A Spectre is Haunting CU Boulder
COMING SOON!!
See you on the 27th!
COMING SOON!!
See you on the 27th!
COMING SOON!!
See you on the 14th!
Two years after Al-Aqsa Flood, over 1/3rd of the population of Gaza has been killed, entire generations cut down in the name of empire’s “right to defend itself.” Reading Fanon's On Violence in this context felt as unbearable as it was necessary. As he wrote that the colonized discover freedom only by moving through death, our discussion circled what it means to resist when resistance is punished with annihilation. We asked what we are willing to lose, not in theory but in flesh and memory, and whether we can imagine decolonization without flinching at its cost. Our discussion was many things; it was a memorial, a refusal to forget the lives stolen from us too soon, and a reminder that liberation is both a demand for life and an acknowledgement of the losses already carried.
Although our conversation was heavy and difficult, we came away with renewed faith in the resistance.
Our Afropessimism night stretched us in the best way. We wrestled with the idea that anti-Blackness is more than prejudice — it’s a structure that shapes the world. People brought in personal experiences that made the theory hit closer to home. We left feeling challenged but also energized, knowing we can keep learning and keep showing up for each other.
This 9/11, we gathered not to repeat the tired scripts of American innocence, but to dig into what that day revealed (and obscured) about U.S. imperialism. Together, we asked uncomfortable questions about empire, violence, and memory, and how narratives of “innocent victims” often erase the violence inflicted abroad.
In our conversation we connected the dots between past and present, between towers and drone strikes, between grief and accountability. And when we’d wrestled with enough contradictions for one night, we did what any good collective does: grabbed pizza!
We kicked off the semester with our first gathering, Color Me a Communist. While the crayons stayed in the box, the conversation flowed from big dreams of revolutionary change in Boulder to small, everyday ways we can support each other and build community. It was a chance to meet new comrades, trade stories, and start imagining what this semester’s organizing can look like. No single blueprint for liberation came out of the night, but we left with something better: new faces, new energy, and the reminder that change starts by sitting down together and talking seriously about what we want.
We’re excited for what’s ahead and for everyone who came out to make the first event of the semester feel so full of possibility!
Manmade Horrors (Not) Beyond Our Comprehension, brought together an amazing group of people ready to think, talk, and sculpt their way through capitalism’s psychological wreckage. We opened with short readings from Karl Marx and Byung-Chul Han, who helped us name the invisible systems that shape our labor and our minds. Marx described the ways workers become separated from what they make, from how they make it, and from who they are. Han pushed that even further, pointing out how we now exploit ourselves, not because someone tells us to, but because we think we must. The discussion circled around real experiences like burnout, school, work, survival, and performance. Then using Play dough, each person sculpted what they produce, how it feels to produce it, and what they feel gets lost in the process. There was laughter and concentration, and some surprisingly strange creations. At the end, we shared what we had made and reflected on what it might mean to reclaim that process.
This meeting, with Duncombe and Debord as our guides, and vodka as our flawed but earnest co-facilitator, we sifted through fantasy and commodification, and the creeping suspicion that our desires have been outsourced to the algorithm. It was a chill night with just a few costumed comrades in the glow of colored lights, grappling with whether the spectacle can be subverted or if we are just bedazzling our own chains.We also took a moment to celebrate our graduating comrades, raising our glasses to those moving on from undergrad and into the next chapter of struggle.
Unfortunately, no revolutions kicked off. Still, maybe dreaming out loud with others, without shame or real conclusion, is its own kind of rupture.
Troublemaking 101 invited students to critically examine obedience, authority, and the role of everyday defiance through the lens of Anarchist Calisthenics and The Coming Insurrection. We reflected on how seemingly small acts of refusal like skipping an unnecessary rule or questioning the routine can lay the groundwork for deeper collective resistance.
The session sparked conversation about how to move from isolated disobedience to organized insurrection, and what it means to train ourselves for a world beyond control.
This meet-up dug into the digital terrain of modern organizing. We covered threat modeling, how to reduce surveillance risk, and the tools you need to keep your comrades safe. Privacy for activists isn’t just paranoia and we have to protect ourselves!
Also, shoutout to Signal, encrypted email, and security culture :P
This meeting cracked open the core question of radical politics: what does it mean to truly remake the world? With help from the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction, we challenged liberal myths, re-examined historical uprisings, and discussed how revolution is not just a singular event but a long, collective process.
We left with more questions than answers— and that’s kind of the point.