A political fantasy of radical action around the university
Ben Hoh, Left Alliance Internal Discussion (June 1995)
1) Running through the foundations of the campaign against fees is a problematic orientation towards "consumer rights". This isn't often fully articulated, but it's familiar enough: "We students can't afford to pay fees; as (hopefully upward-)clawing, canny customers (middle class or not), we deserve better." But regardless of such counterrevolutionary garbage, it is true that especially in this current context, fees will objectively devastate any future prospects of an equitable education system and will play a great part in fucking over people in general (in combination with the refinement of various technocratic training mechanisms), and must therefore be stopped, with "united front mass action". Yes. But what kind of action has actually set the basic rhythm (and hence the practical or formal agenda) for the contemporary campaigns against fees, and against user-pays, etc.? Despite the Left's facilitation of the campaign and the urgency of the issues, we still haven't gotten the rhythm of anti-fees mobilisation away from that of a knee-jerk, isolated and reactive defense that will increasingly lose momentum as the education system is more explicitly integrated with simultaneously marginalising and privileging mechanisms of profit.
Of course, Left Alliance has a principled history of arguing against vacuous and reactive "agendas": within cross-campus forums, we challenge sincere and cynically opportunist populism; in "public", we distribute critical material that competes with populist propaganda. But there's a distinctly limited instinct built into the very impulse of the campaign's current orientation; it doesn't just infect the bits of rhetoric that are outside of our control. We must therefore create alternative models for mobilisation. This must go beyond making our revolutionary arguments against reformist populism "louder" (although this doesn't hurt); on a much more fundamental level, we need to construct non-consumerist situations that would be more conducive to revolutionary politics. We need a reorientation.
2) Upon inspection, one would think that the Left's aim was merely to get lots of panicky and paranoid students chanting radical-sounding slogans. Is this particularly revolutionary (or even deeply politicising), and is it even achievable these days? My assertion: so long as "students" remain a defensive "constituency" that reacts instinctively against government attacks, the potential for revolutionary action will progressively shrink. Of course, one could say that any anti-fees position is "objectively progressive", i.e. it will always defend people who really will get fucked over, and it will necessarily be against the government. So? Saddam Hussein led the struggle against Western imperialism in 1991... in a manner of speaking. While a programme of "pure self-defense" can often be radicalising, this is less and less the case with "students as students" in the 1990s, because nowadays, students are increasingly invited to complicitly associate their very presence in universities with the internalisation of a ruthless user-pays ideology that encourages a blase kind of docility,[1] which only occasionally extends itself into consumer outrage (and that is often directed against anything that isn't "good value", e.g. "wasteful" attempts at non-vocational, participatory and critical teaching, or even general non-curricular activities, radical or not).[2]
As long as we allow this context to continue, we won't be able to convince many more people of the "rightness" of our analysis by quantatively increasing our effort. And in the long run, the instinct underpinning the campaign will effectively overwhelm any valid arguments the Left may put forth about "education for liberation", let alone the usual stuff about negative wealth redistribution or access and equity. When their consumer status is reinforced by the campaign's framing and subsequent motivational direction, most students (whether they've been mobilised or not) are just not going to believe or care about such marginal, lefty bullshit for very long.[3] Mixed signals: in an increasingly technocratic institution, constituency-building is simpy going to fuck up any kind of radical political connections that we try to make. This is a continuum that we've always negotiated (with an opportunistic pragmatism that occasionally masquerades as "strategy"), but why negotiate when the situation is now so overriding?
This leads me to perhaps the major point. The ability to "make political connections" isn't some special thing that only benefits the recruitment-aspirations of "the Left": basically, student "clientilism" stops the rest of society from engaging with the campaign. Therefore, our frustrated and slightly tokenistic attempts to get unions, community groups and other activists involved in the campaign will increasingly tend towards failure. And so "our" support dwindles... and everybody loses. We can roll our eyes at formulaic Spartacist rhetoric about "integrated labour/minority actions", but broadening one's base beyond one's obvious "constituency" (and thus problematising such a notion) is a pretty standard requirement for any "social movement".[4] While existing "social movements" shouldn't necessarily be held up as examples of inherent radicality, the basis of the "student movement" is so laughable that its (short-circuited) "radicality" is inconsequential in comparison. As the Situationist International said in 1966:
[S]tudents continue blithely to organise demonstrations which mobilise students and students only. This is political consciousness in its virgin state, a fact which naturally makes the universities a happy hunting ground for the manipulators of the declining bureaucratic organisations.[5]
Uncanny, isn't it?
If anything, we need to take the most progressive aspect of "social movement" organising, which is its abstract mobilising impulse: people coming together to act against the way things currently work. Pretty basic stuff. "The education system is becoming an elitist, money-making, hierarchical fast-food machine that will fuck the world up! You can help by fighting fees. Save the planet -- free education!" Such popular mobilisation (as opposed to narrowly populist mobilisation) provides a qualitative orientation towards mass-based social change, which is what "we" currently need. If initially successful, such a reorientation of the "education campaign" could actually be harder to deradicalise than that of other "social movements", because there's not much to fetishise in the education system (unlike, say, the trees, furry animals and future middle-class children which figure so potently and dangerously in environmentalist movements).
