Tag: crisis

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Three Crises: 30s – 70s – Now

Here is the outline of a self-organized seminar which we are preparing at Mess Hall in Chicago for the Fall, as one activity of the Slow-Motion Research/Action Collective. It is an outgrowth of Four Pathways through Chaos and the Technopolitics projects, as well as the Public School events around the UC strikes. Hopefully in this seminar we can develop and share a precise but also useful analysis of the current crisis, and lay some foundations for autonomous research and education practices in this city and in collaboration with other groups. Get in touch if you are interested!

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GOALS: The seminar program seeks to develop a framework for understanding the present political-economic crisis and for acting against and beyond it. Historical study is integrated with militant research and artistic expression. The program is a first step toward a self-organized university, including Internet resources for sharing research notes and reference materials.

FORMAT: Eight two-part sessions, each four hours long with a half-hour break in the middle. The first part of each session will be a course delivered by Brian Holmes, with readings that may be done in advance or afterwards. Each installment of the course will be accompanied by another presentation, screening, artistic event or organizing session offering some parallel to or resonance with the material; these are developed by a collective working group. Readings will be posted on the web and full course notes as well as reference materials will be made available immediately after each session. Distanced participation or parallel sessions in other cities are welcome.

CONCEPT: The development of capitalism is marked, every thirty or forty years, by the eruption of extended economic crises that restructure the entire system in organizational, technological, financial and geopolitical terms, while also affecting daily life and commonly held values and attitudes. In the course of these crises, conditions of exploitation and domination are challenged by grassroots and anti-systemic movements, with major opportunities for positive change. However, each historical crisis has also elicited an elite response, stabilizing the worldwide capitalist system on the basis of a new integration/repression of a broad range classes, interest groups, genders and minority populations (whose definition, composition and character also change with the times). In the United States, because of its leading position within twentieth-century capitalism, the domestic resolution of each of the previous two crises has helped to restructure not only national social relations, but also the international political-economic order. And each time, progressive demands that emerged from the crisis period have been transformed into ideologies covering a new structure of inequality and oppression. By examining the crises of the 1930s and the 1970s along with the top-down responses and the resulting hegemonic compromises, we will cut through the inherited ideological confusions, gain insight into our own positions within neoliberal society, identify the elite projects on the horizon and begin to formulate our own possible agency during the upcoming period of instability and chaos.

SESSIONS:

1. Introduction: technopolitical paradigms, crisis, and the formation of new hegemonies.

We begin with a theoretical look at more-or-less coherent periods of capitalist development, known as technopolitical paradigms. During twenty to thirty-year periods, technologies, organizational forms, national institutions and global economic and military agreements all find a working fit that allows for growth and expansion, up to a limit-point where the paradigm begins to encounter conditions of stagnation, internal contradiction and increasing crisis. Autonomist Marxism helps us understand the dynamics of grassroots protagonism during the crisis periods. To grasp the mechanisms whereby systemic order is recreated, we can draw on Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as the construction of a set of discourses and practices that articulate the behaviors of the diverse classes, in order to secure their consent to a new social hierarchy. Hegemony is first achieved at the national level; but when its formation is successful it spreads throughout world society. The ingredients of a hegemony are moral, aesthetic, philosophical and epistemological; but these abstract categories of thought and imagination are intertwined from the start with economic practices and institutional forms. Hegemony is the force of desire and belief that knits a paradigm together and sustains it despite manifest injustices.

2.Working-class movements and the socialist challenge during the Great Depression.

This session describes the emergence of Fordist-Taylorist mass production in the United States, then turns to economic and geopolitical conditions following the Crash of ‘29. We follow the interaction between labor movements and socialist/communist doctrines, while examining the major institutional innovations of the Roosevelt administration. Can the 1930s be understood as a “regulation crisis” of assembly-line mass production? What are the forces that provoked the crisis? Has the “New Deal” become an idealized figure of class compromise for succeeding generations? What does it cover over?

3. The Council on Foreign Relations during WWII and the US version of Keynesian Fordism.

Only after 1938 was the economic crisis resolved through the state orchestration of innovation and production, effected by wartime institutions. Corporate leaders from the Council on Foreign Relations were directly inducted to the Roosevelt government and planned the postwar monetary and free-trade order enshrined in the Bretton-Woods agreements. How was the intense labor militancy of the 1930s absorbed into the Cold War domestic balance? To what extent did the American experience shape the industrial boom in the Keynesian social democracies of Western Europe and Japan? How were the industrial welfare states supported and enabled by neocolonial trade and resource extraction?

