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(Submitter’s note: translated from France Blue, typical business press in France, via anti-authoritarian website https://sansnom.noblogs.org/archives/5776 )

The Paul Langevin school of Alès victim of an act of vandalism
France Bleu, 25 March 2021 (extract)

The staff of the Paul Langevin school in Alès discovered the vandalised building this Thursday morning. Its windows were broken in the night. No intrusion took place into the building, or theft. The school had to be partially closed: only about ten pupils are welcomed today, those whose parents could not provide guarantee for them (“assurer la gaurde”)

About 15 double-glazed windows were broken by stones of at least two kilos thrown at the back of the building. As a first step, entrances will be blocked for a while to order and replace equipment. The main difficulty is to collect all the glass debris that has dispersed everywhere for the safety of children. (…) The town hall has registered its complaints and estimates the damage to be at least 5,000 euros.

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(Submitter’s note: ” from https://darknights.noblogs.org/post/2022/12/02/vitry-sur-seine-france-tires-slashed-for-spie-and-a-private-security-firm-in-solidarity-with-rioters-of-adolphe-cherieux-high-school/ . If you have more information about the rioters at Adolphe Cherioux, send it to the site”)

In mid-November, a car belonging to the Spie company (among others a prison builder) and a car belonging to a security installation company had their tires flattened.

Action in solidarity with rioters from Adolphe Chérioux High School, in Vitry-sur-Seine [town near Paris; Ed], among whom some have ended up in jail and others will go to trial in February. Last week, the students blocked their high school, some clashed with the police and destroyed elements of street furniture (cameras, etc.). This mobilization was partly against the Parcoursup post-high school selection system.

What possible contacts between anarchists and minors in the struggle?

Down with the school, an institution of perpetration of the state, which has more to do with a prison than with “the freedom to learn.”

Solidarity also with anarchist prisoners.

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FUCK FIJI, FUCK MAX HELM

& FUCK THE ORGANIZERS WHO SILENCE SURVIVORS’ FURY

This is an open letter from survivors of sexual assault to the organizers & attendees of UNL’s recent protests. We wish to make one thing known: We are fucking angry about the co-optation, disempowerment, & outright defeat of the movement on this campus at the hands of activist clout chasers.

We want to act. Like us, thousands of people in this city are ready to do something. Yet, when we take to the streets, we find nothing but police: rapist cops who protect the brothers of FIJI & those cops’ opportunist “activist” cronies who pop up incessantly to stop people from displaying their collective strength. The endless, cowardly speeches calling for petitions & emails to university officials are a slap in the face to survivors.

IF IT WAS YOUR SIBLING, YOUR PARTNER, WOULD YOU BE CONTENT TO BEG FOR ACTION FROM THE IMPOTENT OLD MEN WHO RUN THIS INSTITUTION?

If you stood at the house of your rapist & had thousands of people ready to fight beside you, would you merely sit across the street & listen to speeches? No. You would do something.
Thousands have gathered at the house where people have been raped, & those crowds have been told to belittle themselves by politely asking the university to ban the frat & take down the letters. Why are we allowing ourselves to be robbed of our power? Instead of helping people act, the organizers – who no one elected – have stolen the show for themselves. While they call everyone else clout chasers & denounce people who try to do anything at all, they excruciatingly spell their names into the mic & tell us to find them on social media.

TO THESE SO-CALLED ORGANIZERS: YOU ARE THE ONLY CLOUT CHASERS WE SEE. STOP CONTROLLING THE CROWD & THE SURVIVORS WITHIN IT. WE SPEAK FOR OURSELVES.

WHAT WE WANT

• NO MORE PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZERS. This is not about activists or their organizations. Advertising social media accounts at protests is insulting.
• GATHER IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE WHERE RAPISTS CALL HOME & that symbolizes our oppression. Marches and assemblies on empty campus streets with police escorts do not make people in power uncomfortable or change anything.
• STOP PEACE POLICING. People express their pain many ways. Do not tell us how to express ours or delegitimize our actions. We have heard countless calls for petitions & emails – & they haven’t done shit.
• IF THE CROWD WANTS TO DO SOMETHING, STEP ASIDE & SHUT THE FUCK UP.
• STOP WORKING WITH THE COPS. Police protect rapists and rapists’ property. THEY DO NOT KEEP US SAFE. If the police are escorting your march, it means your march is not doing anything to challenge the structures that protect our rapists. FUCK THAT. We do not need PERMITS or PERMISSION to protest.
• SHUT OFF THE PA SYSTEM & let us organize ourselves. The crowd is not stupid. We can figure out how to change things without you telling us what to do.

THIS IS ABOUT SURVIVORS

It is not about organizers who bounce between protests gaining social media followers & institutional legitimacy. They need to step aside & let the people speak. At the very least, they need to stop pacifying this movement. People stop coming to protests because they want to do something, not sit on the Union steps & be commanded by opportunists. So, we ask these activists one last time: Get out of the way.

Sincerely,
Too Many Names to Count

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(Submitter’s note: ” From itsgoingdown at https://itsgoingdown.org/iowa-city-attack-frat-house/ “)

Report on recent riotous student mobilization against a frat well known for carrying out sexual assault in so-called Iowa City, Iowa.

Content Warning: Reports of sexual assault.

photo: @Ollie_XVX

According to an online petition that has now been signed almost 100K times: On the night of September 5th 2020, a freshman girl went to hang out with her friends at the University of Iowa Fiji house while she had no clue what they had in store for her. This freshman girl was, drugged, raped, videotaped, and photographed, and left her with no memory of what they had done to her. Jacob Meloan and Carson Steffen planned to rape this girl, along with many others and continue to get away with it. Not only did these 2 boys plan this and carry it out, but they sent the videos to their entire FIJI group chat where no one said a thing to stop it. All of their members saw what they did to this girl, and the FIJI members just told them to delete their proof. These boys are still allowed on campus, and even showed up in the same class as the girl that they raped. The Iowa City detectives have messages of them planning to do this to her, they have their DNA, they have the videos, and the photos. Almost 1 year of struggling to get this case to court, the Iowa City judge told her that this case will not be taken to court, despite more than enough evidence. Since the courts wont give her justice, we need to do it ourselves. University of Nebraska isn’t the only FIJI house doing this. Shut Fiji down nationwide.

This was the call to action that mobilized around 2,000 students and community members. Failed again and again by the courts, the cops, and the University, hundreds and hundreds of pissed off youth began to show up with signs, noisemakers, and megaphones outside of the Phi Gamma Delta (FIJI) frat, demanding that the rapists show themselves, and demanding that the University abolish FIJI.

Chants of “Cowards!” and “Fuck FIJI!” were heard from across town. Some people began to bang on windows, knock on the doors to the frat, and eventually, someone threw a rock through a window. This sparked an outright onslaught on the multi-million dollar frat house. Tags of “Rapists!” decorated the house, chairs and other furniture went through windows, glass and other debris littered the huge lawn.

Eventually it was revealed that the house was now empty, as the fraternity members had fled out the back and were now hiding in one of their satellite houses across town. The crowd of now over 2,000 people promptly made its way across the river and showed up in even more force at the frats other location. This house quickly saw the same redecoration as the other, as rocks, branches, and skateboards went through windows. Two cars parked behind the frat were smashed up and flipped completely upside down. The house was again revealed to be empty, as the frat members had fled once more. Upon this realization many protesters ran through the house, finding and destroying many FIJI labeled items. Beers were liberated from the houses fridges and coolers, and distributed among the protesters. Golf clubs taken from the house and used as instruments to break the house even more.

Responding to the scene were a timid Iowa City Police Department, who could do nothing but watch from two blocks away, attempting to scare the crowd away with sirens and lights. After the house was thoroughly ransacked for over an hour, many people began to leave the scene and return to their homes. Eventually the crowd thinned enough for the police to move in and secure the house. No arrests were made.

The events of August 31st, 2021 in Iowa City demonstrate that students and community alike are fed up with a widespread culture of sexual assault and misogyny among the Greek life scene. It also demonstrates that students will no longer accept being failed by the state and the University of Iowa in exercising accountability on these rich and influential frats. They will fight back on their own terms.

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(Submitter’s note: ” From itsgoingdown at https://itsgoingdown.org/iowa-city-attack-frat-house/ “)

Report on recent riotous student mobilization against a frat well known for carrying out sexual assault in so-called Iowa City, Iowa.

