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after-school activities
In a post about a post in praise of a critique of a supposed revival of the SDS at American University, Michael Kazin notes the lack of student protest at Georgetown, where he teaches:
But activists who don't focus on electoral politics--or, as in the late '60s and early '70s, flip off the major parties altogether--seem far less numerous. At Georgetown, where I teach, pleasant spring and fall mornings bring out a dozen or so tables on the bricked-in quad (known as "Red Square" for its color, not the shading of its politics). Small knots of students promote pro-choice and pro-life and a living wage, recruit for various ethnic and race-based clubs, and sing the virtues of tutoring homeless children or teaching in an inner-city school. Hardly anyone on campus still defends the war in Iraq; even a student of mine who once interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib thinks the invasion was a stupid mistake. Still, it's been months since I saw or heard a single undergrad seek to channel that sentiment into protest. If anyone is trying to organize a local SDS chapter, they must be doing it exclusively on line.
One reads articles like this quite frequently, and certainly it's hard not to agree that there is a distinct disinvestment in protest culture at US universities. This is not to say that there aren't mobilized, engaged students - there certainly are. But, in my experience, like Kazin's, what protest there is seems to be limited to a very small subsector of the student body - a sort of special interest club like any other special interest club. There are small demonstrations, there are ubiquitous photocopies plastered on doors and walls, there are meetings and listservs and discussion groups and hosted speakers. But it never seems to grow or make much of a dent.
So the first item for discussion: do you think this is an accurate rendition of the situation at universities, at your university, if you're at one? Or is it stupid to fixate so strongly on what happens on campuses in the first place? We are used to thinking of students as the shock troops of revolt and protest, but this hasn't always - or even often - been the case when you take a slightly wider historical perspective.
Second item for discussion: Why don't articles like this ever try to make a real stab at why protest culture is now so anemic at universities? One either throws up one's hands ("politics have changed, huh...") or blames the kids, their cultural decadence (really, students today are more "decadent" than they were in the 1960s? Not sure of that...) or, more deviously, maps one's own political perversity on to the student body today (me as a kid = students in the 1960s / me as a grownup who writes for TNR = students circa now).
I think all of these answers are lazy and/or constructed in bad faith - some worse than others. What do I think is the issue? Personally, I think it's the pressures (both real and perceived, fantasized) of the labor market. The perceived diligence and persistence that it takes to stay ahead of the "acceptable life" curve (which of course varies depending on the university we're talking about - what is an acceptable end for many of my students would represent a catastrophic collapse to most Harvard students). Constant self-monitoring, constant presentation-of-self or anticipation thereof on the market of work and life and status, a grating sense that only the visible people matter is the name of the game. In particular, those students who might be the most likely candidates to participate in or even lead a protest movement - those in the humanities and social sciences - are haunted by a sense that everything worth doing is becoming increasingly impossible to do (collapse of the art market, collapse of the market for creative writing, rationalizing constriction of academia, etc etc) and thus in order to escape the soft hellishness of the cubicle, they need to keep their eyes on the prize.
This is an extremely worried generation of college students. Do you know how many nervous collapses (with hospitalization) happen in my undergraduate classes a semester? I'm teaching a single class of 45 undergrads this semester, and I've had 3 psychiatric hospitializations. I think, for reasons both real and not, students today are too stressed and anxious about their futures to worry about anything at all other than their school work, their internships, and the improbability that they will get to live the life that they would like to live.
The club tables that Kazin sees on the quad are an echo of the clubs they joined or led in high school. The spirit of protest has been pressured into the form of CV fodder; there is no time or energy for revolt save as an "after-school activity," a hobby.
How do I know? Because the same logic structures my own life and work. Obviously, obviously. I am terrified of losing what I have, or not getting what I ultimately want while simultaneously being incredibly disheartened at the absurdity and issuelessness of what it is that I do. Pseudonymous blogging is my after-school activity; it has likely the same use-value as plastering anti-war posters on the designated placarding walls on campus.
By CR | March 2, 2007 in Passivity | Permalink
Comments
"I'm teaching a single class of 45 undergrads this semester, and I've had 3 psychiatric hospitializations."
Yikes.