4. The ‘60s revolts, Third-World self-assertion, stagflation and the monetary chaos of the ‘70s.

The brief convergence of labor movements, student revolts and minority rights campaigns in 1968 was a global phenomenon, spurred on by Third World liberation and the struggle in Vietnam. Wildcat strikes, entitlement claims and the political imposition of higher resource prices (notably by OPEC) were all key factors in the long stagnation of the 1970s. We examine the breakdown of Bretton-Woods, the conquest of relative autonomy by Western Europe and Japan and the last surge of decolonization movements in the 60s, followed in the ’70s by the Third World push for a New International Economic Order. We also look at the fear and anxiety that the ’68 revolts produced in ruling classes across the world. Does the US internalize global economic and social contradictions during this period? Which aspects of the social and cultural revolts posed real obstacles to the existing economic structure? Which ones became raw materials for the formation of a new hegemonic compromise?

5. The Trilateral Commission and the transnational hegemony of Neoliberal Informationalism.

The launch of the Trilateral Commission by Nelson Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973 is an elite response to the crisis, with concrete political effects: some twenty members of the Commission were named to the Carter administration in 1976. During the decade the coming of “postindustrial society” was announced by sociology, while technoscientific innovations like the microprocessor went into production. Cooperation among trilateral elites was paralleled by financialization, the rise of networks, the creation of transnational futures and options exchanges, etc. However, the Treasury-induced US recession of 1980-82, the “Star Wars” military buildup and the emergence of a new innovation system are specifically American contributions to the new technopolitical paradigm that takes shape in the US in the 1980s, before going global after 1989. So we have to understand the difference and complementarity of Republican and democratic responses to the crisis (the right-wing Heritage Foundation was also founded in 1973). What are the defining features of Neoliberal Informationalism? Who are its beneficiaries – and losers? How is the geography of capitalist accumulation transformed by the new hegemony? What sort of commodity is transmitted over the electronic networks? And what does it mean to be a consenting “citizen” of the trilateral state-system?

6. BRIC countries, counter-globalization, Latin American and Middle Eastern social movements.

With the breakdown of the USSR in 1989, followed by the first Gulf War, the world-space is opened up for transformation by the trilateral economic system. The 1990s witnesses the largest capitalist expansion since the postwar industrial boom, driven by Neoliberal Informationalism. The global boom of the net economy was supposed to be synonymous with “the end of history” and the universal triumph of liberal democracy – but that soon hit the dustbin. After tracking the expansion of trilateral capitalism we focus on the economic rise of the Gulf states and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), as well as the political currents of the counter-globalization movements, Salafi Jihad, Latin American Leftism and finally, the Arab Spring (and following hot summer). Do these diverse economic and political assertions mark the end of the trilateral hegemony and the reemergence of a multipolar order?

7. Financial crisis, climate change and elite attempts to stabilize Neoliberal Informationalism.

Here we examine the inherently volatile dynamics of the informational economy, culminating in the Asian crisis of 1997-98, the dot-com bust of 2000 and finally, the credit crunch of 2008 and the ongoing fiscal crisis of the neoliberal state. The central product of Neoliberal Informationalism now reveals itself to be the financial derivative. Little has been done in the United States to control finance capital, but the debt crisis has massively punished the lower ranks of society and seriously eroded the status of the middle classes, with a major attack on the public university system and a move to cut all remaining welfare-state entitlements. What is the significance of the bailout programs? How have the European Union and Japan faced the crisis? What paths have been taken by the Gulf states, and above all, by China? Is contemporary economic geography now changing? Do we see the beginnings of new alliances among international elites, outside the traditional arenas of trilateral negotiation?

8. Perspectives for egalitarian and ecological social change in the upcoming decade.

In the absence of meaningful reform and redistribution, continued financial turmoil appears certain, along with a reorganization of the monetary-military order. Meanwhile, climate change is already upon us, advancing much faster than previously anticipated. The result of all this is unlikely to be business as usual. What we face is a triple crisis, economic, geopolitical and ecological, with consequences that cannot be predicted on the basis of past experience. Can we identify some of the central contradictions that will mark the upcoming years? Which institutions and social bargains have already come under severe stress? In what ways will the ecological crisis begin to produce political responses? How will class relations within the United States interact with crossborder and worldwide struggles? Is it possible to imagine — and work toward — a positive transformation of the current technopolitical paradigm?

