The past few bargaining sessions have provided a fairly good argument for the value of Jacque Ranciere's definition of politics, one that also retroactively links up with the reactions to the defensive of public education movement that began in 2009. For those who haven't read Ranciere's Disagreement, and I suspect a fair amount of you haven't read the book, Ranciere sets up a distinction between the police and politics in his book. He argues that the vast amount of activity placed under the category of the police. Drawing off the work of Michel Foucault, he defines the role of the police as one that creates and enforces complex and hierarchical structures of order, whether in the form of forms of factory discipline, penality, or the forms of domination within the heteronormative and patriarchal family. Politics only occurs in those moments where excluded and dominated parties, people he refers to as 'the part with no part' reject and try to undermine those orders. We can see politics in the sense that Ranciere means it when workers fight for democratic control of their factories or when women reject their proscribed domestic roles. We can see some potential limitations in Ranciere's definition. After all, most counter-systematic movements contain a mixture of both a rejection of old orders, and the call for a new order, an intermixture of what Ranciere would consider politics and the police.
Despite these issues, the value of the notion of the political as that which destroys conventional structures of order is of some value in watching the reactions of the labor relations officials when we bargain. It has been precisely at the moments when we challenge the monopoly of power of the UC administration that those individuals become most nasty, when we bring up issues of class size, social justice issues such as all gender bathrooms, issues of discrimination, along with economic issues not traditionally within the purview of our contract. It's precisely at these moments when we can recognize that the process of contract negotiation contains the potential for challenging the structures of order that those administrators have spent so much time policing the borders of, and their response gestures precisely to the sort of fear that can occur when those borders are challenged. A more notable occasion happened in one of the late UCLA sessions, when we brought up potential discrepancies between the management rights clause of our contract and the stipulations demanded by the rules that regulate the collective bargaining process as set up by HEERA (Higher Education Employee Relations Act.) The middle managers of labor relations went on a tirade, refusing to even answer our questions about the differences between the act and our contract. In effect, even the implication of challenging the myopic domination of management must be stamped out, a response we saw in the conversation around classroom size and housing, both of which would create different expectations and relations within the university.
Ironically enough, Ranciere's framework offers a pretty good explanation of why the conservative forces at Paycheck First have the same response to the new framework of demands as presented by the union. They have dismissed many of the contract campaign, and have offered virtual no commentary on the activities that have gone on outside of the bargaining table as hundreds, if not thousands of rank and file members have acted to fight for a new contract. Implicitly, they accept many of the same principles of policing set up by the administration of university, accepting the premise that was initially set up by the labor peace of the 1950's, where labor gave up its more radical aspirations of workers' control of the workplace for higher wages, job security, and some workplace regulations. However, those demands were only gained by the properly political actions of radical unionists, who created the conditions for the labor peace, and were simultaneously crushed as the precondition of that very peace to go into effect. (I want to emphasize that this peace destroyed thousands if not tens of thousands of workers' livelihoods, and occasion, lives.) As we have moved away from the high points of radical activity within the labor movement, the ability of that movement to hold onto the gains it bargained at the cost of those radical activists. From the impressive gains provided by business unionism in the 1950's at tragic costs, we see a comic repetition in the demands of Paycheck First, who cannot even imagine bargaining our way out of poverty wages, let alone contributing to the fight for a just and genuinely public university, as the majority of the bargaining team has attempted to accomplish.
I should also note that Ranciere's analysis offers an interesting alternative view into the melodramatic interpretation of the conflicts within the union as offered by both Paycheck First and the former members of the USEJ caucus. When we look at their descriptions of these conflicts, we find a very consistent narrative, built upon the concept of what Nietzsche calls wounded identity. The narratives generally erase the political dimension of the conflict, what rules and traditions were being challenged within the conflict, and instead focus on the singular vision of wounded individual who defended these traditions. Reform forces are generally presented as a malevolent collectivity exemplified by representative figures, who are often interchangeable. This narrative is properly melodramatic in its Manichean vision of the good and the evil, the good being represented by the old traditions and leadership of the union and the evil by the inevitably incompetent and hypocritical collectivity of AWDU. It is a narrative that erases the forms of implicit and explicit hierarchical domination that previously defined the union, the intimidation of union activists through yelling, and private one on one meetings (these would often occur in the middle of activities, with individuals being pulled behind closed doors, to be intimidated into voting the 'right way.') The narrative also erases the lack of activity and participation within the union in those years.
The conflicts that have occurred in the past three years have inevitably occurred at moments when forms of policing have been reduced or eliminated from the union structure, from opening up structures of communication, to reducing the ability of single individuals to hold multiple offices. The conflicts within the bargaining process, additionally, have generally occurred at moments when old assumed activities were not repeated in rote fashion. (I will have more details on this question, later, when the process of bargaining is over.) They have also occurred at moments when the new leadership has committed itself to the student movement, and has refused the automatic support of Democratic Party initiatives. These conflicts have often been ugly, and I'm not going to fully endorse the actions that we have taken individually or as a caucus in all of these situations, but they have pointed towards a revitalized, more democratic, and stronger union structure. We have moved the union from a massive political backwater to a relevant party in challenging the austerity measures of the state. I think we have had distinct limitations in this reform process, which I hope change as I leave the union. I would like us to give much more thought to our structures of organizing. The reduction in membership is a process common to both the later years of the old leadership and our time in office, but we have not been able to reverse this process. The ability to do so cannot, however, be accomplished by the simple acts of exhortation used by the old leadership, or their organizing techniques. Instead, we need to develop new forms of organizing that engage with and challenge the new structures of the university. They must be, within the framework laid out by Jacques Ranciere, political forms of organizing.
