Summer is coming. In Southern California, where spring temperatures have gotten into the 90s, it is already high “wildfire or neighbor grilling poorly?” season. Brush springs aflame across the American West while we live through what the historian Stephen Pyne calls “the Pyrocene,” an age of mass burning, as petro-capitalism rips the planet apart in search of new fuels and puts a loaded gun against the head of everyone on Earth.
More global Northerners might be aware of climate crisis in 2022 than in 2007, but it’s not like the transatlantic leadership class is doing anything significantly different. In the USA, we can’t even get a Green New Deal—which isn’t nearly enough, which would only keep imperial capitalism on life support—through Congress, and that’s assuming our reactionary Supreme Court doesn’t dismantle the remnants of the regulatory state, a project it’s working on. Most of us respond by . . . just not thinking about it, by dodging short-term misery and boredom however we can. Rent is still due every month. Go ahead and protest if you want—LAPD will put you in cuffs.
In The Accumulation of Capital (1913) Rosa Luxemburg writes that “capital must begin by planning for the comprehensive destruction and annihilation of all the non-capitalist units which obstruct its development.” In other words, it must colonize more and more of our social and psychological life, devouring humanity along with everything we ever build or discover, and in the century since Luxemburg’s time that process has progressed to a satanic degree. Traditions and institutions disappeared wholesale, all that is solid melting into air.
Are there any islands of non- or anti-capitalist life now? In a world of armored green zones, where are the red zones flowering?
Contra the dominant American fantasy (and I mean both liberals and conservatives love it) of “Campus” as a radical, challenge-oriented, relentlessly critical, sometimes even anti-American space dominated by Marxist professors and naive students who are eager to embrace new political and intellectual theories, US colleges and universities are, despite their superior landscaping, pretty much like the rest of the country. Devoted to money and technologies that enable the pursuit of it, they’re mostly docile places where it’s rare to talk about difficult questions of power, wealth, status, and influence. Instead, for most people who pass through The College Experience as undergraduates, the idea is to play along for a few years, make good connections, and land on a career track that allows you to pay any debts.
The higher-ed majority didn’t choose this. Since the 1970s, governing boards and upper administrators have systematically removed faculty, staff, and students (i.e. the overwhelming majority of what campus PR calls “the community”) from the circuitry of budgets and decision-making, while encouraging (along with the rest of American society) undergraduates to pursue “practical” majors like business, engineering, medicine, or real estate. The message is relentless, slick, and persuasive: Do not engage with the reading and writing disciplines. Invest wisely. Do not become one of the doomed.
Benjamin Ginsberg carefully plots the creation of the “all-administrative university” in The Fall of the Faculty (2011). This administrativization is part of a pervasive neoliberal assault on public and social goods.1 If you want capital to run the campus, you disempower or eliminate the people who nurture these goods, and you make sure that students get the message about which majors and disciplines to avoid. Again, the research is there: Donoghue’s The Last Professors (2008), Giroux’s Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (2014), Newfield’s The Great Mistake (2016), Cottom’s Lower Ed (2017), and Kezar, DePaola, and Scott’s The Gig Academy (2020). These books made their cases with great insight and power. Nothing changed. The ship is still steering into multiple icebergs.
Most academics who consider themselves to be on the Left are ordinary liberals. They have no real beef with capitalism. They’ve accepted that “this is how things work,” even if they’ve managed to carve out sanctuaries inside the corporate university. But even in the smaller “leftist,” anti-capitalist wing of academia, there is widespread infection by what Walter Benjamin calls left melancholia, a sense that history has become pallid and hopeless, that human-resource management won, that we can—at best—negotiate truces with capital and power via things like unions or “shared governance.”
For professors who don’t get shunted into permanent adjunct work with no path to secure employment, the options seem to be pious silence or cynical careerism. If your politics are to the left of Pete Buttigieg, you just don’t talk about them with most people. Keep your head down, do your scholarship, teach your classes graciously, and shut the fuck up.
In Scorched Earth (2022), Jonathan Crary nails the well-educated professionals who serve the billionaire class that ultimately runs our societies. On a very personal level for me, the description stings:
The institutional and spectacular forms through which billionaire culture is valorized and internalized constitute powerfully effective means of social control. An enormous gulf separates this lofty tier from the much larger meritocratic class of those who serve them, whether directly or otherwise. These are the zealous functionaries in banking, law, finance, media and entertainment conglomerates, design and fashion, research institutions and universities, technology companies of all kinds, and other sectors. Most of those in this demographic have no realistic expectation of becoming ultra-wealthy themselves, yet their allegiance to the super-rich is unshakable, stimulated by their intoxicating proximity to the spheres of exorbitant power and privilege. This superficially cosmopolitan class has a vassal-like relation to the uppermost elites, aware that subservient loyalty and contempt for sentiment or empathy will secure them a variety of benefits.2
I am part of what Crary describes. An army of cognitive workers, professors included, fancy concierges hoping someone with access to real funding notices our efforts and lifts us into the professional-managerial empyrean.
But remember, the billionaires do not need all that many vassals.
To wrap this up: There is no sane, democratic future for higher education if we do not develop alternate forms of power within our institutions, separate from managerial ironworks and based on the free association of faculty, staff, and students, the people whose cognitive and physical labor keep these places running. We don’t “go to” or “work at” the university; we are the university. I don’t think that American schools are utterly neutralized (even in 2022 ) as sites of counter-hegemonic critique and non-capitalist sociability, but they have been poisoned by capital and its ancillary management systems.
Zones of resistance—and the expansion of resistance beyond these zones—really are possible. I believe it. There are so many people in academia who are so exquisitely skilled in critique, research, thought, communication; these are real powers, and hope may lie in their direction. Otherwise there is a future of sterile, entertaining, heavily policed arcadias where nothing important for anybody but Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the Pentagon ever happens.
It helps to distinguish between specifically public goods (like state colleges or city hospitals) and general social goods, like education or medicine as a whole. For example, someone (me) might teach at a private university, but the school is still not-for-profit, and I’m engaged in something (humanities education) that is not directly about capital.
Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (Verso, 2022), p. 81, my emphases.