It's been a pretty rough week.  I sat through one of the most difficult meetings I've ever been party to.  That NYT article I shouldn't talk about here.  I have some difficult stuff going on in my family right now.  Two nyu undergrad activists were attacked by the cops and arrested the other night at an impromptu solidarity action with the incredible mobilizations across the UC system.  One of those arrested was a former student.  I hear a certain law student anarchist friend got hit with a police baton in Berkeley.   I got stuck in an elevator with about fifteen other people.  Actually that was pretty fun.  Etc.

I feel a bit better today, excited about organizing possibilities albeit mostly ones outside of my current comfort zone, and excited about my research and its political possibilities and talking a bit about them hopefully at the Minnesota conference in April.  I'm excited about the movements folks are building, the actions folks are taking in CA even if the regents just voted to up tuition by 32% in the next two years, which is obscene even by NYU standards, which are themselves obscene.

What is taking place there, and in Bern, and in Austria, is incredible despite the police repression and the neoliberal state's unflinching acceleration of its privatization/privation engine.  Another university isn't just possible, it's being made on the streets and in the occupied spaces of these movements every day.

But what about those whom the university's discursive practices and regimes of looking cast to its "margins?"  Specifically I am thinking - a more urgent question for the elite private universities, perhaps, than those which can still claim to belong to the public in however extraordinarily attenuated a manner and however attenuated and circumscribed a "public" - and when we say public we are never talking about the commons - about the service labor that makes possible the acts more traditionally associated with the "work of the university," the clerical and technical, service, maintenance, culinary and caring labor that supports the teaching, research, study and policing, the administration and investment and gentrification and enclosure, all the many things that universities do.  In california the UPTE and the UAW are on strike too, and some of the occupations are directly challenging worker firings, I know, but I worry about the extent to which student movement rhetorics marginalize and exclude such workers as subjects of the university.  But maybe too much time in grad school has led me to privilege word over deed, when what we should be paying attention to is not rhetoric but tactics and strategy and action, at the very least what's said in organizing conversations and in strategy meetings rather than in communiques and newspaper articles?  In New York, though, such concerns seem entirely absent from what some anarchists are doing.  Which is ok, I support them anyway, even as I wanna engage them critically, as others have done and continue to do, on their racial politics and anarchohipster exclusions and ennui and hypermasculinism.  Because I believe an organizing conversation can be as transformative and perhaps even moreso as/than a building occupation (and i am all about building occupations) and i believe a wider understanding of what the university is, who is the university, and what the university does, makes for a more radical set of questions and goals than those currently being put forward in some circles.  That's the kernel of the paper i want to give in MN, I think.

Anyway, as I get deeper into my research, I'll try to blog here more regularly.  I missed the GEO Strike entirely, and I'm not really providing the coverage of the UC struggles the title of this blog suggests I should be.  But i was about to quit blogging altogether before Eli suggested the group blogging experiment, and I think i still have blogging fatigue from four years ago, and I'm going to try to make this a useful space for me and for folks who are still reading this thing anyway.

GEO at university of illinois votes to strike

click for the press release

OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE: FOR THE FIRST TIME, MAJOR STUDENT UNION AT
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS OVERWHELMINGLY VOTES TO AUTHORIZE A STRIKE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: FOR THE FIRST TIME, MAJOR STUDENT UNION AT
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS OVERWHELMINGLY VOTES TO AUTHORIZE A STRIKE
GRADUATE EMPLOYEES’ ORGANIZATION REPRESENTS ONE OF LARGEST LOCAL
HIGHER EDUCATION BARGAINING UNITS IN THE UNITED STATES

URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS (November 7): On Monday, November 9th, the
Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will hold a press conference at 1:00 pm at
1001 S. Wright Street in Champaign, IL to announce the results of its
strike authorization vote.

Over the course of a three day vote, an overwhelming 92% of
participating GEO members chose to authorize a strike against the
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.  With the vote, GEO
members have given the strike committee of the GEO a clear mandate to
call a strike at any time.  The Graduate Employee’s Organization,
American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local
6300, AFL-CIO, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a labor
union representing all teaching and graduate assistants (TAs and GAs)
on the UIUC campus.  With over 2600 GEO members, and over 2600
graduate employees represented in the bargaining unit, the GEO is one
of the largest higher education union locals in the United States.