Showing posts with label student movement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label student movement. Show all posts
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Thursday, August 16, 2012
thoughts
It's really hot out right now, so hot that my computer is occasionally adding numbers when I use the letters u, i, e, and t. It's not something that inspires much in the way of sustained intellectual effort, particularly when there's no real effective way to either air condition your apartment or even create a sustained draft through the building. In effect, I'm going to let my post on the industrialization of the household go for the moment, along with my examination of Gore Vidal's essays, and create something a bit more modest to tide the blog over until the weather gets a bit less miserable. I feel like I've been fairly isolated this summer from the events that translate into writing. Other than my brief sojourn to Minneapolis and rural Michigan, I've spent the majority of the summer in Irvine, without much ability to get out due to finances. (I've caught a few shows, and a couple films, but nothing that has really translated into writing. Similarly, I've been disconnected from the politics of the region, having missed the brief uprising in Anaheim, and the general lack of political action on the campus during the summer.)
Beyond that, I'm thinking about returning to Gramsci's concept of hegemony in the near future. The question of how structures of domination and exploitation are able to gain consent from those who do not benefit from them seems to be particularly relevant, as is the question of how to create counter-structures that challenge the forms of common sense that allow for that support. One of the things that I am interested in trying to do for the next year is to create some pedagogical structures to begin to challenge that. I think that the student movement has done a remarkable job of challenging the legitimacy of the attempts to privatize the university, but our educational efforts have remained minimal and, at times, conservative. Often, the notion of public education is reduced to the question of cost, rather than thinking about access, quality of education, and other broader questions. There has been some very good worker solidarity, at times, but not enough exploration of the laboring structures of the university. The question of fighting racism in the university has been brought up in slogans and conversations, but not enough exploration of what it means to fight racism in what Christopher Newfield calls, 'pseudo-integration.' I'd love to organize a combination of speakers, reading groups, and workshops around this. If anyone is interested, feel free to leave a message here, or contact me.
There have also been a couple interesting essays on this, written by a number of groups around the Occupy phenomenon. I'll try to explore those in the near future. I'll leave it there.
Beyond that, I'm thinking about returning to Gramsci's concept of hegemony in the near future. The question of how structures of domination and exploitation are able to gain consent from those who do not benefit from them seems to be particularly relevant, as is the question of how to create counter-structures that challenge the forms of common sense that allow for that support. One of the things that I am interested in trying to do for the next year is to create some pedagogical structures to begin to challenge that. I think that the student movement has done a remarkable job of challenging the legitimacy of the attempts to privatize the university, but our educational efforts have remained minimal and, at times, conservative. Often, the notion of public education is reduced to the question of cost, rather than thinking about access, quality of education, and other broader questions. There has been some very good worker solidarity, at times, but not enough exploration of the laboring structures of the university. The question of fighting racism in the university has been brought up in slogans and conversations, but not enough exploration of what it means to fight racism in what Christopher Newfield calls, 'pseudo-integration.' I'd love to organize a combination of speakers, reading groups, and workshops around this. If anyone is interested, feel free to leave a message here, or contact me.
There have also been a couple interesting essays on this, written by a number of groups around the Occupy phenomenon. I'll try to explore those in the near future. I'll leave it there.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
The last quarter
I haven't been able to post much this month. I've been caught up with the process of grading final exams, and preparing the travel to Minneapolis for the holidays. Additionally, I am trying to finish a chapter of my exam over the holiday season, so I have been spending more time thinking about Judith Merril, and less on the blog. However, beyond that, I think that I have been caught up in the current malaise that has been defining the current activist milieu within California student activist circles. This situation has a number of factors influencing it. The factors that immediately come to mind are as follows. 1. a sense of despair about what the movement (at this point, I think it would be disingenuous to refer to the activism of the year as constituting a 'movement.') accomplished last year despite the level of activity. 2. substantial schisms within the movement because of personal and political differences. Along with that, there has been little effort to deal with issues of racism and sexism within the movement. 3. In addition to these substantial internal issues, there has been a great deal more repression from the administration, ranging from arrests to student conduct charges.
Those are the issues that immediately came to mind, and I suspect that there some substantial issues that I forgot about or don't know about. Often its only until well after a situation is over that we can understand its causes. To be honest, I'm at a loss at how to reorient the current situation to revive the movement from last year (or if that is possible or even desirable.) At the same time, despite all the issues over the past year, it is pretty clear that our substantial activism was the only reason that there weren't more cuts to the university system or further acts of privatization on the part of the regents. We are also moving towards a fairly substantial set of struggles in response to the potential austerity program that will most likely be introduced by President Obama, including cuts to Social Security. Without opposition, there will continue to be a retrenchment of bourgeois class power, a retrenchment that only can be understood in the context of a backlash against the civil rights movement and feminism. We need to see the struggle at the university within that context.
