Long time, shouldn't have left you without a dope beat, etc.

Since the financial crisis, and really since Occupy, there has been much ink spilled regarding the revival of Marx among academics, activists, millenials, intellectuals, et alii.  This is a clumsy narrative for a few reasons -- Marx never went all that far, for many of us.  But it's provided a lot of momentum for any number of disparate projects, from communization theory to the M-Lism of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Democratic Socialism of the Sanders Campaign, Jacobin Magazine, and the Democratic Socialists of America after its "Trump Bump."

I have been thinking a lot about the ways that Marx and Marxism are articulated in these spaces, what they are articulated against and what they are assumed to stand for.  I am thinking about claims, like that made by Nivedita Majumdar at a Jacobin event last year, that intersectionality theory is hostile to Marxism, thinking about what seems to me a depressingly common conflation of marxism with a theory of class as the primary contradiction, an assumption that theories of racial capitalism, black marxisms, attempts to theorize race and capital and gender and capital and capital and sexuality together are postmodern deviations -- "academic cretinism," as one individual writing anonymously under the name of a long-dead Dutch Council Communist put it to me on facebook this past week.  I don't mean to paint with too broad a brush.  Bruce A. Dixon's critique of intersectionality is different from Majumdar's, which is different from random left-communists on facebook which is certainly different from Connor Kilpatrick's, which is probably not that different from Amber A'Lee Frost's.  Nor do I want to suggest that a Marxist critique of intersectionality is unwarranted, or that there isn't some really reactionary shit that has been put forward under the sign of intersectionality that Marx doesn't give us some way into, or that some versions of intersectionality don't disappear class.

But I think some, many, maybe most, not all of these critiques, are weirdly conservative; I think that the Marxism they conjure up is a deeply conservative Marxism more concerned with debunking the last 40 years or so of social theory than it is with offering a compelling account of what Stuart Hall would call the present conjuncture.  I don't think what these critiques have to say about the present conjuncture is really of much use.  Following Christina Heatherton, I also don't think that the way they theorize class is all that Marxist.  Heatherton writes:

It bears repeating that class is a relation and not a fixed identity. The dynamics of class movements emerge in different convergences of struggle. Our theories have to be capacious enough to account for these convergences. The recent scandal of Grenfell Towers in London offers one concrete example. An untold number of poor, immigrant, and working class people died when the public housing tower block where they lived, caught fire. The blaze, we now know, was accelerated by non-fire retardant panels, installed on the face of the building; an effort to minimize its “unsightliness” for wealthier neighboring residents for whom the building was an eyesore. We might not yet have a synthesis of Marxist theory that fully accounts for the convergences of labor exploitation, circulations of finance capital, the predations of real estate speculation, immigration, militarism, colonialism, racism, social reproduction, queer and non-normative familial relations, aesthetics, and neoliberal austerity, but this is essentially what the residents who are organizing against this mass murder by the state and capital are currently articulating. Our theorizing should follow such movements – rather than the other way around. To get free we have to be able to comprehend the “changing terrain of class relations” as it unfolds before us, a point Roediger returns to throughout the collection.

Against "defensive gate-keeping" (which is, I think, what so much of what passes for Marxism has become) and "facile dismissals of 'identity politics,'" Heatherton denounces what has become a "poisonous shorthand" on the left that "more often discounts the insurgent and radical critiques of capitalism that have come from anti-racist, feminist, queer, and non-heteronormative perspectives."

In his classic 1983 magnum opus Black Marxism, the sociologist Cedric Robinson coined the term "racial capitalism" to index how "the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology."

"As a material force, then," Robinson argues, "it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism." Or, in Hall et al's famous formulation from deep in the later chapters of Policing the Crisis, "Race may be the modality through which class is lived."  I want to suggest that a Marxism which understands the articulations of race and class and gender and sexuality, a Marxism which takes as its starting point Ruthie Gilmore's dicta that All Capitalism is Racial Capitalism, is a more useful Marxism for the present than a Marxism which begins and ends with Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder or a Marxism whose chief purpose is a critique of postmodernity that is not, as Jameson was, concerned with reading postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, but is instead a deeply reactionary argument about theory that just wants to call anything that complicates class postmodern as a shortcut around having to grapple seriously with race as a central and defining feature of contemporary class relations.  As Nikhil Singh has recently argued, "rather than deriding race-first politics as a mode of neo-liberal incorporation, it is healthier when the left actively supports and promotes, as black radicals from CLR James to Ella Baker counseled, independent black political initiative as the bellwether of broader radicalizations."

Some belated thoughts on Wonder Woman, which we saw before the boycott conversation had really materialized, with a few spoilers:

1. It's certainly better than the other three DC films of this cycle.  This isn't saying much.  Man of Steel was a neo-Malthusian, protofascist mess, Batman v. Superman was this, but exponentially moreso and without much of the para-feminist take on The Any Adams Lois Lane which made the first film occasionally watchable.  Suicide Squad is just bad.  Wonder Woman is often a more light and comedic film, sometimes in ways that work, sometimes in ways that do not work, but it's certainly easier to watch because of this, less ponderous and pretentious.

2.  It deliberately parallels the first Captain America film, but substitutes the first world War for the second (despite the fact that, like Captain America, the character's origins are in WWII -- Wonder Woman first appeared in 1941, about 6 months after Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's Captain America debuted by punching Hitler on the cover of a comic that was released 9 months prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

3. Screenwriter Allan Heinberg's WWIIification of The Great War is problematic.  As untenable as the exceptionalist narratives around the Second World War may be, the centrality of Empire to both sides in the First World War receives no mention here.  There is a mild indictment of US colonial genocide from a native character named Chief, but otherwise the differences between the war that Wilfred Owen condemned and the one that an entire apparatus of bad historians and hacky journalists celebrate still is entirely collapsed.

4. One could argue that plot developments late in the film render an implicit critique of England's involvement in the war, but this is not explored and largely gives way instead to a bunch of special effects and explosions.  A scene is set in the Ottoman Empire with no awareness of what that might mean for the narrative.

5.  Spoilers in this one:  The most common criticism of Man of Steel involved Superman's decision to murder General Zod at the film's climax.  A similar event occurs in Wonder Woman.  There is far less ambivalence on the part of the titular character.  Indeed, she announces her intentions at multiple points throughout the film.  Yet there has been little discussion of this in the reviews of the film that I have read or the podcast discussions that have popped up in my feed.  I find that curious.  Is this because Wonder Woman is, here and elsewhere, a more martial character, more of a "warrior" than Superman, whose immigrant narrative is much more deeply linked to the ideological project of American exceptionalism?  The film wants to also present Wonder Woman as dedicated to peace, to ending war.  It's a contradiction which calls to mind the entire archive of ideological underpinnings for contemporary humanitarian imperialisms.

6. Gadot's casting illuminates the film's own Zionism.  Her performance is embedded in the logics of IDF militarist/imperialist feminisms, of exceptionalist representations of Israeli womanhood, such that Robin Wright and Connie Nielsen adopt Israeli accents.  The film imagines Themiscyra as Israel.  In this sense I don't think the criticisms of Gadot's support for genocidal IDF attacks on Palestinian civilians can be separated from the film itself.

I think that's all I have for now, but I may add more if it pops into my head.

