Since January of 2012, residents of Delhi University’s largest postgraduate women’s hostel, University Hostel for Women (UHW) have been waging a battle against outright suppression of their democratic rights by, both, their hostel authorities and the University’s Proctorial Committee. Since the hostel’s Chairperson is also the Proctor of the University, the Proctorial Committee has been intervening in the matter, not as a neutral party, but in complete connivance with the hostel authorities. There are two issues which are central to the ongoing struggle of the women students, namely, the imposition of a union constitution by the authorities, and the existence of archaic and conservative rules in the hostel. In the process of their struggle, the women hostellers have been individually victimized to a ridiculous extent by the hostel Provost, Professor Ashum Gupta and the Warden, Dr. Tanuja Agarwala. The Warden and Provost have been sending letters to departments, making misleading phone calls to parents, denying extension of stay to M.Phil researchers in the hostel, verbally threatening their MA students that they will be given less marks for projects and assignments if they continue to support the struggle, etc. As a result, the campaign of the women hostellers has also been geared towards fighting rampant victimization.
Our struggle began when on 22 January, 2012 a six page document was pasted on various notice boards inside the hostel. The document was a copy of the Hostel Union Constitution drafted by the authorities in consultation with the hostel’s Managing Committee. While such a crucial piece of document can only be put into force after being passed by a two third majority of the hostel residents, who are the actual constituents of the union, no such procedure was followed in our hostel. To make matters worse, the hostel authorities tried to hold this year’s hostel union election on the basis of this imposed Constitution. While the authorities claim that they are implementing procedures followed during other student elections of Delhi University (such as DUSU, etc.), the structure of the Hostel Union Constitution reveals something very different. For example, the Constitution drafted by the authorities allows for the outgoing union president to continue on the new hostel union as an ex-officio member! Similarly, before the residents began challenging the authorities, the newly announced election criteria consisted of stipulations which seriously prevented the formation of a strong, independent students’ union. The new election criteria were an unhealthy combination of the stringent Lyngdoh committee stipulations, as well as certain disqualification criteria formulated by the authorities themselves.
A “valid” candidature was, hence, ascertained according to the Lyngdoh recommendations on age and attendance to a course, as well as the system of memos (i.e. the issuing of warning letters for the smallest breach of hostel rules—most of these rules being highly unpopular and contested). The receipt of 5 such memos was arbitrarily made a criterion for disqualification. It is only because the women students united to fight this imposition of a hostel union constitution that certain non-Lyngdoh election stipulations (like disqualification on the basis of memos issued and number of years of residence in the hostel, etc.) were taken back by the authorities. Unsatisfied with this partial victory, the women students have pursued their struggle because apart from the arbitrary introduction of Lyngdoh recommendations, the Constitution imposed by the authorities allows for extensive control of the hostel authorities on the union. Since the attempts of the authorities has been to minimize the autonomy and strength of the students’ union, the hostel residents collectively decided to submit a signature petition to the hostel Warden and Chairperson.
The second issue on which UHW residents have been campaigning is existing hostel rules. Most of the rules in force are those formulated way back when the hostel was started in 1970. The current residents in the hostel are challenging rules such as ‘no exit after 8:00pm’, submission of leave applications approved by Head of Departments for more than one week’s absence from the hostel, the tedious procedure of gate pass and double-locking of rooms which does not exist in the men’s hostels, the limited number of late nights and nights out, closing off the canteen to visitors, etc. Many of these rules such as not being able to exit after 8pm are illogical, especially when we consider how the same authorities allow the residents entry up till 11:00pm under the late night provision. An archaic rule such as ‘no exit after 8pm’ prevents women students from stepping out for urgent work, or even something as simple as getting photocopies from the nearby market, Patel Chest.
However, apart from this, certain the rules (such as closing off the canteen to Miranda House and other college students and staff) have also worked towards making Chhatra Marg (where the hostel is situated) a more isolated place, and hence, unsafe. Certain other rules which are implemented solely in the women’s hostels, like the submission of leave applications approved by Head of Departments for more than one week’s absence from the hostel, are being misused to such an extent that the women hostellers and department heads are unnecessarily burdened with additional paperwork. It is, in fact, shameful that adult women are being made to seek approval from their departments even for personal matters such their travel/vacation plans.
Of course, under the pressure of the ongoing struggle, the University has decided to implement, from the new academic session, certain changes in the rules prevalent in women’s hostels. However, since these adjustments were discussed and formalized without any consultation with women students, they continue to create hassles for the women hostellers. Indeed, apart from a few proposed changes, most of the rules stand the same. In fact, not only will tedious procedures like gate-pass, double locking of rooms and issuing of memos for the smallest breach of hostel rules persist, the University’s new administrative order also proposes a hostel fee hike. Understandably, the women hostellers continue to agitate and raise their democratic concerns.
Typically, the collective struggle of the students has been trivialized and demeaned in several ways. Students’ democratic methods like calling meetings, circulating signature petitions, etc. are constantly projected by the authorities as “illegal” activities that spread “disturbance” and “disharmony”. Basically, when we take the initiative to raise our opinions and discontent, our authorities only see “untoward” activity…OUR VOICE IS NOISE FOR THEM!
Furthermore, ever since the women hostellers have been voicing their democratic aspirations, the authorities have viciously gone after individual students in the bid to transform UHW residents into a captive mass which has no democratic voice. The logic behind the multiple techniques of victimization is the need for the hostel authorities to break the collective will of the students and to project their collective struggle as that of a few individuals. In order to break the collective will and efforts of the residents, the authorities have been threatening individual students to withdraw from the struggle, and have tried to project the students’ legitimate struggle as a smear campaign pursued by one or two students who have some mysterious “agenda”. The techniques of victimization used unhesitatingly so far, include: (i) vicious character assassination, (ii) phone calls to parents and departments, (iii) accosting individuals on the stand they have taken and refusing to cooperate with them regarding the smallest of procedural work within the hostel, (iv) denying extension of stay to M.Phil researchers, (v) bombarding the more active students with show cause notices on every alternate day, etc.
For many of us these victimization techniques are equivalent to the techniques embraced by the management of private companies seeking to break the collective voice of their employees. Considering our hostel Warden is a faculty member of the Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), it comes as no surprise to us that typical labour management formulas are being applied on us students. Haranguing individuals, involving the families of the protesters, threatening individuals with a series of show cause notices, applying multiple pressure on individuals by involving a not-so-neutral third party (in our case, the Proctor’s office, and in the case of workers, the Labour Office), etc. are very similar to the methods used by factory managers who seek to crush the collective voice of their employees. Using such labour management methods, the hostel authorities went out of their way to expose their unethical and undemocratic nature on two particular occasions. One such occasion was on 14th February when a large number of women hostellers boycotted dinner in protest. Rather than being concerned about the condition of the residents boycotting dinner, the hostel authorities ‘rewarded’ those who refused to support the campaign with an extra lavish dinner, and spent the entire day calling individual students to the office in order to force them to withdraw their support for the boycott.
The second occasion on which typical labour management techniques were unleashed on the hostel residents was on the 13th of March. On this day, members of the hostel’s Managing Committee, two Deputy Proctors, the Warden, Provost and Resident Tutor huddled into office to hold a Managing Committee meeting, as promised in writing. Ironically, rather than allowing the students to select and send their representatives to the meeting, the hostel Warden handpicked two students to represent the students’ point of view in the meeting called to ‘resolve’ the issues raised by the residents. As expected these students’ ‘representatives’ were not the more vocal of students, and were forced to compromise as they were outnumbered in the Managing Committee meeting, and were, in fact, locked into the office area during the course of the meeting. Disrespect for amicable dialogue and the strong desire to create a docile mass of women students are clearly reflected in such cases.
As the situation stands, individual victimization continues on a daily basis. For example, despite verbal assurances given by the Dean of Colleges, Prof. Pachauri, on the 16th of March, the hostel Provost has continued to contact supervisors and Head of Departments. The hostel authorities also released a list on the 19th of March of M.Phil researchers who will not be provided an extension of stay, despite the precedent being that the hostel provides such extension in strongly recommended cases. The hostel authorities continue to run UHW as if it were their personal fiefdom. There really seems to be no way to check their authoritarian, undemocratic and unethical practices, unless the larger Delhi University community extends support to the women students.
WE, HENCE, APPEAL TO ALL CONCERNED UNIVERSITY MEMBERS AND ALUMNI OF UNIVERSITY HOSTEL FOR WOMEN (UHW) TO STAND WITH THE DEMOCRATIC ASPIRATIONS OF THE WOMEN STUDENTS, AND TO HELP PREVENT DELHI UNIVERSITY’S AUTHORITIES FROM REDUCING STUDENTS TO A VOICELESS, DOCILE MASS. In the larger context of the backlash against all democratic voices in this University, the ongoing struggle of women’s students emerges as a litmus test for democracy— do we as a University community want to create docile University youth, or right-bearing, politically conscious University youth?
Your contribution to this democratic struggle could consist of the following:
(i) Writing letters to the University’s Vice Chancellor that press for the prevention of individual victimization in its myriad forms, and for an amicable resolution to the issues raised by the students;
(ii) Writing letters to the University’s Vice Chancellor and Dean of Colleges that press for the removal of the hostel Provost and Warden since the two continue to derail a healthy dialogue process by victimizing individual students;
(iii) Writing letters to the media which highlight the sheer lack of tolerance for the democratic issues raised by the women students like the right to draft, amend and ratify their union constitution;
(iv) Discussion with colleagues and other faculty members so as to create a public opinion against how women’s hostels are being run according to the diktats of an authoritarian and conservative set of DU faculty members;
(v) Build students’ resistance against de-unionization and conservative rules, as in UHW, in other DU hostels as well.
Issued by Residents of University Hostel for Women (UHW)
COORDINATION COMMITTEE FOR WOMEN’S HOSTELS IN DELHI UNIVERSITY
Contact: 9350272637, 9818900179
To,
The Warden
University Hostel for Women (UHW)
University of Delhi
15.03.2012
Dear Dr. Tanuja Agarwala,
I am in receipt of a number of letters in which I have been asked to explain/clarify my “conduct” over the past few weeks. Unfortunately, none of these letters issued by you reflect a willingness to understand the issues raised by the hostel residents, and to see them as a democratic expression of the residents’ collective will. Your last letter (dated 12.03.2012) has asked me to clarify why action should not be taken against me, based on the alleged complaint that a few students were “misled” and misinformed into signing the Memorandum calling for a boycott of dinner on 14.02.2012. Your letter categorically refuses to consider the 14th February Memorandum as an expression of the students’ collective will. The very evidence of this fact is that I have been identified as a “culprit” who needs to explain her position, lest action will be taken. I do not wish to be identified as a “hero” of the hostel campaign or a person who can be identified as the “potential victim”. It is high time the authorities of the hostel restrain themselves in identifying individual “culprits” and in scuttling the collective democratic voice of the residents.
Of course, there is always a general possibility that in campaigns/movements there are some individuals who are inconsistent in their position on the issues raised, and therefore, change their position during the course of time. This may explain why some individual residents retracted from their position on the boycott of dinner. However, a change in the position such individuals hold does not mean their earlier position was wrong, or that they were misled into the earlier position they took.
Having said this, in the case of our hostel there is a specific possibility that the authorities resorted to individual intimidation to get some residents to change their position on issues raised. We have indeed come across versions of this intimidation wherein individual residents were called to the hostel office and categorically threatened to withdraw from the campaign otherwise they would not be given extension, their parents would be contacted, their departments intimated, etc. In fact, few parents were called and asked to restrain their daughters. Such draconian, coercive and high-handed practices of the authorities have led to widespread fear amongst a section of the students. It is under such conditions of fear and actual acts of victimization that individual residents were asked to give in writing that they consent to withdraw from the campaign. What else can explain the simple fact that few individual residents began to retract from the boycott call after a lengthy visit to the hostel office? It is another thing that despite all the efforts of the authorities, we are still confident of the support of the majority of students, and therefore, will continue to assert the democratic rights of the residents.
To your allegation that some residents were misinformed into signing the concerned Memorandum, I and several other residents who have studied your letter, have only one thing to say, which is that we find such views unacceptable. This is because residents of this hostel are educated adults who never go around signing documents and memorandums in a fit of absent-mindedness. The Memorandum explaining why a dinner boycott was being called, was properly attached to the signature petition. There were regular announcements made inside the hostel mess, as well as individual dissemination of the boycott’s details during breakfast on the 14th of February. Subsequently, postering on the boycott was also carried out in the hostel on the 14th, which shows that rather than being misinformed and misled into boycotting dinner, individual residents were coerced by you to give up their decision to boycott dinner.
Most importantly, it is wrong to claim that because some students changed their opinion due to victimization or due to certain personal calculations, I and other students are causing “disturbance” in the hostel, and should hence, be punished. It should be recalled that on the 20th of February when the authorities and a section of the students exchanged undertakings in writing, there was a tacit acceptance of the fact that there were two parties of opinion on the issues at stake. It goes against the notion of jurisprudence where a party in conflict of opinion bestows upon itself the power to punish the other party for raising their opinion. Such an approach is neither impartial nor democratic.
It is high time the authorities concede the point that genuine issues are at stake and that there is a collective of women residents who are raising these issues. Elections at the earliest, adoption of the Constitution submitted on 03.02.2012, and the change in hostel rules (such as no exit after 8pm, gate-pass system, issuing of memos, mess rebate, etc.) must be addressed, and should not be trivialized any further. We will not let the hostel authorities victimize individuals or sideline the issues raised by the residents. The authorities have already broken their promise of not indulging in such victimization, as well as their assurance of calling a Managing Committee meeting where a proper discussion can happen with the residents.
Of course, if the authorities still feel certain residents have been misinformed into taking a stand in support of the hostel campaign, then they should ascertain this by holding a secret ballot referendum on the issues raised by the campaign. Perhaps, this is the only way in which UHW residents can prove to all that they are indeed thinking individuals.
Lastly, I am directed by concerned residents to inform you that if any action is taken against me, your office must be prepared to see the struggle continue as well as escalate. This is because when the collective spirit and democratic aspirations have embodied themselves in all the residents, the physical removal of one person makes little difference to the struggle. The authorities should, hence, be under no illusion that by subduing one individual the quest of the residents on their democratic demands will terminate. At the most, it is only for some time that your office will be able to scuttle the democratic voice of the students. Your actions against individuals will always remain a moral defeat in permanence. Hope a better sense prevails.
Concerned Residents of University Hostel of Women (UHW)
Since January of this year, students of Delhi University’s (DU) largest postgraduate women’s hostel, University Hostel of Women (UHW) have been involved in a militant struggle involving several fundamental democratic demands. One of their particular demands carries larger significance on the issue of democracy in the university campuses. This demand pertains to the right of the students to decide the contours of their student union constitution. As constituents of the union, the students have been contesting the fact that their hostel authorities have imposed a union constitution which the students’ have not ratified themselves. They have contested the union constitution on the grounds that it allows the authorities’ extensive control on the students’ union, thereby overriding the chances of a strong and independent students’ union coming into power.
In the process they have also questioned the enforcement of Lyngdoh recommendations in the hostel. After scrutinizing the Lyngdoh recommendations as well as Supreme Court judgments on the implementation of these recommendations, the students believe that they amount to a breach of the fundamental right to form an association [Article 19(1) a and c, Constitution of India]. According to the Constitution of India [Part III], the state can only infringe upon fundamental rights in certain exceptional and concrete conditions, none of which exist in the context of the hostel. Following from the specifications mentioned in the Constitution of India, the students have reached the conclusion that Supreme Court judgments are being unnecessarily taken out of context so as to curb democratic aspirations, independence of student unions as well as the power of resistance.
Apart from the issue of the union constitution, the women students have also been raising the demand to change age-old, conservative rules of the hostel. Currently, the residents cannot step out of the hostel after 8pm. Ironically, such a rule is enforced to ensure the safety of the women students. However, the same authorities persistently fail to curb the filthy and offensive rally taken out by men hostellers on the day of Holi. Under the University’s Ordinance XV-D, such an act by the men hostellers outside the women’s hostel amounts to sexual harassment.
As of now the students have been told that new rules are being brought into force across women’s hostels. However, in the high powered committee constituted by DU to formalize such common rules, no women students were called for discussion. One can only expect that in such an exclusive meeting, the DU authorities have come up with a series of rules which are not pro-students.
Lastly, in the bid to stem the tide of rampant victimization by the authorities, the women students have escalated their struggle, and taken their struggle outside the walls of their hostel. They have been protesting against the unwillingness of the authorities to see the campaign as a collective struggle, and, to subsequently, pick out individuals whom they can victimize. On the 16th of March, they also protested outside the Vice Chancellor’s office. Now they are in the process of involving and uniting students of other women’s hostels of DU.
TIMELINE
14th Jan: First Notification of the Hostel Union elections for 2011-12.
20th Jan: Clarification Notification put up by authorities specifying that residents with 5 memos or more cannot stand for elections.
20th Jan: First Meeting of residents on the issue of the election criteria specified by the authorities. Decision taken by residents to draft a memorandum & collect signatures in support of reverting back to the election criteria that prevailed earlier in UHW.
22nd Jan: Second Meeting of residents. Drafted memorandum is discussed, and additional points added in response to the Constitution put up by the authorities on 22nd Jan. Residents express concern on how: (i) this hostel union constitution was amended by the authorities without gathering the consent of the residents through a GBM; and (ii) that a change in the election criteria was arbitrarily introduced without ratifying it first in a GBM which had a proper quorum, i.e. a sizeable number of hostel residents present and voting.
23rd Jan: A delegation of 5 residents submits the memorandum to the hostel authorities. The memorandum carried 193 signatures of hostel residents. Authorities decide to go ahead with the election on a provisional basis, and give verbal assurance that the residents’ objections will be forwarded to DU’s legal advisor.
25th Jan: Third Meeting of students to discuss next course of action as well as other pressing concerns as strict implementation of hostel rules. More than half the residents attend the meeting and resolve to put up posters on Republic Day expressing their dissent, as well as sit on protest on 27th January, 2012. An organizing committee is constituted to manage the preparations for Saraswati Puja as the residents resolve not to involve the outgoing union members whose tenures have lapsed and who no longer reside in the hostel.
26th Jan: In response to the posters some of the hostel authorities make aggressive speeches after the flag hoisting. Angered residents assemble in the badminton court in large numbers, and decide to again approach the hostel authorities on the issue of hostel elections, the union constitution imposed by them, and the need for the authorities to attend a meeting addressing concerns of the residents with respect to hostel rules, etc. The authorities agree to: (i) postpone elections till the issue of the election criteria is resolved; (ii) forward the residents’ written objections as well as the constitution drafted by residents, to the Legal Advisor; and (iii) meet ALL the residents together via a meeting within a week.
27th Jan: Drafting Committee chosen by the residents starts drafting the hostel union constitution keeping the democratic interests of the residents in mind. The committee also drafts the constitution in a manner which allows for a strong and independent union to be elected into office.
31st Jan: The authorities put up a notice withdrawing certain elections criteria previously announced, but continue to uphold the Constitution that was introduced by them without gathering the consent of UHW residents.
1st Feb: Residents in large numbers attend the Meeting called to ratify the Constitution drafted by the Drafting Committee. In the Meeting residents also voice the need to amend certain hostel rules. In the process of this discussion it was decided that further suggestions and feedback should be collected.
3rd Feb: The Constitution drafted and ratified by residents is submitted to the hostel authorities. 221 signatures, which constitutes an Absolute Majority of the present hostel population, are collected in support of the Constitution. In the covering letter the residents request for a speedy response, i.e. a response within one week.
6th-10th Feb: A survey to collect the residents’ opinions on hostel rules is circulated in all the blocks. Nearly 160 residents fill out the survey. Almost all the residents opt for some kind of change in hostel rules.
13th Feb: Due to the delayed response of the authorities, and lack of any communication from them, another Meeting of the residents is called. All those present and voting agree to boycott dinner on 14th February.
14th Feb: After collecting more signatures of the residents in support of the boycott call, the memorandum intimating the authorities of the boycott is submitted to avoid wastage of food. Almost half of the hostel residents agree to boycott dinner on 14th. Rather than being concerned about the condition of the residents boycotting dinner, the authorities spent the whole day individually intimidating those who support the boycott call. The students were compelled to write application saying they withdraw from the boycott. Even after submitting such applications, many such students continued to boycott dinner. This clearly reflects the moral victory of the residents.
16th Feb: A secret poll is held during dinner time by the residents to ask the residents whether they want to carry on with the protest or not. Residents in full strength supported the continuance of the campaign. The polling is intervened by the Warden trying to take pictures and intimidate the girls. Then, around 9.30 pm Asst.Proctor Mr. Kasim walks in with the Warden and the Resident tutor. He invites the residents to talk. A discussion takes place where he is intimated of all the issues of the campaign and the individual victimization of the residents who had signed the memorandum for boycotting dinner on the 14th. He invites a few residents to the Proctor’s Office the next day, to talk to the Proctor, with their memorandums. The residents were unable to understand the reason for the intervention of Proctor’s Office as it was not a law and order situation, yet they agreed.
17th Feb: A delegation of residents goes to submit the memorandum at around 1.30 pm. They are called again by the Asst. Proctor at around 3.30 pm to talk. They talk to him in detail about the issues covered in the memorandum. The Proctor was not available and so the residents were not able to meet her then. At around 4.35 pm the Proctor herself called the residents to meet her at the Proctor’s Office. The residents went and started to brief her about the issues, but the Proctor was in a haste to leave for a meeting at 5.00 pm and left this meeting mid-way. Thus no conclusion was reached on this day. Bu the Proctor’s Office did assure that individual victimization of the resident will certainly stop.
18th Feb: Despite the given assurance that no victimization will take place, the Warden called up the parents of a number of students. In this conversation the picture painted was such that the residents were portrayed as ruckus makers. The residents of the hostel come from different sections of the society and such a false picture may be taken apprehensively by some households.
20th Feb: Since the authorities did not stand by their own words and the victimization continued, the residents agreed to hold a Mass Meeting outside the Vice-Chancellor’s office on the 21st February. In the evening of the 20th, the Provost comes to the hostel and called for a meeting with all the residents immediately. The only conclusion that could be reached was that the authorities gave it in writing that a managing committee Meeting will be held between 8th March and 15th March to resolve the issue. In return, the residents gave in writing that they will not hold the protest outside the VC’s office because they were assured that no victimization shall take place and that the meeting would be held within the given dates. The residents mentioned that they reserve the right to intimate the Vice Chancellor about the situation in the Hostel.
29th Feb to 12th March: Despite the assurance that no resident would be asked to explain her stand on the campaign, Maya John, a C-block resident is given letter after letter, asking her to explain her stand and to give clarifications for different allegations put on her.
13th March: Without informing the residents, the promised Managing Committee Meeting is held on this date in a very hushed up manner without any student’s representative, without the knowledge of the residents. This meeting continued for an hour and no notice was put up about the results of the meeting.
It seems that in India many good students, after completing their 10th grade, are spending most of their time in private coaching classes and attending colleges/universities only for the practicals. This they do to prepare themselves for entrance exams for engineering and medical seats. Even if they do attend colleges/universities full-time, their main aim is to sit for these entrance exams. Several questions come to one’s mind in this context.
1. How can someone learn theory from one set of ‘teachers’ in coaching classes, and learn about the practical matter (lab work) from certified college/university teachers?
2. What is all this craze about getting into medical and engineering colleges? What does a student who goes to these places almost straight after higher secondary (or what is called high school diploma in North America) really know about society and nature? His/her time is mainly spent on a limited goal: being able to answer expected questions in entrance exams aimed at screening students? Much of the time is perhaps spent on memorizing a lot of information without an opportunity to critically assess and assimilate this. Isn’t there something to be said for a well-rounded post-high school university education before one goes for specializations?
3. Is it not the case that many of the so-called medical and engineering colleges may be ill-equipped to teach the relevant subjects? Parents pay a huge amount of money for a seat for their children. And a lot of people – investors – of course make a lot of money out of this business.
4. What is the outcome of this system? In a country of a billion plus, how many doctors do we produce who actually invent new ways of curing illness, as opposed to writing prescriptions on the basis of knowledge produced mainly in the western countries? Similarly, how many thousands of engineers do we manufacture who produce knowledge about new ways of making things? More importantly, how many scientists – in biological or natural sciences – do we produce who produce new ways of understanding nature and body? Is this craze for professional-technical education promoting an overall scientific culture, a culture that encourages people to be rational and find empirically verifiable reasons for events around them?
5. Under the British system, we were producing clerks. Now, are we not producing a different kind of ‘clerks’ or assistants – sophisticated semi-coolies, tech coolies and the like out of the population that goes into so-called professional institutions? It is interesting that what many of our engineers do (e.g., reading/processing credit card statements transmitted from the West – that is, keeping records), they do not really need sophisticated engineering skills acquired from colleges? Or, is it that the kind of education they receive makes them suitable for only this kind of semi-skilled, techno-coolie jobs, and nothing better?
6. Why is it that a vast majority of good students want to be either an engineer or a doctor? Arguably, the aim of education, real education, is self-development (changing ourselves, our ways of thinking) and social development, i.e. contributing to society and towards a reproduction of natural systems that are sustainable (I am not denying that education, in the current form of society, helps one get a job so one can pay one’s bills). Now, is being an engineer or a doctor (and in the ways in which people become engineers and doctors) necessarily the main way of achieving real education?
7. I do not deny the importance of forces of technology and medicine at all, but are the major problems of human society the ones which can be solved through the actions of engineers and doctors who mainly keep on recycling old knowledge? What about a human rights or labour lawyer who fights for the rights of our peasants, workers, poorer people, and so on? What about a professor who aims at changing the collective self-consciousness of a society, who aims at making us rethink the directions in which a society is moving? What about a professional who can organize and manage the cooperatives of poor women or workers’ coops? What about a scientist who finds out new ways in which nature works, and new and sustainable ways in which nature can be suitably ‘modified’ in the interest of the humanity? What about someone who can organize poor masses in new ways to independently fight for their rights and change the fundamental nature and goal of our society, nationally and internationally? What about artists and story tellers who can feel the pulse of a society and represent it in beautiful ways for us to enjoy and learn from? What about the role of socially conscious journalists who consistently and courageously lay bare (quasi-)criminal conduct and corruption of our economic and political elites? And so on?
8. What is the implication of a society over-emphasizing so-called professional education? Is it not true that in part because of the sort of financial as well as ideological-political emphasis on technical-professional education that we see, other kinds of education (including in basic sciences; social sciences) are neglected, and that to the extent that many students go for this latter kind of education, they go there, perhaps, just to pass time, to remain a part of the army of unemployed and under-employed in a manner which can be seen by society as a little meaningful and dignified?
9. The moot question is: why is this kind of education being promoted? We must understand the nature of the forces (read: commercial and state-bureaucratic interests) that drive the kind of education (rush for engineering and medical seats, and the argument can be extended to other ‘professions’ such as business management) which we want to give our children, which we want to promote. In more direct ways: to what extent is our obsession with the so-called professional education driven by the fact that investors make money by selling professional education as a commodity and by the fact that this kind of education is making India (and other similar countries) a cheap low-wage platform of global capitalism, both for its own business people and international business? To what extent are our bureaucrats and politicians benefiting from this business directly because they also invest in this? And how does the state benefit from this kind of education system, a system which reproduces a cheap skilled labour force through the system of private profit-making such that the state no longer has to provide affordable education? To what extent is the kind of technical-professional education-for-profit we are promoting creating a compradore educated elite, which acts as a conduit through which the country (the nation of workers and poor peasants) is subordinated to international business and imperialist states?
10. Therefore, and ironically, is it not the case that: the kind of mind-numbing education we are promoting is stopping us – or discouraging us – from asking this kind of questions that challenge the nature of education and therefore the nature of society we live in?
DO WE KNOW WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING IN OUR DEPARTMENT?
WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT IT?
Do we support of the Department becoming a Police State?
NO!
Do we support the presence of Bouncers in Faculty meetings?
NO!
Do we voice our dissent?
NO!
Silence in the face of Totalitarianism is equal to Support for Totalitarianism.
Is this who we want to be?
An apathetic and apolitical body of students?
Do we care?
THE NEED OF THE HOUR is to MEET.