Sorry to overstay here at LS, but since this is another one of those issues that I have opinions about...
I think that narratives of cultural change neglect the rationality of protest. In the heydey of the SDS, both major U.S. parties agreed that it was a good idea to draft students and send them off to kill or be killed. That really does change whether it seems like a good idea to be involved in serious protest, both on an individually selfish and communally selfless level.
The other main factor is the fall of the USSR. Zizek is right, in a limited sense, about the lack of felt options; why try socialism if it's been proved not to work? Of course, I disagree with his focus on an absurd mystical / religious / psychoanalytic faith; I think that people have to do the hard work of constructing a new answer economically, politically, as the first leftists did.
So I think those two factors explain the difference in protest culture without the necessity of other explanations. Maybe labor pressure has something to do with it, maybe not.
At any rate, I think it's a mistake to view the current situation as necessarily passive. There are pressures sweeping through Western societies, of which labor pressure is one (really, I'd call it Hirschian competition pressure; see Social Limits To Growth), and historically, the time for revolutions is not when people are ground down, it's when there have been some concessions but things don't improve as much as has been hoped. Those passive students could very quickly turn non-passive if certain historical events occur. And who knows what theory could end up as part of the catalyst if it dared to have universal aspirations.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Mar 2, 2007 2:08:08 PM
Both of you are suggesting good explanations. There are probably many factors, among them being the fact that after 1968 universities are not built with the protest-friendly quads you refer to in the post. Most of these more recent institutions are specifically designed to scatter the student population and to keep them from identifying a central rallying point. It's sort of a paranoid thing to point out, but I take it pretty seriously as a factor in student social life.
Posted by: Jackmormon | Mar 2, 2007 3:27:55 PM
I went to a college with a reputation for and history of significantly radical protest (firebombing of university offices, etc) even into the mid 80's. we had dorms that were built to be riot proof (complete with lockdown procudres to isolate problem areas). even at Wesleyan, though, the feeling was that of not being able to change anything (I was there 5 years ago). I wonder that this isn't an outgrowth of post-68 theoretical approaches to revolution. If, per Foucault, systems of power express themselves as organizing principles of society, then there are no small battles to be won. systemic change on this level is nigh-impossible; our society lost its chance when the police retook the Sorbonne.
Posted by: Dave McDougall | Mar 2, 2007 5:12:21 PM
I agree with Rich, to a degree. Students in college now have been raised on capitalist triumphalism, nullifying aspirations to 60s style activism.
However, 60s style recreation also gets demonized early in one's education. I'd bet most of my students, even self-identified liberals, would be afraid to be involved with the original Woodstock: sex and drugs are as likely to "ruin your future" as neglecting your CV. The kids today like straight living, the missionary position, and patriarchy; frankly I think this goes a longer way toward contemporary student passivity than the collapse of the USSR, however significant that is historically.
Posted by: va | Mar 2, 2007 10:34:54 PM
va: "Students in college now have been raised on capitalist triumphalism, nullifying aspirations to 60s style activism. [...] The kids today like straight living, the missionary position, and patriarchy"
I completely disagree with all of that.
The insistence on looking at it as "capitalist triumphialism" is a way of denying the reality, that the known alternatives failed. No doubt people will come up with better, new ones at some point. Until then, it's protest for what? To make the same mistakes as last time? Students can and do protest around specific issues, but they aren't stupid. And most of the "radical" advice they get is bad. Zizek, to take one example, reconciles a few more people to McDonalds every time he suggests that we need to get back to the good old days of necessary violence and breaking eggs for the omelet that will never be made.
As for "kids today like straight living", that's no different than any kids' these days screed -- as CR wrote, one blames the kids, their cultural decadence.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Mar 2, 2007 11:58:49 PM
Thanks for all the great comments.
And yes, Rich is right in the last comment. The thought "kids today like straight living," and that this is simply an unanchored, moral failure on their part is exactly what I am trying to think beyond. I am quite confident that we are not dealing with some sort of essential change - kids once were moral, engaged because they were simply somehow better than they are now. This doesn't make sense, nor does it hold water when you take the slightest glance at the lifepaths of the American souixante-huitards in the aftermath of the 60s.