Broken window theory: Corey Menafee and the history of university service labor

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

ZACHSW@GMAIL.COM

In November, 1969, a 30-year old black dining hall waitress at Yale University named Colia Williams threw a glass of water at a white student dining hall manager who'd harassed her continuously over the few short weeks that she'd worked in the university's dining halls.  Williams was promptly fired for her insubordination. As a new hire, she had not yet completed the 90-day probationary period that would qualify her for membership in Local 35 of the Federation of University Employees, Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union and thus secure her access to the union's then-flimsy grievance procedure.  Williams’ act happened to occur during a semester in which several members of Yale Students for a Democratic society had taken jobs in the dining halls, inspired by a broader current of “industrializing” – taking working-class jobs in order to organize mass workplace resistance – across the New Left.  Yale SDS in particular was part of the somewhat notorious Progressive Labor faction, which continued to claim the organization’s name following the split at the 1969 national convention (which led to the creation of the Weather Underground.)  The presence of these student radicals in the dining halls made workplace struggles that students might otherwise have ignored objects of widespread concern and political urgency.  Following Williams’ firing, a hundred students, members of Yale Students for a Democratic Society as well as the Black Student Alliance at Yale, marched into the university's human resources office in the basement of Wright Hall to demand the university reinstate her.  The students occupied the office and took several administrators hostage for a few hours.  With the conclusion of the occupation, 47 students were immediately suspended, though all were eventually reinstated.  (One alumnus, who’d taken a job as a university custodial worker, was eventually fired for his role in the occupation.) The occupation was successful - Williams won her job back – or rather, Yale administrators discovered, they claimed, that they had never actually fired her.  But, a month after returning to work, Williams had quit. Subjected to continued harassment from white supervisors due to her newfound notoriety, Williams explained that working at Yale was "agony."

Williams' action, and the actions of her supporters, directly implicated the racist and sexist conditions of service work at Yale in the late 1960s.  Over the last few weeks, a contemporary parallel has emerged in Corey Menafee's decision to destroy with the butt of his broomstick a stained glass pane depicting two enslaved people of African descent picking cotton in the dining hall of Yale's Calhoun College, where Menafee worked as a General Service Assistant.  Although Menafee broke the window this past June, his action has only become public knowledge in the past week and a half thanks to reporting by the New Haven Independent.  Like Colia Williams' defiant glass-throwing, Corey Menafee's window-breaking evokes a long, submerged history of property destruction and direct action by Yale employees.  Much of this activity occurred throughout the long, hard decade of labor struggles between the calamitous defeat of the workers in a truncated 1968 strike, when student scab labor blunted the strike's impact and a weak settlement prompted rank and file rebellion at the contract ratification vote and subsequent threats of wildcat strikes, and the 13-week long walkout in 1977, still the longest at a university with a history of long strikes.  During the 1971 strike workers slashed the wiring and tires of university vehicles.  They and their supporters among a now-radicalized student left also flooded dining halls and blockaded the university' power plants to stop oil deliveries.  (In a speech on campus during one of two strikes in 2003, then-presidential candidate Howard Dean recalled his participation in the blockade.)  In 1977, when a belligerent, right-wing anti-union white student provocateur tried to shove his way through a picket line of striking black blue-collar workers, a striker punched him in the face.  The student required 23 stitches.  (Even senior university administrators agreed that the student was “out to antagoniz[e] or incite violence.”  During the same strike, an unknown party firebombed a university safety office adjacent to one of the power plants, throwing a pair of burning whiskey bottles through a window. Though those responsible for the firebombing were never found, the incident was reported as if it were related to the strike, an act of sabotage by rogue workers or their supporters. 

Most of these actions were directly related to labor struggles, perhaps more so than they directly referenced the university's long history of profiting from and glorifying slavery and the trade in enslaved Africans and their descendents.  Yet these were hardly ever discreet, separate phenomena.  Yale’s labor struggles and battles over its legacy of slavery and genocide have often intersected.  It was three graduate student union activists, Antony Dugdale, J.J. Fueser, and J. Celso de Castro Alves, who wrote the 2001 report “Yale, Slavery, and Abolition,” tracing the university’s connections to slavery in the midst of its hagiographic tercentennial celebration. There's often been an explicitly Antiracist character to labor struggles at Yale, as true of when the vast majority of the university' black workforce refused to work on the day following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (The university had made work optional in the hopes of avoiding disruptions) as when thousands of striking workers and members of the New Haven community demanded equitable hiring of Latino workers during a weeklong strike in March 2003, or when the graduate employee union waged a campaign against the university’s investments in the Corrections Corporation of America which culminated with the university’s hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management LLC, divesting from CCA when Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility refused to do so. 

Make no mistake; Yale’s involvement with slavery far exceeds its continued honoring of John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery ideologue, senator, and statesman.  As Dugdale, Feuser, and Castro Alves noted, the labor of the slaves who worked George Berkeley’s Rhode Island plantation provided the capital for Yale’s first scholarships.  The slave-trader Phillip Livingston financed the university’s first endowed professorship.  (Yale, in turn, trained Livingston’s children in the management of his transoceanic enterprise.)  The profits from slave labor funded the university’s library and laid the groundwork for its endowment, which now exceeds $25 billion.  Besides its close ties to slave-trade merchant capitalists, and the West Indies plantocrats in particular, Yale was itself a site of slave labor.  “Slaveholding,” notes the historian Craig Steven Wilder in Ebony and Ivy, his 2013 history of US universities’ relationships with colonial genocide and racial slavery, “was common among Yale’s early faculty and governors.”  

But if Yale’s legacy of slavery stretched back to its earliest days, the slave pastoral stained glass window Menafee broke is of a much more recent vintage.  Like the residential college in which it was until recently installed, it was constructed slightly more than eighty years ago, in the early 1930s.  Not only has Yale been slow to reckon with its past; well into the twentieth century, it was actively affirming the central role slave capitalism played in its origins and development.  Until 2007 the room where The Yale Corporation (the university’s board of trustees) meets prominently featured a painting of Elihu Yale, the notoriously abusive official of the East India Company whose name the university has borne since 1718 and who may have himself profited from the sale of slaves.  The painting depicts Yale with a dark-skinned child at his feet.  Around the child’s neck, an iron collar is clearly visible. 

Yale University has mostly avoided substantive discussion of its history, choosing instead to emphasize conversions to abolitionism or early African-American graduates.  But one is constantly reminded.  In some ways, conditions for dining hall workers are very different now than they were when Williams worked at Yale.  The three long strikes of the 1970s, the ten-week long strike in 1984, the two strikes in 1996, and the landmark settlement of the second strike of 2003 increased pay substantially, slowed the administration’s attempt to undermine the union by subcontracting and casualizing the labor force, ended the practice of routinely laying off hundreds of workers each summer, and won unparalleled job security language which prevents layoffs during the duration of the contract cycle.  But, in other respects, things haven’t changed that much.  Many food service and custodial workers still work 2 or 3 jobs to stay afloat.  Several stories about Menafee include the detail that he can’t afford a cellular phone.  Yale remains an institution soaked in and celebratory of a long history of white supremacy.  It is impossible to walk through, or by, the university’s many service entrances and not understand this, to not sense how interlinked white supremacy is with the everyday experience of work and/or study.  Indeed, Menafee's action might itself serve as a reminder of the continuities between racialized service work and slavery, at a university that slavery funded, a university where slaves labored, in a city profoundly shaped by the history of slavery and abolition as by the confluence of deindustrialization and capital flight, university tax exemption, real-estate speculation, and expansion, and a mode of racial capitalism which conjoined them through the labor of a predominantly African American workforce of food service and custodial workers whose history of struggle produced Yale's unprecedented history of strikes - as many as twenty between the early 1940s and 2005, depending on what and how one goes about counting.

