In reading for my chapter on Judith Merril, I came across Harry Warner, Jr.'s history of fandom in the 1940's, All Our Yesterdays. The text was clearly created in response to the Sam Moskowitz's text on the same topic, The Immortal Storm. That text infamously transformed the conflicts between fan groups into an overblown melodrama, which threatened to eclipse the importance of the Second World War. In doing so, Moskowitz produced a text, clotted with purple prose that is extremely difficult to read. Moskowitz's writings are typically fairly modest collections of biographies and descriptions of texts that are fairly enjoyable to read, but his work on fandom is quite bad. Warner attempts to escape out the fevered and claustrophobic atmosphere created by Moskowitz through offering a far more modest narrative, focused on the important personae and organizations of the period, rather than its conflicts. Effectively, he creates an informally structured encyclopedia, similar to Moskowitz's collections, Seekers of Tomorrow and Explorers of the Infinite, although better written.
In the process of reading about the various collections and publications of fans, it struck me that there is a remarkable homology between the collecting practices of fans and the writing practices of early fans. At a basic level, early fans worked to accumulate collections of science fictional texts, whether in the form of magazines, books, or mimeographed fanzines. The writings of fans such as Warner and Moskowitz replicate this logic of accumulation within their writing, piling names, dates, and facts on one another. Within the context of fan writing, this makes a lot of sense, and reading this sort of material after engaging with academic texts can actually be a bit of a breath of fresh air. For the most part, fan criticism doesn't move beyond the sophistication of forming generic taxonomies. If we move from the conversation around fan writing to academic criticism these tendencies are quite troubling. The reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss and the genre criticism of Todorov amongst others have already showed the problems with reading texts in such an ahistorical manner. Clearly, expecting fan critics of the period to engage with these trends in literary criticism is both anachronistic and overly taxing. But recent academic scholarship seems to be reproducing this problematic logic, most notably the work of Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. and Farah Mendlesohn.
I want to emphasize that both Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.'s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction are interesting texts, and the products of thoughtful and engaged critics. But I feel that both have a tendency to slip into the same types of eclecticism and ahistoricism found in fan writing. They implicitly critique the strong theoretical positions taken by Darko Suvin amongst others through a refusal to offer a singular definition of the genre. But neither place themselves or their narrative of the genre into a strong historical perspective, unlike Suvin, who produces a strong historical analysis of the origins of the genre, as well as the critical turn that he is a part. In ignoring these questions, the two tend to fall into the same problems originally diagnosed by Suvin. I am not invested in fully defending Darko Suvin's analysis of the genre. His polemical engagement with fantastic literature both ignores the cognitive possibilities contained with the genre (for more, read Todorov's The Fantastic) and ignores the intertwined histories of the genres. But the refusal to concretely engage with Suvin has lead to far more mystification than clarity in the criticism of the genre. I am beginning to believe that this is symptomatic of a larger problem within literary criticism, rather than one limited to science fiction studies.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
On the victory of AWDU
Probably most folks know about the recent victory of AWDU (Academic Workers for a Democratic Union) in the recent triennial elections. The results finally came in after over a week of battles with the opposing slate, who repeatedly attempted to sabotage the vote count. AWDU won the entire executive board, and 45 of 80 joint council seats (although a couple of the seats held by USEJ (the opposing slate, United for Social and Economic Justice are not held by legitimate student workers.) I think that we can see this potential radical shift in the union as a result of the student movement of a year ago. At the most immediate level, we watched as some of the most intense and involved struggles about the nature of the public university occur in a decade without any substantial presence of the union. (particularly on the Irvine campus) But perhaps more substantially, that struggle changed the expectations and the perspective of the students on our campus. Whether students were involved in the protests, occupations, and sit-downs or not, the official narratives of the university and its administrators were viewed with a great deal more skepticism and hostility. In effect, this critical engagement was turned on the leadership of the union when they tried to sell us a bad contract. The leadership was able to force through the contract by getting large amounts of folks at the San Diego, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara campuses to vote for the contract. The leadership took the vote as a tremendous success, but as I noted earlier, all the campuses where activists contested the contract either voted against the contract or had a very close vote. AWDU came together very quickly after this campaign. Without getting too intensely involved in the details of the campaign, USEJ showed that it was not ready for a competitive and democratic election.
