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