Corey Menafee's act of refusal, the refusal to continue working under the symbols of Yale's history of chattel slavery and colonial genocide, punctures the hypocrisy which has suffused so much of Yale's recent hand-wringing over its white supremacist past and present, a hypocrisy which led it to try to fold Menafee's broken window into an ongoing "art survey" launched in response to student discontent over the decision to keep John C. Calhoun's name on one of its residential colleges.  Perhaps it also kept the matter quiet to discourage other such acts against other symbols of Yale’s racism and imperialism, of which many remain.  The tinted glass which quickly replaced the smashed panel could just as easily be read as a small form of counterinsurgency, rendering the university’s interior once more opaque to the New Haveners whose congress along Elm Street, the major thoroughfare adjacent to Calhoun College, has been so heavily monitored by the university’s police department, and projecting a pristine, undamaged facade to the world.

Menafee's act further makes transparent three fallacies: that recent campus protest over cultures of racism and white supremacy on US campuses speak more to the coddled nature of millienial students than the actual political economy of US racial capitalism, that the continued presence of such celebrations of the university’s racism is permitted only for educational purposes, and, above all, that service workers are not themselves implicated by and participants in those debates and struggles.  Maybe nowhere more than in their role as employers of racialized service work do US universities suture old and new forms of white supremacist racial capitalism.  Through studying the history of that labor and those who have performed it, we can gain better insight into how universities have continued to occupy slavery's afterlives.  Standing in solidarity with Corey Menafee and with those who have come before him requires both an unflinching and rigorous critique of this relationship between university service labor and the American college's debt to the enslavement of and trade in people of African descent, and a collective commitment towards its overturning.

Hillary Rodham, Bill Clinton, and the 1971 Yale Strike

Excerpted from Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Beneath the University: Service Workers and the University-Hospital City.  unpublished phd dissertation, New York University 2015.  pp. 424-425

Yale Law School students Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton were both members, alongside future Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal and Bill Clinton’s eventual Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor Robert Reich, of the Yale Law School Students Committee for Local 35, and signatories, during the week before the strike, to a statement asserting “WE BELIEVE THE UNION DESERVES THE SUPPORT OF YALE STUDENTS AND FACULTY.”[1]  Bill Clinton was even, John Wilhelm would note decades later in his eulogy for Vincent Sirabella, the Voter Registration Chairman of the Sirabella for Mayor Campaign.”  And yet, on her first date with classmate Clinton, Rodham would later recall:

We both had wanted to see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery but, because of a labor dispute, some of the university's buildings, including the museum, were closed.  As Bill and I walked by, he decided he could get us in if we offered to pick up the litter that had accumulated in the gallery's courtyard.  Watching him talk our way in was the first time I saw his persuasiveness in action.  We had the entire museum to ourselves.  We wandered through the galleries talking about Rothko and twentieth-century art.  I admit to being surprised at his interest in and knowledge of subjects that seemed, at first, unusual for a Viking from Arkansas.  We ended up in the museum's courtyard, where I sat in the large lap of Henry Moore's sculpture Drape Seated Woman While we talked until dark.^[2]

The relationship between Rodham and Clinton, two instrumental figures in the decoupling of the Democratic Party from the priorities of the mainstream labor movement, thus began with the crossing of a picket line.  [3]  When Rodham and Clinton picked up the garbage strewn about the art gallery courtyard, (if, indeed, they ever did so,) they were doing exactly what everyone from Vincent Sirabella to the Black Student Alliance at Yale had asked students not to do – they were performing –or at the very least offering to perform -- the work that members of Local 35’s Grounds Maintenance division, had refused.  Rodham and Clinton were offering themselves as replacement labor, blunting, if only temporarily, the effects of the strike on the university.  The two law students then bartered their litter pickup, which was, in essence, scab labor, (or maybe just the promise thereof) into access to a struck buildings.  The art gallery and other nonessential buildings were closed because the university did not have enough managers to keep them open during the strike.  They were closed because the people who usually cleaned and repaired them, whose labor helped make the university’s display of art possible, had been forced to absent themselves by the necessity which fueled the ongoing strike.  For Rodham and Clinton, the workers concerns were at best secondary to the romance of the empty museum, the sophistication and transgressive pleasure offered not only by the modernist art, but also by the act of violating the strike.  Hillary Rodham Clinton offers this anecdote in her 2003 memoir Living History not in her discussion of how her time in New Haven affected her understanding of urban politics and life, but rather in a distinct chapter devoted entirely to the origins of her relationship with the “Viking from Arkansas.”  The “labor dispute,” not even named here as a strike, is not only abstracted from the very spaces the future Clintons inhabit in this narrative, it is made incidental to them, an obstacle which has to be sidestepped in order for the art to be viewed and the date to acquire its romantic ambiance.

---

[1] Law School Students Committee for Local 35, “Could YOU Raise a Family on $88 a Week?”, leaflet, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives RU 86 YRG 41 accn1971-A-004 Box 4 Folder 1.  April, 1971.

^[2] Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History.  New York: Scribner: 2003.  53.  I thank Dan Gilbert for alerting me to this incident.

[3] The campaign, notes Wilhelm, was “not a high point for Vinnie.  It persuaded him that the careers of aggressive labor leaders and politicians were not compatible.”  John W. Wilhelm, “Eulogy for Vincent Sirabella,” 1995.   Reprinted in Frank R. Annunziato et al, Greater New Haven Labor History Association, 1995 Labor History Almanac.  1995. recovered by Internet Archive Wayback Machine from the webpage of the Greater New Haven Labor History Association https://web.archive.org/web/20070313192745/http://www.laborhistory.org/almanac_dedic.html accessed 1/30/2015 

I wrote a bunch of tweets about the the ongoing occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge visitor's center that went semi-viral.

That turned into an 1100-word thinkpiece about settler colonialism, nature preservation, ranching, and primitive accumulation.  Happy new year

10 years

Today is the 10th anniversary of the 2005-2006 GSOC strike's first day. That strike is still the longest in the history of the north american academic labor movement (except for the 1999 student strike at UNAM.)  As any perusal of this blog suggests, the strike was a big part of my life for the better part of seven months.  I joined GSOC just over two months before the strike began, organized in the buildup to it, walked the picket line almost every day, organized throughout the strike, and kept organizing for years after it ended,  In the years after the strike ended, the organizing climate for graduate employees at private universities was a difficult one.  University administrations and the labor movement both rightly saw the NYU strike as a fulcrum.  Ten years ago, John Sexton said that GSOC was a "virus", that it could either die a quick death or a slow death.  Today there is a union contract at NYU.  Organizing drives are once again underway at Cornell and Columbia, with new campaigns at Harvard and the New School, alongside new unions or organizing campaigns at the University of Connecticut and the University of Missouri. A quarter-century into its own struggle, GESO is revitalized and holding enormous and energetic demonstrations.

While in many ways the strike was a defeat for the union, it was a testament to the tenacity and dedication of GSOC's membership and its organizers that the union emerged from the strike battered but also infused with new understandings of what it meant to organize and how to do it. The tragedy of the strike was the failure of solidarity between union members, but the lessons of the strike were altogether different, less about the shamelessness of faculty unionbusting - things the previous decade and a half had long since made clear - than about how to build power, how to talk to each other, how to fight. The failure of the years after the strike was the failure of the international union to sustain organizing which took into account the lessons we learned during the strike, a failure I could get into here in great detail but won't, both because I think those lessons were never entirely forgotten, at least by members, and because I still think that the experience of the strike, and the many sacrifices that strikers made (and I don't include myself in this, because I was on fellowship, and because the worst things that happened to me during the strike were getting yelled out of a bar by another first year in my department and having some people in my department who had returned to work write mean anonymous comments on this blog) played an important, if indirect role in the making the present moment possible. So I think it's good to think, at this juncture, with everything else that is happening today in Columbia, Missouri, in New Haven, in Madison, everywhere else, about what the strike got right and what we got wrong and what that experience might mean for the struggles which are now taking place at NYU and everywhere else.

