radical pedagogy: toward a minor education exam reading list

Area 1: Articulating Critical Pedagogy

Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983).

———, “Literacy and the Pedagogy of Voice and Political Empowerment,” Educational Theory 38(1), 1988: 61-75.

———, “Utopian Thinking Under the Sign of Neoliberalism: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Educated Hope,” Democracy and Nature 9(1), 2003: 91-105.

———, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1(1), 2004: 59-97.

Henry Giroux and Susan Searles Giroux, “Challenging Neo-liberalism’s New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 6(1), 2006: 21-32.

Curry Stephenson Malott and Bradley Porfilio, Critical Pedagogy in the 21^st Century: A New Generation of Scholars (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2011).

Peter McLaren, “Revolutionary Pedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times: Rethinking the Political Economy of Critical Education,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 432-462.

———, “The Future of the Past: Reflections on the Present State of Empire and Pedagogy,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Pedaogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007): 289-314.

———, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (Boston: Pearson, 2007).

———, “Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy,” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 6(2), 2010: 1-11.

Peter McLaren and R. Farahmandpur, “Reconsidering Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?,” Educational Researcher 29(3), 2000: 25-33.

Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo, “Not Neo-Marxist, Not Post-Marxist, Not Marxian, Not Autonomist Marxism: Reflections on a Revolutionary (Marxist) Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 10(3), 2010: 251-262.

Peter McLaren, Gregory Martin, Ramin Farahmandpur, and Nathalia Jaramillo, “Teaching In and Against the Empire: Critical Pedagogy as Revolutionary Praxis,” Teacher Education Quarterly (Winter 2004): 131-153.

Matthew Smith, Jean Ryoo, and Peter McLaren, “A Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” Education and Society 27(3), 2009: 59-76.

 

Area 2: Critiquing Critical Pedagogy

Anne C. Bell and Constance L. Russell, “Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn,” Canadian Journal of Education 25(3), 2000: 188-203.

Gert J.J. Biesta, “Pedagogy Without Humanism: Foucault and the Subject of Education,” Interchange 29(1), 1998: 1-16.

James Campbell, “Education and its Discontents: The Pedagogy of Henry A. Giroux,” Critical Studies in Education 33(1), 1992: 96-109.

Jane Durie, “Emancipatory Education and Classroom Practice: A Feminist Post-Structuralist Perspective,” Studies in Continuing Education 18(2), 1996: 135-146.

C. Alejandra Elenes, “Reclaiming the Borderlands: Chicana/o Identity, Difference, and Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 47(3), 1997: 359-375.

Scott Ellison, “On the Poverty of Philosophy: The Metaphysics of McLaren’s ‘Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy’,” Educational Theory 59(3), 2009: 327-351.

• [Peter McLaren responds: “Afterwords,” Educational Theory 60(3), 2010: 391-393.]

Nirmala Erevelles, “Educating Unruly Bodies: Critical Pedagogy, Disability Studies, and the Politics of Schooling,” Educational Theory 50(1), 2000: 25-47.

Sandy Grande, “Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: A Review of Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis,” Educational Theory 53(3), 2003: 329-346.

———, “Red Lake Woebegone: Pedagogy, Decolonization, and the Critical Project,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 315-336.

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 463-487.

Wendi Kohli, “Critical Education and Embodied Subjects: Making the Poststructural Turn,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 511-520.

Patti Lather, “Critical Pedagogy and its Complicities: A Praxis of Stuck Places,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 487-498.

Zeus Leonardo, “The Souls of White Folk: Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, and Globalization Discourse,” Race, Ethnicity and Education 5, no. 1 (March 2002): 29-50.

Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 1992).

• [Includes: Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 297-325.]

Jan Masschelein, “How to Imagine Something Exterior to the System: Critical Education as Problematization,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 521-530.

Gregory Martin, “The Poverty of Critical Pedagogy: Towards a Politics of Engagement,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 337-353.

William F. Pinar, “The Unaddressed ‘I’ of Ideology Critique,” Power and Education 1(2), 2009: 189-200.

William F. Pinar and C.A. Bowers, “Politics of Curriculum: Origins, Controversies, and Significance of Critical Perspectives,” Review of Research in Education 18 (1992): 163-190.

Willem L. Wardekker and S. Miedema, “Critical Pedagogy: An Evaluation and a Direction for Reformulation,” Curriculum Inquiry 27, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 45-61.

Eric J. Weiner, “Critical Pedagogy and the Crisis of Imagination,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe (eds.), Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 57-77.

 

Area 3: Articulating a Radical Pedagogy

Pole 1: Ranciere and Anarchic Pedagogy

Gert Biesta, “Say You Want a Revolution…Suggestions for the Impossible Future of Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 499-510.

Gert Biesta and Charles Bingham with Jacques Ranciere, Jacques Ranciere: Education, Truth, Emancipation (New York: Continuum, 2010).

Abraham P. DeLeon, “The Time for Action is Now! Anarchist Theory, Critical Pedagogy, and Radical Possibilities,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 4, no. 2 (November 2006). [http://www.jceps.com/print.php?articleID=67]

———, “Oh No, Not the ‘A’ Word! Proposing an Anarchism for Education,” Educational Studies 44, no. 2 (September 2008), 122-141.

Issue 42(5-6) Educational Philosophy and Theory – special issue on Rancière

Daniel Friedrich, Bryn Jaastad, and Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Democratic Education: An (Im)possibility that yet Remains to Come,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42(5/6), 2010: 571-587.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Richard Kahn, “Critical Pedagogy Taking the Illich Turn,” The International Journal of Illich Studies 1(1), 2009: 37-49.

