Embattled CUNY students, already laboring under the stresses of a broken economy, are being forced to absorb another blow to their pocketbooks. On November 22, the CUNY Board of Trustees voted to raise tuition by 5 percent for the coming spring semester, and then another 2 percent for the fall of 2011.  Not only that, but the BoT also empowered CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein to raise tuition another 3 percent during the coming year if he deemed it necessary. Such a move would have to be based on an assessment of New York City and State’s budgetary health.  Which basically means that it will happen, given the fact that there is currently no end in sight for the continuing problems each is expected to suffer over the next five years or so.

“These tuition increases are unfortunate but necessary for the University to continue to provide the high quality educational opportunity our students deserve,” Goldstein said shortly after the decision.  According to the CUNY News Wire, Lord Vader sees tuition increases as “necessary to stabilize college operations, protect new faculty hired over the last several years and maintain the University’s widely regarded progress in enhancing academic quality and the value of its degrees.” 

The tuition increases hit all students hard.  Full-time college undergraduates will notice a $115 increase on their tuition bills in the coming semester, while community college students will pay an additional $75 in the spring. Meanwhile Master’s students will get hammered with a $185 increase per semester, slightly more than the $165 fulltime doctoral students can expect. CUNY Law students will see a $255 tuition hike, while Hunter College School of Social Work students will be hit the hardest, with a whopping $500 per semester increase.

CUNY Students and Faculty Take to the Streets

As the Board of Trustees was voting on tuition raises, several dozen CUNY students and faculty attempted to shut down the meeting before the vote took place. As the Advocate’s own Doug Singsen reported in the Indypendent, “As the Board was preparing to vote on the proposed tuition hikes, students in the audience began chanting slogans against the tuition hike, forcing the meeting to come to a temporary halt. Within a few minutes, the Board’s security forces began ejecting the students and teachers leading the chants, forcibly when necessary, to the exit. Outside in the hallway, the ejected protesters took up their chanting again.

“Once all the protesters had been removed, the security guards instructed the protesters to vacate the hallway. The protesters refused to move, so the guards began pushing the crowd of students down the hallway and into the elevators, which were sent to the lobby. Once there, the protesters continued to be shoved toward the building’s main entrance, but the guards could not force them out. As Baruch students watched and cheered from a balcony and other parts of the lobby, the protesters began chanting again and speaking to the students in the lobby. After twenty minutes, the protesters were finally pushed out into the street, where they continued to chant and speak out for another half hour.”

Despite taking to the streets to voice their displeasure, the protest did not alter the course of BoT voting, which was near unanimous in approving the tuition hike.  The only dissenting vote was cast by the Student Senate representative on the board, Cory Provost. 

Not Only Do Students Get to Pay More, They Get Less in Return!

As tuition rates begin to rise, CUNY obviously has to offer something extra in return.  And boy has it ever!  According to Advocate sources, at least one senior college, Baruch, plans on offering “super jumbo classes” in the coming semester.  No, these won’t be super in the sense of better, but bigger.  Baruch is planning to combine several sections of their tier-two courses (electives and second year requirements like Great Works, Modern American History, American Government, Art History Surveys, and Principles of Biology) into expanded gigantic courses of 150-500 students each. These moves are intended to make up for the huge cuts to departments across Baruch, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Savings will be realized through the elimination of what will likely be hundreds of adjuncts who would otherwise be teaching these courses. One source within the English department notes that the college requested that the department slash its budget by $250,000. That would come to about twenty adjuncts let go at a course-load of 2/2!

Thankfully, these moves are not being accepted without challenge. The Advocate has obtained access to a letter from Glen Peterson, chair of the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch which we hope provides an example others will follow.  In the letter, worth quoting at length, Peterson notes that

“On November 22, I sent a message to Baruch College’s top administrators, forwarding it to our personnel and budget committee as well as our Faculty Senate’s executive committee. I described a conversation I had with Chancellor Goldstein and Vice Chancellor Logue earlier that day, in which I explained the impact of the cuts at Baruch, where the administration wants introductory level courses that are taught at normal class sizes to be tripled across the board, thereby devastating years of work developing writing- and communication- intensive classes and pedagogy based on close interaction with students.

“Chancellor Goldstein stated that any changes in class size could have to do only with enrollment increases and constraints on space, and nothing to do with the budget cuts. I explained that the changes were being imposed solely as cost-cutting measures, that very large numbers of adjuncts were being laid off, and that we had been shown the savings that would be thereby achieved.

“In my November 22 message, I asked: ‘What is going on here? The Chancellor insists that budget cuts will not affect the quality of education at CUNY while Baruch’s administration quite forthrightly admits that the shift to an all-jumbo model for Tier-two courses will have significantly adverse impacts on the quality of teaching we provide our students. Clearly there is a major disconnect between the university’s leadership and Baruch’s.’

“In a meeting on November 30 with adjuncts and full-time faculty from several departments, I reiterated that our department opposes, and will not cooperate with, measures that can only damage the quality of education while eliminating the jobs of our adjunct colleagues. We need to join together to stop such measures, before they become “the new normal” and cause irreparable damage.

“At a [recent] Baruch Faculty Senate meeting [on December 2] Baruch’s administration responded to my query by providing financial data demonstrating the marked degree to which the college is underfunded in comparison with every other CUNY campus. The “disconnect” between CUNY’s leadership and Baruch’s leadership exists, the administration explained, because “The average situation facing CUNY senior colleges is dramatically different from the situation facing Baruch.”

“This response, unfortunately, merely restates the problem mathematically; it does not explain why CUNY’s leadership denies that its policies are doing what they are in fact doing, that is, forcing Baruch to dramatically diminish the quality of the education it provides to its students.”

Peterson’s letter underscores the need for broad-based organization against jumbo-sized classes, both within Baruch and beyond. Indeed, if what we understand is true—that the Provost’s actions in this matter are largely taken in a willy-nilly fashion—then this offers an imminently winnable fight for the Professional Staff Congress, the Adjunct Project, the CUNY Contingents Unite, and any other allies interested in joining forces.  Indeed, it’s critical that action is taken immediately in order to stave off similar actions at other campuses. And winning might just prove to be a desperately needed shot in the arm to a CUNY labor movement that has seen better days. 

The Graduate Center Tightens its Belt

A dispiriting memo circulated the Graduate Center community during November detailing the painful belt-tightening measures to be adopted by the GC in the face of major cuts to the CUNY budget.  In the letter, GC President William Kelly outlined the challenges facing our institution:

“The Graduate Center…has experienced diminished tax-levy support over the last few years.  From 2008 to 2010 we absorbed permanent budget allocation reductions totaling $2, 477,600…The 2010-11 budget allocation imposed a further reduction of $2.4 million.  The Chancellery’s mandate that we sequester an additional 1.25 percent of our base budget as a reserve against mid-year cuts added an additional $1.1 million to the total.  Collectively, that’s a $6 million base budget reduction.”

Holy shit!  Kelly also notes that “the prospect of even greater cuts in 2011-12 looms large.”  Great.  As a result, the Graduate Center leadership has taken steps to fill holes punched into being by Albany’s budget pillaging. So pay attention, GC students: this is going to play out in big ways in your life over the years to come.

First, President Kelly has ordered that except in “very rare circumstances,” faculty vacancies will not be filled.  One wonders what might constitute the circumstances under which this rule is not followed, but thus far there is no word on that score.  Second, the GC will institute major cutbacks in its spending on supplies and equipment, and authorize no new expenditures, whether they be requests for conference funding, lecture series or the creation of new research centers.  Third, and most directly important for students will be efforts to expand enrollment. While the president insists that across the board expansion will not be the objective, he expects that the number of Master’s and special certificate program students (those who, surprise, pay the most tuition and receive the least financial aid) will be increased in coming years. 

So, get ready for swelling class sizes everyone! Who knows?  Maybe soon we’ll be treated to our own super-duper mega-courses!

Adjuncts (Actually) Unite!

On November 4, the Professional Staff Congress met to vote on a bargaining agenda for the next round of contract negotiations with the state.  The PSC’s executive council proposal was adopted after a lopsided vote in favor.  But what was most important in many respects was the effectively organized turnout of adjuncts to protest the possibility of a repeat of what took place in the previous round where, despite gains for the PSC, adjuncts were largely left behind.

In addition to the 115 delegates present for the vote, another hundred or so Adjunct Project and CUNY Contingents Unite members showed up to make their voices heard.  Wearing bright orange t-shirts with “We Are the Teaching Majority” and “Pay Parity Now!” emblazoned across the fronts and backs, protestors vocally applauded delegate statements in support of adjunct parity and heckled those that did not.

The AP and CCU position comprises four key demands:  a minimum three-year contract for adjuncts that begins building a system of seniority; $30 wage increase per credit hour for all contingent categories and the promise of step raises ever year; comprehensive employer-paid health insurance for all contingent positions in the CUNY system; and promotional series for Higher Education Officers who receive similar pay rates, benefits and job security as other contingent classifications. 

As the Socialist Worker notes, the superhuman efforts of the AP and CCU organizers have already begun to pay off.  “Even before the DA met, however, the adjuncts’ campaign for the four demands was already bearing results.  The PSC’s bargaining committee adopted the health care and HEO demands nearly verbatim, but significantly weakened the job security and wage demands. The bargaining committee replaced the $30 per credit hour raise, which represents an approximately 50 percent raise for adjuncts, with the vague demand for ‘measurable progress toward pay parity.’ The committee also replaced the demand for three-year contracts, which would protect adjuncts from being laid off without cause, with job protections that only kick in after an adjunct has taught two courses per semester for five years, a condition that department chairs could easily evade by simply laying off adjuncts before they reach the necessary five years.”

Obviously, there is still significant work to be done.  If real change is to occur, the commitment level of adjuncts and contingent labor will need to be both deepened and broadened.  Progress is possible, as the November 4 PSC vote testifies.  But it demands perseverance, creativity, an aptitude to point the way to a more equitable future, and the refusal to sit back and take yet another for the team.

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Not one to shy away from controversy, the outspoken and acerbic political cartoonist Ted Rall (best known for his take down of 9/11 widows and football-playing war heroes) has recently published a new book, Anti-American Manifesto with Seven Stories Press, in which he urges the reader to throw off the chains of pacifism and once again take up the difficult discussion of violence as a political tool. Intrigued by the boldness and chutzpah of this gesture, the GC Advocate sat down with Rall to talk a little bit about the complications and possibilities implicit in this argument.

•  •  •

Advocate: So, Ted, let’s jump right into it. In your new book you explicitly advocate the use of revolutionary violence. It’s hard to get any more radical than that and I can’t imagine the decision to write such a book was an easy one to make. Indeed, in conversations with friends about the book I’ve found that even the mention of revolutionary violence is almost universally greeted with disdain, shock, or disbelief. I am really interested in how you came to this decision to write the book, the events or ideas that led you to this argument, and why you felt compelled to write this book now?

Ted Rall: Well, it was a very difficult decision, from a career standpoint as well as from the standpoint of being a simple American citizen. As a student of history I am well aware of the fact that revolution is dangerous and violent and brutal and can make things worse before they make things better, so it’s not a decision to be taken lightly. I want to be very clear that even though the book is a call to arms and a call to get rid of the current government, and it does definitely defend the use of violence (I would say that there is no such thing as non-violent revolution; no radical change has ever taken place without violence or the credible threat of violence), but I think there is a tendency to sensationalize the violent aspect of the book. Most revolutionary activity is inherently non-violent actually. It’s just that violence is part of the revolutionist’s toolbox; it has to be, otherwise there is no way to credibly remove the state. The rich and the powerful don’t give up wealth and power voluntarily so you can’t fight it nonviolently without effectively tying one hand behind your back.

In terms of the decision to write the book I kind of followed a simple, logical process, which is to ask myself and many other people whether there was any possibility that this system, the Democrats and the Republicans and the corporatist capitalist system that they support, could or would address any of the really serious pressing problems that are faced by the Unites States today—whether those are income inequality or the environment and climate change, or skyrocketing deficits, or war and militarism, or healthcare—and I don’t think so. We are talking about a government that can’t even get it together enough to improve the efficiency of automobiles. I mean we’re talking about a government that passes a health care reform plan that actually makes health care more expensive and harder to obtain for most Americans, so how are they going to provide socialized health care. We are talking about a democratic president who issues an executive order granting himself the right to assassinate American citizens, so how is that president going to increase personal freedoms and civil rights and so on. I am forty-seven years old, I have seen a constant downward trajectory and I came to the conclusion more in sorrow than in anger that the system had become unreformable. It was one particular event however that proved it perfectly for me: the bank bailouts. When Obama decided to continue them in November of 2008, the process that Bush had begun in September and October of 2008, I knew that the system was unreformable, because we are talking about using an economic crisis that called for jobs creation as an excuse for lining the pockets of major corporations; in other words, business as usual. Yet the situation was anything but usual, it was the full blown collapse of the of the global economic system and the only solution to keep political stability going was massive job creation stimulated by the government. But they did not and could not and would not do that. When Obama refused to be the new FDR I knew that, Obama being about the best most progressive, smartest president we were gonna get out of this system, I knew that the time had arrived to call for revolution. Now I wish that other people were doing it, I wish that I could join someone else’s movement. I don’t want to stick my neck out; it’s not fun to attract all of this heat, but no one else is doing it. There’s no Left whatsoever in the United States. All there is is wimpy liberals. So, I wrote this book in order to start a conversation. This is not revolution for dummies, this is not a how-to guide, this is not the anarchists’ cookbook. If you are picking this up looking for how to overthrow the US government buy another book; this is not that book. This is a book that creates the space to have a discussion that is just not even part of American politics. American politics occurs strictly between the Ds and the Rs. We don’t even talk about the Greens and the Libertarians, much less the possibility of getting rid of the system entirely.