Take time to look beyond busy exam schedules at the big picture,
Recognise the value of having an academic space which allows faculty and students to express opinions.
its time we put an end to this long silence.
what are we doing? what exactly are we doing? an MA? running desperately towards a degree? with as much speed as possible?
the only thing that can really get us into gear is exams! i wished we could do better than that. else, we could do much better in the apathetic corporate sector and science colleges we so critique for their “apoliticalness”. are we, the literature students, who theorise and tear authors and critics apart, better just because we STUDY lit.? for we dont seem to be any more political than the table in my room.
facebook is the platform for our protests. upcoming exams, bad syllabi, lack of chairs in classrooms and unsatisfactory IA – all of it goes on facebook. and of course, we expect our techie teachers to take the hint and sort our problems for us. we, helpless souls are limited to our computer mouses. thats as far as we move our fingers. the only time we draft petitions are when we want exams to be postponed, even when it is a perfectly comfortable date sheet. that’s as far we theory people can delve in practice. of course, we expect some of the practioners to see our protests on face book and demonstrate it physically for us.
and surely we do not waste our time organising seminars or attending the ones which were painstakingly fought for by the “over-enthu” and apparently not-so-studious few for their own fun.
why would the messy MA admission process bother us once we are done with it?
why will the semester system issue for UG level bother us, for we are Post Graduate students!
why should it matter if the dept is in a state of chaos, for we will get going soon enough. and if there are those who want to stay here, its their problem.
and if our teachers and mentors who have helped us through so many different things, why should we feel grateful? after all, its their job?
NO. its not their “job” to deal with our questions outside the class. its not their “job” to push for a better IA mechanism or organise a students seminar, or listen to our personal problems, as a lot of them do.
but we do ‘like’ and ‘comment’ on their plight on FB. and surely, as students, busy preparing for our exams (which probably cant happen if these teachers were not there), we cant be expected to do more! poor, helplessly busy us.
we cant speak for ourselves, we cant speak for anyone else. and of course we are students of English Literature who specialize in being articulate, in making coherent theoretical arguments and speaking for the rights of the “mute” subaltern. well, charity begins at home. start speaking for the rights of the environment you are a part of, even if provisionally.
can we please, for once, get over ourselves, our petty goals, our exam phobias and take responsibility for our political positions. for, inaction and silence does not mean NEUTRAL GROUND. it is very much a position. it is very much a choice!
can we, for once, try to take our grudges beyond our comfortable computer tables and fb groups and actually step out to express the beliefs and critiques we so well write down to get a 60%?
can we for once think of a future beyond exams? we are not half as messed up as we will be in the time to come, if we keep shirking from our political responsibilities, if we are not willing to interfere in the course things take in our work/study places, if we are self-obsessed enough to allow the flow of things to drown us.
we have actually read very little, and perhaps understood even less. for if we had understood, we wouldnt have been in the pitiable shape that we are, letting ourselves down as we have.
At the end of 2010, tens of thousands of university students have demonstrated in central London and all over university campuses in the UK, against the coalition government’s proposals to raise tuition fees up to 9,000 pounds. Government and Media coverage of the protests has focussed primarily on two factors – the violence of a minority of protestors and the apparent ‘privileged’ profile of a few student protestors. ‘Rich rioting students’ was just one of the headlines describing the demonstrations. A panellist on BBC’s Question Time described protestors as ‘just a bunch of middle class students’. Michael Gove, the Education Minister, defending the planned increase in tuition fees posed the question: ‘Is it fair to ask a miner to subsidise the education of someone who can go and become a millionaire?’ The irony of this analogy can surely not be lost on those who remember how brutally Gove’s Conservative Party, in its previous incarnation, destroyed the heart of British working class mining communities.
One of the most passionate, but misguided, commentaries on the recent student protests comes from Julie Burchill (the Independent, 16 December), who made a plea to the public to ‘spare us these pampered protesters who riot in defence of their privilege’. Focusing on one student, Charlie Gilmour, who has been singled out by almost all the British media because of his connection to a famous rock star, Burchill vents her anger at so called ‘middle class’ protestors at the same time as dismissing university education as a wasteful time of ‘boozing and bullshitting funded by the taxes of people who had the actual gumption to remove themselves from the playpen of education and get a job as soon as legally possible’. She goes on to suggest that for many working class youth, university education has made little difference to their prospects of getting a job.
Burchill is right to question the success of government-sponsored schemes such as widening participation which critics argue has done little to equalise educational outcomes. All the research suggests that while working class students are more likely to attend university than they did 10 years ago the class gap has not necessarily diminished. Working class students are more likely to attend newer universities, to be part-time students and to study for more vocational subjects. But to dismiss university education for the masses as completely irrelevant is surely wrong. Burchill is also wrong to dismiss the current protests as entirely middle class-led. The fact that some students from middle and upper class families join the student protest does not make the whole student protest an action of the privileged few in defence of their privileges. University students, whatever social class their parents are from, historically tend to act together as ‘students’, and for most part for progressive causes as in the case of the 1968 student protests. At first in 1968 too, the governments and media also sought to portray the student protests as work of radical students and small groups of middle class troublemakers.
The protests over the last few weeks have seen large numbers of working class students (some of them school students) protesting because it is they who have the most to lose from the proposed public spending cuts. Further, to get so hung up on the notion of a so-called middle class-led protest serves to support Gove’s and the coalition government’s attempts to create an ideological standpoint, presumably on the side of the ordinary working people, from which position to launch a wholesale attack on all the social and economic achievements of the previous generations, like the universal child benefit, housing benefit, disability benefits and similar other measures.
The current representation of the protestors as middle class serves a deeply ideological and manipulative function of deflecting attention away from the stark realities of the public cuts and their real causes. Many people who oppose the cuts simultaneously accept the argument that there is no alternative but to sacrifice education and other public services in order to save the economy. Further, a large section of the British public and media appear to have accepted the line presented by the government that the total package of cuts worth £128 billion by 2015-16 was ‘unavoidable’ because of previous administration’s careless spending, and almost self-made huge deficits. Until the financial crash of 2008, however, the Labour governments had succeeded in keeping national debt below the 40 percent of GDP target that they set themselves. In 2006/07, public sector net debt was 36.0 percent of the GDP. In 2008, it rose rapidly primarily because of ‘financial interventions’ to bailout of Northern Rock, RBS and other banks, because of lower tax receipts, and because of higher spending on unemployment benefits, all caused by the global recession. The current deficit was caused primarily by the recession not by previous administration’s pre-crash careless spending. It currently stands as 63.7 percent of National GDP, and was projected to peak at 74.9 percent in 2014-15.
Massive cuts to the NHS, local government, and education budgets are not the inevitable solution to national debt. During the Second World War, the UK national debt reached much higher figures of up to 150 percent of the GDP. It is not uncommon for countries to borrow more during the time of serious national and international crises, like wars, or economic upheavals like the one currently affecting the world, and to pay back the debt over a period of time once the economy starts to grow again. In this sense, budget deficits can be an effective way to deal with shocks such as wars, financial crashes and deep recessions. If anything, the problem of low economic activity is the real, and more urgent, issue than the fiscal stability.
David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ programme offers an ideological justification for the massive public spending cuts which are about much more than just deficit reduction. The pretence of ‘there is no alternative’ offers a means for the Conservative project to radically transform the state and to transfer more services and money from the public to the private sector. If the real intention was to take the British economy out of the crisis, then such massive cuts would not be the answer. There are alternatives: we need to find a fair and sustainable path out of crisis. Budget deficits will more or less automatically heal with the economic recovery. Trying to cut the deficit quickly, in the midst of a serious recession, will damage the economy and extend the crisis. The government instead should concentrate on growth and allow growth to reduce the deficit. Cuts will not reduce the deficit, investment will. Recently, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) announced that it expects economic growth in 2011 to be much slower than previously predicted. A much weaker consumer spending, resulting from massive unemployment and lower wages in 2011, is described as the main reason for this. Cutting too far and too fast will mean more people out of work, fewer jobs in the economy, lower level of taxation from workers and businesses, and more people on unemployment benefit, which will cost the government more. The real challenge is to introduce constructive ways to restructure the national economy so that it can deliver strong and consistent growth.
The current crisis and the way some other parts of the world economy have been dealing with it successfully, and all social and cultural legacies of this turbulent process have highlighted, like never before, the crucial role of education. The financial and economic crisis has had a particularly strong impact on young people with low levels of education. Investments in education pay large and rising dividends for individuals, but also for economies. On average, a young person with a university degree will generate £77,000 more in income taxes and social contributions over his/her working life than someone with a high-school degree only. Even after taking the cost of university education into account, the net public return from an investment in tertiary education is £56 000 for a male, in generated income taxes and social contributions over his working life. Enhancing tertiary education attainment can therefore help governments increase their fiscal revenues, making it easier to boost their social spending, in areas like, for example education. As the global demand for jobs shifts up the skills ladder, it has become crucial for countries to develop policies that encourage the acquisition and efficient use of these skills to retain both high value jobs and highly skilled labour. Burchill is right to suggest that ‘clever working class youth of this country [have] been socially and spiritually ‘kettled’ – hemmed in, suffocated and stifled’ historically by ‘the privilege and entitlement’ of the likes of elite. But does the answer really lie in cutting away higher education for working class students altogether?
Britain’s total investment in higher education, even before the current cuts of the Coalition government, was 1.3 percent of the GDP which is behind the OECD average of 1.5 percent. Despite the student numbers rising by approximately 25 percent in the last 15 years, the UK has slipped from third to fifteenth position in numbers graduating among industrial countries because investment in higher education has risen much rapidly elsewhere. Within Europe, the UK is already falling behind France, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Portugal and Netherlands, among others. Other Western governments, most notably the United States and Germany, have viewed the global financial and economic crisis as a sign not to retrench but to invest in their higher education systems as a necessary part of investing in the skills that will be needed for recovery in near future. In the UK, however, it was education that was first in line for cuts in spending: the cutting of the Future Jobs Fund, the cancellation of school building and refurbishment, the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance, and now funding cuts in university teaching budgets, fewer university places and a massive increase in university tuition fees. All these draconian measures will ensure that talented people from working class backgrounds will not achieve their full potential. The poorer you are the more scared you are by the prospect of tens of thousands of pounds of debt. It seems this is exactly what the Coalition government wants- to keep education for the rich and privileged. And this is what tens of thousands of students are protesting against. If we want British economy to recover and take its place in a much more competitive world, if we want Britain to be ‘open for business’, we should make higher education available for everyone, regardless of their social class. The more skilled people we have, the more likely companies will be willing to invest in the UK.
Bulent Gokay is a Professor of International Relations, Keele University and Farzana Shain is a Senior Lecturer, Keele University
Implicit almost all discussion of public expenditure and revenue, most virulently in the debate over deficit reduction, is the fallacy of public affordability. This fallacy is manifested, for example, in the argument in the United Kingdom that if university education is available to a large portion of the population, the public sector cannot afford to deliver it without substantial fees, even less to provide support grants to all students.
Because “the public sector cannot afford” to provide university education, it is necessary to ration the public contribution on the basis of need (income or means testing). The same argument is applied in very major area of social expenditure: with an ageing population, “the public sector cannot afford” to pay more than a safety net pension; cannot afford to provide all the drugs and care needed by that ageing population, and so on.
“Affordability” arguments are fallacious. The fallacy is obvious once one considers it from the level of society as a whole. Consider the example of funding of university education. Only a tiny minority of people would argue that primary education should be a matter for individual families to decide and wholly fund themselves. This near-consensus results from the conviction that children have a right to be educated, and that a democratic society requires an educated and informed public. These convictions, not finances, determine the provision of primary education by the public sector: for everyone, regardless of income or status, and if some wish to contract for private education, they may do so. The social consensus on public provision of secondary education is equally broad (for everyone), but number of years provided varies (lower in Britain than most developed countries). Only a few on the far right wing would argue that the pubic sector “cannot afford” to provide primary and secondary education for all, though in practice many right of centre attempt to minimize the expenditure and therefore the quality of provision.
The same principle applies to university education: what is the appropriate coverage and to what level? Here there is no consensus, and those who believe that people have no right to higher education avoid taking that potentially damning position by seeking cover under the affordability argument: “I wish we could provide everyone with a university education, but we cannot afford it. In any case, people gain personally from higher education, so they should pay for it themselves to the extent that they can. The public sector can only afford to help the poor, and if you are poor and clever you will find funding.”
This line of argument is the most superficial mendacity, and would apply equally to primary and secondary education (see my previous comment). The true essence of the affordability of higher education argument is, “People have no right to higher education. If they want it, let them pay for it. If you are poor and clever you might go to university. If you are dumb and rich you certainly will.”
When there is a social consensus that people have a right to a university education if they want one, then reducing public expenditure and raising fees does not save society money. There are two affects: 1) for those with high incomes it shifts expenditure from the public sector to households, and 2) for those on low incomes it reduces provision. It “saves public money” in the same sense that not filling potholes is a financial gain.
Most pernicious is the application of the affordability fallacy to pensions and health. Two core values of democratic societies are that children have a right to education and the old have a right to live their final years in decent conditions with dignity. Given this consensus on the elderly, discussing financial affordability is grotesque. The question is, in light of a country’s economic development and productive resources, what level of decency can and should society provide to everyone past a certain age? Once the level is decided, it merely remains to decide the institutional mechanism by which it will be funded. Considerable empirical evidence indicates that provision of pensions through the public sector has the lowest resource cost. This is primarily because unlike private insurers, the public sector need charge no risk premium. Its revenue is guaranteed, and the growth of that revenue is determined by the growth of the economy as a whole.
Even more obvious is the fallacy of the affordability argument for health care. It is an appalling manifestation of the power of capital in US society that there seems to be no consensus that everyone has a right to be healthy, a principle Franklin Roosevelt included in his “Economic Bill of Rights” speech in January 1944, that every American had “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health”. In almost every other developed country this principle is accepted. When it is accepted, as with education and pensions, the issue is not financial affordability, nor is it coverage (everyone qualifies). The only issue is the level of society’s obligation to itself on health care.
The affordability argument perpetuates a profoundly anti-social and anti-democratic fallacy. Whoever makes it asserts (as Margaret Thatcher did) that there is no society and no obligation to fellow human beings beyond an absolute minimum that the residual of social decency forces upon even the most reactionary Thatcherite or Reaganite. Reducing that residual of social decency is the project of the affordability fallacy. Existence is viewed as a collection of isolated individuals, for whom one has no concern, even if, or especially if, for those whose lives are rendered nasty, brutish and short.
Following is the video of a seminar organised by Correspondence and Kudos, the Literary Society of Hindu College (University of Delhi) on 4th March, 2010 with the aim of initiating a discussion on radical student and university politics.
Paramita Ghosh talks to Prasanta Chakravarty, who teaches in the Department of English, University of Delhi, on the current state and dynamic of the Indian publishing industry, contemporary fiction and the culture of reading.
Paramita Ghosh (PG): Your project Humanities Underground is an attempt to rescue the Humanities from the skill-oriented courses that university education is slowly turning into. One would have thought this is more rampant in professional courses like management and so forth. But we see publishing, which is supposed to promote literature, is also going the same way with the birth of categories like chick-lit, books to be read in the metro, page-turners to be gobbled at the airport-lounge. How does one explain this attack or shift in emphasis in the arts/humanities/publishing?
Prasanta Chakravarty (PC): First of all, Humanities Underground is a collective umbrella and much will depend on the enthusiasm of a large number of people who are in their own little ways being affected by this onslaught on the varied and nuanced world. It is also about nurturing a critical, oppositional edge that humanities provide. But we are not trying to rescue anything. No one can and should get in that kind of a saviour mode. It is an online forum for sharing ideas at this point, a venture to see whether there is enough interest in facing the variegated and uncertain world that we live in. The initial signs are quite encouraging. We are receiving a collective surge of questions and commentaries and from different parts of the country and the world too. Debates are happening. Our aim is modest at this stage: to create a space where interested people can share ideas and imagination and work out strategies in order to take on the rapid watering down of reading habits and writing styles, without being self-congratulatory.
The shift you are referring to is interesting. Now I think this dichotomy between classical and popular is often fallacious. The idea of taste is often constructed. In that sense the emergence of the genre of novel itself in the 19th century was a popular venture, or the genre of ‘essay’, which started even earlier as a modest attempt to reflect and ruminate, is now solidly mainstream. So, in that sense this rush for chick-lit or graphic novels show an interesting shift and may become important markers of our times. But the point is about homogenisation. Young and old are often looking to merge in with the available, with the herd rather than look for possibilities. There indeed are publishers, often in regional literatures, who are still taking chances with the subtleties and criticality that literature, art and performance provide us. We have a generation of students who are not even bilingual though they routinely learn French or Sanskrit as a second language in school. What is this strange phenomenon? In Delhi University we are noticing with intrigue that some of our best students who receive astronomical grades in schools and colleges often cannot even write correct English, and notions of style have disappeared from the canvas all together. Humor, for instance, as an art, is a rare commodity. Something strange is happening which Humanities Underground is trying to fathom and explore.
PG: Writing and being a writer is such a glamorous profession these days. Why does everyone want to be a writer? Has the increase in number of publishing houses, the volume of publishing, the appearance of so many literary ‘forms’ contributed to the sense that everyone has a story to tell, everybody can tell stories? Why has this particular approach to ‘form’ become so important in literature now?
PC: There is this democratisation of writing in New India, which is great. This is not unlike the phenomenon that now our best cricketers and popular singers are coming from every region of the nation. Quizzards need not gruel in a Siddhartha Basu type format; KBC will and have replaced that kind of prime-time investment in the esoteric and variegated sense of trivia sharing. Literature likewise has become more user-friendly and accessible: from the potential authors’ standpoint as well as from the reader’s perspective. But this logic of massification, instead of democratisation and freeing literature from its shackles, is actually narrowing down possibilities. Shelf life has diminished and that is fine by the author and the publisher as long as they can fill it up with the next miraculous uproar. In actuality, forms are always changing, they evolve. The logic of this kind of assembly line plays safe and is often brilliantly finessed to homogenise forms. The argument is always democratic and making a quick buck for everyone, which is a formidable one to surpass. This is what we are witnessing in non-vernacular writing at this point. How many of us routinely read poetry or plays? The glamorous always stood out and reserved a maverick space at one point. That idea is being overturned by playing onto the logic of reaching out and by hammering accessibility.
PG: Do you see this phenomenon as a lack? Does it have to do with our culture of reading, which is changing or is India really turning into a nation of writers?
PC: Again, this is not a story of crisis. I would see it as a shift in sensibility as we, as a nation, accommodate to a more conservative and individualised time. I believe Indians still read a lot and a variety of things too. It is a truism that we are an extremely conscious people, politically and aesthetically. Good or hard-hitting artistic production will be appreciated at the end of the day. But that is not coming into focus because people who matter are actively interested in suppressing these factors. Some of our best minds are thus missing on the variety and depth and criticality that even contemporary literature provides. The popular always helps to redistribute the classic. The habit of being in touch with the enduring also means you are in touch with pulse of the everyday life. One is not opposed to the other.
PG: Has the thin dividing line between popular/commercial and ‘high’ fiction confused Indians? A couple of decades ago, for example, a James Hadley Chase pulp story and a Graham Greene novel would not have the same production value, imprint and publishing hype—as they now do if we draw equivalences in current writings. Chick-lit space is eating into, say the shelf space that could accommodate the likes of Amitav Ghosh or Rohinton Mistry. We are producing more of the Chetan Bhagats than Vikram Seths.
PC: Yes, it has perhaps. The confusion, as you call it, is deliberate and well worked out, as I said, but we cannot afford to be judgemental on the buyer and clamp down with the Seths and the Ghoshs of the world onto him. That will be an enormous exercise in misplaced condescension. And besides we all grew up on Hadley Chase and the likes! But we also read voraciously—all kinds of other stuff. That is the more difficult but sure-shot way of tackling the blundering homogeneity that we see in the marquee these days. The idea of choice is quite narrow, if seen closely. All conscious Indians must push each other to carry on with the habit of greedy reading. Old book stores and the newest one on the street are equally important institutions. Variety fosters thinking, and thinking, in turn, breeds criticality and opposition to our herd-instincts.
PG: If one is to push a bit further, one notices two kinds of writers that are getting rejected—those who obviously can’t write, but also those who can ( I am thinking of radical/avant-garde) have little scope to be noticed. I guess I am making this claim because I find it really hard to believe that in 25-30 years of mainstream English language and fiction publishing we have few exemplary writers, and even those whom we can’t really claim as ours often. Why do you think ‘serious literature’ is no longer coming out of our publishing houses? Is the logic that no one is interested in more reflective stuff valid? What do your students in Delhi University, for example, read outside of their course work?
PC: Yes, it is selective usage of the radical that the market prefers. Some writers are pegged as radical and hence their saleability. But I do not see much of avant garde writing in the modernist sense of the term in English langauge writing from India at least. Avant garde does not necessarily mean radical or let us say, such a kind of radicalism is much more bohemian (not busy and straightforwardly progressive) and experimental in form and style. I mean, G.V. Desani’s All about H. Hatter was truly avant garde. Not very often now in fiction we see that kind of devil-may-care approach, at least. You still see that, but in vernacular writings. Serious literature does come out of certain English press too but the problem is reverse: they are but too self-consciously serious. People who subscribe to them, missionaries of sorts, are likely to create a false dichotomy of the classic and the popular and wallow in their cocooned world.
True, many of my students do think in terms of course work but a large section of them in fact indulge in all kinds of readings too: from philosophy to history to various forms of contemporary literature. Writings from Latin America, parts of Asia and Africa are extremely popular with many of my students, which I see as a continuity of sorts with the earlier generation. There is a fair investment in Urdu and Hindi, which is wonderful. Some of them invest in translated works. Many participate in a variety of literary and analytical activities on the internet. But as I said, reading habits often need some kind of jumpstart from time to time; the milieu has to be fostered. That could be done possibly by sharing and exchanging ideas, by deepening debates.
PG: There has been a similar publishing culture in the West—similar turbulence and shifts, one would think. But why is it that in India there is no space or culture for promotion of independent, parallel publishing like, say, Zubaan and Katha? The US does, for instance, have a publishing house like poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, does it not?
PC: I am not an expert on publishing but there may be a variety of reasons. One, as always, it is really difficult to survive in India on a small publishing space even if you are idealistically motivated. In Kolkata, in the past few years, a wonderful independent publishing house has emerged: Gangchil. But they do not even have a temporary space to work on and distribution is a perennial headache. This is a pretty standard story all around the nation. City Lights has evolved over a period of time. It could have sputtered but for the brilliant editorial and marketing intervention of Nancy Peters in 1971. The point is independent publishing too must innovate and professionalise within its ideal and radical space. In India sometimes independent publishers have tried to come under a common umbrella for distribution and so forth. For instance, The Independent Publishers’ Group (IPG) is a partnership of 10 small/medium publishers and publisher-distributors based in Delhi that started a few years ago. Daanish, LeftWord, Samskriti, Social Science Press, The Book Review Literary Trust, The Little Magazine, Three Essays Collective, Tulika, Women Unlimited, Zubaan and Kali for Women comprise the IPG.
Often more upcoming mainstream houses like Yoda, Navayana or Seagull are also publishing interesting and tantalising stuff. Or sometimes motivated zeal make things happen, where financial worries could be handled in other ways: as the Writers Workshop experiment has successfully depicted.
The other side is readership. It is often difficult to build up a loyal and solid base of readers who would be interested in the forms of writings that independent press have often traditionally supported: poetry, pamphlets, non-fiction, plays and so forth. It takes time and energy for such a long haul. The investment is thankless. It is really a culture around the variegated that I return to, which one tries to develop and inculcate. Oppositional and critical publishing houses are fewer, as you say, but that space is more alive in the vernacular. It is possible to conceive such locales in the English speaking world too. I am hopeful.
Debt has had a crushing impact on the lives of those who must take student loans to finance their university education in the US. For tuition fees that have been so notoriously high in private universities now are rising in public universities so quickly they are far out-pacing inflation. Student loan debt in the US has been much higher than in Europe (with the exception of Sweden), though recent developments there would indicate that this gap may soon no longer exist (Usher).
We should also take into account the fraudulent way in which the loans have been administered by the banks and the vindictiveness with which those who have been unable to pay back have been pursued by collection agents. The most frustrating aspect of student loan debt being the legally toothless position the debtor is in, because government policy has relentlessly vested all the bargaining power in the hands of the creditors.
But however agonizing the situation of the indebted, the debt is growing. As of September 2010 total student loan debt amounted to $850 billion, having just surpassed credit card debt by about $20 billion for the first time. And it is rising at a catastrophic rate, e.g., by 25% in 2009 to meet the rising cost of tuition and other college fees. Even the Great Recession has not put an end to this financial explosion. On the contrary, while credit card debt has leveled off, student borrowing has continued to grow to cover the rising costs of living as well as the tuition fees, especially by unemployed workers who are “going back to school” to get a “better,” or at least some, job in the future.
Logic, therefore, makes the remission and abolition of student loan debt a necessary demand for the university student movement, especially in an era when the need for “an educated work-force” has become an institutional axiom. However, student loan debt abolition (for instance) was not a focus or prominent issue in the student mobilization that peaked last spring, especially in California. This constitutes an impasse for the movement, since meeting after meeting it has become clear that refusing the blackmail of the debt and calling for abolition of tuition fees are pivotal to every form of struggle on our campuses. Students holding three jobs to repay (or avoid) loans or taking as many credits they can fit in their schedules to reduce the length and cost of schooling, can neither be active in campus protests against budget cuts and the commercialization of education nor can they engage in self-education and the creation of “knowledge commons.”
In this contribution to the Edu-factory network’s discussion of debt I think beyond this impasse, asking why an organized debt abolition movement does not exist in the US and what needs to be done to assist its formation.
A first consideration is that the very conditions that would call for mass student protest against indebtedness have so far contributed to preempt this possibility. Even before the time to pay back is upon them, the debt has profound disciplining effect on students, taylorizing their studies and undermining the sociality / and politicization that has traditionally been one of the main benefits of college life (Read).
An even more important consideration is the fact that student loans are constructed so that students do not pay them back while they are students. Student loans are time bombs, constructed to detonate when the debtor is away from the campus and the collectivity college provides is left behind. Once we recognize this we can also see that there is a hard-fought struggle around the student loan debt throughout the US, but (a) it operates in a non-communal, micro-social, serial way, mainly through default; (b) it is a struggle that involves subjects other than students, taking off precisely once students cease to be students, for only after they leave the campus do the debt collectors show up at their doorsteps. In other words, while the visible student movement has not so far made debt abolition its goal another movement with that goal has been growing to a large extent underground. One former student after another is rejecting loan payments through default, but they are not publicly announcing it. “For fiscal year 2008 the default rate increased to 7.2 percent, compared with 6.7 percent in 2007 and 5.2 percent in 2006” after a long period of decline from 1990, when it hit a peak of 22.4%, and 2003, when it hit a trough of 4.5%. (NB: These somewhat misleading statistics are calculated according to “cohort” years. For example, the 2007 cohort default rate is the proportion of federal loan borrowers who began loan repayments between October 2006 and September 2007, and who had defaulted on their loans by the end of September 2008. Therefore, they dramatically underestimate the true default rate) (Lederman).
As typical of “invisible” movements, statistics fail us in drawing its proportions. We have no estimate, for instance, of how many have been driven to suicide or how many have been forced to go into exile due to their student debts. Nor do we have a measure of the social impact of the growing de-legitimation of the student debt machine. We can only speculate about the consequences of disclosures concerning the collusion between the university administrations (especially in the case of “for profit” institutions) and the banks, now commonly acknowledged in the media as well as in congressional investigations. For sure, blogs and web-groups are forming to share experiences and voice anger about student loan companies like the biggest one, the Student Loan Marketing Association (nicknamed “Sallie Mae”). On Google alone, there are about 9,000 entries under the rubric “Sallie Mae Sucks,” and another 9,000 under “Fuck Sallie Mae.” Browsing through the chat rooms, with their harrowing stories of wrecked lives and mounting frustration against the operations of Sallie Mae, makes it clear that the potential for a debt abolition movement is high. So far, however, most attempts that have been made to give an organizational form to this anger have largely demanded the application of consumer protection norms to the management of the debt.
