- An Interview with Matthew Evsky (Part 2) -

Summary:

In this interview, Matthew Evsky* speaks on ways that the education system is bound up with policing, mass incarceration, and settler colonialism.  How can we integrate education struggles with abolitionist, decolonial approaches?  For resistant alternatives, we can look to Liberation Schools and free, cooperative universities embedded in communities.  Facing major barriers to these from racism, we must call on white people to renege on their racist bargain with the state and capital.  How can we popularize such an abolitionist politics with narratives that convince people to be for annihilating the very system that gives them privileges?

Connecting Education Struggles with Prison Abolitionism and Anti-colonialism

CW: Picking up from Part 1 of our interview (“A Brief History of (CUNY) Time: Recent Radical University Organizing in NYC”), another thing I’d be interested in talking with you about is off-campus organizing, such as community organizing.  How have you tried to connect your organizing in communities and neighborhoods outside of universities—connecting with people in marginalized communities—with your university organizing?

Matthew: I have felt, in the experience of this past fall and spring [2011-2012], in some cases the overlap between the different kinds of organizing has been great and in other cases the separation has been particularly acute.  So, for example, I do feel like the Really Really Free Market has been situated somewhat nicely in relation to Occupy Wall Street.  Especially when Zuccotti Park was around, OWS was about mutual aid and about people sharing and cooperating in a very specific kind of way.  There were specific individual and philosophical overlaps with the Really Really Free Market.  Some of the RRFM organizers would take the goods that were leftover from the Free Market directly down to Zuccotti Park.  In the April 29th Free Market, a huge contingent of OWS organizers who were part of bringing mutual aid into the May Day actions helped to sort all of the stuff at the end of the Really Really Free Market and took the stuff that they wanted which they were going to then distribute in different mutual aid zones.  So, those kinds of connections between the RRFM and OWS have been pretty fluid.  In January, I was also working pretty closely with the Sustainability Working Group at OWS because they were pursuing doing skill-shares, bartering, and holding events where people exchanged goods and services.  So, a bunch of RRFM folks went to one of their events and they were working with us.

On the other hand, OWS in general, and I also think Occupy CUNY, has not done a particularly good job of being relevant to people in communities outside of Manhattan.  So, for the Bed-Stuy residents that I work with in Bed-Stuy Food Not Bombs, OWS is not relevant to them.  Now, the CUNY organizing I sort of feel is caught in the same kind of thing.  Obviously, Occupy CUNY doesn’t have the same kind of media buzz that OWS does, so it’s not even on people’s radar.  For example, Occupy CUNY hasn’t done a particularly good job of connecting with the colleges that are in places where they would be relevant.  There are some struggles going on at Medgar-Evers College, and the people who are engaged in their struggles are not the people engaged in Occupy CUNY.  So, there are cleavages in that way.

Also, I don’t think that education-based organizing has taken that leap to where it has become relevant to communities.  Occupy CUNY has worked with Occupy the Department of Education (DoE), and they had been doing mic-checking and general meeting disruptions of the Panel on Education Policy (PEP), which is essentially the board of directors of K-12 education.  We had been working with them a little, but not a ton. But, there are all these little pockets in Brooklyn as well as other boroughs where parents are trying to prevent their school from being shutdown.  And Occupy CUNY and OWS are not connected with those pockets of parents.  I don’t know the best strategy to do it.

The feeling I get right now in New York is that the campaign to stop ‘Stop and Frisk’ if not is, is going to be, the biggest and most important thing going on.  I’m beginning to feel that I want education organizing to focus on connecting itself to policing, and policing in K-12—essentially, connecting it to an analysis that is less about neoliberalization as a privatization or as accumulation by dispossession or instituting tuition, and more an analysis of the way in which schools are either pipelines to prisons or just increasingly more prison-like or have been prisons for quite a long time.  So, this entails beginning to work with people who are dealing with cops in neighborhoods and cops in schools, and tying that into how many cops are on CUNY campuses and how CUNY, maybe it has been late in the game, but clearly CUNY is instituting a lot of turnstiles, bag-checking, and things like this.  We need more tying of the education organizing into a reading of the capitalist-prison complex, and working with people who are trying to end the police state and doing prison abolition.  That’s the direction that I would like to see education organizing go in.  That’s a very personal reading, because those are some of the things that I feel I need to have a stronger analysis of.  But, I do think it will make Occupy CUNY and other education organizing stuff more relevant to communities than it is now.

Image by Katy Groves via USPrisonCulture.com

In that sense, I don’t have a strong sense where the adjunct narrative comes in.  If someone were to ask me the question, where does the two-tier labor system and adjunct organizing fit into that, I would probably look to the way people who analyze the prison-industrial complex try to talk about workers in other places and their relationship to the prisons.  So, it’s somewhat of a question of, if we are trying to basically stop this trend of turning all of our institutions either into prisons or into the place where you prime people for prisons, then what is your analysis about the really hierarchical and highly divided workplace in this place, in this case, CUNY?  How do you tie that into a critique of CUNY that is becoming more prison-like, or becoming an “adjunct” to the prison-industrial complex?  I don’t have an answer to that, but I would probably just look to some of the people who talk about this stuff.  It just feels to me, being around New York, the NYPD is this thread that ties through everyone’s lives.  Just because the NYPD’s so big, and they are doing things like surveilling Muslim students and hyper-locking down people of color neighborhoods, evicting protesters from Zuccotti Park, and training the so-called CUNY peace officers who are essentially NYPD, just by a different name.  I think that the police are the glue that ties everyone together, and not in a good way, obviously, but in a narrative way, and in an everyday life kind of way.

CW: I’m really glad you took the conversation in this direction of talking about how to tie education struggles with anti-prison and anti-police struggles.  Thinking about the kind of narrative that we tell about the university in our organizing, you mentioned the need to shift away from a focus on neoliberalism and privatization.  Are you also implying a need to shift away from a kind of defense of the public university that is tied with the welfare state?  That sort of public university vision, then, also necessarily includes the prison-industrial complex and a highly policed society, because it is an elitist institution that is tied vertically with the whole education system, and there are exclusionary mechanisms at each level that stigmatize them as ‘dropouts’ and push them into marginalized communities where they are policed and funneled into prisons.  If that’s your object of critique, then what sort of alternative vision do we want to propose?  Should our alternative vision be a truly open, non-exclusionary university?

Matthew: In my mind, there are a couple levels to this.  One level is people’s different opinions about the role of state institutions in being able to provide for people in ways that are not utterly paternalistic and punitive.  Personally, as an anti-authoritarian, and as somebody who studies anarchist thinking and my research involves talking to people who are anarchists—as well as other people—I’m not totally convinced that I want the state to be teaching people.  In that sense, I am certainly of the opinion that I don’t think nostalgically about elements of the welfare state, other than thinking about the importance of the struggle that led to the creation of them.  So, I think it’s important that people agitated in a way that led to using resources to create free, public education or any other elements of the welfare state.  But, as long as the state is the executive committee of the oppressors (to riff on Marx and Engels from the manifesto), then I don’t want them providing education.  But then, some people are going to say, ‘oh, the state has done incredibly efficient things with some of these programs.’  Or people will say, ‘how are you going to accomplish some of this stuff on community levels?’  I think those debates can play out, but one thing I would say is: as a settler nation—occupying the land that is not the land of the white settlers, and that is a part of an empire that has brought laboring bodies from a whole bunch of different places, but especially West Africa and Central America as well as everywhere else—I don’t see any examples in the university where pedagogy isn’t already saturated with settler, imperial understandings of the world and history and of epistemology. 

I think of it somewhat like this: we’re not just trying to hand over education, the dollars that go into creating public education.  I’m certainly not for just turning over those dollars to the people who want to just pocket them, whether that means admins who are making close to a million dollars or the bond holders of New York state debt who will make a ton of money just because they own that debt and CUNY is tied to those bonds.  I see that the university would have to be really different in order for it to be about liberation, and I’m not sure how we’d get to that.  And I don’t think it’s like we just give up on universities.  Moments when people who are excluded from them are gaining access to them—in my mind, that’s why it needs to come back to a really strong emphasis on racialized and gendered oppression in North American capitalism, and especially through these institutions.  You know, what does CUNY do for people?  Does CUNY provide life chances for New Yorkers of color?  I don’t know the answer to that, but I would guess it’s ‘no.’  It’s really unclear whether CUNY is actually doing anything for people on a structural level. There are probably some statistics that would say that it is, but I’m not sure.

Going back to your question of reproduction, I think the people who have been working on all the school-to-prison pipeline stuff have been getting it right.  The K-12 education system is producing the bodies that it needs for unemployment and incarceration, and it does that in very specific ways.  And I don’t think that people have been using those analytical tools to talk about CUNY.  For example, I think that the system of graduate education is now producing ABDs and not PhDs, and I think that it is producing ABDs so that it can then just blame the low wages that it has already decided to pay on the specific form of credential.  

I think we have to analyze what kinds of people the university is producing and then decide if we want to be those people, and if we don’t want to be those people then we have to struggle against it.  If CUNY is producing a whole bunch of people of color who go for two semesters or two years and then drop out with a lower-than-average but still an excruciating amount of debt and no life chances, and then a few people who are whiter and more privileged and who have a degree, I think we have to ask ourselves, do we want to be either of those people?  And I think the answer is no.  Then, from there, asking ourselves, well, why is it doing that?  Why is CUNY producing people who drop out after a couple of years?  Why is the K-12 pushing people out of school and into prisons?  Then, I think it ties back to forms of settler colonial occupation of this land.

Liberation Schools and Free Universities

Matthew: For me, once you get beyond some organizational ideologies about anti-authoritarianism and the role of the state, ask a very basic question like, do you trust the state to create a liberation school?  And I would just say, I have never seen it done in the past.  This is where historical materialism could come into play.  I don’t see any states, much less an imperial state, creating a liberation school.  That is where my feelings about universities are tending.  I’ve got strategic questions about what we can do.

I think we need to create liberation schools where we are not reproducing imperialist understandings of the world and of how to know things in the world.  We have really good examples of that.  The situation down in Tucson is an interesting example, because that Ethnic Studies curriculum had made its way into the school and was doing incredibly good work, but it’s being ruthlessly destroyed right now.  The teachers who are teaching it have been fired and the books that they’ve been teaching have been banned.  You could either use that example to say it’s possible to bring it into the spaces of the state, or you could use it as an example for why we need to create autonomous places where they can be protected.  But, I would just say that the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson is a good example.  Obviously, other examples are Freedom Schools and Liberation Schools of the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party.  These, in my mind, are the models we need to look to.  But, how that relates to organizing in the university right now becomes a little more of a challenge.  The struggle for Ethnic Studies is key.  I do think there’s something to bringing non-Western epistemological frameworks into the academy, it’s just that, from my position, I’m not particularly optimistic about it, because I don’t have a lot of power.  I don’t see a movement from within the ranks of the more relatively empowered people, meaning the tenure-stream faculty, towards liberation epistemologies.  If I were witnessing something like that, I think I might be a little bit more optimistic.  But, when I look at the faculty, I see a lot of people with more privilege but very little power, and mostly unorganized.  The people who are working in non-Western frameworks are amazing and their ability to write books about those frameworks and incorporate those kinds of frameworks into their teaching is important and amazing.  It’s just that from my perspective the prospect of doing this in a generalized form in state universities doesn’t look good.

CW: What about thinking of the new contingent majority, considering how contingent faculty are a majority of the faculty in the US, something like 70%?  Somebody else I interviewed, ‘James Anderson,’ has been in contingent faculty limbo, trying to apply for a job every year.  He was saying that there’s so many of us, either going into that position now or are in it, he was thinking that it’s not really worth it.  If you want to be a radical through your organizing and teaching, under the conditions of being a precarious academic, it’s so hard to make time to do that organizing within and outside the classroom.  So, he was saying that maybe instead of struggling to remain in academia for many years, he proposed that radical precarious academics could give it a shot for a year or so, trying to make it into the rapidly disappearing secure positions that do exist, but if we don’t make it, then to rise out of academia intentionally, and instead, to devote ourselves to intellectual work and organizing work and teaching in some kinds of movement-embedded popular education.  Of course, the problem then is, how do we develop those institutions, such as Freedom Schools, nowadays that could give us support, resources to do that, money to live on, or at least food and housing to live on?  Have you thought of any ways we could create these alternative forms of support for radical intellectual work outside academia while still trying to remain in relation with those who stick inside academia, and then through those connections, to expropriate resources from the universities and still be able to engage with universities in the spaces for struggle that they open up? 

Matthew: This is something I think about.  It is a challenge, because the social reproduction of the people who are engaging in the project is a major part of its sustainability.  I think it’s actually really interesting too, because I don’t know that much about how the teachers in the Freedom Schools of the past were compensated, whether that compensation came in the form of money or in-kind donations or some kind of social currency.  I don’t know the answers to those questions.  On top of it, the way I envision it is that these projects fulfill dual functions.  They actually help to make and create the communities that can sustain them, and they are the communities that we’re not actually connecting with.  So, to return to the question, why is it that Occupy Wall Street is not relevant to people in Bed-Stuy who come to Food Not Bombs every Saturday afternoon to help one another share food?  In some way, it has to do with the political economy.  The people who were in Zuccotti Park didn’t have much connection to the people in Bed-Stuy.  Since I’m not particularly technically minded, it just blows my mind away that the mutualism of Zuccotti Park was sustained by trans-national donations.  Zuccotti Park basically survived because Twitter allows a form of organizing that was local but was trans-nationally funded.  I certainly imagine Liberation Schools to be embedded in communities in a way that is much more like mutual aid societies of previous eras.  There’s some sort of geographic or place-based community that constitute a membership, and that membership collectivizes in order to allow some members of that community to teach the children of that community.  Maybe it sounds idealistic.  But I think that’s the kind of thing that we’re talking about.

The other model that I think about is more of a cooperative business model.  I’m somewhat blown-away that a bunch of contingent workers who are PhDs are not joining together and creating a university.  Are there barriers to creating a university that I’m missing?  Or is it an element of the lack of organization?  Or is it the slim chances, creating a psychological dynamic?  I just think, this is a moment when cooperatives are flourishing and people want to start them, so why not start a cooperative university?

CW: I’m in.  Let’s do it.

Matthew: Yeah, I think it could be a good way.  I’m sure there are people who understand university finances more than me who would be like, ‘no, that’s not possible.’  But what do you do when there’s a crisis?  You join together with other people that you know and you use collaboration in order to make a living.  Sometimes that just comes from my personal philosophies, but there are examples of it everywhere.

CW: Two thoughts on why it’s tricky.  One is that accreditation is pretty expensive. Further, while it’s easy to make an online cooperative university, making an actual, grounded-in-a-place university is really expensive.  You also need staff, service workers, maintenance workers—people who are often ignored in universities when we talk about radical organizing, even though they are sometimes the most militant radical organizers.  So, those are a couple challenges.

Matthew: Right now I’m reading this book called Grassroots Medicine. It’s about the last four decades of free clinics.  I somewhat think of free clinics as the hardest thing to start.  Not because I’ve started one and I know how hard it is compared to other things, but because you are trying to do something that involves highly skilled labor—not that I think that medical doctors are potentially more skilled than you or I, but they are skilled differently. The professional societies that oversee medical doctors have a lot more magnetism than the professional societies of academic work.  And, they are also actually more powerful and want to prevent doctors from giving their services for free.  Then, on top of it, the work that they do requires specialized tools in a way that teaching doesn’t.  Also, it requires the kinds of maintenance and staff support and bookkeeping that you’re talking about, and they’re also exponentially more in a health care setting than in an education setting.  I’m just bringing it up as an example.  The proliferation of free clinics, in a sense, when I think about that, I think, ‘why not the proliferation of free schools?’  Obviously, some of the reasons are because, well, there are a lot of schools that are still relatively cheap that people will go to.  Maybe I’ve just been working too long on this philosophy of ‘everything that possibly can be done for free should be done for free,’ but that’s sort of how I’m feeling.  A cooperative probably wouldn’t try to provide its services for free, but it could, or it could just blatantly be a free school that people teach at.

On Popularizing Abolitionist Politics: The ‘Who, Where, and How’ of Radical Conversations

CW: Why don’t these free schools just take off?  I think there are a lot of obstacles.  I think part of the problem is that we lack a clear story to tell people of why it’s important.  I think this might relate with what you were talking about earlier, about how in struggles within universities people are stuck in a kind of defense of public, state-based education.  Shifting out of that mindset requires some kind of more popularizable critique of the relationship between education and capitalism and the whole prison-industrial complex and policing—understanding why the whole dominant model of education is so fucked up, and then seeing free schools as a non-and-anti-capitalist alternative.  We have the critiques already in a kind of academic, theoretical way, but a real challenge is popularizing those critiques.

Matthew: I think the barriers are huge.  We overestimate barriers that are more kind of bureaucratic—and for good reasons.  There’s quite a bit of effort that must go into these things.  They can be precarious.  They can be fleeting.  They are not asset-building investments.  But, I think we underestimate barriers that are more kind of like, ‘what are we gonna do?’  And we underestimate racism as a barrier.  That narrative that you’re describing, to me, has to come back to racism.  In many ways, we’re asking white people to go against a certain kind of bargain that they’re playing with the state and with capital.  Asking people to be like, ‘oh, you should commit to this form of education, as a teacher or as a student.’  In my mind, the only way it’s going to work is a strong form of solidarity that is very much about understanding how we’re all connected in a globally exploitative, racialized, hierarchical system—and in way that is not about people feeling guilty about privilege, but is more about people actually desiring of destroying the system, annihilating the system.  When they’re approached with the compromises that they can make, the compromises that go against everyone’s liberation and go for their own privilege, we need to have a narrative that speaks to saying, ‘no, I’m for annihilating the system.’  How do we do that?  In my mind, that is the barrier.

CW: Yeah, how do we popularize an abolitionist ethic and politics—toward abolishing white supremacist, capitalist, hetero-patriarchy?

Matthew: It’s funny, because in organizing, I’m not about appealing to the masses, in a specific kind of way.  Typically speaking, I don’t like watering down messages for ‘the masses.’  I think it does become an interesting question of, how do we tell a story about why we’re doing what we’re doing when the reason why we’re doing what we’re doing is abolition?  And when we’re telling that story to people who gain privileges from that thing that we want to abolish?  I do think that that’s part of our challenge.  ‘Why are you guys doing this free school? Well, we think that liberation is something that requires a very specific framework for understanding the world, and we think in order for people to be liberated we have to annihilate this system of capitalist hetero-patriarchical…

CW: But saying it without that jargon.

Matthew: Exactly.  And saying it either in a strategically covert way or in a compelling enough way that showcases to people that you have things to gain by participating in this.

CW: Yeah, it’s really tricky.  At an organizer training for the IWW, we were talking about how to talk about the IWW’s anti-capitalist politics with people who you’re trying to organize with who don’t hold explicit anti-capitalist positions.  I think that just in the course of talking with people about their jobs and their everyday lives, you can talk about it in a way that’s really clear and uses everyday language.  Asking questions like, ‘why does this company make so much money while we get paid so little?’—that’s basically a way to talk about capital accumulation and exploitation of our labor.  And then bringing race in, such as with a question, ‘why do most of the black people work behind the counter while the white young drivers get paid more?  What’s up with this dividing us by race?’  I think it’s through building relationships with people through organizing, through living together and working in our workplaces and neighborhoods together, that I think we can push ourselves to articulate those critiques in more everyday ways. 

Matthew: That makes me think of something I think about a lot: when people talk in abstract terms about radicalism or about anti-capitalism, there’s a tendency to have very specific, prescriptive understandings of the ‘where, how, and whom’ of those conversations. Like, ‘well, those conversations will happen here because these people are the people that will challenge the system because of their income status and their this that and this.’  I actually think that those questions change in very specific ways.  So, just the question of ‘who’ and ‘where’ will people engage in that conversation that you’re talking about—just a basic conversation that is free of jargon, that is about everyday lives, and ultimately leads to building strong connections that are moving towards liberation.  If you just asked somebody, who and where are they most likely to have that conversation, what’s the answer?  Where is that going to go on?  That’s not going on in our universities.  I think, quite obviously, if you say, ‘it’s going to go on in the workplace.’  Well, maybe it will.  It depends.  Is it going to go on in infoshops?  Where is that going to happen?  Or is going to go on at block parties?  Or at neighborhood assemblies?  Or at Zuccotti Park?  In my mind, that’s a very materialist question.  I think that’s a project of geography people to create the places where that conversation will go on.

CW: Can that happen anywhere, but we just lack the skills and confidence to make those conversations happen anywhere?  There’s no real outside to capitalism and white supremacy.  Any situation we’re in could potentially have those kinds of conversations.  Maybe some of us feel more comfortable in an occupy assembly or something.

Matthew: Well, I definitely think that they’ll happen anywhere, and can happen anywhere, and I definitely don’t think that there is a specifically autonomous space.  But, I just mean it in more concrete ways.  There are specific things that are barriers to having that conversation.  For example, if your workplace is highly surveilled and extremely disciplined and there’s a potential for people to be fired, then that creates an environment where that conversation could go on but is probably not going to go on.  Or if your church has a specific kind of institutional philosophy and the pastor has this kind of approach… All of these spaces that we interact with in our everyday lives—they could be it but they have characteristics that maybe go for it or go against it.  And, I do think the key is to make every space more for that.  We should be making our classrooms more conducive to that conversation.  We should be making our churches, our workplaces, and our homes more conducive.  That’s sort of how I think of it.  That doesn’t mean that every place is going to get the full attention of our effort.  But, it is up to us to make that space happen.

*******

*Matthew Evsky is the pseudonym of a graduate student and contingent faculty member at the CUNY Graduate Center.  This interview took place on June 11, 2012.  This is Part 2 of the interview.  Read Part 1 here: A Brief History of (CUNY) Time: Recent Radical University Organizing in NYC.

 

Summary:

Drawing on first-hand experience, Matthew Evsky* shares a recent history of student and labor organizing at and around the City University of New York (CUNY), including the Adjunct Project, Campus Equity Week, the CUNY Time Zine, Occupy CUNY, and the Free University of NYC.  He delves into the complex relationships between students, contingent faculty, the broader faculty union, and the confusing processes of university exploitation.  The emergence of Occupy CUNY burst into a week of action with a student sit-in that was violently repressed by campus security.  Although seeing undergraduate organizing as the driving force behind a revival of campus activism, Occupy CUNY connected radicals with each other and built supportive direct relationships across divisions of workers and students.  Emerging from a working group on radical pedagogy, the Free University of NYC has enabled people to transform classrooms into spaces of radicalization.

The Adjunct Project and Contingent Labor Organizing at CUNY

CW: Could you say a little about how you’ve come to be involved in radical organizing, particularly in relation to universities?

Matthew: For me, I feel like that starts in graduate school.  I don’t remember exactly a transformative moment, but I do remember arriving at CUNY [City University of New York] and seeing people tabling.  There were folks organizing under the name Adjunct Project.  While I don’t remember exactly when I became interested and started working with them, I do remember the moment when I had no clue what they were doing or what the word ‘adjunct’ meant.  Basically, I recall being in school and not having any consciousness of the university re-structuring or of the university labor market transformations, of corporatization.  Through personal connections, I was then beginning to work on projects with the Adjunct Project, and beginning to learn an analysis of CUNY that the Adjunct Project had already been working on, and to help contribute to that analysis and to teach it to other people—the neoliberalization of CUNY, or the narrative of CUNY as a public institution that is privatizing through fees and transforming its labor relationships and so forth.

I didn’t do education-specific organizing in undergraduate.  It wasn’t necessarily something that I was aware of.  I was in the UC system.  There were people organizing hoping to reinstate affirmative action.  That was one of the bigger organizing goals of the radicals who were education-centered when I was in the UC system in the late 90s to the early 2000s.  I wasn’t specifically a part of that.  I didn’t have a good understanding of that system or what it was about.  I knew that tuition was increasing, but I didn’t know it as a strategy from the top to transform the relationships of education and work and all these things.

So, it was definitely my first and second year of grad school that led to working with the Adjunct Project.  One of the main things we worked on was something called Campus Equity Week.  We put together a series of agitational materials that were for teaching undergraduates about the neoliberalization of CUNY.  Among those were a poster that allegorically described CUNY as a factory with adjuncts sort of as part of the moving parts and students as also part of the moving parts.  The students, after going through the classroom, fall into a PLINKO board, which represents their general precariousness: as they fall through the board, only one or two of the students receive actual gains from the credential, and the rest of the students receive precarious underpaid work.  Also, the poster had various stats such as budget trends and average salaries throughout the CUNY administrative and faculty hierarchies.

In addition to the poster, there was a powerpoint and other materials.  We planned to find professors and adjuncts who would teach this material in the classroom and/or we would teach it in their classrooms if they didn’t feel comfortable with it or didn’t want to take the time to prepare.  We printed the posters, and we tried to get it out there, to train people to do it.  I did it in my classroom and in another person’s classroom.  There was a bunch of other people who were trained and did it in their classrooms as well as others.

I didn’t leave that process thinking anything palpable had shifted.  We were excited by the end products, and we were excited when people we talked to were into it, not just in CUNY but also when we met people at conferences and other places.  We also heard practical criticisms of the poster, the main one being that it’s confusing, that there’s too much going on in the image to be useful.

Before the Equity Week poster, the big thing that we worked on was the CUNY Time Zine.  There were people interested in doing a DisOrientation Guide.  I don’t know the history of DisOrientation Guides, but it seems that in the mid-2000s there was a bit of a moment for them.  A few different schools across the country had produced them [e.g., read an interview on the UNC DisOrientation Guides here].  Some of them were quite large and quite compelling—just the notion that, ‘here’s a guide to your university,’ usually involving workplace issues, investment issues, and also, generally acclimating students to where are the radical spaces, what are the safe spaces, what are the things to avoid—an orientation guide for people who would want to know that their university is a corporatizing behemoth.  So, we had a couple people coming into the grad center who were excited about doing a DisOrientation Guide, and we met a few times in order to make one.  But, we ran into the problem of: would this be a DisOrientation Guide particular to the CUNY Grad Center, and if so would that be useful?  We also thought that this could be a DisOrientation Guide for one of the campuses, but we weren’t particularly attached to any of the campuses.  That killed a bit of the momentum for it, so we ended up doing a zine called CUNY Time, which included things like an article on tuition, privatization, and corporatization.  It also included a power map, which was essentially an illustration that outlined some of the hierarchical elements of CUNY’s power structure: how many people are on the board of trustees, and where do they come from, how many people are on the university and student senates, etc.  That was more of a visual thing, and we wanted people to think of how they would re-structure the university if they had to move things around.  There were also some humorous zine-type elements to it: images and quotes here and there. We ended up doing an updated version of the first one, with some new material, and then a second one.  So, there are three different CUNYTimes out there.

Download the CUNY Time Zines here:

• Issue 1: (web viewable) or (printable booklet)
• Issue 2: (web viewable) or (printable booklet)

After the CUNYTime zine, we did Campus Equity Week [check out this flier from the Fall 2009 Campus Equity Week].  Then, there was a period where the Adjunct Project really struggled.  The relationship of the Adjunct Project to other more hierarchically organized groups was creating problems.  The Adjunct Project at that time was organized as a consensus-based, horizontal group.  However, it did have funding from the Doctoral Students Council (DSC), basically as their labor wing.  Although the DSC didn’t really meddle in the Adjunct Project’s affairs, other than choosing the paid people: there were co-coordinators.  The group had a couple marginally paid people that operated using consensus and in a horizontal fashion, mostly.  The other organized group that I’m talking about is, specifically, CUNY Contingents Unite, which is a group of contingent organizers that came out of a campaign to vote ‘no’ on one of the union-negotiated contracts.  There was a union contract, the last contract, when it came up to be voted on by the membership, it was apparent that the union leadership had, for the most part, sold out the contingent workers.  So, a group of already-radicalized contingents basically put together a ‘vote no’ campaign, and that campaign turned into CUNY Contingents Unite.

CW: Could you give a quick background on the relationship between contingent faculty and the broader union?

Matthew: For sure.  Contingent faculty at CUNY, which can include graduate students who have fellowships that require that they teach and who have assignments at different campuses, professionals who are adjuncts—such as lawyers who teach at the law school—and also quite a few people who have masters or PhDs and simply are full-time part-time employees, i.e., their contracts are for one semester, usually, and they are paid on a contingent pay scale.  All of those people are represented in our union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC).  So, everyone who is a part-time worker as a teaching instructor is already a member of our union.  However, the way the union works is very confusing, and has been very confusing with how to actually organize contingents.  So, one of the things that we did was to try to map out this process.  Basically, the bargaining unit of the PSC is somewhere in the range of 25,000 people.  Of the bargaining unit, maybe only 15,000 or so are members of the union, meaning that they’ve signed their union card.  But, all 25,000 are represented in the contract.  Then, the make-up of the bargaining unit: the number of adjuncts and contingents in the bargaining unit, I think it’s something like 60/40 or 55/45.  It’s close to even of full-timers vs. contingents, swayed a little more toward contingents.  But a significant majority of members are full-timers.

So, the situation in the PSC is that you have a large group of people who are not becoming members, but of that group of people, it’s overwhelmingly contingents.  Why?  Obviously all the reasons we can imagine: you just arrived on a campus, you don’t have an office, you don’t have any support, you don’t know if you will be a worker there later on.  I haven’t been on every campus, but from my experience at Queens, there is not a lot of general grassroots-type organizing by the PSC that would put you in contact with other organizers.  So, you have this huge group that is well-represented in the bargaining unit, but under-represented in the membership, and that process gets starker the higher up in the ranks that you go in the PSC.  So, in the PSC, being the type of union that it is, members essentially don’t do very much other than vote for elections, which can sometimes be relevant, like when the current leadership beat a more conservative leadership. But other times the elections are really meaningless due to the union structure.  Members do not actually have voting ability on things like policy or bargaining priorities.  Those things are decided upon by the executive assembly and/or the delegate assembly, and both of these bodies are like the membership as a whole, overwhelmingly made up of full-timers over contingents.  The delegate assembly meets, votes on stuff, and then there’s an executive committee where all the power actually resides.  There are a couple contingents on the executive committee, but mostly not.  Each campus has a PSC chapter, and those are in a sense the shops within the union.  They each have an executive committee, and they do things, but the chapters really struggle to have contingent participants, again for all the same reasons.

CUNY Contingents Unite is basically a contingent, non-affiliated group of members within the union.  They’re a rank-and-file group that was contingent-based.  They’re for the most part pretty cool, since they focus on adjunct and contingent needs and really target how the union leadership hasn’t sufficiently addressed the situation of contingent workers within the bargaining unit, and precarious work in the university as a whole.  One or two of the lead organizers in their group come out of a very hierarchical internationalist-style of organizing, and that’s the color of that group.  So, to get to the relationship between those groups and what I was saying with the Adjunct Project:  we were struggling with people having different impressions of how to organize the Adjunct Project.  Some folks, not overtly so but in the way that they were acting, were not really wanting it to be a consensus-based organization and other people were wanting it to be a consensus-based organization.  And, that was making it difficult in Adjunct Project meetings to accomplish stuff.  Essentially, the environment was not cooperative, for a certain period.

