Part of the CCDS team at the conference: Kathy Sykes, Janet Tucker, Harry Targ, Paul Krehbiel

By Paul Krehbiel
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

"The capitalist class is in a serious crisis without solution," said David Schweikart at the Moving Beyond Capitalism conference held in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico from July 30-August 5, 2014.  "But there is a solution," he said, "economic democracy, democratic socialism." Over 200 people from 15 countries discussed how to make this happen, organized by the Center for Global Justice.

Chronic high unemployment, depression of wages and benefits, cuts in social services, and growing inequality and repression, and social and political resistance are endemic to nearly all capitalist countries, said Schweikart, a Philosophy professor at Loyola University in Chicago, and author of After Capitalism. 

Schweikart’s model of democratic socialism calls for a regulated competitive market economy, socialized means of production and democratic workplaces (he advocates worker-run cooperatives as an example), non-profit public banks to finance projects, full employment, and a guarantee that human needs will be meet for everyone. 

Cliff DuRand, a conference organizer, said people are creating alternatives to capitalism today all over the world.  "If we’ve built these alternative institutions, the next time the capitalist system collapses…we will be able to survive without it."

Gustavo Esteva, a former Mexican government official, founder of the University of the Land in Oxaca, and an advisor to the Zapatistas in Chiapas in southern Mexico, gave a good account of how the indigenous people of this region are creating a new democratic and socialist-oriented society that they control, within the borders of a capitalist Mexico.  The Zapatistas launched an armed uprising in the mid-1990′s to stop NAFTA and the Mexican government from allowing multi-national corporations to come into Chiapas to extract minerals to enrich the corporations and destroy their lives and their local economy. 

Ana Maldonado of the Venezuelan Ministry of Communal Economy could not attend, so University of Utah Professor Al Campbell filled in for her.  Campbell has worked in Venezuelan with the Community Councils, a new form of grassroots democracy and socialism.  Created in 2006 by the late socialist president Hugo Chavez, there are 20,000 Community Councils today, each holding meetings in neighborhoods where all residents can attend, discuss, and vote on decisions for their community. 

Private, for-profit banks came under sharp attack for causing the 2008 Great Recession, and for ripping off billions of dollars from people world-wide, primarily through charging high interest rates.  Ellen Brown, founder of the Public Banking Institute based in California, declared, "Without interest payments, there would be no national debt," which now stands at over $15 trillion.  Politicians use the debt as an excuse to cut funds for education, health care and other social programs.  An example of local bank rip-offs is a bank loan for the purchase of a house, where the homeowner pays the bank 2-3 times or more than the cost of the house due to interest payments. 

Brown said the solution is to set up not-for-profit public or state banks — like the Bank of North Dakota.  She describes how to do it in her book Democratizing Money: The Public Bank Solution.  Since the 2008 economic crash, 20 other states including California have introduced bills to study or establish publicly-owned state banks.

"The US controls third world countries," Brown explained, "by putting them in debt and then forcing repayment with high interest rates," which they can’t afford to pay.  Brown said the book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, by John Perkins, explains how devastating this is. 

Coops in Cuba

Camila Pineiro Harnecker, a leader of the cooperative movement in socialist Cuba, explained that her country is giving much more attention to the development of worker-run cooperatives as a way to help workers create jobs for themselves, and learn how to become masters of their work and work lives. The state socialist sector dominates the economy, but coops now comprise 12% of the workforce and are expected to increase in number.

There were many examples of people struggling against capitalist-caused injustices, to survive, and also to weaken capitalism by creating socialist-oriented building blocks within capitalist society.

Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese of the Occupy Wall Street movement in Washington D. C. facilitated discussions about how the Occupy movement redirected talk of cuts in social services to stopping the top 1% from enriching themselves at the expense of the 99%.

Enrique Lazcano, a member of the Authentic Workers Front (FAT) in Mexico, talked about building cross-border solidarity with the United Electrical workers (UE) in the US, and how this strengthened both unions to win improvements.  Juan Jose Rojas Herrera of Mexico spoke about the Solidarity Economy, where work is done with as little capitalist exploitation as possible and for the common good. One day of the conference was devoted to visiting a near-by cooperative market and learning how it is run.  David Schwartzman, a professor of Biology at Howard University in Washington, D. C., spoke about the need to combat the capitalist-fueled crisis of climate change by changing the system to socialism. 

Song Mengrong, of an educator in China, spoke about new policies recently enacted by the Chinese government to focus on the needs of the people, calling it "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics." Francisco Javier Ramirez of Mexico spoke about the Morena party, a new people’s party, pledged to reverse the neoliberal policies of the Mexican government which have served the corporate elite at the expense of the people.  Harry Targ, Political Science professor at Purdue University in Indiana, spoke about "fusion politics" – uniting many social movements to oppose capitalism and imperialism, and highlighted the struggles of the Arab Spring and "Moral Mondays" in North Carolina to stop the attacks on civil rights and democracy in that state. 

Kathy Sykes of Mississippi talked about the campaign to organize a union at Nissan and a socialist-oriented Cooperative Economy project initiated by the late mayor of Jackson, Chokwe Lumumba.  Janet Tucker, former president of the statewide organization Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and the national organizer for the US-based Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, spoke about building grassroots labor-community coalitions in Kentucky.  This reporter spoke first-hand about how member-driven union Stewards Councils were built in large public hospitals in Los Angeles County, California, and how these councils empowered workers on the job.  One theme that came up in many presentations was that organizing was a full-time job, and if ignored, gains could be reduced or lost.

Cynthia Kaufman, a Philosophy professor at De Anza College in California, director of an organization encouraging civic engagement, and author of Getting Past Capitalism, captured a key element of the conference: "We get past capitalism by building on the healthy non-capitalist aspects of our world, while we also do pitched battle with the capitalist aspects that we have a fair chance of winning against."

The conference ended with a discussion to help set priorities.  One was to fight neoliberalism and especially trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership, and the second was to build the environmental movement to fight climate change.  -end-

Robin Small

Karl Marx: The Revolutionary as Educator

Springer, New York, 2013. 85pp., £44.99

Reviewed by Patrick Ainley

This book meets a need illustrated by a recent poster advertising a meeting for students at the London University Institute of Education that asked ‘Who was Karl Marx?’

Such is the repetitive diet of Foucauldianism, augmented by the latest academic fashion for Deleuze and Guattari, that even postgraduate students of education are unaware that Marx was, as this book begins by asserting, ‘an important educational thinker’.

Although Marx wrote before the modern state school system was established, Small states ‘He is the greatest theorist of the society that gave rise to schools as we know them – and this is the society we still live in’ (1). As he adds, Marx wrote for people who needed to find out what was wrong with the society they lived in, and how to change it for the better, and so he was also an educator. More importantly, ‘Marx is an educator for us. He challenges us to develop our capacity to think critically about our own society’ (2). This is the seminal Marx presented in this book.

Robin Small, a philosopher of education at Auckland University who has previously written Marx and Education (Ashgate, 2005), is well qualified to introduce new readers to Marx’s revolutionary education in the concise form intended by Springer’s series on ‘Key Thinkers in Education’, edited by Paul Gibbs, in which each chapter is separately downloadable, although the overall price – in virtual form or hard covers – is exorbitant. Hopefully, however, the book will make its way into libraries, because it is an introduction to Marx’s life as well as to his thought. So Small begins with Marx’s own education at the Trier Gymnasium, quoting Marx’s prize-winning essay `Thoughts of a Youth on Choosing a Vocation’, which insists ‘worth can be assured only by a profession in which we are not servile tools, but in which we act independently in our own sphere’ (5). Then, in Bonn and Berlin Universities, Small introduces the ideas of Bauer, Feuerbach and Stirner, which influenced Dr Marx before ‘the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself, turns into practical energy’ (quoted 9) in the form of ‘Marx as Journalist’.

Small details particularly Marx’s debate with Stirner, who ‘wrote on education from a teacher’s standpoint’ (21), and with Feuerbach, taking ‘education’ in the third ‘thesis’ on Feuerbach ‘in a wide sense, to include all the influences that determine human development’ (19), like enculturation in the German term Bildung. Here ‘Marx is emphasizing a critical thinking which is also self-critical’ (24). Then in his first works with Engels, Marx breaks with Bauer to found ‘the theory later known as “historical materialism” [which] centres on a distinction between the “base” and “superstructure”’ (25), with education a part of the superstructure. ‘This is the basis on which Marx is able to advance proposals for school reform. He can acknowledge the limits to what can be achieved within a capitalist society, yet still look for opportunities for an education that runs ahead of the present state of things’ (27).

