2025-2026 Co-Prosperity Sphere, Public Media Institute, Chicago IL
2024-2025 Red Bud Books, Bloomington IN
ROSA provides a multi-tendency framework within which to study revolutionary politics. We think it unlikely that a single, solidified historical approach to revolution can generate a real movement which abolishes the present state of things since the conditions of such a movement result from premises which have only now come into existence. At the same time, we also recognize that more and more people, especially younger people and students, daily become increasingly aware of the need for a revolution of some kind. As capitalism exhausts its capacity to meet its own demand for infinite growth—what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”—weakens and its violence and absurdity swing more fully into view. Not just the specific form of capitalist domination presses into daily life, but also the myriad forms of racial, gendered, and other genocidal violences become visible. History begins again in the intolerability of the present, a growing curiosity about the past, and a desire to build a future that would redeem them both.
ROSA also believes that the current collapse of the bourgeois university and education system gives us an opportunity to reimagine pedagogy. Although most of the people building the school are surplus academic labor, trained in an educational model on a social separation between ‘faculty’ and ‘students’ (where the faculty present themselves as ‘experts’ delivering a knowledge commodity packaged as a lecture to the ‘students’), we aspire to challenge and transform that framework. To that end each school house meets as a collective 4-6 times a year to discuss pedagogical techniques with a view to shaping and re-shaping our own emergent institution and reducing the forces that create social separation within it.
Our curriculum in the history of revolution examines attempts to clear away the situation created by capitalism, the concepts and social theories immanent to those movements, and the constraints within which they had to struggle. Our aim is to train one another to analyze the situation we find ourselves in, to develop a model of how to overcome it, and to understand the practical skills we will need to put that model into action. We believe that only the study of history can adequately prepare us for this adventure.