Jennifer Logue and Cris Mayo, “Imagining the Future: What Anarchism Brings to Education” [review of Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective], Journal of Philosophy of Education 43, no. 1 (2009), 159-165.

Todd May, Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Ranciere: Equality in Action (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Nina Power, “Axiomatic Equality: Ranciere and the Politics of Contemporary Education,” Eurozine, from http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-01-power-en.html [accessed July 6, 2010].

Jacques Ranciere, trans. Kristin Ross, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

Stephven Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle (eds.), Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007).

Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2006).

———, “Anarchy in the Classroom,” The New Humanist 120(5), September/October 2005. [www.newhumanist.org.uk/1288/anarchy-in-the-classroom]

———, “Anarchism, Utopias and Philosophy of Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 35(4), 2001: 627-646.

 

Pole 2: Benjamin’s Critique of Violence and the Strategy of Refusal

Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).

Claire Fontaine, “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike”

“The State and the Bosses Only Understand One Language: Strike, Blockade, Sabotage,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/the-state-and-the-bosses-only-understand-one-language/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

“Infinite Strike,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/infinite-strike/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

Pole 3: Towards a Minor Education

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Dana Polan, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

 

a plea for understanding whiteness

Don’t let the talk of this title fool you: “White History Month,” a talk given at Wabash College by my close friend and colleague, Sam Rocha, is no celebration of white supremacy (a la Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin). Instead, it is a passionate plea for a better understanding of the construction of the white race as a social phenomenon, organized around the typical cultural norm of the power and privilege of putting whiteness under erasure.

GESO emerging trends in higher education panel remarks

This past Monday, February 21, I sat on a panel for a discussion entitled “Emerging Trends in Higher Education: The Changing Face of Academia.” Below are my remarks.

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First, I’d like to thank Franco, Valerie, Maria, and Chris for helping us contextualize the GESO struggle. It is imperative that we link what goes on at Ohio State with what is occurring internationally and with the trends and patterns nationally. Ignoring our links to Tunisia or Wisconsin, Italy or California opens up a space to further sediment our exploitation.

I use this word, exploitation, consciously and hopefully it is unsettling. As the other panelists have shown us, the translation of graduate employee positions to secure, tenured positions with the academic freedom, flexible schedule, and intellectual fulfillment that the vast majority of us want is not happening. What these panelists have helped us realize, I hope, is that without action on our part, here, now, then our positions as graduate employees is doomed to a permanence that shifts our experiences from the realm of a willingly experienced apprenticeship to the first stage of an exploitative relationship that will continue for our entire careers.

But we have a unique opportunity to change this outlook. The emergence of international and national struggles against the global regime of an educational paradigm driven by debt, decreasing opportunities to translate the new discourse of instrumental degrees into employment, and the elimination of rights for public workers (including graduate employees) is serendipitous, for us, as it allows us to connect our struggle to a concrete movement. It is becoming abundantly clear that the changes GESO has been promoting for about a decade now are not unreasonable.

What is it that GESO has been working to correct? Here are a few examples:

- OSU currently has no legally binding contract that guarantees that when an offer of employment is made to a graduate student to teach that the wages and benefits that go with that appointment must be honored. It is a common experience for graduate students at this university to be extended an offer of employment only to have it rescinded. Students who have chosen OSU for its academic programs, stellar faculty, and campus resources frequently find themselves regretting their decision to attend, given that they turned down offers from other universities that would have been more stable.

- OSU currently sets its minimum stipend level at $1000 per month. A non-profit organization in Columbus estimates that the required minimum monthly salary in order to avoid any form of public assistance is $1400, and this is likely to rise. Unionized campuses often have a minimum stipend that reflects the cost of living in the area in which the university is situated, and bargain for raises indexed to cost of living increases. For example, the University of Michigan’s minimum stipend is over $2000 per month. OSU’s minimum stipend level depresses wages and leads to countless sacrifices made by graduate employees every day. Even worse, Ohio State’s minimum stipend level seems to assume a number of stereotypes about graduate students: that they are single, wealthy, come to grad school with no previous debt, and are willing and able to go into debt to close the gap between stipend and living expenses.

- Departments are increasingly asking graduate employees to shoulder more and more of the financial burden in order to teach. The Music department has, in the past and perhaps currently, asked its graduate employees to pay for all photocopies related to teaching. Other departments will not purchase dry erase markers or chalk. The most alarming trend, however, is how many departments are now asking graduate students to teach multiple courses as a rule, rather than the exception, without adequate compensation. Philosophy and Political Science are two departments where students are increasingly asked to take on teaching two sections of a single course, or two different courses entirely, and paid at the 75% appointment level because the university prohibits 100% appointments. 50% plus 50% does not equal 75%; yet in many departments this seems to be rapidly becoming the norm. Gone unchallenged, this will soon become the expectation all around campus. The sad thing is, graduate students are so often desperate for the money and accept this arrangement without question; or when they are presented with the option, it is framed as a “learning opportunity” that will give them “an advantage on the academic market.”

- OSU has no independently mediated grievance procedure, leading to regular abuses of graduate employees and a culture of fear which prevents speaking up.

- Health care costs are unreasonable, especially for those on regular, expensive medications or those with spouses, partners, and/or dependents.

- and the list could go on.

