If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.
Every wheel in the creation, every mine and every mill;
Fleets and armies of the nation, will at their command stand still.

On November 17, I marched with hundreds of other CUNY Graduate Center students from Thirty-Fourth Street to Union Square as part of a day-long series of student walkouts and demonstrations across the nation. Armed with a large “Student Strike” banner and about a dozen “book shields”—depicting the covers of such radical classics as Emma Goldman’s My Life, Ursula K Leguin’s The Dispossessed, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, we filled the sidewalk and the streets with our bodies and our voices. Marchers chanted “Education is a Right/ Fight Fight Fight,” and “All Day all Week/ Occupy Wall Street.” Around Eighteenth Street, as we approached Union Square, the crowd passed a group of several workers dismantling one of those ubiquitous sets of scaffolding that dot the city landscape. As we passed the workers stopped their lifting, smiled and waved, and as we waved back the chant went up through the crowd, “Students and Workers/ Shut the City Down.” The workers seemed pleased with this chant as did the students. Indeed, this particular rallying cry has become surprisingly common among student protests at CUNY and within the OWS movement. I remember feeling a little embarrassed the first time I heard it shouted at a PSC rally years ago, as if such a statement were simply wishful thinking; but the more I’ve heard it repeated and the more I’ve seen young students and faculty members embracing the chant, vigorously shaking their fists in the air, the more it has come to seem like a real possibility.

Just about two weeks earlier, on November 2, protesters at Occupy Oakland had put that very idea into practice, calling a general strike among students and workers for the entire city of Oakland. This was a bold and controversial move and many in the Oakland OWS movement and the general assembly were resistant to issue a call for a city-wide strike that they knew had little chance of actually materializing. Although the vast majority of Oaklanders went to work that day, those who came out to rally and demonstrate managed to shut down a freeway and a port for the entire day, clashing violently with police throughout the night as they first occupied and then defended more spaces throughout the city. Now Oakland is calling for another (this one likely to be much more successful) massive day-long strike of all the west coast ports on December 12. This is not an unprecedented move. The west coast ports have been shut down by longshoremen strikes several times over economic and political issues that directly affect the working class. But the longshoremen are some of the most militant union workers in the country. It will be a lot harder to convince the average worker to take such action. Overall, the idea of a serious city-wide strike, where ordinary workers such as  teachers, postal carriers, secretaries, professors, students, and bus and train drivers, all refuse to work, has not yet even begun to take shape. While workers in cities, states, and even entire nations across the globe often use the general strike as a means of achieving political ends, there has not been a city-wide general strike in the United States since a spontaneous strike erupted in Oakland in 1946 as part of an effort to unionize department store workers.  So why are Americans now so afraid of the general strike?

The reasons for this hesitancy are legion. In New York and other states, laws like the Taylor Law offer stiff penalties to public sector unions that dare to take any kind of job action. But most working class people have never even heard of such laws. The plain fact is that working class people today lead extraordinarily insecure lives, where a day’s work could be the difference between buying medicine and paying the rent or having to choose between the two. And even those workers who can afford a day off have reason to be hesitant. Calling in sick on the day of a planned strike might be seen by some private employers as sufficient grounds for termination, and few workers are in a position to take that chance with their families’ futures. So what has to change? What has to happen that would protect the economically vulnerable while still radically disrupting the normalcy of day to day alienation and exploitation that define our age?

To begin with, if we are going to talk the talk we need to start walking the walk. If students and workers are going to shut any city down, they must first come together to seriously talk about combining their power in a united front. In some places this is already happening, but not nearly at the pace needed to make sufficient gains among the rank and file of such unions as the TWU, DC37, PSC, and AFT. As I’ve argued in these pages before, it is essential that the rank and file of such unions begin to create spaces for organizing outside of the union leadership structures that have, just by virtue of their reliance upon the state for their existence, compromised the real power of their members—that is, their power to withhold their labor. Further, once these channels of communication are in place, it will probably require more than a strike call from an OWS general Assembly to get people out of their seats and into the streets. More than likely it will take a crisis of one kind or another.

In 1946, in Oakland, that crisis took the form of a police crackdown on protesting department store workers. In 2011 the options are seemingly wide-open, since crisis seems to have become the permanent state of affairs in occupied America. Some possible scenarios to watch out for include a further (potentially fatal) escalation of police brutality against students or Occupy protesters; massive austerity measures that further cut essential safety net programs like Medicare, Social Security, or veteran’s health (all already in the works); or a protracted union contract battle capable of generating sentiments of working class solidarity like those expressed in Wisconsin last year. A particularly sympathetic union, if there is still such a thing, threatened by state cuts or, better, a private union being exploited for corporate profit, might also offer a potential battleground in which to again test the mettle of the general strike. The Sotheby’s lock-out is one example that actually seems to be gaining some steam. But the PSC is also on the verge of a potentially protracted and ugly contract battle.  As the PSC moves forward there will be many opportunities to frame that battle as yet another example of the one percent’s attack on the 99 percent of New Yorkers who attend or work at public schools and universities across the nation. As the negotiations over course load, class size, adjunct parity, healthcare, and job security come to a head, it is important that we seek out allies outside our own ranks by connecting these issues to the larger problems of our current economic system which favors the already grotesquely wealthy at the expense of nearly everyone else.

Without a doubt the Occupy Wall street movement has reinvigorated the left, helping to make possible previously unimaginable acts of intelligent and creative resistance. But it has also managed to create important and vital public spaces in cities and towns across the country where electrical workers and professors, janitors and art handlers, the unionized and non-unionized, can come together across different industries and recognize their common struggle. Such solidarity across sectors will continue to make radical actions more possible and the idea of an eventual general strike a lot more plausible.

Share on Facebook

Wel­come to the CUNY Cri­sis blog. We’ll be cov­er­ing the recent sit­u­a­tion developing at CUNY around proposed tuition hikes, the protests against them, and the unacceptably forceful response from the police and university brass. We will be report­ing on this cri­sis and related news begin­ning today. The most recent updates will appear at the top with a EST stamp.

7:30pm A general strike of students everywhere is being planned for next Monday, November 28. For more information on how to get involved, click here.

7:00pm The PSC has formally called for an investigation into the police response to nonviolent student protest at Baruch last night.  The group’s president, Barbara Bowen, had this to say: “The City University has a proud history of student activism and protest. Some of its most important advances have occurred because of collective action by students, faculty and staff. We have made it clear to the university that violent response to non-violent students protest is not acceptable. Students, faculty and staff must be allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly. We call on the university to conduct a full investigation of the police conduct last night. The results of the investigation should be immediately made public.”

6:30pm The Advocate has just received an open letter from the Doctoral Students’ Council at the Graduate Center, CUNY to the president of the school, Bill Kelly, in response to the increased presence of security personnel on campus–an increase without explanation.  It reads, in full:

November 22, 2011

Dear President Kelly,

Over the past week we have heard from students expressing their concerns and questions related to the increased presence of uniformed security guards at the CUNY Graduate Center. What has been especially disconcerting is the disproportionate increase in security forces in areas of the building devoted to student study, governance, and socialization. The large number of security personnel patrolling our hallways and outside our classrooms signals to many that you believe there is a threat to the Graduate Center. Indeed, the presence of these security forces in student spaces, not at the established building entrance checkpoints, suggests that you believe the threat is internal.

We have chosen to address this issue with you in a public letter because this is a public issue and requires a public response.

In light of recent security and police actions toward peaceful student protests on CUNY campuses and at other public universities, it has become especially difficult to believe that deploying additional security personnel without notice does anything but intimidate students and faculty and create an environment of fear. The Graduate Center community must be informed should some imminent danger require you to make the decision to mobilize security forces.

You have assured the Doctoral Students’ Council that peaceful protest and assembly will be allowed on our campus. Indeed, a number of events related to student and faculty protests have gone exceedingly well and without incident from security forces for those peacefully assembled. We thank you in advance for your continued support on this matter and hope you will join the students, faculty, and staff in participating at future events.

On behalf of the students of the CUNY Graduate Center, but for the benefit of the entire community, the faculty and staff included, we request the following information:
(1) a community notice explaining the choice to increase security presence on campus, with reference to specific safety concerns;

(2) an outline of the policies and protocols for responding to student protests, including details on the levels of force that Graduate Center and CUNY security is currently authorized to use, and an overview of how security officers have been trained in responding to these issues;

(3) a report on security actions taken, observations made, and any other pertinent information on public safety officer activity, including an open disclosure of the Graduate Center budget for additional security; and

(4) a clear timeline of when the Graduate Center will draw down the increased security presence.

We thank you for your attention to these matters and anticipate your response.

Sincerely,

Officers of the Doctoral Students’ Council

Colin P. Ashley, Officer for Funding
Annie Dell’Aria, Co-Chair for Business
Anne Donlon, University Faculty Senate Liaison
Nicole N. Hanson, Officer for Outreach
Sarah Jordan, Officer for Student Services
Eero Laine, Co-Chair for Student Affairs
Christina Nadler, University Student Senate Delegate
Jared Simard, Co-Chair for Communication
Patricia Stapleton, Officer for Technology and Library
Monique Whitaker, Officer for Health and Wellness

6:00pm Video of the CUNY Board of Trustees meeting being mic checked at Baruch last night, in two parts—here, and here.

5:30pm CUNY students have issued a statement deploring the use of coercive force to put down protests being conducted by their friends and colleagues, both last night at Baruch and moving forward.  It states in no uncertain terms that, “we condemn the use of police violence against CUNY community members who were protesting peacefully at the public Board of Trustees Public and Budget Hearing at Baruch College on November 21, 2011. We also reject the official statement released by the administration of the City University of New York regarding those events.

“Students, faculty and staff peacefully entered the Baruch lobby to attend the public meeting of the Board of Trustees and were immediately met by a line of police carrying large wooden truncheons and blocking access to the building. Students who were on the official roster of speakers were also denied access. At no time did the students, faculty, and staff attempt to push past the massed police officers, nor to confront them physically in any way. The police directed us to the first-floor overflow room where the meeting would be televised live. Knowing that our voices would not be heard in the broadcast room, we decided that we would hold an assembly in the lobby and allow people to tell their stories and testimonies of experiences as students at CUNY. Most of us sat down on the ground so that speakers could stand and be heard.

“The police attacked us shortly after we sat down and began pushing us toward the wall, responding to our peaceful, lawful protest with physical confrontation. The suggestion provided in the CUNY administration’s statement that anyone ‘surged forward toward the college’s identification turnstiles, where they were met by CUNY Public Safety officers and Baruch College officials’ is a categorical lie, and this is documented in video footage of the events. As the officers continued to push us away from the public meeting, they blocked all exits from the lobby but a single, revolving door, through which we were forced to walk one at a time. Many of the peaceful protesters were shoved violently by the campus police, jabbed and struck in their ribs with wooden truncheons, and left badly bruised. At least one student was struck in the face. It was a miracle that no one was more seriously injured. Those who refused to leave were told that they would be arrested; when one person identified himself to officers as a CUNY faculty member and asked on what charge he would be arrested, he was not given an answer. Another officer blurted, “Because it’s a riot!”

“We deplore the use of violence against peaceful protesters. We deplore the criminal charges made against peaceful protesters exercising their Constitutional rights of free speech and peaceful assembly. We also deplore the CUNY administration’s misrepresentation of the events at Baruch, devised to obscure its complicity in violent action against its own students, faculty, staff, and community.

2:00pm Boing Boing, whose been all over the student protest actions in recent days, has a piece on police bullying last night at the Board of Trustees meeting at Baruch College.

1:30pm In case you missed it, there is a petition going around calling for the resignation of CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein in the wake of last night’s confrontation at Baruch.  It reads: “The Chancellor of the City University of New York, Matthew Goldstein, sat idly by through the full three and a half hours of the CUNY Board of Trustees meeting at Baruch College, on November 21, 2011, while in the same building students, faculty, and staff of his university engaging in peaceful protest were met with a violent police response and numerous arrests. Chancellor Goldstein (who is responsible for many of the policies currently being protested, such as the ending of open admissions in 1999, and increases to student tuition costs of over 20 percent) neither offered any condemnation of this attack on his students when he was made aware of it, nor did he intervene to prevent the continuation of the violence or to ensure his students’ safety. Members of CUNY cannot have any reasonable expectation that they will be able safely to exercise their rights to free speech and protest as long as a chancellor complicit in violence against them remains in office. We thus call for his immediate resignation.”

The petition can be signed by interested parties here.

1:00pm The OWS People’s Library blog has an excellent piece on violence against students and faculty at CUNY which is well worth the read.  Among other things, it asks “why CUNY has a police force and who do they work for? I work at CUNY, inside the Mina Rees Library, (though not for the library) and I interact with CUNY Public Safety officers every day. I’ve watched them save the life of one of my colleagues. I’ve taken First Aid classes from them. In my workplace, they have been part of the CUNY family. But now, CUNY has ordered them to take up batons against students and the officers at Baruch have complied.”

It concludes that “CUNY is the nation’s largest urban public university system  and consists of 23 educational institutions here in New York City. In the past, CUNY was literally the People’s University, offering open and tuition-free education to the poor and working class. However since 1975, CUNY has charged tuition and has increasingly made admission and attendance more and more difficult. The CUNY Board of Trustees has repeatedly voted to increase tuition, making access to this public institution more difficult. Campuses that used to be open to all have installed security barriers and turnstiles, and partnerships with corporations are privatizing this public educational space. At the very first CUNY General Assembly, held at Hunter College – CUNY Public Safety officers were ordered to deny entry to CUNY and Hunter students, faculty and staff who sought to enter the building and have a peaceful meeting, even though they all had proper ID. This denial of entry was based entirely on the political character of their speech. This disturbing trend at CUNY must be stopped before the people lose their university completely.