That being said, I think that it is absolutely crucial that we keep AWDU together as a reform caucus. The example of the mineworkers for democracy shows the danger of closing up the reform caucus after winning the election. We need to recognize that the same pressures that eventually lead to the problems within the last leadership are going to be put on us as the reform slate. The most effective way to accomplish this is to transform AWDU into a membership organization. That way, the organization can act as an effective check and counterpower to potential problems within the union. We need this institutional structure precisely because of the potential impediments that exist within our union, a transient population, high turnover, and a group of folks who have not had much experience being in a union. A strong membership organization can provide that sense of continuity, along with fulfilling those pedagogical functions. Effectively, the union has been operating through the tyranny of structurelessness. Our end goal is to produce a substantial and participatory democracy, but in order to do that we need to strengthen our representative democracy. In part, this means some forms of decentralization, trusting local campuses and their elected leadership to have a better sense of the issues on each individual campus and their ability to make decisions, but it also means making the decision making process less opaque and confusing. We need to recognize that the problems of the union cannot be solved with one fell swoop. They're structural, and only a set of ongoing and structural solutions can solve them.
That being said, I think that it is absolutely crucial that we keep AWDU together as a reform caucus. The example of the mineworkers for democracy shows the danger of closing up the reform caucus after winning the election. We need to recognize that the same pressures that eventually lead to the problems within the last leadership are going to be put on us as the reform slate. The most effective way to accomplish this is to transform AWDU into a membership organization. That way, the organization can act as an effective check and counterpower to potential problems within the union. We need this institutional structure precisely because of the potential impediments that exist within our union, a transient population, high turnover, and a group of folks who have not had much experience being in a union. A strong membership organization can provide that sense of continuity, along with fulfilling those pedagogical functions. Effectively, the union has been operating through the tyranny of structurelessness. Our end goal is to produce a substantial and participatory democracy, but in order to do that we need to strengthen our representative democracy. In part, this means some forms of decentralization, trusting local campuses and their elected leadership to have a better sense of the issues on each individual campus and their ability to make decisions, but it also means making the decision making process less opaque and confusing. We need to recognize that the problems of the union cannot be solved with one fell swoop. They're structural, and only a set of ongoing and structural solutions can solve them.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
A Short Note on the eve of the vote count
It's been a few days since I have posted anything up here. The primary reason has been the lengthy controversy around the vote count in our Grad Student election. After a contentious first day of voting, it had seemed like the vote tally was going to be completed the next day. However, at 5pm the election committee declared a one hour break. That break stretched on for an extra two hours. The head of the election committee entered the count room at 8pm and illegally suspended the vote count until the next Joint Council meeting, putting the count of half the votes until months later. This illegal resolution passed with three votes, and no opportunity to vote against the resolution. The head of the elections committee then literally ran out of the room, knocking over empty ballot boxes and abandoning the open ballot boxes. The remaining elections committee folks closed the boxes and locked up the room. Since that Saturday, AWDU (Academic Workers for a Democratic Union) have been monitoring the locked room with the ballots. Additionally, our Berkeley colleagues have occupied the Berkeley office, demanding that their votes are counted. (Over half the Berkeley votes were challenged by USEJ challenger, and non-student, Des Harmon.)
Because of that, the only real writing that I have been able to get done has been directed towards my dissertation project. However, I thought I thought I would take a brief moment at what is possibly the last day of the vigil over the ballots to report into my unknown and most likely imagined public (and my real friends.) The process has been exhausting, but I've been genuinely impressed with all the folks involved in our slate. I'm hoping that our connections with the UCLA folks will develop further, and that we can form some strong and long lasting Southern California connections. I think that the external and internal challenges that AWDU has faced have produced a genuinely strong organization that can continue on, whether we win or not. In his analysis of 1968, Immanuel Wallerstein noted that the radical upsurge of that time period was directed against the traditional counter-systemic movements and their inability or unwillingness to challenge the capitalist world system (whether through the compromises of Moscow, or the complacency of social democracy.) At a far more modest level, AWDU is trying to do something similar with our own union, demanding that it take a meaningful role in the defense of public education and our rights as workers. It's been remarkable how combative the upper echelons of the local have been to this attempt at reform given their complacency in the face of privatization and administration push back. More than anything else, this contrast shows their real priorities.