Thus in The Communist Manifesto Marx proposes ‘Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.’ What Marx meant by this in relation to the debate over factory schools and over state education as well as the curriculum, Small traces in Marx’s contributions to the educational programme of the First International. Here he ‘emphasized the need for working within the existing social order, while at the same time arguing against … education by the state’, and for ‘a system of state regulation without “interference”’, ‘citing as an example the decentralized public school system of Massachusetts’ (57). Marx and Engels were also impressed by the educational reforms of the Paris Commune, which ‘confirmed that a socialist revolution could not simply take over existing state power but would have to set up an entirely new apparatus of government’ (58). So, they advocated a polytechnic curriculum, which ‘imparts the general principles of all processes of production’, like Corbon’s enseignement professionel, which ‘rethought the idea of technical education’ to take advantage of the positive side of flexibility, so that workers can move from one branch of industry as desired, rather than spending their lives in ‘life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation’ (66).

Meanwhile, Marx’s daughters enrolled in a relatively conventional academic schooling at the South Hampstead College for Ladies, where their father was rather proud of their achievements, but complained repeatedly about the fees! ‘None of this’, Small comments, ‘would have suited Eleanor Marx particularly’, as she was ‘the most like her father in personality – energetic and independent, with a strong rebellious spirit’ (53).

Having seen how Marx responded to the educational issues of his time, Small asks what we can learn from him now that education has become the principal legitimator of social inequality, and a prime means of social control over prolonged youth. ‘Simply repeating what he says … will not be enough … we have to bring our own thinking to the task’ (70). Small focuses on two central topics: the school in today’s society, and the teaching force. (It is a pity he does not extend this discussion to further and higher education, as the age of education has extended to schoolify these institutions.) ‘To rescue education from the influence of the ruling class’, as The Communist Manifesto urges, Marx resists restricting the curriculum to subjects supposedly protected from ideological influences; rather he sees the need to counteract them, together with tradition and habit. These are all instances of ideology, but ‘not simply deceptions imposed on some passive audience. They are grounded in experience and this is the source of their strength and persistence’ (73). ‘Marx located education within “practical social relations” rather than with art, religion and philosophy in the higher regions of the social “superstructure”.’ Education is thus in dynamic interaction with the economic base. As he puts it, ‘education produces labour capacity’, just as health care maintains or restores the ability to work, so that, as Small comments, ‘While the school may be a location where ideology is passed on, that is not its main function’. This avoids ‘the simplistic view that public education in capitalist society is an elaborate conspiracy to spread false beliefs’ (74).

At the present time, that of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘information society’, specialised expertise is crucial to the creation of new wealth, as well as itself being a commodity. As Small points out, ‘In one draft for Capital, Marx speaks of the “general intellect” or “social mind” – that is, the sum of society’s scientific understanding and expertise – as being a means of production in its own right … As Marx puts it, the general progress and accumulation of society’s knowledge “is appropriated gratis by capital”’ (74); ‘At this point, invention becomes a business, and the application of science to immediate production itself becomes a factor determining and soliciting science’ (75). Institutionalised education is bound up with this development, but Marx adds that education distributes knowledge unequally to different classes, as it perverts what ought to be a public good into private knowledge. The modern state has turned public education into a quasi-market, which is ‘free’ only within narrow boundaries, so that promises of equal opportunities and access for all cannot be realised.

This process of marketisation entails what Small calls a ‘redefinition of the “ideological castes”’ (79). This is being imposed in a different historical context from that in which a rising bourgeoisie sought to establish its power, giving rise to Adam Smith’s distinction between unproductive labour, associated with older forms of production for use, and productive labour realised in the instance of the schoolmaster ‘belabouring the heads of his scholars’, because the proprietor has invested his capital in a teaching factory instead of a sausage one. Small comments:

The labour of teachers appears as an overhead expense. That is, it is necessary to keep the whole system going, but not identifiable as adding value directly to commodities … The issue is not just about keeping costs (which here means wages) down. It is about what kind of work teachers are doing – and what kind of work they understand themselves as doing. (80)

Small approaches this is by asking, in conclusion, whether teaching is a professional occupation.

The Manifesto rejoices that ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers’. And Small comments, ‘For teachers the employer may be the state rather than a private school owner, but the same conditions of work apply’ (82), before cautioning that ‘this is not the last word’, because Marx and Engels add, ‘Bourgeois society reproduces in its own form everything against which it had fought in feudal or absolutist form’. So we need to ask, are the ancient vocations – ‘the free professions’, as they are called in German – of doctor, lawyer and priest, being reproduced in a new form, so that the professional model is extended in this new form to new occupational roles? As well as ‘general intellect’, there is what Marx calls ‘general industriousness’ (looking and being busy, like Dickens’s Mr Panks), which the culture of professionalism values, along with a sense of personal responsibility. ‘In Marxian language’, Small comments, ‘this looks like a typical ideological mindset that not only presents a false picture of social reality but also acts to the disadvantage of those who adopt it’ (83).

The de-professionalisation of teaching, along with other professional occupations, as they intermingle in inter-professional working with standardised and simplified para-professions, is analogous to the de-skilling inflicted on industrial craft workers in the 1970s and ’80s. It involves also a loss of autonomous judgement and control over what was an example of what Marx called ‘free activity’, like the often-cited case of artistic expression, but more directly social, with collegiality as its form of solidarity, ‘even if professions tend at the same time to be quite hierarchical in terms of specialized expertise’ (85). It may be, therefore, that these forms of solidarity can be defended and extended rather than abandoned – as suggested by Magali Sarfatti Larson in the conclusion to her 1977 Marxist analysis of The Rise of Professionalism. Like general schooling, leading to graduation as citizen and worker ‘fit for a variety of labours’, re-vocationalised higher education, in which students have a sense of induction to practise in a field of real application – including the academic profession – might be the means for professional workers, in solidarity with other workers, to find ways of claiming and realising the full human potential of all work. ‘But perhaps’, concludes Small, ‘this is where Marx’s assistance runs out and we have to make our own decisions’ (85).

1 March 2014

About the reviewer

Patrick Ainley

Patrick Ainley is author with Martin Allen of Lost Generation? New strategies for youth and education (London: Continuum 2010). They blog at at radicaled.wordpress.com

Six Theses on Anxiety and Why It is Effectively Preventing Militancy, and One Possible Strategy for Overcoming It ¹

Reposted with the kind permission of the Institute for Precarious Consciousness

1:  Each phase of capitalism has its own dominant reactive affect. ²

Each phase of capitalism has a particular affect which holds it together. This is not a static situation. The prevalence of a particular dominant affect ³ is sustainable only until strategies of resistance able to break down this particular affect and /or its social sources are formulated. Hence, capitalism constantly comes into crisis and recomposes around newly dominant affects.

One aspect of every phase’s dominant affect is that it is a public secret, something that everyone knows, but nobody admits, or talks about. As long as the dominant affect is a public secret, it remains effective, and strategies against it will not emerge.

Public secrets are typically personalised. The problem is only visible at an individual, psychological level; the social causes of the problem are concealed. Each phase blames the system’s victims for the suffering that the system causes. And it portrays a fundamental part of its functional logic as a contingent and localised problem.

In the modern era (until the post-war settlement), the dominant affect was misery. In the nineteenth century, the dominant narrative was that capitalism leads to general enrichment. The public secret of this narrative was the misery of the working class. The exposure of this misery was carried out by revolutionaries. The first wave of modern social movements in the nineteenth century was a machine for fighting misery. Tactics such as strikes, wage struggles, political organisation, mutual aid, co-operatives and strike funds were effective ways to defeat the power of misery by ensuring a certain social minimum. Some of these strategies still work when fighting misery.

When misery stopped working as a control strategy, capitalism switched to boredom. In the mid twentieth century, the dominant public narrative was that the standard of living – which widened access to consumption, healthcare and education – was rising. Everyone in the rich countries was happy, and the poor countries were on their way to development. The public secret was that everyone was bored. This was an effect of the Fordist system which was prevalent until the 1980s – a system based on full-time jobs for life, guaranteed welfare, mass consumerism, mass culture, and the co-optation of the labour movement which had been built to fight misery. Job security and welfare provision reduced anxiety and misery, but jobs were boring, made up of simple, repetitive tasks. Mid-century capitalism gave everything needed for survival, but no opportunities for life; it was a system based on force-feeding survival to saturation point.

Of course, not all workers under Fordism actually had stable jobs or security – but this was the core model of work, around which the larger system was arranged. There were really three deals in this phase, with the B-worker deal – boredom for security – being the most exemplary of the Fordism-boredom conjuncture. Today, the B-worker deal has largely been eliminated, leaving a gulf between the A- and C-workers (the consumer society insiders, and the autonomy and insecurity of the most marginal).

2:  Contemporary resistance is born of the 1960s wave, in response to the dominant affect of boredom.

If each stage of the dominant system has a dominant affect, then each stage of resistance needs strategies to defeat or dissolve this affect. If the first wave of social movements were a machine for fighting misery, the second wave (of the 1960s-70s, or more broadly (and thinly) 1960s-90s) were a machine for fighting boredom. This is the wave of which our own movements were born, which continues to inflect most of our theories and practices.

