I meant to post this yesterday. I got sidetracked.
Three years ago today, thousands of workers at Yale University were on strike. It was a thursday, the fourth day of a weeklong walkout staged by unions of graduate teachers, clerical and technical workers, food service, maintenance, and custodial workers, and hospital dietary workers, and it was a day themed around the classroom. GESO held a teach-in (moderated, i believe, by BC) with Gordon Lafer and GSOC's Kitty Krupat, and rallied the superexploited folks from the professional schools, and, cutting my Spanish class yet again, I started out the day as the snow began to fall on the 1199 picket line as people did the electric slide on the line and chanted stuff like "We're freezin, we're freezin', we're freezin' for a reason!" But for me and lots of other folks the most powerful thing that happened that day was the action originally brainstormed by one Abbey Jane Hudson, in which shut down College Street between Elm and Grove and created six classrooms at which strikers, undergraduates, and members of the New Haven community would come together, demonstrate our support for the movement for justice at Yale and in New Haven, teach each other about what was at stake in the fight, and enact a vision of a radically democratic and constituent politics of a university situated in the movement we were building together through struggle and organizing. Capped off by the inches of snow accumulating on Cornel West's head as he told us that "we still hold up a blood-stained banner, and a tear soaked banner, of Light, of Truth, of Justice...,"[1] Education In The Streets, as we called it, was incredibly powerful for me because it was not simply a demand for something from the administration, not just a display of force in the eternal war of position that is Yale's labor-management conflicts, though it served both of these purposes well, not just another reactive gesture to Yale's continuing attempts to colonize New Haven, the globe, and workers' lives with the logics of neoliberalism. What made this action a watershed moment for me in thinking about the work that i do in every sense of that term was the ways in which it, in addition to being an incredibly powerful gesture of support for the movement and the strike and the workers and the unions and the social contract, also was an attempt to create the kind of community and university we all want very much to be a part of. I post this not solely to commemorate, much less to memorialize, but because I think we need to understand what's at stake in this strike in similar terms, to think about the possibilities the strike creates, create structures of organizing and protest in which such possibilities are immanent, and use this to fuel the fight for a/n other/better university.
[1]Thanks to Thomas Frampton for transcribing West's speech.
education in the streets is super sexy and totally sweet. however, is there room for this kind of creative action in the strategy that seems to currently being employed by GSOC? in my mind, thinking about the kinds of possibilities this strike at nyu can create--in terms of theorizing and implementing new, inclusive, and participatory organizing and action--has been cut off. obviously, reclaiming campus space/"public" space is really powerful and that's precisely the kind of work i want to be doing as an undergrad but i feel like this kind of work has been eclisped for something else. that "something else" seems really unconvincing.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with you in teo respects. First, the action I'm describing was less about reclaiming space than about transforming it, and of offering utopian visions of work and teaching and learning and community whihc also functioned as a strategic assault on a very powerful, union busting, imperial university. Reclaiming space always strikes me as a project ephemeral in both scope and duration. You reclaim the street but ten minutes later it's a highway again and you're back to square one. What kinds of dynamic and powerful movements can we build when we not only attempt to recuperate an irrecoverable past but instead put forward a "new world from the ashes of the old."
ReplyDeletesecondly, i don't think that the space for doing this has been eclipsed. We are going into the fifth month of the strike tomorrow and doing anything at times seems incredibly difficult. I think large-scale, creative, participatory actions are incredibly important and powerful and are worth the huge amounts of energy it takes to pull them off.
when i mentioned reclaiming space--i, of course, meant to imply that we should make something of the space we would hypothetically be taking. sorry if i didn't explicity specify that we wouldn't just be standing in the street for 10 minutes. i guess i thought that was implied--because i agree with you in the sense that presenting the kind of world we want to see with the kinds of decision-making processes and social relations that come along with that is precisely the impact of reclaiming space. that said, i don't think your 1st disagreement is really disagreeing with me. because i, too, want to struggle to ask the question you pose. BUT--i wonder, is the union asking those questions??? that doesn't seem to be the frame that the strike is operating in at this point. and that is exactly what i'm having a problem with.
ReplyDeleteto address your second "disagreement": saying that you think these kinds of actions and tactics are worth the amount of energy that it takes to pull them off isn't news to me. but my point was, to take issue with the kinds of actions and tactics the union is putting energy into? from what i can see, it's not putting energy towards the kinds of creative actions you and i have outlined... instead it's running around after sexton and disrupting events in quasi-isolation.