A well-known example is StudentLoanJustice.org (SLJ.org) that systematically compiles testimonials on the subject, organized state-by-state, revealing in graphic detail the dread, disgust, and humiliation indebtedness generates. These testimonies also reveal why, despite their anger and despair, debtors hesitate to join in an open debt abolition movement. As the founder of SLJ.org, Alan Michael Collinge, points out that there are many obstacles to such course of action:
Even now, the barriers to inciting meaningful political action at the grassroots level are daunting, For one thing, facing large –often insurmountable– student debt is a highly personal matter. Many debtors are too embarrassed or humiliated even to tell their immediate family members and close friends about their situation, let alone join in a grassroots effort challenging the injustice of student lending laws.” (Collinge: 93)
The Kantian imperative that debts ought to be repaid cost what may is also weighing on the minds of the debtors despite the fact that the conditions imposed by student loans companies are often fraudulent and generally unfair. As mentioned, many of the developing student debtor organizations refuse to speak of “abolition.” What fuels their indignation is the arbitrariness and arrogance of the creditors’ management of the debt, not the debt itself. As the “content author” of the SallieMaeBeef.com web-site writes:
Allow me to make one thing clear. This site is not for people who chose not to make their payments. Choosing not to pay a debt is one’s own fault. Sallie Mae, like many companies, makes mistakes. I don’t fault them for that. What matters is how they resolve the problems. They did a terrible job resolving the mistakes they made with my account, and I found out that I was far from being the only person suffering because of THEIR mistakes. I also found that they allegedly prey on borrowers, trapping people into paying 2 to 3 times (sometimes significantly more) what they borrowed. There is simply no excuse for it. (www.SallieMaeBeef.com).
The very choice of the term “Beef” in the title of the organization suggests a complaint or a private dispute, not a demand or a public arraignment. SLJ.org, one of the most publicized student loan protest organizations, also rejects both individual or collective refusals to pay– witness what its founder writes of one of SLJ.org’s members, Robert, whose $35,000 debt became $155,000 through the ploys of the financial company which held his debt : “like most SLJ.org members, Robert absolutely agrees that he should pay what he owes, but he simply cannot deal with a debt of this magnitude” (Collinge: 19).
In other words, prominent anti-student loan debtors organizations re-affirm the principle of the student debt. They believe that the safeguards and regulatory oversight that apply to other consumer loans –mortgages, auto loans, and credit card charges–should be applied to student loans as well, which presently is not the case because of the repeated governmental actions taken to block this option.
*In 1998 Congress made the student loan “the only type of loan in US history non-dischargeable in bankruptcy” (Collinge: 14). This means that presently even after filing for bankruptcy and been reduced to the status of a pauper, a debtor is still deemed responsible for payment on student loans, cost what it may, perhaps even facing a charge of fraud and imprisonment, if some politicians have their ways.
*In 1998 all statutes of limitations for the collection of student loan debt were eliminated.
*Since the beginning of the federal student loan program in 1965, the freedom to change lenders in order to find better terms for a loan has been denied.
Once the commodity approach to education is accepted, the political strategy adopted becomes predictable. According to Collinge, “it is imperative that standard consumer protections be returned to student loans” (Collinge: 20). This means, for a start, that student loans should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy, should have a statute of limitations apply to them, and it should be possible to refinance them with other lenders. These are the demands put forward by SLJ.org since its formation in 2005, supported in varying degrees by a number of liberal politicians like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin, and Congressmen George Miller and Danny Davis (see the Acknowledgements section of (Collinge: 151)).
Over the last five years this “consumer protections” strategy has produced significant legislative results addressing some of the grievances listed above. These include the passage of three major acts: The College Cost Reduction Act of 2007 (that halves the interest rate on federally subsidized loans and cuts lender subsidies and collection fees slightly), The Student Loan Sunshine Act of 2007 (that requires university officials to fully disclose any special arrangements between them and lending companies), and in 2010 the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) (described below). For all these cautious legislative efforts however, SLJ.org and similar organizations have not achieved any of their major objectives. If we add the return to power, as Speaker of the House, of John Boehner, “by far the largest recipient of campaign contributions from student loan interests” (like Sallie Mae) and their most aggressive watchdog, we can conclude that the “consumer protection” approach to student debt has reached its limit. Indeed, when Boehner speaks of repealing the Health Care Bill (whose complete name is the “Health and Education Reconciliation Act”), he certainly alludes also to the education rider hidden in it, as much as to the parts of the bill dealing with health care.
What then are the prospects for the struggle against student loan indebtedness?
Clearly a premise for the rise of an openly organized student loan debt abolition movement is that the organized campus student movement and the student loan debtor movement off the campuses meet. Indeed, they need each other and will be in crisis as long as they remain separated. On the one side, the student movement activists cannot call for the liberation of education without confronting the debt peonage waiting for them and their fellows, and on the other, the student loan debtors movement must go beyond the limits of its stalemated “consumer protections” approach. The sense that a limit has been reached in this regard is indicated by the enormous interest generated in early 2009 by Robert Applebaum’s Keynesian proposal, “Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy,” where he called for the government to forgive government student loans and pay back to banks and finance companies the outstanding private student loans (Applebaum).
The combination of an underground struggle involving millions of loan defaulters, intensified by mass unemployment and cuts in social spending, and the exodus of thousands of debtors fleeing the debt collectors hounding them, just as the campuses are becoming again places of mass, open agitation, has set the stage for a student loan debt abolition movement that Edu-factory network, for one, has been calling for.
It is the possibility of this encounter, I believe, that prompted Congress to pass SAFRA that was signed into law by President Obama on March 30, 2010. George Miller, the archetypal East San Francisco Bay liberal, surely had a sense of the political winds that were blowing when he introduced the bill into Congress in July 2009, just as the occupations at the UCAL campuses of Santa Cruz and Berkeley were being planned and a 32% tuition fee increase was being discussed by UCAL’s trustees. But he was certainly looking as well at the rates of defaulting loans and what they expressed in political terms, for I could not otherwise understand why its buffering attempt would take the form of a student loan debt reduction bill, when the student movement on the campuses was not openly calling for it.
SAFRA is full of diversionary and ameliorating moves in the struggle between debtors and creditors that attempt to cushion the impact of the Crisis on student debtors.
(i) it replaces the private institutions with the federal government as the creditor, by halting loan-guarantees to the banks –a major source of interest revenue for the latter at no risk to themselves. The billions of dollars that will be “saved” would be used to increase scholarships for low-income students (Pell grants);
(ii) it provides for a reduction of debt payments, from 15% to 10% of discretionary income;
(iii) it provides for more debtor-friendly “forgiveness” conditions (viz., the debt would be “forgiven” for those working in the “private” sector–if payments were made on time–in 20 years instead of the previous 25 years, and in 10 years for those in “public service,” including teaching and the military).
These more favorable conditions are meant to forestall an increase in default rates–for if the “crisis” continues and unemployment rates remain high, the student debt machine is bound to collapse and will force a “bail out” of student loan debtors similar to Applebaum’s “Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy” proposal. They are also meant to prevent an escalation of student activism on the campuses and above all to keep the two movements divided. Whether SAFRA will succeed in doing this is not something we can foresee at this stage. We can, however, see some steps that appear necessary to build an abolition movement besides the obvious one of bringing both movements together in a national student loan abolition convention.
Building a student loan debt abolition movement also requires that we reframe the question of the debt itself. A first step must be a political house cleaning to dispel the smell of sanctity and rationality surrounding debt repayment regardless of the conditions in which it has been contracted and the ability of the debtor to do so. Most important, however, from the viewpoint of building a movement is to redefine student loans and debts as involving wage and work issues that go to the heart of the power relation between workers and capital. Student debt does not arise from the sphere of consumption (it is not like a credit card loan or even a mortgage). To treat student loans as consumer loans (i.e., deferred payment in exchange for immediate consumption of a desired commodity) is to misrepresent their content, making invisible their class dimension and the potential allies in the struggle against them.
Student debt is a work issue in at least three ways:
Schoolwork is work; it is the source of an enormous amount of new knowledge, wealth and social creativity presumably benefiting “society” but in reality providing a source of capital accumulation. Thus, paying for education is for students paying twice, with their work and with the money they provide.
A certificate, diploma, or degree of some sort is now being posed as indispensable condition for obtaining employment. Thus the decision to take on a debt cannot be treated as an individual choice similar to the choosing to buy a particular brand of soap. Paying for one’s education then is a toll imposed on workers in exchange for the possibility, not even the certainty, of employment. In this sense, it is a collective wage-cut.
Student debt is a work-discipline issue because it represents a way of mortgaging many workers’ future, deciding which jobs and wages they will seek, and their ability to resist exploitation and/or to fight for better conditions (Williams).
The overarching goal of capital with respect to student loan debt is to shift the costs of socially necessary education to the workers themselves at a time when a world market for cognitive labor-power is forming and a tremendous competition is already developing between workers. Employers’ refusal to massively invest in education in the US is not, in fact, a misreading of its class interests as theorists like Michael Hardt maintain (Hardt). It is the result of a clear-cut assessment of the new possibilities opened up by globalization, starting with the harvesting of educated brains as well as muscles from every part of the world. Capital’s strategic use of student loan debts to enforce a harsher work-discipline and force workers to take on more of the cost of their reproduction makes the struggle for debt abolition one that necessarily affects all workers. Accepting the student debt is accepting a class defeat, for it is certainly marks a major set back with respect to the 1970s when education was still largely financed by the state.
Certainly university teachers (like myself and many readers) and our unions and associations must take an active role in the abolition of student loan debt. For we are on the frontline, but in a compromised position, because we must “save the appearances” and pretend that for the university, cultural formation is of the essence, while we know that the student loan money is the source of much of the university’s budget and that the future debt peonage of many of our students “pays” our wages today (Federici). Just as, hopefully, most professors would object to be paid by a university whose revenue was the product of slave labor, so too must we object to having our students pay us at the cost of their post-graduation bondage.
Finally, debt in general is constructed to humiliate and isolate the debtor (Caffentzis). But demands for its abolition can be unifying, because it is everybody’s condition in the working class worldwide. Student loan debt, credit card debt, mortgage debt, medical debt: across the world, for decades now, every cut in people’s wages and entitlements has been made in the name of a “debt crisis” of one sort or another. Debt abolition, therefore, can be the ground of political re-composition among workers. If this is the path it takes with respect to student loan debt, the student movement in the US will experience a decisive turning point and opening out to many allies beyond the campus.
Bibliography
Applebaum, Robert (2009). Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy. www.forgivestudentloandebt.com. Accessed December 10, 2010.
Caffentzis, George (2007). Workers Against Debt Slavery and Torture: An Ancient Tale with a Modern Moral. UE Newspaper (July).
Collinge, Alan Michael (2009). The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History–and How We Can Fight Back. Boston: Beacon Press.
Federici, Silvia (2010). Political Work with Women and as Women in the Present Conditions: Interview with Silvia Federici. Maya Gonzalez and Caitlin Manning. Reclamations. Issue 3 (December). www.reclamations.org. Accessed on Dec. 10, 2010
Hardt, Michael (2010). US education and the crisis. Liberation (Dec. 2).
Lederman, Doug (2009). Economy Sinks, Default Rates Rise. Inside Higher Education. September 15. www.insidehigheredu.com/news. Accessed December 10, 2010.
Read, Jason (2009). University Experience: Neoliberalism Against the Commons. In Towards a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory. Edited by the Edu-factory Collective. New York: Autonomedia.
Usher, A. (2005). Global Debt Patterns: An International Comparison of Student Loan Burdens and Repayment Conditions. Toronto, ON: Educational Policy Institute.
Williams, Jeffrey (2009). The Pedagogy of Debt. In Towards a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory. Edited by the Edu-factory Collective. New York: Autonomedia.
The reduction of funding for universities and a trebling of admission fees are among the many blessings bestowed by the Coalition Government on the United Kingdom (though not Scotland nor, it seems, Wales). Because the (formerly) Liberal (ex-)Democrats (fLxDs) had a pre-election pledge to oppose university fee increases, unscrupulous opponents have called the fLxD’ers “hypocrites”.
Using the pedantic argument that they did not tell the truth, extremists have called them as “liars”. The party leaders, N. Clegg and C. Cable, defend their bold action on the argument that circumstances changed for the worse between making the pledge and gaining the power. Unprincipled opponents, such as the self-seeking university students, have suggested that keeping pledges when it is difficult to do so is a test of character.
What the critics fail to realize is that money spent on education is an investment that increases a person’s earning power (except for the social parasites that choose lower paying jobs such as school teaching and nursing). It is incentive-sapping socialism in its most degenerate manifestation for Big Government to fund education for children whose parents lack the foresight to pay for it.
The Calamitous Coalition (CamCo) should be congratulated for its defense of capitalist principles at the university level. As usual it leaves a job considerably less than half done (see previous comment on old age pensions). It is common knowledge that all competent research shows that across levels of education, the highest return to public investment is for early childhood (“The Economic Impacts of Child Care and Early Education,” 2004, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management). Since the return to money spent on educating the young is so high, it is shocking that it should be done by Big Government rather than families through the private sector.
If, as the Coalition argues, people should pay for their university education because they gain financially from it, all the more for primary school. No doubt this is why in the United States kindergartens are rarely if ever supported by the long-suffering taxpayer, with the United Kingdom quite good on non-funding, as well. Having clearly placed itself in support of markets for university education, CamCo should have the courage of its convictions and announce an end to socialism in education: abolition of all public funds for schooling in any form.
So dramatic would be the change that it is impossible to fully appreciate the long run benefits. Most obvious, the socialist-government schools would cease their near-monopolist crowding out of the private sector at the primary and secondary levels. In the UK the portion of students at market-based educational institutions is a shockingly low seven percent (lower still in the United States). Eliminating the anti-competitive socialist sector would immediately raise that to 100 percent. As usual, leftists and fellow travelers would claim that the number in school would fall once families had to pay up-front the true cost of education.
Would that be a bad outcome? It would merely indicate, as it did at the university level before the Labour Government of 1945-1951, that most consumers choose to buy other commodities instead of education (food and rent are common examples). Indeed, when the British Empire was powerful and great, a minority people attended school of any type. The fundamental problem is the same as for pensions. State pensions exist because people are under the delusion that they have an entitlement to grow old. Public education exists because people are under an equally anti-capitalist delusion that they have a right not to be ignorant. While the first delusion is a severe threat to the public purse, the second strikes at the very basis of the social order that the Coalition defends.
Students are revolting! And quite right too. From the 52,000 strong demo in Westminster on Nov 10 (which went via the Millbank Tory Party HQ- not your average day at the office!) to disciplined and organized student occupations, sit-ins and teach-ins at Leeds, Manchester, Sussex, Middlesex and other Universities, through subsequent Days of Action, to student protests across Europe- Paris, Lisbon, Athens, Dublin. Saying, chanting, acting, demanding, `No to Education Cuts’, `No to (increased) Charges for Education’, `Education should be Free!’ The 10 Nov demo, organized by the National Union of Students and the college lecturers union, UCU, was the biggest student demonstration in a generation.
The next round was Wed 24 Nov, `Day X’. Students at universities, further education colleges, Sixth Forms and secondary schools walked out, and demonstrating against cuts and tuition fees, in a national day of action. Some marched on their local Tory party offices, just as 300 students and trade unionists in Barnet marched earlier on the local Tory Party HQ in Finchley!
The next `Day X’ is the day of the vote in Parliament on 9 Dec 2010 over the fees increase. There’ll be another massive demonstration. The Facebook group `Tuition Fee Vote: March on Parliament’ had 2,300 `attending’ within 45 minutes of being set up! Students and Workers realize this is a common struggle – Day X is supported by the three main anti-cuts umbrella organizations – the NSSN (National Shop Stewards Network), the RtW (Right to Work campaign) and the CoR (Campaign of Resistance) whose 27 Nov London rally of 1300 brought together organizations, socialist/ Marxist parties and groups, national organizations, local anti-cuts groups, students and school students.
One of the most remarkable and inspiring speeches, by 15 year old Barnaby, on Youtube explicitly linked the student struggle to wider struggles and workers struggles.
This time round, students are saying much more than `No Fees’. Saying and chanting `Students and Workers Unite and Fight’, `We are Part of a Wider Struggle!’ A recognition that our struggle is a common struggle for a better, a fairer, not a diminished and crueler, society. Facebook sites such as `School and FE students Against the Cuts’ have brilliant, basic, bold slogans- `Education for the masses not just for the ruling classes!’
What the banker’s crisis, the current crisis of neoliberal capitalism, `making the workers pay for the crisis’, the millionaire Con-Dem millionaire government is doing, is stoking raw anger. Not just among mainly middle class university students, but among working class students at Further Education colleges and Sixth Form colleges.
Raw Anger
There is raw anger at the withdrawal of Education Maintenance Allowances (EMAs) that are currently for low-income working class kids to stay on and study from the ages of 16-19, worth up to £30 per week. Now they are to be scrapped. Nationally 46% of Further Education students get EMAs. In poorer areas like Knowsley, Birmingham and Leicester the figure is 80%. Those affected are kids like members of my family. My grandson is one of hundreds of thousands of working class, low parental income kids, who could not have afforded to stay on to do A levels without the EMA. Millions of working class families will see their EMA support abolished. This is nearly 50 years on from when I received the staying on at school grant that I got as a working class kid staying on at Sixth Form in the 1960s. I couldn’t have stayed on without that grant. Now, almost half a century on, neither will millions of others. This is part of cutting back the social democratic advances won by the trade unions and working class after the second world war. The fight is to save the last vestiges of our post-war social democratic settlement starts here! One benefit, one part of `the social wage’, is being taken away. This is the deliberate culling of educational opportunity.
So, too, is the trebling of fees for university students following the Con-Dem government’s acceptance of the Browne Review. The cap of £3,000 a year tuition fees has been raised to a maximum of £9,000 a year fees! The most expensive state university fees in the world. Leaving students with a projected post-university degree debt of £38,000, that will, inevitably cut out poorer families. And so there is disgust among students at the bankers taking their millions in bonuses while other families agonise over the spiralling cost of what… getting educated!
The Class System and Education
Schooling, education, universities, even as early as nurseries, serve to sort people out – their futures, their minds. To reproduce the class system. It’s not what the official rhetoric claims of course, and it’s certainly not what teachers and lecturers want. But the actual intent of the ruling/capitalist class is for education to create and reproduce a hierarchically tiered and very differentially rewarded workforce. That’s the economic aim. It’s all about sifting and sorting and allocating – on a (raced and gendered) social class basis, `education for the economy’. Little else is deemed important for the masses. Ah- and mind-control- education as an `ideological state apparatus`. Yes, the social and political aim is a socially compliant citizenry. To teach us all our very different places. In the words of one senior civil servant, `people must be educated once more to know their place’. And, to use Louis Althusser’s distinction between the Ideological State Apparatuses (mainly nowadays, the mass media and the education system, formerly mainly organized religions) and the Repressive State Apparatuses (the Laws themselves, the Police, the Armed Forces, Surveillance and Control mechanisms, state force) – when the Ideological State Apparatuses don’t work, then the police kettle students and protesters, charge demonstrators on horses (I remember that from the Grunwick Strike in 1977), and use their batons. The smiley face of the police officer leading/ liaising with marchers, organizers, demos in Brighton over the last few years is replaced by visored, shield bearing and baton wielding riot police.
In the capitalist world, education is differentially funded on a class basis, with different expectations, life chances, and personality characteristics being encouraged and reproduced. In a nutshell, (most) upper class kids get to private schools and elite universities. There they are trained for the Bullingdon Boy, Eton educated Cameron style of leadership, wealth and power. Born- and educated- to power.
Most `middle class’ kids go to schools that are in some way, formally or informally socially and academically selective, and are trained for lower professions and supervisory and managerial jobs. Around half of my grammar school Upper Sixth form in 1963 went on to become teachers. I don’t think any of my twin brother’s secondary school classmates who had left school at 15 went on to become teachers. Most went straight into the manual job market.
Most `working class’ kids go to the middle and bottom rungs of the ladder of educational schools, expectations and opportunity. Trained for skilled manual, semi and unskilled and routine jobs, earning (in most cases) a fraction of the ruling / upper/capitalist class. Some don’t. Most do. There is some (ever-diminishing) social mobility of course, it legitimates the system and gives the illusion of meritocracy. And, for some, better funded lives.
Most, if not all, of the `working class’, live poorer, sometimes far, far poorer, more materially circumscribed lives, being educated not to expect too much, to obey, to accept life’s inequalities, to accept mind-numbing `celebrity culture’ as a substitute for real news and critique. Cameron’s millionaire cabinet (18 millionaires in the Cabinet) think £30,000 a year is poverty! Tell that to the millions on £15,000 or on minimum wage or on benefits! Who know what being hard-up means on a daily basis.
Some, especially in the Tory party, want to bring back grammar schools. Tell that to the millions who got a second-rate education, second-rate funding, second-rate libraries and less qualified teachers in secondary schools compared with the lucky 20% who got into grammar school.
Yes, I was lucky, passing the 11-plus and getting a first-rate education at a Grammar School, encouraged to reach for the stars, study until the age of 21, and set professional ambitions. I went on to become a university professor of education: not the lifestyle of a banker or billionaire, but very comfortable.
Not so for millions who were separated out for a second-rate education system – like my twin brother, who went to local Secondary Schools.
Most working class kids in the 1960s were ejected at age 15 into factory, shop and building site work. Nothing wrong with that work, but manual workers, then as now, get far less in pay, pensions and benefits than the more highly qualified. Of course, both sets of workers – manual and professional – then and now get paid a tiny fraction compared to the ruling class, “the masters of the universe”, mostly educated at private schools, inheriting and passing on privilege.
That was when I was a teenager, half a century ago. But it’s now, too. At school level, with the market in schools, a socially differentiated system where schools choose the kids rather than parents choosing schools for their kids. And class-based, too. With the abolition of EMAs, more so! With more and more working class kids dropping out of education because they can’t afford to stay in it!
And so too at University. In addition to having a three tier higher education system (elite/ Russell Group universities; other old universities; and a third tier, much more working class, tier of ex-polytechnics). There will be less of them, there will be less working class kids going to universities when fees are raised. The culling of educational opportunity. So people will once again not only know their place, but will be less able to change places!
Resistance
But people resist! Students are rebelling! Some trade unions are resisting cuts! And many teachers, students, workers, retirees, have visions of different utopias, past, present and future. Some remember the hopes and visions of the welfare state, of a free education and health service, free at the point of delivery, available on the basis of need not ability to pay. And some of us want better than that! Not its destruction.
Divisive and divided education for conformity is resisted! Many resist! Many teachers/ lecturers/ `teacher trainers’/ students/ families resist magnificently! (I’ve been involved in teacher education for forty years, I see it). Many try day in day out to raise expectations, refusing to label and stereotype and demean kids from particular class and ethnic backgrounds. The best teachers and lecturers, and other cultural/media workers, try, teach, show that we, and that kids’ and students’ futures, need not just be as compliant cogs in an economic machine.
Many – and it will become millions! – not only want but see the possibilities of a far better, far fairer, far more socially just, far more equal education system, society, politics and economy. Students – and anti-cuts campaigns and groups up and down the country – are prepared to struggle and demonstrate and organize. We’ve got to change this educational and social and economic system. And we can. But not with any of the current main parties!
All three of them want to/ accept slash and burn the welfare state, to reverse hard won historical rights and benefits. That’s where socialist groups and parties and anti-cuts campaigns come in. For me, a way forward is TUSC, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, and local anti-cuts movements and coalitions – including the example of the students at Sussex University and other universities, sitting in, teaching-in, joining workers and trade unionists on our marches and demos.
One of the brilliant speeches at the CoR rally was by John McDonnell, one of the very few remaining socialist MPs left.
`This generation was meant to be apathetic, only interested in careers…. They’ve taught my generation, that we have been too long on our knees. And it’s time to stand up and fight. You students (who were arrested during Millbank and the kettling), you are not the criminals… The real criminals are the ones attacking our education system… say this to the TUC, it is time to play your role! We want co-ordinated industrial action, co-ordinated strike action across the country. It is time for generalized strike action. We are posing an alternative.… When Parliament refuses to represent. When politicians lie. When governments seek to ignore us… We have no other alternative but to take to the streets. And direct action to bring them down. Take to the streets’.
Local anti-cuts movements, occupations, sit-ins, demonstrations, and national coalitions such as TUSC, if they are organised democratically, can bring together workers, trade unionists, different socialist groups, students, teachers, OAPs – the people! – black, white, men, women, people of all religions and sexualities – in a common fight for equality. The struggle is wider than just over education!
Dave Hill is Professor of Education at Middlesex, and Visiting Professor of Education at Athens and Limerick Universities. Formerly a Labour Parliamentary candidate and Labour Group Leader, he was the TUSC general election candidate for Brighton Kemptown in May 2010, and is active in the Brighton Anti-Cuts Coalition. He was on the recent Education national demonstration, and is involved in Student / Lecturer actions against the Cuts/ at Sussex and Middlesex Universities.
Released by Delhi State Committee, Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS), A Unit of All India Revolutionary Youth Organization (A.I.R.Y.O.)
We have not abandoned purely student demands,
but the best way to bring THE UNIVERSITY INTO QUESTION
is to intensify the workers’ movement. Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jean-Pierre Duteuil, March 22nd Movement, 1968
KYS’s polemical tract, What Is Ailing University Democrats!, has received many responses, and having read through them closely we have drafted the following. Not all responses were productive for the ensuing debate but there were some that reflected a serious engagement with what KYS had argued. We are happy to reiterate some of the points raised in such responses and to develop them further. With respect to the other responses received, such as those from New Socialist Initiative (NSI) and from University Community for Democracy (UCD), we have some detailed clarifications to make, and of course, some new observations to highlight. Nevertheless, the principal segment of this response is dedicated to the much more significant debate on the nature of working class politics and forms of its alignment with the petty bourgeois section in a given society. We have done this, because those who have sincerely reflected on our observations deserve further elucidation of our position. For those interested mainly in our response to UCD’s rejoinder, we suggest a close reading of Sections 1 and 2. To those concerned with the debate on Marxism’s deployment of class analysis, student-youth politics and the way ahead for the working class movement, please use your discretion and move to Sections 3, 4 and 5.
1. Some Simple Facts for Those Who Harp About Being Factually Sound
To begin with we would like to emphasize that KYS has absolutely no misconceptions about the nature of University Community for Democracy (UCD). We see it as a forum dominated by certain tendencies. It was these dominating tendencies that we constantly confronted in meetings and which we critiqued in our paper. It was very clear to us that right from its inception the functioning and constitutive logic of this forum was heavily influenced by New Socialist Initiative (NSI). With each day of participation in UCD, it became clearer still that the space was not an “open” one. This was because many of us, who joined UCD later, i.e. around July of this year, were continuously considered and treated as outsiders. We will underscore this fact shortly by quoting from minutes of the meetings. We attribute UCD’s functioning and form of politics to the way NSI shaped the contours of UCD. In the interest of its liberal politics (articulated best in its approach to NGOs, the media, the politics of alliance-making, etc.), NSI did not simply propose action plans for UCD to ratify, but even upturned decisions of UCD’s general body meetings in undemocratic ways, hence rendering consensus building in UCD a meaningless endeavour.
The following are references to minutes of meetings and emails exchanged in response to them, which prove the observation highlighted above:
i) In the 24th July meeting it was recorded that some people objected to the extension of an invitation to NGO persons to speak at the July 30th protest meeting. Instead of NGO persons it was suggested that students should be asked to speak. The consensus reached after discussion was that the NGO speakers suggested by NSI would not be called for the protest meeting. For NSI the discussion on NGOs was deemed “unnecessary”. They were unhappy with what was obviously a disruption in their preset plan for the protest meeting. This is why on July 27th an email was sent out by a member of NSI that as UCD’s “most active participants” they had decided to organize a program in Ramjas College, on the same day as the protest meeting (in the morning), for which the disputed NGO person was invited.
Note the repercussions of such a manoeuvre—UCD’s decision on not calling any NGO person as a speaker for the July 30th program was undermined. In Ramjas College the forum was, by force, allied with NGO politics (after all, in such a program UCD would be discussed, and hence, would be sharing a discursive space with NGOs—a space it had decided not to share till it was more clear on the credentials of certain NGOs). Needless to say, KYS was against the inclusion of any kind of NGO and paid ‘activism’.
ii) On the night of 29th June, i.e. 8:52 p.m., a message was put up on the facebook account/google group (many UCD participants were not members of these at the time), asking people to come for a meeting the next morning (30th June) at 10 a.m. We will highlight the contents of this meeting but before that what needs to be noted is that on 29th June, which was the first meeting of the UCD on campus, it had been decided by consensus to meet on the 3rd of July. In the rushed and poorly coordinated meeting on 30th June it was decided by those present (mostly NSI and its sympathizers) that Gandhi Ashram should become a concrete project of the UCD, that creating communes was part of UCD’s vision, etc.
