Mark Cote Utopian Pedagogy Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization

UTOPIAN PEDAGOGY:
RADICAL EXPERIMENTS AGAINST

NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION
Utopian Pedagogy is a critical exploration of educational struggles within

and against neoliberalism. Editors Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and
Greig de Peuter, along with a number of innovative voices from a
variety of different academic fields and political movements, examine
three key themes: the university as a contested institution, the role of
the politically engaged intellectual, and experiments in alternative edu-
cation. The collection contributes to the debates on the neoliberal trans-
formation of higher education, and to the diffusion of social movements
that insist it is possible to create workable alternatives to the current
world order.
This critical examination of the educational dimension of social and
political struggles is presented by both professional academics and
activists, many of whom are directly involved in the very experiments
they discuss. Rescuing and revaluing the concept of utopia, the editors
and their international contributors propose that utopian theory and
practice acquire a new relevance in light of the hyper-inclusive logic of
neoliberalism. Utopian Pedagogy is a challenge to the developing world
order that will stimulate debate in the fields of education and beyond,
and encourage the development of socially sustainable alternatives.
(Cultural Spaces)
mark coté is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication at

Simon Fraser University and a visiting scholar with the Institute for
Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University.
richard j.f. day is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociol-

ogy at Queen’s University.
greig de peuter is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communica-

tion at Simon Fraser University.
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Utopian Pedagogy:
Radical Experiments against
Neoliberal Globalization
Edited by Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day,

and Greig de Peuter
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8923-6 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-8020-8923-2 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8675-4 (paper)

ISBN-10: 8020-8675-6 (paper)
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Utopian pedagogy : radical experiments against neoliberal globalization /

edited by Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day and Greig de Peuter.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8923-6 (bound)
ISBN-10: 0-8020-8923-2 (bound)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8675-4 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 8020-8675-6 (pbk.)
1. Anti-globalization movement – Study and teaching (Higher)

2. Social justice – Study and teaching (Higher) I. Coté, Mark
II. Day, Richard J. F. III. De Peuter, Greig, 1974–
LC191.9.U86 2007 303.48’4’0711 C2006-900053-0
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to

its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for

its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: What Is Utopian Pedagogy? 3

mark coté, richard j.f. day, and greig de peuter
Part I: The Contested University
Introduction 21
1 Utopian Thinking in Dangerous Times: Critical Pedagogy

and the Project of Educated Hope 25
henry a. giroux
2 Teaching and Tear Gas: The University in the Era of

General Intellect 43
nick dyer-witheford
3 Academic Freedom in the Corporate University 64

ian angus
4 A Revolutionary Learning: Student Resistance/Student Power 76

mark edelman boren
5 Exiled Pedagogy: From the ‘Guerrilla’ Classroom to the

University of Excess 93
jerry zaslove
vi Contents
6 Universities, Intellectuals, and Multitudes 108

an interview with stuart hall
Part II: Rethinking the Intellectual
Introduction 129
enda brophy and sebastián touza
7 From Intellectuals to Cognitarians 133

franco berardi (bifo)
8 The Diffused Intellectual: Women’s Autonomy and the

Labour of Reproduction 145
an interview with mariarosa dalla costa
9 Conricerca as Political Action 163

guido borio, francesca pozzi, and gigi roggero
10 On the Researcher-Militant 186

colectivo situaciones
Part III: Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy
Introduction 201
11 The Making of an Antiracist Cultural Politics in Post-Imperial

Britain: The New Beacon Circle 207
brian w. alleyne
12 ‘Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like This?’:

Notes on Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla
Experience 227
shveta sarda
13 Transformative Social Justice Learning: The Legacy of

Paulo Freire 242
carlos alberto torres
Contents vii
14 Breaking Free: Anarchist Pedagogy 248

allan antliff
15 An Enigma in the Education System: Simon Fraser University and
the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society 266
richard toews and kelly harris-martin
16 The Subaltern Act! Peasant Struggles and Pedagogy in
Pakistan 280
imran munir
17 ‘Let’s Talk’: The Pedagogy and Politics of Antiracist Change 294

sarita srivastava
18 Present and Future Education: A Tale of Two Economies 314
michael albert
Ne Travaillez Jamais: Parecon or Exodus? 324
a reply to michael albert by nick dyer-witheford
Jobs Are Not the Problem 329
a reply to nick dyer-witheford by michael albert
19 Academicus Affinitatus: Academic Dissent, Community Education,

and Critical U 334
Contributors 353
Acknowledgments
There are many people whom we, as editors of this collective project,
would like to thank. First, we want to express our gratitude to all our
contributors for making the book possible. From the beginning they
shared and fed our enthusiasm for this project; the excellence of their
submissions has taken the book beyond all our expectations; and the
good nature with which they answered all our queries and requests
made this a pleasurable process.
We are also indebted to Siobhan McMenemy at University of Toronto
Press for the steady hand and strong support she displayed from our
initial proposal through to the printing press. As well, the geopolitical
breadth of the book has been widened considerably thanks to our
translators, Enda Brophy and Sebastián Touza, both of whom are out-
standing and formidable activist-scholars in their own right. The manu-
script was proofed, formatted, and massaged into shape by Rick
Palidwor, to whom we are grateful for his fastidious work. We also
would each like to thank our families. We are eternally grateful to our
partners and children for reminding us that the everyday can provide
the most wonderfully utopian moments.
Finally, we want to thank all of those unnamed and unknown people
who work in their communities with a commitment not only to peda-
gogy but to a belief that a better world is not only possible, but already
among us if we can only learn how to look for it.
UTOPIAN PEDAGOGY:
RADICAL EXPERIMENTS AGAINST
NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION
Introduction: What Is Utopian Pedagogy?
This book offers a critical examination of the educational dimension of

struggles within and against neoliberalism. With this volume, we hope
to contribute both to the debates on the neoliberal transformation of
higher education and to the diffusion of social movements that insist
another world is possible.1 The voices in this book emanate from het-
erogeneous positions: from inside and outside academic institutions
and from their margins; from divergent experiences of racial, class,
gendered, colonial, and sexual relations of power; and from disparate
intellectual and political traditions ranging from cultural studies to
anarchism, from autonomist marxism to popular education.2 Despite
this diversity, the contributors are working towards a common goal of
understanding, combating, and creating alternatives to what we are
repeatedly told is a glorious – and inevitable – ‘new world order.’ The
educational spaces, pedagogical strategies, and intellectual subjectivities
explored here can be considered radically utopian in that they strive to
transcend what is conceivable within the current socio-economic order.
This utopianism, our contributors overwhelmingly agree, has nothing
to do with rationalistic dreams of a future perfect society. The critiques
and experiments they document here are attempts to carve out spaces
for becoming – through resistance, hope, and reconstruction in the
here-and-now – in various sites around the globe.
The book has three parts: ‘The Contested University,’ ‘Rethinking the
Intellectual,’ and ‘Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy.’ Each has a short
prologue that lays out its specific problematic and that summarizes the
chapters that follow. In this general introduction we want to contextualize
the book by addressing the links among the diverse contributions to it.
We begin by surveying the main intellectual and political traditions
4 Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter
expressed in this collection and by highlighting some of the affinities

these traditions share with respect to these key themes: education,
pedagogy, and intellectuals. Then we sketch a portrait of neoliberalism,
that socio-economic complex against which the various critiques and
experiments documented in this book are mobilized. We close by out-
lining what we mean by a ‘utopian pedagogy’ that acts within, against,
and beyond neoliberal hegemony.
Affinities across Disparate Traditions
The contemporary scene is animated by diverse educational struggles.

Any attempt to document even a small portion of them requires an
inclusive approach with respect to intellectual and political traditions.
Indeed, the formation of relays – in dialogue and action – was an initial
goal of Utopian Pedagogy; while respecting particularities, we hoped to
find both commonalities and the sympathetic resonance of differences
across problems and issues, methodological approaches, and ethico-
political commitments that might otherwise have appeared exclusive.
The main traditions of our contributors range from cultural studies to
popular education, antiracism, radical pedagogy, anarchism, and au-
tonomist marxism, but are not limited to these. We have brought these
disparate streams of theory and practice together in this book in order
to reveal lines of affinity that traverse the particularities of each tradi-
tion. Below, we sketch out how this collection has been inspired by, and
is situated in relation to, these traditions and their literatures, mainly as
they relate to themes of education, pedagogy, and intellectuals.
Several contributors have affinities with cultural studies, a tradition
that was forged by unorthodox marxists and postcolonial intellectuals
in postwar Britain. The history of cultural studies is rife with examples
of scholars and activists developing relays between critically oriented
education, bottom-up pedagogy, and oppositional social movements.3
An especially important incubator of many cultural studies ideas was
the adult education movement, wherein socialist intellectuals such
as E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams taught in non-traditional
settings organized through the Workers’ Educational Association or the
‘extramural’ departments of universities. Many of the teachers saw
adult education not only as a point from which to expand the socialist
movement but also as a living example of a democratic-socialist institu-
tion, in that it greatly expanded access to education for working-class
students. These spaces of protocultural studies were inspired, said Wil-
liams, by a philosophy of education whose ‘deepest impulse was to

make learning part of the process of social change itself.’4 Interactions
between critical pedagogy and social movements were further extended
at the time of the British New Left in the 1950s and 1960s. These inter-
actions were tied to many projects that linked criticism with activism,
and involved networks of New Left discussion groups throughout Eng-
land as well as a storefront in London.
After the mid-1960s, cultural studies was institutionalized in formal
university settings. Efforts to conduct radical pedagogy, interdiscipli-
nary thinking, and action-oriented research from inside the academy
brought out tensions. Engaged scholars working out of the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham de-
scribed an enduring dilemma: ‘The academic environment tends to
absorb our politics; the local political group tends to define too nar-
rowly the focus of our theory. We straddle the distinction made by
Gramsci between the “academic” and the politically “organic” intellec-
tual.’5 In an interview printed in this book, Stuart Hall, who directed the
centre between 1968 and 1979, reflects on cultural studies’ passage –
and his own – through various institutional locations, and examines the
contradictory forces that allowed a market logic to reshape British
universities. The limits to and possibilities for the transformation of the
contemporary university as a site of radical pedagogy, amidst and
against its neoliberal restructuring, are taken up in detail in Part I of this
book, ‘The Contested University,’ which, besides the interview with
Hall, includes chapters by Henry A. Giroux, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Ian
Angus, Mark Edelman Boren, and Jerry Zaslove.
A commitment to intellectual work as a political practice is what
most strongly links the project of this book to that of cultural studies.6
This commitment is reflected in a trajectory of research in cultural
studies on oppositional social forces, from the dissident subcultures
and community-based movements of the 1960s and 1970s to the new
social movements of today.7 These inquires are rooted in an expanded
concept of struggle, one that emphasizes the importance of everyday
practices and of contests over meaning in the reproduction and trans-
formation of hegemonic power relations. Many have derided the
depoliticized state of much of contemporary cultural studies scholar-
ship; in this vein, several of the critiques and experiments covered in
this collection are spectres of a more radical cultural studies. In particu-
lar, this tradition’s work on advancing the politics of difference has
done much to legitimate a widened series of social locations from
which hegemonic social formations can be contested – for example, in

their racialized, gendered, heteronormative, and ageist dimensions.
The essay here by Brian W. Alleyne, for example, uses the optic of
cultural politics to analyse an experiment in antiracist, socialist peda-
gogy in Britain in which cultural production played a constitutive rather
than a subsidiary role. And Sarita Srivastava discusses how knowledge
of racialized identities is produced and circumscribed in the context of
antiracist pedagogy within social movements themselves.
Educational projects that are oriented towards empowering mar-
ginalized communities are commonly associated with popular educa-
tion. This liberationist tradition has roots in early twentieth-century
Latin America, and evolved as a series of concrete initiatives that linked
education to socialist movements and to the struggles of indigenous
peoples against relations of dependency and practices of exclusion.8
Popular education strategies are associated with Brazilian educator and
philosopher of education Paulo Freire, who is renowned for his literacy
training with Brazilian peasants. Freire’s best-known book is Pedagogy
of the Oppressed; its insights have been applied in adult and community
education initiatives around the world. Freire vehemently rejected con-
cepts of education rooted in the idea that ‘knowledge is a gift bestowed
by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom
they consider know nothing.’9 Insisting that education is a potentially
subversive force, he advocated ‘conscientization,’ a radical pedagogy
that focused on unmasking domination and mobilizing for liberation –
in short, ‘praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to trans-
form it.’10 There are many connections between the concrete projects
documented in Part III of this book, ‘Experiments in Utopian Peda-
gogy,’ and some of Freire’s ethical commitments: Freirean projects are
characterized by meeting people where they live, whether this be rural
communities or inner cities. There is no one-size-fits-all method, which
means radical pedagogies evolve through experimentation in the light
of a particular context. All participants are ‘simultaneously teachers
and students,’ for as Freire put it, a ‘revolution’ that does not grow out
of ‘dialogue’ is a ‘military coup.’11 It is important to point out that for
Freire, education is not a magic bullet; rather, under certain conditions,
it fosters a ‘process of permanent liberation.’12 Carlos Alberto Torres’s
chapter offers a lucid survey of Freirean ‘transformative social justice
learning.’
Other traditions of radical pedagogy have gained by their connec-
tions to the discourses of cultural studies and postcolonial theory.13
Deployed in myriad teaching and learning contexts – from university

classrooms to media literacy programs to community-based education
to co-research – such radical pedagogy strives to draw out and examine
links between the practices of everyday life and wider structures of
domination. For example, bell hooks has theorized the classroom as a
space for feminist, antiracist pedagogy, in which the point of departure
is ‘when one begins to think critically about the self and identity in
relation to one’s political circumstances.’14 Positioning students and
teachers as active subjects in, rather than objects of, the world, radical
pedagogy starts from the assumption that social critique and self-
criticism and -creation are mutually constitutive processes. But critical
pedagogy and engaged intellectuals, argues Henry Giroux, must work
against despair by elaborating ‘a language of critique and possibility.’15
Giroux’s chapter develops this theme in light of neo-liberalism and the
‘war on terror.’
Education has also been a crucial element of anarchist projects for
radical social change. Free schools, reading circles, public lectures, and
publishing collectives are common examples of activities that seem to
be pedagogical in the liberal-humanist sense, but that contain moments
which look beyond education as indoctrination. ‘We revolutionary an-
archists are proponents of universal popular education,’ declared Mikhail
Bakunin, ‘[but we are] enemies of the state [and of all who worship] the
goddess Science.’16 Like most anarchists after him, Bakunin was certain
that abstract reflection emerges out of everyday lived experience, not
vice versa. Thus the sciences should not develop into autonomous
spheres; instead, they should serve the communities in which they are
located. Anarchist popular education, then, is education for change, for
autonomy of individuals and communities, by autonomous individuals
and communities. This tradition has continued unbroken since Bakunin’s
time. It was an important factor during the Spanish Revolution,17 and
has since been reflected in diverse projects undertaken all over the
world. These peaked in the 1960s and again in the 1990s, and are
coming into their own again via the Internet.
Any discussion of anarchist education must include the deschooling
and unschooling movements, which, although not the sole purview of
self-declared anarchists, include many figures who have been promi-
nent in anarchist circles. Ivan Illich is perhaps the best known of these,
through his book, Deschooling Society.18 Illich argued that traditional
schools operate according to a ‘hidden curriculum,’ one which, ‘uncon-
sciously accepted by the liberal pedagogue, frustrates his conscious
liberal aims.’19 This is because schools in fact alienate us from our

learning; they force us down pathways that serve to perpetuate the
existing order instead of allowing us to pursue avenues that call out to
us as particular subjects. The roots of contemporary deschooling can be
traced to the Modern School Movement, begun in France by Louise
Michel, Paul Robin, and Sebastian Fauré, and continued by Francisco
Ferrer in early-twentieth-century Spain.20 Its central ideas have been
taken up by writer-practitioners such as John Holt, A.S. Neill, and John
Taylor Gatto.21 In this collection the chapters by Allan Antliff and Jerry
Zaslove fall directly within the anarchist tradition; a more spectral
diffusion can be seen in the contributions by Michael Albert and by
Mark Coté, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter.
Like anarchism, the tradition of Italian autonomist marxism is char-
acterized by a rejection of the state form and by a commitment to
furthering self-valorizing practices of autonomous labour and commu-
nity. Since the late 1990s, autonomist marxism has been the subject of
increasing attention outside Italy, especially in the wake of Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri’s books, Empire and Multitude.22 The autono-
mist tendency begins by positing the dynamic capacity of labour and
resistance first, and hence as that which capital and the constituted
power of domination must struggle to harness and contain. It rejects
Leninist models that posit the Party as a site of centralized leadership;
instead, it develops ‘from below’ through the self-organizing capacity
of labour in decentralized, non-hierarchical structures.23 This develop-
ment was coterminous with the shift towards post-Fordist production
techniques, with the increasing commodification of everyday life, and
with a more politicized and creative wing of French poststructuralism.
Specifically, there were links with Michel Foucault’s analyses of the
microphysics of power and with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
theorization of micropolitics. These influences are especially visible in
the autonomist concept of the ‘social factory,’ which sees power and
productivity – and thus the potential for resistance – as dispersed and
as emanating from subjectivities and everyday life just as much as from
traditionally defined ‘factory labour.’24
Since the early 1960s and up to the present, this line of theory and
practice has persisted in various strands of the Italian radical left, with
which a number of our contributors – Franco Berardi (Bifo), Mariarosa
Dalla Costa, and Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Roggero – are
directly associated.25 Their essays are collected in Part II, ‘Rethinking
the Intellectual.’ From the earliest days of operaismo, the labour-focused
political movement that preceded autonomia, methods of inquiry fol-

lowed the spirit of what Marx called ‘workers inquiry.’26 In practice,
these methods were inspired by workers who resisted the union bosses
and union hierarchy as much as they did the factory owners. Thus there
was close collaboration with workers, as activist-intellectuals bypassed
institutional union structures and entered the mammoth factories of
northern Italy to gather workers’ narratives, in order to better under-
stand the changing composition of production and its concomitant
political dynamics. This research into workers’ conditions was the cru-
cible from which the theory underpinning operaismo–autonomia emerged.
The chapter by Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero offers an account of this
methodological innovation, known as conricerca, or coresearch. This
method is now being applied around the globe. Colectivo Situaciones, a
collective in Argentina, has contributed a chapter inspired by its use of
a variation of the conricera method during Argentina’s recent political
crisis, which involved collaborative work with the Movement of Unem-
ployed Workers. In the interview with Mariarosa Dalla Costa – who
played a key role in opening autonomia to a feminist critique27 – we hear
a narrative of a feminist-Marxist intellectual working between scholar-
ship and activism. We also hear a clear outline of the conceptual shift –
so crucial to autonomist analysis – that understands capitalist repro-
duction as something that takes place not only in factories but also
throughout society.
Two autonomist concepts have a special bearing on the themes of this
book: ‘general intellect’ and ‘immaterial labour.’28 The concept of gen-
eral intellect is taken up and extended by both Bifo and Dyer-Witheford.
This term was used rather fleetingly by Marx when he imagined that
collective social knowledge – general intellect – accretes primarily in
fixed capital, or machinery. What interested Marx was how general
intellect would undermine the ‘law of value’ and thus capitalism itself.
Autonomists propose high-technology capitalism as the ‘era of general
intellect,’ and see the general intellect manifesting itself in, and from,
subjectivity. As Dyer-Witheford states, it ‘appears not just in production
but throughout a whole network of educational and cultural relations.
It is present in industrial and service workers, laboring at the interface
with digital technologies, in students keeping pace with technological
innovations through “lifelong learning,” and in the various techno-
cultural literacies on which new markets for electronic and entertain-
ment goods depend.’29 In short, ‘immaterial labour’ is becoming the
‘ether’ of everyday life, the target of capitalist expropriation, and hence
a central site of struggle. For Bifo, the challenge is to generate ‘institu-

tions of knowledge, of creation, of care, of invention and of education
that are autonomous from capital.’30 This idea links many of the experi-
ments discussed in this book.
The preceding sketch of the traditions engaged in this volume has
focused on the tacit and explicit lines of affinity between them. But this
is not to erase all the profound differences between them, or to deny
that they disagree sharply at times. Indeed, the limits of affinity perhaps
constitute the biggest challenge to a utopian pedagogy. Thus some
caveats are in order with respect to this discussion of working across
disparate traditions. Given that Antonio Gramsci’s thought lurks in
many of the above-surveyed traditions, he will serve as a good exem-
plar of what we see as a key tension across the various chapters in this
book – the tension between ‘hegemonic’ and ‘post-hegemonic’ politics.
In The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci distinguished between two kinds of
intellectuals – ‘traditional’ and ‘organic.’31 Traditional intellectuals
include university-based academics but also ‘the specialist in political
economy, the organizer of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc.’32
Traditional intellectuals articulate the interests of hegemonic class for-
mations but at the same time idealize and abstract their determinate
position insofar as they ‘put themselves forward as autonomous and
independent of the dominant social group.’33 Each class also produces
its own ‘organic intellectuals,’ argued Gramsci. These people play a
crucial role in the struggle for hegemony; they are loyal to the class from
which they have emerged and are explicit in their efforts to organize,
advance, and represent the interests of their class as a whole: ‘One of the
most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards
dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer “ideologically”
the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made
quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds
in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals.’34 Organic
intellectuals of the working class remain grounded in the everyday life
of struggle, and organize in support of the interests of subaltern groups.
As for where organic intellectuals might be ‘made,’ Gramsci proposed
the factory councils as an educational space that might allow workers to
better understand their current socio-economic position and work to-
wards social transformation.
From the point of view of a truly radical democracy, these vanguardist
functions are utterly untenable. The chapter by Bifo addresses the con-
cept of the organic intellectual, arguing that it privileges the Party as a
site of mediation, and in so doing not only elides the logic of domina-
tion in the Party form but also blinds us to the potentialities of forms of
political organization that move beyond parliamentary representation.
One of the consequences of Gramsci’s recognition that ‘we are all intel-
lectuals’ is that no monolithic apparatus can contain the multiple and
ever-diversifying modalities of intellectual capacities; the ways in which
links might be forged between that intellectual multiplicity and trans-
formative political practices is precisely what is documented in the
discussions of concrete experiments in this book. This challenge is taken
up at length in Imran Munir’s chapter, which documents a mutable
coalition of rural farmers, Party-based communists, an extraparlia-
mentary revolutionary women’s movement, mainstream NGOs, urban
intellectuals, and a street theatre group, all of which are struggling both
within and outside of representational politics. Finally, while most of
the contributors to this book explicitly reject the pursuit of new hege-
monic formations, the forces of neoliberalism and militarism in our
historical moment know no such restraint. Thus there is a tension in this
collection – a struggle between post-hegemonic projects, which seek to
move away from what Gramsci called ‘irradiation effects’ (see chapter
19), and hegemonic projects driven by the belief that the dominant
order can be challenged successfully only on its own terms and terrain.
What Is Neoliberalism?
This rapid passage through traditions raises an important question:

What are they opposed to? What is the ‘common enemy,’ if there is one,
that they confront? We wish to avoid reducing any of them to the other,
or all of them to a single ‘fundamental oppression.’ Some would say
there is no single enemy against which the newest social movements
are fighting; others would point to a single logic of domination, albeit
with myriad modalities.35 Regardless, our contributors present a dis-
parate set of struggles, each of which needs to be addressed in its
particularity. Yet all of these struggles occur in an increasingly common
context, which we, like many others, call neoliberalism.
The neoliberal project includes what is known as the globalization of
capital,36 as well as the intensification of societies of control.37 It also
relies on and perpetuates shifts in how the global system of states is
organized – that is, through regional agreements such as the North
American Free Trade Agreement and emerging ‘superstates’ such as the
European Union.38 Within these state formations, a politics of represen-
tation – a ‘multicultural’ politics – allows excluded identities and com-

munities to be ‘integrated’ into the global system of liberal-capitalist
nation-states and their sociosymbolic order.39 This is to say that we
cannot understand state domination outside of capitalist exploitation,
and that we cannot understand either of these without reference to
societies of control. The interweaving of the American occupation of
Iraq, the ‘war on terror,’ and the media discourse on ‘extremists’ would
seem to suggest as much.
It is important to add that neoliberal societies sustain state domina-
tion and capitalist exploitation by dividing populations along multiple
lines of inequality based on race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and
region – both inter- and intra-nationally. Thus, although neoliberalism
provides a common context for disparate struggles, the divisions it
perpetuates and heightens mean that its effects are far from undifferen-
tiated. For the privileged classes of the G8 countries, neoliberalism
has meant more service- and knowledge-related jobs, the exporting of
heavily polluting manufacturing plants, and easy access to a vast array
of cheap, low-quality consumer items. Although privatization and
program-slashing have had terrible effects on the lives of women, work-
ing people, and racialized identities within the G8 countries, the
carnage has been even greater outside their gates. Through World Bank
and IMF restructuring plans, entire nations and continents have had
their social, political, and economic structures overturned in prepara-
tion for their integration into the neoliberal order. When we refer to the
neoliberal project, then, we are referring to a complex web of practices
and institutions that are perpetuating and multiplying various forms of
interlocking oppression.40 These allow ‘populations’ to be divided and
managed and our daily lives to be more intensely immersed in capital-
ist exploitation and rational-bureaucratic (state) control. This has not
gone uncontested, of course, from the stirring mobilizations of the
Zapatistas to Seattle through Genoa and to ongoing struggles in Ven-
ezuela, Argentina, and Iraq. Work on all fronts – resistance, blockage,
construction of alternatives – has been going on much longer and much
more intensely in the global South, and this trend seems likely to
continue.
A key question for our collection is this: How do educational prac-
tices figure into this emerging neoliberal social order? On one hand,
it is clear that education is central to the production of well-trained
producer-consumer-citizens who will dutifully take up their assigned
roles in this order. The importance of this function is observable in the
ongoing corporate colonization of public school systems at all levels,

from Coke machines in the hallways of elementary schools to computer
labs ‘donated’ to universities by high-tech firms. The increasing ten-
dency to direct research funding to those whose work has clear possi-
bilities for commercial exploitation or who will aid in state domination
is also indicative of a turn away from critical thought and basic re-
search, which were once considered key tasks of ‘higher’ education
institutions. In the wake of these various transformations, state-based
education cannot be seen, by those of us who are committed to social
justice ideals, as an oasis in the desert of neoliberalism. The questions
thus become: Can education be saved from neoliberalism? How can
and does the university do more than serve corporate powers? How are
we to work positively, within and against the neoliberal revolution, not
to recover some lost nugget of Euro-Enlightenment, but to survive the
intense struggles we are facing and begin to move beyond them? What
spaces of possibility are open to us? How do we open up new ones, and
how do we maintain and disseminate what we create? These are the
questions facing what we call utopian pedagogy.
What Is Utopian Pedagogy?
It is important to clearly distinguish our use of the concept of utopia

from the tradition of excessively rationalistic dream-states inaugurated
by Plato, carried on in the work of Fourier, and finding its way into the
twentieth century via writers such as Huxley and Skinner.41 These
fantastic utopias are based on the construction of a society that has
transcended all relations of power by implementing a blueprint that in
many cases becomes hilarious in its specificity. One need only cite
Fourier’s classification of 810 ‘personality types’ and his incredible
efforts to sort out how they might all interact so as to produce ‘har-
mony’ in everything from sexual activity to flower arranging!42
In compiling this collection, we asked ourselves how the concept of
utopia could be revalued, in response to its many critics on the Left, to
the inevitablism of the Right, and to the absurdity of fantasies of perfec-
tion. A short answer is that we looked to utopia not as a place we might
reach but as an ongoing process of becoming. More specifically, the
utopia that runs through this collection is both a critical attitude to-
wards the present and a political commitment to experiment in trans-
figuring the coordinates of our historical moment. As is becoming
increasingly clear, ‘the enemies within’ a social order of infinite war and
imminent threat – critical thinkers, educators, activists, builders – all

share the common trait of proposing something other than a new Anglo-
American world order, a beyond that exceeds not only this particular
configuration, but also all possible particular configurations.
Instead of accepting that the radical utopian imaginary is an anachro-
nistic holdover from the glory days of revolutionary socialism, we
would argue that utopian theory and practice acquire a new relevance
as the hyperinclusive logic of neoliberalism compels us to take up
positions that are intrinsically outside of and other than what is. The
utopian impulse that interests us does not lead to a promised land. It
knows that domination and exploitation can only be minimized, never
eliminated; that struggle will persist; and that something like a state,
like a corporation, like asymmetrical power relations in any form, will
forever be trying to emerge from within and without our communities
and will therefore need to be warded off. Also, it orients itself to the
radical outside to such an extent that no blueprint could ever survive
the passage from conception to implementation without becoming some-
thing entirely other than what it was. Thus it might be said that utopian
experiments today share a point of departure much more than a point of
arrival. Finally, it is a concept of immanent utopia, where
hope is the celebration of the possible, or rather of specific, existing

possibilities, a celebration that depends equally on the intellect and the
will. Our hope dictates that we recognize and act on a tendency actually
existing in present reality that can lead toward a potential future. This
hope is not utopian, if by utopian we understand the dream of a future
that is separated from the present. Hope is better conceived as a temporal
vector that points from the present into the future from a specific location,
with a determinate direction and force.43
These directions and forces are documented throughout this book,

most concretely in the essays in Part III, from Shveta Sarda’s discus-
sion of a project in youth-oriented ‘ambivalent pedagogy’ in India to
Richard Toews and Kelly Harris-Martin’s discussion of an initiative in
postcolonial pedagogy in Canada.
If the purpose of ‘lifelong learning’ is to produce social subjects for
the perpetuation of the neoliberal order, the goal of an oppositional,
utopian pedagogy must be to foster experiments in thinking and action
that lead us away from that order. Utopian pedagogies emerge out of –
and point us towards – what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘the coming com-
munities.’44 These can be defined positively as marginal crucibles of

human sociability, potentiality, and creativity out of which the radically
new emerges: working-class, Black, queer, (im)migrant, indigenous,
urban youth, rural farmers, to name just a few. To the extent that these
communities are the sources of energy on which states and corpora-
tions rely for their existence, it could be said that the coming communi-
ties ‘are’ the state and capital. But this process of co-optation is often
contested, sometimes subverted, and never totally successful. This
struggle defines the coming communities negatively, as those group-
ings which are not fully acceptable to – or at least not yet fully normal-
ized within – the global neoliberal order. In this positioning lie some
very interesting possibilities: singularity against integration; affinity
without identity; justice without homogenization; sociability without
the state; production without the corporation. It is this imaginary that
we label utopian.
It is those practices which seek to propagate an awareness of the exist-
ence and possibilities of the radical outside that we call utopian pedagogy,
a pedagogy that is itself contested and without guarantees. Creating al-
ternative spaces of education inevitably involves dealing with the same
structured behaviours that are in evidence everywhere else. It is a terrible
error, and a failure of solidarity, to assume that racism, sexism, and
homophobia will somehow magically disappear from alternative spaces
simply because they are ‘alternative.’ Indeed, the struggle against domi-
nation in all of its myriad forms must be relentless and central to any
utopian pedagogy worthy of the name.
NOTES
1 For critiques of the neoliberal transformation of higher education, see

David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002); Bill Readings, The University in
Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); The Corporate Campus:
Commercialization and the Dangers to Canada’s Colleges and Universities, ed.
James L. Turk (Toronto: Lorimer, 2000); The Virtual University? Knowledge,
Markets, and Management, ed. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003). And for discussions of new social move-
ments, see Ian Angus, Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and
Democracy (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2001); Susan George,
Another World is Possible If … (London: Verso, 2004); We Are Everywhere: The
Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism, ed. Notes from Nowhere (London:

Verso, 2003); From ACT UP to WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building
in the Era of Globalization, ed. Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk
(London: Verso, 2002).
2 We do not assume, of course, that this list exhausts all possible positions
from which one might speak for or against neoliberalism, nor does it
represent all marginalized voices. We do not, for example, have any
contributors who address issues of ability or sexual orientation – an
outcome that reflects our own areas of expertise and the networks with
which we are associated at the time of compiling this collection. This is not
to say that these are unimportant, or even less important, than the issues
that are addressed here.
3 For historical accounts of cultural studies, and its links to non-traditional
education, see Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain:
History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997); Stuart Hall, ‘Life and Times of the First New Left,’
in Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 Years On, ed. Oxford Socialist
Discussion Group (London: Verso, 1989); Tom Steele, The Emergence of
Cultural Studies: Adult Education, Cultural Politics, and the ‘English’ Question
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997); Raymond Williams, ‘The Future
of Cultural Studies,’ in The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989);
Stephen Woodhams, History in the Making: Raymond Williams, Edward
Thompson and Radical Intellectuals, 1936–1956 (London: Merlin Press, 2001);
Handel Wright and Karl Maton, ‘Cultural Studies and Education: From
Birmingham Origin to Glocal Presence,’ Review of Education/Pedagogy/
Cultural Studies 26:2–3 (2004): 73–89.
4 Raymond Williams, ‘Adult Education and Social Change,’ in Border
Country: Raymond Williams in Adult Education, ed. John McIlroy and Sallie
Westwood (Leicester, UK: National Institute of Adult Continuing Educa-
tion, 1993), 257.
5 ‘Introduction,’ Working Papers in Cultural Studies 6 (Birmingham: Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1974), 6.
6 See Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,’ in The
Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Simon During (London: Routledge,
1999), 97–109.
7 Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart
Hall and Tony Jefferson (London: Hutchinson and the Centre for Contem-
porary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1976); Storming the
Millennium: The New Politics of Change (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1999), ed. Tim Jordan and Adam Lent; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985); Special Issue on

‘Learning from Seattle,’ Review of Education / Pedagogy / Cultural Studies
24:1–2 (2002).
8 Liam Kane, Popular Education and Social Change in Latin America (London:
Latin America Bureau, 2001).
9 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Penguin, 1972), 46.
10 Ibid., 28.
11 Ibid., 47, 98.
12 Ibid., 31.
13 See Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and
Schooling: A Critical Reader (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); bell hooks,
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (London: Rout-
ledge, 1994); Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur, Teaching against
Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Dangerous Territories: Struggles for Difference
and Equality in Education, ed. Leslie G. Roman and Linda Eyre (New York:
Routledge, 1997).
14 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 47.
15 Henry A. Giroux, ‘Cultural Politics and the Crisis of the University.’
Culture Machine (2000), retrieved from http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/
frm_f1.htm (accessed 12 February 2003). Emphasis added.
16 Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 135.
17 Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists (San Francisco: AK Press, 1998),
48–50.
18 Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
19 Ivan Illich, ‘After Deschooling, What?’ in After Deschooling, What? ed. Alan
Gartner et al. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 9.
20 Emma Goldman, ‘Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School,’ in Anarchism
and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth, 1917).
21 John Holt, Freedom and Beyond (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972); A.S. Neill,
Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (New York: Hart Publish-
ing, 1960); John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of
Compulsory Schooling (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1992).
22 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2000); Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New
York: Penguin, 2004).
23 For surveys of the history and ideas of autonomist marxism, see Harry
Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Leeds, UK: Anti/Theses, 2000), 23–80;
Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-
Technology Capitalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,

1999), 62–90; Italy: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Christian
Marazzi (New York: Semiotext(e), 1980); Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt,
Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996); Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition
and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto, 2002).
24 See Mark Coté, ‘The Italian Foucault: Subjectivity, Valorization,
Autonomia,’ Politics and Culture 3 (2003). http://aspen.conncoll.edu/
politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=259.
25 Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Roggero, Futuro anteriore. Dai
quaderni Rossi ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti delloperaismo Italiano
(Rome: Derive Approdi, 2002); Franco Berardi (Bifo), La nefasta Utopia di
potere operaio. Lavoro tecnica movimento nel laboratorio politico del sessantotto
Italiano (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1998).
26 See Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian
Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto, 2002), 32–62.
27 Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the
Subversion of the Community (Bristol, UK: Falling Wall Press, 1972).
28 Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour,’ in Radical Thought in Italy: A
Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–47; Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the
Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York:
Semiotext(e), 2004).
29 Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-
Technology Capitalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1999), 222.
30 Franco Berardi (Bifo), ‘Book Review of Geert Lovink’s Dark Fibre,’ trans.
Arianna Bove (2002), retrieved from www.generation-online.org/t/
bifosreview.htm (accessed 25 August 2003).
31 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: Interna-
tional Publishers, 1971).
32 Ibid., 5.
33 Ibid., 7.
34 Ibid., 10.
35 See Richard J.F. Day, ‘From Hegemony to Affinity: The Political Logic of
the Newest Social Movements,’ Cultural Studies 18:5 (2004): 716–48.
36 Hardt and Negri, Empire; Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents:
Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: New Press,
1998); Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
37 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ October 59 (1992): 3–7.

38 Continental Order? Integrating North America for Cybercapitalism, ed. Vincent
Mosco and Dan Schiller (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001);
Chris Shore, ‘Inventing the “People’s Europe”: Critical Approaches to
European Community “Cultural Policy,”’ Man 28:4 (1998).
39 Slavoj ~iíek, ‘Multiculturalism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’
New Left Review 225 (1997): 28–51.
40 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and
the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Maxine Baca
Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill, ‘Theorizing Difference from Multicultural
Feminism,’ in Zinn et al., Through the Prism of Difference: Readings on Sex
and Gender (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997).
41 Plato, The Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Charles Fourier,
Design for Utopia: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier (New York: Schocken
Books, 1971), 220; Aldous Huxley, Island, a Novel (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1962); B.F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
42 Charles Fourier, The Passions of the Human Soul and Their Influence on Society
and Civilization (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1968).
43 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman,
‘Subterranean Passages of Thought: Empire’s Inserts,’ Cultural Studies 16:2
(2002): 201.
44 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
PART I: The Contested University
Introduction
Neoliberalism seeks to invest itself in all social spaces and reshape them
according to its logic – and the university is no exception. The contribu-
tors to Part I, all of whom are academics, develop sober critiques of the
neoliberal restructuring of postsecondary education. Nick Dyer-
Witheford dissects ‘Academia Inc.,’ offering a critical account of the
gradual integration of the university into global ‘cognitive capitalism’;
Ian Angus examines the ‘corporate university,’ showing how ‘fiscal
Realpolitik’ has undermined academic freedom, critical thinking, and
democratic self-governance in higher education; Mark Edelman Boren
reveals that universities around the world, pressured by neoliberal
national and supranational governmental bodies, are adapting to a
‘business model’; Jerry Zaslove describes a ‘university of excess,’ whose
students are increasingly reduced to ‘clients’ and where ‘totalities of
knowledge and the particularities of experience are collapsed into per-
formance indicators’; Henry A. Giroux urges that the ‘careerism, pro-
fessionalism, and isolation’ of the ivory tower be replaced by a revitalized
commitment to the public intellectual who makes links to new social
movements and who will ‘take a stand while rejecting involvement in
either a cynical relativism or doctrinaire politics’; and Stuart Hall refers
to a university system ‘driven principally by economic questions’ in
which ‘every procedure has been managerialized.’ These chapters pro-
vide detailed analyses of the specific techniques and practices through
which the neoliberal reconstruction of education is being carried out
and the consequences this process will have for diverse aspects of
academic production – students, teachers, pedagogy, research, culture,
and so on.
The anger these authors feel towards these transformations is pal-
pable. But these chapters are not merely bitter lamentations. At the
most basic level, their critiques offer insights that might inform the
development of new strategies of resistance. Also, these authors are too
aware of the ambiguous history of the university and of the antagonis-
tic potential of thought to either accept the ‘narrative of decline’ or fall
into the trap of despair. So although they speak from different traditions
and experiences, they share a common view of the university as a space
of contestation – or at least as an unfinished project. Arguing against
bad faith and dead-end cynicism, they leave kindred ambivalent aca-
demics with a challenge to protect a potentiality which is among the
most valuable attributes of the university (although by no means exclu-
sive to it): it is a space where intellectual subjectivities set to work,
collaboratively, at the interstices of critical thought and constituent
practice.
These contributors agree, then, that labels like ‘Academia Inc.’ tell
only one side of the story. For the university has always contained a
constitutive tension between the production of knowledge and skills
valuable to power as domination, and the critique of these products.
Bleak portraits of a university increasingly rationalized to conform to
an instrumental model may be accurate, but – as Angus argues in his
chapter – for critical teachers and students, those kinds of characteriza-
tions utterly fail ‘to capture that for which we struggle when we teach
and learn – the ability to think meaningfully about one’s experience
that allows a deeper judgment of the current situation and brings one’s
future actions into question.’ In reflecting on the pedagogic encounters
between students and teachers, many of these authors find the continu-
ing currency of a non-humanistic, non-Eurocentric conception of ‘en-
lightenment.’ As Boren shows in his chapter on campus activism, despite
(and often precisely because of) the overwhelming pressure to remake
students as consumers, the university remains a space of the ‘produc-
tion of revolutionary subjectivity’ – an argument he supports with
snapshots of outbreaks of student radicalism in various parts of the
world, from Latin America to Africa. Successful efforts to alter the
power relations of the university from within are described by Hall and
Dyer-Witheford. Hall recounts a more open, cooperative learning envi-
ronment that in the 1960s and 1970s was so vital to the experiment that
blossomed into cultural studies; and Dyer-Witheford describes a more
recent effort to establish concrete links between universities and social
movements.
Thus, these authors are working in various ways against an image of
Part I: The Contested University – Introduction 23
academia as a ‘circle closed onto itself.’1 Sharing a commitment to a

kind of ‘outreach’ that goes beyond placing corporate representatives
on the board to generate donations, these authors address strategies for
creating bridges between universities, dissenting academics and stu-
dents, and oppositional social movements. In the face of the ‘culture of
compliance’ in the corporate university, says Angus, ‘the first task is …
to overstep these boundaries, to raise the larger questions, to make the
issues public and thus to fulfil the social task of the university by
bringing critical thinking to the public outside the university.’ These
boundaries, as Boren shows in his chapter, are constantly crossed by
students. He assesses the tactics and strategies of various ‘student col-
lectives,’ especially as they come into contact with forces of opposition
outside the university’s walls, such as the labour and antiwar move-
ments. Creating these linkages remains possible because, as Dyer-
Witheford reminds us, ‘in academia as elsewhere, labour power is
never completely controllable.’ For starters, the very cognitive ‘general
intellect’ that capital seeks in order to fuel its future growth and profits
is always already uncontainable, as witnessed in myriad counter-utili-
zations of communication technology. Encouraging dissenting univer-
sity-based academics to creatively explore ways to link their teaching to
contemporary ‘biopolitical activisms,’ Dyer-Witheford describes an in-
triguing experiment in this direction called ‘Media in the Public Inter-
est,’ which is being conducted in his own university department.
Others are less convinced of the space for contestation that exists
within university structures today. Zaslove argues that the sheer depth
of both the commodification of education and the professionalization of
learning requires radical academics to become ‘saboteurs’ of a kind,
refusing the ‘market model’ of education while simultaneously rein-
venting the classroom as a space of ‘guerilla pedagogy.’ Drawing on a
project in ‘community mapping’ in which he has been closely involved,
Zaslove argues for a radical pedagogy that, emerging from the particu-
larities of specific neighbourhoods, operates according to an ‘incom-
mensurable anarcho-communitarian model.’
Various issues central to this volume – the university, the intellectual,
social movements, counter-globalization – are discussed in the inter-
view with Hall. Addressing a number of educational projects with
which he has been closely involved in the name of developing affinities
between knowledge production, cultural politics, and oppositional move-
ments, Hall argues for the continuing relevance of the Gramscian cat-
egory of the ‘organic intellectual.’ In the face of corporate globalization
and the spectre of American imperialism, he makes a passionate argu-

ment in favour of diverse modes of intellectual engagement and forms
of cultural politics. Similarly, Giroux acknowledges the struggles faced
by the university, which he positions within the broader context of our
historical moment of neoliberalism. But he calls for a ‘militant opti-
mism’ predicated on a utopian hope: ‘Against an increasingly oppres-
sive corporate-based globalism, educators and other cultural workers
need to resurrect a language of resistance and possibility, a language
that embraces a militant utopianism, while being constantly attentive to
those forces which seek to turn such hope into a new slogan or to
punish and dismiss those who dare look beyond the horizon of the
given.’ This ethos, which cuts across the various chapters in this part of
the book, is of vital importance to continued discussion of and practice
towards the creation of another university.
NOTE
1 Maurizio Viano and Vincenzo Binetti, ‘What Is to Be Done? Marxism and

Academia,’ in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino,
and Rebecca E. Karl (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 250.
1 Utopian Thinking in Dangerous Times:
Critical Pedagogy and the Project of
Educated Hope
henry a. giroux
There is a time and place in the ceaseless human endeavour to change the
world, when alternative visions, no matter how fantastic, provide the grist for
shaping powerful political forces for change. I believe we are precisely at such a
moment. Utopian dreams in any case never entirely fade away. They are
omnipresent as the hidden signifiers of our desires. Extracting them from the
dark recesses of our minds and turning them into a political force for change
may court the danger of the ultimate frustration of those desires. But better
that, surely, than giving in to the degenerate utopianism of neoliberalism (and
all those interests that give possibility such a bad press) and living in craven
and supine fear of expressing and pursuing alternative desires at all.
David Harvey
Neoliberalism and Democracy
Under the prevailing reign of neoliberalism in the United States, hope

seems foreclosed, progressive social change a distant memory. A life
beyond capitalism or the prevailing culture of fear appears impossible
to imagine at a time when the distinction between capitalism and
democracy seems to have been erased. As market relations become
synonymous with a market society, freedom is reduced to a market
strategy and citizenship is narrowed to the demands of consumerism.
The upshot is that it has become easier to imagine the end of the world
than the end of capitalism.1 Within this dystopian universe, the public
realm is increasingly reduced to an instrumental space in which indi-
viduality reduces self-development to the relentless pursuit of personal
interests and the realm of autonomy is reduced to a domain of activity
26 Henry A. Giroux
‘in which ... private goals of diverse kinds may be pursued.’2 This is
evident in ongoing attempts by many liberals and conservatives to turn
commercial-free public education over to market forces, to dismantle
traditional social provisions of the welfare state, to hand all vestiges of
the health care system over to private interests, and to mortgage social
security to the whims of the stock market. There is a growing sense in
the American popular imagination that citizen involvement, social plan-
ning, and civic engagement are becoming irrelevant in a society in
which the welfare state is being aggressively dismantled.3 Those tradi-
tional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate
with one another, and shape the conditions that structure their every-
day lives increasingly appear to have little relevance or political signifi-
cance in spite of the expressions of the public good that followed the
tragedy that took place on 11 September 2001. Amid growing fears
about domestic security and post–Iraq war jingoism, dissent is now
labelled unpatriotic, and this stance is accompanied by the ongoing
destruction of basic constitutional liberties and freedoms. For example,
under the Patriot Act, individuals can be detained by the government
indefinitely without being charged, without recourse to a lawyer, and
without a trial. The military has been given the right to conduct domes-
tic surveillance, and the FBI can now access library records to peruse
people’s reading habits. In the wake of this assault on civil liberties,
leading political figures such as former secretary of education William
Bennett have taken out ads in the New York Times declaring that internal
dissent aids terrorists and seriously threatens the security of the United
States.
Appeals to patriotic fervour are feeding a commercial frenzy that is
turning collective grief into profits and political responsibility into dema-
goguery. If the tragedy of 9/11 resurrected noble concepts like public
service and civic courage, the overwhelming power of the market quickly
converted these into an endless array of consumer products – every-
thing from shoes to flag pins. But the hijacking of a terroristic act has
done more than fuel market expansion; it has also provided a pretext
for dismantling basic civil liberties and imprisoning the American pub-
lic within a culture of fear and repression. It has provided huge rev-
enues to major corporations that support the Bush administration, and
it has spurred the U.S. military to spend billions on weapons designed
to lend legitimacy to a foreign policy based on the sinister right to
launch pre-emptive strikes against alleged enemies of the United States.
For a brief time, the role of big government and public services made
Utopian Thinking in Dangerous Times 27
a comeback, especially when it came to providing crucial services re-

lated to public health and safety. However, George W. Bush and his
supporters remain wedded to the ‘same reactionary agenda he pushed
before the attack.’4 Instead of addressing the gaps in public health care
and in the safety net for workers, young people, and the poor, the Bush
administration has pushed through Congress a stimulus plan based
primarily on tax breaks for the wealthy and major corporations; at the
same time, it has pressed for ‘an energy plan that features subsidies and
tax breaks for energy companies and drilling in the Arctic wilderness.’5
Once again, investing in children, the environment, crucial public ser-
vices, and those most in need has given way to investing in the rich and
repaying corporate contributors. These practices suggest that little has
changed with respect to economic policy, regardless of all the talk about
the past being irrevocably repudiated in light of the events of 9/11.
Where is the public outrage over a tax stimulus package that gives the
wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans 50 per cent of the total tax cut, while
Bush simultaneously refuses to enact legislation that would reduce the
financial burden for older Americans on Medicare? Where is the out-
rage over the administration’s willingness to give $500 billion in tax
breaks to the wealthy while at the same time ‘student loans, child-care,
food stamps, school lunches, job training, veterans programs,
and cash assistance for the elderly and disabled poor are all being
cut’?6 Where is the outrage over a government that will spend up to
$400 billion conquering and occupying Iraq at the same time that it cuts
veterans’ benefits? Where is the outrage over laws like the Patriot Act,
or the Homeland Security Act, which gives the government unprec-
edented powers to spy on its citizens and suspend habeas corpus?
Where is the outrage over the Bush administration’s ongoing assault on
the environment, which is so evident in the government’s scornful
refusal to ratify the Kyoto Accord to address global warming? Where is
the collective anger over a government bent on ingratiating itself with
corporate interests by gutting the Clean Air Act, by trying to eliminate
federal regulations concerning mercury emissions, by refusing to regu-
late coal-burning power plants, and by refusing to place any restraints
on companies that make cars that pollute the air? Even more serious is
the government’s refusal to address the plight of the 30 million people
in the United States who live below the poverty line, the 45 million
adults and children who have no health insurance, and the 1.4 million
children who are homeless in America.7
Some social theorists, such as Todd Gitlin, make the plunge into
28 Henry A. Giroux
political cynicism easier by suggesting that any attempt to change

society through a cultural politics that links the pedagogical with the
political will simply strengthen the dominant social order.8 Lost from
such accounts is any recognition that democracy has to be struggled
over, even in the face of a most appalling crisis of political agency.
Within this discourse, little attention is paid to the fact that struggles
over politics, power, and democracy are inextricably linked to the cre-
ation of democratic public spheres where individuals can be educated
as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities, and knowledge
they need not only to actually perform as autonomous social agents,
but also to believe that such struggles are worth taking up. The public
sphere is neither homogeneous nor nostalgic. It points to a plurality of
institutions, sites, and spaces. In it, people not only debate and reassess
the political, moral, and cultural dimensions of the public realm but
also develop processes of learning and persuasion as means of enacting
new social identities and altering ‘the very structure of participation
and the ... horizon of discussion and debate.’9
This struggle over politics is linked to pedagogical interventions
aimed at subverting dominant forms of meaning in order to generate
both a renewed sense of agency and a critical subversion of dominant
power itself. In this way, agency becomes the site through which – as
Judith Butler has pointed out in another context – power is not tran-
scended but rather reworked, replayed, and restaged in productive
ways.10 Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not
simply about power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, ‘has
to do with political judgements and value choices.’ This strongly sug-
gests that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy (for ex-
ample, learning how to become a skilled activist) are central to the
struggle over political agency and democracy.11 Civic education and
critical pedagogy emphasize critical reflexivity, bridge the gap between
learning and everyday life, make visible the connections between power
and knowledge, and provide the conditions for extending democratic
rights, values, and identities; at the same time, they draw upon the
resources of history. However, among many educators and social theo-
rists, there is a widespread refusal to address education as a crucial
means for expanding and enabling political agency, and to recognize
that such education takes place not only within schools but also across a
wide variety of public spheres, which are mediated through the very
mechanisms of culture itself – what Raymond Williams once called the
cultural force of permanent education.12
Democracy has been reduced to a metaphor for the alleged ‘free’

market and has nothing to do with more substantive renderings of the
term, such as what Noam Chomsky calls ‘involving opportunities for
people to manage their own collective and individual affairs.’13 It is not
that a genuine democratic public space once existed in some ideal form
and has since been corrupted by market values; rather, these demo-
cratic public spheres seem no longer to be animating concepts for
making visible the contradictions and tensions between the realities of
existing democracy and the promise of a more fully realized democ-
racy. While liberal democracy offers an important discourse around
issues of ‘rights, freedoms, participation, self-rule, and citizenship,’ it
has been mediated historically, as John Brenkman observes, through the
‘damaged and burdened tradition’ of racial and gender exclusions,
economic injustices, and a formalistic, ritualized democracy that has
substituted the swindle for the promise of democratic participation.14
Part of the challenge of creating a substantive and inclusive democracy
involves constructing new vocabularies, locations of struggle, and sub-
ject positions that will allow people in a wide variety of public spheres
to become more than they are now; to question what it is they have
become within existing institutional and social formations; and, as Chantal
Mouffe points out, ‘to give some thought to their experiences so that they
can transform their relations of subordination and oppression.’15
In spite of the urgency of the current historical moment, educators
should avoid crude, antitheoretical calls to action. More than ever, they
need to appropriate scholarly and popular sources and use theory as a
critical resource for naming particular problems and making connec-
tions between the political and the cultural, in order to break what
Homi K. Bhabha has called ‘the continuity and the consensus of com-
mon sense.’16 As a resource, theory becomes important as a means of
critically engaging and mapping the crucial relations among language,
texts, everyday life, and structures of power as part of a broader effort
to understand the conditions, contexts, and strategies of struggle that
will lead to social transformation. I am suggesting that the tools of
theory emerge out of the intersection of the past with the present, and
that they respond to and are shaped by the conditions at hand. Theory,
in this instance, addresses the challenge of connecting the world of the
symbolic, discursive, and representational to the social gravity and
force of everyday issues rooted in material relations of power.
All this suggests that educators and others ought to be trying to
produce new theoretical tools – a new vocabulary and set of conceptual
30 Henry A. Giroux
resources – that are capable of linking theory, critique, education, and

the discourse of possibility to the creation of social conditions for the
collective production of what Pierre Bourdieu calls realist utopias.17 In
part, such a project points to constructing a new vocabulary for con-
necting what we read to how we engage in movements for social
change, while recognizing that simply invoking the relationship be-
tween theory and practice or critique and social action is not enough.
For as John Brenkman points out, ‘theory becomes [a] closed circuit
when it supposes it can understand social problems without contesting
their manifestation in public life.’18 It is also symptomatic of a kind of
retreat from the uneven battles over values and beliefs characteristic of
some versions of postmodern conceptions of the political. Any attempt
to breathe new life into a substantive democratic politics must, in part,
produce alternative narratives to those employed by the producers of
official memory; furthermore, the attempt must address what it means
to make the pedagogical more political. In part this means engaging the
issue of what kind of educational work is necessary within different
types of public spaces. The goal here is to foster people’s capacity to
critique institutions, so that they can interrupt the dominant power and
fully address what Zygmunt Bauman calls the ‘hard currency of human
suffering.’19
If emancipatory politics is to be equal to the challenge of neoliberal
capitalism, educators need to theorize politics neither as a science nor
as a set of objective conditions, but as a point of departure in specific
and concrete situations. We need to rethink the very meaning of the
political so that it can provide a sense of direction but can no longer be
used to provide complete answers. Instead, we should ask why particu-
lar social formations have a specific shape, how they come into being,
and what it might mean to rethink these formations in terms of opening
up new sites of struggles. Politics in this sense offers a notion of the so-
cial that is open and provisional; it provides a conception of democracy
that is never complete and is constantly open to different understand-
ings of its workings.20 In this formulation, the struggle for justice and
against injustice never ends. In the absence of such languages and of the
public spheres that make those languages operative, politics becomes
narcissistic, reductionist, and unreflective and caters to the mood of
widespread pessimism as well as to the cathartic allure of spectacle and
the seductions of consumerism. Emptied of its political content, public
space increasingly becomes either a site of self-display – a favourite
space for the public relations intellectual, speaking ever so softly on
U.S. National Public Radio – or it functions as a site for reclaiming a

form of social Darwinism, a form represented most explicitly in reality-
based television with its endless instinct for the weaknesses of others
and its masochistic affirmation of ruthlessness and steroidal power. Or,
it becomes a site where citizenship is stripped of its civic responsibilities
and is reduced to the obligations of consumption. Escape, avoidance,
and narcissism are now coupled with the public display, if not the
celebration, of those individuals who define agency in terms of their
survival skills rather than their commitment to dialogue, critical reflec-
tion, solidarity, and relations that open up the promise of public en-
gagement with important social issues. Or, even worse, escape takes the
form of a new breed of reality television in which the children of the
obscenely rich flaunt their arrogance, vapidity, and utter contempt for
those who cannot casually run up thousand-dollar bar tabs on any
given night. Millions tuned in to watch Fox TV’s The Simple Life, as
socialite Paris Hilton illustrates the benefits of privilege against the
everyday lives of a farm family in Arkansas. Reality TV now embraces
the arrogance of neoliberal power; it smiles back at us, even while it
legitimates downsizing and the ubiquity of the political economy of
fear.
Educated Hope
Against an increasingly oppressive corporate-based globalism, educa-

tors and other cultural workers need to resurrect a language of resis-
tance and possibility, a language that embraces a militant utopianism,
while being constantly attentive to those forces which seek to turn such
hope into a new slogan or to punish and dismiss those who dare look
beyond the horizon of the given.21 Hope, in this instance, is one of the
preconditions for individual and social struggle, for the ongoing prac-
tice of critical education at a wide variety of sites; it is also a mark of
courage on the part of intellectuals inside and outside of the academy
who are using the resources of theory to address pressing social prob-
lems. But hope is also a referent for civic courage and its ability to
mediate the memory of loss and the experience of injustice is part of a
broader attempt to open up new locations of struggle, contest the work-
ings of oppressive power, and undermine various forms of domination.
The views of philosopher Ernst Bloch are instructive here. He argues
that hope must be concrete, a spark that not only reaches out beyond
the surrounding emptiness of privatization, but also anticipates a better
32 Henry A. Giroux
world in the future, a world that speaks to us by presenting tasks based

on the challenges of the present time. For Bloch, utopianism becomes
concrete when it links the possibility of the ‘not yet’ with forms of
political agency that are animated by a determined effort to engage
critically with the past and present in order to address pressing social
problems and realizable tasks.22 Bloch believed that utopianism could
not be removed from the world and was not ‘something like nonsense
or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it
could be there if we could only do something for it.’23 In Bloch’s view,
utopianism as a discourse of critique and social transformation is char-
acterized by a ‘militant optimism,’ one that foregrounds the crucial
relationship between critical education and political agency, on the one
hand, and the concrete struggles needed, on the other hand, to give
substance to the recognition that every present is incomplete. For theo-
rists like Bloch, utopian thinking is anticipatory, not messianic; it is
mobilizing, not therapeutic. Anson Rabinach argues, that at its best,
utopian thinking ‘points beyond the given while remaining within it.’24
The longing for a more human society in this instance does not collapse
into a retreat from the world; rather, it emerges out of critical and
practical engagements with present behaviours, institutional forma-
tions, and everyday practices. Hope in this context does not ignore the
worst dimensions of human suffering and exploitation; on the contrary,
it acknowledges the need to sustain the ‘capacity to see the worst and
offer more than that for our consideration.’25 The great challenge to
militant utopianism, with its hope of keeping critical thought alive is
the emerging consensus among a wide range of political factions that
neoliberal democracy is the best we can do. The impoverishment of
intellectuals, with their increasing irrelevance – and at times their grow-
ing refusal to address human suffering and social injustice – is now
matched by the impoverishment of a social order that cannot conceive
of any alternative to itself.
Feeding into the increasingly dominant view that society cannot be
fundamentally improved except through market forces, neoliberalism
strips utopianism of its possibilities for social critique and democratic
engagement. In doing so it undermines the need to reclaim utopian
thinking both as a discourse of human rights and as a moral referent for
the project of dismantling and transforming dominant structures of
wealth and power.26 Moreover, an antiutopianism of both the Right and
the Left can be found in those views which reduce utopian thinking to
state terrorism and progressive visionaries to unrealistic if not danger-
ous ideologues. The alternative offered here is what Russell Jacoby calls
a ‘convenient cynicism,’ a belief that human suffering and massive
inequalities in all areas of life are simply inherent in human nature and
an irreversible part of the social condition.27 Or, in its liberal version, the
belief that ‘America’s best defense against utopianism as terrorism is
preserving democracy as it currently exist[s] in the world.’28 Within this
discourse, hope is foreclosed, politics becomes militarized, and resis-
tance is either privatized or aestheticized or collapsed into hyper-
commercialized escapism. Against a militant and radically democratic
utopianism, the equating of terrorism with utopianism seems deeply
cynical. Neoliberalism not only appears flat, but also offers up an
artificially conditioned optimism – one that operates at full capacity in
the pages of Fast Company, Wired Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and
Forbes as well as in the relentless entrepreneurial hype of figures such as
George Gilder, Tom Peters, and the Nike and Microsoft ‘revolutionar-
ies.’ This artificial optimism makes it increasingly difficult to imagine a
life beyond the existing parameters of market pleasures, mail order
catalogues, shopping malls, and Disneyland.29 The profound anti-
utopianism that is spurred on by neoliberalism with its myth of the
citizen as consumer, and of markets as sovereign entities, and with its
collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civic liberties,
on the one hand, and a market economy and a market society, on the
other, not only commodifies a critical notion of political agency, but also
undermines the importance of multiple democratic public spheres.
Against the dystopian hope of neoliberalism, I argue for the necessity
of educated hope as a crucial component of a radically charged politics
‘grounded in broad-based civic participation and popular decision mak-
ing.’30 Educated hope as a form of oppositional utopianism makes
visible the need for progressives and other critical intellectuals to attend
to the ways in which institutional and symbolic power are tangled up
with everyday experience. Any politics of hope must tap into indi-
vidual experiences while at the same time linking individual responsi-
bility with a progressive sense of social agency. Politics and pedagogy
alike spring ‘from real situations and from what we can say and do in
these situations.’31 At its best, hope translates into civic courage as a
political and pedagogical practice that begins when one’s life can no
longer be taken for granted. In doing so, it makes concrete the possibil-
ity for transforming hope and politics into an ethical space – into a
public act that confronts the flow of everyday experience and the weight
of social suffering with the force of individual and collective resistance
34 Henry A. Giroux
and the unending project of democratic social transformation. By em-

phasizing politics as a pedagogical practice and a performative act,
educated hope also emphasizes that politics is played out on the terrain
of imagination and desire and is grounded in relations of power medi-
ated through the outcomes of situated struggles dedicated to creating
the conditions and capacities for people to become critically engaged
political agents.
Combining the discourse of critique with that of hope is crucial in
order to affirm that critical activity offers the possibility for social change.
In this way, democracy is viewed as a project and task, as an ideal type
that is never finalized and that has a powerful adversary in the social
realities it is meant to change. The postcolonial theorist Samir Amin
echoes this call by arguing that educators should consider addressing
the project of a more realized democracy as part of an ongoing process
of democratization. According to Amin, democratization ‘stresses the
dynamic aspect of a still-unfinished process’ while rejecting notions of
democracy that are given a definitive formula.32 An oppositional cul-
tural politics can take many forms, but given the current assault on
democratic public spheres, it seems imperative that progressives revi-
talize the struggles over social citizenship, especially those struggles
aimed at expanding liberal freedoms, the equality of resources, and
those forms of collective insurance that provide a safety net for indi-
vidual incapacities and misfortunes. Simultaneously, any viable cul-
tural politics must address the need to develop collective movements
that can challenge the subordination of social needs to the dictates of
privatization, commercialism, and capital.
Central to such a politics would be a critical public pedagogy that
attempts to make visible alternative models of radical democratic
relations at a wide variety of sites. These spaces can make the peda-
gogical more political by raising fundamental questions such as these:
What is the relationship between social justice and the distribution of
public resources and goods? What are the conditions, knowledge, and
skills that are a prerequisite for political agency and social change? At
the very least, such a project involves understanding and critically
engaging dominant values within a broader set of historical and insti-
tutional contexts. Unfortunately, many educators have failed to take
seriously Antonio Gramsci’s insight that ‘every relationship of “hege-
mony” is necessarily an educational relationship’ – with its implica-
tion that education as a cultural pedagogical practice takes place
across multiple sites, as it signals how, within diverse contexts, educa-
tion makes us both subjects of and subject to relations of power.33

Next, I conclude by commenting on two matters: what it would mean
to make the pedagogical more political as part of a broader effort to
reclaim the radically democratic role of public and higher education;
and the implications of addressing educators as critical public intel-
lectuals.
Public Intellectuals and Higher Education
In opposition to the corporatization of schooling, educators need to

define public and higher education as a resource that is vital to the
promise and realization of democratic life. Such a task, in part, points to
the need for academics, students, parents, social activists, labour orga-
nizers, and artists to join together and oppose the transformation of
higher education into a commercial sphere, to resist what Bill Readings
has called a consumer-oriented, corporate university concerned more
about accounting than accountability.34 As Zygmunt Bauman reminds
us, schools are one of the few public spaces left where students can
learn the ‘skills for citizen participation and effective political action.
And where there are no [such] institutions, there is no “citizenship”
either.’35 Higher education may be one of the few sites left where
students can learn about the limits of commercial values, address what
it means to learn the skills of social citizenship, and work to deepen
and expand the possibilities of collective agency and democratic life. I
think Toni Morrison is right in arguing that ‘if the university does not
take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic
freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems,
as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some
other regime or ménage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and
without us.’36
Defending higher education as a vital public sphere is necessary if we
are to develop and nourish the proper mediation between civil society
and corporate power, between identities founded on democratic
principles and identities steeped in those forms of competitive, self-
interested individualism that celebrate selfishness, profit-making, and
greed. This view suggests that higher education must be defended
through intellectual work that self-consciously recalls the tension be-
tween the democratic imperatives or possibilities of public institutions
and their everyday realization in a society dominated by market prin-
ciples. Education is not training; at its best, learning is connected to a
36 Henry A. Giroux
culture of curiosity and questioning, the imperatives of social responsi-

bility, and at the same time recognizes that political agency does not
reduce the citizen to a mere consumer.
Academics and others bear an enormous responsibility in opposing
neoliberalism by bringing democratic political culture to life. Part of
this challenge involves educators, students, and others beginning to
organize individually and collectively against those corporate forces
that increasingly define the university less as a social institution than as
a business, less as a public good than as a private benefit. Higher
education is being subsumed by market sovereignty, and as a result,
academic labour is being reconfigured in ways that remove faculty
from issues of governance. Increasingly, full-time faculty are being
replaced by part-time workers and limited-term appointees. For ex-
ample, in ‘2001 only about one-quarter of new faculty appointments
were to full tenure-track positions (i.e., half were part-time, and more
than half of the remaining full-time positions were “off” the tenure
track).’37 To resist this ongoing assault on higher education, educators
will have to take seriously the importance of sustained political educa-
tion and critical pedagogy as a necessary step in redefining the meaning
and purpose of higher education as a public sphere essential to creating
a democratic society. Radical pedagogy as a form of resistance might be
premised in part on the assumption that educators vigorously oppose
any attempts by liberals and conservatives, in conjunction with corpo-
rate forces, to reduce them to the role of technicians or multinational
operatives. But equally important, these questions need to be addressed
as part of a broader concern for renewing the struggle for social justice
and democracy. Such a struggle demands, as the writer Arundhati Roy
points out, that as intellectuals we ask ourselves some very ‘uncomfort-
able questions about our values and traditions, our vision for the future,
our responsibilities as citizens, the legitimacy of our “democratic insti-
tutions,” the role of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary, and the
intellectual community.’38
Edward Said argued that the public intellectual must function within
institutions in part as an exile, as someone whose ‘place it is publicly to
raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be
someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corpora-
tions.’39 From this perspective, the educator as public intellectual be-
comes responsible for linking the diverse experiences that produce
knowledge, identities, and social values in the university to the quality
of moral and political life in the wider society; and he or she does so by
entering into public conversations unafraid of generating controversy

or of taking a critical stand.
The issue is not about whether public or higher education has be-
come contaminated with politics. It is, more importantly, about recog-
nizing that education is already a space of politics, power, and authority.
The crucial matter at hand is how to appropriate, invent, direct, and
control the multiple layers of power and politics that constitute both the
institutional formation of education and the pedagogies, which are
often outcomes of deliberate struggles to establish particular notions of
knowledge, values, and identity. As committed educators, we cannot
eliminate politics, but we can work against a politics of certainty, a
pedagogy of censorship, and institutional forms that close down rather
than open up democratic relations. To do this, we will have to work
diligently to construct a politics without guarantees, one that perpetu-
ally questions both itself and all those values, practices, and forms of
power and knowledge that appear beyond the processes of interroga-
tion, debate, and deliberation. Against a pedagogy and politics of cer-
tainty, it is crucial for educators to develop pedagogical practices that
problematize considerations of institutional location and mechanisms
of transmission.
Public intellectuals need to approach social issues mindful of the
multiple connections and issues that tie humanity together; but they
need to do so as border intellectuals moving within and across diverse
sites of learning as part of an engaged and practical politics that recog-
nizes the importance of ‘asking questions, making distinctions, restor-
ing to memory all those things that tend to be overlooked or walked
past in the rush to collective judgment and action.’40 For educators to
function as public intellectuals, they need to provide opportunities for
students to learn that the relationship between knowledge and power
can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and
that what students say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn
privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and
transform when necessary the world around them. More specifically,
these educators need to argue for forms of pedagogy that close the gap
between the university and everyday life.
At one level, this suggests pedagogical practices that affirm and
critically enrich the meaning, language, and knowledge that students
actually use to negotiate and inform their lives. Unfortunately, the
political, ethical, and social significance of the role popular culture
plays as the primary pedagogical medium for young people remains
38 Henry A. Giroux
largely unexamined. When they are teaching about important issues

framed through, for example, the social lenses of poverty, racial con-
flict, and gender discrimination, educators need to challenge the as-
sumption that popular cultural texts cannot be as profoundly important
as traditional sources of learning. This is not a matter of pitting popular
culture against traditional curricular sources. Rather, it is a matter of
using both in a mutually informative way, always mindful of how these
spheres of knowledge might be used to teach students how to be skilled
citizens, whether that means learning how to use the Freedom of Infor-
mation Act, build coalitions, write policy papers, learn the tools of
democracy, and analyse social problems, or learning how to make a
difference in one’s life through individual and social engagements.
At a time when the forces of mass persuasion are assaulting all things
democratic and non-commercial on this planet, intellectuals bear a
special ethical and political responsibility. The urgency of the current
historical moment demands that intellectuals discard the professional-
ism, careerism, and isolation that make them largely irrelevant. Intel-
lectuals inside and outside the university have an important obligation
to offer alternative critical analyses, to dismantle illusory discourses of
power, to work with others to create an international social movement for
social justice and radical change. In short, educators need to become
provocateurs; they need to take a stand while rejecting involvement in
either a cynical relativism or doctrinaire politics. Central to intellectual
life is the pedagogical and political imperative that academics engage in
rigorous social criticism and become a stubborn force for challenging
false prophets, deflating the claims of triumphalism, and critically engag-
ing all those social relations that promote material and symbolic
violence.
At the same time, intellectuals must be deeply critical of their own
authority and how it structures classroom relations and cultural prac-
tices. In this way, the authority they legitimate in the classroom (as well
as in other public spheres) will become both an object of self-critique
and a critical referent for expressing a more ‘fundamental dispute with
authority itself.’41 This does not mean that teachers should abandon
authority or simply equate all forms of authority with the practice of
domination, as some radical educators have suggested. On the con-
trary, authority in the sense I am describing it here follows Gramsci in
calling on educators to assert authority in the service of encouraging
students to think beyond the conventions of common sense, to expand
the horizons of what they know, and to discover their own sense of
political agency and what it means to appropriate education as a critical
function. Crucial here is the recognition that while the teacher ‘is an
actor on the social and political stage, the educator’s task is to encour-
age human agency, not mold it in the manner of Pygmalion.’42 As Said
notes in a different context, ‘the role of the intellectual is not to consoli-
date authority, but to understand, interpret, and question it: this is
another version of speaking truth to power.’43
Conclusion
There is a lot of talk among academics in the United States and else-
where about the death of politics and the inability of human beings to
imagine a more equitable and just world in order to make it better. I
would hope that of all groups, educators would be the most vocal and
militant in challenging this assumption by reclaiming the university’s
subversive role, and by combining critiques of dominant discourses
and the institutional formations that support and reproduce them with
the goal of limiting human suffering. I would hope that at the same
time they would attempt to create the concrete economic, political,
social, and pedagogical conditions necessary for an inclusive and sub-
stantive democracy. Critical scholarship is crucial to such a task, but it is
not enough. Individual and social agency becomes meaningful as part
of the willingness to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise. Schol-
arship has a civic and public function, and it is precisely the connections
between knowledge and the broader society that make visible that
ethical and political function. Knowledge can and should be used to
amplify human freedom and promote social justice, not simply to cre-
ate profits or future careers. Intellectuals need to take a position, and as
Said argues, they have an obligation to ‘remind audiences of the moral
questions that may be hidden in the clamour of public debates ... and
deflate the claims of [neoliberal] triumphalism.’44 Combining theoreti-
cal rigour with social relevance may be risky politically and pedagogi-
cally, but the promise of a substantive democracy far outweighs the
security and benefits that accompany a retreat into academic irrel-
evance and the safe haven of a no-risk professionalism of the sort that
requires, as Paul Sabin observes, ‘an isolation from society and vows of
political chastity.’45
To think beyond the given is a central demand of politics, but it is also
a condition for individual and collective agency. At the heart of such a
task are the possibilities inherent in hope and the knowledge and skills
made available in a critical education. At this particular moment in the
United States, cynicism has become an important tool in the war against
democracy. But rather than make despair convincing, I think it is all the
more crucial to take seriously Meghan Morris’s argument that ‘things
40 Henry A. Giroux
are too urgent now to be giving up on our imagination.’46 Or, more

specifically, to take up the challenge of Derrida’s provocation that
‘we must do and think the impossible. If only the possible happened,
nothing more would happen. If I only did what I can do, I wouldn’t do
anything.’47
NOTES
1 This is actually drawn from Fredric Jameson. ‘It seems to be easier for us
today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of
nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.’ Jameson, The Seeds of Time
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xii.
2 Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso, 1992), 335.
3 Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor (Philadelphia:
Open University Press, 1998).
4 Editorial, ‘Bush’s Domestic War,’ The Nation, 31 December 2001, 3.
5 Ibid.
6 Molly Ivins, ‘Bush’s Sneak Attack on “Average” Taxpayers,’ Chicago
Tribune, 27 March 2003. Retrieved from www.commondreams.org/
views03/0327-04.htm (30 March 2003).
7 See Jaider Rizvi, ‘United States: Hunger in a Wealthy Nation,’ Tierramerica/
Inter Press Service, 26 March 2003, retrieved from www.foodfirst.org/
media/news/2003/hungerwealthy.html (30 March 2003). See also Jennifer
Egan, ‘To Be Young and Homeless,’ New York Times Magazine, 24 March
2002, 35.
8 See, for example, Tony Bennett, ‘Cultural Studies: A Reluctant Discipline,’
Cultural Studies 12:4 (1998): 528–45; Todd Gitlin, ‘The Anti-political Popu-
lism of Cultural Studies,’ in Cultural Studies in Question, ed. Majorie
Ferguson and Peter Golding (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 25–38; Ian
Hunter, Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1994).
9 John Brenkman, ‘Race Publics: Civil Illiberalism, or Race After Reagan,‘
Transition 5:2 (1995): 7.
10 Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, ‘Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s
Politics of Radical Signification,’ JAC 18:3 (1998): 741.
11 Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Institutions and Autonomy,’ in A Critical Sense, ed.
Peter Osborne (New York: Routledge, 1996), 8.
12 Raymond Williams, preface to Communications, 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes
and Noble, 1967), 14.
13 Noam Chomsky, Profits over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New
York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 92.
14 Brenkman, ‘Race Publics,’ 123.