Content Warning: Reports of sexual assault.

photo: @Ollie_XVX

According to an online petition that has now been signed almost 100K times: On the night of September 5th 2020, a freshman girl went to hang out with her friends at the University of Iowa Fiji house while she had no clue what they had in store for her. This freshman girl was, drugged, raped, videotaped, and photographed, and left her with no memory of what they had done to her. Jacob Meloan and Carson Steffen planned to rape this girl, along with many others and continue to get away with it. Not only did these 2 boys plan this and carry it out, but they sent the videos to their entire FIJI group chat where no one said a thing to stop it. All of their members saw what they did to this girl, and the FIJI members just told them to delete their proof. These boys are still allowed on campus, and even showed up in the same class as the girl that they raped. The Iowa City detectives have messages of them planning to do this to her, they have their DNA, they have the videos, and the photos. Almost 1 year of struggling to get this case to court, the Iowa City judge told her that this case will not be taken to court, despite more than enough evidence. Since the courts wont give her justice, we need to do it ourselves. University of Nebraska isn’t the only FIJI house doing this. Shut Fiji down nationwide.

This was the call to action that mobilized around 2,000 students and community members. Failed again and again by the courts, the cops, and the University, hundreds and hundreds of pissed off youth began to show up with signs, noisemakers, and megaphones outside of the Phi Gamma Delta (FIJI) frat, demanding that the rapists show themselves, and demanding that the University abolish FIJI.

Chants of “Cowards!” and “Fuck FIJI!” were heard from across town. Some people began to bang on windows, knock on the doors to the frat, and eventually, someone threw a rock through a window. This sparked an outright onslaught on the multi-million dollar frat house. Tags of “Rapists!” decorated the house, chairs and other furniture went through windows, glass and other debris littered the huge lawn.

Eventually it was revealed that the house was now empty, as the fraternity members had fled out the back and were now hiding in one of their satellite houses across town. The crowd of now over 2,000 people promptly made its way across the river and showed up in even more force at the frats other location. This house quickly saw the same redecoration as the other, as rocks, branches, and skateboards went through windows. Two cars parked behind the frat were smashed up and flipped completely upside down. The house was again revealed to be empty, as the frat members had fled once more. Upon this realization many protesters ran through the house, finding and destroying many FIJI labeled items. Beers were liberated from the houses fridges and coolers, and distributed among the protesters. Golf clubs taken from the house and used as instruments to break the house even more.

Responding to the scene were a timid Iowa City Police Department, who could do nothing but watch from two blocks away, attempting to scare the crowd away with sirens and lights. After the house was thoroughly ransacked for over an hour, many people began to leave the scene and return to their homes. Eventually the crowd thinned enough for the police to move in and secure the house. No arrests were made.

The events of August 31st, 2021 in Iowa City demonstrate that students and community alike are fed up with a widespread culture of sexual assault and misogyny among the Greek life scene. It also demonstrates that students will no longer accept being failed by the state and the University of Iowa in exercising accountability on these rich and influential frats. They will fight back on their own terms.

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(Submitter’s note:” i hate the left, am an anarchist, but i let that slide because this text is fucking amazing”

From an anonymous group of students from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and originally posted to Irruptions, this piece looks at the recent round of riotous protests against frats on campus.)

The university is a deathtrap.

Around us lurk festering aristocrats called “fraternity brothers” who exercise “the right of the first night” on whomever they please, regardless of age. Above us loom the greedy casino bosses called “administrators,” who collect our last pennies and lie that they’ll “boost our chances” in a hollowed-out job market. And before us grandstand the influencer-activists who order us to sit down in front of the student union so that the police can better surveil our movements among the crowd. Does anyone here have our “best interest at heart?”

No.

No one but us.

That is, if we have the courage to learn to stand up for ourselves.

To this end, we think it wise for us students to perform a little self-criticism by looking at a parallel moment in history. The work of the Situationist International—a 60s French revolutionary group who many of today’s so-called leftists could stand to read up on—offers us a lens through which to understand our present wretched state. In their (literal) riot-inducing essay, “On the Poverty of Student Life,” the Situationists and members of Strasbourg University write the following: “[T]he reasons for which [the student] is despised are often false reasons … whereas the reasons for which he is justifiably despised from a revolutionary standpoint remain repressed and unavowed.” It is these revolutionary grounds on which we call ourselves out.

It is, of course, easy to criticize some portion of the student population on the basis of their erotic fixation with “the college experience,” as portrayed in so many filmic monuments to date rape; and, in truth, such students ought to be pitied, for they are embarking on a miserable, alcohol-fueled “last hurrah” before they affix the noose of work, family, and vacation around their necks. But let’s look, as well, at the graduate student and their young activist counterparts: See them taking principled stands for their Instagrams and resumés; see how the tall and gilded halls of power are framed neatly in the background; see how these students do not realize that they are standing before the mausoleums wherein rests all the power they will never wield, for they have buried it beneath Snapchat filters and applications to well-intentioned nonprofits (as if intentions were anything more than toilet paper for landlords, developers, and cops in Lincoln and around the world—but we digress).

To be fair, these student-activist may have been under the delusion that anything was actually accomplished by those climate “strikes,” where no one skipped anything without written permission and wrote their so-called leaders for permission to add their public comment to the dustbin (an antithetical waste of paper for those supposedly concerned about the climate). It is these modern “revolutionaries” who now demand we stand around and faint from dehydration while they tell us about all the big meetings with big people that they have on their calendars “thanks to you,” their supporters. And though they tell us how much they care about us and the movement, they are slow to use their positions of power to, for example, call on someone to go buy more water. But we expect nothing less. Despite their professed concern with the climate, these good citizens of social media have built little of note to help those presently dying in 110° humidity and -50° windchill.

Sooner or later, the professional activists among us will have to realize that the dooms of climate, police, and now sexual violence—about which they so vociferously prophesied through their PA systems—were more than matters of policy to be settled with political campaigns and vote tallies. There will be no running from this knowledge once the power grid fails (again and worse than last winter) and the Ogallala Aquifer finally dries to dust.

So, what is it that we students think we’re doing? There is no and never was any “accountability;” our “voices” were never heard as anything more than the impotent yapping of bourgeois lapdogs.

Once again, the Situationists already revealed that “all these struggles take place over the head of the student, in the heavenly realm of his masters. His own life is totally out of his control—life itself is totally beyond him,” which is why we presently order our Grubhub and say nothing in our own defense. Because what is there to live for in this world? Our careers in a terminal economy? Our elders’ ossified approval? Our budding substance abuse problems? And as we ponder these eternal conundrums, we leave no room in our well-educated brains to think of the workers who folded our Chipotle burritos at risk of their lives in this endless pandemic. We have no concept at all of the suffering we have in common with every restaurant and retail worker, every worker, every unemployed and houseless person, in every city, in every country—because we are “moving on up,” we are “getting out of this garbage-dump town,” and meanwhile the chancellor shits in our faces and calls it a diploma.

To the student activists and the broader Lincoln “left,” we pose this question: How have COVID-19, the George Floyd Rebellion, and now a rape on our campus passed us by as nothing more than a little hiccup in consumer culture, a little fuel for our performances of wokeness? How did the activists among us, who said all the right things and held all the right kinds of space, spend this entire year of upheaval building nothing in common with the communities most at risk from the capitalist diseases of poverty, rape, murder, and—well—literal disease?

Have we misunderstood our task? Have we closed our ears to what is demanded of us by the dead? Let us listen to their words now.

The late philosopher Walter Benjamin writes in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that: Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.

Every so-called leftist in Lincoln has utterly failed to “seize hold of [the] memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” What flashed up was the memory of “rebel-slaves” during “the periodic outbreaks of yellow fever in Haiti” discovering the “hidden partisan knowledge” surrounding those epidemics, as Idris Robinson writes in “How It Might Should Be Done.” It was the long history of coal miners and other workers waging war on bosses who would send them to die in factories and mines. Standing Bear (whose monuments are defaced by virtue of being so close to our campus) marching back to his homeland against Army orders. Omaha-born Malcolm X facing off against the FBI.

So, we ask: Will we students and other assorted “radicals” of Lincoln ever get over ourselves and make common cause with true revolutionaries, such as those who shut down the Havelock Burger King with their resignations? (These “lowly burger-flippers,” as some would have it, showed twice the intelligence and ten times the courage of the “politicized” university student.) Or the members of the August 19th anti-FIJI protest in which the crowd (a mixture of college students and working-class passersby) momentarily escaped the activists’ clutches and brought the fight directly to the pigs?

Perhaps, it is too hopeful to imagine nothing short of the immediate seizure of every fraternity in the country, in the world. Perhaps, it is unrealistic to propose that such reclaimed spaces could become spheres in which we organize new forms of life. Forms of life that challenge rape culture far more than following each other on social media ever will. Rebel-students in Iowa City showed little hesitancy in terms of taking drastic action against the property of FIJI rapists, but it seems we have work to do before we can measure up to our friends to the east.

