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.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GCF460eTEv0

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.

I like your “Two final [sic] points:” paragraph above especially. I’d also like to hear more about the “subjective implication” idea…

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

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.

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

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.