Edit:  I wrote and edited and posted this several hours before Tim Wolfe announced his resignation.  Five years ago I wrote this post on the meaning of november ninth and november tenth in the history of university labor insurgencies.  It's amazing that this victory by the students at Mizzou falls on the same date that our strike began.  I can only hope that the next few months build on these insurgencies to create new anniversaries for us to celebrate in the years ahead.

2nd edit.  Also, I forgot to mention U Chicago's GSU, who are amazing.  Well, I didn't so much forget as intentionally steer clear of mentioning them because I'm out of the loop and wasn't sure what the status of their campaign is.  Thankfully, they're still going strong, and certainly deserve a great deal of credit for helping the movement to organize grad employees at private universities survive and grow over the last eight (?) years.

I posted this on Facebook this morning.  

"Nine years ago today, GSOC began the longest strike in the history of the US academic labor movement. For seven months, NYU TAs refused to work until union recognition was restored. Nearly two dozen of us were fired and blacklisted, and several never worked at NYU again. The strike taught a lot of us important lessons about the labor movement and the political economy of academic capitalism. It was generative and exhilarating and really difficult, and we went back to work in September 2006 without a contract. Today GSOC is negotiating a second contract with the NYU administration, which is, in itself, a testament to the sacrifices and determination of everyone who walked the picket line, told their faculty to fuck off or get their shit together, and spent the last three months of the strike organizing those who'd returned to work, keeping the union alive. Besides the determination of NYU Grad employees, the strike was a testament to solidarity of the broader contingent academic labor movement. Unions from as far off as Illinois sent organizers to us for weeks at a time. GESO sent three of its best full time lead organizers for as long as a year and a half, as well as a full time researcher and another part-time lead. (Two of GSOC's best organizers returned the favor by moving to New Haven and organizing for Unite Here.) The strike was exhausting and hard, and not being on strike and returning to Sextonian dystopian normalcy the year after that was even harder, but I am still in awe of the bravery and determination of all the people who kept the union alive that year and fought so hard against such a bunch of intractable capitalist shit-asses. Thanks guys."

Yesterday, I wrote about this photograph and the incident which produced it. The first time I wrote about this incident, ten years ago, I was relying on microfilm and the photos were too dark to see anything. Since then, this newspaper has been digitized, so we can all see the look of utter agony and dismay on the face of the wife of the President of the university after students supporting a service worker strike stole/expropriated a bunch of food from a scab-operated dining hall and then dumped it on the front lawn of the president's mansion. There’s something deeply sexist about the way Mrs. Brewster is represented in the photograph, as an object of simultaneous scorn and pity, as a symbol of the putative wrongness (or radicalism) of the students’ act, in the way she is only knowable here through her husband’s name, and in the invisibility of the male administrators who were also trying to pick up the garbage. But the photograph, and Mrs. Brewster’s dismay, also mark the dislocation, the profound disruption of the social order, which accompanies the moment when one has to do that work which others usually perform because those others refuse to do it any longer. In this sense, the photo of Mrs. Brewster thus suggests the reversals and utopic imaginaries which the strike had already enacted and made possible, even as it subjected the workers who waged it to insecurity and want.

Yale Break was a feminist newspaper written mostly by clerical and technical workers during the YNFAC organizing campaign.  (1969-1972).  From the chapter I'm writing:

The logo atop the first page of each issue is a clerical worker in a matching prison-striped Yale cap and miniskirt. A comically large IBM typewriter is shackled to her leg just above her high-heeled left foot. In one hand, she carries a stack of books, and in the other, a tray of hot coffee mugs. On her face, she wears glasses, and, like the flight attendants Arlie Russell Hochschild describes in her classic ethnography of emotional labor, The Managed Heart, a wide, cartoonish, haunting smile, part of the job as much as the typewriter or coffee

Yale Non-faculty Action Committee Newsletter, Vol. I, No. 1, June 20, 1969

Spoiler

For a moment there it seemed like white suburban high school kid noir was the next big thing.  First Veronica Mars, (which I wrote about a couple of times during the early years of this blog) then Brick, both obsessed, in their own way, with, in deeply fetishistic and constrained ways, the intersections of class and race and schooling and drugs and death.  Veronica Mars, hailed almost immediately as the heir apparent to the pulp feminism of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which went off the air a little over a year before Veronica Mars began to air on the same network, was also deeply interested in gender, in girlhood, but only the kind of gender that white folks get to have, only white girlhood, and always in ways which fetishized all the fucked up tropes of virginity, --and here I should probably drop a trigger warning -- of rape, of abuse in ways which commodified rather than disrupted, which substituted lurid affectations of pulp sensation for any kind of feminist politics which might actually interrogate the meaning and politics thereof.

The nadir of Veronica Mars as a series is the Hearst College rape plot, which begins with a one-off episode in Season 2, featuring a stunt-cast Michael Cera and Alia Shawkat, the Arrested Development kids all grown up and in college.  The ongoing mystery of the serial rapes is apparently unworthy of any discussion for the rest of that season, and then returns in Season 3 long enough to explain that black feminist militants fake rapes for reasons I don't really remember and I am never going to rewatch that shit, so sorry.  It's pulp, but it's revanchist pulp, a racist, sexist reaction to a caricatured women of color feminism masquerading as neoliberal "postracialism."  A ten-cent Alan Bloom watches PCU critique of academic multiculturalism and/as radical feminism.  By itself, the Hearst rape arc is a good reason to view the wave of nostalgia which surrounds the series in a very critical light.  But other than Sady Doyle's excellent essay, which appeared as I was editing this post, few have done so.  That is, in any case, the spirit in which I write this post, unrelenting, ruthless critique of teenage high school dramas.  Veronica Mars is singularly worthy of such attention, I think, because it is remembered as particularly feminist in ways which it was not always, perhaps not ever.

When Veronica Mars went off the air in 2007, I'd seen every episode multiple times, but I wasn't sad to see it go, because everything after Sheriff Kieth Mars literally pulls his daughter out of a refrigerator at the conclusion of the very entertaining first season is pretty awful.  As I wrote on this very blog almost seven years ago,

Rob Thomas was all too happy to let noir be a synonym for the male gaze, and the show's treatment of rape and sexual violence got progressively worse with each passing season. Supporting characters vanished into the ether, and plotlines became increasingly vapid, predictable, or pulled out of the writers' asses for lack of more compelling stories to tell. The "LoVe" story between Veronica and her borderline psychotic spoiled brat of a sometimes lover Logan Echols went from complicated, precarious, and smartly written, to lazy, faux-epic, and trite.

I still agree with all of that, to some extent.  I don't feel much compulsion to go back and rewatch the series, so I will admit to some fuzziness, especially when it comes to season 3, which I have mostly blocked from memory.  But I just watched the movie, and I thought I would write about it a bit.  I don't believe in spoiler warnings, but I do believe in praeteritio.

