The university came to be
seen as a tool, not just for elites, but for the public good
The university is producing
citizens who are in pursuit of things, happiness through the acquisition of
things and status
The university is in the
service of capitalism and the market
Uncertainties create
uncertain subjects, citizens with no demands over their education or the
conditions of their workplace
What should our society
be?
We live in this moment
494_ror_compliance
BlackCommentator.com: Compliance
Is A Bitch! Accomplices at the “Edu-Factory” - Represent Our Resistance - By
Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD - BC Editorial Board
Compliance
Is A Bitch!
Accomplices
at the “Edu-Factory”
Represent Our Resistance
By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels,
PhD
BC Editorial Board
The
working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They had no ready-made
utopias to introduce par decret du peuple.
They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it
that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own
economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a
series of historic process, transforming circumstances and men.
-Karl
Marx, from ***The Civil War in
I do
not want to become the accomplice of my torturers.
-Jean
Amery, ***At the Mind’s Limits,
Contemplations by A Survivor on
Capitalism:
It has only killed 1,000,000,000 people. But we made a lot of money and we’re
not going to share it.
-Socialist
Party of
The
pursuit of skilled-labor took place on the job. Apprentice carpenters or
electricians stood beside veteran workers at factories or workshops. Today, the
university, once a bastion of Western knowledge that distinguished the “elite”
class from the working class, is the site where, thanks to capitalist’s
interests and the neo-liberal, collaborative support of willing administrators
and faculty, new labor is disciplined to accept their material condition. These
institutions of “higher learning,” suggests post-doctorate fellow, Max Haiven, have
become edu-factories.[1]
The
university, as a Western institution, is far from the image of a marginalized,
yet ethereal paradise of innocence, unless we remember the historical origins,
in the
How
did the universities respond to the “demands of workers” and the “threat of
communist” after World War II? They compromised: The worker’s share in the
“American Dream” could hoist the whole family into the middle-class and a
lifestyle that would include ownership of the latest production of appliances
and, of course, the car and the television, and the home in suburbia. We will
welcome your children, too!
The
steeples and arches remained but doors at universities swung open!
The
university, Haiven continues, came to be seen as a tool, not just for elites, but
for the “public good.” (Beware of the “fine print” or the visible or invisible
signs!). Haiven points out the historical truth surrounding this perception of
the universities as the site now for the “public good” - women, people of
color, gays, and “Third world immigrants” should carry on - in their proper places on the social ladder.
In
some ways and in some fields, Haiven says, the university shifted from the
hands of conservative forces to the “very progressive.” Here, Haven suggests, the
university, at this stage, reflects back to society what society should do. He
argues that this “critical function” of the university is lost and “practically
dead.”
But
what does the university reflect back to society except a mirror image of its
undemocratic reality? Haiven admits so himself. Women and people of color (and
this description refers to people of darker hue, since whites, too, are
comparatively paler color people) are not admitted What of the unemployed and
impoverished?
Does this idea of education
incorporate a vision of freedom and democracy?
The
“critical function” of the university is problematic at its origins, which in
the
Haiven
continues. He argues that in the universities’ shifts to neo-liberalism we now
see yet another shift from public to semi-private institutions of higher
learning. The university, he continues, is now out of reach for many.
But
when it was no longer an establishment for the “elite” class to produce its
future governmental, legal, judicial, social and cultural offspring, but an
exclusive site for the “public good,” was the university any more equalitarian
if half the population of the country was excluded?
Do we return to the university at
this juncture? If we do return to
our collective history, we will recall Plessy
v. Ferguson, the “separate but equal” ruling of the Supreme Court, Thurgood
Marshall and the Brown v. The Board of
Education, brave young men and women standing before university doors
surrounded by the National Guard and angry whites, including workers granted
just a few years earlier the right to aspire to the middle class lifestyle. At
least in this lecture, Haiven does not recall these years when opened doors
slammed closed on Black Americans who had to force them open once again.
Of
course, this time around, Thurgood Marshalls are hard to find and brave young
Black men and women willing to risk their lives not just for an excluded
community but most importantly, to stand on the right side of history. They
have been distracted in the last 40 years by the corporate model of ideal
citizens engaged in consumerism not activism, alienated from self and any
notion of a collective history of struggle.
Haiven
recognizes that the university is in the service of capitalism and the market.
The vales of society, he adds, are now vales of cost benefits. We should invest,
most of all, in the university for the “social good” Haiven argues.
Instead,
the university is the place where student / citizen racks up debt and this
status of indebtedness allows for the shaping and disciplining of new workers.
The university’s production is not an educated or skilled student / citizen but
workers compliant within the framework of capitalism. In turn, “the worker” is
afraid to protest. Haiven points outs they are “afraid to rise up and struggle”
since, once the in-debt-student graduates, he or she must comply and find
whatever work is available to repay their loans. The student-in-debt / future
worker is brought into “compliance with a system that isn’t in their interests.”
“Debt forces to abide by the norms of the system.”
As
Haiven rightly notes, a “police force” is not needed to control this
population.
In
addition, debt, Haiven states, produces student / citizens with few or no
expectations of attaining the middle-class lifestyle. You should know, the university says to this population, that the
middle-class lifestyle is not guaranteed! Uncertainties create uncertain
subjects, citizens with no demands over their education or the conditions of
their workplace.
The
“subject” cannot think on their
relations with other human beings or the collective is stuck thinking, as
individuals, only of survival from day-to-day, Haiven argues.
These
subjects buy the rhetoric dished out by corporate advertisers and the corporate
media. Know that the CEOs bonuses rise
annually to astronomical heights and their homes sit on islands. Watch as we
bring you the latest news via television or Twitter on your favorite idol and the
rich and the famous sporting the designer clothes and flashing the big diamond
ring.