On the contrary, in the 29th June meeting it had been decided to slow down on the Gandhi Ashram and commune issue till there was substantial participation on behalf of affected students. This point has been hidden in the minutes of the 29th June meeting, and in fact, the minutes only discuss grand plans on how the ‘commune’ would be run. The hastily called 30th June meeting was basically aimed at clinching the commune issue even before the 3rd July meeting. After this 30th June meeting a team constituted by “UCD” went ahead to speak with the Gandhi Ashram management. In this regard, this “emergency meeting” was simply held to preset the agenda of the larger meeting to be held on 3rd July. Clearly, there was an overt attempt not to take all of UCD’s participants into confidence when strategizing UCD’s politics and action plan. Perhaps now the reader can understand why KYS has taken the position that coordinating a forum through cyberspace is highly problematic. As an organization, we strongly feel that it is a space that is actively used to undermine the consensus building initiatives of those who take out the time to present themselves in general body meetings. We do not buy the argument that such a meeting was called in haste because there were many Mirandians in dire need of alternative arrangements. Why don’t we? Well, because we knew that the number of students still in need of a PG was negligible—a point proved by the poor response of students to the Gandhi Ashram plan. We knew that such a meeting was actually called to exclude many from UCD’s decision making process.
iii) On 20th July it was noted by Aashima who was recording the minutes of the meeting that “there was a BRIEF [emphasis added] discussion about what our approach should be gradually, if we should focus on hostel evictions or also give more prominence to the issue of unregulated rents and problems in the neighbourhood since many students live in private accommodation.” Ironically, immediately post this meeting it was held that UCD had developed a detailed and important [emphasis added] position on the problem of escalating rents. KYS and CSW were consequently denounced for running a “parallel” campaign on the issue of rent and for compromising UCD’s attempts in this direction. There are two points we would like to clarify here. The first that NSI’s Commonwealth Games-University centric approach ensured that when rent was taken up by UCD it would be done so as a student specific issue/concern. That is why rent is mentioned in the first UCD parcha in precisely these terms—“It (University) has thus become an accomplice in the larger processes of reckless corporatisation that the whole city is undergoing in the bid of become a ‘global city’. This has left students [emphasis added] at the mercy of private accommodation, with its unregulated rents and precarious guarantees. Rents are rising in anticipation of the increased demand for PGs and flats, forcing many existing residents to move out and making accommodation unaffordable for incoming residents as well…” Indeed, raising rents as only a student specific concern is the brainchild of UCD. KYS was trying to point out this unfortunate fact in its last pamphlet, and was least interested in establishing a copyright on the issue of rent control.
The second point we would like to highlight here is that by conceptualizing rent as a student-University specific issue, UCD has not been pursuing a feasible or a desirable campaign for rent regulation. In that sense KYS’s initiatives on rent control cannot be compared or considered “parallel” to those of UCD for it conceptualizes rent as a generalized problem for migrants in city. Why is the UCD campaign not feasible or desirable? It is not feasible because the rents of one area, i.e. the University area, cannot be regulated without the regulation of rents across the city. The UCD campaign is not desirable either because its approach to rent does not take into consideration the majority of tenants in the city. After all, for the scores of DU students living with their families on rent it is not at all desirable that rent be perceived as a University-neighbourhood problem alone. In contrast to UCD and its many constituents, KYS has been mobilizing both students and non-student youth who live on rent. Considering rent regulation is the responsibility of the Delhi Government, we have approached the Chief Minister on the issue. Although the Chief Minister has given certain assurances, we know for a fact that to pressurize the government into action, the struggle for rent regulation across the city has to be further intensified.
Having drawn on these references we would like to highlight, in brief, the nature of KYS’ contribution to UCD and at what conjuncture we finally withdrew from the forum. We do this to put at rest certain presumptuous accusations about our “negative” or “non-proactive” role in UCD. As an organization with other commitments to attend to, KYS sent three to four of its members to UCD meetings up till the point it decided to move out of the forum. Yes, in that sense we didn’t seek to bombard the platform with our physical presence just so as to ensure that UCD’s contours mapped down to what had been pre-decided from before. Again, for UCD activities (such as area-campaigning in Vijaynagar or college campaigning) we sent our members. KYS also circulated UCD’s parcha independently at the SC/ST admission counters in Arts Faculty and amongst students living in Sangam Park-Gurmandi area. This area is a working class neighbourhood in which many students enrolled in Satyawati Morning and Satyawati Evening College, stay on rent. Furthermore, our fraternal organization, CSW also distributed the UCD parcha in University Hostel for Women.
When our participation was not possible during UCD activities such as attending DUTA’s GBMs, we informed other participants well in advance. There have been references to us sabotaging UCD’s campaign on the 21st of July, i.e. the first day of the academic session. If certain participants in UCD were not so hell bent on writing off KYS’s participation they would accept that there was a confusion that day about where to assemble first for college campaigning. KYS members had not checked their email accounts on the night of the 20th which is why they were under the impression that UCD campaigners were to assemble at Khalsa College first, watch the street play, and then move onto the other colleges slotted for campaigning that day. This is why KYS’s member reached Khalsa and not Daulat Ram College on the morning of July 21st. Post this incident our members checked posts of UCD on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the resentment continued on the part of “UCD”.
By the end of July, conditions were such within UCD’s functioning that KYS no longer considered it feasible to participate in the forum. Firstly, two consecutive meetings (22nd July and 24th July) were channelized in a way to literally flush out KYS from UCD (you would only get glimpses of this in the minutes—the real witness to this are the participants themselves). In such a hostile atmosphere no organization can consider serious participation possible. Secondly, and more importantly, the NGO-ization of UCD was something KYS refused to tolerate. Keeping the July 30th Ramjas program (especially its repercussions) in mind, KYS decided to withdraw from UCD. It attended the 30th July protest meeting but only its fraternal organization, CSW sent a speaker. By the end of the 30th July protest meeting even CSW decided to completely withdraw from UCD. So, for those who hinted that our non-participation in the “relay hunger strike” was noted by all, we would like to emphasize that KYS had withdrawn from the forum by then, like many others. Now that the ‘graph’ of our participation has been drawn for all to see, you will observe that claims of us not being supportive and pro-active, are based on wilful misconceptions.
Of course, what we also need to highlight here are the conscious attempts to frustrate the efforts of KYS and others to pave the way for UCD to come on its own. More than one person in their response to KYS’s earlier mail (such responses being quite a significant retrospective critique of UCD), have accepted that corner meetings prior to or after UCD’s larger meetings were actively pursued. We have shown above that such a practice was encouraged by NSI so as to control UCD’s political process—a control/influence not based on substantive debate and ideological consensus building but on apolitical ties of familiarity/friendship. When such apolitical influencing measures showed signs of breaking, NSI actively projected KYS’s arguments which were raised in UCD meetings, as an articulation of “pre-existing resentment”. Many in their email responses have revealed (intentionally or unintentionally) that NSI actively spread this rumour. Unfortunately for NSI, many individuals drawn to UCD could not be fooled for long about the real nature of KYS’s arguments, i.e. on the compromised form of NSI-influenced politics and the sectarianess of UCD’s constitutive logic. Indeed, the biggest obstacle to UCD coming on its own was the umbrella formation NSI had forced upon the forum, in the interest of promoting its own liberal politics.
Let us now draw attention to some crucial details that will elucidate KYS’s position further. Firstly, the crux of KYS’s critique (which some people failed to understand), pertains to how struggles demanding “democratic space from the University”, are elitist and sectarian. We have been arguing this because such struggles entail the following: i) demanding democracy for a privileged minority, i.e. 7 percent youth (i.e., the percentage of youth making it to higher education in India), whose inclusion in the University system is actually based on somebody else’s exclusion; ii) demanding from the University something it does not have—the real power residing somewhere else. Of course, the conclusion to be drawn from these two insights is not that University politics should be shunned, but rather, that the form of such politics be transformed. The solution lies in a politics that is based on uniting non-student youth and University students (please see our discussion below, on the DTU students’ protest and on the issue of fee hike. Also see section 5). Undeniably, for such politics to materialize, organizations will have to stop focusing on the University alone, and more importantly, will have to mobilize University students on issues that unite them with youth excluded from the education system. We do hope that in the near future there are more organizations like KYS, which along with work in the University; pursue neighbourhood work amongst youth residing in working class localities.
Secondly, KYS in its earlier pamphlet highlighted the tokenism prevalent in UCD’s approach to workers and workers’ issues. We stand by our earlier critique. With respect to some of the comments made by UCD’s participants regarding the forum’s approach to workers, we support what Naina highlighted in her mail on September 3rd. However, we would like to further problematize UCD’s position that there is nothing wrong/destructive in perceiving workers (their issues, etc.) through a petty bourgeois lens. Indeed, such practices are a serious obstacle in the path of progressive struggle. We would like to prove this by drawing attention to the highly problematic political and theoretical roots of such an approach. Politics based on petty bourgeois notions of empathy (sympathy, etc.) is nothing but the repetition of Bogdanovian tendencies in the working class movement, which were based on the neo-Kantian notion of verstehen. Such tendencies have always been criticized for their anti-revolutionary potential, and Lenin himself presented a devastating critique of these tendencies in Empirio-Criticism.
To elucidate—when you are seeking to understand the working class, you merely end up gathering empirical information on workers (i.e., how they feel, and how you would feel being in their shoes, etc), rather than perceiving the objective condition of the being of the working class (i.e. the conditions that create and reproduce the class in the first place). It is precisely because of this empirical fact-finding that you fail to reach the condition where you realize the organic connection between your oppression and the working class’s exploitation. Of course, the by-product of not reaching this condition is that the petty bourgeois class, as a whole, fails to realize the revolutionary potential of the working class, especially its ability to liberate all classes from the oppression of capitalism. As a result, the petty bourgeoisie continues to suspect and maintain ideological distance/discomfort with working class politics, and at most, engages with working class politics in patronizing ways.
Furthermore, we would like to reiterate that there is often little ‘good intention’ involved in practices like slum work/tutoring working class children, etc., for bodies like Women’s Development Cells, Social Service Leagues/NSS cells, etc., tend to institutionalize such activities into extra-curricular ones. Indeed, such bodies tap on the sensitiveness of certain individuals and draw them unnecessarily into the network of NGOs. Sadly, this is a huge loss for the working class movement since it doesn’t need youth who, through social work, continue to work within the system. Instead, the movement needs youth who engage with the process of class and realize the need for class struggle. Thus, the intention behind bringing these points to the attention of UCD members was not so much to “mock” their endeavours, but to reveal to them the drawbacks of their form of politics.
Thirdly, by raising the issue of the Miranda House construction workers we sought to establish how necessary workers are for launching a successful struggle against the Commonwealth Games (CWG). Unfortunately, in their response UCD completely elided this issue. In fact, they resorted to highlighting meaningless gestures made by them with respect to workers’ issues. We quote, “…[W]e have stood against construction work in the University that violates legally sanctioned labour standards and have integrated it into our demands…” Indeed, this ‘integration’ with no participation in actual workers’ struggles, amounts to tokenism. UCD and its dominant subset, i.e. ‘new’ socialists, may not be running a trade union, but really, should their pre-decided programs (“hunger strikes, etc.) be so inflexible that they cannot be part of a struggle for which they otherwise mouth support (especially when such a struggle is taking place just down the lane)? Furthermore, UCD’s choice of words while describing its support for workers is troubling indeed, for it reflects a non-engagement with workers’ real issues. It is assumed by the forum that provision of legally sanctioned labour laws means an end to workers’ exploitation. In reality, even when workers are employed according to legally sanctioned labour standards, the process of work itself is highly exploitative. In fact, as observed by our trade unions, sometimes legally sanctioned labour laws like those pertaining to overtime, accentuate workers’ exploitation. In the case of laws pertaining to overtime, contractors use them to exploit their existing force of workers, rather than employing more workers for the job.
You speak of boycotting the Games, yet you fail to support the most productive and meaningful attempts to stall the Games. Really, how can you boycott something that has boycotted you?! A boycott would result in substantial losses in the gains of all those profiting from the Games. Take for example the boycott of foreign goods during the Non-Cooperation movement; it led to a massive dip in sales, followed by a huge loss of profits earned by British manufacturing units, and hence, to a weakening of the colonial state’s position in the market. However, your ‘boycott’ doesn’t have any such repercussions, and it is you, in fact, that are bearing all the losses (the hostels have been taken away and you couldn’t stop it; the prices of everything you consume have risen and you couldn’t stop this either; etc., etc.). This has happened precisely because your ‘boycott’ has been envisaged in an isolationist manner (best captured in students/teachers buying anti-CWG badges and T-shirts). Friends, this is a crucial time and workers are far from silent. For a fact pending construction work at the numerous CWG work sites is not so much due to the rains/corruption (as highlighted by the media), but due to spontaneous and frequent protests by workers employed there. Imagine if these one lakh workers were organized, and then launched their struggles…there would be no Games. In this context, should we be content buying/selling badges, filing RTIs, etc, or, should we be helping bring in the real tides of change? Realizing the necessity of involving workers in the struggle against CWG, KYS and its fraternal organizations like Mazdoor Ekta Kendra and Delhi Nirman Mazdoor Sangharsh Samiti, have been mobilizing workers across different CWG sites. Our intervention in six CWG sites have met with success, but only one was highlighted by the media, i.e. the struggle of Miranda House construction workers. Indeed, the few ‘progressive’ newspapers that covered the workers’ protest did so not because they were interested in highlighting the workers’ demands, but because they were interested in highlighting the active participation of Miranda House students. So much for the media!
On a last note, we would like to emphasize that KYS brought out many other problems with respect to UCD’s campaign. On the question of how certain teachers were participating in UCD we hardly got a satisfactory response. Since Paresh Chandra in an email explained very well the problem with a certain form of teachers’ participation, we do not consider that any further arguments are needed on our behalf. Even on the issue of Gandhi Ashram we received a poor response from UCD, which basically, amounts to no response. For factual details and elaboration on the problems with the Gandhi Ashram project, please see Paresh’s response on September 3rd. Of course, on the question of the “relay hunger strike” we received no suitable reply. If UCD continues to hold on to its own definition of what such a hunger strike is then we have one suggestion to make. We know of a student who hails from an agrarian worker’s family and travels every day by train, from Sonepat (Haryana). He is able to eat only in the morning and is able to have his next meal only when he returns at night. Please also involve him since he is perpetually on hunger strike, i.e. according to your definition. Indeed, it will suit your politics of spectacle.
KYS would also like to object to the misrepresentation of some of its arguments. We have never claimed that only a dalit/poor/muslim/gay/tribal can speak on the issues of the oppressed. UCD has once again missed the point and quoted our arguments out of context. Kindly remember the exact context in which Sujit spoke of his Dalit background. He was replying to someone called Bala.poorna who alleged that Communists (including those in our organization) were upper castes and lacked commitment on the question of caste oppression. When responding to this diatribe our member highlighted his own social position so as to prove that not all Communists are upper castes, and that Bala, in fact, was writing off the voice of the oppressed by resorting to baseless accusations. Interestingly, the real nature of our arguments, were not lost on those who gave it proper thought. Individuals like Naina were quick to pick up our point and have argued very convincingly in our support. We reiterate, it is the form of politics which is important for all participants in a movement (be it the petty bourgeoisie or workers).
2. More About NSI’s Role In UCD And Its Real Position In India’s Left Circuit
In India’s Left movement, New Socialist Initiative (NSI) has been long identified as a bourgeois oppositional formation. We highlight this fact simply because in both NSI’s and UCD’s response we saw some unjustified/unsupported claims to the contrary. Despite its ambitious claims NSI is no longer considered a part of Communist League of India (CLI) camp. For more on politics of NSI please see Lal Salaam (a theoretical-political journal). It is interesting to note that one reason why NSI has been identified as such is due to its “official” or “unofficial” support (see report of CASIM) of political fronts like Indian Social Forum (ISF) and even World Social Forum (WSF). Both ISF and WSF are platforms severely criticized for their rainbow political formations in which NGOs and their funding play a big role in delegitimizing several (armed) people’s movements. In fact, in terms of the form of its politics, NSI is a mirror image of such platforms. In this context, we have one immediate question for all those who wrote off KYS’s observations as “malicious”—are critiques on NGOs and NGO-ised forums, presented by persons such P.J. James, James Petras, Shashi Prakash and many others, simply ad hominem attacks? Can everything be reduced to malice or does that accusation stem from your inability to respond to most of the political questions raised?
Moving on, we would like to flesh out the details of how NSI has actively shaped UCD as a mirror image of itself. We do not buy the argument that UCD is a loosely constituted body or “a composite group of left organizations, individuals, liberals, progressives”…blah, blah blah. We don’t, for the simple reason that UCD’s functioning has revealed something very different. The forum’s being and existence is best explained by drawing an analogy to the Chinese doll (with its several folds). NSI, an archetypal liberal organization, was the core of UCD (the doll according to the analogy being drawn), and from the very beginning different liberal positions were congealed around it. In spite of its claims of debating and then accepting/rejecting questions/programs, “as per the larger consensus in UCD”, NSI did not succumb to these liberal gestures at all. Acting as a vector of the liberal virus itself, it did not merely support ideas/suggestions but actively initiated and consolidated certain developments in UCD. Let us draw on some references which shed light on this not so innocent contribution of NSI in UCD. For instance, NSI members actively proposed the entry of NGOs in UCD’s campaign. Similarly, they supported and promoted NGOs as bodies that build “more nuanced bridges of understanding”. One of NSI’s members, in his adamant support and promotion of NGOs, even boycotted an ongoing discussion during a UCD meeting (24th July to be precise). And to top it all, many NSI members work for NGOs—a reality that orients them towards NGO-izing whatever platforms they are part of. Another revealing example comes to mind and this pertains to the way the media was approached and perceived by NSI. Instead of criticizing the media in its bourgeois form, NSI members went to the extent of identifying newspapers like Tehelka as “friends”/”part” of the campaign! One NSI members even said that Tehelka, if involved extensively, will make the process of the campaign “smooth” (29 June 2010). Expectedly, this perception also became that of UCD, as reflected in some emails exchanged during end June and early July. Of course, we would not have said anything if such statements on the media had not come from an organization that claims to be Marxist. Isn’t it a Marxist axiom that in the process of resisting capitalism we should not reproduce the spirit of bourgeois thinking?
3. How Marxism Identifies the Position of the Working Class vis-à-vis Identities
While upholding KYS’s critique of the form of politics represented by the main tendency in UCD as well as KYS’s understanding of the relationship between identity and class struggle, Paresh Chandra, in his most recent response differs on some of the specificities of KYS’s prognosis. His main difference with our position is that students’ class position cannot be identified on the basis of their class background and the kinds of colleges/institutions/courses they end up in. For him the main defining feature of student [all]- as- worker is the very condition they (students) are being ascribed within the university/education system (more on this later). He further accuses us for identifying the class position of students only on the basis of their background whereby reducing class to a “sociological fixity”. The end result being that we read class as a static sociological entity which can then be found more in some institutions/courses than the others. On the contrary, we had argued that ‘student’ is an identity comprising of different class positions and if we don’t see the different class positions within (and its implications) we will end up reducing university politics into an identitarian one (having identifiable common interests vis-à-vis other social entities and the state). To further elucidate, it is the different class trajectories (journeys) that determine the being of a student. These trajectories are based not only on class background but on the class process itself (i.e. the process whereby one’s class position is subject to change, depending on changes in the contingent factors in the economy). Thus, what kind of student one will end up being is determined by the combination of one’s class background and the class process (something which creates possibilities of contradictory class positions, particularly with respect to the middle strata, i.e. the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, etc.). To simplify the matter, there can be different kinds of students: working class, petty bourgeois, peasant, bourgeois, etc. We will restrict our discussion to working class and petty bourgeois students because of their particular bearing on the nature of university politics that exists in general.
Working class students find themselves in a condition where they get admission to lower grade educational institutes, and even when they enter the threshold of better institutions their inability to cope up causes them to perform badly. Considering this, their pursuit of higher education is such that they take with them merely the basic skills required to survive in the job market. Their education is directly based on them being future bearers of labour power/producers of surplus value, and hence, the logical conclusion of their education is them becoming workers. On the other hand, some petty bourgeois students, through education, come to acquire skills (as a property form), which then helps them share with the bourgeoisie, surplus value produced by workers. Characteristically, petty bourgeois students regard the future as relatively bright, and instead, complain of the drudgery of the present (for them the immediate is what is visible and troubling, i.e. the rigors of the education system and the fact that they sometimes receive less pocket money than what workers earn). Bourgeois students pursue an education so as to acquire the etiquettes which will help their further integration into the ruling class. Thus, their coming to universities to study does not make them part of the working class or petty bourgeoisie.
However, arguing from his position of student-as-worker, Paresh contends that our class analysis of students led us to project class as a sociological entity. To begin with, Paresh has unfortunately misread our historical empiric, i.e., a level where things will only appear as a sociological entity. We never equated class with what simply appears as a sociological entity, and, in fact, see it as a process which is bolstered by state policies seeking to fulfill the needs of the labour market. We concretely think class is a historical accumulation of humankind that has a determinate relationship with other classes, which might or might not appear as sociological entities in their different moments of congealment in the trajectory of their unfolding. In fact, in the paragraph quoted by Paresh, we have talked about students as a sociological entity, hence, requiring a class analysis. If only you had managed to go beyond the phenomenological level (where you have hypostasized our historical empiric) you would have definitely realized that our historical empiric is linked to how ‘student’ as a sociological entity, is connected to government education policies and the education market. For example, when we talked about youth who have studied in government schools, come from the Hindi medium background, rarely get admission to college hostels and struggle to cope with increasing college fees and English medium teaching/coursework, we were hinting at the existence of a dual education system (prevalence of both government schools & private schools). We were also hinting at the cut off system, an administrative process in which students coming from different backgrounds are distributed among graded colleges. Because of the cut off based admission process, many students coming from the working class get admission to low grade colleges, and do not get admission into hostels because such colleges do not have any.
In more ontological terms, we are saying that the state is the constitutive element in the expanded reproduction of the system, which requires different forms of labour to be produced through graded education. Indeed, how else can one explain that only 7 percent of all youth who clear the twelfth class examination, find their way into higher education, and that even at the level of higher education the Radhakrishna system of ‘centres of excellence’ prevails? How else would we explain that our school education is hierarchically arranged in the following manner: Charvaha Vidyalas/Ekal Schools for children of agrarian workers and poor peasants; Navodayas for children of agrarian elites; Sarvodayas for children of the urban working class; KVs (Central schools) for children of central government employees (a strata itself divided into a petty bourgeois and working class position); and expensive private schools like Woodstock, Doon, Mayo, Modern, DPS, etc. for you know whom.
Now that we have clarified what we meant to say in our quoted sentences, let us clarify what Paresh is actually saying in the paragraph quoted from Correspondence’s pamphlet. Paresh quotes, “When Marx says ‘working class,’ does he mean only the ‘male, white, industrial proletariat?…” Kudos to you, your move to go beyond Marx with Marx has allowed you to throw suspicion on Marx’s understanding. This is an infliction of the liberal virus on revolutionary ideas; ironically something you yourself criticized UCD members for. To relieve you of your (mis)reading of Marx, we leave you with Marx’s own words: “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin” (Capital, Vol. I). Clearly, Marx had an understanding of the working class being both white and black. Numerous writings of both Marx and Engels will also prove that they believed the working class was constituted of all sexes. And as far as the industrial proletariat is concerned, Marx always considered it a subset of the working class, albeit the most important and essential force in the working class struggle.
Having said this we also wish to highlight another tacit misunderstanding of Paresh, that Marxism is just about Marx and for that matter what other great Marxist leaders have to say. In reality, Marxism is a summation of different experiences of the working class in its conflict with capital. It is a synthesized articulation of the concrete. This synthesized articulation was used by Marx in philosophical debates (German Ideology, Theses on Feuerbach), in the critique of political economy (Ricardo), in debates on socialism (Proudhon), and in debates on political forms (Eighteen Brumaire, Civil War in France, Critique of Gotha Program). This synthesized summation was continued and applied by different leaders of the international proletarian movement as well as by numerous militant activists in the movement.
Moving on, in his own piece, Paresh bestows the working class position as a whole onto some identities, especially students. Though Paresh many times concedes (here and there) that TENDENCY has some relationship with class POSITION, in his endeavour to apply the epithet of working class on students as a whole, he ultimately detaches tendency from class position. He comes to define tendency as “control on one’s life”, which almost becomes a quasi-behaviourist analysis of stimulus response. To quote him further on this, “in some [students] the petty bourgeois tendency is stronger while in others it is weaker and this varies in proportion to the degree of control an individual has over his/her life.” Having achieved this abstraction Paresh goes onto provide a solution to the thorny question of consciousness. To quote him, “a class conscious student would see herself/himself as a member of the working class and in that will leave behind determinations like prehistory and family.” We really wonder why a class conscious student belonging to a petty bourgeois class position will not develop a petty bourgeois class consciousness! Some (not Paresh) have even come to argue that the petty bourgeoisie can be de-classed and a different consciousness can be imputed in them. Indeed, these two positions might look dissimilar, but they do have kin affinities because both positions tendentially make class position unimportant for one’s consciousness.
We also wonder what the operative part of such analysis could be. One possible form that comes to our mind is the whole notion of “Campus Democracy” (supported by many Left liberals and ‘Left’ organizations on campus), which is achieved through struggles of students, teachers and other staff members to control the university (more on this point in section 5). We cannot actually be sure of whether this analysis is based on the summation of any past or contemporary, concrete experiment in student politics. Let us take the example of the most radical student movement of all time, i.e., the 1968 French student revolt. Many in their nostalgic account of this movement fail to identify the core experiment of the movement—one that should be generalized. The real essence of this movement is best projected in the pamphlet titled, THE MARCH 22nd MOVEMENT, which identified the demand to ‘Defend the common interest of all students’, as illusionary. This essence can also be extracted from statements made by some of its leaders. For example, one of the most radical French student leaders, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in an interview taken by Jean-Paul Sartre, argued that students’ seats in hostels (Cites) should be given to workers and apprentices, and that “well to do students in law and science-po go elsewhere”. Again in his interview to Herve Bourges, he vehemently asserted, “I do not believe in student unity for there are no objective interests common to all students”. In response to another question in the interview he criticized UNEF (considered a Left wing formation), for representing the bourgeoisie, and called it a pseudo mass movement because it did not represent real demands and aspirations of working class students. Cohn-Bendit clearly made a distinction between the November strikes and the Nanterre movement which emerged from the Nanterre campus located outside Paris, i.e. amongst the neighbouring slums. The students here were socially divided between affluent students from the wealthy quarters of Paris and students from working class backgrounds. So, ultimately, inheriting what can be termed the best of the 1968 legacy, we want to assert that the relationship between students and class struggle could take two forms: (i) working class students aligning with rest of the working class outside university campuses; and (ii) working class students uniting against the provision of facilities to a few privileged students, and thereby, demanding for the provision of these facilities to all.
Further we believe the views presented by Paresh stem from a particular (mis)understanding of the working class position and the ontological configuration of identities. This understanding of class is based on a highly problematic understanding of capitalism itself, i.e. of capitalism as a carceral continuum. Due to this conceptualization of capitalism in Foucaultian terms, an identity such as ‘students’ becomes a working class position. This is reflected in expressions such as students being monitored/regimentalized or losing the right to self-determinism—an incarceration considered emblematic of the working class position. It is also present in expressions such as “the working class is that section of people on which [sic] work is imposed”, and this working class with its continuum of subjectivity can be found “beyond localized time and space”. In these terms, the ancient slave, medieval serf and peasantry, i.e. on whomsoever work is imposed, is the working class! Clearly, people who argue from such positions, such as Paresh, actually forget the historicity of the modern working class. Marx clearly identified the working class as distinct from other laboring masses both in terms of time and space. In this regard he identified the working class as a section devoid of property (means of production), and hence, “free”/compelled to sell its labour power.
If we extend the logic of Paresh’s arguments, we will see that they assume that an identity such as ‘students’ is not divided amongst several class positions, but is the working class position itself. To highlight the danger of holding onto such a position we would like to draw immediate attention to the fact that such an “axiom” (if applicable) would apply even to capitalists. After all, capitalists too are bound by social etiquettes of the time and also complain of being caged in by prevailing social norms. In this regard do we attribute to them the working class position as well? We do not, and know that you too will agree to the same.
