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).

 

some dangers of organizing through .edu email

So there’s been this big flap in Wisconsin over the fact that a university professor had the audacity to point out that the legislation to eliminate public unions wasn’t original to Wisconsin, and in fact is part of the strategic plan of many right wing “advocacy” groups. Republicans responded by filing a FOIA request to access all of historian Bill Cronon’s emails. A fellow blogger, Tenured Radical, posted a few FYI’s that I thought I should repost here about how your .edu email address, university computer, and university office are NOT YOURS and you have no expectation of privacy.

• Your university email account belongs to the university. While Bill Cronon is being persecuted by a bunch of right wing Republicans determined to reduce the American working class to pre-industrial conditions, technically your employer can enter your email account whenever it chooses.  This means that we should all be careful what we say when we write from, or to, an edu address.  In fact, it isn’t such a terrible idea to add your gmail or yahoo account to the signature line of your university account requesting that all personal communication be sent there.
• People (including students) who work in IT can get access to your university email through the web server whenever they want to.  They shouldn’t, and they probably don’t, but they are capable of it.  Don’t put anything in an email that you would not want circulated.  This includes personal matters (sex), conflict with colleagues, and correspondence about personnel cases that reveals any information that you, the department, the referees, or the candidate might consider private.
• The computer you are assigned by the university belongs to the university, and they can search it at any time.  They can also search your office without a warrant. According to FindLaw, unless you are covered by a state law or a union contract that prohibits such searches, “Employers can usually search an employee’s workspace, including their desk, office or lockers. The workspace technically belongs to the employer, and courts have found that employees do not have an expectation of privacy in these areas.  This is also the case for computers. Since the computers and networking equipment typically belong to the employer, the employer is generally entitled to monitor the use of the computer. This includes searching for files saved to the computer itself, as well as monitoring an employee’s actions while using the computer (eg, while surfing the internet).”  Does this mean that we should all be thinking about buying a home computer for all activities we wish to ensure privacy for — downloading pornography, getting divorced, blogging?  Maybe.  And technically, the university could prohibit you from blogging on the computer they provide, although arguably this would be an infringement of academic freedom.
• You can’t be sure you have erased something from a computer or a server. In fact, according to Daniel Engber of Slate, you can be pretty sure that you can’t erase anything permanently, even if you use a utility like Evidence Eliminator.  And even if you could, those emails that you sent are now on someone else’s computer, someone else’s server, and so on.  They are retrievable.
• The Republican Party is owned and operated by vicious thugs who abuse their power to make us all into corporate servants and lackeys for capitalist special interests. This has nothing to do with computers:  I thought I would just throw this in.  But we are reminded that there is a long  history for this sort of activity in the United States:  in the late 1830s, for example, the southern slaveocracy pushed for national legislation to censor abolitionist literature. When they didn’t get it, beginning with South Carolina, they passed state laws that allowed local officials to seize these materials and open the mail of private citizens.  The parallel is obvious, isn’t?  Freedom to have absolute power over labor > constitutional right to free speech.  It’s a good thing the Grimke sisters didn’t have an email account.

 

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

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

 

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.

Graduate Employee Unions

I am testifying at the Ohio Statehouse on Tuesday, January 12, in favor of House Bill 365. This bill will make it easier for graduate employees and adjunct faculty to unionize. As the law currently is written, both groups are considered special populations of workers and therefore exempt from current labor laws that mandate an employer recognize a union. Instead, even if we had 100% graduate employee approval of a union at Ohio State, for example, we would have to be voluntarily recognized by our employer in order to gain collective bargaining rights. Of course, President Gee is one of the most vocal anti-graduate union voices in higher education today, so voluntary recognition is not going to happen.

Below is a draft of the remarks I will give to the House Commerce and Labor Committee.

Proponent Testimony for HB 365

Before the House Commerce and Labor Committee

joshua j.  kurz

Graduate Teaching Associate and member of Graduate Employees’ Student Organization, The Ohio State University

I would like to begin by thanking Chairman Yuko, ranking minority member Uecker, and the remaining members of the committee for providing an opportunity to hear testimony on House Bill 365. My name is joshua kurz, and I am a Ph.D. student and Graduate Teaching Associate in the School of Educational Policy and Leadership at the Ohio State University. I have also been a graduate student and employee at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Currently, I am a member of the Graduate Employees’ Student Organization, or GESO, a volunteer-based group that is working to improve the quality of graduate employee working conditions at Ohio State.

