It got fatig’d, I guess.
I used to figure I was an incurable optimist and cheerer for possibility – politically speaking I mean. I’ve begun to lose that. I see that in my expectations for this event put on by some folk I like very much, and this project, also done by some fine people. Eli‘s been pushing me on this, quite reasonably and fairly, following on from some of our conversations about academia and politics.
Here’s what I wrote to him, put here for my own archiving purposes.
A suggested typology of intellectual and political folk –
1. professional intellectuals writing as professional intellectuals
(the Frankfurt School, arguably some of the SI’s professional artists
writing for exhibition catalogs)
2. professional intellectuals writing for movement/organizational
audiences and/or about movement/organizational concerns (Castoriadis
in S or B is a good example, Althusser and his circle is another)
3. nonprofessional people who did a lot of intellectual production and
had that as their primary or a major focus (the SI, the Communist
Party Historians Group [I believe this is the group that Thompson and
Hill and others came out of] the Johnson-Forest Tendency, the UK
groups Solidarity and Aufheben, the German group Wildcat, actually I’d
say almost all the council communist/ultraleftist tradition)
4. the nonprofessional intellectual writings of people who did not
have intellectual production as a main focus but who had to think
things out as part of their other goals (basically any revolutionary
organization that left behind a written record with any iota of ideas
in it – the IWW, the Bolsheviks, the 1st International)
I can say for me while I read a lot of the 1st and 2nd I’m more captivated by the 3rd and even more so the 4th type. While I’m not taken with Hardt and Negri’s work much anymore I think Michael Hardt is one of the best commentators I’ve read in pointing out that social movements and radical organizations think and produce their own bodies of ideas.
Other thoughts –
What are the differences between intellectual production and the production of propaganda ditto re: the production of artistic objects? (So, what’s the difference between the types and functions of slogans that Rosa Luxemburg called for her party to produce and the types of work produced by Adorno? What’s the difference/is there a difference between the Surrealists’ [and the Situationists and… etc] political manifestoes and their artistic production?)
Within each point of the typology above I think the role of institutions and audiences (and the differences between the different types and contexts for institutions and audiences) are often left out so I’m glad you want to talk about that. That’s a loss for understanding intellectual collectivities – at least that’s my experience of reading and hearing people talk about these folk. These sort of folk are most often read and my own habit is always to read people in a decontextualized way as theorists, so “is Althusser right in his description of how ideology operates in institutions?” rather than “what is Althusser responding to in debates within the French Communist Party at the time?”
In terms of folk who have tried to tie together intellectual and political work, I’m personally drawn to things for two largely independent reasons – what seems to me intellectually lively and what I’m concerned about politically. I think these are independent from each other but at the moment that I’m initially fired up about something I tend to have a hard time telling the difference. For instance, I think the SI had really interesting and exciting intellectual debates and often some really great writing (I can’t remember the name right now but Sanguinetti’s short hoax book on Italian capitalism is fantastic) and so I love to read them, but my honest opinion is that they’re a political dead end for the things I most care about. This is perhaps another area where I’m pessimistic, about the prospects for unifying intellectual life with political life. I know a lot of my own connection to lefty stuff has been driven largely by my need for an intellectual life and I know being involved with lefty stuff has enriched my intellectual life a lot (making grad school often feel a bit intellectually dull by comparison), but I’m not at all convinced that the most intellectually satisfying political things I’ve been involved in have been worth very much politically, just as I’m pretty convinced that a lot of the most effective things I’ve done politically have been intellectually a bit boring or at the very least not at all profound.
On tying together political and intellectual work it’s also important to distinguish between intellectual work and professional academic work. In terms of what has been intellectually exciting the overlap of my intellectual life and my political life has pretty regularly been at least as satisfying as the overlap between my intellectual life and my academic life – there are ups and down to each overlap of course. With that change in mind I think the issue of how intellectual and political work square looks very different depending on which we’re talking about with the term ‘intellectual’ – a substantive sense of the life of the mind vs academic life. Based on my experiences, my default setting is to view all claims about that unity as likely being either ideological cover for less than satisfactory situations or as self-serving – even if unwitting – assertions by people whose careers in part trade on political credibility. I also think that squaring the circle of academic/intellectual and political life takes time away from other possible activities and organizations which are to my mind more important, politically speaking.
