biopolitics post-foucault exam reading list

Background Reading:

Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Slavoj Zizek, Mapping Ideology (New York: Verso, 1995).

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Timothy C. Campbell, “Interview with Roberto Esposito,” diacritics 36(2), 2006: 49-56.

Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Michel Foucault, trans. Robert Hurley, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990).

———,trans. David Macey, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003).

———, trans. Graham Burchell, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978 (New York: Picador, 2007).

———, trans. Graham Burchell, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France,1978-1979 (New York: Picador, 2008).

Karl Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes, Capital vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).

———, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1993).

Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (eds.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004).

Agamben:

Giorgio Agamben, trans. Michael Hardt, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

———, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

———, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

———, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

———, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002).

———, trans. Kevin Attell, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

———, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

———, trans. Luca di Santo, The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone Books, 2009).

———, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Nudities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (eds.), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).

Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

Autonomous Marxism:

Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Debating Empire (New York: Verso, 2003).

Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (AntiThesis).

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysius (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

———, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

———, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (NYC: Penguin Books, 2004).

———, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).

Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (eds.), Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007).

Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl, Marxism Beyond Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1995).

Antonio Negri, trans. Maurizia Boscagli, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

———, trans. Timothy S. Murphy and Arianna Bove, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (New York: Verso, 2005).

———, trans. James Newell, Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005).

Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean, Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Jason Read, The Micropolitics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).

Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

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

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.

on the productivity of idleness

The productivity demanded by capitalism, in the division of labor, is a productivity which demands attention, time-on-task, and the reduction of creativity to activity. The productivity demanded by communism, the communism of the Paris Commune and of the flâneur, is that of idleness and detachment, the reduction of activity in order to spur creativity.

a grammar of the multitude

As I prepare for my candidacy exams in Spring 2011, I’ll be posting reading summaries here. All block quotes appear in red and refer to the edition listed at the top of the post.

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Paolo Virno, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004). [Includes an introduction by Sylvere Lotringer, referenced below as "Lotringer"]

Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life lays out his vision of post-Fordism, culminating in the radical statement that “Post-Fordism is the communism of capital” (110).

He begins with an elaboration of the multitude, based on Spinoza:

For Spinoza, the multitudo indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion. Multitude is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many: a permanent form, not an episodic of interstitial form. (21)

The Spinozist multitude is juxtaposed against the “people” of Hobbes. For Hobbes, the state of nature was a multitudinous state, and the development of the social contract moved people from existing as many, the multitude, to existing as One, the people. Virno notes,

The concept of people, according to Hobbes, is strictly correlated to the existence of the State; furthermore, it is a reverberation, a reflection of the State: if there is a State, then there are people. (22)

Essentially, the State is endowed with a single will, that of the people’s. Much like Hardt and Negri’s notion of the multitude, Virno agrees that the multitude

shuns political unity, resists authority, does not enter into lasting agreements, never attains the status of juridical person because it never transfers its own natural rights to the sovereign. (23)

Where Virno begins to deviate from Hardt and Negri, though, is through his articulation of the multitude and post-Fordism with Marx’s notion of the “general intellect” as articulated in the “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse.

Virno departs from Marx, in that he claims Marx equated the general intellect with fixed capital. Virno insists that instead, “the general intellect presents itself as living labor” (106).

In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and ‘linguistic games.’ In contemporary labor processes, there are thoughts and discourses which function as productive ‘machines,’ without having to adopt the form of a mechanical body or of an electronic valve. (106)

The shift in the paradigm of labor is essentially one from labor-time to productive-time. Even a brief example will make this clear: any contemporary individual with a cell phone understands that there has been a complete collapse between the time spent at work (formerly labor-time) and the time in which a person is now expected to be productive. When individuals employed even in the non-profit sector (in other words, individuals engaged in work with no connection to international stock markets, or other demands that a person be available beyond the “normal” work day) receive phone calls at home in order to troubleshoot the next ‘crisis,’ and the norm is to take laptops and cell phones into the home, it becomes clear that the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘life’ has utterly collapsed. This crisis – the crisis of the division of human experience into the labor sphere (poiesis), the sphere of political action (praxis), and the sphere of the intellect (the life of the mind) – is precisely the background of the multitude.

Virno extends this crisis into a critique of Foucault’s notion of biopower, and the contemporary studies of biopower. This is an oblique critique of Hardt and Negri, and needs to be understood as such. Virno notes,

The concept of “bio-politics” has recently become fashionable: it is often, and enthusiastically, invoked in every kind of context. We should avoid this automatic and unreflective use of the term. Let us ask ourselves, then, how and why life breaks through to the center of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it. // In my opinion, to comprehend the rational core of the term ‘bio-politics,’ we should begin with a different concept, a much more complicated concept from a philosophical standpoint: that of labor-power. (81)

Biopolitics, for Virno, is necessarily linked to labor-power, or, the potential to produce. Under a Fordist economy, there is still separation between biopower and labor power, in that there are goods produced and exchanged in such a way as to maintain a division between the polis and the oikos. Under post-Fordism, where the good to be produced is immaterial, we can only operate on the level of life. One sells and buys an individual’s potential to produce as the primary commodity. It is for this reason that Virno writes:

Here is the crucial point: where something exists only as possibility is sold, this something is not separable from the living person of the seller. The living body of the worker is the substratum of that labor-power which, in itself, has no independent existence. ‘Life,’ pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential. (82)

why is life, as such, managed and controlled? The answer is absolutely clear: because it acts as the substratum of a mere faculty, labor-power, which has taken on the consistency of a commodity. (83)

Virno concludes A Grammar with “ten theses on the multitude and post-Fordist capitalism” (95-111). These theses reiterate and extend the primary observations and arguments of the book, and culminate in his tenth thesis: “Post-Fordism is the ‘communism of capital’” (110). In concerning himself with the multitude as the primary figure of post-Fordism, Virno argues that post-Fordism is capitalism’s attempt to articulate many of the demands of communism without any of the emancipatory components, therefore preserving exploitation and alienation. He summarizes by saying,

This [the communism of capital] means that the capitalistic initiative orchestrates for its own benefit precisely those material and cultural conditions which would guarantee a calm version of realism for the potential communist. (110)

This taps into the revolutionary creative potential of the multitude, foreseen by Marx and Spinoza (among others) as the condition for communism and democracy respectively, but for capitalist and anti-democratic ends: the extension of exploitation in the immaterial scene as ‘common sense,’ in other words, a new capitalist hegemony.

In a rather significant way, what Virno does in A Grammar of the Multitude is return the multitude to a position from which to engage in class warfare. But this class warfare is no longer tied to the proletariat (Thesis 9, 109); instead, it hearkens back to the autonomist politics of 1970s Italy, which fought to include the unemployed and underemployed in the struggle against capital. By broadening the revolutionary class, as does Hardt and Negri, but maintaining a more faithful Marxist core, Virno (according to Lotringer in his introduction) imagines the multitude as a class looking for a struggle, rather than a struggle looking for a class (16).  Lotringer insists that Virno avoids “turning exile, or the multitude for that matter, let alone communism, into another splendid myth” (9). What Virno accomplishes is articulating the multitude as “a force defined less by what it actually produces than by its virtuality, its potential to produce and produce itself” (Lotringer, 12).

 

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.