At this point, I am in danger of repeating myself, so I thought I would see what you thought about this. What do you think that we should focus on as student activists next year? Should this focus on reviving the movement from last year or should it try to create something new, something that might deal with the contradictions and power differences that are inherent to the category 'student'? How can we effectively communicate our desire to create a new, genuinely public university to a population who are often all too aware of the university's role in facilitation of inequality? How can we move towards that ideal in some substantial form? What am I missing out within this analysis? Thus far, I haven't had much luck in translating this blog into a space for communication, but I thought I would try again.
As a last note, there are a number of student activists who now face charges for a sit in that occurred last spring. Whatever we decide on, we need to provide substantial support for those folks.
Those are the issues that immediately came to mind, and I suspect that there some substantial issues that I forgot about or don't know about. Often its only until well after a situation is over that we can understand its causes. To be honest, I'm at a loss at how to reorient the current situation to revive the movement from last year (or if that is possible or even desirable.) At the same time, despite all the issues over the past year, it is pretty clear that our substantial activism was the only reason that there weren't more cuts to the university system or further acts of privatization on the part of the regents. We are also moving towards a fairly substantial set of struggles in response to the potential austerity program that will most likely be introduced by President Obama, including cuts to Social Security. Without opposition, there will continue to be a retrenchment of bourgeois class power, a retrenchment that only can be understood in the context of a backlash against the civil rights movement and feminism. We need to see the struggle at the university within that context.
At this point, I am in danger of repeating myself, so I thought I would see what you thought about this. What do you think that we should focus on as student activists next year? Should this focus on reviving the movement from last year or should it try to create something new, something that might deal with the contradictions and power differences that are inherent to the category 'student'? How can we effectively communicate our desire to create a new, genuinely public university to a population who are often all too aware of the university's role in facilitation of inequality? How can we move towards that ideal in some substantial form? What am I missing out within this analysis? Thus far, I haven't had much luck in translating this blog into a space for communication, but I thought I would try again.
As a last note, there are a number of student activists who now face charges for a sit in that occurred last spring. Whatever we decide on, we need to provide substantial support for those folks.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
A Short Essay on Tolerence, Polemics, Sectarianism, etc. (a recent talk and a forward)
I gave this at a conference on academic activism at the University of Minnesota last year. I had a great time at the conference, and enjoyed spending time with my Santa Cruz colleagues, Don, Katy, Erin, and Madeline. Each of their papers was fantastic, and is deserving of a lot of attention. In addition, I met a lot of interesting people there, from union organizers to malcontented undergrads. Morgan really went out of her way to get me on the schedule despite the fact that I put in my proposal far beyond the deadline, and I really appreciate that effort. One should never forget the value of old friendships. That being said, the conference was overwhelmingly white. My hope is that we'll see some changes in the next conference that occurs, or at least a conversation about that situation with practical ends in mind.
I also want to make a couple notes before I begin. 1. The essay presents a very critical view of Lenin's approach to organization. I would like to make it clear that this description doesn't exhaustively describe Lenin's thought or practice. Lenin's work is dense and complex, responding to contingent situations. Within those responses, its impossible to draw out a single coherent Lenin. The Lenin critiqued here is a critique of a real dimension of his thought, but we can see a different Lenin other works, notably State and Revolution, but also What Is To Be Done. That Lenin contains a radical democratic impulse, one that I am deeply sympathetic with. 2. The talk provides a critique of the polemical controversies that have occurred in the UC system, but it isn't meant as a 'balanced' critique, implicating all sides equally. I believe that one needs to begin with an anti-racist methodology to enter into the conversation, and sadly, that excludes some of our colleagues at this point. To be blunt, I can't help but noting that despite their often good qualities and my genuine fondness for them, this critique is most pointedly directed at the sub-cultural anarchist formation within our school. These last points probably need to be discussed more thoroughly, but they should be discussed in the collective topography of the class struggle. To put it more cynically, when one has the choice between an often problematic and sectarian anti-racist politics and a sectarian politics of whiteness, the choice should not be that difficult. I'll be interested if this produces conversation. In any case, here is the talk.
Within the context of the struggles against privatization at the University of California, the top administration has deployed the language of tolerance and civility to criticize the various actions against the privatization of the university, linking them with the racist actions occurring at UCSD. The governor of California took up this approach in order to make the same claims about protests of the Israeli ambassador by the Muslim Student Union at UCI. In both situations, disruption was reread as a sort of repressive violence, and at the same time, a legitimization of harsh disciplinary action. Tolerance and civility then becomes a way to distinguish between a legitimate set of speech acts from a set that are illegitimate, a way of marking actors as authentic members of the academic community and those who are interlopers and upstarts. The problems with this problematic have been discussed frequently, from the work of Wendy Brown to the frequent critiques presented by anti-racist activists in a variety of settings. Tolerance as a method to negotiate difference is both marked by its depoliticization effect and its erasure the forms of domination and exploitation that constitute those forms of difference.
