As a graduate student at the University of Calgary, it pains me that the Graduate Students' Association has chosen NOT to send a single member of the Executive to this year's Canadian Federation of Students' Annual General Meeting. Instead, they have chosen to send two NON-ELECTED students who head up a campaign of disinformation against the CFS with the ultimate goal of seeking to de-federate. The graduate students of the University of Calgary do not have representatives but rather are faced with an oligarchy, including David Colletto - a former president who actually chose not to vote against tuition hikes in 2007.
While my support for the CFS is not unconditional, I would like representatives from other universities to know that this group does NOT have the support of students at the University of Calgary. Indeed, they illegally overturned the election of the person voted in for VP Academic in 2009 because she did not promise her unconditional support for their campaign against the CFS.
While I have been accused of working for the CFS by this group of half-wits, I actually seek radical student movement that pushes the movement beyond reform. At the same time, I support the discussion and dissent that the CFS affords. (I do agree that there are some relevant criticisms of the CFS as articulated by a U of T student here. In my view, the organization would flourish by working less from a position of fear - manifested in politicking and legal disputes - and investing more time in engaging students on issues.)
Certainly, the value of the CFS to the students' movement is seen when contrasted to the politics of the U of C oligarchy who writes off protest as "uncivilized," while explicitly reducing our education to preparation for the "knowledge economy."
I hope the students attending the CFS AGM can sort out the careerists, from the reformers, to the radicals. Feel free to keep our so-called representatives out East.
I leave you with an exceptional communique from students engaged in the UCSC occupation movement.
Like the society to which it has played the
faithful servant, the university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not
only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one
both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making.
No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this
intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and
educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder
once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral
residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.
Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista
of a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these
remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous
habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and
assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped
up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can
make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe
is no more real than the windows in which it appears.
For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria
following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies
and public space a place where things might explode (though they never
do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without
ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the
bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we
never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly
pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety,
then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh
world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from
place to place.
But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a
condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what
it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and
consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of
the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication
of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut
class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the
diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in
elliptical circles.
It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory
tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard”
has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training
for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and
numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American
capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more
years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than
a share in General Motors.
We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs
we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters
of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level
of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after
graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We
work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has
already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan
debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first
century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a
figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by
nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys
is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives.
What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class
without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent
interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the
bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.
This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since
grade-school. Those of us who came here to have our privilege
notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of
psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical
compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile.
No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the
cattle prod of parental admonition. On the other hand, those of us who
came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our
families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take
our place—that the logic here is zero-sum. And anyway, socioeconomic
status remains the best predictor of student achievement. Those of us
the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color”
have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit. But we know we
are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them.
And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves
from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past
in the present for others, elsewhere.
If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to
waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby
teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like
everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it
makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system,
one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with
the demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work hard.”
And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded,
consumer and consumed. It is the system itself which one obeys, the
cold buildings that enforce subservience. Those who teach are treated
with all the respect of an automated messaging system. Only the logic
of customer satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the
teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A? What’s the point of
acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes? Who
needs memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You
can’t be serious. A moral preparation? There are anti-depressants for
that.
Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically
enlightened among us, are also the most obedient. The “vocation” for
which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the
grid, or out of the labor market. Every grad student is a would be
Robinson Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the
exigencies of the market. But this fantasy is itself sustained through
an unremitting submission to the market. There is no longer the least
felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of capitalism by
day and polishing one’s job talk by night. That our pleasure is our
labor only makes our symptoms more manageable. Aesthetics and politics
collapse courtesy of the substitution of ideology for history: booze
and beaux arts and another seminar on the question of being, the steady
blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by somebody somewhere, some
not-me, not-here, where all that appears is good and all goods appear
attainable by credit.
Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system
adapted to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the
star professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and
adjuncts paid mostly in bad faith. A kind of monasticism predominates
here, with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the
strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its essential
altruism. The underlings are only too happy to play apprentice to the
masters, unable to do the math indicating that nine-tenths of us will
teach 4 courses every semester to pad the paychecks of the one-tenth
who sustain the fiction that we can all be the one. Of course I will
be the star, I will get the tenure-track job in a large city and move
into a newly gentrified neighborhood.
We end up interpreting Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “The
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point
is to change it.” At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of coming
to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to begin again
at the seemingly ineradicable root. We admire the first part of this
performance: it lights our way. But we want the tools to break through
that point of suicidal thought, its hinge in practice.
