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One of my brothers completed his GED recently. He quit high school a few years ago, then taught himself welding. I’d tried to talk him into going back to school and to think about college, he eventually said “it’s not going to happen so just forget it.” He had had many bad experiences in schooling. Finally took the GED, did quite well. He’s now talking about going to community college. There’s nothing wrong with being a welder and nothing honorable about getting other sorts of jobs (bracketing “I want to help people” sorts of impulses) but I’d like it if he did this. His jobs have been unsafe in the short term (higher risk of accidental injury - he put me as co-beneficiary on his life insurance) and in the long term (occupational illnesses). To my mind it’s about relative options in the labor market and about time - time to devote to books and ideas and such.
This touched off another round of “where do I want to try and work?” sorts of questions. I don’t want to romanticize, but I want to look into community colleges. My friend Adam told me to look at institutions with a high transfer rate - students who go on to other colleges. I’d like to teach students like my brother. I currently teach at a state university. Tuition is higher than at the local community college system but lower than private liberal arts schools. Class sizes are also a lot bigger and the place seems impersonal to me. Teaching is my favorite thing about graduate school, so I’m thinking I’d like to work someplace where my main job is teaching rather than writing and publishing.
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There’s a conference on here that some friends worked on. I went for an hour today, was all the time I really had free today. (Also went to yoga again, holy crap do I like yoga, I wish I had time to go to yoga class every day.) Got to meet Eli, who I will see more of this weekend, and Marc Bousquet, who unfortunately is leaving early tomorrow and so I won’t see more of. The session I heard involved a discussion on the justification of the humanities. I was not very happy with it.
To my mind, the justification for the humanities is an old-fashioned one. They’re an intrinsic good. I’m not interested in debating that. Put another way, what’s good about this sort of thing is intellectual excitement. My brother is tracked into a part of society which is not encouraged to value intellect but instead is encouraged to shut the fuck up and follow orders. I think there’s something good in helping people work hard intellectually - read things and write things they wouldn’t have otherwise. This is one of the main reasons I like to teach Capital - it’s a hard book. It’s the hard book I’m best capable of teaching, and it’s a famous and historically important one, one that’s hard to read alone. My students read a lot of it and get it reasonably well and afterward they’re more capable of reading hard books. I think that’s a good thing, especially for students of certain backgrounds. I think of this as something along the lines of the old strike slogan “bread and roses too.”
That said, I think there’s nothing radical or subversive in this. This came up in the discussion today at the conference. Someone asserted that there’s something radical about thought and about intellectual work and all of that. That’s false. There’s nothing inherently radical about any of this. There’s nothing radical about teaching or writing for a living. Similarly, there’s nothing radical about being an ER nurse or working in literacy. These are wonderful things to do with one’s life and are tremendously valuable pursuits. They’re ethically important. They are not politically radical. There’s a Marx quote that I like very much that relates to this, I like to invoke it a lot:
“how grossly Feuerbach is deceiving himself when by virtue of the qualification “common man” he declares himself a communist, transforms the latter into a predicate of “man,” and thereby thinks it possible to change the word “communist,” which in the real world means the follower of a definite revolutionary party, into a mere category.”
Leaving aside the particular organizational form invoked here, the party, the point as I take it is that radicalness is contextual. More specifically, it’s tied to collective organization for power. If that organization fails then it’s arguable that the organization is radical in a different sense than a successful one. Along the same lines, a dear friend of mine (who I sadly have lost touch with) once argued that people should not call themselves ‘revolutionary’ but rather ‘pro-revolutionary’ because we don’t really know when and how revolution will occur or if efforts which are subjectively pro-revolution will really help make the revolution happen or happen faster.
In the context of the conference discussion it seems to me that people were using the term ‘radical’ as an honorific, along the lines of “there is nothing more radical than a gesture of love” or “what is truly radical is real human connection” or something. Those type of utterances may have a truth to them, but they are not literally true. Acts like these, including helping excite students intellectually or being an ER nurse (or raising children or caring for a friend in need, etc etc), are fully compatible with the logic and tendency of our society. They do not remake society or point toward such a remaking.
As I said, that doesn’t mean they’re worthless. Far from it. They’re worth quite a bit. These sorts of things and the moral values bound up with them can often be part of our motivation for struggling. Whether or not something is politically radical is not the only criterion for assessing its value. I would also suggest that this category mistake (how about we call it “neo-Feuerbachian pseudo-radicalism” or something similarly dismissive?) is often something which supports our employers’ interests - if our jobs are radical then fighting against the job would be reactionary, no?
I would also add that the creation of collective organization to defend these sorts of values is not of itself a radical act, as desperately needed as organization is. Organization like this has a radical potential, but it too can be compatible with the logic and tendency of capitalist society. This is I think pretty clear from the negative aspects of workers’ unions and political parties historically. (I do believe that the experience of struggle is often radicalizing, speaking subjectively, in the sense of making people come closer or more likely to come closer to a pro-revolutionary viewpoint.)
