Inspired by Obama's visit to China, starting here (not sure if this is open to the public).

More bad news. Actually I'm not sure how different this is than before. On a separate note, leave it to FT to characterize Shenzhen as "one of China's most progressive cities"...  And leave it to FT - that champion of free speech - to post a big disclaimer "Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009... Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web." Well the report's here.

Response to a Chinese friend, who said she recently met an American who came, after several years of NGO work in China, to the profound and original conclusion that "China will never democratize."

I wouldn't waste my time with people who say things like that. You should ask him what he means by "democratize." Since he's an American, almost certainly he means to adopt the US model of representative political democracy. Then you should ask him, what's so great about that model? Many Americans I know are discontent with that model. And the US government has a long, dark history of using that model as an excuse to invade other countries, such as Iraq, and set up puppet governments
more useful for American political and economic interests.

If you say this to many Americans they will think you're brainwashed
by the Communist Party and that you're defending the Chinese system,
but it's possible to be critical of both Chinese and American systems
at the same time - and even to see them both as two different forms of
the same global capitalist system.

At the same time, such First World "democrats" try to monopolize the
word "democracy" by implying there is only one kind of democracy -
their kind. You know that in Chinese, 民主 can mean different things.
For example it can refer to someone's way of dealing with divergent
opinions when working together with a group, as in "她处事的方法很民主" (or
不民主). That kind of democracy may be more important than the formal
democracy of political representatives - who in reality always form
part of an elite class and mainly represent the interests of the
elite, not of ordinary, working-class people.

Most anarchists and (real) communists reject such formal,
representative democracy in favor of "direct democracy." Direct
democracy not only means making decisions directly and democratically
(instead of through representatives) - usually trying to come to a
consensus that will satisfy almost everyone involved, instead of
the majority imposing its will on the minority. It also means
exercising direct control over all aspects of our lives. Neither of
these conditions are met by the model of representative political
democracy advocated by people who say things like "China will never
democratize."

In an earlier message she had quoted the American democrat as saying that the fundamental problem of rural China is "poverty," and she wondered about the role that NGOs could play in alleviating poverty, to which I replied:

I'm not sure if the fundamental problem in rural China is poverty. I
think the fundamental problem today is the capitalist system. Basically,
people are poor because the state prevents them from taking things
from rich people. At the same time, the state helps rich people and
their companies to take land from poor people, to pollute their land,
and to make them work for low wages to help the companies profit.
There's more to it than that, but that's the basic problem, as I see
it. The overwhelming majority of NGOs don't aim to deal with this
basic problem, that's why I don't have much hope in them, or in
activism.

I feel like I could set up a whole consulting service for this purpose, but (1) for all the things I know _not_ to do, I'm not sure about which methods will actually work in some situations, and (2) few people would recognize the need to ask for advice until it's too late.

I could write for ages about all kinds of mistakes I've made in trying to come to China, get and extend permission to live here, work here, study here, and do research here. Once I posted a detailed account of a friend being multiply screwed over by a college where I was teaching - again it's not clear what lessons could be gained from that, except not to work for that particular college, but since I've heard many Chinese colleges are like that, maybe I should just advise people not to work for any Chinese college.

Here I'll just focus on my experience trying to do research in China, and the practical lessons I can offer from that. In this case, all the blame can't be laid at the doorstep of China, Chinese culture, the CCP, or even the state or capitalism in general (although I could probably make a pretty strong case that it's mostly due to capitalism and the state, if I wanted to go that route). I'll focus on giving advice I really wish I had at various steps in the process of making this attempt, mentioning my experiences as illustrations.

Getting a Grant

I'm tempted to advise against applying for research grants altogether - if I took all the time and money I spend writing and mailing grant applications, going through the complicated procedures of actually getting the money (which I still haven't gotten yet, after over a year of work on this), paying completely unecessary and ridiculously high prices for academic affiliation in China, and waiting around without "gainful employment" (which at least some grants require - and if you get the timing wrong, you could end up stuck deeply in debt and getting kicked out of China), I probably could have made at least as much money just by working, then quit my job and done whatever research I wanted on my own schedule, as I saw fit.

But if for some reason you feel compelled to get a grant (because it looks good on your CV or whatever), make sure that you do not quit your job until you actually get the cash in your hand. Otherwise you're likely to end up like me, waiting around for five months with no income, not allowed to do research (because of IRB human subjects permission), having to take out loans to pay for ridiculously expensive and completely unnecessary fees for academic affiliation, screwing up personal relationships, career plans, and so on. Don't believe a word people say about when you'll actually get your grant or human subjects permission.

IRB Human Subjects Applications

Don't forget to submit your human subject application to your university's IRB as early as possible. I completely forgot about it - and of course no one reminded me - until about June (after having been informed that I was eligible for a grant and - as they requested - quitting my job in May), and then the office was closed for the summer and didn't get processed until September, at which time I found out that the scanned copy of my signature wouldn't work: they needed an "original inked signature." I suspect these university IRBs are the only remaining bureaucratic apparati in the world that maintain such a ridiculous requirement. Of course my signature had to be on the same page with the signatures of my advisor and my department head, both of whom were in different countries. So we arranged for one of them to mail the form to me, let me sign it and mail it to the third, who would mail it back to the IRB. But after about a month, I never received the sheet, so I signed a third copy and mailed it in October. My IRB still hasn't received it, and that's all we're waiting on at this point. I'm contemplating whether to mail a fourth copy, but I'd have to take out another loan to do that (of course if it's lost in the mail again, I'll either have to take out another loan in any case or drop out of grad school and take up another job. Don't get me wrong: of course I've been working odd jobs here and there. But now I've also got to pay back the loan I took out to pay about 4,000 US dollars for academic affiliation in China, visas, and residence permits - all technically unnecessary.

Academic Affiliation

China does not have a research visa or any national, official permit for doing research in China. Many officials (including university officials) regarding it as illegal for foreigners to do any kind of social research in China - it doesn't matter if the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences writes a letter for you. On the other hand, you can generally conduct as much research as you want on any subject that isn't highly sensitive (I don't think it's necessary for me to explain what those are) without any kind of permit, as long as your establish personal relations with the authorities in the place where you're doing the research. It doesn't matter what kind of visa you're on or who your official "work unit" is.

However, if you're applying for a foreign research grant, such as Fulbright-Hays, you're required to have an official academic sponsor, and that means paying between 3,000 and 4,000 US dollars in "tuition" at one of the few Chinese universities familiar with this procedure (and it's basically guesswork and trial-and-error to figure out which ones can do that), and establishing a relationship with a professor at that university who can serve as your official supervisor for the purpose of that affiliation. I'm told that Fulbright (different from Fulbright-Hays) can actually set that affiliation up for you. But Fulbright-Hays - and probably many other grants - can neither do that nor offer any advice. So again, the easiest way to deal with this would be to not apply for grants in the first place. But if you do, contact me or anyone else with experience in this (my dissertation committee - two of whom have done research in China many times - were not able to offer any useful advice until after I had wasted many months and thousands of dollars on dead ends) to find out exactly which univerities are capable of providing such affiliation, and the exact procedure for doing so. At several universities I know of, that involves applying to enroll as a gaoji jinxiusheng (advanced research student). It's important you get the procedure right the first time, otherwise the "foreign affairs office" of the university will get suspicious of your intentions and you have no chance of ever working anything out with them (this happened in my experience at two universities, and this pattern has been confirmed by someone at the Fulbright office in Beijing and a couple other students trying to get affiliation in China). Of course no one at that office will explain any of this to you, so you really need to know exactly what to do before you approach them.

Conclusion

OK, that's probably enough for now. My main points are (1) if you want to do research in China, it's probably better to not apply for a research grant, get the cheapest visa available (ask among expats in the city you want to go to and you should be able to find no-strings-attached one-year "work" (Z) or "business" (F) visas for 4,000 yuan or so), and do whatever research you want at your own pace and on your own savings (and you can easily find part-time jobs on those visas, not allowed by grants); (2) if you must apply for a grant, make sure you keep your job until you get the cash in your hand, apply for IRB human subjects permission as soon as possible, and ask me or other experienced people about which Chinese universities can provide academic affiliation and exactly how to go about getting that. Don't be like me and waste five months waiting around without a job, taking out loans to pay of these unnecessary expenses, and damaging your personal relationships, just because you wasted several months trying to get academic affiliation in the wrong way with the wrong universities, didn't think about applying for human subjects permission until the office was closed for the summer, and tried to apply with a scanned signature instead of an "original inked signature." Doing research in China could be much simpler than it ended up being for me and several other students I've talked to.

Is that f*d up or what? You can't set up a new Google account without entering a valid cell phone number and then entering a password they send to your phone. Too bad Google is the best email service around. Anyone know any comparable ones that aren't so fascist? (I also wonder whether it's only in China that Google has this policy...)