12:30pm Another video of last night’s protest has emerged which offers clearer evidence of what went down. Students sit down after the 2:00 minute mark and police action follows shortly thereafter.  It’s hard to find a CUNY security officer that is not holding a baton with two hands but officers are aggressive with the baton’s use, shoving and sometimes striking students with them.  This is especially evident with about 15 seconds to go from the end, when an officer in the upper right of the screen hits some students especially hard.

12:00pm The Daily News published a brief report on the protests last night. Perhaps the most notable part of the piece was the interview with Hunter College student Josh Godar who said he and about 15 other students were shoved into a room when cops moved in to quash the demonstration. “I’m an Army veteran. I didn’t serve five years in the military to come here and see civilian people threatened this way,” said Godar. “This is a complete disgrace to the ideology behind this country.”

11:00pm The Occupy Wall Street site has a brief statement with video of went went down last night at CUNY.

10:30am An important statement from CUNY faculty on last night’s police response to peacefully protesting students, which is signed by a lengthy list of the university’s most prominent teachers:

“We faculty members of The City University of New York (CUNY) express our outrage at the police brutality against nonviolent student and faculty demonstrators at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-Davis.

We declare our support for the opening of spaces for protest, political dissent, and, when necessary, nonviolent civil disobedience on our campuses. We support the CUNY student movement in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, including the student strike organized by our students on November 17, along with the protests on November 21 against the prospect of tuition hikes to be decided on by the Board of Trustees, and any future non-violent protests.

We call upon the CUNY administration to look upon these student protests not as a threat that must be monitored, policed, and repressed, but as an opportunity for a discussion across our community about the future of the City University of New York as a public institution meant to serve all those who live in this city.

Therefore, we the undersigned:

1)   Deplore any use of violence against nonviolent student protesters, anywhere.

2)   Call upon the CUNY administration to support and engage respectfully with those students, educators, and community members who are working to open up spaces for protest, dissent, and discussion.

3)   Declare that the use of any violence whatsoever against nonviolent student protesters will never be tolerated at CUNY.

4)   Insist that administrators at both the CUNY-wide level and at individual campuses not call upon any outside police forces, including the New York City Police Department, or any other city, state, or federal law enforcement agencies, in order to disperse students who are engaged in nonviolent protests.”

10:00am The official statement from CUNY, issued last night, in response to the events at Baruch, reads, “While a public hearing was being conducted by the CUNY Board of Trustees at Baruch College, at which more than 95 speakers had signed up to present their views, a group of protesters entered the first-floor lobby.  Because the hearing room was filled to capacity, some of the protesters were directed to an overflow room equipped with the live video of the ongoing hearing.  Some of the protesters refused to proceed to the overflow room and instead surged forward toward the college’s identification turnstiles, where they were met by CUNY Public Safety officers and Baruch College officials.  The protesters were asked twice to exit the lobby or return to the overflow room.  They refused, creating a public safety hazard.  In order to ensure that public safety and access to the building was maintained for students who were attending classes this evening, the CUNY Public Safety officers secured the space and removed the protesters.  One Public Safety officer was transported to a hospital for chest pains and two others received minor injuries.   Fifteen protesters were arrested and processed by CUNY Public Safety officers.  Throughout this time, the public hearing as well as the college’s classes and other business functions continued.”

So, students were arrested to keep students safe?  Hmmmm….

Share on Facebook

For those who have travelled extensively throughout South America, the astonishing majesty of the continent’s Andean mountains is surely etched in the imagination. From the lush jungles in northern Colombia and the lunar salt plains of the Bolivian heartland, to the snow-covered peaks of Argentina’s southernmost tip, the breathtaking diversity of the world’s longest, and perhaps most glorious, mountain range is as wondrous as its history is rich. The mountains have served as the backdrop for the rise and fall of great civilizations, offered scientific discoveries that changed the face of human understanding, inspired masterworks of art and literature—not to mention political revolution—and have witnessed centuries of unspeakable slaughter. Michael Jacobs’ Andes, an account of the author’s journey across South America by way of the 4, 500 mile-mountain chain, is as expansive and enthralling as the geography it covers. Beginning in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and finishing up in the heart of Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego, Andes masterfully details the history, art, geography, personalities, and politics that have defined and been given shape by life in the region. I recently spoke with Jacobs about his book and the art of writing on the road, Latin American politics, the legacy of Bruce Chatwin in Argentina, and what lies ahead for one of the truly great stylists of the modern travel memoir.

I was hoping we could begin by discussing what compelled you to undertake the arduous task of journeying across the entire length of South America’s Andean spine.

I was first drawn to the Andes by childhood tales of my English grandfather, a railway engineer who worked in Chile and Bolivia. When following in his footsteps to those countries, and experiencing the extraordinary contrasts between, say, the Atacama Desert and the ice fields of Patagonia, I thought how wonderful it would be to follow the whole length of the world’s longest mountain range, and see such an unparalleled range of extreme and spectacular landscapes. I also conceived the idea of following the mountains as if unraveling the course of a human life, beginning in the Tropics, where the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt had located the life force, and ending south of Tierra del Fuego, where Humboldt’s great pupil Darwin believed that life barely existed at all.

Talk a bit more if you would about Humboldt who serves, in many respects, as your loadstone throughout Andes.  What was his importance to you (and in general) and in what ways did his experiences in South America shaped your own?

Humboldt was certainly the guiding spirit behind the whole book. He inspired me in the same way as he inspired hundreds of other travellers in the 19th-century. Charles Darwin would probably not have taken up the offer of a job on the Beagle had it not been for a reading of Humboldt’s account of his South American travels. Nor would the great American artist Frederick Edwin Church have travelled to Ecuador to paint what are certainly some of the most ambitious landscape canvases in the history of art, notably “Heart of the Andes.” Humboldt was a pioneer in so many ways. He was the first great scientific popularizer, able to turn a book on the cosmos into one of the great nineteenth-century bestsellers. He was a pioneering ecologist who foresaw the damage to the planet caused by the felling of trees. He was an outstanding mountaineer, who, in climbing almost to the summit of Ecuador’s Chimborazo (then considered the highest mountain in the world),  climbed higher than any known human before him. He was an early supporter of indigenous rights, and was violently opposed to slavery. Above all, for a travel writer, Humboldt’s importance lies in his extraordinary ability to induce in the reader a sense of the wonder of nature. Writers like Christopher Isherwood and Paul Theroux have written funny books chronicling their grumpiness as travellers, with Theroux going even so far as to dismiss the Andes because he suffered continually from altitude sickness. But personally I prefer the relentless energy and enthusiasm of Humboldt. They kept me going throughout my hugely ambitious journey, and during the writing of the book. I began to see nature through Humboldt’s strangely innocent eyes, and to perceive as he did the “irrelevance of man in the face of the natural order.”

Despite the fact that roughly half of the Andean chain runs throughout Argentina and Chile, most of the book takes place in the north and central heartlands of the mountains with comparatively little about the Southern Cone.  Does this reflect your own geographical preferences, the exhaustion of a long journey, or something else?

In terms of the actual travelling I spent probably as much time in Argentina and Chile as I did in the rest of the Andes. But when it came to the actual writing I realized I was going to be well over length before even reaching the south! I love the southern Andes as much as I do the central and northern ones, and I was by no means exhausted when I got there. In fact I had reached that point in travelling when you feel you could continue forever. Similarly, in the writing, I had built up by then an impetus that was allowing me to write for up to eighteen hours a day. The book’s last one hundred pages were written in a frenzy of inspiration, and my own favorite section is from Mount Fitzroy southwards. I cut out an enormous part from the book’s first half, and could have cut even more in the interests of creating less of an imbalance. But ultimately the imbalance reflects my vision of the Andes as a developing human life. You begin slowly, thinking that you have all the time in the world, and then reach your middle years realizing that you still have so much to do and see but so relatively time to achieve this. The speed of the book’s last pages is intended also to convey the literal and metaphorical race to reach the continent’s southernmost tip before the winter sets in, making travel impossible.

I’m interested in picking your brain about politics, briefly. Andes, especially the first half, is very much wrapped up in the world of the Bolivarian revolution and its discontents, and yet the book is almost entirely apolitical. Is this a reflection of your own political worldview, or do you consciously remove your private political judgments and analysis form the narrative. And if so, why?

That’s an excellent question, and difficult concisely to answer. I am fascinated by South American politics, and travelled through the continent at a time of great political change, what with the recent advent of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, and the region’s general swing to the left. I am also highly conscious of how relatively little is known (in Europe at least) about the political situation there. However, I thought that to give a proper political assessment of each of the countries I went through would detract too greatly from the book’s principal theme—the impact of the Andes on travellers. It would also have made the book become rapidly outdated, and would have been much better done by serious political commentators such as Jon Lee Anderson. A long section on Chávez is included, as well as a chapter on Morales’ Bolivia because these touch on another of the book’s uniting threads—Bolívar’s vision of a united South America. For me Bolivar becomes an increasingly interesting figure the more he turns into a hero from a Shakespearian tragedy. Though the book is apolitical, it does in a sense reflect my disillusionment with politics. The last part of the book hopefully conveys an idea of grand ilusions and ideals coming to nothing. My interest in politics ultimately boils down to an interest in  individual case histories, such as that of the tragic young Ecuadorian who is betrayed by corrupt individuals in his desperate attempt to get a visa.

Turning to the more technical side of things, I was wondering if you’d share some about your process of travel writing.  One of the things that stands out to me about your experiences is that unlike, say, a Theroux, you’re constantly on the move and often on little sleep—touring by day, indulging in the nightlife after dark. How do you find time to write while on the road? Or do you not?

Though I have written books based on long stays in a place (i.e., The Factory of Light, which is about my adopted Spanish village of Frailes), I take the Stendhalian view that you either spend a day or two in a place or several years. Often, as with judgments of a person, your immediate impressions are the ones you go back to. If you get to know somewhere too well, your judgments can become too complex and confused. And someone such as Theroux seems to spend much of his time in a place reading books, or complaining how uninteresting somewhere is! I love intense short  stays when travelling, even if it’s always sad to be constantly moving on, especially after making friends. To make the most of somewhere you need to be constantly active which is why I never write when travelling (other than notes), and only use hotels for sleeping in. I always carry lots of books with me, but invariably never read. I’m either sightseeing, being with people, or absorbing every moment of a journey, whether listening to my fellow passengers, or else enjoying the changing landscapes. I am never, ever bored. I always write up a trip when I get back, when you have a better over-view of your experiences, and can see more clearly what might be interesting to others and what is not…Fortunately I have a good memory, and can mentally reconstruct for a long time afterwards every day of a journey, however long the journey.

Bruce Chatwin comes off particularly bad in Andes, having left behind in Argentina an awful reputation with the locals he encountered in Patagonia. You note, somewhat tongue and cheek, that Chatwin basically did what travel writers do: “exploit confidences, publish material without permission, misrepresent, exaggerate for literary effect, use people, and promise to stay in touch and then go away, never to be heard from again.” Is this really how you see yourself as a travel writer? If so, did the anger of the Argentines that had known Chatwin in any way affect your own reflections on how you approach the craft of traveloguing? Or is Chatwin’s work fundamentally at odds with your own?

First, of all, for the record, I’m a huge fan of Chatwin as a writer, and he had an impact on travel writing greater than anyone else of his generation. I love his effortless fusion of past and present, and his ability to transform the ordinary into the mythical and the magical (which has always been my ambition!). But the fact that he was an immensely original stylist doesn’t mean that he was either a particularly attractive person, or particularly original in what he had to say about  Patagonia (which in no way detracts from his greatness as a writer, just as the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca is in no way diminished as a poet by having a view of his native region heavily influenced by romantic stereotypes). I never met Chatwin, but I suspect that he was one of the many Englishmen who can be absolutely charming when it served his purpose, and not so endearing in his everyday treatment of people. What I certainly learned after Andes was published was that you can’t be in the slightest bit negative about him without incurring the wrath of fans of his, such as Chatwin’s excellent biographer Nicholas Shakespeare. This is very unfair, as I clearly stated that Chatwin’s failings were those of all travel writers, myself included. One of the great drawbacks of the genre is that you’re bound to offend someone, however hard you try not to. The anger of so many Argentines towards Chatwin did not affect me in the slightest, as I have seen exactly the same reaction to other writers in whose footsteps I have followed, for instance the Nobel-Prize Winning Spanish author of the classic Journey to the Alcarria, Camilo Jose Cela who is almost universally disliked in the region. My own books on Spain have earned me law suits and death threats, even though I write about people with a fundamental love for them. The irony of my style seems often misunderstood. However, I have to add that the villagers in my adopted Frailes took, in general, remarkably well to the recent publication in Spanish of The Factory of Light. People told me that they couldn’t complain about my portrayal of them because that was exactly what they were like. If only others were so tolerant and enlightened!

Your mention of Chatwin’s ability to turn the ordinary into the magical makes me think of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the world of Colombia more generally. I was intrigued by your experiences in the country: you entered with a certain amount of foreboding considering the country’s (now undeserved) reputation for lawlessness and insecurity, but by the time you left, I sensed that you were especially fond of it, perhaps more than the other countries on your itinerary (with Peru a close second). Is this accurate? And if so, what was so attractive to you about the place? If not, was there a place or region where you felt particularly at home, or fell in love with?