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It strikes me that part of what I’m on about here is what one does where - some issues in the education industry will be solved (or, one can make a contribution to resolving issues) by actions in the classroom, others by writing (not many, but I think Marc Bousquet’s book is one example, as is Joe Berry’s book, though again it’s contextual - insofar as a piece of writing is taken up in useful way as part of other activities which prove useful, then the piece of writing is useful)
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Other posts in a roughly similar vein -
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/12/16/did-you-do-in-the-war/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/11/02/am-i-doing-here/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2008/02/21/do-i-teach-literature-for/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2005/11/15/responsibility/
Nate, I agree with your critique of “radical chic” academics and your critique of the “radical chic” attitude displayed on that panel in reference to one of the panelists’ elevation of “thought” as some inherently radical activity. Yet, I also would take further your somewhat ambivalent statement towards the end of your post about the contextuality of radicalness in different areas of the university (research, classroom, and organizing labor). I’d take it further by combining it with your earlier statement that radicalness is “tied to collective organization for power.” We can articulate strategies for how teaching and research can contribute to organization for power (e.g., your teaching of Capital and your marxist research help toward this end). Conversely, we can think of how organizing academic labor can help create working conditions that enable you to teach and research such marxist stuff more and to have to do wage labor less. I know you know this, but I think that we can theorize this better than we have been by using Massimo de Angelis’s theory. The key to effective class struggle in the university is to create an anti-capitalist “political recomposition” connecting the currently divided commons-producing communities of classrooms, disciplinary departments, and workplace associations. (This is what Isaac and I talk about in our paper… I’ll send you a copy of it…).
Comment by Eli — April 14, 2008 @ 10:26 pm
hi Eli,
Thanks for your comment. I’ve got Massimo’s book but still need to read it. I hope I wasn’t being a jerk in this post - I was quite tired and stressed when I wrote it. If so, then my apologies. I also want to say, I think people saying the types of things I disagree with are wrong but are acting in good faith. I sympathize with them. But I don’t empathize. This is probably simplistic of me but I think basically people don’t make radical change on the job. By doing the job I mean. So, I don’t think my teaching Capital or my writing (writing for academic stuff, anyway) contributes to organizing for power. I think it’s useful for me, in the way that my yoga class is, and so perhaps to that extent it may make a contribution (in so far as I make a contribution). Like Penguin selling copies of Capital. I don’t want to say nothing can come of any of this, but I don’t want to bank on anything coming of it, if that makes sense.
I find it useful to draw parallels to other jobs and other industries in thinking about all this. Say there’s three commies - one who works as an academic, one who works as a nurse, and one who works as an electrician. I don’t know that there are parallel claims that hold up about the connection between ways of doing the job and ways of building power. I mean, all three commies will presumably take part in building power on the job via collective organization and struggle, around the variety of issues people have on the job including doing good work (giving good care, doing good teaching, not cutting corners in wiring people’s houses). But the ways of doing the job are goals - we want more power because we want more control because among other things we want to do our jobs this way and not that way.
Here’s a parallel - when I used to organize hospital workers worked with a committee of janitors. One of the janitors’ complaints was that the hospital cut corners on cleaning supplies to save money, so they would run out of disinfectant at the end of each month, leaving the janitors to clean the toilets with whatever they had on hand - soap, windex, whatever. This bothered them because they felt partly responsible. They didn’t like the idea that someone might get sicker as a result. It seems to me that the demand made and the end that it demands - the way of doing the job, having adequate cleaning supplies - is not radical, nor would them finding some other source of cleaning supplies be radical (it’s ethical, it’s good, but it doesn’t have a communist content). Organizing for and exercising power to get the employer to provide more cleaning supplies might be, or comes closer to it. Know what I mean?
Another way to put this is that I’m quite skeptical (sp?) of the prefigurative claims implied in some of the autonomist/commons-ist perspective. I think the project is building mass organizations to exert power (and in doing so radicalize and educate people, including myself in that term ‘people’ - ie, I don’t mean “I’m already there, let’s bring others to where I’m at”). Specifically, to exert power against the valorization process. That’s different from trying to implement changes in or practice a different labor process. The two are related, but to my mind the aim is build power to fight the power behind/the power which is the valorization process. Insofar as changes in the labor process (teaching Marx, giving good patient care, etc) contribute to that then they’re part of the project. I think such a contribution is not something we should presume - especially the ‘we’ who work as academics because the ostensible radicalness of our work is one part of how the valorization process occurs at least in some parts of academia.
Gotta run. Sorry again that I missed your talk, I look forward to reading it.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — April 15, 2008 @ 10:03 am