NLRB

Here we go.

I was looking through the front material of Historical Materialism 15.1 (2007), at the voluminous list of brilliant scholars and radicals who constitute the journal's advisory board, when I was struck by something.  All of the people listed have a parenthetical location next to their names, e.g., Aijaz Ahmad, (New Dehli), Robert Brenner, (Los Angeles), etc etc etc.  For folks not affiliated with universities, it's the same as those who are - thus (labor notes founder) Kim Moody, (New York) - though last I heard Moody was in the U.K., but the journal is several years old.  There's one exception, a senior scholar in marxist cultural studies and one of my intellectual heroes, who is listed with the designation "(Yale.)"  There are two other instances of this.  Fredric Jameson is listed with "(Duke)", Simon Bromley with "(Open University)".  Bromley's situation is a bit different, since his university is understood to be not fixed to any particular geographical location.  With the other two, though, it's two distinguished Marxist scholars at two very wealthy private universities in two deindustrialized small cities whose economies are now dominated by universities and hospitals.  What does the erasure of New Haven and Durham from Historical Materialism mean?  What does it tell us about the practice and praxis of marxist theory within and without the academy, about the place of the university in radical politics?  As the frontispiece of an issue including Toscano and Vercellone on cognitive capitalism and the general intellect, I think these are actually important questions to take up.  I'd add more, but i have an organizing meeting to run to.

I think, though, that there is a tension here that's a lot like the one I see in this video which is currently making the rounds on the internet among my fellow cognitarians:

specifically I'm interested in the presumed supremacy of mental over manual labor, the differential valuation of cognitive and affective labor explicit in the assumption that there's something horrible and undignified in getting paid less than secretaries and janitors.  It seems to me like what academic workers need to be doing is organizing in solidarity with secretaries and janitors and other campus workers, whether we're fighting the bosses, radically reconstituting the spaces we inhabit, building counterinstitutions, going on strike, or engaging in a wide variety of other kinds of projects, and I think we should be doing all these things at once, combining them and ourselves into new and powerful forms.

Ok, meeting now.

linkdump

The WSN on a possible strike by thousands of NYU adjuncts.

Andrew Ross demystifies "the corporate university" in the chronicle of higher education.

So, what does the U.S. navy do when there's a general strike at the school it's using as a training ground for soldiers in the middle of a multi-continent war?

Carl Paladino, Lee Abrams...  What's up with these capitalist plutocrats' apparent compulsion to send pornographic emails to their entire fucking companies?  What kind of arrogant shit do you have to be to casually sexually harass like three hundred people with the click of a button?  What does this say about the role of digital communications technology and the construction of the gendered workspace?

dispatches from the dissertating, II

I'm still trying to get a handle on the complicated dynamics between university administrators, military officers, and union leaders, let alone rank and file workers and armed services members during the University of Minnesota's multiple wartime strikes during the 1940s, the subject of the chapter I'm currently working on, but if you'd care for a glimpse of how awkward and complex these relationships were, here's one example, where military personnel berate university administrators for one aviation instructor's lack of access to the mimeograph machine due to picketing service workers.

The union seems to also have been in direct contact with the armed services leadership personnel, proposing to them how the military might conduct bargaining unit jobs with soldiers as scabs during the strike. This, I don't understand at all.

dispatches from the dissertating.

Yes, this blog still exists.

ar/ has me on the "three pages a day plan", which is more hortatory than prescriptive, or so i fervently hope.  I'm currently sitting in one of the grad employee cubicles in the department of sundry and copious acronyms trying to live up to these expectations with little success today - i've written about a page, but squeezed in some archival research into the origins of BSEU (now SEIU) Local 113's organizing at the U of Minnesota.  In so doing, I came across this article in the January 16, 1931 edition of the Minneapolis Labor Review, which was and remains the organ of the AFL's Central Labor Union (we now call them central labor councils) in the Twin Cities.  It's a craft unionist framing of what folks now call the edu-factory, seven and a half decades before that term came into vogue, having been described elaborated by the eponymous collective and more recently been transmogrified into a book and a most excellent webjournal.  The edufactory - "what was the factory is now the university" - is the articulation of knowledge and labor within the global neoliberal university as the social factory was the articulation of production and consumption, of productive and reproductive labor within and beyond the factory walls during the moment of the crisis of the bretton woods regime, the crisis of state corporatism, the crisis of disciplinary governability.  So what's this paleo-edufactory then, produced by its own moment of capitalist crisis, articulated by a Yale professor half a decade before the first stirrings of local 35 to a Minneapolis audience three years before the Trotskyist teamsters' frontal attack on the Citizens' Alliance's open shop repressive parastate apparatus?  I don't think this is a vestige of the moment Clyde Barrow so ably dissects in Universities and the Capitalist State -- if anything, it speaks more to the kinds of formation Michael Denning describes in The Cultural Front, the "laboring of American culture," the hegemony of a language and consciousness of labor and work among cultural producers and the protocognitarians Henderson describes here.

You'll have to click on the image to see the whole thing, and i apologize for its horizontality.

Minneapolis Labor Review, 1.16.1931