The GEO has been negotiating with UIUC administrators for over six
months. The GEO seeks a contract that will set the minimum salary for
a 50% nine month appointment at the University’s estimate of a living
wage for a graduate student in Urbana-Champaign and protect tuition
waivers for TAs and GAs. While the GEO presented the administration
with a full contract proposal on the first day of negotiations, the
UIUC administration declined to offer a counterproposal until August
11th, just four days before the GEO’s previous contract expired.  The
UIUC administration’s initial contract proposal sought to freeze GEO
wages for three years, reserve the right to furlough and layoff
graduate employees in good standing, and to count “in-kind”
compensation such as housing or meal vouchers toward the minimum
salary mandated in the contract.

The GEO understands that the state of Illinois is in dire economic
straits, but as University administrators pointed out in their FY 2010
budget request, this is the result of long standing deficiencies in
state level budget prioritization and not a sudden result of the
recent national recession.  Instead of championing the university’s
historic land grant mission, UIUC administrators have embraced the
national tendency toward the corporatization of the public higher
education system. Their consequent failure to secure adequate state
funding leaves the social science, humanities, and fine arts
especially vulnerable. Worse, it jeopardizes access to higher
education for many who have the capacity and desire, but not the
financial resources to attend the University.  If increased state
funding is also necessary to providing at least a living wage for all
campus employees, then the GEO expects the UIUC administration to
forcefully make that case to the Higher Education Appropriations
Committee, other state legislators, and the Governor.

Instead of advocating on the behalf of students and workers,
administrators were granting costly favors to state politicians.  The
former Chancellor diverted $450,000 of discretionary funds to provide
jobs and scholarships for politically well-connected but undeserving
applicants.  Another $400,000 went to the attorneys who represented
the University before the Governor’s investigative committee, and
another $550,000 to new faculty appointments for the former President
and Chancellor.  In this context, the GEO finds it hard to trust the
UIUC administration when it argues that there is not enough money to
provide a living wage.  From the GEO’s perspective, it appears that
budget priorities are simply out of place.  When campus revenues rose
by 7% in FY 2009, only 0.8% ($2.7 million) went to undergraduate
instruction.  Meanwhile, the Chief Information Officer’s budget rose
by 10.9 percent ($1.6 million), and the Division of Intercollegiate
Athletics budget increased 6.2 percent ($4.1 million).

GEO bargaining unit members teach 23.1% of all undergraduate course
hours at UIUC, and perform comparably to faculty in official student
evaluations of instructor performance as measured by the University of
Illinois’ Center for Teaching Excellence.   Yet our salaries draw only
6.5% of state funding, including salaries for GAs and Research
Assistants, who don’t teach.  By contrast, faculty salaries draw over
55% of the University budget.  Graduate employee labor is vital to the
fiscally efficient provision of the University’s core service,
academic instruction. Should graduate employee salaries be set to a
living wage, the University would still have a large pool of
inexpensive and high quality instructional and administrative labor.

GEO members have been working hard to avoid a strike.  Hundreds of GEO
members have participated in three major rallies, and GEO members have
also lobbied the Illinois House of Representatives Higher Education
Appropriations Committee, spoken with state legislators from
Champaign, actively informed campus community members about the
issues, and maintained a constant presence in Urbana-Champaign print,
radio and television media.  The Illinois Student Senate has passed
two resolutions in support of the GEO and the decision to authorize a
strike, and GEO supporters in the faculty senate are working to pass a
similar resolution. GEO members and allies will hold a rally at the
University of Illinois Board of Trustees Meeting in Springfield, IL on
November 12.

As with any labor negotiation, however, the most effective pressure
has been the threat of a strike. Only after GEO members at a General
Membership Meeting voted unanimously to file an “intent to strike”
notice did the University administration offer their first compromise
proposals.  Accordingly, the Coordinating Committee and Steward’s
Council of the GEO voted unanimously to hold a strike authorization
vote from November 4-6. By voting to authorize a strike, GEO members
have taken a vital step in holding the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign administration accountable to its stated commitment
to excellence in research and undergraduate education.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT: Peter Campbell, GEO Communications
Officer, odell.campbell@gmail.com, 253-222-5861, or the GEO office at
geo@uigeo.org, 217-344-8283, 1001 S. Wright Street, Champaign, IL,
61820.  Information about the GEO can also be found on our website at
www.uigeo.org.
###

TAs at McMaster University have called a strike for 8 am monday.  Info and updates here.

addendum to the last post

Couple quick clarifications, because that last post got a bit sprawling and sloppy.  I want to try to clear up some points quickly before I fall asleep.

1. Unoriginal, but I think the role of the student new left in '68 and "the sixties" is somewhat overemphasized.  What does the broader "revolt against work" look like inside and outside of the university?  How might Russo's arguments be recast if we place them within the genealogy of the "long 1960s" which begin sometime in the late 1930s and end, depending on whom you ask, somewhere around 1973?