Funded in no small part by a wildly successful and equally controversial kickstarter, the 2014 film Veronica Mars functions on every single level as a form of wish fulfillment, at once resolution and reboot.  It has to tell us what everyone has been up to for the last ten years.  (really seven, but everyone looks fashionably younger than they are supposed to be in the film this way.  Actually, no one looks much older at all, except for Wallace, and Tina Majorino, whose character's name I do not remember which may be because I am still angry about the final episode of season 2)  But it also has to restore a familiar status quo so the people who payed to make this movie, the self-described fans of the show, feel like they have gotten their money's worth.  If Veronica stayed in New York and worked at a corporate law firm for the entire film, people would feel cheated.  That's a novel constraint in some ways, but not in others; indeed it seems a common trope of reunion specials and analogous genres, which have to have getting the band back together as a kind of pleasurable tension, have to take us to a point where we see the world as we knew it through the original product.  Veronica Mars accomplishes this through two ways, both of which are fairly trite - a ten year high school reunion, and a murder in which Logan, V's ultra-rich psychopath ex boyfriend, is the main suspect.

Veronica returns to Neptune, which is now under the thumb of another hammy Sheriff Lamb, except this time it's Jerry O'Connell in full douchebag mode, which he is singularly good at.  Veronica returns to a Neptune where her father still works as a private eye, where Wallace is a high school sports coach and Tina Majorino's character works for Kane Software, (and neither one of them has more than five lines in the entire film, not because, as Sady Doyle suggests, they are eclipsed by the writers' obsession with the Logan romance plot, though they kind of are, but because the writers are bad.  The writers have no idea how to make either Wallace or Mac, (hey, I remembered her name) especially post-assault, post Beaver Mac, the center of a narrative that has become unmoored from a character who has herself become unmoored from what made the show initially interesting and exciting, that is, the girl with the huge lens inverting the gaze, deploying the genre tropes of a deeply masculinist genre to interrogate the racialized class politics of the fundamentally corrupt nature of SoCal capitalism.  It's only in part the soapy romance that derails that project.  Indeed the romance itself is evocative of the larger problem - that the series' writers are not feminists.  They do not have a class analysis of Southern Californian suburbia.  They have a strawman thereof.  Their racial politics, and here I have to respectfully differ with Alyssa, are also pretty flimsy.  That's why weevil is so marginalized here and in the series itself.  He's a prop the writers long ago lost any idea of what to do with.  Making Celeste Kane George Zimmerman is less social critique than narrative exhaustion.  This is one more verse in a song Veronica Mars has been pretending to sing since the beginning, but it's an empty, repetitive melody, with nothing to say, cashing in on the forms of exploitation and genocide that structure the world we inhabit rather than telling us something valuable about them.

Veronica returns to Neptune to solve the murder of Carrie Bishop.  Carrie Bishop is the character from season one who accuses Adam Scott's charismatic teacher of statutory rape.  Veronica eventually figures out that Carrie is really acting on behalf of her friend Susan Knight.  In the series, Carrie Bishop was portrayed by the actress Leighton Meester, more recently of Gossip Girl.  Here, not only has the character been recast, she has changed her name.  This is an odd choice.  It renders the series as proximate to the film but also an imperfect approximation thereof, the fiction complicated by the very political economy of film production that the film presents itself as a victory over, though it is more an experiment in the outsourcing of risk (an ethos and process at the core of contemporary neoliberalism) than anything else.  (Here I have to disagree with radical philosopher Brian Holmes contention, shared by the media theorist Tiziana Terranova via twitter two days ago, that crowdfunding is "the anarchist welfare state."  Maybe it is, sometimes, like when people crowdfund their gender transition surgeries or anarchist book projects or insurrectionary social centers.  But there's nothing anarchist about corporate film production companies moving risk from their own bank accounts and that of the studios with which they transact to the paypal accounts of consumers who may or may not acquire some sort of participatory claim on or stake in the finished product.) 

I need to talk about Logan Echols now.  Logan began his fictional life as a spoiled, sadistic, racist, little shit, the series' main antagonist and maybe the most obvious suspect in the Lily Kane murder.  Three quarters of the way through the first season, Logan inexplicably becomes Veronica's main love interest.  He is back to being a racist, classist, violent asshole by the beginning of the second season.  He's a fairly loathsome character whom the writers seem to have decided, influenced by a vocal subsection of the franchise's fan base, is an epic romantic hero, and so he takes on the persona of star-crossed dickhead for most of the last two seasons of the show.  At least as far as I remember.  Like I said, it's been a while.

In the film, Logan has "gotten himself together" by joining the Air Force.  He greets Veronica in his dress uniform, she makes Richard Gere jokes that would have been uncomfortably dated a decade ago, and we're all supposed to be impressed with how much he's grown.  Logan Echols, a racist bully well schooled and practiced in deeply bourgeois forms of reactionary violence, finds redemption in the air force.  He bombs Afghan "enemy combatants" now instead of community swimming pools, (S2E1)  hence, maturity!  Progress!  Adulthood!  All of which are signified and achieved through a glorification of militarism; the fetish of the uniform that conceals the bloody empire which it is inextricable from.    Late in the film, Veronica (spoilers) postcoitally quotes Aaron Sorkin's lugubrious and campily melodramatic courtroom dialogue from A Few Good Men to Logan.  In the bit, Veronica appropriates and sanitizes ("effity" not "faggoty") a Jack Nicholson line.  But Logan has in at least one sense actually become Colonel Jessup.  As is clear during an appropriately absurd scene at the 10 year reunion in which Madison Sinclair plays Veronica's sex tape and Logan beats the shit out of half of his male high school classmates, he, like Nicholson's Jessup, remains impressed by, if not obsessed with, the power of violence to protect, to uphold.  But maybe that's a stretch.  My point is really that the militarist imaginary of sexuality in the show - and I don't think this is camp detournment or anything quite so seductive, is both deeply troubling and completely unsurprising.  In the same way the series has also been deeply in love with (and exploitative of) "the good cop" (Principally Deputy Leo, who has a cameo in the film, but also Deputy Sacks, who meets an untimely end when a gaping plot hole smashes into his truck) its dad-worship authoritarianism (when can we finally admit that Kieth Mars is a dick?) is now transferred to Logan-as-Gere, the officer and the gentleman, the spoiled racist poor little rich boy as the national hero.  Maybe Logan isn't Colonel Jessup so much as George W. Bush?

I am not so much on Team Pizz (sp?) though Veronica is rather awful to him here, as I am the abolition of the compulsory heteronormativity that made the series increasingly unwatchable after the premiere of season 2. Veronica Mars to me represents one inarguably great season of campy neonoir television and then about ten years of lost potential, bad writing, exploitative violence, unaddressed trauma, unmourned death (here the scene in which absent classmates named are read at the 10 year reunion is really a lost opportunity - we hear Meg Manning's name mentioned, for instance, and no one notices.  The absence of Lily, not to mention her still presumably very much alive brother and his daughter, is also noteworthy.)  Kind of like this movie, which isn't terrible, but acts as a pretty clear reminder, and helpfully restages and reproduces, pretty much everything that went wrong with the original series.

I should end there, though I think there's also something to say about how the series and movie are so profoundly skeptical of the nerd, the "nice guy."  That the "nice guy" is a particularly venal form of malevolent masculinist revanchism (think "friendzone") is undebatable.  In retrospect this skepticism of ascendant nerdcult is something that the series sort of did right even as it embraced said nerdcult.  Except that the particular way the show decides to go after the "Nice Guy" winds up pathologizing survivors of sexual violence in a really crass and disgusting way (I am talking about Beaver Casablancas but I could be talking about a lot of characters.)  The show's ultimate villain is another "nice guy", and it seems as if Thomas et al want to come back to this critique.  But the writing is clumsy.  There is no emotional resonance, at least for me.  (And I should acknowledge the privileged position from which I write about these issues.)  Martin Starr is an underrated actor who is woefully underused here and has been underused in pretty much everything with the exception of Freaks and Geeks, in which he was phenomenal.  His presence here, and the exchange between him an fellow Freaks and Geeks alumnus Dave Gruber Allen, feels like another crass VM cameo, like Alyson Hannigan as Logan's sister or Charisma Carpenter as Dick and Beaver's (come on) stepmother or Joss Whedon as the gas station attendant or whatever.  It's an excuse to bathe Veronica Mars in the glow of other proximate texts, to claim affinity by association even at the film's supposed dramatic climax.  One of the final scenes of the film, right before Veronica confronts and defeats (no savior here, which was one of the things about the film I did appreciate) a guy who murders women and forces them to have sex with him, is a Freaks and Geeks joke.  This is a problem.  Because while parody and humor can certainly be powerful weapons against sexual violence and abuse, Veronica Mars has never been very good at that sort of thing.