We suspect that a certain petty bourgeois discomfort with the formidable logic of Marxism, in particular, its notion of generalization, is the cause of this “status”/position borrowing. Rather than taking to the working class/proletarian position (in terms of tying one’s own petty bourgeois class interests with the interests of the working class), so as to resolve the petty bourgeois question, certain individuals from the petty bourgeois class have conveniently started calling themselves working class. Marxism as a politics and as a science has never encouraged the concealment or displacement of one’s class position, but has, on the contrary, called for the engagement with one’s class position in the process of class struggle. In other words, Marxism has always called a spade a spade when identifying different class positions and their articulation within different identities. According to Marxism, the petty bourgeois question can only be resolved on the basis of an engagement with one’s petty bourgeois class position in alignment with that of the working class position. The petty bourgeois question cannot be resolved by presuming a working class position itself.
What do we mean by the petty bourgeois question? Well, we believe it is best demonstrated in recent Bollywood movies like Three Idiots and Udaan. What comes across through this rather powerful medium is the present plight of the petty bourgeoisie, i.e. growing competition for limited facilities provided by capitalism, and the increasing mechanization of life due to ever growing demands of the system in place. At this historical conjuncture, the need of the hour is not to equate mechanization of petty bourgeois life with the working class position, but to show the petty bourgeoisie how their OPPRESSION ties up with the working class’s EXPLOITATION. Let us take the example of the medical profession for which youth from petty bourgeois families aspire for in large numbers. Indeed most doctors (mostly, self employed professionals) are from petty bourgeois backgrounds. However, to become doctors, these youth have to undergo cut-throat competition. This is because capitalism as a system does not provide healthcare to the majority of people, especially the working class considering its limited buying power. As a result, it makes provisions for limited number of medical educational institutes and jobs in medical institutions. And it is for these limited seats and jobs that petty bourgeois youth are forced to compete. In this context, the working class’s struggle for the provision of more healthcare facilities and investment in the social sector as a whole, indirectly benefits petty bourgeois youth aspiring to be doctors. It creates the condition for the creation of more medical educational institutes (more seats, hence less competition), as well as more hospitals (hence, more jobs). The process, of course, leads to a less mechanized way of life for youth aspiring for such employment. In a crucial way, it will prevent the growing mechanization of children’s lives, who, in the current scenario, lose their youth under the burden of studies/competition, and who have increasingly come to feel they have lost the right to self-determination.
In this context, the objective interest of this petty bourgeois section lies not in identifying itself as working class. Instead its objective interest lies in uniting with the emancipatory politics of the working class. Such unity is feasible and desirable because in the process of fighting for its own liberation the working class can build a system, annihilating class society, in which other sections of society will have freed and equal access to opportunities and resources.
Returning to the specific question of the working class position and the ontological configuration of identities, we would like to reiterate that it is wrong to perceive different identities as a subset of the working class. Rather than conceptualizing identities (woman, student, Dalit, OBC, Black, delinquents, etc.) as momentary congealments of the working class position, it is important to read them as multiclass entities—as sites of struggle in which contradictory class positions are in conflict with each other. The latter is the precise way in which Marxism conceptualizes identities. This is because it realizes that the different identities in existence have different ontological depths. For example, Marxism believes that the identity ‘woman’ is not the same as another identity, say that of ‘Dalit’, and that the two identities encompass a somewhat different (in terms of degree, etc.), conflict of varied class positions within them. Indeed, unlike the popular perception of Marxism as an epistemology, Marxism is the synthesis of multiple epistemologies that extract experiences emanating from different sites of struggle, i.e. from different identities. By extracting these varied experiences it actively unites the working class/proletarian experience (collective will of the class) that is spread across the different identities (just like other class positions are).
Having said this, let us trace the larger theoretical source of such analysis of identities vis-à-vis the working class position. The theoretical source from which Paresh’s arguments about students as workers emerge, is Negrian clap trap based on the mixing up of Foucault with Marx. In other words, such views stem from earlier endeavours to re-ontologize Marxism, i.e., going beyond Marx with Marx. Negri carries to the extreme the ideas of Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti (great leaders of the Italian working class movement), in particular, their analysis of the political class composition of workers. For Negri, class composition is not just based on determinations like labour power as variable capital, but also on determinations like the historical and social level of labour power’s reproduction. In other words, for him, determination of class composition should include, together with the wage structure, other structures that reproduce labour power.
Marx made a distinction between labour forms which are heterogeneous and take place in different concrete conditions. Hence, concrete labour. But these different heterogeneous labour forms, in capitalism, are commensurate at the level of value they produce, expressed in the price of the commodity at a given equilibrium level. Hence, abstract labour. Abstract labour expresses, therefore, certain relations of production, i.e. relations between producers of commodities and the capitalists who own the means of production and appropriate the surplus value created by labour. For Marx this dual character of labour (abstract and concrete labour) is conditioned on the skewed property relationship which forces a worker to work for a capitalist. Thus, in capitalism concrete labour forms a dialectical unity with abstract labour. Outside the relationship of production this duality cannot exist. Hence, for Marx, destroying the property relations is the precondition for liberation of labour from a condition where one person’s labour becomes another person’s profit.
Negri calls this conceptual distinction a qualitative and quantitative distinction. In this context, he argues that the theory of value, as a form of equilibrium, seizes to have any remaining validity in our time. Negri takes a clear cut Morishimite position. To quote Morishima “…as soon as heterogeneity of labour is allowed for, the theory of value is seen to conflict with Marx’s law of equalization of the rate of exploitation through society, unless the different sorts of labour are reduced to homogenous abstract human labour in proportion to their wage rates, ” (Marx’s Economics). Negri considers Marx’s labour theory of value simply as the refining of concepts developed by his contemporaries. He argues that there is another conception of labour theory of value present in Marx’s work (Grundrisse), which according to him departs radically from capitalist theories and Marxist theories, and focuses not on capitalist processes of valorization, but rather on the processes of labour’s self-valorization. To quote him further “Marx considered the value of labour not as a figure of equilibrium but as an antagonistic figure, as a subject of the dynamic rupture of the system. The concept of labour power is thus considered as valorizing element of production, relatively independent of the functioning of the capitalist law of value…This means that although in the first theory value was fixed in the structures of capital, in this second theory labour and value are both variable elements.” Having freed labour from the distinctively exploitative relationship to capital in the circuit of capital self valorization, Negri reduces Capital to an elementary expression of command. For him changing the property relationship within which the labour process takes place is no longer relevant. Again to quote him, “the notion of foundational war of all against all is based on an economy of private property and scarce resources. Material property, such as land or water or a car, cannot be in two places at once: my having and using it negates your having and using it. Immaterial property, however, such as an idea or image or a form of communication is infinitely reproducible…Some resources do remain scarce today, but many, in fact, particularly the newest elements of the economy, do not operate on a logic of scarcity,” (Multitude). The clear cut meaning to be drawn from this is that resources are scarce which is why they are owned by capitalists, but the newest elements of the economy such as immaterial property can be owned by anyone for self-valorization of one’s labour.
Again to quote him extensively, “The most important general phenomenon of the transformation of labour that we have witnessed in recent years is the passage toward what we call the factory-society. The factory can no longer be conceived as the paradigmatic site or the concentration of labour and production; laboring processes have moved outside the factory walls to invest the entire society. In other words, the apparent decline of the factory as the site of production does not mean a decline in the regime of and discipline of factory production, but means rather it is no longer limited to a particular site in society. It has insinuated itself throughout all forms of social production, spreading like a virus. All of society is now permeated through and through with the regime of the factory, that is, with the rules of the specifically capitalist relations of production. In this light, a series of Marxian distinctions need to be reviewed and reconsidered. For example, in the factory society the traditional conceptual distinction between productive and unproductive labour and between production and reproduction, which even in other periods had dubious validity, should today be considered defunct,” (Labour of Dionysius).
Having detached his ontology of labour from the circuit of capital’s self-valorization and its actualization in circulation, Negri comes to posit that a working class subjectivity for autonomy and self creation is now expressed in a new class composition. In his chronology of capitalism’s development there emerge, (i) Mass workers: all workers working for different capitalists spread over different junctures in the supply chain; (ii) the Collective worker: anyone on whom work is being imposed, and basically, anyone who helps reproduce labour power, (whether within or outside the circuit of capital accumulation and the labour process, such as women doing domestic labour, peasants, students, self-employed professionals, etc.). In a recent avatar, with increasing detachment from the existing working class movement, Negri, once a working class militant, has now come to sermonize from his position as a university democrat. His earlier collective worker has now metamorphosed into “multitude”, and hence, signifying that whomsoever is rejecting work and any control on their life, ARE CREATING a new world—his communism within capitalism (!).
Clearly, Negrian analysis includes playing with (distorting) certain key Marxist categories of analysis and arguments in the attempt to establish the petty bourgeois section (our term)/immaterial labour (his term—which itself is divided in petty bourgeois and worker), as the pivotal force in contemporary times. Of course, there will be an acceptance of the tangible presence of agricultural and industrial labour. To quote Negri, “Agricultural labour remains…dominant in quantitative terms, and industrial labour has not declined in terms of numbers globally. Immaterial labour constitutes a minority of global, and it is concentrated in some of the dominant regions of the globe. Our claim, rather, is that immaterial labour has become hegemonic in qualitative terms,” (Multitude); [emphasis in original]. By extension, this analysis means that the fight against capitalism is not against the property relationship within which the dual character of labour emerges, but SIMPLY AGAINST the daily transformation of our doing/our activities into abstract labour. Furthermore, only this so called hegemonic immaterial labour is in the position to do this. This model is best propagated by John Holloway in his article “Doing In-Against-and-Beyond Labour”. To quote Holloway, “…it is not just in the workplace: life itself is a constant struggle to break through the connections forced by abstract labour to create other sorts of social relations: when we refuse to go to work so that we can stay and play with the children, when we read (or write) an article like this, when we choose to do something not because it will bring us money but just because we enjoy it or consider it important. All the time we oppose use value to value, concrete doing to abstract labour. It is from these revolts of every day resistance, and not from the struggles of activists or parties that we must pose the question of the possibility of ceasing to create capitalism and creating a different sort of society.”
Of course, we sincerely doubt that Paresh is succumbing fully to such views. However, what we wish to point out is that a road somewhat half traveled with Negri, is a grave mistake for those committed to Marxism. If all the identities have simply entered into the reproduction structure of labour power then we can claim, based on this understanding, that all identities are equally subordinated to the rule of capital. And this is precisely what Paresh has almost come to argue. To quote him from his article, “Through and Beyond: Identities and Class Struggle”: “the problem of identities is the way it exists in the current conjuncture…all equally [emphasis added] subordinated to the rule of capital”.
However, contrary to Paresh’s analysis, for Marxism identities are not simply part of the whole (in the sense that they seamlessly flow into the whole, i.e. the working class position), but “parts” divided amongst different classes (Dalits, peasants, women etc. are all divided amongst different classes). In other words, all these identities cannot be axiomatically assumed to be part of the working class and hence, equally subordinated to the rule of capital. They should, instead, be seen as products of heterogeneous forms of labour and their alignment with different moments of capital. To illustrate this it is best to talk in terms of some concrete examples that reveal the multiple class positions present in identities and how these positions articulate themselves in a given social reality. Let us begin with the identity ‘peasant’ and how class differentiations within it are being overlooked by certain left organizations, in particular, Maoist organizations. Indeed, eliding the issue of class differentiation within the peasantry (akin to overlooking class differentiation within students) has been a perpetual problem in the Indian communist movement. Whenever movements have emerged and then intensified, communist organizations have often failed to address the issue of class divisions within the peasantry, thereby allowing rich peasants to curb the radical potential of such movements. As a result of this class collaborationist position, movements that are at junctures which can lead to further unfolding of radical and transformative politics, are withdrawn or die a natural death under the hegemony and dominance of rich peasants. It is this precise class collaborationist position vis-à-vis peasant politics that can be identified as revisionism in the Indian communist movement. Some details of this unfortunate process are discussed below.
At present, in many parts of India we can see Maoist politics at work. The problem with this politics (as highlighted by us on several platforms) is its promotion of a conglomeration/alliance between peasants (ignoring the class differentiation within), regional bourgeoisie (considered as national bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the wrongly ascertained All-India bourgeoisie/big bourgeoisie as comprador and bureaucratic bourgeoisie), petty bourgeoisie (itself divided tendentially into polarizing class processes), and the working class. The crux of our argument is that this form of alliance amounts to singing old songs in new times. This is because since the time of 1947 (the “transfer of power”) the Indian bourgeoisie has come on its own after successfully hegemonizing the Indian national liberation struggle. Following this, in the period of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, heightened conflicts emerged between the different sections of the Indian bourgeoisie under the aegis of the federal form of state. By this time a rank of regional bourgeoisie had emerged in stiff opposition to the big/All India bourgeoisie. The roots of the regional bourgeoisie lay in the transformation of property forms held by the rank of rich peasants. For example, after gradually acquiring property owned by poor peasants, the class of rich peasants moved onto diversifying their capital. No longer did they remain merely rich peasants but became petrol pump/cinema hall owners or entered the lucrative business of transportation, hardware, construction, etc. In this context one can say the tumultuous years post Independence were characterized by struggles based on competitive claims of different moments in the being and becoming of India’s capitalist class. Ironically, many a time Communists wrongly identified these struggles (constitutive of both friend and enemy classes), and formed united-fronts with them.
India’s Independence from colonial rule was based firmly on a multi-class alliance. Post this historical conjuncture, Communists came to make several mistakes while reading crucial moments in the process of class. Their misreading of historical moments for what they were, led them to make a series of dangerous alliances with the Congress, etc. Many such alliances led to the erosion of the Communist Party’s support base in constituencies such as those of the depressed classes. In reaction to the growing inertia and revisionism within the Communist movement, the militant Naxalbari struggle emerged. This militant struggle spread like fire and took the form of a prolonged movement, which actively sought to strengthen the anti-revisionist forces in the Communist movement. To coordinate the anti-revisionist tendency in the Communist movement a front called the All India Coordination Committee for Communist Revolutionaries (A.I.C.C.C.R.) was formed. Unfortunately, this body was dissolved. In its place emerged the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (CPI-ML) which was based on a party program that continued to project the Democratic Revolution as communist strategy. Splinter groups that have subsequently emerged follow some form or the other of this party program. One can say that by deferring the Socialist Revolution the progeny of the Naxalite movement are actually devouring their mother (i.e., the militancy thrown up again and again by dispossessed tribals and agrarian labour).
Take, for example, the Telangana movement in which two tendencies prevailed; one, which sought to keep the alliance intact by neutralizing the claims of agrarian workers who were key participants in the movement, and two, which sought to continue the struggle based on agrarian workers demands (1). The Communist Party came under the sway of the former, and the Telengana movement was withdrawn, hence, firmly establishing the Party (its legitimacy, etc.) on the rank of rich peasants. Post this maneuver the Communist Party came to be identified as the party of Kamma and Reddy—these being the two castes to which rich peasants (and later the regional bourgeoisie) belonged. Jokes circulating in the Dalit circle such as, “he is a Kama-Red” etc., reflect this unfortunate fact. Furthermore, if we trace the history of many rich peasant families involved in the early phase of the Telengana movement, we will find that many were transformed into the regional bourgeoisie. For example, the owner of one of the biggest drug companies in the world today, i.e., Dr. Reddy, hails from a rich peasant background. Similarly, the owners of Nagarjuna, a construction company, are from rich peasant families. They started out by outbidding Birla for the construction of the Nagarjuna Dam and have subsequently become one of the biggest construction companies in the world with several projects in war ridden Iraq and Afghanistan. Ramji Rao is also a notable example. His family participated in the Telengana movement, and he himself, was a state committee member of the CPI (later joined NT Rama Rao). Interestingly, he is now the owner of a 2000 acre film city—the biggest film city in the world!
Another historical blunder comes to mind. This time we speak of Maharashtra and the linguistic struggle that emerged in the early 1960s. The Communist Party supported the movement, and in fact, many workers became martyrs for the movement under the illusion that they were fighting for “Workers’ Raj”. In reality, the movement was in the hegemony of the emerging Maratha regional bourgeoisie/rich peasantry which was opposed to the older Marwari-Gujrati bourgeoisie based in the ‘Maharashtra’ region. All the working class got in return for their martyrdom was betrayal, embodied most cruelly in the celebration of Maharashtra Day on May Day, i.e. May 1st.
Indeed, if 1947 was the tragedy, the compromise in the Telangana movement was a farce. Similarly, the CPI-ML party program and its continuation are farcical repetitions where revolutionary zeal emanating from dispossessed tribals and agrarian workers are galvanized to proclaim deferment of the socialist revolution, and hence, to keep the form of Indian revolution perpetually at the democratic stage.
In this context, we believe that Maoists in India are communists only at a nascent stage of their struggle, i.e. when they begin to emerge from the struggles of dispossessed tribals and agrarian workers. We say this because once their influence in a region grows (i.e., with the formation of ‘liberated zones’), they come to make dangerous alliances with regional elites, and their politics increasingly fails to engage with differentiation present within the tribal and peasant population. It is a fact that the tribal population, for example, is not a homogenous group as often projected by Maoists. Tribal elites ally with the private business sector and become stakeholders in the lucrative forest-goods trade, or become contractors /transporters /moneylenders /suppliers of essential commodities in the region. In pursuing their business these tribal elites do not hesitate in exploiting their poorer tribal ‘brethren’. Similarly, rich peasants in Maoist-influenced regions, rake in significant profits through poppy cultivation, etc. They too openly exploit agrarian labour and poorer tribals employed by them. Though we as a tendency in the larger Left movement will always stand by the proletarian content in the Maoist movement, (and hence, oppose any state repression against them), we continue to criticize their class collaborationist line with respect to enemy classes (unity and struggle). Thus, as argued in this discussion on Maoist/peasant question, taking any sociological entity or identity as homogenous and then constituting a united front, leads to neutralization of the working class position and decimation of the movement’s radical potential.
4. Detailing the strategy and tactics of United Front
This brings us to the very important question of strategy and tactics of United Front. United Front is crucial for the working class movement because it ensures unity between different sections of workers spread over different identities, and also because it unites the working class with other oppressed sections in society. Although United Front ensures the working class is not isolated in its struggle against the rule of capital, it prevents the neutralization of the working class’s position, and hence, keeps intact the foundational logic of the progressive movement (i.e. the impulse of going beyond the system). We believe the dialectics of certain entities determine the form of United Front. These entities are: geopolitical formations (agrarian, forest, urban, slums, factories, universities, etc.); class (rich peasants, small peasants, agrarian workers, tribal contractors, dispossessed tribals, industrial and commercial capitalists, rentier petty bourgeoisie, slum proletariat, workers); different demands and tendencies; and different forms of politics. It is only through concrete analysis of the dialectical process of these entities that we can establish what form of United Front is Rational, Desirable and Feasible. No abstract and ahistorical generalization on the form of United Front and the participation of Communists in it is productive. Having said this, certain general features of any United Front can be summed up and synthesized in practices which we undertake, using, of course, the past experiences of the Communist movement. In the muddy history of United Front its formal conceptualization by the Comintern Congress of 1921 is often lost. Its essence is best retrieved from the report of this Congress in which it is conceptualized as maneuver designed to build unity between workers, given the historical context of the time. According to the Comintern Congress, United Front stood for the minority of communists trying to win over the majority of non-revolutionary workers (2). Later the basic thrust and spirit of United Front was applied by the Comintern to resolve the question of national liberation/nationalities, race, etc. According to its principles, communist workers were to ally with non-revolutionary workers and other sections of society in struggle against oppression, keeping their independence intact. So, the unity could not be based on the neutralization of one’s position. In other words, autonomy of action and will was emphasized. Furthermore, it was argued that with the spread of the working class will amongst non-revolutionary workers, communists would be in the position to expose to the workers the hollowness of non-revolutionary organizations that would obviously rebel against activities embodying the working class will.
Following the Comintern Congress, the principles of United Front found their way into many struggles as well as theses on the combined struggle of the working class and other classes in society (see Roy-Lenin Thesis on Nationality Question, the Dimitrov thesis of 1934-35 where the concept of popular/national front is discussed, Blum Thesis, National Front Thesis by Ho-Chi Min, etc.). In China the first United Front was formed between 1924 and 1927, and was based on the alliance of KMT and CPC. In 1937 the second United Front was formed between the KMT and CPC, which lasted till 1943. From the Second United Front (of KMT and CPC) many insights can be drawn regarding the Chinese communist strategy; many of which are applicable today and should be generalized. The Second United Front was based firmly on the basic thrust and spirit of the Communist International, and thereby, a Leninist position. As a result the Second United Front was based on the expansive hegemony of the proletariat and was characterized by endeavours to continuously work amongst the masses so as to wean them away from the enemy’s fold.
In this rich history of varied experiments with United Front, the so called Gramscian position is often picked up and emphasized. Gramsci’s writings were the product of a particular historical conjuncture, and were composed at a time when he identified the Southern question as the key problem of revolution in Italy. The whole question was centered on how to make the national-popular come on its own. According to Gramsci the failure of the ‘national-popular’ to come on its own amounted to the bourgeoisie winning over the petty bourgeoisie/peasantry. This failure of national popular or the new nation state (after the unification of Italy) was the result of a passive revolution based on the mass of peasantry giving only a passive and limited consent to a new political order. This limited consent of the peasantry led to a weak basis for a new political order, resulting in the Italian Risorgimento which relied increasingly on force. In this context, Gramsci defined as the special historical project of the proletariat, the helping of the nation to come on its own and the re-articulating of the demands and aspirations of the peasantry. With this project in hand the proletariat would come to form a new historical bloc based on continuous endeavours to win the heart and mind of the peasantry (also known as a war of position that came before a war of movement, or frontal attack). Unfortunately, Gramsci’s position on related practices led him to support National Socialism (Mussolini). In fact, precisely because there are fragmentary and inconclusive statements in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks about the extent to which working class hegemony can or must be developed before state power is transformed; his views have since then often been used to propel social democratic trends like Eurocommunism. Nevertheless, (leaving aside his momentary lapses-support for Mussolini and his appropriation by Eurocommunism), for Gramsci the central concern for the United Front was the weaning away of the petty bourgeois class/peasantry from the clutches of the bourgeoisie into the fold of the communist working class movement. (In this way Gramsci remained within the overall tradition of the early Communist International)
Unfortunately, Gramsci’s position, once detached from its concern for the working class movement, is often translated into different kinds of alliance building (Rainbow Coalition, etc.) in which different sections are sought to be won over by neutralizing one’s own demands. In other words, to resolve the antagonism that comes with alliance building, the neutralization of one’s own position is actively pursued. The so called Gramscian position has also been translated into a second form of alliance, i.e. the so called Democratic Alliance. This form of alliance building is based not on the neutralization of one’s demands but on the notion of equivalence of dis/content. An excellent example comes to mind—students are being evicted, so are basti people, and hence, the two can unite. In fact, it is assumed that wider the chain of equivalence, the wider the democratic alliance, and hence, the wider the collective built. However, the problem with such a position lies precisely in its assumption that equivalence in content (quantity) means the equivalence in form (quality). In reality an engagement with the form in which discontent exists in different sites/demands is very important; otherwise a de-materialized so called dialectics will make us believe that a certain level of discontent (quantity) is translatable into qualitatively different forms of articulation. To prove this let us draw on immediate events/incidents before us. Students have been evicted from college hostels in the wake of the Commonwealth Games, yet despite their obvious discontent they have not come forward to stop evictions taking place in other parts of the city (according to the golden rule of equivalence of discontent, they should have). Similarly, more the eviction of students, the more students should have aligned with others evicted. However, this has not happened either. Indeed, evicted students do not see an equivalence in the eviction of slum dwellers. The reason for this is the material constraints created by the complexities of varied class positions. We draw an analogy to elucidate how material constraints exist on the dialectical flow of one “part” into the rest of the whole: A small cat when it grows will become a big cat that meows and not a lion that roars.
The third form of alliance building would be the Leninist position, which is based on expansive hegemony of the working class. According to this position, the expansive hegemony of the working class can only be forged in the alliance by one medium, i.e. uniting of the different sections of workers scattered across different identities. It is the ability to unite heterogeneous labour forms that allows for the emergence of collective will (communist subjectivity). The highest development in the form of this collective will is embodied in Communist parties, whereas in its lowest level of development it is embodied in the communist subjectivity present in individuals, small organizations etc. So, it is only when this medium is acquired that we can make a successful alliance with other oppressed sections in society. For the sake of elucidation we refer to communist organizations’ political work amongst the Dalit community.
As an organization KYS is sensitive to the fact that ‘Dalit’ is an identity divided between a petty bourgeois class position and a working class position. In fact, we see the identity of Dalit as an articulation of United Front. Within this United Front, either the working class’ expansive hegemony can exist or the petty bourgeoisie’s expansive hegemony can exist. Currently, it is the latter that is in force. In the case of the petty bourgeoisie, the understanding of Dalit identity is based on the persistence of the identity across time and space. This position is best articulated by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (see ‘Note by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar on the Depressed Classes’, in Indian Franchise Committee, Vo.I, Calcutta, 1932, pp 202-11). In this piece Ambedkar argued against using any economic criterion for defining the depressed classes, citing examples of many well off persons amongst untouchables. Simultaneously, he argued against the universal voting right saying that the so-called better off amongst the untouchables would equally represent the poorer untouchables. Interestingly, due to the retention of the property qualification only 3.56 percent of untouchables were given voting rights in Bombay Presidency. Even today, the myth of representational politics is being kept alive within the Dalit community which is best projected in slogans such as “DM se CM, CM se PM!” etc. In reality, despite Dalit MLAs, MPs and CMs coming into existence, the material social conditions of majority Dalits remain the same.
Apart from the issue of voting rights we can see petty bourgeois hegemony articulate itself within reservation and the labour market. By demanding proportionate reservation the petty bourgeois section of the Dalit community has created ample space for its own upward mobility, and none for the working class segment of this community (who are in the majority). For example, the crème de la crème of the Dalit community are the first to pick up the few government jobs reserved for Scheduled Castes (i.e., according to the principle of proportion). In no way does their upward mobility in the labour market uplift the conditions of the majority Dalits, i.e. working class Dalits, who to this day toil on other people’s fields or do back breaking and degrading work like manual scavenging. Again, at the level of education, reservation works in the favour of this petty bourgeois section. The fifteen percent reservation provided to Scheduled Caste (SC) students in government institutes for higher education works in the following way: out of every hundred seats, fifteen are reserved for SC students, and for these fifteen seats both petty bourgeois and working class Dalits are made to compete. Considering that the total number of Dalits who seek admission is always greater than the number of seats, the reserved seats end up being distributed according to ‘merit’. In this context the seats go to Dalits from the petty bourgeois class since they have had access to better schooling etc., and hence, are more ‘meritorious’.
In opposition to this expansive hegemony of the petty bourgeoisie is the work of Communist organizations. In the debate on franchise, for example, the Communist Party of India argued vociferously from the proletarian position. Communist leader Ranadive argued that all Dalits should be allowed to vote, and at a particular historical conjuncture even supported separate electorates. Ranadive openly criticized the representational form of politics supported by Ambedkar, and posited, instead, direct democracy to all people (with special provisions to the oppressed section having specific requirements). Communists also worked extensively within caste associations of the time such as the Mahar Samaj Sewa Sangh, thereby, strengthening endeavours of the Dalit movement to fight casteism prevalent at cultural and social levels. Joint teams, comprising of both “upper” castes and “untouchables”, were consciously sent to the anti-caste movement’s various sites of struggle (the Nasik Temple Satyagraha, etc.). It is also a fact that to unite the working class movement against casteism, communist trade unions made many individuals from “untouchable” castes the leaders of Mill Committees, and also, Presidents of All-India Conferences (Comrade Bhise, who was made President of the All India Textile Workers’ Conference, is an important example). In this regard, Communists also fought against the exclusion of “untouchable” castes from certain jobs. For example, during the 1928 general strike (the first general strike to be led by Communists) they demanded that Dalits be employed in the weaving department of textile mills across Bombay. Communist organizations also invested in and promoted individuals from the Dalit movement, who later became cultural icons of the Communist movement. The strategy of the Communist movement (embodied in the several tactics mentioned above), was tremendously successful in weaning away many Dalit leaders and activists from the folds of the petty bourgeois dominated Dalit movement. Indeed it was these Dalit communist leaders who led many landmark anti-caste struggles. For the record, it was Comrade R.B. More’s efforts which led to Dr. Ambedkar’s participation in the Mahar Satyagraha. R.B. More went onto join the Communist Party of India and represented a formidable link between the Dalit and Communist movement.
