March 2013
2 posts
5 tags
A Look Back on Hugo Chavez →
Featured in this week’s Harbinger!
4 tags
The Need for a Student Union
By The Student Union of Michigan
The past few decades have seen a dramatic shift in our university and universities around the country. Once widely accessible to the people of our state, University of Michigan tuition has gradually risen beyond the reach of many incomes. This forces deserving students to either search elsewhere for their education or take on thousands of dollars of debt. This...
November 2012
2 posts
October 2012
3 posts
8 tags
Quebec Students and Chicago Teachers Resist...
This week, unions won remarkable victories in Chicago and Quebec against the right-wing agenda of gutting public education. In Quebec, the right-wing provincial government had imposed a huge increase in university tuition, almost doubling it. This prompted student unions to organize massive months-long strikes which ultimately brought down the province government. In response to this pressure,...
8 tags
With Massive Power Comes Massive Rates of...
By Liana Kallman Though we, the people may like to pretend that it is we the people who make the decisions in our country, the implementation of our laws is in the hands of a select minority: the police. This means that the way a police officer chooses to understand and enforce the law is a key part of how our country is governed. This may sound like an overstatement of the job description of a...
6 tags
We Fight the Same Fight: Women’s rights at home...
Recently, news has come from Iran that seventy-seven programs offered in thirty-six Iranian public universities have suddenly been closed to female students. The majority of these programs are in mathematics, health and physical sciences and other high tech fields, and women represented seventy percent of university enrollment in these programs (they represent sixty-six percent of all university...
September 2012
5 posts
5 tags
Jesus Christ: Super Socialist
By Ellen Nelson “America’s war on religion.” Religious conservatives, it seems, are using this term increasingly often. What exactly does it mean? Is the government shutting down churches? Are religious people being denied their rights as Americans? Are they prosecuted for praying? The answer to these questions is, of course, no; the “war on religion” that is being talked about so...
9 tags
Why Be Involved?
A surge of questions likely flows through people’s minds when they are handed a radical zine such as this one. The primary one: why? Why are you handing me this? Why should a student at the University of Michigan become involved? I am sure you have at least some inkling that things in this country are not as they should be. Even from just the occasional news story, it’s easy to see that our...
“Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will...”
– President Salvador Allende’s farewell speech, 11 September 1973. (via maxineanwaar)
“Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a...”
– Rosa Luxemburg (via sushigoat)
August 2012
5 posts
10 tags
5 Days in Ohio: The National Student Power...
I’m unsure of how to describe the 2012 National Student Power Convergence. As I try to encapsulate the five vivid days I spent in Columbus I find myself writing long, rambling paragraphs. Yet each attempt at prose appears too trite or crude to describe the intense feelings of solidarity and love that I have emerged with. After 5 days of almost non-stop debate, discussion and learning I can...
Red Radical: “It was the first time that I had... →
redradical:
“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle…
July 2012
3 posts
“Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and...”
– Mikhail Bakunin, The Red Association (via antistate)
Labor unrest spreads in Egypt's textile sector →
Strikes brought a swathe of Egypt’s state textile industry to a halt on Wednesday, workers and a labor activist said, disrupting production of a key export as the country hovers on the brink of a balance of payments crisis.
Around 23,000 employees of Misr Spinning and Weaving, Egypt’s biggest textile company, took their strike into a fourth day and were joined by some 12,000 workers...
May 2012
2 posts
11 tags
Diverting the Spectacle: Radical Students and the...
Another election season dawns, and yet again students like myself are urged to “make our voices heard” by selecting our preferred candidate. Many of us will undoubtedly be caught up in the fervor of rhetoric and promises, some perhaps even believing that this time things will be different. As a radical student activist it’s often difficult to view this bi-yearly charade as...
April 2012
8 posts
“Americans 60 and older still owe about $36 billion in student loans”
– Ylan Q. Mui, “Senior citizens continue to bear burden of student loans” for The Washington Post; Original (via chileanstudentmovement)
its not all about the numbers: Alexander Berkman →
with-roots-above:
The law says that your employer does not steal anything from you, because it is done with your consent. You have agreed to work for your boss for certain pay, he to have all that you produce. Because you consented to it, the law says that he does not steal anything from you.
But did you really…
March 2012
21 posts
“Compound growth forever is impossible; an alternative has to arise in which...”
– David Harvey (via rethinksocialism)
University of Michigan: Student Debt and the For...
occupyumich:
So, you saw the flyers. What’s up? Well, the University of Michigan is changing for the worse—so much so you can see it in almost every part of the campus. We can see it just walking around, where the student body is more affluent and whiter than ever before (in 2000, 18.4% of Michigan students had a family income of $200k or more…in 2010, 27.6%). We can see it in the...
A Violent Weekend Recharges Occupy Wall Street →
existentialistmumbojumbo:
Protests meant to mark the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street have thrust the movement back into the spotlight, mostly due to one particularly violent and ugly confrontation.
Around 73 protesters were arrested on St. Patrick’s Day night after an attempt to re-occupy Zuccotti Park by setting up tents was met with stiff resistance from the NYPD. One arrest drew...
9 tags
“I don’t want you to follow me or anyone else. If you are looking for a Moses to...”
– Eugene V. Debs
Occupy UMich: Feminist Ryan Gosling and the Visual... →
occupyumich:
Feminist Ryan Gosling and the Visual Scream stems from our increasing frustration with the politicizing and disciplining of women and their bodies especially as a device to curry political favor and to distract from other issues.
In the past several weeks, it has become increasingly…
10 tags
What's the Matter With Europe?
By now, most of the people reading this have heard of the European Crisis, the terrors of Sovereign Debt, and of the measures being taken to keep the European Union whole. However, this has been going on for so long that it may be good for us to overview the crisis, its causes, its effects, and its solutions in a compact form. The European Union’s origins lie far back in the postwar...
9 tags
Divided It Falls: A Ruling Class Divided Against...
It is no great secret that the American political system, despite its democratic auspices, is a mechanism for the rule of an elite minority. The past thirty years in particular have seen many brazen examples of this, highlighted by an unprecedented expansion of the gap between rich and poor as social welfare spending was cut to make way for ever greater tax breaks for the wealthy....
7 tags
Crime and Profit: US Anti-Immigration Policy
This article, by synthesizing personal observation and statistical information, attempts to understand how U.S. anti-immigrant policies have emerged to produce profit for American corporations by criminalizing undocumented U.S. residents. Though the data used in this article is primarily focused on U.S. immigrants from Latin America, the author recognizes that undocumented people from all over...
9 tags
NAFTA and Immigration: Globalizing the Corporate...
Charged comments during recent Republican primaries have reopened a political can of worms – immigration. While both political parties argue about the character and economic effects of immigrants in the United States, they exclude two crucial questions: why is there an influx of immigration and what role has the US played in this influx? Although many policies have shaped...
6 tags
Communism 101: Unpacking Capitalist Baggage
It is difficult to question a system to which there is no conceivable alternative. We have grown up in an America without a political left, and so, as we watch our system crumble under the weight of inequality, we don’t know what to do about it. We vote for the ‘other’ people, the ones who didn’t visibly have a hand in getting us to our current situation, or the ones who make the best...
7 tags
5 tags