As in other posts on this topic, I welcome comments and debate, but I will delete all anonymous postings. Union democracy demands responsibility, and if you are unwilling to put your name to a post, I'm not terribly interested in what you have to say.
Because of that, the only real writing that I have been able to get done has been directed towards my dissertation project. However, I thought I thought I would take a brief moment at what is possibly the last day of the vigil over the ballots to report into my unknown and most likely imagined public (and my real friends.) The process has been exhausting, but I've been genuinely impressed with all the folks involved in our slate. I'm hoping that our connections with the UCLA folks will develop further, and that we can form some strong and long lasting Southern California connections. I think that the external and internal challenges that AWDU has faced have produced a genuinely strong organization that can continue on, whether we win or not. In his analysis of 1968, Immanuel Wallerstein noted that the radical upsurge of that time period was directed against the traditional counter-systemic movements and their inability or unwillingness to challenge the capitalist world system (whether through the compromises of Moscow, or the complacency of social democracy.) At a far more modest level, AWDU is trying to do something similar with our own union, demanding that it take a meaningful role in the defense of public education and our rights as workers. It's been remarkable how combative the upper echelons of the local have been to this attempt at reform given their complacency in the face of privatization and administration push back. More than anything else, this contrast shows their real priorities.
As in other posts on this topic, I welcome comments and debate, but I will delete all anonymous postings. Union democracy demands responsibility, and if you are unwilling to put your name to a post, I'm not terribly interested in what you have to say.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning
I'm about to leave to find out about the results of the union election in about an hour. This particular recording seemed to be particularly relevant, both capturing a sense of anticipation, and as a description of the process of coming together as a slate. Whatever happens, I feel that we managed to embody many of the positive qualities that Rosa Luxemburg saw as central to the development of a conscious and militant proletariat. Omni sunt communia....
Monday, April 25, 2011
An unpublished editorial written in support of the AWDU slate.
This was initially written as a collective editorial to go in our not so good local school paper. Since it was ignored, I will publish it here, which may get more attention from grad students anyways....
On April 26th-28th, the United Auto Workers 2865, the union for graders, tutors and teaching assistants, will be having its triennial election. This means that all positions within the union, from top to bottom, are up for election, and for the first time in the history of the union, nearly all of those offices are contested. Aside from a few exceptions, the election is between two slates, the incumbent United for Social and Economic Justice Slate and the challenging Academic Workers for a Democratic Union Slate. As the candidates of the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union slate, we’re excited that the rank and file membership has the opportunity to choose between two very different visions of the union in this upcoming election.
Most of us had gotten involved in the union during the debate over the recently ratified contract. We were concerned that the process of negotiating the contract was being undertaken in a manner that left out the concerns and participation of the rank and file membership. Additionally, the information that was provided by the leadership on the negotiation process was often lacking in clarity and detail. The leadership seemed to have forgotten that good contracts are not won by a small group of clever individuals at the bargaining table, but by the collective effort of the entire union. For us, a strong contract could only be negotiated with the collaboration and active participation of the rank and file of the union. We had spent the previous year fighting the university’s administration in the fight against the tuition increases and the budget cuts, and we were distressed to see some of the same forms of obfuscation and deception on the part of our leadership used by the administration.
Additionally, there was very little active union participation on the part of the Irvine branch in the past two years. As the Irvine campuses saw an unprecedented level of activity on its campus, and some of the largest protests in its recent history around the budget cuts, the union played little to no role in the organization of these events. It largely stayed out of the large coalition of students, workers, and professors that formed over that year. At the more immediate level of the economic life of graduate students, the majority of the bargaining team chose to ignore the issue of graduate housing, which is a major concern on this campus. Despite the fact that only 10% of graduate students have affordable housing, the issue was not considered worthwhile in the bargaining process. That issue, along with the lack of substantial economic gains caused us to oppose the contract, and the majority of our campus voted against the contract.
A group of us then decided to run for the elected positions of the union to finally have a meaningful union presence on campus, and have held elected office for the past two months. Within that time, we have worked to organize department meetings, helped organize a public social event for the union, and played a major role in coordinating the March rally against the budget cuts. We are working to make our local union play a larger role in the defense of public education in the state, coordinating with student groups and other unions on our campus. We are currently in the process of organizing campaigns to deal with the issue of the workload of our members on campus, and see this as a campaign to both defend our position as workers and students, and to defend the quality of education on the campus. We are also beginning a campaign to demand more affordable housing for students on this campus.