Below is my rejoinder to Brian Holmes' response to my comments on his blog entry and email message about the University of California protests, the "Communiqué from an Absent Future," and the coming unrest in the US, with Brian's response to my rejoinder interspersed. This will be the end of this exchange, since these final comments make clear we don't have that much more to talk about. Brian is extremely knowledgeable and has a profound understanding of contemporary social reality, but that understanding is shaped by a framework and a politics I don't agree with. Ultimately it seems to me that such a politics doesn't need our help - its goals could probably be easily achieved by already existing hordes of capitalist reformers. As with previous experiments with state socialism and the welfare state, such reforms could only last until capital enters another crisis and declares that, in order to save "the economy" and the society that depends on it, it must "cut the fat," re-liberalize, and plow over any autonomous spaces that we've managed to created in the meantime. Moreover, any compromise that capital accepts in one country, social group or aspect of its operations is usually offset by increasing its exploitation somewhere else (increasing the rate of exploitation among certain workers, dispossessing people to obtain cheap land, etc).  Only the complete abolition of capital and the state could put an end to this kind of back-and-forth, if the world could even survive many more decades of even a re-reformed capitalism. And there's no good reason to doubt the possibility that communistic relations could replace capitalist ones as the basis of society - even a complex global one. Such relations worked well enough for most of human history, and even now they work on a global scale in the interstices of the capitalist system. (Posted with Brian's permission, with some things omitted.)

Brian, I find the theory of the middle class you outline unusually
insightful and convincing. I have a knee-jerk reaction whenever I
encounter the term "middle class," as you can probably guess, because
of the way it often functions to divide the proletariat - or at least,
that's how I've tended to view it. And also because I've never seen it
theorized well - and usually it's not theorized at all, just deployed
ideologically.

I guess the closest I've seen is Michael Albert's "coordinator class,"
and the notion of "the guards" that Howard Zinn uses in his People's
History of the US. But the latter isn't theorized, and the former I
haven't studied closely (since the whole Parecon milieu puts me off
for various reasons), but my impression is that it fails to grasp the
specificity of capitalism and modernity (to say nothing various
regimes of accumulation).

Another attempt to deal with something like the middle class is the
anthropological work of [A] and [H]. That focuses on the split between
"brain workers" and "manual workers" in postsocialist China, and mainly
draws on Gayatri Spivak's writings on Marx. But that I found unsatisfactory
too. For example, they seem to imply that only manual labor produces value,
and that brain workers effectively exploit manual workers. But when I asked
them about this they weren't able to deal with the questions coherently. [H]
actually fell back onto saying it was just a metaphor to describe
unequal power relations.

Brian: Well, the idea that science and art do not produce value will not get you very far in the 21st century, imho.[...]

The concept of the middle class you outline in your message, however,
seems much better theorized and consistent with Marxian analysis. To
what extend did you come up with this yourself, and where else are you
getting the idea from? Can you recommend any readings about it?

Brian: Well, it's something I have been thinking about for a long time. Probably I just put a Marxian, demystifying twist on lots of sociology and also, direct observation. The notion of predation (hunter/hunted relations) originally comes from the American social theorist Veblen. I recently read Minqi Li's article, "Can capitalism survive the rise of China?" which is all about class in world society and includes, btw, references to the Erik Olin Wright book; it encouraged me that my ideas about the (poorly named) middle class were not all wrong. I should write a serious text about all this, because it is desperately needed to politicize the current economic crisis.

I have thought about Marx's category of "petty commodity producers"
(including "peasants" in a specific sense of the term) as something
like a separate class, but one which, under the pressure of capitalist
competition, tends to embody both the opposing logics of capital and
labor within the same family or even individual. Feminist theorists
have elaborated that this split tends to be gendered and aged - men
tend to embody capital and women and children embody labor.

Some of the positions you label as "middle class" might be understood
by this category, or the similar (but more ideologically loaded and
often abused) "petty bourgeoisie."

Brian: Yeah, but if you don't account for the specific character of state institutions, which combine public entitlement (or really, mediator-class entitlement) with corporate ownership or sponsorship, you miss most of society as it really is (at least in countries like the US or France, the ones I know). Marx's class theory is too simple. The thirties changed everything. Basically, there has been no threat of a working-class uprising in the countries where the welfare state was installed. France had a chance in 1968 and it did not happen, because the Grenelle settlement offered higher wages and new entitlements. However, from that point forth, neoliberals designed many techniques to shift economic activity away from the kinds of class relations defined by the welfare state. What we call globalization is the result of that process.

I've previously thought of "professionals" according to these
categories, in that they produce commodities - sometimes using their
own means of production - and sell them, rather than selling their
labor-power directly. But that line has always been a blurry one for
me. For example college instructors may be said to produce their
lessons and sell them to the school in exchange for a salary, but in
my experience as a teacher (I'm a grad student now, incidentally), I
felt more like I was just selling myself directly - that I had very
little control over what and how I taught, and so on. And I imagine
this blurriness could be applied to all professionals in one way or
another - especially as the "clients" or "patrons" they sell to gain
more control over the production process, on the one hand, and as the
professionals' relative privilege and security becomes more
"precarious," on the other

Brian: Yeah, it's true and getting worse. To be involved in the mediator/coordinator class is different than being working class, but there is less and less autonomy! I think the first struggle is for autonomy, and only by creating collective positions of relative autonomy, outside existing normative social relations, can you even develop a full politics worthy of the name. The relative autonomy gives you a place and above all a consciousness from which to intervene. This is where anarchism has strong contributions to make. I should also add that, as neoliberalism advances, the Marxian categories regain relevance! However, capitalism will never again be like it was in the 1800s. It will always create and reinforce a middle class just as it will always have semi-peripheral states. It needs mediators. That's the dialectical effect that working-class self-organization and Bolshevist revolution had on the capitalist world system: it reshaped itself and contained the threat. A new threat is needed today. It should come from a new alliance between those with precarious entitlements and those with none.

By the way, your blog post seemed to imply that certain professionals
are not wage-laborers because they produce ideology, but that just
describes the use-value produced, not their relation to the product or
the means of production. Maybe I'm missing something?

Brian: I didn't mean it that way. For me, ideology is just another product, for sure. What's significant is that middle-class people tend to have assets in addition to wages.

Regarding the issue of assets held by professionals and some
wage-laborers alike, I'm not sure if that changes their class. That
could just as well be seen as a rise in wages for certain sections of
the working class relative to others.

Brian: Yes, and a substantial rise in working-class wages is exactly what Marx never observed! Because it only really happened under the threat of Bolshevism. Read Negri's text, Keynes and Capitalist Theory Post-1929. Very important text, shows how capitalism reacted to the communist threat by producing bureaucratic welfare state.

 

On the other hand, when either
professionals or wage-laborers start using these assets as capital to
exploit themselves or other workers in side businesses (or even via
the stock market, but that's so limited for most workers I don't know
if it's worth mentioning),

Brian: Of course it is not worth mentioning when you are so fixated on the working class that you don't even want to consider the life experience of 30 or 40 percent of the population! {I must interject: I've just explained some ways that Marxian theory accounts for these class positions - no one's ignoring their life experiences!} This is why Marxists have become irrelevant: self-imposed social blindness. I find it a pity. There is a reason why the left is disappearing, it is because we haven't bothered to think for a long long time. I do try to think new thoughts. And society does change. {And so does Marxian theory - maybe you're just reading the wrong stuff...}

then it might be useful to draw on the
Althusserian idea (elaborated by JK Gibson-Graham) that individuals
may simultaneously occupy multiple class positions in different modes
of production. But the fact remains (although I think JKGG tend to
lose sight of it) that one mode and one class position is always
dominant - in the life of an individual, a family, or a social
formation.

Brian: I don't know, haven't yet read JKGG and look forward to it. Recently bought the books...

As for managers, I'm far from a Marx expert and haven't even read all
of Capital, but I'm almost certain he discussed managers there as
non-productive wage-laborers who are paid to exercise the will of
capital. Of course all wage-laborers exercise the will of capital to
the extent that they do their job - which is why you can have
participatory management schemes. But managers are more willing to
exercise capital's will in disciplining other workers precisely
because they're paid more, and because they derive perverse pleasure
from exercising power over other workers, and imagining they are not
workers themselves. So they have an ambiguous position between capital
and productive labor, but I'm not sure if it's necessary to propose a
third, middle-class category in order to theorize it.

Brian: Well, there is a guy called Foucault and I recommend you read him! Especially the two courses, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. {I've read a lot of Foucault, including lectures on biopolitics. Interesting but don't seem very useful towards achieving the goal of communization. Foucault's main practical influence today seems to be in the field of identity politics. See Badiou's critique of this.}

In sum, I find your ideas about the middle class interesting and
stimulating, but I'm not sure if I agree, and I'd like to read
anything you can recommend about it (preferably things I can get
online) - including your own writing.

(A friend just told me I should read Classes by Erik Olin Wright about
these questions, but, based on the description, it doesn't sound very
stimulating...)

I have thoughts about the other issues as well, but I'll save those
for another day. I should reiterate that, when it comes to your
thoughts about revolutionary strategy - or lack thereof, and the need
to create one (or many) - I think we're on the same page. I agree it's
hard to imagine an insurrection accomplishing very much these days.

Brian: In addition to the huge state forces I have mentioned, Foucault's theory of governmentality in the two courses shows very well that what Marxists only conceive as the coercive power of the capitalist class has become a formative logic of the individual. The exercise of capitalist reason by non-owners or merely petty owners is not merely perverse, and it is not just an internalization of power relations: it is massively FORMATIVE of subjectivity, of agency. This is the real problem, because the subjective logic whereby you speculate on your own human capital is the really existing, agential self-consciousness of hundreds of millions of people who are no longer working class and will never be led to conceive of themselves as such. We need to invent new forms of collective consciousness, in which even the word "collective" means something different. It is very very challenging but it is the only way to deal with social reality in the twenty-first century.