I do think that the issue of the draft is a little more complex than Rich has it above, however. Due to the possibility of deferment, college students as college students were a group that was (temporarily, relatively) protected from the draft. In fact, the draft provided great incentives toward academic professionalism, toward grad school attendance, etc. Of course the draft was a still huge issue in getting them out on the quads... but it takes some nuance to think through the situation, accounting for the complexities of the system in place. In general, though, yes, were there to be a draft today, more students would be involved in protest....
But above all, yes, Rich, I agree with this as well: the time for revolutions is not when people are ground down, it's when there have been some concessions but things don't improve as much as has been hoped That is, in short, what I am saying. I feel as though my students (both at elite u. before and state u. now) are each in their own ways "ground down."
Posted by: CR | Mar 3, 2007 12:17:13 AM
I'm just trying to take a stab, Rich. I can't really claim to explain the behavior of millions of 18-22 year olds, but I can say with some confidence that Zizek neither explains nor causes their behavior either.
I should have been more clear that I think the explanations of student passivity CP talks about rely too much on the grand narrative of capitalism for context. In other words, they're trying to explain political passivity economically (students are too invested in their future marketability) and historically (alternatives to capitalism have failed). I think these explanations operate at an abstract level that has nothing to do with the lived experience of a college student--though I agree wholeheartedly these things shape that lived experience. But I guess we'll never know, since no one has thought to ask the kids.
As for my particular stab at it, obviously I should have framed it more as a contextual stab than a personal stab. I'll try again: I think our culture's insistence on Family Values is felt much more personally by the average student than the collapse of the USSR (let's remember, college students were between 4 and 8 years old at that point). Moreover, the evils of sex & drugs & general deviance are inculcated early and repeated often, and are far more likely to influence students' will to oppose the status quo. I mean, I agree college kids aren't stupid, but they're certainly not reading Zizek. If Zizek was as influential as you claim, Republicans would try to ban his books; I think it's far more telling that sex ed. is a politicized instead.
I'm perfectly willing to admit that whatever story I'm trying to tell is well limited, and I think it describes the experience of kids at Kent State rather than Berkeley.
Georgetown is a whole different matter. Students that go there come from the wealthiest families in the country (and world), some of whom are probably the only people on the planet who are actually benefitting (financially) from Bush's policies, including the Iraq war. In that case, I doubt there's any other explanation for student passivity except economics.
Finally, I think it's mistaken to think that college students will be at the avant garde of political opposition, especially if they're not personally involved in policy. Most college students are still dependents after they graduate, so unless they're being asked to go to war, I don't see why they would have a particular interest in protesting much. Undergrads, especially the younger ones, are far, far more likely to reflect conventional wisdom--in many cases, outdated conventional wisdom--than to contend with it.
Posted by: va | Mar 3, 2007 12:59:23 AM
Ack! When I said CP above, I obviously should have said CR. I have no excuse for mangling a two letter pseudonym!
Again, my apologies to the Kids in the House for suggesting they're inferior to their 60s counterparts. I didn't mean to blame them for our current troubles. It remains the case that I blame the adults (of whom I am not one, by the "you can't trust anyone over 30" definition--not by a long shot!).
So here's a thing: if the premise of the question, "Why isn't the children protesting" is that students have every reason to be outraged, occupy a few buildings, throw rocks at ROTC or whatever, surely that means adults have every reason to do the same. So, why isn't our adults protesting the Iraq war in the streets? Is it because of the fall of the USSR?
Posted by: va | Mar 3, 2007 1:10:39 AM
Ack! When I said CP above, I obviously should have said CR.
Yeah, watch it rook.
Kidding. And...
It remains the case that I blame the adults (of whom I am not one, by the "you can't trust anyone over 30" definition--not by a long shot!).
Ugh. Just crossed the line myself. I'd forgotten about all that. Trust nothing that I say...
More substantively:
I should have been more clear that I think the explanations of student passivity CP talks about rely too much on the grand narrative of capitalism for context. In other words, they're trying to explain political passivity economically (students are too invested in their future marketability) and historically (alternatives to capitalism have failed). I think these explanations operate at an abstract level that has nothing to do with the lived experience of a college student--though I agree wholeheartedly these things shape that lived experience. But I guess we'll never know, since no one has thought to ask the kids.