The Adjunct Project essentially became a solidarity organization for Occupy CUNY, which emerged in Fall 2011 with the Occupy movement.

A section of the “Occupy the Octopi” poster

Occupy CUNY

CW: What does the Adjunct Project look like now in relation to Occupy CUNY?

Matthew: As far as I can tell, the Adjunct Project identified that it was not going to be a vehicle for CUNY organizing in that moment.  But, the three paid staff members, along with other satellite people, recognized that they would continue to do what they had been doing, but that the Adjunct Project wasn’t going to be the vehicle as the name ‘Adjunct Project.’  The whole Occupy CUNY started with just a call for a general assembly at the Graduate Center, so when people started attending those assemblies, then with the Adjunct Project, because some of those people were paid and had a budget, they made their resources and budget available to the general assembly.  And, they tried to orient the general assembly toward adjunct issues, in addition to other things, but not in a bad way.  As individual organizers who were concerned about adjunct issues, they were bringing that stuff to the table, but not in an intense and stubborn way.

CW: How is Occupy CUNY going?  How have you been involved?

Matthew: Yeah, I’ve been involved in Occupy CUNY.  There’s a lot to say about it.  It grew up really fast; super quickly there were general assemblies with 100 people, essentially using the tools Occupy Wall Street was using: the consensus-based hand signals, holding assemblies, holding a week of action in November.  During that week, there was a march one day. The night before, there was a faculty speak-out.  These were the first movements of Occupy CUNY and the general assembly, and they were very potent.  The faculty speak-out was really well attended, and also quite an inspirational evening, and sort of showcased the willingness and ability, at least partially, of faculty to participate and to self-organize somewhat.

The march the next day was preceded by a speak-out in the atrium of the Graduate Center, which was incredibly potent: staff, students, grad students, some faculty, some low-level administration—people speaking out.  I can recall strongly the feeling of that speak-out; I’m kinda tingling a bit just now thinking of it.  People were crying. People were speaking from their heart.  Some students were like, ‘I spend most of my time in this building being totally fearful, fearful of talking to professors, fearful of talking to staff, fearful of where I’m going to be in a couple years, fearful of not having any job prospects or even just funding next year.’  And then a staff member would speak out later and be like, ‘I really hope people aren’t fearful of coming into my office.’  It was a kind of dynamic where people were keeping it real.  The differences of privilege and access at CUNY are huge and complicated, but I think that speak-out really peeled back the layer of the facade where everything appears to be ‘all good’—to expose how cancerous everything is at CUNY.  Then there was a march, which was also great.

The following Monday after that week of action was a public meeting of the Board of Trustees.  I think that Friday was when the students at UC Davis were pepper-sprayed, and then that Monday was when CUNY campus security violently charged a bunch of students in the Baruch atrium, basically blocking people from attending a public meeting, and then, when they sat down and were going to hold a general assembly, the guards were ordered to charge those students, and were pushing them with batons, trying to push them out a revolving door.  All of this stuff is available on YouTube (See this video: “Occupy Everything at Baruch” – and other videos linked here along with a “Statement Condemning Police Violence at CUNY Board of Trustees Hearing”).  That really just followed up in the heels of UC Davis.  Fifteen students were arrested: ten of them were detained for the evening and released, and five of them were sent to central booking.

Campus security repressing student protesters at Baruch College – November 11, 2011 – (pic via John Zhang, “What Really Happened at Baruch”)

That was a moment where the follow-up general assemblies were huge because people were like, ‘what just happened?’  On top of it, the November 21st Board of Trustees meeting was really just a public input meeting in order to vote on the tuition increases the following Monday.  So, November 21st was just a sham forum, and the 28th was the real vote.  So, people were like, ‘now we need to mobilize for the 28th.’  On top of that, Occupy CUNY had to grow up really quickly.  There were no members of the National Lawyers Guild present initially on the 21st.  There was no support group that was prepared to deal with 15 students arrested.  There was no understanding of legal issues.  I mean, we had been doing that stuff a little bit, but November 21st showed very quickly that Occupy CUNY had to mature into a group that was able to plan actions to the fullest level, including jail support, including tapping into other sources of solidarity, such as faculty and National Lawyers Guild, etc.  There was an action on the 28^th, which resulted in two arrests.  Occupy CUNY kind of developed from there.  They’ve done tons of things since then.

CW: Do you feel that Occupy CUNY has re-invigorated radical organizing on the campuses?  Has it been symbiotic with other kinds of organizing, like labor organizing with adjuncts?

Matthew: I don’t think that Occupy CUNY at the Graduate Center has necessarily re-invigorated radicalism at CUNY.  I think that undergraduates at CUNY have done that in the groups that they’re a part of, specifically the Brooklyn College Student Union and Students United for a Free CUNY, and the work of New York State based groups, such as New York Students Rising.  So, I would say that the undergraduates are reviving radicalism at CUNY.  With Occupy CUNY at the Graduate Center, I think it did a really good job of bringing together all the various radical people.  The Adjunct Project wasn’t particularly vital, but it had a group of maybe 10 or 15 people that were in its satellite world.  Meanwhile, a whole bunch of new people arrive at CUNY every year who are pretty seasoned organizers or already radical.  Between sociology, anthropology, geography, environmental psychology, English, as well as theater and a couple other places, you have another dozen to twenty people who are amazing and who are arriving every year.  I don’t think the Adjunct Project was doing a good job of tapping into those people, whereas Occupy CUNY did, just because of the vibe.  So, very quickly, people like myself who had been there for several years were organizing with people who were there in their first semester, such as people in theater who I normally don’t have any cross-over with and who were working on community-related projects.  There was a generally positive speed-up of getting people on the same page—not as if everybody agreed on everything, but people were activated and in the same place, along with some professors.

CW: Do you feel that Occupy CUNY has also been effective for connecting people vertically across divisions of levels of education?  And also across different levels of the workplace, connecting undergrads, grad students, staff—for organizing across those divisions?

Matthew: Initially, some students in Students United for a Free CUNY were pretty upset at the graduate student organizers.  Being a grad student at CUNY is a privileged place: the demographics of the Grad Center don’t match the demographics of CUNY, and the demographics of CUNY don’t match those of a high school classroom. Definitely, CUNY’s own hierarchies represent real problems.  But, a positive quality of the Grad Center is that, as far as I understood it, people at the Grad Center were bummed about being characterized as the privileged folks of CUNY and that those antagonisms were there, but people were particularly stubborn about not playing out those roles.  So, there were a lot of people at the Grad Center who were building direct relationships and who were basically willing to work with undergrads in the context of, for example, if they were organizing an action and they needed resources, then not being overbearing and paternalistic.  The fruits of that stuff came out pretty nicely on May 2nd, when two students were arrested at Brooklyn College and grad students at CUNY were extremely supportive without being overbearing and paternalistic, through jail support and other forms of support.  I’ve also heard that Students United for a Free CUNY is less upset with the grad students, and that those relationships are now more solid.

Even years before Occupy CUNY emerged, grad students of the Grad Center were working with undergrads at Hunter, working with the Hunter Student Union, and that was around the time when New York City schools had seen a couple occupations, at the New School and at NYU, and there was organizing around whether or not there would or should be one at the CUNY schools.  I had the sense then that there were tensions in the group between the folks who wanted to work in a consensus model, and this seemed to be the core of radical women of color, and a few male students who were maybe connected with internationalist, hierarchical organizing.  My sense was that these tensions were making organizing difficult for the group.  So, there was a time when Grad Center organizers were attending their meetings in support, but not trying to run the show or determine any outcomes.  The way that I think about it is: consensus-based organizing has been the norm for me during the time I have been at the Grad Center.  There’s always internationalist clubs at the Grad Center and of course CUNY’s long history of student groups includes a lot of different organizational styles, but for me coming in in the mid-2000s the center of radical activity has been consensus-based.  Hunter Student Union was also a consensus-based organization. They had come out of the CUNY Social Forum, which was generally a horizontal project in the vein of the World Social Forum and the US Social Forum and such.  So we worked with them in that fashion, especially when their group was being somewhat overrun by hierarchical folks.  Mainly we would go to their meetings and not talk a lot but have a visible presence and talk when it was appropriate to talk, but being supportive of consensus-based work and of women-of-color leadership.  That group, Hunter Student Union, doesn’t really exist anymore, but it’s an example of organizing across graduate-undergraduate lines.

I would say that Occupy CUNY at the moment has somewhat tapped into faculty and there are some faculty who are self-organizing, but Occupy CUNY has for the most part not been about adjuncts and contingents.  It has not been a labor struggle around contingent and precarious work.  It is but it isn’t.  It is in the sense that that’s central to how the university is working, and Occupy CUNY is about a different kind of university. But, it’s not about contingent workers.  Personally, I think it could be more.  I think it’s a challenge, because it really requires building connections that are about the different groups of people at CUNY.  The savviest undergraduates have an understanding of precarious work at CUNY, but most undergraduates don’t.  For undergraduates, it’s not at the top of their list, rightfully so.  But, I don’t see that there are groups that are about adjunct issues and other groups about undergraduate issues and they are forming compromises.  It’s more like the undergraduate groups are about the tuition hikes, creating a free university—meaning a university that has no tuition—and other debt-related student issues.  And, the graduate students are kind of Occupy organizers who are basically agitating against the CUNY admin.

This is maybe the biggest issue with Occupy CUNY at the Graduate Center: it doesn’t really, for the most part, have an identity, although it does a lot of cool stuff.

CW: Do you find that Occupy CUNY is lacking a shared common critique of what they see is wrong with the university, and also lacking a common strategy and vision of what they want to do?

Matthew: Right now, undergrad students are the ones that know their situation.  But, grad students and other Occupy organizers are certainly the source of the analysis of the university.  Even going back to Campus Equity Week and that other work, the students who become radicalized in many ways are radicalized by graduate student instructors who take the time to break down the situation.  We had an open visioning general assembly in the springtime [of 2012].  A couple young people came who were undergrads at Hunter, and they essentially said, ‘yeah, we see the teach-ins and we kind of know what’s going on, but the real reason why we’re here right now is because our graduate student instructor took the time to break it down to us about how the situation is going, and did it in a personal way.’  Essentially, I’m saying faculty do have a role to play in taking the time to showcase to the students what is going on with their university, because it’s not out there.  There’s no other way to get it.  You can get it in a teach-in, but a strong understanding of what’s going on has to come from a stronger connection.

CW: Do you mean in their classes?

Matthew: Yeah, in the classroom, and over time—as something that takes time to develop and with relationships that require trust, which you can do in a short amount of time but for the most part doesn’t happen.  In a sense, Occupy CUNY is a source of graduate student radicalism, and that has a place because it feeds into undergrad student radicalism in a specific kind of way, but more in the sense of analyzing and talking about the re-structuring of CUNY as well as the radical history of CUNY.  At a certain point, I assume that that kind of analysis will just be reproduced within the student groups.  So, like, the Brooklyn College Student Union, they know their shit, so they’ll just be teaching themselves.  I do feel that in the late 2000s, as far as I’m aware, at CUNY there weren’t a ton of undergraduate groups that were analyzing the re-structuring and talking about adjunct issues, privatization, and tuition fees.  That was coming out of the Graduate Center.

CW: Has there been a kind of collective, systematic effort on the part of radical grad students to help each other gain the skills and knowledge to do that kind of teaching about the radical history and analysis of CUNY in their classes?  You mentioned that earlier with the Adjunct Project there were some trainings.  Has that continued up to now and in Occupy CUNY?

Matthew: It hasn’t been going on formally, but only informally.  Part of it is because, in the aftermath of Campus Equity Week, there weren’t any negative effects of it, but it didn’t feel like we gained traction.  I don’t think people necessarily thought that it was a failure, but we didn’t keep on doing that.  Campus Equity Week had been going on every other year, but we didn’t follow up with it.  Now, there’s been talk about resurrecting that kind of stuff, ‘each one teach one’ or however you want to characterize it.  The grad students are entering the classrooms all the time, so we need to teach one another about CUNY, so then we can, as grad students, teach our students about CUNY.  These discussions have gone on for quite a long time, but the kinds of direct training and creation of material that I described with Campus Equity Week, that has not gone on.

“Occupy the Octopi” – via OccuPrint – Click here for larger, 11X17 pdf

There was another poster created in the Fall of 2011 about CUNY, which represented educational capitalism as an octopus. That poster was integral to creating Occupy CUNY.  There was a teach-in using that poster in Washington Square Park, in the early fall, after Occupy Wall Street had started, but before the general assemblies had gotten really big.  That teach-in was really well attended. I was at that teach-in but dealing with another issue.  There were all kinds of people at that teach-in, from undergraduates to faculty, but mostly graduate students.  As far as I know, that poster was never used in classrooms, but it remained an important tool that people learned about CUNY through.  It just never became a systematic project of Occupy CUNY to take that into the classrooms.  It was really just happening informally by the people who were in Occupy CUNY and were teaching.

I would say the bigger thing that came up was the Free University on May 1^st, and that being a moment to take a critique of the way CUNY is going into public space, and into individual classrooms, but by people bringing those classrooms into the Free University on May 1st, which was in Madison Square Park.  That looked a lot different from Campus Equity Week, but in many ways operated in a similar way, because there were people in the park who were teaching about CUNY, as well as other things.

One of the things that came out of the Occupy CUNY visioning session that I mentioned was the creation of a working group on radical pedagogy.  It’s kind of interesting the way things start and the way they end up.  There wasn’t just a single vision, but one of the visions for the radical pedagogy working group was that it would begin to use radical methods to train radical grad students, from the get-go at the Grad Center.  They would aim to orient people that, ‘you’re going to be in the classroom; we should have methods that would, not just radicalize students, but teach students what’s going on with the political economy of the university.’  The first main thing that that working group did was that they became the Free University working group.  Rather than institute some kind of long-term teacher training kind of notion of radical pedagogy, they did the Free University, and that was incredibly popular and successful.  So, at the moment, that’s where that energy is.

*******

*Matthew Evsky is the pseudonym of a graduate student and contingent faculty member at the CUNY Graduate Center.  This interview took place on June 11, 2012.

Summary:

An adjunct discusses her experiences with using ‘service learning’ in classes to engage students in militant co-research and community organizing.  Such projects can build radical relationships across universities, public schools, and marginalized communities, but require a lot of work – the challenge of building ‘the urban commons.’  Such work must also grapple with the dangers of recuperation in academia.   Beyond the university, she discusses her engagement with urban commons in neighborhoods, such as through co-operatives.  What kind of advantages and disadvantages does the flexibility of adjunct labor offer?  From the position of precarious work and life, how can we organize for mutual aid across our workplaces and communities?

‘Service Learning’ with Students as Militant Co-Research

CW: Could you tell me about your background, particularly how did you get into radical organizing around universities?

Maude: I grew up in a pretty political family, and in a neighborhood where there was a lot of political stuff happening.  I’ve worked on organizing stuff since high school, and then at college.  When I came back to my hometown after college, I started getting involved in questions, basically these welfare reform and immigration reform laws that had been passed under Clinton and that were really punitive.  I got involved in a group in my neighborhood founded by social workers who were trying to address the effects that those laws were having on their clients’ local, immediate lives.  We started doing this organizing in our neighborhood, and that led to us organizing a neighborhood radio station, which I’m still very involved with.  We are ‘undocumented but not illegal.’

Organizing specifically around university stuff is relatively new to me, since I’ve been at grad school [a large public university in another major US city].  I actually haven’t done a whole lot of organizing around university specific issues, even though I think that stuff is really important.  It’s more that I’ve tried, through my teaching, to do work with organizations that I think are doing important work.  It’s more like doing a militant research project with my students and this one organization, but I haven’t framed it as ‘militant research.’  It’s more been just ‘community-based research,’ and I guess I’ve done that because I’ve wanted the university to approve my classes and to be able to teach them.

CW: Could you say more about the classes you’ve taught and what that community-based research entailed?

Maude:  This is where the co-optation/recuperation thing comes in.  At a large, wealthy, private university, where I’ve been adjuncting since I’ve moved back here, service learning has become this really big thing for them.  They have this whole office of ‘civic engagement,’ and they really want to brand the university as the kind of place where this stuff happens.  So, they’ve got this service learning initiative, and instructors can apply for grants to design and lead service learning classes.  Twice, I’ve applied and received about $2000 to $2500 on top of what I’ve received for adjuncting.  The pay for adjuncting for someone without a PhD is $3400 for a class, so this is a pretty big bump up.  There’s this sort of incentive to do it, but, of course, I already wanted to do it anyway.  I think it’s good that they’re paying you extra, because there is extra work to do this kind of class, though that sets up a certain dynamic.  And, then, the fact that it’s couched and framed as ‘service learning’ sets up another dynamic, which I try to interrogate with my students.  We think about, what does ‘service’ mean?

We work with this community organizing group here called Community First [a Maude], and I have done various kinds of work with them over the years.  One of their campaigns that I think is really important—and really geographic—is this public property campaign.  What they are doing is looking at all this property that the city has decided to sell off, and they are very concerned with the city’s selling all of this property to developers at below market rates, so it’s not like the city is getting as much as it could out of this property.  Under our school system’s chancellor for a couple years, the city closed 23 of its public schools (which is a huge percentage of the city’s public schools).  I don’t know that it’s always wrong to close a public school, but the way that it was done made people extremely upset.  So, for the class, I talked to the director of Community First and said ‘I want to do a service learning project with my class, what would be useful for you?’ And she said, ‘something around the closed public schools.’  So, basically what we did as a class was to design a research project to try to figure out who owns all these school properties now, and how are they being used?  Part of it was to create an inventory of all the public schools that are being closed, map them, go out and do field research, photograph them all, and conduct surveys in the neighborhoods where the schools were closed to find out what kinds of uses people would like to see those empty properties put to.

It was a hard class to teach, but it was incredibly rewarding for my students because they felt like they were doing something real, which they were.  And, they got to work with this rad community organization.  We went out and surveyed together with them one Saturday, and that was really nice.  So, it wasn’t just us doing this work for them; it was more us collaborating with them, and that’s what I find can be really hard.  I really love the idea of students doing research that supports radical work, but I also love the idea of students doing research with community members who are instigators of that research idea.  There are a lot of logistical difficulties, as part of it, in terms of getting college students together with non-college students, with their schedules.

CW: How did you try to structure that collaboration into your class?

Maude: The class met once per week for the seminar.  In the first meeting, I just introduced the seminar.  The second week we all went to the office of the organization and met with the executive director and talked to her about what it was that she really wanted out of the project.  Then, when we were designing the survey, we had a bunch of feedback from them on it, as to how people would like to see the schools we used.  On the actual day that we went out surveying, we went out and did the surveys together with members of the organization and members of locally elected neighborhood councils (our city has this system of locally elected neighborhood councils; they’re public offices but they’re unpaid—a small-scale level of democracy that’s supposed to ensure that people’s voices are heard).  At the end of the semester, my students did a final presentation of the research to the staff and board members of the organization.  Over the course of the whole semester, there were only three days where my students were working directly with the organization.  I would have liked to have had a lot more interaction.  I thought about how maybe in the future I would have a class that meets in the office of the organization, or meeting off-campus, so that at least every week in that space we could work with people who are working there.

CW: I’m wondering about the students and how they experienced the class, and about what their backgrounds were.  Did you face any resistance from students?

Maude: It was actually a small class—only 9 students—so it was easier to manage.  I definitely had two students who did disagree, fundamentally, with Community First’s analysis of the public property issue, and thought, ‘the city should be able to sell the property off, and should have that kind of flexibility, and this is how a market system works, etc.’  To be honest, I also had some issues with Community First’s analysis of the issue.  I felt that they could have done a better job making their argument about why this property needed to stay in public hands.  So, that was tricky for me as an instructor; I agree with them on all the fundamental issues.  But, I felt that they could have made their analysis better in some ways.  Yet, I also felt that’s not really my place—they’re doing all this work and I’m just kinda coming in to do this one project.  Anyway, the way I dealt with it with the students was that I kind of chickened out.  I said, ‘look, we’re doing this project with this organization, this is what they want from us, and we’ve agreed to do it.  So, we’re just gonna do this research for them.’  We went into this knowing that we were in this kind of client model, and if we’ve agreed to take this on, we’ve already made this commitment to them, so if we disagree with their politics, that’s too bad, basically.

CW: Did you face resistance from the students over that?

Maude: No, they got that, because the more conservative type students are business majors or international relations majors, and they get the ‘client-provider’ thing, because that’s kind of how they’re being trained. So, it’s ‘just go in and be professional, and do the work.’  But, for me, it’s hard, because I want to be fostering a more radical critique of the whole thing.  That’s one of the main challenges, I think: working with students who have a real resistance to that.  On the other hand, some of my other students were very turned on by the whole thing, and were really excited by what this organization was trying to do, and were really offended by the fact that there are all these vacant public school buildings, just rotting, and that they had been these kind of centers of their community before.  But, to me, that’s one of the biggest challenges for thinking about any kind of radical pedagogy: working with students who aren’t coming from that perspective at all.

CW: Do you feel that it was a radicalizing experience for the students—both the ones who were conservative and the ones who were already down with the politics of the organization?

Maude: Unfortunately, I think that radicalizing might be too strong of a word.  One element of the class that was eye-opening for them was doing this particular work, but another element of the class was taking them into the city—that experience of going into neighborhoods they’d never heard of before, of working with city-dwellers who’d been working on these issues for a long time.  I required them to go to these community meetings in the evenings and observe them.  Those kinds of experiences of being in the city together with regular people was, not radicalizing, but changed how they think about where they live.

CW: Stepping into a little more theoretical register, thinking about the urban commons—and the work necessary for reclaiming, maintaining, and expanding commons—have you thought about the work that you and your students did in the class as a kind of reclaiming of the commons, or getting students involved in work around the commons with that organization?

Maude: I do think that this organization’s work on the public property campaign is very much about this.  They don’t really use the term ‘commons’; they talk in terms of public property.  But, my interpretation of how they’re talking about it is very much thinking of it as a commons.  What they’re saying is, ‘it’s not just for the state to decide on and regulate.  It’s our property, of the people who live in the city, and we should be able to determine what happens with this property.’  I think if I were to teach the class again, I would probably use the commons framework.  But this was a few years ago, and I wasn’t really thinking about the commons.  That could potentially make it a more radical course, to use that kind of framework instead of ‘public property.’  Thinking in terms of the commons requires people to shift their understanding of what they mean by ‘property.’  I think that if I were to do the project that way, thinking in terms of how much work this stuff requires, it would become clear pretty quickly that it requires a lot of work—to try to collectively self-manage, not just these individual spaces or lots, but to try to have some collective control over this whole city full of vacant property that could be put to use by community members.  I think what’s really crazy is how the city that owns all this stuff doesn’t have a really accessible database of it, and there are a lot of ways in which the city seems not on top of it even though they own it.

CW: Did Community First find your students’ involvement to be helpful for their own projects?

Maude: Yeah, they found the report helpful.  They used it in their campaign.  One thing I’m trying to figure out is how to work on things more sustainably across the school year.  One of the challenges of teaching in a university setting is the time restraints.  I would love to be able to do a multi-year project with them that had different groups of students each semester kind of locked into it.  I still really need to learn a lot about how to design courses in such a way that they can really work for doing something in the world, because so much is always changing with what the group needs, so it’s hard to set something out for a four-month plan and to just do it.  Things come up in the middle of the semester and then the group wants something new, and then it’s more work for my students.

Working within and against the Academic Recuperation Machine

CW: In what ways do you see your work in the university recuperated through the academic careerist system?

Maude: What struck me about that was this whole ‘service learning’ thing.   I’ve personally financially benefitted from it, because my classes are service learning classes.  Service learning seems like this trend in higher education now.  Potentially we can do a lot with that trend, and make it work for us, as people who are trying to do work with communities outside the university, because it gives us a way to do that that the university understands.  It gives the university an explanation for why we’re leaving campus for whatever we’re doing.  We can make a special request for a class to meet at a certain time and place because it’s a ‘service learning’ class.  But then, the whole concept of service learning can be pretty patronizing too.  For most of my students service learning is like, one afternoon a week you volunteer at a homeless shelter or you tutor kids at a poor, stereotypically impoverished, all-black elementary school and then you write about your experiences and process them, and it’s very much a ‘service’ kind of thing as opposed to a ‘collaboration’ kind of thing where your actually working with people as equals.  This ‘service’ thing is dangerous because it reinforces the stereotype of the city as ‘this beautiful city but it’s got these totally dysfunctional black people in it who we have to go help.’

I did this other service learning project with a public middle school class where my friend teaches, and so we were doing a bunch of neighborhood research approaches.  My students were all shocked that these kids were multi-racial and came from different classes, because their understanding of the city’s school system as this totally degraded place that is all black and all poor and totally fucked up.  We did this work in the public school that didn’t fit that stereotype at all, and my students were shocked that this is a real public school.  I do think that the whole ‘service learning’ concept is a way that work gets recuperated, but I also think of it as an opportunity for us who, as instructors, want to go outside of the class and do work that’s relevant.

CW: Do you have some suggestions for ways of avoiding that potential recuperation?

Maude: One is to be really clear with the students at the beginning of the semester about what service learning is, and to interrogate the concept, together, with them, and to talk about how there are different ideas of what this thing could be; it could be top-down or based on collaboration with people, as opposed to just helping people in some way.  I suppose that would be the way to do it: to have discussions with students about this.

CW: Have you tried to include discussion about the university structure with your students—about their own positionality within that structure?

Maude: I did a bit, not so much at my current university but when teaching in grad school, in the Fall of 2008 and Spring of 2009.  The economic crisis hit, and that public university was raising its tuition.  Those students were an extremely different crop of students from the crop of students at this very expensive university where I teach now.  I was teaching a city planning class and we were talking about participation and planning and that sort of turned into a discussion about participation in your own education and in this institution where you go: to what degree are you able to participate, what prevents you from participating, and how do we make change here?  Because they were really concerned about the tuition increases, that led to discussion in a couple of those classes.  That was really great, and I’d like to do more of that at this private university too, but I don’t know if I’ll be teaching there, so…  And it’s easier to do that in a public university in some ways, with working class students.  It should still happen in a private university setting, with middle and upper class students, too, though it’s harder for me as an instructor to care about it as much in that setting of privilege.

CW: I think it would be interesting to try to make some connections between the service learning that students are doing on the public schools and the wider institutions of education, including private universities.

Maude: Yeah, I had one group of students in a class, a group of public high school students who were taking a class at this private university for free, because they were in an ‘early college’ program.  That was an amazing group of kids to work with, because they had a consciousness about inequality in the city, and because of their bizarre position in the university as students taking classes for free in this expensive university, and making connections between public education in the city and access to college was great to do with them.  Talking about tuition, loans, and that kind of thing was a great experience.  I would like to do more with making those connections between public K-12 education and issues of access to higher education.  It’s a huge issue in this city: 25-30% of kids don’t graduate from high school.  What’s happening to them?  Not to say that college is the be all and end all; there’s other ways to live besides going to college.  But, to not even have access to education…  There’s a woman who lives in my co-op who’s in this classic situation where she’s a low-income, woman of color, who has a kid, and she’s attending this private for-profit university where I don’t think she’s getting a high quality education, and it costs lots of money, and it’s just sick!  I don’t know if she’s taken out loans or what, but I just feel like, when she tells me about the classes she’s taking, the tests she’s given, and it just doesn’t sound like a quality education.  It’s screwed up.

Building the Urban Commons Beyond the University

CW: Do you think any of your students went on to be involved in radical organizing beyond the university after the class?

Maude: Yeah, one of my students was involved with trying to start a food co-op on campus.  She started to get involved over the course of the semester that she was in my class.  She was very excited about all this stuff: the idea of a food co-op and of the work that we were doing.  I don’t know how much my class really influenced her thinking, but she got a lot of out it.  There was another student who, at the end, was interested in volunteering with Community First and who got really interested in the larger issues.  And then I had one student who was just super committed to the whole project and worked really hard on it.  So, maybe three out of nine had a profound experience with it.  It’s so weird, when you’re in this position of power above students, it’s hard to know what they’re really thinking and what they’re saying, because they want you to like them.

I’m also very interested in thinking about learning situations that are outside of the university.  How can I do more things that set up intellectual spaces that are outside the university?

CW: Have you had any experience with that?

Maude: Nothing that’s super formalized, but I’ve been organizing music shows in the basement of my co-op building, and those have gone really well.  My longer-term goal is to do other kinds of events down there too.  Music shows are easy, because I’ve done it a lot in my life and it’s pretty easy to get people to come out to hear music.   But, I want to eventually do things in the space that are more tied to radical things in this city’s history.  There’s so much interesting stuff, and I don’t know how much people would really come out for it, but I’d like to try to start having a space that’s a place where people can present research that they’ve done or where they can have discussions around different issues.  There are some good films that I know of from the documents on community policing attempts in the late 60s after the riots.  We could screen that film and have a discussion with people working on incarceration issues now.  Trying to think of ways to have a free space for learning, but that’s all free in a socially and culturally oriented sense.

CW: Would you see that as an institution or a tool for building urban commons?

Maude: Yeah, totally.  I feel very fortunate in living at this co-op where the president of the board is an amazing woman, and she and I have really hit it off. She and I have been doing things such as organizing a sidewalk sale where people could come and sell their stuff.  We’re taking over space in a certain way—the sidewalks outside our building—creating a more sociable space, people getting to know each other, and building community through just hanging out together.  That, to me, is really important, and I see that as the absolutely necessary basis for any kind of commons.  I definitely see these kinds of spaces—where people come together to learn and to get to know people in their neighborhood better—as having so much more potential for what can come out of that, once people start building those relationships.

Precarious Work and Life: Organizing and Mutual Aid across Communities

CW: We’ve been talking about both your involvement in university organizing, particularly in your classes, and also your involvement in neighborhood-community building.  Do you see any connections or ways of interweaving those two kinds of organizing?  The one obvious way you do it is by working with Community First.  Have you tried to engage in any organizing that connects between your housing co-op or other sort so organizing you’ve been involved in your neighborhood or the wider city and your classes?

Maude: I’ve definitely thought a lot about it. One of the projects I’ve gotten involved in during the past year is with a group of folks who are interested in incubating new workers’ co-ops here in the city.  I’d love to teach a class that connected really explicitly with that.  I don’t think it would matter what university I was teaching that class at.  I do have a real fantasy of connecting the city’s public university with the workers’ co-op group, because it is a land-grant university.  There’s this mission inherent in the university’s structure to do cooperative extension, but they don’ really do it.  I’d love to have a formal relationship with them, because I think this co-op extension is potentially pretty radical, and I’d like to learn more about the history of that, nationally.  There’s real potential to connect them with groups trying to promote workers’ co-ops in the city.