You’re absolutely right about Colombia. I went with apprehension, and fell in love with the country from the moment of crossing the frontier! I only regretted afterwards that I did not take greater risks, and visit the then more problematical parts of the Colombian Andes such as the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy, or do the overland journey from Cúcuta to Bogotá. Since that first trip I’ve been back to the country four times, and have gone almost everywhere. I spent two months in Colombia earlier this year, travelling the whole length of one of South America’s most important rivers, the Magdalena. I was researching my next book, provisionally titled The Robber of Memories, whose starting point is a chance meeting in Cartagena with García Márquez. It’s being modestly promoted as a cross between One Hundred Years of Solitude and Heart of Darkness! I certainly spent two of the best months of my travelling life doing the journey, even though I had a terrifying three day encounter with guerillas in the middle of the jungle (they were absolutely charming, and were keen that I should help them in their goal of promoting tourism to the region!). The appeal of the country? First of all the people, the friendliest in the world. Secondly, the place instantly reminded me of the Spain of my childhood, with its old-fashioned courtesies, hugely atmospheric colonial towns, and extraordinary hospitality towards foreigners. Thirdly, it’s a place that for me sums up the essence of South America, with some of the oldest ruins in the continent, some of the best preserved colonial towns, and every possible type of scenery, from desert to Amazonian jungle, to the Andean moorland. I’m convinced that it will soon become one of South America’s most important tourist destinations. Despite what happened to me on my last visit, safety is improving all the time.

Last fall Foreign Policy magazine ran an online forum of articles debating the current state of travel writing literature, with some writers pronouncing the genre the dead, others arguing that it is alive and well, and still others staking out territory somewhere in between. What’s your own feeling on the question? Do books like Eat, Pray, Love represent the decline of travel literature, or was there never a golden age as is sometimes pretended?

From 2008 to 2010 I was chairman of the only serious travel book award in Britain, the Dolman Travel Book Award. I had to read about eighty books a year, only about five of which were really worthwhile. But that doesn’t mean that travel literature is in a bad state. If you had to read eighty novels, you would probably come to a similar conclusion. People often look back to the so-called “golden age” of travel literature inspired by Bruce Chatwin—but that was essentially an invention of a group of friends at Granta magazine. I believe that travel writing today is as healthy/unhealthy as it has ever been. What has happened is that the good travel books tend now to cross genres. Some of the best travel writing of recent years has fallen into an indeterminate category between travel writing and reportage or memoir. There is also a current fashion in Britain for “nature writing,” headed by such interesting authors as Robert MacFarlane. Books such as Eat, Pray, Love are not favorites of mine, nor are “good life abroad” books, with their romantic, cliché-ridden evocations of charming Provencal peasants, and Tuscan olive farms. But there has always been a market for those books, and their success allows publishers to bring out more adventurous works. Finally, people often say that the internet will be the death of travel-writing. Access to a huge amount of information about a country obviously makes redundant that type of Victorian book full of statistics about a country’s commerce, politics etc. But good travel literature will be unaffected, because it does something a computer cannot do: give a poetic interpretation of reality.

Finally, what’s next? You mentioned in our earlier correspondence that you were working on a new book?  Any chance you’d be willing to pull the curtain back a bit and let us in on your upcoming projects?

My next book is provisionally titled The Robber of Memories. It’s going to be one of those hybrid travel books I mentioned—a mixture of a travel book tracing my journey up Colombia’s Magdalena river, from Barranquilla to the source in the Paramo de las Papas (where I had my ‘encounter’ with guerillas), and a book about memory and memory loss (my father died of Alzheimer’s and my 92-year-old mother is in an advanced state of dementia). The prologue centers on my chance meeting with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose rapidly fading memories of life are concentrated on the river. The bulk of the book takes the form of a journey by tug boat up the river, the boat eventually getting stuck on a sand bank, in the middle of territory still controlled by paramilitaries. On the way I enter Oliver Sacks territory by visiting some of the villages with the highest incidence of Early Onset Alzheimer’s in the world. A doctor who went to investigate the phenomenon got kidnapped, but then helped the kidnappers when one of their parents got affected by the disease. The ‘Robber of Memories’ is what they call the disease in rural Colombia.

That sounds fascinating. We’ll look forward to it.  Thanks so much for your time!

It’s been a pleasure.

Share on Facebook

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently opened an impressive and exhaustive retrospective of the art of Willem de Kooning (1904-1997).  Born in Rotterdam, the Dutch artist immigrated to the United States as a ship’s stowaway in 1926.  He gained notoriety and success in the New York galleries by the late 1940s and became intrinsically linked to the Abstract Expressionist movement.  Despite his enormous success, de Kooning’s work still remains less familiar to viewers today than the more celebrated works by Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko hanging alongside de Kooning in the MOMA’s permanent collection.  De Kooning has not received nearly as much exhibition attention as either Pollack or Rothko, and, in fact, the current show represents the first comprehensive, all-media retrospective on the artist to date. De Kooning was a prolific artist, who produced work over the course of seven full decades and as MOMA’s show proves, one that is more than worthy of a full retrospective. 

The greatest success of this show lies in its thorough, almost painstaking tracing of the artist’s progression from teenage apprentice to veteran artist..  The seven galleries, filled with over 200 paintings, sculptures and works on paper are divided into seven corresponding periods of de Kooning’s career. The galleries are organized in chronological order, allowing viewers to appreciate the clear changes and developments in the artist’s work over the course of his life.  His methods receive ample attention in the wall texts and labels and reveal a methodical and calculated approach, despite the often spontaneous appearance of the finished paintings.  These wall texts are less helpful, however, in helping the viewer get any sense of what might have been behind de Kooning’s drive to create works full of such intense agitation and anxiety. In tracing his long career, the only thing missing from this excellent show is a sense of de Kooning as a man and an intellect, of his identity beyond the canvas. 

As de Kooning once said, “I have to change to stay the same” and in fact this aptly defines the retrospective from start to finish. Each of the seven galleries attest to this drive to change, displaying works that fall into at least one (and sometimes several) of the artist’s favorite themes.  Images of women, landscapes, and varying degrees of abstraction seem to serve as guideposts in his lifelong quest to explore new artistic techniques.  It is only in the first gallery, representing the artist’s early career, where viewers will find images of still lifes and of men. These early explorations give way in the proceeding rooms to the aforementioned themes, which the artist visited and revisited for nearly forty years. 

The earliest work, a detailed still life in bright pigment was executed when de Kooning was only twelve years old.  This and other early work display his talent as well as his commercial art training; he served as an apprentice to a decorative art and design firm in Rotterdam during his teenage years.  In fact, de Kooning’s understanding of commercial art methods would help shape his own later artistic production. Though he utilized commercial techniques such as tracing and layered collage, he used those techniques in such innovative ways that the results were always more avant garde than Madison avenue. 

De Kooning produced a series of male figures from 1937 to 1944 but never returned to the subject again.  These figures reveal a sense of melancholy and agitation that would become increasingly magnified in his later exploration of female figures.  The artist often served as his own model for the male works, but intended them to represent the everyman and more specifically, the Depression-era everyman, who had become disheartened, downtrodden and alienated.  These works convey a real feeling of anxiety that continues to color much of the later works as well. 

The first gallery also reveals the artist’s initial explorations with total abstraction in a series of paintings dating to the late 1930s.  Influenced by the works of Picasso and Mondrian, whose paintings de Kooning had seen on display at MOMA, the works from this period show a marked shift away from the limits of figuration. These works, including Father, Mother, Sister, Brother (1937) nonetheless still retain a suggestion of the figure in their abstract forms.  Indeed, in these paintings de Kooning seems always to be walking the often fuzzy line between representation and abstraction, a practice he would continue throughout his long career. 

The following three galleries trace de Kooning’s career through the 1940s and 50s, charting his innovations in technique and his intense explorations of the female form, abstraction, and landscape.  The abstract works of this period are more nuanced and original, and it is clear that the artist was slowly developing his own style and moving away from the influence of giants like Picasso and Miró. His series of black and white abstract paintings, including the enigmatic Black Friday (1948) comprised the artist’s first solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948.  As the artist explained, he intended his abstract works to still contain “hints” of representation.  The paintings from this period are meant to function as a passing glimpse of something seen quickly. For de Kooning, abstraction is less about minimizing form than it is about adding an often layered and usually chaotic emotional depth to it. It is no surprise, then, that it was these works that really launched de Kooning’s reputation as one of the foremost and most influential artists in the circle of the Abstract Expressionists, and they represent a clear shift into new territory for the artist.

The true pinnacle of the entire exhibition, however, occurs at the halfway point with the impressive installation of the artist’s third series of women.  De Kooning began this series with Woman I, [HJ1] perhaps his most famous painting.  Begun in 1950, this work occupied de Kooning for two and a half years before he finally finished it in 1952.  He also executed five other paintings of women in this series, as well as dozens of preparatory works on paper.  The resulting series contains images of women portrayed in varying degrees of abstraction, flattened and at one with their colorful backgrounds.  The women, especially the figure in Woman I, appear distorted, grotesque and ferocious.  When these work were first exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery in the spring of 1953, they caused a considerable uproar. De Kooning was quickly labeled a misogynist and simultaneously derided for his return to the figure and retreat from abstraction, the hallmark of the current avant-garde.  Although the female figure is perhaps the most traditional subject in the history of art, de Kooning’s women are radically different than those created by, say, Titian and Rubens, whom the artist greatly admired.  Stylistically, these paintings are innovative in their merging of background and subject while maintaining a bright, wild color palette with some sense of visual order.  The chaotic, yet carefully planned execution of paint gives the works an added sense of anxiety.  And then, of course, there are those haunting, toothy grins on the faces of the women.  These works seem intentionally disturbing and yet viewers learn nothing in this show about de Kooning that might provide a clue as to how to interpret this series.  Although his two previous series of women paintings contained a decent amount of melancholy and angst, the third series takes this psychological state to a new level. The great mystery of de Kooning lies in these works and that makes them all the more fascinating.   

To say that the rest of this lengthy show could not compete with the first half would be a bit unfair. However, the stylistic nuances and evolving combinations of abstraction, figuration and landscape begin to blur together after having already been awed by roughly one hundred works of art, including the tour de force that is the aforementioned third series of women. Yet, de Kooning had another three decades of art left in him, and so, we press forward.  Fortunately, in the next gallery, de Kooning’s large, colorful “abstract parkway landscapes,” completed in 1956 and 1957 feel soothing in the simplicity of their wide brushstrokes and lack of figuration.  Critic Thomas Hess termed these works, “full arm sweeps” in reference to the broad brushstrokes that comprise the artist’s efforts to capture the roadways that lead into and out of Northeast cities.  His color-blurred canvases artfully convey the feeling of whizzing down a tree-lined highway, barely able to discern the shapes of the things passed by.   

De Kooning’s exploration of the shifting nature of abstraction continues through the remaining galleries.  In 1969, the artist began experimenting with sculpture for the first time, and over the next decade produced a range of small to large abstracted works.  These were modeled in clay and cast in bronze, giving them a unique appearance in their combination of modern sensibility and traditional medium.  While some of the works incorporate found objects, most are as inscrutable as his abstractions on canvas.

In the final gallery, visitors find de Kooning in the twilight of his career.  With his health beginning to deteriorate, the artist was forced to take a more minimalistic approach to his paintings.  F These beautiful works—pared down offerings compared to de Kooning’s earlier works—are the most serene of any of his paintings.  Here, ribbons of color float across large white canvasses, signaling the final innovative phase in de Kooning’s seventy-year quest to understand his own artistic vision while at the same moment staying true to it.  

de Kooning: A Retrospective is on view through January 9, 2012

Share on Facebook

In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò, or, the 120 Days of Sodom, was screened at Italian art houses just a few months after the controversial filmmaker was murdered. By that time, Pasolini had distinguished himself as one of the great filmmakers and cultural critics of post-WW2 Italy, using his films and novels as a medium for his critique of consumer capitalism and consumer culture. Salò, which portrays acts of unspeakable violence and brutality being enacted upon helpless teenagers by a wealthy and degenerate fascist officialdom, shocked and scandalized audiences everywhere. Since then, the film has become something of a cult phenomenon amongst devotees of vintage grind-house and exploitation films. However, what its fans and detractors fail to realize is that the film was just another installment of Pasolini’s ruthless and enraged attack against what he labeled “neo-capitalism” and “consumerist civilization.” It is this that makes Salò different from the average grind-house and exploitation film. Pasolini described himself as a Marxist, and indeed, was for a time, a member of the Italian Communist Party. Yet he held a cornucopia of unorthodox and contradictory political views, views which (along with his publicly avowed homosexuality) led him to be expelled from the ICP. What were his views, then? And how are they relevant for today? What’s more, did his prediction of the 60′s hippie counter-culture degenerating into an a-political conservatism, come true?

Pasolini was, in many respects, the first critic of mass consumerism. For him, consumerism, unlike, say, Italian fascism, or German Nazism, was able to carry out the “homologation” and “anthropological transformation” of  European man in a way that was never thought possible. This is because consumerism is tied to a hedonistic ideology, an ideology that teaches us that we do not have to, nor should we, delay our own personal individualistic gratifications. Paradoxically, however, by adhering to this new type of hedonism, one does not achieve, according to Pasolini, individuation.