I very strongly disagree with this. I think economic conditions (or the meta-economic conditions that Rich mentions in his first comment) have tons to do with the "lived experience" of the college student today. At elite u, famously and formerly a gentleman genius' establishment, I was amazed at the intensity and careerist drive of the students that I taught. Writers were pissing themselves over the fact that some of their peers already had six-figure contracts before graduation; clearly, they had already failed. Nearly all the other ones were freaking about ph.d programs or law school... the right phd programs / law school, which are seen as ever harder to. One would think these kids were, by virtue of being there, set for life. But they sure didn't act that way... I went to a good college as an undergrad, mostly during the late-90s full-employment tech boom. Things were different, we weren't like the students I taught after 9/11 and the bursting of the bubble.
Here at state u, the anxiety about work comes before graduation, as a large percentage of the students are already working now. Many of their parents have suffered as a result of the general economic downturn in the region, and they come to college not in order to navel gaze and improve themselves but to earn a credential that will get them a well paying job. I don't know what else to say... The intensification of workplace demands on white collar and blue collar workers alike has very much bled into the college campus today. They are serious, these students, even if distracted. I have them in my office hours telling me about this daily. The psychological collapses that I mentioned above seem to come of the pressures to finish, and finish well, along with other peripheral issues as well.
I feel like I am witnessing the proletarianization of middle-class america, as well as the sub-proletarianization of proletarian america. Right in my office, in the classroom.
Posted by: CR | Mar 3, 2007 1:37:18 AM
I'm totally with you there, CR. Many of my students work themselves, on top of a 16 classroom hours/week courseload. So sure, they barely have time to hook into the current political scene, much lest protest. In addition to the desire to be marketable after graduation (which I don't doubt exists at your elite u., as it did at my undergrad east coast state u.) there's the more urgent need to actually pay for college, as you say. It would make sense that the difference in college costs between the 60s and today has a lot to do with passivity.
What this doesn't explain, though--and maybe this is more true of my current midwestern state u. than other places--is a fundamental resistance to the very idea of protesting/protest culture in principle. Students' attitude, I've found, isn't "I would protest if I could" but a resistance to the ethos of 60s college protesters--they see it as a threat to the white hetero male body politic. My students don't like feminism, and they hate "feminists;" they're sort of OK with passive MLK Jr. style civil rights protesting, but they think we should kind of take what that's gotten us and move on, and I have to imagine that they share Cartman's views on the famous "dirty hippies" that protested the Vietnam War. As much as a socialist world is unimaginable, so is anyone marching under a banner of Free Love.
So, I don't doubt careerism and economics has a lot to do with it, but I think the Dixification of America has done its share as well.
Posted by: va | Mar 3, 2007 2:17:13 AM
Yes, for sure, you're right.
But... one has to wonder where the receptivity to the dixification comes from, what informs the failure of standard issue oedipal reaction to one's parents' position. I tend to read even dixification as a (self-sabotaging) reaction to changing life pressures, largely economic ones. The "in principle" that you name may be an echo of other issues, in other words.
I'll put it this way: I simply resist the sense that people somehow simply changed, and suddenly became very much more receptive to reactionary agitprop simply because they are "worse" or even simply because the instruments of agitprop distribution are somehow more efficient.
You're right, though. Maybe if my state u. here were a bit less northeastern, I'd be egging the chicken, or vice versa.
Posted by: CR | Mar 3, 2007 2:38:19 AM
I tend to read even dixification as a (self-sabotaging) reaction to changing life pressures, largely economic ones. The "in principle" that you name may be an echo of other issues, in other words.
I get it now. I didn't realize you were explaining both student passivity and dixification economically at the outset. Yeah, the class struggle hasn't been going very well for the last 30 years, huh...not that I would know. Kidding--congratulations on your recent 30th, in fact. Thanks CR:)
Posted by: va | Mar 3, 2007 3:07:21 AM
CR:
One would think these kids were, by virtue of being there, set for life. But they sure didn't act that way... I went to a good college as an undergrad, mostly during the late-90s full-employment tech boom. Things were different, we weren't like the students I taught after 9/11 and the bursting of the bubble.