15 Cited in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, ‘Rethinking Political Commu-
nity: Chantal Mouffe’s Liberal Socialism,’ JAC 19:2 (1999): 178.
16 Cited in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, ‘Staging the Politics of Differ-
ence: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy,’ JAC 18:3 (1998): 11.
17 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘For a Scholarship with Commitment,’ Profession (2000):
43.
18 John Brenkman, ‘Extreme Criticism,’ in What’s Left of Theory, ed. J. Butler,
J. Guillory, and K. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2000), 130.
19 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 5.
20 Simon Critchley, ‘Ethics, Politics, and Radical Democracy: The History
of a Disagreement,’ Culture Machine 4 (2002). Retrieved from
www.culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/frm_f1.htm (6 November 2002).
21 This section draws from a chapter on utopian hope in Henry A. Giroux,
Public Spaces, Private Lives (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
22 Bloch’s great contribution in English on the subject of utopianism can be
found in his three-volume work, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice,
Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986 [1959]).
23 Ernst Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and
Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,’ in Bloch,
The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1988), 3.
24 Anson Rabinach, ‘Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of
Fascism,’ New German Critique 11 (1977): 11.
25 Thomas L. Dunn, ‘Political Theory for Losers,’ in Vocations of Political
Theory, ed. Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000), 160.
26 See Russell Jacoby, ‘A Brave Old World: Looking Forward to a Nineteenth-
Century Utopia,’ Harper’s 301 (December 2000): 72–80; The End of Utopia:
Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Leo
Panitch and Sam Gindin, ‘Transcending Pessimism: Rekindling Socialist
Imagination,’ in Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias, ed. Leo Panitch and
Sam Gindin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 1–29; David
Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000);
Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
27 Jacoby, ‘A Brave Old World,’ 80.
28 Norman Podhoretz, cited in Ellen Willis, ‘Buy American,’ Dissent (Fall,
2000), 110.
29 For a critique of the entrepreneurial populism of this diverse group, see
Thomas Frank, One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism
42 Henry A. Giroux
and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

30 Carl Boggs, The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public
Sphere (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 7.
31 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso,
2001), 96.
32 Samin Amin, ‘Imperialization and Globalization,’ Monthly Review (June
2001), 12.
tional Press, 1971), 350.
34 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1996).
35 Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1999), 170. I take up this theme in detail in Henry A. Giroux and
Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education (New York: Palgrave,
2006).
36 Toni Morrison, ‘How Can Values Be Taught in the University?’ Michigan
Quarterly Review (Spring 2001): 278.
37 Martin Finklestein, ‘The Morphing of the American Academic Profession,’
Liberal Education 89:4 (2003): 1.
38 Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), 3.
39 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon, 1994),
11.
40 Ibid., 52–3.
41 R. Radhakrishnan, ‘Canonicity and Theory: Toward a Poststructuralist
Pedagogy,’ in Theory/Pedagogy/Politics, ed. Donald Morton and Mas’ud
Zavarzadeh (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 112–35.
42 Stanley Aronowitz, ‘Introduction,’ in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 10–11.
43 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 503.
44 Ibid., 504.
45 Paul Sabin, ‘Academe Subverts Young Scholars’ Civic Orientation,’
Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 February 2002, B24.
46 Cited in Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Why Does Neo-Liberalism Hate Kids? The
War on Youth and the Culture of Politics,’ Review of Education/Pedagogy/
Cultural Studies 23:2 (2001): 114.
47 Jacques Derrida, ‘No One Is Innocent: A Discussion with Jacques Derrida
about Philosophy in the Face of Terror,’ Information Technology, War and
Peace Project. Retrieved from http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/
911 (13 November 2001).
2 Teaching and Tear Gas: The University
in the Era of General Intellect
nick dyer-witheford
One April day a few years ago, pedagogic utopia visited me in a cloud
of tear gas. The place was Quebec City, the occasion a demonstration
against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, one of a sequence
of counter-globalization street protests, after Seattle, before 9/11. A few
hours earlier, I had been standing in a crowd of labour militants, witches,
antipoverty campaigners, and eco-activists cheering black bloc anar-
chists as they vaulted the security fence surrounding the summit site
before being repelled by riot police. The day then spiralled into
semichoreographed encounters between security forces and demon-
strators, punctuated by regular volleys of chemical agents. For some
time I avoided the worst of the tear gas, but eventually a canister
landed at my feet. Reeling out of the vapour, I sank to my knees,
scarcely able to see or breathe, amidst a stampede of protesters. Some-
one from the running crowd halted to offer me water. As I doused my
streaming eyes, I looked up and was surprised to recognize a student
from a university undergraduate course I had taught the year before.
There was in fact nothing surprising in my rescuer being a student –
many, perhaps most, of the demonstrators were in high school or uni-
versity. This specific student was, however, a shock. He had always sat
at the back of my large, required classes on the political economy of the
media, one (I had guessed) of a regular contingent of business-oriented
enrollees who suffered through my mutated-Marxian analyses of the
information industry with thinly concealed hostility. He had never
asked a question or spoken to me. I did not know his name, could not
pick out his work from nigh on two hundred final papers, and remem-
bered him only because of the special ferocity of the silent scepticism he
radiated. Yet here he was, bandana across his mouth, making like a
44 Nick Dyer-Witheford
member of an anticapitalist Medivac team. I coughed out something to

the effect of ‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’ ‘Oh well,’ he replied
nonchalantly, ‘after that course of yours, I thought I’d better see what
was going on. Never imagined it would be like this. This is amazing.’
And he disappeared back into the fumes.
This was a moment when, for reasons not entirely limited to self-
preservation, university teaching seemed worthwhile – a moment of
pedagogic utopia sufficiently interesting and unusual to warrant some
analysis of its conditions of possibility. To this end, I will put in play
some theoretical concepts derived from the lexicon of autonomist Marx-
ism: ‘general intellect,’ ‘cognitive capitalism,’ and ‘the multitude.’1 I
then offer a concrete illustration of these ideas in a brief case study of
the Canadian university program where I teach, and conclude on an
unabashedly utopian note by framing the preceding observations within
a revised version of Marx’s concept of ‘species being.’
General Intellect
‘General intellect’ is an idea given recent currency by a group of theo-

rists – Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Michael Hardt, Maurizio Lazzarato,
Jean Paul Vincent, and others – who in the mid-1990s clustered around
the Parisian journal Futur antérieur.2 They derive the concept from Marx,
who introduced it in his Grundrisse of 1857. Here he prophesies that at a
certain moment in capitalism’s future the creation of wealth will come
to depend not on direct expenditure of labour time but rather on the
‘development of the general powers of the human head,’ ‘general social
knowledge,’ ‘social intellect,’ or, in a striking metaphor, ‘the general
productive forces of the social brain.’3 The emergence of general intel-
lect is signalled by the increasing importance of machinery – ‘fixed
capital’ – and in particular by the salience of both automation and
transportation/communication networks. Marx’s observations on gen-
eral intellect are brief and fragmentary. But read sympathetically, they
can be seen as a prefigurative glimpse of today’s ‘post-Fordism’ or
‘information capitalism,’ whose production teams, innovation milieux,
and corporate research consortiums yield the ‘fixed capital’ of robotic
factories, genetic engineering, and global computer networks. (See Franco
Berardi, in this volume.)
But if this is the case, what happens to class conflict when capital
reaches the era of general intellect? Marx’s dialectical prediction was
that technologies of automation and communication, by reducing di-
The University in the Era of General Intellect 45
rect labour-time and socializing production, would inexorably render

wage labour and private ownership obsolete, so that ‘capital … works
towards its own dissolution.’4 Things hardly seem so simple today. On
the contrary, high technology and globalization appear – at least at first
sight – to have brought about an unprecedented triumph to the world
market, and disarray or extinction to its revolutionary opposition. Yet at
the very time that capitalism’s apologists were announcing the ‘end
of history,’ deep social unrest was manifesting itself in so-called
antiglobalization movements, which challenge capitalism, albeit in
ways very different from Marxism’s classic predictions of an industrial
working-class uprising.
This was the dilemma that the Futur antérieur group attempted to
think through as its members revised the concept of general intellect,
seeking a new analysis of the factors that would determine the domi-
nance or dissolution of Information Age capitalism. The critical issue,
they suggested, was not just the accumulation of technology – the fixed
capital of advanced machines that Marx had focused on. Rather, it
was the variable potential of human subjectivity, which continues to be
vital – though often in indirect and mediated ways – for the creation
and operation of this apparatus. This subjective element they variously
term ‘mass intellect’ or ‘immaterial labour.’ It is human know-how –
technical, cultural, linguistic, and ethical – that supports the operations
of the high-tech economy, something that is especially evident in the
communicational and aesthetic aspects of high-tech commodity pro-
duction. Negri describes ‘mass intellectuality’ as the activity of a ‘post-
Fordist proletariat’ … ‘increasingly directly involved in computer-related,
communicative and formative work … shot through and constituted by
the continuous interweaving of technoscientific activity and the hard
work of the production of commodities, by the territoriality of the
networks within which this interweaving is distributed, by the increas-
ingly intimate combination of the recomposition of times of labour and
of forms of life.’5 The crucial question thus becomes how far capital can
contain what Vincent terms ‘this plural, multiform, constantly mutating
intelligence’ within its structures.6
The context of this analysis was a rising tide of social discontent with
the privatization, deregulation, and austerity programs of the Juppe
government – programs that were to culminate in the great French
general strikes of 1996, which have sometimes been described as ‘the
first revolt against globalization.’7 These strikes involved large num-
bers of technically skilled workers – nurses and medical paraprofes-
sionals, air traffic controllers, and workers in the most up-to-date cy-
borg car factories. They also involved universities. Rising tuition fees
and declining conditions had brought students and instructors onto the
streets, into cyberspace (computer networks were used to coordinate
protests), and into public debate about globalization processes.
The centrality of the university to the analysis of general intellect is
apparent in a passage by Vincent. He observes that capital ‘appears to
domesticate general intellect without too much difficulty.’8 But this
absorption, he goes on to note, demands an extraordinary exercise of
‘supervision and surveillance’ involving ‘complex procedures of attrib-
uting rights to know and/or rights of access to knowledge which are at
the same time procedures of exclusion’:
Good ‘management’ of the processes of knowledge consists of polarising

them, of producing success and failure, of integrating legitimating
knowledges and disqualifying illegitimate knowledges, that is, ones con-
trary to the reproduction of capital. It needs individuals who know what
they are doing, but only up to a certain point. Capitalist ‘management’
and a whole series of institutions (particularly of education) are trying to
limit the usage of knowledges produced and transmitted. In the name of
profitability and immediate results, they are prohibiting connections and
relationships that could profoundly modify the structure of the field of
knowledge.9
In what follows, I extend this analysis to the situation of North

American universities – Canadian ones in particular – and suggest that
the absorption of general intellect by contemporary capitalism is par-
tial, incomplete, and contested by the emergence of a ‘multitudinous
campus’ linked to broader counter-globalization movements.
Cognitive Capitalism: Academia Inc.
Let us call the commercial appropriation of general intellect ‘cognitive

capitalism.’10 Cognitive capitalism is a regime that mobilizes collective
intelligence to generate high-tech innovations for corporations to sell as
commodities, and/or to produce other commodities. Its critical mecha-
nisms include intellectual property rights, venture finance, and uni-
versity–corporate partnerships. Indeed, no site could be more vital to
cognitive capital than academia, for it is here that there proceeds what
David Noble terms ‘the systematic conversion of intellectual activity
into intellectual capital, and, hence, intellectual property.’11
The absorption of North American universities into cognitive capital-

ism was not a natural process. It has a history. As Negri and others have
noted, the corporate resort to increasingly ‘intellectual’ modes of pro-
duction was the outcome of a cycle of struggles. Capitalism went cogni-
tive in the 1960s and 1970s not only because computers and biotech
innovations were available, but also because high-tech options became
attractive as responses to the massive unrest that was besetting indus-
trial, Fordist capitalism – strikes by industrial workers, the emergence
of new social movements, and guerrilla wars in Vietnam and else-
where.
Making the shift from industrial to cognitive capital – or from Fordism
to post-Fordism – required pacifying and restructuring academia. Cam-
puses from Paris to California, from Kent State in Ohio to Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver, were in tumult as the ‘1968’ generation of
students rose against the cruelties and conformities of the Fordist
military-industrial complex. After the immediate discipline of police
action, shootings, and academic purges, the neoliberal response was
radical reorganization.
This reorganization arose from a dovetailing of two sets of interests:
the state’s and the corporate sector’s. Governments, beset by the ‘fiscal
crisis of the state’ (in fact largely induced by a corporate tax rebellion),
were keen to cut costs; business, on the other hand, wanted more
control over the troublesome but increasingly valuable education sec-
tor.12 Over the late 1970s and 1980s, funding for university education in
most capitalist economies was cut. Tuition fees and student debt loads
rose sharply. Programs seen as subversive or simply inutile to industry
were slashed. These measures, alongside a climbing unemployment
rate and general economic austerity, chilled student protest.
The conditions were thus set for an integration of universities and
business, which was vital to the development of high-tech ‘knowledge
industries.’13 In this new order, basic research has been sacrificed to
applied programs of immediate benefit to the corporate sector. Re-
search parks, private-sector liaisons, consultancies, cross-appointments
with industry, and academic–corporate consortiums are now burgeon-
ing. Moneys subtracted from base operating budgets are being rein-
jected back into programs of direct utility to high-tech capital, such as
schools of communication, engineering, and business administration
and special institutes for computer, biotech, and space research. Univer-
sity administrators now move effortlessly between interlocking corpo-
rate and academic boards. Enabled by changes in intellectual property
laws that entitle them to exercise ownership rights over patents result-
ing from government-funded grants, universities have become active

players in the merchandising of research results. Amidst this intensify-
ing commercial ethos, the internal operations of academia have become
steadily more corporatized, with university management practices
mirroring those of the private sector.
This new rapprochement with academia has performed two func-
tions for capital. First, it has provided business with the facilities to
socialize the costs and risks of extraordinarily expensive high-tech re-
search, while privatizing the benefits of the innovations. Second, it is
subsidizing capital’s retraining of its post-Fordist labour force, which is
being sorted and socialized for the new information economy through
increasingly vocational and technically oriented curricula that empha-
size skills and proficiencies at the expense of critical analysis and free
inquiry. Capitalism, mutating into its informational phase, has become
more intellectual: Microsoft calls its production facilities in Redmond,
Washington, a ‘campus,’ and Motorola and McDonalds now run their
own ‘universities.’ Simultaneously, universities are becoming more in-
dustrial, and are serving as ancillary facilities for capital’s overall project
of high-tech development. This is the dialectic of corporate–university
interaction in the era of cognitive capital.
Cellular Counter-Knowledges
As many essays in this book attest, cognitive capitalism’s assimilation

of the universities has not been seamless. Let us look first at professors
and instructors – the immaterial labour force that is so vital to research
and teaching. The various inducements and threats offered to win their
assent – appointments, tenure, grants, and so forth – have undoubtedly
been widely effective. In the knowledge fields most important to cogni-
tive capital, lucrative entrepreneurial possibilities have led to a prodi-
gious signing on.14 Survival demands frantic attempts to seem useful
within the parameters of the new order. Yet there remain various ‘cells’
of intellectual opposition within the faculty of Academia Inc. Schemati-
cally, we can identify four clusters of this dissent: the ‘hermits,’ ‘long
marchers,’ ‘whistleblowers,’ and the ‘migrant labourers.’
The hermits represent a traditionalist opposition to the new utilitar-
ian model, one that is founded in a commitment to the merits of de-
tached scholarship. This exists both in the humanities (where its roots
run back to the philosophic privileging of contemplative over practical
activity) and in the natural sciences (where it is allied to the defence of
basic rather than applied research). In many ways it is a conservative

opposition; often it is as hostile to activism as it is to commodification. It
is rooted in an idealization of an ‘ivory tower’ past, and, because of
this nostalgic orientation, it has been thinning out over time. Nonethe-
less it remains a residual source of disaffection and is sometimes very
incisive in criticizing the manifest corruptions of academic–corporate
involvement.
Then there are the long marchers – the cadre of the professoriate that
took form during the cycle of social struggles of the late 1960s and
1970s. Many of these people were student radicals or social activists
during those years, and responded to the ebbing of the protest tides by
making what Rudi Dutschke has called ‘the long march through the
institutions.’ A more precise analysis would distinguish various waves
of neo-Marxists, feminists, and new social movers. The directions this
march has taken have been, to put it mildly, various, and include a
spectacular number of recantations, repentances, and reversals. None-
theless, there remain many faculty – especially but by no means only in
the social sciences, and some now in senior positions – with pedagogi-
cal commitments and connections to the historical legacies of these
activisms. These people are the source of much of the Right’s perennial
anxiety about the Left-liberal nature of universities.
Then there are the whistleblowers. Unlike the hermits and long march-
ers, who tend to be situated in disciplines marginalized by the high-tech
thrust of university development, these people are found in the disci-
plines that have been most energetically corporatized, such as biologi-
cal, medical, and computer science. They feel compelled by ethics, or
even by professional standards, to speak out against instances of se-
crecy, fraud, and deception arising from corporate-determined research.
One can cite two recent cases at the University of Toronto. One involved
Dr Nancy Olivieri, a clinician who spoke out against the influence of
pharmaceutical companies on drug trials; the other involved Dr David
Healy, who was offered a position as director of the Centre for Addic-
tion and Mental Health, only to have it withdrawn after he delivered a
speech criticizing the drug Prozac, manufactured by Eli Lily, one of the
university’s most important corporate partners. There are very few of
these whistleblowers, who often pay a very steep price for their actions,
but their significance is disproportionate to their numbers, since the
scandals they provoke open one of the only public windows onto the
inner workings of Academia Inc.
Finally there are the migrant labourers. Following the overall
downsizing logic of post-Fordist capital, academic administrators have

been seeking ways to get the immaterial labour force of the university
to do more with, or for, less. A classic strategy of casualization decreases
permanent hiring in favour of reliance on pools of teaching assistants,
sessional instructors, and junior faculty, who form a contingent aca-
demic labour force subjected to chronic insecurity and lack of benefits,
and who are required to exercise mind-bending flexibility in pedagogic
preparation (celebrated in Doonesbury’s immortal ‘will teach for food’
cartoon).15 This experience of the dark side of pedagogic labour makes
this group a seething mass of discontent, and in some ways the most
organizationally dynamic of all.
These layers or clusters of internal opposition to cognitive capital in
Academic Inc. are in fact intertwined and hybridized in very complex
alignments. For example, I would situate myself as a long marcher
whose rather late departure ensured a recent exposure to the experi-
ences of the migrant labourers. All have genealogies stretching far back
into disciplinary and cultural history. This intellectual complexity is to
some extent protected by the sedimented institutional history of the
university (see Ian Angus, in this volume). Attempts to enact corporat-
ist models find themselves entangled in a melange of practices – such as
tenure – that combine neofeudalistic privilege with the highest liberal
commitments to freedom of thought and expression. Even the entrepre-
neurial models of cognitive capital, with their emphasis on faculty as
grant-getters and enrolment-maximizers, can in some circumstances be
twisted to provide havens and shelters for dissent. Despite the attempts
of cognitive capital to purify the universities and turn them into
intellectual laboratories for high-technology accumulation, academia
remains wormholed with pockets of faculty dissent.
The Multitudinous Campus
The other critical factor in the changing composition of academia’s

collective intelligence is of course the student population (see Mark
Edelman Boren, in this volume). Cognitive capital’s reorganization of
the universities as training institutes for immaterial labour has drawn
into universities increasing numbers of young people for whom a de-
gree has been frankly defined as a job qualification, and for whom
higher education is a means for self-commodification. Such socializa-
tion seems inimical to political activism, and in many ways it is. These
generations are divided from the student radicalism of 1968 not only by
age but also by the vast cultural amnesia induced by neoliberal restruc-
turing. To them, the anti–Vietnam War movement and the Berkeley free
speech movements seem like quaint items of parental nostalgia or
retro-movie sets. Yet these new populations have their own sources of
discontent.
The most important of these is economic stress. The downloading of
education costs onto students has been an integral part of university
restructuring. Tuition fee increases have made university materially
nerve-racking for many. Skyrocketing debt loads mean that this educa-
tion figures for many as the inauguration of indentured servitude. It
also means that many students must work their way through school –
very often in service-industry positions, in ‘McJobs’ or as ‘netslaves.’ In
those positions, they get a good look at the underside of the new
economy, as well as a rapid and practical education in the various
registers of exploitation.
These tensions are increased by students’ exposure to the consump-
tion side of capital. University students are among the demographic
niches targeted most intensively by marketers, who have made ‘youth
culture’ a field of saturation advertising, branding, and promotions. Yet
the result is not necessarily a passive induction to consumerism. In
many ways, exposure to these forces has generated a heightened aware-
ness among students of the forces attempting to shape their subjectivity.
Critique of commercial media, curiosity about alternative practices
of culture jamming, ad-busting, and subvertisements, and a cynical
hyperawareness of how such alternatives can be co-opted by cool hunt-
ers and viral marketers, are an integral part of student culture.16
Today’s students are thus undergoing an extraordinarily intensive
double apprenticeship; they are subjects both of penurious, labouring
discipline and of compulsive hedonistic consumption. They are posi-
tioned in the cross hairs of the ‘cultural contradictions of capitalism’
long ago acknowledged even by intelligent neoconservatives such as
Daniel Bell – a situation of inherent multiplicity that generates re-
sponses ranging from frantic self-promotion to indifferent cynicism.17
This is also a situation against which the properly ‘utopian’ impulses of
youth – the desire to experience education as self-development rather
than as social conditioning, and to experience life creatively and ethi-
cally – often manage to gain traction.
Indeed, in the early 1990s, new currents of student activism began to
percolate across North American campuses.18 Much of this activism
focused around protests against fees, debt loads, and deteriorating
learning conditions. But it also involved anti-sweatshop activism, ‘buy

nothing days,’ actions against the commercialization of campuses, re-
sistance to the commercial development of university lands, and cam-
paigns against university linkages to authoritarian foreign regimes. In
this context, the protests of students and the pedagogy of dissident
instructors entered into a feedback loop, with each reinforcing and
amplifying the other.
Both also began to interweave in complex ways with academic labour
protests. Cognitive capital’s corporatization of the universities, and its
embrace of business management models, has produced a response
that should not have surprised administrators as much as it has. On
many North American campuses, including some of the most presti-
gious, regular university faculty are now unionized – something un-
thinkable even a decade ago. Graduate students in particular are now
an important constituency for labour organizers. Teaching assistants’
strikes have spread across North American campuses, involving insti-
tutions as famous as Yale and scores of others.19
The new campus activism resulting from these converging forces has
a very different flavour from that of the 1960s and 1970s. The revolts of
forty years ago were resisting capital’s tendency to make the university
a ‘knowledge factory.’ But because this assimilation was only partially
complete, these uprisings had a certain isolation. Campuses might
become temporary red ghettos, but there was a fundamental divorce
between these enclaves and the more general conditions of work and
exploitation. Today, the much tighter fusion of academia with business,
and the manifest subordination of education to the job market has
ended this relative isolation and has opened other possibilities. The
conventional distinction between university and the ‘real’ world – at
once self-deprecating and self-protective – is becoming less and less
relevant. If students and teachers have lost some of the latitude of
action and relative privilege that universities once afforded, they have
also become connected to and potential participants in movements
outside the university.
In the mid-1990s this radicalism began to contribute to and connect
with the much wider currents of social dissent known collectively as the
counter-globalization or altermondialiste movement – what Negri and
Hardt refer to as the revolt of ‘the multitude.’ The path to this wound
through the participation of students and instructors in wider move-
ments against deregulation, privatization, and cuts to social programs.
Participation in these movements has pulled academics and students
into contact with labour and trade-union organizations, with public

service workers who are protesting cutbacks, and with diverse other
constituencies surging against capital’s agenda of high-tech austerity.
Out of these contacts has evolved a corporate–university interaction
very different from the one that capital intended – one that is injecting
opposition to corporate rule from the streets into the campuses, and
from the campuses back into the streets.
Polymorphous Communication
The insertion of universities into this global circulation of struggles is

not, however, just a matter of either campus protests or classroom
teaching and learning. It also involves the role of universities as nodes
of high-tech activity in the web of communication. As Vincent puts it,
general intellect is in fact ‘a labour of networks and communicative
discourse … [It is] not possible to have a “general intellect” without a
great variety of polymorphous communications.’20 One of the defining
features of cognitive capitalism is precisely its elaboration of high-tech
communications systems, especially the digital networks, of which the
best known is the Internet.
Universities have been tightly associated with the Internet at every
moment of its history. From its origins in Pentagon research, to its
academic elaboration as a civilian system based on public funding and
open protocols, to the launching of the ‘dot.com’ boom fuelled by the
corporate privatization of university-based research, academic labour
has been central to the emergence of this network of networks. At the
same time, academia has itself been transformed. Campuses have be-
come sites of mass digital apprenticeship. To study today means to
know how to use a computer, and preferably to own one – indeed,
possession is a mandatory requirement at some universities. It means to
be familiar with search engines, websites, online databases, chat rooms,
and e-mail.
From one point of view, this merely signifies the intensifying
subsumption of academia by digital capitalism. Universities themselves
have become a direct target of dot.com enterprise with the drive to-
wards the ‘virtual university’ – code for the activities of corporate–
academic partnerships entrepreneurially pushing the commercial
development of large-scale telelearning systems. Critics such as David
Noble have tellingly challenged the paucity of the pedagogical theory
behind this project; furthermore, they have argued that such ventures
aim at nothing less than the commodification of the university’s teach-

ing function, which would convert academia into what he scathingly
terms ‘digital diploma mills.’21
There is, however, another side to the networking of the universities.
In many ways, the great irony of cognitive capitalism is that it has failed
to adequately contain and control the network that is the greatest achieve-
ment of general intellect. The early take-off of the Net blindsided corpo-
rate moguls, who then frantically scrambled to turn it into an engine of
accumulation. The bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000 signalled the
failure, however temporary, of this attempt. Today, in the aftermath of
this debacle, cyberspace is where the vectors of e-capital tangle and
entwine with those of a molecular proliferation of activists, researchers,
gamers, artists, hobbyists, and hackers. And one consequence of the
networking of universities is that millions of students have access to
these alternative and sometimes subversive dynamics, of which I will
mention only two: cyberactivism and peer-to-peer networks.
The importance to the counter-globalization movement of the
‘electronic fabric of struggles’ is now widely recognized.22 From the e-
mailed communiqués of Zapatista spokesperson Subcommandante
Marcos, to the networked opposition to the Multilateral Agreement on
Investment, to the parody of official WTO websites on the ‘Battle of
Seattle,’ to experiments in electronic civil disobedience, Net strikes, and
other forms of hacktivism, the Internet has been turned into a vehicle of
contemporary anticapitalist self-organization. Cyberactivism is no magic
bullet against cognitive capital, and it has its own problems. But one of
its effects is that there is now washing through cyberspace an immense
tide of discussion and critique about neoliberal policies and alternatives
to them. Much of this stream of counterknowledge has been created by
students and academics, and all of it can be found, through intentional
search or serendipitous discovery, by any student researching a paper
in economics, sociology, political science, environmental science, or a
thousand-and-one other topics. This is a truly astounding enlargement
of what was once termed alternative media.
There are other network activities that challenge capital equally or
more severely, by decommodifying its digital products – for example,
piracy, open-source and freeware initiatives, and gift economy prac-
tices. Ease of digital reproduction and the speed of network circulation
are warping the fabric of intellectual property and blasting gaping
holes in it. As Richard Barbrook notes, while the official ideology of
post-Cold War North America is triumphal celebration of the free
market, in their daily practices millions of Americans are actually in-

volved in the online digital circulation of free and unpaid-for music,
films, games, and information that in effect amounts to a form of
‘dot.communism.’23 These practices are part of the daily life of univer-
sity students. The peer-to-peer (P2P) networks of Napster and Gnutella,
and their various successors, are very largely college-based phenom-
ena. The music industry is now seriously contemplating ‘that parents
could be presented with a bill for their child’s downloading activities at
college, and degrees could be withheld until someone pays,’ and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology has had to resist subpoenas from
the industry ‘seeking the names of students it suspects of being heavy
file-sharers.’24 P2P is the product of a generation for whom the potenti-
alities to freely reproduce and circulate digital information have be-
come the basis for what Hardt and Negri call ‘a kind of spontaneous
and elementary communism.’25
The point here is not to offer a simplistic celebration of P2P networks,
which, like cyberactivism and hacktivism, involve complex ethical,
economic, and political issues. I am suggesting that the networking of
the universities, while in some ways deepening academia’s integration
with cognitive capital, is simultaneously creating opportunities for
students to test the limits of this subsumption. The communication
systems that constitute general intellect remain polymorphous, a ma-
trix of possibilities within which to learn, and teach.
Pedagogical Possibilities
To make these points more concrete, I now want to offer a brief example
of curriculum innovation, drawing on my own experience as a pro-
fessor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) at the
University of Western Ontario (UWO), where I have taught for the past
eight years.
UWO is a large university (about fifty thousand students) in a quiet
town two hours from Toronto. Dominated by its professional schools –
medicine, law, engineering, and the internationally renowned Ivey Busi-
ness School – it has traditionally been seen as a conservative finishing
school for the sons and daughters of Ontario’s business and profes-
sional elites. The student population is ethnically and culturally quite
homogeneous – certainly more consistently white and affluent than in
universities in Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver. Although UWO has a
respectable academic standing, it also has a reputation among under-
graduates as something of a party school. With its green and pseudo-

medieval campus, it is a pleasant place – but not obviously auspicious
terrain for politically utopian academics.
In the mid-1990s, UWO created a Faculty of Information and Media
Studies, formed by a wary marriage of two distinct professional schools
– Library and Information Science, and Journalism. New faculty (in-
cluding myself) were hired from a variety of backgrounds – cultural
studies, cognitive psychology, political economy – to make up a school
that would integrate pre-existing graduate programs in librarianship
and journalism with a broader undergraduate (and eventually gradu-
ate) program in ‘media, information and technoculture.’
There were various agendas at play in the formation of FIMS. Univer-
sity administrators hoped to capitalize on the cultural and commercial
excitement buzzing around the Internet, e-commerce, and high-tech by
creating a program that would lend some flash to UWO’s rather staid
image. They hoped this would boost its competitive position vis-à-vis
other universities in the province in the war for undergraduate enrol-
ments. FIMS was also seen as a possible magnet for corporate support.
If this had been the only force at work, one might have expected the
outcome to be a program functional for cognitive capital: a training
ground for e-entrepreneurs and professional ‘excellence.’ What compli-
cated this trajectory was that the actual design of the curriculum fell to a
group of left-liberal faculty with critical perspectives. Most had back-
grounds in journalism and librarianship. These are professions whose
immaterial labour is central to cognitive capital. But both also have
long, complex traditions of antagonism to, and critique of, corporate
power – librarianship because of its public service tradition, journalism
because of its tradition of investigative journalism. A combination of
initiative and chance meant that faculty aligned with or at least open to
multitudinous perspectives conducted both the initial design of new
programs and the hiring for those programs. These initial decisions had
a crucial and cumulative influence.
What emerged was a faculty that offered courses in, for example, the
political economy of media; collective intelligence, war, and propa-
ganda; intellectual property and ethics; feminist perspectives on media;
and many other communication issues. And many of these courses
were taught from what can broadly be described as a Left perspective.
This program consistently attracted high, and high-quality, student
enrolments. The faculty became – as administrators had hoped, and in a
way that surprised many instructors – a ‘hot’ program. This was in part
because of students’ professional aspirations: they were looking for

careers not only in journalism or librarianship, but also in entertain-
ment or public relations. But it was also because the issue of media had
‘immediacy’ to a generation that had been socialized in the communi-
cation-saturated environment of post-Fordism and raised with the Net
and that had participated in a youth culture formed in the synergistic
webs of media empires. For these students, issues around copyright
and censorship, privacy, hacking, mediated representation and perfor-
mance, search engines, blogging, and digitized work settings were
matters of everyday experience. Out of this exposure rose a host of
opportunities for leveraging critical perspectives, especially when these
issues could be taught using the full resources of ‘multimedia’ class-
rooms, including film, music, and Internet sites.
These opportunities were intensified by the eruption of counter-
globalization movements. The creation of FIMS coincided with a rising
arc of struggles, from the Zapatista insurrection in 1994 through to the
Seattle demonstration in 1999. It was thus caught on a tide of anti-
corporate activism that permeated student and youth culture; demon-
strations against tuition increases and ‘social justice’ days were already
emerging, even on conservative campuses such as UWO. All of this was
grist to the mill of ‘information and media’ studies, for in cognitive
capital every political event is inescapably a media event. Classroom
discussions of information and communication issues fed news, im-
ages, and analyses of issues such as free trade policy, intellectual prop-
erty rights, and representations of street demonstrations back into the
student population.
As my opening anecdote suggested, the demonstrations against the
Free Trade Area of the Americas in April 2001 were a watershed, for
Quebec City was close enough for UWO students to attend. The teach-
ing assistants union, which had recently negotiated its first contract,
sent a busload of graduates. Several undergraduates also went, drawn
by curiosity as well as commitment, and returned more deeply politi-
cized by the experience. Some produced their own media – websites,
videos – recounting these events.
Our undergraduate program has been rapidly identified as the
‘radical’ course on campus – an ethos celebrated, however ironically,
by student fashonistas, who with impeccable branding sense have de-
signed a program logo based on retro-Soviet futurist styles. The Left
ethos of FIMS was a topic of controversy – even, indeed especially,
among students within its programs. Criticisms of the undergraduate
program for not being more ‘practical’ or vocation-oriented, and for the
predominance of broad-brush designated ‘Marxists,’ appeared in the
student press, and catalysed hot debate.
In fact, the actual practices of the faculty are in many ways quite
typical in an era of university corporatization. It offers undergraduates
some academic credits for unpaid work internships in media-related
fields (thereby supplying information capital with free labour); it has
established joint programs with the business and law faculties (thus
demonstrating its willingness to help produce subjects-in-suits); and
many of its classes, both undergraduate and graduate, involve more or
less straight vocational instructional or skill acquisition (Web design,
and so on). In this sense, it is very much a part of Academia Inc.
But because of the factors detailed above (critically oriented instruc-
tors supported by sympathetic senior faculty, supportive students, high
enrolments, cultural climate), it has been possible to maintain radical
curriculum content alongside these mainstream practices, and even to
mount some countervailing initiatives. For example, in 2003 FIMS initi-
ated an undergraduate degree program called Media in the Public
Interest. This is aimed specifically at students who want to do media-
related work with social movements, NGOs, and the public sector
generally. It includes special courses on alternative media and on com-
munication practices in social movements. It also includes an ‘intern-
ship’ program whereby students receive credit for paid or unpaid work
on media issues with social movements.
The Media in the Public Interest program might have been consid-
ered radical, given UWO’s traditional conservatism. Yet it was ap-
proved by the University Senate without any problem. My own view is
that the initiative was shielded by some of the more ‘corporate’ connec-
tions that FIMS had made. Since it already had joint programs with the
business school, connections with the ‘third sector’ could be legitimated
as merely an act of balance. Since we already offered academic credit
for media-related corporate work, why not for volunteer activities in,
say, a network of independent media centres? University–business link-
ages have been rationalized under the name of breaking down the
‘ivory tower’ and connecting academia to the ‘community.’ Once such
an ideological motif has been launched, however, it is very hard to
reject arguments for connections that go beyond the business commu-
nity. Cognitive capital’s rhetoric can thus be played back against itself.
The Media in the Public Interest program is, at the time of writing,
barely launched, and the FIMS is still early in its development. The
balance between corporate and critical content continues to be fought

out among both faculty and students. Any number of factors, local or
global, could stall or shift the dynamics I have described. It is, for
example, too soon to assess the impact of the post-9/11 situation. Stu-
dents and faculty from FIMS were among the organizers of the first
protests in our town against the American invasion of Iraq, and dis-
cussions of ‘sexed up’ intelligence dossiers and spin-manufactured
weaponry will long fill our classrooms. But the long-term effects of the
‘war on terror’ may drastically chill the climate for radical teaching and
learning.
Nonetheless, my experience in FIMS does suggest possibilities, how-
ever minor, for ‘utopian’ pedagogical experimentation within Academia
Inc. To harness general intellect effectively, cognitive capital requires a
certain degree of openness within universities. Part of what business
seeks from academia, and of what university administrators seek to
provide it, is the creativity and experimentation of general intellect,
qualities vital to a high-tech economy based on perpetual innovation.
Business also requires chances for unpredicted invention and unfore-
seen synthesis – such as that attempted in the FIMS creation I have
described. But this opens up possibilities for unexpected swerves and
departures, which may become lines of possibility for those who want
to teach and learn something different from what cognitive capital
intends.
Conclusion: Species-Being
Why was I so pleased to see my student amidst the tear gas in Quebec
City? Because what is at stake in the collision between cognitive capital
and the multitude is nothing less than the trajectory of species-being.
‘Species-being’ is the term Marx uses to refer to humanity’s self-recog-
nition as a natural species with the capacity to transform itself through
conscious social activity.26 In the era of general intellect, projects such as
the Human Genome Project and the globe-girdling communications of
the Internet constitute a techno-scientific apparatus capable of opera-
tionalizing a whole series of posthuman or subhuman conditions.
By entrusting the control and direction of this apparatus to the myo-
pic steering mechanism of marketization, cognitive capital is navigat-
ing its way onto some very visible reefs: a global health crisis, biospheric
disaster, and yawning social inequalities that are dividing a world well
seeded with terrifying arms. The ‘counter-globalization’ movements
that started to race around the planet from Seattle to Genoa and Porto
Allegre in the closing years of the twentieth century are a mutiny
against this course. They are species-being movements, or, perhaps,
movements of species-beings.
Species-being movements contest the ‘general exploitation of com-
munal human nature.’27 The diversity of agencies involved reflects a
situation of hypersubsumption, where, though classic forms of exploi-
tation persist (and are often intensified), capital taps the psychophysical
energies of species-life at every point on its circuit: not just as variable
capital (labour), but also as a circulatory relay (consumerist conscious-
ness, ‘mind share’), a precondition of production (the general pool of
biovalues and communicative competencies necessary for ‘general
intellect’), and even as constant capital (genetic raw materials).
Rife with contradictions, the genuinely new movements, and the
most dynamic ones, are biopolitical activisms that are opposed to both
the world market and reactive fundamentalisms. They are character-
ized by cosmopolitan affinities, transnational equalitarianism, implicit
or explicit feminism, a strong ecospheric awareness, and a practical
critique of the world market. They are rebellions generated within and
against a capitalism that is ‘global’ both in its planetary expansion and
in its ubiquitous social penetration, and whose processes generate sub-
jects able to envisage – and willing to fulfil – the universalisms that the
world market promises but cannot complete.
Such movements represent a nascent alternative to capitalism’s orga-
nization of general intellect. They invoke some of the same intellectual
and cooperative capacities that cognitive capital tries to harness, but
point them in different directions, and with a vastly expanded horizon
of collective responsibility. They establish networks of alternative
research, new connections and alliances; they build a capacity for
counterplanning from below.
Universities are key in this contestation. Earlier, I cited Vincent’s
suggestion that capitalism’s managers are, in the name of profitability
and immediate results, interdicting ‘connections and relationships that
could profoundly modify the structure of the field of knowledge.’ Some
of these emergent ‘connections and relationships’ include the follow-
ing: the establishment of new planetary indices of well-being beyond
monetized measurement; investigation of new capacities for social plan-
ning and participation provided by information technologies; the de-
velopment of forms of social and cultural validation that are not tied to
obligatory wage labour; the emergence of new models of P2P and open-
source communication systems; the critique of nineteenth-century para-
digms of political economy, both free market and Marxist, in the light of
ecological and feminist knowledges; the examination of global ‘public
goods’; the elaboration of concepts of global citizenship; and the explo-
ration, even, of ideas of autonomy, general intellect, and species-being!
Opportunities to open these fields exist because globalization is draw-
ing capital onto the ground of these questions, even while it attempts to
contain and circumscribe the answers it receives within the formulae of
marketization, monetization, and profit. But in academia, as elsewhere,
labour power is never completely controllable. To the degree that capi-
tal uses the university to harness general intellect, insisting that its
workforce engage in lifelong learning as the price of employability, it
runs the risk that people will teach and learn something other than
what it intends.
If the academics linked to species-being movements can occupy this
space and enlarge their frontiers beyond those of cognitive capitalism –
to research and teach on topics of value to movements in opposition to
capital; to invite activists and analysts from these movements onto
campuses and into lectures and seminars; and to use the university’s
resources, including its easy access to the great communication net-
works of our age, to circulate news and analyses that are otherwise
marginalized – we may have more opportunities to hear students say,
‘After that course of yours, I thought I’d better see what was going on.
Never imagined it would be like this. This is amazing.’
NOTES
1 The tradition of Italian autonomist Marxism is discussed in greater detail

in this volume in the chapter by Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi
Roggero, and in the interview with Mariarosa Dalla Costa.
2 Some of the writings of this group can be found in the collection edited by
Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). A key essay is Paolo
Virno, ‘Notes on the General Intellect,’ in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed.
Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl (London: Routledge,
1996). For later discussions of ‘general intellect’ see Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)
and Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution (New York: Continuum, 2003). See
also Tiziana Terranova, ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital
Economy,’ Social Text 18:2 (2000): 33–57.
3 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 694, 705, 706,
709.
4 Ibid., 700.
5 Antoni Negri, ‘Constituent Power,’ Common Sense 16 (1994): 89; see also
Virno and Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy, 213–24.
6 Jean-Marie Vincent, ‘Les automatismes sociaux et le “general intellect,”’
Futur antérieur 16 (1993): 121 (my translation).
7 See Raghu Krishnan, ‘December 1995: The First Revolt against Globaliza-
tion,’ Monthly Review 48:1 (1996): 1–22.
8 Vincent, ‘Les automatismes,’ 121.
9 Ibid., 123.
10 On ‘cognitive capitalism,’ see the papers from ‘Class Composition in
Cognitive Capitalism,’ University of Paris, 15–16 February 2002, available
at www.geocities.com/cognitivecapitalism (accessed 18 September 2002).
11 David F. Noble, ‘Digital Diploma Mills,’ www.firstmonday.dk/issues/
issue3_1/noble/index.html (accessed 12 August 2003))
12 James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St Martin’s, 1973).
13 My analysis of this process draws on Janice Newson and Howard
Buchbinder, The University Means Business: Universities, Corporations and
Academic Work (Toronto: Garamond, 1988); Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowl-
edge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating Higher Learn-
ing (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Richard S. Ruch, Higher Ed, Inc.: The Rise
of the For-Profit University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2001); Sheila Slaughter, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the
Entreprenurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1999).
14 See Martin Kenney, Biotechnology: The University Industrial Complex (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
15 See Cary Nelson, ed., Will Teach for Food: Academic Labour in Crisis (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
16 See Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Knopf,
2000).
17 Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic,
1976).
18 See Tony Vellela, New Voices: Student Activism in the 80s and 90s (Boston:
South End Press, 1988); Paul Loeb, Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and
Action on the American Campus (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1994); Robert Ovetz, ‘Assailing the Ivory Tower: Student Struggles
and the Entrepreneurialization of the University,’ Our Generation 24:1
(1993): 70–95.
19 On these developments, see Stanley Aronowitz, ‘The Last Good Job in
America,’ in Post-Work: The Wages of Cybernation, ed. Stanley Aronowitz
and Jonathan Cutler (New York: Routledge, 1998), 216, 213; Benjamin
Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mahan, Steal This University: The
Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (New York:
Routledge; 2003).
20 Vincent, ‘Les automatismes,’ 127.
21 David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education
(Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002).
22 Harry Cleaver, ‘The Chiapas Uprising,’ Studies in Political Economy 44
(1994): 145.
23 Richard Barbrook, ‘Cyber-Communism: How the Americans are Supersed-
ing Capitalism in Cyberspace,’ Hypermedia Research Centre, University
of Westminster, London, www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk. (accessed 3 May 2000).
24 ‘Tipping Hollywood the Black Spot,’ Economist, 30 August 2003, 43.
25 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 257.
26 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York:
International Publishers, 1964). For recent discussions, see Gayatri Chak-
ravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the
Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 73–81;
David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2000), 206–12, 213–32. See also, for a poignant application of this concept,
Keith Doubt, ‘Feminism and Rape as a Transgression of Species Being,’
in his Sociology after Bosnia and Kosovo (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield,
2000), 61–6.
27 Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 148.
64 Ian Angus
3 Academic Freedom in the

Corporate University
ian angus
The university has historically played many distinct roles – elite, public,
corporate – and has been perpetually haunted by another possibility –
the democratic university. These roles have defined the relations be-
tween the university and capitalist society.1 However, the university’s
structure and functioning do not simply mirror the social and economic
environment with which it must come to some accommodation. Simi-
larly, politics within the university does not straightforwardly mirror
politics outside it. The complex articulation between the two sets the
framework within which a democratic politics can today be carried on
within the university.2
How does one define the university? It serves many functions –
economic, political, ideological, and so on – and undertakes many
activities – research, instruction, technical innovation, and others be-
sides. In today’s climate it is tempting to define the university ‘material-
istically’ as a private–public or corporate–state joint economic institution
that produces training and credentials recognized in the global corpo-
rate economy or the national bureaucracy (and thus defines those who
do not attend or who fail as untrained and without credentials). This is
not wrong; indeed it is the reality of the contemporary corporate uni-
versity, and those who work and learn within it must address this
reality in some fashion or another. For many, it is simply the environ-
ment in which they go about their daily business and is thus as natural
and unquestionable as any other. But given the relatively recent trans-
formation of the public university into a corporate environment, and
given the still incomplete nature of this transformation, a memory of
other practices and legitimations survives. In the era of the welfare state
the publicly funded university was understood to play a public role in
Academic Freedom in the Corporate University 65
developing citizenship and social awareness – a role that shaped and

overrode its economic function. This memory makes many people un-
comfortable with the new corporate reality of the university. University
culture is now torn between memories of better days that lead to a
narrative of decline and despair and a new ‘realistic’ resignation to the
‘fact’ that the university is simply an economic institution no different
from any other except insofar as making shoes is different from renting
highrises.
There was always a minority for whom the corporate function and
even the citizenship function were questionable as such. The university
after the Second World War continued its function of social criticism, a
function that has always hung around those who ask basic questions
about the human condition and social organization. The socially critical
activities of individual faculty were more or less tolerated in the 1960s;
but when faculty and students tried to align the university as an institu-
tion with democratic forces outside in opposition to the government-
corporation nexus – such as at Simon Fraser University and the London
School of Economics – the possibility was soon closed down by the
police. The critical minority was more acceptable within the public
university than within the corporate one, though there were always
limits. Thus, there is a tendency for radical critics to succumb to the
liberal and social democratic narrative of decline, forgetting that the
public role of the university in the welfare state was an interlude in a
longer history in which university education was a key ideological and
practical preparation for a career in the imperial adventure. Like all
empires, the British Empire needed administrators and bureaucrats as
much as soldiers, informants, and head-breakers. The Canadian state
continued to play this role within its own borders. The public university
was itself a transformation of the traditional elite university.
This sort of materialistic definition provokes discomfort in those of us
who work and study in the university. Not because it is wrong, but
because it is right. Nevertheless, it fails to capture that for which we
struggle when we teach and learn – the ability to think meaningfully
about one’s experience that allows a deeper judgment of the current
situation and that brings one’s future actions into question – that one
can still perhaps call for short ‘enlightenment’ (without implying any
specific allegiances). The struggle for enlightenment in its individual,
social, and biological dimensions has never by any means been limited
to the university, but the dignity of the university’s role has rested on its
claim to a link with the project of enlightenment. It is this claim that
66 Ian Angus
unsettles the purely materialistic definition of the university. Thus the

‘idealistic’ definition that the university is ‘a community of scholars’
resurges when one attempts to articulate the project that animates
learning. It is all too easy to document the failures that prove that this
definition does not capture the everyday practice of university life. It is
more difficult to abandon it entirely in the face of an inquiring student
or one’s own struggle to confront despair or madness.
The university is an institution of thought. Thus its economic and
political functions are pervaded by a practice whose distinctiveness
consists in its attempt to transcend those functions by inquiring into
their justification and their place in the wider social order. The univer-
sity has been most itself when it has approximated in practice this
struggle for enlightenment. Must this definition remain ‘idealistic’?
That is to say, must it ignore the realities of economics and politics? Is it
only an ideology that dissimulates? It would seem so if the struggle for
enlightenment were severed from its practical base in the encounter
that produces education. However, even the most mundane practices of
the university appeal to legitimations that refer to the moral and social
significance of education. While such legitimation contains a perennial
slide towards becoming a comforting ideology that merely masks a
rude reality, it can never become entirely so, because of the specificity of
education as a practice. It is this specificity that accounts for the fact that
there was always a minority for whom the corporate function and even
the citizenship function were questionable as such. Thus, in this sense
the critics are well placed. Their criticisms are rooted in a practice that
cannot be entirely dissipated as long as any distinction remains be-
tween education and selling shoes.
The practical and organizational core of the institution of thought is
the seminar room with its interchange between younger, beginning
thinkers and one or more older, experienced ones. This encounter is not
an exchange of information (which produces nothing new), but pre-
cisely an encounter, an event. The event of embodied reflection animates
the struggle for enlightenment. It is no wonder that the corporate uni-
versity in most wealthier countries in the world cannot find sufficient
resources to fund encounters in seminar rooms. While the public uni-
versity of the welfare state was more accommodating, it also contained
a tendency towards imparting information to serve purposes decided
elsewhere. Both citizenship and corporate models prefer the lecture hall
with its many listeners and few experts to the common struggle of the
seminar room. Lectures can be learned and witty. They can be benign,
taken in moderation, but the core of the university is the search for a not
yet discovered understanding, a still elusive formulation. This search
produces enlightenment, not the supposed possession of knowledge
itself that could be transmitted to the largest possible number of adher-
ents. To define the university in this manner is not necessarily ‘idealis-
tic’ in the sense of ignoring the material realities that make the university
possible and that invade its practices. It is simply a definition through
the best of what the university does, based in a specific activity which
the university did not create but to which it has given form. This
activity concretizes enlightenment as the most fundamental and uni-
versal human task.3
Thus, the core of the university is the encounter between students
and faculty, and it is their responsibility to undertake that encounter in
a spirit of enlightenment. Otherwise, what they do could be done better
elsewhere. A community engaged in the search for knowledge enacts
critical thinking. The justification for academic freedom lies in the activ-
ity of critical thinking. Genuine searching requires criticism of received
truths and constituted powers and demands the mutual criticism of
students and teachers based in the quality of their ideas rather than
their social positions. Criticism is of the idea, not the person; it is
compatible with mutual respect, and in fact demands and reinforces
such respect. Though embodied in the seminar room, this activity can-
not be confined to the university. It has a wider importance that pro-
vokes a critique of all those forces which prevent enlightenment and
which entrench domination and ignorance. Occasionally, thinkers who
have taken this project seriously have been drawn to articulate in the
public realm as social criticism the ethic that is built into the practice of
university teaching and learning. For this, they have often been stigma-
tized by the powerful in universities and society as ‘outspoken academ-
ics’ who have wandered outside their supposed academic specialties
without understanding, or even repressing, the ethic that is embodied
in all such inquiries, specialist or otherwise. The socially relevant criti-
cal thinker has no guarantee of truth – any more than any other hu-
man – but the corrective for this is in an expanded sphere of critical
thinking, not in its curtailment. One must ask who is really outspoken
in the society in which we live. Corporations, governments, and the
media say long and loud what they have to say. They shout from all
corners and are impossible to avoid in today’s propagandistic con-
sumer environment. When these powers stigmatize an academic for
being outspoken, the intent is clear: it is to keep public awareness and
68 Ian Angus
debate from extending to these powers and their social role. University-
based thinkers are not the only ones to raise such issues, but they are
one crucial source for social criticism.4
A conception of the university based in the educative encounter that
holds social relationships up to critical inquiry necessarily finds itself in
conflict with entrenched powers. The public university gained a certain
autonomy by accepting the legitimacy of the corporate economy out-
side its gates and by confining its criticisms to the classroom. This
bargain was possible through a conception of ‘spheres of society’ in
which different principles prevailed. While the university was dedi-
cated to critical thinking, the economy was dedicated to profit-making.
One has only to remember the outrage that visited from all corners
when this separation was breached. In the 1960s the student movement
expected ‘the critical university’ to play a social function as well, and
thereby drew the wrath of both public powers and university adminis-
trators, whose distance from economic powers was thus threatened.
But it is important to remember that the separation was not breached
first by the student movement: it was the role of the university in war
research, anti-union activities, and job training for the corporate elite
and its technical lieutenants such as engineers and personnel depart-
ment flunkies, it was corporate funding of technological developments,
it was the failure of the university’s critical function, that provoked the
student movement’s rejection of the separation of spheres. The critique
of the ‘knowledge factory’ was a key element of that movement. In-
deed, the ‘spheres of society’ seemed to apply only to a restriction of the
critical function of the university, and not to its increasingly strong ties
with corporate and warfare powers. It was an uneasy conception at
best, though it offered more independence than the subsequent corpo-
rate university ever could. During the 1960s, in a period of expansion of
the universities driven by the requirements of a more scientific–techni-
cal, bureaucratic capitalism, protections of academic freedom became
more widespread and extensive. For a short moment, professors were
in demand and could expect greater protection of their role.5 Those who
are senior faculty in universities today formed their expectations of
tenure, peer review, and academic freedom of inquiry and expression
during this period.6 It is hard for us to resist a narrative of decline, but
one element of resistance must be to understand that the greater univer-
sity freedoms institutionalized in the 1960s constituted a specific mo-
ment of gain; they did not reflect some natural state, as has often been
assumed. We must also keep in mind the predominantly individual
nature of academic freedom thus understood, though the gains in demo-

cratic self-government within the university were of a more cooperative
nature.
The corporate university has been waging a battle for some years
now against those aspects of the public university that are rooted in the
gains of the 1960s. The main weapons in this battle have been fiscal.
Right-wing governments at the provincial and national levels have
begun their restructuring with the claim that there is not, or is no longer,
sufficient money to sustain current social insurance/welfare practices;
in the same way, university administrations have justified their restruc-
turing with the claim that governments are no longer willing to support
the public university and that they have no other option but to seek
funding from other sources. This is by no means an empty claim. Public
funding of universities has been falling steadily for decades now, and
important issues about the functions and purposes of the university
need to be addressed. University administrations, on the whole, have
avoided addressing these questions directly because of their bureau-
cratic (rather than political) approach to society and have presented the
new fiscal environment as an inescapable force that has turned them
towards corporate sources of funding. Dedicated funding, grant money,
distance education money grabs … The university is no longer a unity
that can define its own priorities; funding of specific functions prevails,
and the whole is simply the sum of its dominant parts.
Increases in corporate funding have supported some aspects of the
university at the expense of others and have helped to transform the
public university into the corporate university with barely a word of
debate. Mainly, this has been done without dismantling procedures and
practices directly but rather by simply voiding them of real content. All
debates are cut off by referring to fiscal Realpolitik and the priorities of
the dean or higher administration. The corporate university has thus
come into being in concert with two things: the undermining of demo-
cratic decision-making in the university, and the rise of the power of
administrations that are responsible only to government and corporate
sources of funding and not to the internal core of the university based in
the educative experience. The suppression of genuine debate about the
function of the university and its social role has been key to this trans-
formation. While fiscal abandonment by a waning welfare state is cer-
tainly a reality, the absolute necessity of a corporate transformation is
not. The absence of debate on this crucial fact has spread throughout
the corporate university like a virus: we are now confronted with dis-
70 Ian Angus
courses of necessity and decline on all fronts. But this helplessness is a

product, not a fact. The tail is now wagging the dog: administrations and
administrators run the university; there seems no alternative to corpo-
rate funding – which means corporate priorities – and the university’s
critical function has become vestigial. Those who keep it alive are used
as window dressing so that others do not have to see what’s going on.
Academic procedures mediate between the corporate world and the
actual functioning of the university (see Hall, in this volume). These
procedures are the result of a history of the university, which has
always accommodated itself to the capitalist environment but at previ-
ous stages gained a certain independence from it. The history of struggles
for academic freedom is one major component of this; another is struggles
for equity. The present demands of corporatization have generated a
pressure that is eroding this hard-won independence. Thus, the admin-
istration voids procedures and rules of self-government within the
university, and when it cannot do this, it violates them altogether. One
current task, then, is to defend the rules and procedures within the
university that limit the administration’s version of corporate rule and
at the same time extend the democratization of the university in light of
the principles that led to academic freedom in the first place. All this is
based in the educative encounter of the seminar room that animates
those with a vision of the democratic university.
What happens when the corporate university violates academic free-
dom (as it is likely to do when establishing the corporate agenda on the
remains of the public university)? There is good reason why recent
years have brought us a number of academic freedom cases that go to
the heart of the functioning of the corporate university. Well, they don’t
come down to your office and announce that that is what they are going
to do. Since there are still vestigial procedures and rules that make such
violations look bad, they must rationalize their actions in another way.
Since they are, obviously, responsible administrators doing a necessary
job, the fault cannot be theirs. If fault is not theirs, it must lie elsewhere.
Thus, a frantic search ensues for those others who are at fault. Finger
pointing at ‘troublemakers’ who ‘do not play by the rules’ is essential to
the administrative diktat of corporate rule. This phenomenon has
emerged in all the recent cases of violation of academic freedom in
Canada – Nancy Olivieri, David Healy, David Noble. All three have
been transformed miraculously and instantaneously from respected
academics worthy of high-ranking jobs and research grants into irre-
sponsible troublemakers and charlatans. The logic of the scapegoat
underpins the violations essential to the corporate university’s transfor-

mation of the purpose of the university. If critical thinking is out, ritual
blaming is in.
Here is the logic: The university has procedures that, theoretically at
least, rule out non-academic grounds and ‘old-boy’ connections and
rumours. If the administration wants to make a decision based on such
rumours, old-boy connections, or non-academic grounds, then it must
interfere with the procedures. Then, if anyone points this out, they must
defend themselves from wrongdoing. (After all, even if rules were
broken, they were only doing what’s necessary in the current corporate
environment.) If they are not wrong in interfering in this way, then
someone else must be culpable: the people who pointed out the viola-
tion, the committees that made the overturned decisions, and most of
all, the person whose academic freedom has been violated. The violated
one is transformed in an instant into a powerful source of wrongdoing,
thus justifying the ‘special means’ that were necessary to avoid this
error. Expel the outside agitator! Then our nice and peaceful university
will function smoothly again. This strategy works well, given the con-
genital timidity of the professor type relative to the current corporate
forces that make all of this seem the only ‘realistic’ option.
Such expulsions do not occur only in the publicized cases. They occur
also wherever students and faculty overstep the bounds of a narrow
specialty to ask more general and universal questions. Keeping every-
one within defined and safe boundaries ensures that difficult questions
will not be asked. The corporate university cannot address openly such
difficult questions, thus it must make sure they do not arise. Therefore,
it promotes and polices a confinement of inquiry to technical questions
within pre-established boundaries – a confinement that violates not
only the procedures but also the function and rationale of the university
as an institution of free inquiry. It is a university in name only, and then
only because the right to so name it as such is vested exclusively in the
government. The culture of compliance that prevails today allows the
corporate university to veil its usurpation of the name. The first task is
thus to overstep these boundaries, to raise the larger questions, to make
the issues public, and thus to fulfil the social task of the university by
bringing critical thinking to the public outside the university.
Contemporary society is pervaded by knowledge-based innovations
of all kinds. Medical research, new drugs, technical innovations, and so
forth affect millions of people daily. Government institutions of regula-
tion and testing, such as Health Canada and Environment Canada,
72 Ian Angus
have been seriously degraded by underfunding such that they often

have to rely on privately funded testing to make their decisions. With-
out an independent body capable of testing the claims of such knowl-
edge-based innovations, the public is left vulnerable. I take it as obvious
that corporations that test their own products – from which they intend
to make huge profits – are not genuine sources of independent assess-
ments. University-based researchers, in contrast, have both the exper-
tise and the independence to make assessments in the public interest.
Moreover, they are able to raise questions concerning the larger social
context and the consequences of such innovations (when they are not
hampered by being confined to delimited technical questions). In sum,
the corporate agenda needs university-based research because it has a
greater purchase on the public trust due to its presumed independence;
yet at the same time, it must undermine this independence because it
tends to raise questions that might challenge the corporate agenda. A
politics of the democratic university in the corporate age will have to
address this contradiction; to do so, it will have to take its critique and
agenda beyond the university faculty, to the students, whose education
is being compromised by corporate-dominated research and to the
public, whose welfare is being sacrificed to it.
This point is perhaps easy to see in the case of medical and technical
innovations, but it is no less pertinent to those who study the social
sciences and humanities. Relevant thinking about social structures and
practices, their history and their prognosis, is required by a democratic
society that relies on informed citizens capable of sensible decisions.
Academic freedom has an important role to play in a democratic soci-
ety, and a defence of the democratic university cannot succeed unless it
reaches the active citizens with whom it has a common interest. Social
democratization and the democratic university, while not exactly equiva-
lent, cannot ultimately prosper without each other.
The policy of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT)
on academic freedom recognizes this connection. It begins: ‘The com-
mon good of society depends on the search for knowledge and its free
exposition. Academic freedom in universities is essential to both these
purposes in the teaching function of the university as well as in its
scholarship and research … Academic freedom does not require neu-
trality on the part of the individual. Rather, academic freedom makes
commitment possible.’7 Its logic proceeds from the good of society, to
the search for knowledge, to the necessity for free inquiry in the search
for knowledge, to the necessity for individual commitment and expres-
sion in this search. To this degree, my argument is nothing more than an

independent and somewhat more extended statement of this logic. But
note: the CAUT policy ends with the statement that ‘academic freedom
carries with it the duty to use that freedom in a manner consistent with
the scholarly obligation to base research and teaching on an honest
search for knowledge.’ Again, no disagreement, but the policy on aca-
demic freedom ends here with the defence of freedom of inquiry. It
defends only the individual freedom of academics and extends neither
to democratic decision-making within the university nor to the social
responsibility of the university institution as such. At no point does the
CAUT policy return to its point of departure in the concept of social
good. In this respect, my argument suggests more. Society as a whole,
through its dominant powers, always makes decisions, not only about
inquiry but also about the application of knowledge. Health and techni-
cal innovations, and also social and political ideas, have social applica-
tions. One should investigate them freely, but should one remain silent
about their application? Is there no concept of academic freedom that
pertains to the question of whether the products of free inquiry are
being properly and sensibly applied? Certainly, this kind of evaluation
always takes place in some form. Powerful institutions such as corpora-
tions, governments, and the media engage in it regularly. When aca-
demic freedom does not extend to the evaluation of knowledge-based
applications, it is completing only half its task. The question, ‘What is a
social good?’ must be raised both in universities and outside them. This
is the connection between the democratization of the university and the
democratization of society. Without it, academic freedom in the corpo-
rate university is just a wizened, empty shell capable only of justifying
the freedom of researchers to accept the large grants proffered by pri-
vate interests. It is sustained by the logic of the scapegoat. A democratic
society demands a more lively conception of academic freedom. Its
logic must be one of free inquiry and expression complemented by
responsible evaluations of the social good and actual applications of
research.
The corporate university undermines academic freedom and self-
government entirely. But the possibility of a democratic university that
respects individual academic freedom while enacting an institutional
social freedom through democratic decision-making haunts both the
recent history of the university and its contemporary situation. Recall-
ing this history should establish the importance of defending those
gains made in an earlier period, but it should also avoid the narrative of
74 Ian Angus
decline. The public university repressed, no less than the corporate

university, the democratic possibility that is rooted in the respectful
give-and-take of cooperative learning in the seminar. This possibility
cannot be kept alive unless we raise basic questions about the meaning
and function of the university in a corporate environment and pressing
for the greatest possible cooperative autonomy that will sustain criti-
cism of that environment. Nothing less befits the institution of thought.
NOTES
1 The precapitalist medieval university and its ancient progenitor, the Pla-
tonic academy, are outside the scope of this essay, which will not reach any
further back than the nineteenth century.
2 My involvement in such matters has been, until recently, only through daily
university politics. The motivation for trying to think more systematically
about them derives from the recent (since 2001, as yet unresolved) contro-
versy over administrative violation of academic freedom in the proposed
hiring of David Noble by the Department of Humanities at Simon Fraser
University. Documents relevant to this controversy can be found at
www.ianangus.ca.
3 See my ‘Appendix Two: Why Are We in the University?’ to ‘Sharing Secrets,
or, On Burrowing in Public,’ in Anarcho-Modernism: Toward a New Critical
Theory in Honour of Jerry Zaslove, ed. Ian Angus (Vancouver: Talonbooks,
2001), 376.
4 Another important source, which also often stimulates research questions
for academics, is social movements. I have discussed the impact of social
movements on democracy and public debate in Emergent Publics: An Essay
on Social Movements and Democracy (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2001) and
Primal Scenes of Communication (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2000).
5 Michiel Horn, Academic Freedom in Canada: A History (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1999), chapter 10.
6 One other aspect of this expansion was the entry of a large and dominant
number of American professors into the Canadian university system. While
the politics of such professors was by no means uniform, this had the effect
of marginalizing specifically Canadian issues and traditions of thought,
calling forth the report The Struggle for Canadian Universities, ed. Robin
Mathews and James Steele (Toronto: New Press, 1969). The argument that
Canadian universities need to be rooted in Canadian society in order to
effectively address its problems retains its relevance even though the more
recent government regulation concerning hiring has altered the American
predominance. University culture often opposes such regulation because it
is committed to a free-floating idea of excellence that is rooted in that 1960s
dominance – an idea that has had a huge impact in that it has muted the
critical potential of Canadian universities. See my discussion of Canadian
nationalism in A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality and
Wilderness (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997),
chapter 2.
7 CAUT-ACPPU, Policy Statement on Academic Freedom (approved by the
CAUT Council, May 1977), available at www.caut.ca/english/about/
policy/academicfreedom.asp (accessed 14 July 2003). After this text was
written, a new Policy Statement on Academic Freedom was passed by the
CAUT Council (in November 2005) and posted on their website (in 2006).
The wording of this policy differs in some respects, and is improved in
some respects, from the one to which I refer, but these changes do not affect
the interpretation and argument given in the body of this essay.
76 Mark Edelman Boren
4 A Revolutionary Learning:
Student Resistance/Student Power
mark edelman boren
Historically, students have generated tremendous power and provoked

large-scale social, political, and economic changes. They have reformed
universities and social institutions, toppled regimes, and transformed
national politics and economic practices. As we enter the twenty-first
century, which is already proving to be as dangerous and as politically
complex an age as any, the role of the student is an extremely important
one. Forces in the world both ancient and new are shaping our respec-
tive and common futures, and students are in a unique position to
influence those forces, which range from ethnic strife, war, terrorism,
and physical exploitation to globalization and economic imperialism.
While at the university, students are not simply preparing to enter the
‘real world’; they are firmly embedding themselves in it. Student activ-
ists are, more often than not, trying to make visible the web of forces in
which they as citizens are caught, and endeavouring to become partici-
pants in determining the nature of their societies.
The power that students wield is specific to their existence in the
university environment and historically has hinged on the formation of
student collectives. It is vital to recognize student activists’ efforts in
terms of power explicitly – that is, as vectors vying for dominance in an
ever-shifting field of contending forces. Manifestations of student power
are dependent upon struggles between oppositional and competing
forces; they are thus always political in nature, even when a given
action is over local or, from all appearances, benign concerns. The
formation of student collectives is itself an overtly martial act in a
struggle for self-definition and political strength. And universities are
sites of extreme if sometimes hidden contention. In the past decade
alone, for example, a tremendous number of universities around the
Student Resistance/Student Power 77
world have buckled under government and economic pressure to re-

structure and enact educational reforms based on business models. By
examining key instances of student resistance and viewing them in
terms of power relations, tactics, and political struggles, we can see
more clearly how student power operates and why activists’ efforts
have succeeded or failed in the past.1 Of course, such investigations will
help interested parties develop and refine future actions.
Conceptualizing Student Resistance
The concept of ‘resistance’ is central to student actions. Students have

historically situated their activist efforts as ‘responses’ to injustices
or aggression, viewing their causes and themselves as the targets of
oppression or suppression. This is not mere narcissism, however; it is
highly strategic. The act of defining the forces of suppression facilitates
the articulation of student positions, suggests the need for collectives to
form, situates the field of combat, and determines the tactics to be used.
Student actions arise in the midst of ongoing conflicts between compet-
ing forces in complex systems of power. They do not simply ‘occur.’
When students claim the role of the subjugated, they are situating a
priori the struggle’s martial nature, and at the same time are making a
pre-emptive move to claim ethical high ground – an effective tactic for
garnering additional support and for widening conflicts. Students have
not traditionally had a vast array of weapons at their disposal, but they
have become quite adept at using the ones they have. From the begin-
ning of the modern university, the success of student resistance has
hinged largely on the ability to involve greater social and economic
forces.
Students can physically fight for a cause and sometimes do so quite
effectively, but such cases are rare. In 1968, students led a riot that
caused de Gaulle to flee Paris temporarily. But the more effective power
that students wield tends to come from activating larger forces in soci-
ety, such as labour or public pressure. When more than 100,000 students
occupied Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Chinese government was not
impressed. But when one million residents and workers gathered to
support those students, and threatened to turn the demonstration into a
popular uprising, the state had to act and chose to suppress the demon-
stration with violence. The important lesson for the purposes of this
essay is that the students of Beijing, though their occupation ultimately
failed, were able to situate themselves as oppressed and to articulate a
position that had a wide social appeal. And they did so in such a way as
to raise an oppositional force that grew into a social collective large
enough to challenge an extremely powerful government.
History suggests that the core group of activists need not be large to
generate a sizeable following. When a very small group of American
Indian activists, led by a Native American student named Richard
Oakes, occupied and staked a claim to the abandoned prison island of
Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay in 1969 under provisions cited in an 1868
treaty between the United States and the Sioux, they garnered tremen-
dous public support for their cause. Local and national television cover-
age drew supporters and forestalled a government crackdown. The
U.S. Coast Guard blockaded the island, but residents ran the blockade
to deliver food and medical supplies. Although the island was eventu-
ally retaken by federal agents – after internal strife weakened the core
protest group – the original action succeeded in raising the profile and
political cachet of the Native American movement.2
It is rare, though, that students succeed in physically challenging the
power of a government, for they are too often ill-equipped to win direct
confrontations. That said, images of troops or police beating or killing
students can incite a powerful popular response.3 This is why students
often resort to confrontational strategies to provoke violence, especially
when the media are present. In this way, even a tiny collective can
suddenly expand into a mass movement. A great number of student
demonstrations are non-violent in nature, and the decision to hold this
sort of protest is a tactical one. Non-violent sit-ins and demonstrations
can capture the moral high ground by forcing institutions and govern-
ments to use physical force to end them; this confirms the oppressive
nature of those powers and thereby justifies the students’ cause – a
manoeuvre that can widen the sphere of a conflict.
Although great provocateurs, students have always had trouble man-
aging power and steering larger political forces, especially after they
have seemingly defeated their opposition; that is to say, what makes for
a successful campaign or revolt rarely makes for good government.
One thing this suggests is that the efficacy of student power is often
contingent on its own formulation as resistance. In 1848, students staged
an organized revolt that for a brief time liberated the city of Vienna;
they then formed an Academic Legion and a Committee of Safety and
through these, effectively ran the city for a few months. But internal
conflicts and power struggles within the Academic Legion and between
it and labour organizations in the city caused the movement to fracture
and fall apart. Subsequently, the city was easily retaken by regional
troops.4
When immediate threats or well-defined forces of oppression sub-
side, resistance actions lose strength and collectives disintegrate. Pro-
testing students can and often do find themselves momentarily in
positions of power, but unless they recognize that the context has changed
and can make the transition from radicals to politicos, their tenure is
relatively brief. Most often, what happens in large-scale uprisings is
that students provoke a political or social movement and then cannot
control the forces at work, even those they wield themselves. When
students spark a coup d’état, which they did on many occasions in the
twentieth century, they often deliver a country into the hands of an-
other powerful figure or organization, one more prepared to rule. On a
smaller scale, when students protest effectively for changes within the
university, concessions strategically given by institutions can fracture
or destroy a movement by changing the political context or by eliminat-
ing the points around which the collective formed. For example, when
students concerned with campus diversity organized a hunger strike to
draw attention to a lack of ‘ethnic professors’ on San Francisco State
University’s campus in 1999, they succeeded immediately in getting a
few professors hired. In making those concessions, the university avoided
a major media event in which it would have been charged with racist
practices; this would have damaged its reputation and perhaps cost it
revenues.5
Student Knowledge / Student Power
The history of student protest must be viewed as a history of power