As we had mentioned before, the current election gives the graduate students the choice between two very different visions of the union. The current leadership has moved increasingly in the direction of running the union in a top down fashion. It’s notable that three out of four of their top candidates are no longer graduate students themselves. Ten out of twelve of the paid staff members are running on the United for Social and Economic Justice slate, including the candidate for the Irvine Unit Chair, Coral Wheeler. This vision of the union emphasizes a decision making process taken on by a small number of paid ‘experts’ with a largely passive membership. Our slate wants to reverse that trend within the union to move to a far more member run organization, allowing more decision-making power on the individual campuses and a process of decision making that is membership led. We feel that participatory democracy is not only a more ethical approach to running the union, but that this process will also produce a stronger union. It is only when the rank and file feels that they can participate in the decisions of the union that they will become active members. We encourage you to vote for the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, April 26th-28th. For more information, see awdu.org.
Monday, April 18, 2011
A short comment on Ernesto Laclau
Ernesto Laclau turns to the work of Rosa Luxemburg in his theorization of the relationship of the empty signifier to politics. He notes,
"Let me go back to an example that we discussed in detail in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: the constitution, according to Rosa Luxemburg, of the unity of the working class through an overdetermination of partial struggles over a long period of time. Her basic argument is that the unity of the class is not determined by an a priori consideration about the priority of either the political struggle or the economic struggle, but by the accumulated effects of the internal split of all partial mobilizations. In relation to our subject, her argument amounts to approximately the following: in a climate of extreme repression any mobilization for a partial objective will be perceived not only related to the concrete demands or objectives of that struggle, but also as an act of opposition against the system. This last fact is what establishes the link between a variety of concrete or partial struggles and mobilizations--all of them are seen as related to each other, not because their concrete objectives are intrinsically related but because they are all seen as equivalent in confrontation with the repressive regime. It is not consequently, something positive, but something negative: their opposition to a common enemy. Luxemburg's argument is that a revolutionary mass identity is established through the overdetermination, over a whole historical period, of a plurality of separate struggles. These traditions fused, at the revolutionary moment, in a ruptural point." (Laclau 40-41)
If one has spent any time reading Luxemburg, this is certainly a curious way of expressing her approach to thinking through revolutionary transformation. Certainly, Laclau gets some of it right. He captures Luxemburg's emphasis on the need to understand revolutionary potential as a product of the coagulation of small skirmishes and battles, often seemingly disconnected. He also understands Luxemburg's critique of the forms of blanquism that have deeply influenced a variety of struggles. Luxemburg rejects the notion that a small group of people can plan forms of unity or struggle in advance. Instead, those processes are developed within the struggle itself. However, it is when Laclau emphasizes the negativity of Luxemburg's thought, the point where he insists that the common thread of these struggles is only in the fact that they contain a seed that opposes the system as a whole, is where his analysis veers widely off the mark. It's not that Laclau is incorrect in bringing up this aspect, but his claim that this is the only aspect of these that is only thing held in common by the struggles. For Luxemburg, partial struggles have two positive qualities: 1. pedagogical: they are a training ground for organizers, militants, and participants. They allow for tactics and strategies to be tested, and that learning process informs further actions, even when they are seemingly disconnected. 2. is vaguer and potentially more problematic for some: for Luxemburg, collective struggle has a sort of vitalistic quality to it. Small struggles allow for the working class to strengthen itself, to increase its capacity, to transform itself into a stronger and more focused assemblage. Rather than simply opposing a structure of domination, Luxemburg sees an assemblage breaking away from a servile dependence on the social rules of those who exploit and dominate it to produce its own forms of rules and organization, built on a radically different social logic.