However, the question that I want to pose is not answered by these critiques. Rejection of tolerance as a negotiation of difference doesn’t erase the problems that tolerance the set of practices tries to respond to. It must be recognized that the conflicts that have arisen in the movements against privatization in the UC system cannot be limited to the conflicts between activists and the upper administration. Instead, the movement has often been defined by serious conflicts along cultural, ideological, personal, racial, and ethnic lines. Simultaneously, a number of conflicts have occurred because differences in institutional loyalties, that is differences in the ability to speak and act due to job status or involvement in administrative positions. Fights have occurred over both tactics and the goals of the movement. These differences have been negotiated to various degrees of success, but the Irvine movement in particular has been marked by a series of contentious splits that have occurred from its earliest discussion. These naturally link back to conflicts that have occurred long before the beginning of this particular budget crisis.
These differences are irreconcilable through simple claims for a need for unity, and need to be worked through by seeing what works in practice. One approach to negotiating these issues has been the slogan, ‘diversity of tactic’, which makes the demand for the acceptance of difference in organizing styles and political tactics. The slogan certainly invites a form of the acceptance of difference that is far wide ranging than those contained in tolerance. At the same time, the slogan is also used to reject any critical inquiry into the ethics or efficacy of any particular tactic, turning its negotiation of difference into an often atomistic and individualistic approach to the other. We are given an approach that allows for the experimentation and freedom to fail that is needed to develop new approaches and conceptualizations of the problem, but the possibility of recognizing our invariable failures and collectively reimagining those projects is taken away. In the end, we need to formulate a new approach to critique that both refuses the fantasy of easy forms of unity and the notion that every critique needs to end in an easy form of dialectical synthesis, as well as a conception of difference that refuses critique as a collective right and responsibility. I intend to explore the possibility of creating this through the critiques of conventional Marxism made by Rosa Luxemburg in her critiques of Lenin and Kautsky. In addition, it will draw on the exploration of ethics by Michel Foucault through his critique of polemics.
In a recent interview, Labor Notes activist Mark Brenner noted that union activism wasn’t necessary simply for the immediate accomplishments of the movement, but also for its ability to act as a sort of training ground for a new socialist project. In other words, the terrain of reform activity is both an end, achieving a set of concrete goals, as well as a means to creating the stage towards greater radical change. In order to understand this, I want to look at Luxemburg’s contributions to the debates within the Second International.
These engagements are frequently read as conventional defenses of Marxist theory and practice against revisionist and reformist tendencies within the international, particularly her debates with the revisionist theorist Edward Bernstein. However, rather than looking at these more conventional debates, I intend to look at a different set of debates, a set of debates that Luxemburg had with her fellow defender of revolutionary Marxism, Vladimir Lenin. This debate, along with the longer debate with Karl Kautsky around the tactic of the mass strike, present a different picture of Luxemburg, one that emphasizes the processes of the revolution, rather than a simple set of correct doctrines, also one that takes seriously the very pedagogical tasks posed by Brenner.
Luxemburg takes on these pedagogical questions most directly in her engagement with Lenin’s response to opportunism, in his book, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. In response to the combined problems of reformism and the split in the Russian party, Lenin proposed a number of stringent controls over party organization. These proposals emphasized the control of the central committee over all aspects of party life, from the naming of local committees to imposing rules of party conduct. For Lenin, this control over the everyday life of the party would exclude the possibility of revisionism or opportunism. The central committee would act as a disciplinary mechanism on the party as a whole, as well as a brake on forms of error arising from the subalterns of the party. In crude terms, a successful form of organization is dependent upon the brain of the central committee controlling the body of the membership, a kind of crude organizational Cartesianism.
Discipline is the key term for distinguishing Lenin and Luxemburg’s concept of organization. She distinguishes the two in the following terms.
“We misuse words and we practice self-deception when we apply the same term – discipline – to such dissimilar notions as: 1. the absence of thought and will in a body with a thousand automatically moving hands and legs, and 2. the spontaneous coordination of the conscious, political acts of a body of men. What is there in common between the regulated docility of an oppressed class and the self-discipline and organization of a class struggling for its emancipation?"
The first model can be drawn to a polemical critique of Lenin’s concept of discipline. Lenin argued that the factory acted as an ideal pedagogical space for the working class, molding it into a collective subject. The proletariat then takes the form of the docile, manipulated body, linking it to the Taylorist project. This concept then legitimates the control of the central committee over the automaton worker. But Luxemburg argued that this concept of discipline misses out on the practices and forms of disciplines that allow for an insurgent social democratic politics. In opposition, Luxemburg argues that these formations of discipline oppose each other. Social democratic practice is defined by a collective political consciousness, a self-directed body operating through the mode of spontaneous, in incomprehensible and terrifying to the instrumental reason it operates within. However, this second mode of discipline begins as a potentiality within the everyday practices of the work day, or what Luxemburg calls ‘unconscious’ practice. Luxemburg argues that the shift from the “unconscious” to the “conscious” constitutes the ‘tendency’ towards centralization. Centralization is, in effect, the ability of the proletariat to coagulate itself into a conscious and acting body.
