This is my contribution to edu-factory. I’ve previously expressed my unease with the idea of the autonomous university, that’s what the following is all about.
As far as I understand, the organizers behind the edu-factory network have two goals for the project, the critical analysis of the university and the elaboration of a global autonomous university. These goals work in tandem. The former occurs in such a way as to lay the groundwork for the latter; the latter continues the former and acts to attempt to change the problems diagnosed in the former. I support both of these goals. I have participated and continue to participate to some extent in the autonomous university projects where I live, and I have been in many a fantastic reading group, which are smaller instances of the same spirit. I do these things because the use values produced in those settings - including this list serve - are precious to me. That said, I believe the autonomous university is not going to provide any resolution to the problems diagnosed in the critique of the university. Or rather, it will only address a few problems and will leave aside some very important other problems. More simply, I don’t think the autonomous university will make as big of an impact as I think the organizers of the edu-factory network seem to think it will make on the edu-factory in which many of us work. I do not mean to be disrespectful or to devalue the hard work of anyone involved in the project. On the contrary, it is my respect for a great many of the people involved which compels me to state this rather than simply quietly unsubscribe from the email list and delink from the network.
The project of the autonomous university sounds to me like basically an attempt to create a worker run cooperative. I am all for worker run cooperatives. I have a great deal of respect for the various radical traditions and movements which used co-ops as part of their vision of a new society, calling that new society the “cooperative commonwealth” and the “commonwealth of toil.” That vision speaks to me - I would eventually like to see a society where all labor occurs in situations something like worker run cooperatives. Still, establishing worker run cooperatives strikes me as an insufficient answer to the problems of the global
edu-factory.
While the autonomous university may have some role to play, it is not going to achieve the needed changes in the edu-factory. Consider the first line of the edu-factory manifesto (online here) which asserts “As was the factory, so now is the university.” This assertion can be read to support my views about the limits to which the autonomous university can transform the edu-factory. To look at problems and struggles in factories and say “the answer is to start our own autonomous factory!” would be a little odd. (Certainly there have been big successes in the history of the working class in the occupation and self-management of factories and other sites, but these successes are relatively rare and have occurred in the context of mass mobilizations.) Like wise it would be odd to look at struggles in food service or in sexwork and respond with “let’s start our own food service business!” or “let’s start an autonomous sexwork business!” Why is it less odd to look at problems and struggles in universities and say “let’s start our own university”? I think there’s an implication in the call for an autonomous university that the labor process of the university can be separated from the valorization process.
Leaving that aside, there is an important difference between, on the one hand, fighting the valorization process via workplace organizing and, on the other hand, experiencing and elaborating better labor process via self-managed alternatives. This is basically the difference between forming a union and starting a workers’ run co-op. I wish only the best for anyone in any industry who strikes out on the latter route, but I doubt it will either
a) survive attacks on it from their capitalist competitors [co-ops will survive because the market allows them to, because they flourish in the market becoming capitalist businesses, or because others wage union struggles and other forms of class conflict]
or
b) pose much of a challenge at all for powers and forces and trends in the industry that making conditions in the industry worse.
Again, there’s a big difference between building organization as in building and exercising power and building organization as some sort of alternative production arrangement.
Then again, what do I know? Perhaps in some contexts a worker run co-op is precisely the answer for some. Not everyone lives and works where I do. Far be it from me to tell others that their answers are not answers. I will say that the autonomous university does not address the majority of the most pressing problems I experience as someone employed in the edufactory. I sell my labor power to a university. My problems in the edufactory result from that fact. Very few of those problems differ substantially from the problems I’ve experienced selling my labor power in other settings. The problems I have in the edufactory result from - and could fixed by changes is - the balance of power in the workplace. Changing the balance of
workplace power is a matter of creating organization that seeks to exercise power in the workplace and against the workplace (against the valorization process). Changing the balance of workplace power for employees is not a matter of alternative institutions outside of the workplace which produce similar use values to those produced in the workplace. Put simply, what we need are not co-ops but unions (or, if others prefer, councils, soviets).