I tend to hope that we can construct enough "counter-power" or
communistic relations and resources in the interstices of the
capitalist system that they can eventually reach some kind of "tipping
point" where massive defections and mutinies would become possible.
And to do this would probably require a serious move away from the
kind of insurrectionary politics that led to the ongoing repression in
Greece, as well as an embrace of reformist politics that might create
better conditions for counter-power to grow. What do you think?

Brian: That was our big idea in Multitudes: push for reforms like guaranteed income that would allow different values and practices to emerge in society. It did not work so far. I still believe in it but there must be a crucial place for conflict in any such attempt. Now I actually think there is a new conflict, brought on by the quasi-suicidal nature of the neoliberal project. I think substantial autonomy can only be developed through struggle against the most damaging aspects of the neoliberal project. So I think I am very much agreeing with you in this respect. I just think that the insurrectional dream is too simplistic, it brings out the security state and fascist opposition as we have seen time and again. New forms of conflict should be developed, with less recourse to violence and stronger transformative goals that can shift attention back to the real demands of the struggle, whenever the state and the fascist elements try to use the violence to delegitimate the movements. Those movements should seek change at all levels and temporalities, in both unmediated and mediated forms (from occupation, immediate seizure of resources, to transformations of governmentality through extended cultural experimentation). Movements should learn to use political leaders, and not the reverse. That's what I think about Obama. We need, for instance, collective helath-care. Otherwise, there is no escape from capitalist governmentality, no chance for people to change their collective consciousness. Only in a life free from fear of sudden death can progressive things be accomplished. And in the course of struggle, other goals emerge.

 

I wonder if that's similar to what you have in mind regarding
politicians like FDR and Obama. But I'm not sure if we have the same
ultimate goals in mind. Do you have any thoughts on the goal and
concept of communization?

Brian: I don't, but in France it seems to mean back to the land, form a commune as the Tarnac folks did. {So apparently you don't know what I'm talking about. If you're curious and want place to start, read Endnotes. Or the Communist Manifesto, or the Conquest of Bread...} There is some autonomy to be gained there but it's a bit too simplistic! The idea of living entirely without money, and therefore of abolishing the division of labor as mediated by a general equivalent, appears unrealistic and undesirable. {OK, so I guess we're not comrades after all. As far a realisticness, surely you know that most human societies thrived for most of history (and of course all of prehistory) without money, or with money serving different and much more limited functions than it does today. And Polanyi, of whom you speak highly below, makes a big deal about this.} BUT the idea of consciously developing times and aspects of existence that are not mediated by money seems perfectly realistic and very desirable. In fact it's a basis for relative autonomy, which need not be mystified as a total solution. What's needed for that is a concept of radically different, but not mutually exclusive forms of exchange: reciprocity, redistribution, market. So far, these have been treated by anarchy, communism and capitalism, respectively. Each claims to have the total solution, while in reality, each is theorizing one sphere. I think that each of the modes of exchange can be used to criticize the excesses, limitations and imbalances of the others. That idea is developed by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, another one of my all-time favorite books.

Below is the response of Brian Holmes to my comments on his blog entry and email message about the University of California protests, the "Communiqué from an Absent Future," and the coming unrest in the US. (Posted with Brian's permission. See my reply here.)

Actually just to preface, I have a fair amount of practical experience with insurrectionalism, I am glad to have lived in France for many years (shit happens there quite a lot) and as part of Multitudes I obviously had a lot of contact with the living post-workerist traditions, not just the texts. Plus I have this tendency to cruise around and go where things are happening. One of the things that motivates me is that everything I have been involved in fails, which seems to be a message that there is a problem. I want to work on that. It is also true that I am not an academic so that gives more freedom. Funny enough, the guys who wrote the Communique were, at least in part, professors! (I have been corresponding with one of them).

I am basically a Marxist, but I really don't think Marx's class analysis is much help 150 years later if you take it in an unchanged or dogmatic form. In Marx's time, the state had nowhere near the proportions it does today. The 1930s-60 and the period of what's called state capitalism or monopoly capital (that's how Marxists called it here in the US) fundamentally changed the class system and what work is. The gains in productivity brought by technology (general intellect, knowledge sedimented in machines) were invested into institutions that stabilized society by bringing mediators into the yawning gap between the bourgeois class who had it all and the working class who had literally nothing, barely enough food, nothing to lose except their chains. It's not true any more and if Marx were alive now he would analyze society today and not the society of 1830-1880. State redistribution of machine productivity and the productivity brought by Taylorism introduced huge categories of managers - people who manage your working time, your consumption, your psychology, your dreams, your children, your education, you sexuality, you driving habits, your imagination, this list could go on forever and it crucially includes: your money. And those people are us, the educated middle classes.

We may all get a wage (well, that's not entirely true either, think about it) but the big difference I see is that the middle classes, under capitalism, are both the hunter and the hunted, the predator and the prey. It's all too obvious with the people who manage your money, who create advertising, who manage education, who sell real-estate: these are very common jobs in the developed countries, they are about preying on other people, especially other middle-class people who do not only have a subsistence wage, as in Marx's time: they have pension plans, health insurance, paid vacations, they own stock, they have education funds for their kids, these are among the attributes of being middle class and in the US, or, I suppose, Australia, that's around 30 to 40 percent of the population depending on how you slice it. So there is something to prey upon, but the rub is that while you are doing that, someone else is trying to prey on you. Of course the middle classes are not just managers, not even in the expanded sense in which I use the term: they also become scientists and engineers, they build computers and surveillance cams and missiles and stuff, unfortunately it's hard to get away from the predatory aspects.

Now, where does this middle class come from? It is not only shaped by the family and by privately owned institutions, as in the bourgeois tradition. It is fabricated socially, through the integration of factory workers to processes of lifetime and generational accumulation on one hand (I was recently out talking to people in Detroit, very interesting, a lifetime in the same company, benefits, retirement, house in the suburbs, new car every year) and on the other hand, it is produced through education to become professionals, technicians and managers... In this way the neoliberal university has become one of the central institutions (I think THE central one) for the reproduction of the neoliberal variety (more on that later) of state capitalism. When you address people in the university as workers, it means you really only want to talk to the actual workers and then a few Marxist-Leninists. A very few. It's not just a subjective belief. Not only does the entire three generations of middle class people before the current one have financial assets (not a very working class thing to have) but they and the present, precarious generation also have access to and actual daily use of socialized assets (such as libraries, technical and health services, schools, sports facilities, and above all the university itself) that may be theoretically open to all the classes, but that are used very differentially according to class status. For all these reasons and more, I think not recognizing the existence of a class situation and a state-form which Marx himself did not describe (but which many Marxists have described since then) is a major error.

Now, where I totally agree with Husunzi is that the social practice of revolt and refusal comes before any theoretical elaboration of it. But since I have been involved in so much revolt and refusal I also know that the elaboration has to start quickly. The paradox is this: the rhetoric (and it is a rhetoric) of things like the Communique, or Preoccupied, or The Coming Insurrection, is always an updated version of a genre that moves from Sorelian insurrectionalism to Situationism. It works, people get fired up, I love it, there's a riot, in France or Italy you can have occupations and whatnot for about a month, and then it's over. How to go beyond the short-lived outbreaks of revolt whose energies are expressed and put into writing by a small minority of generally very middle-class people (you should meet Julien Coupat) who rightly take advantage of any more widespread discontent to try and theorize it and push it further? Well, I think the emerging situation is finally different. The contradictions of neoliberal capitalism (please refer to the immense literature tracking the sea-change in capitalism since 1973) are at once pushing a bunch of people out of the middle class, interrupting the rise of others, disciplining still others in ways they don't like, and doing all that while capitalist society is on a bltantly obvious course toward ecological devastation and increasing war. All of this does not, however, produce an apocalypse: it produces slow decay. It demands complex answers to complex questions, it demands ways of negotiating among people with many different interests and languages, mindsets, structures of feeling as Raymond Williams would say. Usually there is no chance to even begin such processes of organizing the middle classes *in their relation to the working classes, towards whom a portion of the middle classes are precariously sliding.* But every fresh strike, walkout, and revolt in the universities represents such a chance. The essence of the opportunity is to begin imagining and systematizing the ways in which this accumulated knowledge -- this institutional, as opposed to machinic, general intellect -- can be transformed and used to produce a society which will still be complex, but which will not be capitalist. Do we waste that chance by calling for burn baby burn and bring on the police, the secret services, the army, Homeland Security, the corporate press, the right-wing fascist radio crazies, the Ku Klux Klan and so on? It really is a paradox: without passion and total refusal, no politics. Without working through mediations, wet firecracker.

Now Marx, there's a guy, he knew everything there was to know about the technoscience and the organizational practices of society in his time, whether industry, finance, the army, the liberal arts, etc. Today it is probably impossible to know everything (too much) but anyway, most Marxists and especially, most insurrectionalists, they don't wanna know. I feel different. I want to help create a new Leftist knowledge of how to run a society. For that I see only one solution: subvert the universities! I have been working on it for the last ten years. Of course it's difficult, of course you can not do it alone. With Multitudes we started to have a complex composition of collaborators and to be able to critique, stoke the fires of refusal, and - crucially - propose different ways of organizing society. But as so often happens, a few ambitious and opportunistic people drew the journal into a position where it could be coopted both academically and, to a lesser degree, by the culture industry. Who said it was unbearable hypocrisy? well, I did, and that precipitated the departure of the whole post-workerist side including Negri and Lazzarato and Vercellone and all of them. But it's a pity, a real shame, because we need to be able to elaborate alternatives socially.