We will settle, instead, for this—a plea to anyone who will listen: Go offline, and go underground. Talk quietly among yourselves about what can be done and do it. Find the others who are doing the same, within the university and without; make common cause and spread resistance. Spread subversive materials in your classrooms and meeting rooms. Become the Situationists’ model student and “calmly carry the germs of sedition to the highest level.” And, most of all, start living. We hope that, like us, you have had enough of dying.

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(Submiter’s note: This is an extract from George Orwell’s autobiographical essay “Such, Such Were the Joys”. I do not wish to be misinterpreted in submitting this: it is obviously a period that has passed at least in the uk (although not in the majority of the world), and a practice that has been replaced by methods in which the threat of physichal violence is more abstractified and insidious (which is possibly worse in that it is more effectively controlling – Brave New World instead of 1984).  It is also in my view pointless to focus too much on the specifics of repression, and even the individual tragedy before the greater human distortion. However, as a guide to the formation of the institutions – often literally the same buildings – to which we are sent to daily, as well as being a guide to the monumentalisation of authority enforcers by the child and hidden nature of the stuff planted in our brains in school, it works pretty well. It’s also just very nicely written.”)

I cannot remember whether it was that very night that I wetted my bed again, but at any rate I did wet it again
quite soon. Oh, the despair, the feeling of cruel injustice, after all my
prayers and resolutions, at once again waking between the clammy sheets!
There was no chance of hiding what I had done. The grim statuesque
matron, Daphne by name, arrived in the dormitory specially to inspect my
bed. She pulled back the clothes, then drew herself up, and the dreaded
words seemed to come rolling out of her like a peal of thunder:

‘REPORT YOURSELF to the headmaster after breakfast!’

I do not know how many times I heard that phrase during my early years at
Crossgates. It was only very rarely that it did not mean a beating. The
words always had a portentous sound in my ears, like muffled drums or the
words of the death sentence.

When I arrived to report myself, Bingo was doing something or other at
the long shiny table in the ante-room to the study. Her uneasy eyes
searched me as I went past. In the study Mr. Simpson, nicknamed Sim, was
waiting. Sim was a round-shouldered curiously oafish-looking man, not
large but shambling in gait, with a chubby face which was like that of an
overgrown baby, and which was capable of good humor. He knew, of course,
why I had been sent to him, and had already taken a bone-handled riding
crop out of the cupboard, but it was part of the punishment of reporting
yourself that you had to proclaim your offense with your own lips. When I
had said my say, he read me a short but pompous lecture, then seized me
by the scruff of the neck, twisted me over and began beating me with the
riding crop. He had a habit of continuing his lecture while he flogged
you, and I remember the words ‘you dirty little boy’ keeping time with
the blows. The beating did not hurt (perhaps as it was the first time, he
was not hitting me very hard), and I walked out feeling very much better.
The fact that the beating had not hurt was a sort of victory and
partially wiped out the shame of the bed-wetting. I was even incautious
enough to wear a grin on my face. Some small boys were hanging about in
the passage outside the door of the ante-room.

‘D’you get the cane?’

‘It didn’t hurt,’ I said proudly.

Bingo had heard everything. Instantly her voice came screaming after me:

‘Come here! Come here this instant! What was that you said?’

‘I said it didn’t hurt,’ I faltered out.

‘How dare you say a thing like that? Do you think that is a proper thing
to say? Go in and REPORT YOURSELF AGAIN!’

This time Sim laid on in real earnest. He continued for a length of time
that frightened and astonished me–about five minutes, it seemed–
ending up by breaking the riding crop. The bone handle went flying across
the room.

‘Look what you’ve made me do!’ he said furiously, holding up the broken
crop.

I had fallen into a chair, weakly sniveling. I remember that this was the
only time throughout my boyhood when a beating actually reduced me to
tears, and curiously enough I was not even now crying because of the
pain. The second beating had not hurt very much either. Fright and shame
seemed to have anesthetized me. I was crying partly because I felt that
this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also
because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to
convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked
up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the
rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.

I knew that bed-wetting was (a) wicked and (b) outside my control. The
second fact I was personally aware of, and the first I did not question.
It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing that you
committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to
avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be
something that happened to you. I do not want to claim that this idea
flashed into my mind as a complete novelty at this very moment, under the
blows of Sim’s cane: I must have had glimpses of it even before I left
home, for my early childhood had not been altogether happy. But at any
rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a
world where it was not possible for me to be good. And the double beating
was a turning-point, for it brought home to me for the first time the
harshness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more
terrible, and I was more wicked, than I had imagined. At any rate, as I
sat on the edge of a chair in Sim’s study, with not even the
self-possession to stand up while he stormed at me, I had a conviction of
sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt
before.

…Here are two things which in a
sense I remembered, but which did not strike me as strange or interesting
until quite recently. One is that the second beating seemed to me a just
and reasonable punishment. To get one beating, and then to get another
and far fiercer one on top of it, for being so unwise as to show that the
first had not hurt–that was quite natural. The gods are jealous, and
when you have good fortune you should conceal it. The other is that I
accepted the broken riding crop as my own crime. I can still recall my
feeling as I saw the handle lying on the carpet–the feeling of having
done an ill-bred clumsy thing, and ruined an expensive object. I had
broken it: so Sim told me, and so I believed. This acceptance of guilt
lay unnoticed in my memory for twenty or thirty years.

The question is not whether boys are still buckled into Eton collars on
Sunday, or told that babies are dug up under gooseberry bushes. That kind
of thing is at an end, admittedly. The real question is whether it is
still normal for a school child to live for years amid irrational terrors
and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one is up against the very great
difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks. A child which
appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it
cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien under-water world
which we can only penetrate by memory or divination. Our chief clue is
the fact that we were once children ourselves, and many people appear to
forget the atmosphere of their own childhood almost entirely. Think for
instance of the unnecessary torments that people will inflict by sending
a child back to school with clothes of the wrong pattern, and refusing to
see that this matters! Over things of this kind a child will sometimes
utter a protest, but a great deal of the time its attitude is one of
simple concealment. Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to
be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. Even the affection
that one feels for a child, the desire to protect and cherish it, is a
cause of misunderstanding. One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply
than one can love another adult, but is rash to assume that the child
feels any love in return. Looking back on my own childhood, after the
infant years were over, I do not believe that I ever felt love for any
mature person, except my mother, and even her I did not trust, in the
sense that shyness made me conceal most of my real feelings from her.
Love, the spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love, was something I could
only feel for people who were young. Towards people who were old–and
remember that ‘old’ to a child means over thirty, or even over
twenty-five–I could feel reverence, respect, admiration or compunction,
but I seemed cut off from them by a veil of fear and shyness mixed up
with physical distaste. People are too ready to forget the child’s
physical shrinking from the adult

…But it would be very difficult for me to see with
the eyes of any other child, except by an effort of the imagination which
might lead me completely astray. The child and the adult live in
different worlds. If that is so, we cannot be certain that school, at any
rate boarding school, is not still for many children as dreadful an
experience as it used to be. Take away God, Latin, the cane, class
distinctions and sexual taboos, and the fear, the hatred, the snobbery
and the misunderstanding might still all be there. It will have been seen
that my own main trouble was an utter lack of any sense of proportion or
probability. This led me to accept outrages and believe absurdities, and
to suffer torments over things which were in fact of no importance. It is
not enough to say that I was ‘silly’ and ‘ought to have known better.’
Look back into your own childhood and think of the nonsense you used to
believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer. Of course my
own case had its individual variations, but essentially it was that of
countless other boys. The weakness of the child is that it starts with a
blank sheet. It neither understands nor questions the society in which it
lives, and because of its credulity other people can work upon it,
infecting it with the sense of inferiority and the dread of offending
against mysterious, terrible laws…

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The following is a confrontation with the Greek riot squad on the anniversary of the Polytechnic university riots on the 17th November, 1973. This university uprising was a major event in the downfall of the fascist military junta ruling the country, and was condemned by the Greek left, which expelled party members involved, as well as by liberals, of which several are bitterly remembered by witnesses as having broken the molotov cocktails to be used by the insurrectionists. After this, no police officer was allowed entrance to a Greek university until 2019, when a specially created police force was created to expel the areas of the university which had been taken over by the students. Various incumbents of the state suffered greatly from the ability of anarchists, anti-facists and anti-authoritarians to strike from these universities then disappear back into them, and the provision of space to people that not defined by commercial censorship or fear of raids enabled the provision of an unusually honest and intense characteristic of these social phenomena in this territory.

