Comrade, Land as Our Teacher
Saturday, February 27th, 10 am - 11:30am PST
This session will explore the fundamental relationship between land and militant education. Drawing from current and historical examples of international land defense struggles, we will investigate how our caring defense of (and with) the land is a militant education strategy which both teaches us about revolution and makes revolution possible. Proposed collaborators include Gaza and West Bank-based beekeepers and their students (Palestine). Tentative study materials include firsthand report-back materials from an LA Tenants Union youth organizer who traveled to Brazil to study the agrarian reform and collective education models of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST).
SESSION 5: Insurgent Strategies of Youth In Revolt
Saturday, March 13th, 10 am -11:30am PST
This session will explore a wide range of direct action strategies taken up by insurgent youth across varied geographical and political contexts. From encampments, protests, to armed struggle, we will investigate the successes and failures of youth-led uprisings and interrogate how these tactics both advance and are advanced by militant education. Proposed collaborators include youth political prisoner Jakhi Isaiah and/or members of the Jakhi Solidarity Committee (United States) and Juventudes Revolucionarias-16 (Panama). Tentative study materials include Amilcar Cabral's writings on the PAIGC, or The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Guinea-Bissau).
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