Similarly, in today’s context, we as a Communist youth organization actively send joint teams to protests against caste atrocities. To unite working class youth against casteism it consciously promotes leaders from Dalit working class backgrounds. This is why both its Delhi and Haryana state committees are headed by Dalit youth from families of agrarian workers. In the University context, the organization has been arguing for a change in the form in which reservation is implemented. By raising this particular demand on several platforms (including those hegemonized by the petty bourgeois class of Dalits), as well as through its neighbourhood work in working class colonies, KYS has constantly sought to expose the class divisions within the Dalit community. This strategy stems from the fact that its cadre base comes from working class youth.
Indeed, we are the only Left organization in Delhi University (DU) that invests considerable energy/resources (in terms of the number of cadre mobilized, monetary funds spent, etc.) in the admission process of SC/ST students. In fact, we are the only Left organization which remains available to Dalit students from day one of the registration process to the last day of the counseling session. Our demand for a different form of reservation’s implementation stems from the detailed observations we have made during this admission process (in particular, the exclusion of Dalit working class students). Considering the limited seats made available to Dalit students, we have found that most working class Dalits, i.e. children of agrarian labourers who come from neighbouring states like Haryana, Western U.P. and Rajasthan, are denied admission to DU. In this context we have come to demand two things:
i) That reservation should be modeled on a roster system, according to which seats are first allotted to working class Dalit students from government schools.
ii) That there should be an overall increase in the number of seats provided to Dalit students, and to those from the general category.
While the former demand is an important step in revealing the immediate tension between the two classes present in the Dalit community, the latter is a crucial step for building organization work/influence amongst the (discontent) working class segment present in upper castes as well (3). The latter demand helps the organization to expose the hollowness of upper caste pride as well as the lack of unity within upper castes due to the presence of class divisions within them. The synthesis of these two maneuvers not only helps build a successful anti-caste front but also develops a potent opposition to capitalism embodied in capitalist education policies. While a Dalit front can be co-opted by the system, an anti-caste front constituted of Dalit and non-Dalit working class and its allies will go beyond, both, the caste system and capitalism.
Hence, the synthesis of the two maneuvers mentioned above is what amounts to the medium highlighted earlier, i.e. uniting of the different sections of workers scattered across different identities. It is this medium that subsequently paves the way for a successful alliance to be forged with progressive sections of the petty bourgeoisie, i.e. an alliance based on the expansive hegemony of the working class.
To prove how necessary such an alliance is even for the petty bourgeoisie, we would like to draw attention to the recent struggle of engineering students enrolled in Delhi Technical University (DTU), or the erstwhile, Delhi School of Engineering, of which many of our members were part of. Early this year, students of DTU carried out a prolonged and very militant struggle to prevent the conversion of their institution from a central government recognized institute to a state government recognized institute. For a month the students’ struggle persisted and they even ensured hundred percent boycott of the annual examination. However, despite its militancy the students’ struggle met with failure. The reason behind this defeat was the failure of the engineering students to ally their struggle with the concerns of other oppressed and exploited sections in society. The movement remained student/university specific, thereby, failing to become a trans-local one. When participating in the DTU struggle, KYS highlighted the need for the engineering students to reach out to government schools students in the city. We argued that for students aspiring for higher education, the devaluation of the engineering degree was a genuine concern, and that it was necessary to galvanize school students on the issue. The rationale behind approaching government school students (working class students, to be precise) was that they depended heavily on central government-subsidized higher education. With DTU becoming a state government run institution, a massive fee hike was introduced along with several other detrimental changes. Working class school students would have been a crucial fighting force against this gradual privatization of education. Their presence in the DTU struggle would have terrorized the Delhi and central government into accepting all the demands of the movement. Perhaps, if we had more extensive work in government schools in the city, we could have won over the DTU students regarding this strategy of alliance. Currently, our youth organization has work amongst only four government schools and some polytechnic institutes in Delhi.
Friends, this is precisely why we are concerned with the question of United Front, albeit with a notion of the hegemony principle. Indeed, we are concerned with the petty bourgeois question, and this is namely for two key reasons. Firstly, because we are not sectarian, we do not attempt to raise working class struggles in isolation. We obviously think that any isolationist stand will simply reduce working class militants into smaller sects/progressive clubs. Secondly, we realize the petty bourgeois section is being proletarianized gradually, which then creates possibilities for its mobilization either by the working class movement, or, by fascist forces (that seek to keep alive the hegemony of the bourgeoisie).
To talk in more concrete terms of the situation in universities like Delhi University (DU), we do recognize the north campus as a site of struggle, where ‘students’ as a sociological entity (within which different class positions are present) is constituted by administrative policies like cut-offs, funding for hostel facility only in certain colleges, the provision of limited number of seats in existing college hostels, the subsequent exclusion of a large number students from hostels, and thereby, the compulsion for them to live on rent. In this context, we see two concrete demands emerge, which, if given a proper political form by a Left organization, have tremendous potential. One of these demands is rent regulation in Delhi and the second is the demand for more hostels. The issue of rent regulation is a unifying factor for it unifies petty bourgeois students (living on rent in PGs) with working class students and their families who live on rent. From this unity, more hostels can also be demanded and fought for effectively. In the context of DU another pertinent issue emerges, i.e. the problem of fee hikes. This issue, unfortunately, has not been properly theorized and tapped on by many Left student groups. The fact that ‘Left’ student organizations have been unable to tap on the issue and mobilize effectively on it, is because they have made the target of this struggle (i) second and third year college students who are not affected by fee hikes (considering college administrations introduce such hikes for first year students), and are hence, least interested; (ii) first year students whose admission is confirmed on the basis that they pay the hiked fees, and are hence, more interested in “moving on”. Thus, the issue of fee hike is best raised amongst government school students or those who are going to join DU, and hence, have an objective interest in fighting for subsidized higher education. Our larger point is that the constituency of university struggles lies, both, in students enrolled in the university and those outside the university, i.e. school students. This has been KYS’s strategy with respect to Delhi University, and in concrete terms, we have been going to school students with the following demands: (i) abolition of the cut off system; ii) roll back of fee hikes in universities.
We hope this detailed exposition of our understanding on student-youth politics, clears any doubts about our political credibility and the feasibility of our political initiatives. Perhaps, for a distant observer our critique of UCD may have initially seemed liquidationalist in “sectarian” tenor. However, how can we be accused of liquidating a forum that was self-contradictory, and thereby, collapsed under its own weight? In that sense the purpose of triggering the debate was simply to show the fact that UCD had collapsed.
To straighten the record, once and for all, wish to reiterate that our position on UCD is based on the fact that UCD lacked spontaneity of form. If there was a chance for spontaneity in the form of UCD’s politics to emerge, i.e., if evicted students themselves had started a movement, or, participated in large numbers, then we would have definitely waited and continued to participate in the forum. Nothing of this kind happened. Some independent Left-leaning individuals and representatives of different organizations came together to form a JOINT FORUM/FRONT, which should not be conflated with United Front (4). This is a fact well brought out by a UCD member, Devangana, in a lengthy introspective mail. According to such accounts, even before the initial meetings in D-School, the contours of UCD were being fixed by a circuit of people familiar with each other. Considering this, we as participants, insisted that the constitutive logic of the forum be left open to further discussion and debate. Unfortunately, this intervention on our behalf was continually written off by a subset of UCD, and we quote them on this, “…basically the KYS saw itself as an advisory committee whose only role would be to teach us how to conduct ourselves…” The tenor of such comments are really like the old saying “Don’t just talk, do something!” In reality, the problem was not that KYS “was not doing something” (we were taking initiatives both inside and outside the forum, as everyone was free to do), but that we were challenging preset agendas of UCD and its goals and direction. Indeed, there were many who played an inactive role in UCD, and KYS was not one of them. We were identified to the contrary because in the process of actively participating, we were constantly questioning the preset contours of UCD. However, now that the edifice of UCD has collapsed and the “new” socialists are in disarray, there are many well intentioned individuals like Devangana who are hopeful of evolving a better strategy and building a new form of politics. In this context, what comes to mind is Mao’s motto, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent”.
5. University Democracy or Going Beyond: A Contribution to the Critique of the University System
To sum up, we have been arguing that for student politics to become truly transformative (anti-systemic), it is imperative that Left organizations (and Left leaning individuals) address the class divisions present within the student body. It is only with consistent political work amongst working class students and working class youth (those who are not enrolled in universities) that organizations can build a stable and formidable base for a consistent anti-systemic movement. In this way, by connecting the university with the issues of youth excluded from it, organizations are building a unity which lasts despite the momentariness of student life and peculiarities of the university cycle. Further we have argued that without this political strategy, left organizations cannot build a base within non-working class students; the reason being that a form of politics which is devoid of working class students’ radicalism can only lead to partial (fleeting) radicalization of petty bourgeois students. As a result, it is only when a strong base has been created within working class students and youth that the issues of other students can be galvanized (forming United Fronts), effectively into an anti-systemic movement. In this context, we believe that perceiving university politics through the prism of campus democracy (something which all ‘Left’ organizations espouse to) is a self-defeating endeavour. In a polemical vein we have raised the following question: What ails university democrats? The answer: the disease is university (social) democracy itself.
Let us look more closely at the demand for campus democracy or democratic functioning in the university. As a demand it is present in many forms. We have those who argue that ‘democracy’ is a pertinent issue for all University youth, irrespective of class divisions within them. Thus, according to such formulations, campus democracy is a larger unifying demand with tremendous potential for building transformative politics. On the other hand, we have those who argue that students/university youth as workers have much to fight for against the current university system (internal assessment, regimented class programs, etc.). Here too the struggle for democratic functioning by university youth is considered an important and anti-systemic struggle. In other words, the operative part of this demand of campus democracy is the right of self-determinism, i.e., existing University students, teachers and other staff should have the right to run the University in ways they deem fit.
It is precisely here that the hollowness of campus democracy as a demand and as an agenda emerges. Why? Because campus democracy as an agenda is more Janus-faced than progressive. The call for ‘campus’ democracy is, after all, based on a minority of youth who make it to higher education. Needless to say, the inclusion of this minority that aspires for democracy is based on the exclusion of the majority of youth from the university system (embodied in the cut off system, continuous fee hikes, etc.). In many ways then campus democracy is based simply on the semblance of democracy. Drawing an analogy to the Greek republican tradition, one can say that campus democracy works in the very same way. Just as the Greeks built ‘democratic’ city states based on the division between citizens and slaves, university democrats and liberals of today are basing their university politics on the privileged few who make it to higher education. And just like the saying carved on the Greek academia’s portal, “only those who know geometry can enter”, university democrats and liberals of today are basically saying now that you have made it into the privileged inner circle, let us speak of democracy for us.
Apart from this the problem with campus democracy is also locatable in its emphasis. Its narrative and action plans are clearly based on questions of protocol. In other words, campus democracy’s emphasis is not on locating flaws in the system itself (capitalist education policies that exclude the majority from higher education), but in identifying secondary and contingent deviations such as corruption, violation of set procedure, lack of transparency, etc. Of course, these issues (of corruption, lack of transparency, etc.) can do very little when it comes to mobilization of university-youth. As pointed out by Naina in her last email, there is an obvious limitation to how much students can be radicalized using the demand for campus democracy. If the lifeline of campus democracy is the existing student population then there is a serious problem, for these people are not here to stay for long. Considering the university cycle, majority of students are here for a period of 3 to 5 years (the compulsion to work ensures that most do not have the staying power for further studies or research work), and by the time campus democracy as an issue can radicalize them (if it can), it is time for them to go. What then do we achieve if the base of our struggle itself is unstable?
It is a fact that this university cycle has become so engrained in the politics of ‘Left’ student organizations that now an instrumentalist notion of cadre building has developed within them. In other words, since students are enrolled in the university only for a limited period of time, ‘left’ organizations on campus seek to make their presence felt amongst them using the politics of spectacle. Student organizers have come to count their voting figures as the index of their success, which leads them to use (again and again) temporary political activities as a means to draw attention. The emphasis and political logic of these ‘left’ organizations are no longer based on long term plans for taking youth politics forward, but simply, about gathering electoral support or cadre building (which is very often based on little consciousness raising and ideological training). As a result of planning from one academic session to another, these organizations have failed to work intensively and consistently amongst working class students. This failure is embodied in the fact that despite their existence on campus, these ‘left’ organizations are unable to galvanize the support of working class students. Instead of being seen with ‘Left’ student organizations, working class students can be seen with ABVP goons and NSUI lumpens. Ironically, in the battles to save ‘campus democracy’ we are thrown against working class students (coming from peripheral colleges) who have sided with ABVP goons and NSUI lumpens. This happens because student organizations of the ruling class manipulate to their advantage, the discontent prevailing in working class students. They are successful in doing so because ‘left’ student organizations fail to identify the class discontent of these working class students, and hence, give this discontent a progressive form (and radical articulation). In this context, when working class students, (coming mostly from peripheral colleges but also from some north campus colleges of DU), attack us vehemently during brawls between ‘left’ student organizations and ABVP/NSUI; we must realize why they do so. It is because of an enmity stemming from their class position, which then ultimately translates into them despising ‘leftists’. Their enmity characterizes ‘leftists’ as “cool-daddy’s boys”, liberal, oddly dressed, long haired, persons (weirdos). Until we engage with their class discontent can we really wean them away from fascist forces? And can we win ‘the battle of democracy’ without them?
Indeed, the paradox is that campus democracy itself is not strong enough to save its own tenor from the onslaught of government policies. The problem is that it cannot stand on its own: something is missing in its edifice. We believe the missing link is the involvement of working class students and youth. As highlighted above with respect to the issue of fee hikes and the DTU students’ protest, struggles against the onslaught of capitalist education policies can only meet with success once such struggles spill out of the university. Since such policies affect working class youth the most, it is imperative that university students engage actively with class divisions within them, and persistently connect their oppression with concerns of working class youth who are denied admission to universities. If they do so the content as well as the form of university politics will drastically change, and indeed, change for the better. As long as students from petty bourgeois backgrounds are not exposed to the pull and push of the radicalized working class youth politics, they are liable to be co-opted by the ruling ideology and system in place. With a few relaxations here and there, with a few generous grants released now and then, with every small gesture of ‘democratic’ functioning, the prevailing education system can win over majority of petty bourgeois students. Even as we speak, it is doing precisely this. Thus, the petty bourgeois student’s militancy needs another axis for transformative politics to even take root. It needs another vision and it needs a different set of goals so as to take on the current education system. On allying with working class youth, petty bourgeois students will learn to question the very logic of the system in place (embodied in the principle of exclusion of the majority from education), rather than just raising issues of poor implementation, corruption, etc. They will learn that the working class is not only to be found in villages and slums, but within them and around them, and that victory lies in allying with working class issues.
Friends, let our struggles be based on the demand for going beyond empty notions of democracy. Let us, in other words, struggle both within and outside the university so that youth politics comes to be based on a constant linking of issues within the university with those outside (YET CONNECTED to) it.
Notes:
(1) The latter tendency existed in another variant form, which supported the continuation of the movement on the basis of agrarian workers but called for a change in the methods pursued.
(2) Unfortunately, many times without a close reading of documents, the early Comintern’s endeavours as well as communist activities are wrongly identified as propagating “the praxis of the United Front (from above)”. If this had been the political approach of the Comintern, then, rather than a United Front it would have basically propagated the creation of joint fronts of leaders from different organizations. However, the involvement of the masses and the need to wean them away from bourgeois oppositional formations was the emphasis of the Comintern and its strategy of United Front.
(3) Interestingly, there is a third position on this issue of reservation, according to which reservation should neither be opposed nor supported. Instead, another measure, i.e. education for all, should be pursued. The problem with this position (and its abstract demand) is that it fails to tap on the specific dynamics of class conflict prevalent in different caste identities.
(4) UCD’s formation, at most, can be termed a United Front in proxy or a United Front from above which clearly lacked a mass bass. Considering the nature of the forum, it was imperative for participants who were Marxist, to ensure that the proletarian line was not diluted.
First, an axiomatic assertion: the communist conception of the United Front is by no means meant to enable the politics of liberal consensus to come into its own. If anything, it is meant to extinguish the condition of possibility for such politics. The United Front – at least in the realm of revolutionary communist theory – has always been envisaged as a programmatic concept of advance-through-generalisation for the capital-unraveling politics of the proletariat, even as it steers clear of the trap of substituting overgeneralised sectarianism for real, essential unity among concretely varied working-class locations.
This essence of the communist concept and practice of the United Front is most at stake in the ongoing polemical exchanges between the New Socialist Initiative-led University Community for Democracy (UCD) and the Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS). Yet, unfortunately, it is precisely this politico-theoretical essence that has been lost in the fog of those polemics. The NSI, which has to all intents and purposes been the key organising and driving force behind the UCD, clearly envisages socialist United Front politics, discernible in its defence of the current shape and directionality of the UCD, as one of consensus between various social blocs and classes in their ostensibly common struggle against the manoeuvres of dominant politico-economic and socio-political forms of capitalism in the specific location of the university and its neighbourhood. On the other hand, the KYS has, its intentions to the contrary notwithstanding, failed to free the revolutionary impulse – which underpins its otherwise absolutely valid criticism of the UCD as a material embodiment of the politics and ideology of liberal consensus (essentially integral to the hegemony of capitalism) – from the fetish of the historical specificity of its own experience. As a consequence, its otherwise legitimate polemic against the UCD and the NSI has failed to overcome its sectarian tenor and ignite a substantive debate.
The following is a rejoinder drafted by University Community for Democracy to the pamphlet circulated by Krantikari Yuva Sangathan titled “What is Ailing University Democrats”. We will first present what we see as certain basic misconceptions and flawed assumptions at work in way KYS has understood UCD, and then proceed to factually refute a number of statements made in their pamphlet.
UCD is a platform primarily consisting of students and some teachers of Delhi University. It was formed when many of us who were deeply offended by the way the University authorities had decided to evict students from their legitimate right to hostel accommodation decided to come together and protest against this eviction. In the course of our discussions, we concluded that the callous behaviour of the University administration in this instance had to be linked to a larger pattern of increasingly irresponsible and authoritarian governance in Delhi University. Hence, we decided to call ourselves University Community for Democracy. For us, democracy is a mode of governance and organisation which is transparent, open and inclusive. At the same time, while each organisation and individual harbours its own ideological worldview, the fact of coming together on this platform has not been to absolve those differences but to come together with a basic common understanding of the problem at hand. It is, therefore, a coming together of those from the Left and not elsewhere. While demanding our democratic space from University authorities we have also tried to realise what democracy can be for us in our own workings as a platform. All our meetings are held in the open (most of them have been held in the lawns of Delhi School of Economics), all decisions are taken in these open meetings, which are duly recorded in minutes put up on freely accessible internet forums. We do not claim to be saviour of anyone in the University, the downtrodden, the working classes or the poor. We have no claim to be any revolution’s vanguard, or harbingers of a future ideal society. However, each of us is actively engaging with how we want to visualise an ideal society. Ideologically some of us are committed Marxists, some are liberals, while most of us are still exploring our paths in the world of ideas and commitments. Some of us are members of other organisations. All we demand is that these not be reactionary, communal, sexist or casteist.
The KYS pamphlet demonstrates their failure to understand this basic character of the UCD. The central paradox in their formulation is that they see the UCD as an organisation. It isn’t. UCD was always conceived as a network of those who shared a basic understanding of a common problem afflicting both the University in particular and in the city in general. So when the weaknesses of UCD are pointed out, it seem to assume that UCD is an organisation with a defined manifesto in rivalry with (and thereby judged retrograde in comparison to) another organisation like KYS, whereas UCD was loosely assembled as a forum precisely for individuals and organisations like KYS and NSI to ally their valuable experience with mobilisation and work together. The very fact that KYS has criticised UCD for its politics vis-à-vis KYS demonstrates that they saw themselves separate from it, and thereby missed the spirit behind which the network was formed. Indeed, one could go on to argue that the very distinction drawn between UCD and KYS as distinct organisations confirms the strange sense of competitiveness one sensed throughout from KYS members when they consistently spoke (and Sujit reinforces this sense in his reply to Bala) of some issues, such as rent regulation, as rightfully their forte, given that they raised it months before UCD was born. The fact is that UCD was never in competition in KYS, for the efforts of KYS members was considered part of what UCD was meant to be. That is why one was rather bewildered when one found KYS drafting pamphlets on concerns that overlapped with those of the UCD without once informing or involving fellow members in the UCD. Indeed, upon being confronted on this issue, KYS members spoke of their struggle as a “separate” one that needed no prior permission from the UCD. This position seemed to miss the point entirely (no one was demanding that KYS ask for ‘permission’ anyway), for it assumed that the two groups were rivals competing for the same political claims rather than colleagues fighting in the same battle. This attitude, destructive to cooperative participation and petty, to say the least, also finds its way into Sujit’s so-called ‘critique’.
It is also for this reason that one wonders at the naïveté of those who claim that attacking the behaviour of KYS members is a ‘personal attack’, as if the ‘personal’ is somehow a pristine space cleansed of politics and ideology. Indeed, the questions being raised about KYS members’ personal maturity is an intensely political question, especially given that (and this will be understood by those who regularly attended the meetings and did the work) the same KYS members rarely leant themselves to the actual labour of UCD activity (drafting and printing posters and pamphlets, campaigning in colleges, etc). Surely one’s own physical contribution is as much a measure of one’s politics as ideological contestations about the working class. In that sense, it is not simply “fashionable activism” to ask the question of who did what, for some have consistently worked harder than others to make the UCD campaign successful, and those ‘some’ have a right to be ‘resentful’ when others who never fully contributed to that process later claim that the process was undemocratic and politically flawed. The question needs to be asked: as UCD members, what did the KYS members do to improve the process? Having had all the problems they had, at what point did they make the space their own to do something about it? Merely making suggestions at meetings for others to implement is not enough.
Speaking of making suggestions, the KYS pamphlet claims that the valuable ones made by KYS members were “swept under the carpet as mere issues of modus operandi or as divisive tactics”. Besides being factually untrue, as the minutes of the meetings show, it is rather reductive to claim that an imperative to focus on a meeting’s agenda is tantamount to undemocratic repression of criticism. Any member of any organisation knows that meetings have to be conducted with a certain discipline, and cannot simply become occasions for everyone to mouth their opinions on any matter generally concerning the organisation (we hope KYS meetings function with this discipline as well). Those larger questions are of course very important, and it was even felt that a separate meeting should be called specifically in order to discuss the ideological differences that had been raised in previous meetings. Alok, a KYS representative and member of the UCD, was categorically asked to take the initiative to decide a time for the meeting. But taking initiative is precisely what KYS members haven’t been doing in the UCD campaign, so it isn’t surprising that such a meeting was never held.
The KYS pamphlet confirms our argument when it states that “in the very beginning in UCD meetings there have been activists and organisations that have questioned the constituting logic of the forum” (emphasis added). So basically the KYS saw itself as an advisory committee whose only role would be to teach us how to conduct ourselves, to point out faults in our “constituting logic” before it had even been built! This brings us back to our earlier point: UCD wasn’t allowed to grow because KYS seemed determined to see themselves as critical outsiders rather than as participative insiders. They were quick to criticise at every step of the way, without contributing offering concrete suggestions or constructive proposals on what alternative to follow. Many members found this behaviour by KYS members disruptive, and their objections have been noted in the minutes of more than one meeting. In this regard, refer to the minutes of the following meeting:
Minutes of UCD meeting on 22nd July 2010 – pertaining to an incident on 21st July
“The meeting today began with a discussion on the issue of an incident at Hans Raj College where the KYS and CSW (who are members of the UCD) were distributing their organisational parchas and running a parallel campaign on similar issue at a time when they had committed to UCD work – they were to be at Daulat Ram college as part of the UCD college campaign. The discussion was hoping to arrive at a sense of how we will work together as a collective and proceed with our campaign in a democratic manner, without fragmenting into competing campaigns, since most people felt that the UCD is a collective for moving ahead with the issues offset by the Commonwealth Games in the city, and now, the more specific issue of hostel evictions in the university”.
“Also, while everybody agreed that there was absolutely no issue with the fact of individuals and groups will be part of separate agendas and campaigns, we did think it necessary that we must not allow this to become disruptive to our campaign’s efforts. That was raised in the context of how the KYS and CSW apart from absenting from the slotted work at the slotted time for UCD activities were conducting their own campaign on rent regulation (an issue that had come up in the previous meeting to be brought out in the next UCD parcha) and demand for more hostels, and even while they distributed their pamphlets they did not distribute the UCD pamphlets. Some members of the UCD who went to Hanraj yesterday when they came to know about it, brought up the incident in the meeting as an issue of honesty and trust of the collective which consists of individuals, groups as well as organisations. KYS did apologise for the comments by a member of their team. The latter was quoted saying that their campaign and pamphlet were better than that of UCD”.
“While members of the KYS and CSW said that their being at Hans Raj was a result of confusion, there was disagreement about this since it was seen as a breach of trust, going against the spirit of this campaign and collective. While some members assumed KYS and CSW had stepped out of the campaign already, KYS and CSW denied such a claim”.
“Finally, to end the matter a resolution was passed in the house stating that there was a case of misconduct by KYS and CSW relating to the incidents of the previous day. (Out of 24 people, 14 voted in favour of the resolution, 4 voted against, 6 abstained from voting)”.
In this regard, one could even call the KYS duplicitous, because they wore down the UCD at a time when, unlike KYS, it was still a very new campaign at an early stage of its formation. Thus, while their 5,297 words of vitriolic diatribe might sound radical to those dissociated with the workings of the campaign, we maintain that to decry a process one never contributed to help or improve is possibly the most flawed form of politics. When theory cannot give direction to praxis it is rendered meaningless.
And now we have this long litany of accusations against us, trying to prove how we are not an organisation that can lead students of oppressed classes for a joint struggle with the working class to destroy class and emancipate the world. Both the KYS pamphlet and Sujit’s reply to Bala is littered with rather self-conscious references to “petty-Bourgeois” backgrounds as somehow endangering one’s commitment to politics. Perhaps KYS has to ask itself whether experiential politics can be stretched to such an idealtypical situation that anyone who is not dalit/poor/muslim/woman/gay/tribal cannot speak, as if access to capital necessarily yields a flawed political subjectivity. Of course it is important to remember one’s class position, but there is also something to be said for those still trying to become politicised despite their privileged subject positions. Mocking these attempts the way the KYS pamphlet does is precisely what discourages fellow “petty-Bourgeois” folk from making even that small effort, and makes politics into a club rather than a movement. That is the brand of politics KYS espouses, and it is not one we endorse. Thus, when KYS accuses us of not being this or that, the irony of the matter is that we have never claimed to be what KYS accuses us of not being! Unlike the KYS, we do not use Left rhetoric merely as a means to vilify, nor are we impressed by KYS’ attempts to claim the moral high-ground by claiming to work for the oppressed and exploited of this country (itself a suspect claim). For most of us in the UCD, our work has been a discovery of the politics of democracy and protest. We are not here to wear medals for being the most radical. If we were, then KYS has already declared itself the winner, and we happily concede them the title.
***
The following section consists of a point-wise rejoinder to the slanderous allegations the KYS has levelled against the UCD. Sections of the KYS pamphlet have been reproduced in bold and our responses follow in standard lettering. We have not commented on all the factual inaccuracies, for there are far too many and unlike KYS, we have work to do for our campaign. What we have highlighted are only the sections that disturb us the most. We have also consciously chosen not to respond to the large passages in the KYS pamphlet that pontificate about the nature of the working class. There are countless critiques and counter-critiques of their position within Marxist theory, and doing so here will digress from our major points of contention. Nevertheless we thank them for their effort to educate all of us.
1. Regarding teachers and internal assessment
These teachers, acting as pied-pipers and humming the threatening tune of internal assessment, drew their hapless students to the venue by taking their classes there. Students (the majority of whom were oblivious to the issues raised), were obviously not taken into confidence when they were made to come to the “hunger strike” site.
This is a straight lie. No students were ever threatened with internal assessment. Moreover, we are offended by the cavalier recklessness with which KYS questions the credibility of teachers who have been crucial for stimulating progressive debate in the University for decades, and who have stood by the student community in countless cases of injustice against students.