Rather, by defining who you are by what you possess or what you wear, as well as by what others own and wear, one loses one’s individuality and sense of personal worth. And if there should happen to be any individual who refuses to conform to this scheme of things, and refuses to let herself be defined by whether or not she owns a Play Station 2, then that individual is looked upon as “weird,” or “abnormal”;  she is someone who doesn’t know that its “human nature” to buy and consume.

In short, for Pasolini consumerism was the new fascism, the new conformism. The fascism of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, at least, demanded that the individual sacrifice himself for the sake of the collectivity. In German National Socialism, the collectivity was represented by the German “race,” in Italian fascism, by the Italian nation. It was an ideology requiring some degree of asceticism and self-sacrifice.  Consumerism on the other hand, requires no sacrifice of the self, but rather invites a kind of self-indulgence. It is precisely this hedonistic element in consumerism that enables it to captivate the individual soul in a way that fascism was never able to do. (The infamous scenes of copraphagia  in Salò, in which the victims  and their ‘masters’  are served a gigantic meal of cooked  human feces, days old,  in a “Banquet of Shit,” were described by Pasolini as a critique of the processed and fast food industries, and of  mass production, which , according to him, produced  “useless refuse” that we then consume).

Everyone wears the same mass produced clothes; everyone buys the same mass produced furniture. In a gentrified, neo- liberal world, a world of gray skyscrapers and uniformed office workers,  a world where brand names like Prada and Gucci dominate the landscape of the city, and where reality T.V.  Has become the principal intellectual staple of the average American, Pasolini’s gloomy predictions take on a chilling reality. The French Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously implied that the youth of the 1960s were the children of Marx and Coca Cola. For Pasolini, they might, more appropriately, be considered the “children of Mussolini and Coca-Cola.”

Because Salò is often considered by most critics as Pasolini’s greatest film, it would be fitting to give a lengthy synopsis and history of the movie; especially since it is also the most virulent expression of his anti-consumerist views ever shown on the screen. The film is set in Italy in 1944, during the Republic of Salò, the Nazi and SS backed puppet regime of Benito Mussolini, which was established after his liberation from Allied captivity by Hitler. Whereas Mussolini had previously shared power with the Savoy monarchy and the Vatican, he was now, with the Nazis’ backing, enabled to create a true totalitarian dictatorship. This is probably why, in Pasolini’s writings, the Salò Republic is often used as a metaphor for absolute tyranny.

Four fascist officials: a duke, a bishop, the president of the local court, and a banker—the very pillars of bourgeois respectability and morality—kidnap 18 teenagers and bring them to a deserted villa near Marzabotto, in Northern Italy. (Marzabotto was, in fact, a town that was razed to the ground by the Germans in 1944 in retaliation for the murder of SS officers by Italian partisans.)  They also hire four middle-aged prostitutes whose job it is to tell arousing stories of sexual acts, which will “inflame the passions.” They then begin to torture, rape, and abuse the youngsters for three months, before finally killing them by means of mutilation, while the four officials look on at the executions through binoculars.  Among the brutal tortures and humiliations the young men and women are subjected to are: being forced to eat food laced with nails and shards of glass, being raped, having to crawl on all fours on a leash, and barking like dogs, being forced to eat and drink their own and each other’s’ feces and urine, licking the four officials’ boots, and finally, being mutilated by scalping, having their tongues cut out, etc. The film, parodying Dante’s Divine Comedy, is divided into four parts, or “circles”: The Ante-Chamber to Hell, The Circle of Manias, The Circle of Shit, and The Circle of Blood. The brutality that is shown in the movie is so extreme that it sometimes descends into the ludicrous and, in a sick way, the comic.

Salò is often looked upon as a modern transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, or, The School of the Libertines. And it is. Whereas de Sade set his novel in Central Europe during the Thirty Years War, Pasolini has the events of his film take place in Fascist Italy, during the Second World War. Yet there is more to the film than just the switching of historical periods, which nevertheless was a stroke of genius. De Sades’s novel, which he wrote during his imprisonment in the Bastille in 1789, was only discovered and published in 1905. Even though he was born into the French aristocracy, de Sade was very critical of the moral degeneracy and corruption of that class, and, when the French Revolution broke out, he immediately joined the revolutionaries. Indeed, The 120 Days of Sodom was meant to be a scathing critique of the degeneracy of the aristocracy, of the silliness of their views on property rights, and an affirmation of the Enlightenment view of man’s agency trumping the Divine Will.

In Salò, Pasolini is attempting to accomplish something very similar. In one of his last interviews, Pasolini stated that by coming up with the idea of setting de Sade’s novel in the time of the Salò Republic, he finally had a real insight into the “true choreography of Fascism.” In fact, Pasolini himself lived in Salò in his early twenties.  He personally witnessed horrible acts of brutality committed against the local population by the Fascists and the S.S., particularly against the region’s Jewish inhabitants (which, before the German invasion of Italy, had always been protected by Mussolini). Pasolini, then, had a first-hand experience with the brutality of fascism.

Like de Sade, Pasolini wanted to expose the moral degeneracy of a particular class (the Italian bourgeoisie), and its collaboration with fascism. However, unlike most Italian Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci who saw fascism as a “progressive” phenomenon because it supposedly drew segments of the proletariat and petty bourgeoisie into power, Pasolini had a much more radical viewpoint. In his view, fascism is all about the transformation of the human body into an object, a commodity. Many of his critics accused Pasolini of wanting to make just another exploitation film, since the only connection Salò has to fascism is in its setting. Oppression, torture, the dehumanization of people that are looked upon as “subhuman”-all of that is in Salò.  And what was fascism, but the systematic oppression, degradation, and torture of humanity? The Nietzsche and de Sade-quoting-“masters” in the film treat their victims as things, as objects to use and abuse for their pleasure; they are things to be used, ”consumed,” and destroyed. And it was this objectification of the body that Pasolini saw as the ultimate connection between fascism and consumerism. For fascism and consumerism are not tied to each other just by the fact that they force the individual to conform to an ideology and mode of behavior. The ultimate connection between the two is the process of objectification; that just as fascism attempted to turn its victims and their bodies into dehumanized objects, mass-consumerism , in a less obvious, but even more insidious way, turns the individual into a soulless thing, always eager to conform.

It was his views on the sub-proletariat, or, as many liberal and conservative sociologists today like to call them,  “the underclass,” that scandalized Pasolini’s fellow Communists the most.  He (correctly) viewed the working class with suspicion, as capable of being infected with the middle-class mores of the Italian bourgeoisie. The real opponent of bourgeois hegemony, according to Pasolini, was the peasant and the ragazzo di vita (young man of life), the young, unemployed hustler of the Roman borgate (slums), projects, and shantytowns. These were the people who Pasolini described to the Italian journalist Furio Colombo, in his last interview, as being “poor and real people who struggled to defeat the landlord without becoming that landlord.” According to him, “Since they were excluded from everything, they remained uncolonized”). These were people who refused to accept bourgeois, middle-class values, who refused to accept the white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant work ethic. These were people who fought against their oppressors, without wanting to become like their oppressors. Like Richard Wright, who also came to the same conclusion in his struggles with the American Communist Party, Pasolini saw that what the bourgeoisie should fear the most are not the workers, but rather those “abnormal” and “bohemian” types who refuse to accept its values, norms, and work ethic.

Of course, this did not sit well with most orthodox Marxists. Pasolini’s almost Weberian emphasis on  social attitudes and lifestyle instead of on class, his love for the peasant, and his romantic idealization of the lumpenproletariat, as well as his distrust of the laboring classes, was a complete reversal of the schema presented by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. This view of his also runs counter to the goal of every social worker, anthropologist, and sociologist on the planet.  Both the liberal and the conservative sociologist view the existence of the urban underclass as a problem that should be solved. For the conservative, the answer is less government dependency. For the liberal, the answer is for government programs for the alleviation of poverty. Pasolini sees the problem those who study the city have. In his 1958 article, The Shantytowns of Rome, he writes, “Ethnologists recognize the problem (of the underclass), the difficulty of conceiving an irrational state within a rational state in such a way that it does not seem gratuitous and schematic.”

Yet he will have none of their solutions.  For him, the underclass should stay, for it is the only thing standing between the modern city and the process of total gentrification. In Italy, this process of gentrification is described by Pasolini in a 1973 interview as a “process of acculturation, of the transformation of particular and marginal cultures into a centralized culture that homogenizes everything” and that “occurred more or less simultaneously all over Italy.” And in his 1958 article, The City’s True Face, he describes the Roman underclass’s  “acculturation” as an attempt to “mutate the deep mix of anarchy and common sense of these people into a kind of American -style indifference, a ‘standardized’ type, repeated obsessively, hundreds of thousands of times,”

Pasolini’s  romantic love for the underclass, an underclass vibrant and healthy and uncorrupted by middle-class values, as well as his sympathy foe society’s outcasts, were the two ideas that dominated his literary and cinematic works. These ideas are depicted in almost every single one of his films. His first film, Accatone (Street Urchins), which came out in the 1950s was a romantic, homo-erotic glorification of the young hustlers and hoodlums of the Roman borgate. Indeed, so realistic were the scenes in the film, that there were cries for censorship, particularly from the Christian Democrats, the  CIA-backed center-right party that ruled Italy, with very few interludes, from 1946 to the late 1970s, and which, in Pasolini’s view, was mainly responsible for  destroying Italy’s peasant culture in the name of “economic development.” His second film, Ricotta Cheese, depicted a semi-proletarian who is chosen to play Christ in a passion play, and who literally dies on the cross after having eaten some bad ricotta cheese. In The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, which, of all his films, is the most widely seen in the United States,  Pasolini portrays Christ, not as the gentle Good Shepherd found in the Gospels, but rather, as an angry, dedicated revolutionary who cares about the plight of the poor and is ultimately crucified  by the governing elites.

His so-called “Trilogy of Life” films—The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights—were immensely popular and became huge hits. In fact, it was the immense popularity of these films that, at least in part, prompted Pasolini to make Salò; for one of his greatest fears was that, in producing popular entertainment for the masses, he was helping to keep them in their condition of oppression; hence the shocking brutality of Salo. Unlike Chaucer or Boccaccio, though, who centered their tales on the heroic escapades and sexual adventures of the Italian and English aristocracy, Pasolini, in his film adaptations of their stories, like a true socialist, took a different tack.  In his versions of the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, the action is centered on the moral struggles waged by a hardy, but oppressed, peasantry, in their conflict with a dissolute aristocracy. In Porcile (Pigsty), two social outcast—a homosexual and a coprophiliac—find themselves in their fight against a society that oppresses them and views them as outsiders. And in Torema, (Theorem), which some critics say is his greatest film, we see a middle-class Italian family take in a stranger as a lodger. The “lodger” is really a bi-sexual extra-terrestrial who winds up seducing the mother, father, and the teenage son, and ultimately destroys their bourgeois susceptibilities. There is a constant theme, running like red thread, throughout almost all of Pasolini’s films. The theme of the young ragazzo and street hustler, and the social outcast and outsider who is oppressed by society and its “respectable” value—these twin loves of Pasolini’s are the very heart and soul of his films.

It is this concept of an oppositional subculture being co-opted by the culture of the establishment, that led Pasolini to formulate his critique of the beatnik and hippie counter-culture of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. For Pasolini, the hippie was the quintessential symbol of acculturation and cultural co-optation. At first glance, the hippie represented the very apex of cultural resistance to the bourgeoisie. The long hair, the drug use, the sexual promiscuity—all these things are the antithesis of bourgeois respectability. The hippie chooses a lifestyle that is contrary to the typical middle class norm. And it is precisely this emphasis on personal choice, on lifestyle, that Pasolini sees as the chief danger in the hippie’s world outlook. Many of the flower children of the 60s later became conservative. They kept the weed, but not the values. Pasolini saw that there was something inherent in the hippie counter-culture that led it, in an almost deterministic fashion, to become subsumed by the dominant establishment ideology. Why? Because of the inherent, hedonistic, consumerist character of the worldview of the hippie. The hippie of the 1960s, (who usually came from a middle-class background) emphasized the importance of the freedom to choose one’s lifestyle, one’s sexual orientation, one’s style of clothing, etc. It is a very personalized, customized ideology, an ideology that was co-opted in the late 1970s and early 80s, by the attempt of neoliberals to portray capitalism as a post-modernist utopia, where everyone is free to choose his own personal brand or style. Ultimately, it degenerated into an a-political and even anti-political, worldview. In his brilliant essay, The Hippie’s Speech, written in 1973, Pasolini commented on the middle-class snobbery of the hippie, and of the possibility of his being snatched up by a consumerist, and even fascist, culture. According to Pasolini:

That long hair (of the hippie) was hinting at right- wing ‘stuff’. The cycle is concluded. The subculture in power absorbed the subculture that was in opposition and took possession  of it with devilish ability, and passionately made of it a fashion that, if we cannot  really call it fascist in the classic sense of the word, is after all extremely right- wing….Now the long hair is saying, in its inarticulate and obsessed  language of non-verbal signs, in its vandal symbolism, the ‘things’ of T.V. and commercials, where it is now inconceivable to foresee a young person without long hair, something that nowadays would be a scandal for the power in charge….Nowadays no one could ever distinguish, from the physical presence, a revolutionary from a provocateur. Left and Right have physically merged.

In the early part of the century, one knew who was a fascist and who was not. The fascist had either a shaven head or a crew cut, he wore a black or brown uniform and armband, and raised his hand in the Roman salute. Now, one can have a short haircut, a clean shaven chin, and look like a “square,” and be on the Left, and a long-haired hipster can be on the Right, all as a result of a-political hedonism.