crashcourse666 
Hey Nate,
Just to respond to your last comment, I’ll reiterate an argument that I made in our earlier discussion about activism/academics. In thinking of the potentials for synergy or conflict between one’s academic work and one’s political work, we have to consider the different situation of political projects to change the university itself. In these cases, unlike in pretty much all other types of political projects, I think that there is potential for synergy between academic and political work. For example, personally, if we hadn’t organized that “People’s Conferences” during the 2007 AFSCME strike and the subsequent “Rethinking the U” conference last year, I probably not have met you and become involved in the IWW (and our related organizing projects). Another personal example is that I just went to this very academic conference of Geographers, to participate in a series of panels that Renata and Nathan formed around anarchism and autonomist marxism. Through this very academic activity, I had a lot of conversations with people (such as Ant Ince Stevphen Shukaitis, and Pierpaolo Mudu), that allowed us to create new ideas, strategies, and relationships that will, hopefully, be useful for the various political struggles that we are involved in. Sure, your right that participating in these more academic events takes time away from our participation in our other political activities (such as how I didn’t attend our organizing meetings for the past couple weeks because I was preparing for this conference). I’m not sure, however, that we should reduce our considerations of these conflicting commitments to a zero-sum game in which we commodify our time as something that should be spent on whatever we calculate to be the most politically important commitment at the time. I think that in the political struggle to change universities it’s just as important to change the systemic, global structures of capitalist academia as it is to struggle locally to expropriate the means of academic production from our local university administrations (and the two projects must work together simultaneously in order to win). The university system is a global network of relationships, and the only way we can transform those relationships from capitalist to non-and-anti-capitalist ones is by meeting other academics and constituting new, non-and-anti-capitalist communities across disciplines and across the academic/non-academic divides.
Basically, I’m making this argument in order to convince you to save a little hope for the “Reworking the U: Visions, Strategies, Demands” conference (http://www.reworkingtheu.org) that we’re putting on, April 24-26th. What is it about the conference that makes you feel less optimistic? Anyways, I wouldn’t want you to be optimistic about it, but rather to help us identify the limiting or enabling conditions for it to be successful.
word,
Eli M.
hi Eli,
I’m glad you got to meet Stevphen and Ant and I hope you had a good time in Vegas. I guess I just don’t see the extra potential you see at events like this. I mean, I’m glad I met you and some great stuff definitely came out of that conference but similar things come out of other activities. For instance, several folk here in the Twin Cities (Jake and Erik among others) just attended a conference for anarchists in Chicago on understanding the economic crisis and having a coordinated response by anarchist organizations. At that they met people from a number of current left libertarian organizations and former members of the Sojourner Truth Organization.
In terms of the zero sum reduction of time, I think that just is the case, I don’t think that’s a theoretical reduction I’m making. For a long time I chose to do a lot of IWW work and cut corners on all sorts of things. I’ve had to cut back on that because I can’t sustain the IWW workload I used to do. If I spent more time on that work I’d have to become single or quit school, there’s no two ways about it. And while I think it’s totally fair for you to raise questions about calculations of what is or is not the most politically important commitment, I think it just is the case that people prioritize some things over others. I think whatever people spend the most of their time on is the thing they’re most prioritized even if they haven’t consciously decided what to prioritize. (I for one often spend way too much time playing Rock Band 2 when I should be doing school work, not a smart priority setting on my part as it leads to less sleep and more stress – which reminds me, you should come over and play with me some time, the drumming stuff is super awesome.)
Last thought before I get off here, while I do think that academics talking to other academics is important for improving conditions for academic workers, I don’t think it’s likely to result in much in the way of a non- or anti-capitalist university. I don’t mean to be a jerk here and I feel bad because I know y’all have put a ton of time into this event and I respect both your efforts and your sincerity, but to be really honest the event looks to me like any other intellectually interesting academic conference – there’s a CFP in a clear but still academic vocabulary, the format is a pretty standard conference format with panels and papers, the speakers are almost all academics… I don’t see much of a departure and I don’t see this as being any more politically useful than any other left academic conference like Rethinking Marxism or the Florida Marxist Reading Group conference or the recent Idea of Communism event at Birkbeck.