An economist at Ohio University, Richard Vedder, recently wrote in the New York Times, “Since most of the financial benefits of college go to the student, he or she should pay a large portion of college costs.”[i] This has been the conventional wisdom in higher education since at least the Reagan administration, and in strictly economic terms, may in fact be true. However, there are myriad reasons we educate citizens in this country, and especially at the level of graduate education, the purposes of education are undermined by a narrow focus on economic calculations. As we are becoming painfully aware as a society, the challenges of a contemporary world have quickly outpaced our ability to meet those challenges in a humane, equitable, and mutually beneficial way. Graduate education is particularly well suited to play a role in meeting these challenges. Historically, this has been the case, but the economization of higher education has far reaching ill effects, not least of which is the paradoxical situation of both compressing and expanding the length of time to degree, which of course effects the quality of research. The economization of graduate programs compresses graduate education by forcing students to find employment to support themselves, in many cases such employment equates to a full-time job or more, as students are forced to supplement assistantship placements with multiple positions or even non-academic employment. This, in turn, extends the length of time to degree because less time can be spent reading, writing, presenting, debating, and thinking about complex issues. This compression and extension of graduate education leads to the production of work that is not suited to meeting the challenges we must face.

To return to Vedder’s comment, I think it is grossly misguided to judge higher education in general, and graduate education in particular, through an individualistic, short-term economic lens. Many of the problems of today have their genesis in issues that have been debated for millennia. While it is true that science, technology, and mathematics offer solutions to many of these problems, focusing only on these disciplines is akin to a bodybuilder who only exercises the upper body. Philosophy, the social sciences, music, literature, and so on offer as much or more than narrow scientism; indeed, the persistence of the role of religion in global conflict should provide all the necessary justification we need to recognize the importance of fully funding graduate programs in all disciplines as well as providing real opportunities for interdisciplinary work.

It is within this context that I sit before you today, encouraging you to pass House Bill 365. What follows is a more specific set of arguments directly related to the working conditions at universities in general and the experiences of graduate employees at Ohio State in particular.

Graduate employees, such as teaching assistants, graders, and research assistants at public universities are among those persons denied full collective bargaining rights in the state of Ohio. In a nutshell, HB 365 would allow Ohio graduate employees the opportunity to exercise their collective bargaining rights to the fullest extent.

In the past, graduate assistants were commonly viewed as academic “apprentices” rather than “employees.”  However, academic roles have changed significantly over the past few decades.  Currently, full-time, tenured faculty constitute only 27% of higher education teaching staff nationwide.[ii] At the Ohio State University, over HALF of all classes are taught by non-tenured and part-time faculty and graduate students.[iii] Graduate assistants are increasingly the instructors of record for their own courses, rather than grading or leading recitations for large lectures.  Many graduate assistants perform the same kind of teaching as full-time faculty, often spending more face-to-face time with undergraduate students, and yet are denied “employee” status for the purposes of collective bargaining.  This is grossly unfair and degrades the integrity of higher education in the state of Ohio at both graduate and undergraduate levels.

Graduate employees at OSU face a number of challenging working conditions.  For example:

According to a 2008 report commissioned by the Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies, in order to be economically self-sufficient – that is, the ability to live without public or private assistance – in Franklin County, a single adult must earn $1,471 per month, or $17,652 annually.[iv] According to OSU Human Resources, 56% of all Ohio State graduate assistants make less than $1500 monthly.[v] Because many, if not most, graduate employees are on 9-month, rather than 12-month, appointments, their yearly earnings would fall under $13,500.[vi] OSU mandates that all graduate assistants be paid at least $1,000 per month.  This leaves roughly 25% of all graduate teaching associates at Ohio State with pay so low that they qualify for food stamps, heat assistance and other social services.[vii] In the Big Ten, OSU lags significantly behind Michigan, Michigan State, Wisconsin-Madison, Illinois, and Iowa in terms of wages and benefits offered to its graduate assistants.  If it is our goal to attract the best and brightest minds to Ohio State’s many graduate programs, OSU must achieve parity with these institutions.