2. Regarding rent regulation
Let us take the example of rent regulation raised during the “hunger strike”. Firstly, UCD began its campaign with absolutely no concrete demand of rent regulation. The forum was forced to pick up the issue of rent regulation in addition to the issue of hostel eviction because it was constantly accosted by the majority of students who had never even lived in college hostels, and had for a long time been faced with the problem of escalating rents. There was also urgency in making rent regulation an active demand of the UCD campaign because some other organisations had already launched a full-fledged campaign on rent regulation in the city. Hence, it was more in a competitive spirit than with any serious commitment and understanding on the issue that rent regulation became part of UCD’s charter of demands.
Please check our very first parcha, released on . It reads: “It (University) has thus become an accomplice in the larger processes of reckless corporatisation that the whole city is undergoing in the bid of become a ‘global city’. This has left students at the mercy of private accommodation, with its unregulated rents and precarious guarantees. Rents are rising in anticipation of the increased demand for PGs and flats, forcing many existing residents to move out and making accommodation unaffordable for incoming residents as well. The University had made no attempt to devise a mechanism to control or subsidise rents”.
Please also refer to the minutes of the following meetings:
“There were concerns shared about whether we would like to gradually broaden this to wider struggles in the city. It was accepted that we would be broadening our ideas gradually and linking it to wider struggles. This is why we have tried to form a larger forum and this is a campaign within it at the moment” (the ‘this’ we are talking about is the campaign concerning hostel evictions).
“There was a brief discussion about what our approach should be gradually, if we should focus on hostel evictions or also give more prominence to the issue of unregulated rents and problems in the neighbourhood since many students live in private accommodation”.
The very fact that KYS makes this claim despite all this history is itself evidence of the competitiveness prevalent behind the KYS’ anxiety to declare their campaign on rent regulation as the only legitimate one, and to declare all others as motivated “more in a competitive spirit than with any serious commitment”.
3. Regarding the decision to approach University authorities
This is precisely why UCD’s “hunger strike” targeted the audience in Arts Faculty (a transit point for the student/ teaching community), and not any tangible authority (which in this case should really have been the Government of Delhi). And this is why the best that UCD can do on the issue of rent is to demand rent regulation from the Dean of Colleges! Quite rightly, their delegation was informed by the Dean of her incapability to regulate rents since this was way beyond the University authorities’ jurisdiction and responsibility. We return to the fundamental question: why does the University remain the centre of UCD’s resistance when authorities beyond the Vice Chancellor are to blame, and when there are many people apart from students/teachers who are adversely affected by unregulated rents?
We approached the University authorities – the Vice Chancellor – because he is responsible for ensuring a safe, affordable accommodation for the students of Delhi University. In the past (2006) there have been attempts to enlist all those PGs and private accommodation places with the University in order to centrally keep a check on rents. Similarly, on the issue of workers, being the principal employer the University is again directly responsible for seeing to it that workers are paid minimum wages and have proper housing and access to basic facilities.
4. Regarding visit to Bhalaswa
UCD now seeks to locate the working class and its struggle in a far off resettlement colony called Bhalaswa. Unfortunately, judging by recent email correspondences between UCD and students of the Women’s Development Cell (WDC) in Miranda House, the trips to Bhalaswa are being envisaged by the students more as extra-curricular activities. This indicates that UCD’s form of politics is really incapable of building a long-standing and formidable unity between the student community and working class.
It was decided in the very beginning of the campaign that UCD would establish connections with others in the city affected by the Games. It was felt that since students were not the only ones held hostage by the Games, it was necessary to forge ties of solidarity with other organisations working on overlapping concerns, while recognising that our constituency remained the University. In the case of Bhalaswa, we were extended an invitation by people working with Bhalaswa Lok Shakti Manch to come and visit their resettlement colony. The trip was not an official UCD objective, and the students who went did so in the capacity of individuals wishing to extend their support to the Bhalaswa movement.
Please refer to the minutes of the following meeting:
“Kaveri forwarded a message which came from the group from Bhulaswa who came for the protest meeting saying that people interested in visiting the Bhulaswa resettlement site could do so on Tuesday. Please leave your number so that this can be arranged”.
In any case, even if the trip had been an official UCD activity, it would still not justify the KYS’ mocking epithet “extra-curricular”. Most of us may never know what it is like to be a construction worker or a displaced adivasi, but visiting places like Bhalaswa is valuable in and of itself as the smallest of attempts to understand the plight of others, even if it can’t bring about the revolution of the working class that KYS is obviously so successful in doing.
5. Regarding workers’ protest
The same day that UCD began its “relay hunger strike”, workers down the road were protesting against their severe exploitation under various CWG construction projects. UCD failed to respond and join the struggle. The message, therefore, sent out was clear enough—we will participate only when we are in charge and not workers, and we will raise workers’ issues only as an addition to our never-ending list of “democratic” demands. Considering this, are not the issues of workers’ rights being raised in tokenism, i.e. only when it suits them?
Do not brush aside the practical aspects of the campaign. We are not a trade union. We are too small a force to claim to organise workers at the construction sites all over the University. If we were 250 people, we might have been able to attempt to organise workers, but when those actually willing to labour for the campaign number 20 or less at any given time, we cannot (it would have helped if KYS had added to our numbers of working campaigners). But as a university community we have stood against construction work in the University that violates legally sanctioned labour standards, and have integrated it into our demands. Also, the decision to sit on a relay hunger strike was taken well over a week before it began and posters had been put up. Meanwhile, the KYS/CSW workers protest was decided and its posters put up a day before. And then too, in at least three different venues we found that KYS/CSW had pasted their posters corner to corner over UCD ones. If this is not malicious what is?).
6. Regarding Gandhi Ashram
The first pamphlet printed by the UCD spoke of the need to build communes in places off campus. In fact, a team met with the management of a Gandhian trust (funded by Ministry of Social Justice) which ran a hostel near Kingsway Camp, called Gandhi Ashram. The place soon began to be promoted via e-mails etc. almost like any other private accommodation; the purpose being to provide a space for those still desperately looking for affordable accommodations and also to provide a space for regrouping when things got rough during the campaign. Ironically, the Gandhi Ashram hostel is meant for poor Dalit school students who were obviously going to be displaced if college students moved into the dormitories. No one seemed to reckon with this inevitability while the plan was still being hatched.
What we also found disturbing about the Gandhi Ashram plan was the desire of creating an isolated “democratic” space. The message being sent out was nothing but we can create our own isolated commune-like space in this big bad world. This approach stems from the sectarian University-centric politics of the UCD highlighted above, and also from a non-revolutionary conceptualisation of commune life. For many participants in UCD, the commune with its base in Gandhi Ashram was an apparent ‘pre-figuration’ of a new society, whereas it was far from that. Commune was being envisaged as a centre of ‘counter-culture’—an oasis in capitalist wilderness. Interestingly, this is a very familiar trope—it is based, both at once, on a vision of a transformed society without real hope for a process of transformation. This is because it is based on the vision that the lives of a minority can magically change without transforming the whole. This is, after all, how (phantom) revolution itself, is envisaged according to the pipe-dreams (joint-dreams?) of petty bourgeois students/intellectuals who enjoy the comforts/security of generous remittances from home—‘let us, at least, as a small privileged community enjoy revolution making’.
Of course, as pointed out by us in the meetings, it was nothing but ridiculous that UCD spoke of building a commune in a place which was actually going to be charging the students Rs. 1500 per bed and where 6 to 8 women students would have to live per room. How can a commune work within a market structure, and how can a place which gives you no control on the rules and regulations to be implemented, become a progressive, commune-like accommodation?! Despite these criticisms, UCD went ahead and would have signed a MoU with the Gandhi Ashram management, if it wasn’t for the sheer lack of students interested in the place. In fact, just so as to get students to join the bandwagon, emails were sent out exaggerating the facilities available at Gandhi Ashram. In the interest of pulling a crowd, the green lawns of the Ashram were highlighted. Meanwhile, it was downplayed that no fooding would be available at the place and that this was going to be a
dormitory system.
The lies continue. Firstly, Gandhi Ashram was visualised as a means to tackle the practical problem of students who couldn’t find safe and affordable accommodation (particularly girls, who also face the problem of safety). We never claimed it to be an isolated island of counter-culture, but yes, a space where those resorting to that accommodation could critically engage with the problem at hand, and therefore with ideas like a community kitchen. No Dalit students were going to be displaced, because the rooms being given to us were at that time unused. A member of KYS was even present as part of the team that went to Gandhi Ashram to figure out the modalities of making this arrangement. No facilities were ever “advertised”, and all that was publicly declared was the availability of Gandhi Ashram as an option (though of course, if KYS sees any form of publicisation, whether press releases to the media or circulation through emails, as part of a larger Bourgeois capitalist conspiracy, we advise them to kindly sharpen their political understanding; sophomoric regurgitations of Das Kapital isn’t going to cut it). Not once was it thought of as a final solution, but only as a temporary arrangement for students who had not found or could not afford accommodation elsewhere.. Regarding food arrangements, we were in discussion with the Ashram authorities about the possibility of expanding kitchen facilities. And as for the charge of Rs.1500 per month, that price is about one-fourth the cost of accommodation in the outlying regions of North Campus. At any rate, not once did KYS members suggest an alternative to Gandhi Ashram as a possible venue to rehabilitate students who could not afford anything else, which is ironic given their constant chest-thumping about being champions of the poor. Instead of appreciating the attempt made to lend some respite to students while carrying on the work of politicisation through the campaign, all the KYS members seem capable of doing is ill-intentioned criticism and hysterical slander.
***
We hope this rejoinder will put to rest the false allegations made by KYS against UCD. We do not have any faith in KYS’ capacity to introspect about the falsity of their claims. We only hope that the wider audience privy to this debate will learn to take KYS statements with a pinch of salt. Our experience with the KYS has been one big negative lesson, and we are glad that our work now proceeds far more productively and democratically. Anybody wishing to know more about the UCD, to really see how it functions for themselves, is always welcome to visit us on our face-book page, to join our googlegroups mailing list, or to attend our meetings. We are always open.
Delhi State Committee,
Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS)
…THE INTELLECTUALS WILL ACCOMPLISH NOTHING IF
THEY FAIL TO INTEGRATE THEMSELVES
WITH THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS…
Mao Tse-tung
NOTE: This is a review and summation of the proceedings of the forum, University Community for Democracy (UCD). UCD is constituted of different individuals who may or may not belong to organizations. Apart from some dominant tendencies which we have criticized below, the forum has some well-intentioned individuals who have increasingly become discontent with UCD’s functioning. We have prepared this piece for internal discussion within our organization, but due to requests from certain friends in UCD, we are going public with it. It encompasses many points of criticism which we often raised in UCD meetings.
Recently, some University teachers and students in the north campus of Delhi University have been running a campaign under the banner of the UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY FOR DEMOCRACY (UCD). To use the words of the campaign’s founding members, the campaign is committed to fighting against “shrinking democratic space in the University”. The focus of the campaign has particularly been on the eviction of college students from university hostels, in the wake of the Commonwealth Games. A section of “left” intellectuals and “progressive” activists can be seen allying themselves with this forum. It has become fashionable for some to be seen in its meetings and, for those who navigate more in the realms of virtual reality, to trail the forum’s activities in cyberspace.
However, in the very beginning in UCD meetings there have been activists and organizations that have questioned the constituting logic of the forum. Most of such criticism was swept under the carpet as mere issues of modus operandi or as divisive tactics. The validity of the criticism raised was often lost to many of the forum’s participants who were hostile to organization structure, and hence, to criticisms coming from organizations. Even when some of our points of criticism were noted they were hardly addressed in a manner that reassured us of UCD’s commitment to the issues raised. The following pages are a delineation of this unfortunate fact.
At a time when the Commonwealth Games (CWG) are the focus of the media, many activities of the UCD come across more as publicity gimmicks than anything else. It is important for many of the forum’s participants to be seen resisting the Games but to do that they have to mobilize people on issues close to them. With little understanding on the issues concerning different people, UCD raises them in an opportunistic vein, just so as to galvanize different issues and use them. In reality CWG is the starting point and be all and end all of their resistance. And no matter how earnestly UCD denies it, this has been their strategy because right now the Games are the highlight of the season. Even before the University opened and the campaign could take proper shape; there were overt attempts to reach the media for coverage (such as forming media coordination teams and releasing press statements).
Even the “relay hunger strike”, or rather “skip one’s lunch” strike was no exception (it is interesting to note that UCD members sat on “hunger strike” from 9am to 9pm, which basically means they did not sacrifice their breakfast and dinner—In reality a relay hunger strike is continuous, and, thereby, includes people sitting on hunger strike twenty four hours—the term relay refers to somebody ending their hunger strike and another person taking their place). Since a “hunger strike” by University students and teachers is an eye-catching story for the media, it was more important to be seen in this act of drama even if the demands of those on “hunger strike” stood thoroughly misplaced. Sadly, so as to project a significant gathering at the venue of the “hunger strike”, students were actually subjected to authoritarian tactics by teachers supportive of UCD. These teachers, acting as pied-pipers and humming the threatening tune of internal assessment, drew their hapless students to the venue by taking their classes there. Students (the majority of whom were oblivious to the issues raised), were obviously not taken into confidence when they were made to come to the “hunger strike” site.
The fact that the demands of those on “hunger strike” were misplaced reflects nothing but a sheer lack of seriousness and understanding on the issues raised. It was the form in which the “relay hunger strike” raised certain demands that was highly problematic for it reeked of sheer opportunism and sectarianism. Let us take the example of rent regulation raised during the “hunger strike”. Firstly, UCD began its campaign with absolutely no concrete demand of rent regulation. The forum was forced to pick up the issue of rent regulation in addition to the issue of hostel eviction because it was constantly accosted by the majority of students who had never even lived in college hostels, and had for a long time been faced with the problem of escalating rents. There was also urgency in making rent regulation an active demand of the UCD campaign because some other organizations had already launched a full-fledged campaign on rent regulation in the city. Hence, it was more in a competitive spirit than with any serious commitment and understanding on the issue that rent regulation became part of UCD’s charter of demands.
To further delineate the opportunism with which the issue of rent was finally raised by UCD, we would like to bring the reader’s attention to the fact that although they are now talking of rent control; escalating rents are actually being conceptualized as a University neighbourhood problem rather than a general problem for migrants coming to the city (for further illustration of this point please see CSW and KYS’s paper). This is precisely why UCD’s “hunger strike” targeted the audience in Arts Faculty (a transit point for the student/teaching community), and not any tangible authority (which in this case should really have been the Government of Delhi). And this is why the best that UCD can do on the issue of rent is to demand rent regulation from the Dean of Colleges! Quite rightly, their delegation was informed by the Dean of her incapability to regulate rents since this was way beyond the University authorities’ jurisdiction and responsibility. We return to the fundamental question— why does the University remain the centre of UCD’s resistance when authorities beyond the Vice Chancellor are to blame, and when there are many people apart from students/teachers who are adversely affected by unregulated rents? To the reader who might still believe that raising the issue of rent regulation at the University level is perhaps what is immediately feasible for UCD, we have one question—has the life of the minority ever drastically changed without a transformation in the life of the majority? For example, can an individual educated woman today feel hundred percent secure and confident in a work space when the majority of women in society are still perceived as objects of sexual consumption and undeserving of career opportunities? Friends, the answer is no and experience has taught us that.
The question of the sectarian political approach of UCD was raised several times in the meetings. As argued by us in such meetings, issues and demands should really be raised in a way that they appeal to a larger section of people affected by the state’s inaction and its collusion with private business interests. In this way we connect concerns, struggles and militancy of different sections of people who are often segregated from each other due to the functioning of the system in place. For example, the student community and workers find themselves separated by work schedules, their class backgrounds, spatial settings/norms (in terms of workers being restricted to the space of factories/work sites and students to the space of their classrooms), etc. As a result we need a politics that paves the way for a combined struggle by the different oppressed sections of society. And it is only a combined struggle that can create an effective front of resistance to the onslaught of oppression and exploitation we are witness to. However, more than a generalized struggle against recent developments in the city, UCD’s initiatives are more sectarian than anything else. In fact, their particularized (University-CWG-centric) struggle is nothing but the substitution of the generalized working class struggle by ‘middle’ class intellectualism.
Mobilization of workers and strengthening of the working class movement is essential because in our society it is the working class that is in the majority. Its labour creates profit, rent and basically all the resources in society. Understandably then, if the working class fights back the whole system is paralyzed. Apart from the fact that it is the direct object of the most fundamental and determinative form of oppression and exploitation in capitalist society, the working class is the revolutionary class also because its interests do not rest on the oppression of other classes. In fact, precisely because its objective interest for its own emancipation is the destruction of class, it can create conditions for the liberation of all human beings in the struggle to liberate itself.
Thus, contrary to the middle class intellectual’s popular perception of the working class as just another identity asserted along with numerous other identities, the working class is actually a social positioning and not an identity. It is a position which is spread over different kinds of identities, and determines how and when the different identities will assert themselves. It is ultimately through the position of the working class that different identities can be united and radicalized into a wider anti-systemic struggle that goes beyond the form in which society exists. Realizing this, ‘old’ socialism has maintained the working class as its base and has constantly assessed the dynamics of the process of class in order to pursue its politics. ‘New’ socialism on the other hand, has made students/intellectuals their constituting base. In reality, however, students/intellectuals are divided amongst different class trajectories. To put it more accurately, students abstracted from their class position have come to be envisaged as agents of ‘new’ socialism. Indeed, ‘student radicalism’ which is actively promoted by ‘new’ socialism is a by-product of making students an identity devoid of class.
It is a fact that students who join universities like Delhi University (DU), are from different classes. The trend in DU is that students from working class backgrounds generally join the peripheral and evening colleges of DU. They are mostly youth who: a) have studied in government schools, b) come from the Hindi medium background, c) who do not usually get admission to college hostels considering their 12th class schooling, d) are those who really struggle to cope with rising college fees and English medium teaching/coursework. Students from petty bourgeois backgrounds are quite the opposite—a significant number of them have studied in respectable public schools, get admission to the best north and south campus colleges of DU, and are generally the first to get admission to the limited college hostels of DU.
As a result of this abstraction of students’ class backgrounds, forums such as UCD end up raising issues of students in a manner which isolates them from the issues of the working class. This reduces the possibilities of unity between the student community and the working class. To delineate this fact it is best to highlight the issue of rent regulation again. Rather than identifying rent as a problem affecting the student/teaching community as well as workers (most of whom live on rent near industrial belts in Delhi), UCD chose to raise the problem of rent only within the ambit of the University area, and demanded rent regulation from University authorities alone. By refusing to raise rent as a generalized concern of migrants in the city, UCD has simply encouraged the student community to see this as a problem specific to them. Having effaced the issue of class struggle in the immediate locality (the immediate locality being issues of working class youth/students/construction workers, etc. in the University), UCD now seeks to locate the working class and its struggle in a far off resettlement colony called Bhalaswa. Unfortunately, judging by recent email correspondences between UCD and students of the Women’s Development Cell (WDC) in Miranda House, the trips to Bhalaswa are being envisaged by the students more as extra-curricular activities. This indicates that UCD’s form of politics is really incapable of building a long-standing and formidable unity between the student community and working class. Its politics, in fact, inculcates within students a PHILANTHROPIC approach to working class issues, and little or no realization of the significance of class struggle for the transformation of our society. Instead of unity and combined struggle, UCD’s form of politics inculcates a perception/political tendency in the student movement to i) see the working class as a “mass of laboring poor” and not as a class which embodies itself even in the student constituency, ii) to perceive the issues of the working class as markedly different from those of students, and at most, only momentarily connected/’aligned’ with issues of students.
It is not only that the ‘new’ socialists deny the class background of the student community. They also, by denying students their varied class position, end up trying to mobilize only those who come from petty bourgeois backgrounds. As a result, organizations in UCD, such as New Socialist Initiative (NSI) are never seen raising issues of Dalit students who struggle to get admission in DU, of working class students who struggle to pay escalating college fees, or basically, any problem faced by students coming from government schools. In reality, for them, issues of those studying in peripheral/evening colleges or of those studying through correspondence/non-collegiate board are supposedly beyond the concerns of student activism. It is the issues of students studying in the big north campus colleges that are the central concerns of such organizations. For example, such organizations strictly function according to the University calendar. They will be active only during the actual academic session (i.e. between July and March when classes are on), and, will be mostly seen organizing seminars—these being a hot favorite of students from petty bourgeois backgrounds, who enjoy debating theories thrown at them in class. Furthermore, their campaigns in the University are centered on certain pet issues of students studying in a select few north campus colleges. These include protests against college hostel rules; night vigils/candle-marches to ‘take back the night’ or presumably to establish a ‘safe’ university campus somehow; etc. One wonders, how such campaigns actually address the concerns of the majority of students—many of whom do not stay on campus and are denied hostel admission due to the ‘lack of merit’.
Of course, when we as participants in UCD argued how necessary it was to mobilize the working class which is in the majority of those exploited in the name of development, grand events like CWG, etc., our point was noted. UCD posters soon began to carry slogans highlighting exploitation of workers, and as a gesture workers are now talked about in some of the UCD meetings. But the form in which workers’ issues are being raised by them is fundamentally paternalistic and patronizing. In a sympathetic mode the forum speaks of workers and other vulnerable sections of society, but no workers are part of the joint forum. Neither does the forum do anything to promote workers’ self-organization, nor does it participate in workers’ struggles. Making patronizing trips to resettlement colonies in the city, just so as to “investigate” and “report” the plight of slum dwellers, are more measures to appease angry activists in UCD and clear one’s conscience than to draw a formidable, active and organic link between the University community and the working class.
In fact, the recent trip to Bhalaswa was merely a gesture—a move to forge, in haste, some semblance of an alliance with the working class. No way does such a gesture promote self-organization by workers. In the case of Bhalaswa, UCD immediately began promoting a group working in the area, of whose politics they have little knowledge. In fact, in the interest of ‘alliance making’ they have refused to interrogate whether the group really represents the voice of the oppressed in Bhalaswa or is just another bourgeois oppositional group. Similarly, UCD has not taken on the responsibility of assessing, themselves, the actual class dynamics working in Bhalaswa. It is simply assumed that all those residing in resettlement colonies/slums like Bhalaswa belong to the same class composition, whereas the ground reality is more complex. Clearly, UCD’s form of politics, i.e. ‘alliance-making’ is highly problematic. This is because it simply absolves the forum of questioning the constitutive logic and politics of the organizations/groups it is allying with. It also absolves the forum of the responsibility of organizing those constituencies of people themselves. Thirdly, such form of politics leaves ample space for a lot of opportunistic maneuvering. In other words, the forum can move in and out of such alliances, depending on their own calculated interests. An important question arises here, what will happen to these alliances once the CWG are over? Well, expectedly, they will dissipate as quickly as they emerged. The analogy of a cinema hall is perhaps apt to explain this inevitability—just like everyone comes to watch a film in the theatre, cry/laugh together and then go their separate ways, most UCD groups/individuals will move on from the momentary ‘alliances’/joint initiatives they have made during the drama of CWG. A few of them, of course, will leave with plum NGO jobs in hand, and an ‘activist’ image that they can thrive on.
Hence, the point that we are trying to drive home is, that UCD can talk about workers and claim to be radical right through, whereas students/teachers continue to run the show while workers are merely expected to follow and indulge in experience-sharing. Workers’ issues then become just another ingredient to be added to cooking pot of resistance. Friends, the fact is that the forum’s form of intervention is limited to the university community responding on workers’ issues but doing nothing otherwise to help build workers’ self-organizations. Is it not true then that the University democrats finds workers’ issues “good” when they are OBJECTS of reform and concern but not when they are SUBJECTS of the struggle against the system? Here it is perhaps best to highlight the recent struggle of construction workers at the Miranda House CWG work site and UCD’s response—or rather lack of response to it. Friends, since the beginning of August construction workers and their trade union have been protesting against the Miranda House officials for non-payment of the workers’ long-standing dues and the violation of several labour laws. The same day that UCD began its “relay hunger strike”, workers down the road were protesting against their severe exploitation under various CWG construction projects. UCD failed to respond and join the struggle. The message, therefore, sent out was clear enough—we will participate only when we are in charge and not workers, and we will raise workers’ issues only as an addition to our never-ending list of “democratic” demands. Considering this, are not the issues of workers’ rights being raised in tokenism, i.e. only when it suits them?
Interestingly, some participants in the University Community for Democracy, who openly claim their “left” leanings, have unhesitatingly claimed in meetings that there is nothing wrong in particularizing the struggle since the University is their ambit of movement and sense of being. What we perhaps need to add here is the fact that when they are particularizing the struggle to the University, they particularize it even further by only raising issues of a select section of the University community. Such an approach defers the need to generalize issues of struggle, which is why people end up raising struggles in isolation. Such campaigns lose steam, credibility and relevance since they do not tap on certain organic links between their concerns and those of other affected sections in society. Of course, the aforementioned approach is nothing but opportunistic. By keeping the campaign University specific such participants aim for greater projection of themselves in the student community and media (which prefers to highlight University issues any day). By investing all their energy at the University level such participants seek a radical projection of themselves during DUSU elections, etc. This, beyond doubt, is a calculated move by many so called left intellectuals and groups in UCD. It is reflected in the larger party politics of such groups, and also in the double standards maintained vis-à-vis the entry of NGOs in the forum’s programs.
CPI(ML) Liberation, the parent party of AISA (a “left” student organization), in the interest of electoral victories has been allying with the RJD and sometimes with the JD(U). One moment it can be seen opposing the traitor Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) in Bengal, and the next moment it can be seen allying with the CPM in the Bihar Assembly elections! The same kind of double standards was replicated when we opposed the entry of NGOs in the protest meeting held on 30th July and AISA supported us, but then went on to invite the same NGO person to their own program against the Commonwealth Games on August 2, 2010! Needless to say, with elections round the corner crowd pulling tactics become more important. We know for a fact that there are reservations within AISA’s own cadre about participating in UCD, yet it continues in the forum for electoral gains.
It is very disturbing that NGOs which are bodies hugely funded by exploitative governments or by multinational corporations, are provided space on platforms of resistance against exploitation. The history of NGOs tells us that they are compromised bodies which sway on issues depending on the terms and conditions of the funding they receive. They have become a big employment recruitment network and that’s about it, for their work amongst people is channeled more towards ‘welfare’ than towards transformation of society. Instead of using its own agencies to provide for people, the state has been retreating from the social sector, leaving the space open for NGOs. NGOs simply use the limited funding released by governments and non-government organizations so as to absolve the state of its larger responsibilities. And to do this they unhesitatingly exploit a cheap labour force. For example, NGO workers (‘activists’) on the ground receive a meager salary compared to NGO employees in the higher echelons.
Interestingly, by arguing that NGO people are “well-versed” in issues/“are radical”, and by promoting them as speakers, UCD is actually creating a hierarchy of knowledge. And this hierarchy is nothing but a replication of capitalist division of labour in which intellect takes precedence over action/organization building, and the suave, Oxfam funded NGO spokesperson replaces the ‘not so articulate’ trade unionist/ political activist.
There are two more disturbing things to note about UCD’s campaign. One pertains to its search for an alternative accommodation for evicted students, and the other to its “free left” image. In its initial meetings, some UCD members pushed forward the search for an alternative accommodation. The first pamphlet printed by the UCD spoke of the need to build communes in places off campus. In fact, a team met with the management of a Gandhian trust (funded by Ministry of Social Justice) which ran a hostel near Kingsway Camp, called Gandhi Ashram. The place soon began to be promoted via e-mails etc. almost like any other private accommodation; the purpose being to provide a space for those still desperately looking for affordable accommodations and also to provide a space for regrouping when things got rough during the campaign. Ironically, the Gandhi Ashram hostel is meant for poor Dalit school students who were obviously going to be displaced if college students moved into the dormitories. No one seemed to reckon with this inevitability while the plan was still being hatched.
What we also found disturbing about the Gandhi Ashram plan was the desire of creating an isolated “democratic” space. The message being sent out was nothing but we can create our own isolated commune-like space in this big bad world. This approach stems from the sectarian University-centric politics of the UCD highlighted above, and also from a non-revolutionary conceptualization of commune life. For many participants in UCD, the commune with its base in Gandhi Ashram was an apparent ‘pre-figuration’ of a new society, whereas it was far from that. Commune was being envisaged as a centre of ‘counter-culture’—an oasis in capitalist wilderness. Interestingly, this is a very familiar trope—it is based, both at once, on a vision of a transformed society without real hope for a process of transformation. This is because it is based on the vision that the lives of a minority can magically change without transforming the whole. This is, after all, how (phantom) revolution itself, is envisaged according to the pipe-dreams (joint-dreams?) of petty bourgeois students/intellectuals who enjoy the comforts/security of generous remittances from home—‘let us, at least, as a small privileged community enjoy revolution making’.