This substantial misreading of Luxemburg allows for Laclau to link her thought into his theory of the empty signifier as the dominant logic of the political. He does so in the following fashion. By stripping out the positive content of Luxemburg's analysis, Laclau can fit her work into his overall schema of the functioning of the political. For Laclau, the political operates through the empty signifier, which gestures towards the logic of equivalence in any linguistic system. Language is structured on the basis of difference, but those differences are arbitrary. Therefore each sign is equivalent to one another within this system. Laclau notes that this system is analogous to the role of gold, the previous universal equivalent within the system of exchange. And the relationship between Laclau's theory and the logic of exchange value is quite strong, both operate as a system of equivalence, allowing for all the physical qualities of an object to be stripped away to operate in this phantom-like existence. But that entire logic rests upon labor, as Marx would note, the erased dimension of the commodity form that must be critically explored. There seems to be a similar operation within the work of Laclau, erasing the dimension of living labor from his political system. In the end, Laclau's attempt to critique Marx's system repeats the forms of erasure contained in earlier conventional political thought, renaturalizing the structures of exploitation built into the logic of the commodity form.
"Let me go back to an example that we discussed in detail in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: the constitution, according to Rosa Luxemburg, of the unity of the working class through an overdetermination of partial struggles over a long period of time. Her basic argument is that the unity of the class is not determined by an a priori consideration about the priority of either the political struggle or the economic struggle, but by the accumulated effects of the internal split of all partial mobilizations. In relation to our subject, her argument amounts to approximately the following: in a climate of extreme repression any mobilization for a partial objective will be perceived not only related to the concrete demands or objectives of that struggle, but also as an act of opposition against the system. This last fact is what establishes the link between a variety of concrete or partial struggles and mobilizations--all of them are seen as related to each other, not because their concrete objectives are intrinsically related but because they are all seen as equivalent in confrontation with the repressive regime. It is not consequently, something positive, but something negative: their opposition to a common enemy. Luxemburg's argument is that a revolutionary mass identity is established through the overdetermination, over a whole historical period, of a plurality of separate struggles. These traditions fused, at the revolutionary moment, in a ruptural point." (Laclau 40-41)
If one has spent any time reading Luxemburg, this is certainly a curious way of expressing her approach to thinking through revolutionary transformation. Certainly, Laclau gets some of it right. He captures Luxemburg's emphasis on the need to understand revolutionary potential as a product of the coagulation of small skirmishes and battles, often seemingly disconnected. He also understands Luxemburg's critique of the forms of blanquism that have deeply influenced a variety of struggles. Luxemburg rejects the notion that a small group of people can plan forms of unity or struggle in advance. Instead, those processes are developed within the struggle itself. However, it is when Laclau emphasizes the negativity of Luxemburg's thought, the point where he insists that the common thread of these struggles is only in the fact that they contain a seed that opposes the system as a whole, is where his analysis veers widely off the mark. It's not that Laclau is incorrect in bringing up this aspect, but his claim that this is the only aspect of these that is only thing held in common by the struggles. For Luxemburg, partial struggles have two positive qualities: 1. pedagogical: they are a training ground for organizers, militants, and participants. They allow for tactics and strategies to be tested, and that learning process informs further actions, even when they are seemingly disconnected. 2. is vaguer and potentially more problematic for some: for Luxemburg, collective struggle has a sort of vitalistic quality to it. Small struggles allow for the working class to strengthen itself, to increase its capacity, to transform itself into a stronger and more focused assemblage. Rather than simply opposing a structure of domination, Luxemburg sees an assemblage breaking away from a servile dependence on the social rules of those who exploit and dominate it to produce its own forms of rules and organization, built on a radically different social logic.
This substantial misreading of Luxemburg allows for Laclau to link her thought into his theory of the empty signifier as the dominant logic of the political. He does so in the following fashion. By stripping out the positive content of Luxemburg's analysis, Laclau can fit her work into his overall schema of the functioning of the political. For Laclau, the political operates through the empty signifier, which gestures towards the logic of equivalence in any linguistic system. Language is structured on the basis of difference, but those differences are arbitrary. Therefore each sign is equivalent to one another within this system. Laclau notes that this system is analogous to the role of gold, the previous universal equivalent within the system of exchange. And the relationship between Laclau's theory and the logic of exchange value is quite strong, both operate as a system of equivalence, allowing for all the physical qualities of an object to be stripped away to operate in this phantom-like existence. But that entire logic rests upon labor, as Marx would note, the erased dimension of the commodity form that must be critically explored. There seems to be a similar operation within the work of Laclau, erasing the dimension of living labor from his political system. In the end, Laclau's attempt to critique Marx's system repeats the forms of erasure contained in earlier conventional political thought, renaturalizing the structures of exploitation built into the logic of the commodity form.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
On the last Joint Council Meeting for the union
I have been putting off this post for a while. I wanted to wait for my irritation about the machinations of the admin caucus at the last Joint Council meeting to cool a bit before I wrote about that situation and the upcoming elections. There are folks who are at their most entertaining and informative when they rant, but I don't think that I am one of them. Additionally, I am currently running for the Campus Unit Chair for the Irvine branch of the local, and that has kept me a bit occupied as well. I thought I would give a brief description of the events of the Joint Council meeting, and then use that material to diagnose some of the basic problems with the local. As shocking as this may sound, I will then move from there into an argument for supporting the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, the caucus that I am a part of, who is currently running a sixty person slate in the current elections.