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Comments. Ideas. Contributions. Welcome.

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Communiqués

Brian Holmes: Art and the Paradoxical Citizen

To the Arts, Citizens: it’s a fantastic title. Hearing it, anyone who’s been involved in political activism will probably think: “At last we’re getting somewhere.” The idea that art is part of citizenship, that there is a democratic exercise of the arts within the framework of public life, and that this appeal to the citizen-artist can be supported by a major cultural institution, is about as progressive as you could get today. Especially since this is a direct echo of the French republican tradition, where the phrase, Aux armes citoyens, is nothing less than a call to rise up and institute democracy against tyranny – in other words, a call to revolution. The Portuguese know the meaning of this revolutionary call to arms from decisive historical events that are still in living memory. So one can imagine that the organizers of this exhibition did not take their title lightly.

The call to arts is a recognition that citizenship does not stop at the ballot box, that an expressive politics is essential to a democracy, and that in an era saturated with media and advertising, the aesthetic dimension has become a crucial field of social interaction. What’s more, this call to arts is an acknowledgement that censorship continues to exist in all societies and is often intensifying; that archaic values and beliefs raise a barrier to free expression even more powerful than the force of the law; and finally, that citizens’ day-to-day participation in the shaping of their own societies is as urgent an occupation today as at any time in the past, precisely because of the professionalization of politics and the tendency to treat any disruption of the norm as a security issue. All this assigns challenging roles to institutions that attempt to take up the call to arts. Among them is not only that of exhibiting politically engaged art to the public, but also of mediating the ensuing debates, sustaining the inevitable critiques and scandals, archiving the results and thereby helping to build a culture of democratic exchange, which is never easy to maintain and never flourishes without the people involved taking an individual stand, beyond all bureaucratic limits and guarantees. Quite a tall order – as though we were going to wake up and start living again.

Could anything like this dream be achieved in reality? Based on work carried out with a wide range of collaborators over the last decade, what I would like to outline in this short essay is a critical and constructive program that necessarily goes beyond any single exhibition. At a minimum, such a program would have to address the relations of art to financial capital, the issues of national identity and race in artistic representation, and finally, the question of citizenship itself as a frame for the individual’s involvement in society. The call to arts requires us to face certain paradoxes. But it is a chance to examine how democratic and egalitarian ideals can be expressed right now, in the world where we are actually living.

Forces of desire
In the developed and rapidly developing countries, the most impressive urban project of the last thirty years has been the redefinition of cities as competitive nodes in a global financial network. The aesthetic-economic phenomenon of iconic “starchitecture” – including a large number of luxurious new museums – has been the most obvious sign of this competition for visibility within the world hierarchy of cities. At the level of lived experience, the process translates into the gradual reclassification of decaying residential areas as consumption zones for the new professional and managerial classes, i.e. gentrification. Here, the role of artists as “urban pioneers” who brave the difficulties of life among minority and immigrant populations has been well documented since the 1980s – often via highly critical shows in the new museums of the financialized city centers. Yet despite some radical attempts to work with social movements, the failure of critical artists to achieve anything concrete on the level of urban planning demonstrates the trap of career paths dependent on the same flows of investment capital that have reshaped the cities, driving poorer inhabitants far away from the urban centers. In this story, the “call to arts” has mainly involved, not citizenship or democracy, but the valorization of urban real estate as a speculative commodity, leading directly to the current economic crisis.

The place of the arts within the gentrification process derives from their capacity to foster specific kinds of desire. Over the thirty-year period of financialized globalization, it has become obvious that certain forms of vanguard art – for example, the dadaist practice of visual montage, the  situationist theory of the construction of ambiances, and the pop-art embrace of exuberant exoticism – have been functionalized to fit the perceptual and expressive repertoire of a networked corporate culture. Just as  pictorial abstraction offered a visual vocabulary for the dominant forms of industrial capitalism in the Cold War period, so the recombinant signifiers and improvised performance practices of relational art have shown their adaptation to today’s computerized economy of images and signs. The homogenization of the urban landscape under the cover of glittering lights and exotic attractions poses a serious challenge to cultural and educational institutions, whose long-term capacities for the generation of alternative values are increasingly reduced by demands for budget-cutting and box-office type profitability – demands which can only be satisfied by the transformation of those institutions into leisure facilities and corporate innovation centers. However, it is now possible that the economic crisis and the diminishing appeal of kaleidoscopic urban experiences will offer new missions to public culture, if anyone is willing and able to invent them.