Most tactics of this era were/are ways to escape the work-consume-die cycle. The Situationists pioneered a whole series of tactics directed against boredom, declaring that “We do not want a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation is bought by accepting the risk of dying of boredom”.  Autonomia fought boredom by refusing work, both within work (using sabotage and go-slows) and against it (slacking off and dropping out). These protest forms were associated with a wider social process of countercultural exodus from the dominant forms of boring work and boring social roles.

In the feminist movement, the “housewife malaise” was theorised as systemic in the 1960s. Later, further dissatisfactions were revealed through consciousness raising, and the texts and actions (from “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” to the Redstockings abortion speak-out) which stemmed from it. Similar tendencies can be seen in the Theatre of the Oppressed, critical pedagogy, the main direct-action styles (carnivalesque, militant, and pacifist), and in movements as late as the 1990s, such as the free party movement, Reclaim the Streets, DIY culture, and hacker culture.

The mid-century reorientation from misery to boredom was crucial to the emergence of a new wave of revolt. We are the tail end of this wave. Just as the tactics of the first wave still work when fighting misery, so the tactics of the second wave still work when fighting boredom. The difficulty is that we are less often facing boredom as the main enemy. This is why militant resistance is caught in its current impasse.

3:  Capitalism has largely absorbed the struggle against boredom.

There has been a partial recuperation of the struggle against boredom. Capitalism pursued the exodus into spaces beyond work, creating the social factory – a field in which the whole society is organised like a workplace. Precarity is used to force people back to work within an expanded field of labour now including the whole of the social factory.

Many instances of this pursuit can be enumerated. Companies have adopted flattened management models inciting employees to not only manage, but invest their souls in, their work. Consumer society now provides a wider range of niche products and constant distraction which is not determined by mass tastes to the same degree as before. New products, such as video-games and social media, involve heightened levels of active individual involvement and desocialised stimulation. Workplace experiences are diversified by means of micro-differentials and performance management, as well as the multiplication of casual and semi-self-employed work situations on the margins of capitalism. Capitalism has encouraged the growth of mediatised secondary identities – the self portrayed through social media, visible consumption, and lifelong learning – which have to be obsessively maintained. Various forms of resistance of the earlier period have been recuperated, or revived in captured form once the original is extinguished: for instance, the corporate nightclub and music festival replace the rave.

4:  In contemporary capitalism, the dominant reactive affect is anxiety.

Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination.

One major part of the social underpinning of anxiety is the multi-faceted omnipresent web of surveillance. The NSA, CCTV, performance management reviews, the Job Centre, the privileges system in the prisons, the constant examination and classification of the youngest schoolchildren. But this obvious web is only the outer carapace. We need to think about the ways in which a neoliberal idea of success inculcates these surveillance mechanisms inside the subjectivities and life-stories of most of the population.

We need to think about how people’s deliberate and ostensibly voluntary self-exposure, through social media, visible consumption and choice of positions within the field of opinions, also assumes a performance in the field of the perpetual gaze of virtual others. We need to think about the ways in which this gaze inflects how we find, measure and know one another, as co-actors in an infinitely watched perpetual performance. Our success in this performance in turn affects everything from our ability to access human warmth to our ability to access means of subsistence, not just in the form of the wage but also in the form of credit. Outsides to the field of mediatised surveillance are increasingly closed off, as public space is bureaucratised and privatised, and a widening range of human activity is criminalised on the grounds of risk, security, nuisance, quality of life, or anti-social behaviour.

In this increasingly securitised and visible field, we are commanded to communicate. The incommunicable is excluded. Since everyone is disposable, the system holds the threat of forcibly delinking anyone at any time, in a context where alternatives are foreclosed in advance, so that forcible delinking entails desocialisation – leading to an absurd non-choice between desocialised inclusion and desocialised exclusion. This threat is manifested in small ways in today’s disciplinary practices – from “time-outs” and Internet bans, to firings and benefit sanctions – culminating in the draconian forms of solitary confinement found in prisons. Such regimes are the zero degree of control-by-anxiety: the breakdown of all the coordinates of connectedness in a setting of constant danger, in order to produce a collapse of personality.

The present dominant affect of anxiety is also known as precarity. Precarity is a type of insecurity which treats people as disposable so as to impose control. Precarity differs from misery in that the necessities of life are not simply absent. They are available, but withheld conditionally.

Precarity leads to generalised hopelessness; a constant bodily excitation without release. Growing proportions of young people are living at home. Substantial portions of the population – over 10% in the UK – are taking antidepressants. The birth rate is declining, as insecurity makes people reluctant to start families. In Japan, millions of young people never leave their homes (the hikikomori), while others literally work themselves to death on an epidemic scale. Surveys reveal half the population of the UK are experiencing income insecurity. Economically, aspects of the system of anxiety include “lean” production, financialisation and resultant debt slavery, rapid communication and financial outflows, and the globalisation of production. Workplaces like call centres are increasingly common, where everyone watches themselves, tries to maintain the required “service orientation,” and is constantly subject to re-testing and potential failure both by quantitative requirements on numbers of calls, and a process which denies most workers a stable job (they have to work six months to even receive a job, as opposed to a learning place). Image management means that the gap between the official rules and what really happens is greater than ever. And the post-911 climate channels this widespread anxiety into global politics.

5:  Anxiety is a public secret.

Excessive anxiety and stress are a public secret. When discussed at all, they are understood as individual psychological problems, often blamed on faulty thought patterns or poor adaptation.

Indeed, the dominant public narrative suggests that we need more stress, so as to keep us “safe” (through securitisation) and “competitive” (through performance management). Each moral panic, each new crackdown or new round of repressive laws, adds to the cumulative weight of anxiety and stress arising from general over-regulation. Real, human insecurity is channelled into fuelling securitisation. This is a vicious circle, because securitisation increases the very conditions (disposability, surveillance, intensive regulation) which cause the initial anxiety. In effect, the security of the Homeland is used as a vicarious substitute for security of the Self. Again, this has precedents: the use of national greatness as vicarious compensation for misery, and the use of global war as a channel for frustration arising from boredom.

Anxiety is also channelled downwards. People’s lack of control over their lives leads to an obsessive struggle to reclaim control by micro-managing whatever one can control. Parental management techniques, for example, are advertised as ways to reduce parents’ anxiety by providing a definite script they can follow. On a wider, social level, latent anxieties arising from precarity fuel obsessive projects of social regulation and social control. This latent anxiety is increasingly projected onto minorities.

Anxiety is personalised in a number of ways – from New Right discourses blaming the poor for poverty, to contemporary therapies which treat anxiety as a neurological imbalance or a dysfunctional thinking style. A hundred varieties of “management” discourse – time management, anger management, parental management, self-branding, gamification – offer anxious subjects an illusion of control in return for ever-greater conformity to the capitalist model of subjectivity. And many more discourses of scapegoating and criminalisation treat precarity as a matter of personal deviance, irresponsibility, or pathological self-exclusion. Many of these discourses seek to maintain the superstructure of Fordism (nationalism, social integration) without its infrastructure (a national economy, welfare, jobs for all). Doctrines of individual responsibility are central to this backlash, reinforcing vulnerability and disposability. Then there’s the self-esteem industry, the massive outpouring of media telling people how to achieve success through positive thinking – as if the sources of anxiety and frustration are simply illusory.  These are indicative of the tendency to privatise problems, both those relating to work, and those relating to psychology.

Earlier we argued that people have to be socially isolated in order for a public secret to work. This is true of the current situation, in which authentic communication is increasingly rare. Communication is more pervasive than ever, but increasingly, communication happens only through paths mediated by the system. Hence, in many ways, people are prevented from actually communicating, even while the system demands that everyone be connected and communicable. People both conform to the demand to communicate rather than expressing themselves, and self-censor within mediated spaces. Similarly, affective labour does not alleviate anxiety; it compounds workers’ suffering while simply distracting consumers (researchers have found that requirements on workers to feign happiness actually cause serious health problems).

The volume of communication is irrelevant. The recomposition – reconnection – of liberatory social forces will not happen unless there are channels through which the public secret itself can be spoken. In this sense, people are fundamentally more alone than ever. It is difficult for most people (including many radicals) to acknowledge the reality of what they experience and feel. Something has to be quantified or mediated (broadcast virtually), or, for us, to be already recognised as political, to be validated as real. The public secret does not meet these criteria, and so it remains invisible.

6:  Current tactics and theories aren’t working.  We need new tactics and theories to combat anxiety.

During periods of mobilisation and effective social change, people feel a sense of empowerment, the ability to express themselves, a sense of authenticity and de-repression or dis-alienation which can act as an effective treatment for depression and psychological problems; a kind of peak experience. It is what sustains political activity.

Such experiences have become far rarer in recent years.