We must be careful, though, and not focus too heavily on the wages and benefits issues. In fact, OSU has already used a common union busting tactic against GESO just when it seemed that we were gaining the momentum that would lead to unionization. In 2005, OSU caved on the health care subsidy and, in effect, gutted the momentum GESO had built. By focusing on the single issue of health care benefits, the university effectively stopped GESO in its tracks by giving a little, a 75% subsidy at the time; with our momentum killed, GESO has been struggling since then to continue to organize. This is hard to understand, though, given what we know about our working conditions, which are not good. We must find a way to fight back against the rhetoric of gratitude and sacrifice that is so normal: it is frighteningly common to hear “I’m just so grateful to have a position at all; I really need the teaching experience to be competitive on the job market, so I’ll make sacrifices now in order to make my entry into full-time, tenured employment easier.” But again, we know this is no longer the case.

The conditions at OSU are ripe for a collective response. And the GESO members think that response can be in the form of a union. However, with John Kasich in office, emboldened by like-minded governors in New Jersey – Chris Christie – and Wisconsin – Scott Walker, union rights to collective bargaining are under attack. But if we change the way we think about unionization from the mere economism of wages and benefits toward reimagining the collective politics of the precariat – students, flexible workers, academics, and others, then we have the opportunity to shift the balance of power.

Any unionization effort must also focus on the possibility for unionization to intervene in the governance processes at the university in a democratic way. I don’t mean, however, shared governance. Of course we should be involved in decision making processes – and I would especially like to see this happen through direct democracy rather than representation. What I mean, instead, is the possibility of an campus or academic union that takes the university as a site around which we build a ‘world’ or a form of life – in this sense, a union is actually what helps produce a particular sensibility at Ohio State.

This world of which I speak is one in which it is normal to expect agitation around wages and benefits issues, the university’s role in community development, and the way major donations are spent. It is a form of life that naturalizes a solidarity across employment category: janitor, Sodexo worker, graduate employee, and undergraduate work studies would just be the beginning.

This conversation is intended, as Amy noted in her introductory remarks, to begin to conceptualize, yet again, what unionization would mean for the university. What GESO has worked for, historically, has been a union for graduate employees. Over the past year and half to two years, though, we have been making connections to broader movements in Columbus – such as the Jobs With Justice effort to pressure OSU to sign a community benefits agreement that would include local hiring provisions and agreements to use union labor in new building projects. Recognizing that we must work not just in cooperation but in absolute synchronization with the efforts of USAS, SEIU, and Sodexo workers to unionize, with janitors, adjunct and full-time faculty, trade unions, and community organizations. What we have come to recognize is that the struggle of graduate employees is actually a small component integral to the role of a new paradigm of flexible, precarious, immaterial laborers.

 

academic labor and the new paradigm of class politics: toward an immaterial unionism – outline

A while back I posted a first rough draft of an essay I’m working on called “Academic Labor and the New Paradigm of Class Politics.” I’ve now expanded the title to include the subtitle “Toward an Immaterial Unionism,” and I’ve revised it to follow an Introduction – Theses – Proposal format a bit more conducive to the zine/polemic sensibility that I’m going for. I’m hoping to have a draft sufficiently completed to distribute on Monday, February 21, 2011 at the GESO panel discussion, “Emerging Trends in Higher Education: The Changing Face of Academia.”

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Introduction

A Brief History and Rationale for Unions

Thesis 1: The crisis of the university is experienced momentarily, but is in fact the condition of the university’s historical existence.

Thesis 2: The university functions in the economy today as the factory yesterday.

Thesis 3: Given the function of the edu-factory in siting and (re)producing immateriality, unions as a response to academic working conditions are insufficient.

Thesis 4: An academic union, as a manifestation of the common university, is a decisive intervention in the edu-factory.

Thesis 5: The university cannot be saved; it must be reconstituted.

Proposals

ohio state graduate employees’ student organization blog

I’ve added a page to the OSU GESO website that redirects to a new GESO blog on wordpress. I figure it’s a good way to share our newsletter articles and lots of information, clippings, headlines, and stories from around the web that perhaps aren’t relevant enough to make it onto the main GESO website.

GESO website: www.osugeso.org

GESO blog: www.osugeso.wordpress.com

contextualizing u.s. higher education activism

My contribution to the February 2011 GESO newsletter. Distribution of the whole newsletter is scheduled for next week.

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The United States has entered a period of general educational crisis; but this crisis has nothing to do with what mainstream policy makers and commentators would have you believe. Rather than declining in quality and innovation, the US remains a destination country for higher education (meaning most of the world’s best universities are here and attracting students from abroad) and the country remains the site of innovation in science, engineering, and business. This doesn’t appear to be in serious jeopardy in the near future. The changes to higher education being forced through in many states right now, based on arguments about maintaining competitiveness and an innovative edge, are chimeras. Chimeras conjured to solidify the university as a site of immediate value production.

American higher education activism has generally been geared toward creating and preserving a critical distance between the demands of immediate value production and the historic ideal of the university as a site of humanistic education, clearly a case of deferred value production. American students have engaged in activism since the founding of higher education in the country – students at Harvard rioted over the quality of butter in the dining halls in 1766. In the last century or so, American students have been mostly mobilized around creating an inclusive, identity-driven curriculum and the accessibility of the university to various historically marginalized constituencies. These battles reflect the humanistic ideals of the university, and demonstrate that historically what students want from their education is not immediate value. It is external pressure from corporations and ignorant politicians driving the current trend toward insisting that the university serve as a center for vocational training.