(edited to fix up and expand the last paragraph.)

A Birder's Guide to the Commodification of Teens(TM)

I made Johana watch "A birder's guide ot everything," which is a new coming of age drama about some high school birdwatchers that is now available on iTunes and Time Warner On Demand and is premiering in theaters next week.  I didn't like it.  It's not so much the bird-related aspects of the film which I object to, although they are pretty ridiculous - elite birdwatchers crashing down a trail on mopeds, a labrador duck sighting, a presumed white-winged scoter on a suburban street dismissed as commonplace, Ben Kingsley magically knowing what park a migrating bird will next stop at after it's been flushed, ducks migrating during t-shirt weather in the northeast...

No, it was more the rote "serious" teen film cliches, plucked from John Hughes' fictional Schermer, Illinois and given a fresh application of post-American Pie heteronormative raunch.  The nerdy oversexed best friend character could be the Max Casella character from Doogie Howser, MD, except he says "vagina" every other word, because Teens(TM) are the universal consumer, the docile body of the film industry's inexorable need to recycle the same tired representational forms ad infinitum.  Hence the reviews that call this film an heir to Stand By Me (only because it isn't self-consciously pastiche enough to fit in the same genre as Super 8, though it feels at times like a cynical retread of many of the character formulas in that film - the troubled protagonist with the dead mother, the love interest thrust I to the aggressively homosocial boys' club as a matter of happenstance/narrative convenience.  And of course there's the desexualized asthmatic Asian male sidekick, because what would a teen movie be without a little mild racism-cum-ableism?

What's interesting about the film, then, is not the film itself, which is pretty awful, but rather its marketing -- it's being promoted by the heavyweights of what I am coming to think of as bird-capital's NGO wing -- the National Audubon Society and many of its local affiliates and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, both of which likely see the film as a means by which to promote and popularize birdwatching, especially among Teens(TM).  The inter penetration of the for-profit and the non-profit are fairly constant within the world of North American birdwatching - viz partnerships between, say, the Cornell Lab's ebird project and Carl Zeiss optics, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.  But there's something about the boosterism that sticks out, and if I do wind up writing more seriously about birds, birdwatching, and capital, it's something I want to keep thinking about - the ways that capital is invoked as salvific, the capitalist realism of not just ecotourism discourse but conservation evangelism as well.

Some questions about the state of manarchy and the gender of marxist critique

It's interesting how the meaning of "manarchist" has shifted, maybe narrowed, over the last few years.  When I first heard folks using the term about five years ago, it seemed to me that it was a way of marking the ways that even the most theoretically avant-garde variants of anarchist practice and scholarship were marked by their gendered assumptions, hypermasculinist norms, and most troublingly what a lot of people denounced as a profoundly apologetic attitude towards various forms of sexual violence.  In the intervening half-decade it's been popularized (thanks, Ryan Gosling,) but also, maybe, contained, so that to call someone a manarchist is no longer to put masculinity itself on the carpet, but instead to invoke a much more particular sort of naive antifeminism and hypermasculinism which maybe owes a lot more to the experience of the Occupy movement than to the occupations that preceded it.  Does that make any sense?  Is it a useful claim to make?  I'm guess I'm curious about the state of "manarchy" at present, particularly given the latest round of critiques of "call-out culture" and the latest attacks on people for outing anarchists with histories of sexual assault for dishonesty about transformative justice procedures etc.

I guess I'm thinking about this also in relation to the weird backlash against trigger warnings.  I think the politics of safety are pretty fraught, and folks need to read Christina Hanhardt's fantastic book about the politics of Safe Space and the race and class politics of gay neighborhoods and policing, which has a great deal to say on the subject.  But there's also a disturbingly gleeful antifeminism in some of the not-even-critiques that have circulated on social media in the wake of that New Republic piece.  In the fifteen-odd years that I have been involved in radical organizing and other projects, I don't know that I've ever seen such malice directed towards what are, in essence, survivor strategies.  I think TWs are open to critique.  I have lots of critiques.  (In short I think there are ways that TWs assume a universal equivalence of trauma in which the racialized particularities of particular forms of violence are flattened and/or disappeared.  No one is safe, but some are always already safer than others.)  But while assy critique can be liberating and fun to read as well as fun to perform, it can also easily slip into some rather reactionary forms of address.

The two paragraphs above seem a bit more disconnected now than they did when they were congealing in my brain, so I think I'll stop there and move on to something else.

Education in the streets, 11 years on

Today is the 11th anniversary of Education in the Streets.  I've written about it so many times already that I'm not entirely sure what it's useful for me to say here other than that it was a moment that was politically formative and euphoric enough that I am still thinking about it and writing about it today, still deeply invested in the project of stealing the university from the university through the refusal of work, of creating spaces of insurgent knowledge production within oppositional practice of insurgent and transformative labor organizing which moves beyond the workplace to challenge the colonial logics of university service labor urbanization.

The potential for that kind of transversal organizing practice, for the kinds of radical affinities modeled in the organizing that produced that day (March 6, 2003) to emerge elsewhere is maybe the most exciting outcome of the GSOC election victory, besides, you know, remembering John Sexton's promise to the faculty that the union could either die a quick death or a slow death and taking a long, slow drink of wild cherry diet pepsi.   I'll be doing both today, but mostly I'll be thinking about how what it means to teach and what it means to learn are transformed by struggle, how the strike troubles the limits of the enclosure of knowledge-labor, how insurgent labor produces forms of thought and collectivity capable of radically destructuring the most imperial and expansive modes of academic neoliberalism.  Thanks, Abbey.

And happy birthday to Robert Schwartz, z''l.

Been neglecting the blog a bit while writing.  I learned two things today that here seems as good a place to write about as anywhere else, though.  Thing 1: During the organizing campaign for the Yale Non-faculty action committee, a clerical worker drive based in the Yale school of Epidemiology and Public Health from 1969ish to 1971, HERE intervened with the National Labor Relations Board to contest the unit that YNFAC, an affiliate of the National Council of Distributive Workers of America, a lefty breakaway from the RWDSU, was arguing for.  YNFAC wanted to organize an EPH-only unit.  Vinnie Sirabella told the NLRB this was wrong.  HERE had recently tried to organize a universitywide clerical union in 1967-1968 that couldn't get past workers' fear of the boss, and fizzled.  YNFAC eventually brought a universitywide election before the board and lost.  In a lot of ways, it's the most interesting of the pre-Local 34 organizing campaigns.  It's the most feminist, the most progressive, and the most expressive.  But it got crushed by the university's anti-union campaign.