"The self-discipline of Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.”
A social democratic transformation can’t be a simple replacement of the head of the bourgeoisie with a ‘socialist central committee.’ Instead it needs to operate through creating a new form of discipline, linked to the rejection of ‘the old habits of obedience and servility’ that define the current system. The working class needs to acquire this through political practice. But the benefits of that practice can’t be simply limited to the concrete gains from the success of those actions. Action also allows for the working class to reconstitute itself, but this process is thwarted when the central committee makes all of the decisions. Reconstitution needs to be linked to a collective decision making process, perhaps best identified anachronistically as participatory democracy. This means that the terms, ‘organization’, ‘socialism’, and ‘discipline’ can only be defined through the terrain of the class struggle. It turns the class struggle into a sort of laboratory, a space for creating new forms of life.
Okay, how do we bring this back to the conversation of the university? To do that, I want to turn briefly to a comment on the current struggles in California made by a significant ally, Rei Terada. Terada notes,
"Taken together, the student movements project formations that are sometimes difficult to describe using words like “class,” “society,” or “state.” That should not be assumed to be a symptom of incoherence, but absorbed as a sign of the unknowability of experience that is contemporary, experience that is not yet history. We can be glad that the situation requires the expression and discussion of differences without delimiting those discussions in advance."
Terada correctly picks up on the fact that despite the gallons of ink spent, the movement remains undefined. She links the movement’s ‘unknowability’ to the often indecipherable relationship to a series of past struggles, whether it’s civil rights, Situationism, or others, is inescapable. This Babel of voices necessarily draws into the history of the public university, a history of crisis and struggle, inclusion and exclusion. To put it bluntly, our relationship to this institution is changed by the ways we are overdetermined by the struggles of race, gender, sexuality, and class, particularly in the way that the post-war institution included and excluded populations into the new consensus. Our entrance into this terrain of struggle is therefore always marked by this uneven terrain. But Terada argues against dismissing the movement as incomprehensible because of its current unknowability. Instead, unknowability points to the contingent possibility of the moment, the possibility of forms of political thought and action, gesturing towards the Novum.
For Terada, this potential is allowed by the ‘expression and discussion of differences without delimiting those discussions in advance.’ But in order for this to occur we need to conceive of how this conversation can occur. In order to pose this question, we need to shift from a conversation around classical Marxism and the contemporary struggle, to a late interview with Michel Foucault around the question of polemics. He opposes this mode of communication with what he considers a genuinely ethical mode of communication. For Foucault, polemics act as a ‘parasite figure on discussion and an obstacle to the search for the truth.’ He notes that,
"The polemicist… proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that the struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat…. Polemics defines alliances, recruits partisans unites interests or opinion, represents a party; it establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears.
Undoubtedly, there is something immediately appealing to this formulation when in conversation with the state or the upper levels of the administration, but our most conversations as organizers and activists are not with them. Instead, our most important conversations are with colleagues, allies, and new potential members of the movement. To engage with them on this terrain of conversation may lead to new recruits in the war, but disallows reimagining the forms of struggles. Perhaps Rosellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis offers the best way of thinking of this figure, in the section on the bandit camp. The chief of the encampment has found a set of armor to protect him from any possible threat of attack, but this form of armor also completely immobilizes him, allowing the mobile figure of the organizer to enter into the camp and destroy it through his willingness to make himself vulnerable to the bandits. Polemics offers a perceived armor to the potential attacks from the other, but it destroys our mobility. Most radical organizing is, on the contrary, defined by vulnerability. That vulnerability can be seen historically in the violence perpetrated on organizers, but that vulnerability also occurs in the little risks that we take in the everyday conversations that are the day to day activities of organizing.
This image gestures towards the concept of communication that Foucault desires, a “morality that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.”
In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given to him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to the questioning of the other. Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given to him by the other and by the accepted form of the dialogue."
Our ability, for lack of a better term, to move forward depends on this game. There is a tendency on the part of certain sections of the radical movement to dismiss the importance of this dialogical negotiation as ‘mere talk.’ I think that this suspicion is, in part, understandable. After all, the primary model of conversation we are given is the kind of bourgeois synthesis defined by Habermas amongst others, and so often, those modes are used to neutralize radical activity and voices, to operate as apparatuses of capture. But we have to recognize that we give up a lot when we accept the notion that those are the only forms of communication available. More significantly, it’s profoundly dishonest to the actual practices that occur in social movements. I haven’t been to an action, a demonstration, an occupation that hasn’t been anchored by often endless and lengthy meetings, and informal conversations. If one were working in conventional Marxist terms, one could think of the event as the superstructure to the communicative base. Perhaps, its time to take that process seriously.