Unless the autonomous university becomes a source of income for education workers or becomes a resource for the production of workplace power within the edufactory, it will not change the dynamics of the edufactory significantly and will not improve my life much as an edufactory worker. With regard to the autonomous university as a worker run cooperative which provides people with income, I have grave doubts over that. It could happen and I will welcome it if it does, but my guess is that unless it happens alongside massive workplace struggle inside the edufactory the autonomous university would end up either a marginal or privileged space for a few, or just another competitor university, albeit a more democratic and pleasant one to work. On the other hand, with regard to the autonomous university as training and research body for the production of workplace power, I think that idea has a great deal of possibility. Where I live and work, we have conducted several workplace organizing trainings for university employees and workers in other industries. Those have been moderately successful. We focus on basic matters of acting together to exert power in the workplace, give some examples of different ways people have done this in their different workplaces, and we try to give people some resources for figuring how they would build an organization and exert power in their own particular workplaces.
Two final points. First point: I am troubled by the inter-related claims to the centrality of the edu-factory in contemporary capitalism, claims to an epochal shift which has rendered the present incredibly different from the past, and claims that the nature of the valorization process is tremendously different for us - either spatially because the edu-factory is different from other-factories or temporally because the change of era has created a mutation in the mode of valorization. These claims strike me as of questionable truth and strike me as predicated on mistaking the valorization process for the labor process, (I have used these terms throughout, if anyone isn’t familiar with them, I take them from chapter 7 of volume one of Marx’s Capital). Certainly the substance of our work is quite different from other forms of work, just as other forms of work all differ from each other, but our relationships to our employers and to capital is not really so different. More importantly, these claims strike me as moving in precisely the wrong direction. I have already written in earlier emails that I feel there is a rhetorical slip in our discussions about the edufactory: we speak of ourselves as intellectual laborers - as if other labors lack an intellectual content - and we speak of ourselves inside the edufactory as if we and people who do work like us are the only ones who work in this industry, when in reality neither is true.
By emphasizing the differences between our situation and others, we in the edufactory will diminish our power in two ways. On the one hand, we will lose intellectual resources - examples of struggles that can provide lessons for us from other eras and other sectors of the economy. On the other hand, we will lose the support of our fellow employees in the edufactory and elsewhere. I have already stated my discomfort with the implied claims that the edu-factory project represents the interests of workers in The University, when really the network appears to be made up entirely of people who perform labor as or like academics. That does not mean the project is without value, far from it. But it seems to me that one should always pause for a moment whenever one part of a class claims to speak for the whole class, and it also seems to me that this implicit claim to universality is something very, very much a part of what academic workers are trained to do in the edu-factory. That is, it is an attitude which is part and parcel of the ordinary operations of the edu-factory. This brings me to my second point.
In their piece entitled “Precarious Lexicon,” the Precarias a la Deriva wrote that “in jobs with a repetitive content (telemarketing, cleaning, textile workshops), the subjective implication with the task performed is zero and this leads to forms of conflict of pure refusal: generalized absenteeism, dropout-ism, sabotage (….)On the other hand, in jobs where the content is of the vocational/professional type (from nursing to informatics, to social work to research) and, as such, the subjective implication with the task performed is high, conflict is expressed as critique: of the organization of labor, of the logic that articulates it, of the ends toward which it is structured (….) Finally, in those jobs where the content is directly invisibilized and/or stigmatized (the most paradigmatic examples are cleaning work, home care, and sexual work, especially - but not only - street prostitution), conflict manifests as a demand for dignity and the recognition of the social value of what is done.”
(http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias/lexicon.htm) I mention this observation to note again that the edufactory contains more than one sort of work and demands for the autonomous operation of only one sort of work, academic work, will not necessarily speak to or advance the interests of all who do work in the edufactory. I’m not sure that the demand for the autonomous university even represents all academic workers, let alone all workers employed in universities or in education.
