Call for Submissions: “Back to School” issues for Sept. and Oct.

Raging Chicken Press is now accepting submission for the September and October issues.  We are dubbing these two issues the “Back to School” issues for a couple of reasons.  First, this will be the first academic year since Corbett and his Republican cabal gutted public education from kindergarten through college. Students returning to school this fall face increased challenges as class sizes increase, favorite teachers were given walking papers, and extracurricular activities have been slashed.  In short, this fall will be the first year of the Corbett model of education: fend for yourselves.

But we are calling these issues the “Back to School” issues for another reason.  Here at Raging Chicken Press, we believe that it’s time for progressives, activists, and organizers to rethink effective political action.  The right-wing wave that began in Wisconsin and has swept through Republican dominated states during the first part of 2011, shows the bankrupt nature mainstream political action.  As Dustin Slaughter argued in the August issue,

We often cling to the misconception that real change comes from parliamentary measures and the ballot box.  But in so doing, we each shoulder a forgetting that meaningful reform, be it in labor struggles or the civil rights movements of our past, were not accomplished through legislation.  Reforms were, and will always be, achieved by direct action. In spite of itself direct action has at times turned violent (as the struggle for labor rights illustrated), but just as often it manifests its message in non-violent civil disobedience: sit-ins, marches, boycotts. The machinery of government is slow, and it suggests through its impotence the need for responsive measures. The groundwork for peaceful, radical reform techniques has already been paved for us in historical stone. We as a people now need to find the courage to throw ourselves at “the machine.”

We couldn’t agree more. In a sense, it is critical that we go “Back to School” to remind us that meaningful change and effective resistance requires us to take a stand, draw lines, and fight back.  Rational discourse can only be effective when bolstered by organized “communities of resistance,” as Rachel Riedner and Kevin Mahoney argued in Democracies to Come: Rhetorical Action, Neoliberalism, and Communities of Resistance. But going “Back to School” does not mean retreating to libraries; it means relearning the lessons of struggle through involvement in concrete struggles happening right now.

As this call for submissions goes out, 45,000 Verizon workers enter the twelfth day of their strike, right-wing PA Republicans are holding hearings on anti-union “right to work” legislation, Corbett and PA Republicans are handing over large stretches of public land to the natural gas industry. The list goes on and on.

If you are interested in submitting your work for one of these issues, you can do so by sending an email to ragingchickenpress@gmail.com.  Please take a few minutes to review our Submission Guidelines to familiarize yourself with the kind of work we publish and the purpose of our publication.

Deadline for the September issue is 8/31/2011.

Deadline for the October issue is 9/28/2011.

As always, the earlier you get us your submission the better. We look forward to hearing from you!

Bread and Roses,
Kevin Mahoney
Editor Zero, Raging Chicken Press

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