Most graduate assistants are appointed at the 50% level (also known as full-time equivalence or FTE).  This means that these GAs are expected to spend roughly 20 hours per week on their teaching or work duties (half of a 40 hour week) and the rest of their time on their studies.  While some graduate employees are appointed at higher levels – sometimes 60% or 75%, the university has a policy that graduate employees are not allowed to be appointed at the 100% level.  However, there is nothing stopping departments from asking GAs to take on additional work during a term.  Many departments, such as Philosophy, regularly ask students to teach double course loads and in exchange, offer them an increase to 75% pay, even though it is near impossible to fit all of the prep time, class time, grading, time spent answering emails and in office hours for two separate classes (usually totaling around 60 students) into the 30 hour week that is meant to correspond with the 75% pay level.  Essentially, departments frequently ask GAs to take on twice their normal workload for much less than twice their normal pay.  While this situation is considered “voluntary,” it is rare for GAs to refuse, either in fear of losing funding entirely or appearing ungrateful,[viii] or because they so badly need the extra money, no matter how little it is.  As it stands, there is little in place to protect graduate assistants from being sorely over-worked.

OSU does not require departments to provide teaching supplies for their graduate assistants, although some do anyway.  In the Music Department, graduate teaching assistants must pay for their own teaching supplies.  Unlike in many other departments, Music GAs are not permitted access to department equipment to print documents or make copies related to their teaching.  They pay for their own photocopies, purchase their own dry erase markers, pens, chalk, and other office supplies that the department provides free to full-time faculty.  Graduate employees in the Music Department receive among the lowest monthly stipends on campus.  Without the protection of a union, many of them fear they will lose their funding if they speak up too loudly about this problem.

Funded graduate students at OSU are required to sign an appointment document that includes some standard content but differs widely by department. None of these documents is legally binding. As such, graduate employees may have their positions changed on short notice or taken away with no advance warning and therefore no ability to locate another funding source.  There is no set deadline by which graduate assistant appointments must be made each year or each quarter, meaning that sometimes a graduate employee does not know if she or he has a job until mere days before a quarter begins.  Normal course preparation can take dozens of hours to prepare syllabi and lectures, and frequently require the reading of hundreds or thousands of pages in order to design a course. Even those graduate associates who are given syllabi already written must still spend hours preparing lectures, in-class materials, and other work. Because of this, in addition to inflicting anxiety on graduate students, this system has a negative impact on undergraduates as well.  In at least one department last year, graduate teaching appointments were still being adjusted a week into Spring Quarter, causing frustration and confusion to both graduate students and undergraduates alike.

OSU graduate assistants also have no access to a formal grievance procedure, no system to assure that they receive professional, written evaluations of their work, no guarantee of wage stability, and they face as much as $1,000 to $2,000 (a month’s pay or more for most) in fees and health insurance costs over the course of a calendar year, further compressing wages.

The only sure way in which we can negotiate meaningful and stable improvement in Ohio graduate employees’ wages and working conditions is through a legally binding contract.  These improvements would put OSU on par with counterpart institutions in the Big Ten and across the nation.

Over the past few months, we have heard some lawmakers express concern regarding the fiscal impact of this bill.  First, I would like to point out that this bill does not guarantee that adjunct faculty and graduate employees will form a union; rather, it simply provides the conditions for democratically deciding the issue.  Second, in terms of tuition, over the past few decades both undergraduate tuition and university administrator salaries have skyrocketed, while graduate assistant pay has remained relatively steady.  It is important to keep in mind that graduate assistants are not directly funded by undergraduate tuition dollars.  Furthermore, OSU has already raised tuition to the legal maximum for a number of years and will likely continue to raise tuition whether or not graduate employees are unionized.  OSU is a financially healthy institution with a large and complex budget.  We believe that were graduate employees to unionize at OSU, it would not necessarily cost the state more.  The university has the capacity to re-organize its budget to reflect the changing needs of its students and employees.  A fellow grad employee remarked recently, “Our situation frustrates me, because I see the opulence displayed in other areas of university life: senior administrators whose salaries exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars, free concerts and comedy shows for students, and t-shirt give-aways on the oval.  I know that there is enough money at our university to pay for the supplies that I need to teach my students effectively, but I have no meaningful and safe way to voice my complaint, and this serious problem is thus ignored by the administration.” Many other state universities, including Michigan, Michigan State, Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, Illinois-Chicago, Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Iowa, Oregon, Rutgers, Florida, Washington-Seattle and the New York and California state systems, have witnessed graduate employee unionization without significant financial incident.  There is no reason to think that this bill will adversely affect Ohio.  In fact, it could serve to improve the quality of higher education at OSU and across the state.  Don’t undergraduates and their families deserve a fairly-paid, well-treated teaching staff at all levels in exchange for their tuition dollars?