2.  I edited the stuff on the salt metaphor to remove or at least mute somewhat the active/passive binary as a frame for the distinction i'm trying to draw, since that binary smacks of masculinism.  I'm not sure I redeem the metaphor, but it felt kinda glaring to me as it was.

3.  I feel lately like I'm always a) defending politics organized around the point of production to poststructuralist insurrectionist agambenites and b) defending, in both the abstract and in reference to historical and current contexts particular forms of unionism as radical and deeply important struggles.  I am sick of this, and I hate it when people look at me like I'm a trotskyist or something.  I mean, really, let's have a more nuanced understanding of the political and its molecular and capillary operations.  Or can we think in Gramscian/Stuart Hallian/ terms about the many sites and forms of struggle and contestation?  Which isn't to say I'm not in solidarity with poststructuralist insurrectionist agambenites or people who get organizing around work but want to see the union as an always already compromised form or something.  I'm just not a fan of sectarian squabbling.  Well, unless (and I'm going to get shit for this) the ISO is involved, in which case I tend to have a rather short fuse based on past offenses, like lying at membership meetings, threatening to punch me in the face, etc.

I may have more to say on these subjects later.  For now I postpone Harvey & my diss in favor of Ruthie Gilmore's Golden Gulag.

Academic Neoliberalisms, comparative and otherwise

I just finished, this morning, Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart, which is a really brilliant account of the history of feminized labor and evangelical reformations of gender in the making of christian capitalism.  The first half adeptly sketches out the ways in which it's the immaterial, affective labor of entry-level Wal-Mart employees which makes possible the Ozarks' shift from the anticorporate populisms of the fin de siecle West to the christian corporate familial politics which obtain in the cultural politics of the world which Sam Walton stood as an imperfect metonym for.  Moreton's an excellent labor historian, and her grasp of how these transformations occur and the implications of her rereading of the history of the late twentieth century U.S. are profoundly important.

The second half of Moreton's book deals largely with the role of the corporate-religious-university nexus in the nationalization and globalization of Wal-Mart's corporate presence and (and through) its increasingly evangelical mode and ideology of "free enterprise," its connections to the surging new right, missionary evangelism and free trade neoliberalism in Latin America, and accumulation by dispossession and enclosure on an increasingly global scale.  The university - actually three universities - University of the Ozarks, Harding, and John Brown (not the militant abolitionist) - serve as sites of social reproduction, suturing the products of Wal-Mart workers' affective labor to the Republican Party, the New Right student movements (especially Students in Free Enterprise, or SIFE,) missionary christianity, and the origins of neoliberal globalization.

Moreton's description of the relationships between these universities and the growth of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. resonates for me with this week's readings in two important ways.  First, it offers an account of the kinds of classed destinies of the university and their relationships to students and study which are very different either from the kind of subversive criminality of the latter gestured to by Moten and Harney in the interview i discuss in a previous post, or in the episteme-wrecking shifts Alessandro Russo makes the case for in his essay "Destinies of The University."  Like Eli M, I have some difficulty with the rather broad rejection of "classism" as a social analytic for post'68 academic capitalism-or-whatever.  My problem, I think, is that there's too much slippage, Russo's "classism" is too broad and unwieldy a term, conflates neoliberal rearticulations of class into racialized and biopolitical representational frames with a political dissappearance of class as political demand, something I don't really see evidence for.  If the New Right found rather ingenious new ways to articulate race and class, the two were hardly strangers before 1968, and in both the U.S. and in Europe, new social movements have often transformed and expanded rather than discarded the class and labor politics of earlier movements.  Moreton's book, in fact, suggests how even in the absence of a labor metaphysic, the politics of class and the surplus labor of proletarianized women service workers lie at the heart of the rise of the largest corporation and employer in the U.S. and Mexico and do so in part through an ideological state apparatus organized around evangelical conservative universities which offer an important new explanation for but do not in any way debunk the ways in which class and the social relationships of accumulation and exploitation which class constitutes, structure both the social and the university.   Clearly the borderless subjects of Gokce Gunel's insightful ethnography of folks whose lives are affected by a U.S.-inspired, corporate, private university with a secluded, gated campus in northern Istanbul, are also relevant to the ways Moreton traces the movement of students, from Panama and Honduras and Mexico to the Ozarks and back, filtered through evangelical universities daily prayer meetings and Wal-Mart's corporate expansions into the global South.