relations. Although student activists cast their struggles as a resistance
to suppression originating from above, they are actually in the midst of
avenues of power that circulate in all directions. Student power mani-
fests itself through exchanges with other institutions, be they economic,
social, educational, political, or physical. Thus any act of resistance, no
matter how small, is important because it generates energy in the articu-
lation of a given cause and wields power in action. The shift from idea to
action is also vital to the production of revolutionary subjectivity.
The university by its very nature is especially conducive to the forma-
tion of student revolutionaries. Students lead paradoxical lives: within
the confines of the institution and the society in which they live, bound
by political and economic realities, they are taught to challenge them-
selves and the knowledge by which they have come to understand their
world. They are taught to probe the limits of the known. It is no wonder
that while many students do learn the rules of a discipline and accept
their education as a step towards assuming ‘productive roles’ in a given
social order, others – for a variety of reasons – do not. Discourses of
student activism, if not of radicalism, promote the formation of identi-
ties that thrive in the conflict between competing social forces.
There are many reasons why the modern university is ‘a breeding
ground of activism.’ It is the site par excellence for the formation of
revolutionary subjectivity because it is often a protected if not autono-
mous environment in which the dynamic and unstable interplay of
many different and competing social and political discourses is visible.
The conflicts that students witness between ideas, ideologies, methods,
and interests affect how they respond to the competing discourses
around them. A recent example of this happened at Yale. Students there
discovered that the school’s janitors were not earning a living wage,
and chose to intervene; the conflict facing students took place between
discourses of social ethics, institutional economics, class privilege, and
student activism. It is not surprising that some students – who are
encouraged to challenge ideas and compare systems of thought in the
classroom – attempt to translate theory and critical analysis into praxis.
Yet the manufacturing of ‘radicals’ and ‘student unrest’ serves uni-
versities as well, by highlighting the need for devices to control stu-
dents, by defining ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ behaviour, and by
generating guidelines and rituals for dealing with ‘disruption.’ The
existence of activists or ‘agitators’ on campus also suggests a need for
‘productivity markers’ such as ‘progress tests’ and time-to-degree limi-
tations to keep students focused on courses rather than causes. It is no
coincidence that financial aid often is linked to a student’s behaviour
and academic record.
We cannot look at the history of student resistance actions as neces-
sarily linear, progressive, or causal, even at a given movement. Stu-
dents’ actions cannot be isolated from broader historical and social
contexts. One weakness of analyses of particular student movements is
that they tend to suggest a narrative of causal events and a progressive
amassing or loss of power. Such narratives can be informative – for
example, histories of the Students for a Democratic Society and of the
Iranian student movement of the 1970s tell us how they were organized
and developed. Yet once a student movement generates the power to
provoke a reaction from a more powerful and entrenched institution or
government, it is transformed by its new context. This is why the

flashpoints of student resistance can offer insights into larger and often
hidden webs of social and political power.
The very unpredictability of student movements and actions – of
how and when they form and what happens once they do – is one
reason why they are a perennial threat to institutions and the status
quo. A tremendous amount of effort goes into organizing and educating
activists, and most resistance movements are grass-roots affairs. But
whether the organizers are able to garner effective support often de-
pends on their ability to articulate wider concerns and to clearly define
the oppressive forces against which it is necessary to act. When they do
these things effectively, they can jump-start a collective, and a wide-
scale movement can blossom, sometimes almost overnight. The sponta-
neous and seemingly chaotic nature of student movements is one of
their strengths; because they are unpredictable, entrenched opponents
cannot strategically anticipate them. This is why student actions are
potentially one of the greatest resources for anti-establishment or ‘radi-
cal’ causes that challenge the powers that be. It is no accident that
individuals and organizations fighting the twenty-first-century ogres –
neoliberalism, globalization, the corporatization of the university, im-
perialism, war, and other trends that seem overwhelmingly vast and
sophisticated – are endeavouring to link campus-based support around
the world.
Amassing Student Power
The first Western universities were founded in the Middle Ages as loose
guilds for scholars. The word universitas meant simply a collective of
students similar to other labour guilds. Students realized that by form-
ing collectives, they could threaten to relocate to another town unless
the local costs of room and board were lowered to accommodate them.
It is important to know that governments and other benefactors did not
originally form universities as sanctuaries for the pursuit of knowledge
or the production of workers; rather, scholars formed them expressly as
a tactic for wielding economic power.6 In medieval Bologna, for ex-
ample, students repeatedly left or threatened to leave the city to lever-
age reductions in living costs. In 1158, Frederick Barbarossa officially
sanctified their scholarly enterprise as a favoured institution, by grant-
ing city scholars a power of protection. A subsequent three-year boycott
of the city by the entire student body (1217–20) was particularly effec-
tive at reducing local costs, but it was also important in that students
were able to dictate educational reforms to their own university –
reforms that included setting standards and practices of behaviour for
the masters hired to teach them.7 In 1200 the University of Paris threat-
ened to withdraw from the city after a town-and-gown riot in which a
few students were beaten to death.8 Their collective action drew signifi-
cant legal and economic concessions from the city. Students quickly
carved a powerful niche for themselves, negotiating between local,
governmental, and religious institutions, and resorting to economic,
political, legal, and sometimes physical power. One tactical response by
governments and religious institutions to thwart such boycotts was to
donate buildings and land to university collectives. The scholars were
subsequently reluctant to abandon these.
Of course, resistance actions came with a cost. Town-and-gown riots
were commonplace and often quite brutal. Throughout the fourteenth
century, clashes between the citizens of Cambridge and of Oxford and
the scholars studying in those towns ended with parties on both sides
maimed or dead. One especially bloody conflict in 1354 in Oxford left
the university decimated and a number of scholars scalped.9 In 1381,
Cambridge’s officials and a contingent of citizens allied themselves
with peasants to attack the local university. Armed with crossbows,
axes, and scythes, Cambridge residents overran the university; their
rampage was stopped only after a neighbouring aristocrat’s personal
army intervened.10 Following such actions, however, the state repeat-
edly awarded the universities increased economic power over their
host towns (after all, many of the students had important political and
familial connections to the aristocracy). For example, by the end of the
century, through collective actions, battles, and political wrangling,
Oxford University won sovereignty over the town and control of its
market.
Medieval students’ conflicts shed light on contemporary campus
struggles because those earlier resistances were mainly and explicitly
struggles for economic and political power. Students had political chan-
nels open to them that local residents often did not; that said, it was
their manoeuvres as organized collectives that led to their greatest
advances. In the modern world, university power often seems to flow
from the top down, due in large part to the gradual reshaping of
institutions over time by those who have had longer relationships with
them. A student may spend only a brief time at a university; adminis-
trators and governments have more time to influence the forms of these
institutions. Donating buildings in order to prevent student boycotts

is an excellent example of this. Modern strategies have included sanc-
tioning student associations, awarding financial aid, and designating
‘official’ areas for protest on campuses. All of these ‘opportunities’ have
the effect of controlling student behaviour.
But the top-down image of power that has been carefully crafted by
administrations is still often challenged. The UNAM strikes in Mexico,
the U.S. anti-sweatshop movement, and the anti-imperialist/anti-
privatization efforts on many African campuses remind us that student
collectives are still forces to be contended with. Institutions and govern-
ments are more sophisticated than ever in their strategies for dealing
with students, and over the years they have refined their methods of
control; even so, students today have unprecedented access to tactics
that employ economic, political, legal, moral, and social power.
To understand how student resistance actions generally succeed, we
need to look at the history of student collectives and their competition
with institutional forces and other collectives. During the rise of the
medieval university, bureaucracies of masters and administrators formed
to push their own agendas, and they could afford to wait for moments
when student collectives were relatively weak to effect changes. By the
nineteenth century, European models of universities had been exported
around the world through imperialism and mimicry. Unfortunately for
many governments seeking stability, the discourses and ideas that pro-
duced revolutionary subjects were exported as well. Realizing that
schools could be employed to control volatile youth (this began with
lower educational levels first), governments strongly supported institu-
tional reforms that emphasized discipline, and government support
shifted away from students and towards university administrations.
Students have tended, however, to resist overt government interfer-
ence on campuses. In the late nineteenth century, Russian universities
were so filled with revolutionary students that they were often unman-
ageable; students terrorized unpopular lecturers and sporadically held
massive strikes for educational and political reforms.11 The radicalization
of Russian students was in part a reaction to the tight control that police
troops exerted over political demonstrations, but there was also a popu-
lar student discourse of radicalism sweeping the Russian universities.
Prevented from publicly demonstrating, student activists resorted to
violence; some of them even assassinated a number of unpopular gov-
ernment officials. As a result, saber- and whip-wielding Cossacks were
repeatedly unleashed on demonstrations and on relatively innocuous
student gatherings. Political students were forced underground. As

radical groups became more and more extreme in their methods, they
lost their broad-based student support and were marginalized and
suppressed.
In the twentieth century, students began to modernize their collective
power. German students were especially adept at forming political and
social collectives, and these organizations came to be so fashionable
that students often belonged to three or four. Most of these were aca-
demic in nature, but a great many promoted German nationalism.
Students organized locally and then formed national umbrella groups.
By the rise of the Third Reich, much of the German student body was
connected through a vast network of social and political alliances. The
National Socialist German Student Group, a branch of the Nazi Party,
managed to capitalize on the nationalist fervour and dominate the
student groups, in large part because its networks were so pervasive.
By funding lectures, debates, and student activities, as well as student
groups directly, the Nazi Party was able to take advantage of university
student collectives to promote its own agenda. Of course, once in power,
the Nazis decimated political dissent and free thought in German uni-
versities. The organizational strategies of the pre-Nazi German stu-
dents were copied throughout the world, and by the mid-twentieth
century, universities around the world were connected by student orga-
nizations and packed with a huge number of student groups.
In the United States, an explosion of activism occurred in the early
twentieth century, with students forming a great many political and
educational organizations. Many of these were socialist and pro-labour,
and some of them became extremely powerful through national net-
works, only to fall victim to the Red Scare that swept the country in the
1940s and 1950s. The National Student League and the Student League
for Industrial Democracy were very effective, however, at forcing uni-
versity reforms through mass demonstrations and strikes.12
In 1968 in France, students were able to organize enough collectives
to hold strikes that effectively shut down the city. By forging bonds with
labour (uniting with Renault factory workers, for example), students
turned what might have been only a Left Bank affair into a national
crisis.13 A decade later, in 1979, an Iranian student group protesting U.S.
imperialism seized the American Embassy in Tehran, holding a number
of American citizens hostage.14 Finding themselves at the centre of an
international media blitz for which they were unprepared, the students
became pawns in a struggle over the government of Iran itself. Their
provocative action, however, shifted political power enough to deter-

mine the future of the country.
Thus the collective has always been crucial to generating and wield-
ing student power. But individual collectives are usually in and of
themselves not enough to challenge major institutions. To bring about
large-scale reforms or challenge strong institutions, students generally
must form alliances with other social groups in order to widen their
power base. From the anti–Vietnam War movement in the United States
in the 1970s to the pro-democracy demonstrations on Tiananmen Square
in the 1980s, what modern student movements have shown us is that
the means are there to generate large social support quickly. In the
current age of information technologies and globalization, activists have
access to more and more tools for broadening support for given causes
(see Dyer-Witheford, chapter 2, in this volume).
Some Recent Conflicts on Campus: Globalization, Imperialism,

and the Corporatization of the University
Today it is clear that many student struggles that have historically

seemed isolated are in fact connected to one another. The anti-sweat-
shop movement in the United States, the National Autonomous Uni-
versity of Mexico (UNAM) strikes, the increases in tuition fees in
countries ranging from Argentina to England to Australia, the anti-
war/anti-imperialism movement, the standardization of curricula, uni-
versity marketization agendas, and the stampede to embrace information
technology systems – all these are part of a web of power that binds
universities around the globe. Students are more implicated than ever
before in the political and social changes happening in the world; and
they themselves are participating in those transformations, whether
they acknowledge it or not.
In the past two decades, as a consequence of government under-
funding, public universities around the world have been restructuring
themselves as quasi-businesses. Universities have continued to increase
enrolments but without increasing the numbers of faculty positions at the
same rate. This has created what is tactically referred to as an ‘efficiency
problem.’ In the United States, the common solution has been to hire
part-time faculty, who are paid less and who receive no medical benefits.
The direct savings for institutions have been substantial.
By casting the problem of overcrowded universities as a financial
one, and by reforming these institutions as capitalist ventures, govern-
ments and the universities themselves have created an apparent need

to immediately and comprehensively restructure educational practice
and facilities. In the new, corporate-based model, students are consum-
ers who are buying products (an education and a degree) with the
express intention of entering the professional workforce. Then in order
to guarentee quality control, universities standardize curricula, evalu-
ate and reward teachers based on performance (university-sanctioned
competitiveness), and limit experimental, radical, ‘marginal,’ and other
‘inessential’ or ‘inefficient’ courses. Core classes are given priority, and
faculty are pressured to teach them. Human interaction becomes lim-
ited as class sizes soar and information technologies are packaged
(virtual classrooms and distance learning) in order to streamline the
educational process. In sum, in the past decade universities around the
world have sought to change the nature of higher education (see Angus,
Hall, and Zaslove, in this volume).
Of course, universities don’t restructure themselves overnight, and
they generally don’t do so without encountering resistance. For ex-
ample, during the 1980s and 1990s, students at the massive UNAM
staged a series of strikes against the implementation of tuition fees and
time-to-degree limits. The universities were literally falling apart due to
underfunding, and because there were no time-to-degree limits, the
UNAM campuses had become refuges for political activists. Tuition
fees and time-to-degree limits were touted as a way to save the public
university system; as an added bonus, they would professionalize and
deradicalize campuses. Reformers pointed out that the fees were mini-
mal and would only amount to a few U.S. dollars a year; UNAM
students retorted that the reforms were unconstitutional, as citizens of
Mexico are guaranteed education as a constitutional right. Repeatedly,
UNAM officials tried to institute the reforms, and en masse the stu-
dents went on strike, occupying the campuses and marching in num-
bers large enough to gridlock the streets of Mexico City, thus forcing the
administration to back down. Local officials were deeply reluctant to
use force to end the demonstrations, as the country was still haunted by
the student massacres of the 1960s. The UNAM strikes are often cited as
among the first to explicitly challenge the effects of globalization and
neoliberal, free-market economic practices on university systems.15
UNAM students were successful for two decades due to their unity
and sheer numbers. But their ability to repeatedly field those numbers
was in large part due to the fact that every student would feel the effect
of tuition increases. Realizing this, UNAM officials changed their tac-
tics. They made some progress by initiating reforms piecemeal, such as

time-to-degree limits and entrance exams. In 1999 they again tried to
impose a comprehensive tuition hike, arguing that because of the dire
state of Mexico’s economy, they simply had no choice. Students again
went on strike, and occupied the campuses until the spring of 2000,
when university officials announced that if the occupation continued,
students would lose their credits for the year. Student solidarity suf-
fered as the occupation leaders became more and more extreme in their
rhetoric and ideologies. Disgruntled with the radicalization of the ac-
tion, and fearing the potential impact the demonstration would have on
their academic standing, most students withdrew their support of the
strike. The collective crumbled, and UNAM officials brought in the
police to remove the remaining activists.
Immediately after the strike ended, fearing another demonstration,
the administration abandoned its plan to impose tuition increases. But
it has continued to seek less volatile ways to restructure along business
models. Across Latin America – in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador,
Brazil, and elsewhere – students have been fighting similar attempts at
university reform, although without the relative successes and interna-
tional exposure of the UNAM students.
During the 1990s, the restructuring and privatization of universities
was also heavily promoted in many African countries by the World
Bank. Because of their economic situations, many governments had
little choice but to accept World Bank ‘growth grants’ and national debt
reductions that were contingent on privatization reforms. At first, most
reform efforts were met with tremendous resistance by faculty and
students, but by the new millennium, the World Bank had softened its
approach and African governments, needing aid more than ever, had
accepted the Bank’s conditions for aid. In 2000, for example, the World
Bank offered Nigeria a $100 million loan to oversee the ‘modernization’
of its ailing universities.16
Students in Africa have formed collectives to combat government
control of institutions, and often encounter harsh repression. In 2001,
thousands of Ethiopian students protesting for a greater role in univer-
sity affairs were arrested after a rally at the University of Addis Ababa
was brutally suppressed. More than forty demonstrators died, and
hundreds were injured.17 That same year, students demonstrating against
tuition increases at the University of Lubumbashi in Congo were vi-
ciously suppressed by riot police. In Kenya, students rioted at Egerton
University after standardized progress examinations were instituted.
Universities in cash-strapped countries such as Zambia and Zimbabwe

have repeatedly been closed after faculty-led strikes over low or unpaid
salaries. One significant problem that students in the South face in the
neoliberal age – especially in countries with repressive regimes – is that
universities have trouble retaining qualified teachers. Their universities
are often held up as ‘models of inefficiency’ and thus deemed in need of
World Bank–funded reforms.
In Africa and Latin America, students’ strategies for resisting neoliberal
education reforms have mostly involved traditional demonstrations
and public protests. When police try to use force to break these up, they
sometimes turn into riots. The success of these direct-conflict actions
depends to a great extent simply on numbers. Protests against tuition
increases and privatization have been held at universities in countries
around the world, not just Latin America and Africa. Canada, Britain,
Germany, India, and Australia, for example, have witnessed relatively
large demonstrations and strikes related to the increasing cost of higher
education and the restructuring of public universities. Again, the effec-
tiveness of these protests hinges on the mobilization of large numbers
of students, often with collateral public support.
Recently, as part of their struggles against the economic superpow-
ers, students, civil activists, and labour groups have fielded massive
demonstrations against the WTO and the IMF at international summits.
The WTO Seattle protest was important in our context because it re-
energized student activists throughout North America and joined orga-
nizers of student and labour movements with anti-imperialists connected
with the environmentalist, socialist, and anti-globalization movements.
In the United States, students have generally not protested in signifi-
cant numbers against the tuition increases and privatization efforts
sweeping their campuses. But they have demonstrated effectively against
specific neoliberal economic practices. For example, the American anti-
sweatshop movement endeavoured to make universities exercise con-
trol over how clothing manufacturers were treating and paying foreign
workers. Students held sit-ins and demonstrations on local college cam-
puses and used negative press coverage to pressure university adminis-
trations into monitoring and regulating apparel manufacturers that had
been licensed to market their school logos. The Worker Rights Consor-
tium, a national organization, provided students with compelling fig-
ures and statistics, and offered them instructions and help for local
protests, sit-ins, and hunger strikes. By 2003 the consortium had repre-
sentatives on more than 150 campuses in the United States; this exerted
tremendous pressure on the $2.5 billion apparel industry. The consor-
tium was effective in part because it was able to clearly articulate
ethical positions, backed by research, that appealed to large numbers of
students. It also was adept at distributing information and creating a
national network of activists through e-mail campaigns, websites, and
highly visible protests.
More recently, student activism in the United States received a jolt of
energy in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks and the
American invasion of Afghanistan. But rampant patriotism, and the
lack of a clear opponent for disparate activist groups to focus on meant
that cohesion between various organizations remained elusive. Student
concerns about the war, imperialism, corporate imperialism, and so
forth were the subject of separate albeit related battles. But then the
Bush administration set its eyes on Baghdad and the various activist
collectives had something to unite around. On campuses all over the
country, students organized local antiwar demonstrations and found
willing participants who were already engaged in struggles against
the Bush administration and big business. The obvious confluence of
government and corporate interests (especially those related to oil and
defence contracts) – historically situated in a context of cultural, eco-
nomic, and religious imperialism – made it clear to a great many
American students that the battles many smaller groups had been
fighting locally were, in fact, part of an ongoing global enterprise. Of
course, to students in many parts of the world, this was not an espe-
cially new revelation.
Both established and new international networks coordinated simul-
taneous massive demonstrations in major cities around the world, in-
cluding Tokyo, Mexico City, Washington, Berlin, London, and Paris.
Through e-mails, online petitions, Internet spamming, websites, flyers,
lectures, and workshops, student activists spread calls for action and
distributed tactics of resistance. In the Anti-War March on Washington,
for example, major political figures such as Jessie Jackson sought to
connect the disparate interests of the participants – of those concerned
for civil rights, for the environment, for social justice, for peace, for
human rights – in an effort to define a cohesive national and interna-
tional youth movement. The potential for a tremendous collective was
there – one assembled from below. And the numbers, combined with
the presence of political figures and media stars, brought international
television coverage, which in turn made more people aware of the

issues and the efforts.
The growing movement stalled, however, shortly after the United
States invaded Iraq. Internationally, student efforts shifted their focus
to the imperialist nature of the American and British governments.
Within the United States, nationalism immediately soared: those
student-citizens who opposed the war were vehemently attacked as
unpatriotic. The antiwar movement was unprepared for the speed with
which American forces overthrew the Hussein regime and for the new
context of a postwar Iraq. Unable to articulate and organize a cohesive
stance against what quickly became perceived once again as separate
issues – American imperialism, globalization, human rights, the envi-
ronment, big business and so on – the larger social activist collectives
disintegrated.
Student Resistance and the Future
The focus of this essay has been on how students have historically
generated power by forming collectives, and some of the ways they
have wielded it recently, ranging from direct conflicts and physical
struggles to eliciting widespread public support for causes and coordi-
nating efforts with other collectives, especially labour. It is clear that the
world is still a very dangerous place and that students’ struggles will
continue to be fought both on and off campuses. Students’ tendencies
towards idealism, their seeking to put into practice the ideas they learn,
their challenging of the status quo – all of these serve to refashion our
societies to make them publicly rethink where they are heading. Simi-
larly, how a government responds to its students suggests as much
about the future of that society as it does about its current state.
When students begin to resist, when they form collectives and articu-
late stances, they are telling us that they too have a stake in this world
and are claiming the right to wrestle with the competing forces already
vying for power in their societies. The history of student resistance
suggests that revolutionary subjectivity develops through the critical
awareness of existing political situations – an awareness combined with
a social mandate to act. When they articulate a cause and generate
collateral support, students can dramatically reshape their world. Thus
the future of humanity may depend on the university containing a
revolutionary subject.
NOTES
1 The length and focus of this essay preclude any in-depth analysis of
specific acts of student resistance. For analyses of the power relations of
specific student actions, see my Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly
Subject (New York: Routledge, 2001).
2 Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian
Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996),
1–35.
3 The 1970 Kent State Massacre in the United States and the subsequent
popular backlash is an excellent example of this. See Peter Davies, ed., The
Truth about Kent State (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1973).
4 See R.J. Rath, The Viennese Revolution of 1848 (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1957).
5 As the subtitle indicates, my perspective on student resistance is heavily
influenced by Michel Foucault, who argues that individuals are always
caught in and manipulated by systems of power. His analysis of institu-
tions and how individuals internalize rules and regulations to monitor
their own behaviour is especially appropriate for understanding how
modern universities work, especially in relation to state governments and
economic imperialism. For discussions of power, see Foucault, Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pan-
theon, 1977); and Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
6 See Willis Rudy, The Universities of Europe, 1100-1914 (Rutherford, NJ:
Associated University Presses, 1984).
7 See Charles Haskins, ‘The Earliest Universities,’ in Student Activism: Town
and Gown in Historical Perspective, ed. Alexander DeConde (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 19–32.
8 Ibid.
9 See Robert Rait, Life in the Medieval University (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1931), 124.
10 Ibid., 25–7.
11 For a detailed discussion of the Russian student uprisings of this time, see
Lewis Feuer, Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student
Movements (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
12 See Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and
America’s First Mass Student Movement (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993); Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973).
13 See Bernard Brown, Protest in Paris: Anatomy of a Revolt (Morristown, NJ:

General Learning Press, 1974); Ronald Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in
Revolt (New York: Pantheon, 1988); Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret
History of the Twentieth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989).
14 Parvis Daneshvar, Revolution in Iran (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996);
Robin Wright, ‘Letter from Tehran: We Invite the Hostages to Return: The
Extraordinary Changing View of Iran’s Revolution,’ New Yorker, 8 Novem-
ber 1999, 38–47.
15 See, for example, Rhona Statland de Lopez, ‘Mexico’s Largest University
Ends Semester amid Student Occupation of the Campus,’ Chronicle of
Higher Education, 23 July 1999.
16 Burton Bollag, ‘Nigerian Universities Start to Recover from Years of
Violence, Corruption, and Neglect,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 Febru-
ary 2002.
17 Wachira Kigotho, ‘Academics in Ethiopia Are Again under Siege,’
Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 May 2001.
From the ‘Guerrilla’ Classroom to the University of Excess 93
5 Exiled Pedagogy: From the ‘Guerrilla’

Classroom to the University of Excess
jerry zaslove
Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this
occurs repeatedly, again and again, finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand
and becomes part of the ceremony.
Franz Kafka
A distinction needs to be made between academic art based on classical and

Renaissance models and the academicizing process by which all styles are in
time tamed and made to perform in the circus of public taste.
Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Academia in Totalitaria’
In Lieu of a Prelude – ‘Lost Illusions’ and the ABCs of

a Radical Pedagogy
This essay is written in equal parts as a manifesto and a personal

project. The underlying story is the fate of the ‘utopias’ related to
education that came into being in the 1960s – a story that is now part
myth, part prophecy. Myth in the sense that the universities and
cultural movements of the 1960s are easy to parody, as films like The
Deer Hunter, Pulp Fiction, and The Big Lebowski have made all too clear.
Myth also in the sense that these cultural movements changed nothing
and were eventually ‘tamed and made to perform’ – that they eventu-
ally succumbed to the lures of what Herbert Marcuse called the ‘one-
dimensional’ society.1
It is the story of the classroom – that part of teaching that cannot be
reproduced in the way it happens. The underlying deep taboo on any
94 Jerry Zaslove
teaching that moves outside of the always narrowing boundaries of

university education requires an ethnographer, or a Dostoevskian nar-
rator as in Notes from the House of the Dead, where the story is told as a
living history through which one learns about others and oneself. Teach-
ing is a form of colportage driven by a sense of non-contemporaneity –
part legend, part fairy tale, part market exchange. It is driven by the
wish that all learning were true and all truth more than a free-floating
dream world.2
The idea of a radical pedagogy guided by utopian impulses is not
new. However, in the wake of the Cold War and the brutal, futile war in
Vietnam, it felt new for a very brief time. Although the most trenchant
critiques of American life came from writers of the 1950s, it fell to the
1960s generation of middle-class students and fugitives from urban
racism and suburban conformity to present themselves on the stage of
history as the only authentic social force that could name and oppose
schooling as part of a system that seemed to be repeating Europe’s
capitulation to fascism. In retrospect, the illusion of changing the uni-
versity into another kind of institution was prophetic of our helpless-
ness in the face of the corporatism we live with now. Many chapters in
this book document that illusion and that helplessness.
The failures of the movements of the 1960s haunt my own story.
Those failures were preceded by the terrible ambiguities of the 1950s,
which themselves were preceded by a long list of critics who attacked
monarchy, church, and state, but not the university as such. Yet uni-
versities were always places of privilege, capable of purging non-
conformist elements, as the example of the German and Austrian uni-
versities’ compliance with dictatorial regimes makes clear. The McCarthy
era in the United States showed that educational institutions were
vulnerable not only to reactionary politics, but also to other forms of
state coercion. But this is not a history of universities as besieged insti-
tutions. It is the story of the Archimedean point between the contempo-
rary university’s technocratic rationality and any practice of radical
pedagogy. This is a point of balance, struck between hope for something
different and the one-dimensionality of today’s societies, with their
experiences of overwhelmitude, exile, and social attention deficit disor-
der. For while the system has adjusted itself to the coming of the ultra-
mass university, the utopian impulse to make radical pedagogy into an
image of a critical institution has not been entirely misdirected in its
original form, nor has it entirely dissipated.
Radical Pedagogy between Extremes
When I began teaching in the early 1960s, universities seemed like

heavenly cities: sanctuaries for thought, whose social contradictions
had not yet become a part of the society of their times.3 It is a poignant
travel in time to revisit the writers and books that were part of the
critical educational public sphere of that time, such as Paul Goodman’s
Growing Up Absurd, Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (1956).
Goodman described those times in his characteristically upbeat way:
‘Our immense productivity … has been pre-empted and parceled out in
a kind of domainal system: but this grandiose and seemingly impreg-
nable feudalism is vulnerable to an earnest attack. One has the persis-
tent thought that if ten thousand people in all walks of life will stand
upon their two feet and walk out and insist, we shall get back our
country.’4 Nothing in the book, read then or now, would have given
anyone but the most Pollyannaish room for hope. Except of course
Goodman’s anarchistic belief in a human-centred community that could
counter the most alienated forms of poverty, dependence, and brutality,
and in the process free individuals from illegitimate authority.
Goodman brought us the deep insight that pedagogy is classroom
guerrilla work, although he never thought of himself as an academic. He
assumed that individuals could understand that intellectual work creates
‘leaking boundaries’ within the multivocal relationship of classroom to
student to university governance and eventually to social transforma-
tion. Many of the art practices of the time, for example, sought models
that were subversive of the object of art as a patronized and saleable
commodity in a so-called modernist art market. (At the time, modernism
was seen as radical, not as ‘traditional’ and reactionary as it is today.) My
own classroom practices, like those of many others, were participatory,
conceptual, and sensuous; I hoped they would respect and explore the
social and aesthetic functions of learning, as well as its internal experi-
ences. Absurdity, humour, and playfulness along with fading Dada and
soon-to-be-isolated surrealism were vital parts of this pedagogy.
When Jürgen Habermas wrote about the German student movement
in 1967, he admitted: ‘We sociologists did not reckon with the possibil-
ity that students could play a political role in developed industrial
societies. The values of status-mobile and socially climbing middle-
class families accord with the universalistic values of the university
tradition.’5 Students feared that they were being reconstructed as uni-
96 Jerry Zaslove
versities turned themselves into middle-class training grounds, and

that this would reinforce economies of scale vis-à-vis all those expedi-
tionary forces pitted against poor countries. The barrier against the
exploitation of cultural capital was the student. The essence of these
classrooms, however, cannot be explained as ‘pedagogy’; they were
places of particular experiences that were fleeting and transient, that
could be described as proto-incommensurable communities whose mea-
sure could not be taken with certainty, because in the long run these
experiences were not easily transportable to other circumstances. They
were made up of the ambiguity of the Vietnam War as the image both of
complicity with the extremes of capitalism and of a society that really
had no new name. Military-industrial complex? Administered society?
Corporate America? One-dimensional society? Often the war was car-
ried into the classroom, as if the individual professor was complicit
with the system.6 This concreteness and particularity of the experience
of war7 gave the illusion that the past could be mastered by mastering
the university, which was itself a product of the unmastered past of the
translation of economic production into cultural production. One did
not grasp the depths of the contradictions.
‘Utopia is a historical concept,’ Marcuse declared in a 1967 talk. ‘It
refers to projects for social change that are considered impossible.’
Impossible for what reasons? At the time Marcuse said these words, the
students were the incipient intelligentsia. But when the Vietnam War
ended the student movement ended as well – or migrated into the
disciplines. Colonial liberation struggles emerged throughout the world
of the poor but also helped open up this world to the overwhelming
spread of capitalism and new nation-state power. One response to this
crisis was to rebuild the universities as bastions and citadels. Thus the
culture of extremes during the Cold War was lived out in both the
desire for a radical pedagogical turn, and a desire to open the doors of
the university to more students. The critique of the university danced in
tandem with economic necessity to broaden the university to include
more students, more of everything. The extremes of mass culture and
the knowledge industry met.
Growing Up Overwhelmed: Everything under

One Roof – The Wal-Mart Model
Franz Kafka’s parable, cited at the opening of this chapter, describes the
assimilation of the natural anarchism of the human species into a soci-
ety where the leopard takes revenge on the surplus of knowledge by

creating more and more disciplines and research parks. The university
has become the secular temple where everything that exists in knowl-
edge can be found under one roof: the Wal-Martiversity. The utopian
qualities that might have seeded the desire to transform the university
must be placed against today’s University of Excess – the University of
Scale – with all its pious phrases of ‘excellence’ coded to the lucrative
word ‘research’ with all its bureaucratic superstructures. At the end of
this essay I will argue that one must now become something of a
saboteur with regard to the lessons of our times. The marketplace,
brutal and conservative to its core, has now invaded every institution
that would allow us to have a place where we do not tolerate a client-
like posture of total identification with the system.8 Pedagogy now
means mostly how to teach in the classroom, how to make the universi-
ties into measurable, accountable, mobile, and ‘nimble’ benchmarks of
the larger society. Universities have become ‘sites of excellence’ where
totalities of knowledge and particularities of experience are collapsed
into performance indicators. Under what circumstances teaching might
exist in an age when money cuts into everything else by the Damocletian
sword of profit is anyone’s guess. But what is certain is that today there
is no intellectual vanguard leading a discussion of the pedagogy that
would address the total university that conditions what knowledge is.
The utopian period of the critique of university education can be
illustrated with a few names and dates. In our anti-utopian age, during
which ‘utopia’ has become a synonym for ‘totalitarian’ – creating amne-
sia with regard to the utopian stream of educational critique – the
following names and works have been exiled to the world of ‘the gods
that failed’: Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins
(1967); Maxine Greene, The Public School and the Private Vision (1965);
The New Left Reader, edited by Carl Oglesby (1969); The Dialectics of
Liberation, edited by David Cooper (1968); Protest and Discontent, edited
by Bernard Crick and William A. Robson (1970); David Dellinger,
Revolutionary Nonviolence (1970); George Dennison, The Lives of Children
(1969). One knows from Daniel Boorstin’s The Image (1962) and from C.
Wright Mills that Eisenhower’s campaign in 1956 used advertising
firms for the first time to sell the presidential image of total power. And
there was McLuhan and more McLuhan, and let us not forget that Time
magazine in 1966 exploited the ‘image’ of the hippie and the yippie, the
SDS, and the ‘Chicago’ generation as its ‘Man of the Year.’ The New Left
discovered what the older generation – my own – had known all along:
98 Jerry Zaslove
that the United States had become a system of professional managers

manipulating public opinion about the Vietnam War. Journals like Telos
were seriously attempting to link European thought to a new politics.
And then there were the European émigrés and exiles who spoke from
the heart of history – most importantly Herbert Marcuse, whose essay
‘The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition’9 already sounded
the death knell of the New Left’s ability to form an organization that,
like the Old Left, would address the non-technological needs of the
unprivileged. To recall this today is like sighting old cars in the slow
lanes of the educational freeways. These names gave experiential weight
to the often terminal radicalism of the counterculture especially after
the counterculture disappeared. The point: class analysis, and the cri-
tique of schooling as a mass of disciplines. The issues have now become
the growth patterns of the multiversity and finding ways to recycle the
1960s into new disciplines and eventually to create the ‘Market Model
University.’10 That is the alpha and omega of my story and of the exilic
paradigm at large.
Since the Vietnam War ended, radical pedagogy has become caught
in the dilemma of the client-student who has regressed to dependency
on the university’s mandate on the one hand to provide careers and sur-
vival skills, and on the other to professionalize critique and thus accom-
modate it within incommensurable disciplinary boundaries. But one risks
sentimental nostalgia by complaining in these postmodern times, when,
after all, universities have created complex disciplines with newly minted
high status. Yet the suspicion remains: the university has been remade
on the Wal-Mart model, so that everything is available in any size or quan-
tity, and with no centre. In this context, radical pedagogy becomes an
exiled form of education in search of a utopian critique.
With all these challenges, we must again search for bolt holes and
breathing spaces in the system that will allow us to take a more Brechtian
defamiliarizing position with regard to the now universal claims that
universities are part of the marketplace that forms their identity. What
has been lost? And what remains of past struggles over a utopian
pedagogy? By whom, and for whom, is the struggle being waged today?
How do we counter the social pressures of the market, and of the
courtiers, courtesans, and commissars of power? Chomsky puts it well,
if perhaps too simply:
To speak truth to power is a particularly honorable vocation. One should

seek out an audience that matters – and furthermore (another important
qualification), it should not be seen as audience, but as a community of

common concern in which one hopes to participate constructively. We
should not be speaking to, but with. That is second nature to any good
teacher, and should be to any writer and intellectuals as well.11
This call to speak ‘with’ and to find a community in which the radical
nature of education itself lives has been my own guerrilla credo for
more than forty years as a teacher. I have been persuading, cajoling,
engaging, and searching for this community of truth-telling, not for the
illusion of changing the university in order to aggrandize the role of the
intellectual, or even to make the university itself the scapegoat for
society’s ‘extremes,’ but rather as the life or death proposition it is:
being free in a classroom might be as close to a portable radical utopia
as one can get. It may be the incommensurable community – a cross-
roads, a ghetto in a train station, a Kairos where one crosses boundaries
and lives without passports, identity cards, or allegiances to ‘voca-
tional’ or professional careers. Where the utopian pedagogy of the
classroom would lead, no university can tell us. No pieties about liberal
studies, no humanities as citizenship, no remixing of interdisciplinary
studies as a new technology of knowledge, has the answer. There can be
no doxa about the classroom – we must reject the entire carnival of
learning, including the caricature of the university professor as an
obsolete intellectual. Rather, the classroom must be seen as a place of
exploration for exiles from the system. It must welcome fools and
tricksters and any negativity in the approach to culture and art. The
task is to find new audiences, new individuals, new readers even as
they may be disemployed migrants.
A Portrait of the ‘Neo-Student’ – Is It Exile or Diaspora

or Inner Immigration?
Universities have been incorporated into the bourgeois public sphere.

What might once have been named the ‘proletarian education public
sphere’ – which had no label when it was breaking down the walls of
educational privilege – must today become a more polemically charged
‘anarchist public sphere’ for those who are outside the institutions.12
The real question: In the global market, where is the critical educational
public sphere? And who is excluded from the education that at one time
was assumed to be open to all? Those outside can be labelled the new
global proletariat, the new exiles.
100 Jerry Zaslove
Here it would be appropriate to note that we are feeling the impact

of – even as we forget – the previous century’s great movements of
stateless peoples, as in Europe in the early Middle Ages and again in the
fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. UN records (as of 1991) tell us that if
our world had 1,000 people (as if living in one village), it would contain
564 Asians, 210 Europeans, 86 Africans, 80 South Americans, and 60
North Americans. Of these villagers, 60 would control half of the total
income, 500 would be hungry, 600 would live in shantytowns, and 700
would be illiterate.13 Is this the ‘end of history’ and its helpmate, the
end game of capitalist ideology? The coming anarchy? The coming of
the millennium? No. It is indicative of the new role of states in adminis-
tering the neoserfdom of clients, refugees, immigrants, and migrants
living in tent cities – the new dependent collectives without community.
We study them. The wars of attrition are in the statistics, which are a
new form of invasion – a violence that can be quantified, packaged, and
contained. Container shipping on the tracking webs of statistics. Uni-
versities as knowledge factories claim to represent ‘humanity’ and
‘progress,’ yet the overwhelming presence of the discarded defines the
current historical Archimedean point: those who wait in the anterooms
of citizen-blessed societies; people living in camps, zones, enclaves, and
ghettos ‘governed’ by refugee commissions and UN agencies.
Exilic culture is the missing component of any thought about the
totality of ‘humanity.’ Exile is contemporaneous with wars at the bor-
derlands, where those who do not make it into the shelters of the states
die or are returned ‘home.’ In the mutating world of tent cities there is
no capitol, no representation, no real territory, and no democratic struc-
ture. Exile is the trashcan of statelessness and the trans-settlement of
peoples (Indonesia, Africa) and mobility of migrant workers. To speak
today of ‘overwhelmitude’ only in terms of numbers constitutes the
narcissism of small differences; it causes social attention deficit disorder.
The new student is just this kind of diasporic subject – a slave manqué,
a displaced being who is a stand-in actor for the teacher as weird
official. The neostudent sees the world from within the borders of a
university that promises redemption and reconciliation with society
through a career of unspeakable debts. The Professor is the Model of
Opportunity, the Inorganic Intellectual with access to brain-working
technologies. The students can be compared to the ‘internal exiles’ who
take refuge from the war zones. The student lives in a twilight zone
without borders, the client of the state and an image of the future:
pariah to parvenu and back again like a nervous bird.14
The modern university is not a monastery, an enclave, or a battle-

ground. It is not even in the current jargon a ‘contested site’ or a ‘site of
resistance.’ It is ‘hybridized’ into training for the present, not the future.
In this sense, universities are simulacra of postmodern thinking about
the ‘now.’ Education is more expensive than at any time in history, as if
higher admissions standards justify the idea that money equals progress.
This domesticates the student, who becomes an inner exile. Why? Be-
cause the neotraining system, with its promises of employment in the
urgent world of the now, saps the will to resist the larger social order.
The university renders pleasing and acceptable the idea that labour and
social suffering can be managed together. For the student, this is an
unbeatable combination of spectacle, technology, and speedy mobility
through the ranks of the division of labour. It leads away from the
university of leaking boundaries towards the coming of age of the
client. The neostudent is thus both inside and outside the state’s desire
to make knowledge its divine mission for the few who make it in.15
Where is the exit?
New Contexts for an Incommensurable Community – Sabotage

and Pedagogy of the Exiled
More than ever before, an anarchist utopian pedagogy as a way of

seeing the details within the totality of human relationships might open
the world up to a rights-based vision, one that is already on the agendas
of the mutating cities. At the same time, any genuine anarchist would
have to discard the words ‘human rights’ in order to understand the
absence of such rights as they are assimilated into physical violence at
all levels of society. What, then, is to be done, as the Russians used to
ask?
First, all large universities should be broken up into smaller institu-
tions. An anarcho-communitarian, mutual aid model would then be
able to exist to counter the systemic delusions and the in-built manage-
rial nature of overly complex institutions, which mirror the metropo-
lises in which they reside and which, in turn, require the ‘educated’ –
that is, ‘trained’ – individuals to perform the negative archetype of the
citizen of the system. Training is necessary – the bridges can’t fall down.
But training for ‘overwhelmitude’ internalizes the system into us, and
this inner colonization precedes our exiled, nomadic future. More poly-
technics should be founded, not just universities expanding like he-
lium-filled balloons, and these polytechnics should require foundational
102 Jerry Zaslove
liberal studies programs and critical studies based on our common

ground as proto-exiles.
Second, one must subvert the university as the only cultural media-
tor that humans use to protect what they have made. If anarchist
pedagogy makes any sense at all, it must accept in some way that we
live in an open-ended bridging time, which most forms of democratic
‘progressive’ thought distort into ideas of ‘transition.’ ‘Transition’ cam-
ouflages ‘progress’ and is the worst word of all, because it hides the
utopian promise of progress. When students are in ‘transition,’ they
mimic the world outside. Transition ritualizes the cult of dependence.
Today, the enlightened have no choice but to see that the systemic
violence of a society that worships mobility imagines a future unpre-
pared for a world of refugees and displaced and dislocated wanderers
and neostudents.16
The countertendencies to the state should hold on to the belief that
universities are not the only normative institution. Non-traditional in-
stitutes and schools should be created, where expressive forms, as well
as forms of memory and transference boundaries, can help recover
from traumatic, external interventions, including the ‘natural’ ones that
are themselves created by our existing educational institutions. New
anomalous institutions have to be funded. Otherwise we will keep
fooling students with the pretence that the ‘applied’ vocations auto-
matically preserve humane and formative values. The future of the
world is cultural or there is no future at all.
Third, anarchist, libertarian, and other controversial models of peda-
gogy based on a sense of the crisis of society and the state – which
includes all forms of community – should be taught at every level of
education including primary and secondary schools.17 In times of ad-
ministered needs, we make good with ‘treating’ the victims of social
dysfunction and economic failure. We are so good at this that victims
increase. Universities provide analytical techniques – technology, ratio-
nality, calculation – that are supposed to cure the ignorance of the
society about the reigning model of community. Education faculties
should not be isolated from other faculties, as is now the case. In most
universities, no one knows what they do. Yet we know that there are
models of mutual aid and invention without which no capitalist state
can function; there are forms of reciprocity that have no name. They
need names. All university classes should become dialogical-experien-
tial models that educate by expanding the zones of contact with wider
communities. Why ... ?
Fourth, participatory activism – internships and cooperative models

of learning – should become part of all social sciences, humanities, and
technologically oriented programs. Authentic dialogical communities
need to find names and identify communities of reciprocity, of mean-
ings and significance, ceremonies and rituals, symbolic transactions
and celebrations, as well as ideologically formative languages. These
places of formative learning open up for examination new and old
forms of mediation, negotiation, and contract-based dispute resolution.
In order to live out the classroom as a pedagogy of the exiled in which a
radical pedagogy can thrive, the walls of universities must be broken
down by sabotaging the market model on which capitalism thrives. The
dialogical becomes an ‘incommensurable’ model that acknowledges
the shifting and changing experiences and political forms that create
particularities: it does so by relating the academy to experiences outside
of its own highly integrated communities. This was the hope of the
1960s counter-culture and remains the hope of whatever they are called
now – ‘irrational’ communities, or aesthetic communities, or avant-
garde communities, or mutational communities.
An illustration of the incommensurable anarcho-communitarian
model can be found in a community-based ‘mapping’ project that
focused on Grandview-Woodlands, an urbanized residential neigh-
bourhood in Vancouver. (See the chapter by Coté et al. in this volume.)
The project became a local classroom as it situated community groups
in a dialogical relationship to other groups, issues, cultural formations,
and social programs that were active in the area. Using the metaphor of
a geographic ‘map,’ the organizers sought to undercut the cliché of
referring to the population as inhabitants of the ‘inner city.’ Sociological
categories faded away when the neighbourhood workers and inhabit-
ants saw through the lenses of needs and crises: their lives’ true social
and economic boundaries became vital and real. The project used an
anarchistic pedagogy that reorganized the field of forces within cultural
memories – recent and traditional – of the ethnic and cultural land-
scapes that comprise the area. Each day confirmed the residents’ under-
lying sense that their neighbourhood was changing rapidly and was
becoming a paradise for developers and politicians.18
Neighbourhoods today are made up of ‘exiles’ who do not want to
see themselves as clients of the state framed only by rights-based
multicultural relationships.19 The community should be seen not as a
feeder to universities or as a launch pad for ‘citizenship.’ We must learn
that we live in dependency on the city in the face of its expansionist
104 Jerry Zaslove
greed. Even the fashionable term ‘hybridity’ does not give us an image
that solves problems; rather, it mimics disciplinary arrangements in the
university. A new way of thinking is required, a new form of ‘participa-
tory schooling.’ The thinking that there is one community is false; there
is no one community; rather, there is a place that is made up of many
shifting alliances with their contradictions and incommensurable indi-
vidualities. No forced synthesis is possible.
A Guerrilla Utopian Future?
The anarcho-community as a ghost in the machine is not based on any

redemptive view of ‘discourses of resistance,’ although one cannot be
entirely hostile to the emancipatory models that have founded new
authorities of expression as well as new social movements. At the same
time, common values are required in order to counteract the assump-
tion that the state is eternal and is the only mediator of institutions that
humans use to protect what they have made. An anarchist must make
some mandatory demands. How contradictory! But they must be made
in the sense of a Brechtian belief that one starts by negating the nega-
tions. We conclude that communitarian education and the dismantling
of the techno-abstraction of the university as a medieval heavenly ‘city’
should be sabotaged by starting with the assumption that the university
has become an integral part of the market system. If it is to be a vibrant
force, a utopian practice must address the discarded, the victims of the
excesses, the ones who qualify only as an afterthought, and those who
don’t qualify at all for entry into institutions built by a now calcified
neoliberal ideology. It must begin at this point in every university cur-
riculum. Not with ‘human rights’ or ‘multiculturalism,’ but with what I
would call the ‘displaced radical pedagogy’ of those who stand at the
doors of the future and who carry the weight of the world. Dimensional
humans, if indeed they have all their dimensions, still fight the wars
and bleed when they die.
NOTES
1 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

2 For ‘colportage’ and utopian thinking see Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Func-
tion of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). Colportage is the form of literacy related to
exile alluded to here; it differs from the forms of literacy pursued by Paulo
Freire. See my ‘Theory and Resistance in Education,’ in Journal of Educa-
tion, 66:3 (Fall 1984): 321–30. Also see the excellent study by Tom Steele,
The Emergence of Cultural Studies: Adult Education, Cultural Politics, and the
‘English Question’ (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997).
3 I came to Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, Canada, in 1965 – this
has been over half my life, which I have devoted to teaching and writing
in areas that at the time I arrived were unusual in Canada – European
literature, culture, and the way political change and depth psychology
influence our receptions of literature and art. I was informed by anarcho-
Marxist and Freudian approaches and by anarchist social thought, and I
always attempted to find new ways to integrate these with the responsibil-
ity of intellectuals to criticize the system of learning itself. I did not define
this as working in the institution, but rather as making ideas available to
the public, including primarily classrooms. The classroom was the ‘public’
– it was a special obligation because the form of teaching was as important
as the content. The form of teaching was the life and death of the institu-
tion. Teaching at the time was by definition radical because teaching was a
risky leap into the unknown. Teaching is like cultural bungee jumping in
that you are pulled back to the thought that this may not last – something
is always in the wind. The risks of the classroom present a choice: Do you
take a road prepared for you by allowing yourself to join the crowd, or do
you leave some surplus knowledge behind for those who will have to face
the system outside? The classroom was the only way to keep alive the idea
that a radical pedagogy with utopian outlines would not be suffocated by
careerism, professionalism, or even the ambiguous notion of ‘relevance’ –
a notion the university has now adopted and manipulated into its very
own sloganeering about excellence.
4 Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized
Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1956); Paul Avrich, The Modern School
Movement, Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1980).
5 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Student Protest in the Federal Republic of Germany,’ in
Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, trans. Jeremy
J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 28; original German title was
Student Protest and University Reform. See my essay ‘The Lost Utopia of
Academic Freedom – Intellectuals and the Ethos of the “Deinstitutional-
ized University”, in Len M. Findlay and Paul M. Bidwell, Pursuing Aca-
demic Freedom: ‘Free and Fearless?’ (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing, 2001).
6 See Wayne Burns, Journey through the Dark Woods (Seattle: Howe Street
106 Jerry Zaslove
Press, 1982), for one of the best accounts of the 1960s I know. Burns, an
anarchist, pacifist, non-conformist teacher, and long-time partisan of non-
conformist students, was driven into retirement by the excesses of the
student movement.
7 ‘The End of Utopia,’ in Five Lectures (London: Allan Lane, 1970) 63. See
also Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian
Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
8 The classic analysis of the loss of the public sphere is Habermas, The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1989 [1962] and 1993 [1972]). Also see Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge,
Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletar-
ian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 [1972]).
They discuss ‘inward imperialism’ of cultural institutions against labour
on pages 170 to 177. Theirs is a more utopian analysis than Habermas’s
normative one.
9 ‘The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition,’ Five Lectures, 83–
109.
10 As trenchantly critiqued in Harvard Magazine, May-June 1998.
11 Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the
Social Order (Boston: South End Press, 1996), 61. Italics in original.
12 Alexander Kluge, Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feeling) (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 2000).
13 These figures are culled from UN High Commission on Refugees sources
and came to my attention partly through the installation ‘Refugee Repub-
lic’ by Engo Günther and Stefan Matthys, ‘Surveillance,’ Prague Castle,
Prague, June 2002.
14 Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contempo-
rary Society, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson et al. (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999 [1993]).
15 See David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the
Spirit of Invention (New York: Knopf, 1998).
16 This would have to be discussed in terms of works like Michel Maffesoli,
The Contemplation of the World: Figures of Community Style (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Stanley Diamond, In Search of the
Primitive (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1974); Alphonso Lingis,
The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994); David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist
Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004).
17 These ideas are not new. They were advanced by many anarchist-influ-
enced art and cultural theorists, most notably by Herbert Read, who is
now virtually forgotten, in his more than one thousand essays and books.
See Education through Art (New York: Pantheon, 1958). See David Good-
way, ed., Herbert Read Reassessed (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press,
1998). It is Read, not just Raymond Williams, who should be consulted, as
I argue in ‘Herbert Read and Essential Modernism: The Loss of an Image
of the World,’ ibid.
18 The Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser and the Britannia Com-
munity School in Vancouver were the institutional links to the project,
which was funded through the Bronfman Family Foundation’s unusual
community education–community activism projects.
19 For a critique of this model of community see Richard J.F. Day, Multi-
culturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2000). Day critiques ‘managed diversity’ and the location
of current Canadian immigration policy with regard to exiles, the female
household, and the racialization of megacities. The flight to suburbs and
the destruction of neighbourhoods and public spaces within the current
fascination with ‘citizenship’ as the paradigmatic democratic principle are
on the table. See my essay on loss of space, ‘Decamouflaging Memory, or
How We Are Undergoing “Trial by Space” while Utopian Communities
Are Restoring Powers of Recall,’ West Coast Line 34/35 (2001): 119–57. This
essay relates to what I call the exilic and hybrid forms of literacy within
older modernist practices, which are taking place at the borders of nations
where the market prison of globalization is working its duplicitous havoc.
On this, see my essay ‘Vindicating Popular Culture in Latin America: A
Response to Garcia Canclini,’ in Canadian Journal of Latin American and
Carribbean Studies, 23:46 (1998): 133–55. See also Michael Taussig in The
Magic of the State (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).
108 Stuart Hall
6 Universities, Intellectuals, and

Multitudes: An Interview with
Stuart Hall
interviewed by greig de peuter
The Restructuring of the University in Britain
gdp: I would like to begin by asking you to comment on the current

situation of the university, specifically in relation to what seems to be an
inexorable drive towards the restructuring of the university according
to a neoliberal model of governance. How do you see the neoliberal
restructuring of the university playing out in the British context?
sh: In the British context there is no question that the pace of the
neoliberal reconstruction of education has accelerated in the last fifteen
years. I do not want to put this as an inexorable drive, but that process
has extended into higher education since the 1970s and then moved at a
much more rapid pace more recently. That is in keeping with the broader
political climate in Britain: first, in the context of Thatcherism, which
was our break with older social democratic and egalitarian traditions of
politics in the 1980s; and second, in the context of New Labour, which
came to office in the 1990s and is in ascendancy now politically. New
Labour is a curious combination of neoliberalism in the driving seat
and the residue of social democracy in order to carry political consent.
New Labour is a different configuration from Thatcherism, but main-
tains the investment in the neoliberal program, both domestically and
globally.
For a long period, New Labour did not make direct interventions in
the universities. It simply allowed the general climate of market forces
to reshape the university from below. The university, because it is
squeezed in terms of investment, and pushed in terms of expanding
numbers, has moved to market mechanisms to organize its financing.
More recently, we have seen the rise of what is called the ‘audit culture’
Universities, Intellectuals, and Multitudes 109
in Britain, which involves much more careful scrutiny of market out-

comes and attempts to measure outcomes and set standards. That has
been applied to one after another of the public sectors under New
Labour, and gradually the universities came under those regulations.
In the 1980s and 1990s, ‘research assessment’ is a significant interven-
tion in British universities. Every four years, every academic and the
work of entire departments is assessed in terms of outcomes, and future
research funding is then tied to the results of that performance. The
same regular assessment is now applied to teaching, which had never
been assessed in British universities. This assessment has the impact,
first of all, of making ‘performance’ standardized across the disciplines.
Everybody is required to have the same performance level, which
flattens out the distinctions between one discipline and another. It does
not reward teaching because research is prioritized, though next year
you will be examined for your teaching! Every academic also must
produce the requisite number of research papers. Everybody now has
an administrative task: in monitoring, in admissions, and so on. The
more junior you are, the more likely it is that you will be loaded up with
administrative tasks. This means there is a squeeze on the time of every
academic. Research assessment also places tremendous pressure on the
standardization of thought and of academic programs. Each discipline
is supposed to produce a summary of what is ‘basic’ to their discipline
and how their courses are teaching that content. This has damaged the
diversity of programs. It also has the effect of straightening the disci-
plines up, because when you are audited you are required to respond
within a known discipline. If you are interdisciplinary you fall between
domains and so you have to report to more than one board. As a result,
the experimentation in education is squeezed.
These squeezes are basically neoliberal in character. But it is impor-
tant to stress that they have slightly mixed origins. The British educa-
tion system was originally extremely narrow and elitist: only 16 per
cent of the relative age group went into higher education. In the 1960s
and 1970s, there was a push to expand, to double the numbers, which
has in fact happened over the last twenty years. Today, over 30 per cent
of the relative age group goes into higher education. This is a positive
push, and it enlisted people’s support: ‘Yes, draw in students who have
been kept out: more women, more poor students, more adult students.’
But there has been no investment so academics are teaching twice the
number of students in the same amount of time. This pressure of
numbers has a massive impact on people’s careers, on time, on the
110 Stuart Hall
nature of teaching, on the nature of the disciplines, on how much

students are getting from their degrees, and on the diversity of pro-
grams. Added to this are more direct interventions in funding. For
example, the grants that were given to poorer students, so they could go
to the university of their choice and maintain themselves while doing
an undergraduate degree, have been frozen. I don’t know the exact
proportions but I would estimate that now over 60 per cent of students
are doing part-time work.
gdp: What do you see as the major impacts of the neoliberal restructur-
ing on the meaning of the university at our current conjuncture?
sh: The idea of the university as an ‘open’ institution, ‘freely’ in pursuit
of knowledge, was, of course, never quite the case. It has always been a
bit of a myth. That accompanies the elitism of academic life, the closure
around the profession, and the hidden assumptions about who can
benefit from it and who can’t, and so on. Universities have always been
selective institutions in one way or another, either formally or infor-
mally. This institution has always been ripe for democratization, espe-
cially in Britain, where it is immured in such a deeply hierarchical social
system; it is riven with and shaped by the class system. Before these
reforms started that I have been describing, overwhelming numbers of
people who went to universities were from middle- and upper-middle-
class professional families. Parents sent their children to British ‘public
schools,’ which had an overwhelming number of their students go on to
Oxford, or Cambridge, or Imperial – the elite institutions. These were
the people who received university educations and did graduate work.
The benefits were skewed. That is why the expansion of numbers
would seem to be a positive step in democratization.
The process of neoliberal restructuring in Britain, because it is inter-
vening in an older, deeply hierarchical system, carries an ambiguous
resonance. The market can portend to be more open than an old, basi-
cally aristocratic system. This is New Labour’s version of neoliberalism,
and it can represent itself as being a populist drive. It wins over many
people who are attached to the democratization of higher education
and of research institutions because it seems to be a way of bringing air
into a closed system. But the form which this opening takes is encapsu-
lated from on top: it is a market-driven opening, moving very much
against the social democratic idea of education, which goes back not
just to the traditions of the labour movement – which are egalitarian –
but even to Adam Smith, who, after all, said that a market democracy
depends on people having knowledge, that it depends on a state that is

responsible for educating its population. There is a long tradition of
education reform that has been central to the social democratic tradi-
tion. The current situation is a break with that tradition. Indeed, it is a
break within social democracy itself, so it is very confusing for people;
it is not an easy line-up.
Nonetheless, anybody who stands back and looks at what this has
done to the conception of the university will see that it is now pulled or
driven principally by vocational and economic questions – principally
in terms of its contribution to larger economic purposes. It is driven by a
kind of managerialism. Managerialism is not only the hallmark of
neoliberalism but actually what I would call the motor: if neoliberalism
is a set of ideas, how neoliberalism then gets into the system is through
managerialism. It has swept over and transformed the university, where
every procedure has been managerialized. This is very different from
the old system, where universities, in a way, managed themselves,
always remembering that that autonomy was limited to a small num-
ber of people. But there was still a certain ideal of a free movement of
ideas and of personal contact. The best of our education for students,
which was an elite practice, was a one-to-one tutorial in the Oxbridge
system where, whoever it was – even the most outstanding scientist –
you, as an undergraduate, had an hour with that person reading him or
her a paper you had written. You cannot have a bigger exchange be-
tween the bottom and top of the hierarchy! That’s going even at Oxford
and Cambridge, and certainly can no longer be repeated elsewhere.
Inside and Outside the University
gdp: I would like to turn the discussion to struggles to transform the

university from within. You have been involved in experiments in
pedagogical practice that, although they are located inside the univer-
sity, depart in significant ways from its dominant institutional practices.
I am speaking here, of course, of your work at the Centre for Contempo-
rary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the 1960s and 1970s
and then at the Open University in the 1980s and 1990s. If we start with
Birmingham, could you tell us something about the pedagogical prac-
tices that took place at the centre, and the broader context in which they
took shape? What has that experiment taught you about the possibili-
ties of engaging the university as a site of radical pedagogy, as a space
for oppositional intellectual practice?
112 Stuart Hall
sh: This is a long, complicated question. It’s part of my life, I suppose.

The openings represented by the Open University and Birmingham are,
of course, very different … The centre’s students were initially graduate
students in an English department. Now we were studying the popular
press, the tabloids, and television. ‘How do you talk critically about
these forms?’ ‘What were we doing?’ We had to give it a name and we
called it ‘cultural studies’! ‘What seminars do you give these students?’
You give courses in how to read critically, how to listen to language,
including popular language, and how to talk about the visual domain.
We were interested in the cultural dimension and in how to analyse the
society in a way that intersected with more text-based studies.
Gradually, a program of work developed around these interests and
students. In addition to working on their dissertation topic, students
had to read the literature by attending what we called ‘subgroups.’
They might as well read the literature together, we thought. People
working in youth culture would go to the subculture subgroup; peo-
ple working in media would go to the media subgroup; people in his-
tory went to a historical studies subgroup, and so on. The program
developed as these subgroups acquired a life of their own. Subgroups
became the central way of working in the centre. Feminism arose and
people wanted to read feminist literature. There was no protocol. We
didn’t need to go to anybody to say: ‘We’re teaching feminism.’
What I am stressing is the absolute openness. More critical work
could be done; students could read what they liked; students could
argue about Marxism; we could teach other subjects. We wanted to read
the German tradition, Max Weber, Western Marxism, like Lukacs and
Adorno, whose texts were beginning to be published. We read alterna-
tive traditions in sociology, like social constructionism and deviancy.
The whole intellectual program was, relatively speaking, up to us.
Remember too that a student’s decision to use her or his grant to come
to the centre, rather than do research within a traditional discipline, was
itself a rather bold and self-critical move as you didn’t know what
career would follow. We had students who were wrestling against the
limitations of their discipline. They were interested in interdisciplinarity,
if I can put it that way. It was not a conventional graduate student body.
The centre partook of the notion of collective intellectual practice that
was around at the time. This was a moment of collectives, a moment of
collective reading: reading Marx together, reading Freud together. Part
of that spirit was imported as an intellectual milieu in which the centre
operated. It was quite open at this point. The openness eventually led
us into tremendous trouble with the authorities: they didn’t like its
autonomy, they didn’t like what it was doing, and they didn’t like its
view of culture. It was a difficult path: we were inside and outside. Never-
theless, there was room to try and transform basic academic practices
from an individualist basis into a more collective one, and from a
reproduction of traditional knowledge into a construction of critical
knowledge.
As a good Gramscian, I could see that what was at work at the centre
was a different conception of the intellectual. Gramsci had a notion of
two types of intellectual. ‘Traditional intellectuals’ merely refine exist-
ing knowledge as it is; they produce rarified and expanded knowledge
but for the sake of the powers and structures that currently exist. In
contrast, ‘organic intellectuals’ are those who are working critically and
whose work is in some way aligned with emerging oppositional social
forces. For Gramsci, that meant the working class, but the notion of the
organic intellectual also stresses the general importance of critical work
and carries an expanded notion of intellectual politics. It wasn’t only
that workers should be involved but that everybody was associated
with an historical movement.
The problem in the days of the centre that I am describing was that
there was no big movement outside. Gramsci had an emerging Com-
munist Party and a massive movement in the factories in Italy, so his
intellectual work could relate itself to a wider oppositional force. We
didn’t have one, in part because the Labour Party was in turmoil, trying
to come to terms with global capital. We could only move at the centre
in a utopian relation to this other force. We had to say: ‘There is a force
out there, and when conditions are changed, we have a tiny role to play
in making available to it – whatever “it” is – critical knowledge about
the culture which is currently not being generated.’ It was an attempt to
mobilize what Brecht called ‘the means of mental production,’ putting
it at the service of somebody else. I began to think of the centre as a
place where organic intellectuals could be formed.
There are two points in Gramsci’s argument about the organic intel-
lectual that I want to stress. Gramsci shows us it is no use to have
critical knowledge that is simply driven by polemic. Critical knowledge
has to be ahead of traditional knowledge: it has to be better than anything
that traditional knowledge can produce, because only serious ideas are
going to stand up. There is no point changing the society in the light of a
misconstrued analysis of what your culture and society is about.
Built into Gramsci’s idea is also a point about the social limits of
114 Stuart Hall
academic knowledge. Critical intellectual work cannot be limited to the

university but must constantly look for ways of making that knowledge
available to wider social forces. That is why the centre published, why
we tried to push out beyond the confines of the university. It had to be
serious intellectual work done in the hope of making it spread. It is hard
to say, and, in some ways, it is too early to say, whether that happened
at the centre. Undoubtedly, cultural studies broke into other disciplines
and transformed the university; its ideas were picked up and entered a
wider discourse. But you could not guarantee all the points of transmis-
sion into the wider world. You could just think, write, and work –
always in the intention of doing that.
One example is Policing the Crisis (1978), a book that was collectively
written out of the centre.1 It was based on a racial incident that hap-
pened in Birmingham, which we got news of from having connections
outside the university. Some of our students were working locally in the
black communities and in the poor white communities in Handsworth
in Birmingham. They were running community houses; they were try-
ing to get places for black kids to stay so they could leave their parents
and not be on the streets; they were trying to oppose the police, who
were picking up every kid who had dreadlocks, and so on. Students
were actively working educationally and politically in a neighbourhood.
This was the moment of ‘community action,’ the movement to ‘the
people,’ which was very much implicit in 1968 and the politics of the
1970s: no longer trusting established institutions and organizations,
and also trying to move below them to make direct connections with
people. Making contact with people meant living side by side with
them so that you were not parachuting into their conditions from some
other place.
We began to mobilize the resources of the centre to study this racial
incident and to write a book about it. Policing the Crisis began as an
account of this event and ended up as a political critique of the 1970s, a
political critique which ends with the prophecy that Thatcherism is
about to take over, making it one of the few sociological books I know of
that was right in its prediction! It is partly the result of the condensation
of different minds, skills, and political orientations. It took us a long
time, eight years, to write. It produced a book that had massive impact
in sociology, criminology, and political science. It is still used. It had a
political insight into a shift that was taking place. History will have to
say whether instances like that make up for the inevitable isolation
of the centre. Although the centre was a kind of free space within an
organized space, its connections to the outside world were limited by

the nature of graduate student ideas: they don’t pass easily into the
popular press! Those transmissions cannot be made just because you
want to make them.
gdp: This point about the transmission of critical intellectual work to

wider audiences takes us to the pedagogical practices of the Open
University, where you went on to teach after leaving the centre. Can
you comment on this notion of transmission in the context of the
Open University?
sh: I decided to leave the centre. I found it increasingly difficult to be
there. I thought, ‘The transition has to take place. I’ve got to be able to
leave for this experiment to continue.’ I did not want to go to another
traditional university. I decided to take a job as professor of sociology at
the Open University, because it gave me an opportunity to translate
many of the ideas we were working on in the centre for a non-academic,
non-elite public. The social character of the Open University student
body was very different from a provincial university like Birmingham.
Some people saw the creation of the Open University as the last social
democratic gasp within old Labour: to set up a distance-education
university that was available to adults, people over twenty-one, who
had not had the opportunity to go to university, who were not tradi-
tional students, and thus who would not have a traditional academic
background but that would still allow them, over a longer period, to get
a degree while they were working or bringing up families. Taking one
course a year, students could get a first-class degree at the end of eight
years.
The challenge for me was how to translate these ideas so that they
were not only germane to middle-class or upper-middle-class profes-
sional students. These are people who have neither been to school nor
probably written an essay since they were fifteen. For the ideas to pass,
you had to build in the skills of learning into the courses: how to write an
essay, how to read a book, how to take notes, how to listen to a lecture,
and how to come out with something at the end. Pedagogy was a built-
in part of any course. Open University academics were involved in
producing courses, readers, and radio and television programs. I had to
learn the traditions of distance education, though you got some direct
teaching in summer schools when students would come to the universi-
ties when other students were on holidays. The Open University was
not a counterpractice; this was a reformist strategy, if you like, but
116 Stuart Hall
nevertheless a crucial one because one in ten of every student in Britain

was a student of the Open University at that time. You reached a
fantastic number of people.
Academics throughout the country would join our course teams and
criticize courses, not simply in terms of academic content but in terms
of how that content was conveyed to ensure it was interactive and that
every concept was self-explanatory, to enable the students to take an
argument on. If you set a reading, you had to set questions with it.
‘What he seems to be arguing here is this. But some people criticized
him. Do you think that idea holds up?’ That exercise would allow the
student to move on to the next stage in the argument. There had to be a
dialogic relationship. After all, this student could be in the north of
Scotland with no other classmates. It encouraged the autonomy of
learning by giving the student many pedagogic supports. The introduc-
tion of how to teach into the heart of what to teach was an important
transformation of the pedagogic process; it was the equivalent transfor-
mation in the context of the Open University that collective reading and
writing was in the centre.
The two experiments took place in two different contexts. The beady
eye of the education authorities was on the Open University in a way
that it never was on Birmingham. Nonetheless, it was a period of
relative freedom. You could not go as far in radical knowledge as you
had to respect the breadth of your student body; many of them had not
come to be politicized. If students felt they were getting a line, they
would have rightly complained. This setting meant you always gave
the other side to the argument. You had to risk having a student say:
‘Well, I think that’s right.’ You could argue it through in tutorials or in
summer school, but if they were convinced, they were convinced. It
implied a trust in the autonomy of your interlocutor. These students
were people often forty or fifty years old, with responsible jobs and
families: you weren’t going to convert them into anarchist rebels over-
night! The content always operated within the context of a dialogue in
which you had to work for intellectual hegemony. Somebody could
always say: ‘You’re just telling me what you believe and that’s not why
I’m here.’ If you are going to carry an argument, you carry the argu-
ment because you won.
gdp: Your remarks on pedagogical practice open up questions around

learning as a process of politicization and as a cultural practice. Some
contributors to this volume have affinities with the tradition of popular
education, and, with writer-activists like Paulo Freire, stress the trans-
formative dimension of education – as a ‘practice of freedom.’ If I could
interpellate you as a philosopher of education, what are your thoughts
on the nature of, or possibilities for, learning as a process of radical-
ization?
sh: I have a utopian hope that to know more is really to understand
more. It has never been my view that the left has a monopoly on
knowledge. There are, after all, clever conservative people, with deeply
conservative ideas. I think the most important thing that the left, broadly
defined, has to do is to actually engage, contest, and also learn from the
best that is locked up in other traditions which it is opposing. I do not
believe there can just be a process of internal repetition of the left’s
virtues, on ‘our side of the line.’ Knowledge is a contested practice, and
you always contest it against the best of the other side. You don’t give
yourself an easy time. You take on the best partly because, often, pro-
found insights that you need are locked up in older paradigms or are
attached to older, conserving projects. You first of all liberate the poten-
tial critical content of ideas. I don’t think this can be an insular practice:
you have to operate on the whole terrain, the ‘field of knowledge,’ in
Bourdieu’s sense.
I think learning is an active practice where the learner and the teacher
are always in dialogue. I am not, I suppose, a true liberationist in this
field because I believe in the responsibility of teaching. I believe in the
capacity of learning, and in refining the capacity of learning. In this
process, eventually, the learner knows as much or more than the teacher,
moving from apprentice to equal. I am fantastically lucky to have lived
long enough to be now the interlocutor of my old graduate students
who are professors, journalists, and writers and so on. They don’t come
to me to learn anything; they’re my friends. But our relationship had to
begin with an acknowledgment that I had been some place that they
hadn’t, and I had something that they wanted. That can be contested, of
course. There are many ways one can be a teacher. You can be a teacher
who understands the modesty of the amount of knowledge that both
you and your student have but nevertheless take seriously the peda-
gogical function. The teaching/learning process is a long process, a
process of a kind of equalization, but it is not equally equal at all the
stages.
I am wary of people who are so aware of the dangers of patriarchalism
and authoritarianism in adopting the teaching role that they pretend it
does not exist, that they are not in that division: ‘We are just equal
118 Stuart Hall
spirits.’ But we don’t live in an equal world. Teaching is a cultural

practice in that you cannot teach against the cultural grain. Everything
you are teaching has to be done in such a way as to acknowledge the
cultural frame of the learner with whom you are intersecting. At the
Open University there is no point of just thinking that you are teaching
a philosophical argument. Rather, you are teaching a person who is not
supposed to understand philosophy because they come from a poor or
poor academic background. The teaching/learning/knowledge pro-
cess is always embedded in that wider set of cultural assumptions.
Teaching is therefore a process of activating knowledge in the social
context in which you learn. That is, of addressing the ‘how’ of teaching
alongside the ‘what,’ alongside the content of what you are teaching.
Teaching is also a cultural practice in that our culture is stratified by
class and power. The people who come into the learning process come
into it already placed in this hierarchical system. You do not get out of a
hierarchical system by pretending it doesn’t exist; you get out of a
hierarchical system by working against the hierarchies, by gradually
equalizing the dialogue between teacher and taught. I am also for this:
teaching has to be done with a respect for difference, with working at
the differences, as a part of a long process – a ‘long revolution’ in
Raymond Williams’ sense – of gradually shifting those power indices
around knowledge, by disengaging knowledge from power, insofar as
that is possible.
gdp: You have been involved in a number of educational initiatives

outside of a formal university setting, projects that might be seen as
attempts to articulate an ‘organic’ intellectual practice. Could you de-
scribe some of the educational activities you were involved in during
the period of the British New Left in the 1950s and 1960s? What have
those experiments taught you about the contribution that counter-
educational spaces and intellectuals might make to oppositional social
movements?
sh: Before the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, when I was
editing New Left Review and just after – in that New Left period – I
taught extra-mural studies in the area that Raymond Williams was
responsible for. That was traditional adult education, which was out-
side of the mainstream university system. It was related to the univer-
sity but classes were held among people who weren’t going for a
qualification. I remember teaching Middlemarch in a literature class to
people in the south east of England. After a good lecture, students
would say: ‘Actually, that’s the sixteenth class on Middlemarch!’ I also

taught in a place where all the students I had were active members of
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). We read literature, a
lot of which was Russian. It was a scenario for arguing through the
question of the Soviet Union, the New Left, and the rise of the social
movements. Literature provided an entry point for a debate about these
political transformations. This was among people who wanted to go on
learning as adults. They did not want a certificate; they just wanted to
go on learning.
I was also associated with the teaching of film as a sort of popular
movement. There was no film teaching in England in the 1950s. Through
the British Film Institute’s education department we started to go to
film appreciation societies that screened foreign films to talk about film.
I went to prisons, too, to talk about the genre of the western, which was
a wonderful experience. We talked about law and crime within the
stylized frame of the western. That is where film education started in
Britain. It only gradually moved into the colleges through the teaching
of English and into universities. There was no explicit political content
to this practice but there was an attempt at democratization. There was
a new view of popular culture – that this was not just commercial
rubbish. You were dismantling established cultural categories by say-
ing that film can be taken seriously, including popular film, not just
Godard and Eisenstein. These people had paid their money to see a
Bergman film but now they were involved in an educational practice, in
an argument around Bergman. We went into film education because we
loved film and we thought it should be more widely talked about.
Nevertheless, these were countercultural, we may call them proto-
political, practices. They were with audiences who were not in univer-
sity settings, who did not want a qualification, but just wanted to go on
learning – stretching their minds.
In addition, in relation to the New Left, we set up a number of ‘New
Left Clubs’ around the country. They brought together people from
different countercurrents. If you went north to Manchester the club was
very much existing or ex–Labour Party members looking for something
else, or people involved in the Communist Party who left in 1956, or
trade unionists. If you went to the southeast they were largely CND
marchers, young people listening to pop music, sort of middle-class but
radicalized. These clubs had an education program: talks, discussion,
and debate. This was another focus within the political community that
was not university-based but had an educational aspect rather than a
120 Stuart Hall
simply mobilizing purpose. The best of the clubs became self-generat-

ing, showing their own films, some making films themselves. Each club
went in different directions. We were unable to sustain that program
very much.
Of the groups that affiliated around the New Left, I increasingly
associated with CND. I would have seen my role as much pedagogic as
activist. Many people would say: ‘I know about politics at home but I
can’t understand what’s happening in the world.’ My function was to
make understandable the dynamics of the Cold War, for example, what
new weaponry was about, its dangers, and the ideological struggle
between East and West – as much as to say, ‘Join us in a march.’ CND
itself had a pedagogic function in relation to nuclear weapons. I’m
talking here more loosely about the pedagogic function in political
work, which I think is always there. There is a pedagogic emphasis on
dialogue, to make what knowledge you have available to publics out-
side the framework of formal educational opportunities and the social
class structure.
I was involved in a lot of those sorts of activities until I went to
Birmingham. In Birmingham I suppose I did the same thing among
black groups, as by then, in the Midlands of Britain, the race issue was
much more to the fore. When the black groups began to organize
themselves I had more of that pedagogic role. What most of these
groups imagined was that you wanted to be a leader, to be the secretary
of some group. I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in self-
learning, in the liberatory possibilities of the fact that you could be
knowledgeable about, say, foreign affairs, a particular area that is
wrapped up in ‘expertise.’
I don’t have the experience of living and functioning in this way in a
local community. I worked a lot with students in the centre who were
doing that. By then, I was a lecturer, head of the centre, and living
outside of that area. One of the things I promised myself was that I
would never pretend to be a ‘street boy,’ if I am not one. People sniff out
the inauthenticity in two minutes flat. This returns to what I said earlier:
there is a pretence that the social and class divisions do not exist, as if
you can just jump them. I saw it in many of the left groups of that
period – including at the centre. ‘I’m just one of the “boys.” You are not
one of the “boys.” You had a privileged education from the time you
opened your eyes, from the second you opened your mouth. Especially
in England where the class registers are so unmistakable, to pretend
that you just came out of the ghetto …’ There is a certain amount of self-
deception. You can’t be deceptive with yourself, and you can’t be de-
ceptive with the people you are working with. I think you can only
work through the social divisions: you can work through to dismantle
them and make them less effective, less inhibitive, but you cannot just
pretend to jump them. I think that is the difference between a realist-
utopian and a utopian-utopian practice.
Nodal Power, Multitudes, and Utopia
gdp: Contemporary social movements – and many older ones, of course

– indicate a move away from a desire to win hegemony over the state,
shifting towards more micropolitical counterinitiatives, and towards
contesting centralized power as such. These oppositional tendencies
are uninterested in propping up a party apparatus and are challenging
the notion of representative politics. What consequences might those
aspects of the new social movements have on the Gramscian concep-
tion of the political party?
sh: Gramsci believed in the party but he emphasized that the party
brought together workers, intellectuals, women – people from different
conditions of life. The purpose of the party was not to make everyone
the same but to unite these differences and bring them into the cores of
social transformation. Social transformation requires intellectuals who
know something about the social structure, industrial workers who are
at the heart of what drives society, women who are very involved in
domestic life and parenting, and so forth. These are different skills. A
party is not a suppression of difference but rather a space in which the
differences do not vie with each other but begin to cooperate.
We don’t have a party like that, but this notion of a party – in the
small ‘p’ sense – is how I think people have to work in the same context.
They have to work acknowledging their differences, not having unspo-
ken areas where others are not permitted to say: ‘You’re a middle-class
kid. How do you think you’re coming down here to help us?’ Maintain-
ing openness towards that is part of building knowledge of how a class
system has divided us and dislocated us precisely in those places. You
can only work out of those locations.
Nonetheless, Gramsci’s notion of the party has this old ring to it. I do
not want to suggest that things have not changed profoundly. The
suspicion of party organizations has deepened. Political party organi-
zations in the representative sense are much more superficial to how
politics actually work, even in liberal democracies. There has been a
122 Stuart Hall
hollowing out of parties, and I don’t think we can go back. I am not

suggesting that everything could be submerged within or condensed
within even this complex notion of the party any longer. I am using the
party as a metaphor for the relationships that occur when people go
into a community and try to work. That is not to say that what they
should do is create a Gramscian party. I don’t think that’s true.
There has been this move away from organized politics and away
from the state. That reflects something of the fact that the state itself has
been weakened in relation to the market. This is neoliberalism. Opposi-
tional movements are smart to see that power does not lie only in the
state power but lies in civil society, in economic relations, in the market,
and in culture – as much as in the state. This is not to say that the nation-
state has disappeared or that the state is unimportant, but it is relatively
weaker in relation to global forces and international capital than it was
before. The social movements show us that there is not just an intellec-
tual movement away from the party but there are changes in the cir-
cumstances and the structures within which resistance has to operate:
this is a world where power is decentred.
Each of the social movements – feminism in particular – has come to
the point where it has explored this movement towards differentiation,
towards autonomy, and encountered what the women’s movement
calls the problem of structurelessness. I think the antiglobalization move-
ment is now close to this question. The social forums are a kind of
response. There is no move to form a ‘single party’ or a ‘single line,’ but
rather, there is a search for the points of condensation, the points of
overlap, the points of overdetermination that would allow people from
many different traditions not to give up their differences but neverthe-
less coalesce at critical points. This seems to me to point to an acknowl-
edgment that although power is decentralized it is not without its
nodes. In a global world the technical infrastructure of capital is con-
nected from one node to another. These happen to be not from one
nation to another, but from one capital city to another, from Tokyo to
Malaysia to New York to London. This pattern is not one of structure-
lessness but of a new kind of power: nodal power, the power of net-
works. I suppose that until we understand better than we do how these
decentred powers operate we will not quite know what exact strategy
will effectively dismantle them or oppose them.
Nodal power presents certain difficulties when we ask what the right
strategy is. The right strategy is to transform a structure. You have got
to understand how the structure works in order to transform it. I am
convinced that the forms of transformation will be much more plural,

much more locally driven, much more adapted to local conditions. My
suspicion is that the idea of ‘act locally, think globally’ is one part of that
strategy. It is a movement towards the local community, towards par-
ticularity, towards concreteness. That is the play of difference that has
entered the world, in how both capital and countercapital organizes
itself. But whatever has come in the place of state power, which is the
driving force in the nature of global capital – and I mean that in the
widest sense, including cultural industries and how they are organized,
the flow of information, technology – we cannot leave that alone. That
would be to settle for improvements here and there, without looking at
the broader division.
That division is now palpable in the wake of the Iraq war.2 This is the
developed–underdeveloped divide, however you mark that. It is not a
simple North–South question, as critical to network power is the collu-
sion of elites in the underdeveloped world with the elites in the devel-
oped world. You may not be able to draw it spatially any longer, but
however you draw it, there is a line that cuts between those who are
designed to benefit from the global organization of the economy and
those who are not. I do not see how opposition can work without some
network connection between poor farmers in India, rice farmers in
Indonesia, people in logging communities in the Amazon, and the
working poor in developed cities, and so on. This poses questions about
alliance, negotiation, and combination. The combinations may be stra-
tegic for this purpose or that purpose, but behind them there has to be
some general sense that these kinds of interests and those kinds of
interests are different. I believe that any politic requires the symbolic
drawing of the boundary; there has to be some symbolic divide. It may
not be permanent and it does not mean that all the ‘goodies’ are on one
side and all the ‘baddies’ are on the other side. But there has to be a
sense of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ No politics is possible without a sense of ‘us’
and ‘them.’
gdp: This emphasis on combination and on alliance is a dimension of

many of the experiments in radical pedagogy that are documented in
this collection. Elsewhere in this book we have used the concept of
‘affinity’ to conceptualize that dimension. Part of affinity-based politics
entails the creation of alliances that may be temporary and contingent,
and also the identification of common goals and ethico-political com-
mitments among different groups so as to enable a being-in-common.
124 Stuart Hall
Central to the coming together of different oppositional communities is,

however, an awareness of the non-equivalential status of their differ-
ences.
sh: I am very interested in that argument. I am interested in this mo-
ment because it seems to be exactly when the necessary decentraliza-
tion of power – which follows in the wake of all the things that we have
been talking about – comes up against certain inhibiting points, certain
points at which we see the requirements of speaking across those differ-
ences to others. I think we are in a moment of exploring the nature of
those alliances – which are not permanent, which are not formal, which
are always contingent, and which may change. But you cannot operate
without them.
This connects with my work in cultural studies over the last twenty
years, which has been about difference. I began as a kind of Marxist. I
was never a traditional Marxist but a Marxist in the sense that I thought
the axis of capital was really the most important thing. I always under-
stood Marx’s class analysis as more historically specific, so I am not
surprised that the position of classes and the nature of the struggle have
changed. One of the things one liked about Marxism was the notion of a
complex totality, of an account that totalized. But I think one of the most
important impacts of both the events and the theoretical developments
of the 1970s and 1980s has been to wean me off of a totality of that kind.
The question that interests me now is how to think about contingent
totalities in the wake of difference, and crucially, how to prevent differ-
ence from simply fragmenting into atomic particles. This historical
conjuncture is an opening for a kind of coming together of theory and
strategy, with one reinforcing the other. I think the answer to these
questions, conceptually, will teach us a lot about what is really possible.
gdp: We’ve already talked about the Gramscian organic intellectual.