I also want to make a couple notes before I begin. 1. The essay presents a very critical view of Lenin's approach to organization. I would like to make it clear that this description doesn't exhaustively describe Lenin's thought or practice. Lenin's work is dense and complex, responding to contingent situations. Within those responses, its impossible to draw out a single coherent Lenin. The Lenin critiqued here is a critique of a real dimension of his thought, but we can see a different Lenin other works, notably State and Revolution, but also What Is To Be Done. That Lenin contains a radical democratic impulse, one that I am deeply sympathetic with. 2. The talk provides a critique of the polemical controversies that have occurred in the UC system, but it isn't meant as a 'balanced' critique, implicating all sides equally. I believe that one needs to begin with an anti-racist methodology to enter into the conversation, and sadly, that excludes some of our colleagues at this point. To be blunt, I can't help but noting that despite their often good qualities and my genuine fondness for them, this critique is most pointedly directed at the sub-cultural anarchist formation within our school. These last points probably need to be discussed more thoroughly, but they should be discussed in the collective topography of the class struggle. To put it more cynically, when one has the choice between an often problematic and sectarian anti-racist politics and a sectarian politics of whiteness, the choice should not be that difficult. I'll be interested if this produces conversation. In any case, here is the talk.
Within the context of the struggles against privatization at the University of California, the top administration has deployed the language of tolerance and civility to criticize the various actions against the privatization of the university, linking them with the racist actions occurring at UCSD. The governor of California took up this approach in order to make the same claims about protests of the Israeli ambassador by the Muslim Student Union at UCI. In both situations, disruption was reread as a sort of repressive violence, and at the same time, a legitimization of harsh disciplinary action. Tolerance and civility then becomes a way to distinguish between a legitimate set of speech acts from a set that are illegitimate, a way of marking actors as authentic members of the academic community and those who are interlopers and upstarts. The problems with this problematic have been discussed frequently, from the work of Wendy Brown to the frequent critiques presented by anti-racist activists in a variety of settings. Tolerance as a method to negotiate difference is both marked by its depoliticization effect and its erasure the forms of domination and exploitation that constitute those forms of difference.
However, the question that I want to pose is not answered by these critiques. Rejection of tolerance as a negotiation of difference doesn’t erase the problems that tolerance the set of practices tries to respond to. It must be recognized that the conflicts that have arisen in the movements against privatization in the UC system cannot be limited to the conflicts between activists and the upper administration. Instead, the movement has often been defined by serious conflicts along cultural, ideological, personal, racial, and ethnic lines. Simultaneously, a number of conflicts have occurred because differences in institutional loyalties, that is differences in the ability to speak and act due to job status or involvement in administrative positions. Fights have occurred over both tactics and the goals of the movement. These differences have been negotiated to various degrees of success, but the Irvine movement in particular has been marked by a series of contentious splits that have occurred from its earliest discussion. These naturally link back to conflicts that have occurred long before the beginning of this particular budget crisis.
These differences are irreconcilable through simple claims for a need for unity, and need to be worked through by seeing what works in practice. One approach to negotiating these issues has been the slogan, ‘diversity of tactic’, which makes the demand for the acceptance of difference in organizing styles and political tactics. The slogan certainly invites a form of the acceptance of difference that is far wide ranging than those contained in tolerance. At the same time, the slogan is also used to reject any critical inquiry into the ethics or efficacy of any particular tactic, turning its negotiation of difference into an often atomistic and individualistic approach to the other. We are given an approach that allows for the experimentation and freedom to fail that is needed to develop new approaches and conceptualizations of the problem, but the possibility of recognizing our invariable failures and collectively reimagining those projects is taken away. In the end, we need to formulate a new approach to critique that both refuses the fantasy of easy forms of unity and the notion that every critique needs to end in an easy form of dialectical synthesis, as well as a conception of difference that refuses critique as a collective right and responsibility. I intend to explore the possibility of creating this through the critiques of conventional Marxism made by Rosa Luxemburg in her critiques of Lenin and Kautsky. In addition, it will draw on the exploration of ethics by Michel Foucault through his critique of polemics.
In a recent interview, Labor Notes activist Mark Brenner noted that union activism wasn’t necessary simply for the immediate accomplishments of the movement, but also for its ability to act as a sort of training ground for a new socialist project. In other words, the terrain of reform activity is both an end, achieving a set of concrete goals, as well as a means to creating the stage towards greater radical change. In order to understand this, I want to look at Luxemburg’s contributions to the debates within the Second International.
These engagements are frequently read as conventional defenses of Marxist theory and practice against revisionist and reformist tendencies within the international, particularly her debates with the revisionist theorist Edward Bernstein. However, rather than looking at these more conventional debates, I intend to look at a different set of debates, a set of debates that Luxemburg had with her fellow defender of revolutionary Marxism, Vladimir Lenin. This debate, along with the longer debate with Karl Kautsky around the tactic of the mass strike, present a different picture of Luxemburg, one that emphasizes the processes of the revolution, rather than a simple set of correct doctrines, also one that takes seriously the very pedagogical tasks posed by Brenner.
