Solidarity to staff and students at Goldsmiths and very pleased to hear there is a student occupation! (Where is the NUS at the moment???)

As the crowdfunder for the first radical bookshop icon Newcastle for 40 years gets closer to the end I’m making the bold move of calling on all the academics I sort of vaguely know and also those I don’t to share the link for our crowdfunder: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/booksfromb...

@stuartelden.bsky.social @solgamsu.bsky.social @reproutopia.bsky.social @leaypi.bsky.social @drlisacorrigan.bsky.social @ingridagnete.bsky.social @alexniven.bsky.social @ayanassar.bsky.social @quinnslobodian.com @marcusrediker.bsky.social

It’s striking that lots of very bad things have tended to happen to Labour people who foolishly made Peter unhappy, usually with quite unfortunate reputation damage and career consequences. But perhaps Peter is lucky, and that’s just one of those things that happens.

These are crazy, mad times in the world and in the universities sector.

Being a trades union rep keeps me sane and gives me hope.

It's tiring work but today it has been uplifting.

The more people who do this sort of work the stronger our position will be in our workplaces. Anyone can be involved

The Guardian view on Cambridge’s £190m gift: billionaires won’t fix universities’ problems | Editorial Editorial: Philanthropy increases the gap dividing highly selective, elite higher education from the rest. Ministers need a plan for the sector overall

One of the problems with contemporary sociology in the UK is that we don't think about class as a set of social relations.

After the Paris Commune in 1871 the French ruling class founded Sciences Po as a response.

Rokos' donation is interesting, which crisis...

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Joseph Cornelius Rossaint beim Schauprozess.

Heute vor 35 Jahren starb Joseph Cornelius Rossaint (1902–1991). Der Priester wurde 1937 wegen Bildung einer „katholisch-kommunistischen Einheitsfront“ verurteilt. Nach dem Krieg kehrte Rossaint nicht in den kirchlichen Dienst zurück, weil er den Kontakt zu seinen alten Kameraden abbrechen solllte.

Elaborate title to a plan of Glasgow Green and nearby coal workings (1828). At least it doesn't contain any Comic Sans.

I know lithographers who use consistent typefaces, and they're all cowards.

Massive Attack, Tom Waits - Boots on the Ground YouTube video by Massive Attack

Ooof, new massive attack/tom waits tune hits hard.

youtu.be/L-57FrioeuE?...

@workingclasshistory.com

LOP 31 (29 May 1976) The General Strike in Leeds - no. 1 of a series

LOP 32 (12 June 1976) The General Strike in Leeds - no. 2 of a series

LOP 33 (26 June 1976) The General Strike in Leeds - no. 3 of a series

Lots of #GeneralStrike100 stuff around at the moment as we approach its centenary. Fifty years ago, Leeds Other Paper looked back at events of 50 years earlier with a series on how the 1926 General Strike unfolded in and around Leeds.

Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought Scientists say finding is ‘very concerning’ as collapse would be catastrophic for Europe, Africa and the Americas

You'd think stuff like this might concern ruling elites but it doesn't appear to.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

UCU swag table featuring members of your UCU branch committee: bags, beanie and flag

Looks like a few more members being recruited for @uonucu.bsky.social thanks to lots of great conversations at the Staff Information Fair

#OtD 15 Apr 1973 thousands of United Farm Workers (UFW) union members walked out on strike. They were battling the Teamsters union over the right to represent farm workers. The dispute ended with victory, yet again, for the UFW stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8639...

FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY????

How on earth does one run an institution with such depleted capacity?

Massive solidarity with @ucu-ulster.bsky.social

Books from Below: A Radical Bookshop for Newcastle www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/booksfromb...

instead towards thinking about class as something that can be forged through collective struggle and learning.

That ought to make us sanguine about what we can actually achieve though without devaluing the sort of in and against/fugitive, reparative work that can still take place.

But it also ought to remind us that class analysis as a liberatory project and tool requires thinking beyond reproduction and

that we learn to see as monolithic hegemons actually are.

1871 terrified the French ruling class (and created some fascinating experiments in educational thinking - see Kirsten Ross' book).

Elite universities, and Sciences Po in particular, was a response to that.

of universities in reproducing and servicing Capital, it also hides the fact that elites are continually renegotiating their role in education to structure it to the needs of capitalism at anyone point.

For me that is a liberatory point because it highlights precisely how fragile & tenuous systems

The material basis of elite schooling: capital and the state Published in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (Vol. 45, No. 3, 2024)

We go into that in the editorial below.

But this is the thing about where we sometimes end up with class analysis in sociology - we don't see the tie to Capital(ism).

That's not only a question of not saying the scale of ruling class/elite power or the role...

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

or Harkness or Rockefeller in the US, or the donations from enslavement.

Universities are tied to Capital, bound to it, doing its work, year after year.

Elite schools are the same: "a form of solvent, dissolving and mystifying the violence & exploitation involved in the accumulation of capital"

institutions are bound to Capital. They are continually re-created by Capital. Rokos is one of many many many examples - remember Oxford has Blavatnik.

Think of all the 19th C civic universities in the UK (Mark Firth - steel magnate, Sheffield, Armstrong - shipping and armaments, Newcastle)...

to say about Capital & the way education is implicated in capitalism.

It also flattens out the role of struggle in class formation/reproduction.

The micro-(re)production of social/cultural/economic capital is important but sometimes we miss the wood for the trees I think.

Elite educational...

point is important I think. Sociology and the sociology of education is dominated by Bourdieusian analysis.

I'm heavily influenced by him in a lot of the work I've done - his work allows an understanding of social reproduction of the class structure through education.

But it doesn't have as much..

Carney's move to acknowledge the failure and total shift in the way global elite politics works is interesting in this regard.

In the end elite politics will change and adapt, and the bulk of elite schools of politics like this will likely change with it.

And this is where the social relations...

is he intending to resolve? Is it the crisis of centrist politics which has no vocabulary to understand, much less means to resolve, any of the crises we face?

If so, will his donation create a sort of zombie intellectual politics of the political centre? An infrastructure for a failed politics?

The Guardian view on Cambridge’s £190m gift: billionaires won’t fix universities’ problems | Editorial Editorial: Philanthropy increases the gap dividing highly selective, elite higher education from the rest. Ministers need a plan for the sector overall

One of the problems with contemporary sociology in the UK is that we don't think about class as a set of social relations.

After the Paris Commune in 1871 the French ruling class founded Sciences Po as a response.

Rokos' donation is interesting, which crisis...

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I hope you let @ucunorthumbria.bsky.social have right of reply to this.

WEEKEND READING: The time for change is right now: why Northumbria is moving ahead with pension reform - HEPI This blog was kindly authored by Jane Embley, Chief People Officer and Tom Lawson, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost, both of Northumbria University. For over a year, Northumbria University has been ...

its not reform Jane its just a cut, youre taking £100,000 out of my pension because you overspent on some buildings! And overestimated how much student and grant income you could drum up!

See you on the picket line @ucunorthumbria.bsky.social

www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/04/12/w...