It is taken from the Greek counter-information website alerta.gr, and was filmed around the Aristotelis Polytechnic of the northern city of Thessaloniki.

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The entrepreneurial university and the new “enclosures” around it

“Academic asylum, for us, has no place in the Greek public university, in the way it is applied today. The same rules that apply to every public space in the country, will also apply to the public university. The authorities will be able to intervene on their own initiative for any criminal act that takes place at the university. This is an idea we want to discuss. We are considering introducing an entry check system in the academic institutions. I am not aware of any university abroad that does not have access control“.

N. Kerameus. Minister of Education and Religious Affairs, 10th July 2019 on SKAI TV.

The state, recognizing – just like we do – the universities as potential centres of struggle against the state’s management of the pandemic, took advantage of the panic that it itself had cultivated around the pandemic, and shut the institutions down at the first opportunity, imposing remote learning as early as last March and remote examinations in the exam period of the spring semester.

The state management of the terms of operation of the universities has been totally aggressive towards our class if we consider that it completely ceased their function as reappropriated public spaces and fields of struggle, where assemblies, events and migrant squats were housed, while at the same time, every effort was made to prevent the suspension of any business activity that is carried out thanks to the unpaid labour of students or the poorly paid labour of doctoral students and research staff.

Remote learning, which has been generally implemented since March and continues to this day, is a clear weapon for further individualization of students, forcing hem to stay at home, isolated.

The disciplinary-repressive dimension of remote learning is made clear by the fact that while the government had relaxed its measures from May all the way up to 6/11/2020, universities never stopped being in lock-down throughout this period. It is also indicative that during the spring lockdown period not even a week had passed since the closure of the universities that the occupation of the “Ghini” building [in the National Technical University of Athens, a space that had been a centre of struggle for years and where immigrants lived] was evacuated.

The evacuation of the Ghini building was followed by a new sequence of repressive actions, such as the attempt to evacuate the student dormitories and the aggressive eviction of all students living there, as well as the sabotage of the “espiv” server, which is housed in Panteion University. Let us note here that it was real-world, physical, in-person activism that eventually managed to repel these aggressive actions of the government. Only temporarily, of course, since with the enforcement of the new lockdown, the expulsion of students from student halls is being attempted again, as we have learnt from complaints made by students in Komotini (Northern Greece), who are even asked to collect all of their belongings with their departure.

The lack of this physical, in-person activism, the fact that university premises have been rendered lifeless and empty of students as a result of intensified student labour and the political management of the pandemic by the state and in particular the implementation of remote learning, the escalation of repressive violence during the second phase of the biopolitics of confinement, the abolition of academic asylum and the overall entrepreneurialization of the university was what provided the possibility for the simultaneous invasion of hundreds of cops of all kinds (DELTA, OPKE, EKAM units) to evacuate both the historical Polytechnic school in the city centre and the students’ occupation of the Rector’s Office of the National Technical University of Athens, on 13/11/2020.

This attack on the gathering of workers and students at the Polytechnic School and the occupation of the NTUA Rector’s Office in the Polytechnic Campus resulted in the arrest of a total of 92 activists, who opposed the NTUA lockout and kept the university open in the middle of a general lockdown, in order to demand that the three-day celebrations and demonstration of the 17th November (landmark day for the revolt against the Greek dictatorship in 1973) should be conducted as normal

Besides the e-learning cameras we have in our homes, they tried to introduce cameras in the classrooms and now cameras in the universities. And not only that. At the recent meeting of the rectors of the universities with the Prime Minister and the Minister of Education, the government proposed to introduce barriers and cameras at the entrances of the faculties; to establish a special police unit for their protection; as well as the toughening of the penalties imposed on students for offences committed in spaces of the “university community”.

The rectors, playing the role of the “good cop”, refused the toughening of the penalties, claiming that the stated that they agree with the establishment of a special already strict legal framework is sufficient, but they police unit, as long as it answers to the university administration and not the Ministry of Citizen Protection. Nevertheless, the government seems to prioritize the policing of the university in very specific terms. That is why, only a few days after the decision of the rectors, the Minister of Education N. Kerameus announced the recruitment of 1,500 special guards by the Ministry of Citizen Protection. The “university protection unit”, as it will be called, will have its headquarters within university premises, will be under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Citizen Protection and will be assigned to (certain) higher education institutions. Details on the exact characteristics of this unit are not yet known.

A more recent development in the effects of policing and imposing enclosures in the university is the decision of the Rector’s council of the University of Athens to implement entry checks and keep records of those who enter the dormitories of the institution, supposedly for the “health protection” of the students who live there. It is no coincidence, of course, that student dormitories have in recent months become the main space where political ac- tivism and assemblies (not just of students) are housed.

With the enclosing of the universities with cops, security guards and entrance barriers and the complete control of their interior, an attempt is made to strip the function of the universities from the counterweight of any applied proletarian critique so that they are nothing more than factories producing an important commodity, specialized labour power. The latter consists of structured skills and knowledge exploit- able by capital within the alienating productive-labour process, be it paid or unpaid.

So we understand very well what the police and the cam- eras in the universities are there to protect, using as a pre- text the so-called “hooligan-terrorists”, as they have used immigrant peddlers and drug addicts in the past. The cops and the cameras protect the attempted, ever in- creasing entrepreneurialization of university func- tions, which goes hand in hand with the (pre-emptive) suppression of any prospect of antagonistic activity within them.In other words, they try to preserve the unhampered running of universities as enterprises that profit from the exploitation of unpaid and paid student work (from the unpaid undergraduate preparation of our labour power and unpaid internships up to poorly paid research work).

Research programs –in addition to having as their main function the exploitation of students’ labour – are organised collaborations with the private business sector, the army and the police. NTUA (National Technical University of Athens) is known for its research in relation to border protection, repression, military equipment (see Ranger, Andromeda, Ingenious,Prevision research programs), but it is also known for its important collaboration with other international universities as well as with the largest companies in Greece. To give just one example, consider the research on the development of wind farms or the exploitation of energy reserves in natural gas and hydrocarbons. The reason we choose to cite this particular example, among many others – the NTUA alone runs more than 1,500 research projects – is that the government rushed, in the midst of a lockdown, the passing of a law that, among other things, allows hydrocarbon mining in areas protected under the “Natura 2000” network, while at the same time, it was keeping the universities closed to the students so that the corresponding research might not be challenged or hindered.

Besides research, which comprises the most important part of the entrepreneurial activity in the universities, the latter is also highlighted by a series of subcontractors that operate in the universities (see subcontracting of the can- teens, restaurants and security), but also by the introduction of the industry of postgraduate courses with tuition fees and international masters or undergraduate programs. And let us not forget: the “Europeanization” and the policing of the universities was one of the main stated goals of the (currently ruling) New Democracy party, before it even came to power. Moreover, all of what is heralded now, has been a long-standing goal and pursuit of all previous governments – though perhaps not in the same rough and hasty way. At the present time, the government is cunningly reviving the “theory of the two extremes”, in the aftermath of the conviction of the one “extreme” (i.e. Golden Dawn trial) and the “fight against lawlessness in the universities”, taking advantage of the almost non-existent social resistance in the universities (due to remote learning) against the state management of the pandemic on the one hand, and of all the political speculation around a collective act of aggressive mockery towards the rector of the Athens University of Economics and Business (ASOEE), in the aftermath of a recent squat eviction in the premises of this specific institution.

Finally, the entrepreneurial character of the university is also highlighted by the efforts to discipline the students through the planned enforcement of the “n + 2” rule, which postulates the elimination of the student status 2 years after the formal curriculum duration. The “n + 2” rule, like all the other characteristics of the entrepreneur- ial university mentioned above, forges tomorrow’s obedient worker who has to be fast and productive, capable of combining work with studies without any time to do anything else, ready to enter the intensified, competitive and casualised labour market. So, it is not enough that we work in universities unpaid, this will now have to be done at the pace and intensity required by the state in a space monitored by cameras and enclosed by cops.

So, while the bosses are jumping on us from all sides…

…today, we have to take advantage of the crisis for the benefit of the working class; we have to fight, in conditions of the suspension of formal, constitutional legality, for the satisfaction of our immediate needs!

– Assembly Against Biopower and Confinement, 26th November 2020.

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In August 2023, the locks were glued at the catholic chaplaincy issued to Birckbeck, SOAS and UCL.

Why did I do this? Because I could and it was easy. All it required was a hood, some two pound fifty superglue quickly applied to the slit of the lock head, and the silence of night. It looked like I was taking a piss, and indeed, I was taking the piss.

