Hegemonik’s Take on New School Takeover
Posted by Mike E on December 20, 2008
The following was originally posted as a commentary in our takeover thread. It digs into the settlement reached to end the occupation — and the sharpening struggle over what the focus of resistance should be. Hegemonik’s views are of course his own, not a collective summation by Kasama.
by Hegemonik
Of late I’ve been seeing a few analyses from participants and outsiders. I’m a little of both (too sick to enter, not sick enough to go to the outside of the occupation) — and here’s a stab at it:
1) To use a chess analogy: the ending of the occupation came out to a game where the students took more pieces, but the administration managed to stalemate it. The inability of the students to open up a new front, even though the occupied cafeteria was forced open for more occupiers to take part, ended up meaning that they could not open up negotiation terms beyond advancing their position for the next round.
To be explicit: what the students won were demands confined to the university as it exists now. Kerrey, Murtha, etc. stay in their positions, but the students have a better position for the next uptick of struggle (i.e., the concessions on transparency, better treatment of the student population, as well as student roles).
2) This is an instance where, I believe, the revolutionaries who are involved in the struggle need to lead and not tail. Getting transparency, student voices in the mix, etc. are good — but Kerrey and co. agree to these compromises hoping that they will put a wet blanket on the sparks of a broader issue (namely: Kerrey’s unsavory political use of New School as a megaphone for his warmongering).
It will be up to the revolutionaries involved in the takeover to insist that the issue is not about getting New School’s finances in order, or even making sure that it only invests in Ben-and-Jerry’s style feelgood capitalism — it’s about denying the New School as a fig leaf to cover a nakedly vicious and avaricious agenda.
Two Sets of Illusions
3) There are two sets of illusions that need to be dealt with in the summation of the occupation:
a) The liberal summation: that narrowing the scope of the occupation’s propaganda to student syndicalist-type demands “won” the occupation. Put bluntly: nobody puts their body on the line for membership in a provost search committee. It’s when these issues are tied into the defining issues of our day, such as the war machine or the financial crisis, that the people act.
b) The anarchist summation: that unless propaganda is purely focused against Kerrey as a warmonger, that this constitutes being less than revolutionary. The struggle for structural reforms in the university can’t be relegated to simply “not revolutionary enough.” Those structural reforms are necessary for agitating students that the cause is explicitly in their interests, that they are co-authors (and not merely passive readers) of demands.
4) Where to go from here?
First, whatever unity comes out of the occupation should generally be invested outside of institutions built out of the occupation, and into a new round of struggle. Let the liberals to invest themselves in the institutions of the search committees, the people reviewing investments, etc. And keep up a relationship with them. But don’t get dragged too much into being the Kerrey administration’s conscience.
Second, start sharpening up the messaging around why Kerrey must go. Do not let him use the concessions that he made to burnish his image — after all, this man came within a hair of siccing the cops on the occupiers, knowingly committing libel in order to make his case. And let us not forget the result of prior attempts to unseat Kerrey: he made concessions, and then allowed things to cool off.
Last, if there is to be a determined push against Kerrey, it will not be confined to the New School. The Kerrey administration and its use of “outside agitators” as a theme to divide the population against the occupiers should not be taken seriously. After all, didn’t Kerrey call for an occupation of Iraq, a nation he has no citizenship in, as a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq?
All talk of outside agitators should be treated as the ravings of a man desperate to keep power.
celticfire said
Thanks for sharing this information and materialist perspective, hege.
Sinclair Ali said
“b) The anarchist summation: that unless propaganda is purely focused against Kerrey as a warmonger, that this constitutes being less than revolutionary. The struggle for structural reforms in the university can’t be relegated to simply “not revolutionary enough.” Those structural reforms are necessary for agitating students that the cause is explicitly in their interests, that they are co-authors (and not merely passive readers) of demands.”
I think this (and the liberal summation point) are 100% great, but I’m curious as to how this is the anarchist summation? I have no idea what voices are speaking on this.
Mike E said
I’m reluctant to comment too much on New School events — where I know very little about the background and development of the current struggle, about the choices people made and why they made them.
Hegemonik wrote:
And i also don’t want to hammer unfairly on the phrasing of one sentence in Hegemonik’s post — especially because the overall thrust of his post is an argument for breaking out of the confines of narrow institutional demands.
But, I think it is worth saying that students (and people generally) can embrace demands that are not framed narrowly in terms of their own most immediate narrow self-interest.
In general, it is a sign of the advance of a radical upsurge when demands increasingly DON’T focus on narrow, local issues (in one institution, or one factory, etc.)
There were contradictions here between the faculty and the administration at the New School. There were important issues afoot over the direction and mission of this important school…. and it is not always wrong to wade into those waters.
But I can’t help wonder if the demands raised at the New School weren’t considerably less radical than many issues that could and should be at the center of radical political work today. It seems to have been deliberate. And I wonder if the emphasis on structural demands (over the important demand for the removal of the war criminal Kerrey) may have set up a situation where the students found themselves accepting minor concessions (on committees etc), while leaving the power (and initiative) in the hands of Kerrey. Some demands are easily coopted, and some concessions can quickly reveal themselves as relatively meaningless.
Our movement must radiate is a sense that we care about about the fate of the planet and distant peoples.
We need to project the need for a radically different society (and one that is not imagined as a pretty-unradical “more control for you of your own life and your institution”). We should stand in contrast to the very American “What’s in it for me” mentality. Such views are not nearly as influential as some people think.
hegemonik said
I hate to argue semantics, but I think it’s necessary.
Mike argues:
I think the difference between our thinking is that I’ve learned what people are capable of and what they do are two different things.
In other words it’s not about whether students can embrace demands. Anyone can embrace any number of demands (that is the beauty of advertisement and propaganda).
The decisive factor is whether the students will embrace demands (or line, or slogan) as their own.
The problem I found with the radicals involved in the occupation (mainly the anarchists, but just as sharply with the Trotskyists and a few others) was not that they pressed the political case against Kerrey, or that they brought attention to the youth revolt gripping Europe, or even that they pressed these issues too hard. The problem was that when these issues got brought out, it came out so clumsily. It hints that these issues are still felt – even by the radicals – to be mythic battles between unseen gods, to be invoked in a ritualistic fashion. There’s no relationship with those issues, much less a presentation toward the students of how they should relate to them.
Mario Savio is shown elsewhere on this site as a model of a campus based fighter. All well and good, but let’s re-examine what made that speech so stirring both to those assembled and to those who listen to it now. Did Savio speak at length about CORE and the problems of the South (the issues embraced by Jack Weinberg, the movement’s initial martyr)? Not really. Nor did he get sucked into the minutiae of campus codes on political speech. Savio instead, through the course of immersing himself in the struggle, came up with a great mass line formulation about the nature of the country and how it was grinding people into nothing, and how compelled he felt to stop its workings.
In other words, he presented a view of the world in which these disparate struggles (the youth, black people, working people) were connected by a common theme – where beyond saying “it’s all connected” people really felt they were all connected.