We might here focus on two related developments: pre-emption, and punishment by process. Pre-emptive tactics are those which stop protests before they start, or before they can achieve anything. Kettling, mass arrests, stop-and-search, lockdowns, house raids and pre-emptive arrests are examples of these kinds of tactics. Punishment by process entails keeping people in a situation of fear, pain, or vulnerability through the abuse of procedures designed for other purposes – such as keeping people on pre-charge or pre-trial bail conditions which disrupt their everyday activity, using no-fly and border-stop lists to harass known dissidents, carrying out violent dawn raids, needlessly putting people’s photographs in the press, arresting people on suspicion (sometimes in accord with quotas), using pain-compliance holds, or quietly making known that someone is under surveillance. Once fear of state interference is instilled, it is reinforced by the web of visible surveillance that is gridded across public space, and which acts as strategically placed triggers of trauma and anxiety.

Anecdotal evidence has provided many horror stories about the effects of such tactics – people left a nervous wreck after years awaiting a trial on charges for which they were acquitted, committing suicide after months out of touch with their friends and family, or afraid to go out after incidents of abuse. The effects are just as real as if the state was killing or disappearing people, but they are rendered largely invisible. In addition, many radicals are also on the receiving end of precarious employment and punitive benefit regimes. We are failing to escape the generalised production of anxiety.

If the first wave provided a machine for fighting misery, and the second wave a machine for fighting boredom, what we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety – and this is something we do not yet have. If we see from within anxiety, we haven’t yet performed the “reversal of perspective” as the Situationists called it – seeing from the standpoint of desire instead of power. Today’s main forms of resistance still arise from the struggle against boredom, and, since boredom’s replacement by anxiety, have ceased to be effective.

Current militant resistance does not and cannot combat anxiety. It often involves deliberate exposure to high-anxiety situations. Insurrectionists overcome anxiety by turning negative affects into anger, and acting on this anger through a projectile affect of attack. In many ways, this provides an alternative to anxiety. However, it is difficult for people to pass from anxiety to anger, and it is easy for people to be pushed back the other way, due to trauma. We’ve noticed a certain tendency for insurrectionists to refuse to take seriously the existence of psychological barriers to militant action. Their response tends to be, “Just do it!” But anxiety is a real, material force – not simply a spook. To be sure, its sources are often rooted in spooks, but the question of overcoming the grip of a spook is rarely as simple as consciously rejecting it. There’s a whole series of psychological blockages underlying the spook’s illusory power, which is ultimately an effect of reactive affect. Saying “Just do it” is like saying to someone with a broken leg, “Just walk!”

The situation feels hopeless and inescapable, but it isn’t. It feels this way because of effects of precarity – constant over-stress, the contraction of time into an eternal present, the vulnerability of each separated (or systemically mediated) individual, the system’s dominance of all aspects of social space. Structurally, the system is vulnerable. The reliance on anxiety is a desperate measure, used in the absence of stronger forms of conformity. The system’s attempt to keep running by keeping people feeling powerless leaves it open to sudden ruptures, outbreaks of revolt. So how do we get to the point where we stop feeling powerless?

7:  A new style of precarity-focused consciousness raising is needed.

In order to formulate new responses to anxiety, we need to return to the drawing board. We need to construct a new set of knowledges and theories from the bottom up. To this end, we need to crease a profusion of discussions which produce dense intersections between experiences of the current situation and theories of transformation. We need to start such processes throughout the excluded and oppressed strata – but there is no reason we shouldn’t start with ourselves.

In exploring the possibilities for such a practice, the Institute has looked into previous cases of similar practices. From an examination of accounts of feminist consciousness raising in the 1960s/70s, we have summarised the following central features:

• Producing new grounded theory relating to experience. We need to reconnect with our experiences now – rather than theories from past phases. The idea here is that our own perceptions of our situation are blocked or cramped by dominant assumptions, and need to be made explicit. The focus should be on those experiences which relate to the public secret.  These experiences need to be recounted and pooled — firstly within groups, and then publicly.

• Recognising the reality, and the systemic nature, of our experiences. The validation of our experiences’ reality of experiences is an important part of this. We need to affirm that our pain is really pain, that what we see and feel is real, and that our problems are not only personal. Sometimes this entails bringing up experiences we have discounted or repressed. Sometimes it entails challenging the personalisation of problems.

• Transformation of emotions. People are paralysed by unnameable emotions, and a general sense of feeling like shit. These emotions need to be transformed into a sense of injustice, a type of anger which is less resentful and more focused, a move towards self-expression, and a reactivation of resistance.

• Creating or expressing voice. The culture of silence surrounding the public secret needs to be overthrown. Existing assumptions need to be denaturalised and challenged, and cops in the head expelled. The exercise of voice moves the reference of truth and reality from the system to the speaker, contributing to the reversal of perspective – seeing the world through one’s own perspective and desires, rather than the system’s. The weaving together of different experiences and stories is an important way of reclaiming voice. The process is an articulation as well as an expression.

• Constructing a disalienated space. Social separation is reduced by the existence of such a space. The space provides critical distance on one’s life, and a kind of emotional safety net to attempt transformations, dissolving fears. This should not simply be a self-help measure, used to sustain existing activities, but instead, a space for reconstructing a radical perspective.

• Analysing and theorising structural sources based on similarities in experience. The point is not simply to recount experiences but to transform and restructure them through their theorisation. Participants change the dominant meaning of their experience by mapping it with different assumptions. This is often done by finding patterns in experiences which are related to liberatory theory, and seeing personal problems and small injustices as symptoms of wider structural problems. It leads to a new perspective, a vocabulary of motives; an anti-anti-political horizon.

The goal is to produce the click — the moment at which the structural source of problems suddenly makes sense in relation to experiences. This click is which focuses and transforms anger. Greater understanding may in turn relieve psychological pressures, and make it easier to respond with anger instead of depression or anxiety. It might even be possible to encourage people into such groups by promoting them as a form of self-help — even though they reject the adjustment orientation of therapeutic and self-esteem building processes.

The result is a kind of affinity group, but oriented to perspective and analysis, rather than action. It should be widely recognised, however, that this new awareness needs to turn into some kind of action; otherwise it is just frustratingly introspective.

This strategy will help our practice in a number of ways. Firstly, these groups can provide a pool of potential accomplices. Secondly, they can prime people for future moments of revolt. Thirdly, they create the potential to shift the general field of so-called public opinion in ways which create an easier context for action. Groups would also function as a life-support system and as a space to step back from immersion in the present.  They would provide a kind of fluency in radical and dissident concepts which most people lack today.

Anxiety is reinforced by the fact that it is never clear what “the market” wants from us, that the demand for conformity is connected to a vague set of criteria which cannot be established in advance. Even the most conformist people are disposable nowadays, as new technologies of management or production are introduced. One of the functions of small-group discussions and consciousness raising is to construct a perspective from which one can interpret the situation

One major problem will be maintaining regular time commitments in a context of constant time and attentive pressure. The process has a slower pace and a more human scale than is culturally acceptable today. However, the fact that groups offer a respite from daily struggle, and perhaps a quieter style of interacting and listening which relieves attentive pressure, may also be attractive. Participants would need to learn to speak with a self-expressive voice (rather than a neoliberal performance derived from the compulsion to share banal information), and to listen and analyse.

Another problem is the complexity of experiences. Personal experiences are intensely differentiated by the nuanced discriminations built into the semiocapitalist code. This makes the analytical part of the process particularly important.

Above all, the process should establish new propositions about the sources of anxiety. These propositions can form a basis for new forms of struggle, new tactics, and the revival of active force from its current repression: a machine for fighting anxiety.

Footnotes

1. The discussion here is not fully relevant to the global South. The specific condition of the South is that dominant capitalist social forms are layered onto earlier stages of capitalism or pre-capitalist systems, rather than displacing them entirely. Struggles along the axes of misery and boredom are therefore more effective in the South. The South has experienced a particular variety of precarity distinct from earlier periods: the massive forced delinking of huge swathes of the world from global capitalism (especially in Africa), and the correspondingly massive growth of the informal sector, which now eclipses the formal sector almost everywhere. The informal sector provides fertile terrain for autonomous politics, as is clear from cases such as the city of El Alto (a self-organised city of shanty-towns which is central to social movements in Bolivia), the Zapatista revolt (leading to autonomous indigenous communities in Chiapas), and movements such as Abahlali baseMjondolo (an autonomous movement of informal settlement residents in South Africa). However, it is often subject to a kind of collectivised precarity, as the state might (for instance) bulldoze shanty-towns, dispossess street traders, or crack down on illicit activities – and periodically does so. Revealingly, it was the self-immolation of a street trader subject to this kind of state dispossession which triggered the revolt in Sidi Bouzid, which later expanded into the Arab Spring. Massive unrest for similar reasons is also becoming increasingly common in China. It is also common for this sector to be dominated by hierarchical gangs or by the networked wings of authoritarian parties (such as the Muslim Brotherhood).