Fenced-in nations
Perhaps the greatest challenge to an egalitarian and radically democratic stance in art today comes from the resurgence of conservative electoral rhetorics based on national identity. This resurgent conservatism and outright racism grows in direct proportion to the destabilization of traditional customs and labor relations by the individual mobility and ethnic mixing that accompanies financially driven globalization. Threatened with joblessness, established citizens attack the migrants whose cheap manpower used to make their lives so easy. In the United States, major progress in the cultural integration of ethnic minorities was countered, from the late 1980s onward, by the outbreak of the neocon “culture wars.” Since then, the US has witnessed the construction of physical barriers as well as a network of electronic security systems along its 3000-kilometer border with Mexico. The situation is even worse in the European Union, whose member states have not had such long experience with  inbound immigration and have not been able to generate the political and cultural representation that can bolster the claims of recent arrivals to full citizenship. At this point, the political systems of all these democracies are prey to racist sloganeering, resulting in the intensification of repressive policing, the arbitrary denial or suspension of visas, outbreaks of violence at street level and increased legitimacy for the seemingly endless wars in the Middle East.

The important question is, to what extent can contemporary art institutions become effective sites of social integration, beyond the mere display of exotic signifiers? At least three pathways offer real possibilities. The first and still most common is the high-culture elaboration of motifs and cultural practices borrowed from the heritage and everyday experience of minority groups, which is exactly what modernist art did with European folk motifs in the early twentieth century. The second involves the collaboration of artists with neighborhood groups on activist campaigns for equal rights and protection from violence and discrimination – a kind of work which gives minority publics a direct stake in the institution. Unfortunately this remains rare in contemporary art because of a class bias that uses the criterion of aesthetic purity as a way to screen out most local participation. The third possibility is to support and display vanguard practices from non-Western countries as a way to explore world society and to encourage the complex process of cross-cultural interpretation. All these possibilities challenge the former concept of artistic institutions as the guardians of a national identity. And the most interesting thing about them is that they all point directly to the limits of current conceptions of citizenship.

Human ecology and progress
The fundamental political problem now facing the developed nations is that the values of citizenship are conceived exclusively in terms of economic growth. The only imaginable progress lies in rising profit margins and increasing levels of consumption. But the endless search for competitive advantage requires at least four things: an aggressive expansion of markets at the expense of other countries; a cheapening of labor either through automatization or recourse to a work force not subject to national standards; a predatory use of credit to extract savings from individuals and governments; and finally, a negligence of the human and ecological costs, which are treated as “externalities” and left off the account books of a social order that is regulated only by monetary accounts. Under these conditions, the “citizen” is redefined as an increasingly cheap worker (whose economic rights should continually be diminished) and as a voracious consumer (whose pockets must be filled with borrowed money). At the same time, the “non-citizen” is invited to work for even less than the most ill-paid sectors of the national population while simultaneously being reviled and declared illegal, so as to stave off demands for expensive social programs. Clearly these are the ingredients of not one but several disasters, all of which are at least partially underway: economic penury even within the developed nations; climate change for the entire world; generalized alienation manifesting itself as terrorism; and finally, outright war. The twenty-first century is likely to see a major crisis, different from those that marred the twentieth, but perhaps equally violent.

In this threatening configuration, the artistic sphere remains a place where philosophical inquiry, sociological analysis and radically egalitarian political concepts can be articulated with common forms of perception and intimate experiences of daily life. Yet such uses of art are rare, by comparison to the major role that aesthetic production has taken in the financialized economies. And they are paradoxical, compared to the reigning doxa or dogma of financial capitalism and consumer citizenship. To sustain the democratic potential of artistic invention will ultimately require a reworking of the very notion of progress, whether through the kind of fiery debate that attends upon scandalous transgression, or through the pleasure that comes with a generous exploration of diverging values. Art institutions, if they want to survive as something other than corporate design labs and pay-per-view leisure centers, will have to show larger numbers of people that they can serve as social sites for participation in the development of alternatives. Really, it’s no joke to associate the historical call to arms with a contemporary call to the arts. At stake is a new practice of what it means to be a citizen.