Finally, denial of collective bargaining rights to low-wage employees such as graduate assistants has already had a financial impact on Ohio’s communities.  Again, we estimate that nearly a quarter of all OSU graduate employees qualify for food stamps and other state and federal assistance programs.  Ohio State graduate assistants are using local food banks in increasing numbers.  The Ohio State University is artificially compressing wages and then asking our local and regional communities to subsidize the accumulation of capital at the university that is then redirected toward non-essential projects (a 109 MILLION dollar renovation of the library!?!), weak gestures aimed at student satisfaction (bringing in yet another comedian), and administrative salaries amongst the highest in the nation. In a state that claims to place great value on education, and that boasts one of the largest public universities in the world, this is unjustifiable.  This bill does not mandate graduate employee unions, but rather allows for greater opportunities for us, as graduate employees to work meaningfully with OSU to improve graduate assistants’ standard of living and the quality of higher education in Ohio.

We are faced with a choice. Either we continue to enable a management-centric approach to higher education where we continue to produce great metrics (ever-increasing ACT scores of incoming first-years and retention rates and graduation rates) in the face of a constantly degrading quality of life for faculty, adjuncts, graduate and undergraduate students; or, we push back and allow the very people being exploited in this system to redress grievances, collectively engage in their employment, and negotiate legally binding contracts. Indeed, the long-term health of Ohio depends on a robust system of public education, which needs a steady production of graduate students who can dedicate their time to research and teaching. A graduate union may not be the most ideal solution, but it is a significant step in the right direction.

I thank you for allowing me to speak today on behalf of this important legislation.  I welcome any questions you may have.

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[i] Haves vs. have-nots at public universities, found at: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/haves-vs-have-nots-at-public-universities/?th&emc=th (accessed 1/9/2010).

[ii] American Federation of Teachers (AFT) report on Academic Staffing Crisis, citing data pulled from the U.S. Department of Education, 2007 Fall Staffing Survey.  See  <http://www.aft.org/topics/academic-staffing/index.htm>

[iii] Ohio Board of Regents report, “Instruction by Faculty Type  at University System of Ohio Institutions: Fall 2003 to Fall 2007.”  See <http://regents.ohio.gov/perfrpt/statProfiles/statProfiles09.php>

[iv] “The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Ohio 2008” (July 2008), report prepared by Diana Pearce, PhD on behalf of the Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies.

[v] The Ohio State University, Office of Human Resources.

[vi] In order to be more precise in some of our assertions we would need more data from Ohio State. However, the administration consistently denies GESO information that it could use to make the bargaining process easier. If any legislation is passed, it should include provisions to compel Ohio’s universities to provide transparent data on issues such as percentages of graduate employees at different pay levels, releasing lists of current graduate employees and basic contact information.

[vii] According to statistics from the Ohio State University Office of Human Resources, nearly 25% of OSU graduate assistants make less than $1200/month.   The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) requires that qualifying individuals earn an income at 130% of the federal poverty guideline, or $1174 or less per month.

[viii] The peculiar relationship between advisers and advisees exacerbates this problem. When one person (an adviser) has such drastic control over an advisee’s academic future, it is hard for any student to stand up for themselves when they are being exploited for fear of unjust punishment. Not only do advisers direct thesis and dissertation projects, they also write recommendation letters, which are perhaps one of the strongest factors in academic job placement. In short, the lack of protections at an institutional level for graduate employees leave them open to what can turn into a highly volatile, unpredictable, and sometimes petty clash that has dramatic consequences for a student.

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.