If the CSU Teachers Go on Strike - Let's Join Em!

Bellow is a copy of a flyer (and it's text) for distribution at local CSUs (California State Universities). Teachers are voting on striking yes or no (looks like strike will happen) and here in Stanislaus County (Central Valley), students response has been mixed. Although universities serve to create specialists and often only serve to thrust out new managers and bureaucrats into the world, strikes like these can possibly break down some of the division between faculty and students. Hopefully, anarchists and other radicals can get everyone from students, to staff, to janitors, to professors, at least talking about the realities of class society and the need to get rid of it. We can also use this opportunity to promote actions between students and faculty outside of the unions and left organizations. Who knows, maybe we can even use these tensions at these factories of social capital to destroy the whole damn thing (dream of dreams)! Please use the flyer shown bellow to post all over and feel free to change it to suit an event or happening in your area. Enjoy - Modesto Anarcho Crew!

Text from Flyer: Faculty across the state are set to strike in what could be one of the biggest job walk outs in California history. Fed up with bum pay compared to other colleges (and especially that of the CSU bosses) faculty are now threatening to go on a series of “rolling walkouts”. But it’s not just professors that are feeling the strain of the modern economy. Students have also been hit hard with increased fees and rising tuition costs. Since the 2001-02 school year, undergraduate tuition has climbed 94% at CSU's schools. Both students and teachers now have the same enemies. Both teachers and students are now either getting their pay docked - or paying through the teeth, while the CSU executives since 2005 have received an average 23% pay increase on top of an already fat salary.

But it’s not just a problem of the bosses who would put their own interests over the needs of those which perpetuate this university, but of an entire system and mentality that seeks to squash any real human solidarity against the forces which make our lives miserable. Even now, some students are calling for protests against teachers if they do decide to strike! It only seems to make sense for students to support their struggle - for not only do we share some of the same hurdles, but many of us are seeking to become teachers of one sort or another ourselves. How do we intend to confront the issues they now face if we do not struggle with them? Let’s start sticking up for all of those who are stuck in this university - from the dishwashers in the cafeteria, to the professors in the library. From the students working two jobs to afford to go here, to the shuttle bus operator who drives that student to her bike. If the executives at the CSU have their way, only the super rich will go to college and teaching and working at a university will turn into just another “McJob”. Recent events in Oaxaca Mexico have shown full fledged social uprisings happen in the face of a simple teachers strike, when the rest of the community showed up to support. In Paris 1968, students, teachers, and workers occupied the university and factories, fighting to bring about a society for total self-management and freedom. In Greece recently, people have poured out in the streets to militantly protest attempts to privatize the Greek university system. If they can do it there, we sure as hell can do it here. Fellow students: let’s ditch our misconceptions about class struggle - or soon we’ll be losing the class war.