What
happens to that pent-up anger? No more
guarantees of a middle-class lifestyle for you!
Well,
we know. Someone or some “special interests” group is to blame. Blacks and
immigrants, women who should have remained at home! The usual parade of
culprits near at hand! Easy targets! Visible most notably when a collective of
individuals fear their right to the American Dream is in danger of being taken
away. Haiven need not remind many of us of this phenomenon in the
I
would argue that capitalism’s movement counts on this distraction and confusion
among citizens. Chaos is as profitable as “peace.” We are here with this capitalist movement serving as the driving force
against other alternative ways of being because we were never there in a
democratic society at the origins of the state or its institutions.
We are in dire-straights!
As
an adjunct professor, Haiven has observed that however much these students in
debt are distracted by the rhetoric of capitalism, the last thing they want is
distraction from their life’s pursuit, from getting through classes in order to
obtain that job!
We are at the stage when the captain
calls out: “Red Alert!” The new
citizen, the new worker, fights - but fights to become a more willing slave to
what those workers who got aboard trains labeled the middle-class! I think
Malcolm would say the chickens have come home to roast! You get what you
desired if what you desired was that paradise of the innocent. But now even
these words are no longer good enough!
The
angry students promised nothing at all but, forced to enter the doors of the
university like so many sheep, are willing to be accomplices of their
torturers. Why not resist the distraction
of words and images of some other era when you have been taught to see only the
here and now, some other way of being in the world without “happiness” and the
potential source of your happiness?
Haiven
has observed those classes of students, the new future worker tired, he says,
of giving “special interests” groups their mental energy in the classroom, and
they hate the distraction of discussions on race, gender, and class!
Red Alert! The new citizen / worker
has arrived! As I have noted in my
experience, these new citizen / workers as students become the police! Armies of storm troopers in university / factory
varsity jackets and in university / factory sweatshirts!
Max
Haiven suggests that we imagine something beyond the public and private
university, something, he offers, akin to education on a grassroots level, where
citizens ask the question: “what should our society be?”
Abandoning
the public and private educational institutions from K through higher education
is the only viable option for the survival of all aboard this ship labeled the
U.S. Empire, but however dire our situation, we are not aboard the USS
Enterprise with a rational captain and ranking officers - or even crew! And for
this reason, I argue for the recognition from those on the Left that we are in
worse shape than citizens who historically defended their right to exist in
other eras - worse, in ways than those in
Marx
could write of the French worker:
They
have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with
which the old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full
consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up
to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the
gentlemen’s gentlemen with the pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage
of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes
and sectarian crochets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility. (from The Civil War in
How
do you abandon the sinking ship when all hands collaborate, knowingly or
unknowingly to bring it down? How do you tell the student to stop attending the
university or stopping paying the debt - forego your personal goals for the
social good? How do these in-debt-students, future workers, resist the movement
“forward” with capitalism when they have no history of past movements of
resistance?
Grassroots
level education is fine, but it is certainly not new. In recent memory, the
Black Panthers tried it, and for a time, the organization was successful. That
is the problem, right? This kind of success has a history of encountering the
State’s iron boot! It is even dangerous for individuals to attempt this kind of
“militancy” now as the legal apparatus of the State will find a way to cite
some kind of “violation.”
Surely
the Occupy Movement, for example, is engaging in grassroots education, but not
on a mass scale.
Start
small, okay. But consider Haiven’s question: “What should our society be?” - a
call to proactively consider the forms resistance should take for this era in
light of the fact that the majority of our new workers at the edu-factories
across this country are no less prison camp laborers, and the “elite” among
them are the chosen few who will serve as the Empire’s agri-specialists, drone
manufacturers and operators, skilled language manipulators for the media and
“special interests” groups such as Exxon Mobil and GS, managers of corporate
finance, legal and policy makers for the “judicial system” and Homeland
security, and teachers - at all levels.
Compliance is a bitch! And it kills!
It
is hard to turn people around on a dime. We need a change in circumstances and
people if we are to avoid the death of not just millions, but this planet.
In
***At the Mind’s Limits, Amery, a
resistance fighter and survivor of torture at Auschwitz, writes of the
multiple-front lines and methods of attack at the Nazis’ disposal. There he was,
a Jew and resistor, hanging by his arms in a cell for distributing leaflets
while the Nazi war machine destroyed towns and cities and transported the enemy
to be worked to death or exterminated outright.
Amery
remembers:
The
piles of corpses that lie between them and me cannot be removed in the process
of internalization, so it seems to me, but, on the contrary, through
actualization, or, more strongly stated, by actively settling the unresolved
conflict in the field of historical practice.
Our
new workers trained at the edu-factory cannot identify with the current piles
of corpses between themselves and the current Superpower regime.
As
the late German writer, W.G. Sebald, wrote of Amery’s philosophy, he held on to
the “validity of resistance even to the point of absurdity.” Resistance must
follow “out of a principle of solidarity with victims and as a deliberate
affront to those who simply let the stream of history sweep them along” (***On the Natural History of Destruction)
We live in this moment. How will we
respond when even Nature resists our ignorance? How do we resist meaningfully
and beyond rhetoric and a compliant workforce stuck on capitalism?
BlackCommentator.com Editorial
Board member and Columnist, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern
American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.
[1] Max Haiven, ***“Student Debt and the Edu-Factory:
Against the Foreclosure of the Future” (originally recorded at
[1] Max Haiven, ***“Student Debt and
the Edu-Factory: Against the Foreclosure of the Future” (originally recorded at