The other thing that I’ve thought a lot about and would really be into is: Community First does these empowerment circles, which are study circles in which people learn about a particular issue.  A recent one was about proposed changes to public housing regulations, meaning that the amount tenants have to pay each month would go up.  This week, I worked with a group of tenant organizers who are in town to do some research in local archives about the history of tenant organizing in the city.  I’d organized the papers of this group that did tenant organizing for 25 years.  So, I went with these tenant organizers to the archives to help them find good stuff, so they can put together an exhibit on the history of tenant organizing here.  They’re pretty radical folks, and I was helping them find visuals that they can blow up to use in their event.  Since Community First does these empowerment circles, I was thinking it would be cool to do more research and education work with Community First members outside the academic institution but working on these targeted projects, such as tenants’ rights history.  It would involve getting together with folks who are interested in learning a certain thing, and doing it together.  It would be outside the context of the university, although [Big Private University] has historically offered classes for free to community members around community stuff, so there’s possibly potential for doing something like this through which people could get college credit (but I don’t know how important that is to folks).  I’m into thinking creatively about how to do this teaching and learning outside the university, or with more specific connections between the university and these other groups.

CW: Along the lines of how to do these teaching and learning projects outside the university, I feel that one tension we face is about the funding.  Universities have all this funding for teaching and learning projects, and we can tap into that.  Thinking about how you have grappled with the tension of working as a kind of precarious contingent adjunct teacher while trying to do radical teaching both within and outside the university, have you thought of how your being a part of a housing co-op has helped you cope better with that precarious working condition?

Maude: My partner and I have definitely made an intentional decision to keep our living expenses as low as possible to do the kind of work we want to do.  But, living in our co-op isn’t actually that much more affordable.  Sure, it’s more affordable than if we had a mortgage on a three-bedroom house.  The relative affordability of it has enabled us to not have to work full-time, for now.  Also, even more than the affordability of it is the stability, and just knowing that we’re here and nobody is going to make us leave.  Our city has very good tenants’ rights laws.  But, there is something psychological about ownership, even if it might be totally fabricated.  I know it’s total bullshit but I do have that feeling because I’ve been inculcated in this idea that homeownership is a stable thing, but of course when you look at foreclosure and all it’s no more stable than the next thing.  But, there still is this feeling, like, ‘okay, we’re good here, we know how much we pay every month, and that’s set.’  The affordability and the stability of it have been good for not feeling pressured to have to get a full-time job.  Part of buying into this place was knowing that, if we can afford it at this stage in our lives when we’re severely underemployed, maybe someday we’ll make more money and know that at least we can afford this at a pretty low-level of income.  It’s freeing in a way, and I’m happy with it.

Regarding precarity in general, I think in some ways being an adjunct allows you more flexibility for designing these kinds of courses.  It depends on the university, but at the university where I’m adjuncting, the oversight on the classes where I teach is extremely variable.  I feel that I can come and do pretty much whatever I want.  I’ve often had the opportunity to say ‘I want to teach this class,’ and then to teach it.  Of course, being a full-time professor would give me a lot more time to design stuff and to feel that I was being compensated for it.  I suppose, ideally, being a full-time professor you’d have just as much freedom in terms of what you were designing.  With an adjuncting gig, they’ll let you teach the class and they’ll stick you in there as if it’s some weird elective.  Whereas if you’re full-time, there’s probably certain classes that you’re expected to teach.  In some ways the precarity might make it easier, but in the end I don’t think that’s good.  I get frustrated too, thinking that if I had a more steady gig, that would allow me to develop longer-term relationships with these groups who I want to do these classes and research with year-after-year.  It’s frustrating that I never know semester-to-semester if I can continue that kind of work.

CW: Do you have any supportive relationships with other precarious academics or teachers in your area for supporting each other in radical teaching and organizing?

Maude: Not at all!  I have one friend at the school where I’ve adjuncted, and she’s great.  We’ve had a couple of conversations but never anything trying to set up any real kind of support system for ourselves.  My friends don’t tend to be academics in this city.  I did start a sort of reading group of people doing research on this city, but most of them are tenured faculty and not in my position. So, I barely have an academic community here, and that makes any kind of organizing around academic stuff hard, because it’s not like my good friends are doing it.  I feel pretty isolated in my position.

CW: This interview now was instigated from a discussion [at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) conference in NYC] about how we could create resources for each other with us being mostly precarious academics in different cities.  Do you feel that we could create some sort of supportive network across our different grounded local places?  Do you have any ideas for how we could support each other?

Maude: I think that would be great.  I think a lot of the support I would need would be in relation to the particular institution in which I’m teaching.  I’m part of a union at this institution (one of the few institutions where the adjunct labor is organized in this country).  So, you would think that I would have more connection with fellow adjuncts here.  That’s something I could definitely follow-up on.  Its being unionized is one of the draws to me of teaching there.

There’s stuff like sharing syllabi and teaching methods, but that’s not necessarily specific to us being precarious workers.  What I really need is health insurance.  As a precarious worker, that is the far overriding thing that I need.  That’s kind of boring to try to organize around.  I can buy it through my union, but that’s really expensive.  If I were to get involved in my adjunct union, maybe there would be ways for me to connect with other adjunct organizing efforts.

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This interview with Maude Ontario (a pseudonym) was conducted on May 24^th, 2012.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have collaborated on various projects over the past fifteen years, including a number of essays on the conditions of academic labor. Drawing from the black radical tradition, autonomist and postcolonial theory, they have elaborated an approach to politics that is more concerned with the less socially visible aspects of organization and interaction. Currently they are working on a book entitled the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study that will be released by Minor Compositions / Autonomedia in Spring 2013 [Update: it was released and you can read it here]. As part of that project Stevphen Shukaitis conducted several interviews with them to give an overview of their work and approach. This interview is an excerpt for ClassWarU from their conversation.

Stevphen: Preparing for the interview I resorted to a typically web 2.0 approach of asking on Facebook what questions I should ask. I sent some of these to you. One question that seemed quite interesting was whether it was possible to be part of the undercommons and not study, or whether the undercommons includes, or could include, university workers and forms of affective labor which are not immediately pedagogical

Fred: A couple people seem to be reticent about the term ‘study,’ but is there a way to be in the undercommons that isn’t intellectual? Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we were using the term ‘study,’ I think we were committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities was already there. These activities aren’t ennobled by the fact that we now say, ‘oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could be said to be have been studying.’ To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What’s important is to recognize that that has been the case – because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.

What I also want to say about that question is that it strikes me as being overly concerned with the rightness and legitimacy of the term. It’s not so much that I want to say, ‘oh, he or she didn’t understand what we meant by study.’ It’s more like, ‘okay, well, if that terms bothers you, you can use another term.’ You can say, ‘my understanding of study doesn’t work for what it is that I think I want to get from what you guys are saying.’ So, that person then has to have some kind of complicated paleonymic relation to that term. They have to situate themselves in some kind of appositional relation to that term; they have to take some of it, take something from it, and make their own way away from it. What I would say would be, insofar as you are now in what might be called a dissident relation, you are precisely involved in what it is that I think of as study.

So if the question is, ‘does it have to include ‘study’?’, my first response is: okay, you don’t understand what we mean by study. And then my second response is: but it’s okay that you don’t understand what we mean by study, because you’re going to do something else now. So, my first response was to be kinda correct and say, ‘by study we mean this. The thing that I think that you want from what we’re saying is precisely what it is that we mean by study.’ And I’m gonna say, ‘you seem to have a problem with study. How can you have a problem with study? If you truly understood what study is, you would know that it is this sort of sociality. That’s all that it is.’  But, then I would say, that’s like being kind of an asshole. That’s sort of taking this guy to task for not having a properly reverent, adequate understanding of the term – and what I’m saying is that it’s precisely his misunderstanding of, his active refusal to understand, the term that is an extension of study. Just keep pushing it. I will always think of his or her tendency to want to avoid or to disavow study as an act of study. But, if he or she doesn’t think about it that way, that’s okay.

Stefano: At the same time, I’m happy for us to say more about study. I don’t think it’s a question of being completely passive about it and saying, ‘do what you want.’ There are reasons why we felt that we had to pursue these terms, and one of the key reasons – which Fred’s already talked about – is our feeling that it was important to stress that study is already going on, including when you walk into a classroom and before you think you start a class, by the way. This is equally the case with planning. If you were to think of the way we use ‘policy,’ as something like thinking for others, both because you think others can’t think and also because you somehow think that you can think, which is the other part of thinking that there’s something wrong with someone else – thinking that you’ve fixed yourself somehow, and therefore that gives you the right to say someone else needs fixing, and policy becomes that way. If planning is the opposite of that, if it’s to say that, ‘look, it’s not that people aren’t thinking for themselves, acting for themselves together in concert in these different ways. It’s just it’s not showing up for you because you’ve corrected yourself in this particular way where they always look wrong for you and where therefore you try to deploy policy against them. But, the very deployment of that policy is the biggest symptom that there’s something you’re not getting in thinking that you need to do that – and it seems to me, really, the same with study.’ I think it’s also fine for people not to use it or to find something else. But, equally, I think that the point about study is that there is an aspect to it where it’s about saying that intellectual life is already there at work around us. When I think of study, I’m as likely to think about nurses in the smoking room as I am about the university. I mean it really doesn’t have anything to do with the university to me, other than that, as Laura Harris says, the university is this incredible gathering of resources. So, when you’re thinking, it’s nice to have books.

Fred: Of course the smoking room is an incredible gathering of resources too.

Stefano: Yes. So, I just don’t think of study and the university with that kind of connection – even though originally we were writing about what we knew, and that’s why the undercommons first came out in relationship to the university. I don’t see the undercommons as having any necessary relationship to the university. And, given the fact that, to me, the undercommons is a kind of comportment or ongoing experiment with and as the general antagonism, a kind of way of being with others, it’s almost impossible that it could be matched up with particular institutional life. It would obviously be cut through in different kinds of ways and in different spaces and times.

Fred: Studying is not limited to the university. It’s not held or contained within the university. Study has a relation to the university, but only insofar as the university is not necessarily excluded from the undercommons that it tries so hard to exclude.

Stevphen: The particular question you’re responding to was asked by Zach Schwartz-Weinstein on the history of non-instructional academic labor, which brings me to what I wanted to ask. I understand there’s a much broader and deeper understanding of study that you’re working on. But, your work started in the 1990s from looking at particular conditions of academic labor. So this is a question of how the broader conception of study fits into the more specific conditions of academic labor you’re talking about. You’re talking about how certain kinds of academic labor pre-empt collectivity or, almost because they encourage a very individualistic investment in the labor, they pre-empt that sort of broader project from emerging. So, is this something that is very particular to academic labor or is this something that is more general to forms of labor that require this investment? I guess, mostly it’s: how do you understand the relation between the specific forms of class composition of academic labor and broader patterns? I think it’s easy for the specific to be conflated with the more general kind.

Fred: When I think now about the question or problem of academic labor, I think about it in this way: that part of what I’m interested in is how the conditions of academic labor have become not conducive to study – how the conditions under which academic laborers labor actually precludes or prevents study, makes study difficult if not impossible. When I was involved in labor organizing as a graduate student, with the Association of Graduate Student Employees at the University of California Berkeley I was frustrated with the way that sometimes graduate student investment in thinking about themselves as workers was predicated on the notion that workers don’t study. But this was more than just a romanticization of authentic work and a disavowal of our own ‘inauthenticity’ as workers. It was that our image of ourselves as academic laborers actually acceded to the ways in which the conditions of academic labor prevented study. We actually signed on to the prevention of study as a social activity even while we were engaging in, and enjoying, organizing as a social activity. It’s like we were organizing for the right to more fully embed ourselves in isolation. It never felt like we studied (in) the way we organized, and we never approached a whole bunch of other modes of study that were either too much on the surface of, or too far underneath, the university. I think we never recognized that the most insidious, vicious, brutal aspect of the conditions of our labor was that it regulated and suppressed study.

Stefano: Yes that was one side of what was bothering us. Then, the other side of it was that there was this way in which it looked like the university – and the way that one worked in the university – was where study was supposed to happen. So, it meant that, on the one hand, you had some graduate students appearing to disavow study and, on the other hand, you had many academics who claimed to be monopolizing study or to be at the heart of study – and this for me meant that, first of all, study itself was becoming, as Fred says, almost impossible in the university. It was the one thing you couldn’t do in the university because of, not just the kinds of positions of people, but also because of the administration of the university. But, secondly, it meant that it was impossible to recognize study beyond the university or to acknowledge this incredible history of study that has gone on outside the university and continues to go on beyond it.

That said, probably there was something – I don’t know about for Fred, but I needed to work through a little bit – that I was an academic worker and I needed to position myself in a way that moved beyond its restrictions. But the other thing was that there are certain ways in which that academic model of preventing study has been generalized. So, it’s no longer just in the university that study is prevented. Because the one true knowledge transfer from the university has its peculiar labor process. They successfully managed to transfer the academic labor process to the private firm, so that everybody thinks that they’re an academic, everybody thinks that they’re a student – so, these kind of twenty-four hour identities. People propose the model of the artist or entrepreneur but no, this is too individual; capitalism still has a labour process. The university is a kind of factory line, a kind of labour process perfect for reintroducing a version of absolute surplus value back into the work day by trying to fashion work into this model which we associate with the university. And when we look closely at what was really going on in the university, what was really transferred, it was precisely everything but study, or rather a kind of regime that had become expert in closing down study while performing intellectual work. So, the other reason to stay with the university is not just for a certain set of resources or because the teaching space is still relatively if unevenly open, and not just because somehow study still goes on in its undercommons, but because there is this peculiar labor process model there that’s being exported, that’s being generalized in so-called creative industries and other places, and which is deployed expertly against study.  This is something Paolo Do has tracked in Asia too where the expansion of the university means an expansion of this baleful labour process into the societies where it expands.

Stevphen: Connected to another point you make, when we start talking about ‘students as co-workers,’ would that be to sort of disavow the disavowal of study? In writing on academic labor you talk about how academics cannot acknowledge their students as co-workers because this would pose a problem. So, what would it mean to acknowledge that co-laboring process, not just within the university itself but more generally?

Stefano: I might not put that the same way today as how we were putting it at that time. I felt like we were involved more in an internal critique around academic labor than I feel connected to now. It’s not that I’d be running away from it, but I sort of felt we needed to do it so that we didn’t feel like we needed to keep doing it. Instead of putting it that way, I might say, there’s a kind of fear in the university around something like amateurism – immaturity, pre-maturity, not graduating, not being ready somehow – and the student represents that at certain moments. And supposedly our job with the student is to help them overcome this so they can get credits and graduate. Today it’s sort of that moment that’s more interesting to me, because that’s a moment where your pre-maturity, your immaturity, your not-being-ready, is also kind of an openness to being affected by others, dispossessed and possessed by others. But, of course, in the university, what they’re trying to do is get rid of that, so you can be a fully self-determined individual ready for work, or as Paolo Virno says, ready to display that you are ready for work. So, to me, it’s less about the student as co-worker, though it’s undoubtedly true that students do a lot of the work, and much more about the student, as Denise Ferreira da Silva would say, as an example of an affected body. And of course the professors, just like the philosophers that Denise is talking about, the professors freak out at that student, while at the same time it’s the thing they work on, it’s a necessary point in the production cycle for them. They’re trying to remove anything that feels like that kind of affection between bodies and to produce self-determined individuals. Entering with the student at that moment, at that affective level, is the part that interests me a bit more now than, say, entering with them as the worker, though I don’t think that’s wrong. It just seems to me less than what could happen.

Fred: I think, looking back at those earlier pieces, that we just kept pushing ahead, and kept moving, but that the movement was predicated on us trying to think about where we were at the time. These are the conditions under which we live and operate, and we need to try to think about that. There’s something wrong going on, let’s think about how it is and why it is that things aren’t the way we’d like them to be – and we just basically had the temerity to believe that our desire for some other mode of being in the world had to be connected to our attempt to understand the way that we were living and the conditions under which we were living at that moment. In other words, and to me this is a kind of crucial thing: I wasn’t thinking about trying to help somebody. I wasn’t thinking about the university as a kind of exalted place in which being there is a mark of a certain kind of privilege, and that the proper way to deal with or to acknowledge that privilege was to take this wisdom or to take these resources that I had access to and to try to distribute them in a more equitable way to the poor people who didn’t have the relation to the university that we did. Me, I never thought about it that way. I was just always like: the university is fucked up. It’s fucked up over here. Why is it fucked up? Why is it that shit ain’t the way it should be here? Yeah, there’s some stuff here, but obviously there’s stuff in other places too. The point is: it’s fucked up here, how can we think about it in a way to help us organize ourselves to make it better here? We were trying to understand this problematic of our own alienation from our capacity to study – the exploitation of our capacity to study that was manifest as a set of academic products. That’s what we were trying to understand. And it struck us that this is what workers who are also thinkers have always been trying to understand. How come we can’t be together and think together in a way that feels good, the way it should feel good? For most of our colleagues and students, however much you want to blur that distinction, that question is the hardest question to get people to consider. Everybody is pissed off all the time and feels bad, but very seldom do you enter into a conversation where people are going, ‘why is it that this doesn’t feel good to us?’ There are lots of people who are pissed and who don’t feel good, but it seems hard for people to ask, collectively, ‘why doesn’t this feel good?’ I love poetry, but why doesn’t reading, thinking, and writing about poetry in this context feel good? To my mind, that’s the question that we started trying to ask.

Stevphen: It’s especially hard to ask that question in England where the assumption is that everyone’s miserable and very polite about it anyways.

Fred: But, that’s the insidious thing, this naturalization of misery, the belief that intellectual work requires alienation and immobility and that the ensuing pain and nausea is a kind of badge of honor, a kind of stripe you can apply to your academic robe or something. Enjoyment is suspect, untrustworthy, a mark of illegitimate privilege or of some kind of sissified refusal to look squarely into the fucked-up face of things which is, evidently, only something you can do in isolation. It’s just about not being cut off like that; to study the general antagonism from within the general antagonism. My favorite movie is The Shoes of the Fisherman and I want to be like this character in it named Father Telemond. He believed in the world. Like Deleuze. I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. But that’s beyond me, and even beyond me and Stefano, and out into the world, the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon refusal of the academy of misery.

Stefano: About seven years ago I moved from the US to the UK, from a university system where graduate students taught on an industrial scale, to a more semi-feudal system with a lot of precarious adjuncts instead. But then I got connected with comrades suffering through the Baronial systems of Italy and elsewhere in Southern Europe, and if they wanted to study they had to leave the university, at least strategically. That opened up another question for me, which was when you leave the university to study, in what way do you have to continue to recognize that you’re not leaving the place of study and making a new place, but entering a whole other world where study is already going on beyond the university? I felt I ought to have some way to be able to see that world, to feel that world, to sense it, and to enter into it, to join the study already going on in different informal ways, unforming, informing ways. When I speak about a speculative practice, something I learnt by working with the performance artist Valentina Desideri, I am speaking about walking through study, and not just studying by walking with others. A speculative practice is study in movement for me, to walk with others and to talk about ideas, but also what to eat, an old movie, a passing dog, or a new love, is also to speak in the midst of something, to interrupt the other kinds of study that might be going on, or might have just paused, that we pass through, that we may even been invited to join, this study across bodies, across space, across things, this is study as a speculative practice, when the situated practice of seminar room or squatted space moves out to encounter study in general.

Fred: It’s funny, this ubiquity of policy making, the constant deputization of academic laborers into the apparatuses of police power. And they are like night riders, paddy rollers, everybody’s on patrol, trying to capture the ones who are trying to get out – especially themselves, trying to capture their own fugitivity. That’s actually the first place at which policy is directed. I think that a huge part of it has to do simply with, let’s call it, a certain reduction of intellectual life – to reduce study into critique, and then at the same time, a really, really horrific, brutal reduction of critique to debunking, which operates under the the general assumption that naturalized academic misery loves company in its isolation, like some kind of warped communal alienation in which people are tied together not by blood or a common language but by the bad feeling they compete over. And so, what ends up happening is you get a whole lot of people who, as Stefano was suggesting, spend a whole lot of time thinking about stuff that they don’t want to do, thinking about stuff that they don’t want to be, rather than beginning with, and acting out, what they want.

I get so annoyed with a certain kind of discourse around that kind of weird narcissism – that double-edged coin of the narcissism of academic labor – in which you naturalize your misery on one side of the coin, and then on the other side of the coin, you completely accede to the notion of your absolute privilege. So, on the one hand, you wake up every day being miserable and saying, ‘this is the way it is.’ And on the other hand, you wake up everyday saying, ‘look how privileged I am to be here. And look at all the poor people who aren’t privileged to be here.’ One of the deleterious, negative effects of that particular kind of narcissism is that it doesn’t acknowledge the ways in which one of the cool things about the university (I’m not saying this is the only place where this happens, but it is a place where this happens) is that every day that you go into your classroom, you have a chance not to issue the call to order, and then to see what happens. And the goddamn president of the university is not going to knock on your door talking about, ‘how come you didn’t issue the call to order?’

Stevphen: Agreed on that.Another thing I want to ask you about is, over the past few years there’s been another revival or proliferation of kinds of alternative education projects, things like Edu-factory to free schools and all sorts of free universities. What they all were struck by is sort of, when you leave the institution, why do people want to imagine what they’re doing in terms of the institution anyways? The limit of the conception of collectivity is another institution.

Stefano: Yeah, I’ve been struggling with this myself, as I’ve been doing elaborations on this proposal for the School for Study that we’re thinking about doing in France. The first three times I did it, I was putting in all kinds of shit that didn’t really need to be there – that was a kind of recapitulation of the university in ways that didn’t have to happen. It was only in the last version, really after Denise had looked at it and said, ‘why is all this other stuff in here? What you’re really interested in is study, so why not just have it be a forum for study?’ And that’s when the name changed and that’s when we began to click on what we were gonna try to do with it. And it’s absolutely the case that, when you think you’re exiting the university, you’re not. You’re taking all this shit with you.

But also, Matteo Mandarini gave us this very interesting phrase. Tronti has this phrase where he says, ‘I work within and against the institution.’ So, the Queen Mary project was this within and against the institution project. But it’s also been elaborated in Precarious Ring stuff and other places as something that would also be known through co-research, something like ‘within and for.’ So, the within and against gets cut with a kind of with and for. When you move further out into an autonomous setting, where you get some free space and free time a little more easily, then, what you have to attend to is the shift, for me, between the within and against – which when you’re deep in the institution you spend a lot of time on it – and the with and for. And that changes a lot of shit. All those things are always in play. When I say ‘with and for,’ I mean studying with people rather than teaching them, and when I say ‘for,’ I mean studying with people in service of a project, which in this case I think we could just say is more study. So, that with and for, the reason we move into more autonomous situations is that it grows, and we spend less time in the antagonism of within and against.

Some people love the productivity of the antagonism. Personally, I don’t say it’s not productive, but the further I get to the with and for, the happier I am. But that’s a challenge, to remember that and to do it, and to learn how do it, if you spend a lot of time in the within and against, as we did. I’m only saying this to say, if I watch the migration of the Queen Mary collective project from the within and against towards the with and for that’s available to us by becoming this kind of School for Study that we’re talking about now, we have to study how to do that. We don’t necessarily know how to do that, and we’re still trying to figure out how to do that, because we’ve been inside so much. It’s not that you ever leave the within and against – I don’t care how far you squat. Obviously, there’s a shift in what becomes possible and where you can put your attention in different circumstances.

Stevphen: Perhaps that’s why the work both of you did of analyzing academic labor within a given position is necessary for the leaving, so when you leave you don’t bring some of the things with you.

Stefano: Well, at the personal level, and I started this morning saying this, and I still think it’s true hours later, I had to go through that academic labor shit, especially with Fred, in order to free myself in a million different ways, including getting more into this autonomous stuff. I only feel now that that’s had a full effect, that I can think free of all the shit that was in me through the labor process I was, and remain, immersed in. The first thing I made everyday when I went to university was myself, and the university these days is not necessarily the best place to make yourself.

Fred: I agree with that too. We were talking about how it was a way for us to understand who we were, and what was going on where we were – and to try to take more fully into account the necessity of understanding what your own conditions are. So, let’s say that in some ways, the academic labor stuff were attempts at location and locating, mapping some sort of terrain that you were within. And I think the later stuff is much more interested in trying to achieve a kind dislocation and a kind of dispersion – and, therefore, it claims a certain mobility. I agree with Stefano that, well I don’t know if we had to do that, but that’s where we got started. We could have got started in another way.
Stefano: Yeah, in a way, the undercommons is a kind of break, between locating ourselves and dislocating ourselves. What’s so enduring for us about the undercommons concept is that’s what it continues to do when it is encountered in new circumstances. People always say, ‘well, where the fuck is that.’ Even if you do that clever Marxist thing like, ‘oh it’s not a place, it’s a relation,’ people are like, ‘yeah, but where’s the relation.’ It has a continuing effect as a dislocation, and it always makes people feel a little uncomfortable about common. For me it was like the first freight that we hopped.

Fred: Yeah, it’s a dislocation. As our old friend Bubba Lopez would say, we started riding the blinds.

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Stefano Harney is Professor of Strategic Management at Singapore Management University.  Fred Moten is the Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke University.  They have written several pieces together, such as “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses” and “Debt and Study.”  Stevphen Shukaitis is Lecturer in Work & Organization at the University of Essex and the editor of Minor Compositions.

In this interview, Joe Grim Feinberg shares his experiences with a radically democratic union, Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago.  Rather than waiting for recognition from the state, they have thrived by getting together as workers, declaring themselves to be a union, and organizing to improve their working conditions.  Joe praises the IWW’s strategy of organizing a union for all workers that, if followed consistently, de facto leads to an anti-capitalist approach.  Such a strategy faces many limits, as grad students are habituated into academic professionalism, which goes against the idea of industrial unionism.  Instead of professionalizing for individual insertion into the capitalist rat race, academics can take pride in what they do through organizing and taking control of the production process.

CW: Can you tell me how you came to get involved in radical organizing, particularly in relation to universities?

Joe: I guess I always had radicalism around me when growing up, because both my parents were involved in student movements in the 60s and 70s and in various political things after that too.  As an undergraduate, I didn’t get that involved in university politics, and not even as a graduate student for the beginning of the time that I was there. I think that like a lot of students that are active in politics your first impulse is to get out of the university and to get out into what seems to be the more real world.  Maybe that’s especially an impulse that’s strong in the United States where universities are so cloistered. Part of being a radical means you’re critical of that separation of university life from the rest of the world.  So, it kind of took a catalyst to get me directly involved in the politics of my own university.

I could go into the specific history of what happened at the University of Chicago, but basically the administration made some tactical blunders on its own side, which made a lot of grad students, all at the same time, angry.  Some of us who were already interested in labor organizing realized that this was kind of a moment when, if anything was going to change about the university, this was the moment to try to do it.  Secondly, we were pissed off ourselves so we wanted to get back at the most immediate adversary.  It took precedence over organizing somewhere else where we weren’t located.  I think, through that, I came to appreciate the value of organizing where you are, and using that as a basis for being active in the so-called outside world.  People, also, in other struggles respect you for organizing where you are when you come to them for solidarity.  That’s not to say that there isn’t a constant problem of getting too isolated and forgetting or not having time for real meaningful solidarity.  But, I think the solidarity can be especially meaningful when it comes from a position of you fighting for yourself while you’re fighting for others.

Graduate Students United’s ‘Apple Action’

CW: Could you say more about the organizing you were involved with as a grad student worker?

Joe: Maybe it would be worth mentioning that I had already joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) a couple of years before getting involved in grad student organizing.  So, I was helping out with a couple of those organizing campaigns.  I was kind of scattered between different things and without being a major player in any of them.  I was also involved in a radical discussion group in Chicago that a few friends decided to start up to create some more dialogue between radical groups and to bring together the different people who generally either talk just to themselves or talk past each other or at each other.  Those were the two main things, this discussion group and the IWW.  So, when the organizing drive started at the University of Chicago, there were some people who were advocating various other ways for improving the situation of graduate students.  But, what I got involved with was a unionization campaign: Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago.

Already having the experience of being in the IWW, that was my model for how I thought an organizing drive could work.  In other words, to explain what I mean by that: you first of all find a few people who are working in the same workplace, you get together and you declare that you are a union.  You don’t wait until you have over 50% of the workplace before saying, ‘we finally have a union.’  So, it’s not a drive to convince more and more people and then get to an all-or-nothing position.  Rather, you start where you are and you grow and grow.  There’s a good line that some of the fellow organizers in the IWW say: ‘when you organize this way, you never lose.’  There’s a frequent line that more mainstream unions will say: ‘we have to do this because we want to win.’  I’ve heard that a lot from some of the people, who I respect a lot and they do great work, but that’s a particular perspective that I strongly try to avoid.  So, we don’t do all of this because we want eventually to win; we do it because right now we are constantly winning.  If you organize, organizing itself is always a process of winning.  It also means that if you lose an election for unionization, you are not back to zero.  You don’t lose your union.  At the University of Chicago, we are also hoping to get union recognition, to have a National Labor Relations Board recognized union.

CW: Could you say a little more about the history of how you started the union drive there, and whether and how you were able to push an IWW approach?  And then, how did the decision to go with a business union happen?

Joe: Well, I don’t think there’s been a decision to leave behind the IWW approach.  Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago is kind of taking a ‘dual approach’ at this point, is how I’d put it.  When we started, I was the only active IWW member involved in the organizing committee that we had.  We didn’t start off by founding an IWW branch there.  That would have been one way to go if there had been support for that.  But what we decided to do was to start our own independent union.  I as well as other people who weren’t IWW members came to a consensus about the general approach, which was, like I said, to start with people you have, form a union, and grow.  We founded this independent organization that wasn’t recognized by anyone else but ourselves, called it ‘Graduate Students United,’ came up with a website, membership cards, bylaws, a procedure for running meetings, and tactics, and ultimately a longer term strategy for winning concessions and improvements from the administration, using the power we had as organized workers, understanding also the limitation we had by being not yet a majority of the workplace.

So, we started with, first, a period of organizing before we had any formal membership.  We tested the waters, talked to people, and organized one rally before there was any formal organization.  And then, when people already knew us, and already respected us, we launched Graduate Students United as a membership organization that people could join.  Actually, the first day, we had an event, and I think we got 75 people to join, to sign membership cards that day.  Also, I think it’s worth mentioning that a useful part of our approach was that we charged dues from the start.

With a lot of unions, a standard approach is that you try to sell the union by saying, ‘you don’t have to pay any dues until you get your first contract, and dues will come out of the raise you get in that contract.’  It sounds like a good deal if you’re thinking of this in terms of a consumer—how much money you put in, how much you get out.  Maybe it’s a good strategy for winning elections, probably it is; it seems like a good argument.  But we charged dues. On the one hand they’re nominal: we charge five dollars a year.  Given the resources we already had as students at the university, we could use university spaces for our meetings, and we didn’t need major capital to start things off, and we’re using all-volunteer labor.  That has been enough to cover the cost of photocopies and posters and things like that.  But, what I’ve found in talking with people is I never met anyone who was really turned off by paying five dollars.  On the contrary, people would say to me that they felt like it was a real thing, that we were serious about it.  They were happy to pay their five dollars to be part of something and that they knew the five dollars would go to some good.  That meant that they were already invested in it in a way that wasn’t just, ‘am I gonna get a better contract that will give me this five dollars back?’  But they give the five dollars knowing that this is part of a collective effort that won’t get it back for them just as individuals but will be part of improvements that all students will enjoy.