Luxemburg takes on these pedagogical questions most directly in her engagement with Lenin’s response to opportunism, in his book, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. In response to the combined problems of reformism and the split in the Russian party, Lenin proposed a number of stringent controls over party organization. These proposals emphasized the control of the central committee over all aspects of party life, from the naming of local committees to imposing rules of party conduct. For Lenin, this control over the everyday life of the party would exclude the possibility of revisionism or opportunism. The central committee would act as a disciplinary mechanism on the party as a whole, as well as a brake on forms of error arising from the subalterns of the party. In crude terms, a successful form of organization is dependent upon the brain of the central committee controlling the body of the membership, a kind of crude organizational Cartesianism.
Discipline is the key term for distinguishing Lenin and Luxemburg’s concept of organization. She distinguishes the two in the following terms.
“We misuse words and we practice self-deception when we apply the same term – discipline – to such dissimilar notions as: 1. the absence of thought and will in a body with a thousand automatically moving hands and legs, and 2. the spontaneous coordination of the conscious, political acts of a body of men. What is there in common between the regulated docility of an oppressed class and the self-discipline and organization of a class struggling for its emancipation?"
The first model can be drawn to a polemical critique of Lenin’s concept of discipline. Lenin argued that the factory acted as an ideal pedagogical space for the working class, molding it into a collective subject. The proletariat then takes the form of the docile, manipulated body, linking it to the Taylorist project. This concept then legitimates the control of the central committee over the automaton worker. But Luxemburg argued that this concept of discipline misses out on the practices and forms of disciplines that allow for an insurgent social democratic politics. In opposition, Luxemburg argues that these formations of discipline oppose each other. Social democratic practice is defined by a collective political consciousness, a self-directed body operating through the mode of spontaneous, in incomprehensible and terrifying to the instrumental reason it operates within. However, this second mode of discipline begins as a potentiality within the everyday practices of the work day, or what Luxemburg calls ‘unconscious’ practice. Luxemburg argues that the shift from the “unconscious” to the “conscious” constitutes the ‘tendency’ towards centralization. Centralization is, in effect, the ability of the proletariat to coagulate itself into a conscious and acting body.
"The self-discipline of Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.”
A social democratic transformation can’t be a simple replacement of the head of the bourgeoisie with a ‘socialist central committee.’ Instead it needs to operate through creating a new form of discipline, linked to the rejection of ‘the old habits of obedience and servility’ that define the current system. The working class needs to acquire this through political practice. But the benefits of that practice can’t be simply limited to the concrete gains from the success of those actions. Action also allows for the working class to reconstitute itself, but this process is thwarted when the central committee makes all of the decisions. Reconstitution needs to be linked to a collective decision making process, perhaps best identified anachronistically as participatory democracy. This means that the terms, ‘organization’, ‘socialism’, and ‘discipline’ can only be defined through the terrain of the class struggle. It turns the class struggle into a sort of laboratory, a space for creating new forms of life.
Okay, how do we bring this back to the conversation of the university? To do that, I want to turn briefly to a comment on the current struggles in California made by a significant ally, Rei Terada. Terada notes,
"Taken together, the student movements project formations that are sometimes difficult to describe using words like “class,” “society,” or “state.” That should not be assumed to be a symptom of incoherence, but absorbed as a sign of the unknowability of experience that is contemporary, experience that is not yet history. We can be glad that the situation requires the expression and discussion of differences without delimiting those discussions in advance."
Terada correctly picks up on the fact that despite the gallons of ink spent, the movement remains undefined. She links the movement’s ‘unknowability’ to the often indecipherable relationship to a series of past struggles, whether it’s civil rights, Situationism, or others, is inescapable. This Babel of voices necessarily draws into the history of the public university, a history of crisis and struggle, inclusion and exclusion. To put it bluntly, our relationship to this institution is changed by the ways we are overdetermined by the struggles of race, gender, sexuality, and class, particularly in the way that the post-war institution included and excluded populations into the new consensus. Our entrance into this terrain of struggle is therefore always marked by this uneven terrain. But Terada argues against dismissing the movement as incomprehensible because of its current unknowability. Instead, unknowability points to the contingent possibility of the moment, the possibility of forms of political thought and action, gesturing towards the Novum.
For Terada, this potential is allowed by the ‘expression and discussion of differences without delimiting those discussions in advance.’ But in order for this to occur we need to conceive of how this conversation can occur. In order to pose this question, we need to shift from a conversation around classical Marxism and the contemporary struggle, to a late interview with Michel Foucault around the question of polemics. He opposes this mode of communication with what he considers a genuinely ethical mode of communication. For Foucault, polemics act as a ‘parasite figure on discussion and an obstacle to the search for the truth.’ He notes that,
"The polemicist… proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that the struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat…. Polemics defines alliances, recruits partisans unites interests or opinion, represents a party; it establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears.
Undoubtedly, there is something immediately appealing to this formulation when in conversation with the state or the upper levels of the administration, but our most conversations as organizers and activists are not with them. Instead, our most important conversations are with colleagues, allies, and new potential members of the movement. To engage with them on this terrain of conversation may lead to new recruits in the war, but disallows reimagining the forms of struggles. Perhaps Rosellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis offers the best way of thinking of this figure, in the section on the bandit camp. The chief of the encampment has found a set of armor to protect him from any possible threat of attack, but this form of armor also completely immobilizes him, allowing the mobile figure of the organizer to enter into the camp and destroy it through his willingness to make himself vulnerable to the bandits. Polemics offers a perceived armor to the potential attacks from the other, but it destroys our mobility. Most radical organizing is, on the contrary, defined by vulnerability. That vulnerability can be seen historically in the violence perpetrated on organizers, but that vulnerability also occurs in the little risks that we take in the everyday conversations that are the day to day activities of organizing.
