Thursday, February 19, 2015

‘Activism’ class at University of Michigan teaches capitalism should be ‘overthrown’

‘Activism’ class at University of Michigan teaches capitalism should be ‘overthrown’:
"A textbook used for an “activism” class at the University of Michigan teaches that capitalism should be “overthrown” – claiming “capitalism means waste, poverty, ecological degradation, dispossession, inequality, exploitation, imperialism, war and violence.”
The textbook, “Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution,” is assigned as mandatory reading for “Organizational Studies 203: Activism,” a class at the public university that pledges to teach students about the “struggles of movements past, as well as hands-on engagement with the struggles of today.”
The course is unbiased on paper, with its description stating “neither this course, nor its instructional staff, embraces or rejects any ideology, movement, or political project. We will not preach social change from any particular point of view.”
But the book blames the “global slump we are living through” on capitalism, adding it “is the predictable manifestation of a crisis-prone economic system rooted in production for profit rather than for human need. … [F]or the sake of human development and ecological sanity it needs to be overthrown.”
It describes capitalism as morally perverse, and defines it as “a profit-driven economic system rooted in inequality, exploitation, dispossession and environmental destruction.”"

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