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Communiqués

Notes on Childcare at the Wisconsin Occupation

by China Martens

http://indyreader.org/content/notes-childcare-wisconsin-occupation

Working to create support for parents and children is one of my main forms of political activism (see http://dontleaveyourfriendsbehind.blogspot.com/), so after reading reports of how the protesters had settled into a camp within the Capitol Building that included childcare, I wanted to find out more. I asked Ryan Harvey (who had written about the childcare station in his “Dispatches from the Madison Fight #3, also here on indyreader.org) to put me in touch with an organizer. Mary Jo, a mother of three active in the protests, responded to my query.

Caretakers of young children will appreciate this: When I finally got voice- to-voice phone contact with Mary Jo she said that, ironically enough, she was having childcare issues at the moment. She couldn’t get to the Capitol to get her press pass on time this morning (she’s with radio), and now the kids are throwing flour all over the kitchen floor because she is on the phone with me. “Gotta go, China, call me back!” In a bit she called back and rushed out this informal interview over the telephone. Day-by- day the situation is changing. These are the typed notes from our chat on Thursday March 3, 2011:

Mary Jo said that people/families are already in crisis in their daily life. Being at the Capitol and holding space like this puts them in further crisis. Camping out in the Capitol building for almost 20 days is creating stress.   Authorities only let one person go in and out of the building at a time – it’s not clear to families if they can get back in, but they can. But it’s okay, since people need to rest. It’s been three weeks and they are regrouping: this is going to be a long battle.

Childcare is important space and (she designates it as) stress-free space!

They were asked to move yesterday  (March 2nd) and the childcare space had been targeted since they were the only ones on the second floor. It was started by mothers looking for a quiet space to relax and recoup away from the main action. The police told them they must leave for the building to be cleaned. When I asked if they were still in the building, Mary Jo replied, “OH YES – we are still there and we are not moving. If you move – you’re done!” Mary Jo is holding space for children who will also be affected by this bill and for their parents who have come to protest. Her vision is to lobby for families.

How did (what Mary Jo has dubbed) “The North Wing Family Center” start? First a friend R. started by getting meals for youth and putting their art and other flyers on the wall. That helped change the space and set the tone. Others started hanging murals and banners and stuff. L. had a baby. Put up signs for childcare. Two moms, S. and L. just sat with each other, and then L. spent the night. The next day Mary Jo came. She asked what the mothers wanted and together they made a list.

She tells me that lots of power plays go on within the Capitol – some try dictating what they should do, and how others should do things. Some of the people said, “We should compromise, they want us to leave–we should”. However, Mary Jo is part of those who say “No.”

The mothers had started it by needing a space to rest, and they found it. But by the next day, there were already some (without children) that were trying to kick them out of their space – which is a really good space. “Stake your ground,” her friend recommended. Half the moms decided they would leave like they were asked to. Mary Jo says, “I’m not leaving, I’m going to sit here and hold space.” The moms left, but a half an hour later they came back because they had been shooed out of the first floor when the hearings started and there was nowhere else to go. There were three moms. Then I. and E. with her two-year-old made five moms.

I ask if anyone who’s not a mom is helping out now? Yes, Mary Jo says. C. (a male without children of his own) is holding the space now. She tells me that conceptually the idea came from M.G. (another male) who said “Everyone is not here,” and then they had a long conversation about what they could do for families. The Children’s Museum is a block away and has offered some support with a discount on admission. They are strategizing about what to do next.

 These are Mary Jo’s key points about the family space they have created:

-We are holding space for the people who aren’t here yet

-Not everyone is at the table

-Everyone is affected.

-If we don’t put family first and foremost in the movement, the movement will fail!

Mary Jo tells me a little more about her struggles with holding space. “I held that ground [where we had set up the families’ area] at least 3 times where it became very unsure and I had to be very strong and clear. And people aren’t used to that in this day and age. I’m uncompromising. I call it the battle of the north wing.” The most recent incident had happened the day before. Five police officers came in, very forcefully, with their shoes on (You couldn’t ask them to take off their shoes. She had instituted a “no shoes” rule at the door because snow was tracking in and getting very dirty, and she wanted to keep the space clean for babies crawling on the ground). They pushed away the rocking chair she had brought from home at the door. “Excuse me!” she said. A policeman said, “I’ve worked here for 21 years and I can do what I want, I have immunity.” “What does that mean?” she asked. He answered that it means you can come and go, as you like. Mary Jo replied that she has immunity too! “The police told us that we needed to get our stuff out! But we ignored them and they didn’t come back. You just don’t leave when they say!”