The reason I compared the autonomous university to an attempt to create a workers’ run cooperative (or perhaps a federation thereof) is that the initiative strikes me as an attempt to disentangle the labor process in existing academic work from the valorization process. That’s an understandable impulse. Compared to most of the other work I’ve done, I enjoy the substance of my job in university. Reading, writing, discussing - those are enjoyable pursuits. I particularly enjoy teaching and find that rewarding. Even more than enjoying these parts of the job, they form a part of my sense of self in relation to others. As the Precarias put it, my “subjective implication with the task performed is high.” This is not unique to the edufactory, of course, and I suspect that some of the impulse to see the edufactory as central to capitalism today may be the result of our subjective implication with our work in the edufactory. (I can imagine lawyers and doctors and media professionals, for instance, objecting to the claims made about the edufactory lying at the heart of capitalism and arguing for the primacy of a jurisprudence-factory, a hospital-factory, a spectacle-factory.)
My subjective implication with my work in the edufactory connects to what I dislike about my job - the ways in which the power structures on the job interfere with those elements. This is not unique to the edufactory, however. As I said earlier, the majority of the problems I have with my job in the edufactory are the problems involved with having to sell my labor power and having to let others use my labor power during the time I have rented it to them - I have concerns with respect, pay, benefits, the amount of time I spend working and the intensity of my work. These things will exist as long as capitalism exists, but are best challenged by organization at the point of production as I’ve already said. That is, I have problems with having to have a job and the qualities of having a job, like almost anyone else who has a job and very much like others with jobs in which the employees are highly subjectively implicated.
More importantly, however, there is a problematic aspect to the impulse to disentangle the labor process from the valorization process in the edufactory, which is that there seems to be an implied valorization (in the non-marxian sense of the term) of academic labor. That is, there is an implication here along the lines of the dignity of labor. This strikes me as in keeping with a certain ideology by which the edu-factory operates, an injunction for the edufactory worker to value their labor (and thus not to resist the valorization of their labor) because their labor is worth doing, because it is good for society. (In some respects this recapitulates the old traditions of labor republicanism and small-producer socialism, as does the project for an autonomous workers’ co-operative university, a sort of return to the early modern era within what some would call postmodernity.) This is again what the Precarias call subjective implication. To my mind, edufactory workers’ subjective implication in our work is at best ambivalent, being a source of division and class weakness as much as of conflict and powerful organization
Of course, as someone who is subjectively implicated in my work, I don’t have an argument to make against the importance of edufactory work. In fact, part of what keeps me going as an academic worker is precisely my sense that the work is important, along with the other things I find satisfying about it. I’m not sure that that sense is exactly accurate, though, and I’m hesitant about uncritically valorizing it precisely because I think it’s linked to maintaining the valorization process in the edufactory. I think the sense of importance of academic work functions as a sort of conscience wage, a nonmonetary payment in use values such as satisfaction and a sense of superiority. (I have in mind two writers who touch briefly on non-monetary wages: Leopoldina Fortunati in her discussion of love as a payment in exchange for domestic work which goes unpaid in monetary terms and David Roediger in the psychological wage that white people in the United States receive for their role in white supremacy. See Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction and Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness.) I see the sense that academic labor is important (and perhaps unique) as an important part of the impulse to see academic labor as separable from the academic valorization process. This is not an argument against that separation, but a plea for caution and critical engagement with the sensibility. Put simply, the bosses in the edufactory want edufactory workers to think of the edufactory as producing something important. I take it as axiomatic that if we find ourselves doing something at all similar to what the bosses want then we should pause a moment and reflect further.
In closing, I would like to repeat that while I think the autonomous workers’ co-operative university is not the project that I and others with jobs like mine most need, I would welcome that project’s success, and I think it might contribute to the unions (or soviets) which I think are needed. Finally, I repeat my respect for and gratitude to the organizers of the edu-factory list.