We did win a few concessions through the kinds of protests that we organized, public protests on campus, including a teach-outside day to see how many people supported us and how many people were graduate students who were teaching all the classes.  We won an almost 100% raise after about a year of organizing, and some improvements to health care access and child care access, though not as much as we’d like to get if we had even more power in negotiating with the university.  The administration doesn’t treat us as a negotiating partner.  It makes these improvements after the fact, after we organize, after we make demands, after we cause trouble.  It presents them as its own decision.  But we can claim, and I think most of the grad students agree with us, that our organizing has been the cause of that.  We’ve been pretty successful in that way.

Since I have been out of the country, I’m not up to the minute in our books.  At the time I left we had about five hundred members.  Those members are concentrated in social sciences and the humanities, so we have a pretty strong showing in those fields, but it’s a big university with a lot of graduate students.  And we have a lot of supporters who never got around to signing membership cards. But formally we are still pretty far from having a majority of grad students in the union. There’s a lot we can still do in that position, but there are also things we can’t yet do.

So to tell the other part of the story, about our involvement with the mainstream business unions, we decided at some point that it was in our interest to be a part of a larger union federation.  And it would also be integrating us into the union movement as a whole, so this was a time for us, not only to get help from a union that had more resources, but also to ultimately support other unions and be a part of that process of solidarity.  So we held an internal election to decide which union federation we should affiliate with.  First we had a committee that met with different unions and came up with a list of them and of the pros and cons of affiliating with each of them.  Our list included the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), who are the largest graduate student organizing federations.  Also, we considered a couple others that were active in Chicago: the SEIU was interested because they have other members at our university, not teaching professionals but other workers—and the IWW was also on the list, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).  We had an election internally, and the members chose dual affiliation with the AFT and the AAUP as the most beneficial option.  I think the IWW would have been a good thing, and we’ll see in hindsight how our ultimate choice worked out.  But, certainly those other unions, especially the AFT, has a lot of money and resources and was willing to make the case that, ‘if we think you can win, we’ll put in all those resources and help you get a contract.’  For understandable reasons, that’s an attractive thing for our members. There have been some complications with that.  I don’t know if you want me to get into the details.

CW: Can you give me a brief synopsis of what’s gone on with that?

Joe: Basically what happened was that when we had the affiliation election, Obama had just been elected and had promised to overturn the Brown decision that denied graduate students organizing rights at private universities.  So all of the major unions were thinking, ‘we’re gonna get a green light to organize through our normal methods, and getting the University of Chicago grad students would be a feather in our caps.’  So, everyone wanted us then.  Then Obama himself stalled and the Republicans stalled, and the AAUP, who is dually affiliated with us, they themselves don’t have the resources to do a major drive, so they were waiting for the AFT.  And the AFT’s been waiting for the NLRB decision to change.  Basically what it’s meant is that, after two years of being, from our perspective, affiliated with them, they’ve been pretty limited in the amount of resources they give to us.  On top of that, the struggle for collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin made them, understandably, devote a lot of resources to organizing in Wisconsin, and that took resources away from organizing with us.  And the NLRB decision is still up in the air.  It became an organizing issue for us last fall, actually, when GSU was able to start a national campaign to get the NLRB back on track and to look at cases again, in particular the NYU case, which would overturn Brown if the decision comes in grad students’ favor.  So, GSU has been organizing around the NLRB, but without much support from the AFT.  If the NLRB decision never comes through, then we still have our union, we still have our members, we still have our own internal process, our bylaws are still the way they were.  We’ll keep going and then it might even be more convincing for members to affiliate again.  To re-think it, affiliate with the IWW, who would be a good fit at that point.  But if an NLRB decision changes things, then we’ll have the option of formal legal recognition, which is a very attractive option.  It does give you new kinds of bargaining power, along with the disadvantages it involves.

CW: So, you mention the IWW affiliation possibility.  I’d like to ask you more about that.

Joe: I remember hearing how devastating it was for organizers of other grad unions to lose unionization elections.  Hearing about that kind of experience was part of our motivation for organizing the way we did with: ‘if we win the election, great.  If we lose the election, no sweat.  It’s just the NLRB.’  Like I said, we haven’t had the opportunity to get there.  So it’s been both a curse and a blessing that we haven’t had the support of the AFT, but also haven’t had the distraction of putting all effort into an NLRB election that you might lose.  My goal, and I think the others involved have generally agreed, is this: the way you get the election, the way you might win, is to have a strong group that will be there even after you lose.  Well, we’ll see at this point.  There’s still a question mark about what happens with the NLRB.

CW: I’m wondering, from your perspective as an IWW organizer, what do you think the disadvantages of not taking an IWW approach, affiliating with the IWW, from the get-go are? Conversely, what would be the advantages of taking an IWW approach?

Joe: Like in the abstract, or in our case, if we had not affiliated with the AFT and gone straight with the IWW at that point?

CW: I guess there are two questions.  There’s thinking from the beginning, if you’d taken an IWW approach instead of an independent union.  Then, there’s a second question of, what if from this point you’d go with the IWW instead of the AFT?

Joe: I guess at the beginning, an obvious benefit would have been to be a part of a large organization that already had had a lot of the discussions we had about setting up our bylaws and creating an organization with its own set of symbols and name and its own new traditions.  We could have taken a lot of that ready-made from the IWW.  We would have had help, support, and organizers from outside of the university.  I mean, our fellow workers supported us, but the level of concrete support would have been different if GSU had been an IWW union.

But there were some disadvantages to going that way too.  Not only the fact that I was the only member of the IWW involved from the start.  I guess at that point I was faced with the choice of trying really hard to convince all the other organizers to join the IWW or to say, ‘look, this is where we all are right now.  Let’s start something right now and maybe later we can join or not join together.’  At that point, I think for somewhat unfair reasons, but some of the reasons are also partly the fault of the IWW and partly that it’s misperceived—it’s perceived as an organization with a specific kind of ideological orientation that, in a context of grad students where everyone has their own political theory, you have people who think, ‘well, that’s not me, I’m a whatever… I’m a Trotskyist, so I’m not going to join the IWW.  I’m a liberal democrat…’  So, that was a disadvantage.  That’s not my interpretation of the way the IWW works when it’s working well.  And I don’t think it’s the way the IWW should be seen.  It should be an organization for all workers.

Industrial Workers of the World, Twin Cities Branch (pic via TCorganizer)

CW: Do you have a good way to respond to radical-minded grad students who make those kinds of critiques—to convince them that whatever their politics is it could be consistent with the IWW?

Joe: Since we didn’t go that route, I didn’t have these arguments that much.  But, when I’m talking to someone about it, I say, ‘the IWW is precisely not a political union.  Other unions support Democrats for political office, whether its members support those candidates or not. The IWW will never put its resources into pushing a political candidate.  It’s a union where you can have whatever opinions you want about how parliamentary elections should go, how the state should go.  You can even be a Republican and be in the IWW.  It’s different from an anarcho-syndicalist union in that sense.  It’s not a union for anarchists, even if its strategy includes many points that anarchists tend to sympathize with. The point is IWW members share a strategy of organizing, and that strategy is to be a union for all workers.‘  People have reason to be confused and have mixed feelings about the IWW, because there are some tensions within the organization and its history.  Is it a union for all workers or is it a union for revolutionary workers?  Those are real questions that I wouldn’t just toss out.  But, I like to take the part of the IWW that says: we need a union for all workers. What does that mean?  It’s a strategy that a lot of us think will ultimately lead towards abolishing the wage system, but the strategy that’s important is right now, what do you do on the ground?  And that is, you collect everyone together who works in a certain industry and then, say it’s everyone who works at universities, and then within that framework you can focus on a single, smaller unit.  Everyone in that unit is eligible.  And you start by signing people up one-by-one.  And you start by seeing that the basis of your power lies in organizing together as employees—whatever ultimate political ideas you have.  That’s part of the beauty of the IWW: it’s a place where you can come and, through that organization, it gives you a place to argue over those things, but you don’t have to have those ideas before starting, before joining.

CW: Two related advantages I see of an IWW approach: one, that it’s, like you say, not an ideologically political organization, but it kind of embodies an anti-capitalist politics in practice.  By organizing together as workers we’re trying to improve our working conditions, which includes fighting against wage exploitation, which is part of capitalism.  Second, related with that is the industrial approach of the IWW: organizing across industry.  So, for us as grad students, an IWW approach would advocate for organizing in collaboration and solidarity with other workers in the whole education industry, recognizing that divisions between workers are one of the biggest obstacles to building our power.  So, I’m wondering, were you able, in your independent union approach, to maintain that kind of anti-capitalism in practice, and also that kind of organizing across the whole education industry approach?

Joe: On the anti-capitalist side of things, my idea of the IWW is that its anti-capitalism comes from being consistent in that organizing approach.  If you’re consistent in the organizing approach, de facto it leads to an anti-capitalist approach.  If you’re consistent in advocating for improving conditions in the workplace, if you’re consistent in opposing the structures that cause your exploitation, if you’re consistent in advocating for power of employees and decreasing power of employers, then that leads to an undermining and ultimately an overthrowing of capitalism.  But, you don’t have to jump from the beginning to the end at every moment in the conversation.  I think you can be a totally legitimate, full member of the IWW and not be at the point where you think that it’s a question of overthrowing capitalism.  It’s a question of maintaining this strategy consistently right now.  And so, I feel like we’ve been able to maintain that strategy consistently.  Most people who are active organizers in GSU not only came to consensus on that strategy but also had one or the other idea about ultimately making systemic change that would be related to changes in the overarching economic system.

I think there are problems with that too.  It’s not that simple, being consistent.  Someone else can say, ‘well, I’m being more consistent in sticking to advantages that we have right now, instead of irresponsibly fighting on.’  There are a lot of questions that come up where you can understand how one gets to a more conservative business union approach.  My idea of being a Wobbly means, at every moment, figuring out what is the approach that will be consistently undermining the system while it is improving the conditions of workers.  And I think that the best way to do the one is to do the other, in both directions.  For me, that’s what the Wobbly approach comes down to.

CW: I really like how you’re talking about consistency here.  That brings me to a question that I’d like to work through with you.  You might be one of the few people in the world who have thought about this much, as an IWW person who has experience organizing a grad student union.  U of Chicago is one of the only examples I can think of that has taken something like an IWW approach and that has had some success with it.  I’d like to ask you a critical question about the IWW approach.  Thinking about consistency, for grad students, grad instructors, and teachers, what is our role as workers within the education system within capitalism?  The education system, from an anti-capitalist perspective, is a major part of capitalist reproduction.  Through education, students are disciplined, categorized, and their labor power is valorized for sale in the job market.  Class hierarchy is reproduced through that.  So, I feel that with this question of consistency, I feel that as teachers, we have sort of split subjectivities between being waged exploited workers and being participants in this kind of disciplining of students, participating in capitalist reproduction.  We are also ourselves going through that disciplining process as students.  So, we have these complicated, split-up subjectivities.  From an anti-capitalist perspective, we would want to push the organizing as workers part.  So, I wonder, through your experience organizing in this grad union, are there ways you’ve thought of creating a more nuanced view of anti-capitalist organizing in the education industry?

Joe: Well, on the one hand, I think that you’re right that this tension is especially salient for graduate student instructors.  On the other hand, I don’t think it’s entirely unique to us.  I think almost every worker participates in reproduction of the system, certainly outside of the workplace, in home in all sorts of ways, in educating children, watching TV and absorbing political ideologies and arguments.  But also, every workplace has its own components of not only producing surplus value for the owner but also producing conditions for reproducing the system as a whole.  It’s especially difficult for graduate students who are teaching people to act a certain way in the world.  You could say something about workers at arms production plants who are absolutely exploited as workers, but who are in a very difficult position in the world economy of exploitation.  Police have probably an even more difficult situation than grad students, with respect to the internal tensions that they have to deal with.

But, you’re right that it’s a very specific situation that we have. Each workplace is different, and we should understand those differences.  I wouldn’t say that I came up with an easy answer.  This also gets me back to your previous question about solidarity.  I think sometimes that solidarity with other workers was more difficult than I hoped it would be.  Part of that is maybe something that’s always going to be the case when you devote a lot of time to organizing one cause, one program, one campaign, or whatever.  People were burnt out when it came to showing up to some allies’ demonstrations.  That might not be different for grad students or anyone else.  But you are dealing with a system that not only employs people and forces them to be part of this reproductive system but also gives them a lot of psychological reward for playing that part.  So, grad students are taught to think very highly of their profession—and that idea of professionalism really goes strongly against the idea of industrial unionism.  Not that I don’t think there’s a place for it.  I think that every workplace has a certain professionalism to it, and it’s not only legitimate but very valuable for the personal realization of any worker to be able to take pride in the work they do.  I mean, craft unionism speaks to an important need that comes out of the division of labor in society.  But I think that there’s room for doing that within an industrial organizing approach that places value on each part of the system of work without ordering them in a hierarchy.  What the formula is for creating that kind of an organization, I’m not sure if it’s been perfectly worked out within the IWW.  It’s a constant debate in the IWW, actually, how the industrial unions should be related to one another, what the categorizations should be.  It’s not just a trivial debate.  Should the industrial union focus on organizing all grad students together or should it focus on organizing University of Chicago janitors and nurses together with grad students?  The industrial approach would generally be the latter, but there are certain practical considerations that come into play.  It’s not an easy question.

CW: I like this distinction you made between professionalization generally and taking pride in the work that we do.  Just thinking about the work that grad students do, such as in a classroom, part of that work is teaching, part of that work is disciplining and categorizing students.  So, we can do teaching work, thinking about how teaching and learning happens all over society outside of the university—there’s teaching and learning that happens in marginalized communities in informal ways, and in radical movements outside of the university in popular education, and in ways that happen without the kind of disciplining and categorizing of student labor that happens within universities.  So, I feel that we can be more selective in what we, as graduate students, take pride in our work—taking pride in creating good teaching and learning situations, and at the same time, fighting against the disciplining and categorizing parts of our labor that are part of the capitalist reproduction process.  I think there are times when that distinction can be made clearer.  For example, when your union had teaching that happened outside of the classroom, or when a strike is going on.  Or just being explicit in the classroom about your and your students’ positionality in relation to the wider education system and capitalism, and the role that education plays in capitalist reproduction, and thinking about the different vertical strata of the education system, and about how students are pushed out at the lower strata and into marginalized communities and highly policed neighborhoods and funneled into the schools-to-prisons pipeline.  There are a lot of connections between different kinds of organizing, different kinds of solidarity that could be made, through teaching in the classroom.  This is kind of a segue to asking you about radical pedagogy—if you’ve tried any of that and how you think of that in relation to organizing.

Joe: Maybe one way I’d put it, as a general principle, I think it’s a good idea to see pride in your work as being conditioned on the organizing and solidarity with others.  Part of the early success of the IWW came from its rejection of this pride in craft unionism, and taking that as a precondition for being able to organize workers who saw themselves as completely excluded from any kind of work that they were allowed to take pride in.  The most exploited and marginalized workers were thus able to take pride in being a part of this organization and organizing as Wobblies, and through that, then you can have lumberjacks who are proud of their being lumberjacks and proud of being IWW members, and for migrant farmworkers in the same way. Hobo lingo was older than the IWW but it became a kind of professional pride to be a member of this class that’s excluded from all professions.  But, I think that part of the internalized hope there is that through organizing and through taking control of the production process we put ourselves into a position where we can take some pride in what we do.  Maybe that’s another way of saying something similar to what you just said: as an organized graduate student, I think the work of radical pedagogy can be a part of organizing, in its own sense, especially if you connect it with the kinds of pedagogy that you can do outside the walls of the university.  So, to put it in an imperative sense: don’t just be proud that you’re such an elite graduate student, but be proud that you are part of a process that is making teaching into labor that’s worthy of being proud of.

I don’t think it’s worthy of being proud of reproducing an elitist system, and I myself have had constant trouble with identifying with my profession.  In some ways, to get to the specific part of your question, for that reason among other reasons I also have had trouble being motivated to delve into what sometimes passes for radical pedagogy, or at least, let’s say, progressive pedagogy, which often in the United States, especially, involves great devotion to one’s students as the highest honor.  Of course it’s almost embarrassing, a moral flaw, for me to admit that I don’t place the interests of my students as at the pinnacle of what I’m doing when I’m teaching at the University of Chicago.  In terms of my own psychology, I know that I can’t exclude myself from the system of privileges that have enabled certain people to get where they are. And I know that most of my students at the University of Chicago have also benefited from this system.  It is valuable to teach them, of course, and every individual deserves the best possible education.  But I’m put in a position where the greatest thing I value in the world is not making these students into a new elite, which is what my position, if I don’t do anything else, would have me do—that’s what I’m paid to do.  In order to engage in effective radical pedagogy, or at least pedagogy that’s worth being proud of, you do have to question the system, and that means getting people to question themselves, teaching them while you’re questioning where you are, being involved in struggles for other forms of pedagogy and other spaces of pedagogy, breaking down the walls of the university in that sense.

CW: Do you feel like part of the problem is that people who try radical pedagogy approaches might not question their own complicity, through working in the university, with the system that they’re fighting against?  Are they romanticizing a certain vision of the university or defending some kind of ideal of the university as a space outside of capitalism, outside of the system that they’re fighting against, rather than having a clear critique of the university?  Perhaps this gets back to what you were saying at the beginning: seeing the importance of organizing where you are at, starting from that position of recognizing that wherever you are is an organizable terrain, that there’s no outside.   

Joe: Yeah, I do think there’s some of that that happens.  I wouldn’t go too far in saying that radical pedagogues in the United States don’t question their position.  There’s a constant questioning that’s part of something like a ritual of self-denial that goes into being a radical teacher in the United States, especially at the university level.  That’s a positive thing in general.  Part of my point though is that actually it doesn’t have to be a self-denial.  If you’re part of organizing to change and transform your position, then you don’t always have to be pointing elsewhere.  One of the most frequent arguments we hear against our unionizing efforts, is that ‘we’re privileged so we don’t deserve to organize, we don’t deserve better conditions, etc.’  And the thing about this argument is that it comes from and is designed to persuade precisely those people who have radical sympathies.  But for me, I think that the pre-condition of our having the right to speak about our position and the right to advocate for radical forms of pedagogy outside the university is our organizing to transform the university itself.  It’s not just questioning your position—people are questioning their position—but how the questioning takes place and what your answer to the question is.  So, not just saying, ‘I am privileged, I am an elite, I need to face myself,’ but, ‘I am in this position, this is what the system does, what can I do from this position to help change it?’  I think there’s a different implication if you follow that out.

CW: I have another more meta question for you.  Radically minded academics have connected with each other through these informal networks, such as through conferences or listserves.  But many of us are being pushed into more precarious kinds of working and living situations where it is, or it’s going to be, harder to continue doing radical organizing and radical intellectual work—if we have to teach four adjunct classes a semester just to get by.  So, I wonder if you have any thoughts on how we can maintain our relationships and build the power of our informal networks of cooperation to make them better connected with movements and to support each other better.

Joe: I don’t know if I have any great new ideas.  I’ve heard about great work that’s being done, like in the Twin Cities, there’s that Experimental College set up outside the university with regular classes.  I know that there are people who went to Occupy locations and had teach-ins there.  I think that to form these kinds of links is definitely important and making them more than a lot of separate instances, that’s the right question.  I kind of like the concept that Edu-factory came up with of ‘autonomous university.’  I’d like to see that institutionalized in a way, but I think maybe some people are afraid of institutionalization.  If networks remain too fluid and loose, it’s harder for them to turn into a movement.  But, I think there is some space to really get involved with precarity as this kind of point of reference to connect with each other and with other struggles, and with tenured faculty who are worried about this impending precarity.

Especially, I see the whole world of adjuncts as being this huge mass of people who are far more marginalized than graduate students and, to a much greater extent, have internalized that marginalization and come to, I don’t want to say accept it—because the adjuncts I know (and I’ve been an adjunct as a grad student) reject the conditions and are angry about the conditions everyday.  But, there’s a level at which, as an intellectual space, adjuncts are excluded in a way that graduate students aren’t yet excluded.  Graduate students tend to be part of the same intellectual field as tenure-track professors.  Then, if they finish their dissertation and don’t get into the tenure-track, then they’re pushed out into the adjunct world and excluded from this sphere in which their opinion matters and in which their papers can get published and in which they have time to do research and in which the research they manage to do on their own time will be taken seriously.  So, that could be a really valuable thing, if grad students and other precarious instructors could actually create a kind of prospective space for adjunct intellectual work to become a leading force for rethinking the world as well as the university.

CW: I feel like one big obstacle for adjunct organizing is that, with being pushed out of the tenure-track world, there’s a kind of stigma against complaining.  It’s individualized and you’re seen as kind of someone who failed on an individual level: you didn’t make it in this myth of a meritocracy in academia.  I wonder if there’s some potential for really intentionally re-framing the conditions through which people are pushed out of academia—particularly, for people who take more radical positions in the research and teaching that they do, more radical than their disciplines are willing to handle.  Maybe for grad students coming up, I feel like that imagined future trajectory as becoming a precarious adjunct kind of backforms onto grad students lives.  As a grad student when you’re thinking about your future, that threat of becoming a precarious adjunct has a disciplining effect on the radical work that you’re willing to do as a grad student.  So, I wonder if there’s some way we could organize to fight that stigma, to have a more collective way of organizing to avoid that.

Joe:  All the details come in the process of organizing, but I definitely think that one of the imperatives for turning things around would be, first of all, to come again and again and again with the analyses that people like Marc Bousquet have made and, to their credit, Cary Nelson at the AAUP—which some people see as an organization of tenured professionals, but which has really taken seriously the issue of contingent teaching.  They’ve done important research to demonstrate that there’s a structural cause as to why so many people are becoming adjuncts.  When you look at the system as a whole, there’s no way you can argue that PhD holders are just getting to be less competent, and that’s why they’re not getting jobs, the way you can think about an individual case. It’s important to keep repeating and repeating that.  But also, on an intellectual level, I think creating these kinds of alternative intellectual fields would help convince adjuncts and future adjuncts, grad students who are imagining that that might be the track that they’ll go down, that there’s legitimate intellectual work for you to do, and which needs to be done, and that you are in a position to do it that tenure-track faculty might not be in.  You have a position in society that they’re not in, and you can shed certain light on things that other people can’t.  And part of the struggle for improving adjunct conditions is the struggle for getting more time to do that kind of research.  Again, I think it’s necessary to have all these parts of organizing so you can do more radical research and teaching, and see the radical research and teaching as a part of what you’re organizing.

CW: I wonder if there might be a way to make a kind of more formal kind of organization to institutionalize this kind of organizing approach that sees these connections from a kind of broader anti-capitalist perspective, maybe through the IWW.  I don’t feel like there’s any institution that is working on it with that kind of perspective.  The things I’ve seen the AAUP write have tended to buy into a romanticized view of the university, a bit too protective of the system as it is and of the professionalization process.

Joe: Yeah, any romanticization has a kernel of real hope and beauty in it, but the traditional US university was, generally speaking, as bad as any old elite institution in the United States. If we’re going to move forward we really have to look forward. And in some ways the mass of adjuncts offers a real opportunity. It is a terrible and inhumane situation for all the people who have to live through it, but it’s also the first time that this country has had not only such a large number of highly educated people, but a mass of people whose marginalization gives them an inherently critical perspective on the system that educated but refused to hire them.  I think adjunct organizing has potential to accomplish things that were never done in the old, stable universities that people might romanticize, where every professor was a gentleman and also very likely a supporter of the system that made him.

So I see, from an organizational and political perspective but also the intellectual perspective, some real work to be done, like what’s been started in projects like the conferences at Minnesota [‘Beneath the University, the Commons’] or like our little journal at U of C, or the Minnesota Review as it used to be under Jeffrey Williams, or Marc Bousquet’s projects. Still, most of these projects, though they advocate for adjuncts, there’s not really a space that actually is made for adjuncts to be working through their own intellectual work.  That’s something that could be part of a broader organizing project.

CW: That’s a really good idea.  Have you read this Recomposition Blog?  They have interviews and reflections by teachers about their working conditions.  I feel like something like that, a space where adjuncts can talk about their experiences and discuss them with other adjuncts, from a radical and anti-capitalist perspective, would be useful.

Joe: And through that, not only to talk about their own lives as adjuncts but to create a space where they can talk about whatever they would like to be researching and what they are limited in their ability to do because of their position as adjuncts—because they don’t have time, because they’re not listened to, because their opinion isn’t respected.  That’s the kind of thing that seems to me would be valuable.

Joe Grim Feinberg is a Graduate Student-Worker in Anthropology.  He is a member of Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago and the Industrial Workers of the World.

Summary:

From her experiences creating an occupied social center in Rome, Claudia Bernardi speaks of self-organization and self-education between migrants, students, artists, and other precarious workers.  Within the global crisis, these spaces of resistance make common institutions that cross the boundaries of the university and city. As a kind of autonomous study center, the project has intertwined labor union organizing with political movements and knowledge production.  Building occupations have spread to include artists and other cultural workers who have squatted cinemas and theaters, making culture as a common good.  In a time of proliferating borders and frontiers, we all become migrants, struggling across divisions for shared spaces, culture, and knowledge.

Contaminating the University: An Occupied Atelier for Self-Education and Self-Organization

CW: Could you tell me how you got involved in radical organizing and what kind of organizing you’ve done?

Claudia: I got involved in radical organizing when I was a teenager, above all after the experiences we had in Mexico with the Zapatista movement and then Genoa in 2001 [G8 protests].  Inside the proliferation of radical organizing in the so-called noglobal movement, I became part of a collective that since 2001 defined the concept of “living knowledge” as a theoretical tool to analyze the transformation of labor and knowledge production [see De Nicola A., Do P., “Quella strana fabbrica di saperi che produce solo precari” in Posse, Il Lavoro di Genova, ManifestoLibri, 2001]. Beyond our political work in the university we decided to occupy a space outside of the university. The basic thinking was that the university is a productive space for students who are already workers inside it—they produce knowledge and cooperation that is not recognized.  At the same time, students are productive outside the university—they do precarious work and they deeply use their knowledge outside the university.  So, there is a strict connection between these two spaces of production: even in those universities that seem bound by their campuses, actually the border collapsed in the face of a strong overlapping between the university and metropolis. So, we occupied a private space with undergrad students, PhD students, and precarious workers of the 3rd sector – to transform it into a free, independent one.

A mural outside ESC (via)

We occupied a space immediately outside of the university, a student district that was at the same time the object of a huge gentrification process, and was inhabited by migrants and artists too. We were in the middle of the material production outside the campus, but with a strong connection within the university.  In fact, we were in the social center we called ESC, an autonomous atelier, (Eccedi Sottrai Crea – Exceed, Subtract, Create), but at the same time occupiers animate different autonomous assemblies in most of the colleges of the university.  In this sense, we always have a tight connection and exchange from one space to the other. It was basically aimed to cross the border of the university, to share knowledge in an independent way, and at the same time, to contaminate the academy and their form of knowledge production.

::Fluo Night:: An art show inside ESC – part of the Draftsmen Congress  (pic via)

CW: Could you say more about the kinds of connections that this social center has created between students and people off-campus—migrants and precarious workers?  How have the informal networks of cooperation and community amongst migrants and workers connected with student organizing through that space?

Claudia:  There are two levels of the discourse.  One is related to the students inside and outside the university, and inside and outside ESC.  The other is about migrants, because access to the university is closed for most of them, but, at the same time, they are medium or high skilled: often they have a degree, but it is not recognized in Italy.  So, there is always a gap between these two conditions of precarity of life.

The connection between students and migrants takes place mainly inside ESC. But, we always try to build up activities and discussions even in the university, about immigration laws and migrants’ work. In ESC, we offer a front-office of free legal help for migrants and a free Italian language school where we do not ask for money, documents or Visas:  these projects are led by undergrads, PhD students and social workers.  At the same time, we try to involve migrants, who find help in ESC, with our activities in the university.  For example, we had a course of self-education about the post-colonial condition, borders and knowledge production where migrants were the researchers inside this course.  Moreover, we have completely reversed the role of the educator and the educated. During 1^st March of 2010, we organized a “Lesson of alien illegality” in front of the Parliament to protest against both the reform of education and immigration: refugees from Afghanistan or other countries and illegal alien did a public lesson about their condition in Italy.

Learning wall at ESC – part of the Draftsmen Congress (pic via)

Learning wall at ESC (pic via)

Then, a recent example of this crossing border organizing could be the Draftmen Congress [www.solidarityaction.istitutosvizzero.it] based in ESC atelier, in cooperation with the 7. Berlin Biennale of Art. We transformed ESC in a white, empty space, where people could enter, take colors or pencils and draw or write on the walls: in this way the boundary between artist and observer collapsed.   We did a lesson of Italian language school on the wall of ESC, using the images and drawings as a process of knowledge production, shared with their teachers who are students of the university. In this way, the learning of language escapes from the vertical relation between teacher and student, the language itself became less of a border, and more part of the same process of redefinition of knowledge and learning.

::Fluo Night:: An art show inside ESC – part of the Draftsmen Congress (more pics here)

Of course, creating connection with migrants is really hard, because they are not only coming from various countries but they lived in different condition: sometimes they are researchers from Asia, others are careworkers from South America or cleaners from South Africa. So, the redefinition of knowledge production, outside of any charitable approach, is at the core of these kind of projects.

Radical organizing in ESC is led mainly by PhD and undergraduate students. One of the most important tools to link ESC and the academy is the proliferation of political debate and creation of activities for and with students and precarious workers.  Our bodies always move between the university and our atelier, and that’s very important, because the aim of ESC to cross the border of the academy is always renewed by different persons of various skills coming and leaving, debating and organizing.

The first place for radical organizing are the self-managed assemblies: they are autonomous from the political projects of ESC, even because inside the university the condition of students is much more heterogeneous and it’s not politically defined.  There are students from other leftist experiences and not part of the autonomy/post-operaist tradition we refer to, so the assemblies are the place of organization of living knowledge inside and against the academy. Then, because of the last education reforms, tuition and fees are much higher than before, so students have to finish the university very quickly. So, ESC is more stable from the point of view of the circulation of people, while the university is much more moveable and differentiated in time.

The relationship between radical organizing at the university and in ESC is the common production of autonomous knowledge. Inside the university, self-education takes place in a completely independent way, but at the same time, when we do our seminars inside the experience of Free Metropolitan University (LUM; www.lumproject.org) in ESC, they are attended by students who build up self-education seminars inside the university as well. On the one hand, four faculty — humanities, political science, philosophy, and medicine – develop every year self-education seminars about different topics connected with their studies (e.g., art and language production, new conceptual understanding of the global crisis, immaterial workers and political economy, etc.)