Sorry to be so negative. Some of the stuff at the conference does look really cool (like the stuff on teaching working class students).
take care,
Nate
Note to self – reservations on edu-factory, written a while ago and never posted.
*
1. To restate a criticism from my earlier contribution, edu-factory over-emphasizes alternative knowledge production. This amounts to an argument for a workers’ run co-operative enterprise – or worse, working for free – producing either pedagogical commodities (classes
for students, perhaps even qualifications) or cultural commodities (written works, art works, etc).
2. To restate another criticism from my earlier contribution, edu-factory emphasizes the labor process in education over the valorization process. While I do think it’s worthwhile to talk about the academic labor process – I work in a university in part because aspects of the labor process are important to me: I like teaching and think it’s a use value which is good for society – it is also
important not to over-emphasize the differences between our industry and others. Like any capitalist industry, our employers are indifferent to the labor process except to the degree that it is functional for the valorization process. They care about the use values we produce only to the degree that they have exchange values and can be used to realize value advanced. I believe over-emphasis of
the labor process is tied to edu-factory as would-be or advocate for workers’ co-operative enterprise.
3. In the recent posts on the web-site about actions and so forth, the project has moved away from #1 and #2 to some degree. This is a positive thing. Still, the actions discussed there seem to me to reflect another problem. I would say that the approach is one of activism rather than organizing. In my view, the condition of academic workers at least in the United States would be greatly improved by
creating labor unions. Even reformist labor unions would improve conditions among most academic workers, and there is no particular reason why we couldn’t form more radical or even revolutionary unions, and/or unions which depart from many of the standard paradigms of labor organization.
In case people are uncomfortable with the term ‘union’ or in case people understand that term differently than I do, what I mean is that we need to create organizations through which we will be capable of exerting power in relation to our employer. Control over the labor process will be an important aspect of this (I would like more control over how and what I teach, for example), but renegotiating the terms of the sale of our labor power and the terms of the valorization process is more important (I would rather get paid more and work less while having less control over how and what I teach than have more control over teaching while continuing to get paid too little and work too many hours).
4. This is one of my most serious concerns: Edu-factory is not a project composed of or addressed to people who work in all facets of the education industry but of a specific sector or sectors. My impression is that the edu-factory project is primarily animated by people who work in these types of jobs, one or the other or some combination of them. I am fairly certain that undergraduate students
are a minority in the project as well, such that the main constituency of edu-factory are career academics or people who are in pursuit of academic careers. I’m not sure about this, but I would guess that most but not all of the main people active in edu-factory are contingent academics, either people who are currently pursuing PhDs or people
have PhDs but are not yet tenured or not currently in tenure track positions. There is nothing wrong with this. As someone pursuing a PhD myself and someone who has worked as contingent faculty (the two categories overlap in many ways), I recognize that graduate students and contingent faculty definitely – I would even say desperately –
need to organize ourselves. Nonetheless, changing conditions within the education industry will require more than academic workers. It will require the participation of everyone who works in education. And while this change will require the “production of oppositional knowledge” it will also require more traditional forms of union activity.
5. Edu-factory speaks in a false universal. This is the issue that led me to begin to write this. Edu-factory speaks about the entire education industry while at the same time speaking only for one stratum or a handful of strata who work in the industry. The “we” implied in edu-factory is an academic laborer (a teacher, a writer, a
researcher, a student), and from the idioms in the discussions and articles the academic laborers involved are for the most part in the humanities and social sciences. Despite this make up, edu-factory does not speak of itself of in a way that makes it clear that the project represents a limited sectorial interest. Edu-factory speaks of itself
as representing the totality of the education industry (and I know that edu-factory does not speak with one voice in a straightforward matter, but if edu-factory is a multiplicity of voices there is a nevertheless a homogeneity on the issue of who does and does not
participate and whose labors in the education industry are highlighted and whose are never mentioned).
I am intensely uncomfortable with this situation. This situation – a constituency, composed of one stratum or a few strata, which speaks of itself as composing or as representing an entire class or group – strikes me as, at best, an aspiration to hegemony and at worst a
self-centered and mistaken vision of how educational institutions run, one which does not see the many labors required outside of academic labor. In my view the history of the American labor movement is full of examples of where this type of approach has gone wrong. (I believe this has been a common mistake within the Italian marxist tradition of operaismo as well, emphasizing a hegemonic figure of the working class then treating that figure as if it were the entirety of the working class, rendering other parts of the class first subaltern then nonexistent.) This approach is at the heart of what I would call craft unionism: organization of some workers based on an ideology of skill
in labor – an ideology over-emphasizing the labor process – while subordinating or excluding other workers, either by seeking a hegemonic position over them or by simply neglecting them.