2. Affect: emotion, bodily disposition, way of relating

3. When using the term dominant affect, this is not to say that this is the only reactive affect in operation. The new dominant affect can relate dynamically with other affects: a call-centre worker is bored and miserably paid, but anxiety is what keeps her/him in this condition, preventing the use of old strategies such as unionisation, sabotage and dropping out.

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• → Plan C MCR: Do You Remember The Future?

By Michael Synder

Progressive America Rising via EconomicCollapseBlog.com

Oct 3, 2013 – Why are young people in America so frustrated these days?  You are about to find out.  Most young adults started out having faith in the system.  They worked hard, they got good grades, they stayed out of trouble and many of them went on to college.  But when their educations where over, they discovered that the good jobs that they had been promised were not waiting for them at the end of the rainbow.  Even in the midst of this so-called "economic recovery", the full-time employment rate for Americans under the age of 30 continues to fall.  And incomes for that age group continue to fall as well.  At the same time, young adults are dealing with record levels of student loan debt.  As a result, more young Americans than ever are putting off getting married and having families, and more of them than ever are moving back in with their parents.

It can be absolutely soul crushing when you discover that the "bright future" that the system had been promising you for so many years turns out to be a lie.  A lot of young people ultimately give up on the system and many of them end up just kind of drifting aimlessly through life.  The following is an example from a recent Wall Street Journal article…

James Roy, 26, has spent the past six years paying off $14,000 in student loans for two years of college by skating from job to job. Now working as a supervisor for a coffee shop in the Chicago suburb of St. Charles, Ill., Mr. Roy describes his outlook as "kind of grim."

"It seems to me that if you went to college and took on student debt, there used to be greater assurance that you could pay it off with a good job," said the Colorado native, who majored in English before dropping out. "But now, for people living in this economy and in our age group, it’s a rough deal."

Young adults as a group have been experiencing a tremendous amount of economic pain in recent years.  The following are 30 statistics about Americans under the age of 30 that will blow your mind…

#1 The labor force participation rate for men in the 18 to 24 year old age bracket is at an all-time low.

#2 The ratio of what men in the 18 to 29 year old age bracket are earning compared to the general population is at an all-time low.

#3 Only about a third of all adults in their early 20s are working a full-time job.

#4 For the entire 18 to 29 year old age bracket, the full-time employment rate continues to fall.  In June 2012, 47 percent of that entire age group had a full-time job.  One year later, in June 2013, only 43.6 percent of that entire age group had a full-time job.

#5 Back in the year 2000, 80 percent of men in their late 20s had a full-time job.  Today, only 65 percent do.

#6 In 2007, the unemployment rate for the 20 to 29 year old age bracket was about 6.5 percent.  Today, the unemployment rate for that same age group is about 13 percent.

#7 American families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

#8 During 2012, young adults under the age of 30 accounted for 23 percent of the workforce, but they accounted for a whopping 36 percent of the unemployed.

#9 During 2011, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.

#10 At this point about half of all recent college graduates are working jobs that do not even require a college degree.

#11 The number of Americans in the 16 to 29 year old age bracket with a job declined by 18 percent between 2000 and 2010.

#12 According to one survey, 82 percent of all Americans believe that it is harder for young adults to find jobs today than it was for their parents to find jobs.

#13 Incomes for U.S. households led by someone between the ages of 25 and 34 have fallen by about 12 percent after you adjust for inflation since the year 2000.

#14 In 1984, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older was 10 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger.  Today, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older is 47 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger.

#15 In 2011, SAT scores for young men were the worst that they had been in 40 years.

#16 Incredibly, approximately two-thirds of all college students graduate with student loans.

#17 According to the Federal Reserve, the total amount of student loan debt has risen by 275 percent since 2003.

#18 In America today, 40 percent of all households that are led by someone under the age of 35 are paying off student loan debt.  Back in 1989, that figure was below 20 percent.

#19 The total amount of student loan debt in the United States now exceeds the total amount of credit card debt in the United States.

#20 According to the U.S. Department of Education, 11 percent of all student loans are at least 90 days delinquent.

#21 The student loan default rate in the United States has nearly doubled since 2005.

#22 One survey found that 70% of all college graduates wish that they had spent more time preparing for the "real world" while they were still in college.

#23 In the United States today, there are more than 100,000 janitors that have college degrees.

#24 In the United States today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.

#25 Today, an all-time low 44.2 percent of all Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 are married.

#26 According to the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of all Americans in the 18 to 24 year old age bracket lived with their parents during 2012.

#27 One poll discovered that 29 percent of all Americans in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket are still living with their parents.

#28 Young men are nearly twice as likely to live with their parents as young women the same age are.

#29 Overall, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents according to Time Magazine.

#30 Young Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated that previous generations have saddled them with a nearly 17 trillion dollar national debt that they are expected to make payments on for the rest of their lives.

And this trend is not just limited to the United States.  As I have written about frequently, unemployment rates for young adults throughout Europe have been soaring to unprecedented heights.  For example, the unemployment rate for those under the age of 25 in Italy has now reached 40.1 percent.

Senator Joseph McCarthy

Inventing the Egghead: the Battle over Brainpower in American Culture

Author: Aaron Lecklider

University of Pennsylvania Press

Reviewed by Todd Gitlin

Aaron Lecklider, who teaches American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, proposes to stand the last century of American intellectual life on its head, or at least on its side. In keeping with Antonio Gramsci’s project of looking beyond the world views of traditional intellectuals – the ones who get paid to write and talk – he wants to resurrect the working class’s organic intellectuals, the non-professionals who exercise ‘brainpower’ even if they’re not credited for it by snobbish conservateurs who carve out exclusive domains where cultural capital confers privilege upon the best and the brightest. Popular culture, Lecklider writes, has been for the last century ‘a critical site in shaping American ideas about brainpower’ (p. 225).

Intelligence, he argues, is contested domain. The town has as much of it as the gown. This is a clever idea, and Lecklider, frequently original, carries it a considerable distance—sometimes farther than the evidence warrants. His starting – and finishing – point is that the charge of ‘anti-intellectualism’ famously and exhaustively leveled by Richard Hofstadter against American culture is actually self-fulfilling, for Hofstadter and his allies, failing to acknowledge that intellectual life could be conducted by non-professionals, ‘opened historians to attack by ordinary women and men for attempting to preserve an elitist category, creating a cycle of misunderstanding that continues to manifest in contemporary American life’ (p. 222). Hofstadter, from this point of view, ‘bracketed off intellect from the brainpower of ordinary women and men and divorced intelligence from working-class cultural politics’ (p. 222). By implication, it’s no wonder the left has been crammed into the margins of history. But Lecklider has prepared a clever flanking movement. The conflict over who is entitled to be regarded as intelligent may even culminate in a happy ending:

    Reclaiming the history of an organic intellectual tradition in American culture represents a starting point for envisioning intelligence as a shared commodity across social classes; wrested from the hands of the intellectuals, there’s no telling what the brainpower of the people has the potential to accomplish (p. 228).

Lecklider begins his counter-history in the early decades of the 20th century.

Even as managers downgraded ordinary workers, adopting Taylorist methods to ‘transform’ themselves into ‘scientists’ (p. 26), vast numbers of working-class Americans refused to believe that managers and their hired hands held a monopoly on brains and intellectual interests. Institutions including amusement parks, comic books, public lectures, and summer schools cultivated the sort of intelligence that did not need – indeed, might actively resist – the sort of formal education on offer in the decades before 1920, when fewer than one 18–24-year-old in 20 was enrolled in college. Brainpower, Lecklider insists, was the subject of class struggle. Contra Hofstadter – who looms in the shadows as Lecklider’s foil throughout, emerging as an explicit bête noire in the epilogue—America as a whole was not ‘anti-intellectual.’ Rather, at least at the turn of the 20th century, ‘anti-intellectualism coexisted with representations of an intellectually gifted working class’ (p. 8). The history of intelligence in American culture, he argues, is ‘tortuous’, ‘considerably more complicated’ than the straightforward declinist narrative embraced by scholars such as Hofstadter, Lasch, Lewis Coser, C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse and – odd company on this list – Reinhold Niebuhr (p. 224).

He does offer a good deal of evidence that brainpower was not exclusive to a single class. Lecklider is strongest when he examines union educational programs, for here he can offer not only the prospectuses of educators but testimony from women who engaged in these programs themselves. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union adopted ’Knowledge Is Power‘ as a slogan in the 1910s (p. 71), followed by ‘the future of the world lies in the hands of intelligent and well-informed workers’ (p. 76). Workers’ education began with radical ideals—the residential Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers (BMSS) ‘promot[ed] workers’ power in the workplace and society’ (p. 70) – but over the years it devolved into practical coursework. Lecklider is exacting when such programs fall short of revolutionary ideals, chastising the BMSS for ‘divorcing … classroom experiences from everyday life in the workplace, thus compartmentalizing intellectual labor as distinct from working in industry’ (p. 78). To justify his criticism, he cites Bryn Mawr’s dean quoting one student asking ‘bemusedly’, upon arriving on campus, ‘Where are all the factories’ (p. 78)? But a single remark, especially one cited by a dean, is hardly conclusive evidence that conducting the school on a campus in the summer ‘introduced’ an ‘obstacle’ to the correct cultivation of class consciousness among organic intellectuals (p. 78).