In LUM’s seminars, since 2005, we work on different topics, defining every year a central concept to rethink and analyse transformations of the present: marxian lexicon; the role of passions inside capitalism; gentrification process inside the metropolis; the exploitation of the body inside the biopolitical framework; the relation between  property, expropriation, and the common. One year ago we analysed the concept of “tumult,” a Machiavellian figure that links turmoil, revolts with the production of institutions: it is a constituent process that connects together the institutions, new production of norms and the tumult, the revolts: it is not a division between spontaneity and organization, but rather it is a constituent process.

The seminar is a place where the academic division between professor and students dissolve, a place of transdisciplinary connection among fields of study and various analitycal languages. We always try to create common knowledge in different spaces in which students are autonomous to decide what they want to study, discuss, and share.

Resistance within the Global Crisis: Creating Common Institutions Inside and Outside the University

CW: What sort of relationship with the university have you worked out through ESC and these autonomous seminars?  Do students get credit for doing the self-education seminars in the university?  Then, a broader question: seeing ESC and the Free Metropolitan University as a kind of autonomous university—that is not part of the education system and that doesn’t put students in competition for those grades and credits and discipline them as capitalist subjects—how do you view the relationship between this autonomous, anti-capitalist university and the capitalist university?  Do you see a kind of ‘engaged withdrawal’ relationship between them?

Claudia: The self-education seminars took place inside the university, they are inside and they are against trying to build up common and independent spaces.  Briefly, self-education is a tool and dispositif [device] of organization: it’s very important because if we think about self-education outside of the organization of conflict, it just becomes a counter-course or a free seminar, but that is not what we do.  People who become involved in self-education understand that it is possible to do politics inside of the university and against the factory of knowledge. In immaterial production there can be independent, autonomous, anti-capitalist politics, able to organize and selfmanage their learning; they are the living knowledge. We have to understand the difference between the topics and issues’ potential either to be conflictive—to be autonomous and to be a tool of organization—or an anti-capitalist topic, at the same time, could be a part of the academy, of the same capitalist production.

Self-education is an organizational dispositif.  When we do a self-education seminar, we ask for credits inside the university as a sabotage able to balance the power in our favor. “UniCommon. The revolt of living knowledge”, is a network of nearly ten cities that every year do self-education seminars all around Italy.  But, in the last two years, the so-called reforms of education are basically destroying and erasing issues and languages.  For this reason, self-education and autonomous spaces are much more important now, to fight against the destruction of education and culture.  Self-education now is a place of resistance, and at the same time it is a space of creation of common institutions inside of the university.  In these common spaces, we try to build up an autonomous university—the common institution of knowledge.

On the contrary, LUM’s seminars do not give or ask for credits because it is completely another experiment: it’s really a Free Metropolitan University, much more a space of militant research.  So, we try to grasp and develop new conceptual tools to understand the transformation that we are living. Through having all these debates inside the Free Metropolitan University, we also try to contaminate the university itself.  The production of knowledge inside the global crisis, I think, in Italy at least, changed completely; the modes of teaching and learning have become much more controlled, disciplined and over-simplified. There is a process of impoverishment,  a huge attack to culture and knowledge.

An Autonomous Study Center for the Common Alternative: Connecting Political Organization with Knowledge Production

CW: With ESC and other movements you’re involved in, how do you define your relationship with the universities as they are being attacked by the state, while also trying to create something different and resist the traditional model of universities?  It seems like you have multiple points of conflict.  How do you situate your project in relation to those different points of critique—the traditional universities and the state with its austerity measures?

Claudia: Of course, the crisis worsened the situation, but even before the austerity measures there was an ongoing process of the destruction of the university under the label of Bologna Process. The last movements in Italy, in particular in 2005 and 2008, were basically student movements claiming free education, autonomous spaces, welfare against precarity and a common self-reform of the university. The government attacked us heavily: we were called children, we were being told we were not capable of building up our own lives, not to be researchers, so, we had to migrate or, as the Minister of Welfare told us, ‘you need to do manual work’. It’s just the evidence of their intention to close the university as a space of knowledge production, to discipline and control students, as paradigmatic figure of the contemporary workforce, by building up new borders within the university, they aim to establish which are the preferable figures of labor: precarious, removable, passive and exploited.

Of course, this scenario is very difficult and this heavy attack is addressed towards all those persons who produce knowledge, not only students or researchers, but artists, performers and technicians too. In fact, in the last years several theaters and cinemas have been occupied to rethink this kind of production and sociality outside of the “expertise” but together with figures living in the metropolis (families, students, migrants…)

A second level is trying to escape from the nationalistic and eurocentric approach of italian university.  So we constantly improve our transnational connections, working with activists and researchers across Europe and Mediterranean space, both sharing radical organizing tools and practices, for example Book Bloc that spread beyond Italy in the last two years.

Book Bloc – Palermo, Italy – December 2010 (pic via)

Then, the problem of the fight with the academy is basically over the new borders that they establish using citizenship, debt, language, deskilling processes. We are facing a lack of immaterial production inside of the university.  For this reason, we tried to connect with other experiences, like social centers, radio stations, and even projects that involve squats of migrants.  One example could be our effort to build up an independent center of study, self-financed by ESC and other social centres, part of the union of factory workers, an independent italian newspaper and associations. Throughout this relationship between students and precarious workers and the factory workers, we built this new experience.  It’s an autonomous study center for the common.

Occupied Cinemas and Theaters: Culture as a Common Good

CW: So, it sounds like having those occupied spaces as a place for people to meet and to have debates seems very important for building connections and coming up with shared political knowledge that can guide organizing.  Do you feel like these occupations are happening more often now?  Is this a tactic that’s been spreading in Italy?

Claudia: In the last year, there were several occupations of theaters and cinemas all over Italy. There is a kind of network of independent spaces for culture.

In the past year, there are two examples in Rome that are worth speaking about.  The first one is Nuovo Cinema Palazzo, a very old cinema, where the local government recently decided to build a casino there.  So, all the population organized—there are even comrades of ESC squatting there, and migrants and even residents of 70, 80 years old, migrants, several artists and care workers.  After one year of struggle, occupiers have been recognized as a ‘multitude’ by the same court—as a multitude of people resisting against the casino and as legitimate to take back the place. Now, there are several independent projects: theater, performances, children’s activities, a free room for study—libraries in La Sapienza are open for only three hours a day now, and they are going to be completely closed from September—language courses, spaces for migrants.

It’s really a heterogeneous space and we are creating knowledge about ‘what is an occupation of a cultural space?’  What does it mean to, not only defend culture and to resist the attacks of the government, but to create a new way of the production of culture?  That’s the main antidote to the attacks of the government.

The second one is Teatro Valle.  It’s the oldest theater in Rome, built in 1727.  It was going to be closed, so a group of artists decided to occupy it—developing a common way to build up a common constitution through a large process of definition of new norms to organize and manage the space, affirming theatre as an institution of the common. They are finding out a new way, inside and against the Italian law, to create new norms that legitimate the space as part of ‘commons’ To build up these open spaces, we had several debates to create that status with the lawyer, philosophers, journalists, and all the artists.  They wrote this statute that is free and available to be modified on the website, and after months, they are collecting all the advice from people and raising funds to create a foundation. They are producing law “from below” and, at the same time, they are creating anomalous norms that will be available for everybody. [Read more about Teatro Valle in English here.]

CW: It’s amazing to hear about artists being so politically active.  In those occupations, are the artists and cultural workers taking on leading roles in organizing the occupations?  Here in the US, there’s often a division of labor in movements between art work and organizing work.  It sounds here like the roles of artists and organizers kind of integrate together.  Do you feel that’s been an important part of the movement?

Claudia: About the composition of these occupations, they are very heterogeneous and managed by a general assembly that takes place one day a week and they manage all the occupations from the political, theoretical level to the organizational one.

In ESC, there is no division inside the space, because we worked a lot in the last ten years to not divide the theoretical production from the practical one.  So, we avoid dividing the intellectuals and the people that manage the space: nobody can create a separated assembly, a separated group, or to divide the work inside the autonomous spaces.

Of course, above all in the occupied theaters, at the beginning it was very difficult, because some of the artists had often individualistic attitudes and little attitude to build up together a common space. So, they decided to give less importance to the individual, but to create a shared understanding of what kind of discourse we have to develop to understand what we are doing.  That’s why they discussed a lot about common institutions: what does it mean to share knowledge—to build up something different?  To fight capitalistic production of culture within society?

So, they focused on what we have in common: why we are here and what we can develop all together—putting aside our individual status and trying to understand how to multiply our work inside this place and how to address our cultural production with the others in the city and national level.  That’s why other occupations of artists and cultural workers took place, from Palermo to Milan to Venice.  So, now there is a kind of network that connects these spaces.  And we tried on the transnational, European level to enlarge it.  So, before going to Frankfurt [for Blockupy Frankfurt – May 16-19, 2012], we did a caravan from Athens to Frankfurt, going through Romania and Serbia and across Eastern Europe, trying to meet all the people involved with other occupations of theaters and cinemas.

Migrant Struggles within and against Changing Borders and Frontiers

CW: Could I ask you a question about your own research on migrant struggles?  I know there’s a ton you could say about it, but I’m interested to hear how you negotiate the tensions between doing research, being an academic, while also being a political organizer.  How do you bring together your organizing work with your academic work?  How do you try to connect migrant struggles in the Americas with struggles in Italy?

Claudia: I have always been interested, from the personal point of view, about transformation in the Americas, above all in Central America, in particular the border between the US and Mexico.  Why?  First of all, there are lots of similarities between the Americas and Europe, especially in the last ten years.  Simplifying it a lot, the spatial and hierarchical tool in the Americas was the frontier, while in Europe it was the border. In recent years, due to militarization and new forms of capitalistic accumulation we have seen how these two tools, in my opinion, are overlapping, both in the Americas and in Europe. Above all, we are facing it in the last three years, with the global crisis, when the aggressive attack of capitalism shaped itself as an internal colonialism within european borders: the role of Germany in Greece’s crisis and its financial and economical attack is paradigmatic.

Poster by DignidadRebelde (via)

But, I started my dissertation about the border between Arizona and Sonora, with the proposal of SB1070, which is very similar to a law they introduced in Italy: a huge criminalization of migrants inside the national space.  At the same time, in Arizona and other states, they are banning Mexican-American Studies, Chicano Studies, and Ethnic Studies.  In Tucson, they already started banning them from the high schools.  This is a huge attack on difference, on migrants of several generations, and on culture, through an intense racialization process that involve language, skill and knowledge production.   I think that here it is very similar—with all the specific differences we have in Italy—that we are facing a huge attack on culture and education.  You never find a second-generation migrant in Italy teaching inside the university.  Yet, there is a huge proliferation of cultural production, of fictions, of articles, of essays from second-generation migrants in an independent way.

The compromise is that my topic in Italy is completely outside of the academy. So, the first compromise was with language—to study in other languages from different fields of study, and to try, from the immaterial point of view, to escape from the organization of knowledge of the Italian academy.  Of course, I have adopted a lot the Anglo-american way of organized knowledge, but I was contaminated with the Mexican and the South American one.  So, my first fight inside the academy is from the research point of view.  I crossed different methodologies, but also different hierarchies of knowledge organization. I think it’s important to provincialize, not only Italy, and not only Europe, but above all the Western knowledge organization.

Basically, I am trying through self-education to introduce the issue on which I work inside the university.  So, I organized some seminars about the post-colonial condition that I think is really connected with the colonial experience between Mexico and the US, and all the theories of internal colonization and border studies.  In Europe, there is a wide definition of borders now, the internal ones: the modification of the Schengen agreement—it can be suspended for six months—means to divide North and South Europe.  It means that the knowledge production, the sharing, and the definition of what a migrant is, is really influenced by all these transformations.

Finally, I try to establish connections with professors to use the large spaces in their courses. Of course, I have a scholarship, otherwise I would never support free work in the university, even for a few hours. So, I try to enlarge the space of debate about these topics, from a political point of view, teaching and sharing with students what a border is, how a border is defined inside our society, and to establish connections between the US-Mexico border and the upcoming borders in Europe and even the old ones.  It’s interesting how we can find lots of similarities in these spaces, and how students realize how the reforms and laws that are being approved in Italy were addressed to create new borders and to define what “a migrant is”, a stigma marked on them: now we are once and for all migrants, above all european students inside the same Europe.

(co-author of “Snapshots of the Student Movement in Montreal”)

Summary:

Against a kind of activist-y, spectacular politics, Marianne Garneau argues that US students and workers can learn from the Quebec model how to organize our power as a class.  Quebec students have kept their tuition low because they’ve historically had a vibrant, militant student movement, one that is willing to strike and directly disrupt, and not wait for the leadership of the business unions. The organizing model is to create directly democratic bodies—department-by-department assemblies—that know how to leverage our power to fuck up the business of the people who are screwing us over, whether they’re our educators or our employers.

CW: Could you say a little about how you became involved in radical organizing, particularly around universities?

Marianne: I first became political by participating in the punk scene where I grew up, and I started university in ’97.  Of course, just a couple years after that the anti-globalization movement took off, and so, while I was doing my BA my friends were going to Seattle and to Quebec to participate in the anti-globalization protests.  I didn’t go to those cities but I was obviously involved in those politics and in the local manifestation of that movement; we’d have marches and stuff [where I lived too].  But I wouldn’t say I was doing anything terribly significant at the level of organizing students, although I did know people who were.  So, then I went and did my master’s degree elsewhere in Canada, and then I came to New York in 2006.  Throughout that time I was involved with the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World], although not terribly active.  I did do some workplace organizing, but not through the IWW.  And I did various political, sort of activist-y type stuff.  So, I got to New York in ’06; came here to do my PhD in philosophy, and I decided to lay low while I was here—not being a citizen, being here on a visa, and so not having all the protections you would have to operate politically as you do when you are citizen. I was still interested in stuff but I wasn’t really actively doing much.

And then Occupy started. The Zuccotti encampment was literally two blocks away from my house, and so I was just thrust into the middle of it, and also very much interested in it, actively.  It re-animated that whole political side of me that had been latent for a few years, and I couldn’t help but get involved.  Shortly after Occupy started, students in New York started meeting—university students across different universities in New York: from the New School (where I’m at), from NYU, from the various CUNY system, from Juilliard, I think a couple from Columbia—and we started meeting weekly.  Basically, the issues that started to come out organically had to do with things like student debt, which is really atrocious in the United States, tuition—because tuition was going to be raised at CUNY by something like 30% over 7 years and they wanted to resist that; as a bastion of public education, it’s supposed to be accessible.  CUNY used to have open enrollment, and I think it used to have zero tuition.  So, students started meeting in New York.  Last November, as part of that, there was an occupation at the New School, which I got heavily involved in.  Through this process, I came back to the Wobblies [the IWW] and have started doing more concrete organizing that kind of overlaps the student organizing category and the labor organizing category.

Occupied Manhattan – A picture from inside the New School student occupation in November 2011 (it started on the 17th, which was the big day of action for education, and ended a week later). It involved post-secondary students from all across New York, and took place in a New School student study center at 90 5th avenue. (pic from Marianne Garneau)

CW: Could you say more about your IWW organizing and how you’re connecting that with the Occupy organizing? 

Marianne: Sure.  So, the IWW has a branch here that probably has over 100 members, if you’re going to be more inclusive about it.  But in any given month, we probably collect dues from between 50 and 70.  There are a couple bigger campaigns in New York, like the Focus on the Food Chain campaign.  It’s a good, active branch.

When Occupy started, a number of different working groups started, and some of them had a labor focus.  One of them was called Occupy Your Workplace.  Some Wobblies have been involved in that, including myself since a couple of months ago.  Another fellow worker has been involved with that since the beginning.  One of the things we’ve done is run organizer trainings through the IWW, but reaching out to people through the Occupy Your Workplace working group, and that has ended up getting some new members on board in the Wobblies.

That’s a kind of structural overlap that’s taking place.  But I could also describe the overlap for myself.  The thing about being involved with the IWW is it gives you a good clear organizing focus and skill-set and orientation.  So, when the student stuff kicked off in New York around Occupy, in September, October, and November, and through the winter, it had a very activist-y focus.  And that has its limitations.  You can sort of be visible and spectacular and pull stunts and have days of action and marches and whatever, the kinds of stuff they were organizing.  For example, we were protesting outside of CUNY when they were voting on whether to raise tuition, which of course they did.  Actually, that’s an amazing story too.  There was a day that the board of governors were meeting, they cancelled classes and locked the building down and had the meeting, which actually by law is required to be a public meeting because they are a public university.  So, we all stood outside and protested.

CUNY protest against tuition hikes (pic via NY Times)

At the time it felt like that was the only thing we could do.  But, then you look at something like what’s going in Montreal right now, where they organize themselves into assemblies, university by university, faculty by faculty, department by department.  That’s where that strike mandate came from, from that real democratic procedure.  In New York it’s been more on the order of activist-y, what I like to call spectacular politics, which is a technical academic term for this stuff that you do that’s very visible but not necessarily organized at the real locus of power.  Now, I’m moving more to this Montreal model of organizing.

So, right now I’m working on this campaign at the New School to organize student workers, and there’s a real significance of that kind of campaign at the New School because the New School is extremely expensive, located in an extremely expensive city, and they offer probably worse funding to their students, especially at the graduate level, than any other post-secondary institution in the country.  They not only don’t offer funding packages, supporting funding packages like stipends that you could live off of, but they charge you tuition as a graduate student—and tuition is $25-30,000 a year, and they’ll discount it for you as a graduate student, but you’re still paying out of pocket to be there.  Whereas, most universities are paying you to be a grad student, they’re investing in you.  As a result, pretty much every student at the New School ends up working at the New School in some part-time temp-y type job, and people get federal work-study.  I don’t, as an international student, but a lot of people get federal work-study as part of their funding package, which you work out.  You get a reward of, like, $2000, and you work for it as a job.  The thing is that the New School then hires these students at a rate of $9 or $10 an hour, so they’re prioritizing exploiting the labor of their own students over their students receiving funding so that they can be students, so that they can have the time and opportunity to study and develop themselves as students.  Besides the work-study, there are a lot of students who work on campus to get employment, again, strictly out of financial necessity.  And, the New School, the way that they pay us, the way that they treat us, the way that they’ll jerk people around—they’ll reduce their hours to like one hour a week or they’ll award them money and take it away or give them jobs and take them away or pay really poorly, and none of this has any benefits either.  They’re treating us as though we’re like teenagers living at home with mom and dad who want some pocket money for beer.  The way they treat us as laborers is sort of with that kind of contempt.  And yet they know that’s not the case at all, they absolutely know that their students are trying to support themselves in very expensive New York City.

So, we’ve started meeting.  This is where a more Wobbly orientation comes from.  We started building a committee, reaching out to the student workers on campus, definitely within the parameters of ‘no management.’  We haven’t been involving part-time salaried employees either, not that we have an antagonistic relationship with them.  But, we’re gathering and building a committee of student-workers.  We’ve met a number of times so far, just kind of setting ourselves up in terms of having an email list and people’s contact information and identifying offices of where to find student-workers on campus.  We’re kind of completely diffused in this school: there will be two students working in one office, and two students in another, and three in another, and we’re all in different buildings.  We don’t have a typical campus either: we’re all spread out.  To me, that just presents an interesting challenge as to how we’re going to organize.  We kind of also by the same token have tentacles all throughout the organization, which, if you can get them to act at the same time, can have a really dramatic effect if you’re trying to pull some kind of direct action in the workplace.

So, that’s how the Wobbly thing has mostly influenced me in the student organizing that I’ve been doing: taking it in that direction of, not having some elite crack group of activist-oid students over here meeting (and I’ve been a part of that kind of thing), but having something that is based on everybody’s participation who is similarly positioned.

CW: How are you doing your campaign?  Are you taking an explicitly IWW approach?  Have you defined the group as Wobblies, or is it an independent thing?

Marianne: It is an independent thing.  We’re not organizing under the auspices of the IWW.  This campaign kind of had two starts.  One was back in the spring.  A couple of students met a couple of times, and we were starting to just identify this as something to organize around, but it never really got off the ground, because as students you just end up being incredibly busy and bogged down between the month of March and the end of the semester, and it didn’t have enough momentum or enough membership to keep going.  So, it sort of got re-animated this summer.  One of the things we did was to have this IWW organizer training.  It brought in a bunch of Wobs who hadn’t done the organizer training—I actually hadn’t myself.  It brought in people from Occupy Your Workplace, and I invited everyone from our campaign to participate in it.  There ended up only being two people out of eight who made it.

The IWW model is the model that we’re pursuing.  The good thing is that there have been people on the committee—by ‘committee’ I just mean people that are student-workers that have signed onto this campaign, share their contact information, intend to come to meetings, and have it explicitly stated that they are on board.  So, there was one member on the committee who was like, ‘hey, why don’t we just do this through like, the UAW, in particular, because they organized adjuncts at the New School about five years ago?’  To make a short story long, when this student-worker organizing campaign had that first kick-off in the spring, there was one person who was coming to meetings who was, sort of, really insisting on meeting with some business union reps, particularly from the UAW.  So, I conceded and I sat down and had a meeting with this woman who was involved in the campaign to organize adjuncts at the New School.  She was a perfectly nice person, and she gave me a couple of beginner organizer type handouts.  It was like the AEIOU stuff we talk about in our IWW organizer trainings.  It was all really innocuous, good stuff.  At the same time, she wasn’t terribly interested in our campaign yet, because at the time we were thinking more along the lines of organizing academically employed students—so, teaching assistants and research assistants and that kind of thing.  She wasn’t terribly interested in our campaign yet.  She certainly wasn’t trying to hijack it or anything, because she knew that we were at zero; we just hadn’t done any work yet. She even sort of said something like, ‘look, if the UAW were to get involved, they would only get involved once you guys had already built some momentum on the ground.’  So, they could parachute in later and start doing card check and stuff like that.

So, when this student-worker organizing campaign kicked off in the summer it had the focus of organizing work-study, and the really casual, clerical, hourly wage-slave type student-workers.  Again, somebody on the campaign—somebody different this time—was like, ‘well we should do this through the UAW.  We should do this because they’re already on campus.  Or we should do it through the Teamsters.  Let’s reach out to a business union to help us with this.’  Fortunately, there was a sort of ready-made response to shut that down, which is that, I don’t think that federal work-study students are even legally allowed to organize, but they’re definitely legally prohibited from striking because you can’t strike the taxpayer.  So, it’s built into our campaign, and into what it is that we’re trying to organize and do, that we can’t go that route.  And, the same kind of suggestion comes up in another form, where people say, ‘well, how about we reach out to our shitty student union?’  It’s called the University Senate.  The answer is because that’s not the kind of mandate they have either.  Those guys have never done shit about this cause, they don’t talk about it, they’re not interested, and they don’t have that kind of mandate.  And they’re organized in such a way that they receive—basically the university collects five or fifteen dollars from every student every semester, it’s like dues check-off, and gives it to this organization, and they just don’t do shit.  They’re just not interested in that kind of thing.  And they’re not going to take a position against the administration, which is who collects and hands them their money.  It’s almost the same sort of structural issue that you have with a business union.

CW: Based on my experiences with business unions, I’m wondering whether or not you’re considering going with the IWW or an independent thing, and why or why not?

Marianne: I’ve been thinking more and more…  What we’ve been doing instead is just an unaffiliated organizing campaign.  In the day and age of Occupy and that kind of thing, I think that there’s more of a possibility of doing things like that.  And people are less confused about the idea of there not being a particular nameable umbrella organization under whose auspices you are organizing or with which you are affiliated, because with Occupy, there’s no political party, there’s no trade union, there’s no particular affiliation; it’s just Occupy, and you just do stuff, and you do it via direct action.  So, I think that that precedent means that when we get in a room and have a meeting with student-workers, they’re not waiting for the particular card carrying organization to show up.  They understand what it is to organize on the basis of solidarity and direct action.  That’s the IWW bent that we have anyway; that’s the kind of campaign this is going to be.  It’s gonna be built out of a committee of workers on the floor, and we’re going to run things on the basis of direct collective action and solidarity unionism.

But, just in the last couple weeks, I’ve been thinking about how we do need something to make this concrete.  You know how difficult it is to get people out to a meeting, and to convince them that what you’re starting is something actually real, and it’s solid, as opposed to just an idea of, ‘hey, working here sucks, if only it were better.’  And I feel as though it might actually be important to do this instead with the Wobs.  To be extremely concrete about it, there’s something to be said of having pins and cards and a name.  It’s that kind of thing that makes things real in people’s minds.

CW: Is your student-worker organizing there at the New School the only Wobbly-type education organizing in New York City or is there other education worker organizing happening?

Marianne: There’s a lot going on in New York, and, unfortunately, most of it is not happening along IWW lines, broadly construed.  So, for a long time people were saying Occupy is dead, Occupy is in hibernation, and it wasn’t true—but now it’s actually true.  There are still working groups and working groups still meet, and there’s still stuff going on leading up to the summer and leading up to September 17th, which will be the one year anniversary.  But, the general assembly doesn’t meet anymore, which as far as I can tell is fine because it wasn’t a very effective body in the first place.  But, Occupy really was going on through the whole winter and through the spring.  When it was still hot, one of the things that it was doing: it had something called Occupy the DOE (which is the Department of Education), because Bloomberg had created this thing called the PEP (the Panel on Education Policy) and it was a completely disingenuous body of non-native bureaucrat fuckheads, who would look at public schools in the city and their performance and vote on whether or not to close them.  I think they looked at 33 public high schools and voted to close, like, 32 of them.  It was a clear powerplay on the part of the forces of capital to replace public institutions with private ones, because they then open up charter schools.  I actually have a Wobbly friend who organizes teachers at charter schools (not under the auspices of the Wobs but with the AFT or UFT).  So, Occupy would show up to these PEP meetings—and actually, mostly it wasn’t Occupy; it was the neighborhood parents, students, and concerned citizens at large.  I don’t know if they were being partly organized by the business unions involved in the schools.  So, there’d be big, big rallies outside these PEP meetings.  Just to give you a picture: there was one meeting where the panel had six members, they were all sitting around a table with microphones, and they had those industrial headphones—noise-canceling headphones that dudes on the airport tarmac wear—and were just plugged into each others’ microphones.  That’s how loud the room was, because the meeting was open to the public, and that’s how loud the screaming, yelling, and whistling was, on the part of hundreds and hundreds of people who were packed into there.  You couldn’t hear anything but angry protest.  So, there was serious public mobilization, perhaps organized a bit too.

So, that was one thing that was going on in the area of education.  But, again, with the model of: show up and protest outside or inside, and be completely excluded, and they decide against your interests anyway.  Another area of education organizing was a campaign five years ago organizing adjuncts at the New School.  I know of campaigns elsewhere in the United States: there’s one in Chicago, of organizing adjuncts.  At CUNY, the student adjuncts and research assistants are already organized, and they’re organized into the same union as the tenured faculty and everybody else.  But, it’s the typical worst-case scenario of being organized by a business union.  They pay their dues, they get their shitty contract, they keep their head down, they keep working.  No actual real militant organization of the class.

I hate to be negative, but the positive thing to say, I guess, is that there’s been a lot of different mobilizations in New York around educational issues, like, big stuff regarding student debt coming out of Occupy.  But, it takes extraordinarily unsatisfying forms.  The biggest thing that’s happening now with New York City university students that are still meeting across New York City is that they’re creating this Free University.  They had one on May 1st in Madison Square Park, and I went to it and it was better than I thought it was going to be.  It was kind of awesome.  Regularly scheduled classes were taken to the park on a completely voluntary basis by professors and students.  They just relocated class that day to the park.  Other things that were going on were spontaneous lectures, including well-established academics—people talking about the political moment.  It was an inspiring place to walk around.

But, then, they took that model and now they’re going to kind of beat it to death.  They’re going to organize an entire Free University, and it’s like, guys, this doesn’t fucking do anything: it doesn’t do anything about tuition, it doesn’t do anything about debt, or about the massive inequities that exist in the education system in the first place.

Actually, I’ll give you an even better example of this.  So, Occupy Wall Street started on September 17th.  October 17th was a big day of action: the one-month anniversary.  November 17th was a big day of action.  There was a protest, a march, I think it was on September 30th, the day that 700 people got arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.  Immediately, a group of us kind of saw each other on that march: professors and students at the New School.  We started emailing each other.  We had a meeting on Monday or Tuesday, and threw up some hastily printed off fliers around campus, inviting students to walk out on October 5th, five days later.  And, the school actually walked out.  Professors canceled classes, students streamed out of classes.  There was actually a walkout at the New School.  For the ostensibly radical reputation that we have, it was fucking incredible, the fact that this happened.  I’ve been there for six years, nothing like that had ever happened.  I would never have predicted something like that would have happened.  We didn’t even organize it.  There was no time to organize something like that in five days.  It just happened spontaneously.

OWS – November 17th ‘Day of Action’ – (pic via Time)

Same thing happened on November 17^th: high school students, university students, everybody streamed out.  I was teaching as an adjunct at the time, at Juilliard, and I didn’t make my students walk out, because that’s not the point of a day like that.  But I had another student come in and disrupt my class and invite my students to walk out, and they did, and I walked out with them.  We came down to Union Square where the big gathering was.  I was also on the inside of organizing the occupation at the New School.  So, we had a big gathering at Union Square and the New School is a block away.  So, as the march started, I started handing out leaflets, telling people, ‘come join the occupation right here in this building.’  We had our occupation.  That was just a massive, massive day: massive mobilization.

New School Occupation – Nov. 17th, 2011 – Read the Inaugural Statement here

The following are some photos of the New School Occupation from Marianne:

The occupation breaks up a week later—I can talk about that; it’s a long story.  Then, what do students do?  We continue meeting citywide, university students, in December.  And they start planning for a fucking day of action on March 1st, another big march.  It’s this bad mentality of a) giving over to politics of spectacle rather than real organizing of our power as a class, and b) thinking like, ‘that was cool and fun, that happened once, let’s just keep doing that and doing it again.’  It’s like, look, all that was fine, but it wasn’t a really powerful thing.  Then, students of New York threw their weight for two and a half months of organizing towards a big day of action for education on March 1st [2012].  The call first came out of California and we echoed it in New York.  We thought it would be a natural thing.  We were telling as many people as possible.  We were organizing the crap out of it.  And it didn’t happen!  Nobody walked out.  Nobody participated.  They planned the shit out of this thing: like muster points, parade routes, and whatever.  And absolutely nothing happened; nobody walked out.

I went to meetings before and after, where I said: there’s a sense in which a big walkout or march is not something you can organize.  Sometimes people get pissed off and mobilized and that’s what they do spontaneously.  If they’re not going to do it spontaneously, you cannot organize them to do it.  But what you can organize—as we know as Wobblies—you can organize people into direct democratic bodies that know how to leverage their power—we’re really the ones who hold all the power—to fuck up the business of the people who are screwing us over, whether they’re our educators or our employers.  I’ve been tilting at windmills for the last couple months in New York to get people to think more along the lines of that model.  And, in conjunction with that, move away from consensus and towards majority rule and Robert’s Rules, and that kind of thing.  I’m just completely outnumbered and drowned out, and it’s not shifting.