The Joint Council meeting started around 2pm on Saturday, April 9th. As part of the Irvine delegation, we had already been in Berkeley since noon the previous day for the meeting of the reform caucus. That meeting turned out to be quite productive, resolving a number of outstanding issues, and producing a strong slate of candidates to run in the upcoming election. That morning a number of us had met to discuss a number of proposals that we wanted to introduce to the Joint Council. Most of these proposals concerned the formal structures of the elections. After the suspicious nature of the previous vote on the contract, we wanted to introduce a number of measures to make sure that the same problems didn't occur in the next elections. We wanted election observers, daily counts of the vote, and a uniform set of ballot boxes that were not easily opened or seen into. The collective set of proposals was designed to lower the chances of ballot stuffing to occur, which would be quite easy to do with the current haphazard and unorganized nature of our elections procedures. However, these were not the only focus of our proposals. We also wanted to discuss access to resources for organizing. The current leadership has done its best to block any connection between the Irvine elected leadership and the rank and file. It took weeks for us to get a key to the office, and we still have no access to the membership database, nor have we been trained in its use. Additionally, we wanted to make the workload survey written by rank and file members and appropriated by the leadership into a far more interactive structure, allowing participants to not only input date, but to get a sense of the workload situation in their department, rather than simply receiving data months later.
The first vote of the meeting set the tone of what was to come. One of our members put up a proposal to add an additional agenda point to the fairly sparse official meeting to cover proposals on the upcoming elections. After a short discussion, it was voted down by a small majority. At that point, two things were fairly clear, there were very few to no neutral voices in the room, and that we were in the minority. From there, the meeting moved into a number of empty rituals, briefly presenting the union's budget, and the previous minutes. However, it was important that we brought our issues to the table, and we began with the workload survey issue. We managed to begin that process with a fairly substantial mistake on our part by leaving a reference to our caucus, Academic Workers for a Democratic Union in the written version of the proposal. That language was never officially entered into the proposal, but its existence on paper was repeatedly used to challenge the validity of the proposal. That situation eventually led to the proposal being declared out of order by the president of the union. After a lengthy and complex debate, a compromise proposal was introduced that would allow the leadership to have greater control over the apparatus of the survey, and after the challenge to the president's declaration was voted down by the administration caucus, the compromise was voted in with a fairly large majority.
To tell the truth, if the results of the compromise are put into effect, the compromise will succeed in making the survey better, although the leadership has often sat on these sorts of decisions, letting them die. Time, and our demand for a better and more interactive survey apparatus will only tell on this question. But I wanted to take a little time to talk about the nature of the debate itself before moving on. The primary concern of the administration caucus folks was security; who would have access to this information, who could enter information, etc. It's notable that most of the security issues that were brought up could also apply to the old survey, which was already posted. This critique was largely formed by the fear that the administration would intercept information, and the fear that angry members would skew the information of the survey. Implicitly, these issues could be combated through control over the information. Additionally, a number of interesting issues came up with the relationship between the survey and organizing. These positions were in opposition to one another, but united against the survey. The first position placed the survey in opposition to person to person organizing, arguing for the latter, and the second wanted a survey that would create a specific action for the members to take. Our position was sort of the unthought of the other positions, seeing the survey as a tool that could be used for face to face organizing, as well as a form of cognitive mapping for both rank and file members and organizers to see where workplace violations were occurring, making workload issues a collective issue, one that could be linked to the issues of the budget cuts, and fought as a political issue. At the same time, despite the occasional awkwardness and miscommunication, this was a genuinely democratic debate, one that lead to a potentially useful solution if followed through on.