Other new thing I learned today: Joe Lieberman's 1970 campaign for the CT state senate against an incumbent who was the senate majority leader became entangled with a conflict between the conservative democratic mayor of New Haven Bart Guida and his political machine and Yale University over taxation.  Supporters of the incumbent claimed that Lieberman, a 28-year old "liberal" Yale graduate and assistant dean, was getting campaign funds from money the university had earmarked for "the community."  (This would have been illegal on like fifteen levels.)  Meanwhile Lieberman's people accused the mayor of announcing plans to unilaterally add 11 Yale properties to the city's Grand List as a way of drumming up anti-Yale fervor against the Lieberman campaign.  (Meanwhile, -I knew about this part already - the university is suing the mayor over the tax stuff and imposing a hiring freeze on service workers which winds up leading to the second near-wildcat strike in under a year and fuels a lot of the militancy that explodes into the 7-week long strike in May-June of 1971, the 10-week long strike in 1974, and the 13 week long strike in 1977.

Oh, also, two months ago I wrote a 3,000 word essay on the UAW, the university, organizing, capitalism, mustaches, bureaucracy, winning, etc that I have only shown to two people and don't know what I am going to do with.  If I publish it, it will need to be edited and rewritten, and I don't really have the time to do that at the moment or know when I will or if I even want to publish it.  But I was going to post it here, and I want to note that just so you know I haven't entirely ignored this space for the last however many months it's been since I published anything.

A sign of Albany's slow gentrification, this  upscale doggy day care storefront used to be the base of operations of Occupy Albany

Eight years, three months, and eleven days ago, GSOC-UAW's first contract with NYU expired.  Since the NLRB had struck down its own four year old precedent a year earlier, and NYU had unilaterally decided to make GSOC a thing of the past, this meant that August 31 was the last time NYU's graduate employees had union recognition.  In protest, many of them (this was the day before I started grad school, also the day I signed a union card) sat down in the street and blocked traffic in front of Bobst library, the site of invisible grad employee labor, of so many student suicides, and of the offices of President Sexton and his university leadership team.

Today GSOC is once again recognized, winning an American Arbitration Agency-supervised election by a total of 620 votes to 10.  I'm in a mild state of shock, and I'm pretty misty eyed, thinking about all of the people that made this possible, from the newer cohorts I don't even know to folks like Mike, Susan, Maggie, Tracy, Paul, Jenny, Franny, George, Steve, Andy, Miabi, Joanna, Leigh Claire, Jessie, Bekah, Sonia, Tricia, Stephanie, and everyone else who helped lead the union through the strike, Brenda and Mary and Anita and Jeffrey and Maris, who gave up a year or more of their lives for a union they didn't even belong to, the undergraduates who stormed Bobst, Rana, Patrick, Stefanie, Dacia, Lauren, Kari, Emmy, Tammy, Natan, Liz, Alex, David, Burgard, Magali, "the twins," union peter, sarah, paulette, lilly, and everyone else who sustained the union through the house of delegates and years of limbo and FAR4 and John Sexton's imperial circumatlantic (and pacific) expansions and debt-financed fire island bungalows.  Apologies to many folks I forgot to mention.

I have many criticisms of UAW strategy and leadership, but the refusal to walk away and abandon GSOC, or to sell it out to administrative trap doors like the 2005 open shop proposal or FAR4 or a TA-only, Washington Square only unit deserve a lot of praise and made this moment possible.  As folks think about what the second contract will look like, I hope one thing that people mull is a refusal to agree to noninterference in academic matters, a clause which both limited the scope of what GSOC could do (academic matters are our working conditions) and gave NYU some admittedly cynical ammunition with which to demonize the union and the grievances it filed while trying to contest administrative moves to staff union jobs with then non-union and much cheaper adjunct labor.  If the only power we have is in our labor and our ability to refuse to perform it, I don't think that academic workers should be afraid to organize to transform our workplaces beyond the limited scope of fordist collective bargaining regimes.  I also think it's important to remember that without ongoing shopfloor organizing across the university, the union is vulnerable to future attack and weakened even in the absence of any unionbusting initiative on NYU's part, so the question of a sustainable culture of constant and ongoing organizing becomes paramount.  Finally, the NYU strike and subsequent struggle have been linchpins for the broader movement across the US of the organization of contingent academic workers at private universities.  Workers at Columbia and Penn got arrested with us multiple times.  GESO sent four organizers and a researcher down for the duration of the strike and months afterwards.  I think it's important that GSOC find similarly powerful ways to be in solidarity with these and future struggles in the coming years.  Congratulations and thank you to everyone who made this possible.

Eight Years

Thanksgiving marked the eighth anniversary of John Sexton's so-called "threat letter," a long, rambling missive, released late in the strike's third week, which dropped the proverbial hammer on hundreds of striking teaching and research assistants, informing strikers that if they did not return to work by December 5, 2005, they would be fired from the positions they were striking and banned from further teaching at the university for an additional two semesters.  The punitive blacklist was ultimately rescinded, but the threats had their intended effect, sending many strikers back to work, mostly over the winter break.  Those who remained on strike eventually felt the full brunt of administrative repression, when the administration made good on its threats.  Beginning in late January of 2006, graduate student teaching assistants and instructors, first in the Sociology ad Spanish departments, and later, the vast majority of strikers in the english department, recieved letters from a mysterious administrator in the provost's office named Frank Hoppensteadt, PhD, informing them of their impending pay cutoff.  There was a grievance process on the university's terms (the union contract's expiration having been the cause of the strike in the first place) which went nowhere, and the strike gradually shifted from its semi-euphoric (semi because harassment and threats circulated intradepartmentally throughout the first few weeks, leading, for instance, to strikers in the Math department returning to work very quickly) to its apocalyptic phase, a generalized sense of frustration and hopelessness which my blog posts from the moment mid-late february, 2006, let's say) both acknowledge and attempt to move beyond with occasionally triumphalist language and frequent gestures towards New Haven as roadmap. 

Late last week, the UAW and NYU reached an agreement.  GSOC will withdraw its two petitions before the national labor relations board for TAs and RAs at NYU and NYUpoly, respectively.  The challenge to the Bush administration's legalized excision of contingent graduate student academic workers from collective bargaining and federal labor-management regimes will have to wait indefinitely.  In return, the university  administration has agreed to an election in less that two weeks for a bargaining unit which includes teaching assistants at both NYU and NYUpoly, a larger unit than the one the strike failed to preserve, and administrators have also importantly agreed to remain neutral and begin bargaining quickly in the event that the union indeed wins the election.  

I first heard about all of this in the middle of my panel at ASA, although I did not learn details immediately.  The full announcement, inlcuding one statement by President Sexton and Bob Berne and another joint statement by UAW officials and university administrators came early this week.  From those of us no longer actively organizing, which now means everyone who was around for the strike, and most of us who organized during the almost eight years since its end, there have been a range of emotions articulated in several different forms and venues, and reaction among others in the academic labor movement seems similarly unsettled, as folks try to make sense of whether this is some kind of sellout, or a worthy conclusion to a very long and very difficult struggle, pending, of course, an actual election victory and then all of the things that follow it, or neither, or both.  At the moment, and don't hold me to this, what we know about the agreement makes it look pretty good.  Though it will not change federal labor law, a victory at NYU after 8 years of administrative retrenchment and against one of the most aggressively expansionist, authoritarian, anti-union and anti-faculty administrations around, would likely spur rather than set back ongoing and future organizing at Yale, University of Chicago, and other private universities, though I am interested to hear from folks organizing there and elsewhere about how they interpret what this means and how it changes the strategy moving forward.  I do think that there is an argument to be made (and unions have been making it for well over a decade) for circumventing the ponderous and anti-worker NLRB process in any way possible.  However, GSOC will either need an eventual NLRB decision or a remarkably high level of organization - something we have struggled with in the past - to prevent a repeat of 2005, meaning another withdrawal of voluntary recognition, absent compulsory legal recognition under the National Labor Relations Act.   