As for Obama and FDR, it is another long story. I live in the USA where most people are political zombies. If you have a brain, well you know first of all that Roosevelt came from an elite family had to be pushed into creating the American version of social democracy (still the best thing we have ever had) and second of all, you know that the US economy never recovered until the beginning of WWII. But let's start with the radicalization and then extend the discourse about it, again I share the idea with Husunzi. Social movements wake people up, it's the best thing you can do! I currently support all the movements against the financiers and I want to take part in them as well as subverting the unis whenever possible. I guess I work on the theory, when we have time to talk with other people we extend the areas of agreement and maybe even the terrain of the struggle!

There would be more to say and I don't think I answered all the points, but I do really appreciate the chance to debate about them.

all the best, Brian

I recommend reading both Brian Holmes' comments on the Nettime list and his longer and quite different blog entry mentioned there, both dealing with the implications of the recent university walkouts and occupations at the University of California, NYU and the New School in the US, along with other countries. (H/t "dr. woooo" on the money_banks_crisis list.) The blog entry also contains a sympathic critique of the "Communiqué from an Absent Future," that came out of the UC protests, regarding (1) class analysis, and (2) the possibility of insurrectionary communization in the US today. First, excerpts from the former:

I dunno if people are following the events in California very closely, 
but in my view, the recent faculty-staff-student walkout there is a 
presage of many things to come. It offers a foretaste of what you might 
call regime change in the USA. The September 24 walkout across the 
entire University of California system follows a large number of similar 
movements in Europe, as well as the occupation of a building at the New 
School in NYC last December. At stake in the California case is the 
accelerated erosion of what used to be the most opulent welfare state in 
the country.[...]

[Mitch] Daniels [governor of Indiana] predicts a competitive downsizing of state 
governments to attract businesses fleeing comparatively high-tax states 
like California. For him it's a positive future, because like a good 
Republican corporate businessmen he has been "trimming the fat" since 
his arrival in office. What he doesn't talk about is the social 
explosion that is going to occur when the formerly "fat classes" get 
trimmed. We all know that the kinds of compensation formerly extended to 
minorities and economically disadvantaged people evaporated long ago, 
but what is at stake now are service cuts for the (aspiring) middle 
classes. The UC walkout is a harbinger of the upcoming season of protest 
and dissent in the land of the (collapsing) almighty dollar.

Actually, what the regulation school economists call a change in the 
"regime of accumulation" happened long ago, beginning in the late 
seventies. After the two oil shocks of '73 and '79, corporations 
successfully reorganized their production methods, adopting "lean and 
mean" postures, outsourcing most of their industrial labor and 
automating the rest, while at the same time opening up vast new foreign 
markets and shifting parts of their capital to the financial sphere. 
European corporations followed suit in the 1990s, stung by the sharp 
recession in the early part of that decade. In parallel to these changes 
in the production regime, the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan began 
the transformation of the "mode of regulation," or the set of 
governmental and cultural norms that stabilize and regularize the social 
conditions generated by the new pattern of capital accumulation. The 
final consequence of the neoliberal attempt at instilling a transformed 
mode of social regulation is what Europeans, and especially the French, 
have long been calling "precarization": which means the descent of large 
fractions of the former middle classes into an uncertain, "precarious" 
status, whose unpleasant realities are now rushing to the forefront of 
everyone's minds with the surging unemployment brought on by the 
financial crisis. "Stabilization," for the new corporados, apparently 
means crushing en entire sector of the population underfoot -- and 
keeping them there.

The big question is, will it hold? Will huge numbers of people accept 
the loss of their assets and their comfortable lifestyle, and teach 
their children to be the disciplined, ferociously competitive 
workaholics that the corporate employers demand for a very restricted 
number of future jobs? My guess is that the fiscal crisis of the states 
(and maybe of the Federal government too, if the dollar continues to 
decline precipitously as it has for the past seven months) will provoke 
a social and political crisis right here in America. It may not look 
exactly like the one in Greece last winter, but for the first time in a 
long long time there will be overt social conflict here too, as there 
has been off and on in Europe for the last two decades. [...]

From the blog entry:

After the huge student movements in France in 2006, as well as last year’s occupation of the Sorbonne by the staff and the professors; after the rolling and agitated “anomalous wave” of protests against the Bologna-process restructuring of higher education that swept Italy last year; after the astonishing refusal of tuition fees by Croatian students this spring and summer — to name only three arenas of an expanding transnational revolt — the global crisis of the university has finally come home to the neoliberal heartland: the State of California. [...]

[I]f somehow you have not yet done so, the first thing to read — and certainly one of the most powerful student-movement texts since the Situationist tract On the Poverty of Student Life — is this impresive and impassioned document, emanating from the “Research & Destroy” collective and prefiguring the events at UC Stanta Cruz[,] where the Graduate Student Commons is still occupied as I write [....]

[Most of what Holmes' writes about the communiqué is affirmative - here I only excerpt from his critique:]

Now exactly here, I want to ask the question: how can anyone possibly accept this idea that the function of the university is to reproduce the working class, without distorting every meaning of the words, “working class”? The working classes of the university are the janitors, the food-service people, the maintenance men and women and so forth, not the students — and not even the students who occasionally do those jobs at night or at odd hours scattered over the course of a week. The students, on the contrary, are being trained as scientists, engineers, technicians, health-care professionals, government officials, middle and upper managers, and ideologists (a category in which I would include both artists and teachers). [... I]t is false to say that the neoliberal societies do not need the human resources produced by the university. They do, crucially, to maintain their advantages in what they themselves define as the Darwinian struggle of each country and indeed, of each corporation against all the others. The present aim of the Republicans — the neoliberals — is to save money on taxes, to open up new markets for education and research while continuing to exploit the remaining (and hardly inconsequential) public budgets, and to exert further discipline over its future middle-management cadres by placing them under the full threat of joblessness and inability to pay their enormous student loans. [...]

[I thought this point was wrongheaded until I read the email message quoted above. On a pedantic level it's still wrong: in Marxian terms anyway, most uni grads indeed become wage-laborers of some kind (including half the positions Holmes' implies to be something else) and thus remain part of the working class, albeit a privileged part relative to janitors and so on. And the communique doesn't claim that "neoliberal societies do not need the human resources produced by the university" - Holmes is arguing with a strawman there. On the other hand, the email message points us to a reason at least the subjective belief that uni grads are not workers is important here: one major source of the unrest that Holmes believes will grow is the fact that the relative privilege university graduates used to enjoy is being undermined - the process Holmes' calls "precarization." Now for the second point, which I think is more substantial:]

Why then, in such a brilliant text, do we get such a tremendous mistake of class analysis? Undoubtedly (well, I don’t really know, but this is the tone of the text anyway) because from that point forth, it is very easy to lapse into an outdated concept of revolution, wherein everyone dons a black mask and engages in a massive and sweeping orgy of destruction that will send the existing system up in flames and allow the rise of a new one from its ashes. Now, does that appear likely? Has anyone studied what Homeland Security has been preparing for in this country for the last eight years? Has anyone observed the massive deployment of police, National Guard, secret service and Army personnel armed with so-called less-lethal weapons at the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, or at the RNC in St Paul last summer? Has anyone noticed how successfully agents-provocateurs have been used at all these kind of events since the anti-globalization movement brought street demonstrations back to the Western countries at the turn of the millennium?

The “Communiqué from an Absent Future” marks the return of an insurrectionalist spirit to the United States, where it has not been seen on any large scale since the 1970s, with the brief exception of an important moment in Seattle. This spirit should be put to good use by everyone. If the current movement goes anywhere, some rioting in the streets is inevitable. But no one should kid themselves that student riots are going to change the system. What students can do, from their own class position, is both to reach out to the hyper-exploited working classes toward whom they are, in effect, precariously sliding, and at the same time, to help to radicalize all those around them in what has become the central institution for the reproduction of the neoliberal hegemoney, namely the contemporary research university. A strike that can shut the university down — as has already happened for a day in the huge UC system — can also open up space for questioning what the uses of the university could be in a different society.

If the former role and glory of the public university under the welfare-warfare state is definitively over, then what can it become in the future? Wouldn’t the best way to shut down its current operations be to convince all those inside it that the way it is operating is a travesty of all its potentials, including those inscribed at the heart of every academic discipline? Why not shut it down with an excess of transformative intellectual production that would have a huge insurrectional advantage, namely that it could not be stopped by police armed with truncheons and stun guns and less-lethal weapons that they are just dying to use? In the absence of a deep, problematic delegitimation of neoliberal capitalism and the invention of new ways to run a complex society, which transparently appears as the most urgent thing for any intellectual to focus on, the real revolution will never come. Yet the way things are going, with climate change and planetary civil wars looming on the horizon, all of us are mortally threatened by the absence of that revolutionary future.