Given your remarks about the turn to particularity in oppositional
politics, I’m wondering if there are not more parallels to be drawn
today to Foucault’s concept of the ‘specific intellectual.’ There seem to
be tensions, productive ones, between these two conceptions of intellec-
tual practice. What in your view are the possibilities and limitations of
the specific intellectual?
sh: The movement that we were talking about – towards greater contin-
gency, greater pluralism, more differentiation, away from organized
parties, and coherent wholes, cultures, and uniform scripts – is one to
which Foucault contributed, about which he wrote himself, and which
is one of the kinds of politics that emerges from his work. The ‘specific
intellectual’ was a particular critique of an earlier style of leadership
and of intellectual work that was very much associated with a more
totalizing organic conception.
However, I do not myself buy entirely the notion of the specific
intellectual as a contemporary intellectual strategy, precisely because
you cannot then attend, from this differentiation, to the point of
overdetermination, connection, and overlap. To do that I think you do
need the public intellectual. You need the intellectual who speaks across
different sites – at the intersections. This is related to the necessity of the
pedagogic function as an element in oppositional strategy – that is, a
figure that is not confined to the particular knowledge of a particular
site. There is specific intellectual work to be done in each of these sites,
but there is public intellectual work to be done as well. In the United
States, the work of some of the public intellectuals there has been
crucial in keeping a struggle going. I think that is true in relation to the
opposition to the Iraq war. We could not have had the demonstrations
that we had without somebody looking for what is common in different
positions. Just as someone has to articulate why the situation feels
different in Italy than in the United States or in London.
I think there are other elements in Foucault’s writings that bear on
this moment. I think the question of the ethical moment is of crucial
importance at a point where structural determination has ceased to
work, when we cannot depend on the ‘law of necessity’ moving us in
the ‘right’ direction. This has always been a real problem in Marxism: if
the law of necessity is moving us in that direction, then why bother with
this struggle? Once that certainty dissolves we are into something else
and the ethical investment, the ethical point, is where you are required
to intervene – to establish a position, even if a position is itself contin-
gent on something else. The taking of positionalities with an ethical
dimension is a mode of working that overrides the specificity of the
contexts of location and their appropriate knowledges. We are more in
that moment than we were at any time in the past.
gdp: The title of this book is Utopian Pedagogy. Engagement with the
concept of utopia is one of the lines we see running across the various
intellectual traditions brought together in this collection. Rejecting the
version of scientific socialism you just criticized, utopia here is an
impulse oriented towards the production of new ways of living, of new
social relations, in the here and now. To what degree, if at all, does a
126 Stuart Hall
concept of utopia have currency for you in our historical moment?

sh: I have never thought that radical change could do without its
utopian dimension. This is because change presupposes the movement
from what is towards something else. It is dependent on becoming as
well as being. Becoming will always have to have a certain utopian
dimension to it, because it is always configuring something that doesn’t
yet exist. On the other hand, what I would call a ‘bad’ utopianism
configures a future-becoming as a complete break from what already is.
I don’t think that is a very useful way of thinking about the future,
because the future is always made in part out of who you are and where
you are. I think the possibilities of utopian thinking arise from the fact
that we are that hybrid thing: already attached, already embedded, and
already embodied but alongside a desire, a longing, for things to be
what they are not. Utopian thinking has to operate on the basis of the
tensions between those two unreconciled arms within individuals, within
groups, within communities. In some ways this is why I have never
been, in the absolute sense, a revolutionary. I do not believe in Year One.
I don’t think there is any pure break of that kind.
Insofar as a future-becoming is not just an empty projection but is
grounded in experiences that we can already have, and is seen as an
incubation of prototypical relationships – trying to embed them as
alternatives within an existing structure – that has an enormous amount
to teach us. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was not, of
course, going to lead the revolution. But I will never think about the
future, about knowledge, or about intellectual work ever again outside
of what was, well, a utopian experience, in the sense of being able to
work with others in a new way. It leaves some trace, which means that
thinking about the future is grounded. So when people say, ‘It can’t
work,’ you can reply, ‘It can kind of work.’ Yet I could not generalize it
or build an entire university system on that basis.
Indeed, to convert a local centre of resistance into a system is itself the
pull toward the past, to slow it down, and so on. The very institutional-
ization of cultural studies has represented a certain loss of freedom, a
loss of experimentation, a loss of its political impetus. I am not sure if
that is not built into the institutionalization process itself. Institutional-
ization always awaits or lies in the path of too rosy a picture of alterna-
tive communities. But if you view them correctly – as laboratories for
how to build relationships which are not entirely governed by existing
hegemonic ones – then they have a tremendous amount to teach us.
They are sort of black holes inside the existing universe. We can go
through them into a sort of concrete utopianism. They function as

glimpses, which reinforces one’s sense that one is not just building pies
in the sky.
gdp: I’d like to close by asking you about your more recent work, which
addresses questions of cultural identity, difference, and migration in the
context of the visual arts. In what ways, if it all, do you conceive of this
work on cultural politics as a transformational pedagogical practice?
How do you see this work in relation to some of the themes of peda-
gogy and politics that we have been talking about?
sh: I go into this domain only because I am concerned with moments of
closure. I think the moment of war and of a superpower ruling the
world in the conditions of globalization is a threat of a moment of
closure. In a moment of closure many languages are required to main-
tain the impetus for change and to keep cultural politics going. One of
the places where one finds this is in contemporary visual art practice. In
art everything that is of the serious kind is now around questions of
migration, borders, peripheries, boundaries, and decentred barriers,
and of the multiple experiences on the different sites of the world and
the people who thread their way through it. Because one finds them
vividly captured and expressed in a lot of the work of creative artists,
that domain provides an access for me to talk about the reality of
migration as a world event. I think migration is the undecide, the joker,
in the path of globalization. The one thing that should not move is
people: messages can move, technologies can move, industries can
move, capital can certainly move – but people always stay where they
are, because capital cannot take advantage of differential conditions
unless there are poor workers in Indonesia, and so on. There is no point
in, say, all of Pakistan moving to Los Angeles and requiring West Coast
wages. That disrupts the whole thing. Capital needs the periphery.
Migration distills all of these questions of difference and over-
determination that we have been talking about. This is the only point at
which I can give concreteness to the notion of the multitude. These
multitudes are slightly suspicious about the way in which Spinoza has
been imported too abstractly by Hardt and Negri into Empire. But when
I think about migration I know who the multitudes are: they are not
organized for anything, and they are not, I am afraid, often in produc-
tive labour. These people are doing the shit work of global capital: they
are servicing it, feeding it, washing its windows late at night, cleaning
its offices, and looking after the children of the global entrepreneurs.
128 Stuart Hall
But they are everywhere: they refuse to be tied down; they refuse to lose
their language; they refuse to lose their religion; they refuse to be only
migrants. Migration, the refusal to stay in one place, is often at the cost
of horrendous poverty, civil war, ethnic cleansing, and religious and
political persecution. Yet whatever it is at the cost of, people move.
This is now just a disruptive force. It is not yet an organized force.
This is globalization-from-below rather than globalization-from-above.
These are counterinstances, counterlives. Du Bois once said, ‘The color
line will be the central problem of the twentieth century.’ I think migra-
tion will be the central issue of the twenty-first century – something
around the capacity to move, to be not rooted, to maintain an identity
while it is plural. Migration is a politics of contingency. The migrant
always lacks something, as it is always a loss to move; and yet it is, in
some ways, a gain because it opens new perspectives and points of
connection that have to be made, that are not given in some lawlike
way. There is no political guarantee: it can wind up fundamentalist, it
can wind up as a cultural bunker – as much as it can wind up as a kind
of vernacular cosmopolitanism. This is a site of contestation that we
have got to work on. I think this is a crucial moment. This is not any
longer an ethnic politics. It is a cultural politics of difference, which is
what globalization is about. The thesis of Empire is an open question.
Our contention is really whether the current cultural politics of differ-
ence across the world will be monopolized and hegemonized by global
capital, or whether it will be allowed to find some more plural, multifo-
cal world as a sort of utopia of the future.
NOTES
1 Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts,
Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London:
Macmillan, 1978).
2 This interview was conducted in London on 17 February 2003, two days
after more than one million people marched in that city against the U.S.–
British invasion of Iraq.
PART II: Rethinking the Intellectual
Introduction
enda brophy and sebastián touza
For most of the twentieth century, emancipatory movements main-

tained a pedagogical relation to the intellectual subject of modernity, as
the trusted bearer of critical discourse. This figure – referred to by
Michel Foucault as the universal intellectual – was a self-appointed
carrier of truths and assumed the task of representing abstract majori-
ties (‘the working class,’ ‘the proletariat,’ ‘the people’).1 The universal
intellectual embodied pedagogical theory as a moment prior to and
separate from practice, and relegated emancipatory struggles to a sec-
ondary realm of concrete application. Whether his platform was the
party, the union, the academy, or the press, this almost invariably male
modern intellectual was an unrivalled explicator in matters such as
rights and true consciousness.
The articles in Part II confront the crisis this relationship has endured
at the hands of the radical subjectivities that have been confronting
capitalism and other forms of domination since the 1960s. Instead of
unidirectional pedagogies, the authors offer us radical toolkits (Mariarosa
Dalla Costa), strategies of counterformation and resubjectification (Borio,
Pozzi, and Roggero), antipedagogies (Colectivo Situaciones), and re-
combinant strains of knowledge and practice (Bifo). The authors are
well positioned to do so; they are all militant intellectuals in the grassroots
movements of Italy and Argentina, two spaces that have resonated in
the imaginary of social movements as laboratories for experimenting
with new organizational forms and with emerging radical subjectivities.
The intervention of the modern intellectual was pedagogical because
it assumed a privileged access to universal truths and values. Research
confirmed his values and founded new truths that represented every-
one. In opposition to this, the radical intellectual figure introduced in
130 Enda Brophy and Sebastián Touza
the articles by Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero, and Colectivo Situaciones

carries out research because she knows that she does not know. Re-
search is a militant quest without an object (Situaciones), in which the
classical idealized relation between subject and object disappears in the
practice of coresearch (Borio et al.). This practice does not produce
knowledge about, processed according to the rules of academic institu-
tions (which focus on the production of utilitarian classifications, collec-
tions, and descriptions of preconstituted identities). Rather, the
production of knowledge is a form of intervention that presupposes
constant experimentation, that ‘develop[s] practices in all possible di-
rections’ (Situaciones), and that seeks subversive paths ‘to virtuously
fuse theory and practice’ (Borio et al.). A counterformation or anti-
pedagogy emerges as part of an open project that seeks to reconstruct
antagonistic subjectivities. It begins with the ambivalent values of work-
ers, immigrants, the unemployed, and other groups that are confront-
ing capital and other practices of domination. Indeed, research-militancy
and conricerca are without end.
Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero approach the process of pedagogical
counterformation as part of the ongoing concern that operaismo
(workerism) has with the issue of organization. They write from the
broad and heterogeneous space of the Italian radical left, especially
operaismo, which is generally known as ‘autonomist marxism’ outside
Italy. Their article offers a valuable account of the emergence and prac-
tice of conricerca (coresearch), which materialized in Italy as a method
of ‘worker inquiry.’ In this context, conricerca was a radically demo-
cratic practice bent on understanding the ‘composition’ of a radical
subject (the mass worker of Italian Fordism), so as to construct rank-
and-file forms of struggle rather than the formulaic varieties imposed
by the Italian Communist Party and the major trade unions. The
‘coresearcher’ they describe accompanies the formation of subjectivities
that struggle to establish the levels of commonality subtracted from
capitalist forms of socialization through the provision of conceptual
tools.
As Colectivo Situaciones reminds us, the politics of an intervention
that is pursued as research necessarily adopts an ethical stance. The
collective has positioned itself in a non-representational conception of
knowledge, and thus does not describe specific practices and research
tools; instead, each situation demands its own particular practices and
tools. In its chapter, the collective writes from the specificity of a prolif-
eration of resistance in Argentina and engages in a critique of the values
involved in the different subject positions in research and militancy.
Part II: Rethinking the Intellectual – Introduction 131
Bifo’s article illustrates a different strand of the richly diverse operaismo

movement by providing a cartography of the terrain that gave birth to
‘the cognitariat,’ a social subject whose intellectual capacity is integral
to the production processes of high-tech capitalism. According to Bifo,
as capital reaches the phase of ‘general intellect,’ the working class,
because of its very composition, dissolves the external relation between
intellectuals and workers; this has the effect of removing the founda-
tions that supported the Leninist pedagogical function of the party.
Intervention, or the question of ‘what is to be done,’ becomes immanent
to the cognitariat, who is saturated by her immaterial labour and awash
in a world where – in Paolo Virno’s formulation – language has been
‘put to work.’2 The current task, Bifo argues, is to explore how the
elements of the sociality of productive labour recombine; this will make
possible an assemblage whereby knowledge would be organized ‘ac-
cording to criteria other than those of profit and the accumulation of
value.’ Bifo examines the subjective impoverishment induced by the way
in which cyberspace colonizes the experience of time, and suggests that a
precondition for any recombinant self-organization of knowledge is to
map the space and time of socialization of intellectual workers – a pro-
cess that necessarily involves the cognitive and emotional dimensions.
In her interview, Mariarosa Dalla Costa acknowledges this historical
shift by suggesting that ‘the “intellectuality” of the movement today is
an extremely widespread condition,’ and offers a compelling parallel
account of her own life as a radical feminist intellectual working both
inside and outside the academy. Her encounter with modernist radical
movements and their pedagogies provoked a lifelong concern for how
we constitute ourselves intellectually and politically within movements
as well as how we array ourselves against the external forces we struggle
against. Her time as a member of the Italian radical group Potere Operaio
(Workers’ Power) was key to her development as a militant; even so,
she suggests that ‘intellectual power itself was used against women as
it reinforced cohesion among men.’ In this sense, her decision to form
Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle) and to break away from Potere
Operaio – which was refusing to engage in non-class struggles – is
instructive insofar as it reveals the heterogeneity of terrains on which a
truly multivalent radical pedagogy must learn to operate. Her experi-
ment, and those of others who participated in the formation of a materi-
alist critique of unwaged domestic labour within patriarchal capitalism,
was thus an anticipatory foray into the terrain of affinities and the
broader microphysics of power.
From the perspective of the unavoidable problem of political organi-
132 Enda Brophy and Sebastián Touza
zation, two discernible expressions of intellectual intervention come

into view in the following chapters. Bifo and Colectivo Situaciones urge
us to think about the complete disappearance of modernist notions of
the intellectual; this disappearance has brought in its wake a radical
elimination of hierarchies within a number of social movements that
are fighting to change the existing state of things. Theirs is an act of
rupture with past models, an act that is reflected in their own experi-
ments, whether they are conducted in piquetero neighbourhoods in Ar-
gentina3 or through the antennae of the telestreet movement in Italy.4
In the work of Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero, and Dalla Costa, there
seems to be a greater willingness to continue embracing facets of slightly
stratified models of radical pedagogy. This is no crude vanguardism –
make no mistake. Rather, the approaches are the result of a certain
tendency in operaismo: organization may be spontaneous but nonethe-
less is always ‘organized’ (as Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero remind us in
their chapter through the words of Romano Alquati). In this process
there is still room for people to intervene, create, and even direct
struggles. In these struggles the intellectual maintains a distinguishable
role, having – as Dalla Costa says – a greater set of ‘tools’ at her disposal
that can then be placed at the disposal of others. Networks are estab-
lished in which, instead of a homogenous ‘mass intellectuality,’ affini-
ties of competences are set in motion and skills are shared. Thus the
following chapters are not the collective articulation of a single posi-
tion, but rather a set of contributions confronting the inseparable prob-
lems of counterpedagogy and political organization.
NOTES
1 See Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Inter-

views and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1980);
Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power,’ in Foucault
Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1964, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1996).
2 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004 [2002]).
3 MTD de Solano and Colectivo Situaciones, La Hipotesis 891: Más allá de los
piquetes (Buenos Aires: De Mano en Mano, 2002).
4 Franco Berardi (Bifo), Marco Jacquemet, and Giancarlo Vitali, Telestreet:
Macchina Immaginativa Non Omologata (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 2004).
From Intellectuals to Cognitarians 133
7 From Intellectuals to
Cognitarians
franco berardi (bifo)
Translated by Enda Brophy
While the word ‘intellectual’ may no longer be part of the parlance of

our times, throughout much of the twentieth century this term con-
densed key questions of ethics, of politics, and of ‘what is to be done.’ In
recent decades the very nature of intellectual labour has changed com-
pletely, becoming progressively absorbed into the sphere of economic
production. Once digital technologies made possible the reticular con-
catenation of individual fragments of cognitive labour, intellectual labour
– now fractalized and cellularized – became subjected to the cycle of the
production of value. In the pages that follow I discuss the roles that
intellectuals have played in modernist thought and cognitive labour in
the current era, and propose a strategy founded on the self-organization
of what I call the ‘cognitariat’ – that is, networked cognitive labour as
political subjectivity in movement. I argue that in this new context the
political and ideological forms of the twentieth century Left, especially
as they relate to the ‘intellectual,’ have become inoperative. This be-
came clear with the movement that arose in Seattle in November 1999.
We now see a new terrain of social struggle – against the environmen-
tal and psychic devastation of the planet, against the privatization of
the products of collective knowledge, and against the commodification
of the genome. These movements show us how we can oppose the
failed ideology of neoliberal capitalist globalization with a new alter-
native globalization – the globalization of networked cognitive labour.
But, as I argue at the end of this essay, the radical potentiality of the
cognitariat is today facing a new kind of counterattack by capitalism
in its high-tech form: excessive speed, information, and the anxiety of
‘cybertime.’
134 Franco Berardi (Bifo)
From the Enlightenment Intellectual to the

Revolutionary Intellectual
It was during the Enlightenment that the twentieth-century concept of

the intellectual was formed. The Enlightenment intellectual is defined
not by social condition but rather by a universal system of values. The
role the Enlightenment attributes to the intellectual is that of founding
and guaranteeing, through the exercise of rationality, universal prin-
ciples such as respect for the rights of man, equality before the law, and
the universality of law itself; and guaranteeing the realization of these.
This modern figure of the intellectual – one that incarnates an ideology
– finds its philosophical legitimation in Kantian thought. In the context
of Kantian thought, the intellectual is a transcendent figure, one whose
activity is independent of social experience, or in any case whose activ-
ity is not socially determined in its cognitive or ethical decisions. The
intellectual appears in the Enlightenment era as the bearer of a univer-
sal rationality, abstractly human; in this sense, one can view him as the
subjective determination of the Kantian ‘I think.’
The role of the intellectual is closely tied to the elaboration of that
system of values which constitutes modern universalism. The intellec-
tual is the guarantor of thought free from any belonging, the expres-
sion of a universally human rationality. In this sense, the intellectual is
the guarantor of democracy. Such a democracy cannot emerge from the
social sphere, from a belonging, but only from the desert, from the
unlimited horizon of choices and possibilities, from the possibility of
access and of citizenship for every person as a semiotic agent (that is, as
a subject that exchanges signs in order to access universal rationality).
This detached, universal intellectual is established in opposition to the
romantic figure of ‘the people,’ or rather withdraws itself from it. Uni-
versal thought, from which the modern adventure of democracy is
born, evades the territoriality of culture. Democracy cannot carry the
imprint of a culture, of a people, of a tradition; it must be a game
without foundation, invention, and convention, not the affirmation of a
belonging.
Significantly different is the perspective of the revolutionary intellec-
tual, who is linked to, and affirms himself by way of, historical-dialecti-
cal thought. In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx refers to the role
knowledge must play in the historical process: ‘Philosophers have hith-
erto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change
it.’ The marxist intellectual is an instrument of the historical process of
achieving a classless society. For Marx, thought becomes historically

effective only once it recognizes in the working class the horizon of
action. The communist project makes of theory a material power
[potenza], and of knowledge an instrument for changing the world.
Only inasmuch as he participates in the struggle to abolish class and
waged labour does the intellectual become the bearer of a universal
mission. In this vision the intellectual has nothing to do with the Volk
(people), because the Volk is the territorialized figure of belonging, the
predominance of Kultur with respect to reason, the pre-eminence of the
root with respect to the finality. Actually, the working class does not
belong to any territory, culture, or lineage, and its mental horizon is that
of a universally exploited class that is striving for a universal of libera-
tion from exploitation.
Organic Intellectual to General Intellect
The role of intellectuals is central in the political philosophy of the

twentieth century, especially in communist revolutionary thought, be-
ginning with Lenin. In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin asks himself how it is
possible to organize collective action and how the activity of intellectu-
als can become effective. For Lenin, intellectuals are not a social class;
they have no specific social interests to uphold. They are generally an
expression of parasitic profit but can make ‘purely intellectual’ choices
to turn themselves into organizers of a revolutionary consciousness
descending from philosophical thought. In this sense intellectuals are
very similar to the pure becoming of the ‘spirit,’ to the Hegelian unfold-
ing of self-consciousness. For their part, the workers – who are still
bearers of social interests – can only pass from a purely economic phase
(the Hegelian ‘in itself’ of the social being) to a politically conscious
phase (the ‘for itself’ of self-consciousness) through the political form of
the Party, which incarnates a philosophical legacy and transmits it.
Marx speaks of the proletariat as the heir to German classical philoso-
phy: thanks to workers’ struggles, a historical realization of the dialecti-
cal horizon becomes possible – the arrival of the end point of German
philosophical development from Kantian Enlightenment to romantic
idealism.
Gramsci’s reflections on intellectuals constituted a social analysis and
approached a materialist formulation of the ‘organic’ relationship be-
tween intellectuals and the working class. Nonetheless, the collective
dimension of intellectual activity remained within the party, defined as
the collective intellectual (see Hall, in this volume). The Gramscian

intellectual (who had yet to be put to work by the digital network)
therefore could not access the collective and political dimension except
through the party. But in the second half of the twentieth century,
following mass education and the techno-scientific transformation of
production that came about through the direct integration of different
knowledges, the role of intellectuals was redefined. No longer were
intellectuals a class independent of production; no longer were they
free individuals who took upon themselves the task of a purely ethical
and freely cognitive choice; instead, the intellectual became a mass
social subject that tended to become an integral part of the general
productive process. Paolo Virno uses the term ‘mass intellectuality’ to
denote the formation of social subjectivity tied to the massification of
intellectual capacity in advanced industrial society.
The birth of the student movement in the 1960s was the sign of the
mutation of the social scenario out of which emerged the new figure of
mass intellectuality. The student movement became a decisive actor in
modern history when, in 1968, the social effects of mass schooling came
to maturity. For the first time in history, the intellectual function recog-
nized itself as a mass political subject. The student movement was only
partly aware of the social mutation it was signalling. In Europe at least,
large numbers of student activists tried to interpret their role according
to the categories of Marxism–Leninism; they saw themselves as a politi-
cal vanguard, an army of intellectuals at the service of the people. But in
the very same movement of intellectual labour in formation, there
emerged the prospect of the social organization of mass intellectuality.
Shortly before his untimely death in a car accident, Hans Jurgen Krahl,
a leader of the German student movement, wrote his Theses on Techno-
Scientific Intelligence which were published in the journal Sozialistische
Korrespondenz-Info 25 in 1969, and then as the book Konstitution und
Klassenkampf.1 In his thesis, Krahl stated for the first time that the new
social composition of intellectualized labour cannot be organized ac-
cording to the political and organizational categories of the traditional
worker’s movement.
In the late 1960s, in parallel with the movements of 1968, Italian
operaismo (‘workerism’) brought to light, in a highly original analysis,
this necessary inversion of perspective (Mario Tronti, Raniero Panzieri,
Toni Negri, Romano Alquati). I prefer to speak of this stream of thought
as ‘compositionism,’ because its essential theoretical contribution con-
sists in its reformulation of the problem of political organization in
terms of social composition (see Borio, Pozzi, and Roggero, in this

volume). Compositionism abandons Leninist notions of the Party as
collective intellectual while leaving open the notion of the intellectual
itself, by proposing a re-examination of the Marxian concept of ‘general
intellect’ (see Dyer-Witheford, in this volume)
Marx spoke of the general intellect in a section of the Grundrisse
known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’:
But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth
comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour em-
ployed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour
time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion
to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on
the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the
application of science to production … Real wealth manifests itself, rather
– and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion be-
tween labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative
imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power
of the production process it superintends.
Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs,
self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry; natural
material transformed into the organs of the human will over nature, or of
human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain,
created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The
development of fixed capital indicates to what degree social knowledge
has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the
conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of
the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what
degree powers of social production have been produced, not only in the
form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the
real life process.2
During the century of communist revolutions, the Marxist–Leninist

tradition disregarded and relegated to the background the notion of the
general intellect, even though in the postindustrial productive trans-
formation it emerged as a central productive force. By the end of the
century, thanks to digital technologies and the creation of the global
telematic network, the general social process had been redefined by the
general intellect and the Leninist conception of the Party definitively
abandons the stage. Even the Gramscian notion of the organic intellec-
tual lost coherence, based as it was on the adherence of intellectuals

to an ideology. What counts now is the formation of a new social
concatenation (which we can call the cognitariat) that represents the
social subjectivity of the general intellect.
Cognitariat and Recombination
If we want to define the ‘what is to be done’ of our times, we need to

focus on the social function of cognitive labour. It is no longer a case
of constructing a vanguard-subjectivity – the organic intellectual – to
organize the collective intellectual in the Party; rather, it is a matter of
creating movements capable of organizing cognitive labourers as a factor
of transformation for the entire cycle of social labour. The problem of
our time is how to create recombinant function, a function of subjectivity
that is capable of spanning the various domains of social production
and then recombining them within a paradigmatic frame that does not
depend on profit but rather on social utility.
Intellectual labour is no longer a social function separated from gen-
eral labour. It has now become a function that extends across the entire
social process. It in fact involves creating techno-linguistic interfaces
that allow for the fluidity of the process and its recombinant power
[potere]. Recombining does not mean subverting or overthrowing, nor
does it mean bringing to the surface a hidden social authenticity; rather,
it means assembling elements of knowledge according to criteria other
than those of profit and the accumulation of value. It is no longer a case
of constructing forms of political representation but of giving form to
processes of knowledge, and of technical and productive concatenation
based on epistemological models that are autonomous of profit and
that are based instead on social utility. Intellectuals no longer perceive
the realm of political action as external to their daily practices; they now
see such action as embedded in the transversal connections between
knowledge and social practices.
Production must not be considered a purely economic process, one
that is governed exclusively by laws of exchange; into that process there
enter extra-economic factors which reveal themselves to be all the more
decisive when the labour cycle is intellectualized. Social culture, con-
trasting imaginations, expectations, and disappointments, loathing and
solitude, all enter to modify the rhythm and pace of the productive
process. Social productivity is conditioned by the emotional, ideologi-
cal, and linguistic spheres. And this becomes all the more clear as
emotional, linguistic, and planning spheres become involved to a greater

and greater degree in the production of value. Krahl states:
Social combination gives production an ever-greater scientific character,

and, in this way, makes of it a totality, a general labourer, but at the same
time it reduces the single capacity for labour to a simple moment of
production … The application of science and technique to the productive
process has reached a stage of development such that it threatens to
unravel the system. It therefore has induced a new quality of the socializa-
tion of productive labour which no longer tolerates the form of objectifica-
tion imposed on labour by capital.3
On the basis of these premises, he then critiques the political plan-

ning of the twentieth-century labour movement: ‘The absence of reflec-
tion on the professional constitution [Verfassung] of class-consciousness
as a non-empirical category has brought within the socialist movement
a tacit reduction of class consciousness in a Leninist sense that is inad-
equate to the metropolis.’4 With respect to the metropolitan condition,
Leninism, then, is inadequate both as an organizational model and as a
conception of the relationship between social consciousness and the
broader labour process. We might add that Leninism is completely
inadequate once the social composition of labour assumes the form of a
network. The Leninist view was founded on a separation between the
labour process and cognitive activity of a superior kind (let us call it
consciousness). This separation has a basis in the proto-industrial form
of labour, in which the worker possesses knowledge of his or her trade
but does not possess any knowledge of the system of knowledge that
structures society. The basis of that separation becomes increasingly
fragile the moment the mass-worker, forced into an ever more frag-
mented and repetitive labour activity, develops his sociality in a dimen-
sion that is immediately subversive and anticapitalist. That separation
loses its entire basis when we find ourselves before a mentalized form
of social labour, when single intellectualized workers become the bear-
ers of a specific consciousness and of an awareness – albeit tormented,
uneven, and fragmentary – of the social system of knowledge that
spans the entirety of its productive cycles.
All of this was made abundantly clear during the dot.com boom of
the 1990s, which made possible a vast process of self-organization of
cognitive producers. These people were able to invest their competen-
cies, knowledge, and creativity, and found in the stock market the
means to finance their desire for achievement. Dot.com-mania was

dominated by a somewhat fanatic ideology of liberal optimism that
made cognitive labourers subaltern and dependent on the domain of
finance capital. Yet the process as it actually unfolded during the dot.com
years contained elements of social as well as technological innovation.
In the second half of the 1990s there took place what amounted to a
class struggle within the productive circuits of high technology. The
emergence of the network was marked by this struggle. The monopo-
lies in software, telecommunications, entertainment, and advertising
took advantage of the labour of collective intelligence, and now are
attempting to take away its self-organizational tools in order to force it
into a condition of flexible, precarious, and cellularized subjection. The
dot.coms were a laboratory for the formation of a productive model,
and of a market. In the end, the market was captured and suffocated
by monopolies, and the legions of entrepreneurs and venture
microcapitalists were robbed and dissolved. In this way a new phase
has opened: the monopolistic groups that had gained the upper hand
during the cycle of the ’Net economy have allied themselves with the
dominant group from the old economy (the Bush clan, representatives
of the oil industry and the military industrial complex), and this is
impeding a particular project of globalization. Neoliberalism has pro-
duced its own negation: monopolistic domination and state-military
dictatorship. Cognitive labourers had been enthusiastic supporters of
liberal ideology; they have become its marginalized victims.
The promise implicit in the new-economy ideology was of getting
rich quick and participating in the economic fortunes of the system. But
by 2000, the house of cards had collapsed, and there emerged a crisis of
the virtual class. The psychic energy invested in the economy dissi-
pated. The possibilities of obtaining high compensation, or even mean-
ingful employment, have diminished in the innovative sectors, and this
insecurity could soon generate a panic.
All of this is eventually going to transform the recombinant prospects
of the cycle of cognitive labour. The virtual class, so sure of itself, so
embedded in the circuits of an economy that believed itself to be safe
from material adversities and sheltered from cyclical crises, has now
been forced to recognize itself as a cognitariat, a proletariat endowed
with extraordinary intellectual means, a repository of the knowledge on
which capitalist society now depends. The happy yuppie has discov-
ered that he is an exploited worker, and it is in this discovery that there
lies the condition for a process of self-organization of cognitive labour.
The figure of the intellectual has emerged completely redefined by the

evolutions that have manifested themselves in production in recent
decades.
The Cognitariat against Capitalist Cybertime
Rosa Luxemburg believed that capitalism is inextricably linked to a

process of constant expansion. Imperialism is the political, economic,
and military expression of this need for constant expansion that brings
capital to relentlessly extend its domain.
But what happens when every space of the planetary territory has
been subjected to the power (potere) of the capitalist economy, and when
every object of daily life has been transformed into a commodity? In
late modernity, capitalism seems to have exhausted every possibility
for further expansion. For a time, the conquest of extraterrestrial space
seemed to be a new direction for capitalist expansion. Subsequently we
saw that the direction of development is above all the conquest of
internal space, the interior world, the space of the mind, of the soul, of
time.
The colonization of time has been a fundamental objective of capi-
talism in the modern era: the anthropological mutation that capitalism
has produced in the human mind and in daily life has been above all a
transformation in how we perceive time. Yet with the spread of digital
technologies, which allow absolute acceleration, something new is oc-
curring. Time is becoming the main battlefield, because it is the space of
the mind: mind-time, cybertime. Thus we must introduce a distinction
between the concept of cyberspace and the concept of cybertime. This
distinction is key to the contemporary techno-subjective arrangement
of struggle. The power [potenza] of this new figure of intellectuality of
the ‘cognitariat’ is being reterritorialized by way of the tyrannical op-
erations of capitalist cybertime.
Cyberspace is the sphere of connection of innumerable human and
machinic sources of enunciation, the sphere of connection between
minds and machines in unlimited expansion. This sphere can grow
indefinitely, because it is the point of intersection between the organic
body and the inorganic body of the electronic machine.
But cyberspace is not the only dimension possible for the develop-
ment of this interconnection: the other side of the process is cybertime.
This is the organic side of the process, and its expansion is limited by
organic factors. The human brain’s capacity to elaborate can be expanded
with drugs, and with training and attention, thanks to the expansion of
intellectual capacity, but it faces limits of time, which are connected to the
emotional, sensitive dimension of the conscious organism.
Generally we call cyberspace the global universe of the infinite pos-
sible relations of a rhizomatic system that virtually connects every
human terminal with every other human terminal, and that simulta-
neously connects human and machinic terminals. Cyberspace is a
neurotelematic rhizome, and therefore a non-hierarchical and non-
linear network that connects human minds and electronic devices.
Cybertime, in contrast, is not a purely extendable dimension, because it
is connected with the intensity of experience that the conscious orga-
nism dedicates to information coming from cyberspace.
The objective sphere of cyberspace expands at the speed of digital
replication; in contrast, the subjective nucleus of cybertime evolves at a
slower rhythm, the rhythm of ‘corporeality’ – that of pleasure and
suffering. Thus as the technical composition of the world changes,
cognitive appropriation and psychic responsiveness do not follow in a
linear manner. The mutation of the technological environment is much
more rapid than changes in cultural habits and cognitive models.
As the stratum of the infosphere becomes progressively denser, infor-
mational stimuli invade every atom of human attention. Cyberspace
grows in an unlimited fashion; mental time, however, is not infinite.
The subjective nucleus of cybertime follows the slow rhythms of or-
ganic matter. We can increase the time of exposure of the organism to
information, but experience cannot be intensified beyond certain limits.
Beyond these limits, the acceleration of experience provokes a re-
duced consciousness of stimulus, a loss of intensity as it relates to the
aesthetic sphere and also (importantly) the sphere of ethics. The experi-
ence of the other is rendered banal; the other becomes part of an
uninterrupted and frenetic stimulus, and loses its singularity and inten-
sity – it loses its beauty.
Thus we have less curiosity, less surprise; more stress, aggressive-
ness, anxiety, and fear.
The acceleration produces an impoverishment of experience, because
we are exposed to a growing mass of stimuli that we cannot elaborate
upon, according to the intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge.
Again, we have more information, less meaning; more information,
less pleasure.
Sensibility is within time. Sensuality lies in slowness. The space of
information is too vast and quick-moving to elaborate on sensuality

intensively, deeply. At the point of intersection between electronic
cyberspace and organic cybertime is found the crux of the present
mutation. The great majority of humanity is being subjected to an
invasion of the video-electronic flux, and suffers the superimposition of
digital code over the codes of recognition and of identification of reality
that permeate organic cultures.
The psychopathic epidemic that appears to be spreading in social
behaviours also depends on this gap, on this asymmetry between the
format of emission (the techno-communicative system) and the format
of reception (the social mind). The acceleration produced by network
technologies, and the precarious condition of cognitive labour, forced as
it is to subject itself to the pace of the productive network, has produced
a saturation of human attention that has reached pathological levels.
In the labour process we no longer have availability of time; attention
is supersaturated. First, we have no time for attention within work, and
second, we have no time for affect, for that kind of spatial attention that
is eroticism, the attention to our body and to those of others. Sensibility
tends to become obtuse. So, what happens when we no longer have
time to pay attention?
What happens is that we perceive things badly, what happens is that
we are no longer able to make decisions in a rational manner. This is
producing an effect that psychiatrists define as panic. Society risks
being propelled into a condition of panic, of diffuse psychopathy, of
desensitization and disaffection. Annoyance in the face of the other,
aggressive reactions, are the roots of the new climate of war into which
the West has fallen.
To understand the origin of this social psychopathy, we must first
look at the relationship between cyberspace and cybertime. Cyberspace
is the infinite productivity of the general intelligence, of the general intellect, of
the Net. When an immense number of points enter into a non-centric
and non-hierarchical connection, we have the infinite production of
signs, of intellectual commodities, of semiocommodities, of informa-
tion.
Yet cybertime is by no means infinite. Cybertime is the organic, physical,
finite capacity to elaborate information. This ability is found in our mind,
and our mind needs slowness, it needs to be able to affectively singular-
ize information. Once this ‘elaboration time’ disappears, the human
mind is forced to follow the rhythm of the machinic network, and this
brings about a pathology that manifests itself as panic and as depres-

sion on an individual level, and as generalized aggressiveness at the
collective scale.
One answer to ‘what is to be done’ is that the intellectual and thus
radical pedagogy must learn from this gap between cyberspace and
cybertime. Only by freeing the cognitariat from subordination to its
virtual dimension, only by reactivating a dynamic of slow affectivity, of
freedom from work, will the collective organism be able to regain its
sensibility and rationality, its ability to live in peace.
NOTES
1 Hans Jürgen Krahl, Costituzione e Lotta di Classe (Milan: Jaka Books, 1969).
2 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin, 1973), 704–6.
3 Krahl, Costituzione, 365.
4 Ibid., 367.
The Diffused Intellectual 145
8 The Diffused Intellectual: Women’s

Autonomy and the Labour of Reproduction:
An Interview with Mariarosa Dalla Costa
interviewed by enda brophy, mark coté,

and jennifer pybus
EB, MC, JP: One of the constant concerns emerging from within the
history of the Italian radical left, from Antonio Gramsci’s vision of the
organic intellectual to operaismo’s tormented relationship with the party
form, is the relationship between intellectuals and movements pushing
for radical social change. We would like to begin by asking you to speak
to the notion and role of the intellectual, as it was when you began your
militancy, and as it is now.
MDC: With regard to this question of what an intellectual is, I think that
a person who plays this role within a movement is someone who,
having had the possibility to study, to build for herself a set of critical
analytical tools, and above all being animated by the will to build
something good, a different and better world, poses to herself not so
much the problem of her own situation, ignoring that of others, but the
problem of the overall conditions of humanity, trying to discover which
might be the most crucial matters from where to begin and the paths to
be followed in order to transform those conditions. Today, more than
ever, we are in a context in which great tragedies and great suffering are
plainly evident. In my opinion, therefore, the intellectual is somebody
who poses to herself these questions: what is the root cause of all of this,
which are the most urgent issues, of which are the most significant
subjects to follow and to connect with – and there are many of these – in
order to construct opposition, refusal, struggles, and alternative paths.
Therefore I would say very simply that the function of the intellectual is
this: to put at the disposal of others, to put in common, this greater set of
critical analytical tools, to make those tools freely available, and this
naturally demands being rooted in a reality that is in movement, a
146 Mariarosa Dalla Costa
reality within which the researcher herself puts certain choices into
practice, in which she can deem some matters to be more crucial than
others. And the hope is, depending on the choices made by all of those
who are today committed to transforming that which exists, that there
effectively comes about the wide-ranging social transformation of which
we are in need. I would like to add that while in the 1970s this broader
set of critical analytical tools was accessible to few of us, today, thanks
also to newer communication technologies, there is within the move-
ment as a whole a very great and diffuse capacity for analysis, for
attaining knowledge of the issues that matter in the world, of the
mechanisms that provoke these and of the forces that activate them-
selves as a result. It is not a coincidence that the movement has had to
equip itself in regard to this with a fresh set of analytical tools and new
organizational dimensions, ad hoc groups and associations that follow
the various issues by computer, radio, or video, in order to sustain a
relationship with such a vast and promptly available amount of infor-
mation, obviously constituted not only by the facts but also by all the
analyses and communiqués that circulate. So the ‘intellectuality’ of the
movement is therefore today an extremely widespread condition.
EB, MC, JP: Let’s go back in this respect, to the era of operaismo and
Potere Operaio (PO), which you were a part of. Can you discuss your
position as a woman within a group, a movement such as PO? What
kinds of tensions and affinities were there for you as a feminist within
the group, which was so heavily dominated by men? What were the
strategies you developed that emerged out of those tensions?
MDC: I should point out that when I began my feminist activity, found-
ing and promoting Lotta Femminista – which at the beginning, in June of
1971 in Padova, was called Movimento di Lotta Femminile – I left PO.
Therefore there was not the problem of how I would operate as a
feminist within PO. The militant activity which I carried out as a femi-
nist was a full-time activity that did not permit a double militancy, an
issue other women confronted when militating in different organiza-
tions. For them, evidently the feminist commitment was of a different
kind than ours was, because for us there remained neither the time nor
the mental space for any other militancy. But above all, the militancy
which we were expressing was intended to offer a radically different
viewpoint on the world which, starting from the crucial nature of the
labour of reproduction (broadly understood), was bent on reformulat-
ing the political discourse and project, and therefore was intended as an
approach that had a general validity. When I became a part of PO in

1967, a feminist movement did not exist and therefore the issue of
whether I should enter PO or work in the feminist movement never
arose. In Italy at that time there were only the realities of the
extraparliamentary groups, and for me, seeking out PO was related – as
I said in Rome1 – to a profound need to find justice.
I was conscious of the fact that there was injustice in the world. I
wanted to do something, both to understand its origins – to have
therefore the set of analytical tools which would permit me to under-
stand where the injustice that I was seeing in society during that period
originated – and to seek to remedy it. I therefore had this double need:
to understand, but also to act, a need for militancy. PO answered this
need, which was very significant. It was very important to be intro-
duced to the study of Capital, to the study of Marx’s other works, and to
those of Marxist scholars. The first work I read was The Class Struggles
in France, 1848–1850. It was a very important work. Therefore, simply
being introduced to and studying this theoretical legacy was, I believe,
something fundamental, such that I continue to offer extracts of Marx’s
work to my students.
The other great discovery was that of the factory. I remember that
once I went to Marghera,2 at that time [Toni] Negri was there also,
probably it was the first time, and he said to me ironically, ‘witness the
beauty of industry’!
For me discovering the factory, such a brutal dimension of life, with
that fixity of a condition of labour, being in the same place in order to
carry out the same tasks every day of the year, to discover the noxious-
ness of the factory, the degradation of working-class neighbourhoods ...
all of this exposed me not only to an extremely weighty reality from a
human point of view, which very many individuals had to confront
every day to survive, but it exposed me to that which was the mecha-
nism of capitalistic production. I therefore saw represented that mode
of production that was at the origin of human suffering and misery in
the time in which I myself lived, the era of capitalist production which
had begun approximately five centuries previously. I therefore recog-
nize that this education at PO answered my need, answered my re-
search, and gave me a formidable set of critical tools. On the other hand
in the Italy of the day the relationship between man and woman was
still quite barbaric ... And this was even more so within militant circles,
where intellectual power itself was used against women even as it
reinforced cohesion among men. Let us call it ill-employed pride. From
this condition of excessive male intellectual power on one side, and of
the non-visibility of women as subjects on the other, there emerged the

‘explosion of contradiction’ and therefore the emergence within the
span of the movements of the time of the feminist movement which, as
far as the Lotta Femminista offshoot is concerned, without a doubt grew
out of the extraparliamentary group Potere Operaio. But a quite analo-
gous process came about in Lotta Continua as well.3 In any case the
image of a woman during the period immediately prior to the emer-
gence of the women’s movement was significantly out of focus: a woman
oppressed and conditioned by domestic labour, which had yet to be
posed as an issue deserving of attention. Her position within the capi-
talist organization of labour as a subject destined to the labour of
reproduction, which was unwaged and therefore not counted as such,
had yet to be analysed. Rather, it was perceived as an expression of love
or as a mission. This condition was suffered by women largely because
there was no adequate interpretative framework, either one that could
serve them or one that they could confront men with, a framework that
could explain their hardships. There remained unexplained all of the
greater labour incurred by the woman who, even when she worked
outside the home, retained the domestic responsibilities regardless, and
this meant that she had to apply herself in the workplace (as in any
other context) in a condition of heavy disparity with respect to that of
men. As the reason for this had not been ‘brought out,’ the woman
could not say what the cause of her hardship was and often there
flowed from this an abuse of power on the part of men, because of
whom – as I said in Rome – many women told me they ran the risk of
going insane. At the same time the women’s movement, having offered
an explanation for their condition, saved them from this fate. Let us
keep in mind the social context of Italy as it stood then. In 1971, when
we organized the first feminist meeting, the advertising of birth control
products was still illegal. There was therefore a prohibitionism regard-
ing a woman’s sexuality, a non-recognition of her right to express a
sexuality that was not purely a function of procreation, a social expecta-
tion that a woman would be married a virgin and after nine months
would have her first child, without any right to a period of life in which
she could know her own sexuality, not even in marriage. Not only were
we living in a time when if a woman was not married she was socially
wayward, and therefore, in a certain sense, she was obliged to marry.
But also it was assumed that, whoever this husband was, even if he
used violence against her (even though the issue of violence had not yet
been raised), she had to keep him. I have clear memories of certain
dramatic cases in which, when the woman consulted a priest, the priest’s
response was: ‘Oh no, a wife must stay with the husband in any case,
even if he hits her. If you leave your house you must remember that you
may be charged with abandonment of the conjugal home.’4 Therefore,
women having to get married regardless, and having to keep their
husband no matter what kind of man he was, women never having
been owners of their own sexuality, because a woman had to be married
a virgin and there was no availability or ownership of birth control
products which were strictly prohibited, this was the general female
condition in the Italy of the time that PO was formed. As a rebellion
against this condition, thanks to which woman was never the owner of
her own body and of her own life choices, there emerges the Feminist
Movement. And even before this there was the composite movement at
the end of the 1960s, the movement of ’68 with its libertarian inclination
even in sexual life. At this time there matures also the great conquest
that encompassed mass access to university. This allowed many women
to have a completely different life condition during the period of time in
which they attended university. Because they met their fellow students,
they could begin to have a social life on more equal terms, incompa-
rable to that of their mothers, who had faced the problem of how to
meet a possible future husband since encounters then had been rare,
very few in the life of a woman. Instead, mass access to university
allowed many women the possibility of a more open relationship with
fellow students of their own age and therefore the possibility of having
relationships of sociality and sexuality that the preceding generation
absolutely did not have. This was, therefore, a very important fact.
In any case, given the substantial power difference between men and
women (of whom there were very few) that existed within the PO
group, similar to that in other groups, at a certain point the relationship
between female and male comrades began to fray. Increasingly there
was the sense that there was a problem as far as our condition went,
and we began to realize that, as militants, we were fighting for every-
body, for workers, for technicians, for students, but not for ourselves
because that which we were living, our condition as women, was not
represented in the struggles we were engaged in. We thus realized that
there was a problem that was not represented even in the vast activity
of militancy that we were sustaining. Due to this I felt the need to stop
for a moment, to separate myself from these struggles, to begin to
analyse this condition in order to understand where the problem lay. In
the spring of ’71 I produced, also thanks to my encounter and confron-
tation with Selma James, a text that I presented as a draft in June of the
same year to a group of female comrades whom I assembled for what
would be our first meeting. That text, which was revised somewhat in
the months that followed, would become a small book entitled Potere
femminile e sovversione sociale [The Power of Women and the Subversion of
the Community], published in March 1972 in Venice with a vanguard
publishing house, Marsilio. This book was immediately adopted by the
international feminist movement as a useful tool for militancy, trans-
lated into six different languages, and as a classic feminist text, in-
cluded as course reading in numerous American universities. With the
draft presented at our first meeting I was bringing attention to the
renowned analysis of domestic labour and its attendant implications,
and my convened female comrades declared their agreement and from
that point there originated our debate, our action, the desire to struggle
taking our own condition as a departure point. That analysis posited
that domestic labour was the primary labour of all women and there-
fore the issue from which, as women, we had to begin. We discussed
among ourselves why as subjects we had disappeared and lacked the
power to become visible, why we were the object of this abuse of power,
why the struggles that we carried forward on a daily basis were invis-
ible. They were invisible because nobody paid attention insofar as they
were connected to a form of labour that was itself invisible due to the
fact that it was unwaged, the labour of reproduction.
EB, MC, JP: This break with a certain kind of militancy and criticism, in
favour of a radical feminism that placed the labour of reproduction at
the centre of a new critique, was a critical one. How did this unfold?
MDC: This [issue of unwaged labour] was the great question to which
no answer was given. Not only was no answer given, but subsequent to
the great repression against all of the movements in the 1970s, this
matter, in the terms in which we had raised it, became taboo in Italy
together with the very feminism that had brought it up. It is telling that
at the European Social Forum in Florence in 2002 (which I participated
in as part of the workshop put on by the activist intellectuals from the
Internet journal The Commoner), some of the female presenters at the
Forum of the World March of Women referred to the feminism of the
1970s as a ‘feminism of self-consciousness.’ But what of that other
feminism? That of the great struggles carried forward? Evidently that
taboo still functions to this day. In the 1970s we promoted quite a wide
debate on domestic labour in various countries. I myself was in the
United States and in Canada many times, I had brought the debate and
the consciousness of the struggles we were engaged in from the Atlantic
coast to the Pacific. We had built in 1972 a Feminist International around

domestic labour, on the labour of reproduction, on all of the issues that
derived from this, and in this way we had built with our female com-
rades from other countries the International Feminist Collective in or-
der to promote coordinated action. In the United States as well there
were Wages for Housework groups, as there were in England, in Ger-
many, in Switzerland. Less so in France, because at that time the group
Psychanalyse et Politique was prevalent. There were Wages for House-
work groups in Canada as well, where we held many meetings to
coordinate our actions. All of this work allowed for the sedimentation
in the world of a great tradition of the analysis of domestic labour that
was extremely well articulated, and our action and struggles made
themselves heard. Yet what happened at the end of the 1970s and above
all in the 1980s impressed on us yet again that history is always written
by the victors. The repression also meant the erasure of our history and
our struggles, and the debate on domestic labour moved ahead in terms
that were themselves domesticated, the object of measurement and
investigation, even of the recognition of value, so long as it was not a
matter of economic value. Any expectation of economic remuneration
became unspeakable. The discussion of domestic labour continued as if
it had never had an origin in all that which we had written and done,
and thus was deprived of its demand to represent a moment of struggle
for a different world, for a different organization of production and
reproduction. Our mobilization and example was always attached to
the demand for a drastic lowering of working time for all, both women
and men: we wanted a twenty-hour work week, precisely so that women
and men could have time for reproduction and this did not remain the
responsibility solely of women. We disappeared, we were banned as
authors because of our own activist lives and the kind of discussion that
we had promoted, and this above all at the hands of female historians
and sociologists on the left. For those of us who worked at universities,
all of this hostility and eagerness to erase was instrumental in facilitat-
ing the work of other women researchers of the female condition who,
rather than profoundly placing in question the existing political system,
proposed and continue to propose the advancement of a few within
that given context. This was the case in Italy. I don’t believe there was
anything comparable faced by feminism in the United States, even
taking into account streams that had roots in marxian studies. There,
feminism, even in its activism, was not part of a history of militancy
with the characteristics of the Italian situation. We had carried forward
a militant feminism that not only had engaged in great struggles, but
had constituted part of a context of rebellion within which various

other subjects moved during those years – workers, students, techni-
cians, women. For this reason, within the project of the normalization of
society and its discourse, this feminism was erased. There began a
feminism that I refer to as ‘discourses against discourses,’ words against
words that in a certain sense essentialize the positions of the other
solely as a pretext for debate. To us, who were used to thinking in order
to act, it all seemed extremely dull and depressing, to the point where
neither those who were my closest comrades nor I participated in the
‘debates’ of the 1980s. Many of us continued to search for issues that
might seem like crucial ones and within which one could envision a
chance to achieve something. If one could not pick up again from here
then there must be another place, not only geographic, from which to
begin once more. It is no coincidence that many of us directed our
attention to the Third World. Silvia Federici went to Nigeria, I myself
made many trips to Africa, Indonesia, Central America. We did this on
the one hand as part of a search for issues that could bring us back to the
fundamental nature of certain problems, ones that were no longer up
for debate in Italy, and to the urgent need for action. On the other there
was the search for life, that life which was no longer possible here, so
dismal and depressing was the context and so lacking in significance
the very horizon of discourse around women.
EB, MC, JP: In this period your work opened up to an outside, a world
with which your immediate struggles did not allow you to engage
during the 1970s. This seems like a natural enough choice when faced
with what in Rome you referred to as ‘state feminism.’
MDC: There was indeed a good deal of state feminism. Let us say that
the effect of smothering, of the concealing of our feminism, came about
also as a result of the great abundance of resources that were offered to
this other feminism, large financing efforts, the structuring of aca-
demic-feminist networks of study. Through this, much attention was
given to circuits of academic discourse, a discourse that was its own
end, or even better, one that was intended to reproduce the university
apparatus. But above all it was intended to rationalize feminist dis-
course. As I was just saying, the demand for the remuneration of
domestic labour that was internal to a drastic reduction of the working
day, all connected to a more extended and articulated system of ser-
vices so that both men and women could have more free time, was no
longer discussed. We had reached the point where, when some women,
within a sociological or political context, were discussing some irrel-

evant measure of retribution of some aspect of domestic labour, they
took pains to point out and clarify that in any case this measure had
nothing to do with wages for housework ...
EB, MC, JP: From this stems your increasing interest in the notion of the
earth, of the relations between the earth and human body as vitally
linked to social reproduction. This was what we referred to previously,
when we mentioned the opening of your perspective towards an exte-
rior – you began to look at other places in the world. Not that PO was
bereft of what was here and there a global perspective, but your work
began to deal with these themes in other parts of the world, particularly
in developing countries.
MDC: I would like to make a few concluding remarks on what became of

the labour of reproduction, and part of my considerations reconnect to
your question. This work that began in the 1980s and continued through
the 1990s until today collided with – both in advanced nations and in
developing countries (I know the term is an unhappy one, but so is the
‘Third World,’ so one may as well use one or the other with the knowl-
edge that they are purely conventions) – a great project of the underde-
velopment of reproduction. Therefore the conditions of the labour of
reproduction have worsened for the overwhelming majority of people in
advanced countries and even more so in developing countries. This is the
great problem from which to begin. Not only has there been no solution
but there has been a worsening of the conditions, with two effects: on the
one hand it has jeopardized the path towards autonomy for women, on
the other it has intensified the workload which women dedicate to the
well-being of the family or of the community of the village. This is the
process that collided with the labour of reproduction and that heavily
affected the life of the subjects who are primarily responsible for it –
women both in advanced countries and in developing ones.
Discovering the issue of the earth as a crucial one is tied to the fact
that in those years I visited the countries of the Third World many
times, and therefore had a chance to directly observe how the popula-
tions in those countries reproduce themselves. Our analysis of the labour
of reproduction in advanced countries had to first of all assume that this
labour involved the administration of a paycheque that in Fordist soci-
ety was primarily brought home by the man. Instead, under post-
Fordism the woman had to administer two incomes, his and her own
precarious one, because nowadays in any family both must work and
the problem is that this work is very precarious. Yet in advanced coun-
tries the labour of reproduction fundamentally passed and still passes
through the administration of money, it is combined with the adminis-
tration of this money that enters the house. This is a discussion we had
shed some light on in the 1970s. It is not true that the male worker
brings home a paycheque and consumes it by sitting down at the table
(this is obviously a simplified example). The male worker comes home
and there is the woman who undertakes the labour of spending this
paycheque, going to the supermarket, buying goods, bringing them
home, transforming them, making meals, and serving meals that the
worker, she, and the children eat. This is called productive consump-
tion, because the male worker, but not only he, must eat in order to
replenish his labour power. We had shed light on the whole course of
this work undertaken by women, a course that was previously invis-
ible, but this labour nonetheless had to pass first of all through the
spending of money. Subsequently, in a book on the New Deal,5 I would
retrace these themes, analysing some cues offered by the debate en-
gaged in by American economists around the role of women in the
decades from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Great De-
pression. In the early 1970s, when in Italy we were analysing this
problem, the woman had to spend the money brought home primarily
by the man, even if shortly thereafter, between 1972 and 1979, in our
country there was an increase in female employment of roughly one
and a half million, an increment which already gave us a glimpse of a
new profile for women and a new structure for the family. This dy-
namic, as I had yet to confirm, was not true of the Third World: there, at
least back then it was the case, the reproduction of individuals passed
centrally through agricultural labour destined for self-consumption ...
The conclusion of this discussion is that the issue of land, as soon as
one leaves advanced regions, becomes immediately apparent as a cru-
cial one regarding whether or not individuals can sustain themselves or
(as often is the case) barely survive. In the 1980s when structural adjust-
ment policies demanded by the IMF (International Monetary Fund)
were applied in a drastic manner in almost all [developing] countries,
strong pressure was placed on governments to privatize land that re-
mained free, setting a price for its purchase. So no more access for
agricultural use without having a deed for the property, the price of
which was set so that whoever wanted to cultivate it needed to have the
money to buy it. This move was particularly dramatic in its effects for
many populations, as often the only ones who had enough money to
purchase pieces of land were state bureaucrats, so they had an interest
in passing laws that set prices for the land and thus were on exactly the
same political wavelength as IMF representatives who were prescribing
these kinds of measures. I believe that many of the struggles that have
broken out in Africa and that are often dismissed as ethnic struggles,
ethnic warfare, are due to the extreme scarcity of land, land which is
constantly diminished and is thus no longer sufficient to sustain those it
had sustained before. So here the issue of land becomes dramatic inas-
much as these privatization policies involve expropriation, because
those who buy the land take it away from those who were previously
able to cultivate it communally. This facet is accompanied by other
measures typical of structural adjustment, which often include the re-
moval of subsidies for small-scale agriculture destined for local con-
sumption (meanwhile the infrastructures and a great deal of the water
used in the production of crops for export are financed with public
money), the elimination of subsidies for the most vital foodstuffs, the
privatization of various state-owned enterprises, the privatization of
water, the transformation of stable jobs into precarious ones, frequent
layoffs because the public sector must be streamlined, the devaluation
of currency, and other measures. All of this has caused levels of poverty
never witnessed before in the Third World.
So when we see these multitudes of migrants around the world, who
are pointed to as examples of overpopulation, these are above all the
result of the expropriation of land that has taken place from the Philip-
pines to Africa to Latin America in order to make room for the large
agribusiness plantations, for enormous dam projects, or for capitalistic
projects of various types. In my estimation, then, the huge problem of
hunger in the world has above all as its origin the privatization of land.
This obliges one to pose to oneself the centrality of such an issue, of how
it is emerging once more similar to what happened five centuries ago in
Europe. The very first multitudes expelled by this mode of production
were in England, where capitalism began its course by expelling free
producers from their land, creating a mass of individuals with no land,
with no means with which to produce and reproduce themselves, who
to survive had no other option than to sell their own labour power
without being able to bargain for the conditions of this sale. Marx
speaks of the so-called merchants of human flesh who packaged contin-
gents of the population in order to send them to the manufacturing
districts – a practice that is very similar to what is taking place today at
a planetary level, where often the destination is not even the factory.
Therefore it was a great project of expropriation of land, described by
Marx in Chapters 26, 27, and 28 of Capital – Volume I,6 that sent contin-
gents of individuals to colonize the new world, America. But there

would follow the expropriation of Africa, in the sense that there enor-
mous swathes of the population were carried away from their land by
violent means while on the other side of the Atlantic the Native peoples
would be expropriated from the land in an equally violent manner. The
latter would never have accepted capitalist work discipline, and so they
were exterminated and replaced with Africans brought in chains as
slaves. There was delineated in this manner the triangle of suffering
constituted by Port Calabar or Port Harcourt, where the slaves de-
parted from, the American plantations, where slaves were forced to
work in order to produce cotton, and Manchester, where the factories
were located for processing cotton.
Therefore the ship cycle was to take the slaves from Africa, bring
them to the plantations in America, bring the product of their labour,
cotton, to Manchester for the British factories, and set off again for
Africa. This is the circuit of capitalist production that even today repro-
duces itself by proposing once again the expropriation of land, brutal
labour conditions, and slavery. The expropriation of land is proceeding
across the planet in an increasingly extended manner and is producing
this population that appears as overpopulation but is not. So the whole
debate on overpopulation is compromised at its very foundation, be-
cause it ignores the first cause of this excess, the expropriation of land.
The population, just like five centuries ago, appears to be in excess
because it has been deprived of its means of production and reproduc-
tion, above all the soil, and together with this it is deprived of the
resources and individual and collective rights that contribute towards
guaranteeing survival.
Together with the expropriation of land as it took place five centuries
ago, there is reproduced labour under brutal and slave-like conditions.
This phenomenon, too is growing in dimension. It is estimated that 200
million people work in these conditions, of whom roughly half are
children. One only has to think of the making of carpets, or the produc-
tion of saris, or of the plantations and mines in Brazil.
With respect to the different role that the land has in human repro-
duction in contexts as different from ours as the African one, I would
like to go back to what I was able to ascertain during my stay in Nigeria.
The figure we would refer to as the student worker, in Calabar, that old
slave port, was a student who cultivated the land between university
buildings where cows also grazed. This is a very different version of a
student worker; one who, to support himself, does not necessarily go
off to engage in waged labour, but who instead cultivates a bit of land
that the university gives him the possibility to utilize, which helps him
maintain himself. I say this to point out how much difference there is in
the world as far as modalities of reproduction go.
So if it is true that the land is crucial for the subsistence of populations
it is equally important that we ask ourselves what has become of these
populations once they have been expelled from their land. As I have
stated in various pieces I have written, they are mainly destined to die,
which is a different way to solve overpopulation than those officially
espoused. Death by starvation, death due to economic difficulties, death
due to the constant wars that also take away land by rendering it
unusable, death due to military and police repression, death due to the
conditions in which the expelled live in refugee camps, or death due to
the spread of illnesses brought on by the collapse of sanitary-hygiene
systems. Only a small portion of the survivors will be able to find
underpaid labour in the advanced world.
So if I reflect on the labour of reproduction and on the world today, I
either consider such an enormous issue, that of the function that the
expropriation of land has, and therefore I question myself as to where I
should begin so that populations rather than being destined for exter-
mination have at least the possibility to nourish themselves, to first
survive and then to live, I either pose this question to myself or all of the
other ones seem secondary.
The issue of the land is not only one of expropriation, however, and it
is not only one of expropriation within the countries that make up the
Third World. In the recent counter-summit set up in opposition to the
one put on by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) in June of 2002
in Rome, there were smaller farmers from the United States, something
I refer to in my essay ‘The Native in Us, the Land We Belong To.’8
In fact, this agricultural politics based on large-scale expropriations
and on the technologies from the Green Revolution provokes an ongo-
ing crisis not only in the Third World, but also in the First, and for that
reason, as I was saying, American farmers were there with farmers
from the Third World at the counter-summit. But the rediscovery of
land as the fundamental element, the only element from which we can
derive the possibility of sustenance and life, and I would add also of
inspiration and the senses, which is not a secondary aspect, emerged in
the new modalities of organization and the construction of networks
that individuals thrown out on the street by the unpredictable swerves
of the global economy have come up with not only to survive but also in
order to guarantee for themselves a certain quality of life. I have heard
that in the recent movements that have arisen in the crisis in Argentina,
groups of unemployed people have occupied land in order to guaran-

tee for themselves the possibility of sustenance and have introduced
new modalities of exchange such as bartering, without the intermedi-
ary of money. They also have instituted modalities of alternative pro-
duction and the possibility of minting and using alternative money.
This reality, which took many activists by surprise, did not surprise me,
because for some time now I had been paying attention to this phenom-
enon. As I discussed in the book on the New Deal, the United States has
a long tradition in this respect. The Seattle League and the Unemployed
Citizens’ League as far back as the 1930s had constructed large net-
works of alternative production, as well as bartering, and they used as
currency their own money vouchers. And in recent decades, the Lets (or
‘green dollars’), valid for spending within a system of the supply of
services connected to it, has been the most famous form of alternative
money. Another example is the Ithaca Hours, which mints an alterna-
tive currency that is valid locally and can circulate. And there are other
forms. This practice of minting alternative money, as I was saying, is
part of an old American tradition. Yet it is one that is particularly
relevant in the context of the construction of ever-larger alternative
networks that are also related to land and labour.
This means that people in the most diverse contexts across the planet
are rebelling against the death sentence imposed on them because the
global economy has decided there is no space for them, and they are
determined not only to find a way to continue to sustain themselves,
but also to avoid a degraded standard of food. If at one time in the
United States social assistance was conceived of as having coupons so
as to be able to go to the supermarket and access processed food that is
not fresh, people have now decided to leave this conception behind and
are demanding fresh and healthy food. I think this is a great shift; it
means that the question of the land is important not only with respect to
the process of expropriation with the consequence of then having to
accept whatever product of the Green Revolution, but also in terms of
the devastation of the land’s reproductive powers wrought by these
agricultural techniques. There is a rebellion in progress on this terrain –
carried forward by ever increasing swathes of the population in devel-
oped countries as well as developing ones – that is representative of
people’s increasing determination to guarantee for themselves health
as well as survival.
EB, MC, JP: You speak of the devastation of the earth’s reproductive
powers, which seems like a good transition point for us to ask you to
speak of the body, of your most recent focus on the medical establish-
ment. Perhaps you could begin by giving us your thoughts on the
present state of discourse surrounding the body as an entry point for
your own activism surrounding the practice of hysterectomy.
MDC: ... I would never have been able to discover the tremendous abuse
that is inflicted on the female body, that is, hysterectomy – something I
will return to later – if I had not had a very strong sense of identity that I
built for myself along my feminist path, if I had not had the exceptionally
strong sense that I had to defend my body as organism and as an intact
body, and if I had not had in mind the importance and the richness of the
abundance of resources that an integral body presents ... Yet the abuse of
this operation8 is not only a contemporary issue. It has obviously gone on
for some time, because I have memories even from when I was very
young of many women being subjected to it, although then it was almost
impossible to find a figure for the number of operations that were carried
out. Since the reform of the Italian health system at the beginning of the
1990s it has at least been possible to access such data ... In 1994, in Italy,
38,000 hysterectomies were recorded, in 1997 that figure grew to 68,000,
and in 1998 and 1999 the numbers fell just short of 70,000 recorded
operations a year; this meant that at a national level, for one woman out
of every five there was the likelihood of having to undergo this operation,
while in some regions, such as the Veneto, it was one out of four women.
This was the mass castration of women. It was exactly a case of mass
castration and disablement, because one must remember that this opera-
tion as a rule, in half of all cases, is accompanied by ovariectomy, the
removal of the ovaries even if these are healthy. Preventative ovariec-
tomy, as they refer to it. It is the only case in medicine in which a healthy
organ is removed as a preventative measure ...
I have also concluded that regarding this operation some horrendous
abuses of disabled people have taken place. One woman wrote to me
from Australia, giving me all of the details in her case and permission to
speak of it, and asking me whom she could contact in order to publicize
what had happened to herself and also to others, so as to do something
about it, so that it will not happen to others. When she had not yet
menstruated and was still a child with mobility problems – she was in a
wheelchair as she could not move her legs – yet with a perfectly capable
mind, doctors subjected her to a hysterectomy so that she would not be
faced with the problem of menstruation while in the wheelchair ...
Another abuse which I wrote about in the Rome article [La Porta
dell’Orto…], even though there I did not have enough time to discuss it,
is that now for breast cancer a preventative measure has been devel-
oped that is inconceivable to me. For women who are the bearers of the
BRCA1 or BRCA2 chromosome, which it has been suggested indicates
a high risk for developing breast and/or ovarian cancer, one measure
consists of removing both breasts and ovaries in order to protect them
from this risk. This is referred to as preventative surgery. However, as
doctors themselves say, it is not certain that the woman who undergoes
the operation would have gotten breast or ovarian cancer, and it is not
certain that even after such mutilation she will not get cancer in such
locations ... This seems to me to be genetic terrorism.
EB, MC, JP: We want to end by asking you to discuss your role as a female
professor and the pedagogical strategies you employ in that space.
MDC: I believe I have basically maintained great continuity with the