Pasolini may have been an unorthodox Marxist, but his views shocked those of the Left and the Right. His advocacy of what Furio Colombo called “a sort of magical paleo-Catholic and neo-Chinese monasticism” may sound a little strange, but his ruthless criticisms of a new, heartless capitalism that stultifies the intellectual life of modern man with shiny baubles, is as relevant today as when he began his crusade in what was then still an industrially backward nation. In an age of reality shows, of Entourage and America’s Next Top Model, Pasolini’s gloomy message should be hearkened to. And in a  United States with the largest underclass in the world and one of the highest poverty rates in the Western hemisphere, Pasolini’s prediction that “The core of the struggle for the Third World revolution is really America,” should be taken seriously.

So why is Pasolini’s social philosophy still relevant? Why should we read his essays and poems now, at this particular historical junction? We are living in an era of neoliberal capitalism; a capitalism that is trying to stamp out any form of cultural and political resistance. It is an insidious form of capitalism that tries to dull us with Gucci hand-bags and reality T.V. shows. By remembering Pasolini and his message, we can learn that what the bourgeois fears the most are oppositional cultural norms, rather than mass strikes. Let us hope his message will be remembered for as long as the bourgeoisie remains with us.

Share on Facebook

Adjunct Healthcare under Attack—PSC Members fight back

The start of the new academic year could mark the beginning of an adjunct healthcare bloodbath if the rising cost of insurance, CUNY’s “meh” attitude, and the city’s blind eye to the welfare of adjuncts aren’t successfully confronted. For the time being, the PSC has been successfully been pushing back against the potential loss of health care for more than 1,700 CUNY adjuncts, but there is still plenty of work ahead

At its heart, the threat to adjunct health care is simple. At the very moment that the CUNY system develops an increasing dependency on adjunct labor, it has scaled back its fiscal commitments to part-time laborers, most glaringly in the case of healthcare coverage.  At current, CUNY only contributes about 20 percent of the total cost of adjunct health care through contributions to the PSC Welfare Fund, a cost which has jumped dramatically in recent years. As the basic health insurance premium has more than doubled in the last eight years—from $3,461 per member in 2003 to an incredible $8,061 in the current year—the amount that CUNY contributes has actually decreased almost $1,000, from $2,583 in 2003 to $1,675 in 2011.

The attempt to force CUNY to take a greater share of responsibility in devising a solution will be an uphill battle, however. While university brass have recently indicated a willingness to work with the union to achieve a structural solution to the problem of rising healthcare costs and the startling increases in the part-time labor pool, its actions have not been as encouraging. In the past decade, PSC reps have asked CUNY to work with them on a compromise solution that will shift some of the fiscal responsibility from the Welfare Fund to the university system and away from the individual laborers whom CUNY has come to rely upon.

CUNY, however, says that in fact it has not underfunded adjunct health insurance but instead has lived up to its obligations as outlined by past agreements with the union. As Pamela Silverblatt, The Vice Chancellor for Labor Affairs argues, “the union has raised the issue of health benefits for adjuncts in prior rounds of collective bargaining, and it has consistently agreed to settle its collective bargaining agreements at the specified funding levels. Despite the fact that the costs have escalated—by the Welfare Fund’s estimates adjunct health insurance will cost about $14 million in the upcoming year—the PSC has over many years and several rounds of bargaining agreed to the specified contributions to the Welfare Fund, and the University has consistently made the mutually agreed-upon payments.”

The Union, for its part, argues that Silverblatt’s response misrepresents the real issue, when she claims that CUNY has not underfunded adjunct health insurance.

“While CUNY has met its contractual funding obligation to the Welfare Fund, that is not the issue. The real issue is that CUNY, as the employer, has consistently resisted its responsibility to provide adequate, ongoing funding for adjunct health insurance for its eligible adjunct employees. Adjunct health insurance costs will grow to $14 million this year; yet CUNY will provide only $2.8 million of this cost. The union’s position is that we should work together to solve the real problem, and we urge the University to join us in this effort.”

Thus, CUNY adjuncts find themselves once again in the unenviable position of being stuck between two organizations, neither of which seems fully-committed to protecting their interests. It is imperative, therefore, that adjuncts put pressure on the PSC not only to defend the welfare fund, but to also push for meaningful advances in the extension of part-time employee protections and benefits, including permanent and stable health insurance for all adjuncts, significant wage increases, and real job security. What pressure organized adjuncts have placed on the union leadership has paid off.

On September 26, hundreds of adjuncts and other, vocal and supportive members of the PSC hit the pavement out in front of the Board of Trustees headquarters to protest the dismal state of health coverage for part-time labor. The protest was another spirited reminder that adjuncts and their supporters won’t take the deteriorating conditions of their professional, and therefore their personal, lives sitting down.

Those gathered received a small treat for their labors and willingness to come out and stand united behind part-time claims for equal treatment.  Barbara Bowen, president of the PSC, announced to the crowd (and, in fact, made the crowd repeat the announcement in unison) that Chancellor Matthew Goldstein had assured her that the board had requested that Albany provide full and permanent healthcare coverage for all adjuncts in the CUNY system.

While it has taken huge amounts of effort to get the Board to simply make a request of Governor Andrew Cuomo which in all likelihood will be laughed out of Albany, if we look at the numbers, the idea of full and permanent healthcare for part-timers isn’t so nuts. Said one HEO at the protest, “New York City has a budget of $66 billion and the state has a budget of $132 billion. $14 million for adjunct insurance is chump change in the bigger scope of things.” Asked why he was coming out for adjunct rights, he expressed solidarity, as well as a touch of healthy, self-interested pragmatism. “This is an assault on labor, and we feel that if they are coming for the adjuncts in the morning they will come for [the rest of us] at night.”

In Solidarity: LIU Faculty Hit the Streets to Protest Austerity

As CUNY campuses begin to organize for another academic year under the pressures of fiscal crisis, other local faculty unions are embroiled in their own fight against the administrative squeeze on labor.  On September 7, hundreds of faculty and staff at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University (LIU), as well as a healthy showing of PSC representatives, took to the streets to protest a ten-year wage freeze and dwindling benefit packages.

The protests came a day after negotiations between LIU and the faculty union, the Long Island University Faculty Federation—an affiliate of the AFT/NYSUT—broke down after the administration’s latest crappy offer was rejected by union representatives.  Reportedly, the university offered its part- and full-time staff a five-year deal where the wage freeze would remain intact for the first three years, followed by a paltry 2 percent raise in each the final two years.

The strike, which lasted for roughly a week, shut down 95 percent of the college’s classes, effectively bringing university life to a halt.  In the end, administrators returned to the table with a slightly better offer that was accepted by the striking workers. The new plan calls for a freeze in the first year of the new contract, a 1 percent base pay raise in the second, a 1.5 percent increase during the third, and then a 2 percent increase in the final two years of the deal. In addition, faculty members  were promised additional payments in the final four years of the contract, between half a percent and 2 percent if the university tuition revenues increase by more than 3 percent.

The Clarion reports other gains as well.  “The contract has some significant other gains—including the first ever paid office hour for LIU’s adjunct faculty: one paid office hour for those who teach more than nine contact hours per semester.”  On top of this, LIU has promised to make matching contributions to adjunct pensions for the first time ever. The union scored another significant victory by forcing a cap on the number of non-tenure track appointments to the university, which are no longer allowed to exceed more than 15 percent of the total full-time faculty lines.

File Under “Sorry, What?!?”: Anonymous Email Gets Department Chair Fired

An anonymous email sent to Medgar Evers College President William Pollard alleging inappropriate sexual relations between a faculty member and students led to the knee-jerk firing of Zulema Blair, chair of the school’s public administration department.  The unsigned email, sent from a Yahoo! account belonging to “DisgruntledSue” cuts right to the chase, accusing Blair of having sex with students, having a student’s baby, and being a member of the “elite Medgar Staff Slut List…You can’t turn a whore into a housewife,” the email concludes, “but you can definitely turn one into a Dean.”

Apparently Pollard was convinced by this reasoning. Two weeks after the email was sent, Pollard revoked the college’s tenure-track offer to Blair and axed her shortly thereafter. CUNY refused to comment on the situation, and would not answer inquiries as to whether an official investigation had been launched to determine the validity, or lack thereof, of the claims leveled in the anonymous message.

For her part, Blair is irate. “This e-mail is slander. It’s horrific, and I want whoever sent this out to be punished,” Blair told the New York Post. “This is character assassination. This does not speak to any work or any of my accomplishments at Medgar Evers College.” Indeed, New York State Senator Eric Adams recently honored Blair with public recognition of her contributions to academia and society more broadly. “Her academic activities spill out into the community, where she chairs the Black Brooklyn Empowerment Coalition, an organization committed to the political, economic, and social empowerment of Brooklyn residents of African descent,” Adams recently wrote. “Her role within this organization has motivated her to work collaboratively with other area leaders to empower members of the Central Brooklyn community via voter registration drives, political campaigns, education of formerly incarcerated individuals with respect to their voting rights, and more.”

The situation has not been resolved as the GC Advocate goes to press.  Meanwhile, Blair’s attorneys have filed suit to force Yahoo! To disclose the identity of the person registered as “DisgruntledSue,” an action the email provider has thus far refused. It doesn’t take a genius, or even an academic labor activist, to draw some fairly obvious conclusions about what may likely be in play.  According to Blair’s lawyer, the context is clear. “The obvious conclusion according to the papers that were filed is that the e-mail was a motivating factor not to grant her tenure.” Thus, the identity of the sender could offer a critical clue in understanding whether this is really about Blair’s supposed relationships with students, or whether a much pettier and cutthroat motivation may lurking behind the accusations, a motivation that has nothing to do with keeping students safe.

Brooklyn College Faculty Condemn NYPD Spying on CUNY Campuses

By now you’ve likely heard that the New York Police Department has been making a regular habit of spying on—you guessed it!—Muslim students across various CUNY colleges and beyond in recent months.  The story was first broken by veteran police investigative reporter Leonard Levitt at the start of September. According to Levitt, “The New York City Police Department has been spying on hundreds of Muslim mosques, schools, businesses, student groups, non-governmental organizations and individuals [targeting] virtually every level of Muslim life in New York City, according to a trove of pages of Intelligence Division documents.”

Of particular note to the CUNY community, Levitt revealed that “The NYPD has also been monitoring Muslim student associations at seven local colleges: City, Baruch, Hunter, Queens, LaGuardia, St. John’s and Brooklyn. The department calls the two student groups at Brooklyn and Baruch colleges “of concern” and has sent undercover detectives to spy on them, the documents reveal.” On top of that, a “lecturer” at Brooklyn College was identified as a “person of interest,” one of forty-two targeted around the city.

In response, faculty at Brooklyn drafted and passed a resolution condemning the NYPD actions, arguing that the snooping operation violated students and faculty rights and academic freedom more broadly. “The use of undercover police agents and the cultivation of police informers on campus has a chilling effect on the intellectual freedom necessary for a vibrant academic community,” the resolution stated.

The Faculty Council passed the resolution unanimously on September 13 after learning that undercover police officers were attending classes and meetings of campus organizations while pretending to be students. Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn and author of the resolution told the Associated Press that “That’s what’s so troubling here: this was a giant fishing expedition,” an accusation the NYPD denies. “That seemed to be really beyond the pale of acceptable behavior, especially on a college campus,” Said Vitale. And it also may be against the law.  As it turns out, the spying was part of a CIA-sponsored endeavor to collect domestic intelligence on possible threats to national security, efforts that very well may violate laws that bar the agency from spying in the United States.

Share on Facebook

In many respects, 2011 has been marked as much by the mayhem of nature as it has by the upheavals of men.  While challenges to political authority have captured the imaginations of millions and produced exciting tremors of revolution across the continents, Mother Nature’s increasingly ferocious response to the heavy environmental footprint of industrial production will likely be judged the most profound source of social change around the world in the years to come.

From the Japanese tsunami, which triggered the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, and the extreme drought that currently threatens the lives of millions in the Eastern Horn of Africa, to the wildfires, hurricanes, and periodic flooding that have decimated both coasts of the richest country in the world, anthropogenic climate change is increasingly—and undeniably—at the core of politics and society everywhere in the world.

Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti’s excellent new book examining the intersections between climate change, neoliberal economic policy and the spread of political violence, bracingly argues that the convergence of these threats to international security has set our world along a course that will result in a broken planet conditioned by catastrophe, conflict and xenophobic distrust. That is, unless meaningful action is taken immediately to reorient international relations away from this disastrous trajectory.

I recently spoke with Parenti — who has for several years been a visiting scholar at the CUNY Center for Place, Culture and Politics and is currently visiting professor of sociology at Brooklyn College –about his book, the future of climate wars, failures of leadership in Washington and at the UN to combat environmental degradation, and what can be done to avoid a world driven by the politics of natural catastrophe and the ethics of the armed lifeboat.

I wanted to begin by briefly touching on the book’s title and, more importantly, discussing the theoretical concept that largely gives shape to the book’s narrative arc: what you refer to as the “catastrophic convergence.” Can you give us a sense of what you mean by each and talk about how they informed your research and analysis?

The “tropic of chaos” is less important than the “catastrophic convergence.” The tropic of chaos is more of a play on words that refers to the conditions in the Global South which is that belt of post-colonial, underdeveloped, over-exploited states that mostly lay between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. So, it’s sort of a name for that region of the world.