As a result of these issues, I am not convinced by the “Autonomous University as a Common Process” which states that “the autonomous university is not an alternative to the class struggle within the university, or ‘union’ claims. On the contrary, the class struggle is the base of the autonomous university. This is our experience in university movements and auto-education projects: there is no autonomous university without class struggle, without the struggle against the exploitative relationships and the hierarchization process. So the invention of autonomous institutions is a political and subversive process.” There are many things which have class struggle as their base. The recent election of an African American to the U.S. presidency has its base in a long process of class struggle.
The election is at the same time a recuperation of those struggles. Without broadening the base of edu-factory – or, acting more self-consciously as a network seeking to balance the interest of one or a few sectors in the education industry with a broader revolutionary vision – I think the edu-factory projects role within the class struggle will remain ambiguous at best.
Hey Nate,
No problem about criticizing our conference. I totally agree that we did not do a good job of bringing in non-academic activists, despite that being one of our initial goals for the conference. Also, your sort of right that the format is not too different from the usual academic format, though more than half of the sessions are not paper-panels but other formats including workshops, roundtables, an art installation, and a ‘drifting’ activity facilitated by the counter-cartographies collective. However, your critiques of the conference as lacking the potential for making any progress toward creating a non-and-anti-capitalist university brings us back to the very question that started our activism/academics debate a couple months ago. When you argue that there’s no hope for progressive change through these normal academic institutions such as conferences, then I would reply by saying, should we either try to change those institutions or give-up on them and leave academia for a more effectively anti-capitalist life? I think you might be misinterpreting our goals for the conference if you are saying that we are framing it as something that is going to revolutionize academia immediately. We definitely don’t want to seem ‘radical chic,’ but maybe we are guilty of that in the call for ideas (especially since we called our conference organizing collective the ‘committee on revolutionizing the academy’ (comRAD) – but that’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek). I think that our conference has basically the same modest goals as other leftist interdisciplinary conferences, but with the additional aspiration of pushing the form of the conference to create a better forum for discussing issues of the politics of the university that don’t usually find a forum within disciplinary conferences, such as academic labor organizing and radical pedagogy, and that hardly ever are concentrated together so that new relationships can be built amongst people working on these issues. In your comparison of the conference with an anarchist conference, I agree that they can have similar results and I didn’t mean to imply that there’s some ‘extra potential’ in ours compared to theirs. Rather, we’re just trying to create a radical kind of conference for people who work in academia. I wish that we could have been more radical with it, but with our small organizing collective we have lacked the energy and time for putting in the work necessary to create new forms for the conference and to build relationships with non-academic activists. Certainly we could try to do it better next year, but we will hopefully pass on the baton to a different organizing group somewhere else and we’ll pass on our knowledge of the shortcomings of the conferences of the last couple years. So, yeah, I do appreciate your constructive criticism on this, because it will help us not only learn how to do it better in the future, but also maybe to do some last minute adjustment of the schedule to bring in some more non-academic activists. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on that front.
On the question of time management between our activist and academic lives, I was just trying to say that there are sometimes ways to combine them in non-instrumentalizing ways. For example, Nathan and Renata made panels on anarchism which allowed us to build connections with anarchist activists while simultaneously doing work that is helpful for our academic careers (e.g., a line on our CVs, potentially publications, etc.). Of course we need to be vigilantly conscientious about the danger of instrumentalizing our activism for careerist academic ends, but that’s not an insurmountable obstacle but rather a practical problem that we need to face by developing a community of anarchist academics who keep each other in check with an ethics (with value practices that frown down upon reducing our anarchism to ‘radical chic’ careerism and that promote actually radical synergies of our academic work with anti-capitalist movements). Does that make sense or am I being too idealistic?
And yeah, I’d be up for playing some Rock Band 2 if I can play the drums.
word,
Eli
hi Eli,
Before I forget again – there are all new bouldering routes up at the COA so let’s go climbing (and if you’re into it, my brother and I joined Vertical Endeavors in St Paul), and let me know your schedule to rock band it up.