The only thing that actually holds out some promise of shifting that now is what’s going on in Montreal.  What’s going in Montreal is exactly what I just described; it’s a very Wobbly thing in a way.  I went to Montreal myself during the Anarchist Bookfair, because I was tabling, and I met with some of the organizers, some of the members of CLASSE.  Then, a comrade and I in the IWW wrote an article on exactly how they organized, the nuts and bolts of how they organized that shit in Montreal [see “Snapshots of the Student Movement in Montreal”].  I just disseminated that article as widely as I could in the student movement in New York and elsewhere.  For the first couple of months, after people started paying attention to Montreal—which I would say is about May, after that strike had been going on for a while—there was a flood actually of sort of “protest tourism.”  People from New York would go up to Montreal and participate in this grand spectacle that is the student strike there, and they would try to echo it with solidarity actions here.  It’s so tangible how the message, the real core of it, would get perverted—because people would go up there and write articles and Facebook updates and stuff like that about how, ‘the revolutionary spirit in Montreal, we need that spirit to catch flame here in New York,’ and it’s like, no, we need to organize on the same model!  That’s the real issue.  But, I think that after awhile people are eventually catching on to the fact that the reason they pulled this off was because they used a very particular model of organizing it.  And it’s not just a matter of spreading the revolutionary inspirational fire here.

This is catty, but one of the ways the Montreal strike got perverted when it came to New York is: in Montreal it’s called grève illimitée, which means unlimited strike, which is great, because it’s a play on unlimited in time and unlimited in scope.  In New York, the anarchist insurrectos—there are unfortunately very few organizationally-minded anarchists in New York; they’re mostly insurrectionists—they created a big banner which they bring to all of their solidarity casseroles marches, and they have it on their Facebook page or whatever, and it’s “Infinite Strike.”  That’s fucking meaningless!  What’s “infinite strike”?  By even saying the word “infinite,” you’re sort of deforming it beyond any recognizable shape whatsoever.  But that’s so the sort of insurrectionist New York re-interpretation of grève illimitée, which is an invitation to other sectors to participate alongside, and it’s a statement to the Québec government that we’re not going away until we get what we want.  And they perverted that into some meaningless “infinite strike.”  So, that’s in a nutshell the problem with New York.

CW: With what you learned from going up to Montreal and talking with people about it, how are you trying to translate that into your organizing approach in what you’re doing with the student-worker organizing?  Has anybody around NYC picked up that approach and started to do that?

Marianne: The student organizing that’s happening in New York, it does have a focus on issues: things like tuition and debt, as well as things like access to education.  Definitely, at the most radical, critical forefront of that are the students at CUNY.  And I would say that that’s because their institution has a real radical history.  Unlike at the New School where we have only a radical intellectual history, CUNY has a real radical history.  It used to have open enrollment, and it used to be run practically by committees of students and teachers.  I think that that sort of democratic DNA kind of still lives in CUNY.  So those students are radical in terms of things like access to education, issues of race and gender in education, tuition, and accessibility.  And they have multiple assemblies at CUNY: grad students, undergrad students, there’s supposed to be one that’s CUNY wide.  There are divisions that have cropped up between the undergrad and grad students because they belong to different demographic profiles.  So, CUNY being a public and more accessible institution, the undergrad population tends to be lower income and more racially diverse.  Whereas the graduate students tend to be more white, male, and elite, as most graduate student populations are.  So, that’s a constant rift.  But, as far as I know, these assemblies are still basically on the basis of voluntary participation.

Before describing what’s significant about Montreal, by contrast, and what I learned from speaking to the student organizers there, let me first say that a lot of people in New York, and I think elsewhere in the United States, when the Montreal student strike broke out, or when they started hearing about, they assumed that the reason why they were able to pull that kind of shit off in Montreal is because they are already organized into student unions that have some ability to bargain and negotiate—not just student associations but student unions.  Whereas, in the United States, correct me if I’m wrong, student unions are actually illegal; you can’t have that kind of student union in the United States that has that kind of position.  So, people thought, well that’s why they’re able to pull this stuff off in ‘commie Montreal.’  But, that’s not the case at all.  The student strike in Montreal was able to be organized because they completely by-passed that infrastructure.

CEGEP Vieux-Montreal assembly – voting to continue the strike without conditions (August 13, 2012 – pic via The Link)

The way they by-passed it was in two ways. First of all, in institutions, organizing these assemblies—an organizer told me, they first started doing this as a university-wide kind of thing, and then they realized, no, we have to go more fine-grained than this, because otherwise you’re not going to get students to come out and participate.  And if you don’t get students to come out and participate, the student body at large is not going to take the decisions of this assembly to be authoritative.  So, they went more fine-grained, and they went to faculties, which we would call divisions or something here: so, faculty of law, faculty of science, etc.  And then they realized, no, that’s still not fine-grained enough for the same reasons.  We need to go more micro. We need to go down to departments, so, like, the philosophy department and whatever.  Pretty soon, that model spread, and every department at every university had an assembly, and they were quite well attended.  I think it was something like 40% participation.  It was quite substantive, and it was very clear that everybody was welcome to come, and when people did come, there was no guarantee as to which way the vote was going to go.  There were people who were drawn to come because they wanted a strike to happen, and there were people who were drawn to attend because they didn’t.  One woman who I was talking to, her department voted not to go on strike.  That’s how the strike was built.  That’s one organizing level that made it possible: really, really drilling down and having direct democratic assemblies, which operate on the basis of majority rule, but with some trappings of consensus brought in.  So, people were doing temperature checks, and they would do progressive stack, such as if they saw that people in one corner were disgruntled or disconnected. So, bringing in some lessons from consensus meeting and decision-making, but mostly on the basis of majority rule.  And then, once it was voted whether or not to strike, that of course had to be enforced, and I’ll speak to that in a second.

Poster with history of CLASSE (click for large version) – via Stopthehike.ca

The other significant thing about the way they organized the strike was the fact that there was CLASSE (Coalition large de l’ASSÉ) [English website, French website].  In French, ASSÉ is a play on the word ‘enough,’ but it’s an acronym, ASSÉ, Association of Student Syndicalists, or something like that.  It has an explicitly anti-capitalist and syndicalist bent.  So, the coalition, CLASSE, that came out of that was a way for individual departments to affiliate with something larger without having to do that through their unions.  Because they’re already organized into unions, their union belongs to an umbrella union organization.  In Quebec, there’s the FECQ and the FEUQ and ASSÉ.  So, if your union is affiliated with FEUQ then you can’t affiliate with FECQ, whereas CLASSE was open to any affiliation.  So, you could be already a part of the FECQ or the FEUQ but you’re welcome to also join CLASSE.  So, they had a different way of coagulating all of the student groups.  That’s the organizing model.  That’s how they were able to pull it off.

A friend of mine, who I’d met in Montreal, made a really, really important point the other day.  She put a link on Facebook to an article that was describing how incredibly difficult and frightening and onerous and shitty it was, once they had voted to strike in a particular department, to enforce that strike.  She said, you’d get yelled at, you’d get assaulted, you’d get insulted, you’d get students mad at you, professors mad at you.  And they figured out one of the better ways of maintaining the strike discipline, in other words, enforcing the picket line, was not to prevent students from going into the classroom but just to prevent professors from going into the classroom.  And the professors who are sort of softy-lefty liberals are kind of like, ‘alright, sure, I won’t cross the picket-line because, pat self on back, I’m cool that way, and now I have a couple hours off, and I’m part of a union too, so I kind of vaguely respect picket lines’—whereas, if they tried to enforce the picket line against students, students would get really, really pissed at you, defending their exercise of their time, or whatever.  Even though they knew that a strike had been voted on.

So, those are really important and really hard lessons that people here need to take from Montreal.  Drilling down and actual use of assemblies to make decisions and not sit around and just have a meeting and talk about ‘how difficult debt is to deal with and screw the administration and let’s create a protest.’  But, vote on a real, rubber-meets-road decision, like, ‘are we going to shut down their business?  And if we are, how are we going to enforce that?’

CW: So, how do we build something like CLASSE in the US?  There are definitely a lot of differences of the context in Quebec.  I wonder if you think it’s possible.  How can it be done to build up to something like that here?  Would we need to build an ASSÉ type radical student union first? 

Marianne: That’s a really good question.  It’s sort of the question of, how do you create something out of nothing?  Because, yeah, we’re starting from zero.  And, the other way we’re starting from zero is that Montreal has a real solid history of these kinds of strikes—this exact kind of event.  They had it four or five years ago.  They had one seven years or ten years ago.  They have them on a regular basis.  People like to point out, ‘well, tuition is lower in Quebec than anywhere else, therefore how can you complain?’—which is that ridiculous argument that somehow two wrongs make a right.  Why not lower everybody else’s tuition to Quebec levels rather than raising it to Alberta levels, for example?  The fact that their tuition is so low is a reflection of the fact that they’ve always historically had this really vibrant, really militant student movement, one that is willing to strike and directly disrupt, and not wait for the leadership of the business unions.

By the way, the business unions of Quebec and the umbrella associations of business unions of Quebec, like the FTQ and the CLC, documents have been leaked about how they are explicitly talking amongst themselves about not supporting the strike anymore—because it’s circumventing their mandate [see article: “CLC Sells Out Students”].  They’re talking about not sending donations, not doing solidarity actions, and they’ll cloak it in the language of ‘Quebec has its sovereignty, Quebec has a certain independence, and doesn’t want to be dictated to by the rest of Canada,’ so they repeat that in the labor movement, like, ‘don’t overstep your bounds and go support the Quebec student movement because that’s their own thing.’   Anyway, the labor bureaucracy is completely trying to sabotage the Quebec student movement because they’re fucking embarrassed by it.  It shows how impotent they are and it shows how the real way of organizing is anarcho-syndicalism, basically.

So, that leads into my answer to your question, which is, there’s a sense in which we have a big problem because we’re starting from scratch and we don’t have that history and we don’t have that experience of experienced organizers to mentor younger organizers in the United States.  But, having said that, you can create an anarcho-syndicalist organization.  In other words, it’s kind of great that they’re not relying on the official labor bureaucracy to carry out this strike.  Because, yeah, we don’t have one of those in the US, but we don’t fucking need that.  That’s not actually how these things are organized.  In fact, it means that there’s possibly less of an impediment, because if we don’t have those assholes to deal with who are going to try to undermine and sabotage us, then it’s one fewer roadblock.  We can just do this from scratch and out of the blue, and have it hopefully work.

But, in terms of concrete steps: absolutely talking about and disseminating exactly how they are doing things in Montreal, trying to launch that kind of model here, trying to organize assemblies in departments here.  You’re trying to import a model that is, in a way, foreign, although it is a model that would be endorsed, supported, and embraced in theory by a lot of students here.  But, now we just have to get the sort of traction for the actual, on-the-ground creation of that, and use people’s wide-eyed inspiration of Montreal to import the model.

CW: To use a cliche, I feel like, ‘we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.’  There might only be a few dozen people across the country who are really inspired to do this.  Maybe we could come up with some kind of plan together.  We do have some resources with our IWW organization, also, such as trainings.  This is one thing I’m really excited about trying to make happen: to modify the IWW organizer training to make it specific for the university-organizing context, particularly for students and student-workers.  I think having a concrete project like that could be kind of a focal point for that kind of organizing to kick off.  That would be a way to build on the experience that IWW organizers have.

Marianne:  It goes back to the sort of basic lessons of the IWW.  It comes down to training, because that’s what the gap is.  Let’s not fetishize the gap between where we are and where we need to be—as a matter of consciousness or as a spiritual matter.  It’s a matter of training—people not actually effectively having the concrete skills to carry forward the struggle in this way.  The dissemination of those trainings: the IWW should absolutely be putting together a training for organizing at the level of education.  The IWW Montreal is actually a very decent branch, and there are members that are part of CLASSE that I met when I was there; they’re awesome, and I assume they’re at least partly involved in this.  Yeah, we put together an educator training, we run that training, and disseminate that training.  The other dimension is bringing people into the fold, arming them with the skills but bringing them into the fold.  And that gets back to sort of Organizer 101 too.  You go and you speak to people directly about the issues that they’re facing, and you sort of agitate them, and whip them up, and you talk about what some of the solutions are, which we’re getting sort of directly broadcast out of Montreal.  And then you start organizing.  That means talking to people individually.  In my department, we do have a forum—a student body that’s left-leaning and that meets regularly—going to that and bringing up the model of how they’re doing things in Montreal, and suggesting that as a way we get together.  Maybe, to cement that model, holding some kind of department intervention or direct action that gets us some kind of small result.  Inspire people with that model and to continue on with that model.  In a way, what you’re saying makes me think of how this is all Organizing 101.

A lot of students haven’t been involved in union organizing because they’re students—they’ve been in school their whole lives, so they haven’t been particularly involved in workplace organizing.  Part of the reason I happen to have been is because I’ve been working the whole time that I’ve been in school, almost full-time.  I think that you can kind of sense that different sensibility among students who have only been students or who are living as students on the basis of loans or parental support—where being a student is a really subordinate position, where you’re kind of a consumer, but you’re completely passive, and you’re also not the source of production.  So, it’s hard to have any sense of your own power in that situation.  It’s a really passive role, and unfortunately, I think that lends itself to a certain lack of experience, and even a sort of lack of conceptual imagination when it comes to organizing.  It’s almost like the model in their head in some sense is speaking out in class, because that’s the environment that they’re used to, and that’s how they know how to make an intervention and get some attention and re-direct things.  So, I feel that a lot of student organizing is almost on that model of speaking out in class.  It’s, you know, ‘let’s demonstrate.’  But, having said that, there’s huge potential there.  Look at Montreal.

Summary:

Dr. Anna Feigenbaum gives her thoughts on radical teaching and organizing within and beyond the university.  Against education that tries to transmit radical politics to students, she recommends an approach that starts with students’ experiences and works with them through the difficulties and challenges they face—and witness—in their everyday lives.  Revolutionary pedagogy can be embedded in art and creativity, engaging students through playful, reflexive and collaborative projects.  Rather than getting caught up in puritanical self-flagellation over what cannot be achieved, struggles can be seen from a more ecological perspective, one that works both inside and outside institutions simultaneously: chiseling the university’s walls while building cooperative alternatives.

Radicalization in Montreal Student Organizing

CW: How did you come to be involved with radical organizing and pedagogy around universities?

Anna: The first thing I got involved in was the graduate feminist group at McGill University.  At the time I got involved it was just a lunch meeting, but we ended up becoming much more.  I think that was a lucky coincidence of who was there at the time.  This group that was meant to be a kind of feminist reading group turned into one of the bastions of engaged grad student activism.  We put pressure onto the more formal graduate union, and we got involved with the TA union, sitting on committees and bringing forward motions around such things as corporatization.  In 2005, the major student strikes happened in Montreal, the precedent to what we’re seeing now.   We ended up forming this group with some of the people who worked at QPIRG (Quebec Public Research Interest Group) called GRADE – The Graduate Association for Decorporatizing Education.  That ran for about two years.  We did a kind of ‘rad grad’ orientation: new students workshops, trainings, and radical tours, modeled on the one that QPIRG ran for freshmen.  We did a few events throughout those couple years, such as a cabaret.  We were a small collective, and we had a fall-out between liberals and radicals—your traditional story of left groups infighting.  So, we didn’t last very long, but for a time we were a kind of pressure group pushing that sort of radical edge onto our post-graduate society.

CW: How did GRADE relate with the grad union?

Anna: Some of the people in GRADE were part of the Post-Graduate Student Society (PGSS), sat on it and had votes on it.  So, they would put forward motions and give talks at their meetings.  They ran parliamentary style.  We were kind of a pressure group or a lobby group in relation to them. When strike votes were going through PGSS, we would be pushing the agenda of those.  At McGill, there’s maybe 200 or so radical grad students, so you knew everyone.  QPIRG, the union, and the radical contingency of PGSS all worked together.  We did a union drive to try to unionize sessionals around that time (2006).  These things were tied around tuition hikes and all this corporatizing of McGill that was crystallizing at that moment.

CW: Could you say a little more about the corporatizing that was happening at McGill?

Anna: I remember the tuition thing being huge.  That’s one of the things that people really struggle to understand about the student protests in Montreal now, because the tuition is relatively very low.  But, in the student movement in Quebec you have this really radical contingency arguing for free education—that this is a public good.  That’s still very alive in Quebec.  That was new to me; as an organizer I found it very interesting to see how strong that was.  So, on the one hand, you have this very pragmatic protesting happening around tuition hikes.  But, then, you have this much broader debate happening around, ‘what is the nature of education, and public education?’  That’s where you get the arguments against corporatized education.  McGill is this kind of money house with tons of funding from big defense companies and tons of connections with all sorts of corporate institutions, and institutions like the World Bank.

There was also a group that we worked with at Concordia that was unmasking all these connections.  So, we were also doing some of that work of exposing corporate connections.  We organized a protest with that group when there was a World Bank conference at McGill, and we organized some events around that.

We focused on the way these two issues are coupled together: on the one hand, free education and the ways in which the corporatization of public education changes what we think the place of the university is in society, and, on the other hand, ties with corporations.  I don’t think we were doing this very coherently.  It was more one of these pragmatic collective formations, where ‘nobody is doing this, and somebody needs to do this,’ and so a bunch of people who wanted to do it got together and did it.

CW: As a grad student group, did you have links with undergrads as well?

Anna: At both Concordia and McGill, QPIRG was really the hub of Anglo-radical organizing.  It’s also where things like No One is Illegal would meet, and where the anarchist bookfair was organized.  It was very practical.  They had money, paid staff, photocopier machines, and couches in the rooms so you could sit together.  A lot of undergrads were involved in the PIRGs and those other community organizations that are often packed with students, especially in the transient kind of Anglo community that Montreal has.  So, you had a lot of informal interactions with students through those other kinds of activist engagements.  ‘Rad Frosh’ was organized by QPIRG—the paid staff as well as the volunteers.  So, a lot of the tighter organizing came through QPIRG.

There was a big issue around closing the sexual assault center.  For that, we worked with the student union.  There was a year, maybe 2007, when the undergrad student union was radicalized.  Often it was not.

CW: Moving ahead now, what have you been involved with since grad school?

Anna: I have done a lot of anarchist free school stuff in London.  I haven’t organized any, but I gave workshops.  London is not so good at sustainable free schools, but has a lot of people who get together and organize one-offs.  So, there’ll be one that lasts for a summer or a week.  At that time, there were some neat things happening.  Some young art student types were occupying rich people’s mansions in expensive neighbourhoods and creating free schools there.  So that was more like T.A.Z. [temporary autonomous zone] stuff—they came for a little while and then left.  I think there was one called the Really Free School.

I was also in this group called the Feminist Activist Forum.  That was around in 2007-2009.  We would do workshops around the country.  Then, I started working at a small, liberal arts institution.  Teachers have a lot of freedom there in what they teach and how they do it.  So, it was a great place for working on pedagogy stuff.

Against the Transmission Model of Radical Education: Start with where your Students are at

CW: Could you say more about your pedagogy?  What sorts of radical pedagogy have you tried?

Anna: I actually started teaching in undergrad, when I TA’d my first class.  And then I started TA’ing pretty early on in the PhD.  I TA’d feminist theory.  Then, I started teaching women’s studies.  Women’s Studies is a place where the whole curriculum is more amenable to critical content.  A large portion of the students know what they are getting themselves into.  I taught there with a heavy-stick kind of approach; not like, ‘we’ll beat radicalism into them,’ but ‘we’ll show them the inequalities and injustices in the world, and they’ll be converted to this radical way of thinking.’  That worked okay because a lot of the people who choose to do Women’s Studies want that kind of transformative experience.  They’re expecting that from you.  But there are maybe a quarter of the students for whom that didn’t work at all.

Then I taught a couple classes that weren’t radically political in their formation.  And that heavy-stick approach really didn’t work.  In one of the classes I actually got into trouble for something I’d done with them.  I had a reprimanding meeting with the department chair about ‘anger management.’  That kind of anger around students’ political ignorance and that kind of demanding of criticality backfired in this situation. Then I taught a media studies class for the first time, and again got some bad teaching evaluations.  I just didn’t feel engaged with them as I was teaching the class.  That made me re-think, ‘what’s the best way of reaching the students who aren’t already game, who aren’t already involved in these new ways of thinking?’

I’d read a lot of bell hooks; she was very formational in my early teaching, and she still is.  I’d read one piece where she talks about respecting the pain of your students as being real pain.  With these kinds of transitions of consciousness comes a lot of real fear and anxiety.  I took that to heart and started to think about how we might re-structure that kind of transformative or radical education around this notion that there’s a lot of pain in uncovering systematic injustice.  Whether it’s linking up with your life or linking things in other people’s lives together.  So, I started to take a much more kind of cultural approach—still using the ‘personal is political’ stuff from Women’s Studies, but with an approach that looks, from the outside, like a more innocent way.  For example, ‘let’s make a graph of how much we use our mobile phones in a day.’  Then, you start from these kinds of innocuous activities and tasks, using various forms of questioning about their own lives.  To start to unearth that critical stuff, rather than coming in with the kind of critique that you want them to have.  So, there’s very little transmission model of radical teaching left in me, and a lot more activities, hands-on stuff, a lot of Platonic dialoguing.

CW: Do you find that’s been working well for you?

Anna: Yeah, I think teaching at a small liberal arts college has been amazing.  A lot of the students there are really international, many have lived in multiple countries, a lot are quite wealthy, but the kind of race/class/gender paradigm is really different than in your standard American university.  Our wealthiest kids tend to be from the poorest countries, and the poorest kids are from the richest countries.  A lot of the Middle Eastern and African kids are the wealthiest, and a lot of the white kids from the States are from more working class families and are on scholarship.  So, you can’t just work through those things in the same way that you can in the national context of the US, where race, class, and gender play out according to certain kinds of post-colonial narratives.  The narratives are mixed up with each other in more complicated ways, and that opens up more opportunities for creative pedagogy—for using that hybridity of cultures as a starting point.

I designed a lot of the pedagogy for teaching there, for teaching that particular student body.  I’m a bit nervous about how that’s going to translate back—I’ll be teaching at a big State University in the US next year, and then I’ll be teaching at a British university with a lot of kind of middle class white British students.  And I don’t think it will all translate.  I think you need different tactics for different student bodies.  I think that teaching homogenous student bodies is a very different thing from when you are teaching in a much more diverse kind of classroom.  It’s student-centered pedagogy: giving students hands-on activities and tools for working through their own lives, but also centering the way that you do your curriculum around the student demographic that you’re working with.

CW: Have you had any opportunities to bring radical movements into the class or to try to connect students with any radical organizing outside of the class?

Anna: Yeah, I’ve done the classic move of bringing in guest speakers to talk about these kinds of things.  That always goes well, as long as the speaker is good.  Students really like speakers who talk about life experience rather than academic research.  So, bringing in fun and engaging people is useful.  Once in our Women’s Studies class, we brought our class to a demo, but only a few turned up, so I wouldn’t say that was very successful.  I co-taught that class with a friend.  We had a lot of reservations about doing that, in the sense: what is your accountability or responsibility if you bring them with you on a demo?  What if something happens to them?  Are you there as their protector?  I think there were a lot of ethical questions that we hadn’t thought through, and I think it wasn’t until we had the experience when we were like, ‘we’re not sure what the best practice is for doing that.’  And it depends on the situation.

Last fall, I wasn’t living at Occupy in London, but I was helping to run an art space there, for a couple weeks, at its peak.  I brought the students there and I gave them this media ecology assignment where they had to find out about all the different aspects of the camp that were communicating with the media, and they had to make a little map.  That worked out super well.  They were so glad I had brought them there.  That time, again, it was all voluntary.  Also, at the Occupy in London, the police were pretty hands off after the first day.  It was not an un-safe space.  It was such a public area; people were going to the Cathedral still.  So, it was a great space to introduce people to what action and protest can look like.  Some students who were super nervous about being in a protest space just didn’t come, and some only stayed for a few minutes, but they came.  I had them meet me at Starbucks, which was a great tactic, because there was a Starbucks practically in the camp.  I knew that that would make them comfortable, because it was something that they knew, something that wasn’t radical.  So, we started there, and we just kind of went together; they could go off or they could stay near me.  That was great.  I think every one of them thanked me for bringing them there.

[pic of Occupy London protest camp via Guardian]

I think that is one of the amazing things about protest camps.  Rather than taking students on a march or a demo where there’s this very kind of scripted character that you perform, the protest camp is this convergence space of all sorts.  It felt very different to take students to a protest camp than it did to take them to a demo.  But, there was also six years between these two experiences.

Camouflaging Anti-oppressive Pedagogy and Adapting Techniques

The other thing that I tend to do: I bring a lot of activist practices into my teaching.  So, a lot of my exercises have come out of my participation in facilitation training and anti-oppressive training.  I bring a lot of that into my classroom.  For one of my classes, I taught them consensus decision making.  They had to do their final project using working groups and all with the consensus process, and they had to present something back to the group: they did a mock creative resistance.

CW: Are there any particular anti-oppressive activities that you’ve found to work well in classes?

Anna: One year I tried to do the privilege exercise, and I didn’t think that that went well, in part because the class was too big, and in part because those kinds of exercises are disconnected from students.  It’s like you’re trying to transmit it into the class.  So, I never use something without adapting it, without kind of camouflaging it.  One of the larger projects I’ve done is in a cultural theory course.  We met twice a week: once a week we’d do the formal academic stuff, and the other day I took a bunch of the kind of prompts that you do for thinking through cultural diversity.  I took some of them from anti-oppressive training materials and then I took some of them from memoir-writing workshops, and I kind of mashed it all up.  Then, each week, they have this prompt that’s about thinking through their own lives.  So, sometimes it’s about thinking through exclusion or something like this.  One that I do is using Gloria Anzaldúa’s ideas of borderlands—on how we inhabit multiple spaces—and they have to draw a map of the ways in which different cultures they have grown up in rub up against each other.  Then, we all share them with each other and we have discussions about what came out of the exercise.

The first thing I do at the start of the term is have them read a couple pages from bell hooks’ Critical Thinking, and then we have a discussion in week one about what critical thinking is and why it’s important.  In the next week, we do a listening exercise, which comes from consensus decision-making and anti-oppressive training.  We talk about how to listen, how to synthesize other people’s thoughts, how to look for overlaps and commonalities in experience, how to productively come to difference and ask questions.  That works really well.  Then, we do this thing called the ‘six word memoir,’ in the second week.  You have to write down answers to all these categorical, socio-economic questions.  There’s stuff about race and also about how we identify ourselves sub-culturally.  It’s a memoir exercise, and you just do six words to answer each category.  And then we just go around the circle and everyone has to read them (though they don’t have to read something if they don’t want to).  That’s amazing because it’s all about self-identification, but also about the ways that others categorize us.  Some people take these really creative approaches to the assignment and say quirky things.  And other people use standardized terms ‘I am African-American’ or ’White’ or whatever, or they will even write down, ‘people call me this, but I think of myself as …’  And then we talk about all the different ways that people have chosen to categorize themselves, and about the difference between how we self-define and how others define us and what that means.  And then, unearthing, or unpacking, from there.  That series of three exercises (critical thinking, listening, and memoir sharing) really set this mood that carries through the whole class—this nice place of difference being something we learn from together.

Again, this is not a straightforward, ‘here’s our anti-oppressive exercise, and I’m going to hand you cards, you’re going to be a Muslim woman and I’m going to be a drug addict in jail, and then we’re going to try to imagine that we’re these kinds of people.’  I do think those kinds of exercises can be interesting, and I have friends who have used them and they’ve worked.  But, for me… I also teach media and communication stuff, so couching it and camouflaging it as art, as creativity, as these kinds of personal processes, I’ve found that really useful.

***For more on these classroom activities and others, including syallbi, assignment templates and worksheets, check out Anna’s blog, We-Thinking the Classroom***

In addition to my own classroom practices, I’ve gotten really involved in the last few years in communities of people who care about teaching.  They’re not necessarily radical pedagogy people, but they’re doing innovative learning stuff.  You can poach from them, and select the content that you want.  Those spaces have been amazing, because it’s people who are really good at teaching, and who really care about teaching.

I’ve found that a lot of my friends who are into the content of radical pedagogy are not necessarily good teachers.  They don’t necessarily like their students.  They’re not necessarily engaged reflexively in their teaching practice.  So, I’ve found that I’ve developed as a teacher more by being with people that don’t necessarily share my politics but that share my passion for teaching. I learn different things in those different communities.  The ghetto of ‘radical but effective teaching’ is very, very small.  But I don’t think that’s the only place to look for teaching resources.  In the UK, there’s a big open education resource movement.  They’re doing all sorts of neat stuff, especially in media studies.  There’s lots of people there doing great stuff with technology and collaboration, some of which I find inane, because they’re not teaching any ethical or social justice content.  But that, to me, is for us to bridge.

Spaces for Autonomy: Chisel the University’s Walls while Building Cooperative Institutions Outside

CW: What are the biggest sorts of obstacles that you see to anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian teaching and organizing in universities? 

Anna: The question for me is, what’s possible in the university that you’re in?  Trying to preserve as much autonomy and space for innovation in our own classes as possible is, I think, a surmountable obstacle.  But, again, it depends a lot on what kind of department you’re in, what kind of manager you have, what kind of institution you’re at.  I think, if you can find that place where you’re able to do the content but without it being something that the students can run up to a chair and say, ‘this person’s making me learn… whatever.’  It’s that kind of camouflaging of what you do.  I don’t know if that’s a compromise or a strategy, but there’s a little bit of freedom left there, in our individual teaching methods.

On the institutional level, what it is to be part of a department, what it is to work with colleagues in an ongoing relationship, I think that unionizing has to happen, or at least collectivization around grievances and concerns.  At base, knowing your rights… I’m amazed by my colleagues who just don’t know their rights!  There are all these borderline illegal things that can be going on, and people don’t even know.  I didn’t even know I started looking it up, and it was so empowering just to know what the labor laws are.  And there’s all sorts of great materials on that, but if you don’t have a union, you don’t have someone who’s handing that material out, or posting that material.

I realize I’m answering more about what spaces I think are possible!  The obstacles, I think, are sort of obvious.  It’s a corporate structure that doesn’t care about you.  The university does not care about your wellbeing.  That’s not its priority.  All the relations have been monetized.  To me, there’s no dream of, like, the other university where that doesn’t exist.  That’s what these institutions are. It’s more about what are the spaces and ways of surviving, and what are the best practices for working within them?  I think that’s about what we do in our classroom, how we deal with our colleagues.

It’s obviously very time consuming, as you know, to be involved in union drives.  And I think that that’s a real concern.  Like, how much do we organize within the institutional arena vs. organizing outside—and it’s incredibly exhausting to try to do both.  I was excited to get involved in this political group that was starting, butwhen I started doing union stuff, I just couldn’t do both.  I couldn’t be at that many meetings and try to make something work in my own workplace, while keeping up my teaching and home life.  So, I think that there’s a real tension around time and energy..  You can maybe change your working conditions, but I don’t think we’re at the imploding and taking over of the university and turning it into something new stage… I don’t think we’re anywhere near there.  To me, in both the classroom and in your working conditions in the university, the walls are pretty enclosed.  It’s about chiseling.