And that was all I was doing. In the context of the conditions of social war in which pure anti-authoritarianism began, the last half of the nineteenth century, my action was almost nothing. Yet I could do it, could wave my tits in their face, and show them they were not there by our consent. Even for the day or two they had to prop their door open because they couldn’t fix it properly. Yet it was not a true imposition of my free humanity on their commands. To do that, I would have had to turn the place to ashes.

Why am I saying this? Why can’t we live and let live, and be tolerant? You can understand an objection to the university, but shouldn’t people be free to think whatever they think?

To this I respond, of course they should be free to think what they think. But they should think it in the ashes of the building dependent on commerce, acres of land taken from you or I, years of enslavement we must go through in the factories they invest in. They should think it independent of the forced hand of the vulnerable, which reaches towards the church basket in the face of milleniae of hellfire. Surely this is worse than the threat of a prison. Or in the face of exclusion from the “right” to truth that the church has, as the belief in god is the only rupture allowed from the universal predictability of reality, if one does not wish to face the actual threat of imprisonment doled out by the ever present psychologist/psychiatrist.

In the same way a fascist may think what they want to think, in the ashes of the state, workplace, institution, party or militia that make fascism more than just a personal idiocy, or move towards these. And it is not the case that we are different sections of society, that have to tolerate each other: we are two, and identity is opposed on us to distract us from this fact. There is the one who has violence in monopoly, and the one who must persue violence secretly. That is all. We can have no toleration of the side which monopolises violence, such as the chaplaincy depends upon.

And because this aspect of religion – the sole legalised insanity – when existing through force is the same as the university existing through force. God is the ultimate teacher figure, he who through his immortality maintains a different substance category of knowledge to you with your finite span. And his role is to teach people that there will always be a boss and always someone who can speak better for you about your own life. This is precisely why our debts go to people who are paid to claim he exists.

I have also graffiti’d, on multiple occasions, the scientology headquarters located on tottenham court road next to these universities. I have no clear recollection of the dates and how many times I have done this. On the same night, multiple banks and the luxury hotel at russel square had their locks glued,and cctv all over the City of London financial district was blinded with spray paint, but the church action was more interesting to me.

Gossip

I would also like to describe, briefly and for gossip, the recent situation at the student’s union at soas. This and in particular the seperate actions of new “ceo” Irfaan Zaman need to be described in great depth. However, I can focus on the situation of the student “representatives”, who have been parachuted in from one of three soas islamic societies known for its salafi politics, a particular hardright understanding of the religion. We understand this from the members of the other Islamic societies, but other than them, a grand taboo has fallen over the discussion of this. A concerted campaign was organised by this society to vote en bloc for “islamic governance” (one of them managed a youth religious society across london, concerned presumably primarily with sexual abstainence and clean living, and the other, an ex member of the banking and finance society, keeps a large saudi flag on his desk).

What this naturally looks like is that, when a student was being dragged out by security for putting up a poster stating the university director’s role in the killing and torture of Arthur Muhamelwa and Mthokozisi Ntumba, they encouraged the gaurds, as they didn’t want “libel” on their walls. And because, fundamentally, the idea of the boss and unquestioning belief dominates everything they are. This is of no ultimate relevance, as student union representatives and representative politics in general are a fraud, pale imitations of the roman tribunes they are based on who carried with them the threat of revolt (not that the tribunes were more powerful than you and I either, or anything other than parasites like any student rep). Yet propagandistically, their obedience is superb to the institution: they carry out their little role with gusto.

Yet at least I have triggered the soas activists, who, in their endless faith in formal politics and their total lack of genuine feeling, would hate their representatives to be rightwing christians, yet have no concern for rightwing islam. I applaud the actions of some of them in recoiling, at least personally, against the invitiation of a Hindutva nationalist politician to campus by another of the student reps (now suspended for alleged sexual assault), but remind them the ball was in their court to have done something to them. Religion will be waved in front of our noses every day on the grounds of the campus we are dragged to by necessity, until we learn to strike quickly and anonymously, and the various chaplains are in an office on the third floor I believe.

Yet it will have no value to get rid of religion, and keep the moral bosses, and the mortal planners of your soul.

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Max Stirner

The False Principle of Our Education
Or — Humanism And Realism

Because our time is struggling toward the word with which it may express its spirit, many names come to the fore and all make claim to being the right name. On all sides our present time reveals the most chaotic partisan tumult and the eagles of the moment gather around the decaying legacy of the past. There is everywhere a great abundance of political, social, ecclesiastical, scientific, artistic, moral and other corpses, and until they are all consumed, the air will not be clean and the breath of living beings will be oppressed.

Without our assistance, time will not bring the right word to light; we must all work together on it. If, however, so much depends upon us, we may reasonably ask what they have made of us and what they propose to make of us; we ask about the education through which they seek to enable us to become the creators of that word. Do they conscientiously cultivate our predisposition to become creators or do they treat us only as creatures whose nature simply permits training? The question is as important as one of our social questions can ever be, indeed, it is the most important one because those questions rest on this ultimate basis. Be something excellent and you will bring about something excellent: be “each one perfect in himself,” then your society, your social life, will also be perfect.

Therefore we are concerned above all with what they make of us in the time of our plasticity; the school question is a life question. They can now be seen quite clearly; this area has been fought over for years with an ardour and a frankness which far surpasses that in the realm of politics because there it does not knock up against the obstructions of arbitrary power.

A venerable veteran, Professor Theodor Heinsius,[1] who, like the late Professor Krug[2] retained his strength and zeal into old age, has recently sought to provoke interest for this cause by a little essay. He calls it a “Concordat between school and life or mediation of humanism and realism from a nationalistic point of view.” Two parties struggle for victory and each wants to recommend his principle of education as the best and truest for our needs: the humanists and the realists. Not wanting to incur the displeasure of either, Heinsius speaks in his booklet with that mildness and conciliation which means to give both their due and thereby does the greatest injustice to the cause itself since it can only be served by a sharp decisiveness. As things stand, this sin against the spirit of the cause remains the inseparable legacy of all faint-hearted mediators. “Concordats” offer only a cowardly expedient. Only frank like a man: for or against!
And the watchword: slave or free!
Even gods descended from Olympus,
And fought on the battlements of their ally.

Before arriving at his own proposals, Heinsius draws up a short sketch of the course of history since the Reformation. The period between the Reformation and the Revolution is which I will assert here without support since I plan to show it in greater detail at another opportunity that of the relationship between adults and minors, between the reigning and the serving, the powerful and the powerless, in short, the period of subjection. Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority. Not everyone could be called to this command and authority; therefore, education was not for every one and universal education contradicted that principle. Education creates superiority and makes one a master: thus in that age of the master, it was a means to power. But the Revolution broke through the master-servant economy and the axiom came forth: everyone is his own master. Connected with this was the necessary conclusion that education, which indeed produces the master, must henceforth become universal and the task of finding true universal education now presented itself. The drive toward a universal education accessible to everyone must advance to struggle against the obstinately maintained exclusive education, and in the area also the Revolution must draw the sword against the domination of the period of the Reformation. The idea of universal education collided with the idea of exclusive education, and the strife and struggle moves through phases and under sundry names into the present. For the contradictions of the opposing enemy camps, Heinsius chose the names humanism and realism, and, inaccurate as they are, we will retain them as the most commonly used.

