SPfAE Resources

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A collection of SPfAE-specific organizing tools, including posters, flyers, zines, and reference materials. The majority of these were handed out at the 2009 SDS Northeast Regional Convention held in Rochester, NY. However, some of these were collected afterwards. Feel free to download and distribute these materials, keep 'em for your chapter or personal reading material. We hope these help you all out in organizing.

We hope to continue expanding this section, so if you or your chapter have any materials that you would like to contribute, please email either students4democraticsociety@gmail.com or Brit at reebri05@evergreen.edu. Thanks!


Contents

Posters & Flyers


Tri-folds, Leaflets, & Pamphlets


Zines

  • Communique from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life
    • Download at: http://www.mediafire.com/?hyzunmn2kgm
      • Opening: "Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt. The bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of the more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for any more. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is not more real than the windows in which it appears.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen- without ever imagining what could make it happen ourselves- we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd or emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in the elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for… what? - drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalsim was long ago packed up and sold to China for a more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors."

  • The New Radicals in the Multiverse by Carl Davison
    • Download at: http://www.mediafire.com/?tdajjzymjqm
      • Opening:"The student movement has come under criticism from both the right and the left for its lack of coherent ideology and strategy for social change. While there is certainly a great deal of truth in this criticism, my sensibilities tell me that this lack may be more to our advantage then to our disadvantage. TO my mind, the great strength of the New Left has been its unconscious adherence to Marx’s favorite motto- doubt everything. The student movement is young and inexperienced; yet, it has shown great wisdom in maintaining the principle that political truth must come from political experience. Ideology is not something sucked out of thumbs, nor found in this or that set of political catechisms. Rather, political analysis and strategy is something that grows slowly out of years of political experience and struggle. It must find its beginnings and maintain its deepest roots in people’s day to-day life-activity, for it is social reality that we are trying to understand and change.

In deepening that understanding of social reality, we must always remember that “The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking this is isolated from practice is purely scholastic question.” Too often we are bogged down in theoretical disputes when the only way we can answer those questions is in practice, in political experimentation, in action. This is why we must remain open on many political questions. But this is not to say that we should only “Do what the spirit say do.” The concept of practical-critical activity (I.e., praxis) is three-sided: we must act, then reflect on the activity, and finally criticize the activity. The progress of action, reflection, and criticism must be repeated again and again. The body of knowledge ever changing and expanding, that grows from this process emerges as an ideology. Finally, the process is historical; it develops over a period of time. It is for these reasons, as well as the fact that we are young and politically inexperienced, that we must emphasize an on going practical-critical activity over and above any allegiance to theoretical certitude. I hope that my following remarks on theory, strategy, and tactics will be taken in this context. All my assertions come from a limited experience and, as such, are open to criticism, revision, and the acid-test of political practice."

Reference Material

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