I guess this has been more about Moreton than the polygraph journal.  That's in part, I think, because the essays in the journal I was most struck by were Morgan Adamson's great essay on "The Financialization of Student Life," the tail end of which I saw her present at the Rethinking the University conference in Minneapolis in April of last year, and Eli M and Isaac Kamola's piece on enclosure and struggles over the university's commons, which I also first encountered as a presentation at the same conference.  And I've been thinking about that roundtable with Marc Bousquet and Fred Moten and Stafano Harney some more, thinking about study and how it might or might not be in excs of labor.  I've been thinking about the claim Moten and Harney made in a fantastic essay on professionalization and exodus in the university, that the "only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one," that the radical intellectual comes to steal from - and to escape to - the university, which is always a deeply compromised space.  Professionalization within it is thus cooptation, labor discipline, etc.  I'm not sure it can't be denied that the university is a place of refuge - the assumed subject here has to be an academic or at its furthest plausible limits an undergrad.  Non-academic employees at universities, particularly folks who are subcontracted and outsourced service labor, often have very different relationships to the institution.  But I also think that the false premises on which one comes to the institution need not necessarily be those of criminality.  Some unions ask militants who want to organize to take jobs at particular workplaces and to help organize from within.  Folks in the labor movement call this practice "salting."  The national right to work committee condemns it as a form of sabotage, destruction from within.  I think, whether deliberately or not, that this is more or less how I approach(ed) graduate school.  Not particularly interested in entering the profession, I came in large partha to organize.  This was probably stupid, and I don't think I've been as effective, whether as an organizer or as an academic, over the last four years and two months, as I would like, but I still think it's worth recognizing this as another possible subject position for the subversive intellectual within the university - not just to form gypsy encampments, but to constitute instead the undercommons as a site of  ferment, constant organizing and insurgency, and refusal of the university's modes of control and accumulation in ways which affirm rather than disrupt the prophetic modes of the undercommons' nomadic, liminal subjection.  I guess one could argue that this is a more authoritarian and hierarchical mode of being in common than the more affinity based coterie of criminals and gypsies and, most provocatively, "maroons" Moten and Harney envision, but I don't know that I see that as necessarily the case.  Nor am I sure that one model is more politically effective than the other.  Anyway, it's a conversation to continue in the future, but this post is losing steam and I need to return this rented laptop to the work-study undergrads who run the laptop rental desk in the basement of the library.  I do want to think more about what it means, though, to approach the academy as a salt, and as assault.  But that sounds like the social war stuff, with which I have issues which I may address in a later post...

study?

Working my way through the latest ish of the journal Polygraph in preparation for the next iteration of the blogging group with the two Elis, I stumbled on Stefano Harney's suggestion that those who choose to turn to the "local union" for support in organizing struggles within the university/for the undercommons will have to contend with a "research department full of thugs."

Now I should first say that I greatly enjoy most of Harney's work on the university, with and without Fred Moten. And I have had, especially over the last four plus years, my share of frustrations with local and international union structures and politics. But I think this is at best silly and at worst essentialist and elitist in the way it poses the union researcher as too coarse, to blunt, for the non-work of study towards which all academics should strive to devote their time, should flee to as refuge from teaching and other forms of labor which aren't in excess of the limits of labor. I know a lot of union researchers and many of them have profoundly complex understandings of how the university works, who works in the yniversity, where endowment value comes from, etc. More importantly, I see echoes here, in study's otherness from work which contradicts some of the gestures Moten and Harney have made in previous essays to expand how we understand labor in academic contexts, and perhaps I'm being unfair, of the kinds of rhetoric that John Sexton used four years ago when the administration of New York University tried and failed to destroy the flawed and embattled, but not particularly thuggish union which has consumed the bulk of my organizing and activist energies since I moved back to the city in 2004.

Ought we to be blindly and uncritically pro-union? In this age of "Workers United" and the N/UHW fight, it's impossible to have such an orientation, and that's not what I'm arguing for. Nor am I trying to pick a fight with Stefano Harney, who i think is pretty brilliant. Instead i want to think about the implications of the presence here of a lot of the tensions I've been trying to parse lately with regard to how radical academics have accepted and adopted the autonomist refusal of work into how we theorize our own labors. It seems like what gets Harney into trouble here is the need to rescue study by understanding it as something other than or beyond labor. Maybe we need to expand or challenge our understandings of exodus and refusal in ways which allow us to recognize, as I would argue Harney's co-interviewee Marc Bousquet has, the power and subjectivity of the refuse(d). How does the discursive abjection of labor function here in relation to the class politics and labor hierarchies of university spaces? Why must that which we need to refuse be made abject? Or, conversely, can study really be rescued from labor? Can it really be redeemed as the kind of anti- or non-capitalist commons that Eli Meyerhoff and Isaac Kamola talk about persuasively in the same volume?