On what you say here, I have to say, I really appreciate the engagement (given that I’m not being very constructive). I hear you here as basically scaling back the expectations and rhetoric of the conference, in comparison with some of what’s on the site. I like that and as you’ve described it here the event sounds more up my alley. Part of what I’m reacting to (over-reacting to, admittedly) with the conference – and with things that seem related but which I’m conflating with it, at least a bit unfairly, like some of the edu-factory statements – is the difference between the rhetoric and implied claims and what I think actually goes on/will go on at the event.
you asked “should we either try to change those institutions or give-up on them and leave academia for a more effectively anti-capitalist life?”
I don’t have a real option to give up. This is the industry where I work and I don’t have any other job skills. Given the rest of my life (and my lack of sufficient revolutionary commitment to really suck it up and go get a job in meatpacking or something) I’m stuck here and will have to make it work. Being here, I’d like to see the institutions changed. I don’t think that has much to do with my being a communist, though, so much as being low on the foodchain in the industry – while I think we can and should work to improve things here I don’t know that that’s necessarily anti-capitalist. (Can be, in the right organizational context and with certain types of actions.) So part of the disconnect for me is what the character of the changes are that we want and can realistically hope to achieve in the near future. (How those tie to anti-capitalism and so on is another discussion I’d be keen to have too.)
I think this sounds really good, trying “to create a better forum for discussing issues of the politics of the university that don’t usually find a forum within disciplinary conferences, such as academic labor organizing and radical pedagogy (…) we’re just trying to create a radical kind of conference for people who work in academia.”I’m all for that. I’ve got a minor quibble here re: the mixing of academic labor organizing and radical pedagogy, but that really is minor. I think getting together people to talk about those issues is really valuable. Maybe this is just a matter of mood (I’m tired, I’m particularly tired of school so that I’m bored by academic events a lot of the time) and intuitions (I’m not hopeful about the prospects of combining academic professionalism with revolutionary politics, as in the discussion a while back). Given where I’m at, something that looks and feels like the stuff I/we do for work doesn’t feel to me like something which is conducive to changing our workplaces and allowing us to get more control over it. As such, the reference points I’m more excited about are more like things that go on in other contexts of labor organizing and movement building. Given that I have little in the way of ideas on how to replicate that here and am contributing little or nothing to the process within our industry I should probably just clam up.
“there’s no hope for progressive change through these normal academic institutions such as conferences”
I guess what I’d say is that I’m not clear what the goals are, based on reading the web site, and I expect that the goals of the various folk coming to the conference differ. I took the rhetoric of the CFP (and, again, I’m probably unfairly conflating that with other things) as implying that a lot is on the line and that there’s lot of possibility here. I’m not sure the latter is the case (the possibility) but like I said I’m also unclear on the goals. By progressive changes do we mean unionization and better wages? more enlightened pedagogy? lower tuition for undergraduates? I’m for all of those things. All of them would be good to achieve. None are necessarily revolutionary despite being progressive, though, and if the goals are revolutionary change then the criteria for evaluation are a little different I think. Sorry, I’m not being clear, I can’t do better just now.
Gotta run, gotta prep to teaching.
take care,
n8
Hi Nate,
Sorry for the delay in replying to you… And I’m not even going to reply to your previous comment just yet (but I will soon…) I just want to give you links to some good critiques of the “On the Idea of Communism” conference that you might find interesting:
http://kafila.org/2009/03/14/re-booting-communism-or-slavoj-zizek-and-the-end-of-philosophy-i/
http://kafila.org/2009/03/16/evangelist-st-zizek-and-the-end-of-philosophy-ii/
word,
Eli
notes for a post never written –
Among the questions that’s come up is that of what makes something radical. For my purposes, I mean stuff that builds up mass organizations or struggles against capitalism or other big structures of power.
Modes of participation –
1. doing your job (nurses working in a hospital)
2. using perks and resources of your job for other purposes, in a way indifferent to or hostile to the job (stealing printing, using prestige to get attention for some cause)
3. using skills of your job for other purposes and in other sites than on the job (nurses doing medical care at rallies, graphic designers doing printing for movement magazines)
4. non-job related activities (attending rallies and demos and meetings etc)