This image gestures towards the concept of communication that Foucault desires, a “morality that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.”
In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given to him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to the questioning of the other. Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given to him by the other and by the accepted form of the dialogue."
Our ability, for lack of a better term, to move forward depends on this game. There is a tendency on the part of certain sections of the radical movement to dismiss the importance of this dialogical negotiation as ‘mere talk.’ I think that this suspicion is, in part, understandable. After all, the primary model of conversation we are given is the kind of bourgeois synthesis defined by Habermas amongst others, and so often, those modes are used to neutralize radical activity and voices, to operate as apparatuses of capture. But we have to recognize that we give up a lot when we accept the notion that those are the only forms of communication available. More significantly, it’s profoundly dishonest to the actual practices that occur in social movements. I haven’t been to an action, a demonstration, an occupation that hasn’t been anchored by often endless and lengthy meetings, and informal conversations. If one were working in conventional Marxist terms, one could think of the event as the superstructure to the communicative base. Perhaps, its time to take that process seriously.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
October 7th
So, another state-wide day of action has been called for on October 7th in response to the continuing privatization of education. As far as I can tell, there has been very little discussion about planning something within the Irvine context, and I am a little concerned about that. We had some very impressive events last year, as well as some fairly substantial conflicts. At this point, the substantial alliance that produced the February sit-in and other events seems to have fallen apart, and there doesn't seem to be much interest in reviving or replacing it. (In all fairness, I think that it is very possible that substantial organizing can occur here without my notice. I'm not hopeful that this is the case, though.)
We should recognize that the same crisis in state funding is still in effect, and the University of California's upper administration is still largely committed to the logic of privatization. The student movement was really the only effective counter-measure to those forces, and most likely, we would have seen much more draconian actions if it hadn't occurred. I am genuinely concerned at what that administration would accomplish if we don't continue to put pressure on them.
At the same time, I don't want to paper over the real problems with the movement, particularly around issues of sexism and racism within its ranks. We have repeatedly gestured towards the need for an intersectional analysis, but that analysis has often been overwhelmed by the nostalgia for the often very problematic master plan, as well the post-war public research university. Our relationship to those institutions differ profoundly depending how we are racialized and gendered as subjects. At the heart of this, is a need to think through the way that the public research university, simultaneously allowed for the inclusion of working class students, as well as its contribution to reinforcement of the logic of white supremacy. (Without a doubt more needs to be written here, and that analysis needs to hold onto a number of intersecting categories to be useful.)
I want to keep this posting brief, so I will end with some questions for the probably not too large group of folks reading this. Do you think that a continued student movement (a very problematic term that stands in for a movement that has included actions by workers, professors, as well as students.)is necessary? If so, how can that process be revived in the UCI context? What are the conversations going on outside of our little cul de sac, in the other UC schools, outside the state? I'm not sure if I will hear from anyone, as that I've just started this blog, but I thought I would toss out the question.
In addition, I want to make it clear that aside from a vague sense that we need confrontational activism on the campus, I'm not sure what the answers are to these questions. They are posed from a position of ignorance, and not that fake ignorance that Socrates takes on in the dialogues.
We should recognize that the same crisis in state funding is still in effect, and the University of California's upper administration is still largely committed to the logic of privatization. The student movement was really the only effective counter-measure to those forces, and most likely, we would have seen much more draconian actions if it hadn't occurred. I am genuinely concerned at what that administration would accomplish if we don't continue to put pressure on them.
At the same time, I don't want to paper over the real problems with the movement, particularly around issues of sexism and racism within its ranks. We have repeatedly gestured towards the need for an intersectional analysis, but that analysis has often been overwhelmed by the nostalgia for the often very problematic master plan, as well the post-war public research university. Our relationship to those institutions differ profoundly depending how we are racialized and gendered as subjects. At the heart of this, is a need to think through the way that the public research university, simultaneously allowed for the inclusion of working class students, as well as its contribution to reinforcement of the logic of white supremacy. (Without a doubt more needs to be written here, and that analysis needs to hold onto a number of intersecting categories to be useful.)
I want to keep this posting brief, so I will end with some questions for the probably not too large group of folks reading this. Do you think that a continued student movement (a very problematic term that stands in for a movement that has included actions by workers, professors, as well as students.)is necessary? If so, how can that process be revived in the UCI context? What are the conversations going on outside of our little cul de sac, in the other UC schools, outside the state? I'm not sure if I will hear from anyone, as that I've just started this blog, but I thought I would toss out the question.
In addition, I want to make it clear that aside from a vague sense that we need confrontational activism on the campus, I'm not sure what the answers are to these questions. They are posed from a position of ignorance, and not that fake ignorance that Socrates takes on in the dialogues.
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