1970s in terms of my teaching methods. This is because I always try to
start the discussion by getting students to begin with a problem. All you
need to do is turn on the television: misery is being multiplied, starva-
tion is being extended, deaths are being constantly multiplied. Why is
this? We are in the mode of production that is considered the most
productive of all, which ought to have guaranteed more resources
compared with other ways of organizing, and yet this is simply not the
case, all it produces is more misery, more death, more hunger. Why
does it not produce a more generalized well-being? This is the point
from which I generally begin in my teaching. This I follow up with
some explanations as to the fundamental laws of capitalist develop-
ment, that typically this mode of production produces accumulations of
wealth in the form of capital on one side and the expansion of misery on
the other: the concentration of wealth and the extension of hunger. My
students read chapters 27, 28, and 33 of Capital, Volume I, quite closely.
Thus we cover expropriation of the land and the theory of systemic
colonization, because there they can find the roots of the phenomena,
the results of which appear as soon as they turn on the television but the
true origins of which are always kept hidden. When I was able to teach
longer courses, in the years previous to the reform of the universities, I
also had my students study the chapter on the working day in the same
volume very closely. Currently, the course offerings have been halved
and I have to work around this. What I cover are the Marxist tools of
analysis that I think cannot be set aside, as well as writings, texts, and
videos by researchers of capitalist development, of international debt,
of globalization and its new subjects, of the issues of the land and of
women. Here obviously I employ the older and more current works
that belong to our tradition and the ways in which these have been
fruitfully crossed with eco-feminism. I offer the students a choice be-
tween the numerous texts produced by the protagonists of current
movements against neoliberal globalization and against war, therefore,
those by Vandana Shiva, José Bové, Marcos, Rigoberta Menchù, and
others, so that they can capture the manner in which reality is in
movement. Thus there is starvation, but it is not a starvation that
remains immobile, it is a hunger that contains people who on the one
hand struggle, rebel, and on the other propose an alternative view, who
have other demands and who propose alternative solutions. It is not
true that there aren’t solutions ... at the same time I try to bring the
students to the understanding of paths by which another knowledge
can be constructed ... I also maintain something that might sound
somewhat heretical for those who are committed to the view that glo-
balization is an ineluctable fact – that there is a need, in many respects
but beginning with the agricultural and nutritional one, to relocalize
development and ruralize the world again. This means that if I want to
have genuine food it has to be produced nearby, it has to be produced at
a local level for it to be fresh. This implies that every country must have
its own diversified agricultural production. In the agricultural and
nutritional sphere this means that encouraging specialization by geo-
graphic areas within the neoliberal internationalization of markets and
the industrial production of food is a strategy that ought to be refused.
The aspiration of populations, that of having a local and diversified
agriculture that offers them fresh and genuine food which does not arrive
on an airplane after having been polluted in order to be preserved, is a
fundamental demand. Therefore, these issues, the expropriation of the
land, local cultivation, the local diversification of crops, avoiding a situa-
tion in which one country produces x crop exclusively and another, y
crop ... they are in all of our interests even in developed countries, not
only in the Third World. These are issues on which can be built a political
recomposition, because our freedom and our quality of life depend on it.
In Rome I said that even if we took for granted that one day there would
be a guaranteed social wage for all, what would we do with it if we could
only buy poison and with it our own extinction? Therefore it is time that
the debates around the money-form and technology were united, in a
very strong and important manner, with those of the land and of agricul-
ture. I consider them to be the primary issues facing us today.
Interview transcribed by Silvia Carriciolo

NOTES
The following interview was carried out on a splendid day in June of 2002
amidst the blooming oleanders on the terrace of Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s
house in Padova, Italy. While the entire interview was filmed as an intended
resource for women’s centres across North American universities, Mariarosa
kindly allowed us to publish a shorter version for this collection.
1 Dalla Costa is referring to a talk given at the Operaismo a Convegno confer-

ence organized in Rome in June of 2002. For a report on the conference, see
Enda Brophy, ‘Italian Operaismo Face to Face,’ in Historical Materialism 12.1
no. 1. For a partial translation of Dalla Costa’s talk, see Arianna Bove’s
translation at: http://www.generation-online.org/p/pdallacosta.htm. This
talk with the title ‘La porta dell’orto e del giardino,’ has been partially
published in Italian in G. Borio, F. Pozzi, and G. Roggero (eds.), Gli operaisti
(Roma: Derive Approdi, 2005) and in its entirety as ‘La puerta del huerto y
del jardin’ in Noesis 15, no. 28 (julio–diciembre 2005): 79–100 (http://
www.uacj.mx).
2 Trans. note: Porto Marghera was a site of petrochemical production during
the 1960s, where workerist militants such as the Veneto-Emiliano section of
Potere Operaio engaged in struggles. See Steve Wright, Storming Heaven:
Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto
Press, 2002).
3 Lotta Continua, or ‘Unceasing Struggle,’ was another strong tendency within
the Italian extraparliamentarian left of the 1960s and 1970s.
4 Trans. note: In Italy at the time the abandonment of the conjugal home or
‘abbandono del tetto coniugale’ was a punishable by law.
5 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Famiglia Welfare e Stato tra Progressismo e New Deal,
3rd ed. (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1997).
6 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977).
7 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, ‘The Native in Us, the Land We Belong To,’ in
Common Sense 23 (1998); and in The Commoner 6 (2002), at http://
www.thecommoner.org.
8 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, ed., Isterectomia. Il problema sociale di un abuso contro
le donne (Hysterectomy: The Social Problem of an Abuse against Women)
(Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2002), forthcoming from New York: Autonomedia.
Conricerca as Political Action 163
9 Conricerca as Political Action
guido borio, francesca pozzi, and gigi roggero

‘Knowledge is only knowledge. But the control of knowledge – that is

politics.’ This dazzling insight offered by Bruce Sterling in Distraction
could be usefully employed to sum up the practice of conricerca.1 As an
activity transforming the existing state of things, as the site of education
and counter-cooperation, conricerca is – constituently – a production of
knowledge that is ‘other than,’ an experiment in organizational prac-
tices, and a space of resubjectification. In fewer words: a lot of ‘ricerca’
without ‘con’ is a precariously founded sociological account; a lot of
‘con’ without ‘ricerca’ leads to sterile ideological production.
Recently in Italy, the evocativeness of the word inquiry2 has pre-
vailed over its actual utilization as a practice. In short, ‘inquiry’ has
occasionally been used as a shortcut to self-legitimation with respect to
the difficulties inherent in political action. Perhaps today we have en-
tered a different phase. The bursting forth of new movements onto a
global scene until recently considered at peace augurs well. As always,
the subjective push of struggles places in question not only the present
state of things, but also the reassuring preconstituted identities of those
engaged in that contestation. In this new space there is re-emerging a
predisposition towards research, without which the political militant would
be nothing more than an ideological megaphone detached from real
dynamics, or a dispassionate conserver of his own role and of that
which already exists, be it a party or another organization.
When does one engage in research? Research is carried out when one
has no certainties, when that which is made an object of knowledge,
and how to intervene within it, is not known. This knowledge and
intervention is often impeded by a tendency towards seeking refuge in
static and frozen identities – something that was especially widespread
in the political subjectivity formed during the long winter of the 1980s
164 Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Roggero
and early 1990s, amidst the stagnation (at least in Italy) of social con-
flict. Conricerca is in contrast, always critique and problematization. It
does not allow us to stand idly by on mummified certainties. Conricerca
has it that certainties must be acquired in the field, so that we can
constantly question them and formulate new hypotheses. The slippery
question of identity must be confronted from a similar perspective. We
form our identities by critiquing and opposing ourselves to that which
exists, and by activating processes that construct alternatives. In this
way, identity enables us to recognize ourselves and make ourselves
recognized: it is a process, and we cannot allow it to survive unchanged
by the dynamics that nourished it, lest it become a deadweight.
We should state at the beginning that we do not intend to talk about
inquiry and research from the perspective of an academic scientism: rather,
the lens through which we intend to look at reality is political and irrevoca-
bly partisan. That is, it is on the side of that which has been stripped of its
own capacity for autonomous cooperation; on the side of that ambivalent
group which through labour is today power [potenza]3 for the system, but
which can also become a force for itself, for a parting of ways with capital-
ism. At the same time, though, we will not be limiting ourselves to an
abstract theoretical discourse on conricerca. Conricerca as a category can
only be empty unless it is understood as a tool for fostering a new and
different form of political action, the growth of which is central to processes
of struggle. From this perspective, science, scientificity, and a method for
the construction of knowledges and of capacities must be considered in
their potential ambivalence. They are decisive for every form of social
cooperation, and can be deviated towards a goal other than the systematic
one: towards a goal of transformation.
So, conricerca must involve experimenting with subversive paths that
are capable of virtuously fusing theory and practice; if it did not, it
would risk falling into disciplinary specialization, and fail to live up to
its declared intent, which is to transform the world. We hope this
chapter will contribute towards the construction of experiences of
conricerca, ones that do not begin from misleading premises of unity, but
that encounter – in experiments in different contexts – the common
elements of confrontation and of a dynamic subjective recomposition. If
this chapter offers individual militants or collectives some ideas on
which to reflect, some potentially useful tools, or simply some good
questions – if, in short, it becomes theory for and within the praxis of
those who dream and struggle for ‘another possible world’ – it will
have achieved its key objective.
Historical Contextualization of Conricerca
The idea of conricerca4 emerged in the context of American sociology,

but it was strongly politicized in its first transposition to Italy in the
1950s by Roberto Guiducci and above all by Alessandro Pizzorno (both
socialist sociologists). Their reference points in North America were not
so much an identifiable sociological school or an exhaustive set of
theoretical currents: it was more a matter of cues, elaborations, and
insights derived from various sources. These included fields as diverse
as literature and industrial sociology (where one could find analyses of
human relations and critiques of Taylorism and Fordism), as well as the
work of important figures such as David Riesman, who studied and
described, through participatory methods, various cultural and indi-
vidual changes as American social classes were reconfigured.5 Based on
these currents, as early as 1956 Pizzorno described conricerca as a method
that proposed not only to
know in order to inspire action, which can only be integral to historical

knowledge, but indeed to know in order to lay the foundations for action.
Knowledge does not at a certain moment pass the baton to action, even if
the latter is enlightened; rather, it must determine action; in the same
manner that the necessity of action explicitly brought about certain ways
of knowing and not others. Organized action involves organized knowl-
edge, not in the sense of having a catalogue or a timetable, or a good work
plan, but rather to force problems to emerge, the themes of the research,
the objects to be grasped within that same organizational situation.6
Owing to the open hostility of the Italian socialist-communist world

towards anything ‘American’ – not to mention towards the much-
reviled bourgeois discipline of sociology – conricerca was fated to arouse
the curiosity of people who either were outside the official Worker’s
Movement or openly dissented within it.7 One particular form of
conricerca – though it was not explicitly defined as such – was carried
out by Danilo Montaldi. His own politics – which he developed amidst
the so-called ‘minority’ tendencies (Internationalists, Bordighists,
Trotskyites), and which were steeped in a profound anti-Stalinism –
were marked by efforts to build new relationships among intellectuals,
militants, and classes, and to imagine forms of proletarian organization
that were different from those in countries where actually existing
socialism had turned cancerous. From here, he came into contact with
the important journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, which was among the most
fertile spaces for discussions centring around the need for a new politi-
cal creed uncontaminated by the swampy waters of marxism and of
socialist communism, the pitfalls of which were even more evident
after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. 8 Also, from France there arrived
Diario di un Operaio9 (Diary of a Worker) by Daniel Mothé (himself a
contributor to Socialisme ou Barbarie), translated by Montaldi and
launched by Romano Alquati in Turin, the factory city that was then
central to Italian automobile production. In his account of the daily
struggles of Renault workers, Mothé bitterly criticized leftist intellectu-
als for glorifying workers. Such glorification served only to justify the
hegemony of the party over a class, which was thus reduced to an
abstract unitary icon. Workers were more than strong arms with hungry
stomachs; they had their own values, everyday qualities, sufferings,
imaginaries, desires, pleasures, and material and spiritual satisfactions.
In short, they had their own subjectivity, both singular and collective.
From North America there came yet another stream of thought that the
Italians could draw from when elaborating their own experiences of
conricerca: the diaries of Taylorized workers (which included the essay
‘The American Worker’ by Paul Romano and the analyses of James
Boggs).10 Through research and rank-and-file political action, Montaldi
tried to allow elements of autonomy and protagonism to emerge from
below, freed of both marxist objectivism and socialist–communist bu-
reaucracy. He did this mainly by focusing on an atypical proletarian
subjectivity, often at the margins rather than at the centre of the class.
This subjectivity was characterized by moments of alterity and poten-
tial antagonism.11 To this end, he employed sociology without ever
reducing the theory of Marx to mere sociological theory.
In this synthetic cartography of Italian conricerca of the 1950s, we can
place Romano Alquati as the third point of the triangle, next to Pizzorno
and Montaldi.12 After working for a time with Montaldi, Alquati began
his own political trajectory, first in Milan and then in Turin, where he
breathed life (in theory but above all in practice) into a distinctively
political conricerca. His legacy passed through the defeats of the 1970s
and the deafening silence of the 1980s and 1990s, and is still alive today.
In the late 1950s, soon joined by Pierluigi Gasparotto, Emilio Soave, and
Romolo Gobbi, Alquati began exploring individual and collective worker
subjectivity as it changed through time, as the old figure of the profes-
sional worker, derived from factory artisans, gave way to the new
figure of the ‘mass worker,’ composed primarily of migrant peasants
from southern Italy.
In the 1950s, Italy made its late entry into Taylorism and Fordism,
and worker struggles soon resurfaced. At the forefront was the mass
worker, a product of the new factory systems. This figure had some
links with the proletarian and peasant cultures of conflict, which still
retained a degree of autonomy. The mass worker was viewed with
suspicion or outright hostility by the Italian Communist Party (PCI)
and by large segments of the trade union movement, the political
culture of which was steeped in the work ethic and the productivist
scientism of the professional worker. The political potential of this new
figure was understood only by small groups based outside the Workers’
Movement. These groups constituted the seedbeds of Italian political
workerism, which found expression in journals such as Quaderni Rossi
and Classe Operaia, and later in the experiences of Potere Operaio and
the various groups of Autonomia.13
Stimulated by a general ferment that was not only Italian but also
international, coresearchers smashed the mythical icon that had been
passed down by the socialist–communist tradition – the heroic working
class, lover of work, that sacrificed itself for everyone, that was made
up of pure angels of goodness. Instead they investigated what exactly
that new working class was, not only from a theoretical perspective but
in the materiality of struggles and power relations and in its quotidian
behaviour – in its subjectivity. Coresearchers saw the mass worker as a
leading figure in that cycle of struggles, not only because he was central
to the renewed capitalist productive cycle, but also because his objec-
tive position united subjective behaviours that were potentially in con-
flict. This subjectivity was not completely self-antagonistic; that said, it
offered spaces for resubjectification that could presage processes of
transformation. Thus, conricerca was an instrument not only for the
knowledge of subjectivity, but also for the construction of processes of
counterformation and for experimenting with organizational forms.
These forms were not parachuted in from the outside; rather, they were
constructed internally, in the relations among vanguards, militants, and
workers. In Ricordi sul secondo operaismo politico, Alquati maintained
that
the thing that in those years was most irksome to the historico-commu-
nists was catching the bolshevik contrast between spontaneity and orga-
nization off-balance by throwing down these two words: ‘spontaneous
organization!’ If a subterranean or submerged spontaneity managed to
come to light in an open struggle it meant that it had built that which we
called the rhizome of a spontaneous organization, similar in nature to the old
mole in Marx: a network of little moles, which however almost always

included militants that were in some way also interconnected with ‘ex-
ternal’ subjective and political forces ... At times the new strikes were
strongest where there were fewer comrades. The organization started from
below ... but then in order to grow qualitatively it needed something else. 14
Thus, conricerca developed as communication and cooperation, as a

process of resubjectification and counterformation, and as a forum for
the autonomous political representation of the ‘organized spontaneity’
of the workers.15
In the 1970s and (albeit without the benefit of struggles) the 1980s,
small groups of militant social scientists practised embryonic conricerca.
In the 1990s, well-intentioned paths of inquiry met with the various
objective difficulties and subjective limits that were discussed at the
beginning of this chapter. Today, perhaps, a new phase is emerging.
Today, conricerca needs to be rethought, in a context that at certain levels
has been profoundly transformed. It must be filled with new content
and practices, it must in part be reinvented.
Inquiry and Conricerca
Let us take a step back and consider what conricerca is. First of all, we
must distinguish between the method of conricerca and the method of
cooperation underlying its activities. In other words, we must distin-
guish between the construction of research tools and experimentation
with forms of political organization. At the same time, we must con-
sider how we can counterutilize the tools of capitalism – including
those forged by the social sciences – in order to empower our own
actions. Tools are not neutral: they need to be problematized, combined
in peculiar ways, bent, overturned, and transformed. So, it is a matter of
elaborating and constantly testing experimental methodologies that are
open and flexible; of counterutilizing even science in order to empower
the non-scientific action that is politics. And we must use those tools to
detect tendencies and transformative actions amidst the unpredict-
ability and contingency of the event.
On this basis, we can say that inquiry and conricerca are not the
same thing. There are at least three major differences between the two.
Inquiry, first of all, is extemporaneous – that is, it lasts for a pre-
determined time and then stops. This locates it in a medium- to short-
range perspective. Its articulation results more than anything else
in the rooting of a militant figure who is capable of expressing and

allowing for the growth of a knowledge of political intervention. In-
quiry gathers data about the political elements of social reality and
behaviours; about specific processes of struggle; about the composition
of conflict; and about the site where it has located itself. Conricerca, in
contrast, configures itself as an open process, a ‘spiral becoming’ that
constructs new levels of knowledge and practices, from which one can
always start again in order to build others. Second, inquiry is mainly
cognitive in its dimensions, whereas conricerca is the concrete activity
of transformation of that which exists. It locates itself in a medium-
range perspective and has a planning horizon.16 Third and finally,
inquiry presupposes a separation between the production of knowl-
edge and the construction of a political path, whereas in conricerca,
elaborations of strategy and choices of practices are internal rather
than external to the field of cooperation of the coresearchers, in terms
of flexible goals, purposes, and trajectories. Often, conricerca is impor-
tant as a space for the political counterformation of militants more
than for the results it offers. In this way it provides a system for effi-
cient political action.
Yet inquiry and conricerca are not mutually exclusive. On the con-
trary, inquiry amounts to a specific phase of conricerca. For example,
questionnaires can be distributed in order to better understand the
particular reality one wants to investigate and intervene in. This can
often be useful, as a means for exploring the chosen environment and
for building a communication network to advance one’s political and
coresearch actions.
Constructing and Experimenting: Open and Flexible

Models of Conricerca
So far, it should be clear that conricerca rejects the myth of scientific

objectivity. What is important instead is the methodological confronta-
tion: to begin from well-defined hypotheses in order to question them,
and from a sketch of a project in order to test one’s own practice
varying or enriching it along the way. A kind of ‘counterlearning by
doing’!
Schematizing in a highly reductive manner, the first phase of a
program of conricerca (which, as a process, is much more complex,
stratified, and articulated) can be subdivided methodologically into
three parts:
1 Formulate initial hypotheses and choose the particular composition

on which it will begin to move.
2 Contact the prechosen subjects and conduct interviews, then contact
new subjects and conduct new interviews.
3 Collectively verify the hypotheses, critique and/or enrich them,
elaborate on the results, and produce new knowledge, while experi-
menting with new practices for coresearching political cooperation.
The chosen instruments (the questionnaire, focused interviews, video

interviews, and so on) will vary according to specific requirements, and
more than one technique can be used at a time. What is important is to
never lose sight of the hypotheses, intentions, and aims of the project.
The hypotheses connect the research to the theory, which is always
undergoing critical re-elaboration. It can be useful for the group con-
ducting the project to compile a document that describes every phase,
from its starting hypotheses to the dissemination of findings.
If placed in communication with one another, made to interact, and
inserted into a circularity of comparison, such varied experiences can
give rise to experimental models, which in turn can be circulated, while
concomitantly autonomously producing new languages. In sum,
conricerca, as an unending production of knowledge that is other than
an open source practice, is truly unpatentable and against any copyright!
Coresearching New Paths of Transformation inside the Movement
Within the movement of movements it has been evident for some time –
at least in the Italian context – that there are widespread difficulties in
comprehending its potentialities and emergences. This movement has
amply demonstrated that it cannot be reduced to the sum of its orga-
nized components, which are regularly surpassed and shattered. On
the other side, militants have increasingly had to confront a generalized
difficulty in reading its real composition. All of this is at once a great
advantage and an evident problem. The plurality of practices and ac-
tive subjects has in fact exposed various interpretative grids as inade-
quate, putting into practice – in the materiality of processes rather than in
the domain of ideologies – a radical critique of political representation.
This, however, has yet to bring to the production of autonomous political
representation, in the form of the elaboration of planning, a sedimenta-
tion of relations of force, and processes of experimentation in organiza-
tional forms – flexible and transitory – that go beyond those already
definitively thrown into crisis. This is the problem, one that is not (fortu-
nately) resolvable by a simple substitution of political representation. It
is an open question, and hurried attempts to resolve it are not helpful.
Stated more simply, what is the situation, what are the forms of
action, and what are the thoughts of the hundreds of thousands of
people who since 1999 have filled the global streets from Seattle to
Genoa, from Quebec City to Johannesburg, from Melbourne to Flo-
rence, all the way up to the 110 million antiwar protesters who mobi-
lized on 15 February 2003? These actions have repeatedly denied the
arguments of those who at every possible turn hurriedly celebrated the
movement’s ‘funeral’! What subjectivities, at both individual and col-
lective levels, have emerged in the interweaving of collective processes
and singularities?
It is a matter of reading and rereading the great open questions of the
present through the lens of struggle, rather than the lens of capitalist
processes and their own self-legitimations. What is ‘work’ today, when
all human action becomes subjected to labour, when capital is valorized
and accumulated above all through consumption – as Naomi Klein has
documented in No Logo – and through one’s self-reproduction?17 What
are the new centralities? What ambivalences do they have? What forms
of conflict are adequate to such transformations? How is it possible to
think about a surpassing of the nation-state – a surpassing that is
constructed and directed by movements and not streamlined for sys-
temic processes? The urgent need is to rename and rethink processes
from a point of view that takes sides, after years of risky subalternity to
capitalistic interpretative categories.
Above all, therefore, there is the choice of where to conduct coresearch.
In its discriminating course, conricerca does not move only with those
who (as in The Matrix) seem to have swallowed the red pill (already
politicized subjects) or the blue pill (the happy and contented homog-
enized subjects, who have been ground up in the machinery of obedi-
ence and consent). What interests us is the grey zone in between, the
zone of fleeting and constantly shifting borders, the zone of those who
do not accept and who are politically active, who desire something else
but have yet to socialize their desires of transformation. This is the zone
of potenza (power), the space of what is possible, the place of strong
ambivalence, the fuel of the movement.
Thus it is necessary to acquire the capacity to move within a verti-
cally stratified system. Even in a phase of relative de- or re-spatialization
of forms of labour, places and social circles are not equivalent: there
exist new strategic sites to investigate, to interpret, on which to wager.

That said, political centrality is assigned not only by objective positions
of production and reproduction, but also by an interweaving with those
subjective potentialities which are actually operant. In short, a certain
subject is not politically central exclusively insofar as it works in a
strategic place within the overall systemic plan, nor only because it is
quantitatively great in number: it becomes central when it is capable of
producing conflict, of breaking given equilibriums, and of generalizing
its own struggles.
One’s coresearching actions must as much as possible root themselves
in the ambivalence of processes, knowing how to seize within them a
double-sided genealogy: one must know not only how to read the side of
capitalist command, but also the sign of conflict and refusal, of that oth-
erness of behaviours. That is the unmistakable negative of capital, the
side which has a potential to be activated in a process of self-transfor-
mation. Conricerca begins from a project and from hypotheses, tests them,
modifies and implements them, and then constructs more advanced lev-
els of knowledge and strength. To sum up: it is a matter of coresearching
to try to understand which forces are fighting for what kind of transfor-
mation with what kind of organization.
Constructing New Forms of Counter-cooperation
In this context, there are at least two unresolved matters that today
should be considered. (1) Social conflict, which both causes and ex-
presses itself in social movements, does not yet have the strength to
substantially alter the direction of global capitalism; and (2) some orga-
nized forces are attempting to intercept and condition these move-
ments, but these forces are often unable either to comprehend the
specificities of these movements or to construct the preconditions for
their alternative development. So a first goal might well be to under-
stand and confront these two open questions, by constructing some
hypotheses and in this way charting a path for research and interven-
tion. The method of conricerca is therefore fundamental, as is the place-
ment of those who carry it out. This method provides, above all, the
ability to recognize the difficult parts and levels of social reality present
in the system, and from this to construct a praxis that connects in a new
way the struggles with the subjects who constitute themselves as the
antagonistic side. As we have already seen, conricerca works in the
medium range (and at the levels included therein); it is a ‘hinge’ level
that connects the higher systemic levels, characterized by relative in-

variance, with the movements below, which are in rapid flux. Its effec-
tiveness lies in the militant’s movement upwards and downwards as he
or she engages in continuous interrelations and constructs relationships
between different levels of reality. It is necessary to deepen knowledge
and to comprehend the systemic complexities, and concurrently to syn-
thesize, select, and simplify adaptation to a precise goal, and then to
propose intermediate objectives and paths so that knowledges [conoscenze]
are transformed into know-how [saperi], which can then be formatted
and constituted so as to be partisan and therefore useful in strengthing
and lending incisiveness to political intervention.
The process of subjectification which proceeds both in constructing
for and negating oneself as a functionally constituent part of the system,
must traverse all levels of reality. It must move from the highest level of
abstraction in order to get to the lowest level of concrete factuality, and
then begin to rise again in a process of constant exchange and transfor-
mation that empowers political action. In this process there is the possi-
bility of constituting a form of social cooperation that is ‘other than’ and
politically counterposed to the capitalist political character, that struc-
tures autonomy and constructs individual and collective counterpaths
of liberation, all the while subtracting territory and undermining the
progress of the systemic perspective.
Conricerca is the construction of a particular kind of force that be-
comes the capacity for cooperation as well for effective power [potere].
Both are able to confront capitalist Power and cooperation. Conricerca is,
therefore, above all a constitutive process, one that is flexible and clearly
defined and that is implemented by giving life to a collective dimension
of accumulation, or rather, to the counter-accumulation of know-how
[saperi] and particular abilities directed towards the achievement of
precise antisystemic goals. Countersubjectification is constructed on a
path of mutual growth, through collectivities cooperating among them-
selves. In this way they are plurally empowered.
Therefore, there is or should be a class subjectivity (which remains
almost completely to be investigated or invented), within which there
moves and acts also an intermediate subjectivity that guides, attempts
to stabilize processes of struggle, of conflict, of alternative socialization,
building within this a conscious organizational presence that aims to
root itself and extend a project of counter-organization in order to
achieve processes of recomposition. In this way strength is given to the
intrinsically political character of the class, making emerge from am-
bivalences the conflict and the negation of oneself as a part of capital.

This strength, in turn, is composed of multiple single subjectivities that
are formed only through confrontation and through the encounter with
reality, which constitutes itself transversally in processes of action, of
reflection, of comprehension, of study, of elaboration of knowledges
[conoscenze], know-how [saperi], and theory.
Such a subjectivity would test itself and draw strength by transforming
and acting within the social reality, by opposing and denying the role
imposed on it by the capitalist system. This would deny a particular
relation of atomization and separation of individuals, who would then be
forced by the system to cooperate as long as they are organized towards the
ends of capitalist accumulation, which in accumulating surplus value and
Power [potere] consolidates and increase dominance, transforming the so-
cial system and the individuals that comprise and develop it. This denial
could occur even in the absence of broader alternative goals, which have
yet to be proposed through experimentation.
Conricerca is therefore also and above all a particular form of alterna-
tive organization that consolidates itself socially and that assumes a
precise political dimension. It must offer itself as the capacity to orga-
nize – and thus to keep together and allow to behave in a focused
manner – the collective and individual countersubjectivities in a spe-
cific form of social cooperation that is able to empower the anticapitalist
dimension. In constituting itself as a counterorganization, it constructs
a recompositional procedure; it explores and measures itself against
the spontaneity of the class, encouraging models of comprehension of
reality and of specific political action. It promotes events that are
unrepeatable, such as the breakage of certain equilibriums and the
overturning of relations of force. It is, in this sense, a precarious process
that is constantly changing and redefining itself. It involves the con-
struction of something that was not there before: a constant action of
self-empowerment and of destructuring the adversary. It is a re/search
for/of a strategy.
Where one carries out conricerca (because conricerca, intervention, and
presence are not separate dimensions), with whom, and under what
pretext, is as important as the method. Conricerca makes it possible to
identify the social, productive, and reproductive spaces where the power
relationship between resistance and capitalist development and the
resulting forms of mutability has become central. From such spaces can
emerge processes of aggregation, recomposition, and subjectification
across classes. Location is thus the result of a political choice, one that is
allowed by paths of inquiry into the direction of capital and of class
composition during a particular period. Those compositions are al-

ready the fruit of a particular form of action and of a manner of reflect-
ing and constructing synthesis.
Putting Experiments onto the Network
Small experiments in inquiry are already in progress, other promising

hypotheses are in the pipeline. Surrounding us there is a general need
to build forms of communication and confrontation, a strong demand
to place oneself on the ’net.18 The spaces and questions within which
experimentation is taking place suggest, in nuce, some conjecturable
strategic sites: schools and universities; migrants and migrant labour;
communication; and precarious labour, new forms of employment, and
of labour more generally. Amongst the different paths there are differ-
ences in localization, of scope, of perspective. Nonetheless, while avoid-
ing ill-auguring unitary icons, we need to pose ourselves the problem of
co-researching not only the multiplicity in what is shared, but also what
is shared in the multiplicity, if we do not want to risk jumping on the
bandwagon of the apologists of ‘weak thought’ who, not disposing of a
commanding knowledge of complexity, break it up into many smaller
fragments, laying claim to the properties of a specific part of the whole.
The taking of sides and the critique of universality that are our starting
points have nothing to do with democratic multiculturalism, an instru-
mental exaltation of diversity (amongst equals …) employed in order to
justify the cultural and political hegemony of the Western bourgeoisie.
As Christian Marazzi keenly points out,
the exaltation of a plurality of differences has resulted in the appearance

of some real monsters. The fact that a [Pim] Fortuyn is a subject of
multiple differences, and that he paid for this, developing a position of a
refusal of the other, of a refusal of Islamic culture (much like Huntington,
with whom he frequently aligned himself), seems to me to demonstrate
how ambiguous the question of the multiple and that of multiple differ-
ences are, when these are not brought back to the original problem, that is,
the problem of difference: certainly of gender difference, but also of the
difference between capital and labour, of the difference that gives sub-
stance to the conflict internal to and against capital.19
The difficult question is how to build a syncretic practice that, begin-

ning from one’s own irreducible and inalienable pluralities, can give
form and substance to the common goal of transformation. In other
words, how to tend towards that synthesis-within-complexity that is

one of the great strengths of Toni Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire20:
the ability to name one’s side and one’s enemy.
An analogous reasoning can be done with the concept of multitude.
The theories that interpret multitude as an already given subject, or as a
category that can be substituted for that of class, raise many questions.
The discussion of the multitude is interesting instead where it is con-
figured as a space for reflecting on the dynamic relationship between
the singularity and the collective, as a plural setting of a potential
resubjectification. 21 The emphasis here is on an irreducible partiality, on
the material critique of universalism forced into being by collective and
individual social behaviours (by the ‘right to flee’ practised by mi-
grants, for example). This points to the intrinsically political nature of
autonomous subjectifications that have always been concealed by ob-
jectivist analyses. A space that does not exclude the category of class,
but on the contrary indicates the need to rethink it; not in its sociological
or economic objectivity, but as a potentially antagonistic entity subjec-
tively redetermining itself. A space that, to conclude, problematizes and
redefines the relationship between intrinsically political nature – hence
material potentiality – and autonomous political representation, or an
organized transformation of systemic relationships.
The bet that today we find ourselves making consists in redefining
and in some aspects reinventing the practice of conricerca. One of the
most glaring problems (as we mentioned above) is the spatialization of
new forms of labour. In the 1950s and 1960s the industrial districts
concentrated and spatialized workers – at that point the segment of the
class leading the struggles – according to a well-defined temporality.
Today the situation is quite different. There is no social figure that is
central nowadays, and likely there will not be in the future, at least not
as there were in the past. At the same time, at least at first blush, there
are no longer circumscribed spaces in which are aggregated great quan-
tities of subjects put to work. From this perspective, we are witnessing a
despatialization of forms of labour and workers. On closer imspection,
it is perhaps better to speak of a relative despatialization, whereby
processes of despatialization accompany processes of respatialization.
For example, in Milan (the Italian capital of the ’Net economy), the old
industrial structures that fell into disuse are now occupied mainly by
the factories of communication, of the Internet, and of entertainment
and education (such as universities). The production of heavy tangible
commodities has left the stage, and been replaced by the production of
lighter intangible goods. The old workers have been replaced by the
new ’Net workers, the new reproducers of themselves. Discontinuities
and continuities mix. There remain, though, commodities, the slavery
of labour, capitalist command, profit as an objective, and the factory as
the mode of organizing production. Since the crisis of the new economy,
’Net workers have begun perceiving themselves subjectively and rec-
ognizing themselves as ‘knowledge workers’ (see Berardi, this volume).
Nonetheless, within this frame, new figures and new colours are begin-
ning to make up the painting – and thus new ambivalences.
Yet today we can turn the problem of spatiality upside down; in other
words, it is a matter of first constructing the spaces and then giving life
to paths of aggregation. Of rooting oneself in spaces that act as strategic
sites, and at the same time constructing spaces (mobile and even vir-
tual) in which dispersed subjects can root themselves. For example, an
academic publisher, a radio station, a newspaper, a website, and an
independent television station can be instruments for politically
spatializing diffuse subjects. Through these, one can begin and strengthen
the processes of conricerca. The important thing is to find ways to utilize
the plurality of means, to traverse them critically and transform them,
without thinking that one in particular can in itself be the bearer of a
new form of political action or of immediate liberation.
Decolonizing Subjectivity: Conricerca as Subversive Pedagogy
One of the most important results of conricerca is the construction of a

space for the political counter-formation of militants and of subjects
that manages to involve others in its own actions. During the decades
of ideologically triumphant capitalism, there was formed a social
subjectivity colonized largely by capital, by its models of life and
consumption, of culture and beliefs, of needs and desires.22 As the
practices of the ‘movement of movements’ have demonstrated, it is
possible to begin denting this colonization, to spread practices of
disobedience. It is now a matter of enlarging the crevices opened in
‘capitalist totalitarianism,’ and of consolidating and branching out in
various parts of society with the strength accumulated. This cannot
happen spontaneously, nor can it happen through some enlightened
leadership that has descended from above. Conricerca is, from this
perspective, an experiment in subversive pedagogy, in radical critiques
of knowledge and culture in the decolonization of subjectivity of the
construction of counter-subjectivity.
For such experimentation to work, it is necessary to position one’s

perspective beginning from the ambivalence of processes. Upsetting
one’s perspective can become a path to interpretative keys that pose
themselves as alternatives with respect to that which exists. For ex-
ample, the mass workers who in the 1950s and 1960s migrated from the
south towards the factory city of Turin, have been depicted by the Left
as dispossessed masses pushed northwards by misery. Actually, as the
coresearchers have demonstrated, these migrants were generally more
educated young people, bearers of conflictual cultures forged in the
struggles of the southern countryside, pushed by conditions of depriva-
tion, but also pulled by the search for a better life in another world, one
embodied in the siren call of mass consumption. Sandro Mezzadra
gives the same attention to subjective expectations when he speaks of
the migrant’s ‘right to flee.’ This is certainly not to negate the suffering
that pushes people to migrate, but rather to point out the activities of
refusal, which constantly exceed the self-proclaimed global order. 23
This brings to light the material critique of existing borders and the
international division of labour as put into practice by the migrants.
Again, think of the interpretation given to the flexibility of workers.
This flexibility today has certainly become a hammer for rendering
certain conditions of life precarious; yet how can we not see in this a
strong sign of the refusal of labour, of the worker’s struggles to flee the
chains of dependency? If we forget one side – that of conflict and
subjective expectations – we end up weeping endlessly about the ‘evil’
of capitalism, which unilaterally attacks an inert and disembodied ‘mar-
tyr’ proletariat. If we forget the other side – that of domination – we can
find ourselves mistaking processes of systemic innovation for the cho-
sen path of liberation.
Once again, it is a matter of changing course – of not limiting ourselves
to a condemnation of exploitation, and of leveraging the subjective
needs, expectations, and aspirations of a possible liberation.24 To move
politically within ambivalence is to know to analyse the two sides of
processes in order to build a third perspective: that which is not there.
This is the perspective of radical transformation.
The movement of movements, having forced the world to pay
attention to it during the battle in the streets of Seattle, is currently
completing an important passage. Inaccurately referred to as an ‘anti-
globalization’ movement, it is becoming the active subject of another
globalization, within and against that of markets. There can be no
nostalgia for what we are leaving behind, beginning with the parochial
borders of the nation-state. The new movements can of course also

accumulate force by re-elaborating that force which is found in the
legacies of anticapitalist struggles – the capacity to recognize oneself
within a history, to use it critically and to further it. At the same time,
though, we must point out some evident discontinuities with respect to
the short-circuits and failures of the past, so as to bury that which is
dead, shake off bothersome ideological encrustations, and defeat use-
less reductive ghosts. It is necessary to know how to die in order to be born
different. This is all the while accompanied by only one certainty:
counterglobalization can realize itself only through the materiality of
conflicts and the functionality of certain (mobile) planning goals, not
beginning from the precautionary elaboration of institutional orderings
that are actually its own posthumous mediation, or from anticipated
attempts at normalization.
With great lucidity, Franco Berardi (Bifo) states the open question that
the movement of movements must confront: How are we to pass
from the pervasiveness of means of communication (such as the Internet)
to the invasiveness of means of communication (from the flyer to televi-
sion, says Bifo)? Reflecting on the complexity of the system is a com-
pletely different thing from becoming complacent about complexity
understood as an infinite and never-synthesizable sum of many parts.
The alleged end of grand narratives has opened the ideological field to
capitalism as the only narrative possible. The movement, with the still
embryonic force of its own struggle, took care of cleaning the slate of
such illusory ideas of pacification. To say ‘another world is possible’ is
to open a great new collective narration, one that is not univocal but
rather is made up of many irreducible singular narrations. The prob-
lem, then, is how to hold together the command of complexity with the
capacity to act afforded by simplification, while at the same time mov-
ing between different levels of reality. That is, how are we to pass from
the pervasiveness of intrinsic political character and of the microphys-
ics of power, to the invasiveness of the political as the planned subver-
sion of the present, the construction of counterpower, and the injection
into the systemic relationships of power and domination? In other
words, how are we to plant within material processes those instances of
transformation that the movements make emerge during large events?
How are we to verticalize the proliferation of struggles, and from there
redescend to contribute towards their further spreading, in a dynamic
circularity that is constant and endless?
Philip K. Dick, analysing the evident difference between his Do An-
droids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the cinematographic version of Blade

Runner, noted that the book and the film do not get in each other’s way,
but instead mutually reinforce each other. This is because, said Dick, the
difference lies in the fact that where a book speaks, a film moves; a book
has to do with words, a film with events. This is exactly the point: to
recombine in dynamic fashion the power [potenza] of words with the
force of the event, the film of a revolution without end with the book of
another world to be invented, against and beyond capitalism. Which is
to say: the decolonization of individual and collective subjectivity, the
decommodification of connections and relations, the delabouring of
human activity.25 To organize energies in order to transform them into a
plural and mobile strategy: this is the challenge that the movement of
movements can take on, if it wants to pass from the red zone of the
countersummits to the ambivalent ‘grey zone’ potentially activatable in
paths of conflictual rootedness, capillary transformation, and sedimen-
tation of planning skills. Let us not begin with the pretence of giving
answers: it would already be a lot to begin to pose to others and to
ourselves questions that open perspectives: this is conricerca.
NOTES
1 The Italian term conricerca is roughly translatable as ‘coresearch,’ or ‘re-

search with.’ The original term has been preserved wherever possible.
Where it is used as a verb (as in ‘conricercando’), the word has been trans-
lated into its rough English equivalent and conjugated accordingly (thus,
for the previous example, ‘co-researching’ would be used). (Translator’s
note.)
2 In the present essay the analysis of concrete experiences – both of inquiries
and of movements – begins with the Italian context. Not as much because or
at least not only because (as more than one commentator has suggested) this
country is an important political laboratory for the practices of the move-
ment; but above all because it is the situation in which we are located and of
which we can most appropriately speak. We begin with the ‘Italian prov-
ince,’ therefore, so as not to remain spatially ensnared in it. This is in fact the
prospect with which every political reality must reckon: either we direct our
territorial rootedness towards a tendentially global scenario, or we run the
risk of imposing heavy and nostalgic limits on our perspectives. Above all,
during a phase in which struggles have demolished the old radical model
according to which the most advanced point of the struggle reveals the
future to those further behind. We find ourselves within a mode of pro-

duction that offers analogous characteristics at a global level; what vary are
the gradations and the local specificities – in other words, the non-homog-
enization of the productive and reproductive dynamics.
3 On the untranslatability from Italian to English of potenza and potere, see
Michael Hardt’s introduction to one of Negri’s books on Spinoza, The
Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). There the problem is solved by
translating potenza as ‘power’ and potere as ‘Power.’ I have maintained this
distinction for the purposes of this translation. (Translator’s note)
4 A clarification and a premise. First, we will not deal with the genesis and
diverse practices of conricerca, or better, the multiple conricercas, in a
historiographically or analytically complete manner. Such a task would
demand a good deal more space and different objectives. Some will pro-
ceed by offering highlights. Second, the experience from which the au-
thors of this essay begin is a conricerca on operaismo (workerism) and
political subjectivity, the point of reference for which is Romano Alquati.
A first phase was concretized in a work titled Futuro anteriore. Dai
‘Quaderni Rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano
(Rome: Deriveapprodi, 2002). Through qualitative in-depth interviews
with almost sixty of the political protagonists of the various experiences
that are a part of the composite galaxy of Italian political workerism, a
critical analysis was attempted of the experiences in question, and of the
subjective paths taken, in order to grapple with questions that currently
remain unresolved. The modus operandi of conricerca, adopted from the
beginning as a perspective and a project, took form in the successive
debates and above all in a conference held in Rome at the beginning of
June 2002, during which intellectuals and political militants engaged with
diverse research groups presently active in Italy and (to a lesser extent)
Europe. In this way there was launched that reticular process of engage-
ment and elaboration, of interrelation and cooperation, which is the
essence of conricerca.
5 One might refer to texts such as The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing
American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950); and
Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1952).
6 Alessandro Pizzorno, ‘Abbandonare la sociologia-letteratura per una
sociologia-scienza,’ in Opinione – mensile di politica e cultura 1 (May 1956): 25.
7 In accordance with the cult of the organic intellectual, it was held that
marxist theory was a completely self-sufficient science.
8 Among others, the journal featured the work of Claude Léfort, Jean-
François Lyotard, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Edgar Morin, all of whom –
via different routes, sometimes less political and more academic – became
well known in the European intellectual landscape of the following
decades.
9 Daniel Mothe, Diario di un operaio (1956–1959), trans. D. Montaldi (Turin:
Einaudi, 1960).
10 Paul Romano’s work, which had already appeared in Socialisme ou
Barbarie, was translated in 1954 by Montaldi and published in instalments
by the newspaper Battaglia Comunista, a political organ of the PCI.
11 See for example Montaldi’s Autobiografie della leggera (Turin: Einaudi,
1961), an important piece of research on atypical proletarian figures in
the industrialization phase of the Valle Padana in northern Italy. Another
excellent example of his work is to be found in Militanti politici di base
(Turin: Einaudi, 1971), a collection of biographies of militants living in the
Cremonese and Bassa Padana districts. Finally, the study on immigrants
carried out with F. Alasia, Milano corea (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960) should be
noted.
12 Some of the conricerca projects carried out by Romano Alquati are dis-
cussed in Sulla Fiat e altri scritti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975); Università di ceto
medio e proletariato intellettuale (Turin: Stampatori, 1978) is an anticipatory
and lucid analysis of the processes of transformation of the figure of the
student; the latter is already in practice a knowledge worker. Also on the
theme of university and training there should be noted ‘L’università e la
formazione l’incorporamento del sapere sociale nel lavoro vivo,’ in Aut
Aut (Florence: Luglio-agosto, 1976), 154; Introduzione a un modello sulla
formazione (Turin: Segnalibro, 1992); and Cultura, formazione e ricerca.
Industrializzazione di produzione immateriale (Turin: Velleità Alternative,
1994). Even in recent years Alquati has put into circulation valuable
theorizations and instruments with which conricerca experiences can be
put into practice. The fruits of this are Per fare conricerca (Turin: Velleità
Alternative, 1993); and Camminando per realizzare un sogno comune (Turin:
Velleità Alternative, 1993).
13 For a critical analysis of such experiences, see Futuro anteriore.
14 The text is forthcoming. A first version is contained in the CD-ROM
enclosed with Futuro anteriore.
15 Soon enough, however, within the Quaderni Rossi journal there developed
a split between those who saw conricerca as an instrument of political
action, and those who instead attempted to recuperate more classical
forms of worker inquiry, preferring to keep themselves at the margins of a
production of knowledge that did not imply direct intervention in the

mounting worker struggles. The former gave life to Classe Operaia, the
latter put out three more issues of Quaderni Rossi.
16 The medium range is a position that acts as a hinge between a higher
dimension of elaboration and production of a political synthesis aimed at
hypothesizing larger goals and transitional passages, and a lower dimen-
sion of the movement, where the massification of behaviour and the
articulations of struggle and conflict act also on the quantitative diffusion
as an element with which to invest existent power relations. There is
therefore also a specificity of figures of militancy in recognizing the
necessity to consider and move oneself with a praxis that must flow from
the diversity of systemic levels.
17 While few lines are dedicated to this strategic question in this essay,
Romano Alquati’s forthcoming Sulla riproduzione della capacità-umana-
vivente oggi (Rome: Manifestolibri) is fundamental in this respect. The text
places itself in continuity with the elaboration begun in the preceding
volume, Lavoro e attività. per una analisi della schiavitù neomoderna (Rome:
Manifestolibri, 1997).
18 In order to facilitate communication, a mailing list has been established as
a useful instrument for an embryonic and open network between different
experiences of inquiry and, basically, of conricerca. The address is:
conricerca_futuroanteriore@inventati.org.
19 Christian Marazzi, speaking at the Operaismo a convegno seminar, Rome,
1–2 June 2002.
20 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2000).
21 In this respect, the approach taken by Sandro Mezzadra and M. Ricciardi
is a valuable one: ‘Individuo e politica: uno spartito marxiano,’ in Derive
approdi (Rome: Primavera 2002), 21.
22 Let us make one thing clear: the term colonization has nothing to do with
the Marxist vicious circle in which there is presented a capital that inevita-
bly shapes the proletariat into thinking according to its own categories.
There is no escape according to this reasoning! And let us also go beyond
the Gramscian notion of hegemony that aims at a simple cultural and
political guidance from above that appropriates and gives direction to the
diffuse popular sensibility. With Slavoj ~iíek we should provocatively ask:
‘Why are the dominant ideas not the ideas of the dominant?’ (See ~iíek,
Difesa dell’intolleranza (Troina: Città aperta edizioni, English edition, 2003,
17). Colonization is the (temporary and reversible) streamlining for capi-
talist goals of behaviours and languages – genealogically ambivalent
ones – that do not necessarily come from above, but instead often go
beyond or are actually from the beginning explicitly opposed to the logic
of domination. One has only to think of the capitalist subsumption of the
political lexicon of struggles: the instances of worker’s autonomy from
work have been distorted and mystified so that they are now presented as
autonomous labour; the demand for flexibility in the control over life-time
has become precariousness; the only revolution spoken of is the one brought
by information technologies or by the new economy; and so on. Or one
might reflect on how activities borne in the setting of certain cultures and
social practices become styles to be fed to mass hyperconsumption (the
success of ‘ethnic’ products, for example). This reveals to us how the
nature of language is never neutral. The well-thought-out slogan ‘Don’t
hate the media, become the media’ is important, but on its own is not
enough: if the autonomous production of signs and meaning manages to
disrupt the order of dominant discourse, it will risk remaining trapped by
rapid processes of subsumption. The problem is that of going beyond the
order of given discourse, of breaking through it, transforming it: to con-
struct alternative discourses as fields of battle for new signs and senses.
23 Sandro Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2002).
24 From this perspective, especially significant cues are offered by the re-
search being done around ‘Subaltern Studies.’ Here, Indian historians are
rereading the history of colonialism according to a perspective that is
completely different from the one offered by various traditional litera-
tures. It is capable, therefore, of bringing to the fore the complex relation-
ships between domination and resistances, between colonial violence and
insubordination that constituted its material dynamics. The ‘subaltern’
therefore cease to be empty categories or mythical icons, depicted as
criminals by official historiography, or by the paternal rhetoric of national
elites, by marxist historiography’s abstract call of history as the struggle
for socialism. Put differently, subaltern studies theorists have been able to
bring to the fore the living flesh of the processes of subjectivation, config-
uring the autonomous, plural, and contradictory space in which there
played itself out a politics of the rebels, the true subjects of the revolts,
of the insurrections, and of the proletarian struggles. It is a matter of a
methodological perspective that seems to recall, in another context and
with its own specificities, that revolutionary inversion of perspective
condensed in the heuristic formula of Mario Tronti’s ‘first class, then
capital’: in other words, it is the struggles that are the motor of processes,
it is worker insubordination that forces capitalism to take the initiative.
25 Labour is a specific activity that yields capital, and therefore a source of

exploitation and alienation, which is opposed to free human activity. This
counts – in different ways and with different ambivalent perspectives –
both for the production of tangible commodities as for the production and
reproduction of intangible commodities, both for the old workers of the
assembly line and (in different objective and subjective forms) for the new
reproductive and cognitive workers. And there is no mistaking of labour
for employment: all of human life is tendentially subjected to labour.
186 Colectivo Situaciones
10 On the Researcher-Militant
colectivo situaciones
Translated by Sebastián Touza
At long last we have learned that power – the state, understood as a

privileged locus of change – is not the site par excellence of the political.
As Spinoza stated long ago, such power is the place of sadness and of
the most absolute impotence. Thus we turn to counterpower. For us,
emancipatory thought does not look to seize the state apparatus to
implement change; rather, it looks to flee those sites, to renounce insti-
tuting any centre or centrality.
Struggles for dignity and justice continue: the world, in its entirety, is
being questioned and reinvented again. It is this activation of struggle –
a true counteroffensive – that encourages the production and diffusion
of the hypotheses of counterpower.
Popular struggle has recently re-emerged in Argentina. The piquetes1
and the insurrection of December 20012 have accelerated the pace of
radicalization.3 Commitment to and questions about concrete forms
of intervention are once again crucial. This counteroffensive works in
multiple ways and confronts not only visible enemies, but also those
activists and intellectuals who intend to encapsulate the social practices
of counterpower in pre-established schemes.
According to James Scott, the point of departure of radicality is
physical, practical, social resistance.4 Any power relation of subordina-
tion produces encounters between the dominant and the dominated. In
these spaces of encounter, the dominated display a public discourse
that consists in saying that which the powerful would like to hear. This
reinforces the appearance of their own subordination, while – silently,
in a space invisible to power – a world of clandestine knowledge [saber]
is being produced that belongs to the experience of microresistance and
insubordination.
On the Researcher-Militant 187
This happens on a continuous basis except in times of rebellion, when

the world of the oppressed comes to public light, surprising both friends
and strangers. Thus, the universe of the dominated exists as a scission:
as active servility and voluntary subordination, but also as a silent
language that allows the circulation of jokes, rituals, and knowledges
that form the codes of resistance.
It is this precedence of resistances that grounds the figure of the
researcher-militant, whose journey is to carry out theoretical and practi-
cal work oriented towards coproducing the knowledges and modes of
an alternative sociability, beginning with the potencia (power)5 of those
subaltern knowledges.6
Militant research works neither from its own set of knowledges about
the world nor from how things ought to be. On the contrary, the only
requirement for researcher-militants is a difficult one: to remain faithful
to their ‘not knowing.’ In this sense, such research is an authentic
antipedagogy – which is what Joseph Jacotot wanted.7
Thus, the researcher-militant is as far from institutional procedures as
from ideological certainties; and is distinct from both the academic
researcher and the political militant, not to mention the NGO humani-
tarian, the alternative activist, or the simply well-intentioned person.
The question the researcher-militant faces is, rather, how to organize life
according to a series of hypotheses (practical and theoretical) on the
ways to (self)emancipation.
To work in autonomous collectives that do not obey rules imposed by
academia requires the forging of positive links with subaltern, dis-
persed, and hidden knowledges, and the production of a body of prac-
tical knowledges of counterpower. This is quite the opposite of using
social practices as a source of confirmation for laboratory hypotheses.
Research-militancy, then, is also the art of establishing compositions
that will endow with potencia the projects and elements of alternative
sociability.
Academic researchers are subjected to an entire set of alienating
mechanisms that separate them from the very meaning of their activity:
they must accommodate their work to predetermined rules, topics, and
conclusions. Funding, supervision, terminology, red tape, empty con-
ferences, and useless protocols determine the parameters within which
official research unfolds.
Research-militancy distances itself from circuits of academic produc-
tion – without, of course, opposing or ignoring them. Far from disavow-
ing or negating university research, it is a question of encouraging
another relationship with popular knowledges. Knowledges produced

by academia are usually linked to the market and to scientific dis-
course, scorning any other forms; what characterizes research mili-
tancy is the quest for sites where those same knowledges can be com-
posed with popular ones. Research-militancy attempts to work under
alternative conditions, created by the collective itself and by its ties to
counterpower; it pursues its own efficacy in producing knowledges
useful to the struggles.
Research-militancy thus modifies its position: it tries to generate a
capacity for struggles to read themselves, and to capture and dissemi-
nate the advances and productions of other social practices.
Unlike the political militant, for whom politics always takes place in
its own separate sphere, the researcher-militant is a character composed
of questions and is not saturated by ideological meanings and models
of the world. Nor is research-militancy a practice of ‘committed intel-
lectuals’ or of a group of ‘advisors’ to social movements. The goal is
neither to politicize nor intellectualize the social practices. It is not a
question of managing to get them to make a leap in order to pass from
the social to ‘serious politics.’
The trail of multiplicity is the opposite to these images of the leap and
of seriousness: it is not about teaching, nor is it about disseminating key
texts; rather, it is about looking into practices for emerging traces of a
new sociability. When separated from practices, the language of re-
search-militancy becomes reduced to jargon, mere fashion, or a new
pseudo-academic ideology deprived of situational8 anchoring.
In more practical terms, research-militancy develops through work-
shops and collective reading. Together, these produce the conditions for
thinking about and disseminating productive texts. By these processes,
researcher-militants generate networks linked by concrete experiences of
struggle. Since 2000, we have followed a specific path within the magma
of social practices, encounters, and discoveries that have come to be
called the ‘Argentine laboratory.’ This laboratory is most famous for the
insurrection of a new type that took place on 19 and 20 December 2001.
To disseminate the findings to which this path has led us, we have
created our own publishing house, De Mano en Mano,9 through which
we have published a series of dossiers, drafts, and books that have
nourished research with their effects. In the following section we dis-
cuss a series of hypotheses about the concept of the researcher-militant,
as they have emerged at different points along this path. These hypo-
theses are still being developed and need to be understood as provi-
sional.
1. Research-Militancy Does Not Have an Object
We are aware of the paradoxical character of the above statement – if

there is research, it must follow that something is being researched; if
there is nothing to do research on, how can we talk about research? But
at the same time, we are certain that this conundrum is precisely what
lends potencia to the inquiry. In fact, to do research without objectual-
izing10 already implies abandoning the usual image of the researcher,
which is what the researcher-militant actually strives to do.
Research can be a path to objectualization (we are not being original
when we confirm this old knowledge; still, it is worth recalling that this
is one of the most serious limits to the researcher’s typical subjectivity).
As Nietzsche reminds us, the theoretical man (or woman) – who is
somewhat more complex than ‘the reading man (or woman)’ – is the
one who perceives action from an entirely external point of view (that
is, his/her subjectivity is constituted in a way that is completely inde-
pendent with respect to that action). Thus, the theoretician works by
attributing an intention to the subject of the action. Let’s be clear: any
attribution of this type supposes, with respect to the protagonist of the
action that is being observed, an author and an intention; it confers
values and objectives, and in the end it produces ‘knowledges’ about
the action (and the one who acts).
Thus, criticism remains blind in two important ways. First of all, with
respect to the (external) subject that exercises the criticism. Researchers
are not required to investigate themselves. They can construct consis-
tent knowledges on the situation as long as, and precisely thanks to,
their being outside, at a prudent distance, which supposedly guaran-
tees a certain objectivity. This objectivity is authentic and effective to
the extent that it is nothing more than the converse of the violent
objectualization of the situation they are working with.
But criticism remains blind in a second way: researchers, in the pro-
cess of attributing, are merely adapting the available resources of their
own research situation to the unknowns their object presents to them. In
this way, they set themselves up as machines that confer meanings,
values, interests, affiliations, causes, influences, rationalities, intentions,
and unconscious motives to their object.
Both blindnesses – which are in fact the same blindness, but affecting
two different points (that of the subject that attributes, and that of the
resources of the attribution) – converge in a single mechanism for
judging good and evil according to a set of available values.
This modality of knowledge production presents us with a clear
dilemma. Traditional university research, with its object, its method of

attribution, and its conclusions, generates valuable knowledges – above
all descriptive ones – regarding the objects on which it does research.
But these descriptive operations are in no way subsequent to the forma-
tion of the object, because the form of the object itself is already the
result of objectualization. This is so to the extent that university research
is much more effective the more it uses those objectualizing powers.
Science – and especially ‘social’ science – operates more as separator,
and reifier, of the situations in which it participates than as an internal
element in the creation of possible experiences (be they practical or
theoretical).
Researchers offer themselves as subjects of a synthesis of experience.
It is they who explain why things happen. And they are preserved as
such: as necessary blind spots of such synthesis. They themselves, as
meaning-giving subjects, remain exempt from any self-examination.
They and their resources – their values, their notions, their gaze – are
constituted in the machine that classifies, coheres, inscribes, judges,
discards, and excommunicates. In the end, the intellectuals are the ones
who ‘do justice’ to the matters of truth, as administrators – and adapt-
ors – of that which exists regarding the horizons of rationality of the
present.
2. The ‘Militant’ Character of Research
We have talked about commitment and militancy. Are we suggesting

that the political militant is superior to the university researcher?
No, we are not. Political militancy is also a practice with an object. As
such, it has remained tied to a mode of instrumentality: one that con-
nects itself to other experiences of a subjectivity that is always already
constituted, with prior knowledges – of strategy – equipped with uni-
versally valid statements that are purely ideological. Its form of being
with others is utilitarian: there is never affinity, always ‘agreement.’
There is never encounter, always ‘tactics.’ In sum, political militancy –
especially that of the ‘party’ – cannot constitute itself as an experience
of authenticity. From the start it gets trapped in transitivity: what inter-
ests it about a social practice is always ‘something other’ than the actual
social practice itself. From this perspective, political militancy – includ-
ing left militancy – is as external, judgmental and objectifying as uni-
versity research.
Nor do humanitarian militants – that is, people who work within
NGOs – escape from these manipulative mechanisms. The now-global-

ized humanitarian ideology constitutes itself from an idealized image
of the world already made, a world that cannot be modified. Faced with
such a world, we can only dedicate efforts to those places, more or less
exceptional, where misery and irrationality reign.
The mechanisms unleashed by solidarity humanitarianism foreclose
any possible creation; they also naturalize – through their charitable re-
sources and language of exclusion – the victimizing objectifying that sepa-
rates individuals from their subjectifying and productive possibilities.
When we refer to commitment and to the ‘militant’ character of
research, we do so in a precise sense, one that is connected to four
conditions: (a) the motives behind the research; (b) its practical charac-
ter (its elaboration of situated practical hypotheses); (c) the value of
what is being researched – the product of research can only be fully
grasped when it shares, with the problematic being investigated, the
same constellation of conditions and preoccupations; and (d) its proce-
dures – its development is already itself a result, and this result leads to
an immediate intensification of the procedures that are being employed.
3. A Radical Criticism of Current Values
Idealization always strengthens the mechanism of objectification. This

is a serious concern for research militancy.
The mechanism of attribution always leads to idealization (even if
that mechanism is not given under the modality of scientific or political
pretensions). Idealization – as with any ideologization – expels from the
constructed image anything that could make it fail as an ideal of coher-
ence and plenitude. Whatever the idealists think, any ideal is more on
the side of death than on the side of life. The ideal amputates reality
from life. The concrete – life itself – is partial and irremediably incoher-
ent, and contradictory. As long as it persists in its capacities and potencias,
life has no need to adjust itself to any image that would give it meaning
or justify it. Quite the opposite: life itself is the creative source – not the
object or depositary – of the values of justice. In fact, any idea of a pure
or full subject amounts to nothing but the preservation of that ideal.
This mechanism of idealization is clearly at work in the figure of the
excluded as it has been used to define the unemployed in Argentina; as
we have pointed out: ‘Exclusion is the place that our biopolitical societ-
ies produce to be able to include people, groups, and social classes in a
subordinate way.’11
Thus, idealization conceals an inadvertently conservative operation:

once again, behind the purity and the vocation for justice that seem to
give it origin, we find dominant values lurking. Hence the righteous
appearance of idealists: they want to do justice – that is to say, they
want to materialize and bring into effect those values they hold as good.
Idealists merely project those values onto the idealized (at the moment
when that which was multiple and complex turns into an object, an
ideal), and they do so without interrogating themselves about their
own values – that is to say, without having a subjective experience that
transforms them. This mechanism reveals itself as the most serious
obstacle for the researcher-militant. Idealization originates in subtle
and almost imperceptible forms, and gradually produces an unbridge-
able distance. This is so to the extent that researcher-militants only see
what they have projected onto what is already a plenitude.
That is why research-militancy cannot be carried out unless serious
work is done on the research collective itself; in other words, the latter
cannot exist without seriously investigating itself, without modifying
itself, without reconfiguring itself in the social practices in which it
takes part, without reviewing the ideals and values it holds dear, with-
out permanently criticizing its ideas and readings – in the end, without
developing practices in all the possible directions.12
This ethical dimension points to the very complexity of research-
militancy – to the subjective work of deconstructing any inclination
towards objectualization. In other words, of doing research without an
object.
As in genealogy, it is a question of working at the level of the ‘criti-
cism of values.’ It is about penetrating those values and destroying
‘their statues,’ as Nietzsche affirms. But this work, which is oriented by
and towards the creation of values, cannot be done through mere ‘con-
templation.’ It requires a radical critique of current values. That is why
it implies an effort to deconstruct the dominant forms of perception
(interpretation, valorization). There can be no creation of values with-
out the production of a subjectivity that is capable of submitting itself to
a radical criticism.
4. Producing Non-utilitarian Ties
Another question arises: Is it possible to engage in such research with-

out at the same time setting in motion a process of falling in love? How
can there be a tie between two social practices without strong feelings of
love or friendship?
Certainly, the experience of research-militancy resembles that of the

person in love, with the proviso that love is what a long philosophical
tradition – the materialist one – understands by it: it is not something
that just happens to one with respect to another, but a process that
requires two or more.13 This sort of love relation participates without
the mediation of an intellectual decision; instead, the existence of two
or more finds itself pierced by this shared experience. This is not an
illusion, but an authentic experience of antiutilitarianism, which con-
verts the ‘one’s own’ into the ‘common.’
In love, and in friendship, in contrast to the mechanisms we have
described so far, there is neither objectification nor instrumentalism.
Nobody restrains himself or herself from what that tie can do, nor is it
possible to leave that tie uncontaminated. We do not experience friend-
ship or love in an innocent way: all of us emerge from the experience
reconstituted. These potencias – love and friendship – have the power to
constitute, qualify, and remake the subjects they catch.
This love – or friendship – constitutes itself as a relation that renders
undefined what until that moment was kept as individuality, compos-
ing a figure comprising more than one body. And individual bodies, as
they participate in this relationship, cause all the mechanisms of ab-
straction – deployments that turn the bodies into quantified exchange-
able objects that are just as characteristic of the capitalist market as the
other objectualizing mechanisms we have mentioned.
That is why we consider such love to be a condition of research-
militancy.
We usually refer to this process of friendship or falling in love by a
less compromising term – composition. Unlike articulation, composition
is not merely intellectual.14 It is based neither in interests nor in criteria
of convenience (political or other). Unlike ‘accords’ and ‘alliances’ (stra-
tegic or tactic ones, partial or total), which are founded in textual
agreements, composition is more or less inexplicable and goes beyond
anything that can be said about it. In fact, while it lasts, it is much more
intense than any merely political or ideological compromise.
Love and friendship tell us about the value of quality over quantity:
the collective body composed of other bodies does not increase its
potencia according to the mere quantity of its individual components,
but in relation to the intensity of the tie that unites those bodies.
5. Research-Militancy Does Not Intend to Be a New Party Line
It works – necessarily – on another plane.

If we maintain the distinction between ‘politics’ (understood as

struggles for power) and the social practices in which processes of
production of sociability or values come into play, we can begin to
distinguish the political militant (who founds his/her discourse in
some set of certainties) from the researcher-militant (who organizes
his/her perspective beginning with critical questions about those
certainties).
This distinction is often lost when a social practice is presented as a
model and carelessly turned into the source of a party line.
This is how some come to believe they have seen the birth of a
‘situationist’ line, as the idealized product of language or even the
jargon of the publication and image (which, apparently, the notebook15
transmits, at least among some readers).
Detractors and supporters of this new line have turned it into a
source of disputes and conspiracies. In this regard, we can’t help but
admit that, of all the possible outcomes of this research, these are the
ones that concern us least, because they are so unproductive, and be-
cause such idealizations (positive or negative) usually work against a
more critical look at those who make them. As a consequence, a too-tidy
position is rapidly adopted in the face of what is meant to be an opening
exercise.
6. The Immanence of Research-Militancy
Let us take one more step in the construction of the concept of research
without an object, of thought that resists becoming ‘knowledge.’ Interi-
ority and immanence are not necessarily identical processes.
Inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, are – if we are allowed
such an expression – categories of the dominant ideology: they usually
hide much more than they reveal. Research-militancy is not about being
inside a social practice, but about working in immanence.
The difference can be presented in the following terms: The inside
(and so the outside) defines a position organized within a certain limit
that we consider relevant. Inside and outside refer to the site of a
body or element in relation to a disjunction or a boundary. To be inside
is also – accordingly – to share a common property, one that makes us
belong to the same set.
This system of references raises questions about where we are situ-
ated – about nationality, social class, and even the position in which we
choose to situate ourselves with regard to, say, the next elections, the
military invasion of Colombia, or cable television programming.
In the extreme, ‘objective’ belonging (that which derives from the

observation of a common property) and ‘subjective’ belonging (that
which derives from choosing with regard to) come together for the
benefit of the social sciences. Thus, if we are unemployed workers, we
can choose to enter a piquetero movement; if we belong to the middle
class, we can choose to be part of a neighbourhood assembly. Through
determination – common belonging to the same group, in this case
social class – choice becomes both possible – and desirable.
In both cases, being inside implies respecting pre-existing limits
that distribute places and belonging in more or less involuntary ways.
It is not so much a question of disavowing the possibilities that derive
from the moment of choice – which can be, as in this example, highly
subjectivating – as it is about distinguishing the mere ‘being’ and its
‘inside’ (or ‘outside,’ it doesn’t matter) from the mechanisms of sub-
jective production that arise when we disobey these destinies. In the
end, it is not so much a question of reacting when faced with already
codified options as it is about producing the terms of the situation
ourselves.
In this sense, it is worth presenting the image of immanence as
something other than merely being inside.
Immanence refers to a mode of inhabiting the situation. It operates
from composition – from love or friendship – in order to bring about
new possible materials. Immanence, then, is a constitutive co-belonging
that transverses representations of the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside.’ As
such, it does not derive from being there; rather, it requires an operation
of inhabiting, of composing.
To sum up: the concepts of immanence, situation, and composition
are internal to the experience of research-militancy. They are terms that
are useful for operations that organize a common and above all constitu-
tive becoming. If in another social practice they become the jargon of a
new party line or the categories of a fashionable philosophy – some-
thing that does not interest us in the least – they will for certain acquire
new meanings on the basis of uses that are not ours.
The operational difference between the ‘inside’ of representation (foun-
dation of belonging and identity) and the connection of immanence
(constitutive becoming) has to do with the greater disposition this last
form confers on us to participate in new social practices.
7. What Research-Militancy Produces Is beyond Confrontation
It seems as if we have produced a difference between love/friend-

ship and the forms of objectification against which the figure of the
researcher-militant rises up, however precariously.
Nevertheless, we have not yet touched on the fundamental issue of
the ideologization of confrontation.
Struggle activates capacities, resources, ideals, and solidarities. As
such, it tells us about a vital disposition, about dignity. In struggle,
death is neither pursued nor desired. That is why the meaning of dead
comrades is never clear, and always painful. When confrontation is
ideologized, this dramatic character of struggle is banalized to the point
of being postulated as exclusionary.
When this happens, there is no room for research. As is generally
acknowledged, ideology and research have opposite structures: the first
is constituted from a set of certainties, the second only on the basis of a
grammar of questions.
Nevertheless, struggle – the necessary and noble struggle – does not
in itself lead towards the exaltation of confrontation as the dominant
meaning of life. There is no doubt that the limits may appear somewhat
narrow in the case of an organization in permanent struggle, such as a
piquetero organization. Yet to take this point for granted would be to
prejudge.
Unlike the militant subjectivity that is usually sustained by the ex-
treme polarization of life – by the ideologization of confrontation16 – the
social practices that seek to construct another sociability are highly
active in trying not to fall into the logic of confrontation, according
to which the multiplicity of experience is reduced to this dominant
signifier.
Confrontation by itself does not create values. It does not go beyond
the distribution of the dominant values.
The results of a war show who will appropriate existence – that is,
who will have the property rights as they relate to existing goods and
values.
If struggle does not alter the ‘structure of meanings and values,’ we
are only in the presence of a change of roles, which is a guarantee of
survival for the structure itself.
8. A New Image of Justice
We have arrived at the point where two completely different images of

justice are sketched for us, and in the end that is what it is about. On one
side, the struggle is for the ability to use the judging machine. To do
justice is to attribute to oneself what is considered just. It is to interpret
in a different way the distribution of existing values. The other side

suggests that it is a question of becoming a creator of values, of experi-
ences, of worlds.
That is why any struggle that is not idealized has these two direc-
tions, which start from self-affirmation: towards ‘inside’ and towards
‘outside.’
Research-militancy does not look for a model social practice. In fact,
it affirms itself against the existence of such ideals. Let it be said with
good reason that it is one thing to declaim this principle and something
very different to achieve it in practice. One could also conclude – and
here is where our doubts start – that in order for this noble purpose to
become reality it would be necessary to make ‘our criticism’ explicit.
When we consider this demand carefully, we can see that we are being
asked to keep the model – now in a negative way – in order to compare
real social practices with an ideal model, a mechanism that the social
sciences use to extract their ‘critical judgments.’
As can be seen, to develop a new image of thought from a practical
experience of knowledge production is no small task, since it concerns
forms of justice (and judgment is nothing but the judicial form of
justice). Research-militancy cannot offer anything that resembles a ju-
ridical event, nor does it provide resources to pass judgment on other
social practices. Rather, the opposite is true: if we as ‘authors’ have
pretended anything at all, it has been to offer a diametrically opposite
image of justice, one founded in composition. What is this good for?
There are no preliminary answers.
Till always,
September 2003
NOTES
This article is composed, at the request of the editors of this book, of frag-
ments of two different articles that address the mode of intervention we
intend to create: research militancy. We reproduce parts of ‘For a Politics
beyond Politics,’ an essay published in Contrapoder: una introducción, edited
by our collective (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Mano en Mano, 2001). We also
pick up a good deal of the text of ‘On Method’ which prefaces the book La
Hipótesis 891: Más allá de los piquetes, cowritten by our collective and the
Movement of Un-employed Workers of Solano (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de
Mano en Mano, 2002).
1 La Hipótesis 891, the book cited above, deals with what has been opened by
this experience of struggle and thought known as piqueteros.