The current battle over the role, meaning, and value of higher education in the United States (and the world) is a battle over the very meaning of the public sphere within the new paradigm of class politics: immaterial labor. As capital continues to adapt itself to the realm of finance, services, and the production of creativity, traditional labor politics are put under erasure. There are still factories, meat packing plants, construction sites, and other traditional bastions of labor, but they are increasingly marginalized in favor of an economy based around the production of affects, ideas, and services that are nor produced in linear, regimented, atomized modes of production. These changes are driving more diverse students to the university. It is not surprising that the current crisis in higher education coincides with this historically unmatched increase in college enrollment by ethnic minorities and traditionally poor white populations.

The new modes of production coupled with the influx of the historic laboring classes into the realm of immaterial labor – a realm traditionally dominated by the bourgeoisie – are shifting the site of class politics from the factory to the university. The university has become the factory, at least in terms of its function in the economy; but this change presents new challenges. Immaterial production is difficult to measure quantitatively, making the ability to engage in collective bargaining increasingly difficult. This leads to downright silly measures of “productivity” by valuing the quantity of faculty publications over quality: publish or perish is a new form of class war, designed to keep faculty and graduate students concerned more about output than defending their quality of life.

Now more than ever we must recognize that the working conditions of faculty – including the contingent labor of graduate assistants of all types and adjunct faculty – are directly tied to the meaning and value of public higher education. Without tenure, academic freedom, and benefits and compensation that guarantee a form of life conducive to the life of the mind the public university as an idea and an aspiration will cease to exist.

Ohio State already receives among the highest amounts of private and corporate sponsorship of research among US universities. President Gee is, and has been, committed to the destruction of academic disciplines and the relegation of research funding through an internal system of competitive grants. He has also been vocal about the need to change the tenure system. It is obvious why Gee is seen, worldwide, as one of the foremost proponents of the corporate university, and wishes to see the traditional role of higher education altered in favor of a notion of “productivity” and “usefulness” to society that is the very death of public education.

Join GESO in defending the very idea of public higher education by demanding 1) the compensation and benefits that allow us to live our lives while pursuing our educations, 2) a meaningful role in the governance process of the university, and 3) the redirection of university resources away from vanity building projects and towards university support for research in ALL disciplines.

an open letter to the gonzaga university community

Re: Generation Me (Bulletin, 12/2/10)

Enough with “Generation Me.” These pop-psychological explanations for why the current generation just can’t live up to the previous serve no purpose. They are analytically weak. They lead us nowhere.

For a university that purports to place so much emphasis on social justice – by definition social action in response to social phenomenon (in other words, a collective justice) – it is amazing how blind everyone is to the university’s own complicity in creating a social milieu in which “generation me” is produced.

Generational studies operate in this strange space of holding individuals ultimately responsible for ostensibly collective failures. Generation Me is narcissistic, yet so were Generation X and the Baby Boomers. Generation Me is materialistic, yet so were Generation X (the 80s anyone???) and the Baby Boomers (the 50s???). “Generations” exist to prove the superiority of the past as the present leaves them behind.

So why is no one asking the real question? Student behavior throughout history has shocked and appalled administrators – if you need proof, look up the 1766 Great Butter Rebellion at Harvard. Supposedly, this generation has a knack for shocking and appalling administrators through outrageous behavior linked to alcohol and drug abuse. Because that has never happened before. Again, I return to the unasked question. Rather than asking in what ways are student behaviors irrational, I’d rather we asked in what ways they are perfectly rational?

I started at Gonzaga just over ten years ago, and graduated in 2004. Generally, we expected to graduate and get jobs, and for many of us this has held to be true. But for many of us, it has not, and statistically, things are just getting worse and worse. The sad reality is that most college graduates are no longer guaranteed a job, especially not a job in the field in which they major. A college degree helps, yes, but it is no guarantee. And the proliferation of college degrees has actually aided the compression felt in most fields, where there has been a downward push to require higher and higher degrees for more and more menial level work. This is the first generation in recent history that will be worse off than their parents. We’ve done everything we were supposed to do: we had jobs in high school for the resume-building experience; we participated in every activity under the sun in order to be appealing to admissions committees; we performed community service through CCASL, our churches, the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and countless non-profits; we’ve served in AmeriCorps in the greatest numbers in history, in the PeaceCorps, Jesuit Volunteer Corps…; we’ve aspired to law, medicine, green business… This generation has done everything they were supposed to do, and we are getting screwed by institutional and structural forces that, as 18-30 year olds, we have had little role in shaping.

And administrators seem surprised at their disaffection? This isn’t a surprise, it is willful ignorance.

Yet rather than become nihilistic, college students today are seeking meaning and refuge in their social relationships. (Granted, alcohol as a social bonding tool is not always healthy, but this isn’t really a generational problem.) Again, we come to an unasked question: rather than focus on the “spectacular” behavior of students as abnormal, why is no one asking why the university has expanded – steadily, slowly, but surely – their desire and ability to control student behavior on and off campus? We’ve reached a limit for education that can’t be surpassed in education’s current form. Administrators and students represent different sets of interests, and this thing we call education is usually not at the center of either set.

My challenge to GU students is this: rather than blame your fellow students, or allow yourselves to be blamed, why not focus your energies on further experimentation with social relationships? Why not recognize that the future is yours, but you must take it back from the ever-expanding efforts of those who wish for you to just shut up and behave? Recognize the limits of your university schooling, and create your own opportunities for education that aren’t captured by the university to be utilized as advertising tools. Forget education, it forgot you years ago. Experiment. Create your own free schools. Teach in. Occupy. Demand more from the university than condescension.