We could think we are set for life, but I suspect that the 'bursting bubble' is indicative of a climate of fear and paranoia that was already in place pre-911. Was there ever a time when one could be (or should that be 'feel'?) set for life? If the news is anything to go by, then crisis is a daily event, begging the question as to what a crisis really is when crisis is the norm? This is what makes it hard to take the news seriously, and yet it is the backdrop: 'anchors' panicking at the immanent collapse of everything, while living standards and personal safety on the ground give a different picture. Even the news-averse cannot completely ignore the anxious emotional backdrop, whatever the percentage of its reality lives in lah-lah land.
My interest in depoliticization leads to a lot of discussion with fellow students about their disengagement from politics. Time and time again, one thing comes up: "I don't follow the news" - "why don't you follow the news?" - "because it's depressing and I can't change anything". We students perceive that our political contributions have no effect, so we focus our energies on our CVs, somewhere where results are visible. This amounts to quietism, passivity, and conformity as Ulrich Beck's biographical agents, or as you put it:
Constant self-monitoring, constant presentation-of-self or anticipation thereof on the market of work and life and status, a grating sense that only the visible people matter is the name of the game. In particular, those students who might be the most likely candidates to participate in or even lead a protest movement - those in the humanities and social sciences - are haunted by a sense that everything worth doing is becoming increasingly impossible to do (collapse of the art market, collapse of the market for creative writing, rationalizing constriction of academia, etc etc) and thus in order to escape the soft hellishness of the cubicle, they need to keep their eyes on the prize.
One casualty is political savvy. A colleague of mine recently opined, after I gave a presentation on Judith Butler, that she found feminism irritating because she had not ever felt personally oppressed. She continued that studies show how women outperform men in exams. She was genuinely unaware of (and sceptical at) the 'glass ceiling' and pay gaps. Only two of our group (inluding myself) seemed in any way disturbed or surprised by what she had said. As VA says
My students don't like feminism, and they hate "feminists;"
The lack of causes to mobilise around allows this "I'm not personally affected" attitude to prevail. All we seem to be left with is either the reconstruction of left/right as it crumbles, or 'citizenship', 'participation', and other such management speak. I agree with my colleagues that it is depressing. The only consolation I feel is through touching base with discussions like the one here at LS. It is as if in the absence of discernable political engagement, its discussion retains the hope of the return of the repressed, if that's what it amounts to.
Posted by: Jeff | Mar 3, 2007 4:27:21 AM
"one has to wonder where the receptivity to the dixification comes from, what informs the failure of standard issue oedipal reaction to one's parents' position."
Someone who is 18 now, and whose parents had them when they were 30, had parents who were 15 in 1973. If you're looking for psychological explanations, a lot of it *is* standard issue oedipal reaction to one's parents' position.
But I don't think that they are that important. Mostly, the tension that you describe looks like something that's only going to be resolved by some amalgamation of Fred Hirsch and Bob Black. "Capitalism" per se isn't really necessary to explain it; you'd see the same thing in socialist society in which people competed for the managerial class jobs.
But history matters as well as economics. It doesn't matter whether college students are too young to have experienced events in 1989; those events still help to determine the current situation intellectually as well as in other ways.
Finally, I think that va underestimates the way in which theory affects practise. Sure, very few people read Zizek. But the rare few political organizers on campus usually are looking around for something. It only takes one encounter with the whole Leninist thing to have people reject that path and implicitly think that no avenue is available in that direction.
Environmentalism is a potential theoretical framework that might serve -- sustainability, etc. The problem with it, though, is that it doesn't really say much about what human framework should be inside the human-to-environment one. In theory, you could have any political arrangement that produced certain behavior, and the attempts to link environmentalism with certain political forms deemed necessary have not really been successful in my opinion.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Mar 3, 2007 9:14:55 AM
One obstacle, I think, to greater student engagement in politics is that knowledge (even here at Berkeley) is treated as another item for consumption. On the one hand, college becomes an extension of high school, because it seems these days a bachelor's degree is never enough. And on the other hand, college becomes like a trade school because many students come in with a specific goal or skill set they are looking to acquire -- a "liberal arts" education is a nuisance for many people. Molecular Biology majors on campus have agitated for their own college, where they can receive a B.S. rather than a B.A. in order to be more marketable for med school/grad school/industry. Many of these people, however, do read the news -- a subscription to the NY Times or Wall Street journal comes with MCAT Test preparation classes, because "current events" come up at medical school interviews.