To me, it’s about how much energy goes in and how much energy goes out.  So, I think there are those internal obstacles, and the biggest obstacle is just the amount of time and energy that the university takes from your life.  When things are messed up in your workplace, it’s really hard to still have energy to put elsewhere.  Then, I think what some people do is to try to be in the university as little as possible and to poach as many resources as they can from it.  But, to do that, you have to be in a privileged position within the university, because you have to be able to get them to fund you and still not hate you when you’re not doing any of the service work that you’re meant to be doing.  You certainly don’t have the ability to do that when you’re a graduate student or an adjunct or part-time worker—at least not for any sustained amount of time.

I think if we really want a different education institution, we need to build it.  You can build a space in the university, but that university owns that space; it’s not yours.  You can start a center, but at the end of the day that is the institution’s; it is not yours.  When the institution wants it closed, it’s closed; that’s not up to you.  So, I think it’s really dangerous to be trying to continuously carve spaces out of the university.  I think you can’t carve sustainable alternatives that are going to fund you within the institution.  I think, that if we really want alternative education systems, we need to make them with business plans and waged workers outside of the institution.  But, that means engaging with all sorts of existing government and capitalist structures.  You can’t start a business without doing that.  And, I think that gets a lot of people nervous.  But, that’s where I find myself going, as I age!

CW: Do you have any ideas for how we radical academics can help each other make more time and energy for us to do radical pedagogy and organizing, both inside and outside universities?  You mentioned creating our own alternative institutions; do you see those as a way to help us make more time for that?

Anna:  I think that all these free schools and that stuff are great, but they run on volunteer time, and volunteer time is the energy we have left over after we’re done making our wages.  Or, we’re in a particular kind of situation where we don’t really need wages.  Or, we live on lots of very, very cheap wages, which is only a possibility for some people in very certain ways.  So, I think that if we want sustainable initiatives, we have to be finding ways to fund them, and to wage people.  So, say, a person’s only got a part time job in an institutional university, but then they’re able to make ten grand doing the logistical coordinating for this free school, because the free school has subscribers and sustainers that enable it to exist, that are about working toward sustainability.  I don’t like that it necessarily needs to be monetized, but I think that the reality of the world we live in is that if we do want to create our own kinds of cooperative and communal structures—that can sustain people—then either we need wages, or we’re going to be constantly on this cycle where we’re trying to increase our volunteer time to do these projects that tend to not be able to last for more than a limited amount of time.  It seems like we’re yearning for something that’s not just a temporary autonomous zone.  It seems that there’s a collective desire in radical communities to have things that are more sustainable, to be building things that actually nurture us and that offer real alternatives, and I just don’t think that that can happen unless we create our own cooperative business structures.  There’s models, there’s people doing that, there’s little bits of that everywhere.  We need to grow those, to make them bigger.  Then, of course, you run into the whole, ‘it will become another institution.’  But, there are fundamental differences between cooperative business structures and capitalist ones.  So, I think, figuring out, what is it that we want out of this communal, cooperative structure that we don’t see in these other ones?  Most Universities are non-profits, but they don’t function in that way. So, why is that?

I think, what a lot of friends of mine are working on now that I find inspiring is really thinking about how we might start to build bigger things with the positions that we’re in now.  We have a lot more social capital, and some of us more financial capital than we did ten years ago, when we were undergrads.  So, thinking about, how do we get some research funding to study, you know, how we might make a cooperative?  And, then, through that, using research for building things, getting research funding to actually build and make things that can be handed back over to communities.  How do we actually use resources from these institutions so we can build this other thing for our communities?

On a small scale, being in that graduate feminist group was the greatest thing, because there was this place where you could go, and when shitty stuff was happening you could talk about it, have a drink, have a laugh, and eat good food with people whom you have affinity with.  That was an amazing way to survive grad school.  When people go off and get jobs—if they get jobs—after they finish their PhDs, you really lose that.  It’s hard to find, sustain, and build those kinds of radical friendships, which are so important for preserving energy and time, and for getting excited about projects.  Trying to find a number of people to just sort of survive.

A few months ago, when things were bad at work, one of the older feminist women , sent us this email that was like, ‘I think we as women in the department should meet, and we should have a chat.’  We had this amazing long meal at someone’s house, and it was like, why did it take until a moment of crisis to do that?  And after we did that, it was amazing: when something bad happened to one of us, we would  send a personal email to each other and say, ‘okay, I just want you guys to know that this is happening.’  It was just so empowering.  How did we not learn to see those connections before the moment of crisis?  How do we learn to not just look for people who resemble us when we’re looking for affinity?

Puritanical Self-Flagellation isn’t the Only Answer: Alternative Networks as Foundations for Resistance

CW: In thinking about creating alternative sorts of institutions, one big challenge they face is to avoid being marginalized and creating a kind of radical ghetto, and not having any impact on changing the normal institutions.  I think of universities as big social organisms that have a lot of different people in them: undergrads, maintenance workers, clerical staff, etc.—all sorts of relations of hierarchy, inequality, exploitation, and oppression.  I wonder if you have any thoughts on ways that the alternative radical institutions could have some kind of re-engaged impact on those universities that we’re both escaping and trying to expropriate resources from?

Anna: I don’t think that everyone can do both of those things simultaneously.  If you want to have radical politics and be in the institution, then you help organize within the institution.  Not that it has to be exclusive, but if you’re in the institution, I think it’s important to take up the struggles of the working conditions of the people around you.  I don’t necessarily think that you can build alternatives that are going to fight these causes in some imagined or distant future.  Building alternatives is not the antagonistic gesture.  The antagonistic gesture comes from within; at this point in time, it comes from people who are doing that organizing from within.

The model of ‘proliferate alternatives’ says we just keep making the alternatives and the alternatives become so attractive that it pulls people away.  But practically, these free schools and similar initiatives are going to need food and shelter and sanitation and all of these big infrastructural things, and if you are going to really build that alternative university, in any kind of sustainable way, you need to think about all the divisions of labor that happen in a university and create new systems that work in a very different way. I do think that TAZ alternatives can proliferate, but I don’t think these alternatives alone can address the immediate problems of people’s institutional lives.  The TAZ alternatives are meant, almost, to seduce away from.  But, unless they’ve built the infrastructures and the relationships they need to be ongoing, that’s only short-term relief.

I think because we often feel like, ‘if I make project y, then I’m not going to be working on issue x…’—we end up doing a splattering of projects in our voluntary labor time that only fill stop gaps and provide temporary nurturance, rather than sustainable infrastructures.  We also sometimes end up spending a lot of time whining about how everything that we do is not enough or is going to make us sell-out or lose integrity.  We have this kind of puritan vision, and we just get trapped or frozen, because we think, ‘oh, I don’t want to just organize in the institution because, then, I’m not building these radical alternatives.  But I don’t want to just go build the radical alternatives, because I won’t be changing the institution.’  And, instead of actually doing either of those in a kind of committed and systematic way, we just do little bits of ineffective things on both sides, or we become frozen and we sit around with our friends and we drink in a squat and complain about how neither of those things is going to change the world.  So, it’s also that we lose energy when we torture ourselves with this puritanical self-flagellation, of like, ‘I can’t make the difference I want.’  Yeah, we can’t, but what is the thing that feels good, and what is the thing in which you have good people around you that want to build with you?  I’ve got friends who’ve come up with some interesting models of how we might have exchanges between different projects.  They are asking, what are ways that we can get on with tasks within and outside of institutions, and all the while be building those relationships, such that when it’s time in the world for other forms of resistance we’ll have those foundations?

CW: I really like your idea of how some people can kind of rise out of the normal institutions and create alternatives while some people can stay within and struggle within.  Thinking about this kind of division of struggle, or division of labor, are there models for how we can have exchanges between the folks working on the different sides?  Talking with grad students, with the academic job market being so shitty now, it’s often not really a choice for whether they stay in or not.  They’re often pushed out of academia.  I often find that many former grad students who were radical get pushed out, and it’s pretty sad when they lose connection, losing their sense of relation with their former radical academic comrades.

Anna: People who go into the institution or people who go and do some other jobs?

CW: Both, really.  Are there ways we could be more intentional about maintaining relationships with people who are pushed out of the academic job world and with people who purposefully rise out of it, leave it, but who want to still be radical intellectuals?

Anna: So, two pragmatic things there.  One, for the exchanges, I turn to my friend Dru who helped start the Media Co-op in Canada, which is an increasingly successful actual business plan for self-sustaining media production. They have this whole open source business program (so, if you know anyone who is trying to start a media co-op…).  He’s also designed a business plan for how we would finance an alternative university.  He used to run a free school, every summer, for a week.  In his vision, you just have a small staff of kind of site maintainers, like two or three people.  And, you have small cohorts of students.  They don’t get a normal university degree.  They get a one-year kind of degree in ‘cooperative entrepreneurialism’ or something, a degree in how to make more cooperative alternative structures.  They all do skill shares, and everyone does all the tasks.  You have like a researcher and a community activist in residence and then you just rotate in for a month at a time, with different visiting people to run different kinds of intensive courses.  Those people could be anyone, people with part-time jobs, folks on institutional leave.  And you give them a place to live.  You do it like an artist residency.  You give them a little stipend and a place to live.  I think this plan is a fairly ingenious start toward thinking about how to actually make a sustainable, small-scale alternative university. There are also some folks in the UK working on these kinds of more sustainable alternatives. A project in Lincoln has just launched and there’s a conference in December at Oxford to talk through ideas and plans for establishing alternative universities.

For the other thing, my friend Jamie Heckert is doing this project now where he’s interviewing people on open source publishing projects [read the first roundtable on publishing here].  He was talking with one of his interviewees about how England’s radical spaces all know of each other but aren’t really networked together. So if someone came over to give a radical talk, even though there are all these social centers and a few bookshops still left, and all these radical people in universities, we don’t have any system to say, ‘Here’s your tour.  Go there, stay with this person, go here…’  And we should!  That’s a really easy way to sustain independent researchers that doesn’t take a lot of work.  It takes only, say, ten people that subscribe to the project, that are willing to be the coordinator of that city.  This is an actually doable thing.  So, then, we were saying, let’s set up something like that.  I have a friend, Tim Gee (he wrote Counterpower), who just did a US book tour from the UK and was on Facebook, saying, ‘does anyone know where I should stay in Boston?’  And it made me think, there should be some pre-existing network of people to tap into for this.  Jamie was also saying it would be fun to travel in small groups, to do it like how bands tour together, to travel in packs.  So, say there’s this group of people who are launching their poetry collection, and they’re going with this person who’s launching their political comic book or whatever, and you do the tour thing together.  I like that as a very-easy-to-put-together model about how we can sustain independent scholars.  We can help enable you to choose (or be forced not) to work and still be part of a scholarly community.

CW: It would be nice to have something like that alternative education institution.  If, as contingent academics, we just got jobs every other year, we could have something to do in the years in between.

Anna: Yeah, it seems to be a good plan for dealing with precarity.

About the interviewee: Anna Feigenbaum is an academic and writes for the blogs We-Thinking the Classroom and Protest Camps.  Follow her on Twitter: @drfigtree.

[i]t’s increasingly difficult to define what, substantively, it means to be a thinker of the Left

(Castree and Wright 2005: 6)

Not too long back I read two articles on anti-austerity protest and Quebec student strikes that were published by ClassWarU, and a few others, mostly by activist student scholars. Almost all the articles and interviews that have been published so far in this website pertinently point out the urgent need to employ alternative pathways to connect people, participation and place. There is little to no doubt that the question of happiness and wellbeing is overwhelmingly difficult to answer, as it is ensnared by the laws of neoliberal capitalist accumulation, under continuous and progressive expropriation to the creation of hierarchies and hegemonies (through continuous division of labor along sex, race, class, religion, education, and nationality) to constant production of all forms of social exclusion. The poor and middle classes have shouldered the heaviest burdens of the global political obsession with austerity policies over the past five to six years. In the United States, budget cuts have forced states to reduce education, public transportation, affordable housing, health and other social services. In Europe, welfare cuts have driven some severely disabled individuals to fear for their lives. Austerity is still the order of the day and the struggle against austerity is an all-class war orchestrated in plazas, universities, parks, streets, squares, or any public places that we can think of. This article holds my deep reactions on academic exploitation at the crossing point of other kinds of exploitation that have burgeoned as a response to neoliberal capitalism. There is no simplified account of these struggles, however there is a common thread that explains why ordinary people whose lives get dismantled are standing up in solidarity to resist the neoliberal mix of policies and the polarization of wealth. At this point, it is probably futile or stupid to ask the question, ‘Who benefits from austerity policies?’ or ‘How exactly does scrapping of subsidies, raising tuition fees, and downsizing of factory workers or info-workers, affect the people or the society and a nation as a whole?’ Neoliberalism has resulted in exploitation, appropriation, privatization and deregulation – all of which have affected ordinary people and populations on the margin.

Now I turn to myself, to explain how exactly academic exploitation continues and why? I am an academic and at the interface to secure a stable academic position and to pursue my career as an academic I must publish, probably in key journals. So I am more than willing to publish my articles and gladly give away my copy ‘rights’ to the corporate publisher through the journal. In academia, we are trained to willingly and effortlessly give away our rights over our work or creative project to corporate journals and, in hindsight to giant corporate publishing houses, who would sell our works to scholars like myself, probably to those who do not have access to university libraries and such like, all over the world. However, I also know, that there cannot be anything more ‘exploitative’ than this – where my labor, time, innovative thinking does not get paid for nor am I rewarded for the knowledge I generate. So, in this neoliberal age, I am producing knowledge for ‘free’, so corporate publishing houses can make profit and benefit. Such exploitation goes unchecked because the university hiring process and tenure process quantify efficiency, productivity or scholarly strengths through numbers of manuscripts published, where they are published (ranking of the journals), besides other benchmarks. With my visiting researcher status, whereby I am paid for the classes I teach and for my student supervision work, I cannot state that I am paid for whatever I publish. At the same time, unless I publish I cannot secure an academic post. I am intensely aware that the practice of publishing in corporate journals is gravely problematic. But my radical academic friends and well-wishers have repeatedly told me that I need to publish in flagship journals to survive in academia. Many times, I am forced to recall Nick Blomley, is it “chic to be radical”????

There are other factors that are seriously problematic in academia. In our constrained academic systems, critical social science is progressively drifting apart from action-oriented research on real life issues and this gulf is widening due to a lethal brew of militarization, taylorization, and corporatization of the academic world in the neoliberal landscape. Authors who have touched on the role of time and globalization have shown that university work is technology-driven with the blessings of the internet, techniques of managerialism, accountability and efficiency. Long back in the mid 60s, Marx outlined that the capitalist production disciplined its workers by the clock and today, our everyday activities are determined by units of time. Then why should it be different for academics? Presently, academics suffer from this ‘cult of speed’, compression of time and intensification of work. For example, I always suffer from ‘time crunch’, every work is time-bound, I am always harried to absorb more information in a limited amount of time; to publish more; to serve on more committees; to create ‘strong’ research records; to serve the public; to teach and I do all this to perish as public intellectuals. Very recently, I have started to bring my daughter to work, so she can at least talk to me or share her stories as she scribbles on my office table or plays with her legos. Staying in an academic job is like a war waged against the ‘cult of speed’ and the compression of time, which separates the academic self from personal self thanks to globalization and corporatization.

Today, our universities are corporate infoscapes, perhaps one of the most visible sites of globalization. Universities seek profits from for-profit institutions and foundations, gradually adapt to the corporate policies and goals and concurrently engage with the market, displaying market-like behaviors. Academic work is taylorized as it maximizes job fragmentation, standardizes best practices and minimizes waste by minimizing skills training and requirements; it furthermore emphasizes efficiency and achieves high productivity in minimal time by maintaining low wages as they are determined by pay-by-result methods. Not only this but the neoliberal strategies of rule formulates the academic policy of coercions that act upon the academic workers’ body to manipulate its elements, gestures and behavior. I was told, several times by my superiors, how I should talk, how much time I should spend with my students, which conferences I should or should not attend, where I should publish and how many I should publish. Do we not as the academic workers’ enter the machinery of power? I believe that academic work resembles the ‘factory whistle’ or the ‘school bell’ marking division of time into discrete and segmented units that regulate the various chores we ought to perform throughout the day. I argue that academic work challenges edu-workers’ freedom and creativity through discipline, control, and surveillance, by re-visiting my experiences and challenges because I was expected to extol efficiency and professionalism. My repeated reading of Foucault and many others in graduate school, in fact, forces me to think that I am disciplined to perform or wear the professional academic attire, to which I question whether I should perform?

It is discomforting that we comply with the rigid norms of academic system and allow the academic grilling to impose upon us and direct us to work long hours for the accumulation of research wealth, which ultimately does not bring any real change to the society. The knowledge produced through the journal articles circulates within the academic circuits, does not reach or include the people on the margin or the grassroots organizations or the union workers. Then why should we write on neoliberal exploitation, workers struggles, alternative development if it does no good to the society. Again I ask, isn’t it chic to be radical? aren’t we dwelling in privileged enclosures? or how much are we doing to subvert these hierarchies?

Not only the numbers matter, but it is pertinent that the articles are published in highly regarded journals. We continue to struggle at the crossroads of contract positions, sordid salaries, restricted sabbatical opportunities and limited benefits, which force us to secure grants and assume other academic responsibilities. Often with all these additional chores that require prime attention, teaching backslides and almost always these academic commitments castigate us from our personal and family commitments. I recall that I worked for exhaustingly extended hours to coordinate, teach, supervise students and publish the required number of manuscripts, which took a remarkable toll on my health and rapidly diminished my time with my family. As a radical feminist, I juggle to get to grips with the academic exploitation that fashioned my academic ‘self’ to the efficiency and professionalism straitjackets.

“Cognitive labor is an idealized common because it is neither common across the hierarchy nor what tends to be common” and, I would love to have a romantic idea that there should not be any barriers across various kinds of work, paid or unpaid, ‘edu-workers’ versus factory workers or junior-contract-faculty members versus tenured professors. Unfortunately hierarchies exist, very prominently, and they revive through various practices that go on in the academic world, like the fact that scholars from recognized universities get well-placed and quickly get into tenure-track positions, whereas those from non-distinguished universities languish in contract positions year after year. It does not matter what experiences or skills the latter group can bring or that they have the necessary knowledge through similar four-year PhD training. What sells well in the end is the ‘name’ of the university and ‘who’ recommends the job market graduates. Deskilling or devaluation across work, bluntly, continues within the walls of our universities. The edu-labor is constantly ranked, divided, disciplined and hierarchized in our phallocentric knowledge enclosures. The abstract student body is stratified and mapped based on the labels that are placed on them which mark the reproduction of racism and patriarchy, if not capitalism. This makes me question, are academics not re-living the very capitalism and exploitation that they loathe? Therefore, in our academic system, grilling persists in various layers and in many forms.

It’s also important to point out that, with globalization, our boundaries have become fluid with an increase in movement of people, information, technology, and knowledge, but the zones of cultural difference have become permeable and even crumpled. It is not only a challenge for the students to acknowledge historical developments, social and racial formations, politics of knowledge and power and the unidirectional eurocentric cultural-economic-political dominance over other cultures but a pivotal challenge for educators “to link culture to the practice of a substantive democracy”. I outline this because I have experienced discomfort and insecurities and even fear when I analyzed the politics of war and resource exploitation, covert state-development agendas, racist environmental policies to student groups; I was unaware the extent to which the top administrators would signal the importance of matters of gender, ethnicity, class and culture or to what extent the campus climate would be tolerant to radicalism, feminism, anarchism or socialism. Hence as a feminist immigrant-of-color, staying on contract positions practicing radical geographies in predominantly male-white academic systems was demanding. Nevertheless I vehemently confirm that if our universities have been converted into prison-like enclosures that primarily respond to capital generation, where tuition fees are staggering, faculties are underpaid, and zero-benefit contract or adjunct faculty positions are generously increasing; if academic labor is ‘sold-out’ in the academic labor market for the accumulation of academic capital; if students are trained to be future knowledge gizmos for capital and life-long corporate consumers, if the tenure or hiring process still continues to be repressive, then as radical academics we have failed. Furthermore, whatever ideologies we are rooted in need to resist the mass-mutation and corruption of the academic system.

No matter what amount of fear and unforeseen trouble academics encounter, it is highly important for radical academicians and those on the left to find ways for the deconstruction of the popular media and politically misconstrued images and discourses of the reality, agency, identity and culture. Academics have to work on research that improves the lives of the people on the margin; organize against all forms of exploitation, in solidarity, with students and people in-the-bottom; promote intellectual freedom; facilitate social critique; encourage academic socialism; thwart provincialism. And most importantly, radical academics have to practice what they preach within the walls of the universities or conference halls. In our self-interest to stay alive in the academic system, we have become self-indulgent where our mental conscience to do for the real people and the real world regresses in front of our tremendous zeal to exist in academia, hence it is expedient to intervene and in concerted fashion change the all-encompassing capitalist system we are fenced into.

Summary:
Drawing on his extensive research on the history of universities, Mark Paschal debunks mystified views of higher education.  Instead of relying on overly sophisticated theories that are tough to popularize, Mark recommends focusing on what attracts people to universities: opportunities to make better lives for themselves.  We can create autonomous universities with a kind of vocational training more in line with historical materialism than the humanities—to learn skills for taking over empty buildings and holding down city blocks for radical causes.  To connect such organizing with the informal networks that already exist in marginalized communities, rather than presuming that the knowledge and skills gained in universities can be useful in struggles, learn others’ modes of communicating and ask questions about how we can be useful.  Since the fucked-up-ness of the capitalist university-prison-industrial complex can seem overwhelming, rather than merely trying to illuminate the problems, we need physical interventions that demonstrate viable alternatives.  To inspire a mass exodus from universities, we must continue to struggle within existing institutions—such as through strikes and occupations—while we create autonomous universities that force the dominant ones to confront their own limits.

From New Left Nostalgia to Occupy Everything: Debunking Mystified Views of University Education

CW: I just read your piece on “Our University?” and your student debt piece “A Framework for Student Debt”, and I find that your work is offering a much-needed critical, historical account of universities.

Mark: It’s something of a strange thing. There’s so much mystification built up around the idea of education—like, education in the abstract is such an amazing thing, according to everybody.  People don’t really look at what education means, what it is, what it says.  People forever have been saying, ‘it creates passive subjects,’ and stuff like that, but that seems to miss the totality of what’s happening with university education.  It’s amazing that I’ve had a pretty good response to what I’ve been writing, and other people have written things similar to this before.  But, for whatever reason, many people want to say, that ‘we need to go back to something, that we can and should go back to something, and that there is something marvelous and wonderful about education’—completely weird, mystifying moments of the 50s and 60s.  People don’t really interrogate any of that.  It’s just this natural assumption that everyone should be going to college.  I think the New Left had something to do with that, in the 1960s—the idea of creating a culture at the university level rather than at the level of struggle. It’s a bit more complicated than this, obviously, as the university was embroiled in struggle throughout the 60s. However, the early 70s was a period of institutionalization that made pedagogy in the university a site of struggle to create a culture, rather than thinking about struggle, class conflict as a place to create a culture.  That was something new that really transformed the university in the 50s and 60s, and that leads into this idea, it’s very easy to flip that, ‘everyone should be going to university then.  It’s what you have to do.  It’s the greatest thing ever.’  Very strange.

Columbia University Protest, 1968 (via)

CW: Can you give a little background on your own radical formation and how you got into radical thinking and organizing around universities?  

Mark:  I come from a moderately conservative, Pentacostal Christian background, true believer style.  I went to undergrad at a Pentacostal School, ironically enough, called Vanguard University.  In my Senior Year, I sort of left Christianity.  The questions I wanted to ask were different from the questions we were asking there.  The questions I was asking were already formed out by the answer that I would be giving: Jesus.  So, I turned and started to look at Christian anarchy and Liberation Theology as my gateways.  I had to make a living, so I was working in random places.  Eventually, I decided I was going to go back to graduate school.  My whole life I’d never known there were radicals.  I didn’t really know how to get in touch with radicals or radical organizing.  Music was really my introduction to radical politics, so that was the only way I really understand how to be in radical politics—the whole hardcore scene, post-punk stuff and all that.  I really wanted to be involved in some way.  I felt like I needed to be doing something, so I thought, ‘well, I know a lot of radicals who are in the university, so that’s where I’ll go and that’ll be some space where I can figure out what’s going on and what to do.’  So, I moved from Los Angeles out to Durham [NC], and met some people there, and up to Connecticut, and I finally moved back out to the West Coast.  I was sort of a Marxist-anarchist, something.  I was excited to move to Santa Cruz, because there was a big protest scene, and there were a lot of people, not just protesting, but attempting to take the university—back in 2004-2005—shutting down campuses.  It was a pretty radical place.  Then, my first year here, some other people and I spent a lot of time talking about, ‘what’s going in the university?  Why aren’t more people protesting?  We’ve got all these fee hikes, all these things going on.  And then, the collapse of the financial system; there has to be something more going on.’  And that conversation was happening at a number of other places: at Berkeley, at NYU, seeing what was happening at other universities around the world, especially in Austria and the Greek situation.  There has to be something more to it than simply going to class.  Talking about radical politics can’t be the culmination of what we are doing here.

At the time, I was going to do my dissertation on the political economy of San Francisco.  So, I started looking into the relationship between Stanford and UC Berkeley and the financial and engineering sectors of San Francisco, the creation and building up of San Francisco.  And then the occupations happened in 2009. A number of faculty at UC Santa Cruz and Berkeley straight-up condemned the students—radical faculty members—like, ‘you guys don’t know what you’re doing.  You’re doing this wrong.  Occupations and things like this aren’t going to get you anywhere.  You have to demand things and you have to go through protests.  You’re just antagonizing people. It’s clearly not how change happens.’  There were a number of criticisms, but that then didn’t go anywhere beyond that.  Rather than saying, ‘you’re not doing things the right way, here are some other ways to think about how to do things,’ it was just silence after the condemnation.  I thought that was a very strange thing to do.  You guys are all radicals.  In your memory, you have this idea of the 60s, but that didn’t really change anything.  It tried to change institutions internally, but that clearly has a limited shelf life.  So, in conversations with my advisor, talking about this research that I had been doing on Berkeley and Stanford, he was like, ‘maybe you should think about doing a history of higher education, the story of higher education.’ ‘Oh yeah, I can do that.’  So, I’d done a presentation for the London 2010 Historical Materialism conference, “A Brief History of Two Occupations.”  Surprise! It turns out, occupations had been happening pretty much constantly since the late 1960s.  It’s just that it’s not in our historical memory.  There have been thousands of students who have occupied buildings for ethnic studies and other things over the course of the last 40 years.  Pretty much every other year in the last 40 years there have been occupations of things.  But, people have no memory of that.  So, the idea that this is a terrible tactic and doesn’t get you anything, that holds no water whatsoever.

So, it continues to come up, in talking about tuition, that ‘this is just a bunch of greedy bastards in the administration, and they need to get our priorities right, and if they can only get our priorities right, we can go back to this glorious time of state-funded higher education in the ’60s.  Berkeley in the 1950s.’  But, that doesn’t seem to be something that we necessarily want.  That was funded by the Cold War.  It’s not trying to show that a return is simply not possible because of a few conservative politicians.  It’s endemic to the purpose and transformation of higher education itself.  So, that’s sort of a brief synopsis of how I’ve come to be where I am, and what my subject matter has come to be.

How to popularize radical organizing? Focus on what attracts people to universities: training to make better lives for ourselves, in common

CW: In talking with other people, one issue and challenge that we’ve identified for organizing around universities, and radical organizing generally, is that we have a lot of good critiques—we can make some very sophisticated critiques of the university in capitalism—but we have trouble popularizing these critiques.  We have trouble translating that sophisticated theory into a kind of language that can circulate with a wide audience, so it can become useful for on-the-ground organizing conversations.  I’m wondering, in light of that challenge, could you say a little about what you think are some of the most important elements of this history of higher education in relation to capitalism?  And do you have any thoughts on how to popularize this kind of historical critique?

Mark: This is actually where I see the purpose of my own work when I (graduate, or have people to work with so I don’t have to graduate, depending on what happens – rather than saying this last part, can we just say “finish”? That way I don’t have to deal with calls from family and in-laws, which would be nice).  I think that there’s a tendency on the part of people organizing to wonder why more people aren’t interested in the things that we’re interested in.  ’How can people be so apathetic?  Why aren’t more people joining us?’  I’ve long been convinced that that’s the wrong way of thinking about ‘the people’.  That leads to questions where it’s someone else’s responsibility to come to my point of view.  That’s not a solution that anyone could ever have. ‘Maybe if I dressed better.  Maybe if I smelled better.  Maybe if I smelled worse.’  It makes all these things subjective.  We have very sophisticated theories and long, complex, historical studies, but then when it comes time to asking questions based on them, we’re so used to asking questions within a sophisticated framework that we sort of neglect why it is that people come to the university, or why it is that people are attracted to the university in the first place.

I think that one of the interesting things about the sophistication of theory and this idea of creating this culture of dissent and this culture of radical organizing is that if you look, historically, at the university, up until the 1860-1870s, only 1% of the 16-24 year old population ever went to universities.  In the US, people in the Midwest and the West were fundamentally opposed to university education.  Farmers and the working class had no use for it.  They thought that it taught people how to dissociate from the communities that they were from, in favor of this bureaucratic way of life, entering into the elite class, and forsaking your roots.  It was only when university education in the 1880s became fundamentally about training rather than about the spread of these ideas, whether it’s, at the time, upper class ideas, and now with radicals in the university, it becomes about oppositional ideals. Not surprisingly, debt swept over the Midwest and South throughout this period and you were beginning to see a real consolidation of land and the formation of corporations in the 1880s and 90s.  There’s been so much emphasis in Leftist university alternatives—and in the practice of being a Leftist in a university—on criticism and in the realm of culture, but that has never been why most people go to university.  From the start, I think the alternatives miss what it is that attracts people to the university in the first place.  If people aren’t interested in them, if people are interested in learning how to make better lives for themselves, through training that’s going to allow them to get into the job market or to give them skills with which they can do something that takes them out of the job market, whether it’s being entrepreneurs or whatever it is, then maybe we should be focusing more on that.

I think that people talk about Occupy all the time because it was a very hot subject for a bit, but right now in the United States there are about 15 million more or less empty buildings littering the landscape. That’s a tremendous number of buildings.  There’s also around 22% real unemployment and underemployment.  So there are a lot of buildings being unused and a lot of people who are unused.  Capital has sloughed off tremendous numbers of people and of real estate and buildings.  If we want to participate in the radical transformation of society, it can’t be through a sophisticated enough theory; it’s gonna have to be through people re-claiming private property, taking private property and making private property common.