Nate - I’m desperately trying to work through some writing at the moment, but I just wanted to say that I think the analysis here is excellent. I’ve also been meaning to get back to you on the material you put up the other day in your post on the end of capitalism, but I may need to reply at some delay. Sorry not to be more substantive - just wanted to say that I appreciate the post - there’s a great deal of rich insight here, and not simply in relation to this particular initiative, but in relation to the complexities of how we mobilise - in the name of which ideals - and how forms of mobilisation connect up with broader power structures. There can sometimes be a catalytic effect in the experience of even marginal institutions that suggest that something “other” might be possible, but the issues you are raising resonate with me…
Comment by N Pepperell — January 5, 2008 @ 10:36 pm
Ugh.
The autonomy of the university has traditionally been the demand by which the professional-managerial class passes from class-in-itself to class-for-itself. The university is a separate sphere because knowledge workers do, generally, occupy privileged roles within the production process under capital — roles which are intertwined with deskilled lower-waged positions, even if they themselves foster alienation and are threatened by wage reduction, automation and deskilling. In a capitalist context a self-managed university poses a problem above and beyond the problem of a self-managed fast food chain or brothel, because the university is the key site of reproduction of nearly the entire set of knowledge professions specifically. Because of this, the “worker-owner” role means not only the implicit defense of the capitalist division of labor and market (which is the main contradiction faced by the typical worker-owner) but also the more or less explicit defense of the privilege held by the professional-managerial stratum, and thus of the permanent social and political fragmentation of the proletariat. (Obviously by “knowledge worker” I mean a broker/producer of institutionally legitimated knowledge — all work depends on knowledge and creativity.)
It’s a little disingenuous to say, “Certainly the substance of our work is quite different from other forms of work, just as other forms of work all differ from each other…”, because this fails to recognize the university as an artifact of the capital’s progressive vertical rationalization/disintegration of the labor process. The various technician, coordinator, instructor, engineer, etc. professions each originally developed as higher-waged task bundles offset by larger sets of lower-waged task bundles involving more taylorized, routinized, miserable work. Pretending that this division of labor is so prevalent under capital for any other reason than the obvious — that it is a vertical division — is akin to treating, say, racial formation in North America simply as an inconveniently, arbitrarily placed set of obstacles to the development of natural, horizontal solidarity.
Traditionally, when communists have been willing to demand the autonomy of the university (and so on) it has been on the assumption, or expectation, that mental workers, the “new working class,” or what-have-you will then be free to serve as the vanguard against capital. After all, they face alienation more directly by not being quite so darn distracted by scarcity. (This argument is even present in the liberal version — “a new left cannot rely on only aching stomachs to be the engine force of social reform,” according to the Port Huron statement.)
I don’t see much of a break from that tradition in “Where once the factory was a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists, so now the university is a key space of conflict,” etc. Isn’t that the same crap academic new-leftists have been saying for over 40 years now? It sounds to me like fancy theoretical window-dressing for pessimism, elitism, introversion and unaccountability. Those people don’t even halfheartedly gesture toward solidarity with the world outside the university, they just bullshit it away: “Perhaps it once made sense to speak of town and gown. But now the borders between the university and society blur.”
Ugh.
Comment by MJ — January 7, 2008 @ 2:09 am
hey MJ,
My apologies again for the misunderstanding via text message and thanks for clarifying. Unfortunately I continue to not understand - I have to ask you to unpack your second paragraph for me, the one that starts “it’s a little disingenuous” as I’m not sure I get it. What I meant by my remark “our work is different” was to set aside objections like “but our work is different!”, ie accusations that I’m flattening or something. I want to do that in a way which then sets me up to say “yes, and every type of work is different from every other”, ie to make a counter-accusation of flattening: I think this stuff has an implied claim like “all forms of labor except ours are similar, the important differences are our labor vs other labor,” a claim which is false and pernicious.