Advocate: Along those same lines, how has your life changed since the publication of the book? What’s the last month been like for Ted Rall? What have you learned about America, particularly concerning the subject of this book?

TR: I guess many things did not come as a surprise. The fact that the media and the political system are so deeply entrenched and unwilling to consider actual change came as no surprise. The fact that there are many very reactionary, hateful people who defend the status quo no matter what came as no surprise either. But what did come as a surprise were the huge crowds that came out to my book signings, which indicated to me that there is a thirst for talking about these sorts of options. Many, many people have been over the system for a long time, but that conversation doesn’t take place, so I provided a forum for that kind of dialogue to happen. What I’ve learned, and it’s kind of what I suspected, is that there are a lot of people out there like me. I wouldn’t have written the book if I thought I was alone. I don’t think I’m such a unique thinker. A lot of people can look at the same set of circumstances and draw similar conclusions, and they have. So in terms of how my life has changed, I mean, it hasn’t really, except for being very, very busy doing interviews, but that’s about it.

Advocate: One of the claims that you make in your book, and one that I think many Leftists would agree with, is that the Left in America has become pacified to the point of complete ineffectiveness. Why do you think this is? What has changed and how can the Left get its “groove” back as it were?

TR: I wish I knew the answer to the first question. This process started when I was a kid, so in a sense I’ve been living with it my whole life. I’ve never seen what a real Left looks like, but I’ve read about it in books, and I’ve seen it in movies. I don’t know what happened to the Black Panthers and the New Left and SDS and all that. But from what I’ve read, the baby-boomers who fought these battles were exhausted by the end of the late sixties and the early seventies. The drugs and the violence and the failure to get anywhere against the war in Vietnam just wore them out. The assassination squads led by COINTELPRO, and all the strikes of ’68 having no real result just brought them to the point of being tired. And there was no Left at all, even a lame Left in the 1970s, and when opposition started to coalesce it was a whole new generation, it was my generation, generation X, in the eighties against Reagan, and I remember from that time we didn’t know what to do. The country had turned so far to the right we didn’t have the confidence of our convictions. We didn’t feel like if we led the charge there would be anyone there to follow us. So without role models and without any sense of a forward momentum people just got lost.

In terms of the militant pacifism, that is something that really mystifies me because a lot of people will talk about Nelson Mandela, for instance, and say “oh his peaceful example…” Well, he might have a calm tone, but he shot a cop! That’s how he ended up in prison in the first place. If I remember right, he shot a cop while the guy was directing traffic, so it’s not like he was a pacifist by any means. The ANC was very violent and they were considered a very radical communist organization at the time, so I don’t know. In terms of how the Left can get its groove back, well, my book doesn’t explain that either. It’s a call for people to be strong. But how to organize people to do that, I don’t know. There’s going to need to be revolutionary programs, there is going to need to be charismatic leaders, there is going to need to be propaganda films and political parties to start this process of radicalizing not just people’s politics, but their tone. It’s very frustrating for me to see the self-confidence that the Right has and not understand why the Left doesn’t get that this is how we need to be too. I mean, we are right. They’ve been proven wrong about everything, so why are we so wimpy? We are trying to save the world here and yet we’re worried about hurting people’s feelings. I don’t get it at all.

Advocate: It seems to me like one way of getting that groove back is precisely the threat of violence. How exactly would the use of violence by groups on the Left change the political landscape in America? Wouldn’t the use of violence, as several people have suggested to me, merely delegitimize any group that used it and alienate potential allies?

TR: That is an argument, you know. I think what would really happen if there were a real Left is, of course, that there would be numerous stripes of the Left, some more radical than others. When violence has been used it can be very inspiring. For instance when ELF burned down those houses in Washington State on a development, or when they burned down a ski lodge in Aspen, or when they burned SUVs at a car dealership, I remember thinking: that’s funny. I hate those SUVs, I hate suburban sprawl. There are twenty million vacant homes in the United States, why are we still building anything? And you see the ineffectiveness of non-violent approaches. You go to city council meetings, you argue against a development, but the fix is in, everyone’s been paid off. And of course it happens anyway. Did these guys stop the process of sprawl? No. But they got a piece of these guys. They bugged them. They caused them problems. It just seems to me that all of the power is going from corporations and from the Right and coming down like a fist on the Left and on ordinary people. And every now and then when you get to bite these guys back it makes you feel better.

In terms of the danger of turning off the moderates, well, that’s true; that is always a danger, and in fact, if the Left is violent and the government and the Right do not respond with violence then that would not work. What the Left would have to count on is the extremely violent and hostile nature of the system itself; that they would overreact and expose themselves as the monsters that they are. That’s the purpose of any kind of violent act. Like 9/11. If the Unites States had not responded violently and had used that as an opportunity to open up dialogue with the Islamic world, it would have been counterproductive to al Qaeda, but it was a huge victory for al Qaeda precisely because the United States responded with extreme violence, and that radicalized moderates. I think violence only works if it provokes bigger violence from the state, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that it probably would.
Advocate: This leads me to my next question, actually, which is about the idea of complete revolution. Your book, as far as I can tell, argues for complete and total overthrow of the United States government. Aren’t there other less drastic tactics that might produce revolutionary change, or is this the only option?

Look, I can’t predict the future. It would be great if it were possible to reform the system and get some substantial change out of the existing system simply because it would be cheaper and easier in terms of blood and money—that would be preferable. Revolution should always be the last resort. But it’s hard for me to imagine right now, as things stand, because the system has been so incredibly resistant to any kind of reform in recent years. It’s all about give backs, it’s all about push backs. “We’re going to fire you, we’re going to take away your rights. After we make you poor we will make it impossible for you to declare bankruptcy.” It’s just relentless, and that attitude of “we will not compromise, we will not be reasonable” just leads me to believe that you can’t negotiate with these people. But you never know.

Advocate: In the book you also argue that revolution is necessary in large part because the United States is already on its way to collapse. Can you talk more about that? How do you see that happening and when do you think it will happen?

TR: There are so many possible ways that collapse could ensue that it is impossible for me to tell you how it will go down. I don’t know if it’s going to be environmental collapse that sparks food shortages and food riots. I couldn’t tell you if it will be simple economic collapse because the government can no longer issue debt. I can’t tell you whether it will be the complete collapse of the consumer economy because of high unemployment and the inability of people to spend money. I don’t know if it will be blowback from one of America’s countless wars of aggression. All I can say is it just feels incredibly unsustainable and since the collapse probably is coming sooner rather than later, the question is what we should do about it. Should we just let it happen, go the way of the Soviet Union in the early nineties and let the country tank the way Russia did in the nineties? Or do we act and step in and replace the system with something that works better now?

Advocate: In your book you are extremely, how can I put it, reticent about proposing any kind of replacement system…

TR: Yeah, that’s the major criticism of the book. People don’t like that. They want to be told exactly where I’m going to take them, and the answer is: I’m not taking them anywhere! It’s up to them. It’s up to others. This book is already 280 pages; it’s too long really for a manifesto as it is, and it’s actually kind of ridiculous to be in a situation where you have to write a book like this, because in any other country it’s a given that if the government doesn’t work you can overthrow it. And it’s only in the United States that we have such childish politics that the idea of bringing up revolution as an option is somehow shocking or radical. In a way it’s almost embarrassing to have to write this thing.

But the next question is, obviously, what does the new government look like, what does the new regime look like? And I have my ideas about that and I hint at them and I am working on a book now that’s a sequel to this that will lay out what I think should happen next: a transition to Socialism. But like I wrote in the book, what I think really doesn’t matter. I am one of three hundred million people; I am not special. I am not smarter or dumber than anyone else. I am just a guy, and I have my opinions and I will put them forward. But what needs to happen is for us to start thinking outside of this box, get rid of this system, and have a national conversation that involves a struggle over what comes next. Are we going to have a left wing government, a right wing government, something else, who knows? But we need to have that talk. I felt that if I laid this out as a purely left wing book that it would, first of all, needlessly eliminate potential allies on the right, and secondly, it was kind of beside the point. I viewed it as becoming a giant distraction. As it is people on the right would love that because they look at my politics and they say that Ted Rall’s book calls for left wing revolution, but it doesn’t. It just calls for revolution. I didn’t put it in the book, because I wanted to make the case for revolution outside of the construct of ideology, because it is impossible to predict what’s going to come next.

Advocate: Speaking of the Left: in your book you are pretty harsh on some very well liked and admired figures on the Left. Michael Moore, for instance, and the Yes Men, whom I think are really hilarious…

TR: They are hilarious..

Advocate: So, what’s up with that? What’s the problem with what they do? Aren’t they allies in your cause?

TR: I would say the reason I picked them is because they are so good. They are the best that the official American Left has to offer, in the same way that Obama is the best, in terms of the mainstream political system, that the system has to offer. Michael Moore has got this immense audience of tens of millions of people, his movies can open up in hundreds of theatres, he can talk about things that no one else can talk about, he’s got this great Midwestern folksy sensibility, he has a gentle delivery; he’s really kind of a genius. And his TV show was even better than his movies I think. And the Yes Men are great too. And I am sure you’re asking yourself, ok what are you talking about, why are you down on these guys so much, and it’s because they don’t go there. Like Jon Stewart and Colbert, this kind of dissent validates the official system by saying “look at the American political system; it’s so big and open minded that it even allows a guy like Michael Moore or the Yes Men or John Stewart to operate.” And the implication is, it’s not that bad. But you notice that they marginalize people who actually call for radical change, like Howard Zinn or Ralph Nader. Those people are not allowed to get their message out. So you’re allowed to go up to the edge of ridiculing, but you can’t call for real change; all you can do is poke gentle fun, or not so gentle fun, but it’s got to be all in fun. You can’t call for the actual system to be replaced, and that was really the argument I was trying to make there.

Advocate: Do you feel like you have been marginalized in that way?

TR: Absolutely, sure. And that was before I wrote this book even. The country lurched to the right significantly in 2001 and has not come back at all, and everybody I know who is, like me, a Lefty cartoonist, has been savaged by the decline in print and the changing political climate. But I don’t view it as a personal thing; I take it for granted. I guess I could be a milquetoast liberal and have a few more client newspapers, but what would be the fun of that? The story that I’m trying to write about my own life is about taking chances and doing what I think is right, not just trying to put a few extra bucks into my 401K.

Advocate: World events seem to be catching up with the book. Witness just the recent student protests in London, or the news that Obama’s planned spending and entitlement cuts have angered both the liberal left and the radical right. Do you see events like these as somehow echoing or speaking to what you talk about in the book? Is the revolution already underway, and if so, how do we get these movements to coalesce.

TR: The revolution is not underway, but certainly the revolutionary climate is upon us. And the Europeans seem to be, as usual, setting the standard for what needs to be done. They are used to this, they know about this and they are probably going to go first, but Americans are incredibly docile and they’re going to have to stop shooting each other at the mall and start aiming their rage at the rich and the powerful who deserve it.

Advocate: Lastly, I wanted to give you the opportunity to respond in print, if you like, to a commentary by Fox News anchor Greg Gutfeld, who called you a “bitter cartoonist” and said that “advocating phony revolution is where idiots like Ted start and end.” He also argued that you would come after him swinging your NPR tote bag.
TR: I think that is funny. I’ve read a lot of those right wing blogs where they just sort of assume that all Lefties are effeminate and unable to stand up and fight, and they make it real personal, like “I would beat you down; you’d be carrying your yoga mat” or whatever. It’s so funny that they think that is how politics are going to play out, but I am paying the price, in a way, for forty years of wussie Lefties. They are not afraid of us; they think that we are a bunch of wimps, that at the first sign of a fight we are going to run away like little girls. I don’t blame them for thinking that because that is what the American Left is. I think everyone can strive to be braver but I doubt too many of them would do as well as me and two other Leftie cartoonists: Matt Bors and Steven Cloud who just came back from Afghanistan in August. We were there for a month and we lived with locals, unembeded, no contacts with the military, no guards, just us, low key, and we traveled all over the country, we went to Taliban areas and we stayed at Taliban hotels…I’d like to see those guys, those armchair warriors do what we did and see how they come out of it.

In terms of Mr. Gutfeld calling me a “bitter cartoonist,” well, guilty as charged. All good political cartoonists are bitter about injustice and stupidity and I am guilty and I plead guilty. In terms of whether it’s a phony revolution or not, well, there is no revolution at all, so it can’t really be phony, but I certainly would like to see a real one.

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Protesting education cuts in New York on March 4, 2010

The committee that organized the March 4th protests against budget cuts and tuition hikes has put together a planning and strategy meeting on Sunday, August 1 to kick off the fall organizing against cuts and hikes. March 4th was a success in New York and nationally, but we are still far from where we need to be in order to actually stop and reverse these cuts. We need to expand the movement and bring in new activists. Throughout the 1970′s, 1980′s and 1990′s, CUNY students had a thriving movement that was capable of turning out tens of thousands of students at protests, closing campuses through occupations, and winning real victories, including stopping or reducing tuition hikes, budget cuts, school closings and more. That’s what we need to aim for. The meeting on August 1st will hopefully be a small step in that direction.

These issues affect Graduate Center students both in the short term, through tightened budgets, reduced resources and higher tuition, and in the long term, through the gradual  adjunct-ification of public universities and the resulting lack of secure, well-paying tenure-track jobs. We need to organize the Graduate Center politically and make graduate students a force in the student movement. One example of what graduate students are capable of can be seen in the recent graduate assistants’ strike at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the strikers won all their immediate demands and won concessions from the university.