Learning for Communist Life: Autonomous Universities with Historical Materialist Vocational Training

I feel that what learning institutions could be, if we’re going to have institutions of learning—which I think we have to at least for a little while, as a sort of transition—I would want to think about training around a sort of commune vocational training: to learn carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, sewing, cooking, gardening.  Plumbers and electricians make more than academics do, at this point.  There are obviously trade schools that people can go to.  But, you don’t get the historical development of the vocations and of homes, of gardens.  You don’t get the economic and political developments and how these things interact with larger transformations taking place within capital and outside of capital.  Ideally, people could get the skills to build things themselves, to build things in community with others, to hold tools in common with other people.

A group of protestors opposed to cuts on library services chant in Oakland City Hall (6/22/2011), holding tools borrowed from the Temescal Tool Lending Library. (via)

There are institutions like the Oakland Tool Lending Library, things like that that allow people to share tools and resources.  Lots of anarchist houses have tools and have the ability to work on some of these things, but that’s not spread out generally through a generation under 60 years old.  At this point, if you tell people, ‘you can build your own bookshelves,’ they’re sort of perplexed and amazed that such a thing is possible.  It’s one of the easiest things you could possibly do, but that too has been so mystified: the ability to do anything yourself has been both bourgeoisified and also mystified—’why would you possibly do something yourself? It’s cheaper to do it this way, better to do it this way.’

Tool Lending Library poster (via)

Looking historically at the university, people haven’t been attracted to the university for the ideas that are held within it.  In fact, students have always found that they can’t get the ideas that they want inside the university.  They had to create their own instruments external to the university but internal to the larger campus of the university.  So, for example, Harvard and Yale, back in the 1600s and 1700s, there was rote memorization, learning as a steady, supposedly unchanging curriculum.  So, students formed their own secret societies, in order to discuss and debate and find the education they wanted, to hone themselves.  And that was the only place they really read books.

Skull and Bones – Secret Society at Harvard University

They didn’t read books for their schoolwork.  They copied books for their homework assignments, but there are all these studies done on library use for all these schools up to the 1930s; students didn’t check out books—elite students, poor students, students going to becoming bureaucrats or lawyers.  Students didn’t necessarily do the things that we think students have always done.  There’s no love of learning that, like, fostered a light in the bosom of people’s hearts.  There was for some students, but for the majority of students, even when it was 1% of the population who was going (though I’ll stress that it wasn’t the 1% as we currently use the term), they weren’t going because, ‘I just love to be around ideas.’  Who has time to love to be around ideas back in the 1800s?  

It was only when education had a practical, concrete relationship to the present and future of people’s lives that they did really take it in.  There wasn’t a mad grasping to have, like, ‘oh finally we can have vocational skills and humanities.’  When the humanities first started in the 1880s and 1890s, it was a conservative attempt to hold onto classical training.  University attendance in the 18-24 year cohort didn’t reach 5% until after 1900.  Most people didn’t particularly care for that.  Universities thought they could attract students if professors could be entertaining—which is what some of the best professors learn, that, ‘I need to be entertaining, otherwise, who the hell is going to come to this class?  Why take philosophy when you can take engineering?’  So, we have all these ideas about how amazing education is, why it’s so useful.  But that hasn’t historically been what has attracted people to the university.  If we could frame these vocational ideas inside of a larger radical project, that’s what I’d like to do with my life.  I think that seems more in line with how people always used the university, rather than these mystified ideas of what university education should be.

CW: In your correspondence, you mentioned this idea of how you’re interested in creating autonomous learning institutions that are more along the lines of a kind of historical materialism than the humanities.  Could you say more about what that would look like and if there are any concrete examples of that?

Mark: I don’t know that there are any concrete examples of what it is that I would want to do.  If you look back at workers’ education in the early 20th century, I think that there are some resonances, as workers tried to think about, ‘how do we take over factories? How do we run these factories ourselves?  How do we create the tools that we want to be able to create?’  There were a whole slew of workers’ schools that came to exist.  In the early 1840s, there were a few in England.  By the end of the 19th century, there came to be more.  There’s a great story of a liberal-radical workers’ school that was set up, and the students in England were like, ‘fuck this, we’re going on strike.  You’re not giving us the education we want.  It’s too parliamentary.  There’s no radical action involved.’  So they went on strike, and they couldn’t get what they wanted, so they started their own workers’ school.  I’m forgetting right now what that was called, but it happened around 1912, associated with the Pleb’s League.  They would teach themselves accounting, mathematics, history, and especially economics.  This was back before political economy had split off into the social sciences.  So, they’d teach themselves the political economy of the situation they were in.  Also, working people didn’t go to these schools unless they were workers themselves.  So, they would try to take what they were learning back into the factory or wherever it was they were working.  There were other people who were at the same time creating technical schools.  These weren’t usually radicals, but industrialists looking to increase the technical knowledge of the working class.  So, you begin to get middle management and shop-floor stewards.  Both of those were very attractive to people: the idea of worker-led, worker-initiated, worker-created education—Work People’s School in the US and Work People’s College in Minnesota…

IWW demonstration, New York, 1914 (via)

CW: In Minnesota, the IWW is putting on a new Work People’s College…

Mark: Yeah, they started with a bunch of radical Scandinavian people, and after splits with the Socialist Party.  Big Bill Haywood got thrown out of the Socialist Party.  They allied themselves with the IWW and they became for a long time the official school of the IWW.  Tremendous story.  They went into a period of decline after the 1930s.  But, again, there was a bunch of workers who determined what it was they wanted to learn. Typically, history was the most favorite subject, but also economics and accounting.  The situation then was obviously different from the situation that’s the basis of today: burgeoning industrialism, the idea of taking over shop floors and things like that.  Now the idea seems to be much more about taking over worn-out urban infrastructure—given empty buildings, given full buildings.

What seems interesting to learn if you wanted to think about holding down city blocks for a radical leftist cause?  I think you’d want to have something like Home Studies, or Engine Studies, there’s a whole slew of things you could do.  Home Studies would incorporate things like plumbing, bracing a house, framing a house, apartments, electrical work, gardening, cooking, sewing—the basic things that have always gone on in homes—as well as the history, development, and situation of the ecology and economy of how these things work in urban situations.  You could also look at low-tech and no-tech alternatives to the currently existing technology—what is appropriate in a given place and a given time according to the technology and knowledge and skill that we have.  If you were able to teach a course like that, if many different urban places had courses and institutions that did something like that, you’d have a cadre of people who’d become skilled at that—and because you’re teaching the history of class struggle around all these things, about organizing, how people have organized—what the food riots of the early 20th century were about, how they operated.

Occupy Oakland – Move-in Day – Jan. 28, 2012 (via)

I think that one of the things we do now—but there are always these ideas too—is turning these occupied spaces into community centers.  But, to me, that seems like a kind of vague idea: what exactly a community center does, how it operates, what it’s for.  They haven’t combined knowledge into many concrete ideas.  So, there are these vague ideas of social centers, calling back to Italy and Germany in the 70s and 80s, which is great, but for people to go out and put their bodies and health on the line, for large numbers of people who aren’t already committed to the cause, there have to be more concrete things going on than just ‘social centers.’  To develop some of these ideas, I think that takes, first, a relationship of the people occupying to the larger communities that they’re occupying buildings in.  But also, second, this idea that we can transform buildings, that we can make these buildings into something other than what they are now, to serve a different purpose—this history of technical and vocational skills, as things that could be taught and then taken over by people.  I think that’s one of the ways of going beyond simply occupying or raising critical consciousness of things, which has a very limited shelf-life.  Once people have to go out and make their own money and have to buy everything they come into contact with, rather than living in some sort of communal situation.  That’s a big problem.  So, there are obviously a lot of anarchist and communist communes and squats and things like that, but moving it beyond the squat and moving it beyond the realm of just anarchists and communists and make it a viable way to live in the world, I think one of the ways you can do that is through education in these kinds of Home Schools or Engine Schools.

Building Relationships between Radical Organizing and Marginalized Communities: Ask How Universities Can Be Useful, Don’t Presume

CW: I like what you say about how social centers and anarchist, autonomist projects are often based on a vague idea that doesn’t get seriously addressed, particularly about how people living in the communities living around those spaces can become part of the organizing also.  And I haven’t seen many examples of success, except for just a couple examples, such as one in Santa Ana, CA—El Centro Cultural de Mexico—and one in Durham, NC—El Kilombo Intergaláctico.  The latter takes a kind of autonomist, Zapatismo approach.  I was talking with those folks, and they told me one really important way of framing those relationships with people around them: in marginalized communities, there are already informal networks of cooperation going on all the time, and learning that happens in those networks too.  There’s a lot of power in those networks.  So, I think a key question is how radical, openly anti-capitalist organizing projects, like social centers and free schools, can connect with those informal networks.  Do you have any thoughts along those lines?

Mark: I feel there are a tremendous amount of Leftists in literature and other sophisticated humanities graduate programs – which can often be quite important.  That said, I often don’t understand what’s being written in some of their theoretical displays of erudition.  ’That looks really amazing but I don’t have a clue what it is you are talking about.’  I think that there’s such a pre-occupation with theory.  Obviously, nothing really happens outside theory; you have to have theory.  But, the level of sophistication that we get in theory, it tends to overlook the informal networks that do exist and that allow people to get by, and that allow people to elude or escape or make do with their peripheral relationship to the job market, or to the poles of capitalist accumulation, circulation, and production.  Being able to work within those informal networks requires Leftists being able to understand and talk these languages that aren’t university-based, that aren’t humanities-based.  And that requires getting to understand what that language is.  How do you talk when you’re not communicating at a very high, sophisticated level?  When you’re talking through what sort of metaphors you use, how do you relate to people?

I begin to talk and I have all these questions that come up in my mind about all this.  But, I just think that there’s a reliance on university education that so many of us have, or used to have but that’s sort of fallen apart, and that can be a very problematic thing.  What do these skills I’ve learned in the university allow me to do in a sort of communizing way?  ’I can talk.’  Okay, well everyone has their experience of struggle, whether they label it ‘struggle’ or not.  Being able to translate, which means living in informal circuits.

For example, I have this idea of this school I want to start.  I could just go in and just say, ‘alright, I’m starting this in Oakland and everyone’s going to be really excited about it.’  Well, it turns out nobody’s going to come to it, because they don’t know me, they don’t know the people I’m organizing with.  ’Why should we be interested in this?  We already have these things.  I can already work on my car.  I can already do my electrical work.  Why do I need this school and these institutions that you’re trying to bring into this community?  We have no relationship with you.  Why would we care about it?’  So, whatever organizing in universities that we do has to be based on organizing that’s already existing, and then not saying, ‘well we’ve been in universities so we have very good ideas about these sorts of things.’  Saying, ‘these are the ideas and these are the skill-sets that we have from this university work and how do we make these skill-sets work in a situation very different from the university.  How do we teach ideas and skills that would be interesting, that are useful to people? Rather than coming and saying ‘these ideas are useful now why aren’t you making sense of them’?’  I feel like that’s what I’ve been trying to say the whole time:  ’We’ve got these things, you should make use of them.’ vs. ‘How can we make use of the things we have in the struggle?

Moving Beyond Illumination to Physical Interventions: Engaging the Immenseness of the University-Prisons-Policing-Industrial Complex

CW: Speaking about language that we use to talk about university struggles and questions of whether or not it connects with people, generally—thinking particularly about debt, student debt, which has been a big focus of university struggles recently, like with Occupy Student Debt—do you have any ways of thinking about whether and how that way of framing university struggles can resonate with people more widely, particularly people who never get to go to college because they’re pushed out of the education system at a lower level…?

Mark: Or just aren’t interested in going to college.

CW: Yeah, people who ‘rise out,’ and who live in neighborhoods where they have a lot of different concerns, like policing and prisons, other sorts of struggles that might seem, on the face of it, to be disconnected from university education struggles, but I think it would be great if we could figure out how we could link those struggles better.

Mark: Obviously these struggles are linked.  We don’t ourselves have to link them, because they are linked.  Showing how they are linked—people are already doing that.  People like Angela Davis: she’s been showing the links between higher education and states and prisons for a very long time.

Angela Davis in late 1960s (via)

Angela Davis in 2009 (via)

Many of her students in the university have been organizing and writing about prisons.  There are a number of people doing this linking work—both inside and outside the university, on the ground, establishing these connections.  Most rallies that we have at the UC, someone will speak about the prison-industrial complex, and like, how more money is spent on prisons per person than on education, and how that’s wrong.

It’s difficult to think anything beyond illumination.  We can illuminate a problem, show that it exists, and show that these linkages exist.  We might even be able to show points that might lead to some sort of organizing.  As it is, it’s difficult to think beyond illumination, it’s difficult to think beyond ‘this is what the problem is and we’re gonna show everyone the problem, and why are they so apathetic, why can’t they see that these are the problems and we need to change them?’  And you run into this just organizing on campus.  Even within the university itself, talking about student debt.  I used to sit at a table with a sign that said ‘free brownies’ – you don’t have to talk to us if you don’t want to but you’re certainly more than welcome to —leading up to student strikes and things like that.  A number of people would come by and talk, saying ‘why are you guys here?’  They’d be suspicious of anything that’s being given out for free.  Some people would just take it and leave—happy to have that happen; made them smile.  Other people, we would talk with them, and they’d be like, ‘yeah, we understand that things are fucked up.’  And it doesn’t take a PhD in any particular science to understand that the world is fairly fucked right now.

My experience in talking with students was that they feel there’s not much that can be done.  It’s such a massive ball of fucked-up-ness that the only thing that you can do is to try to protect yourself and the people that you are around, like your family and friends.  So, yeah, student debt is really terrible, but it happens at such an immense level that it’s hard for people to imagine changing anything.  The massive growth of the prison-industrial complex has happened on such a level that it seems like, ‘what could we possibly do?’  You can show us all of these things, and say that these things are fucked up and you can say that ‘we should just not have prisons.  If we don’t have prisons, blah blah blah.’—all these answers, all these classic questions.  ‘Well, if we didn’t have student debt, then how are we going to pay for universities right now?’  You can’t pay for universities.  Universities would cease to exist if we didn’t have student debt.  It’s not like we can go back to a time before very expensive labs and dining commons and student residences and janitorial staff; all these things cost money.  Outside of the student debt it takes a massive, total transformation of the entire system of life as we know it.  That’s a difficult thing for people to imagine how the hell it’d happen.  Like, ‘we can show you, all of life has to be changed, now, why don’t you come along with us and we’ll shut down the campus?’  [laughs] Well, what does that do, and how did that make any difference whatsoever?

I feel like that’s the question that a lot of people are trying to work on.  There are small answers.  And I think that’s part of the point: there can’t ever be ‘an answer.’  It’s difficult.  I don’t necessarily want socialism where we seize the state.  The state’s such a bloated corpse at this point.  It’s like a whale that’s washed up on the shore.  ’Yeah, we finally seized the state.  Oh shit.  It sucks.’  It doesn’t do these dreams that past generations had for what the state would do.  I’m sure that some people who have studied the state would say, ‘oh well, it can still do this and this and this… blah blah.’  We live in a time where it’s difficult to think in big answers.  For myself, it seems possible only to think of the local, urban level.  I tend to feel that’s where education and organizing have to take place.  Not in these massive institutions. Organize to de-legitimize.  Organize to build bases and infrastructure.  But at the end of the day it’s going to come down to things like the Oakland Commune and things like what’s happening in Durham being able to enmesh themselves so much into the fabric of the city that that becomes the answer and the model that people begin to look to.  I don’t know what level the police come in.  I don’t know exactly what sort of tipping point it would take before people in sort of the larger urban population shift and say ‘fuck the police.  We want whatever it is these radical organizers are doing here.’  I do know that that’s not going to happen if we continue to talk like academic graduate students all the time.  It seems very clear to me that people aren’t interested in that.  There’s still a lot of resentment in many places about college students in general.

It’s sort of hypocritical I guess to say this.  It comes like, ‘oh you’re in the university, how can you say these things?’  ‘Well I’m so special because I need to have this space because my ideas are so valuable.’  In thinking, what does it take to transform space and time?  It takes the ability to work in space and time.  And language obviously is a part of that.  Ideas and concepts are a part of that.  But, the actual physical intervention in space and time is an underthought part of radical organizing, at least at the university level.

Strikes as Flashpoints: Preparing Ourselves to Seize Opportunities for Building Solidarity

CW: Some of the most insightful writing about physical interventions at universities, I’ve seen, was about the UC Berkeley and Santa Cruz occupations of buildings at the campus.  Particularly, I’m thinking of a piece that Jasper Bernes wrote about ‘The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor.’  It’s basically about the Wheeler Hall occupation, and this idea that students and workers, through that kind of radical action, could build relationships across the glass floor, which is a play on the idea of the glass ceiling.  So, the glass floor separates students going through capitalist reproduction from workers in capitalist production.  Through those actions, students could see their future as exploited wage workers, and workers could see their past and gain antagonism from the students’ antagonism, and through that they could become collectively struggling proletariat subjects together.  Thinking about all the spaces in the university where there are those potentials to form relationships in struggle across capitalist production and reproduction, in spectacular instances like occupations and strikes but also in more everyday spaces like the classroom, where teachers are waged workers and students are paying money to learn something but also to have their labor-power disciplined, categorized, and commodified for sale on the labor market.  So, I wonder if you have any thoughts about any of that—whether in relation to occupations or the classroom.  I’m interested to hear your thoughts on pedagogy that connects with students in a radical way.

Mark: I still think that I’m just beginning to scratch the surface as far as critical pedagogy.  The whole idea of my class, I was hoping that it would be for students who had been going to general assemblies—that it would be a place for them to hear something other than the traditional stories about what higher education is. And then, for research projects, students did documentaries, making zines, and some students did research papers responding to prompts.  I hoped that it would be a jumping off point for organizing for work that they would be doing over the summer, for the disorientation guides, and then for organizing next year.

This idea of the glass floor, I think that’s interesting.  I know that at Santa Cruz, there was a student-worker coalition that came into being around AFSCME’s last strike, or last contract negotiation, which ended up being a strike.  Then, the students at UCSC shut down campus in solidarity with AFSCME workers. AFSCME got a better contract than they were being offered.  There’s a number of students at UCSC who are interns with AFSCME, who get to work with and get to know a lot of the workers, at least dining hall workers and actual waged employees at the university.  There’s not overlapping action and collective action. I wouldn’t say that that’s been a large outgrowth of things like that.  It tends to happen more in flashpoint situations.  We would always be like, ‘why aren’t more workers coming to the general assemblies when we have them?  How do we make the general assembly or these meetings a place where workers could come?’  A few workers who come to many of these things would come to the occupations, but for the most part, most workers didn’t go into the occupation.  Most of the people who work for a waged living don’t come into occupied spaces.  They get off work and they go home, because they’ve been working all day.  I remember when I worked 40 to 50 hours a week, the last thing I wanted to do was spend more time at the place where I worked, regardless of what the reason was for that.  You want to go home, to spend time with you families, to not spend time at the place where you worked.

UCSC Building Occupation, September, 2009

However, at the UC at least, every union’s contract comes up for negotiation this year.  So, that also becomes a flashpoint where that glass floor works, and everyone can very clearly see the relationship of all these different workers across the university and the role that undergraduates and graduate student radicals have to play in transforming the ground and the landscape under which the negotiations will happen.  So, there are these radical organizing campus shutdowns and occupations, all these things that have happened in the past, that opens a much greater space in which solidarity between all the different levels of the university and the UC can be expressed in struggle, rather than just expressed as, ‘yeah, we support the workers.’  ‘We can’t actually be part of this because it’s not a strike.’  So, when we shut down campus, a few of the workers stay and speak, but most of them go back home.

Students brave the cold and rain, blocking off the Glenn Coolridge Dr. UCSC entrance as part of the March 1st, 2012, protest which shut down campus. Photo by Toby Silverman. (via)

When it comes to things like strikes, those have to be taken advantage of; that’s when the glass floor materializes.  That’s when these relationships crystallize: in struggle.  We have to see that opportunity and take advantage of it, because those opportunities don’t always come along.  You have to prepare yourself to take those opportunities.  That’s happening now at UC and in the UAW.  I don’t know if it’s necessarily happening at some of the other union locals.  But there are people thinking about, ‘how do we crystallize different relationships in the university in such a way that they can be seized when there’s the opportunity that they can be seized?’

These contracts are going to be a perpetuation of this institution that we don’t want to perpetuate anyway.  So, that’s a weird thing…

Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing: Struggle within Existing Institutions while Confronting Them with their Own Limits

CW: Can I ask you a question along those lines?  So, considering that contracts, trade unions, business unions, the UAW, AFSCME, AFL-CIO, are problematic, I wonder what your thoughts are on the potentials for building solidarity, industrial unions?

Mark: I’ve been trying to think about how we should understand, not just unions, but also defenses of higher education that we give, in relation to the future of the higher education that we would like to have.  The continual defenses of higher education as it has been seem to make it the case that we need to have higher education as it currently exists but it just needs to be funded better.  That clearly seems not to be the case.  And that happens at all levels—at the union level and almost all levels of organizing.  The place where that doesn’t happen is the occupations where they ‘demand nothing, occupy everything’—that doesn’t then go to ‘we want this.  There are just these great things in higher education.’  It doesn’t fall into that trap because it doesn’t demand anything.  It doesn’t say that we want to replicate this system as it currently exists.

There is a danger I think in abandoning institution-based struggles, just because that’s not what we want to exist.  Lots of things aren’t as we want them to exist.  I think there’s a relationship in all institutional struggle and autonomous struggle with the formation of new organizing models, new education models.  I don’t know exactly what that relationship is yet.  I’ve just begun to think about what that means and what that looks like.  It seems very obvious that universities cannot continue to exist as they currently exist for very much longer—whether it comes with the implosion of the debt bubble, which then would mean that universities can’t build to the same degree and level that they have.  It’s such a top-heavy loaded institution, and everyone’s been talking shit about what happens in universities for at least a century.  In most of the entire history of universities, people have been talking shit about the education that happens: ‘it’s not the right education,’ ‘there are no standards,’ and all this sort of drivel people like to spout about ‘how bad things are today as opposed to how they used to be.’

You have to struggle where you are, because class struggle exists everywhere there are classes—everywhere there’s an institute or site of production, there’s going to be struggle.  You wouldn’t just want to abandon that to say, ‘oh it’s not what we want, so we’re not going to struggle there anymore.’  That’s not very strategic to think in those terms.  If you look at what’s happening in Quebec, or Chile, or Puerto Rico, any place where you see more than 100,000 people coming out, that’s tremendous and you can’t get that if all the work continues to be in the creation of autonomous spaces without organizing within institutions as they are.  So, I think that, in Quebec, where you have 100,000 students who transformed into 200,000 people, that only happens within institutions that currently exist, pointing out the failures of things as they currently are.

But, at the same time, there has to be that transition from, ‘we don’t want things as they currently are’ to ‘we also know we don’t want to go back to ten years ago.’  I think the history of higher education tells me that you can’t just demand these new things in the education system and say, ‘so we want it to be like this.’  There are too many vested interests: faculty, administration, alumni, parents, state sponsors, and private industry sponsors.  There’s too much inertia in the university to transform it like we want it to transform.  History seems to show me that university transformation happens through the de-legitimation of universities as they have existed, and the formation of new institutions, whether they’re academies or universities. Institutions as they exist don’t reform themselves.  They reform themselves when they’re confronted with their own limits on what they could possibly be.

I think that we’re getting to that in a lot of these student movements and union movements, so it’s a matter of framing that issue, framing that this is the limit that universities, as currently constructed, have reached.  I don’t want to imagine them continuing to exist.  It doesn’t mean that I stop organizing.  It means that we’ve reached a limit, not a boundary.  We’ve reached a limit point, which necessitates not just free schools—there are some valuable things about free schools, and there are some limitations about free schools too—but there has to be people in precarious positions saying, ‘we need to do something other than what we’re doing right now.’  I think it’s probably going to be graduate students and undergrads, at least as far as university education, more so in the creation part of it.  In the time you have as an undergrad, it can be very difficult to organize.  You’re only there for a few years, 2 years if you transferred in from a community college. These students can be involved in the creation of new education models that can then arise as viable alternatives—that are doing something different than what it was universities were doing beforehand.

The de-legitimation, the limit-point that we’ve reached with university education—if you look at protest universities, [and I talked about this in the Reclamations/edu-factory piece], it’s like the Italian Renaissance: universities are dead; they do things totally wrong, scholasticism is not necessary for our own time.  ‘We can’t even get jobs in these universities.  We’re going to absent ourselves from those universities.’  They created academies.  They weren’t teaching academies; they were for study, for the perpetuation and discussing of ideas, and they eventually became universities.  In the North, in Germany, with the Reformation, you had a similar sort of thing: ‘As Protestants, we can’t teach in these Catholic institutions, so we have to absent ourselves from them.  These institutions have run their limit.’  The Catholic scholastic institutions were no longer able to provide the education or bureaucracy for that Catholic world, because that world was in crisis, it was disintegrating.  So, they created their own academies, their own places to produce the knowledge that they wanted to produce, that they thought was more appropriate to their time.  And then, through doing that, they were able to find allies outside of their own institution, and the rest is history. Universities, like the University of Bologna, which had been the best law school for 400 or 500 years, tried to keep a middle-path in between Protestants and Catholics, and it became a mediocre institution.  The University of Paris sided whole-heartedly with the Counter-Reformation, with the Catholic side, and it only rose in prestige as it became one of those sites for the ideological production of anti-Protestant ideology.  But, they had to make a choice: ‘we can’t continue doing the things we’re doing.’  Scholastic knowledge in and of itself is useless.  There is this new knowledge, Protestant, Reformation knowledge that has to be taken into account.  And we have to create knowledge in accord with this danger.  So, that was one way you could transform.

Or you could transform and say, ‘the Scholastic way of doing things is attached to a dead world.  We can’t do that anymore.’  The universities now, however, are so massive and so enormous that, other than breaking them up into smaller campus units or something like that, it’s difficult to think about the future for the university when the limit or the dead-point is staring us in the face.

For a Mass Exodus from Universities: Push their Limits, Show that Viable Alternatives Exist, Strengthen Communal Networks

CW: Well, I’m pretty convinced that we need to start some kind of autonomous university alternative.  It seems like a lot of people are taking this route, through free schools and the occupy movement starting popular education projects—for instance, recently the Paul Robeson Freedom School started up in Brooklyn, and there’s a Free University in Occupy Wall Street.  It seems that some of what you’re pointing to is the need for a more clear proposition of what this alternative is, and to actually make it happen.  Getting back to the questions about connecting with informal networks of cooperation in communities, and figuring out how to make that alternative university in a way that connects with those networks and also with social movements around issues in those communities, such as housing, police, prisons…

Mark:  Yeah, and it’s not only, ‘how do you make this sort of wealth of theoretical knowledge available to these informal networks?’ but how do you make the wealth of practical, vocational knowledge available to the theoretical networks.  And I’m interested in both.  I think that this idea of ‘free education,’ when it’s university graduate based, it tends to be more built around ideas and built around sharing these theoretical interventions in people’s lives.  I don’t know why I would be interested in a theoretical intervention in my life unless I was already convinced that I needed that theoretical intervention into my life.  So, any attempt to create a new autonomous university has to be built around a shared knowledge of these informal networks—being able to work on the place that you live, being able to work on the things that you possess with other people, while also allowing this theoretical work that we’ve been doing to continue to flourish, and to flourish in new ways because it will be exposed to new networks of knowledge.  I think that’s where that has to go.  It just can’t be an idea of taking the humanities, these theoretical studies, and sharing that, and wondering why people aren’t coming out in droves and we’re not seeing the transformation of mass consciousness because of that.  Who’s going to be interested in this?  You’re only interested in that because you’ve been exposed to these theoretical ideas in such a way that they make sense for the situation that you live in.

CW:  One kind of strategic question is about: how do we convince other precarious academics, grad students who are coming through the university and who are facing, or anticipating facing, a job market where they have a 60 or 70% chance of being a permanent adjunct.  How can we push the limit of the university—how can we make that limit more apparent, and motivate a sort of mass exodus from precarious academic work?  There are different parts to this question, but one is, how can we create alternative ways for potential precarious academics who think of themselves as radical intellectual laborers to continue to do radical intellectual work in a sort of alternative institution without feeling like they’re stigmatized for ‘dropping out’ of academia, while also having resources to live?

Mark: I am of the opinion that you’ll never be able to convince people—there’s not an argument I could present that would say, ‘these are the numbers; you’re probably going to fail, so you should come and join us.’  I know that when I was entering the university, I still think that if I were to go onto the job market in the more traditional way, I would be one of those people, [said sarcastically] ‘cuz I’m special, I’m great, look at the work I’ve done: people like it.’  That’s clearly not going to be the case.  But most people tend to think that they’re going to be the exception.  I’ve been told my entire life that I’m special, that I’m brilliant, that I’ve always been the smartest one of my friends, blah blah blah blah.  So, in some ways, you have to give up on this idea that statistics or numbers are going to be able to convince someone.  The way you convince people is through viable alternatives that are actually practical and working.  I think that, only until those things are built, are we ever going to be able convince people not to give their labor to this thing that already exists.  

This is the weird thing about radicals in the university, is that it’s difficult sometimes when career matters are weighed in decisions to do things.  It’s like, ‘I can’t do this because I need to get a job.’  That’s true; yes, I totally understand that point.  There’s lots of reasons why that’s the case.  But, there’s also 22% of the working age population that doesn’t have a job.  You find these networks and you find these ways to perpetuate yourself, as a person, without jobs.  So, part of that has to be getting over this fear of not having a job.  It seems weird that radicals would have to get over this fear of not having a job when almost a quarter of the population doesn’t.  Like, who am I that I’m so special that I need full employment?  ’Because I need to be thinking, like my brain is so valuable and the ideas I have are so useful to the movement as a whole that it’s a travesty if I didn’t have employment.’  Needing to get over that idea.  I don’t live in a communal situation necessarily, but I have a lot of people around me who share things back-and-forth and work to make the lives that we have as good as we possibly can.  Aren’t those communal networks the whole point of the organizing?  There are alternatives to the job market as we understand it, already, but we can’t really see those until they crystallize.  So, it falls to those who can have the opportunities and initiative to create some alternatives, to show that these alternatives actually do exist and they’re practical.  Because I think it’s difficult for people to grasp; they’re stuck in the argument based on ‘you’re probably going to fail.  It’s never going to work.  It’ll work for some people but it’s not going to work for the majority of people.’  I feel that that’s so much the argument that we tend to make, that ‘these things are going to fail.’

Organizing at the campus level should be about illustrating the limit as it exists through student debt.   Brian Whitener and Dan Nemser’s article, “Circulation and the New University,” is very good at showing the circuits of capital circulation, how they exist in the university, and how they’re clearly not very sustainable.  It’s all built on the premise of student debt, the precarity of the academic job market.  All of these things can be shown in student and worker struggle at the university level.  But, until there’s some viable alternative that people can vacate for, it’s not going to amount to very much.

For an example of a potential viable alternative, I recommend talking with Mike Neary about The Social Science Centre (Lincoln, UK).  They’re actually working on an alternative.

Mark is a graduate student at UCSC and is on the editorial board of Viewpoint Magazine.