Vicki , 33, student.

…Maybe seeing the world ‘differently’ is how we come to the realization that social alienation is a process that we are intimately connected to: that there is no outside to capitalism. Growing up a wog in an isolated country town made me feel combative about a lot of things. I suppose once you leave the angst of the teenage bedroom you come to understand that antagonism and conflict is everywhere. Developing an understanding of the drivers of injustice and grotesque inequality generated my cynicism, like a lot of people I know - the easiest and most unchallenging kind of un-learning there is. At some point I learnt being excited about the messiness of human relations and their potentiality.

…I was the first in my extended family to go to University so I was pretty enamored by the privilege of formal education, as ‘the way out’. This lead to both an immersion in the institution and its pedagogy, but also learning, through the student movement, to critique its production of power. Being involved in campaigns against the neo-liberalist assault on higher education in the 90’s was critical to my political education. It challenged my relation to public education as an escape/aspiration and developed my thinking about the relation of education to social justice and other use values.

A really important part of my political development was involvement with a national student network called Left Alliance. A collective insistence on reading diverse theory shaped for me what it means to be a communist. Living in a big squat project which was self consciously trying to emulate a European social centre was a challenging and exciting little community. There is nothing quite like the fear of resisting police eviction for a bit of bonding. And the opportunity to sit back with a group of people and go what the hell was that all about and to openly challenge each other and the point of our shared project…..

…I find it difficult to think about the process of learning as influenced by particular events. Engagement with people and particular ideas over a long period of time for me holds the most possibility for an explanation of learning because it provokes self criticism and reflection. That moment when you are in a large group of people, like a rally and you stop and realize that what is going on is an attempt to represent something unrepresentable, to flatten complexity and package life into a demand on the state. Giving up on the myth of an authentic leftist experience of unity and dissent creates a series of long term fraught and contested relationships. These are the spaces that I have learnt from and maybe see political challenge being bound up in. Learning about the difficulty of these processes underlies a focus on coming towards people whose projects of liberation are necessarily contradictory and hard to think of in terms of ‘solutions’ and ‘winning’.

… Learning from struggles is about locating their geneology – understanding history and the particular specificities of a time and place rather than attempting to give meaning to incidents and tactics: like learning about contemporary strategies around Indigenous dispossession has to engage with the foundational violence of colonization. What does it mean to learn from colonization and institutional racism? What interests are generated from this learning? I don’t know, but how ‘we know’ and who ‘we are’, raises difficult questions in my thinking about learning and change.

.. The bookends of my learning: When I was 14 I bought Marx and Engels’ ‘Historical Materialism’ from the Russian pavilion at the Brisbane Expo. I didn’t really understand any of it at the time, I just knew that Bob Santa Maria hated communists and I hated Bob Santa Maria. This was the beginning of an engagement with Marx and ideas around struggle, history, class etc. Recently I’m read a book by bell hooks called ‘all about love’. It’s been critical for me in thinking through what the project of transforming social relations might mean. hooks reckons rethinking love as a doing word is central to creating community. Finding ways to rupture social alienation seems pretty fundamental if we are to ever talk about revolution in a meaningful sense.