Until the Enlightenment began to spread its light in the Eighteenth Century, so called higher education lay without protest in the hands of the humanists and was based almost solely on the understanding of the old classics. Another education went along at the same time which likewise sought its example in antiquity and mainly ended up with a considerable knowledge of the Bible. That in both cases they selected the best education of the world of antiquity for their exclusive subject matter proves sufficiently how little of dignity our own life offered, and how far we still were from being able to create the forms of beauty out of our own originality and the content of truth out of our own reason. First we had to learn form and content; we were apprentices. And as the world of antiquity through classics and the Bible rule over us as a mistress, so was which can be historically proven being a lord and being a servant really the essence of all our activity, and only from this characteristic of the era does it become plain why they aspire so openly toward a “higher education” and were so intent upon distinguishing themselves by that means before the common people. With education, its possessor became a master of the uneducated. A popular education would have opposed this because the people were supposed to remain in the laity opposite the learned gentlemen, were only supposed to gaze in astonishment at the strange splendor and venerate it. Thus Romanism continued in learning and its supporters are Latin and Greek. Furthermore, it was inevitable that this education remained throughout a formal education, as much on this account because of the antiquity long dead and buried, only the forms, as it were, the schemes of literature and art were preserved, as for the particular reason that domination over people will simply be acquired and asserted through formal superiority; it requires only a certain degree of intellectual agility to gain superiority over the less agile people. So called higher education was therefore an elegant education, a sensus omnis elegantiae, an education of taste and a sense of forms which finally threatened to sink completely into a grammatical education and perfumed the German language itself with the smell of Latium so much that even today one has an opportunity to admire the most beautiful Latin sentence structures, for example, in the just published History of the Brandenburg-Prussian States. A Book for Everyone.[3]

In the meantime, a spirit of opposition gradually arose out of the Enlightenment against this formalism and the demand for an all-encompassing, a truly human education allied itself with the recognition of the secure and universal rights of man. The lack of solid instruction which would interact with life was illuminated by the manner in which the Humanists had proceeded up to that time and generated the demand for a practical finishing education. Henceforth, all knowledge was to be life, knowledge being lived; for only the reality of knowledge is its perfection. If bringing the material of life into the school succeeded in offering thereby something useful to everyone, and for that very reason to win everyone over for this preparation for life and to turn them towards school, then one would not envy the learned gentlemen anymore for their singular knowledge and the people would no longer remain of the laity. To eliminate the priesthood of the scholars and the laity of the people is the endeavour of realism and therefore it must surpass humanism. Appropriating the classical forms of antiquity began to be restrained and with it the sovereign-authority lost its nimbus. The time struggled against the traditional respect for scholarship as it generally rebels against any respect.

The essential advantage of scholars, universal education, should be beneficial to everyone. However, one asks, what is universal education other than the capacity, trivially expressed, “to be able to talk about everything,” or more seriously expressed, the capacity to master any material? School was seen to be left behind by life since it not only withdrew from the people but even neglected universal education with its students in favour of exclusive education, and it failed to urge mastery in school of a great deal of material which is thrust upon us by life. School, one thought, indeed has to outline our reconciliation with everything life offers and to care for it so that none of the things with which we must some day concern ourselves will be completely alien to us and beyond our power to master. Therefore familiarity with the things and situations of the present was sought most vigorously and a pedagogy was brought into fashion which must find application to everyone because it satisfied the common need of everyone to find themselves in their world and time. The basic principles of human rights in this way gained life and reality in educational spheres: equality, because that education embraced everyone, and freedom, because one became conversant with one’s needs and consequently independent and autonomous.

However, to grasp the past as humanism teaches and to seize the present, which is the aim of realism, leads both only to power over the transitory. Only the spirit which understands itself is eternal. Therefore, equality and freedom received only a subordinate existence. One could indeed become equal to others and emancipated from their authority; from the equality with oneself, from the equalization and reconciliation of our transient and eternal man, from the transfiguration of our naturalness to spirituality, in short, from the unity and supreme power of our ego, which is enough for itself since it leaves nothing alien standing outside of itself : Hardly any idea of it was to be recognized in that principle. And freedom appeared indeed as independence from authorities, however, it lacked self-determination and still produced none of the acts of a man who is free-in-himself, self-revelations of an inconsiderate[4] man, that is, of one of those minds saved from the fluctuating of contemplation. The formally educated man certainly was not to stand out above the mirror of the ocean of universal education anymore, and he transformed himself from a “highly educated man” into a “one-sided educated man” (as such he naturally maintains his uncontested worth, since all universal education is intended to radiate into the most varied single-mindednesses of special education); but the man educated in the sense of realism did not surpass the equality with others and the freedom from others, neither did he come out ahead of the so-called practical man. Certainly the empty elegance of the humanist, of the dandy, could not help but decline; but the victor glistened with the verdigris of materiality and was nothing better than a tasteless materialist.[5] Dandyism and materialism struggle for the prize of the dear boys and girls and often seductively exchange armour in that the Dandy appears in coarse cynicism and the materialist appears in white linen. To be sure, the living wood of the materialist clubs will smash the dry staff of the marrowless Dandy; but living, or dead, wood remains wood, and if the flame of the spirit is to burn, the wood must go up in fire.

Why, in the meantime, must realism also, if (not denying it the capacity) it assimilates the good aspects of humanism, nevertheless perish?

Certainly it can assimilate the inalienable and true of humanism, formal education, and this assimilation is made ever easier through the scientific method which has become possible and through the sensible treatment of all objects of instruction (I draw attention by way of example only to Becker’s[6] rendering of German Grammar) and can through this refinement push its opponent from its strong position. Since realism as well as humanism proceeds from the idea that the aim of education is to produce versatility for man and since both agree, for example, that one must be accustomed to every turn of idiomatic expression, must mathematically enjoin the turn of the proof, etc., so that one has to struggle towards mastery in handling the material, towards its mastery: thus it will certainly not fail that even realism will finally recognize the formation of taste as the final goal and put the act of forming in first place, as is already partly the case. For in education, all of the material given has value only in so far as children learn to do something with it, to use it. Certainly only the practical and the useful should be stressed, as the realists desire; but the benefit is really only to be sought in forming, in generalizing, in presenting, and one will not be able to reject this humanistic claim. The humanists are right in that it depends above all on formal education — they are wrong, in that they do not find this in the mastery of every subject; the realists demand the right thing in that every subject must be begun in school, they demand the wrong thing then when they do not want to look upon formal education as the principal goal. If it exercises real self-abnegation and does not give itself over to materialistic enticements, realism can come to this victory over its adversary and at the same time come to a reconciliation with him. Why do we nevertheless now show enmity to it?

Does it then really throw off the husk of the old principle and does it stand on the ramparts of the time? In that respect everything must be judged, whether it admits the idea which time has achieved as its most valuable or whether it takes a stationary place behind it. That indelible fear which causes the realists to shrink back in horror from abstractions and speculations must surprise and I will therefore now set down here a few selections from Heinsius who yields nothing to the unbending realists upon this point and saves me quotations from them which would be easy to cite. On page 9 it says:

“In the higher institutions of learning one hears about philosophical systems of the Greeks, of Aristotle and Plato, also, no doubt, of the moderns, of Kant, that he has put away the ideas of God, freedom, immortality, as unprovable; of Fichte, that he has set moral world order in place of the personal God; of Schelling,[7] Hegel, Herbart,[8] Krause,[9] and whomsoever may be called discoverers and heralds of supernatural wisdom. What, they say, should we, should the German nation set about to do with idealistic enthusiasms which belongs to neither the empirical and positive sciences nor to practical life and which do not benefit the state which, with an obscure perception which only confuses the spirit of the time, leads to disbelief and atheism, divides the minds, chases the students themselves away from the professorial chairs of the apostles, and even obscures our national tongue in that it transforms the clearest conceptions of common sense into mystical enigmas? Is that the wisdom that should educate our youth to be moral, good people, thinking, reasonable beings, true citizens, useful and able workers in their professions, loving spouses and provident fathers for the establishment of domestic well-being?”

And on page 45:

“Let us look at philosophy and theology, which, as sciences of thinking and faith are put in first place for the welfare of the world; what have they become through their mutual friction since Leibniz broke the path to them? The dualism, materialism, idealism, supernaturalism, rationalism, mysticism, and whatever all the abtruse-isms of exaggerated speculations and feelings may be called: what kind of blessings have they brought the state, the church, the arts, the national culture? Thought and knowledge have certainly expanded in their sphere; however, has the former become clearer and the latter more certain? Religion, as a dogma, is purer, but subjective belief is more confused, weakened, lacking supporters, shaken by criticism and interpretation, or transformed into fanaticism and a hypocritical appearance of holiness, and the church? oh, its life is schism or death. It it not so?”

For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation to redeeming truth!

Do we want to put pedagogy into the hands of the philosophers? Nothing less than that! They would behave themselves awkwardly enough. It shall be entrusted only to those who are more than philosophers, who in that respect are infinitely more even than humanists or realists. The latter are on the right scent in that even the resurrection will follow their decline: they abstract from philosophy in order to reach their heaven full of purpose without it, they leap over it, and fall in the abyss of their own emptiness; they are, like the eternal Jew, immortal, not eternal.

Only the philosophers can die and find in death their true self; with them the period of reformation, the era of knowledge dies. Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom of will, will be nourished with its most noble juices. Knowledge and its freedom were the ideal of that time which has finally been reached on the heights of philosophy: here the hero will build himself a pyre and will rescue his eternal part in Mount Olympus. With philosophy, our past closes and the philosophers are the Raphaels of the era of thought with which the old principle perfects itself in a bright splendour of colours and through rejuvenation is changed from transient to eternal. Henceforth, whoever wants to preserve knowledge will lose it; he, however, who gives it up will gain it.[Compare with Matt. 10;39 and Luke 17;33] The philosophers alone are called to this giving-up and to this gain: they stand in front of the flaming fire and, like the dying hero, must burn their mortal body if the immortal spirit is to be free.