From there, the situation got more problematic. After a contentious debate over whether we should have a five or fifteen minute break, the meeting got under way. An Irvine member immediately made a proposal to fight for access to our database, along with training to use it. The proposal was seconded, and we were set to debate the issue. But that discussion was immediately foreclosed by a call by a member of the administration caucus to adjourn the meeting. Without discussion or debate, the majority of the meeting voted to adjourn, leaving a proposal on the table, along with several other substantial proposals that we wanted to make, undiscussed. In effect, the majority of the Joint Council voted to forestall any substantial democratic discussion of the decision making process of the union, deferring to the leadership. Many of them seemed genuinely angry that we wanted to spend any time on these debates at all. For me, this anger and confusion is symptomatic of genuine structural problems with our union. Over the past few years, joint council meetings have gone from two days to one day, the most recent, lasting only two and a half hours. That shift has occurred through the active connivance of the current leadership, but it has also produced a strong faction of the elected leadership of the union who think that the union should be run on the basis of a passive assent to the decisions made by a small group of professionals at the top. (It's notable that 3 out of 4 of the top part of the administration caucus (or as they call themselves: the Social and Economic Justice Caucus) are no longer graduate students.) That issue is a far more substantial problem than the occasionally controlling and paternalistic approach to managing the meeting shown by the president, Daraka Larimore-Hall.
I recognize that there is some danger in offering such a detailed description of the messy process of decision making, but I wanted to offer an attempt at an honest description of what is going on. (I also want to make it clear that this 'honesty' comes through the lens of a committed reform activist) However, the problem that we as the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union are trying to respond isn't the issue of 'messiness', but instead the issue of the lack of participatory democracy in the union. The hostility to the continued discussion in the Joint Council meeting is a learned response, I want to argue. It arises out of a society in which very few decisions are made collectively and democratically. Our goal within the AWDU is to start challenging that set of social assumptions within the union to make it stronger through the active assent and decision making processes of the rank and file, rather than through passive acceptance. We want to have a union in which 'Everybody does a little bit', rather than 'a few people do a lot of things' (to quote my friend and former colleague, Kevin Wortman, former activist and recording secretary of the union... incidentally, not a member of our caucus) One practical way of doing that is to make the Joint Council a meaningful decision making body, but it also means empowering the local branches of the union to make decisions about how to respond to their own working conditions. For more details on our platform, please check our website.
Again, I am open to debate from all parties on these issues, but any anonymous responses will be deleted. Democratic debate is a right that entails responsibility. If you want to make claims about the direction of our union, you should be willing to put your name to those claims.
The Joint Council meeting started around 2pm on Saturday, April 9th. As part of the Irvine delegation, we had already been in Berkeley since noon the previous day for the meeting of the reform caucus. That meeting turned out to be quite productive, resolving a number of outstanding issues, and producing a strong slate of candidates to run in the upcoming election. That morning a number of us had met to discuss a number of proposals that we wanted to introduce to the Joint Council. Most of these proposals concerned the formal structures of the elections. After the suspicious nature of the previous vote on the contract, we wanted to introduce a number of measures to make sure that the same problems didn't occur in the next elections. We wanted election observers, daily counts of the vote, and a uniform set of ballot boxes that were not easily opened or seen into. The collective set of proposals was designed to lower the chances of ballot stuffing to occur, which would be quite easy to do with the current haphazard and unorganized nature of our elections procedures. However, these were not the only focus of our proposals. We also wanted to discuss access to resources for organizing. The current leadership has done its best to block any connection between the Irvine elected leadership and the rank and file. It took weeks for us to get a key to the office, and we still have no access to the membership database, nor have we been trained in its use. Additionally, we wanted to make the workload survey written by rank and file members and appropriated by the leadership into a far more interactive structure, allowing participants to not only input date, but to get a sense of the workload situation in their department, rather than simply receiving data months later.
The first vote of the meeting set the tone of what was to come. One of our members put up a proposal to add an additional agenda point to the fairly sparse official meeting to cover proposals on the upcoming elections. After a short discussion, it was voted down by a small majority. At that point, two things were fairly clear, there were very few to no neutral voices in the room, and that we were in the minority. From there, the meeting moved into a number of empty rituals, briefly presenting the union's budget, and the previous minutes. However, it was important that we brought our issues to the table, and we began with the workload survey issue. We managed to begin that process with a fairly substantial mistake on our part by leaving a reference to our caucus, Academic Workers for a Democratic Union in the written version of the proposal. That language was never officially entered into the proposal, but its existence on paper was repeatedly used to challenge the validity of the proposal. That situation eventually led to the proposal being declared out of order by the president of the union. After a lengthy and complex debate, a compromise proposal was introduced that would allow the leadership to have greater control over the apparatus of the survey, and after the challenge to the president's declaration was voted down by the administration caucus, the compromise was voted in with a fairly large majority.