The same people who practice “critique” are also the most
susceptible to cynicism. But if cynicism is simply the inverted form
of enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a
latent radical. The shoulder shrug, the dulled face, the squirm of
embarrassment when discussing the fact that the US murdered a million
Iraqis between 2003 and 2006, that every last dime squeezed from
America’s poorest citizens is fed to the banking industry, that the
seas will rise, billions will die and there’s nothing we can do about
it—this discomfited posture comes from feeling oneself pulled between
the is and the ought of current left thought. One feels that there is
no alternative, and yet, on the other hand, that another world is
possible.
We will not be so petulant. The synthesis of these positions is
right in front of us: another world is not possible; it is necessary.
The ought and the is are one. The collapse of the global economy is
here and now.
II
The university has no
history of its own; its history is the history of capital. Its
essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between
capital and labor. Though not a proper corporation that can be bought
and sold, that pays revenue to its investors, the public university
nonetheless carries out this function as efficiently as possible by
approximating ever more closely the corporate form of its bedfellows.
What we are witnessing now is the endgame of this process, whereby the
façade of the educational institution gives way altogether to corporate
streamlining.
Even in the golden age of capitalism that followed after World War
II and lasted until the late 1960s, the liberal university was already
subordinated to capital. At the apex of public funding for higher
education, in the 1950s, the university was already being redesigned to
produce technocrats with the skill-sets necessary to defeat “communism”
and sustain US hegemony. Its role during the Cold War was to
legitimate liberal democracy and to reproduce an imaginary society of
free and equal citizens—precisely because no one was free and no one
was equal.
But if this ideological function of the public university was at
least well-funded after the Second World War, that situation changed
irreversibly in the 1960s, and no amount of social-democratic
heel-clicking will bring back the dead world of the post-war boom.
Between 1965 and 1980 profit rates began to fall, first in the US, then
in the rest of the industrializing world. Capitalism, it turned out,
could not sustain the good life it made possible. For capital,
abundance appears as overproduction, freedom from work as
unemployment. Beginning in the 1970s, capitalism entered into a
terminal downturn in which permanent work was casualized and
working-class wages stagnated, while those at the top were temporarily
rewarded for their obscure financial necromancy, which has itself
proved unsustainable.
For public education, the long downturn meant the decline of tax
revenues due to both declining rates of economic growth and the
prioritization of tax-breaks for beleaguered corporations. The raiding
of the public purse struck California and the rest of the nation in the
1970s. It has continued to strike with each downward declension of the
business cycle. Though it is not directly beholden to the market, the
university and its corollaries are subject to the same cost-cutting
logic as other industries: declining tax revenues have made inevitable
the casualization of work. Retiring professors make way not for
tenure-track jobs but for precariously employed teaching assistants,
adjuncts, and lecturers who do the same work for much less pay.
Tuition increases compensate for cuts while the jobs students pay to be
trained for evaporate.
In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and
protracted, many on the left want to return to the golden age of public
education. They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an
opportunity to demand the return of the past. But social programs that
depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone.
We cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while
ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public
university” in a capitalist society. The university is subject to the
real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal
education programs. The function of the university has always been to
reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the
changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the
crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period
in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the
university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return
of the public education system. We live out the terminus of the very
market logic upon which that system was founded. The only autonomy we
can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.
What this means for our struggle is that we can’t go backward. The
old student struggles are the relics of a vanished world. In the
1960s, as the post-war boom was just beginning to unravel, radicals
within the confines of the university understood that another world was
possible. Fed up with technocratic management, wanting to break the
chains of a conformist society, and rejecting alienated work as
unnecessary in an age of abundance, students tried to align themselves
with radical sections of the working class. But their mode of
radicalization, too tenuously connected to the economic logic of
capitalism, prevented that alignment from taking hold. Because their
resistance to the Vietnam war focalized critique upon capitalism as a
colonial war-machine, but insufficiently upon its exploitation of
domestic labor, students were easily split off from a working class
facing different problems. In the twilight era of the post-war boom,
the university was not subsumed by capital to the degree that it is
now, and students were not as intensively proletarianized by debt and a
devastated labor market.
That is why our struggle is fundamentally different. The poverty of
student life has become terminal: there is no promised exit. If the
economic crisis of the 1970s emerged to break the back of the political
crisis of the 1960s, the fact that today the economic crisis precedes
the coming political uprising means we may finally supersede the
cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles. There will be
no return to normal.
III
We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.
Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its
authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms.
We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university
in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a
prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life.
Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and
workers into a declaration of war.
We must begin by preventing the university from functioning. We
must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and
class to a halt. We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours.
Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and
mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are
to be understood. This is the only meaningful position to take when
crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society.
Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground
between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy
it.