As much as possible it must be more intelligibly stated. Therein indeed lies the ever recurring mistake of our day, that knowledge is not brought to completion and perspicuity, that it remains a material and formal, a positive thing, without rising to the absolute, that it loads us down like a burden. Like the ancients, one must wish for forgetfulness, must drink from the blessed Lethe: otherwise one does not come to ones senses. Everything great must know how to die and transfigure itself through its death; only the miserable accumulates like the frozen-limbed supreme court,[10] heaps documents upon documents, and plays for the millenia in delicate porcelain figures, like the immortal childishness of the Chinese. Proper knowledge perfects itself when it stops being knowledge and becomes a simple human drive once again, the will. So, for example, he who has deliberated for many years about his “calling as a human being,” will sink all care and pilgrimage of seeking in one moment in the Lethe of a simple feeling, of a drive which from that hour in which he has found the former gradually leads him. The “calling of man” which he was tracking down on a thousand paths and byways of research bursts as soon as it has been recognized into the flame of ethical will and inflames the breast of the person who is not distracted any longer with seeking but has again become fresh and natural. Up, bathe, pupil unweariedly,
Your earthly breast in the redness of dawn.[11]

That is the end and at the same time the immortality, the eternity of knowledge: knowledge, which has become once again simple and direct, sets and reveals itself anew as will in a new form and in every action. The will is not fundamentally right, as the practical ones would like very much to assure us; one may not pass over the desire for knowledge in order to stand immediately in the will, but knowledge perfects itself to will when it desensualizes itself and creates itself as a spirit “which builds its own body.” Therefore adhere to any education which does not terminate in this death and this ascension of knowledge to heaven, the frailty of this earthly life, formality and materiality, dandyism, and materialism. A knowledge which does not refine and concentrate itself so that it is carried away by will, or, in other words, a knowledge which only burdens me as a belonging and possession, instead of having gone along with me completely so that the free-moving ego, not encumbered by any dragging possessions, passes through the world with a fresh spirit, such a knowledge then, which has not become personal, furnishes a poor preparation for life. One does not want to let it come to the abstraction in which the true consecration of all concrete knowledge is first imparted: for through it, the material will really be killed and transformed into spirit; however, to man is given the actual and last liberation. Only in abstraction is freedom: the free man is only he who has won over the bestowal and has taken together again into the unity of his ego that which has been questioningly enticed from himself.

If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era, then the final goal of education can no longer be knowledge, but the will born out of knowledge, and the spoken expression of that for which it has to strive is: the personal or free man. Truth itself consists in nothing other than man’s revelation of himself, and thereto belongs the discovery of himself, the liberation from all that is alien, the uttermost abstraction or release from all authority, the re-won naturalness. Such thoroughly true men are not supplied by school; if they are nevertheless there, they are there in spite of school. This indeed makes us masters of things at the most, also, masters of our nature; it does not make us into free natures. No knowledge, however thorough and extensive, no brilliance and perspicuity, no dialectic sophistication, will preserve us from the commonness of thought and will. It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish. Each sort of corresponding pride and every wind of covetousness, eagerness for office, mechanical and servile officiousness, hypocrisy, etc., is bound as much with extensive knowledge as with elegant, classical education, and since this whole instruction exercises no influence of any sort on our ethical behaviour, it thus frequently falls to the fate of being forgotten in the same measure as it is not used: one shakes off the dust of the school.

And all of this because education is sought only in its formal or material aspects, at the most, in both; not in truth, in the education of the true man. The realists do indeed make progress when they demand that the student should find and understand that which be learns: Diesterweg,[12] for example, knows how to talk a great deal about the “Principle of experience”; but the object is not the truth, even here, but rather some sort of positive thing (as which religion must also be considered), to which the student is led to bring into agreement and coherence with the sum of his other positive knowledge without raising it at all above the crude state of experience and contemplation, and without any incentive to work further with the mind which he has gained by contemplation and out of it to produce, that is, to be speculative, which from a practical standpoint implies as much as to be moral and to behave morally. On the contrary, to educate rational people, that should be sufficient; it is not really intended for sensible people; to understand things and conditions, there the matter is ended, to understand oneself does not seem to be everyman’s concern. Thus sense is promoted for the positive whether it be according to its formal side or at the same time according to its material side, and teaches: to reconcile oneself to the positive. In the pedagogical as in certain other spheres freedom is not allowed to erupt, the power of the opposition is not allowed to put a word in edgewise: they want submissiveness. Only a formal and material training is being aimed at and only scholars come out of the menageries of the humanists, only “useful citizens” out of those of the realists, both of whom are indeed nothing but subservient people.

Our good background of recalcitrancy gets strongly suppressed and with it the development of knowledge to free will. The result of school life then is philistinism. Just as we found our way into and permeated everything with which we were confronted during our childhood, so we discover and conduct ourselves in later years, resign ourselves to the times, become its servants and so-called good citizens. Where then will a spirit of opposition be strengthened in place of the subservience which has been cultivated until now, where will a creative person be educated instead of a learning one, where does the teacher turn into a fellow worker, where does he recognize knowledge as turning into will, where does the free man count as a goal and not the merely educated one? Unfortunately, only in a few places yet. The insight must become more universal, not so that education, civilization, the highest task of man is decided, but rather self-application. Will education be neglected for that reason? Just as little as we are disposed to suffer loss of freedom of thought while we change it into freedom of will and glorify it. If man puts his honour first in relying upon himself, knowing himself and applying himself, thus in self-reliance, self-assertion, and freedom, he then strives to rid himself of the ignorance which makes out of the strange impenetrable object a barrier and hindrance to his self-knowledge. If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves; if, on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstances in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls. What are our gifted and educated subjects for the most part? Scornful, smiling slave-owners and themselves slaves.

The realists may glory in their advantage that they do not simply educate scholars, but rational and useful citizens: indeed, their basic principle: “one teaches everything in relation to practical life,” could even be valid as the motto of our time if they only would not interpret the true practice in a common sense. The true practice is not that of making one’s way through life, and knowledge is worth more than that one might use it up and thereby secure one’s practical goals. Moreover, the highest practice is that a free man reveal himself, and knowledge that knows to die is the freedom which offers life. “The practical life!” With that, one thinks one has said a great deal, and, still, even the animals lead a thoroughly practical life and as soon as the mother has finished her theoretical weaning period, they either seek their food in field and forest as they please or they are harnessed up with a yoke for service. Scheitlin[13] with his science of animal souls would take the comparison even much further, into religion, as is clear from his Science of Animal Souls, a book which for just that reason is very instructive because it places the animal so close to civilized man and civilized man so close to the animal. That intention “to educate for practical life” only brings forth people of principles who act and think according to maxims, but no principled men; legal minds, not free ones. Quite another thing are people whose totality of thought and action swings in continuous movement and rejuvenation and quite another thing are such people who are true to their convictions: the convictions themselves remain unshaken, do not pulse as continually renewed arterial blood through the heart, but freeze, as it were, as solid bodies and even if won and not hammered into the head are certainly something positive and what is more, count as something holy.

A realistic education, therefore, may well produce strong, diligent and healthy individuals, unshakable men, true hearts; and that is indeed a priceless gain for our fair sex; but the eternal characters in whom constance only consists in the unremitting floods of their hourly self-creation and who are therefore eternal because they form themselves each moment, because they set the temporal concerns of their actual appearance out of the never-withering or aging freshness and creative activity of their eternal spirit they do not result from that education. The so-called sound character is even in the best instance only a rigid one. If it is to be a perfect one then it must become at the same time a suffering one, quivering and trembling in the blessed passion of an unceasing rejuvenation and rebirth.

Thus the radii of all education run together into one centre which is called personality. Knowledge, as scholarly and profound or as wide and comprehensible as it may be, remains indeed only a possession and belonging so long as it has not vanished in the invisible point of the ego, from there to break forth all-powerfully as will, as supersensual and incomprehensible spirit. Knowledge experiences this transformation then, when it ceases clinging only to objects, when it has become knowledge itself or, in case this seems clearer, when it has become knowledge of the idea, a self-awareness of the mind. Then it turns itself, so to speak, into the drive, the instinct of the mind, into a subconscious knowledge which everyone can at least imagine if he compares it with how so many and comprehensive experiences of his own self become sublimated into the simple feeling which one calls tact: everything of diffuse knowledge which is pulled out of those experiences is concentrated into immediate knowledge whereby he determines his actions in an instant. Knowledge, however, must penetrate through to this immateriality while it sacrifices its mortal parts and, as immortal becomes will.