Lecklider is at pains to show that BMSS students struggled to ‘resist assimilating to middle-class values and behaviors … by taking an active role in developing the BMSS curriculum and taking charge of discussion within the program’ (p. 81). When the students declared their desires, they were pluralist. They wanted diverse things. So, for example, ‘Bryn Mawr’s immigrant students agitated for the admission of African American women, a campaign that was successful by 1926’ (p. 82). They also expressed an ‘urgent wish’ for music appreciation (p. 81). Was this a fight to ‘resist’ middle-class acculturation, or was it an empowering affirmation of a love for music?

Here, as elsewhere, we see Lecklider straining as he tries to clamp the cultural life of workers into class-struggle polarities. Sometimes he views it as helpful to educate well-rounded workers as opposed to equip organizers with directly usable skills; at other times, when a centralized Workers Education Bureau guided by the American Federation of Labor promotes the decidedly reformist goal of building worker confidence, thus enabling workers to meet employers ‘on equal footing’ (p. 88), Lecklider is not sure whether such efforts, arguably ‘middle-class,’ also contributed to the molding of some sort of collective working-class consciousness.

Turning to African-American currents, the Harlem Renaissance, and the making of urban black identity, Lecklider is more interested in writers than schools or musicians. He notes that for all their antagonisms, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington shared a ‘fundamental agreement that freedom begins in the mind and that building alliances begins with expanding access to brainpower’ (p. 96). His most interesting artifact is Claude McKay’s novel, Home to Harlem (1928), where dialectical possibilities of brain-brawn transcendence play out in homoerotic overtones. The bookish character Ray, a Haitian waiter whom a ‘repulsive’ black character calls ‘that theah nigger professor’ (1), is affectionately counterposed to his bosom buddy, Harlem’s brawnier, party-going, opium-smoking, ‘primitive’ sailor Jake. While some play poker, Ray reads Crime and Punishment.(2) He quotes from Goethe’s Werther.(3) But books don’t make him ‘dopey’.(4) In McKay’s view, Ray:

    felt more [than Jake] and his range was wider and he could not be satisfied with the easy, simple things that sufficed for Jake … he drank in moreof life than he could distill into active animal living. Maybe that was why he felt he had to write.(5)

Lecklider reads Home to Harlem as ‘a special form of resolution to the artificial division of mind and body in modern black fiction’ (p. 112). He has a point, but it would better be put without the graceless jargon in which he declares that McKay ‘prioritizes queer affection’ and that ‘McKay’s depiction of their relationship highlights the boundedness of intelligence within black experiences of embodiment’ (p. 114). The clumsiness of the abstraction is somewhat reminiscent of the passage in The German Ideology where Marx and Engels mock the philosophers’ absurd habit of disguising a fact (‘The cat eats the mouse’) with a pseudo-profundity (‘Devouring of the mouse by the cat is based upon the self-consumption of nature’).

Too commonly, Lecklider’s conceptual categories are too clumsy to enfold the dynamic complexity of an interesting story; and so schematic as to be overwhelmed by the preoccupations of the recent past. At his most Procrustean, he stretches shreds of evidence into a shape that suits his overall argument. Loading the shreds with significance, he tends to stretch the evidence past the breaking point. Thus, he devotes an entire chapter to the image of Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity after the First World War. This is more than one-tenth the entire length of the book, but what it delivers is meager. Lecklider reads relativity as implying ‘that ordinary people’s observations were always wrong’ (p. 51), when in fact it implied that everyone’s everyday observations – including physicists’ and capitalists’ – were, for certain purposes, wrong. He cites at some length a single conservative’s allegation that relativity was ‘a symptom of Bolshevism in an unstable world’: the illusion of the curvature of space, wrote this worthy, Columbia astronomer Charles Lane Poor, was what happened ‘when Bolshevism enters the world of science of course!’ (p. 59, citing an article by Poor called ‘Jazz in the scientific world’). But how representative was Poor? Lecklider ends this chapter in a conceptual blur:

    Though representations of Einstein failed to resolve the contradictions at stake in defining American identities following World War I, his brainpower was used to filter these contradictions through a fascinating individual whose legacy was the subject of contentious division.

Lecklider’s chapter on pictorial and literary representations during the Great Depression is his most ambitious and rewarding. ‘Depression-era representations of intelligence within mass culture reflected a producerist ideology that suggested brains could be trusted precisely because they were inextricable from material production’ (p. 125). Under the sponsorship of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, posters promoted libraries for all, not just brainiacs. If anything, the worker-hero of the 1930s was muscle-bound, not effete. ‘New Deal posters recast workers in the center of civic life by aligning modern machinery with the pursuit of intelligence’ (p. 143). Meanwhile, left-wing writers heralded the emergence of ‘proletarian cognoscenti’ (p. 146), while one ahead-of-her-time novelist, Tess Slesinger, in The Unpossessed (1934), sent up radical intellectuals for their estrangement from the sweaty body. Although here too Lecklider might be accused of Procrustean overstretch, he does intriguingly suggest that, in her view, at least, it is within same-sex relationships that body and mind best match.

What then of the explosive image of brainpower at work that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Images of nuclear physicists in fiction and film are much-visited territory for scholars of Cold War culture (6), and perhaps this explains why, when Lecklider turns to the aftermath of the Second World War, he dwells on a narrow case: how journalists depicted the Oak Ridge, Tennessee nuclear laboratory as a nicely domesticated home town rather than the ‘subversion, elitism, danger, and social transgression’ (p. 190) far more visible in popular magazines, newsreels, and science fiction when they addressed, directly or indirectly, the monstrosity of the Bomb. He pays little attention to the mad scientist so beloved of popular imagery in the Frankenstein tradition.

Instead, in his climactic chapter, he ushers onstage the caricature of the egghead, that sexless or effeminate archetype, weirdly subversive, contemptuous of ‘the people,’ a figure tailor-made to characterize Adlai Stevenson in two successive presidential elections. In popular imagery, why did the egghead loom so large, so contemptible? Lecklider answers his own question:

    The Cold War egghead refracted cultural fears about the challenges to the American way of life posed by homophile politics, antiracist social movements, and a left that refused to disappear in spite of intimidation tactics, blacklists and HUAC belligerence (p. 192).

Lecklider, however, once again overplays his hand, focusing sharply, almost exclusively, on materials that make his point. To flesh out the image of the egghead, he devotes more than a dozen pages to the exegesis of two 1950s depictions of intellectuals as naïve crypto-Communists in the late 1950s: a single obscure science fiction story (‘The chicken and the egghead‘), written by Frank Fenton, a journeyman Hollywood screenwriter, and a play, The Egghead, by Molly Thacher Kazan, a thinly disguised defense of her husband Elia for having ‘named names’ – important, Lecklider insists, as ‘one of the most complicated representations of the egghead in the Cold War era’ (p. 214).

But why do these particular two artifacts deserve such attention? Why not consider, say, the hapless but endearing Mister Peepers, the bespectacled (a sure sign of eggheadedness) junior high school science teacher who had a successful three-year sitcom run (1952–5)? Why not its complement, the long-running Life of Riley (1944–51 on radio, 1949–50 and 1953–8 on television), in which one of the networks’ few working-class regulars is a lovable oaf-dope? Why not Meyer Levin’s best-selling novel of 1956, Compulsion, based on the Leopold-Loeb case of the two Chicago Wunderkind teenagers who, transfixed by a perverse interpretation of Nietzsche, committed a murder to prove they were Übermenschen? However you judge these popular works, aren’t they more significant than a sci-fi story and a briefly running play?

In the end, Lecklider does not refute Hofstadter but does sketch a counter-current open to elaboration, and opens up more questions. How did it happen that ’elitism‘ became the bête noire of the oilman scion and Yale man William F. Buckley, Jr., and his legions of devotees? More could be done to trace the imagery of brainpower and eggheads through the saga of American conservatism’s on-again, off-again marriage with (pace Lecklider) anti-intellectual populism of the Joseph McCarthy-Richard Nixon-George Wallace-Sarah Palin sort, with the eggheads transported to Washington, where they transmogrified into the striped-pants Alger Hiss and demoniac ‘pointy-headed bureaucrats’. How did the fey egghead evolve into the elitist bogeyman: viz., the Al Gore (Harvard ‘69) against whom George W. Bush (Andover ‘64, Yale ‘68) successfully presented himself in 2000 as the people’s tribune. The figures of elitist and counter-elitist in popular culture amply deserve a sequel, all the way down to Sarah Palin’s failed, indeed counter-productive, blasts at ‘the lamestream media’ who pilloried her for claiming insight into Russian policies because ‘You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska’.