The university struggle is one among many, one sector where a new
cycle of refusal and insurrection has begun – in workplaces,
neighborhoods, and slums. All of our futures are linked, and so our
movement will have to join with these others, breeching the walls of
the university compounds and spilling into the streets. In recent
weeks Bay Area public school teachers, BART employees, and unemployed
have threatened demonstrations and strikes. Each of these movements
responds to a different facet of capitalism’s reinvigorated attack on
the working class in a moment of crisis. Viewed separately, each
appears small, near-sighted, without hope of success. Taken together,
however, they suggest the possibility of widespread refusal and
resistance. Our task is to make plain the common conditions that, like
a hidden water table, feed each struggle.
We have seen this kind of upsurge in the recent past, a rebellion
that starts in the classrooms and radiates outward to encompass the
whole of society. Just two years ago the anti-CPE movement in France,
combating a new law that enabled employers to fire young workers
without cause, brought huge numbers into the streets. High school and
university students, teachers, parents, rank and file union members,
and unemployed youth from the banlieues found themselves together on
the same side of the barricades. (This solidarity was often fragile,
however. The riots of immigrant youth in the suburbs and university
students in the city centers never merged, and at times tensions flared
between the two groups.) French students saw through the illusion of
the university as a place of refuge and enlightenment and acknowledged
that they were merely being trained to work. They took to the streets
as workers, protesting their precarious futures. Their position tore
down the partitions between the schools and the workplaces and
immediately elicited the support of many wage workers and unemployed
people in a mass gesture of proletarian refusal.
As the movement developed it manifested a growing tension between
revolution and reform. Its form was more radical than its content.
While the rhetoric of the student leaders focused merely on a return to
the status quo, the actions of the youth – the riots, the cars
overturned and set on fire, the blockades of roads and railways, and
the waves of occupations that shut down high schools and universities –
announced the extent of the new generation’s disillusionment and rage.
Despite all of this, however, the movement quickly disintegrated when
the CPE law was eventually dropped. While the most radical segment of
the movement sought to expand the rebellion into a general revolt
against capitalism, they could not secure significant support and the
demonstrations, occupations, and blockades dwindled and soon died.
Ultimately the movement was unable to transcend the limitations of
reformism.
The Greek uprising of December 2008 broke through many of these
limitations and marked the beginning of a new cycle of class struggle.
Initiated by students in response to the murder of an Athens youth by
police, the uprising consisted of weeks of rioting, looting, and
occupations of universities, union offices, and television stations.
Entire financial and shopping districts burned, and what the movement
lacked in numbers it made up in its geographical breadth, spreading
from city to city to encompass the whole of Greece. As in France it
was an uprising of youth, for whom the economic crisis represented a
total negation of the future. Students, precarious workers, and
immigrants were the protagonists, and they were able to achieve a level
of unity that far surpassed the fragile solidarities of the anti-CPE
movement.
Just as significantly, they made almost no demands. While of course
some demonstrators sought to reform the police system or to critique
specific government policies, in general they asked for nothing at all
from the government, the university, the workplaces, or the police.
Not because they considered this a better strategy, but because they
wanted nothing that any of these institutions could offer. Here
content aligned with form; whereas the optimistic slogans that appeared
everywhere in French demonstrations jarred with the images of burning
cars and broken glass, in Greece the rioting was the obvious means to
begin to enact the destruction of an entire political and economic
system.
Ultimately the dynamics that created the uprising also established
its limit. It was made possible by the existence of a sizeable radical
infrastructure in urban areas, in particular the Exarchia neighborhood
in Athens. The squats, bars, cafes, and social centers, frequented by
students and immigrant youth, created the milieu out of which the
uprising emerged. However, this milieu was alien to most middle-aged
wage workers, who did not see the struggle as their own. Though many
expressed solidarity with the rioting youth, they perceived it as a
movement of entrants – that is, of that portion of the proletariat that
sought entrance to the labor market but was not formally employed in
full-time jobs. The uprising, strong in the schools and the immigrant
suburbs, did not spread to the workplaces.