To tell the truth, if the results of the compromise are put into effect, the compromise will succeed in making the survey better, although the leadership has often sat on these sorts of decisions, letting them die. Time, and our demand for a better and more interactive survey apparatus will only tell on this question. But I wanted to take a little time to talk about the nature of the debate itself before moving on. The primary concern of the administration caucus folks was security; who would have access to this information, who could enter information, etc. It's notable that most of the security issues that were brought up could also apply to the old survey, which was already posted. This critique was largely formed by the fear that the administration would intercept information, and the fear that angry members would skew the information of the survey. Implicitly, these issues could be combated through control over the information. Additionally, a number of interesting issues came up with the relationship between the survey and organizing. These positions were in opposition to one another, but united against the survey. The first position placed the survey in opposition to person to person organizing, arguing for the latter, and the second wanted a survey that would create a specific action for the members to take. Our position was sort of the unthought of the other positions, seeing the survey as a tool that could be used for face to face organizing, as well as a form of cognitive mapping for both rank and file members and organizers to see where workplace violations were occurring, making workload issues a collective issue, one that could be linked to the issues of the budget cuts, and fought as a political issue. At the same time, despite the occasional awkwardness and miscommunication, this was a genuinely democratic debate, one that lead to a potentially useful solution if followed through on.
From there, the situation got more problematic. After a contentious debate over whether we should have a five or fifteen minute break, the meeting got under way. An Irvine member immediately made a proposal to fight for access to our database, along with training to use it. The proposal was seconded, and we were set to debate the issue. But that discussion was immediately foreclosed by a call by a member of the administration caucus to adjourn the meeting. Without discussion or debate, the majority of the meeting voted to adjourn, leaving a proposal on the table, along with several other substantial proposals that we wanted to make, undiscussed. In effect, the majority of the Joint Council voted to forestall any substantial democratic discussion of the decision making process of the union, deferring to the leadership. Many of them seemed genuinely angry that we wanted to spend any time on these debates at all. For me, this anger and confusion is symptomatic of genuine structural problems with our union. Over the past few years, joint council meetings have gone from two days to one day, the most recent, lasting only two and a half hours. That shift has occurred through the active connivance of the current leadership, but it has also produced a strong faction of the elected leadership of the union who think that the union should be run on the basis of a passive assent to the decisions made by a small group of professionals at the top. (It's notable that 3 out of 4 of the top part of the administration caucus (or as they call themselves: the Social and Economic Justice Caucus) are no longer graduate students.) That issue is a far more substantial problem than the occasionally controlling and paternalistic approach to managing the meeting shown by the president, Daraka Larimore-Hall.
I recognize that there is some danger in offering such a detailed description of the messy process of decision making, but I wanted to offer an attempt at an honest description of what is going on. (I also want to make it clear that this 'honesty' comes through the lens of a committed reform activist) However, the problem that we as the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union are trying to respond isn't the issue of 'messiness', but instead the issue of the lack of participatory democracy in the union. The hostility to the continued discussion in the Joint Council meeting is a learned response, I want to argue. It arises out of a society in which very few decisions are made collectively and democratically. Our goal within the AWDU is to start challenging that set of social assumptions within the union to make it stronger through the active assent and decision making processes of the rank and file, rather than through passive acceptance. We want to have a union in which 'Everybody does a little bit', rather than 'a few people do a lot of things' (to quote my friend and former colleague, Kevin Wortman, former activist and recording secretary of the union... incidentally, not a member of our caucus) One practical way of doing that is to make the Joint Council a meaningful decision making body, but it also means empowering the local branches of the union to make decisions about how to respond to their own working conditions. For more details on our platform, please check our website.
Again, I am open to debate from all parties on these issues, but any anonymous responses will be deleted. Democratic debate is a right that entails responsibility. If you want to make claims about the direction of our union, you should be willing to put your name to those claims.
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