The “catastrophic convergence” is the driving thesis of the book, the argument that climate change doesn’t just look like tornadoes, floods, and droughts.  It also looks like religious violence, ethnic pogroms, civil war, state failure, mass migration, counterinsurgency and anti-immigrant border militarization.  And so, climate change rarely works on its own.  Usually, it arrives in the Global South on a stage preset for crisis.  The forces that have preset that stage are militarism, and radical free-market restructuring—neoliberalism. Cold War militarism, and now the War on Terror, have flooded the Global South with cheap weapons and men trained in the arts of assassination and interrogation, smuggling, small unit attacks and terrorism.  Neoliberalism has created increased poverty, increased inequality and a tattered and stressed social fabric.  As a result, it leads to less social solidarity, it damages and degrades traditional economies and makes more populations more vulnerable to sudden weather shocks, extreme climatic events like drought and flooding, which are due to anthropogenic climate change kicking in hard. And it is combining with these two preexisting crises—militarism and inequality and poverty—and the three of them are meeting in this catastrophic convergence and articulating themselves as increased violence. That can be religious violence, ethnic violence, sometimes class-based violence. Sometimes this is expressed as chaos and relative or outright state failure.

But in the Global North, the catastrophic convergence presents itself as a renewed emphasis on building-up the incipient police state that exists in many western European countries as well as the United States. So, we now have a reengagement with the discourse around border militarization, a reanimation of the xenophobic discourse that goes with those policies which are increasingly articulated in environmental terms—there’s an environmental crisis; there’s not enough to go around; immigrants need to be rounded up; everybody needs to sacrifice some civil liberties; the border needs to be militarized. If climate change pushes chaos and state failure in the Global South, it creates authoritarian state hardening in the Global North, at least in its earliest stages.

You offer compelling evidence that while the American popular discourse is largely primitive and backwards when it comes to the politics of climate change, the United States military sees the challenges very clearly and informs to a great degree its doctrine on counter-insurgency. You argue that this gives life to “the politics of the armed life boat.”  Can you talk more about how the US military is responding to climate threats, and what you understand to be the prospects for survival in the armed life boat?

The militarized response in the United States takes place in the military, but also at the state level in the development of a green xenophobia.  They aren’t necessarily connected, but they fundamentally produce the same thing, which is a hardening of state policy.  The military—to its credit—takes climate science very seriously.  It does not question the validity of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which is the last one to be published, the one that was attacked because it had a few footnotes which were wrong.  And they were wrong. There was stupid, arrogant stuff around those errors, but the errors and their correction in no way change the conclusions of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report.  The military takes the report seriously unlike, say, the Republican leadership in the House or many other elements of the American political class.

The military runs scenarios of what the future will bring.  What they see is not so much an increase in conventional warfare between states as they do an increase in humanitarian crisis, civil war, banditry, religious wars, state breakdown.  And they realize that the armed forces will be called upon to respond with various forms of low-intensity conflict: counter-insurgency, direct intervention, humanitarian intervention, shoring-up allied states, as well as increased training and advisory roles in these conflicts.  The future for them is essentially one of open-ended counterinsurgency on a global scale as articulated through these various reports, some of them public, some of them secret.

In terms of the ethics of the armed life boat, which would seek to manage this crisis of a planet in decline, and manage it through the use of force, the examples of that are found on right-wing talk radio, which calls for expelling immigrants, or in people like Deborah Walker, who I discuss in the book. Walker describes herself as a northern Californian environmentalist. She’s also an anti-immigrant xenophobe and a racist.  And then there’s the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)—which I didn’t address in the book because I didn’t know about it; it was only exposed after the book was published—FAIR—the original anti-immigrant lobby group associated with Garrett Hardin and others—started a front group called Progressives for Immigration Reform that was seeking to reach out to environmentalists and progressives with a message of excluding immigrants, talking about the carrying capacity of the country and making the case that immigrants, essentially, should be repressed.

These are the current features of this state hardening. One can imagine how this project of border militarization and planetary management through counterinsurgency and counterterrorism could build around it a kind of paranoid, frightened, xenophobic consent among more and more Americans. And that would be the politics of the armed life boat: the idea that we have ours, the world is ending, and we need to hold on for as long as we can through the force of arms. The military—again to its credit—does not think this is a good long-term plan. They always say that this stuff has to be dealt with through the reduction of carbon emissions. Otherwise, we are going to hit all the tipping points climatologically which will lead to self-compounding climate change and the unleashing of such radical transformations in weather patterns that it will be very hard for civilization to hold on.  Radically rising sea levels and the massive desertification of the grain baskets of the world, among other problems, will make it very hard for even the most developed economies to survive. That’s what scientists predict and project if we continue with business-as-usual, which is burning fossil fuels.

Let’s talk about water for a moment, a point of hope for some environmentalists insofar as it seems to be one of the few things that states have a interest in securing and a resource around which even antagonists—such as India and Pakistan—can cooperate.  You take on a variety of this argument, that “water is rational,” when it comes to something like the Indus Water Treaty, and question its long-term viability. Talk about where things currently stand, and what you see as the prospects for the treaty’s continuing functioning in the future?

The Indus water treaty is remarkable insofar as it has worked for as long as it has. It was signed in 1960, negotiated in 1959, but it is fraying in part because climate change planners and elites in each country are very much aware that water resources are going to be increasingly scarce.  So India is building lots of dams and canals on its side of the border and claims that it is not violating the treaty, that it has the right to use the water under the treaty—which it does—as long as it doesn’t diminish the flow.  But then Pakistan argues that there is diminished flow which contributes to their suspicion of India, they believe that India is not simply impounding the water but that they are siphoning it off. And increasingly we witness this entering the discourse of the radical religious right in Pakistan, the asymmetrical assets that have been cultivated by Pakistani intelligence like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jama’at-ud-Da’wah which recently made statements about India’s “water terrorism” and how water must flow or else blood will. So the issue is becoming more intense.

As and to the question of whether or not it can be maintained, that’s an open question in part because the threat of climate change is suddenly part of the equation but also because there’s just horrendously bad management of the agreement, in Pakistan especially, where there is very little productive adaptation.  I wrote a piece in The Nation recently about just this.  The core of any climate adaptation in Pakistan would be social justice and land reform. No elites in Pakistan are willing to consider this, however, nor do aid agencies make this a condition of development aid, and the United States government doesn’t want to talk about.  There is a tradition of progressive movements in Pakistan but they have suffered tremendous repression and their demands for economic redistribution go unanswered. As a result, there has been no movement on the issue—even after the recent horrendous flooding—towards land redistribution and social justice, out of which might have come some better water management strategies, not to mention better use of the land.

In terms of what I criticize in the book was not the treaty itself, but instead what I thought was sort of a silly article that tried to explain why the treaty works between these two belligerents that have fought four wars, and yet the treaty works. The article argues that it is water rational which to me seems completely tautological. The real question is “why is it rational”? That’s the question, not a conclusion. Why is this rational as opposed to it being rational, for example, for India to annihilate Pakistan by just damming all the rivers?  And I suggest a few answers that I think are rather obvious, including the fact that that would have been simply too extreme. India has the upper hand but the international political atmosphere is such that it would not allow that kind of action.  Also, Pakistan has backing from the United States.  But as things continue to unravel in the future that could be a possibility especially if India diverts more and more water from Pakistan and Pakistan becomes more and more desperate and lashes out, if not conventionally with military force then with their asymmetrical assets, i.e. terrorism, in both India and Afghanistan.

The ability for the world to mitigate against the worst effects of climate change will largely depend on multilateral efforts at containing the damage.  The United Nations has traditionally been the center of gravity for this purpose and yet it’s largely been a failure: Copenhagen was a disaster, and Cancun only cleaned up some of the mess. Among other problems, the Secretary-General has been almost entirely absent as a force in these proceedings, and as you point out, the United States, the necessary prime mover in all of this, hasn’t assumed leadership on the issue.  Why is that, do you think?  Can you talk about how you view the Barack Obama administration’s record on the environment thus far, and what you think can be done to reorient Washington to more productive action?

The way you framed it is correct.  The United States has played a non-productive role, a destructive role. It has not taken the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations seriously and as a result they have broken down. We are the largest economy in the world and until recently we were the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world before China overtook us. The world looks to the United States for leadership but US actions, especially at Copenhagen, were really depressing. As a result those talks fell apart,  Though the process limps on towards its next round of negotiations in Durban South Africa.

What will change the US position? Protest, clearly. There has to be a movement that forces the Obama administration to do this. The Obama administration is proving itself to be very right-wing on many issues, including this one.  It just hasn’t been good on climate even as the majority of people who elected him take climate change very seriously and care deeply about the issue.  And so, I think there needs to be a movement to pressure him. There are campaigns underway that can do just that.  For instance, there is Beyond Coal, a big campaign sponsored by the Sierra Club under the leadership of Michael Brune, and the work that Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network and the direct action group Radical Action for Mountain People Survival and long struggling local groups like the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition are doing to stop mountain top removal coal mining and coal plant production. Using everything from direct action to lawsuits and lobbying this array of groups has helped the construction of about 130 coal plants.

So, there are campaigns like the fight against coal that people should get involved with. There’s also the actions that were taken in August to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline that would run Canadian tar sands  slurry through the United States and  down to the Gulf  final refining and  export, where people committed acts of civil disobedience in Washington, DC.  These kinds of things need to be done.

Beyond that, I think organized labor has to begin taking climate change seriously. The main thing that organized labor has done recently was Rich Trunk urging President Obama to take China to the World Trade Organization because Beijing was subsidizing its clean tech sector. In the name of competitiveness, the AFL-CIO is trying to cut Chinese subsidies, which they will not be able to do, first of all. And second of all, they’re not demanding similar subsidies here in the United States that would put people back to work. It’s pathetic. So, all the various institutions of the left need to take climate change seriously and start building a movement to pressure government to make it an issue on the international stage.

Now, in terms of what the Obama administration could do to reduce emissions: if it wanted to engage the UN process, there’s a lot that can be done without having to go and get permission from the Republicans.

The EPA, for one, has the obligation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This is the result of environmental groups suing and fighting in court for ten years—and finally winning at the Supreme Court level—to get the EPA to consider greenhouse gas emissions under the 1970 Clean Air Act, which holds that if emissions are dangerous to human health than they have to be regulated. And sure enough, greenhouse gas emissions are dangerous to human health due to their adverse effects on the environment. Therefore, the EPA has an obligation to regulate them and has just begun promulgating these rules. Unfortunately, they are not very robust. In fact, they’re pretty lame and the administration is dragging its feet on the issuance of these rules by building in delays. If the EPA were serious and really imposed strict rules, say, on smoke stacks in coal plants and oil refineries it could effectively push investment towards clean technology as the rising cost of dirty energy and carbon emissions would drive people away from it.

The other thing the government could do is leverage its tremendous purchasing power. If state purchasing of vehicles and electric power were done according to environmentally clean specifications, the public sector’s carbon footprint would be substantially reduced. At the same time, it would also likely create knock-on effects in the private sector by allowing the burgeoning clean teach sector to achieve economies of scale and provide its energy, vehicles and services at a rate that is cost competitive with diesel fuel and gasoline.

As power shifts from west to east with the so-called rise of China, many warn that China’s growing political and economic might is being built on the back of environmental degradation, which is only further exacerbating climate change internationally.  In the book though, you briefly mention that China is beginning to move to clean technology production.  Can you give us a sense of how Beijing’s approach has differed from that of Washington, and what the likely outcome might be?

I don’t think that China’s approach is that well-organized, yet.  The main thing to keep in mind, though, is that Beijing’s actions aren’t motivated by some high-minded concern about climate change.  The issue of local pollution has really driven China to embrace clean technology. Take the wind sector, for example, which is growing at something like 20 percent a year in China.  They invited in all the Western firms—Gamesa, Vestas , GE—then essentially counterfeited their technology and then invited these firms to take, in the case of GE, for example, 2 percent of the market.  GE could go to war with them and say “hey, you stole our technology” and try to prove it in court which would only get them shut out of the Chinese market. Or, they can just shut up and take 2 percent of a market that is growing very, very fast. Needless to say, they have chosen the latter.

The one lesson we can take from China is the same lesson that most of the Asian economies remind us of, which is that capitalism develops best when there is a strong state guiding it. Capitalists and capital need discipline, they need to be disciplined. They need to be taxed, and their investments need to be guided by the state because when the market is left to its own self-regulation—which is the ideological preference and prevailing ethos of our political class—you do not get the types of innovations and hothouse developments that have characterized industrialization throughout East Asia.  The command model of capitalism that China has embraced—a version of what was done in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—this dirigiste model is quite effective in potentially mitigating the worst abuses of people and nature committed by capitalism while at the same time encouraging its better, Promethean qualities.

After all, Marx not only criticized capitalism ruthlessly, but also praised its ability to create enormous amounts of wealth and technology and transform the face of the planet. That is essentially what we have done in a bad way with fossil fuels. But we need to push on through it and have a reindustrialization around clean technology. I do not think a retreat from industry back to the local is in any way realistic. We have to accelerate through this crisis and come out the other end with clean technologies. That means that we can’t keep flying around everywhere, driving big cars and generally being wasteful. We have to consume less and transform the way we live, radically. But we aren’t going to do that by turning our backs on machinery and electricity.  We need windmills. If we don’t get them, we are going to continue burning coal and field-stripping our AK-47s in preparation for our neighbor’s next attack on the bunker.