Take back your future and tell Generation Me to shove it.

Sincerely,

joshua j. kurz

Class of 2004

 

academic labor and the new paradigm of class politics

Feedback please! I’m working on this for 1) the GESO website and 2) for some circulation in discussions on academic labor.

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Why would graduate students need a union? is one of the most common questions GESO activists come across while organizing the campus. Answering this question, GESO activists usually focus on our ongoing struggle for transactional benefits such as an increased minimum stipend, better health benefits for students and their families, a formal grievance procedure, and other issues. Rarely, though, do we get an opportunity to discuss larger themes and trends in higher education and political economy. In an effort to make the GESO website as useful as possible, we’d like to take the opportunity to address one of the primary reasons that a graduate employee union (and unions for adjunct and full-time faculty as well) is absolutely necessary: the paradigmatic shift in the United States from an economy of material production to one of immaterial production.

Stated simply, unionism is no longer confined to the realm of the trades (carpenters, electricians, pipe-fitters, etc.) or manual labor (longshoremen, migrant farmworkers, etc.).

The early days of unionism saw the creation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the CIO, the IWW; later, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) were formed to bring unions to new areas of the labor force. Even teachers were unionized in many places by the early 1900s (National Education Association, 1918; American Federation of Teachers, ). The growth of unions in the 20th Century  can be largely attributed to the maturation of a capitalism based on the mass production of material goods. This form of mass production brought with it a rash of problems the likes of which had never really been seen before: children missing limbs from industrial loom accidents, the black lung deaths of coal miners in Appalachia, and so on. Recognizing that government intervention was unlikely, and unable to combat the supposedly free labor contract on an individual basis, workers in the early 20th Century banded together to demand rights including fair wages, retirement benefits, injury and accident compensation, child labor prohibitions, and many other things we take for granted today in any workplace. Individually, a worker could not demand sick leave from the employer who literally exercised a power over the worker that dictated whether he could eat that night, let alone feed a family. Collectively, though, thousands of workers could force an employer to meet these basic demands. The peak of the material labor pact came in the wake of the New Deal and World War II and lasted until about the 1970s.

Decades of reasonable profits and a stable middle class weren’t enough, though, and with the OPEC oil crisis, capital began to push back. Beginning in Chile in the 1970s, then in Britain and the U.S. in the 1980s, neoliberal capital began to take root: outsource material production to countries where labor was not demanding a living wage, insource the production of new knowledge and innovation that would drive an economy without labor (a capitalist’s wet dream!). While we cannot know if we are at the pinnacle of this wave of capitalism, we can certainly say that the U.S. national economy is largely destroyed in favor of a global economy, the regional iteration of which is focused on producing knowledge, affects, and financial instruments – essentially, our economy has shifted to producing immaterial goods.

The university is one of the primary engines in the new economy, and graduate students are essential to the functioning of the university. Graduate students (and other contingent academic labor) have replaced material laborers in function, if not necessarily in experience. [It would certainly be ridiculous to claim that the experience of a graduate student in the humanities is equivalent to the dangerous life of a coal miner in 1920 West Virginia.] What is clear is that the labor required to drive the new economy is not coming from the factories, it is coming from universities.

Most of you are probably thinking at this point, ok, but still, why do we need a union, grad school is only a few years long and then I’ll go on and be a professor (or perhaps for those of you in engineering or some such department, a job in the private sector). If this were 1975, we would say, no problem, tough it out. However, the academic landscape has shifted dramatically: in 1975 the ration of tenured to non-tenured faculty on campus was 75::25; today it is directly reversed, part-time and contingent faculty now make up 75% of the academic workforce, with tenured positions rapidly falling below 25%. The sad reality is, most of us will leave OSU with an advanced degree and then go on to a pastiche of part-time academic jobs with little security, no academic freedom, few benefits, and wages so low that we’ll look forward to a lifetime of debt repayments. A graduate employee union certainly does not guarantee a fix to all of these problems, but it forms a particularly important foundation for a new class politics that can help 1) to alleviate the financial burden on grad students to hopefully reduce debt loads and increase the array of post-graduation opportunities and 2) to build a university-wide coalition of labor activists to not only protect wages and benefits, but also to create a democratic workplace.

 

student affairs

I had a former student contact me to inquire about the field of student affairs, which I worked in for four years: 2 during my AmeriCorps service and 2 more while I got my Master of Science in College Student Personnel. I figured I’d post my response here and then organize the thoughts later for a future post.

NB: SA = Student Affairs

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I’m not terribly surprised you’re interested in student affairs, and I’d be glad to talk to you more about it. I’m not in SA anymore, though, and have largely stopped paying attention to the job market in the field, but things haven’t changed much in two years my friends active in SA tell me. So, let me note a few things, pose a few questions, and make a few suggestions.

1) Miami is a bit of a budget bubble when it comes to student affairs; the programs there get a big chunk of funding even in times of ‘economic crisis.’ This isn’t necessarily so at all (maybe most) universities. Kristen lost her job at the Women’s Center, and many many many other universities are facing similar budget situations [Kristen was a fantastic woman that we hired to be the Assistant Director of the Women's Center who was then let go almost exactly a year later because Miami decided to eliminate the funding for the position]. This means the job market in higher education is likely to remain dismal for a long while. This leads me to…

2) Most likely, the jobs that will be widely available will be in residence life (liability issues will always create demand here) and general student affairs/student organization positions. The reality of things in the women’s centers, lgbtq centers, and so on is that with the clamp down in the economy, fewer people are moving up (leaving lower-level positions occupied) or out (nowhere else is hiring outside of academia).