Our task in the current struggle will be to make clear the
contradiction between form and content and to create the conditions for
the transcendence of reformist demands and the implementation of a
truly communist content. As the unions and student and faculty groups
push their various “issues,” we must increase the tension until it is
clear that we want something else entirely. We must constantly expose
the incoherence of demands for democratization and transparency. What
good is it to have the right to see how intolerable things are, or to
elect those who will screw us over? We must leave behind the culture
of student activism, with its moralistic mantras of non-violence and
its fixation on single-issue causes. The only success with which we
can be content is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production
and the certain immiseration and death which it promises for the 21st
century. All of our actions must push us towards communization; that
is, the reorganization of society according to a logic of free giving
and receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, the value-form,
compulsory labor, and exchange. Occupation will be a critical tactic in
our struggle, but we must resist the tendency to use it in a reformist
way. The different strategic uses of occupation became clear this past
January when students occupied a building at the New School in New
York. A group of friends, mostly graduate students, decided to take
over the Student Center and claim it as a liberated space for students
and the public. Soon others joined in, but many of them preferred to
use the action as leverage to win reforms, in particular to oust the
school’s president. These differences came to a head as the occupation
unfolded. While the student reformers were focused on leaving the
building with a tangible concession from the administration, others
shunned demands entirely. They saw the point of occupation as the
creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, a
rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new society. We side
with this anti-reformist position. While we know these free zones will
be partial and transitory, the tensions they expose between the real
and the possible can push the struggle in a more radical direction.
We intend to employ this tactic until it becomes generalized. In
2001 the first Argentine piqueteros suggested the form the people’s
struggle there should take: road blockades which brought to a halt the
circulation of goods from place to place. Within months this tactic
spread across the country without any formal coordination between
groups. In the same way repetition can establish occupation as an
instinctive and immediate method of revolt taken up both inside and
outside the university. We have seen a new wave of takeovers in the
U.S. over the last year, both at universities and workplaces: New
School and NYU, as well as the workers at Republic Windows Factory in
Chicago, who fought the closure of their factory by taking it over.
Now it is our turn.
To accomplish our goals we cannot rely on those groups which
position themselves as our representatives. We are willing to work
with unions and student associations when we find it useful, but we do
not recognize their authority. We must act on our own behalf directly,
without mediation. We must break with any groups that seek to limit
the struggle by telling us to go back to work or class, to negotiate,
to reconcile. This was also the case in France. The original calls
for protest were made by the national high school and university
student associations and by some of the trade unions. Eventually, as
the representative groups urged calm, others forged ahead. And in
Greece the unions revealed their counter-revolutionary character by
cancelling strikes and calling for restraint.
As an alternative to being herded by representatives, we call on
students and workers to organize themselves across trade lines. We urge
undergraduates, teaching assistants, lecturers, faculty, service
workers, and staff to begin meeting together to discuss their
situation. The more we begin talking to one another and finding our
common interests, the more difficult it becomes for the administration
to pit us against each other in a hopeless competition for dwindling
resources. The recent struggles at NYU and the New School suffered from
the absence of these deep bonds, and if there is a lesson to be learned
from them it is that we must build dense networks of solidarity based
upon the recognition of a shared enemy. These networks not only make
us resistant to recuperation and neutralization, but also allow us to
establish new kinds of collective bonds. These bonds are the real
basis of our struggle.
We’ll see you at the barricades.
Research and Destroy
Link:
We Want Everything
Ironically, green protest against consumerism doesn’t represent the rejection of consumption, but rather its moralisation. From a sociological perspective, green consumption can be seen as a new form of conspicuous consumption. This is consumption for effect. Consumption apparently must no longer be an impulsive act of buying – rather it has become a massively over-examined experience, and both a moral statement and an affirmation of status and identity. In the nineteenth century, theories of commodity fetishism noted the growing tendency for people to live through things – commodities appeared to acquire a life of their own through the working of the market. In the world of green consumerism, the fetish of commodities acquires an unprecedented significance. Things are assigned human and ethical significance. Thus we have the stigmatisation of certain foods as ‘evil’ and the rendering of other products as ‘ethical’.
And, later:
I wrote a very quick response that some may not agree with, but here it is:
OK, so that may seem unremarkable. At this point, I have taken about 3 minutes to read these comments and post this response. Then, I wonder in what capacity Mr. X works with the Harper government. I go back a re-read all of Mr. X's comments and see that he has declared that he is a "senior staffer" for one of Harper's cabinet ministers.
REALLY?!
I am not shocked so much by the obvious bias in his views - such as referring to gay people as "the gays." What blows my mind is that a Harper senior staffer doesn't know his own party's spin. When the Harper camp throws out the de-contextualized statistic to the mainstream media that the Parliament has been prorogued in Canada 104 times in 150 years, they are spinning the story; they are not dumb enough to attempt sincere debate around this fact.
Harper, you know the difference between spin and facts that can stand up in debate to support your case. And, you most certainly know how to dodge discussion when you are on the losing side of an argument. So, let your senior staffers in on the game plan.
Your government already looks scared. When your senior staffers make such novice mistakes as opening debates on facts that should be left hanging as spin, your government just looks stupid.
Links:
Images and blog badges both courtesy of TT and Impolitical