If anything close to "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" ever existed, this process is killing what is left of it. Everybody has their anecdotes about the majority of students' questions being about the requirements for an 'A' mark. Fellow students ask me (let alone my parents!): "what are you going to do with (insert humanities major) here?" And it's not an unreasonable question, but I wonder if knowledge was always this instrumentalized at the undergraduate level. From what I've seen, learning is mostly about "the next step" and very, very infrequently touches a person's life or self in any intimate way. I guess a comparative question could be: when new information (book, news, syllabus) comes around in the 1960s vs. 2007, what answers will satisfy the average student asking "why should I bother to know this?"
Posted by: ik | Mar 3, 2007 2:04:17 PM
Sure, very few people read Zizek. But the rare few political organizers on campus usually are looking around for something. It only takes one encounter with the whole Leninist thing to have people reject that path and implicitly think that no avenue is available in that direction.
True enough, Rich, but it also only takes one conversation between a hypothetical organizer and a faculty acquaintance, who, like Isserman, worries that any organized group of protesters will metastasize into the Weather Underground before you can say "the parallax view" to short-circuit the whole enterprise. I wonder if in fetishizing the Weather Underground the Left has taken some bad lessons from the 60s.
Posted by: va | Mar 3, 2007 3:23:55 PM
For that matter, it only takes one gander at the Wikipedia entries on COINTELPRO and Fred Hamption, plus one article on the NSA's current surveillance racket to discourage any would-be organizer.
Posted by: va | Mar 3, 2007 3:37:36 PM
I have to disagree again, va. Faculty acquaintances urging caution don't discourage students. Neither do stories of past atrocities. (Good student organizers are either brave or have that youthful feeling of invulnerability.) But the idea of protest inevitably brings up "protest for what?" No one can honestly give a general answer to that question right now.
Sure, people could protest for an end to the war, but it's a very abstract issue for most. This war is being fought by volunteers, and paid for with loans that haven't yet come due. And right-wing refusal to consider public opinion means that protest is probably futile. It's not like protestors could make the war any more unpopular -- it's already more unpopular than the Vietnam war was after seven years.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Mar 3, 2007 4:31:43 PM
I have to disagree again, va. Faculty acquaintances urging caution don't discourage students. Neither do stories of past atrocities. (Good student organizers are either brave or have that youthful feeling of invulnerability.)
Maybe, if you want to essentialize hypothetical students that way. But it's notable that Isserman's article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed is a 3000 word cautionary tale to a few hundred people on the internet who he doubts have the chutzpa to live up to their predecessors--and says it could be a mixed bag even if they did. To me that's less a cautionary tale than a nipping in the bud.
The reason I think so is that Isserman's and Kazin's assessments don't seem to jive with their prognostications. Their line seems to be, ha! I scoff at you so-called radical activists! You don't live up to your name! ...And if you did there's a 50-50 chance I would condemn you for it. (Isserman: "Is it to be 1962 or 1969?") There just seems to be a whole lot of counterproductive projection and retrojection going on, assumptions that any burgeoning organization needs to be scrutinized, contextualized, advised, etc., like we're waiting for the groundswell that will stop us asking, where are the student protesters? and instead provide something new to criticize, contextualize, scrutinize, etc. It's possible that trying to speak for students in this way (e.g. let me tell you something about your little movement, but also e.g. let me tell you why you haven't produced a movement worth noticing--my own hypotheses included) is a bad idea insofar as we're not implicated in our explanations, and especially when students have little or nothing to answer for.