Here I also see problems in Holmes' approach - namely his academic bias, which regards "transformative intellectual production," "delegitimation of neoliberal capitalism" and "invention of new ways to run a complex society" as necessary precursors to a "real revolution," rather than things that take place through the process of rebellion and repossession of the world. Of course he may be right, but I just want to point out (1) it is to be expected for academics to overestimate the power of ideas (I know he's not technically an academic, but he seems to be very much part of the academic world - not to imply that I'm not); (2) such celebrations of "intellectual production" are very much in vogue, at least since Hardt & Negri popularized the concept of "immaterial production" - a concept that Ann Anagnost suspects to play into the hands of neoliberal notions of "human capital," and others such as Aufheben argue to be empirically weak, as far as describing how the capitalist system has changed since the 1970s; and (3) this sequence of events - first consciousness raising and blueprint sketching, then collective material action - doesn't seem to correspond to most revolutionary sequences I'm familiar with from history - usually it's been the opposite, or at most a combination of the two.

And it's from decades of theoretical reflection on that history that perspectives like that of the communique arose - not from a "mistake of class analysis" or an "outdated concept of revolution." Although Holmes is clearly familiar with the Situationists and probably, to some extent, the Italian workerists and autonomists, he seems unaware of the Bordiga-influenced post-Situationist debates or the Italian insurrectionary anarchist tradition, both of which clearly influenced the writing of this communique. Although I agree the communique's concept of revolution has long lineage, its specific theorization as "communization" first emerged in 1970s France, according to Endnotes, and it has only become more widely discussed among English-speaking anti-capitalists in the past decade (with Santa Cruz just happening to be an important node of its diffusion).

But I agree with Holmes' doubts about the feasibility of such an insurrection getting very far in the US today - or pretty much anywhere, for that matter - for precisely the reasons he mentions. To succeed it would probably require massive defections and mutinies in the military from the get-go - a possibility as unlikely as anything else. So I agree - another strategy, and thus another concept of revolution, does seem necessary if communization is ever going to succeed. And if that doesn't happen, it seems unlikely that capital will be able to reform itself sufficiently to prevent either ecological catastrophe or a continuation of the world's ongoing degeneration into a battlefield of countless wars over resources, fought by those dispossessed in capital's endless conquests to restore its falling rate of profit and lower the social wage. As Holmes writes, "all of us are mortally threatened by the absence of that revolutionary future."

Unfortunately, beyond "transformative intellectual production," critique of "neoliberal capitalism" (as opposed to capitalism in general, one can only assume) and "invention of new ways to run a complex society," Holmes doesn't offer any alternatives to this "outdated" vision of revolution when it comes to actually implementing those new ways. At least not in that blog entry, but in the email message quoted above, Holmes speaks positively of Franklin Roosevelt as someone who as pushed to make "radical," "progressive" policies in response to popular pressure, and he hopes the unrest emerging now will likewise push Obama to imitate FDR. Granted, Holmes' doesn't elaborate on the content of Obama's hoped-for response to popular pressure, but we can be certain that no politician would be willing or able to implement the communique's central call for "the reorganization of society according to a logic of free giving and receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, the value-form, compulsory labor, and exchange." In any case, I'm sure Obama will come up with something to temporarily alleviate some of the suffering caused by the present retrenchment. That may buy us time until we come up with a more feasible solution to the problem of communization.

3,000 Years of Spontaneous Insurrection
by Yves Frémion
AK Press (2002)

I haven't found an electronic copy, and the National Library doesn't have it (no surprise there), but this seems like something worth buying - even from across the world. Of course buy it directly from AK Press. Skim the book and its great illustrations here.

Every now and then, things explode. Riots, uprisings, revolutions, and new and bizarre social groups spring up seemingly from nowhere. Our standard histories tend to treat these as oddities, if treated at all, or as misguided responses to hard times, limited by lack of responsible leadership. For the first time in English, here's a people's history to puncture that balloon. From the Cynics and Spartacus through the Levelers, Diggers, and Ranters to the Revolution of the Carnation, the San Francisco Diggers, Red Guard of Shen[g]wulian, Brethren of the Free Spirit, Guevara, the Provos, and the Metropolitan Indians. Nearly 100 episodes of the revolt and utopia that popped up without a plan or a leader, from the ancient Greeks to the present. Orgasms of History also includes Volny's original artwork and sketches of the characters involved in the greatest, most inspiring events of all time.
Yves Fremion lives in Paris, where he participated in the May '68 orgasm.

See a brief old review here.




 

Not sure what use it is at this point, but there's a petition here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/9/an-open-letter-to-jacob-zuma

For updates on the situation, see http://abahlali.org/

Democracy Now! interview (October 1 - I'm sorry, I can't keep up with these things! - there's supposed to be a video embedded below - it's not showing up for me but I think that's just b/c i'm behind the Great Firewall):

"On the Terminus of Student Life"

from UC Walkout, the AK Press blog, and WeWantEverything. Also see Occupy California and this report from the Guardian about the immediate context of this manifesto: the student and faculty protests against budget cuts at the University of California. The AK Press blog has some useful commentary and critique. PDFs here and here for printing out and distributing when you occupy your own school. (I've omitted the introduction below.)

I

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.

For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.

But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school. Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile. No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition. On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum. And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement. Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit. But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them. And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.

If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work hard.” And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed. It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience. Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system. Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A? What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes? Who needs memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You can’t be serious. A moral preparation? There are anti-depressants for that.

Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically enlightened among us, are also the most obedient. The “vocation” for which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the grid, or out of the labor market. Every grad student is a would be Robinson Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the exigencies of the market. But this fantasy is itself sustained through an unremitting submission to the market. There is no longer the least felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of capitalism by day and polishing one’s job talk by night. That our pleasure is our labor only makes our symptoms more manageable. Aesthetics and politics collapse courtesy of the substitution of ideology for history: booze and beaux arts and another seminar on the question of being, the steady blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by somebody somewhere, some not-me, not-here, where all that appears is good and all goods appear attainable by credit.

Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system adapted to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the star professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and adjuncts paid mostly in bad faith. A kind of monasticism predominates here, with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its essential altruism. The underlings are only too happy to play apprentice to the masters, unable to do the math indicating that nine-tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester to pad the paychecks of the one-tenth who sustain the fiction that we can all be the one. Of course I will be the star, I will get the tenure-track job in a large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.

We end up interpreting Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of coming to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root. We admire the first part of this performance: it lights our way. But we want the tools to break through that point of suicidal thought, its hinge in practice.

The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible to cynicism. But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent radical. The shoulder shrug, the dulled face, the squirm of embarrassment when discussing the fact that the US murdered a million Iraqis between 2003 and 2006, that every last dime squeezed from America’s poorest citizens is fed to the banking industry, that the seas will rise, billions will die and there’s nothing we can do about it—this discomfited posture comes from feeling oneself pulled between the is and the ought of current left thought. One feels that there is no alternative, and yet, on the other hand, that another world is possible.

We will not be so petulant. The synthesis of these positions is right in front of us: another world is not possible; it is necessary. The ought and the is are one. The collapse of the global economy is here and now.

II

The university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital. Its essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labor. Though not a proper corporation that can be bought and sold, that pays revenue to its investors, the public university nonetheless carries out this function as efficiently as possible by approximating ever more closely the corporate form of its bedfellows. What we are witnessing now is the endgame of this process, whereby the façade of the educational institution gives way altogether to corporate streamlining.

Even in the golden age of capitalism that followed after World War II and lasted until the late 1960s, the liberal university was already subordinated to capital. At the apex of public funding for higher education, in the 1950s, the university was already being redesigned to produce technocrats with the skill-sets necessary to defeat “communism” and sustain US hegemony. Its role during the Cold War was to legitimate liberal democracy and to reproduce an imaginary society of free and equal citizens—precisely because no one was free and no one was equal.

But if this ideological function of the public university was at least well-funded after the Second World War, that situation changed irreversibly in the 1960s, and no amount of social-democratic heel-clicking will bring back the dead world of the post-war boom. Between 1965 and 1980 profit rates began to fall, first in the US, then in the rest of the industrializing world. Capitalism, it turned out, could not sustain the good life it made possible. For capital, abundance appears as overproduction, freedom from work as unemployment. Beginning in the 1970s, capitalism entered into a terminal downturn in which permanent work was casualized and working-class wages stagnated, while those at the top were temporarily rewarded for their obscure financial necromancy, which has itself proved unsustainable.

For public education, the long downturn meant the decline of tax revenues due to both declining rates of economic growth and the prioritization of tax-breaks for beleaguered corporations. The raiding of the public purse struck California and the rest of the nation in the 1970s. It has continued to strike with each downward declension of the business cycle. Though it is not directly beholden to the market, the university and its corollaries are subject to the same cost-cutting logic as other industries: declining tax revenues have made inevitable the casualization of work. Retiring professors make way not for tenure-track jobs but for precariously employed teaching assistants, adjuncts, and lecturers who do the same work for much less pay. Tuition increases compensate for cuts while the jobs students pay to be trained for evaporate.

In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted, many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education. They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity to demand the return of the past. But social programs that depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone. We cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public university” in a capitalist society. The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system. We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded. The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.

What this means for our struggle is that we can’t go backward. The old student struggles are the relics of a vanished world. In the 1960s, as the post-war boom was just beginning to unravel, radicals within the confines of the university understood that another world was possible. Fed up with technocratic management, wanting to break the chains of a conformist society, and rejecting alienated work as unnecessary in an age of abundance, students tried to align themselves with radical sections of the working class. But their mode of radicalization, too tenuously connected to the economic logic of capitalism, prevented that alignment from taking hold. Because their resistance to the Vietnam war focalized critique upon capitalism as a colonial war-machine, but insufficiently upon its exploitation of domestic labor, students were easily split off from a working class facing different problems. In the twilight era of the post-war boom, the university was not subsumed by capital to the degree that it is now, and students were not as intensively proletarianized by debt and a devastated labor market.