Notes

    Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (New York, 1928), p. 114.Back to (1)
    Home to Harlem, p. 166.Back to (2)
    Home to Harlem, p. 272.Back to (3)
    Home to Harlem, p. 259.Back to (4)
    Home to Harlem, p. 265.Back to (5)
    See especially Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York, NY, 1985).Back to (6)

Other reviews:
S-USIH
http://s-usih.org/2013/07/eggheads-of-the-world-unite-you-have-nothing-to-lose-but-your-yolks.html [2]
H-Net
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl [3]
LSE Review of Books
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/08/09/book-review-inventing-the-egghead-the-battle-over-brainpower-in-american-culture/ [4]
Point Magazine
http://www.thepointmag.com/2013/reviews/watch-the-professor [5]
Source URL: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1486

Links:
[1] http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/item/63563
[2] http://s-usih.org/2013/07/eggheads-of-the-world-unite-you-have-nothing-to-lose-but-your-yolks.html
[3] http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Amstdy&month=1305&week=e&msg=zPGm28fSNpWkPMlQ4wlqpg
[4] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/08/09/book-review-inventing-the-egghead-the-battle-over-brainpower-in-american-culture/
[5] http://www.thepointmag.com/2013/reviews/watch-the-professor

Applied learning: degrees at Mondragon are almost exclusively vocational, and research focuses on technology transfer

Source: Getty

By David Matthews

SolidarityEconomy.net via Times Higher Education / UK

We report from Spain on the University of Mondragon, which is fighting to preserve its teaching mission, industry-focused research and mutual governance model

Mondragon is jointly owned by its academic and administrative staff. No one may earn more than three times the salary of the lowest-paid worker

It is hard to think of a time when academics in the UK have been more dissatisfied with where the academy is going. Their list of gripes is long: from the rise of the student “consumer” to overpaid vice-chancellors, a distant management class, increasing marketisation, a seemingly ever-growing brood of administrators and, perhaps least tangibly, a sense that academia is turning into a competitive rather than comradely affair.

Last year, senior scholars founded the Council for the Defence of British Universities, which set out to fight many of these developments, along with what they believe to be increasing control of universities by government and business. But so far no practical alternatives have emerged. Meanwhile, experiments such as Lincoln’s Social Science Centre, a cooperative organisation offering higher education for free, have taken place only on a very small, relatively informal scale.

At a time when many academics feel remote from their university’s managers and strategic plans, the cooperative model, in which all staff have a stake, has obvious appeal. So, can the University of Mondragon, an established higher education cooperative in the lush green mountains of the Basque Country in northern Spain, offer any answers for academies elsewhere? Founded in 1997 from a collection of co-ops dating back to 1943, the institution now has 9,000 students. The staff have joint ownership and the institution’s culture and its model of governance are radically different from those of modern UK universities.

Times Higher Education went to see how and why they do things differently at Mondragon, and to consider whether some of its practices might appeal to UK scholars looking for a new model for the academy.

Even before arriving in Spain, there is one obvious difference about Mondragon – it does not have a press office to restrict access to the top brass or vet comments by its employees. Instead, THE’s trip was arranged directly through teaching and administrative staff. And on arrival, transport was provided by the vice-chancellor, Jon Altuna, who drove from campus to campus – with the occasional stop-off for tapas and wine.

Mondragon is jointly owned by its academic and administrative staff. To become a fully fledged member, employees have to work there for at least two years, and then pay €12,000 (£10,300), which buys a slice of the university’s capital that can be withdrawn upon retirement.

However, it is unlikely that anyone employed by the university expects to earn enough to build a personal art collection or buy membership to an exclusive private members’ club: no one at Mondragon may earn more than three times the salary of the lowest-paid worker.

This is a far cry from the UK, where in 2008 the ratio between the highest- and the lowest-paid workers in higher education was, on average, 15.35:1, according to the 2011 review of fair pay in the public sector led by Will Hutton – a bigger gap than found in any other part of the public sector.

There is one exception at Mondragon, though: the rector, the closest thing the university has to a chief executive, is permitted to take home five times the lowest wage – although even this relative largesse was agreed only after “huge argument”, Altuna notes.

Excluding cleaners and catering staff, who are subcontracted, the lowest-paid staff, such as administrative and maintenance workers, earn €27,421 a year. The highest-paid managers earn just over three times this amount, while the current rector earns about €157,000. “We are not in this project for [personal] profit-making,” Altuna says with a smile.

Although the university’s student population is relatively small, at about 4,000 (it offers 21 undergraduate, 12 master’s and three PhD programmes), another 5,000 people a year undertake professional training at Mondragon. “We want to be one of the main agents in making companies competitive,” Altuna says.

He is referring to the fact that the university is in effect the training and research-and-development arm of a wider network of interlocking cooperatives, known collectively as the Mondragon Corporation.

Discard any quaint images you might have of basket-weaving communes eking out a trade in the Basque hills. The corporation employs more than 80,000 people and had a revenue of €14 billion in 2012. It is the largest cooperative in the world and has 94 production plants outside Spain. Its factories manufacture white goods, industrial components and road bikes, while its construction wing built Bilbao’s swooping silver Guggenheim Museum.

The university has a highly democratic governance structure. Its supreme body is the general assembly, a 30-strong committee of representatives composed of one-third staff, one-third students and one-third outside interested parties, often other co-ops in Mondragon Corporation. It meets annually to decide on the priorities for the coming year and has significant powers: it can, for example, sack members of the senior management team. (It last used this power in 2007 when one manager was dismissed, according to Altuna.)

It is impossible to recreate our model outside Mondragon, but it is possible to spread some of the culture and ideas of our version of higher education

Meanwhile, administrators make up just one in four workers, compared with 52 per cent in the UK higher education sector, according to 2011-12 figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

Mondragon is also highly decentralised. “We say that the chancellor [also known as the rector] has less power than the deans,” says the current holder of the top post, Iosu Zabala Iturralde. (Zabala appears to be the only member of staff who wears a tie – but he does not go as far as wearing a suit jacket.)

The university has four faculties: business studies; engineering; humanities and education; and, since 2011, “gastronomic” science, the theory and practice of cookery. The first three began life as separate colleges, and merged into a university in 1997. Each faculty is its own cooperative, which makes Mondragon a kind of “cooperative of co-ops”, and each department has substantial autonomy. They do not even share the same academic calendars.

Each faculty also has “total freedom to leave the project”, Altuna says. There was a lot of debate in the early days of the university about the wisdom of the faculties joining forces, he explains, but only by combining several subjects could Mondragon become a university and award its own degrees. Now they have lost their distinct identities, making it very difficult for them to break away, he thinks.

What also makes the university unusual is that its three founding faculties are spread across five towns in the Alto Deba region, the heart of the Basque Country. Most are “remote” locations, Altuna admits, estimating that none has a population of more than 10,000. Only in recent years has Mondragon set up bases in the cities of San Sebastian and Bilbao.

Mondragon places a strong emphasis on transparent governance. For example, any worker in the Faculty of Engineering can check on the expenses of any of their colleagues – with enough detail provided to make it possible to work out which restaurants they have been to and when, Altuna explains.

Its students and staff say the institution has a very different ethos from those of traditional universities. As Raquel Pangua, a fourth-year undergraduate training to be a teacher, puts it: “We are like a family. We all work together – the university gives a lot of importance to group work. In public universities, they mostly work in an individual way, and maybe tutors don’t have that close a relationship with their students. We have a really close relationship with teachers.”

So Mondragon has equality, autonomy, openness, transparency and no ties. Are there any catches? Plenty, as it turns out.

Mondragon is a private university, and thus it receives minimal public funds. Just over a 10th of its income comes from the Basque government’s structural funding, although the institution’s suite of new buildings – including the architecturally bold €17 million Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastian, designed to look like a stack of crooked plates from the outside – are largely funded by the Basque and Spanish administrations.

There is little room for the humanities: degrees are almost exclusively vocational. Mondragon offers bachelor’s degrees in mechanical, computer, biomedical and energy engineering, business administration and management, primary education and gastronomy and culinary arts. The master’s courses are largely in similar areas, although there is an MA in social economy and cooperativism.

Almost a third of Mondragon’s income comes from technology and knowledge transfer fees. It develops new products for the corporation’s engineering firms, consults for local businesses and advises schools in the region.

As a point of comparison, UK universities earned just 7.3 per cent of their income from research contracts with UK-based industry, charities and public bodies in 2011-12, according to Hesa.

Mondragon’s heavy dependence on technology transfer income means that “there is no ground for research that has no return”, Altuna says.

Still, there is no sense that academics at Mondragon begrudge the lack of opportunities to conduct blue-sky research; if anything, they seem proud that their work is being put to good use. But Altuna freely admits that some researchers “cannot understand it”. “They have quit and gone to a public university,” he says.