Bringing the children to the occupation is good for the kids, Mary Jo tells me – and its good for the community! People recharge and ground themselves watching children.

Mary Jo is good at showing how an action is built from the conversations and actions of many. She tells me another kernel of wisdom to ponder. C. (who works as a “mama’s little helper” and helped Mary after the birth of the last of her three young children) said “Families need backup at home. The GOP wants to affect us in our communities and homes.”

Mary Jo expands: “There is a whole tier of people who cannot get to the Capitol. It’s too intense there. But they are supporting the occupation from the outside. We need to figure out how to increase the support there.”

Mary Jo wants to emphasize how parents are organizers and that many parents who are organizing this action at the Capitol have children at home. Parent organizers first seek support from their own families but even their extended support systems are not enough during this time. She asks other organizers that she knows are parents how they are doing; and how they are keeping things sane at home. What has been happening is there are a lot of typical gender divisions: many of the mother activists are staying home with the children while the father activists continue more visibly working on these issues. She and her husband are currently hiring a nanny to stay home with the children as she continues to organize but she is well aware of the fact that not everyone can afford this. What Mary Jo would like to express to the reader is that the struggle in Madison is going to come to us all. We need to reach out and ask for help. The reason Mary Jo and others continue working to keep a Family space at the Capitol occupation is to work towards collectively supporting children and parents, primarily mothers–those most affected by the new state government’s policies.

Note: As of Monday, March 7 the “North Wing Family Center” is no more. All their stuff has been removed. Concerned participants are planning what to do next and how to rebuild in a new setting or format to support families at the protest. I will post up more information when I receive it.

For more background on the larger protest in Madison, Wisconsin:

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/whats-happening-wisconsin-explained#

Inspired by “Did You Know There Was a Pop-Up Kindergarten in Tahrir Square?” :

www.good.is/post/a-moving-letter-from-egypt-about-the-role-of-children-in-tahrir-square/

And with thanks to Ryan Harvey for his reports and putting me in touch with  the North Wing Family Center:

http://voiceshakes.wordpress.com

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Features

Ask About An Autonomous University: 5 Exam Questions For Life

When I talk about the current crisis with people who use universities, I like to find out what they want, so I ask questions. Since I can’t imagine a level of funding that would make the education industry tolerable under capitalism, I ask how we can imagine simultaneous occupation of and withdrawal from school. Common university ideology makes us feel that our work is a labor of love, yet resentment and fear fill our days. Exhaustion grips us to such an extent that we have no choice but to withdraw, but rather than fleeing into our families, the latest 3D entertainment or the hippest new bar, perhaps we could collectively seek refuge in an autonomous school we might tolerably call our own. Perhaps such a university could somehow open a future.

I ask soft questions at first, leaving more difficult issues for others to ask in discussion. Starting with our immediate desires for working and learning allows a group to wonder about the kind of world an autonomous university needs and might help to produce. Almost always, someone, usually an undergraduate, wants to know how militancy can become part of education and how a school might become a dynamic seed of revolutionary change. Someone else, usually a faculty or staff member, usually asks what sorts of change would be needed so that a parent who needs time wouldn’t have to worry about child care. In order to answer that question, the group has to imagine radical restructuring of what it means to live and work at a school.

All of these questions ask how we can imagine a university independent of the state and designed by our desires: a communized school. Most people think this crazy at first. Then they start to fantasize. The gap between what they really want and what they currently have to do to participate in universities starts to educate us about the challenges we face. More importantly, our fantasies could be realized if we stopped attending to our masters. Our bosses say that outside of science and business education, the university doesn’t produce anything worth paying for. I choose to take them at their word and suggest we let them try to live without us.


1) Why are we interested in continuing to work in universities as they are?

If we remain at our jobs for our paychecks, let’s admit it. Compensation for students, staff and faculty dwindles every year while our workload increases. Recently, group of department heads at my institution proposed unpaid furloughs and increased teaching loads to help solve the schools financial woes. Such an offer assumes that we love teaching and learning. Surely we do, but we can also imagine ways to act on that love other than by rendering ourselves daily to an institution that betrays the very premises of education and makes every creative act painfully frustrating. We must sort aspects of our current situation that we value from the conditions that revolt us.