Defending Public Education: Organizing for the Fall and Beyond

Sunday, August 1
2:00pm – 6:30pm
CUNY Grad Center, Room 5414
(365 5th Ave, btw 34th and 35th, photo ID required)

On March 4th, all across the country, we saw the first nationally coordinated day of action to defend public education.  It was neither the beginning nor the end, but an expression of the developing struggle to defend public education both in k-12 and higher ed. Now a call for another national day of action this fall on Oct 7 has been issued, the text of which can be found below.   This is another opportunity to bring together students, teachers, parents, and ordinary working people as part of an on-going effort to stop the cuts and other attacks on education.

We are calling on all activists, students, teachers and whoever wants to get together and fight for public education to attend an organizing meeting on Aug 1st to discuss Oct 7 and how to build the struggle this fall.  Atached is a leaflet for the Aug 1st meeting.

Discussions will include:
• the nature of the attacks on education
• the experience organizing so far and the current level of struggle
• Oct 7 as the next national day of action
• how to continue to build a movement this fall and beyond

-organized by the March 4th Committee

The national call for action for October 7th is reprinted below.

National Actions to Defend Public Education, October 7^th 2010

Last fall, California sparked a movement that has grown drastically over the past year. Much energy went toward building March 4th 2010, National Day of Action to Defend Education, which as a resounding success in the struggle to defend public education. Thousands organized and participated in the events of that day which took place in 32 states.  Major actions took place throughout California, but also in Milwaukee, New York City, Illinois, and Baltimore with hundreds of actions planned nationwide. University of Puerto Rico students capped off a two-month strike with a victory receiving many concessions from administration.

What is clear is that this fight is not over. The lines are drawn. As working families struggle to recover from the crisis, access to education is diminishing as cuts continue to come. California activists have proposed October 7^th as the next Day of Action. Internationally, activists are focusing on October and November as crucial moments in the struggle to fight back against neoliberalism and defend education rights. We, the below signed organizations and individuals, call on students, teachers, faculty, staff, workers, and parents to unite together and Defend Public Education this fall.

In Texas, the Board of Education has drastically changed the content of Texas textbooks, to include praise of Joseph McCarthy, and many other clauses. In Arizona, The state has passed the racist SB1070 that mandates police detain anyone looks like an undocumented worker. Following this, Arizona is also shutting down ethnic studies programs. In New York City, Chicago, and Detroit, districts are facing massive school closings. Public universities throughout the country are raising tuition costs and looking for more private investors. Budget cuts, tuition hikes, school closings, and right-wing reforms are hitting working families the hardest, especially in communities of color.

As these cuts continue to come, we see the costs of neoliberalism hit home harder than they have before. Public education has been losing funding for years, much of which disappeared because of neoliberal changes to the economy. The current budget crisis in many states will result in further drastic cuts to public education, including further cuts to underfunded schools, increases in unpaid days off for staff, a incentive program promoting “reforms” that are outright attacks on teachers, a restructuring of the public university around the needs of private business – largely supported by massive private grants, and tuition hikes that threaten accessibility to higher education for working families and people of color.

As the education disparities between poor and affluent grow ever wider, public schools serving communities of color are swiftly being re-segregated, provided fewer resources, and less-experienced teachers. These students are being tracked into non-academic, dead-end programs while ethnic and multi-cultural classes and opportunities are being cut.

This crisis and this solution are a direct result of neoliberal-era ideology, reducing or dissolving taxes on the rich and corporations while working people struggle to provide for their families out of their ever-shrinking pockets. As private interests gain more power, as the private dollar begins to strengthen its influence in education, our democratic rights are being stripped away.

The time to act is now, students teachers and staff are preparing for the next wave of actions. We need your support and participation to make this day a historic moment in American history. To get involved please Email: fall_actions@defendeducation.org or call us at 860-916-2761.

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Adolph Reed

GC Advocate readers, particularly those steeped in cultural studies, literary theory, political science, and sociology literature are probably very familiar with “star” academics like Cornell West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William Julius Wilson, all hailing from our most venerable of higher education institutions that purportedly form the core foundations of the Ivory Tower in America. What they may not be familiar with are the ideological and historical foundations that are constitutive of these scholars’ interpretations of black American thought (not to mention those of their followers), as well as the cultural and political commentary that flows from it. When these black scholars comment on the social, cultural and political conditions of Americans in general and black Americans in particular, people listen. To be sure, the reflex among people on the left is to assume that whenever Cornell West says something we must take heed as it will most likely call attention to the problem of racism, America’s “disease.”

And as readers will recall, last summer we could not turn our attention away from Professor Gates’—and most Americans’—indignant response to a Cambridge police sergeant who in our collective minds committed the egregious sin of racially profiling and arresting one of the most respected black scholars in the United States. The story had a bottoms-up ending that culminated with President Barack Obama’s intervention to bring Gates and Sgt. Crowley together for what reportedly was a “frank” discussion about the incident. In the United States, it seems, we have reached a point where questions of race and racism can now be resolved with the semi-public consumption of cool, inebriating suds. Given this particular instance and the current historical and political moment, how are we to make sense of what race and racism mean in the United States? How do the black scholars mentioned above, among others, and their perspectives on questions of race and racism set the framework for understanding and explaining the concepts of race and racism in the United States? How is the discipline of black studies shaped by and in turn how does it shape political and cultural debates about these issues? And what are the operating assumptions that supposedly shed light on questions of race and racism as problems deeply entrenched in America’s psyche and history? These provocative questions require ambitious answers, which is precisely the project that Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth Warren take up in a new book.

Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought compiles a series of essays that combine theoretical rigor and incisive, politically grounded critique to interrogate—and in the process demolish—many of the assumptions made by mainstream black scholars who write about and comment on the “black” experience. These assumptions, including the existence of a singular, undifferentiated “black community,” are deployed in much of what is now branded African American studies within the American academy. The essays in the book, particularly those in Part II and III, explain how these assumptions then become reified into mainstream political discourse. This process and the discourses that follow from it, the authors argue, “have shaped the main lines of public debate of political, social, and cultural ideas and strategies through which dominant notions of common black American identity and agendas have been constructed and pursued.” Central to this argument and its critical interpretive framework is the historicist approach running through each of the ten essays in the book; an approach through which the authors situate their arguments within broader streams of social, political and cultural currents in order to understand black American thought and the processes and frameworks that, in many instances, facilitate and constrain policy interventions that bear on black Americans.

This historically grounded method in the study of African American thought represents a significant contribution in the practice of political science. This is a signature approach to examining and interpreting the literature explored by the book as a whole and by Reed in particular. Similar to the approach taken in this collection of essays, in W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (1997) Reed makes a strong case for an “evolutionist or a generative” perspective on the history of political thought. This approach to historical and political inquiry allows for the examination of individuals and debates that prevail given specific historical and political junctures in American society, which in turn shed light on the genesis of current political debates and the intellectual history that shaped them.

As the subtitle of the book suggests, the substantive fulcrum advancing the authors’ critiques is the ideological and material foundations that have evolved from Emancipation to the post-Jim Crow eras, paying close attention to the academic discourses that took place in the 1980s, which have influenced the current shape of the black studies field across American universities. Arranged chronologically, Renewing Black Intellectual History is divided into three parts, each corresponding to particular political, social and cultural moments in American history—Part I: Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Retrenchment; Part II: The Jim Crow Era; and Part III: The Post-Jim Crow Era.

The authors’ arguments are bold, trenchant, refreshing and, ultimately, necessary to understand the current state of black studies and how its intellectual practice both informs and is informed by political debates that center around race and racism in the United States. Students and practitioners in the fields of political science, history, sociology, cultural studies, and literary theory will find the book provocative and timely. If you’re not familiar with Reed’s scholarly work, this will be a great introduction to his oeuvre. And if you are familiar with his work, this will be an excellent addition, not only to your personal collection of “critical” works in the academy, but also an illuminating collection of essays that will undoubtedly provoke you to consider alternative interpretations of black cultural studies, intellectual history, and the ideological foundations under which they operate.

I had the opportunity to have a candid and provocative telephone conversation with Reed—who is currently teaching at the University of Pennsylvania—about several topics including some of the recurring themes in Renewing Black Intellectual History, his thoughts on race and racism, his intellectual and political projects, and the discipline of political science in general and black studies in particular.

•  •  •

Douglas Medina: What was the catalyst for writing Renewing Black Intellectual History?

Adolph Reed, Jr.: Well, it’s kind of funny because Ken[neth] Warren and I got to know each other when I was being recruited to go to Northwestern, and he was still there. And I just happened to have read a little of his work, before that dance started, and he’d read a little of my work. And he left after a year and went to the University of Chicago, but with the understanding that we could team teach between the two campuses, which we did. And we had like a two man seminar, really, that met in this bar in Hyde Park for about five or six years. And a lot of it was about trying to get a handle on the black cultural studies stuff and to figure out the best way to provide a critical alternative to it. And we were going back and forth, because one approach would be something like that book that Don Green and Ian Shapiro did on rational choice [Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory by Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Yale University Press (1996)]. But what was really daunting about that was that meant we had to read a lot of that crap and read reams and reams and reams of it.

And the way that this thing that we’d kind of jokingly called the seminar at Jimmy’s, because we’re also closing down the bar every night, went was that we would decide to go read some Stuart Hall or some Paul Gilroy or something, and then meet to talk about it and complain about how dense the stuff was and how it didn’t add up to anything, about how the labor that was necessary to get through the text was in no way compensated by the payoff of insight that you came to once you got through it.

So, we kept saying, “well, damn, you know, I don’t know if I can get myself up to go in that direction to tackle this stuff,” because you read too much bad shit and see too many bad movies and stuff, like in the name of being current in the field anyway.

And the other alternative was to think about collaborating on a history of black studies that would go back to the beginning of the 20th century—to the beginning of the Negro History Project—and then reconstruct an account that acknowledges the creation of black studies at the end of the ‘60s and the beginning of the ‘70s and follows its evolution.

But, we realized that to do that book properly would also be a really big undertaking and in some ways even a bigger one. And we both had other stuff on our individual research agendas.

So we had the idea that we could take some of the burden off ourselves. And since there were a number of scholars who were operating in the same kind of interpretivist frame of reference, and really what it is is an historical materialist approach to black intellectual history, that maybe a way to go with this would be to collect a chunk of that work and present it as de facto articulations of the alternative approach. That is to say, because we both had become really skeptical of debates about interpretation, because the big problem is that those debates are conducted at a level of abstraction that just leaves too much hiding space.

So, we figured that the ideal thing would be to collect a number of discrete studies that show the payoff of an historical materialist approach to black American intellectual history. And then, as we went about it we wanted to be interdisciplinary and we’ve got historians, political scientists, and lit[erature] scholars, but all of whom are working out of the same interpretative disposition.

And then we thought that doing two books, a companion piece [Culture/Politics: The Present(ism) of Black Studies by Adolph Reed, Jr. and Kenneth Warren, forthcoming] that was more interpretivist, or rather was more about engaging in interpretative debate would be a nice compliment to this one. And, you can play off it and each could help the other.

The focus of Culture/Politics is a little tighter and a little more theoretical. It’s really directed explicitly as a challenge to the cultural turn in black studies.

Medina: As I was reading the book it became clear that one of the main arguments that you and the other authors make is that the discipline itself is politicized, the discipline of black studies. And it is a political enterprise of sorts. That being the case, it’s also subject to interpretation and therefore contestation. So what do you think led to that, the dominant interpretative framework for what we now know as black American studies?

Reed: I think there are a couple things to say about that. One of them is that on one level, probably any academic discourse, especially in the social sciences but also in the humanities, is going to be imbued with, if not political significance, at least political inflections given the moment.

In fact, I was thinking about how modernization theory was consciously, in some cases, and perhaps less consciously in others, an appendage of American Cold War era objectives in the post-war period. So, these notions of the five stages of growth and the cultures of modernization were clear alternatives to a class discourse and to a discourse of inequality and underdevelopment. And there was a parallel within the United States. Or rather, in American politics. We saw class being defined in cultural terms and the emergence of ethnic/pluralist discourses and so forth and so on. And a reification, say, in the urban politics field of the moment of post-war growth politics as though it were like a natural law. But in the case of black studies and Latino studies and women’s studies, there’s an additional boost that those fields of study themselves emerged quite directly out of the ferment of the 1960s, both on and off the campus. From my perspective and, I think, from the perspective of most of the authors, if not all of the authors—but, you know, I’m not carrying proxies with me, or, I mean, I’m not a ventriloquist—the issue, I think, is how to think about what it means to say that the discipline is saturated with politics. Because I think one of the arguments that a lot of us come together around is that at the end of the day—in fact, at the beginning of the morning—there’s a substantive difference between writing a journal article or a book and engaging in politics. They aren’t the same thing.

And one of the problems that we associate with the cultural turn, and not just in black studies but across the board inside the academy with the emergence of the cultural studies mindset in the late ‘80s probably, is a tendency, like an intellectual tendency, to kind of blur distinctions between scholarly practice and political practice.

I think I discussed this a little bit in my chapter in Renewing, maybe a little bit more in a chapter of the Obamamania [The Perils of Obamamania, forthcoming] book, that it’s not that difficult to understand how the slippage came to pass. A lot of it had to do with the retreat of extramural politics. As the labor movement goes into retreat the, what used to be called the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the absence of political dynamism outside the university either creates more space or gives too much room or puts pressure on the work of academics to sort of make political claims.