I really the first line of your comment, that’s well put and helpful, particularly in relation to the rest, that the professional-managerial class as a class-for-itself operates at the expense/detriment of others. This is I think part of why calls for academic freedom have never moved me. (And it seems quite reasonable to me for people whose tax and tuition dollars are being spent in universities to make claims about how that money should be spent and to express discontent over certain things.)
I’m in complete agreement re: the rest, though I may want to claim a proletarianization of academic work beyond what you might, I’m not sure (this relates to another academic political call that leaves me cold, the defense of tenure - I say tenure be damned, let’s get rid of it - it’s increasingly just for a managerial stratum anyway at least at big universities - and have unions instead). Another thing left out of both the edufactory stuff and my post is the unpaid labor of students and the variety of ways in which universities are factories that produce labor power, like you mention - not just knowledge but also legitimacy as you mention, as well as work discipline (remind me to tell you about an argument I gotten into with a “marxist” about grade inflation, if you care) and various bad ideologies.
Your remarks on tradition and old commie stuff makes me think again, I wish someone would write a book on the student left and its subsequent history in academia - I wonder if there’s a link between defenses of tenure and all that stuff and a sort of politics which believes in some level of self-management under capitalism, not self-management in a co-op form but of the reins of power, seizing the management apparatus of the unions, parties, universities (maybe self-management isn’t the right term here, I’m not sure). I could imagine people making arguments about the merits of some access to university governance that faculty should have, but none of them speak to me. Faculty have no more right to govern the university than anyone else who works there and their managerial positions are precisely that: managers’ prerogatives. Nothing radical about that - bosses are bosses are bosses. I’m rambling now, so I’m out, but one last thing -
I like your point on university folk as vanguard. (What a ridiculous idea that is!) It’s striking how easily the post-operaismo thing, general intellect and immaterial labor and all that, is compatible with that view. Even if that’s not the intent of the folk involve re: edu-factory - I imagine they’d say it’s not - the arguments seem totally compatible as you note. Sergio Bologna remarks at one point how a lot of the other Italian comrades despite their politics etc were ready to whip out their Lenin masks when the moment seemed right. Maybe this is a sort of Gramsci mask, war of position and all that?
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 7, 2008 @ 2:57 am
OK maybe it wasn’t disingenuous so much as potentially dangerous — there are (some) important differences between most professionals’ labor and most other labor. There are all sorts of samenesses since you all face capital as proletarians. I’m probably right there with you on the proletarianization argument. I guess that’s probably such a huge thing to get folks to acknowledge you end up downplaying the special nature of the university as the site of reproduction of the privileges held by technocrats in the rest of the productive process.
But if all the unveiling of a professor’s or a student’s antagonisms to capital accomplishes is a circling of the wagons of the university, it’s a step against working-class recomposition on the shop floor. The analogy with racial formation is a minefield but I’ll walk into it again here: the terms on which many mid-19th century white (”white”) workers in the US developed and described their antagonism to capital were also the very terms on which they set themselves apart from slave labor. Their struggles against the various institutions of indentured servitude were often motivated by, and organized in public rhetoric around, the outrage that they as “white men” should be subjected to something so close to the degraded, dependent slavery of black labor. And look at the legacy of the struggle for autonomy on those terms.
Comment by MJ — January 7, 2008 @ 8:48 am
hi MJ,
Thanks for explaining. We’re on the same page though I’m not trying to make all those points in this post. I’d also say that the circling of the wagons might not be “of the university” but inside the university - segmentation of the university workforce between academic and nonacademic is the norm I think (with strong segmentation of the academic workforce as well, and I believe of the nonacademic as well). I tried to get at this somewhat in this post but didn’t go into much depth as I’ve already done so in emails to the edufactory list, maybe I’ll dig those up and put them up on the blog. It seems to me there’s a rhetorical move going on in the use of the term “the university” - it selects one type of work that happens in universities and makes it the only type. To use your racial formation analogy, it’s like a section of unionized white workers in a large plant referring to themselves as the entirety of the workers in the plant, erasing the nonunionized workers who are more likely people of color.