3) There's another (less accurate but eye-opening) method of charting our campaign's suspicious rhythms. Historically, note the low levels of response (from most of the Left and people in general) to campaigns against the Australian Technology Park and full fees for overseas students (which are both still incredibly important indicators of the education system's restructuring). Take the case of the latter: full-blown, upfront fees for overseas students were introduced soon after HECS for local students, further concretising the profiteering course of the education system. Things were obviously getting worse, people were being fucked over, and in popular terms, the thin edge of the wedge was getting way thicker. If this was the case, why is it suddenly more appropriate that we should "go sick" at the prospect of fees for local undergraduate students? I don't think this can be completely rationalised by the observation that the current threat will affect the system more intensely (which is perhaps too naive a justification, given that we've seen this coming for years, via the example at hand; the problem is that it wasn't really even seen as an example, let alone something to "go sick" about).[6]
Underneath our "objectively correct" explanations, then, a major reason for our currently "opportune" action is that the orientation of the anti-fees struggle is reactive, populist and "self"-defensive, and we're relying on this. In a way, the current outrage is partly predicated on nobody previously caring about overseas student fees; even though the Left did some campaigning on the issue, it wasn't really a "goer": most students wouldn't be automatically be against overseas student fees. Even if we admitted this, but then asserted that our politicising role was nevertheless doing well in overcoming this unconscious but blatant lack of principles, people would be thinking troubledly about overseas student fees all the time. Since this is manifestly not the case, our efforts at intervention are clearly in a state of crisis.
4) To overstate the case again: the current system of anti-fees mobilisation actually hurts the Left and the cause at hand (even in its most vacuous manifestation, i.e. "I don't want to pay fees"), because its gains are increasingly impossible to place in a political context, and its mobilisations are always in defensive, mindless, boom-and-bust cycles that will increasingly weaken as things get worse. And things are getting worse, because unlike the "ordinary" fee-paying mentalities of the past, the internalised user-pays ideologies are new ones, tailored to fit a set of previously non-existent and radically dangerous relationships between "education" and "profit". The damage to "student activism" by the continued rationalisation and corporatisation of the education system may be irreversible; if full fees for all undergraduate students are eventually introduced after further extensions to already-existing user-pays systems, the response (from a student movement rendered practically non-existent by rich postgrads, smarmy voucher-payers, and debt-ridden, commodity-driven undergrads) might be a brief whimper.
5) As my urgency about the current situation suggests, I'm not advocating that "because students are a cretinised bunch of prats, we should just fuck 'em", and then abandon any hope of mass mobilisation against fees... or anything else. No. In fact, a major reason for intervention into the relatively local environment of the university is to mobilise people in order to stop such cretinisation, towards the fight for free education and political action in general, etc., which will stop further cretinisation, which will open up spaces for political action, which will... and so on.
In his LA briefing paper on the 1993 Budget, Comrade Toby Borgeest suggested that our opposition to user-pays schemes can be seen in terms of "interference" in a "feedback loop" that is currently settling into a comfortably capitalist wave. Rather than merely saving us from discrete attacks by the forces of darkness, "successful" actions must break the university's autonomic, zombie-like streak, allowing more people to actualise more collective, political potentials within its walls, and lessening its ability to manufacture tools for capitalist world domination. However, "interference" isn't merely a way of simply looking at what we already do; instead, this perspective can reorient our approach, towards an open emphasis on stopping the claustrophobic, spiralling movement of the system, in order to constructively open our institutional context to qualitatively revolutionary potentials. No more angry zombies!
I suggest that LA needs to extend its admirable critical work, towards a complete rejection of the strategies of the last ten years of anti-fees activism, which have taken advantage of (and then attempted to counter-hegemonise) students' defensive impulses, which in turn have become less and less open to progressive orientations. And I mean an effective rejection, not lots of condemnatory rhetoric; we need to actually free people from riding the crest of a wave of populist knee-jerking.
I think that this means trying to avidly reframe "education campaigns" so that they lie in the general territory of "a movement of 'selfless' agitating around a pressing social issue of inequality and shittiness, engaged by everybody, but especially by those in the middle of the situation". An initial and deeply qualitative difference, in comparison with the self-defense impulse. Principled, broadly social defense. Nobody seems to have this in mind, at least in any practical sense. It's even modest, but far less reactive than current patterns of behaviour. To make a perfectly liberal observation, there doesn't seem to be much "idealism" happening these days; instead, the combined ruthlessness of ultra-left adrenaline-pumping (which need not be actually "radical" at all) and student opportunism are now becoming alarmingly interchangeable.
6) Again, it's not as if we have to completely and negatively marginalise ourselves into some ultra-leftist stratosphere. Adequately political alternatives to the current system of campaigning, with more potentials for informed and radical mobilisation, aren't necessarily elitist or "ultra-ideological", but instead should merely be qualitatively different. Therefore, there isn't some binary choice between the Sparts and populism: we don't have to strategically lie, like the ISO and DSP, who eventually start believing their own propaganda. (I can just imagine: the DSP "leading" a "highly mobilised" bunch of manipulated pressure-groups towards... communism? I very much doubt it.) Of course, there are arguments that people do get politicised by "graduating" from their involvement in populist struggles, and this is undoubtedly true -- many of us are clear examples of this -- but this is marginal activity.