So, I’ve said this maybe in more provocative ways and in a more provocative context. But, one of the things that most of us in the book find disturbing, or maybe at least unsatisfying, about this turn is the extent to which academics presume that their academic work carries political stakes that reach outside the university, in a way. That may not necessarily be the case.

That puts pressure on them or encourages them to seek to speak beyond the university and to take on—in the space that you’d think about where the scholarly work gets done—to take on a project of speaking to topical debates outside the academy.

I guess this is the way that I put it somewhat more provocatively: that there’s a tendency to represent oneself outside the university as a voice of scholarly expertise that can say things that are of political significance, and to represent oneself inside the university as a representative of the oppressed community who’s channeling that voice.

Medina: One of the things that’s become clear for people who follow your work is that you stand apart from many scholars who study the question of race and African American political thought, and American politics in general. Being on the left, you are essentially a scholar who also does extramural political civic work. How do you manage that? How do you negotiate that? How does your scholarly work inform your political activism and vice versa?

Reed: They’ve always been connected. I went to graduate school out of a sense of defeat when I’d been out organizing for a few years, even before I graduated from college.

I left college after a cafeteria strike. And I went [into] eastern North Carolina and worked for three years, and came back one summer and graduated, and then went to graduate school largely—or at least partly—because I had a sense that we’d just gotten outflanked and that the bourgeois politicians had basically won. But, going to Atlanta in the early 1970s, I didn’t encounter anything that would challenge that view, to put it mildly.

So, from the very beginning for me the academic project was an intellectual project, and the intellectual project was part of a political project. My politics have been focused on one ultimate objective since I was—at the latest—since I was nineteen years old. And that objective is overthrowing capitalism.

I think it’s important to make distinctions between work that one does as a propagandist—work that one does in sort of sharp political commentary—and work that one does as a scholar. And there are domains in which it’s appropriate to do either. Both have their place and I’m not embarrassed about either one.

It’s the same principle when you’re trying to build something politically: you’re supposed to do what needs to be done. You do whatever has to get done.

I don’t believe that academics have a responsibility to be civically or politically active. In fact, I would just as soon have most of them not be, given what I imagine their politics and their class interests are.

My expectations are more modest, that they just face up to the political and the ideological implications or biases in their own work, the questions they ask and the problems that they consider meaningful and how they go about doing them.

As long as everybody’s clear and puts their shit aboveboard, then that’s not only all that I expect, it’s, I think, all that should be expected, in a university setting or in the academic setting.

And when we in the Labor Party [Reed was a founding delegate of the Labor Party in 1996, and he is co-chair of its Campaign for Free Higher Ed] decided to try to get a ballot line in South Carolina, I was basically commuting to South Carolina on the weekends for a while there, and going to flea markets and standing out in the sun all day to get signatures and stuff.

From one perspective, I could say, “Well, it slowed my progress in getting these books done.” On the other hand, I think [it] strengthened and deepened my understanding in—maybe in nuanced ways that I couldn’t even draw a straight line through. So, it makes the work better.

One of the things that I think politics—at least in the way that I’ve tried to do politics—has done for my academic work is that it just kind of stresses the concreteness of the questions.

I think maybe a part of this is like getting older and being in the racket for a long time, too, because I remember in my early years as an assistant professor in high theoretical discussions or—I would find myself feeling that there were links that I was missing, that things just didn’t seem to make sense. And the reasonable impulse is to chalk it up to one’s own shortcomings and then try to figure out what’s being missed.

But, I’ve always been trying to find the levers that can help us build the kind of movement that we need to build to transform this society. That’s not a simplistic thing, either. Because it means you got to try to figure out what the cultural domain is, what the ideological domain is.

Medina: You’re one of the few scholars, political scientist specifically, who persists in looking at questions of social phenomena through the lens of political economy. That’s unusual. Why do you do it? What are the benefits of doing that, given that not many people are practicing that approach?

Reed: That’s a good question. The discipline is getting worse and worse and worse. I decided, when the APSR [American Political Science Review] published its second article in three years on genes and politics—this was the one on the genetic bases of political ideology. And it was…bullshit all the way through, from beginning to end. It was play science…. I’ve not renewed my dues. I haven’t been to the convention. I don’t plan to. We had to fight back even in our department [at Penn]. Last academic year, we had to fight back an attempt to hire one of these genes and politics idiots.

But, I tell you, it was Rosalind Rosenberg in the early ‘80s in her book, Beyond Separate Spheres, [who] made the point that—and I’m sure she’s not the only person that made it—when egalitarian political forces and ideas have the momentum outside the university, then the center of gravity—for a variety of reasons—within academic discourses, especially in the social sciences, shifts to the left. And when conservative ideas have the social momentum, then the center of gravity shifts to the right.

And no matter how much academics like to pretend that they influence—political scientists in particular like to pretend—or believe that they influence what appears on the op-ed pages of The New York Times—the fact of the matter is much more the opposite.

There’s a Catch-22 about this, too…There were two choices that faced left academics. You either follow the liberals in making the concessions to maintain respectability, or not. And the price of not doing it is to set yourself up to be dismissed as cantankerous or you’re too aggressive or uncivil [and] whatnot.

You need to call this shit for what it is, and especially for people who want to redefine what it means to be on the left in ways, to be blunt, that are just consistent with the limits of neoliberalism. This is part of the problem I’ve found; maybe I was a little naïve about this at the outset. And partly, I came out of the tradition of sharp Leninist polemics, anyway.

So, what I came to see was that if you don’t make the critique sharply or in a very sharp way, then it gets ignored, right? If you make it in a sharp enough way that people will pay attention to it, then all they pay attention to is the sharpness. So, then they’ll say that “so and so is a bomb thrower, takes no prisoners”, this, that, and the other.

And that’s one reason I stopped talking to reporters except, for Don Terry at The New York Times. But, I wouldn’t talk to anybody else, among other things, because I realized that they got the story written before they talk to you, and they’re auditioning you for parts that they’ve already crafted. And there’s this moment of repressive tolerance. I remember, I did a couple of these things, one with—I think it was Peter Applebome or maybe Jason Deparle, one of them. [It was] a long article on some shit about welfare or workfare, the underclass or something.

And I was on the phone for more than an hour trying to talk him off of the simplistic cultural poverty framing he was operating in. And what I got for my effort was a little quote that’s dropped in the middle of the article…and the thrust of the article was not changed a bit. So there’s a moment where the author says, “But not everyone sees it this way,” and then they quote you. And then, they say, “But others say….”So, I said fuck it.

Medina: They call that objectivity, right?

Reed: Right. Right. Right, exactly.

So, yeah, I said fuck it. I mean, you can write this shit, but you don’t need me to be part of it.

Medina: Exactly. So, they legitimized the whole article by using you.

Reed: Right, exactly.

So, political science has always been problematic, I think, as a discipline. I sometimes think that the thing about academic disciplines is like what my father used to say about state legislatures, that the worst one in the country is the one that’s presiding in the state where you are at the moment. So, the worst academic discipline is the one you’re in.

I would sometimes say that the one thing I can say for political science was that it’s not economics. But, that difference is getting narrowed, because one of the problems in our discipline has been this really powerful impulse to try to explain politics by reference to every fucking thing else in the world you can think of except politics…

Medina: Or inequality.

Reed: Oh, yeah. Well, in fact you can’t even talk about “inequality” anymore.

Medina: As you point out in Renewing, we talk about “disparity.”

Reed: Right.

Medina: We don’t talk about “inequality” anymore, or “equality.”

Reed: That’s exactly right.

And I think I’m going to do something for the Socialist Register next year on the racial disparity discourse around the differential impact of the economic downturn—or the depression, basically. Just an examination of the disparity discourse: what work it does for whom and then what work it doesn’t do for whom, basically.

Medina: One of the things that I want to go back to here is specifically the chapter, “The Color Line Then and Now,” the chapter that you wrote. That’s the chapter that brought it all together, I thought. And in it, of course, you elaborate on Du Bois’ color line formulation, which you argue a lot of black studies scholars are using to deploy the concept of race and racism. You critique this approach, because it doesn’t really clarify anything. In fact, you say that it obscures more than it clarifies. What did you mean by that? How does it do that? What are the mechanisms that lead to that?

Reed: Well, I think one of the problems is a straight conceptual one: that the category is asked to do too much work, so that racism is a notion, a concept that’s not very tightly specified. And in fact, one of the debates now between left and right is that conservatives want to specify racism in a very, narrow way as an individual prejudice or, rather, unjustified individual prejudice or bigotry…..

But I understand that the objective and defensible foundation for this is that the way that American politics has evolved over the last sixty years or so, and thus the terms on which egalitarian interests have won the victories that they’ve won are such that in law and public policy and increasingly in non-policy discourse, the only kinds of inequality that are considered unjust are those forms of inequality that have to do with disparities based on some kind of ascriptive status like race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever.

So, for instance, when I was involved in the Cabrini-Green tenants’ lawsuit against the city, they had to file the suit under the 1968 fair housing law, which meant that they had to charge the city and the CHA with discrimination, and discrimination on the base of race, age, and gender, when the issue was really displacement.

I understand that pressure. I mean, if you’re trying to seek the actual remedies for actual people, then the language that’s available in the law, through which to operate and, frankly, like in moral discourse to some extent, exerts a pressure to define the injustice in racial terms.

I think there’s a lot more than that going on, though. I think that there’s also a political economy of race relations that invests—or that ties activists to a discourse of race and racism as the sole metric of inequality or injustice.

But, I guess to go back to the other point I was making, the right wing wants to define racism in a very, very narrow way. Our side wants to define it very, very broadly. And that’s because, partly, of the iconic power that the charge of racism has at least within the universe of people who understand themselves to be antiracist.

I’m not at all convinced that it has that sort of iconic power out in the society at large, and especially as the currency of racism just seems to be inflated, so that when Houston Baker and Cornel West can’t get a cab uptown, that’s racism. If the police beat you down, then that’s racism.

I mentioned to a student in class last night that on one level—while I understand what people wanted to do in articulating the notion of institutional racism, it’s on one level an oxymoron. And so what happens is, I think, that racism becomes a convenient shorthand that—and I think this is what I mean by the charge—that it obscures more than it clarifies—it becomes an alternative to explanation, you label in lieu of explaining.

For instance, I think the sub-prime mortgage crisis is a good illustration of this problem. So, you say that blacks and Latinos were disproportionately targeted for these high-risk mortgage instruments, and were steered toward them even when they could have qualified for something less risky. And you say, “So, this is a clear disparity and it’s a clear evidence of racism.”

Well, but what is the racism? Where does the racism intercede? What carries it? It’s not doing anything itself. So, is the claim that the people who are involved in steering these classes of people to these high risk mortgages are themselves racist? But that just feels a little bit like the Nation of Islam’s white devil theory—that white people just kind of go around trying to find ways to gratuitously fuck over black people.

It seems more likely that these people, black and Latinos, in these inner cities were targeted because they were vulnerable, and they were discriminated against and they had a history of being discriminated against for conventional mortgages.

Medina: In Renewing, you also make this point in analyzing and looking at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Reed: Yeah, absolutely. I was just looking at some numbers this morning. I can’t remember what I was reading, but I was struck to see that 45 percent of people who live in the most damaged sections of the city were black. But, see, what’s interesting about that is that, more than 60 percent of the population was black, at that point. So, by definition, that means that 55 percent were not black. And in the poorest parts of the city, the same thing.

It feels like what on some level is going on is a vestigial mindset from the last days of the Fordist era, where there was an assumption that if you could demonstrate a racial disparity, then that would call for a remedy of some sort. Not necessarily an adequate remedy because most often the remedy would be a representational one or some form of recognition instead of redistribution. So, there’d be a job for the person who announced the racism, to be kind of crude about it.

But, the problem is that for twenty years that hasn’t worked, but people do it anyway. And I think they do it anyway for a complex of reasons. One is it’s just soothing. It just feels good because it’s comfortable. But, another is that there is no other—or that this is the consensual language within which one is expected to express a grievance that has any bearing at all to do with race.

And I think that one of the reasons that it is takes us back to the political economy of race relations, because there are vested interests that want to insist that the only way to talk about any kind of inequality that at all involves people of color is through the language of race.

By the way, I think reaction to the Tea Party stuff is a good example of this, because I’m convinced that the Tea Party crowd is like an iceberg tip with no iceberg underneath, which makes them just like our movement. And they’re trying to grow icebergs.… They’re trying to grow icebergs underneath the iceberg tips just like we are. And they’ve got some advantages, some big advantages that we don’t have.

Medina: They got Fox News.

Reed: Right, exactly. Yeah.

At the same time, groups like Color of Change and the Southern Poverty Law Center also have an interest in, I wouldn’t say exaggerating, but in stressing the significance of this phenomenon, because they fundraise off it.

The Democrats also have an interest in exaggerating the significance of this stuff because they need shit like that to tell us that the other guy is worse and that’s why we need to shut up and get behind Obama.

Medina: Actually, what you just said leads me to another theme that kept coming up in the book, and really in all of your work, namely the question of elite brokerage politics. So, what is the relationship between, getting back to the book, black studies, politics, and elite brokerage politics?

Reed: Well, that’s really an interesting question, too.

I think that this posture of speaking for a population or being interpreters for a population that, for whatever reason, is presumed not to be able to speak for itself at the public microphone is the foundation of the cultural politics mindset inside black studies.

Michael Rudolph West at Holy Cross three or four years ago published a really nice book called The Education of Booker T. Washington in which he makes the argument that Washington basically invented the idea of race relations. Not through direct argument and certainly not through a theory, but through his practice.