That aside, one thing which I wasn’t clear on before - in the conversation this post is aimed at, part of what I’m trying to say is “our labor is like every other waged labor”, that the uniqueness of the labor process isn’t the issue because it’s not the labor process that should be the target for change. Put differently, at a very schematic and abstract level we do what everyone with jobs does - we sell out labor power and our employers make use of it. The project of the autonomous university which has been floated in the edufactory stuff seems to me not to address that and isn’t a sufficient response. I think implied in your comments is that mine is also an insufficient response, which I think is totally true - what I’ve said so far could be said just as well from a straight forward reformist trade unionist perspective.
Just now I made a connection to the picket line stuff - http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2007/08/22/is-a-picket-line/ - in the lead up to the AFSCME strike this fall where I work. The idea that teaching class off campus strikes me as involving a mistake about academic labor that’s at least in the same ballpark with what I’m on about in this post.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 7, 2008 @ 12:40 pm
Makes sense. I still don’t think you’re nearly harsh enough towards those people, but politics is politics, I guess.
I like your “Two final [sic] points:” paragraph above especially. I’d also like to hear more about the “subjective implication” idea…
Comment by MJ — January 7, 2008 @ 2:37 pm
You know me MJ, I like to be nice, except during bouts of insomnia. I also think there’s a threshold beyond which harshness means conversation is over. At that point there’s little point in even talking, or rather the point becomes one of analyzing an enemy - talking about rather than talking with.
Re: subjective implication, I think I know but I’m not 100% sure what the Precarias mean by it. I think they’ve read a lot of poststructurally stuff that I’m not real familiar with. I think of the term as meaning the same thing as identity or sense of self. I’d like to know how much that is deliberately cultivated and how much of it just sort of happens. A friend passed on a story once of another friend in nursing school - in some class there was a discussion of budget cuts and nursing shortages and so on, and now nursing is a calling not a job. The teacher set the discussion up to push people to be like “oh yeah I’d totally work for free as a nurse if I had to.” That’s what the Precarias quote makes me think of. I think this is at least in part a psychological wage like Roediger and Fortunati talk about. Same thing was all over the place in the NGOs I worked at - “it’s not a job it’s a movement, we’re making a difference,” etc, a payment in satisfaction and (in part derived from) the ability to be condescending to/about others who don’t do that sort of work.
Comment by Nate — January 7, 2008 @ 2:48 pm
Sort of like if you’re punk you have to listen to mostly shitty music but it’s balanced out by getting to act like you’re better than everyone?
Comment by MJ — January 7, 2008 @ 3:23 pm
Yes, exactly, and ugly clothes.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=GCF460eTEv0
Comment by Nate — January 7, 2008 @ 5:01 pm
Pasting this here for the sake of notekeeping. My friend David pushed me by email on some of this, among other things my overstatement of the point of production and narrowness of the type of organizing I’ll accept. (David if that’s not a fair summary let me know.) My reply -
I agree with that there’s positive potential in the project of an autonomous university. I think the project would likely be fun for participants, which is a good in itself, and could have other effects. I think women’s self-defense classes and consciousness raising groups from the earlier feminist movement could count as a type of autonomous
university, and those were very important things. Likewise with every other radical study group that’s every existed, I’m all for that and I think it can have a big impact.
As for point of production organizing, it’s true that I’m heavily focused on that. To a large extent, people on the list who know me could probably have predicted something close to what I was going to say - “I bet Nate will say we need to organize at the waged point of production.” I do believe that the waged point of production is the most important place for organization of our class. I don’t know that I actually have strong arguments for that and I won’t try to make any now. I will say, though, that the level or rate of point of production organizing in the US seems to me to be low. There are about 9 or 10% of US workers in unions, and many of those workers never went through an organizing drive. (My dad’s a 30+ year member of the IBEW and has
never been part of one.) Again I don’t have a solid argument here or evidence, but I think it’s reasonable to conclude that the low rate of organization at the point of production is linked to the (relatively speaking) longer hours, worse conditions, and lower pay in the US compared to many countries we’re likely to think of as comparable. And
again, the worst problems I encounter in my own life are largely job related - too much time, too much stress, too little money, etc, which is part of why I prioritize workplace organizing. That said, I’d never tell people who have other primary problems to drop those struggles
and start doing workplace stuff instead.