Meanwhile, eight years to the day after the SCRC/GUS occupation of the tenth floor of Bobst library, eight years of organizing and waiting, dropped balls and slammed doors and clandestine organizing meetings at the four faced liar, on the second floor of dunkin donuts, at that shitty expensive bar on university place after the picket line, in the sociology department, at Liz's apartment, in SCA, in the old union office, and in the new union office the single GSOC Venceremos sticker which inexplicably remained fixed to a mirror in the West Wing bathroom on the tenth floor of Bobst, eight years of work-ins and the ghosts of the strike, eight years of phonebanking and wandering through unfamiliar departments and laboratories, eight years of picketing, incompletes, concern trolling from faculty and hostility from so-called colleagues, eight years of missed paychecks and slashed healthcare  and the whole archive of messy fucked up shit I won't go into here, it feels so strange to no longer be a part of the bargaining unit, to be on my way back to ALbany, frantically trying to find a job and finish my dissertation when I feel like I should instead be doing turnout or throwing police barriers through bobst's picture windows and declaring the reestablishment of the NYU commune or something.)

N.B.:  I started writing this post on 11/26, but finished it on 11/30 and will correct the date in a few hours.  Also, for more information about the deal and what GSOC is up to, keep checking http://makingabetternyu.org

#marxistsatthemovies, or, this just happened.

What follows is a poorly formatted collection of my 100-some-odd contributions to the #marxistsatthemovies hashtag.

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7 Oct Organic Composition Of Human Bondage, Capital #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7 Oct The Critique of Everyday Life of Brian #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7 Oct The Practice of Every Day Is a Holiday Life #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7 Oct The Suburban Commando Revolution #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7 Oct The Production of Spaceballs #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h The Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 of Equality #marxistsatthemovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h No Future For Old Men: Queer Theory and The Death Drive #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h Is The Rectum a Shallow Grave? #marxistsatthemovies #noideaifbersaniisamarxist
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h Last Chance David Harvey#MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h Rebel Cities Without A Cause #marxistsatthemovies #nodemands
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h Minor Literature Report #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical14s Joshua Cloverfield #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12m There's Something About Mariategui. #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical15m Mad Max: Beyond Horkeimer. #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical28m The Good Jameson #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical 6h They Camatte Night #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical6h The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Reemergence of The Communist Movement #marxistsatthemovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical6h Scattered Dreams, Speculations on Value #marxistsatthemovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical6h Two, Three, Many Days of The Condor #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h When Harry Haywood Met Gwendolyn Midlo Hall #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h New Modern Times #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h Theory of Orlando Bloom #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h How To Train Your Dragon Is It To Be Done? #marxistsatthemovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h The Coming To America Insurrection #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical7h Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl-Interrupted #marxistsatthemovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical11h Pages from a Black Worker's The Notebook #MarxistsAtTheMovies
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical11h Crazy Indignant Heart #MarxistsAtTheMovies #charlesdenby
from Albany, NY
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical11h Midnight Notes on a Scandal #MarxistsAtTheMovies
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vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical11h The London Hanged 'em High #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical11h Love Is A Many-Splendored-Headed Hydra #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Walk Hard Road to Renewal #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Grosse Pointe Blanqui #MarxistsAtTheMovies (inspired by @BigMeanInternet threatening to have me killed.)
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Seven Days in May 68 And Its Afterlives #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Bandung of Outsiders #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Ranciere in The Dark #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h WALL-E-rstein #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Balibars of Fury #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h Up in the 18th BrumAire #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h 62. The Civil War in Frances Ha #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h 61. Fourier Rooms. #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12h 60. Fragment on The Time Machines #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical13h 59. Labor and Monopoly Capitol Critters #MarxistsAtTheMovies #actuallytv
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical13h 58. The Black Atlantic Jacobins Dahlia #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical13h X:Men Origins of Wolverine, The Family, Private Property, And The State #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1m Time, Labor, and The Social Network Domination #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical10m The Long Kiss Goodbye Twentieth Century #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12m A Kiss Before Dying Colonialism #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical10s Facing Reality Bites #MarxistsAtTheMovies cc: @afrofabulist

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical21m The Fetish Of The Commodity and its Secrets and Lies #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical24m So-called Primitive Love Accumulation #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical44m Deconstructing Harry, Reconstructing Womanhood. #MarxistsAtTheMovies #hazelvcarby
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical48m All Quiet On the Cultural Front #MarxistsAtTheMovies #MichaelDenning
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical55m Off Limits to Capital #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical57m Critical Condition of Postmodernity #MarxistsAtTheMovies #richardpryor
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h Driving Miss Days of War, Nights of Love #MarxistsAtTheMovies #technicallyanarchists

Harry Potere Operaio and the Half-blood Modern Prince #MarxistsAtTheMovies #2for1

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical53m The Sandlotta Continua #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical54m Romano Alquati Holiday #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical54m Radio Days Alice #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h For a Few Dollars Padmore #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical15s FINALLY GOT THE NEWSIES #MarxistsAtTheMovies

vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical47s Detroit Rock City, I Do Mind Dying #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical24s Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and the Giant Peach #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical2m Bodies, Rest, and Moten. #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1m Policing the Bubblegum Crisis #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical3m The Psychic Life of Power Rangers #MarxistsAtTheMovies
vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical4m Gender Trouble in Little China #MarxistsAtTheMovies

1. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical3m

   Bifo Sunrise #MarxistsAtTheMovies

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2. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical12m

   Love at Tronti #MarxistsAtTheMovies

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3. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical17m

   Cookie's Fortunati #MarxistsAtTheMovies

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4. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical32m

   All that is holy smoke is profaned #marxistsatthemovies

    from Albany, NY
5. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical40m

   In Foucault Blood #marxistsatthemovies

    from Albany, NY
6. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical41m

   The Curious case of Walter Benjamin Buttons #marxistsatthemovies

    from Albany, NY
7. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical50m

   #FREEMARISSA

    from Albany, NY
8. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical50m

   Sergei Eisenstein #marxistsatthemovies #justsaying

    from Albany, NY
9. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical52m

   No More Marcuses #marxistsatthemovies

    from Albany, NY
10. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Stalin Down #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
11. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Rob M.N. Roy #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
12. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    In The Heat of The Proletarian Nights #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
13. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    I Hardt Guattaris #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
14. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Occupy Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
15. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Abolish Working Girl #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
16. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    How Deleuze Your Lover #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
17. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Wild at Hardt and Negri #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
18. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Subalterner and Hooch #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
19. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Against the True Romance of Community #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
20. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Gramsci's All That #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
21. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Legends of the Fall of the House of Labor #marxistsatthemovies #davidmontgomerypresente

     from Albany, NY
22. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    City of God and Country #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
23. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Timecop, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
24. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    All that is solid melts into Air Bud #MarxistsAtTheMovies

     from Albany, NY
25. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Born in Flames #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
26. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    The Salt of the Earth #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
27. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Swimfanon #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
28. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Bakunin to the Future II #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
29. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Hot to Trotsky #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
30. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Attack the Bloch #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
31. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    A Socially Necessary Labor Time To Kill #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
32. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Adams Family Use-Values #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY
33. vogelfrei ‏@nerdosyndical1h

    Midnight in Paris Commune #marxistsatthemovies

     from Albany, NY