And West’s argument is that from the end of the 18th century until emancipation, the way that the question of the status of black people in this country got played out was in the discourse of what was called the Negro problem which was bound up with the existence of slavery and what would happen if slavery were abolished or if it weren’t abolished.

And he contends that after emancipation, the Negro problem just kind of vanished out of public discussion because what we had was a thirty-year period of contestation over how blacks were going to be incorporated into American civic life. And with the defeat of reconstruction and the defeat of the populist insurgency, the consolidation of the Jim Crow regime in the South, and the acquiescence of the Northern liberals, you wind up in this moment where blacks are citizens technically, but they’re kind of in the society but not of it, and the Negro problem is back again.

And he argues that in the context—since blacks are technically members of the society—the question then shifts from the framework of the Negro problem to the framework of how the races are going to relate. And he says in the framework of race relations: blacks disappear as workers, students, farmers, parents, individuals of any sort whatsoever, and are folded into the Negro.

And the Negro, by definition—because it’s an abstraction—doesn’t have a popular voice. So then the question is, in the title of Robert Penn Warren’s book, Who Speaks for the Negro? And Washington came forth as the person to speak for the Negro. He wasn’t the only motherfucker like that. There were a bunch of them, of course.

West’s argument, I think, is a little bit like the argument that I make about disparity, because he says that the race relations framework also takes questions of equality and inequality off the table because what’s the issue in the framework? The only issue is whether race relations are bad or good. And what bad race relations means is tension or hostility. And the only alternative to bad race relations is good race relations. And what good race relations means is there’s no tension.

But, the way you get tension, of course, is for the subordinates to make demands that piss off or make uncomfortable the people on top. So, the only way to have good race relations is to shut up and accept white supremacy, basically.

And it’s in this context that this notion of the Negro leader emerges. And it’s a notion that’s really never gone away. We talk about that stuff now. Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson.

Medina: And of course, the ultimate one would be our president.

Reed: Yeah, although he¬—

Medina: He does try to stay away from the question of race altogether.

Reed: Yeah. Although he’s trying to play on it both ways. A student just pointed out last night that he [Obama] checked the African American box on his census form, which doesn’t surprise me. Because he’d be crazy not to.

So, I think there’s an irony because it appears to be a populist kind of formulation. But, the approach to politics that posits the existence of the black masses or the black community or the grassroots are entirely consistent with an elite brokerage politics to the extent that masses and community are abstractions. And they’re abstractions that assume a singular voice. And presumption of the singular voice is what justifies the notion that some self-proclaimed spokesman will step forward and say what needs to be said to get paid in the right way.

Medina: So, what do we need to do? How can we build what we need to build? Where do we go from here?

Reed: That’s the big question.

I do think that we need to find ways just to start talking about capitalism. And, I mean, not like the Spartacist League, but I mean to do political education among people, whenever we can connect dots. The thing is, I guess, to try to always find the levers that can kind of break some stuff open.

I do think that maybe the greatest travesty—or the greatest outrage of this administration, next to the war stuff—is its absolute abdication of any attention to the fiscal crisis at the state level.

We need something, it seems to me, to do two things. To crystallize the perspective, or the understanding, that the same thing is happening to every state and that you can’t just fight it state by state. And we also need something to help get on the offensive about, which means also to mobilize, or to try to mobilize, outside the ranks of the academy.

Because this is another problem that’s a form of something like narrow trade union consciousness where the tendency is to go fight for what’s yours. We can’t do that now. The only way to fight to maintain any benefit is to fight the universal item, basically.

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Like many present-day lawmakers in the United States, the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi gave at least some thought to the question of how to pay for health care. One section of the famous Code of Hammurabi detailed what the fall 2009 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly cheekily referred to as a “fee schedule” for doctors in the 18th century BCE. For successfully employing a “bronze lancet” to treat a severe wound, Babylonian doctors were entitled to a set remuneration. If the patient were a “gentleman” he was to pay ten shekels of silver. The son of a poor man would owe just five (thus fees were in part tied to one’s ability to pay), and a gentleman whose servant needed care was to pay the doctor two shekels (an early version of our present day employment-based health insurance system?). These latter provisions might strike us as almost modern, but the code took a more draconian stance when it came to dealing with medical malpractice. Doctors who killed or maimed a patient while operating did not end up in court facing a civil suit as they might today; they simply had their hands cut off.

Nearly four thousand years after Hammurabi’s laws were first carved into stone, physicians have considerably more to work with than bronze lancets when it comes to medical technology, but the United States has yet to figure out a decent way to ensure that everyone has access to medical care and a means to pay for it. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act recently passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama purports to be the beginning of a long-term solution to that problem, and it comes after a year-long fight that sucked nearly all of the oxygen out of mainstream political debate in this country.

The terms of the health care discussion, such as it was, were heavily circumscribed from the outset. While a single-payer system—some version of which has been adopted in basically every other fully industrialized nation—has polled extremely well in public opinion surveys for years, anything akin to “Medicare for all” was deemed “politically impossible” from the outset (the obvious reason being that it was anathema to the enormously profitable and powerful insurance industry and its political backers, generally went unspoken). During his major address to congress on health care last September, Obama “triangulated” in a highly cynical fashion when he likened single-payer to absurd conservative proposals that would end employer-based insurance and force individuals to buy insurance on their own, labeling both interesting but impractical ideas. Despite its popularity and the fact that a House single-payer bill has been co-sponsored by over ninety members of congress in recent years, the corporate media provided little reporting or commentary on this option.

While single-payer advocates were not even offered a seat at the negotiating table, major stakeholders in the current for-profit health care system were central players from the beginning as the Obama administration sought to avoid the ire of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries that had helped derail health care reform in 1993-94. America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the trade group of the health insurance industry, was in regular touch with the administration and promised to work for reform but sat on the fence for months before deciding to oppose the Democratic proposal. This decision angered the Obama administration and led to a war of words between the White House and the insurance industry. In the end, however, the two main demands of the industry (everyone would be required to buy health insurance, no government-run “public option” to compete with private insurance) were met by the legislation signed by the president.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies’ trade group PhRMA, led by former Republican congressman Billy Tauzin, struck a deal with the White House last summer under which Big Pharma would agree to $80 billion in cost-cutting measures in the years ahead. In exchange the White House promised that it would not seek to lower prescription drug prices, an issue on which Obama had campaigned in 2008. PhRMA eventually supported the reform legislation with an expensive ad campaign, even reviving the fictional couple “Harry and Louise” whose commercials had helped to derail the Clinton reform effort but who now argued that we could “get the job done this time.”

In the Senate, control of the legislation was initially handed over to the conservative Democrat from Montana, Max Baucus, who had received over $1.4 million in campaign contributions from the health and insurance sectors during the 2008 election cycle. Baucus and five other members of the Senate Finance Committee (including three Republicans) were tasked with working out a compromise bill. The GOP made the (rather obvious) calculation that it was not in their political interests to help Obama pass a massive, bipartisan makeover of health care and as such embarked on a course of staunch opposition while paying lip service to the idea that they were negotiating. Several months were lost in the process, and during the summer recess a popular backlash against the supposed government “takeover” of health care exploded on the political scene, with the half-term ex-governor of Alaska arguably driving the discussion more than the president. The backlash—which undoubtedly was given excessive attention by the media—consisted of a potent mix of genuine, grassroots, anti-government conservatism (and libertarianism) and corporate astroturfing led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey’s group Freedom Works. The Obama administration was clearly caught off guard and never really regained control of the debate.

This loss of control was perhaps nowhere more evident than in the discussion of the public option, a fairly limited and inadequate reform which would have been available only to a small percentage of the population (and only if they wanted it), but which was quickly spoken of by the right as though it were culled from the pages of Mein Kampf. Many of Obama’s supporters on the left, meanwhile, came to view the public option as the holy grail of reform, taking little notice of the fact that it was never described with any real specificity and could well have proved a failure if implemented and significantly set back the cause of single-payer to which most progressives are committed. Adding to the confusion, mainstream media outlets generally represented the proposed public option as unpopular despite the fact that surveys routinely showed that more than 50 percent of the country supported it. Obama obligingly mouthed his support for the public option to avoid angering his liberal base more than necessary, but it seems likely he abandoned the idea of including it in the legislation early on, perhaps as part of a quid pro quo with industry groups.

Scott Brown’s surprise victory in the January special election to fill the late Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat seemed to kill the possibility of reform, but ultimately the Democratic leadership—fully recognizing that failure to finish any legislation would have been politically disastrous—was able to craft a route to passage based in large measure on the original, moderate Senate bill reported out of Baucus’s finance committee. Liberals cheered, hailing the bill as the greatest domestic policy achievement since Medicare and Medicaid, while many conservatives suggested that the bill was essentially the beginning of the end of freedom in the United States

In reality it’s extremely difficult to say what the effects of reform will be on public policy and on American politics in the long run. In terms of what the policy will actually do there are several issues at play. Measures which will significantly expand the number of people who have access to Medicaid, allow young people to stay on their parents’ plans until age twenty-six, and end discrimination based on pre-existing conditions (among others) are unambiguously beneficial assuming they are actually implemented as advertised. Despite threats of repeal if and when the Republicans retake the government, and forthcoming constitutional challenges by conservative attorney generals in a dozen or so states, it seems extremely unlikely that the law will be taken off the books by Congress or the courts, and as such a number of provisions will likely begin to have a demonstrably positive effect even before the 2012 election.

More threatening to the future of the legislation will be business efforts to fight its implementation through legal channels while also fighting a continued public relations war via advertising. According to the Wall Street Journal, the US Chamber of Commerce is planning on spending $50 million attacking health care reform and attempting “to unseat vulnerable Democrats who voted for it.” The Chamber also plans to take legal action if and when they disagree with implementation of the law. Critics have remarked that the legislation is full of loopholes, and much of the uncertainty about the law going forward stems from the fact that the meaning of some of the key provisions will likely be decided in the courts. We’ve already seen a preview of this lawyerly strategy when the insurance industry briefly tried to argue (perhaps correctly) that the law did not actually require them to provide coverage to children with preexisting conditions this year, as had been assumed. The industry quickly backed down from that argument after an outcry, but it’s a safe assumption that high-priced corporate attorneys will be looking for any legal loopholes that, for example, allow insurance companies to cover individuals poorly or not at all.

In spite of industry concerns, the conventional wisdom is that most health care companies will benefit from the new law. The New York Times reported on April 9 that the legislation will likely prove to be a boon for health care stocks, as companies like CVS Caremark and Quest Diagnostics are expected to profit handsomely from increased prescription drug sales and medical tests respectively. Insurance companies may face more difficulties once they have to cover people with pre-existing conditions at which point, as one health analyst told the Times, we’ll have to see if “they price these things so that they can avoid losing money” (that seems likely!). Despite their earlier opposition, AHIP has now, according to Time magazine, signed on in support to make “sure the new law succeeds beyond most expectations,” though AHIP and its health care industry members no doubt define “success” differently than do many of the supporters and intended beneficiaries of the bill.

In political terms, the health care debate has energized both the new Tea Party Movement and the Democratic base. Given the moderate if not conservative nature of the reform—which, as Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich has pointed out, is similar in certain respects to proposals made by Richard Nixon—it says a great deal about politics in the age of Obama that many liberals are now mobilizing around what they see as an enormous policy success while the Tea Party and the GOP are mobilizing to roll back the rising tide of fascism, or something. Regardless, for the next few years if not beyond we shouldn’t be surprised to see continued, intense grassroots energy directed at health care reform from both the right and liberal-left.

To what ends that energy will be directed is arguably a more difficult question. Perhaps in part because of the fierce intensity of the debate, many pundits speak and write as though the current battle lines for the health care debate will persist indefinitely. However, if history is any guide when it comes to major social legislation, that likely will not be the case. When the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, it was not particularly popular with FDR’s labor base (which was largely indifferent to the very idea of social insurance) nor with the Republican opposition (some of whom made reference to a threat to “the integrity of our institutions” and warned of “the lash of the dictator”). The act held to the racial and gender strictures of its time and excluded the majority of African Americans and women from the old-age insurance portion of the plan (the NAACP actually testified against the bill). Over time, however, Social Security became more inclusive, and was not only accepted by the next Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, but was expanded significantly by his administration, and labor unions and other progressive groups would come to defend Social Security as the bulwark of the (admittedly limited) American welfare state.

The story with Medicare is somewhat similar in terms of shifting politics. In the early 1960s, future Republican standard bearer Ronald Reagan railed against Medicare on behalf of the American Medical Association and argued that it was a stepping stone to socialism. He had changed his tune, however, by the time of the 1980 election when incumbent Jimmy Carter tried unsuccessfully to make an issue of his past statements in opposition to the by-then-popular program. George W. Bush and a Republican congress added an outlandishly expensive prescription drug benefit to Medicare in 2003, and in August of last year Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele argued in a Washington Post op-ed that “we need to protect Medicare…” Many progressives of the mid-1960s viewed Medicare and Medicaid as poor substitutes for their real goal of a national health insurance plan, but now “Medicare for all” is the rallying cry for many on the left.

A consideration of even the most basic variables demonstrates how difficult it is to predict the future politics of Obamacare. While the legislation is not in fact a government takeover of health care, it is perceived that way by many (on both sides of the debate). Will this perception continue to hold in the future? How popular will the reform be in five to ten years, and which aspects will be popular and which less so? If many view the program as successful (or as a failure), will it be because of a belief that the government took a larger role in the health care system, or because they left the private system largely as is, merely tweaking around the edges? If health care costs continue to go up, as is likely, will that be blamed on the federal government, the states, the insurance companies, or some combination thereof? We cannot know the answers to these questions at this point, but it’s entirely possible that liberals will be lamenting the failure of reform ten years from now while conservatives will have decided it wasn’t so bad. Or not.