These aren’t to dissuade you, just to give you a realistic picture of what is going on in higher education right now. Things may recover, and may even take off to new heights, but I’m not fully convinced.

If you are intent on exploring further, here are a few things to think about.

1) Why a university setting? Why not an independent not-for-profit? What goals or outcomes does your everyday work (or the work you desire to do) revolve around? Remember, at a university, you get 100% turnover every few years, so you will ALWAYS be combating what seems like the same problems over and over again, barring major changes in American culture of course. It is worth asking yourself, are you OK with the kind of repetition that comes with the territory?

2) Why students? Do you have a general idea of how you’d like to work with them already? Why? What would the masters do for you on top of this already? For example, you were able to see some clear differences between Erica and myself in how we supervised the Ambassadors – was there something that stuck out to you about those differences that will draw you one way or another? I was extremely lucky that Jane and Kristen were willing to experiment with me in supervising the Ambassadors; most places will not allow that kind of experimentation, let alone foster it. So, the question, in other words, is how much do you want to hew to “proven” models that foster quantitative outcomes, which is the clear direction the field has been going? Asking yourself “why students” and “how do I want to work with students” can help you decide whether the SA setting, or elsewhere, is where you really belong.

3) What are your feelings about the theory/practice ‘divide’? Most of the SA crowd is really practice oriented, often to the point of imagining they are creating ‘real change’ while actually perpetuating a lot of truly awful social/political/economic relations. However, being cast as ‘too theoretical’ can get you a reputation as an outcast, a crank, or ineffective. So there are dangers on both sides. My personal philosophy is that SA is situated within the university, and should therefore be heavily engaged with academic/theoretical work and significantly involve professors and their research as much as possible. How much are you willing to be a life-long student (rather than a life-long practitioner doing ‘homework’ by catching up on developments in the field)?

Hmmm… rereading this, I think it becomes clear that I have a few issues with the field. I really loved my time in SA, but I think there are clear ‘sticky’ spots that should be thought through before entering a professional program with marginal transport value (an outside employer sees College Student Personnel on your resume and may not know what the hell that means). You also really need to avoid the pitfall that many in student affairs fall into; you ask them why they are in the field and they say “because I just loved my undergrad experience SO much I just want to do that for others.” This is a great sentiment, but I think it really cheapens what SA can be (not necessarily what it is).

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There was a bit more personal stuff here at the end which doesn’t need to be put up here, but the email didn’t end this abruptly. Anyway, maybe tomorrow or the following day I’ll post some thoughts on this more generally and expand on this.

Communique from an Absent Future

I’m reposting this from the “we want everything” blog, one of the main outlets for the occupations at UC Santa Cruz. It’s long, but it’s also one of the most vicious critiques of higher education I’ve ever seen and well worth the read.

I

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt.  This bankruptcy is not only financial.  It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making.  No one knows what the university is for anymore.  We feel this intuitively.  Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market.  These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university.  Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties.  We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments.  Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt.  The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do).  Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities.  Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords.  We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved.  We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project.  University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers.  Even leisure is a form of job training.  The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office.  Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work.  We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym.  We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle.  “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what? —drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk.  A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow.  And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have.  Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation.  Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt.  We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around.  Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color.  Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003.  What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives.  What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest.  Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school.  Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile.  No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition.  On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum.  And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement.  Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit.  But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them.  And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.

If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers.  Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for.  It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things.  One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience.  First we pay, then we “work hard.”  And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed.  It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience.  Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system.  Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here:  was the course easy?  Was the teacher hot?  Could any stupid asshole get an A?  What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes?  Who needs memory when we have the internet?  A training in thought?  You can’t be serious.  A moral preparation?  There are anti-depressants for that.

Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically enlightened among us, are also the most obedient.  The “vocation” for which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the grid, or out of the labor market.  Every grad student is a would be Robinson Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the exigencies of the market.  But this fantasy is itself sustained through an unremitting submission to the market.  There is no longer the least felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of capitalism by day and polishing one’s job talk by night.  That our pleasure is our labor only makes our symptoms more manageable.  Aesthetics and politics collapse courtesy of the substitution of ideology for history: booze and beaux arts and another seminar on the question of being, the steady blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by somebody somewhere, some not-me, not-here, where all that appears is good and all goods appear attainable by credit.

Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system adapted to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the star professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and adjuncts paid mostly in bad faith.  A kind of monasticism predominates here, with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its essential altruism.  The underlings are only too happy to play apprentice to the masters, unable to do the math indicating that nine-tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester to pad the paychecks of the one-tenth who sustain the fiction that we can all be the one.  Of course I will be the star, I will get the tenure-track job in a large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.

We end up interpreting Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”  At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of coming to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root.  We admire the first part of this performance: it lights our way.  But we want the tools to break through that point of suicidal thought, its hinge in practice.

The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible to cynicism.  But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent radical.  The shoulder shrug, the dulled face, the squirm of embarrassment when discussing the fact that the US murdered a million Iraqis between 2003 and 2006, that every last dime squeezed from America’s poorest citizens is fed to the banking industry, that the seas will rise, billions will die and there’s nothing we can do about it—this discomfited posture comes from feeling oneself pulled between the is and the ought of current left thought.  One feels that there is no alternative, and yet, on the other hand, that another world is possible.