Share on Facebook

The buzz since the CUNY Board of Trustees’ increasingly infamous meeting that tabled John Jay College’s nomination to award an honorary degree to Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner has been remarkable, for a few reasons. The speed with which the news spread and the reach of interest in an administrative decision at CUNY have turned heads.  On Wednesday evening, I met Mr. Kushner at the memorial for murdered theatre artist and activist Juliano Mer Khamis, at which time he told me CUNY administrators remained flippant about his case.  Less than 48 hours later, his assistant called me with news that the head of the Board of Trustees had called an emergency meeting for the following Monday.  Facebook Revolution?  I don’t think so.  News spreads.  And yes, New York cares about its public institutions, CUNY included.  The speed and spread of this news may be remarkable but ultimately perhaps should not be surprising.

I want to focus on two other reasons why media reactions to the tabling of Mr. Kushner’s nomination are noteworthy, especially in relation to an understanding of free speech and activism in our universities. The first starts even in Mr. Kushner’s own response to the Board’s actions.  While the playwright defends himself by highlighting his right to his own opinion, much of the letter is spent in qualifying and defending his political positions on Israel.  It is totally understandable that Mr. Kushner felt he needed to clear his name from false accusations; elsewhere, however normalizations of his political beliefs, often coupled by restating his religious identity, or by a reflection on his illustrious career have a dangerous effect.   Ben Brantley’s op-ed in the Times on May 5, 2011 is an especially good (meaning problematic) example of this type of a public reaction.  His article opens with an example of a kind of side-stepping I will elaborate on further below: “I have neither the background nor the inclination to hold forth on Tony Kushner’s political views on the Middle East” and continues, “One of our most high-reaching dramatists, Mr. Kushner is a writer of rare intellectual scope and reading in both art and politics.”

I’m not confronting Brantley on his assessment of Kushner.   However, this type of reaction completely ignores that Kushner’s case is but one in a series of devastatingly problematic decisions made by CUNY administrators against faculty or syllabi that don’t espouse the same conservative stances on Israel as held by some CUNY trustees, students, or alumni.  By highlighting Kushner the illustrious playwright, we advocate empathy for his person instead of attacking an institutional problem.  What happened to Mr. Kushner during that May 2^nd Board meeting was shameful.  Mr. Kushner at the very least deserves an apology from the Board.  But the Board’s action would not be less problematic if Kushner was a failed playwright or if his views actually were as “radical” as board member Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld claimed them to be.  If we believe in free speech, then we believe it to be free, whomever is speaking, not just for our most successful citizens, or our most moderate thinkers.  How will we defend adjuncts – up for different positions but similarly accused – whose books are still in the process of being published?  How will we garner public support for faculty who dare to stimulate alternative thinking on the Middle East but who Broadway theatre-goers have never heard of? This is a case about free speech at academic institutions.  But it’s also about free speech about Israel at these same institutions, something we must assert we also believe in.

The second remarkable feature of the buzz around Mr. Kushner’s case is, it seems to me, how much of it completely misses the point of why this defamation of Mr. Kushner is an issue academics, artists, and citizens of New York should be concerned with.  I have overheard or read countless instances of skepticism over the past few days expressed in variations of “What’s an honorary degree, anyway?”  “Who even cares if he gets it?” and/or “Yes, but it’s the board’s right to give the flimsy piece of paper to whomever they want.”  This obsession with the really superfluous details of what is actually an alarming defamation of an individual for his alleged political beliefs is indicative of a grave problem within our academies and within the larger culture of liberalism in our contemporary moment, indicative of a culture of apathetic stagnation.  Instead of remembering that holding one’s own political opinions is supposed to be a sacred right, we make excuses for why this case is specific, why this board’s actions are excusable, why this playwright may have needed a light slap on the wrist.  Instead of saying, “Holy shit.  How did this happen?  Who is the Board?  They disqualified him for having once had an idea?  Fire them.”  We stutter.  We wonder instead if Kushner’s stance on Israel is problematic.  We debate whether or not BDS (which anyway Kushner doesn’t support) is sound political strategy.  We talk about the merits of the founding of a national political entity 3,000 miles away 60 odd years ago.   What are we doing?

These efforts to “understand” the situation – driven by an increasingly brittle instinct to “contextualize,” to “check” source material, to “imagine” (in the most blasé ways possible) every subject position – are symptomatic of an increasingly frightening inability of the Left and “liberals” in the US to take stances, to state opinions, and to act.  The inability to decide (in this case) whether or not one agrees with Kushner’s views on Israel and the concurrent misconception that one must do so before one states an opinion on the issue is paralyzing us from demanding the basic tenets required for healthy universities, stimulating classrooms, and educational integrity.  Instead of jumping to defend a basic right we all believe in, we sit on our thumbs, waiting for other “experts” to weigh in. We are “unqualified” we don’t know enough “to say.” (See Brantley’s introduction above.) So we stay quiet.  Or we say, “Oh, an honorary degree?  Who cares about that anyway?  How silly.”

But the truth of the matter is that Mr. Kushner was publicly defamed for a misinterpretation of his political ideas – ideas he had and voiced long before his nomination by the John Jay faculty.  And these alleged opinions were the only reasons sited for why he was ineligible.   There is no other way of putting it: the CUNY Board of Trustees decision on Tony Kushner is simple blasphemy for an institution of higher learning in the city of New York in the United States of America.  I don’t care if the honorary degree amounts to a piece of cheese he has to share with the recipients of the same honorary degree at the 22 other CUNY colleges.

It is true that an extraordinary number of people: faculty, students, administrators, associated with CUNY and not, have already spoken up in defense of Mr. Kushner.  Which is to be commended.  Yet, on this and on hundreds of other examples of complicated discussions, I fear we as intellectuals, as students, and as “empathetic” citizens in a complex world are not speaking, not acting, not demanding, because we fear being labeled misinformed or worse, homophobic, racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, or any combination, as the case may be.  This arm’s-length identification of the complicated world in which we live in (which, yes, is the direct result of an institutional attempt to correct for centuries of devastating violence), is nevertheless decimating the efficacy of an engaged political Left.  I am not advocating rash decision-making or misinformed knee-jerk, emotional re-activism.  Simply put: we must be able to recognize the often scary world in which we live and act in it.  This takes courage.  We must reclaim the right to speak, to make mistakes, and to pontificate.  This will mean that we will offend each other, on occasion.  But we must remember how to disagree, publicly, to debate, privately, and to teach each other the truths individual experiences have taught us.

Whichever side of the Palestine-Israel conflict we find ourselves on, not hearing from others will not evaporate the existence of that disliked viewpoint or the experiences that shaped it.  Restricting opinions voiced on this conflict in the Middle East will undoubtedly have the effect of fewer creative solutions to some of the most complex international problems of this century and the last one.

We are the students and faculty of CUNY.  A grave problem in our administration is our problem.  Censoring faculty, students, or invited guests based on their political beliefs, or interpretations of their political beliefs is not for us.   Every such instance, no matter the position, degree, or award in question, intimidates others from voicing opinions on contentious material, from addressing complicated subjects, and from encouraging difficult dialogue.  This cannot be the climate in which we choose to teach and to learn and in which we invite others to do so.

Share on Facebook

One of the foundational principles of labor organizing and collective bargaining is that workers can and should withhold their labor if their job situation or environment is threatening to their health and livelihood or inadequate to their needs—herein resides workers’ ultimate source of power. A variety of different laws implemented throughout the twentieth century have affected American workers in myriad ways, and it is helpful to consider the trajectory of these laws in order to understand our contemporary labor climate—particularly as it concerns public sector workers (most of us at CUNY), and specifically for contingent workers like adjuncts and graduate assistants who have very specific needs and interests due to our precarious situation.

Some of the most important laws and acts passed during the twentieth century include the National Labor Relations Act or Wagner Act of 1935 (which gave private sector workers the right to bargain collectively, but did not address the rights of public sector workers), the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 (which demobilized labor by imposing limits on workers’ ability to strike, by applying strict penalties to public sector workers who went on strike, and by prohibiting communists or other “radicals” from union leadership), the Condon-Wadlin Act of 1947 (which, in its initial incarnation, expanded on Taft-Hartley by imposing very specific sanctions on striking public workers such as immediate dismissal from the job, a three-year ban on raises for re-hired public sector workers, and probation without tenure for five years), and the very complex and multi-faceted Public Employees Fair Employment Act of 1967—Article 14 of the New York State Civil Service Law. This act—which came to be known as the “Taylor Law”—governs and constrains New York’s public sector workers today.

To understand the complexity of the Taylor Law and the controversies surrounding it, it is useful to look at the immediate postwar period. In 1947, after a strike by public school teachers in Buffalo, lawmakers in Albany created the Condon-Wadlin Act, which outlawed strikes by public workers in New York State and did not provide them with any statutory means to collective bargaining. Despite the new law, however, the postwar period featured a steady increase in labor’s strength in the public sector, which was accompanied by a rising militancy among New York workers. According to Joshua Freeman, Graduate Center professor and author of Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II, by the early-1960s, job actions by municipal workers were on the rise. The newly formed United Federation of Teachers (UFT) initiated a brief strike in 1960 and led another one-day work stoppage in 1962. In 1965, eight thousand welfare service workers and members of the Social Service Employees Union (SSEU) went on strike, closing city welfare centers. To break the strike, the city fired five thousand of the striking workers and jailed nineteen of the union’s leaders, but because the SSEU had included welfare recipients’ issues in their demands, they had strong support from the community and went back to work after the city conceded and pledged not to seek penalties under Condon-Wadlin.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a series of strikes by teachers, welfare workers, and transit workers ultimately evidenced the unenforceability of Condon-Wadlin, and in 1963, the legislature revised the penalties to water the law down with an eye to making it more enforceable. This modification of the law proved ineffective; the transit workers strike of 1966 ultimately shut the law down, when anti-labor Republican Mayor John V. Lindsay succumbed to the TWU, granting them a fifteen percent pay increase which exceeded federal anti-inflationary wage increase standards, and was thus denounced by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The TWU strike and its aftermath also forced Governor Nelson Rockefeller to step in and wrest control of the situation from Lindsay.

In 1967, Rockefeller created an advisory panel to assess the legal situation of public sector workers. This panel, headed by labor researcher George W. Taylor, recommended a replacement for Condon-Wadlin, which would create both a formal process for collective bargaining for public sector workers and legally take away their right to strike. Rockefeller claimed this was the best way to balance the purportedly conflicting interests of New York citizens who required vital public services (and thus were negatively affected by public worker strikes) and the public sector workers who supplied those vital services (but who needed a way to secure their own rights). The Public Employee Relations Committee that made the recommendation ultimately became the Public Employee Relations Board—the agency charged with officially overseeing the process of negotiations between labor and management, and with formally implementing and interpreting the new law.

The Taylor Law is a complex piece of legislature, with fourteen different sections, addressing a variety of different aspects of negotiation. Central to the law is the interpretive role of the Public Employee Relations Board or PERB (addressed in Section 205), which consists of three members appointed by the governor, and which can be involved at any stage of negotiations between the state and the union, at the request of either party or at the agency’s own behest. The PERB functions solely as a mediator between the state and the union’s bargaining agents and can impose penalties on either for engaging in improper practices, such as “bad faith” negotiations, but it does not have any control over the contract that results from the negotiations that it oversees.

The mandates of the Taylor Law regarding the collective bargaining process concern both local governments (“public employers”) and municipal unions (“employee organizations”). Under the law, employers are required to determine bargaining units within public sector unions, to recognize employee organizations for each bargaining unit (and also the rights to organization, representation, recognition, and certification of municipal unions, all of which are covered in Sections 202-204), and to determine (or allow for debate regarding) what will be considered “mandatory bargaining issues” during negotiations. Mandatory bargaining issues are determined by the PERB in the case of conflict between public employer and union leadership, and the decision can be appealed in court. Although what constitutes “bargainable issues” is not explicitly defined by the Taylor Law, “terms and conditions of employment” are explicitly defined as negotiable, and the law states that it is up to the PERB and the negotiating parties to determine what falls within this category. In subsection 4 of section 201 on “Definitions,” “terms and conditions of employment” are defined as “salaries, wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment provided” (retirement benefits are excluded from explicit coverage). Under New York case law, wages, medical benefits, sick/vacation/holiday leave, reimbursement for expenses, severance pay, disciplinary policies, and work rules are all considered terms and conditions of employment, so these are generally negotiated as mandatory bargaining issues when the union goes to the bargaining table with the municipality.

The Taylor Law is best known (at least by labor organizers and activists and by many public sector workers today) for its “no-strike clause”—Section 210, “Prohibition of Strikes.” In an earlier section of the act, Section 201 on “Definitions,” a strike is defined as “any …concerted stoppage of work or slowdown by public employees.” The “Prohibition of Strikes” section details a variety of strict penalties for violation of this prohibition, including payroll deductions in the form of twice an employee’s daily rate of pay for every day he/she is on strike, legal sanctions including imprisonment and/or firing of members and officers of the union who are deemed to be involved in the strike or who are believed to be the instigating parties, and, for the union as a whole, the loss of “dues check-off” (the automatic deduction of and delivery to the union of dues from members’ paychecks by the state) and loss of the right to charge and collect an agency fee from all members of the bargaining unit. Although it could be argued that these penalties are not as strict as those designated under Condon-Wadlin, Condon-Wadlin’s draconian sanctions were very rarely applied during its twenty-year history. In contrast, the sanctions under the Taylor Law are understood to be more enforceable, and have been applied forcefully in recent cases. It is interesting to note however, that some labor lawyers, such as Staughton Lynd, argue that the no-strike provision in the Taylor Law is actually cancelled out by the previously mentioned NLRA, particularly section 7. This section states: “Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” Section 8 of the law lists ways that the boss (in the case of public employees, the state) is not allowed to interfere with this organizing process, and defines “concerted activity” as strikes and other job actions.