For those of us on the left, it’s impossible to be happy with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or the way the process unfolded, though one can hardly be surprised by the outcome. The legislation seems to have further entrenched the role of for-profit insurance in the health care system which, in the long run, will inevitably continue to drive up costs as corporate profits are prioritized over people. The industry bought political access and helped write the bill to significantly suit its own interests, and single-payer advocates had no real opportunity to articulate the case for a European or Canadian style system in the course of a lengthy national health care debate the likes of which may not come again for many years.

On the other hand, the new law does seem to codify (at least in theory) the principle that access to affordable health care is a right, not a privilege, of all Americans. This legislation will almost certainly not deliver on that promise, and a decade or two from now it’s quite likely that Congress and a new president will be discussing health care all over again as costs spiral wildly out of control. At that point, having perhaps internalized the notion that everyone deserves to have coverage, even more Americans (and more legislators) might be open to the idea that a single-payer system is most efficient at containing costs while still providing everyone with access to care. Even if we get to that point eventually—a very big if—drug and health insurance companies will rake in a whole lot of shekels in the meantime, and tens of thousands will die because they could not afford to pay the man or woman with the bronze lancet that could have saved their life.

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Mac McClelland

Nearly fifty years after Burma’s last democratically-elected government was overthrown by a military-led coup, the Southeast Asian country has suffered some of the world’s most egregious human rights abuses.  For activists, Burma has become synonymous with institutionalized rape, torture, forced labor, and ethnic cleansing.  In the popular imagination, however, the enormity of Burma’s crisis remains obscured by indifference and the overshadowing presence of disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur.    

In 2006, Mother Jones editor and human rights reporter Mac McClelland volunteered as an English language teacher with a Burmese refugee organization in Mae Sot, Thailand, a small frontier town hugging the border with Burma.  There, she lived, worked, and partied with a small band of hard-drinking refugees who risk their lives to document the slowly grinding genocide consuming ethnic minorities in Burma. McClelland collects their stories of struggle and survival under a murderous regime in a wide-ranging, meticulously reported, and vividly recounted new memoir, For Us Surrender is Out of the Question.      

McClelland sat down recently with the CUNY Advocate to discuss her new book, the reason the world continues to ignore the genocide in Burma, and why there still may be hope for victims of the world’s longest-running war.   

I hoped we could begin by setting the stage a bit.  Can you discuss how it is that you came to work with Burmese refugees in Thailand?

It really was as lame as I describe it in the book.  I was dicking around on the internet, saw something about these Burmese refugee camps near the border in Thailand, but I couldn’t find any information about why they were there.  I saw that there were 100,000 Burmese refugees in Thailand, and I was like, “Huh? Really?”  I had never heard that before.  Of course, you know somewhere in the back of your mind that Burma sucks, that it’s not exactly a place you would want to live, not exactly a bastion of democracy, but I hadn’t heard that there was a refugee crisis, that there are hundreds of thousands of refugees leaving the country. I couldn’t find any easily accessible information about what the hell the story was, so when I finished graduate school I was like, “I’m just gonna go and check it out.”

Did you travel there with the intention of writing a book?

No. I really just wanted to go and see what was going on. 

What was the most surprising thing that you experienced while you were there?

Well, the genocide. The genocide that I had never heard of, that most people have never heard of because people are afraid to label it a genocide. It’s too complicated, too politically charged. To realize that something of that scope, at that level of horror, was happening and that it’s not widely reported—despite the fact that it has been documented to death—was stunning to me.  I mean, to every single thing that came out of the mouths of these guys that I was working with my response would be, “Really?!?” They would show me videos, and pictures, and I would get interviews, just endless stacks of shit, and with all of it, in every case, my response was, “No, that’s news to me. No, that story doesn’t exist in my media.  No, I don’t know what you are talking about.”  In retrospect, I guess it was stupid to have had faith in thinking that I would have known about this.  But it is so big! You would think that somebody would have been doing something about it. 

So, why haven’t they?  Is it simply that Burma is home to the world’s longest running war, and so doesn’t constitute news? Is news fatigue a factor? Or is there something else going on that we should consider?   

Yeah, well, it seems to me that the fact that it is so old could possibly have something to do with it, but at the same time the story is so juicy, it is so shocking, that it seems to me like something that could totally move papers.  But it’s also that people in this country—this is not as true in the UK—don’t really know what Burma is, where Burma is, don’t necessarily know what continent Burma is on, so I think that news organizations assume that the story will be a hard sell, and they’re probably right.  If I were more of a conspiracy theorist I would say that the genocide in Burma is being underreported because our government doesn’t want the people to know about it because then they would have to do something about it. And they don’t want to do something about it because then China would get mad. But really, I think it’s just a hard-to-sell story. Of course, it could also be fatigue: people definitely had Haiti fatigue, just as they had New Orleans fatigue before that.  The thing with Burma, though, is it seems like it hasn’t reached that point.  I just think we don’t know what to do with it.  Instead, we talk about the same thing over and over again, which is that there’s a political prisoner [Aung San Suu Kyi] there . Couldn’t we use that as a news peg to say “Oh, and by the way, there’s also a genocide going on”?

Let’s talk about your approach to reporting on the crisis in Burma.  There’s a wonderful tension in the book between the rigorous historical research that contextualizes the story—which feels almost academic in nature—and the vigorously informal tone you adopt that frames the narrative.  First, did this mixture result from having a particular audience in mind while writing?  And second, can you discuss the challenges of negotiating the slippery slope between these two elements of your style?     

I definitely did not have a particular audience in mind.  To me, the number one thing was that I had the stories of these refugees which were fucking crazy. I really wanted to tell them. Period.  As for the way the narrative came about, that was more the result of personality than anything else. First of all, I am a huge nerd: I love research and fact-checking and collecting information.  At the same time, I write the way that I speak.  When we were shopping the book proposal, a lot of people were not huge fans of that. They would be like, “Yes, this is an important subject and people should write more books about Burma. But we can never abide by the scathing, the obnoxious tone of this narrator!” 

Since the excerpt from the book came out in the new Mother Jones, some pretty important organizations—I won’t name any names—have written letters to the editor saying “What the fuck were you thinking, framing this in this way. It’s totally inappropriate for a human rights story.”  So I guess I know, now, who is not my audience! They thought that I was undermining the importance of the situation by not being dryer in talking about it. But for me, that’s exactly the problem with all this information!  It’s presented in a way that no one would ever want to look at it.  Even the videos you see have these dire voiceovers—almost always done by British people—and there’s always this slow and sad piano music in the background. The moment you cue it up you say to yourself “I’m not going to watch this. It’s going to be boring and/or sad.” 

I’ve read a thousand books about Burma and even the modern ones, they still read like reports, like academic tracts. They’re long, there’s no narrative, and there are no characters. Because there are no characters, I think that makes it hard for people to read, to engage with this conflict.  So, I was basically writing the book I needed when I was trying to find out what was going on.  This was the book I was looking for, and couldn’t find.

Given the jaw-dropping violence and atrocities being perpetrated in Burma and the world’s seemingly indifferent response thus far, do you still hold any faith that the United Nations or other members of the international community will intervene on behalf of victims there at any point in the foreseeable future?

I have some. We have peacekeepers on the ground in Darfur, after all, so we know we can do it. It’s not like the mechanisms aren’t there, that money isn’t there.  They are.  It’s just that people aren’t employing them.  Thank God I can point to Sudan, though, because otherwise I would probably answer no, I don’t have much faith. In Burma, those villagers would be so happy to see something like that.  Even just the attention would be important. They would be so happy that people knew what was happening. It would make a huge difference in their lives.  So yes, I do have some faith.  I recognize that it might be stupid, but if more people were talking about Burma, then the United Nations would be forced to address it. 

Let’s talk about United States foreign policy for a moment.  Given the necessary political will to act on the situation in Burma, what options, if any, could the Barack Obama administration reasonably pursue to have a positive impact there?

First of all, our government could lead the charge for a commission of inquiry into crimes against humanity in Burma.  Everyone knows that the United States is in charge, in many ways, of the United Nations, and certainly of the Security Council.  So, if we made a big deal of Burma, showed that this is a cause that we are behind and are willing to fight for, that would make a huge difference in comparison to what we are doing now, which is nothing. If a commission of inquiry were to be put into place then all this documentation sitting around would have to be looked at. I can’t imagine that people would see all that and then decide that this is not a problem. The Obama administration actually wouldn’t even have to do all that much work: it wouldn’t cost anything; people wouldn’t have to be moved around.  The president would simply just have to say, “We need to do this thing, right now.”

You make the point in the book’s closing chapter that when it comes to US-China relations, economic concerns trump human rights complaints that Washington might otherwise press with respect to Burma.  Yet in the case of Darfur, we saw something a little different play out. Why? What are the key determinants that distinguish these two situations from one another? 

I think civil society plays a huge part.  First of all, it’s about awareness: the public doesn’t know about Burma, and if the public doesn’t know about Burma then they aren’t putting pressure on politicians to talk about it. And so they won’t, because it’s easier to ignore it.  The “g” word also plays a big part in this. Right now, we just have this vague idea about Burma—that there’s a dictatorship or something there, that they sound really mean, and that there’s a lot of censorship.  This is not enough for people to get behind, to pressure the United States to stand up to China and fight them on the issue.  But imagine if someone threw it out there, called it what it was, and said, “This is a genocide!  These are the pictures.  Here is the evidence.”  This is what happened in the case of Darfur.  The exact same thing could happen in Southeast Asia. There’s no reason why it couldn’t.

A host of possible actions, peaceful and coercive, have been articulated to pressure the Burmese junta to respect basic human rights and prepare the way for civilian rule. At the end of the day, other options having been considered, what do you think about possibilities for military intervention in Burma?  Is this going too far?

I don’t think it’s going too far.  In my opinion, peacekeepers are the answer.  At least, they’re as close to the answer as we’re likely to get. The ideal solution, of course, would be that the country eventually evolves away from dictatorship and builds the necessary institutions for a democratic society and blah blah blah. In the meantime, someone needs to protect these fucking villagers in the east of Burma. It’s absurd what’s happening.  I read exile newspapers.  Every single day, there are reports of five-year-old girls being gang-raped, four thousand new refugees pouring over the border into southern China, this sort of thing.  It is so urgent. Perhaps not to you, perhaps not to me, but it is for the people who have to deal with it.  The fact that this has been going on for so long, and that so few people know about it, is ridiculous.     

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The rapid national organization of the Tea Party has become one of the most extraordinary developments in American politics since the election of Barack Obama. Depending on one’s perspective, it is either a diverse movement or a confused one. In truth it is both, but only because it is a cover for more than one movement. What we may be witnessing is a momentary intersection of two nascent movements, a populist one and a fascist one. Which of these movements will prevail will depend on what happens to the US economy in the near future. The future power of the Tea Party will crystallize, disintegrate, or morph in direct relationship with the so-called “real” economy of “Main Street.” The economic recovery will have to feel real to ordinary US citizens to succeed. So far it hasn’t. If there is no real recovery on Main Street, if ordinary Americans do not begin to feel like things are getting better in ways that really matter to them; if its middle-class majority becomes convinced that liberal capitalism has permanently malfunctioned then it is quite possible that the fascist elements of the Tea Party will coalesce into more extreme forms of antagonism.. It appears we are at that threshold now.

 In a recent New Yorker, Ben McGrath implies the Tea Party is nothing more than a hodge-podge of paranoid, right-wing populists. Likewise, Jonathan Raban’s expose in The New York Review of Books describes the convention in Nashville as a “loose congeries of unlike minds” united only by a common “contempt” of Obama. Both articles observe that many of the members subscribed to a wide range of counter-narratives concerning American power, such as the “birther” insistence that Obama isn’t an American, or the “truther” insistence that there are serious holes in the story of the 9/11 commission. There are evangelical wings and libertarian advocates. And then there is the surprising fact that the Tea Party movement is so old, and the unsurprising fact that it is so white.

The Tea Party’s suspicion of Washington, Obama, and the liberal media, however, is justified. The current financial crisis has conclusively exposed the real ties between Wall Street and Washington. The resolute self-censorship of the mainstream media to investigate that relationship has severely degraded many people’s faith in corporate journalistic integrity. This goes not only for CNBC, which championed the financial insanity during the bubble, but also for liberal publications like the New York Times and The New Yorker. Both the Times and FOX News are equally as likely to derisively dismiss interpretations from the right or left that don’t fit their ideological lens as a form of conspiracy theory. The recent crisis has opened an enormous rift between information that appears to explain the world and the information in the mainstream media, which seems merely to describe it. The abject failure of the mainstream media to investigate the potential conflicts in the relationships of the power elite on Wall Street and in Washington continuously opens a vacuum that progressives and conservatives must fill with their own research.

As Ben McGrath and others have noted, the Tea Party does a lot of its own research. Liberals dismiss their ideas with the same group-think arrogance found in the Tea Party itself, but one must at least give the Tea Party some credit for originality. The recent explosion of so-called conspiracy theory is not the product of the Internet’s ability to provide cheap access to fringe thinking. It is due to the degraded ambitions and responsibilities of mainstream American journalism and its complicity within the tiers of power it follows. Mainstream journalism actively participates in the simultaneous silencing of alternative media and the promotion of bounded debates that exclude openings outside the political mainstream. The resentment of Tea Party members for this silencing parallels progressive resentments of the same institutions. This silencing is a form of corporate censorship, not unlike that which the Chinese regime uses to edit Google searches. The difference is that the Chinese government uses censorship to edit stories, suppress information, and punish journalists for publishing anywhere. In the US, one can publish one’s thoughts online, for free. They are just not honored by those in power, and thus only “believed” by a small circle of one’s readers. Censorship in the United States instead takes the form of active derision, humiliation, and snobbery towards individuals promoting alternative narratives about the world. The Tea Party exists because of this information vacuum, however, and not simply because gullible people are excited by novel accusations and wacky ideas. This vacuum also serves the purpose of matching information to the emotions of one’s life, which is a necessary link one must make in order to explain the world to oneself.

