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. 


About the Program

ROSA is three-year program of study designed to facilitate collective critical analysis of our present moment and the revolutionary legacies we can draw upon to confront it. Our first year covers key movements, thinkers, and struggles of revolutionary history, mapping the global rise of capital from the European bourgeoisie’s seizure of political power to global attempts to overcome capitalism through present-day rebellions against white supremacist policing and state power.

Our second year provides an opportunity to dive deeper into the ideas and movements explored in the first year, examining historical revolutionary struggles with an emphasis on what the social theories immanent to each revolutionary  movement have to teach us about the contemporary situation. We will also explore how the process by which parties to previous struggles arrived at their self-understandings helps us to come to our own understanding of how we will abolish the society we need to abolish.  Finally, and most importantly, we will ask ourselves what skills we will need to develop in order to see this adventure through.

In our third year we study the contemporary terrain and its constraints, as well as developing our organizing skills in an attempt to develop a communist practice and develop the skills needed to put the models of social transformation explored in preceding years into action.