The difficulty in our education up till now lies, for the most part, in the fact that knowledge did not refine itself into will, to application of itself, to pure practice. The realists felt the need and supplied it, though in a most miserable way, by cultivating idea-less and fettered “practical men.” Most college students are living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled, they continue drilling. Every education, however, must be personal and stemming from knowledge, it must continuously keep the essence of knowledge in mind, namely this, that it must never be a possession, but rather the ego itself. In a word, it is not knowledge that should be taught, rather, the individual should come to self-development; pedagogy should not proceed any further towards civilizing, but toward the development of free men, sovereign characters; and therefore, the will which up to this time has been so strongly suppressed, may no longer be weakened. Do they not indeed weaken the will to knowledge, then why weaken the will to will? After all, we do not hinder man’s quest for knowledge; why should we intimidate his free will? If we nurture the former, we should nurture the latter as well.

Childlike obstinacy and intractability have as much right as childlike curiosity. The latter is being stimulated; so one shall also call forth the natural strength of the will, opposition. If a child does not learn self-awareness, then he plainly does not learn that which is most important. They do not suppress his pride or his frankness. My own freedom is safe from his wild spirits. If pride turns into spite, then the child approaches me with violence; I do not have to endure this since I am just as free as the child. Must I however defend myself against him by using the convenient rampart of authority? No, I oppose him with the strength of my own freedom; thus the spite of the child will break up by itself. Whoever is a complete person does not need to be an authority. And if frankness breaks out into insolence, then this loses its vigour in the tender strength of a true wife in her motherliness or in the firmness of the husband; he is very weak who must call to authority for help and he does wrong if he thinks to improve the impudent as soon as he makes him fearful. To promote fear and respect; those are things that belong with the period of the dead rococo.

What do we complain about then when we take a look at the shortcomings of our school education of today? About the fact that our schools still stand on the old principle, that of will-less knowledge. The new principle is that of the will as glorification of knowledge. Therefore no “Concordat between school and life,” but rather school is to be life and there, as outside of it, the self-revelation of the individual is to be the task. The universal education of school is to be an education for freedom, not for subservience: to be free, that is true life. The insight into the lifelessness of humanism should have forced realism to this knowledge. Meanwhile, one became aware in humanistic education only of the lack of any capacity for so-called practical (bourgeois not personal) life and turned in opposition against that simply formal education to a material education, in the belief that by communicating that material which is useful in social intercourse one would not only surpass formalism, but would even satisfy the highest requirement. But even practical education still stands far behind the personal and free, and gives the former the skill to fight through life, thus the latter provides the strength to strike the spark of life out of oneself; if the former prepares to find oneself at home in a given world, so the latter teaches to be at home with oneself. We are not yet everything when we move as useful members of society; we are much more able to perfect this only if we are free people, self-creating (creating ourselves) people.

Now if the idea and impulse of modern times is free will, then pedagogy must hover in front as the beginning and the aim of the education of the free personality. Humanists, like realists, still limit themselves to knowledge, and at most, they look to free thought and make us into free thinkers by theoretical liberation. Through knowledge, however, we become only internally free, (a freedom moreover, that is never again to be given up); outwardly, with all freedom of conscience and freedom of thought, we can remain slaves and remain in subjection. And indeed, external freedom is for knowledge just that which the inner and true, the moral freedom, is for the will.

In this universal education, therefore, because the lowest and highest meet together in it, we come upon the true equality of all for the first time, the equality of free people: only freedom is equality.

One can, if one wants a name, place the moralists above the humanists and realists since their final goal is moral education. Then, to be sure, the protest comes immediately that again they will want to educate us to adhere to positive laws of morality and basically, that this has already taken place up to the present time. Because it has already happened up to now, therefore I am not of that opinion, and that I want the strength of opposition to be awakened and the self-will not to be broken, but rather to be transformed, that could clarify the difference sufficiently. In order still to differentiate the claim which is set forth here from the best efforts of the realists, such a one, for example, as is expressed in the recently published program of Diesterweg on page 36: “In the lack of education for character lies the weakness of our schools, like the weakness of our overall education. We do not inculcate any convictions,” I rather say, we need from now on a personal education (not the impressing of convictions). If one wants to call again those who follow this principle -ists, then, in my opinion, one may call them personalists.

Therefore, to go back to Heinsius once again, the “vigorous desire of the nation, that the school might be more closely allied with life” will only be fulfilled if one finds real life in full personality, independence and freedom, since whoever strives toward this goal relinquishes nothing of the good of humanism nor of realism, but rather raises them both infinitely higher and ennobles them. Even the national point of view which Heinsius takes still cannot be praised as the right one, since that is only the personal one. Only the free and personal man is a good citizen (realist), and even with the lack of particular (scholarly, artistic, etc) culture, a tasteful judge (humanist).

If my conclusion is to express in a few words which goal our time has to steer toward, then the necessary decline of non-voluntary learning and rise of the self-assured will which perfects itself in the glorious sunlight of the free person may be expressed somewhat as follows: knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person.

[1] Otto Friedrich Theodor Heinsius (1770–1849), philologist, professor, and later director of the Couvent-Gris in Berlin, author of several highly regarded grammars and dictionaries, histories of German literature. The book cited by Stirner is Konkordat zwischen Schule und Leben, oder Vermittelung des Humanismus und Realismus, aus nationalistische Standpunkt betrachtet, published by Schultze in Berlin in 1842. Also useful is his Zeitgemäße Pädagogik der Schule: historisch und kritisch aufgefaßt für das gesammte Schulpublikum, published in Berlin in 1844.

[2] Wilhelm-Traugott Krug (1770–1842), famous German liberal philosopher and literary figure, successor to Immanuel Kant to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Königsberg in 1805, and from 1809 to 1834 professor of philosophy at Leipzig. Krug suspended his academic career to fight against Napoleon in 1813, and was subsequently president of the Tugendbund. He was author of more than a score of works, several of them in series of two to five volumes.

[3] Geschichte des brandenburgisch-preussischen Staates. Ein Buch für Jedermann was published in 1842. The author, A. Zimmermann, is a very elusive figure, and virtually nothing is known of him even today. At one time he was confused erroneously with Wilhelm Zimmermann (1807–1878), a prolific writer of popularly written histories, many of which appeared in the decades of the 1840s and 1850s.

[4] Cf. Ger. rücksichtslosen, used in a special sense here, as the opposite of contemplative, not boorish or thoughtless.

[5] Cf. Ger. Industrieller. From the context there is no evidence that Stirner’s critique is being directed to what we would call industrialists or manufacturers today. Perhaps the closest we can come to his thinking here would be the term of Albert Jay Nock, “economism”, as a description of a life devoted almost exclusively to the production and consumption of goods for the sake of producing and consuming, instead of for their discriminating enjoyment.

[6] Karl Ferdinand Becker (1775–1849), famous German grammarian, student of the logic of German speech, innovator in fields of syntax and style. His Deutsche Grammatik was published in 1829, his Organismus der deutschen Sprache was in a second edition in 1841.

[7] Friedrich Wilhelm Josef von Schelling (1775–1854), a major figure in German philosophy, but also a philologist of substance.

[8] Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), German philosopher and critic of philosophers and philosophy, a disciple of Wolf and Kant and later a critic of Kant and Hegel. At one time a professor at Jena and later at Königsberg and Göttingen, his books, which included several works on pedagogy and educational theory, were well known in Germany.

[9] Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832), prolific writer in the field of philosophy, and especially on the subject of theories of learning. He was the author of nearly twenty-five books and many smaller pieces, a number of which were published posthumously.

[10] A reference to the old supreme court of the Second German Empire, which by Stirner’s time had been, for all practical purposes defunct for more than a century, but which continued its formal existence through lacking any means for enforcing its verdicts.

[11] From Goethe’s Faust, a quotation which has been exceedingly familiar to generations of German students.

[12] Friedrich Adolf Wilhelm Diesterweg (1790–1863), formidable German philologist and educational critic, director of the teachers college in Berlin in 1832. He staged a fierce attack on control of education by State and Church, and as a supporter of a program for centring education around the child he was widely referred to as an emulator and continuator of the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827). Diesterweg, the editor of two educational journals of considerable importance, was forced to retire in 1850 after years of bitter attacks. As in the case of Professor Krug, he was highly regarded in France.

[13] Versuch einer vollständigen Thierseelenkunde by Peter Scheitlin was published in Stuttgart and Tübingen in 1840.