The self-censorship within the corporate mainstream media is all the more problematic because the narratives they’ve inherited from their own political wing—their White House—just aren’t selling. What David Brooks, David Axelrod, Timothy Geithner and the Times fail to understand is that Obama’s pragmatic ideology is not one of compromise, but a compromised ideology. Obama’s intellectual principles have traded originality for power. From the beginning of his 2008 presidency campaign, he defined himself by his slip-shod fidelity to being “smart” without being “ideological.” His refusal to address the real ideological underpinnings of his own worldview has thus turned into his greatest weakness. He has no organizing principle for the world, and that’s why he’s become the perfect cipher for the real tiers of American power working around him. The most insidious part of Obama’s presidency is his blindness to his own beliefs. He’s the smartest guy in the room, but his lack of originality—his failure to think outside the box—stems directly from the fact that he doesn’t believe he’s in a box to begin with.

His decisions have thus become a synthetic gumbo of liberal policy decisions without the benefit of a liberal ideology—no Great Society, no Works Progress Administration. Obama’s form of pragmatic liberalism denies itself as liberalism, and thus Obama and his supporters constantly claim the righteous high-ground of compromise; all they want, they say, is smart power. What they don’t realize is that the real ideological and economic foundations of liberalism are dead. The collapse of the US economy is not only the fault of the Republicans, but is equally the fault of Obama and Bill Clinton, and Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer. Democrats have used US power in past decades as a platform for neo-liberal free-market policies like NAFTA and deregulation, as well as neo-conservative foreign policy adventures like Iraq. For Obama, things working right means a surge in Afghanistan, business-as-usual bonanza bonuses for the banking barons, and no single-payer or even public option healthcare system. It shouldn’t continue to surprise progressives that Obama doesn’t seem passionate about gay marriage, troop withdrawals, or financial reform.

In the face of Obama’s ineffectual leadership, it’s not surprising that Scott Brown was able to pull independent votes in the Massachusetts special election. Obama was correct to surmise that the populist tides that carried him into office also carried Brown into his. This populist tide also fertilized the Tea Party. It exists because the past financial collapse has killed liberalism—itself a contradictory mish-mash of capitalist exploitation and partial government programs. It’s dead because the United States has recently either escaped or forestalled economic collapse, but many regions in the United States are still experiencing the full shock of that catastrophe. Entire communities are socially and economically dead. For all practical purposes, these regions are currently sitting on the edge of the extreme social decay that follows economic depression. They are merely surviving while financial markets cautiously resume the practices of lending, leverage, and bonuses that contributed to the origins of the crisis. The economy has not recovered so much as it’s been revived, but the corpse that’s talking on CNN still looks, to everyone, like Frankenstein’s monster.

The Federal Reserve, not the Treasury Department, electrified this monster back into existence. The Fed’s policies absorbed and soaked up the worst of the credit crisis through quantitative easing, money printing, and the trillions of dollars of toxic securities it purchased. Those actions make the bailout seem trite. They have received very little attention in the mainstream media, although organizations like GATA (Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee) and websites like Zero Hedge have filed lawsuits and uncovered documents to pinpoint vast schemes of corruption, influence, and manipulation at the Fed now and in previous decades. The Fed serves as the lynchpin of liberalism because it creates money. By softening the effects of recessions through monetary expansion—that is, by creating credit bubbles—it reduces the possibilities for social revolt against the ruling elite. This is because middle-class wealth depends on an addiction to that credit and money. It thus prevents the social consequences of financial risk. Run by a cabal of banks, the Fed usurps the constitutional mandate for the Treasury to print money and instead prints it for the government, all the while controlling interest rates. During recessions and depressions it follows the Keynesian proscription to “spend” out of a recession. This is the world Obama wants to find pragmatic solutions to sustain.

The true litmus test of liberalism for a wobbly progressive is an opinion about the Fed, because a real liberal has either never questioned it or flat-out supports it. The failure of progressives to imagine a financial system post-liberalism is one of its main intellectual weakness, and thus one of the reasons for the continued success of the Tea Party. The Tea Party libertarian argument for free-markets without the Fed is not identical to the free markets proposed under the banner of neo-liberalism. The Tea Party’s argument against government spending includes a sustained critique of the Fed, embodied by Texas representative Ron Paul. This is one of the reasons why the Tea Party appeals so well to populist sentiment: it has actually persuaded working and un-employed Americans that another economic system is possible, even if that other system is a species of capitalism. But non-liberal capitalism is a de-centralized, utopian idea. It bears as much relation to contemporary financial capitalism as Chinese communism does to the Soviet kind.

This is where the Tea Party might one day intersect with the progressive green movement. Both movements could favor de-centralized economies that exchange commodities and non-fiat currency between local producers and consumers. Without the Fed’s cheap money, economies wouldn’t grow as fast. This slower growth would have great benefits ecologically. Thus the Tea Party and the greens may imagine similar alternatives to corporate globalization, in that neither imagines the enormous institutions necessary to support corporate forms of growth and support – primarily the state itself. There is thus a fascinating logic in the desire to shrink government, were it to actually work: since the state is the central agent of support for capitalist firms, there’s a chance a weak state might lead to weaker corporations. On the other hand, it might lead the way to ever more horrible forms of corporate control. This is the conversation that should be taking place right now between progressive greens and Tea Partiers. If they can find a consensus around environmental pollution, they might unite in their mutual opposition to mass industry, consumption by debt, and centralized economies run by corporate lobbyists. This conversation isn’t happening, of course. And so the points of commonality between the Tea Party and certain progressive and green skepticism around Obama and liberalism may never grow into an even wider populist tent.

This may also never happen because there are very real problems with the Tea Party. The common dissatisfaction with Obama always seems hung on phrases that suggest violence. There is more xenophobia than conspiracy theory in the birther vitriol. At the Nashville conference, important Republican demagogues such as Tom Tancredo and Sarah Palin were crowd favorites. Their style of charismatic, cartoonish patriotism make them leading political figures in what could become a newly indigenous American fascism.

In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton notes that Italian and German fascist movements blossomed during the collapse of their respective liberal capitalist states, and that both national movements came to power explicitly on anti-communist and anti-socialist slogans. They directed popular enthusiasm into dictatorships against the left, and mobilized passions already inflamed by the collapse of those capitalist economies. Crowds formed in order to inflict and threaten violence against specific targets, and legitimated it by simultaneously victimizing themselves and claiming ‘chosen-people’ status. The movement worked as an “anti-political politics,” or a politics that sought to use democratic techniques and extra-legal violence to destroy enemies of the people. Noam Chomsky uses similar language to describe the fanatic anti-political, anti-government perspective of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

What distinguishes the Tea Party thus far from these earlier fascisms is its failure, thus far, to explicitly self-identify as a racist movement, or as a group itself victimized by an enemy.  The vague idea of liberals or big government isn’t concrete enough to stir violence against groups, only institutions—like the IRS or the Pentagon or any federal agency. The fact that it is a white movement with some racists within it doesn’t make it a racist movement—not yet. Instead, angry whites dominate the group without elevating their whiteness as a condition of belonging. If it is racist, then, it advocates a weird kind of white power that other races are free to join. It has also failed to identify another “identity” group it holds primarily responsible for its problems. They rally against Mexican immigration without explicitly expressing disgust with Mexicans themselves. Tea Partiers have an obvious problem with “radical Islam,” but they aren’t organizing violence against Muslim-Americans. Different parts of the Tea Party seem angry at different enemies, and they project onto Obama a synthetic caricature of their fears. Even stranger, the Tea Party’s appeal as a fascist party has been clarified by its avowed declaration that Obama is a totalitarian, socialist, communist, and finally fascist dictator. It appears at times to be the very movement it proclaims to organize against.

The Tea Party is not yet the dependable vehicle of any coherent fascist policy, then, even as the politicians associated with it channel its emotions into threats of violence. Tea Party candidate for Texas governor, Debra Medina, was reported not to advocate “bloodshed” herself but rather to invoke it as “inevitable” if the constitution isn’t properly defended. In a stunning admission, she also told Glen Beck that she believed there were “good questions” about the role the Bush administration may have played in 9/11, and that the American people had not “seen all the evidence.” Her candidacy attracted attention and positive coverage from readers and listeners of Alex Jones’ “Prison Planet” and “Infowars” websites and radio shows. His popularity has also recently reached new heights; he was interviewed on the Geraldo Rivera’s FOX news program after the media tried to link John Patrick Bedell, the so-called Pentagon shooter, with the 9-11 truth movement. Jones is the  leading American skeptic of the 9/11 commission and, whatever his excesses and paranoia about issues like global warming, he is perhaps the most interesting figure in alternative media for bridging progressive and Tea Party politics together. He is also the greatest beneficiary of the mainstream media’s descent into corporate censorship, for better or worse.

But at this stage of its ascension, the movement’s failure to find a sustainable target for its anger has weakened the Tea Party. It will need a common enemy for the fascist wing to succeed and grow. This enemy cannot be Obama indefinitely. Still, their abject hatred of him is the closest the country has seen to a lynch-mob mentality in decades. Forty years ago, this same aggression would have led to open violence against African-Americans, especially in the south.

The reason the Tea Party has become legitimate for many Americans is because there is real anger right now. No one has been punished for the credit crisis except the middle and working classes. There is no sense that our laws apply to people in power. The elite have made statements expressing open contempt for ordinary Americans. Obama has appeared as a scapegoat for the right because the justice system hasn’t articulated a case against the real criminals, and because he has participated in that failure. His decision not to investigate the previous administration over torture and war crimes reveals a moral weakness under the deceptive guise of his “pragmatic” ideology. He wants to unite Americans but not address the forces that are tearing them apart. The truth is that Americans are divided more than ever by class, and those that are exploited deserve to feel angry. Geithner and Obama claim to have made the hard decisions in rescuing the economy, but they did so by saving the very institutions responsible for destroying it. In consequence, Obama’s desire for bi-partisan unity is as fatal an intellectual idea as it is a strategic one. He wants the parents to stop fighting so that they can keep beating the kids, or else to beat them softer and then give them health care.

Obama has surged twice in Afghanistan in the name of “nation-building” at a time when US infrastructure is falling apart at home. He rapidly expanded US drone strikes and covert operations in Pakistan in total violation of international law. He endorsed both real and proxy involvement of the US military in Yemen and Somalia. Even more ominously, his war strategy in Afghanistan continued even after a scandalously dubious election there, and just as Afghanistan’s now illegitimate President Hamid Karzai’s brother was exposed as a prominent drug trafficker on the CIA payroll. Everyday stories break about the clandestine involvements of the intelligence services and military contractors, and war with Iran seems increasingly likely. In combination with the role of the Fed, it’s clear that the US presidency doesn’t actually have the power necessary to change the country. Strangely, at the moment when executive power has never appeared stronger, a fascist wing of a populist movement has emerged because there is actually a power vacuum in the democratic machinery of this country. Fascist sentiments arise when government isn’t working. And if it continues not to work, one way or another there will be blood.

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One of the first Herstory students, CUNY GC Womyn's Feminist Studies Caucus Co-Chairperson Tammy Meir Clinton-Albright, takes a moment to ponder the centuries of phallocentric oppression experienced by her gender.

Her committee said it couldn’t be done.  There was no way history graduate student Kram Ebeihcs would be able to write her proposed thesis, “The Penis Dialogue: Personal Reflections on Phallic Imagery in Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues,” within the Graduate Center’s conservative History Department, which is better known for its biographical work on reactionary idols like Andrew Carnegie and Ronald Reagan and for its reliance on facts. 

“I was crestfallen when my proposal was rejected,” said Kram, whose male to female “transition” surgery is almost complete.  “When they asked me to articulate my methodology more clearly, my response was to write a personal reflection on how this request had violated my soul.  When they refused to even read that response, I put an interpretive dance of my anger on youtube.  Finally they kicked me out of the program. So I reverted to my backup plan and found a professor in the English department who would sign off on my project.”

But thankfully the English Department will now be relieved of its duty as the repository for victimized scholars and their “projects.”  The Grad Center has recently created the first Ph.D. program in Herstory.

“If you feel about it,” said Kram, who is serving as the program’s first spokeswomyn, “you intuit that since womyn are often taking notes at high level meetings in government and the private sector, they really have written the first drafts of history, at least since men made the mistake of teaching them how to write.” 

The details of the program are still quite unknown, but that hasn’t stopped many women’s dreams about the program from being interpreted as if they have actually occurred.  Although most other Grad Center programs are housed at 365 5^th Avenue, many dreams have said that the Herstory program will hold classes at “CREATINGSPACE for Women” in Park Slope, where according to its website “the sacred is felt, the spiritual explored, and sisterhood unfolds.”   “By jointly holding courses with CREATINGSPACE on neglected subjects like “Visioning,” “Women in Nature,” “Illuminating the Shadow” and “Listening in to the Guidance,” the Herstory program will be able to hit the ground running, or should I say, connect with the oneness of the ground in the process of rediscovering our ability to run,” said spokeswomyn Ebeihcs. 