Posted by: va | Mar 3, 2007 6:08:39 PM
Protest culture has been commodified into performance art. Not that it was less ritualistic 30 years ago, but the stakes now are lower (no draft, as RP sez), and the potential cost in surveilled settings higher (it ain't just the architecture); the aura of anonymity online, however illusory, provides a seemingly safe venue for provocations, and facilitates offcampus flashmobbing in less monitored and probably more effective locations. But even the young and naive recognise that such activities leave a better marked trail than they used to.
Posted by: nnyhav | Mar 3, 2007 9:15:26 PM
The reason I think so is that Isserman's and Kazin's assessments don't seem to jive with their prognostications. Their line seems to be, ha! I scoff at you so-called radical activists! You don't live up to your name! ...And if you did there's a 50-50 chance I would condemn you for it.
Nicely put, va...
Rich -
"Capitalism" per se isn't really necessary to explain it; you'd see the same thing in socialist society in which people competed for the managerial class jobs.
I don't think so. I think ever intensifying nature of the situation is part and parcel of capitalism, and capitalism in a particularly crisis-strewn and anxious phase.
Posted by: CR | Mar 3, 2007 10:52:05 PM
I think that you should try Social Limits To Growth if you haven't already, CR. The intensification is exactly what you'd expect in a society that's generally getting richer, in which more and more people can compete for positional goods. As Hirsch puts it, if everyone in a crowd rises onto their toes in an attempt to see over the heads of everyone else, no one can see further -- but it is still individually rational for each person to do so, because if they don't, they can't see as far. I think that Hirsch explains the mill of ever-increasing educational qualifications for jobs better than a simple capitalist model does.
One way out of the cycle is to redesign the job structure, but socialism has not really been better than capitalism in that regard. Once again, try Bob Black -- he's a nut, but he's one of the first antiwork theorists.
Let's see, to va and nnyhav, I think that you vastly overestimate the effects of suppression/surveillance within the U.S. va, it's not essentializing to say that organizers aren't easily intimidated, it's a self-selection process -- any beginning organizer quickly runs into low-level attempts at intimidation, so that all the good ones are highly resistant to it. nnyhav, I'm not saying that surveillance is good, but what does it really matter? If you're legally protesting, it just makes it harder to frame you, and it's not like there's some secret blacklist by which that guy videotaping you at the demo can ruin your future career.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Mar 4, 2007 1:16:04 AM
Social Limits to Growth is officially on my list of stuff to pick up at the library on Monday.
Just from your descriptions, though: I do definitely think that logic is in play. I expect more of myself because others expect so much of themselves. There are more of us in the field, etc etc. Yes.
That is, no doubt, a factor. But even more significant, I would argue, are the ever intensifying tendencies toward the casualization of labor (adjuncts in academia corresponding to part-time workers without benefits across the spectrum, walmart workers replacing unionized supermarket employees) and the global quest for lower labor prices (which shifts the jobs here where I live abroad, helping the new worker, killing the old one, but above all resulting in a huge gain for the shareholder, and ever larger mcmansions in the jersey suburbs...) plus of course structural reactions to wage-driven "inflation" (I've quoted my favorite scene from Bob Woodward's book on Greenspan, right? Where Clinton discovers that full employment isn't - and "can't be" - the goal of any administration.
These changes - casualization, globalization, macro-interventionism - are real and have tangible effects. Hirsh's scenario is very much in play as well, but to my mind more as a meta-effect.
Socialism, in this model, helps by providing a new social contract that insists on work guarantees (vs. casualization), wage guarantees (vs. globalization's wage erosion), and macro-intervention on behalf of the worker rather than the corporation. All this, of course, is incredibly expensive, inefficient, and it kills "global competitiveness," which is exactly why any socialist movement needs - today in particular - to be international in scope and membership.
Posted by: CR | Mar 4, 2007 1:39:39 AM
Or, to put it another way: While higher expectations might account for certain aspects of the dynamic, they certainly don't speak to the fact that so many elements that formerly could be taken for granted - access to health care, low cost education, collective bargaining, the forty hour week - have now been removed to the sphere of impossible fantasy or self-sabotaging traditionalism.
Posted by: CR | Mar 4, 2007 1:54:22 AM
OK, I see what you mean, CR. Casualization of work does operate to make the large central band of jobs less desirable, and therefore intensifies competition for the upper band of them. Yes, I agree with that.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Mar 4, 2007 10:15:03 AM
CR,
Thanks for this.
