On Sharing: Anti-Curricula. A Course of Action

Anti-Curricula. A Course of Action
We do not need education without needing a world that is being destroyed.

Our emphasis is on education: within the reality of our social relations, confined by the struggle of daily life, against the hierarchical relations between institutions, academics and students.

We share our work in education so that one day we might become free through education. It can feel like a hopeless act of hope yet as a conscious act of anti-alienation, sharing can be emancipatory.

We have been objectified as Teachers and Learners. These are illusory concepts. Sharing is to resist the commodification of our lives and escape the measures of Capital, its controls of 'quality' and its life-support machine of 'efficiency'.

Sharing brings curricula to life as a flow of ideas, an unstoppable, irrepressible mass intellectuality that recognises no disciplines and responds to every act of discipline.

The institutionalisation of sharing is the absorption of sharing into the alienating processes of the institution. As a flight for freedom, it is in vain. The Crisis remains.

The locus of struggle is not exchange but production. In the sphere of production, sharing as a revolutionary act becomes a recognition of what is common. There is nothing revolutionary about acts of exchange.

Sharing our work in this way is an act of communal production. There is no exchange, no gift, simply a flow of contributions to the commons. Every factory, every street, every village, every school is a potential commune, a site of communal production, seeking to dissolve the question of needs.

Existing borders are irrelevant when we recall the humanity in sharing, the joy of giving and receiving, the immaterial wealth of knowledge that already exists, and the pleasure of creating social relations that resist the organising principle of private property and wage labour.

The desire for communism is a productive desire that finds nothing lacking. We express this desire by sharing, understood as a social force, or a curricula of action against a world that is being destroyed.

To share is to critique the present state of things. The conditions of this critique result from the premises now in existence. Sharing is the negation of our negation.

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Inside and Outside the University
Common sense, mass intellectuality and the general intellect

COMMON SENSE
As intellectual workers we prefer to share our work with others inside and outside of the university. As intellectual workers we refuse the fetishised labels of academics and students and engage in teaching, learning and research only in so far as we are able to operate in and against the university. We offer our work as an act of solidarity with those who wish to engage with our ideas. In offering our work as a free gift we recognise the limitations of giving. Reduced from being to having we are now reduced to giving: alienated acts of generosity (i.e. Charity) based on a recognition of the needs of others and an assumption of their incapacity to fulfil those needs (i.e Anomie). No. Our concept of sharing requires further elaboration. Not having, or giving, but doing. In other words our concept of sharing is based on a recognition of what we all have in common, the basis of which is our ability to do. In the Worker-State (i.e. Capitalism), in which all activity is regulated by wage work, doing is reduced to acquiring what has been done by others through the exchange of money (i.e. Poverty). We refer to this understanding of Crisis (i.e. the Violence of Abstraction) as common sense. Common sense is not a network or a matrix, it is not physical or virtual, but a pedagogy or way of knowing, that is elaborated in the lessons learned from the history of class struggle. Common sense is the basis of our intellectual not-working (i.e. Doing).

MASS INTELLECTUALITY
As intellectual workers we prefer to share our work with others inside and outside of the university. As intellectual workers we refuse the fetishised concept of widening participation, and engage with teaching, learning and research only so far as we are able to dissolve the institutional boundaries of the university. Not mass education or education for the masses but mass intellectuality. Mass education is based on the assumption that people are stupid and must be made not-stupid (i.e. Educated). Mass intellectuality recognises that education maintains the population in a condition of stupidity (i.e. Intelligence Quotient) regulated through examinations and other forms of humiliations (i.e. Grades and Assessments). Mass intellectuality is based on our common ability to do, based on our needs and capacities and what needs to be done. What needs to be done raises doing from the level of the individual to the level of society. In the society of doing, based on what needs to be done, my own needs are subsumed with the needs of others and I become invisible (i.e. Free).

GENERAL INTELLECT
As intellectual workers we prefer to share our work with others inside and outside of the university. As intellectual workers we refuse the fetishised concept of the knowledge society and engage in teaching, learning and research only in so far as we can re-appropriate the knowledge that has been stolen from the workers that have produced this way of knowing (i.e. Abundance). In the society of abundance the university as an institutional form is dissolved, and becomes a social form or knowledge at the level of society (i.e. The General Intellect). It is only on this basis that we can knowingly address the global emergencies with which we are all confronted.

The University of Utopia.
No time and no place.
http://www.universityofutopia.org/sharing

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