Of course, as pointed out by us in the meetings, it was nothing but ridiculous that UCD spoke of building a commune in a place which was actually going to be charging the students Rs. 1500 per bed and where 6 to 8 women students would have to live per room. How can a commune work within a market structure, and how can a place which gives you no control on the rules and regulations to be implemented, become a progressive, commune-like accommodation?! Despite these criticisms, UCD went ahead and would have signed a MoU with the Gandhi Ashram management, if it wasn’t for the sheer lack of students interested in the place. In fact, just so as to get students to join the bandwagon, emails were sent out exaggerating the facilities available at Gandhi Ashram. In the interest of pulling a crowd, the green lawns of the Ashram were highlighted. Meanwhile, it was downplayed that no fooding would be available at the place and that this was going to be a dormitory system. Indeed, such concealment amounts to lying.
Lastly, as we would like to point out, it is a shame that the University Community for Democracy prides itself for its “Free Left” image. It is typical for such a forum to claim its steadfast commitment to ‘democratic issues’. However, in reality, their idea of democracy is based on the empty notion of dialogue and communication. Democracy is, unfortunately, abstracted from its link with socio-economic forces which is why it becomes more difficult to build a consistent anti-systemic movement. We see this problematic notion of democracy manifested in the very first pamphlet released by UCD. What was repeatedly highlighted in it, as a problem, was the fact that recent developments in the city as well as at the level of the University were not discussed before implementation.
Ironically, despite all their claims, most UCD participants stand for a façade of democracy and democratic functioning. For example, many emails and curt replies to questions raised in the meetings reflect the emerging dogma that only “pragmatic” things should be discussed in meetings (pragmatic issues being those that will help UCD attract more people). Thereby, it was constantly demanded that the ideological issues be shunned, and in a very undemocratic way, that is precisely what happened in meetings. The question is, what is it that UCD will do with the people who are immediately attracted to its campaign. Aren’t they supposed to work on these people and ideologically bring them closer to progressive politics? What does one read into this persistent impatience with ideological issues? Why do they behave as if the campaign is running against time? One can only presume that they want their whole show to be unfolded before CWG! In that case there is really no long term commitment to the issues being raised, and those that join the UCD campaign are just being perceived as faces/numbers to be posited against the Games, rather than thinking human beings who have the potential to link their immediate concerns with long term politics.
Furthermore, due to its “free left” image, we find that most UCD participants enjoy asserting their “individual” form of participation vis-à-vis an organizational one. As a result, UCD has succeeded in joining a lineage of platform and forum hopping so common to bodies that are dominated by individuals. The simple fact is platforms will be unsteady as long as “radical” individuals refuse to put their “radical-ness” to the test and bring themselves under the discipline and responsibility of organization/party structure. Left fronts and left organizations cannot make individuals their fighting force and leave untouched/un-mobilized the majority of those exploited, i.e. working class. After all, what is the best form of protesting against the Commonwealth Games? Is it not by organizing the large number of workers employed under CWG projects and mobilizing them to stop work at the numerous construction sites? Indeed, this is the most effective way of exposing the Games for what they are, and certain organizations and trade unions have been doing this since the very beginning of CWG construction work.
Having said this, it must begin to seem obvious somewhere to the reader why UCD has raised the issue of workers’ rights more in the spirit of opportunism. What else can be expected when there are group’s dominating UCD, such as New Socialist Initiative (NSI), that have no work amongst workers, i.e. no trade union to speak of, and basically do nothing to promote workers’ self-organization. In their book of strategy workers issues will always be raised so as to appear radical/cool in front of impressionable students than to actually organize workers. Their politics will, in fact, promote workers’ rights and NGOs in the same breath. It is a fact, that NSI has more presence in the NGO network than in the existing workers’ movement. This is because most of their members work for NGOs, and hence, have an objective interest in promoting them. This is why on the day of the protest meeting on 30th July NSI took additional effort to put together a program in Ramjas College, inviting a now well known NGO person. Of course, we didn’t see that kind of effort put in when it came to extending solidarity to the construction workers’ struggle in Miranda House College. The fact is that groups such as NSI have work only in the University and are inactive in any other constituencies of people, especially the working class. At a time when there is an uproar regarding the Commonwealth Games, their attempt to oppose the Commonwealth Games is doomed to be student-centric and University specific. And even when they do raise the issues of the university community it will be done so opportunistically, and the issues raised will be those that cater to a select section of the university community.
Friends, ask yourself—would you rather stand by opportunistic and sectarian politics that takes for granted the issues/concerns of the majority, or would you rather stand by the combined struggle of workers and students? Friends, it is high time we recognize that NGO-ised, petty-bourgeois dominated campaigns are more enemies than friends in the struggle for emancipation. It is time to stop doing the fashionable and to be seen doing the productive. It is time to play the role of the harsh critic and to organize a formidable combined struggle against the oppression and exploitation prevalent in our society.
JOIN THE STRUGGLE TO KEEP THE SPIRIT OF EQUALITY AND JUSTICE ALIVE! LONG LIVE REVOLUTION !!
JOURNAL OF CRITICAL POLICY EDUCATIONAL STUDIES (UK)
CULTURAL LOGIC (USA/CANADA)
KRITIKI (GREECE)
RADICAL NOTES (INDIA)
The venue of the Conference will be the city of Athens and possibly the surrounding areas.
Conference and Local Organizing Committee Coordinators:
Dave Hill, (Middlesex University, UK)
Peter McLaren, (UCLA, USA)
Kostas Skordoulis, (University of Athens, Greece)
Keynote Speakers:
To be announced, to include Dave Hill, (Middlesex University, UK), Peter McLaren, (UCLA, USA), Ravi Kumar (Jamia Milia Islamia University, Delhi, India). There will also be keynote speakers from Greece. Key women Marxist writers are being invited as Plenary speakers.
Important Dates
Participants should submit an abstract of 300 words by: 15 December 2010.
Notification of acceptance of paper presentation by: 15 January 2011.
Full papers should be submitted by: 30 May 2011.
The papers will be peer reviewed and published in the Conference Proceedings.
Selected papers will be published in Special Issues of JCEPS, Cultural Logic and KRITIKI.
Presentations
There will be 6 plenary presentations (two per day), each plenary session lasting one hour. Other papers will have 30 minutes (inclusive of the paper presentation plus discussion)
Conference Fee
The Conference fee is 300 Euros. (approx $380, or £245). The fee covers participation in the conference, the book of abstracts, coffee/tea/refreshments during conference breaks and participation in the conference dinner in a traditional taverna.
Participation of unemployed, and of colleagues from the third world is free/ no fees.
Further Information about the Invited speakers will be announced in the second circular. As will the contact address and registration details for the conference. Though in the meantime it would be interesting to see who might intend to offer papers… send me a provisional (non-binding) indication of interest if you like? (dave.hill35@btopenworld.com and dave6@mdx.ac.uk ) (It’s not mandatory to let me know in advance… … paper abstracts can be submitted until 15 Dec 2010.
Down with eviction of students from College Hostels!
Onwards to students self-activity!!
The current administration of Delhi University has attempted to reshape the University through a series of sinister agendas – be it the introduction of semester system, the European Studies Programme or the biometric identification system. All of them have shared one thing in common: the thwarting of democratic debate on proposals for change, and the routine violation of regulatory protocols.
The latest episode has been the eviction of students (2,000 students according to reports) from a number of hostels in Delhi University in order to make them available for the Commonwealth Games. Hostels are being renovated and beautified for the officials and visitors of the Games, while students are scrambling around for their own accommodation. The students, like the 40,000 families on the Yamuna bank, are now among the many that have been displaced in the name of national glory. What comes into question is the fact that the University has agreed to avail of 20 crores of rupees from the Commonwealth Games project without taking any cognisance of how and where such resources are generated. It has thus become an accomplice in the larger process of reckless corporatisation that the whole city is undergoing in the bid of becoming a “global city”.
This has left students at the mercy of private accommodation, with its unregulated rents and precarious guarantees. Rents are rising in anticipation of the increased demand for PGs and flats, forcing many existing residents to move out and making accommodation unaffordable for incoming residents as well. The University has made no attempt to devise a mechanism to control or subsidise rents. The inflated prices that students pay are in effect the costs they bear for the cosmetic surgery DU is undergoing, and by extension, the hidden burden they carry for the Commonwealth Games. Some newspaper reports even indicate that hostel fees may increase after the hostels have been “upgraded”. Moreover, the lack of a viable and safe alternative has compelled many girls seeking admission in DU to rethink their decision. The University has also failed to consider living conditions around campus, especially from a gender-sensitive perspective. We can only begin to imagine what it must be like for those with physical disabilities to navigate around dug-up roads, unmarked holes and hazardous construction material.
The students are told that their eviction is “for their own good”. It is “for them” that the authorities are “improving student infrastructure”, making “world-class” hostels. Where was this concern for well-being when the college authorities took the decision to evict students? Not once was there any dialogue with students about this “upgradation”, or about the best and most suitable way to go about it. Instead, the whole decision-making process was shrouded in mystery, leading to utter chaos and confusion: while Hansraj made its hostel residents sign a bond last year declaring they had no objection to being evicted between July and October 2010, Miranda House students have still not been officially informed about the eviction!
We cannot allow the University to get away with such deliberate and avoidable irresponsibility. We make the following demands from the University:
• We demand the provision of alternate accommodation for evicted students.
• This accommodation should be at par with the hostels, both in terms of prices as well as qualitative conditions such as basic amenities and safety.
• We also demand, as conscientious members of a larger community, that this provision not be met at the cost of another section of society.
On our part, let us work towards creating another space, a commune perhaps, an imaginative and practical alternative that is self-governed by members of the university community, a cooperative living space that meets its own needs and conducts itself in a responsible and democratic fashion.
If you are angered by what you see around you in the University, and indeed, in the city, if you want to speak out against the shrinking of democratic space and are ready to reclaim what is rightfully yours, please come and join us!
The author is a supporter of Socialist Resistance and was the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition parliamentary candidate for Brighton Kemptown in the June 2010 British general election. He offered his alternative to the market driven education “reforms” of the other parties.
I have spent my lifetime as a teacher in `challenging’ primary and secondary schools and in teacher `training’ and in universities trying to tackle inequalities in schooling- inequalities that result in millions of working class children having far less educational opportunities- and subsequently, usually lower paid jobs- than the children of richer parents, especially the 7% who go to private schools- and snap up most of the highest paid, elite, jobs.
The very choice of what and how it should be taught, how and what schooling should be organised, how any whom it should be funded, and where and how the funding should be targeted, and a consideration of `who wins and who loses’ through all of the above, are all intensely political. And we want that politics to be in the interests of the millions not the millionaires!
I come from a working class family brought up in some poverty, for example on Free School Meals (like a million others!) in St. Martins’ St., off the Lewes Rd., Brighton. I went to Westlain Grammar School, my brothers to underfunded secondary modern schools, such as Queens Park and Moulscoomb. Three times as much was spent on the education of grammar school students (which educated 20% of state schooled children) than on Secondary Modern students (which educated nearly all the other state school children under the then selective school system)! My children went to local state schools. The inequalities I have witnessed- and lived- as a child, and as a teacher and socialist political activist, have led me to spending my life fighting for greater equality in education and society, and against racism, sexism and against homophobia.
What an indictment of our divisive education system that students from private schools are 25 times more likely to get to one of the top British universities than those who come from a lower social class or live in a poor area. And that (in 2008), only 35% of pupils eligible for free school meals obtained five or more A* to C GCSE grades, compared with 63% of pupils from wealthier backgrounds. This stark education inequality mirrors that in our grossly unequal society.
It is incredible, actually it is only too believable, that in Britain today, the richest section of society have 17 years of healthy life more than the least well-off in society. The minimum wage should be raised by 50%. How can people- decent hard working people like some in my own family, live on take-home pay of less than £200 a week! And there should be a maximum wage, too! Nobody, banker, boss, or buy-out bully, should be on more than £250,000 a year- (and this figure should reduce progressively so that within 10 years no-one is taking more than four times the average wage, nobody should be creaming off £27 million or £90 million a year for example! Certainly not when there are 4 million children living in poverty! I was once one of them. I was helped by the welfare state. We need our public services. We need to improve them, not cut them, not attack them.
All three parties, New Labour, LibDem, Tory, dance to the music of big business. All are promising cuts. Whatever they say, those cuts will hit schools, children, and the quality of education in our state schools. Already we are seeing staff cuts and course closures in universities up and down the country. In Brighton, for example, both Brighton and Sussex Universities are promising to cut out the nurseries, and Sussex to chop over 100 jobs. Brighton University is proposing to cut its Adult Ed art courses. Vandalism! Cutting popular and widely used public services!’
And don’t believe cuts are necessary. They’re not! Cutting the Trident nuclear submarine replacement programme, bringing troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, stopping the Identity Card programme, and collecting even some even of the £120 billion in taxes unpaid by the rich… yes, £120 billion! And raising taxes high earners…would mean cuts are not necessary at all!
But you won’t hear that from the other parties, just from Socialists, like the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, and from Respect.
A socialist manifesto is:
1. Cut class sizes (they are currently some of the largest in the rich world- much larger than in private schools for example). According to OECD research Britain is 23rd out of 30 developed countries in terms of large class size. Other countries such as Finland have a maximum class size of 20. Finland is widely seen as providing an extremely high quality of education. For a maximum class size of 20 by 2020 in both primary and secondary schools!’
2. Abolish league tables and abolish SATS (some external testing is necessary, but SATS so very often restricts teaching to `teaching to the test’, and results in undue stress (and an increase in bedwetting, compared to the pre-SATS era, for example).
3. Restore local democratic control of `Academies’. They should be run by the democratically elected local councils, and keep to national pay and conditions agreements. Why should rich businessmen and women take control of any of our schools? Let’s keep the added investment- but it’s the government that pays for that added investment anyhow! Let’s keep and enhance the added investment, but distribute it fairly between all schools. Our schools and the children in them are not for sale! Nor, through uneven funding for different types of school (e.g. academies) should some schools be set up for success at the expense of others being set up (and underfunded) for relative failure.
4. Private profiteering out of our schools! Bring the education services hived off to private profiteers back into either national or local private ownership! These include Ofsted, Student grants, school meals, cleaning and caretaking.
5. Free, nutritious, balanced school meals for every child to combat poor diets, obesity, and… yes… for some children… hunger!
6. Restore free adult education classes in pastime and leisure studies as well as in vocational training/ studies
7. Restore free funded residential centres and Youth Centres/ Youth clubs for our children so they can widen their experiences of life in safe circumstances and enhance their education beyond the confines of the home or city.
8. For a fully Comprehensive Secondary School system, so that each school has a broad social class mix and mix of ability and attainment levels.
9. For the integration of Private schools into the state education system- so that the goodies of the private school system are shared amongst all pupils/ students. All schools to be under democratic locally elected local council control. No to Private Schools. No to religious groups running schools. No to big business / private capital running our schools and children!
10. Free up the curriculum so there can be more creativity and cross-subject/ disciplinary work.
11. Get Ofsted and their flawed tick-box system off the back of teachers. The results of Ofsted are to penalise even the best schools (outstanding in every aspect- other than in SATS attainments) in the poorest areas.
12. Encourage Critical Thinking across the curriculum. Teach children not `what to think’, but also `how to think’. Including how to think critically about the media and politicians.
13. Teach in schools for ecological literacy and a readiness to act for environmental justice as well as economic and social justice Encourage children to `reach for the stars- and to work for a society that lets that happen- a fairer society with much more equal chances, pay packets and power, and about environmental and sustainability issues.
14. Proper recognition of all school workers, and no compulsory redundancies. For teachers, secretarial and support staff, teaching assistants, school meals supervisory assistants, caretaking staff, there should be workplace democratic regular school forums in every school. Regarding jobs (for example the threatened job cuts at Sussex University- and the `inevitable’ job cuts in every? school after the election- no compulsory redundancies- any restructuring to be conditional on agreement with the unions.
15. Setting up of school councils – to encourage democratic understanding, citizenship, social responsibility, and a welcoming and valuing of `student/ pupil voice’.
16. Ensuring that schools are anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic- making sure schools encourage equality, welcome different home and group cultures.. As part of this, anti-bullying practices in every school must be fully implemented, to combat bullying of all sorts, including racism, sexism, homophobia, and bullying based on disabilities. And this should be not just in anti-bullying policies, but also be part of the curriculum too!
17. An honest sex education curriculum in schools that teaches children not just `when to say no’, but also when to say `yes’, a programme that is focuses on positives and pleasure and personal worth, not on stigmatising sex and sexualities.
18. No to `Faith Schools’ and Get organised religion out of schools. If Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians, or whichever religion wishes to teach religion, let them do it in their own time, places of worship (Saturday/ Sunday schools) or in their supplementary or complementary schools. Teach ethics and spirituality by all means, and teach about religions. But no brainwashing. Teach a critical approach to religions.
19. Broaden teacher education and training so that the negative effects of the `technicisation and detheorising’ of teacher training (that were the result of the 1992/1993 Conservative re-organisation of what was then called teacher education- subsequently retitled teacher training). Bring back the study and awareness of the social and political and psychological contexts of teaching, including an understanding of and commitment to challenge and overturn racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of under-expectation and discrimination- such as discrimination against working class pupils.
20. A good, local school for every child. No school closures! “Surplus places” should actually mean lower class sizes! And increased community use of school facilities.
21. A completely fully funded, publicly owned and democratic education system from pre-school right through to university. Education is a right not a commodity to be bought and sold. So, no fees, like in Scandinavia, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, where education up to PhD level is free. No university of further education/ vocational training fees, and a living grant for students from less well-off backgrounds/ income.
In my jobs, firstly as a teacher, and now as a Professor of Education (and writer/ editor of 17 books on education and equality) I have been round hundreds of schools. Many of them are brilliant. Schools in the poorest areas, schools in better off areas! Brilliant. But, with better funding, smaller class sizes, an end to the destructive competition between schools (if every school is a good local school) and with more professional judgement being allowed for teachers- then I look forward to a time when all state schools match the class sizes and results of the currently more lavishly funded private schools’. And working class kids – black, brown, white- get the fair deal currently trumpeted- but in actuality denied- by all three major parties.
Prof. Dave Hill, The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) parliamentary candidate for Brighton Kemptown. He teaches at Middlesex University and is Visiting Professor of Critical Education Policy and Equality Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland. This article appeared in Socialist Resistance on 15 April 2010.
We should not ask for the university to be destroyed, nor for it to be preserved. We should not ask for anything. We should ask ourselves and each other to take control of these universities, collectively, so that education can begin.
- From a flyer found in the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, originally written in the University of California
Since the massive student revolt in France, in 2006, against the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE), and the ‘anomalous wave’ in Italy in 2008, student protest has mounted in almost every part of the world, suggesting a reprise of the heady days of 1968. It reached a crescendo in the Fall and Winter of 2009 when campus strikes and occupations proliferated from California to Austria, Germany, Croatia, Switzerland and later the UK. The website Tinyurl.com/squatted-universities counted 168 universities (mostly in Europe) where actions took place between 20 October and the end of December 2009. And the surge is far from over. On 4 March, 2010 in the US, on the occasion of a nationwide day of action (the first since May 1970) called in defense of public education, one of the coordinating organisations listed 64 different campuses that saw some form of protest. (Defendeducation.org). On the same day, the South African Students’ Congress (SASCO) tried to close down nine universities calling for free university education. The protest at the University of Johannesburg proved to be the most contentious, with the police driving students away with water cannons from a burning barricade.
At the root of the most recent mobilisations are the budget cuts that governments and academic institutions have implemented in the wake of the Wall Street meltdown and the tuition hikes that have followed from them, up to 32 percent in the University of California system, and similar increases in some British universities. In this sense, the new student movement can be seen as the main organised response to the global financial crisis. Indeed, ‘We won’t pay for your crisis’ – the slogan of striking Italian students – has become an international battle cry. But the economic crisis has exacerbated a general dissatisfaction that has deeper sources, stemming from the neoliberal reform of education and the restructuring of production that have taken place over the last three decades, which have affected every aspect of student life throughout the world.(1)
The End of the Edu-Deal
The most outstanding elements of this restructuring have been the corporatisation of the university systems, and the commercialisation of education. ‘For profit’ universities are still a minority on the academic scene but the ‘becoming business’ of academe is well advanced especially in the US, where it dates back to the passing of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, that enabled universities to apply for patents for ‘discoveries’ made in their labs that companies would have to pay to use. Since then, the restructuring of academe as a money-making venture has proceeded unabated. The opening of university labs to private enterprise, the selling of knowledge on the world market (through online education and off-shore teaching), the precarisation of academic labour and introduction of constantly rising tuition fees forcing students to plunge ever further into debt, have become standard features of the US academic life, and with regional differences the same trends can now be registered worldwide.
In Europe, the struggle epitomising the new student movement has been against the ‘Bologna Process’, an EU project that institutes a European Higher Education Area, and promotes the circulation of labour within its territory through the homogenisation and standardisation of schooling programs and degrees. The Bologna Process unabashedly places the university at the service of business. It redefines education as the production of mobile and flexible workers, possessing the skills employers require; it centralises the creation of pedagogical standards, removes control from local actors, and devalues local knowledge and local concerns. Similar developments have been taking place in many university systems in Africa and Asia (like Taiwan, Singapore, Japan) that also are being ‘Americanized’ and standardised (for example, in Taiwan through the imposition of the Social Science Citation Index to evaluate professors) – so that global corporations can use Indian, Russian, South African or Brazilian, instead of US or EU ‘knowledge workers’, with the confidence that they are fit for the job.(2)
It is generally recognised that the commercialisation of the university system has partly been a response to the student struggles and social movements of the ’60s and ’70s, which marked the end of the education policy that had prevailed in the Keynesian era. As campus after campus, from Berkeley to Berlin, became the hotbed of an anti-authoritarian revolt, dispelling the Keynesian illusion that investment in college education would pay down the line in the form of an increase in the general productivity of work, the ideology of education as preparation to civic life and a public good had to be discarded.(3)
But the new neoliberal regime also represented the end of a class deal. With the elimination of stipends, allowances, and free tuition, the cost of ‘education’, i.e. the cost of preparing oneself for work, has been imposed squarely on the work-force, in what amounts to a massive wage-cut, that is particularly onerous considering that precarity has become the dominant work relation, and that, like any other commodity, the knowledge ‘bought’ is quickly devalued by technological innovation. It is also the end of the role of the state as mediator. In the corporatised university students now confront capital directly, in the crowded classrooms where teachers can hardly match names on the rosters with faces, in the expansion of adjunct teaching and, above all, in the mounting student debt which, by turning students into indentured servants to the banks and/or state, acts as a disciplinary mechanism on student life, also casting a long shadow on their future.
Still, through the 1990s, student enrollment continued to grow across the world under the pressure of an economic restructuring making education a condition for employment. It became a mantra, during the last two decades, from New York to Paris to Nairobi, to claim that with the rise of the ‘knowledge society’ and information revolution, cost what it may, college education is a ‘must’ (World Bank 2002). Statistics seemed to confirm the wisdom of climbing the education ladder, pointing to an 83 percent differential in the US between the wages of college graduates and those of workers with high school degrees. But the increase in enrollment and indebtedness must also be read as a form of struggle, a rejection of the restrictions imposed by the subjection of education to the logic of the market, a hidden form of appropriation, manifesting itself in time through the increase in the numbers of those defaulting on their loan repayments.
There is not doubt, in this context, that the global financial crisis of 2008 targets this strategy of resistance, removing, through budget cut backs, layoffs, and the massification of unemployment, the last remaining guarantees. Certainly the ‘edu-deal’, that promised higher wages and work satisfaction in exchange for workers and their families taking on the cost for higher education, is dissolving as well. In the crisis capital is reneging on this ‘deal’, certainly because of the proliferation of defaults and because capitalism today refuses any guarantees, such as the promise of high wages to future knowledge workers.
The university financial crisis (the tuition fee increases, budget cut backs, furloughs and lay-offs) is directly aimed at eliminating the wage guarantee that formal higher education was supposed to bring and at taming the ‘cognitariat’. As in the case of immigrant workers, the attack on the students does not signify that knowledge workers are not needed, but rather that they need to be further disciplined and proletarianised, through an attack on the power they have begun to claim partly because of their position in the process of accumulation.
Student rebellion is therefore deep-seated, with the prospect of debt slavery being compounded by a future of insecurity and a sense of alienation from an institution perceived to be mercenary and bureaucratic that, in the bargain, produces a commodity subject to rapid devaluation.
Demands or Occupations?
The student movement, however, faces a political problem, most evident in the US and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. The movement has two souls. On the one side, it demands free university education, reviving the dream of publicly financed ‘mass scholarity’, ostensibly proposing to return to the model of the Keynesian era. On the other, it is in revolt against the university itself, calling for a mass exit from it or aiming to transform the campus into a base for alternative knowledge production that is accessible to those outside its ‘walls’.(4)
This dichotomy, which some characterise as a return to the ‘reform versus revolution’ disputes of the past, has become most visible in the debate sparked off during the University of California strikes last year, over ‘demands’ versus ‘occupations’, which at times has taken an acrimonious tone, as these terms have become complex signifiers for hierarchies and identities, differential power relations, and consequences for risk taking.
The contrast is not purely ideological. It is rooted in the contradictions facing every antagonistic movement today. Economic restructuring has fragmented the workforce, deepened divisions and, not last, it has increased the effort and time required for daily reproduction. A student population holding two or three jobs is less prone to organise than its more affluent peers in the ’6os.
At the same time there is a sense, among many, that there is nothing more to negotiate, that demands have become superfluous since, for the majority of students, acquiring a certificate is no guarantee for the future which promises simply more precarity and constant self-recycling. Many students realise that capitalism has nothing to offer this generation, that no ‘new deal’ is possible, even in the metropolitan areas of the world, where most wealth is accumulated. Though there is a widespread temptation to revive it, the Keynesian interest group politics of making demands and ‘dealing’ is long dead.
Thus the slogan ‘occupy everything’ – building occupation being seen as a means of self-empowerment, the creation of spaces that students can control, a break in the flow of work and value through which the university expands its reach, and the production of a ‘counter-power’ prefigurative of the communalising relations students today want to construct.
It is hard to know how the ‘demands/occupation’ conflict within the student movement will be resolved. What is certain is that this is a major challenge the movement must overcome in order to increase in its power and its capacity to connect with other struggles. This will be a necessary step if the movement is to gain the power to reclaim education from the hands of the academic authorities and the state. As a next step there is presently much discussion about creating ‘knowledge commons’, in the sense of creating forms of autonomous knowledge production, not finalised or conditioned by the market and open to those outside the campus walls.
Meanwhile, as Edu-Notes has recognised,
already the student movement is creating a common of its own in the very process of the struggle. At the speed of light, news of the strikes, rallies, and occupations, have circulated around the world prompting a global electronic tam-tam of exchanged communiqués, slogans, messages of solidarity and support, resulting in an exceptional volume of images, documents, stories.(5)
Yet, the main ‘common’ the movement will have to construct is the extension of its mobilisation to other workers in the crisis. Key to this construction will be the issue of the debt that is the arch ‘anti-common’, since it is the transformation of collective surplus that could be used for the liberation of workers into a tool of their enslavement. Abolition of the student debt can be the connective tissue between the movement and the others struggling against foreclosures in the US and the larger movement against sovereign debt internationally.
George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. Together with the collective, he has co-edited two books, Midnight Oil: Work Energy War 1973-1992 and Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War. Both were published by Autonomedia Press.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the students and faculty I recently interviewed from the University of California, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Rhodes University in South Africa for sharing their knowledge. I also want to thank my comrades in the Edu-Notes group for their insights and inspiration.
Footnotes
(1) Edu-factory Collective, Towards a Global Autonomous University, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2009
(2) See, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Alidou, Ousseina, A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000, Richard Pithouse, Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006 and Arthur Hou-ming Huang, ‘Science as Ideology: SSCI, TSSCI and the Evaluation System of Social Sciences in Taiwan’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 10 2009, Number 2, pp. 282-291.
(3) George Caffentzis, ‘Throwing Away the Ladder: The Universities in the Crisis’, Zerowork I, 1975, pp. 128-142.
(4) After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California, 2010, Accessed at www.afterthefallcommuniques.info.
(5) Edu-Notes, ‘Introduction to Edu-Notes’, unpublished manuscript.