But the Herstory program’s curriculum could also be one of the most wide-ranging and demanding at the Grad Center, with courses that explore “the dark part of the self known as the Shadow,” being balanced by grueling yoga and Pilates classes, longitudinal social experiments in lesbian separatism, and actual attempts to live according to “The Rules” and the guidance of “The Skinny Bitch” books.  Videos of the lesbian separatism colony could also generate significant revenue for cash-strapped CUNY. 

Some in the Grad Center hierarchy have voiced concern that the courses in the department will not be welcoming enough to male grad students.  “I’m sure our classes in how men use pornography to possess women will be a draw for male students,” said Ebeihcs in response.  In a further plug for the class, she said, “Students will be expected to thoroughly analyze video evidence.”    

Another skeptical view of the new Herstory program worries that it is essentially a Trojan horse.  “First they want to join some harmless sharing circle, the next thing you know they expect you to go with them too!” said Ebeihcs’s exasperated live-in boyfriend, Erik Nilsson.  Academically the belief is that Herstory could supplant History as it is practiced in a variety of other disciplines.  “There’s really nothing to worry about,” said a reassuring Ebeihcs.  “Look at Art History at the Grad Center.  It already effectively is Art Herstory and no one is worse off.

“At the end of the day, all this negativity will dissolve like ice cream on my tongue when I eat my feelings,” Ebeihcs continued.  “The Herstory program really has very modest ambitions.  We are more Susan Faludi than Andrea Dworkin for sure.  There is an undeclared war on women in America, we would just like to see that war officially declared.  Then we will simply deny men sex until they agree to end it.”

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Imaginal Machines by Stevphen Shukaitis. Autonomedia (2009).

At every level, Imaginal Machines is a subversive text. Against the rising tide of complacency, Stephven Shukaitis sketches out new possibilities for political engagement that are at once seditious and savvy. Resolutely anti-disciplinarian (in both senses of the word), he leaps recklessly from philosophy to art criticism to social movement studies. In the book’s opening pages, Shukaitis promises to “connect Surrealism with migrant workers, the Industrial Workers of the World with Dadaism, and back again.” Against all odds, he does so, and with great aplomb. From its non-linear organization to its whimsical typeface, Imaginal Machines courageously defies convention. Throwing caution to the wind, the book explodes the limits of both what can be said and how it might be said.

Stylistically, Imaginal Machines is both entertaining and terrifically complex. The text overflows with prescient metaphors, digressions, in-jokes, and parenthetical observations. But these quips and asides are not merely adjunct to the primary text but rather rival the “main” narrative for attention. The subtext quickly becomes the surface, and in an affront to neo-positivist ways of knowing, Shukaitis bends his lyrical prose sideways and backwards, without ever compromising lucidity. Reflecting the uncertainty of postmodern times, nearly every declarative statement comes paired with a qualifier or a caveat. The result is a text that folds in upon itself with multiple levels of meaning.

The body of the text is centered around a series of case studies (though the notion of a case doesn’t align with the author’s method). Shukaitis takes us on a whirlwind tour of what others have called “alternative institutions” (several of which he was involved in personally) and offers a probing introspective analysis. Yet unlike other recent assessments of the global Left “scene,” which tend to be optimistic to the point of absurdity (for example, We Are Everywhere, NowTopia, Real Utopia), Shukaitis maintains his (self-)critical edge throughout. Indeed, Shukaitis is keenly aware that—by most measures of success—the Left is losing badly. For example, in a chapter on worker self-management (WSM), Shukaitis describes his four-year-long involvement with a worker-owned record label in vivid detail. But ultimately, he concludes that WSM may have limited radical potential (though his argument is significantly more complex), and in the process offers the type of deep self-critique that is painfully absent in most
Left circles.

The term Imaginal Machines merits some explanation. As Shukaitis notes, his title is borrowed from a term coined by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), itself a derivative of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s desiring-machine. So the imaginal machine is “a particular arrangement or composition of desires and creativity as territorialized through and by relations between bodies in motion.” The idea of outer space figures prominently here. For Shukaitis, the metaphor of space is relavant precisely because it represents that which cannot be (entirely) known. In science fiction film, the music of Sun-Ra, and the popular imagination, space functions as a zone of limitless possibility. Shukaitis suggests that a politics bounded by the coordinates of the known world is hopelessly constrained. Instead, “an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world.” Whether or not space is operating at the level of metaphor here, it is a powerful heuristic device.

Imaginal Machines is often remarkable for what it doesn’t do. Though the concept of “radical imagination” emerges as a dominant theme, Shukaitis self-consciously refuses to mention C. Wright Mills, whose Sociological Imagination is usually considered among the most important contributions to the concept. For a traditional social scientist to write a book on the “imagination” without explicitly invoking Mills would approach blasphemy. But Shukaitis is no traditional social scientist (though he may be a blasphemer). Likewise, Karl Marx appears mainly through his metaphors (the architect and the bee, the old mole, “storming heaven”). Yet Marx lurks in the deep crevices of Imaginal Machines’ pages and his influence is never far from the surface. Though the book is, in part, a critical encounter (rencontre) between autonomist Marxism and poststructuralist theory, this is not Shuakitis’ main intellectual project.

While it adheres to some extent to traditional book-publishing conventions, Imaginal Machines strives to be a rhizomatic text with no beginning and no end—only a boundless middle. Characteristically, most of the book’s conclusions arise from the embedded case studies, while the book’s final chapter (the “actual” conclusion) opens up far more questions than it provides answers to. In the section on work and self-management, Shukaitis at one point recommends a politics based on “the constant immanent shaping and creativity that will not allow itself to ever be totally bound in a fixed form.” There is a sense here that Shukaitis is commenting on the very text he is producing—or better yet, the “work” of book-writing. If there is an enemy in Imaginal Machines, it is the idea of closure—that struggle should at some point cease, that the revolution should be contained, that organizations should seek permanence.
This opens the question of failure, another major theme in the book. For the post-9/11 Left, most of the last decade has been characterized by moods that don’t translate well into English—malaise, ennui, schaedenfreude, and melancholia. Large street protests seem to have quieted down, while, at the same time, the ever-resilient late capitalist state has demonstrated a unique ability to co-opt dissident movements. Of course, as Shukaitis reminds us, this is nothing new. thirty years ago, the threat of worker militancy and factory occupations famously portended the rise of worker participation committees, quality circles, and the team concept—a blow from which most unions have yet to recover. More recently, in continental Europe, widespread protests around (against?) precarious work were “answered” in the form of “flexicurity” (flexible security) regimes—a Phyrric victory at best. Yet accelerated cycles of recuperation—defeat via compromise—may well be a unique feature of post-Fordism. The task then becomes devising a politics that can resist the overarching tendency toward capture—even temporarily.

Here, Shakaitis draws heavily on the notion of infrapolitics, as posited by James Scott and popularized by the cultural historian Robin Kelley. Much like Deleuze’s minor politics, Kelley’s infrapolitics suggest a “hidden transcript of power…or a space that is somewhat encoded or otherwise made less comprehensible to those in power.” Shukaitis argues that in order to avoid recuperation, resistance must operate largely in the sphere of infrapolitics—beyond the watchful gaze of the state—and speak in ways that defy understanding. Perhaps the answer to Guyatri Spivak’s prescient question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a definitive “yes”—but not in ways that are universally intelligible.

The audience for Imaginal Machines is sure to be broad. On the one hand, the book is written by a movement insider with extensive knowledge of the contemporary American Left and is grounded in real political struggles. On the other, Imaginal Machines is a sophisticated endeavor, deeply informed by high theory (especially of the Italian autonomist and the French poststructuralist variety). Yet Imaginal Machines is not just another “social movement study” by an academic from the distant perspective of a “neutral” observer. Shukaitis constantly reminds us that actually-existing political practice is already immersed intheoretical presuppositions, just as good theory emerges from real struggles. But Shukaitis transcends and ultimately dispenses with the classic binary between “theory” and “practice” by masterfully weaving both into a seamless narrative. The result is the rare academic book that is certain to appeal to activists and organizers, but does not compromise its scholarly integrity in so doing.

This is a unique and extraordinary text that deserves wide attention. Just as Baruch Spinoza famously posed the question “What can a body do?” Shukaitis seems to ask “What can a book do?” The answer, it appears, is far more than we think.

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Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors

A New Literary History of America by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Belknap Press (2009).

There is an early, instructive moment in A New Literary History of America—Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s magnificent collection of short essays on American literature and culture—that reflects the tone and scope of the entire work. Norma E. Cantú is describing a visit to the Alamo and her participation in a healing ceremony, an attempt to exorcise a century and a half of “violence, overt and covert, that was done to Mexicans and blacks in Texas” after the thirteen-day siege in 1836: “The rupture, the terrifying rending of the fabric that was life before 1836, has made me who I am, but it has also rendered many of us Texans blind to our own history. The healing circle that October afternoon taught me that the battle is not yet over.” Cantú’s message, at once recuperative and polemical, is emblematic of the volume as a whole, which reads less as a standard literary history than a “healing circle” of its own, a linked set of disparate moments and actors, drawn together in remembrance, solidarity, even defiance, and pledged to the forging of new histories, new readings of the collectively-shared past that is America. Cantú’s essay on Texas-Mexico border writing is at once a reverie for the dead, an attempt at cathartic closure, and a process of communal rebirth, and so is A New Literary History of America The collection is nothing short of a re-visioning of American literary history and identity in light of the concerns of the twenty-first century, a new set of sightings, soundings, and range findings of once-familiar territories from contemporary perspectives.

A book as long and as rich as A New Literary History of America cannot have justice done to its many individual essays in the space of a single review. Nevertheless, highlights from the volume fairly leap out every twenty or thirty pages or so, begging especial mention: Cantú’s luminous essay, mentioned above; or Mary Gaitskill’s take on Norman Mailer, which pastiches the first-person style of the first part of Mailer’s Armies of the Night, and in so doing offers at once a subtle critique of Mailer’s swaggering authorial voice and a celebration of his personal and literary excesses; or screenwriter Michael Tolkin’s deft pairing of hardboiled noir prose with the drinking stories of Alcoholics Anonymous members; or Marcus’s prophetic reading of Moby Dick against a twentieth-century TV Guide and twenty-first-century reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan. In all of these pieces A New Literary History of America delights as well as instructs, the contributors fashioning their own highly stylized narratives in direct response to the critical challenges posed by the texts and authors under study. In so doing these essays usefully collapse the boundary between critic and subject, reviewer and reviewed, so as to quite efface normative divisions between the arts of fiction and criticism. While not all of the pieces in the anthology reach for these heights, the more standard, encyclopedia-style essays—which constitute the bulk of the volume—are nevertheless almost uniformly successful, short, lucid gems of exposition and erudition: the effect of reading these pieces, a few at a time over the course of a month or so, was that of so many windows opening up onto a shadowy past, be it the coasts of the Americas as first glimpsed by European voyagers, or the reception history of James Fenimore Cooper’s wilderness romances in Europe, or even the professional acting career of Junius Brutus Booth, father of John Wilkes Booth and the introducer of Romantic theater to the United States. Even those authors particularly well-embalmed by the twin desiccants of scholarship and popularity, sawdust-stuffed figures like Emerson and Whitman and Henry James, get a thorough airing, and new light thrown into the unexplored crannies of their well-creased hides. All of these pieces, and so many others—especially those treating subjects and periods in which I’m a proud nonspecialist—are consistently informative and exciting.

But like any list or canon, even the inclusiveness and openness of A New Literary History of America cannot fully encapsulate or encircle the entire terrain of American cultural and literary history, even with the inclusion of chapters on Porgy and Bess, Bob Dylan, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, all of which share space with more traditional subjects like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Carl Sandburg, and Philip Roth.

Like groundbreaking books on American literature before it, books such as D. H. Lawrence’s iconoclastic Studies in Classic American Literature or Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, the ultimate inconclusiveness of A New Literary History of America is a happy fault of its rare virtues: its plurality and attempt at an all-encompassing sweep; its commitment to the poetics and politics of literary, cultural, and historical criticism; its self-reflexive inquisitiveness of its own and others’ narratives of origin and identity; and its privileging of diversity and hybridity over sameness and rigidity—qualities that the book will be seen to share with America itself, whose always-elusive “more perfect union” is forever receding, like Gatsby’s green light, beyond its grasp. The omissions and imperfections of A New Literary History of America are many: one looks in vain among the contributors for luminaries like Louis Menand, Rebecca Solnit, and Toni Morrison; a few of the contemporary chapters, like Hua Hsu’s on hip hop, are thin on texture and detail; brand-new modes of communication, like LOLspeak and YouTube,
are absent. But even these gaps succeed as provocations to further exploration, lacunae on our historiographical map to be filled in with further literary and cultural cartography. At its best and quirkiest, A New Literary History of America reads like a vast provocative setlist or syllabus compiled by a team of obsessive collectors and enthusiasts—Benjamin’s author-as-producer refashioned as the twenty-first-century’s geek compiler of alternative histories and tragically overlooked moments. As a great literary mixtape, A New Literary History of America looks beyond itself to other, newer literary histories, ones even less finished or closed, open to newer media and newer discoveries. At times I found myself wishing that the book weren’t immured by copyright laws and the solidity of print production, that an open-source weblog or online supplement were busy recording further contributions to this great project—the genesis of slash fiction, the beauties of Andy Warhol’s a: a novel, learned excurses on the lyrics of Jay-Z or the nomadic aesthetics of iPhone photography: the list, as with this compendious list of lists, is long. A New Literary History of America stands strongly, as both example and challenge to the work—spanning periods, genres, languages, ethnicities, and media—that will follow it.

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