ROSA is a collaborative learning program examining revolutionary history and theory to develop the analytical and practical skills needed for contemporary social transformation.
Want to join us?
STUDY | ANALYZE
ORGANIZE
ROSA provides a non-ideological framework within which to study social transformation. 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.
FAQs
Who are you, anyway?
ROSA is a new and growing collective of scholars, activists, and organizers around the country interested in developing a pedagogical model for revolutionary study designed to facilitate collective critical analysis of our present moment and the revolutionary legacies we can draw upon to confront it. It aims to build a federated model of local and autonomous schoolhouses around the country that are engaged in common methods of revolutionary study. The schoolhouse in Bloomington is developing a syllabus that allows us to draw upon our own local intellectual resources while still being in dialogue with emerging ROSA schoolhouses elsewhere in the country.
Why ROSA? What does it even mean?
ROSA refers most immediately to Rosa Luxemburg, an often overlooked organizer within the great proletarian upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Her revolutionary practice centered around the role of education and aimed to distill lessons from the struggles of proletarians themselves. Taking inspiration from Luxemburg, we aim to think openly alongside an eclectic array of revolutionary thinkers from around the world in order to reflect on the lessons they too drew from the vast, globe-spanning struggles of the dispossessed classes. To that end, ROSA also means for us the development of a Revolutionary Open Study Association that can learn from those past lessons and actively formulate lessons of our own by reflecting on the emergent and sustained struggles around us.
“Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.” – Rosa Luxemburg
When does it begin?
Year 1 is set to begin in late September, 2025. We’ll follow up with folks who sign up via the form, and share all the relevant details.
So, how do we get outta this mess?
Boy, if we knew… But we’re certain that the processes of social transformation cannot be devised in advance, only to be carried out like clockwork. Instead, they emerge from the arduous and daily struggles of those living opposed to the imperiousness of capitalism in all of its forms. We can develop our capabilities to be attentive to those struggles by studying them and engaging with them collectively. We aim for ROSA to be a space where we can continually ask this question and formulate novel and experimental answers to it.
Do you really think education is going to help?
The order of the famous triadic slogan is noteworthy: “educate, agitate, organize.” Education and schooling have formed the cornerstones to countless social movements and revolutions throughout history, offering their participants a space to develop themselves collectively and push the boundaries of what and how they know the world around them. The ability to critically assess the state of the world—how it came to be—and investigate openings for its undoing has offered past generations an important toolkit for building powerful challenges to capitalism. Similarly, we believe that schooling can provide us with the opportunity to think together about the world we currently inhabit and what it would take to see it transformed. There are no ready-made answers for how we might envision and enact social transformation; in order to reach toward an answer, we need the chance to regard our pasts and present openly and critically and, from there, develop hypotheses about how to change the world.
“And I pray
Oh my god, do I pray
I pray every single day
For revolution”
Still interested?
Join in here: sign-up form
If you’d like to support our schoolhouse, please consider sending us a donation. Any amount helps! All funds received will go to paying lecturers and ensuring the program can be sustained.
Reach out with any questions @ rosabloomington@proton.me
