CAFA and the “Edu-Factory”

Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis

For about twenty years our relation to the edu-factory has been shaped primarily by the experience we made first as teachers in African universities (George at the University of Calabar from 1983 through 1987, Silvia at the University of Port Harcourt from 1984 through 1986) and later as members of CAFA (Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa), an organization we helped to found after returning to the U.S.

Teaching in Nigeria was a life-changing experience at many levels. These were years in which the country’s social and political life was undergoing a historic change, under the impact of the “debt crisis,” of prolonged negotiations with the IMF and, along with them, the introduction of the first austerity plans. The universities were at the center of this process and the resistance to it, both because of the intense debate and anti-IMF mobilization they generated and because, from an early start, they were one of the main targets of the cuts in public funds that were introduced in the name of paying the debt.


Already by 1984, on many campuses, student protests --against the cuts of student allowances and the repression of student activism--were the order of the day. By 1986, when the government implemented the first structural adjustment program (publicized however as a “homegrown” measure), the confrontation between students and government had become open and the student movement was more and more repressed by force. At least 30 students were massacred on May 5, 1986 in response to a peaceful demonstration on the campus of Ahmadu Bello University (Zaria). By the time we left Nigeria, the universities, when not shut down, were battlefields, as the students, soon in collaboration with teachers’ unions, became one of the main opposition forces to structural adjustment and the dismantling of public education demanded by the World Bank.


Having seen our students beaten, tear-gassed, expelled, it was inevitable that on returning to the US we would organize around education in Africa. We founded CAFA, in 1991, together with other colleagues, who, like us, had left the country because they found it difficult to continue to work there under the new SAP regime. Our objective was both to mobilize students and teachers in North America in support of the student/teachers struggles on the African campuses, and to denounce the World Bank’s program for education in Africa. It was clear, in fact, that the attack on the schooling system carried out through World Bank-designed SAPs, was part of a broader attack on African workers, and what many in Africa defined as a re-colonization project.

Revelation Vertigo

Haduhi Szukis, Fifth Estate

"Autonomy is both the goal sought after and that whose presence–virtual–let us say, has to be supposed at the outset of an analysis or a political movement. This virtual presence is the will to autonomy, the will to be free." – Cornelius Castoriadis

There exists a tendency, shared across different strains of radical political thought, to see the horrors of our present as comprising a false totality, that when torn asunder, will reveal a more liberatory existence hidden beneath. This is to understand revolution as revelation; as the dispelling of the conditions of false consciousness, and a reclamation of an autonomous existence that continues to live on, albeit deformed, within this world we must we leave behind.

For the autonomist, this comes in the form of the working class for itself whose existence was disrupted, not destroyed, by the violent upheavals that formed the economic basis of capitalism (a process which Marx observes plays the same role in political economy that “original sin” does in theology). In primitivist thought, this becomes a reclaiming of a mythical ancestral past crushed, but never fully destroyed, by the weight of technological development and the machinations of alienation.

As powerful as such lines of argument can be, one danger in the politics of revelation is that every act of revealing not only illuminates the existence of certain processes and phenomena, but also effectively conceals others that do not fit within the structure of the revelation. It is when revelations become dogmatic, when they become “churchly” one might say, that they blind the true believer to all that falls outside the blinkers they have placed on their intellectual vision.

To question the process of questioning is to return to the etymological root of the concept of revolt, one based on a process of returning, discovering, uncovering, and renovating; one that is a state of permanent questioning, of transformation, of change, an endless probing of appearances. For it must be remembered that every act of revelation is not simply a discovery of what is, but also a construction of that which is, through a process of shared perception and understanding. Thus, to speak of an autonomous self-determining capacity that existed before the advent of capitalism providing the seeds and routes going through and beyond it, is not simply to uncover its existence, but also to take part in its collective construction. It is the presupposition of this autonomy, based on a perhaps mystical foundation, which enables the struggle for its realization.

Politicizing Sadness

Colectivo Situaciones

More than five years after the insurrection of that Argentine December
of 2001 we bear witness to the changing interpretations and moods around
that event. For many of us sadness was the feeling that accompanied a
phase of this winding becoming. This text rescues a moment in the
elaboration of "that sadness" in order to go beyond the notions of
"victory and defeat" that belong to that earlier cycle of politicization
which centered on taking state power, and, at the same time, in order to
share a procedure that has allowed us to "make public" an intimate
feeling of people and groups.

Sadness arrived after the event: the political fiesta — of languages,
images, and movements — was followed by a reactive, dispersive dynamic.
And, along with it, there arrived what was later experienced as a
reduction of the capacities of openness and innovation that the event
brought into play. The experience of social invention (which always also
implies the invention of time) was followed by a moment of normalization
and the declaration of "end of the fiesta." According to Spinoza,
sadness consists in being separated from our powers (potencias). Among
us political sadness often took the form of impotence and melancholy in
the face of the growing distance between that social experiment and the
political imagination capable of carrying it out.

A Video Interview with Peter Linebaugh

Counterviews

The short Counterviews video interview, "A Walk with Peter Linebaugh," by Tao Ruspoli, may be accessed here.