2 See our book 19 y 20. Apuntes para el nuevo protagonismo social (Buenos Aires:
Ediciones de Mano en Mano, 2002).
3 On the night of 19 December 2001, thousands of Argentineans occupied the
streets, squares, and public places of the country’s main cities. The follow-
ing day, after three dozen died in street battles with the police, president
Fernando de la Rúa resigned. The revolt launched a period of intense social
creativity, which began with the founding of the unemployed workers
movement – also known as piqueteros for their practice of blocking roads –
in the second half of the 1990s. In the month following the revolt, hundreds
of popular assemblies sprang up in neighbourhoods across the country.
Many factories and businesses that had gone bankrupt were taken over by
their workers and began to operate under their control. Several of these
initiatives came together, forming circuits of trade based on solidarity
principles; these helped provide the necessities of life for millions who had
been marginalized from an economy crippled by its acquiescence to the
IMF’s recommendations and those of other trans-national ‘development’
agencies. (Translator’s note.)
4 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
5 In Spanish there are two words for power: poder and potencia, which derive
from the Latin words potestas and potentia. Colectivo Situaciones’ under-
standing of power is rooted in this distinction, which they take from
Spinoza. Potencia is a dynamic, constituent dimension, whereas poder
is static, constituted. Potencia defines our power to do, to affect, and be
affected, whereas the mechanism of representation that constitutes poder
separates potencia from the bodies that are being represented. To preserve
the emphasis of this distinction, I use the Spanish word potencia, where
appropriate, throughout this chapter. See above, page 181, note 3, for
parallel Italian usage. (Translator’s note.)
6 The figure of the ‘researcher-militant’ was presented for the first time in
Miguel Benasayag and Diego Sztulwark, Política y situación. De la potencia al
contrapoder (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Mano en Mano, 2002).
7 See in particular the beautiful pages of the book by Jacques Rancière, The
Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1991). For Jacotot, all pedagogies are founded in
an explication of something given by someone from a superiority of intelli-
gence, and produces, above all, explicated kids. In contrast, ignorant school-
masters teach without explicating. They can teach what they do not know
because they organize their experiences according to a radically different
principle: the equality of intelligence.
8 Each situation is part of a system of relations, networks, connections,

transmissions, and distributions of power. See Colectivo Situaciones, 19 y
20. Apuntes para el nuevo protagonismo social. Situation refers to a capacity to
cut off the space-time that is ‘both condition and product of the emergence
of sense’ (19). ‘Situation does not mean local. The situation consists in the
practical affirmation that the whole does not exist separate from the part,
but in the part’ (26). ‘The situation can be thought of as a “concrete univer-
sal.”’ We can only ‘know and intervene in the universal through a subjec-
tive operation of interiorizaton from which it is possible to encounter the
world as a concrete element of the situation. Any other form of thinking
the world – as external to the situation – condemns us to an abstract per-
ception and practical impotence’ (30n). (Translator’s note.)
9 Literally, ‘de mano en mano’ means ‘from hand to hand.’ The publishing
house was created by the student group El Mate, to which the members of
Colectivo Situaciones originally belonged. Mate is a South American
infusion that is usually sipped through a straw (bombilla) from a gourd
that is passed from hand to hand. (Translator’s note.)
10 The authors use objetualizar in the double sense of ‘transformation into an
object of research’ and ‘to be transformed into an object’ (i.e., as opposed
to becoming a subject). (Translator’s note.)
11 Cf. 19 y 20: Apuntes para el nuevo protagonismo social, 100–1. The excluded
are constructed as subjects of needs, incapable of creative self-activity.
Their actions always have an a priori interpretation. The concepts of
unemployed and excluded, which come from the external gaze of the
government, the media, NGOs, and most academics, have the effect of
reducing the intensity and power of the real people who have been im-
poverished by neoliberalism. In contrast, the unemployed workers move-
ments call themselves piqueteros – a subjectivity that is not limited to the
confrontations which are part of the roadblocks the word refers to but that
designate a struggle for dignity which goes beyond a request of incorpora-
tion into the society of wage-labour. (Translator’s note.)
12 These multidirectional practices, each of which has constituted a signifi-
cant moment in the development of Colectivo Situaciones, include joining
in processes of collective reflection on some of the most creative expres-
sions of Argentina’s new protagonism, including the unemployed work-
ers’ movement of the district of Solano in Greater Buenos Aires; the
peasants’ movement of the northern province of Santiago del Estero;
HIJOS, the organization of the children of the disappeared during the
dictatorship; Creciendo Juntos, an alternative school run by militant
teachers; several neighbourhood assemblies and the now dismantled
barter network; and a number of other groups, including alternative
media and art collectives such as Grupo de Arte Callejero. Colectivo

Situaciones’ practices have also involved encounters with intellectuals
both in Argentina – including Horacio González, León Rozitchner, and the
editors of the journal La Escena Contemporánea – and abroad – including
Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, John Holloway, the past
leaders of Uruguay’s legendary MLN Tupamaros, and several collectives,
including the Italian DeriveApprodi and the Spanish Precarias a la deriva.
Many of these encounters have resulted in published interviews.
(Translator’s note.)
13 This materialist tradition of the concept of love includes Spinoza and the
recent readings of his philosophy by Negri and Deleuze. Negri points out
that love constitutes the exuberance of being in Spinoza’s ethical material-
ism. See The Savage Anomaly (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), 152. For Deleuze and Guattari, love and friendship define the re-
lation of immanence between the philosopher and the concept he or she
creates. See What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 1–12. (Translator’s note.)
14 The critique of articulation is developed in full by Colectivo Situaciones in
the last chapter of 19 y 20: Apuntes para el nuevo protagonismo social. Articu-
lation is the type of relation established by hegemony, in which the differ-
ent parts of a network are ordered around a centre. In this relation, being
part of the network constitutes a norm and dispersion appears as a defi-
ciency of the parts. In contrast, relations of composition lead to the for-
mation of multiple counterpowers, which form diffuse and eccentric
networks. (Translator’s note.)
15 This refers to the five research notebooks, each titled Situaciones (Buenos
Aires: De Mano en Mano, 2000–2). Each of these notebooks summarizes
the research-militancy activities of Colectivo Situaciones with a different
grassroots movement. (Translator’s note.)
16 The movements that comprise what Colectivo Situaciones defines as
Argentina’s new protagonism – those with which the collective has been
practising research-militancy – are characterized by a refusal to constitute
themselves as frontal opponents. Like the Zapatistas, they reject the logic
of confrontation, and instead carefully invest in the creation of experi-
ences, practices, and projects that affirm the desire to expand life. ‘Be-
tween the power that destroys and the practices of counterpower there is
a fundamentally asymmetric relation’ (Colectivo Situaciones, ‘El silencio
de los caracoles,’ www.situaciones.org, accessed 11 January 2004).
(Translator’s note.)
PART III: Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy
Introduction
The contributors to this section primarily discuss educational projects

in which they have been involved as organizers and as participants. The
concrete experiments they describe breathe further life into the critical
themes and radical impulses introduced in earlier chapters of the
book: utopian imagination; linking universities, academics, and social
movements; autonomously mobilizing people’s intellectual capaci-
ties; and creating educational spaces outside the state form and
market imperatives. Among other things, the following chapters
discuss free schools, supplementary schools, workshops, education
societies, publishing, theatre, media labs, and, in one instance, a poten-
tial alternative economic system. Each project was a response to an
urgent need to critically analyse relations of power around nodal points
of domination. These experiments are necessarily partial in their scope,
and are never outside of the operations of power; indeed, they are often
components of larger struggles transversally linked on a global scale.
Despite the variations on utopian pedagogy documented here, these
projects reflect a common desire to produce circumstances, spaces, and
subjectivities that, within and against the present, strive towards
antiuthoritarian, autonomous, radically democratic modes of organiz-
ing intellectuality and learning.
Part III begins with Brian Alleyne’s analysis of the ‘activist pedagogy’
of the New Beacon Circle in London. Alleyne suggests that liberal
multiculturalist strategies for antiracist change are insufficient, and
argues that any real progress in combating racism in Britain has been
due to struggles organized by racialized communities themselves.
Brought to London by way of Trinidad as part of the Black Diaspora,
the New Beacon Circle is a well-established network of individuals,
groups, and institutions devoted to developing socialist and antiracist

cultural politics in Britain. The circle has long emphasized educational
initiatives, from supplementary schools to book fairs, within and out-
side mainstream institutions. Alleyne’s narrative looks at New Beacon
as cultural politics in action; it describes an antiracist activist pedagogy
that is committed to making ‘direct interventions into actually existing
social and cultural spaces with the aim of effecting change and creating
alternatives.’
Written in phenomenological-poetic style, Shveta Sarda’s chapter dis-
cusses Cybermohalla, an ongoing experiment that involves working
across divisions of class, race, and caste in working-class districts in
India. She describes Cybermohalla’s open media labs, which have been
set up to provide young people with access to computer technology.
Well aware of the double edge of the high-tech sword, organizers and
participants open up questions about how local neighbourhoods are
tied up with the global knowledge economy, and seek to discover how,
through practical experience in creative multi-media production in lo-
cal settings, it is possible to develop a ‘transformative relationship with
technology … not just be addressed by it.’ Giving extensive space in
the chapter to texts written by the young Cybermohalla participants
themselves, Sarda’s contribution pivots on what she calls ‘ambivalent
pedagogy’ and on what one participant calls ‘speech without fear’ – a
necessary component of any experiment in utopian pedagogy that is
respectful of singularity.
Carlos Alberto Torres returns to a source that has long been consid-
ered foundational to utopian pedagogy: the thought of Paulo Freire.
While few of our contributors explicitly address Freire’s ‘pedagogy of
the oppressed,’ there can be no doubt that he is at least a spectral figure
throughout this book. Torres emphasizes that ‘transformative social
justice learning’ by necessity must be mobile and experimental, and
must traverse all social and economic spaces where ‘domination, ag-
gression, and violence’ occur. Torres makes this forthright call: ‘A model
of transformative social justice learning should be based on unveiling
the conditions of alienation and exploitation in society. That is, creating
the basis for the understanding of the roots of social systems and
behaviours and their implications in culture and nature.’
Allan Antliff sees such understanding emanating from independent
educational spaces. Writing from an anarchist perspective, he discusses
a number of projects that he considers part of a necessary practice of
Part III: Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy – Introduction 203
anarchist institution-building. He argues that ‘just as anarchists have

created their own press, Internet sites, communes, bookstores, and
other cooperative ventures, so they need to create their own educa-
tional institutions.’ Those whose opinions about anarchism have been
formed by stereotypes of disorganization and nihilistic destruction may
be surprised to hear how widespread ‘anarchist pedagogy’ is. Antliff
provides numerous examples of it, from the ‘Anarchist U’ free school in
Toronto to a reading circle organized by a fifteen-year-old high school
student in West Virginia. Efforts in anarchist pedagogy persist, despite
what Antliff shows to be strong state repression.
Multiple lines of affinity are at play in Kelly Harris-Martin and Rich-
ard Toews’s article on an experiment in antiracist, postcolonial peda-
gogy undertaken by the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society (SCES/
SFU). This chapters gives us a sense of the daily life of a vibrant
initiative in utopian pedagogy happening in Kamloops, British Colum-
bia, as seen by an instructor and various students, both Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal. SCES/SFU was created by and for the people of the
Secwepemc (Shuswap) nation. This may have something to do with its
success. Although it is open to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
students, this collaborative project of a local university and the
Secwepemc nation is not a space where Aboriginal people feel they are
on the outside looking in, or must fight hard just to be seen and heard.
While it centres on indigenous knowledge systems, it remains very
much an in-between space, a deliberate attempt to raise for discussion
various unequal power relations that permeate interactions between
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.
Imran Munir’s chapter, ‘The Subaltern Act! Peasant Struggles and
Pedagogy in Pakistan,’ answers Gayatri Spivak’s pressing question –
‘Can the subaltern speak?’ – not in the affirmative of signification but in
the recognition of action. For Munir, pedagogy is not something to be
considered in and of itself; indeed, it can only signify meaningfully
within its specific struggle. In short, when considering radical pedagogy
we must try to understand the context in which it takes place; further-
more, learning about such resistance fulfils the pedagogical function
implicit in the circulation of struggles. Much that is unexpected is
described in this article. In a region ruled by repressive religious ortho-
doxy, women militants are leading the fight against a state–military
apparatus that is intent on expropriating their land; Christian and Mus-
lim communities are banding together in that struggle; and there is an
unlikely alliance of autonomous peasant movements, orthodox Marx-

ists, NGOs, and educated urban elites. Finally, there is an intriguing
pedagogical movement based on participatory and interactive street
theatre, which has long been at the forefront of social movements and
resistance, ‘especially in the rural areas, to educate people about de-
mocracy, women’s education and empowerment, feudalism, sectarian-
ism, election procedures, minority rights, corporate farming and other
forms of oppression.’
Creating alternative spaces of education involves much more than
avoiding state repression and corporate colonization. Inequities, ten-
sions, and oppressions that permeate mainstream society appear in
‘alternative’ spaces as well. This is central to Sarita Srivastava’s chapter,
which focuses on attempts to use the pedagogical tool of antiracism
workshops to address the problem of ‘divisive conflicts over racism
that have been some of the strongest challenges facing social movement
organizations.’ Despite a large amount of this kind of activity in the
1980s and 1990s, many of those working for antiracist change have been
disheartened by the lack of tangible results. Formal, facilitated discus-
sions have often failed to achieve their goals; more importantly, they
can be extremely painful and discouraging for the non-white partici-
pants, who become wary of repeating the experience. This situation,
coupled with the decline in support for any kind of equity work under
neoliberal regimes, leads Srivastava to ask: ‘What are the possibilities
for a pedagogical practice that might offer local challenges to global
inequities of race and nation, that might offer genuine alternatives to
neoliberal multiculturalism?’ She suggests that if the antiracist work-
shop is to be redeemed, we must move away from what she calls the
‘Let’s Talk’ model, which leads too easily to the reinforcement of stereo-
types and becomes a stage for expressions of white guilt that get stuck
at an individualistic level of analysis.
In the book’s introduction we spoke of the limits of affinity. The ten-
sions inherent in determining such limits are revealed in Michael Albert’s
article, ‘Present and Future Education: A Tale of Two Economies,’ in the
response by Nick Dyer-Witheford, and in Albert’s subsequent reply. For
many years, Albert has been committed to conceptualizing and imagin-
ing alternative socio-economic futures – a project that has evolved along-
side his involvement in various alternative media and education projects
such as Z Magazine, Z Media Institute, and Znet. Albert’s chapter out-
lines, in summary fashion, a possible future economy, one that he has
called ‘participatory economics’ or ‘parecon.’ He argues that if we really
Part III: Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy – Introduction 205
want to create alternatives in the specific context of education, we also

need to elaborate ideas about an alternative economic system, because
the latter is an important part of the broader context of education. Dyer-
Witheford responds that while he respects Albert’s commitment to open-
ing a discussion on alternative modes of economic organization, parecon
is insufficient because it retains much that is problematic about capital-
ism – in particular, a relentless emphasis on work and an already devel-
oped model for determining remuneration. Albert remains open, however,
with respect to specific questions of pedagogy in a parecon: ‘Are there
implications for the actual structure and procedures of schooling and
education that are implicit in the logic and structures of parecon? I would
guess that the answer is yes, not least but not confined to the fact that of
course educational institutions would be self-managing, would interface
with participatory planning, would incorporate balanced job complexes,
and so on.’
The chapter by Mark Coté, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter dis-
cusses ‘Critical U,’ arguing therein for an alternative modality of aca-
demic subjectivity and an expanded concept of ‘community education.’
Operating out of Vancouver, Critical U is a community-based ‘free’
school – ‘free’ in that it operates autonomously from the state education
system and does not charge tuition fees. This project is a modest experi-
ment in building a dialogic learning space that is not subject to the
instrumental logic of states and corporations, and indeed, is explicitly
in struggle against neoliberal hegemony. To situate this project, the
authors offer a brief genealogy of the intellectual, and then describe the
various Critical U courses, which have ranged from globalization to
food production to media literacy. The guiding ethos of the experiment
is that ‘it is precisely what we do not know about how our communities
live – and how they might want to live – that demands such experi-
ments in community education, in the hope of producing something
unknown and unknowable – something that is valuable precisely be-
cause it “doesn’t yet exist.”’
There are many connections between these chapters, but also pro-
found differences – in political, practical, and conceptual orientation.
While this variability presents readers with important questions about
the limits of affinity, these chapters also bring into view differences
which remind us that what one activist or academic sees as the ‘frac-
tured’ state of ‘the movement,’ another might see as the exciting plural-
ity of coexisting paths to other worlds, of multiple manifestations of
educational alternatives happening in the here-and-now.
11 The Making of an Antiracist Cultural
Politics in Post-Imperial Britain:
The New Beacon Circle
brian w. alleyne
The British liberal elite has come to recognize the complexity of the
racial and ethnic composition of Britain, which manifests itself in often
fervent and self-congratulatory pronouncements that contemporary Brit-
ain is a foremost ‘multicultural society.’ For many on the liberal Left,
multiculturalism is that ‘judicious’ mixture of ethnic communities and
identities. It is my view that the discourse of multiculturalism tends to
obscure more than it reveals. In particular, it glosses over the long,
complex, and contradictory history of antiracist struggles, radical
intellectual work, and autonomous cultural initiatives that Britain’s
non-white populations have undertaken, and through which these popu-
lations have forged potent and often insurgent forms of ‘cultural capi-
tal,’ shaping and reshaping the spaces they occupy in the British social
formation and in the national imaginary. In other words, the multicultural
reality of Britain has come about not as a gift of the British nation-state
but through decades of political and cultural work, central to which has
been a struggle over meaning – in short, ‘cultural politics.’ For many of
these struggles, education has been both a recurring element and a
historic condition of possibility.
This chapter explores the activist-pedagogy of one group that sought
to negotiate an inclusive place in Britain for the descendants of Black
and Brown migrants: the New Beacon Circle, based in North London.1
Many of the contributors to this book have addressed contemporary
alternative educational initiatives; I consider one that started in the
mid-1960s and is still active today. In this way, I emphasize the continu-
ity in radical experimentation in utopian pedagogy. In the case of the
New Beacon Circle, such experimentation has been a component of
contestatory responses to specific situations of class and ‘race’ domina-
208 Brian W. Alleyne
tion – responses that have been, simultaneously, attempts to build

progressive educational alternatives that might endure into the future.
Bringing a particular reading of anticolonialism in the British West
Indies to their activist work in London, the New Beacon Circle is centred
around the New Beacon publishing house and bookshop, which was
established in 1966. Over the next four decades, the circle’s activities
wove together Black cultural production, antiracist organizing, and
community education. This chapter explores a number of initiatives of
the New Beacon Circle and concludes by analysing them through the
lens of cultural politics. To guide this discussion I must first provide
some historical context with respect to education and the colonial Brit-
ish West Indies.
Education and Colonialism in the British West Indies
Bourgeois-liberal conceptions of education have had profoundly para-

doxical outcomes. In the industrialized North, expanded schooling at
the secondary and postsecondary levels was largely intended to equip
individuals for the various economic roles required in such societies,
and also to instil in them the civic virtues of liberal democracy, respect
for person and property, and law and order. In many respects, the
liberal-humanist ideal of the ‘cultured’ person was what drove the
expansion of schooling, where reading and debate were seen as ‘cul-
ture’ in its ‘nurturing’ sense.2 This notion of ‘culture’ as nurturing the
‘good citizen’ was, of course, differentially available to those who were
differentially situated in the social structure by class, ‘race,’ and gender.
Nonetheless, the ‘cultured citizens’ who were produced did not always
extend to the status quo the loyalty expected by the ruling order. Therein
lies the conundrum of literacy and schooling: on the one hand, they
could and did produce citizens committed to a dominant ideological
project; on the other, they produced literate, critical dissidents with the
means to disseminate radical ideas through the printed word to an
increasingly literate public.
Examples of this antagonistic dynamic abound. In the plantation
societies of the Atlantic, un-free persons were prevented from acquiring
literacy, often by law, and always by custom;3 in the Atlantic world,
some of the earliest instances of activism that combined cultural and
political issues saw literate radicals bringing reading skills to those who
were socially subordinate.4 Indeed, the imaginations of progressives all
over the world have long been gripped by the possibility of infiltrating
Antiracist Cultural Politics in Post-Imperial Britain 209
the apparatus of schooling and turning it towards the end of revolution-

ary change, and have long sensed the importance of building educa-
tional processes into the machinery of radical movements. Here we
might note just four examples: the place of alternative media and
reading circles in early-nineteenth-century British radical culture, as
described by E.P. Thompson;5 Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’
and literacy campaigns, which originally centred on Latin America but
eventually circulated around the globe;6 the workers’ education aspects
of the International Working Men’s Association, with which Marx and
Engels were closely associated;7 and the call by Italian communist
Antonio Gramsci for the making of working-class ‘organic intellectu-
als.’8 As these examples suggest, one result of expanding literacy and
general schooling has been to create spaces for oppositional education
outside the control of the state.
Another result has been a heightened interplay of education, poli-
tics, and cultural production. This was visible in the United States
when education was treated as a strategic front in the battle against
entrenched racial segregation after slavery was abolished. W.E.B. Du
Bois, for example, insisted that Black intellectuals must set to work
disseminating ideas beyond the academy and throughout the wider
society. For Du Bois, Black intellectuals were obligated to get involved
in activism – to take their hard-won knowledge to the mass of op-
pressed Blacks in the United States prior to the Civil Rights era. Du
Bois also held that exposure to so-called ‘high’ culture was a necessary
element in the education of the oppressed. While conceding that Blacks
needed technical and vocational education, Du Bois argued that Black
Americans also needed to spawn their own subgroup of intellectuals,
who would constitute a relatively autonomous field of social and
cultural production that could confront White supremacy on the ter-
rain of culture.9
In the colonial and postcolonial British West Indies, too, education
was a pivotal but at the same time paradoxical site of anticolonialist
struggle. There, as elsewhere, capitalist modernity entailed forms of
dissent wherein the class structuring of society was contested by people
who employed tactics from inside, as well as outside, the established
institutional arrangements and terms of bourgeois liberal democracy.10
Many key figures in the independence movement began with the as-
sumption that a schooled population is the soil out of which civil
society emerges and expands, that education empowers people to be-
come active agents in knowledge creation and full participants in poli-
tics.11 The transition from colonialism to independence saw attempts to

implement Western-style modernization; the expansion of mass sec-
ondary and postsecondary schooling was seen as a key element in this.
Opportunities to form new nations and new political subjects were in
the air, so great efforts were made to expand primary schooling for
children, and literacy for adults as well. Mass education was also seen
as a way to encourage people to defend the postcolonial public sphere
from authoritarian and neocolonial tendencies.12 This reconfiguring of
the role of education reveals just one of the ways in which expanded
schooling, at whatever level, had political and cultural consequences
that the developmentalist states, and the individuals who launched
these programs, did not intend.
We can take as an example the Trinidadian intellectual-politician
(and, for a time, subversive pedagogue), Eric Williams, whose teach-
ings and writings offered a trenchant critique of colonialism while also
being oriented towards promoting popular participation in postcolonial
government. Williams’s ‘People’s University’ in 1950s Trinidad was an
educational counterinitiative. Remembered for his slogan ‘the future of
the nation is in the school bags of its children,’ Williams – a renowned
historian of Atlantic slavery – delivered a program of public lectures on
economic history and politics to audiences of thousands at a square in
the heart of Trinidad’s capital.13 These lectures made critical ideas on
colonialism available to the wider Trinidadian public, most of whom
had been denied access to any education beyond basic literacy, in a
social formation where most Black and Brown people were destined to
join the labouring masses in the service of colonial power. The lectures
were part of a series of public meetings that saw Williams crisscrossing
the island, bypassing the conservative media in an attempt to prepare
the populace for postcolonial citizenship. Williams became the elected
leader of an internally self-governing Trinidad in 1956, and again when
full independence from Britain was achieved in 1962. His postcolonial
governments would find that expanded education could produce
enemies as well as supporters of the status quo. Ultimately, the great
promise of Williams’s People’s University was unfulfilled: he did not
appear to trust Trinidadians to be the agents of their own history. He
could not imagine popular participation beyond the limits of a bour-
geois democracy that carried over many of the authoritarian elements
of colonial rule. By 1970, Williams found himself the Black leader of a
country populated mainly by non-Whites, in the paradoxical position
of being opposed by a wave of Black power activism. He was unable to
deal with the militant Black cultural politics that came out of the turbu-
lent 1960s.
Formal education in the colonial British West Indies was also inter-
woven – in contradictory ways – with the cultivation of anticolonial
thought and politics. At the turn of the twentieth century in Trinidad
there was a close correlation between ‘race’ – marked off by skin colour –
and social class: the middle and upper classes were occupied by a cross-
section of people, albeit disproportionately Whites, while the lower
strata were overwhelmingly peopled by those of African or South Asian
(Indian) descent. For the mass of Blacks and Indians at the time, the
chief route to social mobility was secondary education, followed by
some kind of career in the civil service, commerce, or – if they managed
to acquire higher education – the professions.14 Such schooling often
had the unintended consequence of fostering a Creole intelligentsia,
many of whom eventually became radicals in Britain itself.
The paradoxes of this process were especially visible in the competi-
tive ‘scholarship’ contests that were held across the British West Indies.
A lower-class Black or Indian boy (the avenues at the time were open
mainly to males), through grinding study, might win a scholarship to
one of the island’s secondary schools. There, over five to seven years, he
would be exposed to a British-style grammar school education, which,
if he went no further in terms of formal education, would qualify him
for a clerical position in the colonial civil service. From the initial
thousands of young boys in primary school, a few hundred would gain
places in secondary schools (for which they had to pay fees that only the
middle class could normally afford); and of these few hundred, only
two or three would emerge as scholarship winners. And there were yet
more hurdles to come: if the student was very ‘bright,’ he might win
one of two or three island scholarships and proceed to England to study
at a university for a profession. What has been called the ‘cult of the
Island Scholar’ was more highly developed in Trinidad than elsewhere
in the colonial West Indies.15 According to Ivar Oxaal, ‘of the greatest
importance in accounting for the high level of competitive scholarship
in Trinidad was the fact that the colony’s secondary schools were the
first colonial institutions to participate in the external examinations of
Oxford and Cambridge.’16 Many of the critical artists, radical intellectu-
als, and activists who would later gather in and around the New Bea-
con Circle made their passage to Britain through this highly competitive
selection process.
It was on these margins of the modern Western world system, and
especially in the elite colonial classrooms, that we can see the formative
context for an Anglo-Caribbean radical consciousness that was schooled
(in the sense of acculturated to ruling cultural capital) and at the same
time rebellious. Educated in the English version of the Western high-
culture canon, in schools set up in the West Indies but emulating the
British grammar school, some of the ‘bright boys,’ by virtue of being
Black or Brown, colonial, and marked for future greatness through
triumph in the scholarship contests, came to feel that strictures were
being imposed on their personal development by a social system which
boasted ideals of humanity that were seldom realized. The schooled
radicalism that sometimes ensued was a decisive influence on the for-
mation of the New Beacon Circle.
New Beacon Circle: Beginnings
New Beacon Books (est. 1966) is a North London-based Black and Third
World publisher and bookseller. People who have remained in close
association with the house’s founders, and who have been involved in
some or all of its various projects, constitute what I call ‘the New
Beacon Circle.’ This is my term, not theirs: I use ‘New Beacon’ because
the New Beacon bookshop was the locus around which I came to learn
about these activists and their projects. I suggest that the people en-
gaged in these various initiatives constitute a ‘circle’ because they are
linked through friendship, kinship, and comradeship. Central to my
account in what follows is Trinidadian immigrant John La Rose and his
close associates, as each of New Beacon Circle’s projects had or have in
common their heavy involvement.17
The New Beacon Circle has engaged in more traditional forms of
political organizing over the past four decades, from coordinating legal
defence campaigns for Black youth to supporting dissidents impris-
oned by repressive regimes. Most of its activism, however, has focused
on culture: cultural forms, cultural production, and the struggle over
meaning. Its projects bring oppositional political awareness to areas
perceived as ‘cultural’ in bourgeois discourse, such as artistic creation
and publishing. Distinctively, New Beacon’s cultural activities are bound
up with a set of discernible political commitments: socialist, antiracist,
and popular-democratic. Education has been both a central element of
and a recurring thematic object in its activities; self- and community
education are at the core of its work. In what follows I briefly describe
five of the New Beacon Circle’s activist-pedagogic contributions to the
making of an antiracist cultural politics in postimperial Britain: promot-

ing Caribbean art and anticolonial literature and politics; publishing
and selling books; launching supplementary schools; organizing
struggles against racism in Britain’s state schools; and participating in
international radical book fairs.
But first let me situate myself in relation to New Beacon. I learned of
New Beacon as a publisher when I became interested in the radical
writings of C.L.R. James. I met John La Rose in Trinidad in 1994, at a
pan-Caribbean Assembly of Caribbean Peoples, which brought together
creative people, activists, and other elements of civil society from the
French, English, Spanish, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. One of the
main organizers was the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) – the
most influential trade union in Trinidad and one of the key workers’
organizations in the English-speaking Caribbean. At that event I was
working as a volunteer for the organizers, having previously met the
OWTU’s education officer, David Abdulah. La Rose was the European
representative of the OWTU, and he was introduced to me by Abdulah.
I was at the time about to begin graduate studies in sociology at the City
University of New York. I intended to write a study of C.L.R. James.
In New York I met Jim Murray, who ran the C.L.R. James Institute, an
open and radically democratic project in the autonomous spirit of James
himself.18 From his Upper West Side flat, Murray collected James’s
papers, built up a small but comprehensive library of the Black Atlantic,
and, together with his colleague Ralph Dumain, assembled an exhaus-
tive catalogue of works by and on James and his political milieu. At the
C.L.R. James Institute, Murray provided resources and support for
people engaged in any kind of creative work. The institute was in turn
connected to Keith Hart, who had played a major role in bringing
James’s American Civilization to posthumous publication.19 Hart super-
vised my doctoral dissertation at Cambridge after I moved to Britain in
1995.
After my first London interview with La Rose in 1996, I felt that I had
to rethink completely my research project. When he agreed to begin a
series of life history interviews with me, I quickly came to realize that I
was gaining privileged access to a space where politics met intellect and
action. In the six years since that first meeting I have come to focus
much of my intellectual and political interest on La Rose and his closest
associates. More than being research correspondents, the New Beacon
activists have in some cases become friends. They have provided me
with a political home in Britain, and I have become involved in a
number of their ongoing projects. I have come to share their political

imagination; in the old ethnographic term, I’ve ‘gone native.’ In learn-
ing about activists as a sociologist, I have become a part-time activist
myself, even though my main occupation is that of a conventional
university teacher.
Early Pedagogical Struggles
The origins of the New Beacon Circle lie in the early 1960s, by which
time a number of writers, artists, and graduate students from the Carib-
bean – many of whom had travelled to Britain on scholarship – were
well established in Britain, especially in London. Among them was
John La Rose, a Trinidadian who came to Britain in 1961 to study law
but who soon got involved in activism. After his arrival, La Rose met
Edward Brathwaite, a poet and student in West Indian history from
Barbados, and Andrew Salkey, a BBC journalist from Jamaica.20 Per-
ceiving a lull after the initial impact in the 1950s of the first works of
George Lamming, Roger Mais, Samuel Selvon, and V.S. Naipaul, the
three men felt that something needed to be done to bring Caribbean arts
and letters back into the cultural spotlight in Britain. In 1967, the three
immigrant Caribbean intellectuals and artists decided to start a forum –
the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) – where Caribbean-descent
students, artists, and writers in Britain could meet. Concerned with the
history, politics, and culture of the Caribbean and its growing diaspora,
CAM was a discussion space where works were presented and cri-
tiqued and public meetings were held. It also launched an arts journal.
The events organized by CAM, which was active until 1972, helped
expand interest in Caribbean and other Third World literature. In many
important ways, it contributed to the growth of the New Beacon pub-
lishing house and bookshop.
La Rose started New Beacon Books in 1966, with the support of
British-born Sarah White. He positioned its publishing and bookselling
activities in relation to a radical intellectual tradition in colonial Trinidad
that extended back to the late 1700s. ‘New Beacon’ was meant to invoke
the Trinidadian ‘Beacon’ literary and critical circle of the late 1920s, and
early 1930s, which was a high point of sorts in the development of a
relatively autonomous (in the sense of ‘native’) intellectual tradition in
Trinidad.21 For example, a group of intellectuals started two pioneering
cultural journals: The Beacon and Trinidad.22 These intellectuals, one of
whom was C.L.R. James, were not, as some have suggested, merely
‘non-whites seeking their way in a white literary world.’23 In fact, they

were descendants of and contributors to a history of struggle against
colonial domination going back to the early 1800s. From a liberal-
humanist standpoint, these critical intellectuals attacked the arrogance,
Eurocentricism, and anti-intellectualism of the Trinidadian middle and
upper classes. Although their positions were often contradictory, they
were unrelenting in their efforts to contest White supremacist and
colonialist thought and practices in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the
Black Atlantic.24 Theirs was an enlightened, humanist vision, informed
– if not always critically – by ideas on ‘race.’ When Trinidad and The
Beacon were founded in the 1920s, the intellectual space in Trinidad was
actually fairly complex; there was a network of literary and debating
societies, and there had been several attempts to produce literary jour-
nals. Further development was constrained by limited access to second-
ary schooling, to local universities, and to an established publishing
house.
Republishing works from Trinidad’s intellectual tradition was central
to New Beacon’s early publishing program in Britain. La Rose recalled:
‘I saw publishing as a vehicle which gave an independent validation of
one’s own culture, history, politics – a sense of one’s self – to break the
discontinuity [caused by a lack of information in colonial society].’25
In 1969, for example, New Beacon republished a book written by a
nineteenth-century Trinidadian autodidact, John Jacob Thomas, a black
rural schoolteacher who was perhaps the most important Trinidadian
intellectual of the nineteenth century. Thomas had published a founda-
tional text of the radical tradition in Trinidadian literature, Froudacity
(1889).26 This was a response to James Anthony Froude’s The English in
The West Indies, which was highly critical of the capacities of the for-
merly enslaved to govern themselves.27 Froude was an Oxford profes-
sor of history and a defender of the British Empire and its ideology of
White supremacy. Thomas countered Froude’s reactionary work by
demonstrating the great advances made by Blacks in the decades
following emancipation in 1838, and he documented the many ob-
stacles raised by the British colonists to prevent Blacks from acquiring
land and education. One of the strengths of Thomas’s work was that it
established that there was a tradition of scholarly writing by Black
people in the colonies.
The recovery of Thomas’s work made a vital contribution to late-
1960s antiracist struggles in Britain by providing a kind of cultural
capital for those engaged in the struggle against the dominant view that
Black children in Britain were intellectually inferior to their White coun-

terparts owing to their origins in the Caribbean or Africa. Both were
seen in racist discourse as places where literary culture was virtually
non-existent. Thomas’s work was also seen by New Beacon as having
great potential to encourage Black Britons to recognize positive con-
structions of Black intellectual subjects. Other early New Beacon publi-
cations, all of which were aimed at bringing Caribbean history and
letters to a reading public in Britain, were Caribbean Writers: Critical
Essays, by Ivan Van Sertima; Marcus Garvey, 1887–1940, by Adolph
Edwards; and Foundations, a volume of poetry by La Rose himself.
Since its founding in the mid-1960s, New Beacon has grown into one
of Britain’s biggest suppliers of Black and Third World literature. Its
publishing arm has not grown at the same rate as its bookselling opera-
tion (which has nearly 20,000 titles in stock at present); even so, New
Beacon had published more than sixty-five titles by 2004. Its lists
include fiction by established and new Caribbean authors as well as
reprints of classic Caribbean fictional works. The house has also pub-
lished contemporary Black British fiction, criticism, history, and poli-
tics. The geographic scope of its publishing and bookselling encompasses
the Caribbean, the United States, Africa, and Britain. Mainstream book-
sellers have recently allocated more space to Black literature, but this
space is occupied largely by better-known, usually American, authors.
New Beacon sources it books from across the majority world, and thus
occupies a specialist space. From this position, it has made a unique
contribution to the spread of Black writing and anticolonialist critique.
In addition to bookselling and cultural production, New Beacon has
involved itself in struggles against class and ‘race’ domination in Britain’s
state schools.28 By the late 1960s, the schooling of Black children was
becoming a highly politicized issue in London and in other British cities
that had seen Black settlement, as a generation of Black children brought
to or born in Britain was entering the school system. The children of
West Indian immigrants faced a number of challenges in British class-
rooms. As noted earlier, in the colonial West Indies, education had been
the main route to social mobility for non-Whites, who were lower in the
class hierarchy; even though only a handful of students made it through
the hyperselective system to finish with a secondary school diploma,
the possibility was tangible enough to lend the manifestly unjust sys-
tem some stability and legitimacy. In Britain, most Caribbean migrants
found even that narrow route to mobility blocked: it was overdetermined
by the class base of schooling, where working-class young people were
intended for working-class jobs – but Black working-class school leavers

were not programmed for any jobs at all.29 Education seemed to serve
different functions for British working-class people than for those from
the West Indies and Africa.
One specific practice in British schools – ‘streaming’ or ‘banding’ – was
a locus of struggle, and here New Beacon made important contributions.
Like many Black parents, La Rose was outraged when he became aware
that British schools tended to direct Caribbean-heritage children into
‘educationally sub-normal’ (ESN) streams, or ‘bands.’ La Rose was a
member of the North London West Indian Association, a group whose
member-parents vigorously opposed ESN policy in the London borough
of Haringey. Proposals in 1969 for banding in Haringey were the impetus
behind the founding of the Caribbean Education and Community Work-
ers Association. Caribbean-descent as well as British schoolteachers who
were opposed to banding joined to challenge the education authority’s
reliance on IQ testing and the assumptions on which these evaluative
mechanisms and their interpretations were based.30
New Beacon mobilized its publishing capacities in support of this
struggle. The then fledgling publisher organized meetings of activists,
teachers, and parents to help formulate a collective response to band-
ing. Then, in 1971, it published How the West Indian Child Is Made
Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System.31 This work, by
Grenadian-born Bernard Coard, documented the racist underpinnings
of ESN policies and made it clear that the self-image of Black Caribbean
children was being damaged by the low expectations of teachers, which
only compounded an already hostile social environment. Coard also
exposed the racist tone of many of the teaching materials used in British
schools. Besides being obviously related to the antiracist struggles that
were being waged at the time around schooling and in the wider
society, Coard’s work may be read as a contribution to the radical
sociology of education, a field that was expanding at the time, pro-
duced by teachers and academics who had been radicalized by the
social movements of the 1960s.32 New Beacon also contributed to the
response to the banding proposal by supplying published materials to
oppositional groups in support of a broadening of the cultural range of
what was taught in British schools.
Another response to the racial bias of British state schools involved
setting up local community schools for Black children, which sought to
supplement formal schooling with extra lessons. In 1969, La Rose and a
number of other parents started the George Padmore School to provide
supplementary education for their children, in the hope of combating

the negative stereotyping these children were likely to face in class-
rooms. The school’s founders introduced cultural products and influ-
ences from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa, thereby enhancing
the ‘cultural capital’ of Black children. A key objective of the Padmore
School was to foster a sense of the cultural and historical value of
African societies:
The first time I gave a talk on African history and civilisation to the
children at the Padmore school, some of them laughed loudly when I
mentioned ‘Africa.’ I think it was partly a nervous, embarrassed reaction,
because they, as black kids in Britain, were used to hearing Africa dis-
missed as a primitive place, and Africans as primitive people. Africa was
something they were a bit ashamed of. So we had to change that. We had
to teach them about the civilisations of Africa ... I don’t mean we neglected
the history of Europe, of classical Greece and Rome; that too was part of
our history; it was part of my own education at St Mary’s College in
Trinidad. We did not neglect European culture – after all, the kids were
growing up here in Europe – but we wanted them to learn about and
develop pride in the African parts of their heritage.33
The curriculum at the Padmore School included world geography,

Caribbean cuisine and music, and talks by African and Caribbean-
heritage adults about their lives in Africa, in the Caribbean, and in
Britain. All of this prefigured the slow and contested rise of ‘multicultural’
awareness in British education. Since the early 1970s, there has been a
steady growth in supplementary schools organized by ethnic minori-
ties in Britain.34 From this perspective, the Padmore School was among
the pioneers in multicultural education, which, although now accepted
by many in the British education establishment, has long been the target
of a backlash from those on the Right who see multiculturalism as an
attack on the integrity of ‘British’/or ‘English’ culture.35
The New Beacon Circle initiated other projects in Britain that injected
radical critiques of ‘race’ and class hierarchy into the field of education.
For example, in 1975 it helped establish the Black Parents’ Movement
(BPM), which organized a range of campaigns and activities in and
around issues facing Black youth and their families in Britain; many of
these related to the problems they faced in the school system. BPM’s
1979 pamphlet, Independent Parent Power, Independent Student Power: The
Key to Change in Education and Schooling, put forward a set of critical
assumptions and strategies that, they argued, would have to guide

Black communities in their efforts to transform British schools. Its per-
spective was highly critical of the instrumentalism that in many ways
differentiates ‘schooling’ from ‘education.’ ‘The B.P.M. sees schooling as
the preparation and selection of workers for the labour market. Some for
better paid factory jobs, some for professional or middle class jobs,
others for the low paid jobs or unemployment. The exam system is the
means by which this selection is made.’36 For BPM, then, the bureau-
cratic requirements of school management sometimes conflicted with
the needs of students and parents. Though these parents were con-
cerned about their children’s (un)employment, they also wanted to
bring about change in the content that was being taught. This led the
New Beacon Circle to pursue educational projects outside the existing
structural boundaries of education. One result was the George Padmore
School.
This does not mean that the New Beacon Circle activists gave up on
the challenge of transforming mass educational institutions. But to do
that, argued BPM, Black families and students would have to mobilize
opposition to various British education policies. As the title of the
pamphlet suggested, autonomous organization would be vital to over-
come the conflicts of interest that too often arose among students,
parents, and teachers:
1 Parents and students, unlike teachers and ancillary workers, are

generally either unorganized or badly organised to protect or ad-
vance their own independent interests in schools or with education
authorities. This is particularly true of Black and White working
class parents.
2 Teachers and education authorities have been against the idea that
parents and students should actively influence what happens in
schools or with the education authority.
3 Certainly, teachers will appeal to parents to help fight against the
cuts; but naturally the main concern of teachers will be to protect
their own jobs and working conditions.
BPM emphasized that parents and students cannot assume that teach-
ers are their natural allies in struggles against racist school environ-
ments and curricula. Such struggles require that Black parents and
students organize independently. So whereas the liberal sees a partner-
ship of parents and teachers working together towards fitting the stu-
dent out for citizenship, the New Beacon Circle’s activist praxis brings
social conflict to the heart of education. It rejects liberal constructions of
the classroom as a neutral space, as well as the assumption that parents
and teachers have interests in common.
Circulating Radical Culture
The various threads of activism I have discussed so far come together in

the final initiative of the New Beacon Circle that I want to describe: the
International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books. These
large gatherings of radicals, Black writers, Third World intellectuals,
and activists were held twelve times between 1982 and 1995 in London,
with satellite fairs in other British cities and in Trinidad. The fair was
founded by New Beacon, Bogle L’Ouverture Books, and the Race Today
Collective. Bogle L’Ouverture was founded in London in 1967 by
Guyanese-born Eric and Jessica Huntley, and published mainly Afro-
Caribbean and African literature. Based in Brixton in south London, the
Race Today Collective emerged as a splinter from the Institute of Race
Relations. Its members wanted to confront racism in Britain more di-
rectly, instead of working within existing state structures, which was the
institute’s approach.37 The Race Today Collective published the journal
Race Today and involved itself in a wide range of Black political activi-
ties in Britain. Members of these three organizations were all heavily
involved in publishing, bookselling, and education as sites of political
action and social transformation, and it was they who inaugurated the
Book Fair.
The first International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World
Books was held in April 1982 at the Islington Town Hall in North
London and was attended by some six thousand people over one week.
The fair gathered momentum from the previous two decades of struggles
against racism, classism, and social and cultural exclusion that had
been waged by Black and White progressive activists, as well as by
many ordinary people whose main concern was fair treatment in the
housing market, in schools, and in workplaces. The first fair was planned
during 1981, which was a year of enormous racial tension in London.
As Sarah White recalled,
[1981] was the year of the New Cross massacre and also the Brixton Riots,
and [the Book Fair] really arose out of the work that had been done by the
three organizations – Race Today, New Beacon and Bogle L’Ouverture –

and we had worked together in the alliance. So it was a kind of cultural
manifestation of the politics that had been going on at the time. That is one
way of looking at it. Plus the fact that all three organizations were in-
volved in publishing.
The three organizers of the fair each had concrete links with struggles
and activists in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, North America, and Eu-
rope. These connections facilitated broad international participation
in the fairs, and were themselves sustained and strengthened by the
gatherings in Britain. The fair opened up a space where the respective
transnational constituencies of New Beacon, Race Today, and Bogle
L’Ouverture could be brought together, thus deepening and broadening
the networks on which the success of their (often non-waged) activities
depended. In this sense, New Beacon was one node in an extensive
network of radical Black cultural-activist organizations.
For many of those attending the book fairs – and I have in mind
especially progressive teachers, small publishers, writers, and artists –
their most important resource was networks of human relationships,
through which work and ideas were produced, circulated, and fed back
into the struggle. Many relied on these networks for their financial
autonomy from the political and cultural establishments in their respec-
tive countries. A number of independent publishing ventures drew
inspiration from the politics of these fairs. Jeremy Poynting, for ex-
ample, of Peepal Tree Press, one of the largest publishers of Caribbean
fiction in English, remembers receiving significant encouragement
and technical advice from New Beacon in the early stages of his
venture.38
The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books
was a counterhegemonic site in relation to a Eurocentric literary, cul-
tural, and political establishment. Such events can be understood as
strategic campaigns aimed at gaining, extending, and securing relative
autonomy for radical Black and Third World writers and artists. The
political thinking behind the fairs was classically Gramscian: the orga-
nizers waged battles against ‘race’ and class oppression in cultural
spaces, and thereby politicized and so challenged settled bourgeois
conceptions of culture as individual accomplishments. By shifting liter-
ary culture into a public space, the fairs encouraged a rude democrati-
zation of the written word.
Conclusion: Cultural Politics, Antiracist Education,

and Transformation
The type of political activity that is today captured by the term ‘activism’
is connected mainly to the new social movements. These movements
have had a strong impact on Western societies, especially in the areas of
gender, ethnicity, ‘race,’ environment, education, and sexuality. These
movements engage in struggles over and against power, a crucial dimen-
sion of which is meaning.39 In this regard, new social movements share
much in common with the forms of cultural politics that came into public
awareness when the student, women’s, and Black power movements
came to the fore in the 1960s. Cultural politics can be imagined as a kind
of politics that attacks the exclusionary distinction of ‘high’ and ‘low’
culture; that foregrounds the ways in which elites value their own cul-
tural capital while devaluing that of those who are subordinate to them in
a given social formation; and that seeks to politicize how cultural forms
are consumed and how culture is produced.40 I hope this chapter has
shown that the modes of struggles associated with cultural politics ex-
tend further back in time and wider across space than is often acknowl-
edged, and that elements of this kind of politics can be seen in action
throughout the history of capitalist modernity, in both the colonial and
the postcolonial parts of the world system.
That education has played a pivotal and paradoxical role in the
emergence, shape, and trajectory of cultural politics is clear in the case
of the New Beacon Circle. For the New Beacon Circle, education is
perhaps the single most important process for bringing about the kinds
of social transformation they desire. These transformations are best
understood in terms of a transcendent vision, one that combines the
internationalism of the classical Left with the anticolonialism of the
radicalized British ex-colonial. Imagine Rosa Luxemburg in a political
chat room with C.L.R. James. You get my point.
Much of what passes lately for informed discussion of multiculturalism
in Britain is actually a crude essentialism dressed up in the designer garb
of ‘culture.’ Where once there was talk of ‘race,’ there is now talk of
‘culture.’ Since 11 September 2001, talk of multiculturalism in official
circles has begun to slide into talk of averting a ‘clash of civilizations.’
From the top-down perspective of the British state, protestations against
a multicultural Britain constitute the latest in a long line of strategies that
the state has developed for controlling the overseas colonial population.
These strategies have always involved constructing the colonized as
fundamentally different from and other than the English – a strategy first
employed in subjugating Ireland, one of Britain’s first colonies. This

otherness has been both the means and the justification for the surveil-
lance of the colonials. Especially suited for surveillance were (and still
are) those elements perceived as troublemakers or as potentially threats
to ‘British values’ of honesty, civility, and democracy. For many of the
ruled – especially those who are Black or Brown – retreat into cultural
identity is often a defence against an increasingly right-wing political
culture in which White + Might = Right.
An uncompromising antiracist pedagogy drawing on Black, radical,
and Third World currents, of the sort developed by New Beacon, poses
a potent challenge to Britain’s postimperial xenophobia and racism.
That pedagogy can help dismantle the racialized patriotism that re-
mains so central to dominant representations of Britishness.
All of the New Beacon projects I have discussed have intervened
directly in already existing social and cultural spaces with the aim of
effecting change and creating alternatives. The projects are distinguished
by an orientation towards planning and building structures that will
endure into the future; these projects are imagined and implemented
with a transcendent orientation. The setting up of an educational trust
and archive, bearing the name of the Pan-African Marxist George
Padmore, supported by an expanding Web presence,41 is an indication
that the key figures in the New Beacon Circle have an eye to the future.
Of course, transcendence is never guaranteed. Still, the New Beacon
Circle chose to act, not in a naive or voluntarist manner, but rather with
an acute awareness that some of their projects are bound to fail. Their
collective life’s work is a timely reminder to a younger generation now
being politicized in the anticapitalist, antiglobalization, and other op-
positional movements that social change must be not only struggled for
but also organized toward; and organized struggle grows out of struggles
to organize. The New Beacon Circle’s radical pedagogical ventures into
publishing, bookselling, and activist organizing have helped constitute
the multicultural society that Britain is not yet, but might yet become.
NOTES
In memory of Jim Murray (1949–2003), activist, friend, and comrade. La lotta

continua.
1 I use colour-‘race’ terms in capitalized form and always with implicit

quotation marks. I reject both ‘race’ as ontology and racial ways of seeing/
knowing. Race and its attendant colour lexicons are undeniably part of an
apparatus of organizing social life, but to accord them near-ontological
status is to lose sight of their instrumentality and contingency. I treat race
as a sociological object, not as an epistemological standpoint. That I feel
the need to make these almost banal points here is an indication of the
renewed fascination, both popular and scholarly, with ‘race.’
2 Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981).
3 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
4 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
5 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Pelican,
1968).
6 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985);
Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transform-
ing Education (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1987).
7 Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (London: Bookmarks,
1983).
tional Publishers, 1971).
9 Rutledge M. Dennis, ‘Introduction: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Tradition of
Radical Intellectual Thought,’ in Research in Race and Ethnic Relations: The
Black Intellectuals, ed. Rutledge M. Dennis (London: JAI Press, 1997);
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing
My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International
Publishers, 1968).
10 Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular
Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982);
Ellen Meiksens Wood, The Retreat from Class: The New True Socialism (Lon-
don: Verso, 1986).
11 David Lowenthal, West Indian Societies (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1972).
12 O. Nigel Bolland, ‘Creolization and Creole Societies: A Cultural National-
ist View of Caribbean Social History,’ in Intellectuals in the Twentieth-
Century Caribbean, ed. A. Hennessey (London: Heinemann, 1992); C.L.R.
James, ‘A New View of West Indian History,’ Caribbean History 35:4 (De-
cember 1989): 49–70; Eric Williams, Education in the British West Indies
(New York: University Place Book Shop, 1968).
13 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964); Eric
Williams, Williams Speaks: Essays on Colonialism and Independence (Wellesley,
MA: Calaloux, 1964).
14 Carl Campbell, Colony and Nation: A Short History of Education in Trinidad

and Tobago (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1992).
15 Ibid.
16 Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power: The Rise of Creole Nationalism in
Trinidad and Tobago (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1968), 62.
17 For an extended discussion of the New Beacon Circle see Brian W. Alleyne,
Radicals against Race: Black Activism and Cultural Politics (London: Berg,
2002).
18 See www.clrjamesinstitute.org. Jim Murray died on 21 July 2003, after a
short illness.
19 C.L.R. James, American Civilization, ed. Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
20 Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary and
Cultural History (London: New Beacon Books, 1992).
21 Selwyn Cudjoe and Paget Henry, ‘The Audacity of It All: C.L.R. James’s
Trinidadian Background,’ in C.L.R. James’s Caribbean, ed. Paget Henry and
Paul Buhle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 39–55.
22 Reinhard Sander, The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the
Nineteen Thirties (New York: Greenwood, 1988).
23 Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Verso, 1988),
26.
24 Brain W. Alleyne, ‘Classical Marxism, Caribbean Radicalism and the Black
Atlantic Intellectual Tradition,’ Small Axe 3 (1998): 157–69; Anthony
Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James (Lon-
don: Pluto Press, 1997).
25 Barbara Beese, ‘Race Today Interviews New Beacon,’ Race Today 9 (1977): 7.
26 John Jacob Thomas, Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude
(London: New Beacon, 1969 [1889]).
27 James Anthony Froude, The English in The West Indies; or, The Bow of Ulysses
(New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1888).
28 State school here includes both comprehensive (all ability and all subject
areas) and selective (‘grammar’ schools, which are oriented towards the
traditional scholastic curriculum). The New Beacon activists and their
associates were engaged mainly with schooling in England.
29 A. Cambridge, ‘Education and the West Indian Child – A Criticism of the
ESN School System.’ Black Liberator 1 (1971): 9–19; Paul Willis, Learning to
Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1977); Farukh Dhondy, ‘Teaching Young Blacks,’ Race
Today 10 (1978): 81–6.
30 Trevor Carter, Shattering Illusions: West Indians in British Politics (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1986).
31 Bernard Coard, How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal
in the British School System (London: New Beacon, 1971).
32 Michael F.D. Young, Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology
of Education, Open University Set Book (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971).
33 Personal Interview. London, 15 January 1997.
34 Carter, Shattering Illusions; Gus John, The Black Working-Class Movement in
Education and Schooling and the 1985–86 Teachers Dispute (London: Black
Parents Movement, 1986); Heidi S. Mirza and Diane Reay, ‘Spaces and
Places of Black Educational Desire: Rethinking Black Supplementary
Schools as a New Social Movement,’ Sociology 34:3 (2000): 521–44.
35 Stephan May, ‘Critical Multiculturalism and Cultural Difference: Avoiding
Essentialism,’ in Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and
Antiracist Education, ed. Stephan May (London: Falmer Press, 1999).
36 Black Parents Movement, Independent Parent Power, Independent Student
Power: The Key to Change in Education and Schooling (London: Black Parents
Movement, 1980). Emphasis in original.
37 Jenny Bourne and A. Sivanandan, ‘Cheerleaders and Ombudsmen: The
Sociology of Race Relations in Britain,’ Race and Class 21 (1980): 331–52.
38 Personal Interview. Leeds, n.d., 1998.
39 Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual
Needs in Contemporary Society (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989).
40 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
41 www.georgepadmoreinstitute.org
Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla Experience 227
12 ‘Before Coming Here, Had You Thought

of a Place Like This?’: Notes on
Ambivalent Pedagogy from the
Cybermohalla Experience1
shveta sarda
A formal definition of a pedagogue in a working-class locality could be

as follows: a figure who, through interactions, brings into the students’
consciousness a reality beyond their immediate reach; a figure who
brings into their lifeworld skills from other locations that will place
them in a more advantageous position in society.
The frame of the lifeworld of the pedagogue is visible and articulate.
It is in a position from which to propose a vision for the other world – a
vision of empowerment through intervention. The inner world of the
‘student’ is of anticipation, anger, and restlessness. It lives with different
intensities of indignity and humiliation born of the derision felt at the
perception that it must, and can be, ‘transformed.’ It lives in the troubled
terrain of entitlement to, gratitude for, and suspicion of intervention.
Reverberations of the question, ‘Before coming here, had you thought of a
place like this?’ offset the stability of this figure.2 The idea of young
people in working-class settlements as tabulae rasae is displaced. What
replaces it? This question calls for a realignment of positions, a redraw-
ing of assumptions and protocols of interactions. What emerges?
‘The Edges of Thought’
Eighteen-year-old Raju Malyal lives in Dakshinpuri Resettlement Colony

in South Delhi.3 A student of class tenth (a critical year in the Indian
system both for future studies or employment), he attends afternoon
school on weekdays, and on weekends he helps out at the small
neighbourhood eatery run by his father. Raju, in a public reading before
250 friends, acquaintances, and strangers, reads: ‘I wanted to think
about what Shamsher Ali had written in his text, “The Edges of Thought.”
228 Shveta Sarda
I read the text thrice, and in doing that, felt as if Shamsher Ali was
sitting in front of me all this while, talking to me about it.’4
Eighteen-year-old Shamsher dropped out of school before complet-
ing class ten. ‘No one cares what you do in afternoon school. I wasn’t
learning anything, anyway.’ Shamsher lives in Lok Nayak Jai Prakash
(LNJP) Colony in Central Delhi.5
The intimacy, desire, and searching quality of Raju’s narration indi-
cate that the dominant coordinates through which young people’s lives
are mapped – the home, the school, and the workspace – far from fill all
existing spaces for engaging with their subjectivities.
Lately, Shamsher has started spending his early mornings at a work-
shop in the colony that produces cardboard boxes. Reflecting on his
routine, he writes: ‘I like to hang around there and chat. The time I
spend there are the only moments of respite I get from thinking. Thought
is my enemy.’6
There is a rawness to this recognition of living with the incomprehen-
sibility of certain conditions of social realities, and a capacity to live
with that vulnerability. Within the unyielding structures of institutions,
frameworks, and discourses is a search for the edges of thought – the
whispering, agile peripheries of the mind that imagine, flow, combat,
seek, assert, and create. This needs a space that can support and allow
for this search.7 It craves and ferrets out challenging friendships that
nurture thought in a manner that does not read the rawness and vulner-
ability of a stutter as defeat or helplessness, but as pregnant with
possibilities of new discoveries.8
Raju reads on: ‘Sometimes, we create boundaries in our thoughts,
stopping ourselves from thinking, stopping ourselves from finding the
edges of our thoughts, from where we can plunge into newer depths.
Why do we do that? Why do we create shores of the ocean of thinking,
or disallow ourselves from moving towards horizons by being swept
away by waves?’
‘A Thought Full Stop’
Reading her text to her peers at the lab about a visit to the Jama Masjid
in Old Delhi, not far from the neighbourhood, twenty-two-year-old
Azra described how she drifted through the city, first on foot, and then
on a cycle-rickshaw.9 Her passing description of the rickshaw driver
caught the attention of a practitioner from Sarai who was also present at
the lab. The description was shy, as if Azra had found something
disturbing about the rickshaw driver. She had written: ‘He was a young
man. He was wearing pants and shirt and looked like he had been
through some years of formal schooling. Fair and handsome, he seemed
to be a Kashmiri. I thought, “Bechara [Poor thing]! Surely he can get
himself a better job than driving a cycle rickshaw.”’
Sensing that Azra had perhaps unconsciously adopted a popular
critical stance considered necessary in talking about education and
unemployment among city youth, the practitioner probed further than
the description carried him. He asked: ‘Azra, can you tell me a little
more about the rickshaw driver? Why did you call him bechara?’ Sur-
prised at how little she remembered about him, and that bechara was a
conjunction she had used in her text to move on to a description of the
street by shifting her gaze from him, Azra, her eyes on the text, re-
flected: ‘By calling him bechara, I created a distance between him and
my thought. Bechara is not a conjunction of different thoughts here. It’s a
thought full stop!’
Bechara is the singular, the figure pushed out of our imagination by
our metanarratives. A voice muffled, a story silenced, a trajectory of
thought left unmapped and unexplored, save as evidence for, or an
affirmation of, our dominant thought – another statistic. These full
stops are like barricades, creating boundaries around our thought, a
closed community of ideas.
Helping conduct a survey to gauge perceptions about caste and
religion among children in his colony, Lakhmi found the methodology
very troubling. Each time the children were reticent to answer ‘objec-
tive’ questions, the interviewer was expected to guess the child’s re-
sponse and fill in the answers. ‘I simply couldn’t understand,’ he said,
‘How am I supposed to decide whether the child’s silence means “yes”
or “no”?’
It is perhaps through the silencing of many that knowledge is created.
A pedagogue working within realities marked by inequality, conflict,
and contestation cannot be innocent of the intimate relationship
between knowledge and the politics of silence.
A couple with a newborn child refuses to discuss with the family
their acute desire to move out of the close-knit, protective neigh-
bourhood they have lived in for years. A student drops out of school
for fear of the indignity of being called a failure. A young man
labouring at a construction site quietly daydreams through the spray
230 Shveta Sarda
of invectives from his supervisor during cycles of carrying bricks to the

eleventh floor.
These absences in life – the inadequacies of biographies – are the
inadequacies of speech. Silences reside in the recognition of the politics
of these lingering inadequacies.
Crowds carry silences with them. The singular, distanced figure de-
void of its biography, multiplies to become a mass, indistinguishable in
its features, so remote. Azra says: ‘Sometimes it seems like a beehive,
sometimes like insects crawling on the ground …. There are many
sounds, but none reach our ears properly.’10 In the stinging relations of
full stops and silences, silencing and knowledge, what can be a knowl-
edge producer’s methods of engagement?
‘The Gaps’
On a dark winter evening in early January 2002, during the LNJP

Compughar’s trip to Bombay, we reached the Dadar metro station,
which was bustling with commuters hurrying into and pouring out of
local trains. Falling into step with a stream of commuters heading for
the exit, we reached the footbridge to the vegetable market. Swinging
batons of policemen attempted to control and bring to order the hodge-
podge of bodies – some halting for breath, others finding their own
rhythms and directions. Underneath, the market was bright with halo-
gen lamps lit in different stalls. Crowds thronged the stalls, the market
was flooded with bodies packed together – a sea of heads that could
allow no one admittance. Nonetheless, the crowd seemed to be swelling
by the minute.
We decided to walk through the crowd in pairs. Reaching the other
side, we were surprised at the ease with which we had moved through
the crowd. Someone from the group said: ‘There were gaps in the
crowd which we could not see from above. Once we entered the crowd,
we could walk through these intervening spaces.’
Later, in a text from the experience, Azra wrote:
The crowd from in front –You see faces, different features and appear-
ances that could not be seen from above, expressions on faces. Some faces
seem to be searching something. Sometimes, the search seems to be for a
glimpse of the unknown, and on other occasions, it is a somewhat inti-
mate search.
Standing on the footbridge presented a distanced view from afar. The

frame of the visual field, removed from the experience of the market
and created from a height, produced anxiety, fear. This was a particular
vantage point. But knowledge, as our movement towards and into
the crowd suggested, is a question of different perspectives, not spe-
cific positions. The tensions between differences of perspective were
productive.
A crowd demands to be entered, experienced. The gaps – ruptures,
disjunctions, joints – present themselves as possibilities, points of entry.
It is in bringing near, in moving through the gaps that an engagement is
sought.
‘Speech without Fear and Fearless Listening’
Knowledge is about the bold and simultaneous existence of a multiplic-

ity of voices that fragment our conception of reality, decentre the very
act of the production of knowledge, the translation of lifeworlds; this is
where the edges of our worlds are in conversation with one another, not
muted and silenced. The speech of millions is essential in this. What
witholds and prevents speech is the fear of listening to too many voices,
the fear of a resultant cacophony. But there is a richness in the multiplic-
ity of a band when it plays myriad instruments, when there is improvi-
sation, and more than one sound can be heard.
Azra says: ‘The simultaneous existence of multiple, diverse voices
means there is speech without fear, with freedom and dignity. And that,
in turn, implies that there be responsible and fearless listening.’ Being in
the network of knowledge production is as much about being a server,
as a host or a client.
Speech is imbricated in the politics of space, and played out in our
everyday lives. When the young people at the LNJP lab decided to
circulate their writings in the colony through the public form of a ‘wall
magazine,’ they were faced with a peculiar problem.11 As young people,
they had till now been addressed by elders in the colony. They now
confronted the matter of finding a way to address the colony. The fear
was that even if they could initially skirt topics they knew would earn
the disapproval of their elders, what about issues for which norms were
not specified? Three issues of the wall magazine, named Ibarat (Inscrip-
tion), were brought out in quick succession. But following these, ques-
tions of what terrain to choose, what topics to select, what issues to
232 Shveta Sarda
discuss, what mode of writing to adopt, superseded, and there was a

long pause before the fourth Ibarat. Narration is halted because it does
not find a context.
Narration is a function of desire. Desire is not person-centric; rather,
it is a constellation – of people, settings, memories, preferences – in
relations with one another that originate and extend beyond the indi-
vidual. Narration flows between these elements, and this flow is made
possible by a curiosity to hear. To narrate is to relive an experience
through the act of telling, through speech. This reliving requires a
nurturing context of friendship, a challenging and compassionate lis-
tening, which evokes and is receptive to a narration. To listen, then, is
to wrestle with your desire, to be vulnerable in a search for a means to
look at yourself anew, to question how another has been imagined.
There must be so many narrations that are never made because they
do not find gradients they can flow towards. Narrations seek this
terrain of hospitality, this context created by thirst and difference, this
desire.
A pedagogue is not a library of known and catalogued books that can
be issued out. And a narration is not a requisition for a title or an author.
In what is the desire that the pedagogue – the guest of the young people
of the host locality– imbricated?
‘To Think You Are Alone Would Be Gross Injustice’
The formidable discourse of labouring rides over social inequality. Here,

the question of earning a livelihood, of entering the labour market, is
very important. This discourse of livelihood can be one of computer
literacy, of speed – it requires skills in typing, preparing Excel sheets,
making database entries, writing letters, designing pamphlets, cards,
etc. In short, these are the lower-level skills required for the labour force
in growing computer-based economic activities. The emphasis is on
efficiency, dexterity, and software training. Such vocational training
is offered by a number of IT institutes mushrooming in and around
working-class settlements. It presents the familiar and troubling dis-
junction between two imaginaries – the discourse on livelihood for the
working-class, and knowledge production.
The tussle between these two imaginaries once arose in a dialogue at
the labs around the meaning of working with computers, implying the
necessity to learn to type at a good speed.12 The question that arose was
of the relation between the flow of the keyboard and the flow of thought.
The labouring discourse overpowers here because it blocks the possibil-

ity of thinking of people outside the language of productivity or as
cultural producers. Thus it is extremely difficult for the young people to
suggest to themselves that technology can be entered through creativity
in the technological space.13
The dialogue at the lab continued by drawing out the difference
between a ‘hobby’ and a ‘line’ (career choice). ‘Hobby’ is the sphere of
the creative, of playfulness and inventiveness. A ‘line’ is what one
pursues in life to earn a living, to secure an income, and this is at the
cost of creative instincts. With a rejection of folk forms and public
cultures of storytelling, or other modes associated with these rich tradi-
tions of creative resources, which erupt sporadically on the urban scape
during religious festivals and organized showcase events, the sphere of
the everyday expressions of creativity searches for outlets and forms.
In this loss of language around creativity, training to work in beauty
parlours (learning bridal make-up, applying mehandi, etc.) is the most
popular career choice for girls in working-class settlements. Men may
become part of local dance or theatre troupes, or paint billboards, signs,
etc. These become modes for bringing the ‘hobby’ and the ‘line’ to-
gether. These micropractices are an assertion by the young people of
their creative urges.
‘Unlikely encounters’14 with free software programmers have opened
up another dimension: the most interesting conversations happen when
programmers visiting the labs talk about their experiences of sharing
skills in a creative community that has participants from different back-
grounds, and in different geographical locations.15
This creates a fascinating context, in which you imagine yourself, and
also the locality, as part of a matrix of other spaces. It shows the possi-
bility of a conversational and practice-based universe where there are
people who will find excitement in your quirkiness, play, interests, and
ideas. Yashoda, who came to the lab two years ago with a turbulent
personal background, and so a mistrust for all forms of determinate
aggregates, writes: ‘To think you are alone would be gross injustice.’
She is a prolific writer, and one of the strongest votaries of ensembles
formed around the relationship of thought and creativity.
What these interactions and dialogues gesture towards is the reality
that one can have a transformative relationship with technology – and
not just be addressed by it. This is a critical shift in register. This is a
universe where your thought is of consequence in a larger framework
of knowledge production.
234 Shveta Sarda
‘What Do Words Contain?’
Word is.
a memory: which gives the word its recognition.
a story: an incident that keeps the memory of the word
alive.
time: every word carries with it the shadow of time.
image: an image is associated with every word.
thought: different people think differently of the same
word.
sound: a sound follows every word.16
This textural world of the word lies beyond the realm of judgments. It is
not bound by the binaries of ordinary and special, valuable and useless,
good and bad, ugly and beautiful. Fertile and mutable, it evokes and
invites more narrations, linking with other experiences. Nisha Kaushal
from Dakshinpuri says: ‘Utterances are suggestions for others to open
up. You don’t define a boundary of the conversation and it flows
through suggestion upon suggestion.’ In this mode of excavation of
perspectives and meanings in an ensemble of producers, a universe of
hyperlinked experiences emerges, rhizomatic in its growth, inclusive in
its spread, and open in its propensity to encounters.
This accretive relay of experiences as texts and conversations creates
an interdependence and densification of ideas – ideas collide and mingle,
open out and jostle. This is practice-based, and it flows from everyday
experiences.
Nasreen at LNJP narrated her experience of witnessing an accident:
Because the bus was crowded, the driver was speeding, halting at the
stops very briefly. One man, who was trying to get on, was clutching on to
the handle on the door. He was trying to put one foot on the steps of the
bus. But unfortunately, he slipped, and along with that, his hand also lost
its grip on the handle. He fell. The driver drove on.
Her peers Neelofar and Shamsher responded:
Neelofar: When I was listening to Nasreen’s story I was remembering

scenes when people, specially boys, run to get on moving buses. Some do
this because the bus doesn’t stop long enough, while others get off the bus
and then get on again when the bus starts to move. Bus conductors do this
often ... I like it when people first let the woman, or family members they
are traveling with, board the bus, and then get on.
Shamsher: Listening to the story, I feel like I am the driver and am driving
the vehicle, looking at either side. I am glancing at the rear view mirror,
and looking at the road as well, which will take the travelers in the bus to
their destination. But my attention is not on the passengers at all. I am
waiting for the destination.17
Unstable and mobile links between experiences, thoughts, and ideas

emerge. Conceptual connections between ideas and different producers
make possible a networked thickening of the emergent concepts. The
diversity and richness of experiences and ways of thinking creates the
possibility of the emergence of a relational knowledge field.
Yashoda Singh, at the LNJP lab, writes about her body, and how she
perceives her room through it:
The wind has entered with such force from the chinks in our walls, that a
shiver has run down my whole body. The upper part of my body is
outside the quilt, and wind is entering from the sides as well. The wind
comes and makes me aware of its coldness ... My back is really hurting
now. So I should lie down. But what’s this? The whitewash on the walls of
our house is just like the pair of lips of a woman who has put lipstick on
one of the lips, but not on the other. Because the walls are whitewashed,
but not the roof ...18
The intimacy of the narration, its searching quality and metaphorical

evocations, is striking. Yashoda thinks through the lived experience of
space through claims and withdrawals, through her own body. The
body is inscribed in different ways in different narratives.
Lakhmi writes about Ashoki, who cleans sewers in his colony by
going inside them. He has written the text in an autobiographical mode,
imagining himself to be Ashoki, and his encounter with Lakhmi Chand’s
gaze in the crowd of bystanders (residents of the colony) as he enters a
sewer:
The boy who had come to file the complaint was also there. He was
looking at me with surprised eyes. Maybe he was thinking that when he
had come to the office, I was wearing clean clothes and talking to him like
an officer. But today he was surprised at seeing me in dirty clothes. I was
236 Shveta Sarda
laughing within. In his eyes, I was first an officer, a sahib. He had called me
sir. But what would he call me now? Maybe he was also thinking of the
same thing.19
The text raises the question of how the body is socially perceived,
problematizing the fixedness of the representational frame around filth,
cleanliness, and notions of waste and disposal. What emerges through
these is a complex narrative of the body – as imagined, narrated,
socialized. This rich, layered, contradictory terrain of experience and
body and social dignity allows for a networked thickening of ideas.
This practice-based universe produces a contingent, unstable, and
relational knowledge field. The ‘pedagogue’ is a node in this network,
searching the emergent with producers/practitioners.
‘What Is It That Flows Between Us?’
This practice of producing and building in a network resonates with

and draws from other practices and philosophies – for instance, the free
software modes of production. Virtual technological practices inform,
further complicate, and deepen the imagination and the everyday at
the labs.
Sharing resources through peer-to-peer networks, a class of applica-
tions that takes advantage of available resources – like storage, cycles,
human presence – along the links between routers of data packages,
presents an actual and realizable technological juncture as well as a
metaphorical resonance with the peer-based practice at the labs. The
agility and improvisation of tactical media provide a larger context of
multiauthored production and a network to link with as producers and
creators. Practices like hyperlinking, lists, and weblogs provide tools
and practices for cultural producers.
All of these have made possible the creation of and search for new
forms of knowledge, communities, and practices at Cybermohalla.20
Ambivalent Pedagogy
Ambivalence is an affirmation of contradictory perspectives, vantage

points, positionings, and feelings. Ambivalent pedagogic processes ges-
ture towards the porosity of the boundaries between the nodes of a
server and a learner, realized through thinking about and practising in
networked relations of knowledge production. Different nodes produce
knowledge, and through the contingent and specific relations formed

between ideas, experiences, and practices, together search the emer-
gent. Critical to the engagement is an acute consciousness of and con-
stant reflection on the relations between friendship and knowledge,
knowledge and conditionalities of speech, knowledge and silences,
knowledge and sharing. It is from these that an ethics of the interaction
in each site-specific unlikely encounter evolve.
The encounters multiply over time. Seeking unlikely encounters, as
guests in another locality, Yashoda, Azra, Lakhmi, Neelofar, Raju,
Nasreen, and Suraj will carry with them and receive anew the rever-
berations of the question, ‘Before coming here, had you thought of a
place like this?’ The question would be differently inflected, every time,
at each site, layering and thickening its experience and meanings.
NOTES
1 Mohalla in Hindi and Urdu means neighbourhood. Ankur-Sarai’s Cyber-

mohalla project takes on the meaning of the word mohalla, its sense of
alleys and corners, of relatedness and concreteness, as a means of talking
about one’s place in the city and in cyberspace. In its broadest imagina-
tion, it is a desire for a broad, horizontal network (both real and virtual) of
voices, sounds, and images in dialogue and debate. A step towards the
realization of this desire is the generating of self-regulated media labs in
working-class settlements in Delhi, which can facilitate the development
of researcher-practitioners from the locality. The young people who come
to the labs are between fifteen and twenty-four.
2 The practitioners at the labs often ask visitors this question. Is it a question
of suspicion of a stranger? Or is it an assiduous search for a relationship
of dignity? There is a strong realization at the labs that their life world is
perceived as curios in a ‘waiting room.’ To Yashoda, a practitioner at the
LNJP lab, a khaas nazar – a special look cast at her – is a gaze that produces
a feeling of suffocation. She writes: ‘What can be said of the looks that are
not from strangers, but well-wishers? They seem unfamiliar sometimes.
What are these looks? They leave a trace of suffocation in my life, which
otherwise seems to be going on just fine. Even if I want to tell others about
these looks, I can’t. Because I don’t understand them myself. Because in
the courthouse of glances, there are no eyewitnesses.’
3 Between 1975 and 1979, during the state of emergency, Delhi saw the
violent clearing away of irregular settlements under the aegis of
238 Shveta Sarda
Jagmohan, vice-chairman of the Delhi Development Authority. The dislo-

cated inhabitants were to be moved to undeveloped plots on the fringes of
the city earmarked for resettlement colonies. This was the beginning of the
official history of Dakshinpuri, which is now bustling with life and not as
weak infrastructurally.
4 The public reading was at the launch of the 2003 Cybermohalla publica-
tion Book Box, which consisted of ten booklets of texts from the labs, five
postcards, a CD with animation, a sound-and-text film, and free software
for Windows. For the Book Box and the full text of Raju’s reading, see
www.sarai.net/publications/cyber_pub/book_box/launch.htm
(accessed 5 October 2004).
5 LNJP is officially a slum settlement. The irregular dwellings started
appearing in the early 1960s, when people began settling unoccupied land
beside the LNJP hospital. Over the years, many more people made homes
here and the density of the colony increased. LNJP lives with the daily
threat of demolition. In its neighbourhood is Turkhman Gate – a settle-
ment with a predominantly Muslim population, which saw massive
demolition between 1975 and 1977. After the demolition, residents were
sent to different resettlement colonies.
6 For Shamsher’s full text, see www.sarai.net/publications/cyber_pub/
book_box/english/questionsbetray.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004).
7 Compughar, or the Abode of Computers – as the Cybermohalla media
labs are called by the young practitioners – is one such liminal space. The
young adults practising at the labs meet on a daily basis, and grapple with
ideas and stutter into concepts through a sustained practice of sharing
through conversation. The LNJP Compughar was set up in May 2001, the
Compughar at Dakshinpuri in August 2002.
8 It is vital for the pedagogue to have a deeper understanding of the periph-
eral realities of any such space. Individuals are not discrete, separate units;
rather, they are experientially imbricated in a social network that extends
beyond them. An understanding of the implications of this vis-à-vis an
institution like the school – which dissects both the experiential and the
network from which a student emerges – is extremely significant for an
experiment like Cybermohalla. Prabhat Jha, one of the Cybermohalla
project coordinators, writes: ‘The question we must constantly ask our-
selves is whether we see ourselves working among the 30 or 40 young
people immediately in front of us, or among the locality which they have
emerged from and are a part of. As soon as we bring this into view, the
entire scene changes. If we see ourselves as working in a community, it is
not possible for us to forget that along with the practitioners are their
families, and along with the families, the neighbourhood. That is, the
sense that your work has reverberations in spaces outside of the immedi-
ately visible context of the labs, and is constantly a receiver of reverbera-
tions from other spaces, is a very important one.’
9 Over the past two years at the labs, a sustained and regular practice of
writing has emerged. Everyone writes in diaries – small notebooks with
ruled paper. These writings, some of which are in the biographical regis-
ter, some in the register of space, others an engagement with another
biography, are a rich database of narrative, comment, word play, and
reflection.
10 For the full text of ‘Crowds from Afar, from in Front and from Within,’
see www.sarai.net/publications/cyber_pub/book_box/english/
eyescrowd.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004).
11 The wall magazine is a primary ‘public form’ at the labs. Texts are written
and selected for a twelve-page wall magazine designed and produced
at the lab. They are then photocopied and circulated in the locality by
being posted on public walls. The first three wall magazines were on
names of the lanes in the colony, on work, and on the trip to Bombay.
Translated versions of these issues can be found at www.sarai.net/
projects/cybermohalla/media/wall_mag/ibarat01/english.htm;
www.sarai.net/projects/cybermohalla/media/wall_mag/ibarat02/
english.htm; and www.sarai.net/projects/cybermohalla/media/
wall_mag/ibarat03/english.htm.
12 The labs are equipped with three computers each, a scanner, a printer, a
sound booth, portable sound recording units, and digital and analogue
cameras. The computers run on free software. Image Manipulation soft-
ware, GIMP and Text Editor, Open Office are the applications used for
making animations and typing in and formatting texts. The practices of
taking photographs, recording sounds, and creating animations seem to
have an archival impetus, rather than being object-oriented, or with an
output in mind. They are constantly reworked, catalogued, and logged.
This archive then will create a centrifugal force; instead of being worked
with to be presented to a public, it may create a pull – that is, the ‘public’
will have to come to see it.
13 An interesting phenomenon is that although there is so much pressure
from the labour market for people who are familiar with proprietary
software, a brilliantly dynamic and productive culture of copying (for
example, MP3s) is part of this very environment. It is in the alleys and
small rooms right here that the nodes of production that sustain the grey-
market economies thrive. These nodes, through which the locality enters
240 Shveta Sarda
the larger politics of economic transactions as a producer, are part of the

everyday reality of these practitioners. It is in this context that cassettes
with assorted favourite tracks and CDs with the latest film (burned before
its release) are freely circulated among peers, and copied for them.
14 I would like to thank Park Fiction (www.parkfiction.org) for its rich
concept of Unlikely Encounters: groups that develop tools, attitudes, cour-
age, practices, and programs, and that make unlikely encounters, meet-
ings, and connections more likely, search for them, jump over cultural and
class barriers, go where no one goes, look where no one’s looking.
They do not allow their activities to be reduced to symbolic action,
mirroring, critique, negation, or analysis of their powerlessness, nor do
they muddle along in their assigned corner. See www.parkfiction.org/
unlikelyencounters/begriffe.php (accessed 5 October 2004)
15 Among many other programmers, Arish Zaini of the GNU/Linux Users’
Group in Iran visited Delhi in early 2002. He has been working with a
small group to develop a Persian-language KDE desktop. During his visit
he spent a day at the Compughar in LNJP, where he shared his work with
young women who were proficient in Urdu and in working with the
English-language desktop. In the convivial atmosphere of a mutual ex-
change of personal stories and interests in technology and language, a
small promise of a CD to install the Persian desktop at the lab was made
and sealed. Now, from the Persian desktop, an Urdu language desktop
can be developed and shared at the lab.
16 For the full text of ‘A Word,’ written by Suraj Rai after a discussion among
the practitioners at the LNJP Lab, see www.sarai.net/community/
cybermohalla/book02/pages/pdfs/wordscontain.pdf (accessed 5 October
2004).
17 For texts from Nasreen’s other peers at LNJP, see www.sarai.net/
publications/cyber_pub/book_box/english/eyescrowd.pdf (accessed
5 October 2004).
18 For Yashoda’s full text, see www.sarai.net/publications/cyber_pub/
book_box/english/beforecoming.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004).
19 For Lakhmi’s full text, see www.sarai.net/publications/cyber_pub/
book_box/english/inversion.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004).
20 From the Technological Imagination of Cybermohalla, version 01: ’Is there
a significance in interaction and collaboration with peers? What does it
mean when edges, margins and in-between spaces become alive, pulsat-
ing, interacting? When clients are also servers? When users are also
producers; browsers are also editors? When centers are dislocated and
resources are dispersed? When diversity and multiplicity thrive? When
ideas are not static or owned, but shared and developed collaboratively?
When unpredictable addresses and routes with unstable connectivity are
generators of knowledge, sites of narration, and nodes and zones of
communication?’ For the full text, see www.sarai.net/publications/
cyber_pub/by_lanes/194-215.pdf (accessed 5 October 2004).
242 Carlos Alberto Torres
13 Transformative Social Justice Learning:

The Legacy of Paulo Freire
carlos alberto torres
The intellectual and political work of Paulo Freire haunts a number of

the theoretical discussions and practical experiments addressed in the
present book. Renowned as pioneer of ‘popular education’ theory and
practice, particularly in the Latin American context, Freire addressed a
serious dilemma of democracy: the constitution of a democratic citizen-
ship. He also advanced in the 1960s – quite early, compared with the
postmodernist preoccupations of the 1980s – questions of diversity and
border crossing as central tenets of transformative social justice learn-
ing. Freire taught us that domination, aggression, and violence are
intrinsic to human and social life, and argued that few human encoun-
ters are exempt from one type of oppression or another; by virtue of
race, ethnicity, class, and gender, people tend to be victims or perpetra-
tors of oppression. Thus, for Freire, sexism, racism, and class exploita-
tion are the most salient forms of domination. Yet exploitation and
domination exist on other grounds besides, including religious beliefs,
political affiliation, national origin, age, size, and physical and intellec-
tual abilities, to name just a few. 1
Starting from a psychology of oppression influenced by psychothera-
pists like Freud, Jung, Adler, Fanon, and Fromm, Freire developed a
pedagogy of the oppressed. With the spirit of the Enlightenment, he
believed in education as a means to improve the human condition, to
confront the effects of a psychology and a sociology of oppression,
to contribute ultimately to what he considered the ontological vocation
of the human race: humanization. In the introduction to his highly ac-
claimed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire stated: ‘In these pages I hope I
have made clear my trust in the people, my faith in men and women, and
my faith in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love.’2
The Legacy of Paulo Freire 243
Freire was known as a philosopher and a theoretician of education in

the critical perspective, and as an intellectual who never separated
theory from practice. In Politics and Education he forcefully stated that
‘authoritarianism is like necrophilia, while a coherent democratic project
is biophilia.’3 It is from this epistemological standpoint that Freire’s
contribution resonates as the basic foundation for transformative social
justice learning. The notion of democracy entails the notion of a demo-
cratic citizenship in which agents are active participants in the democratic
process, able to choose their representatives as well as to monitor their
performance. These are not only political but also pedagogical practices
because the construction of the democratic citizen implies the construc-
tion of a pedagogic subject. Individuals are not, by nature, ready to
participate in politics. They have to be educated in democratic politics
in a number of ways, including normative grounding, ethical behaviour,
knowledge of the democratic process, and technical performance. The
construction of the pedagogic subject is a central conceptual problem, a
dilemma of democracy. To put it simply: democracy implies a process
of participation in which all are considered equal. However, education
involves a process whereby the ‘immature’ are brought to identify with
the principles and life forms of the ‘mature’ members of society.
Thus, the process of construction of the democratic pedagogic subject
is a process of cultural nurturing, involving cultivating principles of
pedagogic and democratic socialization in subjects who are neither
tabulae rasae in cognitive or ethical terms, nor fully equipped for the
exercise of their democratic rights and obligations.4 Yet in the construc-
tion of modern polities, the constitution of a pedagogical democratic
subject is predicated on grounds that are, paradoxically, a precondition
but also the result of past experiences and policies of national solidarity
(including citizenship, competence-building, and collaboration).5
A second major contribution of Freire is his thesis advanced in Peda-
gogy of the Oppressed, and reiterated in countless writings, that the
pedagogical subjects of the educational process are not homogeneous
citizens but culturally diverse individuals. From his notion of cultural
diversity, he identified the notion of crossing borders in education,
suggesting that there is an ethical imperative to cross borders if we
hope to educate for empowerment and not for oppression. Crossing the
lines of difference is, indeed, a central dilemma of transformative social
justice learning.
How can we define transformative social justice learning from a
Freirean perspective? As a social, political, and pedagogical practice,
transformative social justice learning will take place when people reach
a deeper, richer, and more textured and nuanced understanding of
themselves and their world. Not in vain, Freire always advocated the
simultaneous reading of the world and of the word. Based on a key
assumption of critical theory that all social relationships involve rela-
tions of domination – and that language constitutes identities – trans-
formative social justice learning, from a meaning-making or symbolic
perspective, is an attempt to recreate various theoretical contexts for the
examination of rituals, myths, icons, totems, symbols, and taboos in
education and society, an examination of the uneasy dialectic between
agency and structure, which begins a process of transformation.
Language constitutes identities. However, language works through
narratives and narrations, themselves the products of social construc-
tions of individuals and institutions. And these social constructions
need to be carefully inspected, both at their normative and at their
conceptual and analytical levels. From a sociological perspective, trans-
formative social justice learning entails an examination of systems,
organizational processes, institutional dynamics, rules, mores, and regu-
lations, including prevailing traditions and customs – that is to say, key
structures which by definition reflect human interests.
These structures represent the core of human interests, expressing the
dynamics of wealth, power, prestige, and privilege in society. They
constrain – but also enable – human agency. It follows that a model of
transformative social justice learning should be based on unveiling the
conditions of alienation and exploitation in society. That is, on creating
the basis for the understanding and comprehension of the roots of social
behaviour and its implications in culture and nature. One can enhance
one’s understanding of this by considering the theoretical contributions
of Pierre Bourdieu on habitat and habitus, and how social capital affects
and is affected by the construction of ideology in education.6 Likewise,
one can resort to Basil Berstein’s analysis of class, codes, and controls,
which offer – especially in relation to class analysis – a horizontal and a
vertical modelling of social interactions in education.7
Transformative social justice learning is a teaching and learning model
that calls on people to develop a process of social and individual aware-
ness. This process is encapsulated in the famous term concientização,
popularized in the 1960s in Brazil by the Bishop of Olinda and Recife,
Helder Camara. Freire himself adopted the notion of conscientização, at
one point in his work calling for a comprehensive challenge to authori-
tarian and banking education. But he later stopped using it when he
saw that it was being employed as a ruse to mask the implementation of

instrumental rationality under the guise of radical education.8
Reclaiming conscientização as a method and as a substantive proposal
for transformative social justice learning entails a model of social analy-
sis and social change that challenges most of the basic articulating
principles of capitalism, including frivolous hierarchies, inequalities,
and inequities. This poses an interesting contradiction in teacher train-
ing. It can be argued that a principle of social organization of schooling
in capitalist society reproduces the conditions of production of such a
society. If so, how is it possible to advocate and produce social change
from within existing structures?9
Conscientização is not simply a process of social transformation. It is
also an invitation to self-learning and self-transformation in their most
spiritual and psychoanalytical meanings. It is a process in which our
past need not wholly condition our present. And it is a dynamic process
which assumes that by rethinking our past, we can fundamentally gain
an understanding of the formation of our own self, the roots of our
present condition, and the limits as well as the possibilities of our being
a self-in-the-world, reaching the ‘inedito viable,’ that powerful concept
elaborated by Freire in the 1960s.10
Thus conscientização as a process of social introspection and self-
reflectivity of researchers, practitioners, and activists invites us to de-
velop a permanent ethical attitude of epistemological and ethical
self-vigilance. Concientização invites us to be agents of social transfor-
mation facing potentially transformable structures. To this extent the
notion of dialogue – so well developed in the Freirean opus – becomes
an agonic tool of social agency, critically emblematic of its limits and
possibilities.
Dialogue appears not only as a pedagogical tool, but also as a method
for deconstructing pedagogical and political discourses.11 More than
thirty years after Freire’s most important books were published,12 the
concept of a dialogical education that challenges the positivistic value
judgment/empirical judgment distinction has appeared as a demo-
cratic tool for dealing with complex cultural conflicts in the context of
unequal and combined development in Latin American education –
although its applicability in industrial advanced societies can also be
documented by many experiences.
In summary, Freire’s contributions have provided us with a peda-
gogy that has expanded our perception of the world, nurtured our
commitment to social transformation, illuminated our understanding
of the causes and consequences of human suffering, and inspired as

well an enlivened ethical and utopic pedagogy for social change. Freire’s
death has left us with the memory of his gestures, his passionate voice,
and his prophet’s face with its long white beard – and with his marvel-
lous books of Socratic dialogue.
As an appreciation and celebration of his work, and of his contribu-
tions to transformative social justice learning, I would like to quote
Paulo Freire himself. In 1996, when he spoke at the University of San
Luis, Argentina, he remarked: ‘As an educator, a politician, and a man
who constantly rethinks his educational praxis, I remain profoundly
hopeful. I reject immobilization, apathy, and silence. I said in my last
book, which is now being translated in Mexico, that I am not merely
hopeful out of capriciousness, but because hope is an imperative of
human nature. It is not possible to live in plenitude without hope.
Conserve the hope.’13 A mystique of hope is another fundamental prin-
ciple of transformative social justice learning.
NOTES
1 In this paper I focus on transformative social justice learning, but I am

aware that this construct needs to be enriched to reflect the diversity of
oppressive situations.
2 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Montevideo: Editorial Tierra
Nueva, 1972), 19.
3 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy and Politics (Los Angeles: Latin American Center,
1998), 56.
4 I thank Walter Feinberg for this suggestion in a personal communication
to the author.
5 M.P. O’Cadiz and C.A. Torres, ‘Literacy, Social Movements, and Class
Consciousness: Paths from Freire and the São Paulo Experience,’ Anthro-
pology and Education Quarterly 25:3 (1994): 1–18); C.A. Torres, Pedagogia da
luta. De la pedagogia do oprimido a la educação publica popular (São Paulo:
Cortes Editores and Institute Paulo Freire, 1998); Pilar O’Cadiz, Pía
Linquist Wong, and Carlos Alberto Torres, Democracy and Education. Paulo
Freire, Social Movements, and Educational Reform in São Paulo (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1998).
6 See Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction, critique sociale du jugement (Paris:
Minuit, 1979). See also the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Michael Apple,
Ideology and Curriculum (New York: Routledge, 2003).
7 Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, 4 vols (London: Routledge,

1970–3).
8 See Carlos Alberto Torres, Education, Power and Personal Biography: Dia-
logues with Critical Educators (New York: Routledge, 1998).
9 Carlos Alberto Torres, ‘Schooling in Capitalist America: Theater of the
Oppressor or the Oppressed?’ in Promises to Keep: Cultural Studies, Demo-
cratic Education, and Public Life, ed. Dennis Carlson and Greg Dimitriadis
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 263–75.
10 Jose Eustaquio Romão aptly distinguished three sociological categories
associated with Freire’s notion of the ‘inédito viable’: incompletude (incom-
pleteness), inclonclusão (inconclusiveness), and inacabamento
(unfinishness). ‘Pedagogia Sociológica ou Sociología Pedagógica.’ Paper
presented to the Mid-Term Conference of the Research Committee of
Sociology of Education, International Sociological Association, Lisbon,
Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, 18–20 September
2003. See also Isabel Bohorquez, ‘Lo inédito viable en Paulo Freire. Tras el
perfil de un sueño,’ Cordoba, Argentina, unpublished paper.
11 See Carlos Alberto Torres and Adriana Puiggrós, eds, Education in Latin
America: Comparative Perspectives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
12 Paulo Freire, La educación como práctica de la libertad (Buenos Aires:
Siglo XXI, 1978); Pedagogía del Oprimido (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1978);
Carlos Alberto Torres, Estudios freireanos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del
Quirquincho, 1994).
13 Varios, El grito manso, Paulo Freire en la Universidad de San Luis, unpub-
lished manuscript, 1996.
248 Allan Antliff
14 Breaking Free: Anarchist Pedagogy
allan antliff
Before I begin, I should say something about my own politics. I’ve been
involved in the anarchist movement for some time and have partici-
pated in a wide range of anarchist educational projects. My academic
life and my political life run parallel to each other, and intersections are
frequent. This essay is an instance of it.
Anarchist pedagogy breaks free from authoritarian modes of educa-
tion and the regulatory mechanisms of the state. It actualizes its politics
by functioning immanently, in the here and now. This is the sense in
which anarchist pedagogy is utopian. It is a gesture towards the future,
akin to spraying a circle-A on a bank window before the bricks go in.
‘In anarchist theory,’ writes Paul Goodman, ‘the word revolution means
the process by which the grip of authority is loosed, so that the func-
tions of life can regulate themselves, without top-down direction and
coordination. The idea is that, except for emergencies and a few special
cases, free functioning will find its own right structures and coordina-
tion.’1 Here we have the foundation of anarchist pedagogy: an open,
cooperative social structure.
Take, for example, the Survival Gathering held in Toronto, Canada,
from 1 to 4 July 1988. I was unable to attend this event, but I can draw
on extensive documentation, including first-hand accounts, to outline
its key features. The first thing to note is that the gathering was decen-
tralized, non-hierarchical, and social in the most profound sense. On
the first day a general meeting was held at the gathering’s ‘convergence
centre’ to make operational decisions concerning issues such as media
relations, food, and housing.2 This orientation process introduced those
unfamiliar with anarchism to the movement’s consensus method of
decision-making (discussions continue until collective agreement is
reached or until those opposed to the majority position agree to sus-
Breaking Free: Anarchist Pedagogy 249
pend their objections). Also, a schedule booklet was distributed outlin-

ing the purpose of the gathering. The booklet included a map of the
various downtown locations – the convergence centre, community halls,
cafes, parks – where, for the next two days, workshops would be held.
At these workshops, topics such as capitalism, indigenous struggles,
and anarchist feminism were discussed with the help of facilitators,
who ensured that no single voice was privileged over others.3 In addi-
tion to the workshops, a Networking Day was scheduled where mem-
bers of federated organizations, including the Anarchist Black Cross
and the Animal Liberation Front, could meet to discuss their respective
projects.4 Throughout the four days, at the gathering’s convergence
centre, groups set up tables where they distributed journals, books,
leaflets, and pamphlets. Musical performances, an exhibition of anar-
chist posters, and poetry readings rounded out the events.5
In short, those at the Survival Gathering experienced learning in all
its infinite variety. They not only attended, they organized. They not
only learned, they taught. Indeed, the gathering itself was an instance
of education by example. It was an anticapitalist social structure in
microcosm, providing free housing, entertainment, education, and food
to everyone. But there was one more aspect that merits mention.
A Day of Action (DOA) was scheduled for the final day of the event.
For this, the participants planned a ‘general protest’ against select ‘state
institutions [and] corporations.’6 However, the day before the DOA –
3 July 1988 – a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf shot down a civilian
Iranian aircraft, killing 290 people.7 Survival Gathering participants
decided to start their demonstration at the U.S. Consulate, on Univer-
sity Avenue in the downtown core. Despite a heavy police presence,
they converged on the building the following afternoon. From there
they marched down the avenue, covering sidewalks, streets, and build-
ings with anticapitalist graffiti. At a Canadian war memorial, Nazi and
U.S. flags were burned. Then the crowd ‘took to the streets, laughing
and yelling, “No War, No KKK, No Fascist USA!”’ The police attacked,
people fought back, some damage to targeted businesses ensued, and
eventually the protesters dispersed.8 ‘How much positive affect the
DOA had is hard to say,’ wrote one participant. ‘In a sense it’s much like
any anarchist paper, leaflet, book, etc. as it is in itself a criticism of the
state, an attack against its institutions, a loud voice raised in protest.’9
From an educational standpoint, the DOA was a textbook instance of
parrhesia – the articulation of truths that threaten, hurt, or anger a more
powerful opponent.10 This form of speech does not attempt to convince:
the purpose is to challenge.11 Those who take such action do so because
250 Allan Antliff
they believe that for society to change for the better, truth-telling is
necessary. ‘In parrhesia,’ writes Michel Foucault, ‘the speaker uses his
freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of
falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criti-
cism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and
moral apathy.’12 Similarly, anarchists transformed Toronto’s streets into
a forum for parrhesia by directly challenging the legitimacy of the Ameri-
can killing spree, using every means – speeches, flags, graffiti, chants,
and rioting – at their disposal.
Which brings me to desire, and its role in anarchist pedagogy. In
1910 Emma Goldman wrote: ‘Anarchism stands for a social order
based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of produc-
ing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human
being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of
life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.’13 And
more recently, in The Education of Desire, Clifford Harper has observed
that ‘anarchism promises and provides choice and autonomy, it de-
mands independence and responsibility, and at its heart lies subjectiv-
ity and rebellion ... The only way to live is with these as the cornerstones
of day-to-day practice.’14 ‘Disarm authority – arm your desires!’ – that
is the ethos.15 Thus anarchist pedagogy is more than confrontational:
it is a pleasurable activity in which self-realization develops hand in
hand with social change.
A good illustration of this mode of learning is Ambience of a Future
City, an urban-focused project initiated by Kika Thorne and Adrian
Blackwell in 2001. Ambience of a Future City was a collaborative exer-
cise involving local community groups in Toronto that are self-run, non-
hierarchical, and critical of capitalist urban development. In a series of
meetings, each group discussed specific spaces in the city and how they
could be transformed along anticapitalist, communitarian lines. Thorne
and Blackwell then created plans that represented these visions and put
them on display in the spaces concerned.16
The first group to be contacted was a self-run activist organization for
youth based in Regent Park, one of Canada’s oldest public housing
developments. The Focus Media Arts Program, as it is officially called,
runs a community radio program called Catch da Flava and produces
an online newspaper of the same name (www.catchdaflava.com). Its
activities encompass photography, film making, and journalism – all
with a community-based, critical edge.
Catch da Flava chose their own office, located in the basement of a
Regent Park housing block, as their project. During two hours of taped
interviews they discussed their situation, moving from general issues

to specific ones. Thorne and Blackwell then developed a plan to reno-
vate the group’s offices based on these ideas. They presented the plan
to the group and displayed it on a billboard outside the building.
Inspired by the process, Catch da Flava went on to substantially
renovate the space.
The second group to be contacted were anarchists who lived in or
near Kensington Market, one of the liveliest areas of the downtown
core. Their focus was a parking lot on a Kensington side street that was
connected to a busier shopping street by an alley. The participants
imagined replacing the parking lot with a cooperatively run, commu-
nally owned building that would provide a home for anarchist projects
as well as affordable housing (see figure 14.1a). The complex would
feature a publicly accessible courtyard and a walkthrough between two
streets. Activist organizations, a bike shop, a film space, and an area for
people to relax and enjoy themselves would be located on the ground
level; the upper stories would have apartments. The project addressed
the need for a building that anarchists could call their own, where they
would be free to develop long-term projects without fear of eviction at
the whim of a landlord. Here a real, living countercommunity could be
nurtured. Again, a billboard displaying the plan was erected on the site
to show the contrast between the anarchists’ vision and the present
reality.
The third plan (and billboard) posited new uses for a former indus-
trial area – the ‘Portlands’ – along the Toronto waterfront. Toronto
city planners have long coveted this location as a potential site for
an Olympic Games, so Thorne and Blackwell contacted Bread Not
Circuses, an activist group that in the 1990s played a pivotal role in
mobilizing people to oppose two Olympic bids.
Bread Not Circuses proposed using already existing examples of
social land use to revitalize the Portlands. They imagined combining
public housing with sites where ‘communities of anticapitalist resis-
tance’ would be fostered and an extensive commons of wild spaces.
Discussions focused on creating a matrix of possibilities for people to
‘self-define their lives outside the constraints of private property, with-
out the constraints of bureaucratic organization.’17
The Ambience project is compelling not only because it brought the
visions of three collectives into focus through a non-hierarchical learn-
ing process, but also because to varying degrees these visions dove-
tailed with anarchist values. Thorne and Blackwell did not seek out
capitalist developers to envisage schemes for maximizing profits. They
252 Allan Antliff
14.1a Kika Thorne and Adrian Blackwell, Ambience of a Future City: Anarchist
Cooperative in Kensington Market, 2001.
an anarchist cooperative in kensington market
ambience of a future city — kika thorne + adrian blackwell
This proposal for the design of an anarchist cooperative in Kensington Market was
based on a conversation between Suzanne Alexanian, Danielle Allen, Adrian
Blackwell, Allan Graham, Sandra Jeppesen, Bernie Munich, Kika Thorne and Dan
Young, August 2001.
A complex of buildings create a public square surrounded by an info

shop, gallery, vegan restaurant, an all ages performance space, organic
food cooperative, and a raked cinema with cafè for radical films, videos
and lectures. The bike share co-op and the metal/wood fabrication work-
shop are entered from Bellevue Avenue. There is a rooftop garden above
the double-height workshop. TVAC, the Toronto Video Activist Collective
and Tao Communications, a radical information network, will occupy the
2nd floor of the complex, along with internet access, a darkroom, rehears-
al spaces, a sound engineering studio and office space. The 3rd, 4th and
5th stories are apartment/studios, which can accommodate anything from
a single person to collective living. Thirty percent of the units in both build-
ings are dedicated to housing transient or homeless activists, musicians,
writers and artists. The 6th floor of the east wing is a writer's colony. A
seasonally enclosed corridor connects all buildings. The passenger and
freight elevator provides barrier free access to all floors.
These buildings are constructed out of a concrete structure with wood
balconies and removable greenhouse glazing panels in the corridors. The
basic living unit is 500 sq. ft. Inhabitants receive raw space with plumb-
ing and electrical and are expected to build the interior with salvaged
materials. The grey water is purified through a rooftop living machine and
employed for irrigation. Rainwater is filtered by means of organic sys-
tems, stored and used for drinking, cooking and washing. Human waste
is transformed in composting toilets. Photovoltaic solar panels on the south
roof power the complex. There is an organic greenhouse and food com-
posting system on the roof of the north building. The building is heated
primarily through passive solar energy, augmented by hot water solar pan-
els on the east wing of the north-east building.
Ground floor/site plan, a detail from the ambience of a future city poster
by Kika Thorne and Adrian Blackwell; drawings made with Michael Bartosik.
14.1b Kika Thorne and Adrian Blackwell, with Michael Bartosik (drawing and
communication), Mark Lindquist and Dan Young (graphic support), and Allan
Graham (sound mastering).
254 Allan Antliff
sought to nurture countercultures that would be qualitatively different

from the existing system.18
Which is to say that anarchists would never confine pedagogy to
theoretical critiques in the halls of academe. Their pedagogy is always
already engaged because it encourages tension between the restrictions
imposed by the forces of repression and anarchism’s libertarian aspira-
tions.19 As David writes in the Black Bloc Papers:
To find dignity and affirmation through the creation of an alternative

community despite the dominant opposition is truly dynamic. Such limi-
tations impel the human mind to expand its cognitive ability, and in this
consciousness is sharpened. Furthermore, the limitations to its full actual-
ization is the impetus to its destructive aspect. It must necessarily seek the
eradication of that opposing force as the condition of its coming into full
being. It is more than a decision to organize in a particular manner. It is a
revolutionary force.20
In sum, anarchist pedagogy fosters communities of learning that

mitigate against everything that capitalized education stands for. And
here I can draw on personal experience. In the summer of 1998 I was
living in Toronto, where I attended an anarchist gathering called Active
Resistance (modelled on the 1988 Survival Gathering). Towards the
end of the event, I was asked if I would be interested in helping found
a Free School.21 This project was an outgrowth of discussions held
during one of the gathering’s workshops, and seven people were
already committed to it.
And so we set to work. At weekly meetings held over two months,
we discussed everything from our name to where we might hold classes.
Early on we resolved to call the project an Anarchist Free School (AFS) to
make our politics explicit. This also ensured that people seeking to
promote antithetical political beliefs (Nazis, Marxists, and so on) un-
der the umbrella of an ‘alternative’ educational organization wouldn’t
join us.
After settling on the name, we drew up a statement of purpose, an
operational structure, decided on the first round of courses, and en-
gaged in publicity and outreach. By mid-September we were ready. We
blanketed the downtown with a flyer announcing that the AFS would
be launched at an open meeting on 4 October 1998.22
The flyer listed the courses to be offered, with times and locations.
And it included an AFS identity statement with a short outline of ‘How
We Operate’:
The Anarchist Free School is a volunteer-run, autonomous collective offer-

ing free courses, workshops, and lectures that cover a wide range of
topics. Education is a political act. By deepening our knowledge of our-
selves and the world around us, sharing skills, and exchanging experi-
ences in an egalitarian, non-hierarchical setting free of prejudice, we
challenge dis-empowering habits and broaden our awareness of alterna-
tives to the inequalities of capitalist society.
The Free School is a counter-community dedicated to effecting social
change through the application of anarchist principles in every sphere of
life.
How We Operate: Participation in the Free School is a commitment. The
school’s ‘governing body’ is a general meeting, open to all, which con-
venes once a month. At this meeting problems and proposals are brought
to the attention of Free School participants, who arrive at solutions by
consensus. ‘Participants’ are those attending workshops/courses; facilita-
tors of workshops/courses; working committee members; and people
who, having served as participants in the past, continue to support our
efforts in some capacity.
Day-to-day logistics at the School are dealt with by working committees
(answerable to the general meeting) which are self-organized and run by
consensus. Working committees keep the School up and running by deal-
ing with finances, time and venue scheduling, publications, and other
matters. Committees report every month to the general meeting, where
their needs and concerns are addressed.
I should add that the AFS really was free – a policy that ensured the
participation of low-income people who were intimately familiar with
capitalism’s shortcomings: impoverished activists, single mothers,
people living with AIDS, struggling university students, and so on. In
this way the AFS found its natural constituency among the oppressed.
The first round of courses, which ran from October to mid-December,
included Intermediate Spanish Conversation; Wild Plants of Toronto;
The Conflict in Chiapas (Mexico); and Radical Parenting. In February,
courses were augmented by an Anarchist Free School Lecture Series
held at the University of Toronto. Attendance was good, and one of the
talks was published in Kick It Over magazine and later issued as a
pamphlet.23 By the fall of 1999, when I left Toronto, the AFS was operat-
ing out of an Anarchist Free Space.24 The flyer for that fall (see figure
14.2) suggests the dynamism of the project, which was now branching
out into film making, book launches, and so on. The project ended in
late 2000, but this turned out to be only a hiatus. In the summer of 2003
256 Allan Antliff
14.2a Toronto Anarchist Free School Flyer, fall 1999. Courtesy of Anarchist Archive, University of Victoria.
14.2b AFS Flyer
258 Allan Antliff
I attended one of the founding meetings for Toronto’s Anarchist U

(AU), successor of the AFS. A number of former AFS members lent their
experience to the project, which was launched that fall.
The AU has taken advantage of internet technology by posting a web
page, www.anarchistu.org, which is fully interactive so that members
of the AU collective can change their course postings as they wish.
Anarchist U operates on an all-volunteer basis, with no fees or infra-
structure costs to undermine accessibility. And like its predecessor, it
offers a wide range of courses, such as Chaos Theory, Queer History,
Art and Collaborative Processes, and Politics Through the Media. The
only requirement is that the subject not violate anarchist principles.25
How many people have participated in these projects? I counted
about eighty at the opening of the AFS, and hundreds more took part
over the next few years. By all accounts, AU has been equally success-
ful.26 In fact, an anarchist structure encourages growth. The participa-
tory mandate lets any student become a teacher by proposing a course
and facilitating it. A class with twenty-five students might nurture five
future teachers, who might in turn draw in more students, and so on.
These are ‘open’ institutions.
An article in the Toronto Star (21 October 2003) highlighted other
strengths. The author, Daphnie Gordon, found that student life at
Anarchist U made for quite a contrast to the hierarchy-ridden, state-
adjudicated, capitalized Canadian university system:
Sick of overcrowded university classes, boring lectures, high tuition and

less-than-spectacular grades? No problem. Now there’s a school in town
run by educated volunteers who ‘facilitate discussion’ rather than lecture,
argue that grades create a negative learning environment, and limit class
sizes to about 25. Plus, the whole thing is free. Yep, free.27
Anarchist U was sweeping away the impediments that hamper sta-

tus quo institutions of higher learning, thus making it possible to com-
bat a more generalized psychic oppression. In an interview with Gordon,
course facilitator Luis Jacob observed: ‘Our society strives for hierarchy.
It happens at work, in schools, even in some homes [and] it leads to
alienation. We all know what alienation feels like and it’s awful. In a
sense, all of society suffers because everyone’s potential isn’t realized in
that system.’28 In other words, the ‘normal’ learning experience from
grade school to university is alienating because it naturalizes the au-
thoritarian values that repress the creative potential of the majority by
14.3 ‘Hey Kids ... Tell Us What You Learned in School Today!’ 2004. Courtesy
of Terry Everton.
260 Allan Antliff
perpetuating social and material inequalities (see Terry Everton’s Chris-

tian Angst: ‘Hey Kids ... Tell Us What You Learned in School Today!’).29
In contrast, the pedagogy at Anarchist U was liberating students and
teachers alike. Once education was made free and grading and other
assorted punitive measures (degree denial) were set aside, people could
learn without competing with one another or striving to satisfy author-
ity figures in their midst. As one Anarchist U student related: ‘I’ve been
learning a lot. The people at Anarchist University are there because they
want to be there. They’re there to learn and everyone has something
interesting to contribute.’30
One might well wonder, then, how anarchists negotiate non-
anarchist learning environments. A few cases from the United States are
instructive.
In the winter semester of 2004, at Fort Lewis State College in Colo-
rado, Professor Mark Seiss undertook an anarchist pedagogical experi-
ment.31 Working under the auspices of a general-studies course option,
he offered a class on Deconstructing Systems in the Pursuit of Anarchy
in which students learned the basics of anarchism and then turned a
critical eye on existing social systems.32 In the process, the class de-
cided, by consensus, to ‘deconstruct’ Colorado’s postsecondary system.
The students refused to allow five of their papers to be selected ran-
domly for final evaluation by the General Education Council, which
oversees the statewide general-studies curriculum, on the basis that the
council members were not qualified to judge the worth of the course.33
The evaluators hadn’t participated in discussions or read the materials,
and they certainly weren’t as well versed in the subject matter as Seiss
or the students themselves. One student related: ‘We learned all semes-
ter that we didn’t need that kind of patriarchal force overlooking every-
thing in society, so why would we let them overlook what we were
doing in class?’34 In this instance, anarchist pedagogy generated an
institutional crisis in Colorado – a crisis that as of April 2004 had yet to
be resolved.
In the fall of 2001, Katie Sierra, a fifteen-year-old high-school student
in Sissonville, West Virginia, began handing out flyers promoting a
planned anarchist club while wearing a T-shirt protesting the recent
American invasion of Afghanistan. Sierra’s T-shirt read: ‘When I saw
the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered
sense of national security. God bless America.’35 The manifesto for the
club read: ‘This anarchist club will not tolerate hate or violence. It is our
final goal to dispel myths about anarchism, especially the belief that
anarchy is chaos and destruction.’36 Fifteen to twenty students were

already interested in joining, and a ’Zine was in the works. They had
already discussed forming a Food Not Bombs group (FNB distributes
free food to people in need).
Sierra was proposing self-managed learning with a circle-A, learning
that would call the Bush administration’s ‘war against terrorism’ into
question and much more besides. Alarmed by her activities, the princi-
pal of the high school suspended Sierra for three days and forbade her
from wearing political T-shirts or founding an anarchist club, on the
grounds that she was ‘disrupting school activity.’37
On the evening of the last day of her suspension, Sierra decided to
defend herself at a local Board of Education meeting, where her case
was being discussed. The response was less than welcoming. As re-
ported in the press, one board member shouted: ‘This isn’t something
funny or cute. You’re talking about overthrowing the government!’
Another accused her of being a traitor, yelling: ‘[It’s] people like you
who stood up and waved a Japanese flag on Pearl Harbor day.’ The
president of the school board asked: ‘What the hell is wrong with a kid
like that?’ False statements at the meeting to the effect that Sierra was
wearing T-shirts that read ‘I hope Afghanistan wins’ and ‘America
should burn’ were published the following day in the local newspaper.
This set the stage for her return to school.
During her first week back, students spat on her car, and a group told
the school’s Reserve Officer Training Cadet instructor (the U.S. military
recruits directly from high schools through its ROTC program) that
they were going to subject Sierra to ‘West Virginia justice.’ In the face of
these and other threats, Sierra was forced, for reasons of personal safety,
to transfer to another school. Subsequently, the district school board
forbade her to return to her home institution. In 2002, aided by the
American Civil Liberties Union, she took her former school principal
and the Board of Education to court for violating her civil rights. The
jury ruled that the decision to disallow an anarchist club was wrong but
that the banning of her T-shirts was legal, as was the suspension.38 Thus
Sierra’s attempt to introduce anarchism to her high school met ‘death
by a thousand cuts’ through a drawn-out process of administrative and
media harassment, vigilantism, and legalized censorship.
Others don’t even get their foot in the door. In 2004 the producers of
Big Tea Party (BTP), a Philadelphia-based cable TV program, were
denied the right to present a made-for-public school video titled ‘Green
Tea Party’ at the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo Confer-
262 Allan Antliff
14.4 Big Tea Party: Gretjen Clausing, Elizabeth Fiend, Valerie Keller, Philadel-
phia, 2001. Courtesy Big Tea Party.
ence (see figure 14.4). They had been invited to participate in the confer-
ence by a professor of education who was familiar with their success at
reaching inner-city children. The video in question was about kids
‘riding bikes, visiting farms in search of better food choices, donating
old clothes to charities, and composting at home.’39 However, at a
meeting of the conference’s organizing board, an official of the Pennsyl-
vania Department of Education raised BTP’s promotion of anarchism
on their web site as a potentially ‘controversial’ issue. After much
debate, a majority on the board voted to cancel the invitation.40
Incidents such as these underline that anarchist pedagogy embodies
values that are antithetical to the existing social system. These are not
frustrated attempts at reform, they are encounters on the terrain of
education between irreconcilable social forces. The anarchist movement
may not be powerful enough yet to overthrow educational authori-
tarianism, but it is powerful enough to inspire revolts against it. And
each event gives rise to tensions that raise a larger question: What do
anarchist educators need to do to change society as a whole? I would
argue that cultural–political autonomy is the key issue here. Just as

anarchists have created their own press, internet sites, communes, book-
stores, and other cooperative ventures, so they need to create their own
educational institutions. In this way they will ‘realize (make real) the
moments and spaces in which freedom is not only possible but actual.’41
Liberate learning, and the rest will follow.
NOTES
1 Paul Goodman, Drawing the Line: The Political Essays of Paul Goodman, ed.
Taylor Stoehr (New York: Free Life Editions, 1977), 215.
2 ‘Anarchist Survival Gathering: An Anarchist Unconvention,’ Endless
Struggle 8 (1989), reprint in Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology, ed.
Allan Antliff (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), 350–2.
3 Jean Weir, ‘Survival Gathering, Toronto, July 1–4, 1988,’ Insurrection 5
(1988), reprint in Only a Beginning, 347–49.
4 ‘Anarchist Survival Gathering,’ 350–2.
5 Interview with Rocky Dobey, 25 October 2002.
6 ‘Anarchist Survival Gathering,’ 350.
7 Ibid. In 1987, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq began losing its war with Iran,
the United States deployed warships in the Persian Gulf to back up the
Iraqis. The downing of the Iranian aircraft in 1988 was not the Americans’
first act of war – its forces had sunk an Iranian ship the year before. See
William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe,
ME: Common Courage Press, 2000), 30.
8 ‘Anarchist Survival Gathering,’ 351–2.
9 Ibid.
10 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e)/Foreign
Agents, 2001), 17.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 20.
13 Emma Goldman, ‘Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,’ in Anarchism and
Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), 62.
14 Clifford Harper, The Education of Desire: The Anarchist Graphics of Clifford
Harper (London: Aldgate, 1984), 61.
15 I am quoting the subtitle of the North American magazine Anarchy: A
Journal of Desire, Armed.
16 Interview with Adrian Blackwell, 21 September 2003.
264 Allan Antliff
17 Kika Thorne and Adrian Blackwell, ‘Portlands People’s Zone – A Toolbox

of Possibilities,’ Fuse 36:2 (2003): 14.
18 David, ‘The Emergence of the Black Bloc and the Movement Towards
Anarchism,’ in The Black Bloc Papers, compiled by David and x of the
Green Mountain Anarchist Collective (Baltimore: Black Cover Editions,
2002), 37.
19 It is important to underline that this tension arises from anarchism’s
aspirations and carries the qualitative stamp of its origins. For more on
this issue see Alfredo Bonano, The Anarchist Tension (London: Elephant
Editions, 1998).
20 David, ‘The Emergence of the Black Bloc,’ 36.
21 On Active Resistance, see Antliff, Only a Beginning, 353–6.
22 Anarchist Free School (flyer), Toronto, 1998, Toronto Anarchist Free School
Collection, Anarchist Archive, Special Collections, University of Victoria.
23 Jim Campbell, ‘From Protest to Resistance: The Vancouver 5 Remem-
bered,’ Kick it Over 37 (2002), reprint in Only a Beginning, 152–6.
24 Jeff Shantz, ‘Anarchist Free Space,’ in Only a Beginning, 338.
25 I am citing courses posted on the Anarchist U website www.anarchistu.org
(accessed 2 April 2004).
26 The numbers related to the AFS are my personal recollection. There is also
documentation of participation in the Toronto Anarchist Free School
Collection, Anarchist Archive, Special Collections, University of Victoria.
For information on the AU, see Daphne Gordon, ‘Anarchy Enters the
Classroom,’ Toronto Star, 21 October 2003, C.2.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Terry Everton, ‘Hey Kids … Tell Us What You Learned in School Today!’
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed 57 (Spring–Summer 2004): 47–9.
30 Gordon, ‘Anarchy Enters the Classroom,’ 2.
31 C.D. Durango, ‘Anarchy Class Refuses to Hand Over Papers,’
www.colorado.indymedia.org/feature/display/7513/index.php
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 ‘Infoshop.org Interviews: Katie Sierra,’ www.infoshop.org/interviews/
katie_sierra.html (accessed 2 April 2004).
36 ‘Katie Sierra sued her high school principal, Forrest Mann, for the right
to start an anarchy club and express her political views at school.’ Visit
www.courttv.com/graphics/news/topnews_content/insertbox_bg_bot.gif
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Elizabeth Fiend to Allan Antliff, 18 February 2004.
40 Fiend to Antliff, 6 April 2004. Fiend to Antliff, 18 February 2004.
41 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy,
Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 1991), 132.
266 Richard Toews and Kelly Harris-Martin
15 An Enigma in the Education System:

Simon Fraser University and the
Secwepemc Cultural Education Society
richard toews and kelly harris-martin
Not long ago, Connie,1 an Aboriginal student in Simon Fraser

University’s First Nations Educational Institute in Kamloops, British
Columbia (better known as SCES/SFU),2 was called to her son’s non-
Aboriginal primary school for a teacher/parent conference. Her son, it
seemed, was having trouble socializing; instead of ‘playing’ with the
other children, he chose to be on his own during recess and lunch and to
sit alone in class, away from the other students, who preferred to sit in
groups. The teacher concluded that Connie’s son was educationally
challenged. As Connie noted,
His teacher is afraid that my son will not fit in as he continues in school
because he likes to be on his own, and they’re worried that he will need
counselling. They’re afraid that when he gets older he will not have any
social skills and will eventually drop out. To make sure this doesn’t
happen, they say my son will need remedial help. I don’t understand the
teacher. I told her that my son has always preferred to be on his own, but
we aren’t afraid that he doesn’t know that he is a member of our family.3
From the point of view of the non-Aboriginal world, dropping out

has consequences – consequences that have already been ascribed to
Connie’s son in perpetuity. ‘They think,’ she noted poignantly, ‘that
because he doesn’t fit into the white mold and act like all the rest of the
white kids, he will naturally be a drop-out and become a welfare case.’
In this collection of essays, we are asked to consider the idea that
education can be a utopic pedagogical event. Is there an inherent con-
tradiction between Connie’s experience and what we are asked to con-
sider? To answer this question, we need to address two further questions:
The Secwepemc Cultural Education Society 267
Is there such a thing as a utopian pedagogy? And if there is, what does it
look like?
Utopian Pedagogy Defined
For Fredric Jameson, utopia is eminently social and radically political;

the space of a past and future utopia is a social world that is collectively
cooperative and dramatically embedded in a corrupt and Westernized
money economy.4 In the absence of utopia, says Jameson, things remain
as they are, contingent on a conspiracy of totality.5 It is only in hope,
says Jameson – leaning on Ernst Bloch for his inspiration – that the
conspiracy of totality can be turned around.
It is here that Bloch’s vision has something concrete and productive to

offer us. For Bloch’s work suggests that even a cultural product whose
social function is that of distracting us can only realize that aim by fasten-
ing and harnessing our attention and our imaginative energies in some
positive way and by some type of genuine, albeit disguised and distorted,
content. Such content is called ‘Hope’ or in other words the permanent
tension of human reality towards a radical transformation of itself and
everything about it, towards a Utopian transformation of its own exist-
ence as well as of its social context. To maintain that everything is a ‘figure
of Hope’ is to offer an analytical tool for detecting the presence of some
Utopian content even within the most degraded and degrading type of
commercial product.6
From this perspective, sources of utopian hope are everywhere latent.

But in the twenty-first century, utopian pedagogy is an unauthorized
concept subdued in a theoretical womb, unable to emerge into a world
unprepared for sweeping changes to an archaic educational system.
The SCES/SFU Experiment: The Historical Context
‘Post-secondary education,’ says Shuswap Nation chief Ron Ignace, ‘is

taking place against the background of our situation as a colonized
people. In order to improve our lives and educate ourselves, we have to
struggle hard to attain even a portion of the material support that non-
Native urban post-secondary students take for granted.’7 The struggle
Ignace speaks of is answered by an experiment. This experiment gives
us some indication of what a utopian pedagogy might look like. The
Secwepemc Cultural Education Society (SCES) program, located in

Kamloops, British Columbia, is an educational partnership between the
Kamloops Indian Band and Simon Fraser University, located in
Vancouver.
In 1990, Chief Ignace wrote:
Native Peoples in general and the Shuswap Nation in particular have

been struggling for many years to regain control of the training and
education of their people. A testament to this is the long-standing slogan,
‘Indian control of Indian Education.’
Education outside Indian control does not work; history has clearly
demonstrated that education under the control of governing non-Native
authorities has been oppressive, as is witnessed by the Indian Residential
Schools. The public education system has had an equally dismal track
record.
Historically, Native peoples have been blamed for the failure of non-
Native authorities. As victims, Native people have been blamed for the
faulty political and educational agendas of those in charge. The chiefs of
the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council said, ‘we will not accept the blame, but
we will take on the challenge of building our own post-secondary institu-
tion – an Interior Indian Federated College.’8
For Chief Ignace, this challenge is significant in a fundamental way:
It is important that our own people learn to tell our own history and
culture from the point of view of our elders and within the context of our
own philosophies and traditions, or else future generations will simply
re-tell those versions of our past that were once appropriated by Euro-
Canadian society. The latter all too often do not truly reflect who we are
and how we once lived our lives and impacted on history. It is for this
reason that research on our own societies, and with it the research compo-
nent of the SCES/SFU Program, is of utmost importance and integral to
our endeavours.9
Reflecting these concerns, the SCES program was established ‘follow-

ing the signing of the 1982 Shuswap Declaration by the seventeen
Bands of the Shuswap (Secwepemc) Nation.’10 The declaration was an
agreement to collaborate with the seventeen bands for the purposes of
promoting and preserving the Secwepemc language, culture, and his-
tory. The motto of this new program was and remains knucwentsutce me
knucwentwecw-ep – ‘help yourself and help one another.’11 In order to
reflect this motto, the SCES program, from its very beginning, would
have to be, in the words of the academic coordinator, Marianne Ignace,
‘an institution with a difference, one that does not de-personalize but
that speaks to students because of their open access to everyone in it.’12
But access had to be grounded in a mission. For the SCES/SFU pro-
gram, the mission was to provide ‘high quality education to aboriginal
people, relevant for the needs of aboriginal people of the B.C. Interior
and beyond, as controlled and mandated by the Secwepemc host Na-
tion in collaboration with the First Nations [being] served and with
[their] public partner institutions.’13 Accompanying this mission was a
vision that remains to this day, which is ‘the collective and individual
empowerment of aboriginal people through education, as our peoples
are developing a capacity to become self-governing and self-sufficient,
while staying rooted in our languages, cultures and histories.’14 Have
this mission and this vision been realized?
From its inception, the SCES/SFU ran an adult education program
to bring early drop-outs back into the educational fold, as well as a
Native University and College Entrance Program to upgrade students
to secondary school graduation level. They knew that the Native stu-
dents didn’t fit easily into the Canadian postsecondary education sys-
tem. Rates of failure, attrition, and withdrawal were very high. Also,
those who did succeed in these distant, urban-based institutions were
lost to the communities; they seldom came back. The Shuswap leaders
wanted university education for their people, but they wanted the
university to come to them, on their terms.
The SCES/SFU partnership program began modestly in the fall of
1988 and winter of 1989, as a one-year pilot project, with nineteen
Aboriginal students taking introductory sociology and anthropology
courses. Two large, sparsely furnished rooms in the girls’ dormitory of
the old residential school provided the physical setting – an irony that
was not lost on any of the participants. Indeed, as Ignace points out:
‘[On] the part of our 1st generation of students, it took courage to take
courses in a brand new institute that was in this all-too-familiar place
where they themselves or their mothers had slept.’15
Within five years, the old Residential School proved inadequate in
terms of space and facilities. New arrangements had to be made. While
not much of an improvement, the SCES/SFU program is now located
on a campus of six mobile trailers. These house administrative and

faculty offices, class and seminar rooms, archaeology and computer
labs, a student lounge, and a resource library/reading room.
Despite its limitations, this upgraded campus is providing an educa-
tion for a growing number of First Nations students. Of these students,
several have continued on to master’s degrees in anthropology, archae-
ology or education.
A Teacher’s Story (Richard Toews)
Clearly, the SCES/SFU experiment has made a number of advances in

terms of providing access to postsecondary institutions for Aboriginal
people, and is changing the way we think about the form and content of
‘higher’ education. But does this program represent a utopian peda-
gogy in the Blochian sense of a source of hope? And more importantly,
is it a prefiguration of what is to come? How is it unlike the controlled
educational environment we find on most university campuses today?
I am a white male and a product of the educational imperatives of
our present system. Many years ago, as an elementary teacher trainee, I
was taught the ‘right way’ in terms of teaching methods. I learned that
to be an ‘effective educator,’ I had to have a model and religiously hold
myself accountable to that model. But would this model hold true in all
cases, in all social and cultural contexts? Could I, with impunity, apply,
for instance, the ‘audio-tutorial approach,’ the ‘personalized system of
instruction’ approach, or the ‘goal-based scenario model?’ All of these
are top-down methods of teaching that achieve the desired results. The
question is, should one resort to top-down methods in all contexts? Do
top-down approaches inspire the critical thinking that should be the
hallmark of all education? The answer is clearly no. Fortunately, though
the SCES/SFU program is not wholly without those who feel most
comfortable with a top-down approach, it does provide a space for
experimentation.
When I was contracted to teach at the Kamloops campus, my first
concern was of a political nature. I was told that teaching anthropology
and sociology in the SCES/SFU program would require knowledge of
First Nations issues. But how, I wondered, does one teach about tribal
groups in Africa, marriage ceremonies throughout the world, funeral
rituals, rites of passage, the nature of community, of work, of play, and
so on, from a First Nations perspective? How are these practices under-
stood and articulated differently? Clearly, cultural context provides a
way of thinking about these issues. But a more pressing concern led me
to ask a different question: What would happen if I abandoned my role
as an authority figure for that of a fellow student who wanted to
understand something of how the First Nations people viewed their
world in a context of difference? What would happen if education were
both critical and participatory, if all the participants were both teacher
and student? The participatory aspect of learning revealed to me the
idea that teaching has little to do with prescribed methods that osten-
sibly ‘work.’ Teaching, rather, is about a relationship predicated on
critical friendship and deep respect, one that graciously observes
alterity. Teaching in the SCES/SFU program allowed me to under-
stand how education can be about ruptures, lines of flight and fancy
that take one into a wonderfully mysterious world of creatively ordered
chaos.
For a teacher who needs a methodology, working in the SCES/SFU
program could easily lead to a sense of angst. The SCES/SFU program
succeeds because it is the students who set the educational agenda
rather than the instructor. It is based on a teaching strategy that may
involve no method at all, or where the ‘method’ requires embarking on
a journey of mystery, with no discernable path or trajectory.
Still, the SCES program retains vestiges of the hierarchical structures
so evident in mainstream educational institutions. There are teachers
who draw a salary and who are responsible for drawing up course
outlines; there is the system of grading for success, and we all know
who the ‘successful’ students are. But there is also evidence that the
students in the SCES/SFU program use what Deleuze and Guattari
would call an arboreal system in rhizomatic ways: ‘In the case of the
child, gestural, mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their
freedom and extricate themselves from the “tracing,” that is, from the
dominant competence of the teacher’s language – a microscopic event
upsets the local balance of power.’16 In this sense, SCES/SFU stands as
an example of a utopian pedagogy within and against mainstream
education.
An Experiment Come Alive
In the following account from one of the students, Julia Bennett, we can
begin to get a stronger sense of an educational approach that emerges
from a lived reality of colonial domination. For Julia, an Aboriginal
student and the mother of a grown family:
The small integrated campus known as SCES/SFU is so much more than

its bare portables and small classes. There is a caring atmosphere filled
with trust and respect, an enigma in the education system. The staff and
professors take an active interest in each student. Their approachability
puts new students at ease and builds the atmosphere that is so conducive
to learning, which is what we do here so much better than being taught.
As in any social setting there is some conflict but it is minimal.
The curriculum is approached from the aboriginal perspective and
includes studies of the aboriginal peoples of the world and their cultures.
[It was] my first opportunity to study the changes brought about by
colonial domination. Having been so heavily influenced by the colonial
regime, it is important that people learn why the events of history un-
folded as they did. How these events have had an impact not only on
aboriginal cultures but the dominant cultures as well is of great impor-
tance to me. Simply because these events created subservience and racism.
Through its curriculum, this university campus promotes an understand-
ing of this for all students who attend classes here as well as a true
understanding of aboriginal cultures. True equality is not possible with-
out the absence of subservience and racism. This campus is a giant in its
endeavors to promote the understanding that will eventually achieve this.
The SCES/SFU program is geared mainly towards First Nations

students and First Nations concerns. But it also strives to be a place
where non-Aboriginal people can participate. Donna Sedeger is one
such student. She returned to school at thirty-two after several years
raising a family as a single parent. She first enrolled in the mainstream
education system, at Thompson Rivers University, but soon found that
it did not meet her needs, and switched over to SCES/SFU.
The staff at SCES/SFU are not staid, scholarly types with only their own
opinions to propagate. My transfer was painless and prompt. SCES/SFU
had the major that I wanted, and the faculty thoroughly encouraged me to
expand my goals and delve into another field I had not even considered,
anthropology. In the two years since I transferred, there have been many
personal eruptions in my life. My counsellor and BA adviser have helped
me through these times without batting an eyelash. The staff, including
the receptionist, have become like family to me. This interpersonal rela-
tionship has helped me to overcome such obstacles as the test anxiety I
used to suffer from. The anthropology instructors encourage open discus-
sion in class, and value different ideas and thoughts. My grades have
improved dramatically since transferring to this facility. The small, close

classes are more personal, and the instructors are able to give more time to
individual students, as needed. In my time at SCES/SFU, I have partici-
pated in an archaeological excavation, I have learned so much of First
Nations’ history, and have done an anthropological study of my own. This
facility has made dreams come true for me. I am in my final year of my BA
program, with a joint major in archaeology and anthropology. The first of
my goals is near at hand. My enthusiasm in education has not wavered; it
has encouraged my eldest child to enrol in this facility as well. My daugh-
ter and I are currently in the same criminology class. She is still in her first
year of her BA, but this is her second year at SCES/SFU. Although we are
non-Aboriginal, the Aboriginal students at this facility have welcomed us
without prejudice. The multicultural ideals propagated at UCC are all
well and good, but they are unable to disguise the undercurrent of preju-
dice inherent in the education system, and that of individuals attending
that institution. The fact that the First Nations Society is separate from the
general student council of UCC bears witness to this fact; this is not the
case at SCES/SFU. All students are equal, and there is no separation of
societies at this facility. To say that SCES/SFU is the ‘best kept secret of
Kamloops’ is an understatement at best. The community does itself a great
disservice by not encouraging more of the population to ‘check us out.’
Utopia and Utopian Pedagogy
As noted above, a utopian pedagogy is far from a sure thing wherever it

is practised. Dangers lurk at every turn, so that any undertaking of this
nature must proceed with caution to avoid becoming its own victim.
Indeed, the notion of utopian pedagogy we have used in this chapter is
predicated on a concept of utopia that has the potential to become
problematic. We need, therefore, to spend a few minutes unravelling
this notion of utopia so that we can see its link to utopian pedagogy.
As Gramsci notes in his Pre-Prison Writings (1994): ‘A utopia envis-
ages a future status quo, which is already established and tidy, thus
removing any impression of a leap into the darkness.’17 But for Bloch a
utopia is precisely about the leap into the dark, or at least an embracing
of hope. It is oriented towards the not-yet consciousness, ‘the psychologi-
cal birthplace of the New,’18 which he refers to as the ‘utopian field.’19
For Bloch the very idea of the utopian is absolutely essential and is
designated in the ‘horizon of the consciousness that is the becoming,’ in
the rising of the horizon of ‘expectation, hope, [and the] intention
towards the possibility that has still not come: this is not only a basic
feature of human consciousness, but, concretely corrected and grasped,
a basic determination within objective reality as a whole.’20 Moreover,
Bloch wants us to see how utopia is signified in a consciousness that is
open to dangers as well as to potential victories. Both are addressed
in Kelly Harris-Martin’s account of her experience as a student in the
SCES/SFU program.
A Student’s Story (Kelly Harris-Martin)
To participate in what can be seen as an experimental model for a

utopian pedagogy is a rare experience. The leap of faith into the un-
known darkness in pursuit of a system that supports the needs of a
‘whole person,’ and not merely of a glassy-eyed drone in a lecture
theatre, is intoxicating and in many ways irresistible to me as an under-
graduate student. To say that the SCES/SFU campus is merely the
Kamloops branch of Simon Fraser University is hardly accurate. It does
not encompass the many unique aspects of the campus. When we
examine these diverse elements, a definitive pattern emerges, that high-
lights important aspects not only of the SCES/SFU experiment, but of
more traditional campuses as well.
Learning institutions tend to compartmentalize all aspects of a
student’s life. There are outside interests, and there are scholastic inter-
ests, and never the twain shall meet. When we study biology, we study
only biology. To recognize that students are in fact multifaceted crea-
tures with unique hopes, dreams, and fears is simply beyond the scope
of a traditional educational institution. Those who are able to learn by
rote and take shorthand notes are the most likely to succeed. Learners
who are more tactile are often left behind or left out entirely, herded
towards vocational training rather than cerebral pursuits.
To attend SCES/SFU is to embrace not only a mandate for First
Nations content, but also a new way to learn. The need ‘for precision
and certainty is a typical Eurocentric strategy.’21 ‘From the Indigenous
vantage point, the process of understanding is more important than the
process of classification.’22 When students come from the linear, top-
down teaching environment found in most public schools, this can be
more difficult to understand than the content of the courses themselves.
Being required to think critically and to assume the role of subject of the
act, as Friere suggests, will, most likely, force students to think critically.
This is in direct opposition to the conformist mainstream system where
I began my education. Yet only through this abrupt change can a

student hope to observe and participate in the pursuit of a utopian
pedagogy.
The SCES/SFU campus has a First Nations mandate, so it is not
surprising that the subject matter taught here is flavoured with indig-
enous perspectives. However, the differences between this campus and
more traditional ones go far deeper than course content. To embrace
this education as a vehicle of cultural transmission, social change, and
personal examination would perhaps be more appropriate. A lofty
aspiration, no?
So how do we pursue these goals on a daily basis? I have found
diverse teaching styles to be the norm rather than the exception. Field
trips and unusual projects are common – in some courses they are
routine. In one course, I participated in a traditional pit cook of indig-
enous plants; in another, we held several classes inside the pit houses in
the nearby heritage park. I have attended celebrations for linguistics
classes; I have watched demonstrations of dyeing moose hair; I have
learned the importance of baby baskets to Lil’wat culture. At first
glance, these subjects have little place in the world of academia, yet we
must ‘regard all products of the human mind and heart as interre-
lated ... knowledge.’23
Continuing the theme of exceptions to the norm, I have had the good
fortune to be assigned some extraordinary texts that I doubt I would
have encountered otherwise. Some modern educational institutions
seem very proud of their interpretations of facts; but to me, those
interpretations often seem narrow and somehow cold. In mainstream
education, required readings seem to change little from year to year, at
least until a publisher sees fit to release a new edition. Unfortunately,
new editions – in this student’s opinion – have more to do with book
sales than with new information. Perhaps that is why my required
reading materials here at SCES/SFU strike me as such challenging
exceptions. The materials I have encountered so far have reinforced in
my mind Freire’s contention that the selection of texts is central to
helping both learners and educators overcome a focalist vision of
reality and gain an understanding of the totality.
It is essential that students experience this totality and integrate all
aspects of life into their university experience. For some, this entails
balancing motherhood, fatherhood, or other familial responsibilities
with their studies. For others, it means learning how to be supportive of
these mothers and fathers as fellow students. I have always been im-
pressed that at various times children have been present in the class-
room. I often see children talking to their parents between classes or at
breaks. They are a part of our community here, and rightly so. Children
are often found in the student lounge while their parents attend class in
the next room. It is one more example of how life at this campus
embraces the totality of the human experience and strives to not com-
partmentalize life into narrow categories, based on an outdated belief
in the conditions under which higher learning should occur.
SCES/SFU is on the Kamloops Indian Reserve, but all students are
encouraged to share their perspectives regardless of where they come
from. Many of the students are elders in their own right, with a wealth
of personal knowledge to share, which most freely do. It is a unique
experience to observe the elders being treated with so much respect –
something I was not used to seeing when I began my studies here. It
seems only fitting that these elders should be teachers. The result is a
place where often the teacher becomes as much a student as the pupils
themselves, enabling ‘a dialogical praxis in which the teachers and
learners together, in the act of analyzing a dehumanizing reality, de-
nounce it while announcing its transformation in the name of the libera-
tion of man.’24
Those who know me often ask why I choose to go to school 125
kilometres from home and commute several times a week. I could have
gone to SFU in Burnaby, or to OUC in Vernon, where I live. The answer
is simple, yet rarely easy to convey: I choose to go here because it is the
only school I know that fulfils all my needs as a student and as a person.
I am working towards a BA with an archeology major, and I feel that an
understanding of First Nations issues beyond books and classrooms is
only appropriate. I want to understand the culture and its diverse
peoples as fellow travellers down the road of life, and as fellow stu-
dents, and not as an afterthought in some dry academic text.
My personal experiences at SCES/SFU have been truly remarkable.
The laughter that can be heard on campus at any time more than makes
up for the second-hand portables, which are an inferno in the summer
and unpleasantly cool in the winter. I like having the odd kitten wander
through and make itself comfortable near my books. Our library con-
sists of older books mostly cast off from other libraries, yet it is clean
and tidy, and it contains some materials I doubt could be found any-
where else. This campus is a community, and has all the elements of
one, both good and bad. Perhaps a campus is better this way than
perfect and well funded – after all, these conditions probably prepare
students more thoroughly for real life, and give them better problem-
solving skills than a better-equipped facility could ever provide.
I have been blessed to encounter several individuals whom I am
proud to call friends, and many more who will always have a special
place in my heart. Yet I was not completely comfortable in writing this
paper, as I do not feel that I can speak for any experience here but my
own. I have been treated with respect and consideration, and have
achieved far more academically than I ever believed I could. This is
largely due to the diverse teaching approaches, the fascinating read-
ings, and the holistic environment in which I am fortunate enough to
study. So far, my education here has changed me on many levels, and I
find myself viewing the world with new eyes. To embrace a new view-
point is challenging, not only academically but also personally. I am
lucky to have been given the opportunity to express myself not only as
a student but also as an individual with my own point of view, which
has value not only to me, but also to others as they define and redefine
their own. This dynamic environment is helping me to become a better
person and, I hope, one who will be able to make a greater contribution
to my community. Besides a degree, I will leave here with life skills and
perspectives that will never appear on any test or be reflected in my
GPA; yet it is those things which I believe will serve me most often as I
continue my personal journey into the future.
All of the above having been said, we return to the questions posed
earlier in this chapter, ‘Is there such a thing as a utopian pedagogy? And
if there is, what does it look like?’ ‘Eminently social and radically
political’ certainly applies to this campus, and to say that it is not
‘collectively cooperative’ is to have missed its intentions entirely. Yet it
continues to be affected by the ‘corrupt and Westernized money
economy’ into which it has been thrust and which it strives to keep at
arm’s length. However, it is only by embracing all of these diverse
factors that one can truly see that hope, as defined by Bloch, is very
much alive and that indeed, the pursuit of a vision of utopian pedagogy
is being done one semester at time, in Kamloops.
NOTES
1 Name has been changed.