Check back later in the week for my response to this week's readings. Apologies for the sentence structure of this blog entry -I wrote it on my phone. I need to stop doing that.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

UCSC, Reoccupied

taken from http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/ucsc-students-occupy-deans-office-15-october-2009-call-to-revolt/

UCSC STUDENTS OCCUPY DEAN’S OFFICE, 15 OCTOBER 2009: CALL TO REVOLT!

The glass walls of passivity, separating us from one another, can only be shattered with revolt. We are occupying a second building on the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California because we have answered the call of the first to occupy everything. Tonight is a demonstration to students and workers everywhere that the division between taking what you want and planning for a movement to come only appears as a problem for abstract thought about taking action. We only catch sight of the fires of the insurrection to come on the morning after the unrest of the night before.

What is a crisis anyway? It is the exclusion from work and public services of those most precariously situated within this system. To a crisis which is generalized, it is pointless to respond with generic activism. Activists of more prosperous eras held demonstrations. Still, they were unable to secure any lasting position for those on whose behalf they took “action”. As the current crisis unfolds, it is necessary to elaborate innovative forms of escalation and revolt. Our crisis is as much the failure of these tired forms of mobilization as it is the collateral damage caused by a growing economic catastrophe.

We have lived through too many cycles of defeat and must try something else. We are compelled to negate the crisis itself with whatever capacity we have now. Tonight, we have taken the Humanities and Social Sciences building. As long as we occupy this space, Dean Sheldon Kamienecki will be deprived of his workplace. This empty figurehead, who last spring made decisions about what jobs get cut and which departments lose funding, will no longer have access to the means of his existence. While we hope this occupation quickens his pulse and that of administrators like him, we have not taken this building to send them a message. Although we hope that they fear for the integrity of their documents and office supplies, we do not occupy to demand the reinstatement of funding channels to what they were before the crisis exposed the fucked up priorities of this school. This occupation is a second call to everyone who has been targeted by this crisis. Which is to say: it is a call to everyone. We cannot wait for some movement to come that will stop the forces pushing ever more people out of this system. Our task is to disrupt the functioning of this system by appropriating what is ours for ourselves.

No amount of organizational meetings, phone calls or emails to legislators have the capacity to build a movement. Society cannot negotiate its way towards liberation. There is no need to raise consciousness. The crisis is already making people painfully aware of the situation. Peaceful marches, rallies and symbolic protests, attracting spectacular media attention, will never increase our ranks because this very process of mediation reduces us to passive observers of what is supposed to be our own activity. Organization for action has become an end in itself cut off from the reality of capitalism in decline. How many voices of outrage are required for a political rally to have a set demands met? We all know the answer to this question: no amount of voices will ever be enough. There is no power to which we can appeal except that which we find in one another. The organization of the movement occurs whenever a freshman or a service worker learns how to barricade doors, how to avoid arrest, how to pick locks. The movement has staying power when, for every one of us who grows tired, there are three who will take our place.

We have recently learned that the University of California does not use tuition money or student fees to fund research and education. On the contrary, they place one hundred percent of this money into an account with the Bank of New York Mellon Trust in order to protect their borrowing power in credit markets. They hold our tuition as collateral in order to finance the largest and most speculative construction projects in the state of California. UC pledged collateral rose by 60% with the last issue of bonds to $6.72B from $4.2B. The number of students taking out debt has risen 20% since 2000: 80-100% for students of color. Average debt levels for graduating seniors rose to $23,200 in 2008 alone, a 24% percent increase over 2004. We know very well what is going on: the University’s ability to finance bonds for new construction increases in direct proportion to their ability to slash spending on education, raise student fees indefinitely and ensure that students cannot disrupt the function of the University itself. This spectacular credit swap finances new construction on the backs of parents who increasingly risk foreclosure on their homes and students who will work the rest of their lives to pay off their debt. The University of California has already been securitized, ensuring that none of us have a future within this system.

We in the US have been too timid for far too long. We are afraid of the police. We are afraid of losing our jobs or getting expelled from school. We are afraid of people shouting in the streets. Security is the watchword of our era: no one wants to take risks. But this illusion of comfort — our separation from one another into perfectly compartmentalized lives, disconnected and self-amused — increasingly unravels with each person thrown out of work, every family evicted from their home and each student unable to afford unending tuition increases without bartering away her future on credit markets. It remains for those terminated by this system to use these failures as flash-points for generalizing the struggle. Perhaps, at last, we can understand one another, for we are all going bankrupt.

Press contact: (eight-three-one) 332-8916

website: http://occupyca.wordpress.com