That is why our struggle is fundamentally different. The poverty of student life has become terminal: there is no promised exit. If the economic crisis of the 1970s emerged to break the back of the political crisis of the 1960s, the fact that today the economic crisis precedes the coming political uprising means we may finally supersede the cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles. There will be no return to normal.

III

We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.

Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms. We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning. We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt. We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours. Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood. This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society. Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.

The university struggle is one among many, one sector where a new cycle of refusal and insurrection has begun—in workplaces, neighborhoods, and slums. All of our futures are linked, and so our movement will have to join with these others, breeching the walls of the university compounds and spilling into the streets. In recent weeks Bay Area public school teachers, BART employees, and unemployed have threatened demonstrations and strikes. Each of these movements responds to a different facet of capitalism’s reinvigorated attack on the working class in a moment of crisis. Viewed separately, each appears small, near-sighted, without hope of success. Taken together, however, they suggest the possibility of widespread refusal and resistance. Our task is to make plain the common conditions that, like a hidden water table, feed each struggle.

We have seen this kind of upsurge in the recent past, a rebellion that starts in the classrooms and radiates outward to encompass the whole of society. Just two years ago the anti-CPE movement in France, combating a new law that enabled employers to fire young workers without cause, brought huge numbers into the streets. High school and university students, teachers, parents, rank and file union members, and unemployed youth from the banlieues found themselves together on the same side of the barricades. (This solidarity was often fragile, however. The riots of immigrant youth in the suburbs and university students in the city centers never merged, and at times tensions flared between the two groups.) French students saw through the illusion of the university as a place of refuge and enlightenment and acknowledged that they were merely being trained to work. They took to the streets as workers, protesting their precarious futures. Their position tore down the partitions between the schools and the workplaces and immediately elicited the support of many wage workers and unemployed people in a mass gesture of proletarian refusal.

As the movement developed it manifested a growing tension between revolution and reform. Its form was more radical than its content. While the rhetoric of the student leaders focused merely on a return to the status quo, the actions of the youth – the riots, the cars overturned and set on fire, the blockades of roads and railways, and the waves of occupations that shut down high schools and universities – announced the extent of the new generation’s disillusionment and rage. Despite all of this, however, the movement quickly disintegrated when the CPE law was eventually dropped. While the most radical segment of the movement sought to expand the rebellion into a general revolt against capitalism, they could not secure significant support and the demonstrations, occupations, and blockades dwindled and soon died. Ultimately the movement was unable to transcend the limitations of reformism.

The Greek uprising of December 2008 broke through many of these limitations and marked the beginning of a new cycle of class struggle. Initiated by students in response to the murder of an Athens youth by police, the uprising consisted of weeks of rioting, looting, and occupations of universities, union offices, and television stations. Entire financial and shopping districts burned, and what the movement lacked in numbers it made up in its geographical breadth, spreading from city to city to encompass the whole of Greece. As in France it was an uprising of youth, for whom the economic crisis represented a total negation of the future. Students, precarious workers, and immigrants were the protagonists, and they were able to achieve a level of unity that far surpassed the fragile solidarities of the anti-CPE movement.

Just as significantly, they made almost no demands. While of course some demonstrators sought to reform the police system or to critique specific government policies, in general they asked for nothing at all from the government, the university, the workplaces, or the police. Not because they considered this a better strategy, but because they wanted nothing that any of these institutions could offer. Here content aligned with form; whereas the optimistic slogans that appeared everywhere in French demonstrations jarred with the images of burning cars and broken glass, in Greece the rioting was the obvious means to begin to enact the destruction of an entire political and economic system.

Ultimately the dynamics that created the uprising also established its limit. It was made possible by the existence of a sizeable radical infrastructure in urban areas, in particular the Exarchia neighborhood in Athens. The squats, bars, cafes, and social centers, frequented by students and immigrant youth, created the milieu out of which the uprising emerged. However, this milieu was alien to most middle-aged wage workers, who did not see the struggle as their own. Though many expressed solidarity with the rioting youth, they perceived it as a movement of entrants – that is, of that portion of the proletariat that sought entrance to the labor market but was not formally employed in full-time jobs. The uprising, strong in the schools and the immigrant suburbs, did not spread to the workplaces.

Our task in the current struggle will be to make clear the contradiction between form and content and to create the conditions for the transcendence of reformist demands and the implementation of a truly communist content. As the unions and student and faculty groups push their various “issues,” we must increase the tension until it is clear that we want something else entirely. We must constantly expose the incoherence of demands for democratization and transparency. What good is it to have the right to see how intolerable things are, or to elect those who will screw us over? We must leave behind the culture of student activism, with its moralistic mantras of non-violence and its fixation on single-issue causes. The only success with which we can be content is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the certain immiseration and death which it promises for the 21st century. All of our actions must push us towards communization; that is, the reorganization of society according to a logic of free giving and receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, the value-form, compulsory labor, and exchange.

Occupation will be a critical tactic in our struggle, but we must resist the tendency to use it in a reformist way. The different strategic uses of occupation became clear this past January when students occupied a building at the New School in New York. A group of friends, mostly graduate students, decided to take over the Student Center and claim it as a liberated space for students and the public. Soon others joined in, but many of them preferred to use the action as leverage to win reforms, in particular to oust the school’s president. These differences came to a head as the occupation unfolded. While the student reformers were focused on leaving the building with a tangible concession from the administration, others shunned demands entirely. They saw the point of occupation as the creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new society. We side with this anti-reformist position. While we know these free zones will be partial and transitory, the tensions they expose between the real and the possible can push the struggle in a more radical direction.

We intend to employ this tactic until it becomes generalized. In 2001 the first Argentine piqueteros suggested the form the people’s struggle there should take: road blockades which brought to a halt the circulation of goods from place to place. Within months this tactic spread across the country without any formal coordination between groups. In the same way repetition can establish occupation as an instinctive and immediate method of revolt taken up both inside and outside the university. We have seen a new wave of takeovers in the U.S. over the last year, both at universities and workplaces: New School and NYU, as well as the workers at Republic Windows Factory in Chicago, who fought the closure of their factory by taking it over. Now it is our turn.

To accomplish our goals we cannot rely on those groups which position themselves as our representatives. We are willing to work with unions and student associations when we find it useful, but we do not recognize their authority. We must act on our own behalf directly, without mediation. We must break with any groups that seek to limit the struggle by telling us to go back to work or class, to negotiate, to reconcile. This was also the case in France. The original calls for protest were made by the national high school and university student associations and by some of the trade unions. Eventually, as the representative groups urged calm, others forged ahead. And in Greece the unions revealed their counter-revolutionary character by canceling strikes and calling for restraint.

As an alternative to being herded by representatives, we call on students and workers to organize themselves across trade lines. We urge undergraduates, teaching assistants, lecturers, faculty, service workers, and staff to begin meeting together to discuss their situation. The more we begin talking to one another and finding our common interests, the more difficult it becomes for the administration to pit us against each other in a hopeless competition for dwindling resources. The recent struggles at NYU and the New School suffered from the absence of these deep bonds, and if there is a lesson to be learned from them it is that we must build dense networks of solidarity based upon the recognition of a shared enemy. These networks not only make us resistant to recuperation and neutralization, but also allow us to establish new kinds of collective bonds. These bonds are the real basis of our struggle.

We’ll see you at the barricades.

Research and Destroy

2009

Political Arrests in Belgrade
{from http://asi.zsp.net.pl/political-arrests-in-belgrade/ }

On Saturday, Sept. 4, five political activists were arrested in Belgrade
on trumped up charges. The five, Tadej Kurep, Ivan Vuloviæ, Sanja Dojkiæ,
Ratibor Trivunac and Nikola Mitrovic, are activists in or associates of
the Anarcho-Syndicalist Initiative, the Serbian section of the
International Workers’ Association (AIT).

The arrests are allegedly related to a direct action which took place at
the Greek Embassy on Aug. 25. Negligible damage was done; a crack in one
window, a tiny burn mark on the facade and a circled A graffiti on the
embassy as a act of symbolic solidarity with Thodoros Iliopoulos. The
prosecutor however imagines this as an act of “international terrorism”
and would like to charge our comrades with such. If the state allows such
charges to be pressed, they could be facing 3-15 years in prison.

As it is, the five were arrested, harrassed and are to be held in custody
for at least one month while the case is organized.

Although one of the accused, General Secretary of the IWA Ratibor Trivunac
clearly and publically declared that he knew nothing of the action, he was
arrested. It is not the first time that authorities have come after him or
his comrades for no other reason than the fact that they are radical
critics of the state.

We are calling on people around the world to take action now!

If you can organize a protest at a Serbian Embassy, Consulate or other
Diplomatic Mission, please do so ASAP. Rather than one day of action, we
think actions can be spread out over a few days, but we think it’s best
not to wait! Try to make an action by Sept. 15-16.

Also, send faxes and protest letters! Below a link with the list of
addresses of Serbia diplomatic representations all o ver the world. If you
like, you can also send a letter to the government through this page :
http://asi.zsp.net.pl/free-the-anarchists/emailpage/. You can write your
own text or use out sample text. Our page can keep a log of signatorees so
we may pass them on to the comrades in Serbia so they know which people
have sent protests.

Please send us information about your demos, protests or articles on the
case!

FREE THE FIVE NOW!

ADDRESSES OF DIPLOMATIC MISSIONS OF THE REPUBLIC OF SERBIA:

http://www.mfa.gov.rs/Worldframe.htm


==============================

On May 31, the 4th Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples Abya Yala
("America") called for a Global Mobilization in Defense of Mother Earth
and the Peoples from OCTOBER 12-16, 2009, "against [pollution], the
commercialization of life ... and the criminalization of indigenous and
social movements."

"We the peoples and our territories are one entity. [We resolve] to reject
all forms of land division, privatization, concession, predation and
pollution from extractive industries."

Root Force is supporting this call and encouraging people throughout the
Americas and across the world to answer it with actions targeting the
infrastructure of global trade. Infrastructure expansion projects such as
highways, mines, power plants, pipelines and telecommunications cables
form the front lines of the assault on indigenous peoples and the Earth.
They are the backbone of the system that is killing our planet and
enslaving its people.

For more information about the call to action and why we think
infrastructure projects are appropriate targets, see below.

For help planning and publicizing actions, contact Root Force: rootforce
[at] riseup [dot] net. You can find direct action, strategy and messaging
resources here: http://www.rootforce.org/get-involved/resources/

Send action reports to rootforce [at] riseup [dot] net. If you can't pull
together a direct action, consider holding events that promote
anti-infrastructure organizing and action.

BACKGROUND

On May 31, the 4th Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples Abya Yala
issued a closing declaration resolving, among other things:

"To proclaim that we are witnessing a deep crisis of the Western
capitalist civilization -- overlapping the environmental, energy and
cultural crisis, social exclusion, and famines -- as an expression of the
failure of Eurocentrism and the colonialist Modernity that was born from
ethnocide and which is now carrying all of humanity to its own slaughter.

"To offer an alternative lifestyle against the civilization of death,
rescuing our roots in order to project ourselves to our future, with our
principles and practices of balance between men, women, Mother Earth,
spiritual beings, cultures and peoples, all of which we call Good Living /
Living Well. We are a diversity of thousands of civilizations with over 40
thousand years of history, which were invaded and colonized by those who,
just five centuries later, are leading us to planetary suicide. ...

"To confirm the organization of the ... Global Mobilization in Defense of
Mother Earth and the Peoples, against the commercialization of life
(including land, forests, water, sea, agrofuels, external debt), pollution
(extractive transnationals, international financial institutions, GMOs,
pesticides, toxic consumption), and the criminalization of indigenous and
social movements, to be held from October 12 to 16, 2009."

Read the full declaration here:
http://intercontinentalcry.org/today-we-separate-from-cruelty/

WHY INFRASTRUCTURE?

There are three primary reasons to target infrastructure as a way to
defend the Earth and support indigenous sovereignty.

1. Infrastructure projects devastate ecologies and communities, whether
it's the massive fish kills caused by dams and oil spills, the stripped
land and poisoned air left by highways and mines, or the dislocation of
poor, rural and indigenous peoples caused every time a new dam, road, mine
or power plant moves in.

2. Infrastructure projects facilitate further exploitation above and
beyond their immediate effects: a road brings loggers and missionaries; a
power plant brings industry and sprawl.

3. Infrastructure forms the physical basis of the global economic system
-- a system that is killing our planet and cannot function without the
continued dispossession of indigenous land and destruction of Earth-based
cultures.

This civilization will not change its genocidal and ecocidal trajectory
willingly, and the Earth cannot be saved by half-measures. The system must
come down, and its reliance on infrastructure -- especially the
infrastructure of trade -- is one of its greatest weaknesses.

LEARN MORE

Taking down the system by fighting infrastructure expansion:

http://www.rootforce.org/what-is-root-force/strategy/

Infrastructure and indigenous sovereignty:

http://www.rootforce.org/factsheets/indigenous/

Infrastructure and the environment:

http://www.rootforce.org/factsheets/environment/

More infrastructure fact sheets (labor, global warming, etc.):

http://www.rootforce.org/factsheets/

TAKE ACTION!

Join people around the world on October 12-16 to say NO to the
commercialization of life and the criminalization of indigenous and social
movements, and YES to a world based on respect for all life. Join Root
Force in the struggle against the infrastructure of global trade, and help
us demolish colonialism at its foundations.

For help planning and publicizing actions, contact Root Force: rootforce
[at] riseup [dot] net. You can find direct action, strategy and messaging
resources here: http://www.rootforce.org/get-involved/resources/

Send action reports to rootforce [at] riseup [dot] net. If you can't pull
together a direct action, consider holding events that promote
anti-infrastructure organizing and action.

A friend just introduced me to an interesting and potentially important cluster of Chinese websites. I’m thinking of calling it the Hammer Network (at the risk of sounding like I’m talking about the 1980s American rapper with big pants). The url of the main site in this cluster is chuizi.net, which means hammer, as in the hammer & sickle. The name of the section of this site functioning as a sort of homepage is called Workers’ News, but that’s so boring & easy to confuse with other sites. Another site in the cluster, listed at the bottom of each page as the owner of chuizi.net, is honghuacao.com, which means Chinese milk vetch - a medicinal herb whose flower is much prettier than its English name. That’s apparently some kind of obscure metaphor that no one I’ve asked is familiar with.¹ In any case, I’ve decided not to call it the Chinese Milk Vetch Network for Workers’ Solidarity.

All these sites are registered in mainland China, but none of several well-connected leftists and labor activists I’ve asked have heard of this cluster, except for the one who ran across it, and she has no idea who’s behind it. Some of these sites are linked to more well-known left sites, such as Utopia & Research on Chinese Workers, but I haven’t run across any external site linked to the Hammer Network (including Utopia, which has links to over 160 sites!).

I can’t find the number of visitors to any of the websites.² Workers’ Forum lists 371 registered users, and Honghuaocao Workers’ Rights-Protection Consultation Network lists only 58. But many of the hundreds of forum threads list between 1,000 and 4,000 views, so obviously somebody is using these websites.

Where these sites differ from other Chinese left sites is that they seem more interactive and oriented toward facilitating mutual aid among workers and their supporters. The general orientation is clearly Maoist, which is pretty much the only oppositional perspective readily available to Chinese workers besides liberalism - generally (and rightly) seen as an ideology of dissident elements in the ruling class that increasingly overlaps in important ways with the CP’s present ideology (Dengism, for lack of a better word).³ I suspect these sites have some high-level connections in the CP, otherwise you’d think they would have been blocked or shut down before achieving even this low level of popularity, considering the level of interactivity and the radicalness of views expressed in the forums. On the other hand, the mutual aid promoted by these sites is mainly oriented toward enforcing China’s labor law against unscrupulous bosses - an approach the state generally accepts or even promotes at the central level.

The layout is a little confusing. The homepage of chuizi.net is also a distinct section called Workers’ News, which has several sub-sections in addition to separate sections listed alongside it, some leading to sections of chuizi.net, others to other websites. (It’s possible the strange layout is due to concerns about certain sections being more likely to be blocked or shut down.) The main sections listed on the homepage are:

Workers’ News (chuizi.net)

Workers’ Forum (chuizi.net/?action-bbs and chuizi.net/b)

Workers’ Rights-Protection (honghuacao.com)

Workers’ Photos (chuizi.net/?action-uchimage)

Workers’ Blogs (chuizi.net/?action-uchblog)

Mutual Aid Q & A (chuizi.net/m.php?name=wenda)

Workers’ Web (maopai.net - this means “Maoist” and the site is also called “Mao Portal”)

Special Section for Liu Hanhuang⁴ (chuizi.net/b/thread-3201-1-1.html)

Each of these sections or websites has sub-sections (some being links to yet other websites). To make things even more confusing, the Workers’ Forum seems to have two different homepages: chuizi.net/?action-bbs can only be accessed from Workers’ News; under that, every section returns to chuizi.net/b as its homepage.

It’s only there (chuizi.net/b) that you find an “about us” section, and the wording seems to imply that Workers’ Forum started out as a separate website. Established in 2006, the administrators have changed several times, along with the content.⁵ “Finally,” Workers’ Forum says, “we’ve settled on the present site design and operating principles.” Namely, “Workers’ Forum is a non-profit public welfare website created by a group of social youth [社会青年] and independent scholars [民间学者]. Now it is mainly maintained by a few volunteers… Our mission is to serve workers and promote the workers spirit of solidarity, mutual aid and perseverance [进取].” And that’s all it says. But it does list a few “allied sites”:

Maoist Portal (aka the Workers Web listed above; 3 mirror sites are listed here, presumably in case one gets blocked)

Honghuacao Rights-Protection Mutual Aid Network (honghuacao.com)

China Polls (tpiao.cn - also listed as a main section under chuizi.net/b - contains hundreds of polls with open commentary - the most popular presently being about Liu Hanhuang)

Nine Maps (9ditu.net & two broken mirrors - contains detailed maps of numerous cities in China & elsewhere with no commentary, but with links to chuizi.net/b as “9 Maps Community,” and links to a thread about Liu Hanhuang)

If you didn’t read my footnote 4, by now you may be wondering who Liu Hanhuang is. In case you missed it, here it is again (if you read it, skip this paragraph):

Liu Hanhuang is a 26-year-old migrant worker from rural Guizhou who killed two of his former Taiwanese bosses in June, in a row over compensation for the loss of Liu’s right hand while working in a hardware factory in Dongguan, after nearly a year of negotiation and Liu’s attempted suicide. He has become an internet hero among workers and the left in China. There is a popular campaign to reduce his sentence - as Deng Yujiao’s sentence was reduced due to popular pressure a few months ago - but at this point I’m not sure if the campaign has had any affect. There seems to be no English news on the web about the campaign (typical of both Chinese state media & liberal Western media). But there is an English petition - started by a Taiwanese human rights group - here. In over a month it has garnered only 79 signatures! I have no idea how many people in China support him or have even heard of him, but I was surprised that only 513 people had taken this anonymous poll in a Hammer thread with over 4,000 views (95.32% or 489 people voted that Liu’s sentence should be commuted). This is the only poll I can find on the web, but you can find dozens of writings expressing support for him. There are also several Chinese petitions but they are blocked.

I originally planned to briefly introduce several of the ongoing workers’ struggles reported and discussed on the Hammer Network, but it’s taking me too long to do that. It would be better to devote individual posts to each incident. Not sure how many I’ll get around to blogging about, but I’ve already started one that I hope to finish and post in the next few days.

One thing to note, in case you want to use these websites, is that the Workers’ News section is almost entirely about other countries (the Ssangyong struggle in South Korea is given prominence on the main page), and most of the reports on China don’t deal with workers’ struggles (the only one I see on the main page is about Tonghua⁶), or even workers. So the Workers’ Forum seems to be the place to go to learn about ongoing struggles. Most of the active threads there deal with workers’ grievances, and most of those involve bosses withholding wages. A few deal with workers fighting back.

Another interesting thing is that, while logging in, in order to authenticate that I was human instead of a bot, I was given a Chinese fill-in-the-blank to the effect of “The working ___ leads everything” (工人＊级领导一切). I guess, in addition to bots, they’re also trying to weed out class enemies.

____________________________________________________________________
Notes

My gf wrote this on her blog about our adventures last night ("ma dabao" refers to me):

事情得从一条裙子说起，一条紫色的长裙子。当然颜色不重要，重点是我很喜欢，还有，它很长
       然后是另一主角上场了，两星期前，咱家买了一辆车，自行车。
       下午试讲通过了，俺们就说，诶，咱们骑着车出去玩儿吧，庆祝。去了巴黎咖啡，玩到半夜，男主角搭着我从科华北路一路唱着歌儿骑回家。正高兴着]呢，突然听到 喀嚓一声，裙角迅速的缠到好几圈到自行车车轱辘里。出于安全的考量，我们要迅速的撤离事发地点，马大宝说，把裙子扯断，我不，我要和裙子共存亡。马大宝又 说，那你把裙子脱了，到路边去弄。 我说你有毛病吧，乞丐装和不穿能是一回事嘛。蹲在路旁边扯了老半天，弄不出来，马大宝又说，你这裙子没救了，扯吧。说完连麻醉都不打就把我裙子给截肢了， 全截啊，我顿时化身为街头超短裙辣妹，看到心爱的裙子已经回天乏术，顿时悲从中来，热泪盈眶。。。。。（这里省略心情若干）
      新滴问题又出现了，搅到轱辘里面的灾布料，怎么也扯不出来，马大宝聪明啊，摸出了打火机，在西月城街上公然纵火，烧啊烧，沿着外围快烧到车轮子了，无奈路 边连根小棍子都找不着，扫大街也扫得忒干净了吧。马大宝又冒出了雷人的话“你想上厕所吗”，我看着这月黑风高的，街上空无一人，顿时明白了他的意思，反 问，“难道你不想？你喝得不少啊”。。。无奈啊，消防员难为无尿之扑火啊。咱俩热锅蚂蚁搬终于找来几片叶子戳戳戳把布料给弄了下来，火也熄了。。。就在这 关键时刻，天上居然应景的下起了小到中雨
    车子链条松了，咱俩大半夜在西月城街上开起了维修处理点，机油弄得满身都是，还弄不好。天上突然掉下个好心人，三下五除二给上好了
    回家的路上，男主角说，你别难过了，我赔你条新裙子呗，唉。。。。到哪里去找一样的裙子哦。。还是每年8月7日到西月城街去给我裙子烧根香吧]                                                                                                烈士啊。。。。

Update: A second radio interview with Loren Goldner about the Ssangyong strike/ occupation is here.

Among workers’ resistance to lay-offs justified by the economic crisis, three of the most prominent & interesting in the past few weeks have been the cases of Tonghua Iron & Steel Group in Jilin (China, state-owned), the Ssangyong auto plant in Pyeongtaek (South Korea, recently bought out by Chinese capital), & the Vestas wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight (UK, owned by Danish capital). Comparing these three cases, one is tempted to draw one or both of the following conclusions: (1) violence pays, & (2) the Chinese government is more merciful, at least on its remaining state-sector workers, than the Korean & UK governments.

I won’t try to pretend to know much about Xinjiang or have anything insightful to say about the riots last month. I’ve been there twice & saw some amazing things. The most beautiful landscape I’ve seen anywhere in the world is in the Altay area bordering Siberia & Kazakhstan. Kashgar was also amazing - I managed to visit this spring before the remains of the old city were demolished. But I can’t access my photos now because Picasa is blocked, along with Twitter & Facebook, ever since the riots in Urumqi last month (Flickr, Youtube & Xanga had already been blocked for months at least. We’re lucky CSG was mysteriously unblocked a few months ago - which means I can start blogging here again, hopefully along with many other old & new bloggers in the growing CSG family).

As you probably know, the PRC cybercops started blocking Facebook & Twitter during the Urumqi riots, & there's no telling when they'll let up. For that & other reasons, I've decided to resume blogging here on a more regular basis, & to resume posting links I want to share on Delicious. I don't like MSN (in general & including MSN Spaces), but it's one of the few blog sites with an English interface that isn't blocked in China, & it also happens to already be set to feed into Facebook, so my friends there will see my posts here.

I'm out of the habit of blogging, & was never very comfortable with it, so it may take some getting used to.

There's so much to say, not sure where to begin, & I don't want this to turn into too much of a chore, so I'll just write a few things that come to mind tonight & save the rest for later.

I'm back in the 'du for a minute, after travelling for a couple weeks: visiting Hubei, Hong Kong, and a conference/workshop on rural co-ops at SYSU organized by Hairong & Tan Tongxue. The latter especially was inpiring in several ways. Maybe I'll get around to writing more about that in future posts - I'm not sure how much I should be giving away about my research ideas, plans & fieldnotes here. Here I'll just say that dozens of rural cooperative organizers - grassroots, professional, volunteer & academic - shared their experiences there, along with a few foreign visitors, who spoke mainly on transnational movements for food sovereignty, altnerative food networks & the re-valorization of "peasant" agriculture. The two groups seemed to be coming from starkly different worlds, like "chicken talking to ducks" (as the Chinese saying goes), but there was a little bit of communication that I hope will contribute to the building of transnational linkages & exchange (if not collaboration) among agrarian movements.

One of the inspirations I got from the gathering involved recognizing that there _is_ something like a popular rural cooperative/ "rural reconstruction" movement in China, or perhaps several overlapping movements, each with different but not necessarily coherent or fully-formed orientations. So this may be something appropriate for research after all, & I have a lot of new questions & a few leads in that direction. I gave up this project a couple years ago because I thought an aspiring movement had fizzled out as it entered the embrace of more-or-less conventional state development projects, but now it looks like there's quite a bit more going on that I had realized, & these movements (provisionally, for lack of a better term at the moment) seem to be growing & inspiring new local initiatives.

Enough on that for now. So I'm back in the 'du for a few weeks, with a few tasks before officially jumping into "the field":
1) complete an application for permission to do research on "human subjects" (those of you who read my blog 3 years ago will recall a lot of complaining about that then - well that was for pre-diss research, now I have to do a new one for diss research. yes i know i should have done this long ago, but just never got around to it, what with teaching & all)
2) when i finally get that permission, complete the procedure for receiving research grant (asap, i'm already running out of my savings & have some biggish expenses coming up soon)
3) improve my chinese listening, writing, writing & speaking - i had been taking my ability for granted the past few years, but the conference shocked me into realizing I should actually force myself to work on this some more - for example, listening to the news at least 1/2 hour every day, learning to take notes in chinese
4) read as much as possible from the (research-related) writings i've been putting off for the past few years, including some new things i've just learned about (next in line: Hans' dissertation on rural Hubei; The New Peasantries by van der Ploeg...; in Chinese, I still want to work towards writing a review of the 16-volume series of village studies edited by He Xuefeng; now that i'm resuming the "social movement" approach I should also read more of the social movement literature; & finally, I should spend some time browsing the websites & other resources related to these movements & preparing questions for the field...)

I originally wanted to write about some unrelated things I've experienced in the past couple days, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Well let me just add one thing: my friends in Urumqi & their families are safe. The entire internet is still completely blocked there, along with cell phone text messaging (except, we assume, for government officials & important businesses). There's no word how long this will last, but it lasted 6 months after the riot in Lhasa last March. As for details about the Urumqi riots & crackdown, rumor on the street is that about 800 people died (the official death toll is like 200), but my friends had no idea how many were Uighur, Han or Hui, & how many were killed by which group of rioters or by state authorities. I haven't searched for news reports about the situation since the days after the riots - at that point, the Guardian was running the best reports. Two lefty interpretations of the events are here & here. Let me know if you've seen anything better.