Confronting the Taylor Law

While the Taylor Law is well known as the primary legal prohibition on strikes and other job actions by public sector workers and unions, what is less well known is that, at its origin in 1967, the Taylor Law was, from labor’s perspective, an improvement in New York State labor law. By lessening the harsh penalties for public sector job actions that had existed under Condon-Wadlin, and by granting new recognition to aspects of public sector collective bargaining, the Taylor Law in some ways strengthened the position of public sector workers and unions in New York State. However, the passage of the Taylor Law was also state lawmakers’ attempt to create labor peace at a moment of particularly intense class conflict by crafting legislation that offered new carrots to labor while holding onto the stick which outlawed public sector strikes. This tactic did not prove effective, particularly in the years immediately following the law’s institution, and examining a variety of historical events during this time can help us understand how and why.

Just as Condon-Wadlin had failed to quell public workers’ unrest, the Taylor Law did not deliver labor peace. One year after the law’s passage, sanitation workers in New York City went on strike. In 1968, the UFT also carried out a series of bitterly divisive strikes after the dismissal of teachers by a community-elected governing board which sought to increase community control of schools and to promote racial integration in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district of Brooklyn. While sanitation workers and teachers were challenging New York State’s new labor law, workers in other sectors were also engaging in actions, with strikes by Consolidated Edison and United Postal Service workers as well as by painters and longshoremen.

As the 1960s came to a close, strike action was reaching a peak in the United States. Much of it involved “wildcat strikes” which featured workers taking action without the approval of their union leaders. In 1970, postal workers, employees of the federal government who were also barred from striking, launched what Freeman calls “the largest public employee strike and the largest wildcat (or at least semi-wildcat) strike in U.S. history.” The following year featured a slowdown by New York City firefighters in which they refused to carry out anything but emergency services, and a six-day wildcat job action by New York City police officers.

In the early-1970s, faculty members of the City University of New York were also finding new ways to advance their position as public sector workers. In 1972, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), formed after a merger of the United Federation of College Teachers and a faculty organization called the Legislative Conference began bargaining its first contract. As negotiations seemed to gridlock, union members voted to strike if no contract agreement was reached by October 1973. CUNY responded to this vote by threatening to impose a contract under the terms of the Taylor Law. The conflict was averted, however, when the union and CUNY reached an agreement before the October deadline.

The New York City fiscal crisis of 1975 ushered in a new era for public sector workers, and stimulated intense debate about how to respond to the attacks on labor that the economic crisis had precipitated. To resist the mass layoffs imposed by city officials during the fiscal crisis, some union leaders proposed a general strike, an action which failed to materialize in part due to opposition by UFT President Albert Shanker and other New York City municipal labor leaders. At CUNY too the fiscal crisis threatened the jobs of faculty and staff. A segment of the PSC favored launching an immediate strike to resist faculty layoffs and budget cuts, but the referendum was defeated 58-26 in the union’s delegate assembly. Opponents of the strike argued that the Taylor Law would have a devastating impact on a union as small as the PSC, and that this might include loss of tenure rights and a fine of two days pay for every day on strike. The next year, when the city claimed to be unable to meet CUNY’s payroll, the PSC responded that its members would carry out a work stoppage if they were not paid. Then-CUNY Chancellor Robert Kibbee met this threat by shutting the university down for two weeks. According to Christopher Gunderson, “the dramatic action left faculty unpaid and postponed the graduation of thousands of students as well as the issuance of grades.” And when CUNY reopened, members of the university’s Board of Higher Education voted for the first time in CUNY’s long history to impose tuition on its students.

After the many intense labor battles of the 1960s and early 1970s, direct confrontations to the Taylor Law became more and more rare and city and state officials seemed more willing to use severe methods to break strikes by public workers. In 1979, prison guards and other security and law enforcement workers, all members of Council 82 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) went on strike. The union was fined, its Executive Director was sentenced to thirty days in jail, and it’s dues check-off was temporarily suspended.

The Transport Workers’ Union (TWU) also launched two more direct challenges to the Taylor Law: an eleven-day strike in 1980 and a two-and-a-half day strike in 2005. According to Freeman, the 1980 strike “represented the last major effort by New York workers to challenge the postulates of austerity.” The fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s had so transformed the political terrain of the city and weakened labor’s position that former allies now openly opposed the union. Mayor Ed Koch encouraged businesses and employees to keep the city working despite the strike. As Freeman observes, “having a Democrat like Koch position himself as a cheerleader for anti-unionism reflected the changed, post-fiscal crisis power relations in the city and the dramatic weakening of pro-labor sentiment.” Though the 1980 transit strike ended with some considerable gains for workers, the union was also fined heavily and lost its dues check-off system for four months. Twenty-five years later during the transit strike of 2005, as labor’s power in New York City had eroded even more, the penalties applied to the union’s illegal job action were even greater: the union’s work stoppage earned the TWU a $2.5 million fine, dues check-off was suspended, and union president Roger Toussaint was jailed for ten days.

Why Confront the Taylor Law? Students, Workers, and Self-Organization

As is shown through this history, the Taylor Law was not just a one-sided defeat for labor, but is instead tied up in a dynamic set of contradictions.. Acts such as the Taylor Law, which formalize and standardize negotiations between management and labor, have emerged from certain historical conditions that are rooted in the early days of the U.S. labor movement. Since the turn of the century, different methods have been used by different sectors of the working class to secure gains. Historically, there has been much debate over the best way for workers to approach winning gains: should we make deals with management to maintain “bread and butter” demands such as wages, hours, and benefits, or should we attempt to confront the contradiction between bosses and workers inherent in capitalism head-on and take control over the means of production? From the late-nineteenth century, this split was animated in part by the antagonism between the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and advocates of industrial unionism, an approach which favored organizing all workers in a workplace into a single union rather than separating workers by craft or job type (which was the AFL’s model of organizing). Labor historian Marty Glaberman illustrates this contradiction by discussing the sit-down strike of 1936-37 by General Motors workers who were members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, a part of the recently formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). At the end of this strike, workers had a one-page contract, which simply gave them the right to bargain collectively. All other workplace dynamics were negotiated between workers themselves, or through direct action against the bosses. Workers had control over the means of production, and the bosses knew that workers were the ones with the real power.

The institution of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) was and still is seen by many as both a gain and defeat in labor organizing, and is recognized as a strong corollary to state laws that constrain gains by limiting workers’ ability to struggle in the long-term. The model of negotiating through a bargaining approach that is separate from the everyday workers themselves stands in contradiction to the way workers actually won many of the gains we think are so important today, such as the eight-hour work day and maternity leave. These gains were won not by union leaders bargaining behind closed doors, but by workers withdrawing their labor and taking control of their workplace. The codification of these rights into legal agreements with the state (such as the Taylor Law) or management has implications which are two-fold. Glaberman describes the contradiction like this: “A contract is a compromise. It establishes that no matter what union gains are recorded, the right of the company to manage production is also recorded…The union officials become the enforcers of the contract and the union becomes the agency by which the worker is disciplined…” (1972: 14-15). The danger of relying only on the kinds of gains that are afforded by CBAs and through federal and state labor law is that unions can (and often do) become organizations above and outside of workers, instead of groups of people fundamentally working together to change the very tangible conditions under which they work.

What we can see by looking at the past experiences of working New Yorkers, from the 1950s teachers’ strikes, to the 1966, 1980, and 2005 TWU strikes, is that public sector workers in New York haven’t just treated labor law as something they automatically have to follow; in fact, the biggest changes in working conditions, and even in legislation itself, came from direct and militant disregard of these laws. The Taylor law was a revision of a more draconian law which was busted through direct action and the explosion of resistance by working people, students, and teachers. Moving forward, it is clear we cannot change the Taylor Law simply by asking legislatures; we have to prove the law and all other oppressive labor laws and working conditions irrelevant by and through our own struggle. This struggle may include but is not limited to both wildcat and union leadership-sanctioned work stoppages, pickets, slow-downs, and other creative methods of building alternative institutions in our own workplaces.

Share on Facebook

Wel­come to the Kush­ner Cri­sis blog. We’ve been cov­er­ing the recent sit­u­a­tion of polit­i­cal purg­ing at CUNY involv­ing Pulitzer Prize-winning play­write Tony Kush­ner, who was denied an hon­orary degree from John Jay Col­lege by the CUNY Board of Trustees. It would seem that Kush­ner does not have polit­i­cally correct-enough views for the BoT with regards to the state of Israel. We will be report­ing on this cri­sis and related news begin­ning today. The most recent updates will appear at the top with a EST stamp.

If you haven’t already done so, please make sure to “like” the FB page ded­i­cated to mak­ing the CUNY Board of Trustees over­turn their ridicu­lous deci­sion. Thanks!

6:00pm The singer Dar Williams weighs in with her support for Tony Kushner.

Dear Members of the Board,

To the City University of New York Board of Trustees,

My name is Joao Hwang and I studied International Studies at the City College of New York and served in the US Army for close to seven years, where I deployed to Afghanistan (2003-2004) and Iraq (2005-2006). I fought in two wars for this country with full faith and confidence that I was safeguarding our democratic values and our way of life consistent to the laws of this country. I believe that many of us who served felt the same way. It is precisely for this reason that I write to you today, as I find the latest actions of the Board of Trustees to be offensive as well as inconsistent with the values of academia, much less the values that so many of us fought to defend.

I write to you in protest of the Board’s decision to deny Mr. Tony Kushner an honorary degree on the basis of his political beliefs. This is not about agreeing or disagreeing with his political beliefs. It is irrelevant. Since when does a PUBLIC academic institution require individuals to be judged by their political beliefs? What would you say about the foreign students and faculty members, of which there are many in the CUNY schools? Are their academic achievements to be thrown aside because their primary affinity might not be the United States of America? Is the purpose of ANY educational institution to profile anyone’s political loyalties? Is it not to educate? To foster open discussion in an effort to better understand our world and seek solutions where possible?

This is why I find the Board’s decision to be an exceptional insult to all those who served as I did. The Board, and specifically Mr. Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, is exhibiting a disturbing pattern of behavior. By running a PUBLIC institution as a clearinghouse for political conformity, you violate the rights of free expression and intellectual freedom by promising denial of recognition for others.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you spit on our oath to fight NOT for what is being said, but the RIGHT to say it. I implore you to do the right thing and not only reconsider your decision to grant Mr. Kushner anhonorary degree, but also a public apology to let it be known that the Board of Trustees will not conduct themselves in such a manner again. This is not the first time this has happened, and I fear that this will not be the last.

Sincerely,
Joao Hwang
2nd Infantry Division (South Korea)
10th Mountain Division (Afghanistan, Iraq)

12:30pm: We are happy to announce that we can now add the acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison to the growing number of prominent literary voices who have  come to the defense of Mr. Kushner. Below is the full text of her letter to the CUNY Board of Trustees.

***

Dear members of the City University of New York, Board of Trustees:

Please regard this letter as my urgent request that you reconsider and approve the awarding of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner.  Censure, whether subtle or blatant, of any artist—let alone one with the stature of Mr. Kushner as well as his creative and intellectual power–should be anathema in the Academy where the free exchange of ideas is its raison d’etre.

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I read about this “controversy” with some amusement.  It seemed to emerge right out of an Oscar Wilde or Bernard Shaw play: a policing body thwarting an artist for views unapproved by that body, views which the artist neither held nor advertised.   But my amusement quickly disappeared when I learned that the decision to remove Mr. Kushner from the list of candidates for the honorary degree was not theater, and that some board members appeared to have taken Plato’s exile of poets [artists] from an ideal state seriously.

The stifling of debate that is the hallmark of fear should never be tolerated. Mr. Kushner’s compassionate and revelatory challenges to conventional wisdom are to be praised as the healthy signs of a democracy and the signature of an intelligent, gifted artist.

Yours truly,

Toni Morrison

1:45pm: The civil rights attorney and Legal Director of the National Center for Gay and Lesbian Rights, Shannon Price Minter, has threatened to return his honorary degree from the CUNY Law School unless the Kushner decision is overturned.

***

May 8, 2011

Dear Dr. Schmidt:

I was honored to receive an honorary degree from CUNY Law School in 2004 in recognition of my work on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their families. I was shocked and dismayed to learn that the CUNY Board of Trustees had blocked the offer of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner.  I understand this was the first time in the history of the institution that the board intervened to prevent the offer of an honorary degree.

The Board of Trustees’ treatment of Mr. Kushner is a grave assault on the university’s role as protector of the free exchange of ideas.  Rather than modeling reasoned, informed debate, the Board of Trustees leveled public charges against Mr. Kushner that were uninformed and deeply offensive.  No one deserves such treatment, but least of all a person with Mr. Kushner’s history of accomplishment and commitment to promoting tolerance, mutual understanding, and respect.

As a longtime supporter of CUNY, I have attended many conferences at the Graduate Center, published with CUNY faculty members, mentored CUNY students, and worked with CUNY alumni.  I am saddened that the reputation of CUNY has been so badly tarnished by this recent uncharacteristic action.

I sincerely hope the CUNY Board of Trustees will act quickly to reverse its decision and approve the decision of John Jay College of Justice to offer Mr. Kushner an honorary degree.  If not, I will, with deep regret, have no choice but to join other past recipients in returning my honorary degree.

Yours truly,
Shannon Price Minter

Share on Facebook