2) How can temporary autonomous schools be made more stable without becoming institutions?

We can think of many examples of temporary autonomous zones within and around universities: reading groups, support forums, certain kinds of exhibitions, self-funded film series, informal athletic communities etc., etc. Historically, in times of extreme hardship such as the Russian revolution, classes taught by figures like Lev Kuleshov became autonomous zones because there weren’t any institutions to receive support from. The glories of 1920s Soviet cinema emerged from Kuleshov’s winter classes in a roofless room without a projector, camera or film stock. One might also think of the Bahktin Circle from which works emerged as powerful as Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Marxism And The Philosophy Of Language, and The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. After the revolutionary the period, what had been autonomous became institutional once again. How can we learn and live without reifying ourselves and reproducing our current hardships within yet another system?


3) What role does accreditation play in what we do?

People often tell us that even if we could occupy the buildings of a university and build our own curriculum there, we would lack legitimacy. Accreditation mostly serves as a sign that a school can legitimately create a hierarchy of job candidates for employers. As labor at all levels become increasingly precarious, a degree and a high GPA become increasingly expensive but illegitimate commodities. If jobs don’t exist, a degree can’t help us get them. The idea that education aims at employment lacks any legitimacy in the first place. Many faculty members got into the business partly out of a profound discomfort with the lived experience of capitalism. We all must eat and care for our children. Can we imagine a way to do so and have the world respect us without serving as a motor of social reproduction in a system that makes so many of us want to flee?


4) Would autonomous universities evaluate learning?

An autonomous university might not have grades. Perhaps the faculty would be able to acknowledge that they learn as much as the students do. Perhaps the students would be able to be open and honest about what they get out of their experiences at the school. Like accreditation, grades serve to differentiate the labor force while rendering future workers servile. To add insult to injury, of all the onerous tasks current universities demand, those who do it complain about grading the most. We can think of more productive forms of feedback.


5) How can the exploitative character of self-administration be corrected?

Aside from the utterly unnecessary managers, underpaid women do most university secretarial work. In the late 1980s and the 1990s universities used personal computers to shift some of the administrative burden onto faculty members without compensating them for the work. Teachers became more exploited and many secretaries became unemployed. Today’s institutions oblige faculty not just to print out their own syllabi and do their own accounting, they also require teachers to use poorly designed web-based learning software for every class and help build the departmental websites, creating more work while salaries get reduced. Perhaps in a university we could call our own, administration would take a different form.


Categories
Communiqués

Building a Powerful Left in the U.S: Show #3

Download Show in MP3 Format

source: http://buildingapowerfulleft.org

This show is debuting on a day, February 2nd, 2011, when a historic uprising is taking place in Egypt and across North Africa, as people are rising up against autocratic regimes in the region – regimes, it is important to note, that have been supported by the dominant global superpower, the United States.

But what sparked these uprisings at this time?  In large part, it’s been the increase in economic insecurity that stemmed from a global economic crisis, itself sparked by the collapse of the housing market in the United States and the attendant financial crisis.  But even more fundamentally, the bubble that was the US housing market of the last decade was propping up an economic system in deep trouble – unable to deliver a standard of living for American households and many around the world, on the order of the prosperity that was established in the United States and elsewhere in the post-World War II economic boom.  In recent decades, the only way that even the appearance of such prosperity could be maintained was through the generation of bubbles like the US housing market.

From the late 1970s onward, the  economic regime promoted most memorably by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was the “TINA” model.  “TINA” stands for “There Is No Alternative” – but to organize the economy around so-called “free markets,” and clearly to the benefit of private capital and the wealthy. It is a model that around the world has been called the Washington Consensus, or Neoliberalism.  But now, in the United States and across the globe, this economic regime is in clear crisis, seemingly unable to deliver even the illusion of prosperity any more.

On today’s show, we hone in on the economic crisis.  In obvious ways, the fact of the crisis provides ample opportunity and opening for the revival of the Left here in the United States and across the world – and yet, this has not the case.  And in particular,  there seems to be a dearth of ideas being put forward by the Left as how to respond to the economic crisis.

Is this so? Is there really such a dearth?  Or is it that they simply aren’t getting a hearing in the mainstream media?

Today we’ll hear from economists Robert Brenner, L. Randall Ray, Richard Wolff, and Dean Baker.

Listen: