It’s Just Academic

When I was first involved with Occupy Wall Street, academics and intellectuals were everywhere. Education and Empowerment was a massive working group, which did achieve a great deal. A year later and the academics, with honored and honorable exceptions, are on the sidelines, sniping, even as conferences and courses with titles using words like “radical,” “rethinking” and “political” abound. While European movements seem ready to change the paradigm, universities here remain comfortably asleep.

This injunction is against my tenured and tenure-track colleagues. One of the most noticeable features of the movement is the prominent place of adjunct and contingent faculty, and especially graduate students–precisely the people who do have something to lose. These are the people behind Occupy University, the Free University, Occupy Student Debt and many other of the best movement moments. Meanwhile there are a growing wave of books and articles by the tenured, weighing in “more in sorrow than in anger” about the various failures that they perceive in Occupy.

Let’s take an example that has been bouncing around Facebook of late, called “Occupy Wall Street, Flash Movements and American Politics,”  published in the online section of Dissent by David Plotke, a professor of politics at the New School. I don’t know Prof. Plotke and as far as I’m aware we haven’t met at any Occupy event. The piece isn’t evil or terrible. It’s just operating in such a different conceptual to those of us working in the movement as to render it ineffective as as intervention.

Plotke offers four contrasting interpretations of Occupy, all of which make judgments in relation to electoral politics, especially the current election., enabling his conclusion that it was a “flash movement.” This undefined term is rendered as calling Occupy

the Herman Cain of the left.

It’s a cheap shot and Plotke quickly disavows it, in a “have your cake and eat it” form of writing.

The three paragraphs on his own answer to the question of Occupy’s meaning are followed by much longer excurses on the impact of Occupy on the Democratic Party, and whether it is more or less effective than the Tea Party. Nowhere does Plotke consider that Occupy was founded as a direct democracy movement, precisely because participants have little or no belief in the current system’s capacity to effect change. It’s right there in the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City:

no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.

It is entirely consistent with such an analysis that, in Plotke’s words:

The Tea Party experience shows how political currents can now appear both inside and outside the party system.

For most in Occupy, and indeed many others, the Tea Party is a well-funded corporate vehicle, tapping into white racism for a brief set of “upsets” in 2010. Plotke is nonetheless impressed with the selection of a far-right candidate for the 2012 Senate election in Texas:

There is nothing marginal or purely symbolic about this sort of success.

We might question how much difference one right-winger from Texas over another will really make. We might make parallels with the nomination of Tammy Baldwin for Senate in Wisconsin, where Occupy activists have invested in electoral politics; or we might talk about Elizabeth Warren. But this is to hold the electoral mirror to Occupy as if it was the goal of the movement: and it is not.

In fact, it is remarkable that throughout the long essay, Plotke never once quotes anyone involved with Occupy, or any of the many documents it has produced, although he did apparently interview people for the piece. Imagine writing on the Republican Party without naming or quoting any known Republicans. Plotke prefers the straw man strategy:

Neo-anarchists and other far leftists provided part of the core leadership of Occupy

He gives these unnamed persons fake credit for starting the movement but continues to note ominously:

There were leaders—yet OWS tended to deny they existed. Without any formal means of selection, they were there.

This is a combination of familiar scare tactics. First, it suggests that there were good things at the beginning (the “flash” moment) that became corrupt. This is a version of the interpretation of the French Revolution that claims to like “1789” but deplore everything that came after the storming of the Bastille. Next, it updates the “reds under the bed” meme of the Cold War to suggest that the poor dupes of the rank-and-file were manipulated by extremists:

Affirming the virtues of a leaderless and unprogrammatic movement afforded room for maneuver for actual leaders, without requiring them to articulate and defend their political and ideological positions. In this rapid and surprising sequence, neo-anarchists became Popular Front Leninists of a sort.

Does that sound familiar, Occupy people? Or does it sound more like a familiar Cold War paranoia from the New York “public intellectual” class?

This America-centric reading is consistent with the lack of mention of any of the other global justice movements from the Arab Spring to the Indignados and Quebec strikers that both inspired and sustained Occupy. On and on, Plotke goes misrepresenting the movement. He snips:

We’re not likely to see large efforts by an Occupy Dallas or Occupy South Carolina.

Really? But Occupy Atlanta was very strong before its eviction, and Occupy Tampa continues to be so. Just today word came in of activists in Utah creating a Strike Debt project and reprinting the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual. Plotke will say, well, that’s not a “large effort.” It is for the people involved. What has mattered in this first year to most of us is the chance to try to be the change we’d like to see. We’re carrying on, making links with colleagues in Europe and Latin America. It’s a shame so few have been willing to get out of the ivory tower to join in.

8 thoughts on “It’s Just Academic

  1. Nick, thank you for this thoughtful post. Here are my two cents on the question of leadership.

    I actually agree with Plotke that an informal leadership has always existed within Occupy as with any other social movement. The question however, is not whether social movements should be hierarchal or horizontal, institutionalized or spontaneous, but whether fighting against power differentials is always worth it or the right thing to do.

    Perhaps instead of dreaming up “a world without hierarchies” (an OWS refrain) we should be considering existing “heterarchies.” And build from them.

    Axel Bruns (2008) uses the notion of heterarchy to talk about the power-law distributions of Wikipedia. He sees nothing wrong with the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia edits are contributed by a tiny minority of users (the same goes for Linux and F/OSS).

    If power-law distributions are a byproduct of participation in an open and distributed environment such as Occupy, then the issue is how to reward voluntary efforts and informal leaderships rather than considering them as distortions of a purely democratic process.

    I am not talking about creating a professional class of revolutionaries. I am more interested in how to create protocols and institutions that enable activists to exert leadership on a rotating basis.

    Discussed and designed in restricted meetings by the informal leadership of OWS, the creation of the Spokes Council was a bold move in this direction. It would be important to understand why it failed as an experiment.

    I had few more cents on the question of full-time vs. precarious faculty, but it’s too late and I prefer to dedicate myself to the fine art of sleeping.

  2. Nick-

    As usual, your thoughts are right on point.

    The issue as I see it (not sure if this is from the inside or the outside of academia, to be honest) is that for many, there are existing conditions from which many in academia benefit greatly. While it is easy to analyze some of these conditions (both within and outside of academia), to look for and actively seek out the concrete transformation of those conditions would necessarily come at the expense of those benficiaries. Criticizing the supposed failures of Occupy, whether logistical or in message, seems to be as much a sport as Monday morning quarterbacking and only ends up ensuring the insularity of those offering critique. I am happy to see Martha’s comment because I hope it is a surprise to no one but Fox News that academia, despite its choice of readings, is almost always a faithful defender of the larger framework that allows (demands!) existing conditions to continue as is. I

  3. Plotke is a colleague. I would describe him as an “honest liberal.” I think some of your critical points are on point. Comparing Occupy to the Tea Party is not comparing like with like. But then Plotke does not see politics through the prism of class. He is looking at it through the electoral system and competing strategies for achieving power through it. He is not writing for people in #ows. There’s no reason to think he should be too beholden to that readership. Its not his job to make #ows feel good about itself. I think the challenge in this arena is to show how the more activist-scholar can arrive at a better, or usefully different, analysis because s/he is more directly involved.

    • I don’t think Plotke’s job is to make OWS feel good about itself. I do think he should judge what it has achieved in its own terms: if it is not engaging in electoral politics, then it is bound to seem like a failure in that arena. Shouldn’t one at least consider Wisconsin and Massachusetts where electoral issues have been more prominent? For better or worse, I felt condescended to by this piece–again, I don’t know the writer at all and it’s a reaction to the writing.

  4. Nick –

    Are you trying to make a broad point about academics, or a point about this person’s article?

    If the latter, then good show.

    If the former, then you might consider more carefully articulating the charge you are leveling against tenured and tenure-track faculty. I think it is this:

    *You tenured and tenure-track faculty love to talk and criticize, but you aren’t very involved (any longer).*

    That is probably true. Here are some reasons why.

    First, academics aren’t activists. Most make observations and make critical interventions. If they were activists, they abandoned that for a life of intellectual pursuits.

    Second, many academics are interested in politics and study it. They write about the politics they see unfolding before them.

    It follows from these two observations that many academics write about politics in which they are not involved.

    Is there a problem with that? Or is there only a problem with that if the politics they critique are on the left? Must I be a Tea Partier to criticize them? Or am I only allowed to criticize those whom I despise, not those whom I hope to succeed?

    The sentiment that faculty need either to get in the trenches or shut up is familiar. Change the world, don’t theorize it! I often feel this way. But, I am not convinced it is a defensible sentiment – at least not usually.

    You should probably devote some space to defending this sentiment before you attack all of us who run afoul of it.

    Finally, I might have misunderstood you from the start. You are trying to rally the troops. You are trying to get your colleagues out into the streets with you. And the tactic you are using is to shame them. That’s fine too. It sometimes works. So, go for it. Some of us, though, might find that tactic a little bit too much for our tastes. Should I really be ashamed that I am not part of Occupy? That is hard to believe.

    • So I think I was just driven to respond to this one piece because it has been much in circulation here– but it does imply the questions you raise in this thoughtful response. I’m going to step back for a bit and think about what I want to say to them: which is not to say I won’t respond but that it’s probably another whole post or perhaps even a longer essay that’s needed.

      I do find the changed conditions of the current New Academic Majority of adjunct and contingent faculty plus grad students puts a new burden on the minority of tenure-track faculty–Cathy Davidson has called them/us the academic one per cent.

      I think posts like this are about starting a discussion by pushing for a point of view strongly: certainly this one has done that!

      I don’t, however, think people should be ashamed of not being in Occupy. I worry about people who want to make academic material out of Occupy. I’m not in a Politics department and I don’t claim to speak for those who are or to suggest how that work should be done. I do see how pieces like this, which appear in general circulation magazines, have real effects and are not, then, simply about the conditions of academic study of politics.

  5. Nick, I appreciate the post, but do want to point out that the trajectory you describe at the outset has been the norm for US academics’ participation in popular movements as long as I’ve been in a position to notice, from the 60s forward, and esp after the mid-70s when all kinds of rotten ‘long march through the institutions’ crap was adduced for sniping from the sidelines.I have heard academics say “First I want to get tenure” and “First I want to be promoted” without blushing.

Comments are closed.