I want to make sure I get the argument. Is it "students on average are less political" or "students on average are (doing) less political (stuff) on campus"?
I suppose either way the two might conceivably feed each other. My impression in Chicago a few years ago was that students were an important constituency for antiglobalization circles, but that they didn't act on campus. Which might mean, among other things, that they were going to draw in less students who weren't already plugged in in some way.
Regardless of which is the case, it might not have big/deep explanations but might be smaller ones about how earlier cycles/student generations did or did not cultivate leadership. The pace of student life in terms of people graduating out is really high and the time it takes to develop into being committed and capable is pretty long too (many students do really impressive stuff for all that). So there's a distribution of more and less experienced and confident folks. The mores are going to generally be the engines of things. If their engine-ness doesn't involve sufficient cultivation of lesses into mores then when the mores graduate there's a relative loss of leadership and things have to start over again. I doubt that that's a sufficient explanation of present conditions, but I think it's likely a factor (and as such, it would lessen the all determining power of other factors we can think of, like tuition rates and admissions reqs).
take care,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Mar 4, 2007 5:12:31 PM
You will probably elect not to post my response, but here it is anyway. All of you simply put, spew intellectual bullcrap. No one cares what you think, what you write or how much you love to hear yourselves speak. All they care about is what they have to do to make it. They are focused on 'making it', and none of you are their role models.
Posted by: Madmouser | Mar 4, 2007 5:17:49 PM
Sorry to comment twice, but I just read (very quickly) the posts and such you linked to. If anything, they're index of the authors being out of touch with the student left (I am too, for whatever that's worth, which is why I can't say what's the situation at the university I'm at). The Chronicle piece's linking of black bloc-ers to Weather would be laughable in its total lack of being informed if it weren't a not so subtle "these kids are future or maybe even contemporary terrorists". It's also indicative I think that none of the articles engages with anything written by SDSers nor offers anything positive to or for SDS, an implicit recognition of the out-of-touch-ness and the resulting lack of anything constructive to offer to students. Instead, nostalgia, doubts, and other forms of pouring water on an activity.
Posted by: Nate | Mar 4, 2007 5:31:24 PM
I'm not sure if better late than never, but anyway, on my campus, some students are active. We still have take-back-the-night and events for gaypril and national coming out day. Most anti-war protests, though, were organized by faculty. College Republicans have been active, tying yellow ribbons around all the trees to 'support our troops', bringing in speakers, doing something with flags either for troops or fetuses. And, the students are starting various publications from different perspectives.
They don't seem as engaged as those supporting Solidarity in the early eighties or those at Columbia fighting for divestment in the later eighties. A few years ago, I was frustrated when a bunch agreed to circulate petitions to get Dean on the ballow; it snowed, and they all bailed.
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 5, 2007 11:49:37 AM
hi Jodi,
I'm curious, how visible (in the sense of or implied in the articles CR links to) is TBTN and queer related stuff at your U? Where I went to college that stuff was a huge deal for a lot of people (TBTN was enormous for me and was my first real involvement in a collective politcal thing), but I have no sense how notice-able it was for other people because I was plugged into those networks.
best,
Nate
ps- Mouser, it's a shame you feel the need to waste your time talking to people who you feel are a waste of your time. You should see a shrink about that, or at least make sure to get enough hugs on a regular basis.
Posted by: Nate | Mar 6, 2007 12:39:39 AM
I note the desperate quality of Madmouser's post: we just "don't get it", it's all about "making it", not finding modes of resistance. The other 30 comments have parsed this to death, but I want to add that this phenom transcends academe, this mass psychosis that precludes resistance, and it takes two forms, either aggressive ideological compliance or a docile fatalism.
Posted by: Bob Allen | Mar 11, 2007 4:05:46 AM
either aggressive ideological compliance or a docile fatalism
and sometimes both.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Mar 31, 2007 5:44:49 PM
"Deke:"
it's an odd comment from Kotsko yes, but; GO AWAY.
Posted by: | Mar 31, 2007 11:56:28 PM
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