Also on this, the main point I was really trying to make in the piece, or a major distinction involved in the piece, is a difference between two sorts of organizations - on the one hand, prefigurative production of use values, like in co-ops, which may exist under capitalism and impact capitalism via the mediation of the market, and on the other hand organizations which exist for the purposes of class conflict. The former carry out production, distribution, etc activities in a way somewhat similar to what they will do after the end capitalism. The latter won’t exist after capitalism because there will be no need for them, and carry out attacks on structures of economic power. This distinction isn’t limited to point of waged production struggles. It could apply to distribution (autonomous distribution networks such as peer-to-peer and taping clubs and organized exhibitions of films etc vs stopping
distribution via roadblocks like in various Latin American countries and in attempts to jam businesses’ web sites and telephone lines in various pressure campaigns around the world), in consumption (consumer co-ops vs consumer boycotts), in housing (housing co-ops vs tenant organizations), etc.
Second, the above doesn’t have to apply only to economic matters either. To some extent, people routinely practice self-management of their sexuality and self-management of interactions outside of/different from racial and gender and other hierarchies. Those things are very important. But to my mind there’s an important difference between a group of people who try to live other than the existing terrible order and a group of people who try to actively confront that order - nonracist (or, some would argue, less-racist)
living vs anti-racist activity which aims to exert power against forces and institutions which continue racism,
nonpatriarchal/less-patriarchal familial-relationship arrangements vs challenging the supports of patriarchy, alternative schooling vs trying to exert power on schools etc.
Again, I’m not trying to minimize the former in any of these pairs. I think that stuff is important. But it seems to me that this stuff will either be marginal (and probably for a privileged “margin”) unless there’s some mass struggle creating the space or, if it gets generalized it will face repression (which it will survive only if there’s mass struggle again) or recuperation. This is very schematic,
of course, but what it boils down to I think is two sorts of
organizational principles - cooperation vs conflict. Of course organs of class conflict need to be internally cooperative (you could argue that a democratic union is a workers co-op which produces special use values of class conflict and power), but their point is to exert power
against other forces. Cooperative entities don’t necessarily have that element. Eventually our society will consist solely of cooperative endeavors and we won’t need to exert power on other people in this way, but I think we’re only going to get to that society by a lot of conflict.
The last thing I want to say is that I think both of these things have transformative potential as experiences - cooperative decision making is powerful, it’s an opportunity to be part of running our own lives in a way that a lot of us don’t get to do a lot of the time. (I think academic workers probably get this more than many other workers, though I’m not totally sure.) That’s exciting. It’s also hard work and we have to learn to do it - lack of opportunities to run our own lives means less experience at doing so. It also changes people to be part of conflict. Confrontation is scary, and the will or need alone to have a confrontation doesn’t mean we’ll be effective in exerting power. Maybe cooperative activity has the same effects, I’m not sure, but I’m convinced that collective confrontational activity can radicalize people, change how they look at the world and how they want to live, as well as push people who already convinced of a need for another way to start to think hard about how act effectively on that need.
Comment by Nate — January 8, 2008 @ 10:07 am
Hey Nate,
I wanted to write something more substantial but ran out of time, so just wanted to say it’s a really good piece, especially in the context of that list. I’m a lurker there and mostly find it full of pretentious and/or myopic rubbish! So I liked your response to Jon Solomon too. Also… the Bousquet site is good and I want to read his book. It would be great if there was some discussion list more along these lines that we are interested in.
Comment by Mike B — January 8, 2008 @ 7:00 pm