We will not be so petulant.  The synthesis of these positions is right in front of us: another world is not possible; it is necessary.  The ought and the is are one.  The collapse of the global economy is here and now.

II

The university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital.  Its essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labor. Though not a proper corporation that can be bought and sold, that pays revenue to its investors, the public university nonetheless carries out this function as efficiently as possible by approximating ever more closely the corporate form of its bedfellows.  What we are witnessing now is the endgame of this process, whereby the façade of the educational institution gives way altogether to corporate streamlining.

Even in the golden age of capitalism that followed after World War II and lasted until the late 1960s, the liberal university was already subordinated to capital.  At the apex of public funding for higher education, in the 1950s, the university was already being redesigned to produce technocrats with the skill-sets necessary to defeat “communism” and sustain US hegemony.  Its role during the Cold War was to legitimate liberal democracy and to reproduce an imaginary society of free and equal citizens—precisely because no one was free and no one was equal.

But if this ideological function of the public university was at least well-funded after the Second World War, that situation changed irreversibly in the 1960s, and no amount of social-democratic heel-clicking will bring back the dead world of the post-war boom.   Between 1965 and 1980 profit rates began to fall, first in the US, then in the rest of the industrializing world.  Capitalism, it turned out, could not sustain the good life it made possible.  For capital, abundance appears as overproduction, freedom from work as unemployment.  Beginning in the 1970s, capitalism entered into a terminal downturn in which permanent work was casualized and working-class wages stagnated, while those at the top were temporarily rewarded for their obscure financial necromancy, which has itself proved unsustainable.

For public education, the long downturn meant the decline of tax revenues due to both declining rates of economic growth and the prioritization of tax-breaks for beleaguered corporations.  The raiding of the public purse struck California and the rest of the nation in the 1970s.  It has continued to strike with each downward declension of the business cycle.  Though it is not directly beholden to the market, the university and its corollaries are subject to the same cost-cutting logic as other industries: declining tax revenues have made inevitable the casualization of work.  Retiring professors make way not for tenure-track jobs but for precariously employed teaching assistants, adjuncts, and lecturers who do the same work for much less pay.  Tuition increases compensate for cuts while the jobs students pay to be trained for evaporate.

In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted, many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education.  They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity to demand the return of the past.  But social programs that depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone.  We cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public university” in a capitalist society.   The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system.  We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded.  The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.

What this means for our struggle is that we can’t go backward.  The old student struggles are the relics of a vanished world.  In the 1960s, as the post-war boom was just beginning to unravel, radicals within the confines of the university understood that another world was possible.  Fed up with technocratic management, wanting to break the chains of a conformist society, and rejecting alienated work as unnecessary in an age of abundance, students tried to align themselves with radical sections of the working class.  But their mode of radicalization, too tenuously connected to the economic logic of capitalism, prevented that alignment from taking hold.  Because their resistance to the Vietnam war focalized critique upon capitalism as a colonial war-machine, but insufficiently upon its exploitation of domestic labor, students were easily split off from a working class facing different problems.  In the twilight era of the post-war boom, the university was not subsumed by capital to the degree that it is now, and students were not as intensively proletarianized by debt and a devastated labor market.

That is why our struggle is fundamentally different. The poverty of student life has become terminal: there is no promised exit. If the economic crisis of the 1970s emerged to break the back of the political crisis of the 1960s, the fact that today the economic crisis precedes the coming political uprising means we may finally supersede the cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles.  There will be no return to normal.

III

We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.

Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms.  We demand not a free university but a free society.  A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning.  We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt.  We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours.  Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood.  This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society.  Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.

The university struggle is one among many, one sector where a new cycle of refusal and insurrection has begun – in workplaces, neighborhoods, and slums.  All of our futures are linked, and so our movement will have to join with these others, breeching the walls of the university compounds and spilling into the streets.  In recent weeks Bay Area public school teachers, BART employees, and unemployed have threatened demonstrations and strikes.  Each of these movements responds to a different facet of capitalism’s reinvigorated attack on the working class in a moment of crisis.  Viewed separately, each appears small, near-sighted, without hope of success.  Taken together, however, they suggest the possibility of widespread refusal and resistance.  Our task is to make plain the common conditions that, like a hidden water table, feed each struggle.

We have seen this kind of upsurge in the recent past, a rebellion that starts in the classrooms and radiates outward to encompass the whole of society. Just two years ago the anti-CPE movement in France, combating a new law that enabled employers to fire young workers without cause, brought huge numbers into the streets.  High school and university students, teachers, parents, rank and file union members, and unemployed youth from the banlieues found themselves together on the same side of the barricades.  (This solidarity was often fragile, however.  The riots of immigrant youth in the suburbs and university students in the city centers never merged, and at times tensions flared between the two groups.)  French students saw through the illusion of the university as a place of refuge and enlightenment and acknowledged that they were merely being trained to work.  They took to the streets as workers, protesting their precarious futures.  Their position tore down the partitions between the schools and the workplaces and immediately elicited the support of many wage workers and unemployed people in a mass gesture of proletarian refusal.

As the movement developed it manifested a growing tension between revolution and reform.  Its form was more radical than its content.  While the rhetoric of the student leaders focused merely on a return to the status quo, the actions of the youth – the riots, the cars overturned and set on fire, the blockades of roads and railways, and the waves of occupations that shut down high schools and universities – announced the extent of the new generation’s disillusionment and rage.  Despite all of this, however, the movement quickly disintegrated when the CPE law was eventually dropped.  While the most radical segment of the movement sought to expand the rebellion into a general revolt against capitalism, they could not secure significant support and the demonstrations, occupations, and blockades dwindled and soon died.  Ultimately the movement was unable to transcend the limitations of reformism.

The Greek uprising of December 2008 broke through many of these limitations and marked the beginning of a new cycle of class struggle.  Initiated by students in response to the murder of an Athens youth by police, the uprising consisted of weeks of rioting, looting, and occupations of universities, union offices, and television stations.  Entire financial and shopping districts burned, and what the movement lacked in numbers it made up in its geographical breadth, spreading from city to city to encompass the whole of Greece.  As in France it was an uprising of youth, for whom the economic crisis represented a total negation of the future.  Students, precarious workers, and immigrants were the protagonists, and they were able to achieve a level of unity that far surpassed the fragile solidarities of the anti-CPE movement.

Just as significantly, they made almost no demands.  While of course some demonstrators sought to reform the police system or to critique specific government policies, in general they asked for nothing at all from the government, the university, the workplaces, or the police.   Not because they considered this a better strategy, but because they wanted nothing that any of these institutions could offer.   Here content aligned with form; whereas the optimistic slogans that appeared everywhere in French demonstrations jarred with the images of burning cars and broken glass, in Greece the rioting was the obvious means to begin to enact the destruction of an entire political and economic system.

Ultimately the dynamics that created the uprising also established its limit.  It was made possible by the existence of a sizeable radical infrastructure in urban areas, in particular the Exarchia neighborhood in Athens.  The squats, bars, cafes, and social centers, frequented by students and immigrant youth, created the milieu out of which the uprising emerged.  However, this milieu was alien to most middle-aged wageworkers, who did not see the struggle as their own.  Though many expressed solidarity with the rioting youth, they perceived it as a movement of entrants – that is, of that portion of the proletariat that sought entrance to the labor market but was not formally employed in full-time jobs.  The uprising, strong in the schools and the immigrant suburbs, did not spread to the workplaces.

Our task in the current struggle will be to make clear the contradiction between form and content and to create the conditions for the transcendence of reformist demands and the implementation of a truly communist content.  As the unions and student and faculty groups push their various “issues,” we must increase the tension until it is clear that we want something else entirely.  We must constantly expose the incoherence of demands for democratization and transparency.  What good is it to have the right to see how intolerable things are, or to elect those who will screw us over?  We must leave behind the culture of student activism, with its moralistic mantras of non-violence and its fixation on single-issue causes.  The only success with which we can be content is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the certain immiseration and death which it promises for the 21st century.  All of our actions must push us towards communization; that is, the reorganization of society according to a logic of free giving and receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, the value-form, compulsory labor, and exchange. Occupation will be a critical tactic in our struggle, but we must resist the tendency to use it in a reformist way.  The different strategic uses of occupation became clear this past January when students occupied a building at the New School in New York.  A group of friends, mostly graduate students, decided to take over the Student Center and claim it as a liberated space for students and the public.  Soon others joined in, but many of them preferred to use the action as leverage to win reforms, in particular to oust the school’s president.  These differences came to a head as the occupation unfolded.  While the student reformers were focused on leaving the building with a tangible concession from the administration, others shunned demands entirely.  They saw the point of occupation as the creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new society.  We side with this anti-reformist position.  While we know these free zones will be partial and transitory, the tensions they expose between the real and the possible can push the struggle in a more radical direction.

We intend to employ this tactic until it becomes generalized.  In 2001 the first Argentine piqueteros suggested the form the people’s struggle there should take: road blockades, which brought to a halt the circulation of goods from place to place.  Within months this tactic spread across the country without any formal coordination between groups.  In the same way repetition can establish occupation as an instinctive and immediate method of revolt taken up both inside and outside the university.  We have seen a new wave of takeovers in the U.S. over the last year, both at universities and workplaces: New School and NYU, as well as the workers at Republic Windows Factory in Chicago, who fought the closure of their factory by taking it over.  Now it is our turn.

To accomplish our goals we cannot rely on those groups which position themselves as our representatives.  We are willing to work with unions and student associations when we find it useful, but we do not recognize their authority.  We must act on our own behalf directly, without mediation.  We must break with any groups that seek to limit the struggle by telling us to go back to work or class, to negotiate, to reconcile.  This was also the case in France.  The original calls for protest were made by the national high school and university student associations and by some of the trade unions.  Eventually, as the representative groups urged calm, others forged ahead.  And in Greece the unions revealed their counter-revolutionary character by canceling strikes and calling for restraint.

As an alternative to being herded by representatives, we call on students and workers to organize themselves across trade lines. We urge undergraduates, teaching assistants, lecturers, faculty, service workers, and staff to begin meeting together to discuss their situation.  The more we begin talking to one another and finding our common interests, the more difficult it becomes for the administration to pit us against each other in a hopeless competition for dwindling resources. The recent struggles at NYU and the New School suffered from the absence of these deep bonds, and if there is a lesson to be learned from them it is that we must build dense networks of solidarity based upon the recognition of a shared enemy.  These networks not only make us resistant to recuperation and neutralization, but also allow us to establish new kinds of collective bonds.  These bonds are the real basis of our struggle.