An educational idyll: on the lush campuses in the Basque mountains, students say they encounter a different ethos. One says: ‘We are like a family. We all work together’

Because employees’ salaries are dependent on their faculties not running at a loss, academics have to bear money in mind far more than they might like.

“At public universities, the lecturers – and sometimes the directors of the departments – don’t talk a lot about money,” says Vicente Atxa Uribe, director of the Faculty of Engineering. “They talk more about academic things.”

They think “the world will provide” their salaries, claims Zabala, but that is not the way at Mondragon. Lecturers must constantly drive student recruitment, and rack their brains for new, income-generating technology transfer projects, he says.

Mondragon’s heavy reliance on contract research also leaves it exposed to the chill winds of Spain’s bleak economy, and ironically, the business faculty has been squeezed more than most.

Juanjo Martin, who is responsible for Mondragon’s international relations, admits that the business faculty is “not doing really well” financially. Businesses have cut back on commissioning his faculty’s consultancy work while continuing to buy research from the engineering department because their projects are “more tangible than ours”, Martin suggests.

The faculty will make a loss this year, and workers have had their salaries cut – to 80 per cent of their normal pay – partly because, says Martin, “it’s impossible to fire people” from the co-op. “This year we are really suffering from the [economic] crisis in the Basque Country.”

Under the university’s regulations, a faculty can have up to 30 per cent of its losses offset if other faculties are making a profit. Although wages are now as low as they are allowed to go in the business faculty, Martin is still positive.

“Of course we are unhappy [with the pay cut] but it’s not as if we were in a public company. The project is ours. You are relaxed because you won’t lose your job,” he explains.

Although parts of the university may be struggling financially, other Mondragon Corporation cooperatives are in worse positions. The trouble is, when your comrades get into difficulties, it is only brotherly to bail them out. All co-ops recently elected to give 1 per cent of their income to support the beleaguered Fagor Electrodomésticos, a white goods manufacturer affected by the slump in Spanish demand. About 1,000 of its workers will be shifted to other, more successful co-ops, Altuna says.

Still, Altuna is keen to stress that the university is not totally economically bound to the wider corporation: 40 per cent of its technology transfer income is generated from deals with companies that are not cooperatives.

“Some people imagine we’re like the Mormons but in fact we’re open to the whole society,” Martin adds. He points out that two-thirds of students in the business school go on to work outside the cooperative movement.

Another disadvantage of being a private institution is that Mondragon’s students must pay fees up front, and staff admit that most have to scrape the money together with the help of their families.

At just under €5,500 a year for a bachelor’s course, fees are relatively low for a private university in Spain, and make up just over a third of Mondragon’s income. But Spanish public university fees, although they are increasing, are presently much lower, at about €1,000 a year. Mondragon does, however, offer grants to students from poorer families, and students can work part-time during their studies at Alecop – a co-op that manufactures educational training and simulation equipment – to help fund their studies.

Mondragon does feel subtly different from many UK institutions – staff are open about its problems, there is no relentlessly upbeat corporate message, and relations between workers feel less hierarchical and more relaxed than on many UK campuses. But some veteran staff express concern that the university’s cooperative spirit is waning.

Founding father: the founder of the Mondragon Cooperative movement, the priest José María Arizmendiarrieta

“I think some of the values have been lost along the way,” Martin observes. “Going to any meeting here, and any meeting in a public limited company, there is no difference. This is happening in all the co-ops in Mondragon.”

The cooperative spirit has become perfunctory, he believes. “It’s like going to church, where you can go just on Sundays and listen to the priest and you are a Christian,” he says.

Fred Freundlich, a US academic who has been working at Mondragon since the 1980s and lectures in business studies, says he has observed a decline in camaraderie. Fewer workers now eat their lunch together or go out for a glass of wine after work, he says.

One of the benefits of Mondragon’s ethos, he observes, is its highly collaborative research style. He contrasts this with the US where, he says, “the culture is that faculty members may end up collaborating but each one is there to do their individual research”. But these days, even at Mondragon, researchers can be more reluctant to invite others to join their projects, focusing instead on trying to clock up as many of the hours they are required to work as possible, he says.

Freundlich thinks this is symptomatic of wider social change. In a bid to revive some of the older values, he is bringing in co-op “veterans” to explain to younger staff how they used to work together.

Other social pressures are chipping away at the sustainability of the project. The Basque Country, like much of southern Europe, has a rapidly ageing population. “Not only in the Basque Country, but Spain generally, there are too many universities, and there’s not enough domestic demand to keep them running,” Freundlich observes.

Mondragon is looking to expand its activities overseas, principally into South and Central America, both to spread its ideas and to create new markets for the companies in the corporation. “The only way that our project can survive is to create activities in countries that are developing,” Altuna says.

The university is helping a network of about 40,000 non-profit businesses in Colombia turn a private university into a higher education institution that will serve them with training and research. Mondragon is providing governance experts, lecturers and researchers. It has also acquired 80 per cent of a private university in Mexico.

The plan is to eventually turn these two institutions into co-ops, but for the moment, the idea is too radical to implement in those countries, Altuna says. Indeed, many subsidiaries of cooperative businesses outside Spain are not co-ops, he says. The idea is an alien one in China, for example.

But in South Korea, people are going “crazy” for cooperatives, Martin says, and the university receives regular delegations from countries where there is curiosity about the project.

“It is impossible to recreate our model outside Mondragon,” Altuna says. “But it is possible to spread some of the culture and ideas of our version of higher education.”

Whether a cooperative university could flourish away from the special circumstances found in the close-knit Basque Country is unclear. But it may offer hope to those unhappy with the academy’s present direction in the UK and elsewhere.

In 2011, three academics – Rebecca Boden of the University of Roehampton, Davydd Greenwood of Cornell University and Susan Wright of Aarhus University – visited the university and wrote that Mondragon was a “highly successful” alternative to what they called “neoliberalised university formations”.

“It is possible to create and manage successful universities that do not involve the exploitation of faculty as passive employees and the treatment of students as mere clients in a fee-for-service educational scheme,” they conclude in “Report on a field visit to Mondragón University: a cooperative experience/experiment”, published in the journal Learning and Teaching.

Mondragon rejects the idea of private profit-making, and yet academics are perpetually concerned with bringing in income. Earnings are relatively equal, but fluctuate with financial performance. Governance is highly democratic, but allows for an unprecedented degree of influence from businesses and students. It may be an alternative to the state-funded public university – but is it worth it?

Could it happen here? Prospects for a cooperative university in the UK

A number of vice-chancellors have had private talks about adopting some elements of the cooperative model at their institutions, according to Mervyn Wilson, chief executive and principal of the Manchester-based Co-operative College, which specialises in studying and researching the movement.

The problem with universities in their current form is that they “treat professionals as employees”, he argues. This means that running difficulties and big decisions are seen as “management’s problem”, not “our problem”.

Give staff a slice of ownership and control and they are more likely to take responsibility, Wilson believes.

He says he has met a “handful” of university leaders who are concerned about ways they can “differentiate” their institutions in the UK and globally.

“The ones I’ve spoken to see a very distinctive community-focused role,” Wilson says. They are not willing to go down the “sharp-elbowed” corporate route favoured by others, he adds.

The introduction of higher undergraduate fees in England and more open competition for students means that the “ground is opening up…over the next three to five years lots of institutions will be looking at appropriate governance reforms in the marketised sector”, he believes.

There are already a number of cooperative higher education projects under way in the UK, in Brighton, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cardiff. In Lincoln, the not-for-profit, cooperative, zero-fee Social Science Centre took its first cohort of nine students last October. But for now, these projects are extremely small and do not have degree-awarding powers.

Dan Cook, school manager and director of education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol, is currently in the early stages of a master’s thesis on cooperative universities. He thinks there is at least the possibility of something much bigger emerging.

If a larger cooperative institution were established, although it would face significant hurdles, “these are essentially the same ones any other private university…has successfully faced”, Cook says.

The government is encouraging new entrants to the sector and in the past year, it has approved the creation of three new private universities, Regent’s University and the for-profit University of Law and BPP University.

But “the more likely possibility is for an existing university to convert to mutual status”, Cook believes. There would be various ways in which a university could legally convert, he says, but of the challenges that such a change would present, “none is insurmountable”.

In 2011, the Cabinet Office announced £10 million in funding to help public sector organisations spin off into mutuals, which it defines as “organisations in which employee control plays a significant role in their operation”, and this could include cooperatives.

“The bigger question than the legal one is that of culture – are universities ready to mutualise?” asks Cook. “That’s a much bigger ‘if’, but it is a question I’m hoping to make some progress on”.

However, many of the principles on which cooperatives are based are not necessarily that radical in higher education. Cook points out that the University of Cambridge “is already configured as a sort of workers’ co-op” because every academic is part of the governing body, Regent House.

But, he adds: “I don’t think anyone has told them yet.”

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Article originally published as: Share option (29 August 2013)