Neither am I suggesting that in order to
act, we need the most meticulously "correct" analysis; such caution usually
stifles "creative thought on the move". The movement just needs to be qualitatively different in composition and its direction. But what does this mean? To digress: if anything, LA seems to have a fetish for "analysis"
that could possibly move in the Spartacist direction of condemnatory
spectatorship. While it's great that LA is more communist these days, we must
acknowledge that there are activities which may not be totally informed by
explicitly Left critical thought, but which are constructive in orientation,
and potentially able to be politicised. Most of my work, which I regard as Left
Alliance "activist" work, has been on this level. Anyway, my point is that we
need communism, but we don't need ultra-leftism, theory-fetishism or
sectarianism. If it would do any good, we could argue in cross campus forums
that the present "pitch" of the "education campaign" is actually
self-defeating, destructive, anti-political, and for leftists, fundamentally
dishonest. But I'd prefer to be more constructive, and to enjoin the debate on
the level of experimental activity.
[1] In contrast, "workers as workers" are not required to associate their very presence in the condition of wage slavery with a requirement to impulsively consume. Instead, the postmodern turn in the First World towards relatively high levels of working-class consumption helps to dissociate workers from that condition, leading to other kinds of identification and the much heralded "end of class". In liberal democratic nation-sates, workers' sense of their presence in "the world" may well be predicated on the internalisation of consumerist ideology, but labour defense struggles -- by their very separation from consumerist "reality" -- still have revolutionary potentials which reach beyond the idea of their mere necessity as the protection of interests, and towards an otherworldly radicality. (This is in addition to workers' strategic and revolutionary positioning within the capitalist mode of production, and also despite the decline of organised labour in the First World.) Meanwhile, the overdetermined and ever more concrete linking of impulsive consumption with the situation of the university means that even if we can figure students as being exploited (through their payment for providing labour for intellectual production), student "defense" still can't succeed in even its simplest objectives. However, the situation of the university as a site of production may mean that student sabotage, rather than "defense", may be a useful (but limited) kind of "constituent" mobilisation...
[2] Such a context leads me to appreciate the Spartacist League's call to protest against the Budget's proposed abolition of AUSTUDY for non-citizen students. However vague, disengaged and unsuccessful this protest was, it appeared to be one of the few attempts in the last five years to critically mobilise students and others against "government attacks" from a foundation that didn't rely on the most basic, self-interested impulses of the student population. Besides proving the Sparts' bizarro anti-social weirdness, its failure is also a grim indication, and not a vindication, of the populist consensus. If the urge to protest outside the parameters of self-interest (which is a pretty ordinary expectation we should have of any principled "social movement") doesn't basically inform our struggles against things like fees, then things definitely aren't as radical as they may seem.
[3] Activists in NOSCA (the Network of Overseas Students' Collectives in Australia) are currently experiencing incredible difficulties in mobilising "new" overseas students, most of whom just don't give a flying fuck about "imperialism" and "exploitation". The overseas student population has been radically reconstituted, not only by the increasingly effective access-barrier of full fees, but also by participating in a ever-strengthening set of ideological codes that define the workings of an ultra-commodified education system. These older NOSCA activists are ambivalent about participating in campaigns for things like travel concessions, because while necessary, those things can't really be radicalised. And if the original campaign against overseas student fees (and NOSCA's struggle as an organisation) hadn't been primarily fought on the ideological terrain of "Third World exploitation" and "the commodification of education", NOSCA certainly wouldn't have lasted as long as it has, and its activists wouldn't have bothered to continually warn local students about the future possibilities of such profiteering measures.[4] Over the years there have been strange arguments made in favour of "student control of student affairs". While this probably has some currency when placed in opposition to authoritarian institutional powers (e.g. the government, the university administration, etc.), it obscures most revolutionary links, most of the time. What happened to world liberation? Given our increasing inability to radically act in self-defense, the whole ethic of "students working for students" is (on the whole) pretty weird.
[5] On the Poverty of Student Life, Brickburner Press, 1981, p.8.
[6]This is the lesson of the American SWP, which joined the apolitical peaceniks and populist Leftists in opposing the Vietnam War primarily to "bring our boys home", unscathed. Any attempt to introduce "real" socialist politics undersuch a banner was thus rendered as an vague, arcane afterthought or a pissy government warning on a packet of cigarettes, as if they were saying, "by the way, 'our boys' should not be used for destroying mass-based, anti-imperialist liberation movements". Such a move joined in the populist sabotage of the potential for a pretty "popular" revolt against the US imperialist death machine. While America's popular anti-Vietnam movement was, regardless of this, far more qualitatively oriented to the Left than any contemporary possibilities for popular revolt against the "mindless corporate machine" of the university, we move further and further away from such an orientation with each spasm of populist "pragmatism".