2 At the time of writing, Simon Fraser University was in involved in an
educational partnership with the Shuswap Nation (SCES). This partner-

ship has since terminated. Nevertheless, references to SCES herein should
still reflect the philosophy behind the education program administered in
Kamloops by the Aboriginal community and SFU. While the relationship
between SFU and SCES has terminated, SFU is still committed to part-
nering with Aboriginal peoples with respect to delivering high-quality
education, with the proviso that Aboriginal peoples take a leadership role
in terms of administering programs and ensuring an Aboriginal per-
spective.
3 Personal communication.
4 Fredric Jameson, The Jameson Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 331.
5 See Richard Toews, ‘Politics and the Historical Eutopos: A Critical Encoun-
ter with the Jubilee Group in the Context of Justice, Law and Community’
(PhD diss., Simon Fraser University, Department of Sociology, 2000).
6 Jameson, The Jameson Reader, 366.
7 Chief Ron Ignace, The Third Year: A Year of Consolidation, Annual Report,
Secwepemc Cultural Education Society and Simon Fraser University,
1990–1.
8 Ron Ignace, The Second Year, Annual Report, Secwepemc Cultural Educa-
tion Society and Simon Fraser University, 1989-90.
9 Chief Ron Ignace, The Fourth Year: A Year of Consolidation, Annual Report,
Secwepemc Cultural Education Society and Simon Fraser University,
1991–2.
10 Secwepemc Education Institute, 2002/2003 SCES/SFU Calendar, 13.
11 Ibid., 13.
12 Marianne Ignace, Seventh Report: A Quantum Leap, 10th Anniversary of the
SCES/SFU Program, 1998, 1.
13 Secwepemc Education Institute, 2002/2003 SCES/SFU Calendar, 13.
14 Ibid.
15 Marianne Ignace, Seventh Report: A Quantum Leap, 1.
16 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987), 15.
17 Antonio Gramsci, Pre-Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy, trans. Virginia
Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 20.
18 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice et al. (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1996), 116.
19 Ibid., 112.
20 Ibid., 7.
21 Marie Battiste and James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood Henderson, Protecting

Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage (Saskatoon: Purich, 2000), n.p.
22 Ibid., n.p.
23 Battiste and Henderson, Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage, n.p.
24 Cited in John L. Elias, Paulo Friere: Pedagogue of Liberation (Malabar, FL:
Kreiger Publishing, 1999), 49.
280 Imran Munir
16 The Subaltern Act! Peasant Struggles

and Pedagogy in Pakistan
imran munir
Pakistan offers an unexpected perspective on the relays between resis-

tance and pedagogy. Unexpected, because the popular image associ-
ated with Pakistan is that of a nuclear-armed, fundamentalist breeding
ground of terrorism, a country locked in an armed confrontation with
neighbouring India, and a client state serving America’s regional inter-
ests. What is mostly unacknowledged is that Pakistan is a hub of vari-
ous movements, struggles for democracy, peasant revolts, and workers’
struggles. Also often forgotten is the constituent role of pedagogy therein.
The general level of ignorance regarding these struggles reflects the
ongoing difficulties faced by the subaltern when they try to speak. Yet
their capacity to act is not only uncontainable, but also already peda-
gogical for those who look.
To understand the interplay between struggle and pedagogy in Paki-
stan, some historical, political, and economic context is necessary.
Pakistan offers an exceptional challenge for any analysis, because
before it achieved independence in 1947, it had two hundred years of
exploitation and experimentation under colonial rule. Colonialism and
religion have been the two strongest influences on modern Pakistani
society and its sociopolitical discourses, particularly in the rural areas,
where most Pakistanis reside. Before colonialism, rural areas operated
under the village system. Villagers were, in effect, units of brotherhood
cultivators; for each of these, an elder, who had no land inheritance
rights, collected state taxes and performed minor judicial and adminis-
trative duties.1 Under the Mughal feudal system in India, all lands
belonged to the rulers. Landlords had no inheritable rights, and this
prevented them from gathering political power.2 In 1871, the British
imposed a new administrative regime through its Settlement Act. Un-
Peasant Struggles and Pedagogy in Pakistan 281
der this act, land titles were allotted to select loyalists, thus creating a
new ‘parasitic landlord class’; under this new system, cultivators be-
came serfs.3 With the help of this new class, the empire plundered the
vast agricultural resources of India. Later, in 1900, the British intro-
duced the Punjab Land Alienation Act to protect Muslim landlords in
northern India by prohibiting any land transfers to non-agriculturists.
The main beneficiaries of this new system were the landlords and the
tribal chiefs. When Pakistan won independence on the slogan of a
separate homeland for Muslims, it inherited this politically dominant
and legally protected landlord class.
The situation became more complex in post-independence Pakistan
when the military officers and bureaucrats started receiving lands as
gifts. The landlords joined hands with the military and the bureaucracy
to block any progressive land reform. At the same time, the state’s
approach to economic and industrial development introduced com-
pradore capitalism and multinational corporations to Pakistan. Also,
Pakistan’s state ideology is based on religion. Today, when the mullahs
declare, ‘Islam is in danger,’ the misery and poverty of the workers and
farmers is quickly forgotten.
The result of all this is that Pakistan’s rulers brook little dissent, let
alone political or cultural pluralism or autonomous economic activity.
All of this accounts for the authoritarian or totalitarian underpinnings
of modern Pakistan. As Hassan Gardezi has rightly pointed out: ‘This is
a deadly combination of forces that sustains the praetorian role of the
Pakistani state and retards the process of democratization in the coun-
try. Each of these forces thrives on the other.’4
All of this has also made Pakistan a breeding ground for peasant
struggle and pedagogy. Historically, with the state’s support, Pakistan’s
landlords have blocked the peasantry from organizing themselves and
from exercising their right to vote. They have done so by running for
elections themselves or by supporting their preferred candidates. As a
result, elections have failed to change the status quo or to devolve
power to rural areas. Hence, electoral politics alone has failed to bring
about a change or devolution of power in the rural areas. Yet a failure of
representational politics in practice demands theoretical adjustment.
Historian Ayesha Jalal notes that political processes do much to deter-
mine how the state interacts with society. When such processes have
obvious gaps, ‘then this relationship can only be understood at the
cultural and ideological level.’5
Some Western scholars have studied South Asian Muslim societies in
282 Imran Munir
terms of two categories: the fundamentalists, and the Western modern-

ists. However, one American-based Pakistani anthropologist, Akbar S.
Ahmad, rejects that ‘two category’ classification, and offers instead a
more nuanced cultural analysis, one that addresses the complex inter-
actions of history, ethnicity, religion, class, and culture in Muslim socie-
ties.6 For him, ‘culture’ never splits from the past completely. Rather, it
resides in time and space; it absorbs alterations gradually and under-
goes minor modifications. Culture is not limited to customs and sects.
As cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz explains, it is a ‘structure of
meaning through which people give shape to their experiences.’ Simi-
larly, politics is not limited to legislation and intrigue, but is ‘one of the
principal arenas in which such structure publicly unfolds.’7 Thus, cul-
ture and politics overlap and are mutually constitutive. And culture, in
its broader sense, provides a sort of ‘record of a number of important
and continuing reactions to changes in our social, economic and politi-
cal life, and may be seen, in itself, as a special kind of map by means of
which the nature of the changes can be explored.’8 Below, I approach
pedagogy as a cultural and political activity.
In an Islamic ideological state, ‘culture’ is viewed as subordinate to
religion, as based in the fixed laws and universal principals of the
Quran and in the teachings of prophet Muhammad. It is a problem
when the state interprets religion and culture according to universal
fixed laws, not least because in practice, religion is embedded in spe-
cific cultural contexts. For instance, Islam manifests itself differently in
Indonesia than in Pakistan or the Arab states.
To better understand all of this, we can view religion, politics, and
media reports as cultural products that are key to Pakistan’s broader
ideological discourse. This discourse, I suggest, comprises two funda-
mentally different world views: the dominant, and the subordinate. The
first is grounded in traditionalism and conservatism, whereas the sec-
ond challenges the status quo and struggles for change. This perspec-
tive will help us understand the ongoing conflict in Pakistan as one that
involves elements of power, leadership, and ideology in both the domi-
nant and subordinate segments of the society. Since I focus largely on
agricultural workers, I consider it central to my analyses that ‘human
work on the land is a social practice with a long history’ and that ‘to do
social life is to do discourse.’9 Thus I apply this contestory sense of
discourse to explicate pedagogical experiments within particular peas-
ant struggles in Pakistan. My account draws on Pakistani newspaper
archives and personal interviews with peasants and left-wing political
parties. I treat these sources as interpretations set in a discursive context

in a process of struggle.
The Peasants’ Revolt
Today, the peasants and tenant farmers of two provinces, the North
West Frontier Province (NWFP), and the Punjab, are engaged in an
unprecedented conflict with the Pakistani state. These movements dif-
fer in political and strategic terms, but their goal is the same – to protect
peasant rights. In NWFP, the peasant movement is led by the Commu-
nist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP – Communist Workers Peasant Party).
In the Punjab, the peasants have united under the banner of an autono-
mous movement, Anjuman Mozareen Punjab (AMP – Tenants Associa-
tion of Punjab), and are supported by leftist political parties, by Kutchi
Abadi (Squatters Movement), and by civil-society groups, including
human rights organizations, progressive theatre groups, NGOs, teach-
ers’ associations, and labour organizations. These relations of affinity
constitute a network in which struggle and pedagogy both circulate.
The NWFP and Punjab movements are taking different approaches in
their struggles to acquire political clout and change the exploitative
status quo. At the same time, civil society activists are serving as cata-
lysts in these struggles. I will discuss all of this, and then examine the
role of pedagogy in these various struggles.
The NWFP and Punjab peasants, led by leftists, have a long history of
rebelling, first against colonialism and later against the feudal rulers
and landlords. A historical overview of the revolutionary struggle in
Pakistan is necessary in order to understand the current subaltern re-
volt as historical experience ‘which cannot be verified or cannot be
expressed in terms of the dominant culture, but [is] nevertheless lived
and practiced on the basis of the residue – culture as well as social – of
some previous social formation.’10
In the early twentieth century, Marxist-inspired Indian revolutionar-
ies engineered powerful revolts against British colonialism, especially
in the Punjab and Bengal provinces. These revolts were crushed, and
their leaders ended up in exile in North America. In 1911, these exiled
revolutionaries – most of them peasant Sikhs from Punjab – formed the
‘Hindi Association of Pacific Coast’ in Portland, Oregon, with the help
of North American revolutionaries. The Punjabi-speaking cadre called
this group Ghadar, or ‘revolt.’11 They provided much-needed support
to the revolutionary movement in India. In 1920 they helped found the
284 Imran Munir
Communist Party of India (CPI) as a mean to wage a revolutionary

struggle against British Imperialism. The communists played a key role
in the freedom movement; but in 1946, at the height of the revolution,
the CPI chose to embrace the Stalinist ‘two-stage’ theory, which decreed
that India first had to go through a bourgeois democratic revolution.
The CPI thus threw its support to the British imperialists. This was a
terrible blunder, in that it alienated the CPI from the workers and
peasants; it also weakened the struggle against feudalism and capital-
ism in India, paving the way for the Congress and Muslim League to
steer the revolution towards a national independence movement.
In 1947, Pakistan inherited the party cadre and pro-Stalinist party
line from the CPI. The Sino-Soviet rift divided the Communist Party of
Pakistan (CPP) into two camps – one pro-Soviet (CPP), the other pro-
Peking (Mazdoor Kissan Party – MKP). In 1958 a working-class move-
ment spread across Pakistan that strongly influenced the peasantry; this
resulted in the founding of the All Pakistan Peasants Association. A
working-class movement paralysed the country, and to crush it, Gen-
eral Ayub Khan imposed ten years of martial law. By the 1970s, leftist-
backed peasant movements were surfacing across Pakistan, the most
successful of which was in Hashtnagar, in NWFP near the Afghan
border. These peasants, organized by the then Maoist faction of the MKP
(now the CMKP), liberated the land from feudal rule through an armed
insurrection.12 The feudal rulers, with the state’s help, attempted several
times to remove the peasants from the land. Over the past thirty years,
three hundred peasants have died in conflicts over land possession.
After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent
American invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan’s military rulers found
themselves fully supported and financially backed by the U.S. govern-
ment, and had a golden opportunity to eject these peasants without fear
of any sanctions relating to democracy or human rights. Pakistan’s
military regime was providing air and ground bases for the Americans’
attack on Afghanistan, which shares a 1,600-mile border with Pakistan.
In January 2002, about 3,500 paramilitary troops and police in armoured
vehicles attacked a Hashtnagar village. In the first attack, tractors were
brought in to destroy the crops, but the peasants fought back and
burned the tractors. The police opened fire and wounded several people.
Soon after, students from local colleges and schools joined their peasant
families in the fighting. After an intense battle that lasted several hours,
many senior police officers had been wounded. The uniformed attack-
ers retreated, only to launch a surprise attack on another village nearby,
whose men had gone out to celebrate the earlier victory. However, this
village’s women defended their homes and fields and even launched a
counterattack. Under heavy fire, the women threw burning blankets on
the armoured cars and tractors, once again driving back the police, who
abandoned their burning vehicles.13 The following day, besides arrest-
ing a local peasant leader, the police laid charges against the leaders of
the CMKP and several dozen others under the Terrorism Act. This act
calls for the accused to be tried in a special court, which has the power
to convict and sentence death within seven days. The peasants retali-
ated by surrounding the police station. After negotiations, the police
released the arrested leader but laid several dozen more charges against
the CMKP leaders and peasants.14
The most striking feature of these events was the role played by
women, who in traditional Pashtun society are not even allowed to
leave their homes without a male escort. They defied patriarchal cul-
tural barriers by taking up arms and fighting bravely on their own to
protect their land. This surprisingly strong resistance by women is
especially significant when we remember that NWFP is ruled by reli-
gious fundamentalists, who are working furiously to introduce Islamic
legislation to segregate women from the mainstream society and im-
pose a Taliban brand of Islam.
Hashtnagar’s peasant women demonstrated autonomous resistance.
There are also organized political militants, such as the CMKP member-
ship, who believe that such peasant gains are crucial not only for
Pakistan’s revolutionary struggles but also for those in neighbouring
Afghanistan. In the latter country, two Maoist organizations – the
Afghan Liberation Organization (ALO) and the Revolutionary Asso-
ciation of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) – have decades-old ties
with the CMKP. The ALO, the RAWA, and the Hashtnagar CMPK are
all Pashtun organizations, and are at the forefront of the anti-imperial-
ist struggle against the American occupation in Afghanistan. The CMKP
fears that the next target of American imperialism in the region will be
the progressive forces that oppose the U.S.-imposed Afghan interim
government.
Peasants Revolt in the Punjab
A war rages here. On one side, thousands of police, rangers, and the
military; on the other, thousands of men and women armed with nothing
more than ‘thappas,’ wooden sticks that women use to wash clothes. The
286 Imran Munir
women, thappa in hand, are in the front-line; the men, unarmed, are
behind them. Confrontation of this sort is unprecedented in our country.15
One million tenants across the Punjab are demanding ownership rights
of over 68,000 acres of state land that they have tilled for one hundred
years. The government wants to cancel their tenancy rights. In 2000 the
military government introduced changes that demoted the farmers
from sharecroppers to renters. It also asked the 150,000 tenants of Okara
Military Farm, a large farm near Lahore, to sign the new contract that
could lead to their eviction. The plight of these farmers began one
hundred years ago, when the British government forced poor Christian
and Muslim families to clear the forest for agricultural production to
meet the increasing demands of the British army in India. The farmers
were promised land rights in return – a promise never fulfilled.
This land came under the ownership of the Punjab government. After
independence in 1947, it was leased to the military and to the Agricul-
ture Department. These leases had expired decades earlier, yet the
military and the Agriculture Department were continuing to demand
payments even though they now lacked legal title. They were seeking
to abrogate the farmers’ tenancy rights and the status those farmers had
enjoyed for almost a century. These farmers could simply be evicted
without any legal recourse, so in 2000, they organized a movement to
demand land ownership rights, under the slogan ‘malki ya maut’ (own-
ership rights or death.) This resistance quickly gained momentum. At the
time, the state authorities were announcing plans for corporate farming
initiatives, which would involve replacing tenants with contract workers
with only minimal rights, and this only heightened the tenants’ resis-
tance. The AMP, a million strong now, emerged to protect the farmers’
rights.
The most distinctive feature of this peasant movement is that it has
mobilized women, who have led several demonstrations and fought
bravely against police and rangers. The AMP’s struggle has also chal-
lenged the social taboo that restricts women’s mobility: in districts
where the AMP’s struggle has taken root, women are now moving
freely and participating in the struggle. Indeed, women have been more
active than men in this struggle; the women activists have created a
thappa force, a first line of defence against police actions. The moment
police or paramilitary vehicles enter any village, almost all men, women,
and children emerge from their homes to defend themselves. A large
proportion of the tenants in these villages are Christian, and in a coun-
try in the grip of Islamic fundamentalism and sectarian tensions, it is

amazing that the Christian and Muslim communities have bonded so
closely in a movement of such magnitude. Many AMP leaders are
women and Christians. The movement is now negotiating with the
government – something almost unheard of in the Pakistani sociopolitical
context. Poor peasants with no social status are seated at the same
bargaining table with the elite.
In 2002, the military regime announced a referendum on whether to
give General Musharraf a five-year extension as President of Pakistan.16
The AMP leaders saw the referendum as an opportunity to bargain
with the government and to press for land ownership rights. As a first
step, they announced that they would be urging peasants to stop all
future payments – a call that was heeded unanimously across the
province.17
The military government was desperate for AMP support in the
referendum, so it took no action against the peasants, instead promising
them ownership rights in exchange for support in the referendum.
Several left-wing and human rights activists who were supporting the
peasants’ struggles advised the AMP leaders not to support the presi-
dent in the referendum, contending that his offer was merly an election
ploy. However, the AMP’s leaders were inexperienced, and trusted the
general’s promise. They offered him their support as part of a broader
strategy to increase their political influence. This strategy worked
for a short time: they were allowed to discuss the plight of the peas-
ants during election rallies, which were covered by the government-
controlled media, and they succeeded in forcing the junta to announce
ownership rights for the farmers.
However, a week after the referendum, the military junta launched a
massive countercampaign, with the intent of forcing tenants to share
half their crops. To this end, it cordoned off their villages and cut off
their electricity and water supplies. In addition, thousands of peasants
were charged with antistate activities, and hundreds of others were
declared terrorists. Seven people were shot dead. Villages were virtu-
ally sealed off, with no exit or entry allowed.18 The tenants’ leaders
allege that the government has threatened to kill them if the protests
continue, and have disseminated a list of government officials who
have sexually abused their women. AMP chairman Anwar Dogar has
stated that all the women who were sexually abused by government
functionaries reported their experiences of barbarity to him in person:
‘It has now almost become an established ritual. Farm owners and
288 Imran Munir
officials even invite their friends to take part in this ugly abuse of poor
farm women.’19
Dogar also alleges that the Punjab Seed Corporation destroyed huge
sections of tenants’ crops by blocking flows of canal water; in the
process, it actually damaged 70 per cent of the land it cultivated itself.
Tenants took their case to the Lahore High Court, which ordered the
authorities to unblock the water supplies; however, this order was
flouted by the irrigation authorities, who were under pressure from
army officials.20
At a press conference, the AMP leaders accused a Ranger brigadier
general of summoning them to his headquarters and telling them that if
they did not disband their movement, he would kill them all after
dragging them to the Indian border. The peasants’ struggle is now in its
fourth year, and the AMP leaders are threatening armed resistance: ‘So
far we are involved in a peaceful and non-violent struggle but if the
army continues its atrocities we will take up arms and resort to suicide
attacks. We want ownership or death.’21 Dogar adds: ‘The Army will
have either to end its illegal occupation of our land or kill all of us. I
foresee our youth clashing with the Army ... We are in millions and the
Army is in thousands. It will not be difficult for us to overpower the
Army.’22 Tariq Ali, a historian and political commentator who was
involved in the Marxist-led revolt in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province in
the 1970s, notes:
The de facto merger of Army and state on virtually every level has meant
that the generals act here as a collective landlord, the largest in the coun-
try, determining the living conditions of just under a million tenants. The
functionaries of the khaki state regularly bullied and cheated their ten-
ants: they were denied permission to build brick homes; the women were
molested; and management approval had to be obtained – and paid for –
to get electrification for the villages or build schools and roads. Bribery
was institutionalized, and the tenants suffered growing debt burdens. The
unconcealed purpose of this ruthless exploitation was to drive the tenants
off the land so it could be divided into private landholdings for serving
and retired generals and brigadiers. The rationale of the prospective new
owners was that, when the time came, they would re-employ the evicted
tenants as farm-serfs.23
Revealingly, the media have been forbidden to report on any part of

the government’s reactionary activities. The press – a potentially impor-
tant force in the circulation of this struggle – has been directly sup-
pressed by the state. For example, Sarwar Mujahid, a journalist cover-
ing the conflict between tenants and the military in Okara for an Urdu
newspaper in Lahore, was arrested on charges of terrorism and inciting
public resistance against the military.24 However, several human rights
and women’s rights activists and some noted scholars succeeded in
dodging the government blockade and taking up the cause. These activ-
ists are professionally well established in Islamabad and Lahore, and
have been using their local and international connections to expose the
military government’s actions against the peasants. Their role is crucial to
the peasants’ struggle: they are not only providing coverage of the struggle
through NGO publications but also raising the issue in a wider political
discourse. Several of them are regular contributors to the English press in
Pakistan and abroad. They are also helping Western journalists and
diplomats visit the besieged villages, and encouraging them to pressure
the government to halt its violence against its own people.
Unexpected Alliances, Unexpected Pedagogy
The military government has thrown the leaders of two main political
parties into exile and has silenced all its opponents in Pakistan. It views
the AMP movement as a dangerous threat to its unbridled power. The
defence minister has said that the government cannot give the land to
tenants because it would open a Pandora’s box in the sense of encour-
aging similar demands across the country. The AMP resistance is a
nightmare for the state: over vast tracts of land, peasants are refusing
to either pay cash rent or give up harvest shares. However, the leftist
CMKP and the Labour Party, both of which are involved in the AMP’s
struggle, say they have learned to work with a wide array of unex-
pected allies. ‘We have already learnt how to work with neo-liberals
and the anti-imperialist right when we formed an alliance with them to
start peace rallies against the U.S. invasion in Iraq.’25
The AMP’s heroic defiance of the state’s brutality has made it a
favourite among those who believe in social justice, democracy, and
equal rights in Pakistan. In this way, we can see a doubly articulated
pedagogical function at play: peasant resistance has fortified the spirits
of sympathetic observers by reminding them that there is much to learn
from these subaltern acts. In turn, unexpected pedagogical experiments
have been flowing out of and into the peasant struggles, and playing an
important constituitive role.
290 Imran Munir
Especially in rural areas, several street theatre groups have been

playing a significant role in educating people about democracy, women’s
education and empowerment, feudalism, sectarianism, election proce-
dures, minority rights, corporate farming, and myriad forms of oppres-
sion. For example, the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ is a participatory and
interactive troupe whose main purpose is to train people to fight op-
pression. The group received training from a Brazilian, Augusto Boal. It
has formed fifty-two theatre groups in Pakistan and trained more than
five hundred theatre activists. Other groups, such as Ajoka and Lok
Rehas, have staged many plays in rural areas to foster awareness of
important political and social themes in the context of class struggle
and imperialism. The street theatre movement, launched in the 1980s to
oppose Ziaul Haq’s Martial Law, is consistently at the forefront of
oppositional movements in Pakistan. The groups perform in remote
towns and villages to educate people about social and political issues
and about how they can organize to combat exploitation. Lok Rehas
performs only in Punjabi so that its works are accessible to ordinary
people. It has a mobile theatre built on a motorcycle to perform puppet
shows for children. Ajoka has performed several plays in India to
promote peace between the two neighbours.
With the involvement of interactive theatre groups, the South Asia
Partnership–Pakistan (SAP PK), which is funded by the Canadian Inter-
national Development Agency (CIDA), has initiated a provincial-level
farmers’ network in Punjab and Sindh provinces with the goal of em-
powering poor farmers at the social, political, and economic levels. In
the Punjab, this initiative has evolved into the Poor Farmers Movement,
out of which an independent farmers’ newspaper has emerged, the goal
of which is to educate farmers on corporate farming, neoliberal global-
ization, and the dangers of genetically modified crops. The reach of this
newspaper is extended by literate farmers, who read it aloud to their
fellow villagers. This movement has succeeded so well that in several
villages, for the first time, women have been able to exercise their
voting rights in elections, and candidates backed by the movement
have swept local elections.26 The involvement of poor farmers in the
electoral process has changed the traditional dynamic between land-
lords and farm workers: the landlords must now approach these farm-
ers for their vote. In the 2002 general elections, the Poor Farmers
Movement forced the provincial and national assembly candidates to
sign onto a ‘no to corporate farming’ platform in exchange for its
support. Several hundred SAP–PK-trained village women with univer-
sity degrees are involved in spreading awareness among rural women

of the importance of the electoral process.
In these cases, early successes in representational politics have de-
manded practical adjustments. With the help of the SAP–PK, the Poor
Farmers Movement has established a ‘Kissan Baithak,’ reviving the
baithak, which is a traditional space for dialogue. The baithak began by
providing a space for farmers to discuss traditional and modern agri-
culture techniques and has since been extended to discussions of
pedagogical strategies. The first baithak, established in Toba Tek Singh,
was an immediate success: each farmer contributed twenty kilograms
of wheat every month to run baithak affairs. The members also ac-
quired land in several districts of the Punjab to establish more baithak
to educate and mobilize still more farmers. A spokesman for the Poor
Farmers Movement, Mahmood Ahmad, states that more than two
hundred farmers’ committees have already been established across
the Punjab to resist antifarmer policies, the WTO, and various intellec-
tual property regulations that have been slated for implementation in
Pakistan in 2005. To this end, members of the movement travel from
village to village to discuss feudalism, globalization, the WTO, and
women rights, and to promote baithak strategies such as boycotting
the products of multinationals. The Kissan baithak has also condemned
the military government’s actions in Okara and offered its support to
the AMP.
Conclusion
In today’s Pakistan, a transformative pedagogy has emerged through

deeds – in short, the subaltern teach and act. The million-strong AMP,
by persistently defying state brutality, has become a nationwide symbol
of resistance and is attracting the attention of political parties, the
media, and other groups opposed to army rule. According to one Paki-
stani commentator: ‘AMP is now almost a vanguard for many struggles
in the country. Should an AMP or student movement be successful in its
agenda, the domino effect could be tremendous. For this and other
reasons, it is important to realize that the rhetoric of human rights,
freedom and democracy cannot and must not be accepted in its present
form. It must be understood and challenged. It is the spectre of this
challenge that haunts the elite.’27
The AMP has emerged as an important political force; it has even
won a few seats in local elections. Given the extent of state repression,
292 Imran Munir
the leftist parties admit they are in no position to engineer any major
changes in Pakistan’s political system. Nevertheless, they see a ray of
hope in the AMP. ‘It is utopian thinking but there are visible signs that
we can guide the unrest to national liberation one day,’ says one major
figure in the opposition.28 Such utopian thinking does have some roots
on the ground. In the 2002 national elections, for the first time in
Pakistan’s history, a ‘red candidate,’ displaying Marx’s photograph on
his chest, took the oath in Parliament. Afrasiab Khattak, chairman of the
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, also sees the AMP struggle as a
cause for hope: ‘The peasants have demonstrated enormous courage.
They are fighting the most organised and highly armed force of the
country, that is, the Pakistan Army. They are fighting its repression with
empty hands, peacefully. This is a rare phenomenon in the history of
Pakistan. If they succeed, a revolution could come in Pakistan that will
end the feudalism.’29
NOTES
1 See Hassan N. Gardazi, A Reexamination of the Socio-Political History of

Pakistan, Reproduction of Class Relations and Ideology (Ceredigion, UK:
Edwin Mellen Press, 1991).
2 B. Davey, The Economic Development of India: A Marxist Analysis
(Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1975), 29.
3 Hassan N. Gardezi and Jamil Rashid, eds., Pakistan, The Roots of Dictator-
ship (London: Zed Publishers, 1983), 29.
4 Gardazi, A Reexamination, 139.
5 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 277.
6 See Akbar S. Ahmad, Religion and Politics in Pakistan: Order and Conflicts in
Pakistan (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
7 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books,
1973), 312.
8 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Penguin,
1958), xvii.
9 Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates, eds., Discourse
Theory and Practice: A Reader (London and Delhi: Sage, 2001), 4.
10 Raymond Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,’
in Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and
Douglas M. Kellner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 159.
11 In 1915, the Ghadar Party dispatched five boatloads of arms and ammuni-
tion from California to India with the help of Germany. Hundreds of
Ghadar Party cadres went to India to wage armed struggle against the
British. Most were arrested. The arms shipments were seized, and the
party leaders hanged by the British. For details of the Ghadar Party in
Indian politics, see L.P. Mathur, Indian Revolutionary Movement in the United
States of America (Delhi: S. Chand & Co., 1970); Mark Juergensmeyer, ‘The
Gadar Syndrome: Ethnic Anger and Nationalist Pride,’ Population Review
25:1–2 (1979): 48–58; and Khushwant Singh and Satindra Singh, Ghadar,
1915: India’s First Armed Revolution (Delhi: R&K Publishing, 1966).
12 The MKP and the Communist Party united again in 1994 to form the
Communist Worker Peasant Party (CMKP).
13 ‘Pakistan Police Attack Peasants to Grab Land,’ Guardian, 27 February
2002.
14 Ibid.
15 Asha Amirali, ‘Rebellion in Pakistan,’ Znet, 5 July 2002, www.zmag.org/
content/SouthAsia/8431711874961.cfm (accessed 9 October 2004).
16 General Musharaf staged the referendum on 5 May 2002. It was declared
rigged and fraudulent by many international (including EU) and by local
human rights organizations.
17 Daily Jang (Lahore), 23 April 2002.
18 Daily Dawn (Lahore), 25 June 2002.
19 ‘The Ugly State Terror in Rural Punjab.’ South Asia Tribune, 10–16 August
2002.
20 Ibid.
21 ‘Peasants threaten suicide attack.’ Friday Times, 29 May 2003.
22 ‘Fighting the army, for farm land.’ Frontline 20:14, 5–18 July 2003.
23 Tariq Ali, ‘The Colour Khaki,’ New Left Review 19, January–February 2003.
24 See Human Rights Commission of Pakistan report, ‘Freedom of Media,’
2003.
25 Interview with labour leader.
26 See SAPPK report, ‘Strengthening Poor Farmers in Pakistan.’
27 Asim Sajjad Akhtar, ‘Mercury Rising,’ Herald (Karachi), Annual 2002.
28 Interview with a local leader of CMPK.
29 ‘Fighting the Army, for farm land.’
294 Sarita Srivastava
17 ‘Let’s Talk’: The Pedagogy and Politics

of Antiracist Change
sarita srivastava
In this era of transnational resistance to globalization, the difficulties

of ‘working across difference’ have become both familiar and newly
important. Deeply divisive conflicts over racism have been among the
strongest challenges facing social movement organizations; they have
rattled the fragile notions of both ‘woman’ and ‘worker’ as grounds
for solidarity. In the early 1980s, there rose a new wave of voices chal-
lenging oppressive practices within social movements and community
organizations,1 voices that also reverberated in many class-rooms and
workplaces, and encouraged efforts at antiracist, anti-oppression
pedagogies. In the current neoliberal context, and in the context of so-
called campaigns against ‘terrorism,’ these concerns have neither dis-
appeared nor become any easier to address. Antiglobalization protests
in Seattle and Quebec City, for example, saw significant tensions among
the diverse groups of activists.2 Yet as new post-9/11 fears about ‘the
enemy within’ continue to grow, so too do the difficulties inherent
in forging links among activists and educators, at both transnational
and local levels. Both transnational activism and theorizing about
transnationality are increasing in scope, but both are also falling in-
creasingly under suspicion.3 At the same time, severe cuts to progres-
sive social programs mean that initiatives in anti-oppression education
have been drastically curtailed in many places.
We may lament the narrowing of space for these educational projects,
but we must also ask ourselves whether they have actually brought
about profound change. My focus here is on the limitations of one of the
more popular pedagogical tools, the ‘workshop,’ especially as it has
been used within social movements and community organizations. The
‘antiracist,’ ‘equity,’ or ‘diversity’ workshop, or facilitated formal dis-
The Pedagogy and Politics of Antiracist Change 295
cussion, became quite popular in the 1990s, and has often been used in
universities, schools, public agencies, and social movement organiza-
tions, both by those seeking to address inequities and by those wishing
to manage diversity. In the Canadian context, the New Democratic
Party was elected in the province of Ontario in 1990, and established the
Ontario Anti-Racism Secretariat. This meant a flush of funding (since
cut) for antiracist initiatives such as community workshops.4 In 1992
the Toronto Board of Education drafted a new equity policy that in-
cluded sexual orientation, making it virtually unique in North America.
Many educational initiatives followed, including equity workshops at
the high school level. Like many activists and educators, I have initi-
ated, participated in, and facilitated a number of these workshops. As a
national campaigner for Greenpeace Canada in the early 1990s, I
codesigned and facilitated that organization’s first antiracism work-
shop. Several years later I was asked to design antiracist workshops
for the Aboriginal youth of the Saugeen Nation, a few hours north of
Toronto.
In their most hopeful and progressive incarnations, workshops like
these draw on traditions of popular education and are linked to ideals
of systemic antiracist change. But what successes can we actually claim
for these pedagogical interventions? Despite the rapid growth in
antiracism education through the 1980s and 1990s, the progress of
antiracism in organizations has often been dishearteningly slow, for
both activists and educators. There are by now many indications that
formal, facilitated discussions and workshops often fail, and further-
more, that they can be especially discouraging, draining, and painful
for non-white participants. Many people of colour have dropped out of
and refused to participate in mixed antiracism workshops. Discussions
have been particularly stormy in social movement organizations. As
Susan Friedman remarks: ‘Such tentative progress around issues of race
among different groups of feminists is still matched by ... anger, failures
of dialogue, and withdrawal.’5 Most women’s and community organi-
zations in Canada (and elsewhere) have stalled in their attempts to
move towards greater equity and ‘diversity’;6 the boards of non-profit
organizations in Canada have historically been almost devoid of people
of colour.7
So we cannot afford to glorify antiracist workshops as a necessary
step towards change. For participants, they have often been ugly and
painful, and the results have been slow and uneven. Yet neither can we
afford to simply dismiss these pedagogical attempts, or to resign our
own or others’ efforts to some historical dustbin of good intentions and

necessary compromises. How might we reconcile these tensions? I have
found myself caught between them: I have continued to act in ways
that suggest a certain optimism about the difference that pedagogy can
make, not only as an activist facilitating antiracist workshops, but also
as a university instructor. At the same time, in my academic Writing
and teaching I have often criticized the practice and effects of anti-
oppression pedagogies, as well as the assumption that education can be
a route to progressive change. Particularly in the context of ‘working
across difference,’ I have argued that a focus on education, even one
anti-oppressive in its orientation, can reproduce many of the relations
of power we seek to change.8 Are there any possibilities, then, for a
pedagogical practice that might offer local challenges to global inequi-
ties of race and nation, that might offer genuine alternatives to neoliberal
multiculturalism?
I believe that alternative projects have no choice but to begin with a
closer analysis of antiracist pedagogy and practice, and its allowable
productions of knowledge. My own research in Toronto, a large city
whose population is almost 40 per cent non-white, is based on my
confidential interviews with antiracist activists working within organi-
zations, and on my observations of, participation in, or facilitation of
antiracist workshops and organizational meetings.9 I have found that
despite its promise to challenge racist knowledges and practices,
antiracist pedagogy is implicated in perpetuating inequities of race and
representation. In particular, some antiracist workshops are character-
ized by the desire of some white participants for ‘better’ knowledge
of the racial other. I argue that social movement techniques such as
consciousness-raising, popular education, and feminist therapy, drawn
from the central belief that ‘the personal is political,’ have been inter-
preted in individualized ways that train a spotlight on people of colour
as knowledge resources. In particular, we see pedagogical practices that
focus on soliciting participants’ personal experiences and feelings. I
refer to this as the ‘let’s talk’ approach to antiracist pedagogy. One of
my concerns with the ‘let’s talk’ pedagogical model has been that it
limits how non-whites may speak about racism and act to challenge it,
and can also shape representations of them and their emotional expres-
sions. In particular, the positioning of the person of colour as an educator
and expert on racism, and the stereotype of the angry or sullen woman of
colour – these are reproduced through the relations of antiracist debate in
organizations. Finally, these same ‘let’s talk’ techniques can encourage a
focus on the emotions and moral deliberations of some white partici-

pants, rather than on measures for organizational change. Below I
touch briefly on each of these closely linked problems, which have a
unique character shaped by their social movement contexts.
‘The Personal Is Political’
For over a hundred years, ‘the personal is political’ has been a founda-
tional principle for many social movements, one which posits that
personal experiences, feelings, and ‘consciousness’ are linked to social
structures, analysis, and action. In its contemporary form, ‘the per-
sonal is political’ has often led to an emphasis on the personal and
emotional as a route to analysis and knowledge. Not surprisingly, the
historical tenacity and breadth of ‘the personal is political’ has a
number of implications for social movement organizations that are
attempting to address racism.
Antiracist workshops are often shaped by discussion techniques that
encourage personal and emotional disclosure. While the success of
‘reality TV’ and talk shows indicates that this confessional approach is
widely popular,10 it has unique form and meaning within social move-
ment or non-profit organizations. As indicated above, in many social
movements, ‘let’s talk’ techniques have been built on the foundational
belief that ‘the personal is political.’ This historical foundation helps
explain why, in movements that share any historical links to, for ex-
ample, socialism, anarchism, or feminism, the ‘let’s talk’ approach sees
personal experience as a basis for initiating social analysis, social change,
or organizational change. So within progressive social movements and
spaces shaped by social justice ideals, the ‘let’s talk’ approach is one in
which the sharing and disclosure of personal feelings and experiences
is framed as desirable, principled, and important for reform. The result
is that talking about experiences and emotions is seen as a vehicle for
self-disclosure, and furthermore, forms a tenacious framework for the
production of knowledge – in this case, knowledge about race.
Consciousness-raising and popular education, both common in the
mélange of organizational and institutional attempts to manage accusa-
tions of racism, emphasize the importance of gaining ‘critical con-
sciousness’ through the analysis of experience. Common during the
early years of second-wave feminism, consciousness-raising groups
were small groups of women who met regularly and spoke informally,
connecting personal experience to the structures that produce those
experiences. Popular education, widely used in many organizational

and community settings, similarly advocates using the lived experi-
ences of participants as a starting point for a collective analysis of the
relations that shape those experiences11 (see Torres, this volume).
However, while both consciousness-raising groups and popular edu-
cation are based on Marxist definitions of consciousness as the system
of ideas that both supports and is determined by the system of produc-
tion, in practice many interpretations have often been far more per-
sonal. As Adamson and colleagues put it: ‘The purpose [of CR] was to
understand our personal lives and experiences, not to build a mass
movement.’12 In this interpretation, which has had immense appeal
and tremendous success, everything personal comes to have political
significance.
Antiracism Workshops
As a result of the broad appeal of these personalized interpretations of

consciousness-raising and ‘the personal is political,’ disclosure of per-
sonal feelings and experiences has become formalized as a method of
political education, analysis, and conflict resolution in many organiza-
tional settings. While not an example of antiracist discussion, Sherryl
Kleinman’s step-by-step description of conflict resolution in an alterna-
tive health organization is illustrative of how these techniques are often
interpreted. Kleinman found that the organization’s members were
strongly encouraged to openly express their painful emotions as the
most sincere and effective way to resolve a conflict.13 Whenever there
was any conflict within the organization’s board meetings and retreats,
the organization’s members were expected to express their feelings
directly to another individual: ‘They expected the participant to talk in
the first person, admit a “negative” feeling (anger or fear) and address
that thought or feeling directly to the person he or she had conflicts
with.’14
Models of antiracist education often reveal a common history with
consciousness-raising and popular education techniques, emphasizing
the diversity of ‘personal experience and lived realities as a source of
knowledge.’15 Typically, non-whites are expected to disclose stories of
racism, while whites share their feelings of being shocked, affronted,
racist or not racist, and so on. As my interviews show, workshops and
meetings then become focused on the exploration of experiences of
racism and feelings about racism. In discussing her human rights course,
for example, Razack writes that her goal was ‘to forge a politics of
alliances based on this sharing of daily experiences.’16 Discussions of
antiracism have also become dominated by a range of techniques for
producing knowledge through expressions of experience and emotion.
The very language and model of the consciousness-raising group itself
have been continually used by feminist groups to explore racism.17 Gail
Pheterson, for example, describes an elaborate five-month series of
feminist consciousness-raising sessions on racism, anti-Semitism, and
heterosexism.18 Consciousness-raising sessions were also the strategy
taken by a Canadian feminist publishing collective in the late 1980s.
When Maya, a woman of colour I interviewed, raised concerns about
racism at the collective, her white coworkers responded by holding
‘consciousness-raising’ sessions for all the staff and collective members.
In organizational attempts at antiracism, an antiracist discussion or
workshop is often facilitated by a professional or informal facilitator
who uses techniques of experience-sharing to elicit, discuss, and analyse
personal experiences of racism, as well as to solicit feelings about those
experiences and about coworkers. A toolbox of techniques drawn from
consciousness-raising and popular education models shapes these ‘let’s
talk’ discussions of antiracism. These techniques are explicitly aimed at
shaping group dynamics and physical space, and are designed to en-
courage a participatory and egalitarian environment for sharing experi-
ences. As I have documented elsewhere,19 a number of techniques are
typical: small group discussions in which participants tell personal
stories and share emotions; the ‘go-around,’ in which each member of
the group is compelled to speak in turn about his/her experiences of
racism; the flip chart, used to record stories about racism through
drawings or texts; and role plays of racist incidents.
This focus on personal experiences and emotional disclosure has
been criticized as especially painful for many non-white participants, as
of limited use for conducting useful discussions, and as unnecessary
for making antiracist change.20 These tools can also produce a knowl-
edge of racism and racial identities that supports individualized and
emotional strategies for antiracism, rather than organizational ones.
This framework provides white participants with a space for express-
ing their fear, guilt, or anger; but it demands something else from
people of colour. While white participants may feel encouraged to
explore their feelings and self-knowledge, people of colour are gener-
ally expected to share their experiences and knowledge concerning
racism. In formal meetings, informal discussions, and workshops, people
of colour are expected to confront, directly persuade, or ‘share’ their

feelings with whites in their workplaces or organizations. In one organi-
zation I studied, a women’s drop-in centre, the staff collective had come
to an impasse after two women of colour began raising concerns about
racism in the centre’s programming and division of tasks. The board’s
response was to hire an antiracism facilitator. Ginny, one of the women
of colour, complained that discussions of racism during these regular
sessions became focused on individual personalities and emotions, rather
than on organizational change: ‘She [the facilitator] turned it into a
therapy session. She would say, “Ginny, it sounds like you think that
Denise doesn’t understand what you are trying to say.” She basically
did a “personality test.” I was supposed to be a “visual person,” whereas
Denise was more of an oral person.’21
Zahra, a coworker of Ginny’s, shared her frustration with the thera-
peutic, ‘let’s talk’ approach of the facilitator. In particular, she found
that the facilitator’s focus on the emotional was overly therapeutic and
irrelevant in a workplace discussion of organizational problems: ‘All
she [the facilitator] talked about was, “How do you feel, and how do
you feel?”’
Shalini, a young woman of colour working on short-term contract in
an antiviolence advocacy group, describes a similar tactic for dealing
with antiracist concerns. At a board meeting, Shalini was taken aback
by the racist attitudes of a board member towards programming for
black youth. In response to Shalini’s concerns, the director suggested
that she should confront the offending board member directly. In other
words, Shalini’s complaint was read as a supposed conflict between
two individuals; the remedy was talking, rather than strengthening
organizational support for antiracist programming. Not surprisingly,
the responsibility for dealing with this racist incident was being as-
signed to the woman of colour with the most junior and precarious
position, who was expected to initiate a personalized confrontation
about racism. Incredulous, Shalini refused. Here we can see how this
model for discussion, change, and pedagogy inexorably reverts to per-
sonality, emotions, and personal style as explanations for racism. By
mining the intimate and personal field, it hopes either to discover the
roots of conflict, or to smooth it over by teaching people how to talk to
one another.
Ginny’s organization, a small women’s drop-in centre, provides an-
other illustration. Ginny and another coworker raised concerns about
racism in the distribution of tasks, and in programming for women
coming to the centre. Ginny hoped that an antiracist facilitator would

help focus discussion on organizational change. Instead, the discus-
sions took a personalized turn, at times attempting to resolve the con-
flict between individuals, at times becoming a theatre for Ginny and
other women of colour to tell their stories: ‘We talked about how we
experience racism in the organization and in women’s organizations.
Denise never said anything except “I feel bad”... All Denise would say
was, “Thank you for sharing.”’
Thus, there is a racialized dynamic between teller and listener, be-
tween spectacle and grateful guilt. While Ginny and another woman of
colour spoke about their experiences of racism, their white coworker
Denise alternated between expressing gratitude and sorrow for Ginny’s
‘sharing.’ Women of colour report that often the demands for knowl-
edge are framed not only by white women’s gratitude and sorrow, but
also by their anger and denial.
According to many interpretations of ‘the personal is political,’ since
personal experience provides an alternative way of understanding so-
cial relations, and since true emotion reveals true experience, disclosure
of one’s experiences and emotions becomes an important form for
resolving conflict and producing knowledge about racism.
In more formal antiracist workshops, popular education techniques
may focus explicitly on the production of knowledge about racism
through the experiences of people of colour. Gurnah, for example,
describes racism awareness training (RAT) workshops in Britain as
‘rightly concerned with people’s personal experience of racism.’22
McCaskell similarly notes that antiracist education ‘requires a particu-
lar type of pedagogy ... based on learners’ real social experience.’23 One
model common to many workshops is the discussion, presentation, and
analysis of personal experiences of racism. The analysis may be struc-
tured and formal, or form a minor part of the process. Early on in the
workshop process, various methods such as small or large group dis-
cussions or ‘go-arounds’ (everyone speaks one by one) are used to elicit
personal experiences of racism. The facilitator may record them on a
flip chart, display them, or do an oral presentation. I attended one anti-
racist workshop for a mixed group of community members, activists,
and professional antiracist workers that may demonstrate this model.
We were asked to speak about our experiences in small groups, present
our discussion to the larger group, and have our comments displayed
on the wall. A Toronto Board of Education manual used in antiracist
workshops for adolescents prescribes very similar techniques, asking
students to ‘share personal experiences of racism.’24 Facilitators are told

to use the participants’ personal experiences of racism as ‘raw material’
for social analysis. They are asked to prompt the young person of colour
for details, and ‘get them to describe their experiences and feelings in
the most vivid way possible.’ They then record and organize the experi-
ences under general categories.
Knowledge of Racism and Race
These workshop techniques underline pervasive assumptions about

the link between ignorance and racism. In particular, education and
consciousness-raising techniques are being increasingly personalized,
and this is supporting and being supported by liberal multiculturalist
assumptions about how racism may be countered through better knowl-
edge of others. Whether linked to official multicultural policies (as in
Canada), or to conventional models of cross-cultural exchange, peda-
gogical models that emphasize the value of hearing about one another’s
everyday lives, experiences, and cultures have been such a strong thread
that, despite a number of critiques, these forms of official, practical,
and academic multiculturalism continue to influence antiracist work
(see also Alleyne, in this volume). In both antiracist and liberal multi-
cultural models of education, the production of knowledge – knowl-
edge of the experiences of people of colour, self-knowledge, or knowledge
of the other’s perspective – is seen as an important goal. Because of the
enduring assumption that racism can be traced to individual prejudice,
debates about racism are particularly susceptible to the influence of
reformist liberal pedagogical models, despite their avowed intention of
using antiracist models to focus on relations of power and systemic
change. As David Goldberg argues, the inevitable outcome of liberal
analyses of racism is policies which assume that ‘racism can be eradi-
cated for the most part by education.’25 Antiracist educator Enid Lee
suggests, for example, that antiracist education ‘enables us to see that
racism is learned, and therefore, can be unlearned.’26 The idea that there
is an ‘automatic’ association between knowledge and conduct27 is influ-
ential, even in the context of more radical political efforts.
Some activists’ responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center
and on Afghanistan on and after 11 September 2001 reflected these
closely held notions about the associations between ignorance and rac-
ism, and between knowledge and conduct. In particular, some campus
and community forums supported the popular belief that a fuller knowl-
edge of Muslim communities would lead to more fruitful strategies. For

example, during a community forum on American military action in
Afghanistan, held in Toronto in the autumn of 2001, organizers at-
tempted to run an antiracist workshop. Another approach, taken by
organizers at the University of Toronto around the same time, was to
mount a film/lecture series about Islamic religion and culture, presum-
ably to educate those who were ignorant about its ‘positive’ aspects. As
Cynthia Wright28 wryly observes, the critical response to a terrorist
attack by Christian fundamentalists would hardly be to screen The Ten
Commandments – yet a screening of the History of Islam was the response
of campus activists seeking critical discussion following 9/11. In the
end, representational strategies of this sort merely highlight that violent
actions by whites are not causally linked to ethnicity and religion. Why
not examine instead how knowledge of Muslim fundamentalism is
represented in the North American mass media? Instead of supporting
the belief that racism – in this case against Muslims – is irrational and
can be countered by greater knowledge, this strategy could instead
highlight how dominant representations of Islam in the Western media
provide rational support for Western foreign policy.
There is an assumption, in other words, that knowledge of racism is
best acquired by examining the lives of people of colour – rather than
by acknowledging and challenging the multitude of racist knowledges
and practices. Contrary to their intended outcomes, the pedagogical
practices and philosophies in antioppression or ‘diversity’ workshops
often produce people of colour, queers, and other marginalized partici-
pants as the objects of knowledge. Carmen, a lesbian of colour, works
for a large women’s advocacy group. She relates how her coworkers’
demand for her personal experience became suddenly urgent only in
the context of a diversity workshop: ‘I remember the facilitator just said
to me, “So Carmen, why don’t you tell us what it’s like to be a lesbian in
a straight office?”’ Yet, as Carmen pointed out, ‘you’ve never once
before asked me about my life.’ Linda Carty writes that these expecta-
tions of knowledge from experience also shaped her experience as a
Black woman teaching university students: ‘What was clearly expected
of me, the Black woman instructor, was to bring to class my personal
experience of the issues being discussed (I was actually told this more
than once by some participants outside of class).’29 Gloria Anzaldua
describes a similar scene in her ‘U.S. Women of Colour’ class: ‘Several
white women stood up in class and either asked politely, pleaded or
passionately demanded (one had tears streaming down her face) that
women-of-color teach them.’30 The ‘equal’ sharing of experiences and

feelings is overridden by the power relations of race. In most of the
cases I have studied, the tellers – people of colour who share their
experiences – are seen as primary resources, the ‘authentic’ knowers. As
we have seen, techniques are aimed at having participants discuss and
present, role-play and analyse their personal experiences of racism. The
goal becomes knowledge about race that is produced by and about
people of colour – knowledge for whites to scrutinize, reject or express
gratitude. This educational approach to gaining knowledge of ‘the other’
reconfirms static associations between racial identity and lived experi-
ence. The assumption is that people of colour who speak in workshops
or in discussions of race represent stable identities that reflect a global
experience, and that their stories will thus provide the most truthful
knowledge. Organizational discussions of antiracism may then begin to
echo the ‘cultural’ celebrations of liberal multiculturalism to which they
are often contrasted, as the performance of scenes from people’s lives
satisfies a desire for data and drama.
The focus on people of colour as the ‘authentic’ knowers means that
this pedagogical project can represent a treacherous space for those
who are made ‘other.’ The focus begins and can remain on these indi-
viduals, on the legitimacy of their stories, and, by implication, on the
legitimacy of their identity. For example, the faith in knowledge as an
antidote to racism often marks participants of colour as experts if they
accept the invitation to dialogue, or as angry or indifferent if they reject
that invitation. Antiracist education, and efforts to effect change, can
then become bogged down by the ways that angry or indifferent re-
sponses are linked to racial identity – for example, by the ways they
reinforce the stereotypical ‘angry woman of colour.’31 In Ginny’s ac-
count of a workshop at a feminist collective, an antiracist facilitator
calls attention to Ginny’s anger and labels it unproductive: ‘The facilita-
tor actually said to me, “I think you have a real fuck-you attitude.” And
I said, “You’re right, I do, and I actually have one towards you right
now ... I resent being portrayed as the angry woman of colour.”’
Anger about racism, and indifference or irritation at organizational
efforts at antiracism, are clearly not embraced as part of the open
sharing of emotion. Participants are entreated to express their feelings,
yet certain expressions of emotion are considered acceptable, others
pathological and dangerous. This highlights both the racialized repre-
sentations of emotion and the emotional representations of race.
Ironically, these techniques of knowledge production may reproduce
the same relations they seek to ‘uncover.’ Because the ‘let’s talk’ model
is influenced by trends towards individualization, discussions of expe-
rience often glide over any close examination of social relations. People’s
experiences are displayed, and then they are used to produce and
reinforce a collective knowledge that often denies the power relations
which produce that experience. In particular, the processes by which
whites might have learned racist knowledge are rarely explored, and
neither are strategies for challenging racism at the organizational and
systemic levels.
Denial and Innocence
The ‘equal’ sharing of experience is further subverted by the more

direct denial, dismissal, and competition of stories – a phenomenon
described in my interviews and observed in workshops. The ultimate
denial arises when stories are simultaneously desired and rejected. One
man at an antiracist workshop I attended proclaimed that it couldn’t
really be this racist in Canada. A Toronto Board of Education manual on
youth antiracist workshops alerts facilitators that ‘guilt and defensive-
ness’ can be a problem ‘to the process.’ The antiracist workshop can
provide a space and format for this denial. Also, the inevitable dis-
missals and denials of their stories can place people of colour in the
position of having to defend, reassert, and reinforce their identities as
resources on racism.
Within social movement and community organizations, passionate
commitments to egalitarian visions, communities, and identities give a
distinct character to discussions of racism. When activists have their
moral visions challenged by accusations of racism, there is often an
entrenchment of the exclusionary practices that prompted the challenge
in the first place. In the feminist movement, where much of my research
has been focused, a common response is to try to recuperate one’s
innocence in the face of antiracist challenges. Outright denial, tears,
anger, and protestations that ‘I’m not a racist’ are not uncommon. One
woman involved in initiating antiracist discussions in her organization
recounts: ‘There’s people who say, “I’m feeling attacked. Why am I
being attacked? I’m not racist, I’m not prejudiced ... I’ve never discrimi-
nated against anybody in my life.”’ Maya tells of an antiracist work-
shop in her feminist collective, referred to as a ‘consciousness-raising
session for white women.’ She is highly critical of the consciousness-
raising technique, declaring that it provided a space ‘where women
disclosed their experiences of internalized dominance’ – a space, in

other words, for them to express their previously undisclosed racist
perspectives. She recalls: ‘It was the most brutal and horrific experi-
ence, that I will never forget … I mean ... I don’t even want to repeat
some of the things I heard, because it is too painful. But I ... vowed
never again to ever participate.’
The following example of a workshop exercise illustrates how protes-
tations of ignorance on the part of white participants not only constitute
people of colour as the resource for better knowledge, but also relieve
whites of this responsibility. The example is from an antiracist work-
shop at a large women’s centre that has been attempting antiracist
change for a number of years. It is particularly useful because it is told
by both a woman of colour and a white woman, each involved in
antiracist work. The two of them have very different memories of the
same incident. Yasmin, a recently hired woman of colour, describes her
irritation at an exercise that involved dividing the participants into two
groups: women of colour, and white women:
There was an exercise – Naming the Things that You Are Proud Of’ –
asking us to name the things that we were proud of having accomplished
as a group. When people reported back, the white women had almost
nothing. That made the women of colour really angry. By you not putting
anything, it shows that you are not aware of what you have. Although
you think you have an analysis, ironically that analysis is actually mini-
mizing the power that you have.
Even when asked directly, the white women sidestepped the oppor-
tunity to examine their own histories and stories of ‘pride’ and ethnicity.
Yasmin pinpoints the pervasive tendency of whites to ignore the rela-
tions of power inherent in the decision not to make oneself vulnerable,
in the privilege of rejecting the notion of ethnicity. At the same time,
Yasmin says, the white participants thought they were challenging
racism precisely because, in refusing to participate in the exercise, they
were refusing pride in whiteness. Samantha, a white manager at the
same organization, felt that the discussion was fruitful, and she was
taken aback by the anger expressed by the women of colour:
We had a discussion about what makes us proud to be white, and a bunch

of other things, which we had a very heated discussion around – and the
women of colour went off and talked about what made them proud to be
women of colour. A very loaded question. And so we decided that there

was nothing that made us proud to be white, because … anyway. But,
very, very, very good discussion. But women of colour were really pissed
off that white women couldn’t come up with anything. And – imagine if
we did come up with stuff! They would be saying, ‘How dare you take
credit for stuff.’
Samantha’s description shows that some white women felt caught in

the dichotomy of this exercise: How were they to express feelings of
pride without reinforcing racial superiority? ‘Naming the Things You
Are Proud Of’ places women in a competition of knowledge and emo-
tion about race and ethnicity, a competition that seems destined to fail –
or perhaps to be ‘won’ by the white participants who choose not to
participate. The exercise was likely meant to ethnicize whites, and
perhaps to counter the usual spectacle of women of colour as ethnic
resources. Instead it supported that problematic construction of racial
identity, in that the participants and facilitators failed to analyse the
relations of power in representations of both whiteness and ethnic
pride, which became visible when the white participants chose not to
make themselves vulnerable.
Once again, we see that the burden of being a teaching resource is
placed solely on women of colour, who themselves learn nothing new
about the construction of ‘white’ or European culture from the perspec-
tive of white women. This workshop discussion merely highlights that
only non-white ethnicity is meant to be displayed and explored in these
pedagogical efforts, and that whiteness remains the invisible ethnic
norm, supposedly with no stories to ‘uncover.’
The dead end of this exercise reinforced the wishful myth that whites
are ignorant when it comes to race. How could the white women have
responded differently? What kinds of discussions of whiteness would
avoid a facile equivalence between white and non-white ethnicity, a
reduction of racial dominance to ethnic difference? Perhaps Samantha
could have begun with a willingness to be vulnerable in discussions of
whiteness, in that way acknowledging the vulnerability of women of
colour as well as the privilege of her refusal to be vulnerable. Perhaps
she could have begun with a willingness to express her critical thoughts
on the notion of ‘pride.’ This line of inquiry might have led in some
useful directions: Which sources of pride reflect privilege and exclu-
sion, and which challenge dominant relations of power? What might
white women’s stories of ethnicity and pride tell us about constructions
of racial dominance and inferiority? It was the fear of revealing this

knowledge that kept Samantha and her colleagues quiet, that kept
them in the safer place of ‘ignorance’ and innocence.
These preoccupations with morality and self are common obstacles
to a fuller discussion of antiracism. My interviews have also shown that
as some white feminists become involved in antiracist efforts, they may
also move towards deeper self-examination, rather than towards orga-
nizational change. Interview accounts of workshops often describe how
white feminists become tearful when they express the pain and hurt,
and the solidarity, they feel on learning about racism. Yasmin describes
how some white women reacted when they were challenged that they
had not contributed to an antiracist workshop exercise. That, Yasmin
says, ‘just led to tears on the part of the white women ... and blah,
blah ... things like, “I’ve tried really hard to see where I’ve come from, and
who I’ve oppressed as a white woman.”’ Clearly, this sharing and ‘free’
expression of emotion and personal experience, meant to build analysis
and solidarity, can come to focus on the emotional needs of some white
participants, can stall change efforts, and can create additional vulner-
abilities for non-white participants.
Conclusions and Alternatives
Repeated failures of pedagogical strategies, whether labelled as antiracist

or anti-oppression workshops, or as discussions on equity and diver-
sity, have been a discouraging facet of change efforts within social
movement organizations. Sarah complains that the feminist organiza-
tion she works in has made several identical attempts at antiracism: ‘We
have done [antiracist] training already a couple of times. And so many
of us who have been here for four or five years have already done some
training. And it feels like Antiracism 101.’ The continual shortcomings
of many antiracist workshops can be explained in part by pedagogical
practices that focus on individual experience, emotion, and morality –
practices that provide space for the constitution of racist knowledges,
identities, and effects. In the prevalent ‘let’s talk’ approach, the belief
that ‘the personal is political’ has been recast through liberal concep-
tions of the individual, racism, knowledge, and social progress. The
‘let’s talk’ approach shapes pedagogical strategies so that discussions of
racism often focus not on an egalitarian exchange of knowledge, but
rather on correcting a supposed ‘ignorance’ of racism. One result is the
use of techniques that constitute people of colour as either the produc-
ers of that knowledge or as recalcitrant obstacles to knowledge produc-

tion. These same pedagogical techniques allow a focus on the hurt,
anger, and angst of some white participants – preoccupations that can
deflect people from a broader analysis of racism and antiracist change.
In social movement contexts, these kinds of emotional reactions – ‘I’ve
never discriminated against anybody in my life’ – can be particularly
intense because they are founded on implicit assumptions of egalitari-
anism. In these contexts, organizational change often becomes derailed;
antiracism may instead be interpreted as an ethical preoccupation,
accompanied by practices for producing greater self-knowledge and a
better ethical white activist subject.
One alternative is for workshops to analyse the knowledge and power
relations of antiracism and racism. Britzman suggests that education
begin by asking, ‘How do historical categories like “race,” “sex” and
“gender” give meanings to narratives that compose the field of multi-
culturalism?’32 Such projects could also explore ‘the process of estab-
lishing others in order to know them;33 here we see an alternative to the
pitfalls of the ‘Naming Things We Are Proud Of’ exercise discussed
earlier. Toni Morrison’s appeal for more studies that analyse the strate-
gic use and manipulation of the Africanist character and narrative in
American literature suggests another model for antiracist education.34
All these proposals create an opportunity to explore the organizational
obstacles to equity and the historical roots of inequity.
In emphasizing how we know the racialized self and other, antiracist
workshops may also give greater priority to how we change those
knowledge and power relations. A form of antiracist workshop that
treats antiracist change as a central or initial objective rather than an
end point might be more appropriate in many situations. Basil Moore
promotes the idea of connecting young people with the antiracist move-
ment to help them become ‘activists for social justice.’35 McCaskell
and Bellissimo describe their efforts at the Toronto Board of Education
to help students gain leadership skills to become ‘advocates for sys-
temic change.’36 I have also advocated the reconfiguring of antiracist
workshops, using practical coalitions as a model.37 In this approach,
workshops would be formed around particular political objectives,
community or organizational projects, or tasks; they would focus on
sharing the analyses, skills, and strategies required to promote and
support action on racism. For example, one woman interviewed about
antiracist sessions in her organization was fed up with the personalized
direction these sessions were taking, and instead began gathering data
on the racialized division of labour among collective members. In this

way she was able to demonstrate that women of colour were carrying a
far greater burden of administrative and behind-the-scenes work.
These approaches offer some starting points for alternative antiracist
projects. Still, their implementation remains a challenge; even the work-
shops I critique here have been made more scarce by recent economic
restructuring. Since the mid-1990s, neoliberal policies have brought
about a dramatic decline in government funding for equity programs.
In Ontario, after the NDP was replaced by a more economically and
socially conservative government, the Anti-Racism Secretariat was elimi-
nated, and planned equity legislation was rolled back. In Toronto, there
have been drastic cuts to the Board of Education equity program.38 Yet
even in the face of these cuts, work on antiracist education is continu-
ing – for example, umbrella funding agencies such as the United Way
now require that the organizations they support make efforts towards
diversity and equity. In other words, there has been uneven movement
towards antiracism and equity – there has been energetic progress, but
this progress has been limited by funding cuts, insubstantial organiza-
tional responses, and recalcitrant opposition from individuals. How-
ever, antiracist struggles are inescapable in the current context of
transnational organizing. Transnational feminist activism, for example,
is facing a familiar danger: a supposed global sisterhood39 that has
emphasized the commonalities among all women, has also excluded
the particular histories and lives of some women. Movements for lib-
eration have always been complicated by multiple sites of difference
and inequity, and by tensions between ideals of egalitarianism and
practices of exclusion. This ambiguous context helps explain the unique
difficulties of antiracist debates in social movements, but also presents
us with the increasingly urgent need for research, pedagogy, and activ-
ism that will challenge oppressive power relations within movements
and organizations.
NOTES
1 For example, the rapid evolution of antiracist challenges within the Cana-
dian feminist community during this period is discussed in Srivastava,
‘Facing Race, Saving Face: Antiracism, Emotion, and Knowledge in Social
Movement Organizations’ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2002).
2 The film This Is What Democracy Looks Like (Independent Media Centre,
May 2000) documents some of these tensions during protests at the World
Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999.
3 See Alissa Trotz, ‘Transnational Feminist Organizing,’ guest lecture to ‘Intro-
duction to Women’ Studies’ class, 26 March 2002, New College, University
of Toronto; Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc,
Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and
Deterritorialized Nation-States (Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach, 1994).
4 The New Democratic Party (NDP) traditionally has had strong links to
labour organizations and is the most ‘left-leaning’ of the major political
parties in Canada: it has governed several provinces.
5 Susan Friedman, ‘Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives
of Race in Feminist Discourse,’ Signs 21:1 (1995): 1–49.
6 See CRIAW, Looking for Change: A Documentation of National Women’s
Organizations Working towards Inclusion and Diversity (Ottawa: Canadian
Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, 1995); Pramilla
Aggarwal, in Angela Robertson, ‘Continuing on the Ground: Feminists
of Colour Discuss Organizing,’ in Scratching the Surface: Canadian Anti-
racist Feminist Thought, ed. Enakshi Dua and Angela Robertson (Toronto:
Women’s Press, 1999).
7 V. Murray, P. Bradshaw, and J. Wolpin, ‘Power in and around Non-profit
Boards: A Neglected Dimension of Governance,’ Non-Profit Management
and Leadership 3:2 (1992): 165–82.
8 See Sarita Srivastava, ‘Song and Dance? The Performance of Antiracist
Workshops,’ Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 33:3 (1996): 292–
315; Srivastava, ‘Tears, Fears, and Careers: Antiracism, Emotion, and Social
Movement Organizations,’ Canadian Journal of Sociology 31:1 (March 2006):
55–90; and Srivastava and Francis, ‘The Problem of “Authentic Experi-
ence”: Storytelling in Anti-Racist and Anti-Homophobic Education,’
Critical Sociology, 32:2–3 (2006): 275–307.
9 This research is based on twenty-one confidential interviews with white
and non-white feminists involved in antiracist efforts in eighteen women’s
organizations based in Toronto, Canada, including drop-in centres, shel-
ters, feminist advocacy groups, and feminist publications and publishers.
In order to preserve this confidentiality, neither the individuals nor the
organizations are named. Pseudonyms have been used where necessary.
I also draw on observations of twelve antiracist workshops or workshop
series, as well as numerous organizational meetings, in a variety of sites
including feminist, environmental, social justice, and popular educational
organizations, and an Aboriginal youth conference. In five of these work-
shop series I was either a participant or a facilitator.
10 See for example Ziauddin Sardar, ‘The Rise of the Voyeur,’ New Statesman
129, 6 November (2000): 25–7, which documents the rise of the reality TV
format; and Suzanne Moore, ‘On Talk Shows the Democracy of Pain
Reigns Supreme: We May Not All be Famous, but We Have All Suffered,’
New Statesman 128, 12 February (1999): n.p.
11 Rick Arnold and Bev Burke, A Popular Education Handbook (Ottawa: CUSO
Development Education and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
1983); and Rick Arnold, Deborah Barndt, and Bev Burke, A New Weave:
Popular Education in Canada and Central America (Ottawa: CUSO Develop-
ment Education and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1985).
12 Nancy Adamson, Linda Briskin, and Margaret McPhail, Feminist Organiz-
ing for Change: The Contemporary Women’s Movement in Canada (Toronto:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 241.
13 Sherryl Kleinman, Opposing Ambitions: Gender and Identity in an Alternative
Organization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 75.
14 Ibid.
15 George Dei, ‘The Challenges of Anti-Racist Education in Canada,’ Cana-
dian Ethnic Studies 25:2 (1993): 47.
16 Sherene Razack, ‘Storytelling for Social Change,’ Gender and Education 5:1
(1993): 63.
17 Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London:
Verso, 1992).
18 Gail Pheterson, ‘Alliances between Women: Overcoming Internalized
Oppression and Internalized Domination,’ in Reconstructing the Academy:
Women’s Education and Women’s Studies, ed. Elizabeth Minnich, Jean O’Barr,
and Rachel Rosenfeld (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
19 Srivastava, ‘Song and Dance?’
20 Razack, ‘Storytelling for Social Change’; Akua Benjamin, ‘Critiquing Anti-
Racist Consultancy,’ presentation at Making the Links: Anti-Racism and
Feminism, a conference of the Canadian Research Institute for the Ad-
vancement of Women (CRIAW), Toronto, 13–15 November 1992; Elizabeth
Ellsworth, ‘Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working through the
Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy,’ Harvard Educational Review 59:3
(1989): 297–324; Sarita Srivastava, ‘Voyeurism and Vulnerability: Critiqu-
ing the Power Relations of Anti-Racist Education,’ Canadian Woman Studies
14:2 (1994): 105–9.
21 All unattributed quotations are taken from my interview transcripts.
22 Ahmed Gurnah, ‘The Politics of Racism Awareness Training,’ Critical Social
Policy 10 (Summer 1984): 7.
23 Tim McCaskell, ‘Anti-Racist Education and Practice in the School System,’
in S. Richer and L. Weir (eds.), Beyond Political Correctness: Toward the

Inclusive University (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 253–72.
24 Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, The Resource Guide for
Antiracist an Ethnocultural Equity Education, JK–Grade 9 (Toronto: Ontario
Ministry of Education and Training, 1994), 19.
25 David Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning
(Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 117.
26 Enid Lee, Letters to Marcia (Toronto: Cross Cultural Communication
Centre, 1985), 8.
27 Deborah Britzman, ‘The Ordeal of Knowledge: Rethinking the Possibilities
of Multicultural Education,’ Review of Education 15 (1993): 126.
28 Cynthia Wright, personal communication, November 2001.
29 Linda Carty, ‘Women’s Studies in Canada: A Discourse and Praxis of
Education,’ Resources for Feminist Research 20:3/4 (1992): 15.
30 Gloria Anzaldua, ed., Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Per-
spectives by Feminists of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), xx.
31 For example, the cover of Toronto Life magazine in February 1993 trum-
peted an exposé of antiracist struggles at a women’s shelter with the
headline, ‘Battered Woman: Why Angry Women of Colour Drove June
Callwood from the Shelter She Created.’ See E. Dewar, ‘Wrongful Dis-
missal,’ Toronto Life, March 1993.
32 Britzman, ‘The Ordeal of Knowledge,’ 126.
33 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 52.
34 Ibid.
35 Basil Moore, ‘The Prejudice Thesis and the De-politicization of Racism,’
Discourse 14:1 (1993): 64.
36 McCaskell, and Domenic Bellissimo, ‘Exposing Young Minds to Equity,’
Orbit 25:2 (1994).
37 Srivastava, ‘Song and Dance?’
38 The now amalgamated Toronto District School Board was recently consid-
ering a report regarding cost-cutting that recommends eliminating all
equity programs and staffing.
39 Robin Morgan, in her anthology of women’s organizing around the world,
conceived of sisterhood as the ‘common condition’ and ‘world view’ of
all women; Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: The International
Women’s Movement Anthology (New York: Anchor Books, 1984).
18 Present and Future Education: A Tale of
Two Economies
michael albert
Thinking about education involves two broad frames of reference, which

in turn generate two approaches of study.
Part of education is intrinsic and oriented towards the individual. To
think about education starting with the student, we examine the pro-
cess of conveying information and skills and developing talents in
students. We ask, What is the best way to educate students, given the
exigencies of what is taught, the attributes of students, and the abilities
of teachers?
But part of education is also contextual and social. To think about
education starting with society, we examine the process of transferring
information and skills and developing talents from the point of view
of society’s needs. We ask, What is the best way to educate students
consistent with accomplishing what society seeks?
Ideally, we will get the same answer from either of these angles.
Ideally, society’s interests and those of each new generation of students
will accord. If so, we will have a clear agenda. If not, we will have to
choose between serving students and serving society’s dictates.
Most readers of this book live in societies that have capitalist econo-
mies with private ownership of productive assets, corporate divisions
of labour, authoritarian decision-making, and market allocation.
Because of these institutions, capitalism incorporates huge dispari-
ties in wealth and income. About 2 per cent of the population, called
capitalists, own productive property and accrue the benefits. What I
call the ‘coordinator class’ of empowered lawyers, doctors, engineers,
managers, and so on, comprises roughly 20 per cent of the population
and largely monopolizes empowering work and the daily levers of
control over their own and other people’s economic lives. The coordina-
Present and Future Education 315
tors enjoy high incomes, privileged status, and great personal and
group influence over economic outcomes. Finally, the bottom 80 per
cent of the population do largely rote work, take orders from those
above, barely influence economic outcomes, and receive low income.
This is the working class.
This threefold class division is brought into being by the key institu-
tions of capitalism. First, private ownership of productive property
demarcates the dominant capitalist class. Markets structurally impose
on owners a need to accumulate profits. The corporate decision-
making structure gives them their ultimate power to dispose over
their property.
Second, the small number of owners and the large requirements of
control propel the creation of an intermediate coordinator class. The
corporate division of labour defines the coordinator class as monopoliz-
ing empowering work and access to daily decision-making levers.
The requisites of legitimation ensure that this class will also monopo-
lize training, skills, and knowledge – as well as the confidence that
accompany these.
Third, all these features ensure that the largest portion of citizens are
left with little or no individual bargaining power; they must work for
low wages at rote, tedious, obedient jobs.
These features vary in the suffering they impose and the options they
permit, depending on the relative bargaining power of the three classes.
But in every instance of capitalism, the broad scaffolding of the
economy’s defining institutions is always the same.
What are the implications for education? If an economy has 2 per cent
ruling, about 18–20 per cent administering and defining, and about 80
per cent obeying, then each year’s new recruits from the educational
system must be acclimated to occupy their designated slots. These
recruits must be prepared to exercise their functions, to pay attention to
their responsibilities, and to ignore distractions. This is true for those
who will rule, for those who will have great but less than ruling power,
and for those who will overwhelmingly obey.
A useful word for all this is ‘channelling.’ Each new generation is
channelled into its appropriate destinations. The educational system
takes the incoming population and processes it so that for about 80 per
cent of its members the inclination to impact events is reduced to nearly
nil, confidence is nearly obliterated, knowledge is kept minimal and
narrow, and the main skills learned are to obey and to endure boredom.
Another 20 per cent are channelled to expect to have a say, to have
316 Michael Albert
confidence, to have a monopoly on various skills and insights, and so

on. The elite learn at the major societal ‘finishing schools’ such as
Harvard and Oxford how to have dinner with one another and other-
wise comport themselves in accord with their lofty station.
The point is simple. If a society requires its populace to have three
broad patterns of hopes, expectations, and capacities, its educational
system will divide its populace and provide precisely those differenti-
ated outcomes. In that context, any effort to look at education from the
perspective of each individual maximally developing his or her poten-
tials and pursuing his or her interests will be mere rhetoric or will be
limited by presuppositions that most people have no serious potentials
or interests, or will try to attain outcomes against the economy’s needs.
Indeed, these are precisely the attitudes regarding education we see in
our societies.
Is there any alternative? Will society’s hierarchies always trump peda-
gogy aimed at developing each student’s potentials and aspirations?
Will significant gains for students only arrive as a result of struggle, and
only persist while they are steadfastly defended, being periodically
obliterated whenever vigilance diminishes?
When the Carnegie Commission on Education considered the state of
U.S. education as part of a governmental effort to understand what
‘went wrong’ in the 1960s, it decided that the problem was too much
education. The population, the commission reported, expected to have
too much say in society, too much income, too much job fulfilment, too
much dignity and respect – and upon getting ready to enter the economy,
many members of the population had their expectations dashed and
they rebelled as a consequence. The solution, the commission argued,
was to reduce the tendency for education to induce high expectations in
most of the population. Higher education would have to be cut back
and lower education made more rote and mechanical – save for those
who were destined to rule, of course.
If we look at education from the perspective of the person to be
educated, the authors and readers of this book may have differences or
open questions about exact methodologies, but I suspect we would all
agree on broad aims.
We should help students to discover their capacities and potentials,
to explore them, and to fulfill those they wish to pursue, while they
simultaneously become broadly confident and able to think and reason
and argue and assess in the ways needed to be one among many
socially equal and caring actors. Others might formulate this mandate a
bit differently, but one thing is quite clear: for this type of education to
happen, society must need this type of incoming adult. It must not want
wage slaves who are obedient and passive, for example.
To be compatible with worthy pedagogy conceived from the student’s
perspective, the economy needs to call forth from all participants the
fullest utilization of their capacities and inclinations. What kind of
economy, in place of capitalism, could do this?
The alternative I propose I call ‘participatory economics’ – ‘parecon’
for short. In summary, parecon seeks to fulfil four key values (in addi-
tion to meeting needs and fulfilling potentials) by embracing four de-
fining institutional commitments. The values are solidarity, diversity,
equity, and self-management. The institutions are workers’ and con-
sumers’ councils with self-managed decision-making norms and meth-
ods, balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and
participatory planning.
The first value is solidarity. Capitalism is a system in which to get
ahead one must trample others. You must ignore the horrible pain
suffered by those left below or literally step on them, pushing them
farther down. In capitalism, as a famous baseball manager used to say,
‘nice guys finish last.’ In contrast, participatory economics is intrinsi-
cally a solidarity economy. Its institutions for production, consumption,
and allocation compel even antisocial people to address the well-being
of others. To get ahead in a parecon, you have to act on the basis of
solidarity. This first parecon value is entirely uncontroversial. Only a
psychopath would argue that, all else being equal, an economy is better
if it produces hostility and antisociality.
The second value we want a good economy to advance is diversity.
Capitalist markets homogenize options. They trumpet opportunity but
in fact curtail most avenues of satisfaction and development by replac-
ing everything human and caring with what is most commercial, most
profitable, and most in accord with existing hierarchies of power and
wealth. In contrast, parecon’s institutions for production, consumption,
and allocation not only don’t reduce variety, they emphasize finding
and respecting diverse solutions to problems. Parecon recognizes that
we are finite beings who can benefit from enjoying what others do
that we ourselves have no time to do, and also that we are fallible
beings who should not vest all our hopes in single routes of advance;
instead, we should insure ourselves against damage by exploring di-
318 Michael Albert
verse avenues and options. And this value, too, is entirely uncontro-
versial. Only a perverse individual would argue that, all things being
equal, an economy is better if it reduces options.
The third value we want a good economy to advance is equity.
Capitalism overwhelmingly rewards property and bargaining power. It
says that those who have a deed to productive property by virtue of
having that piece of paper deserve profits. And it says that those who
have great bargaining power based on anything from monopolizing
knowledge or skills, to having better tools or organizational advan-
tages, to being born with special talents, to being able to command by
brute force, are entitled to whatever they can take. A participatory
economy is, in contrast, an equity economy in that parecon’s institu-
tions for production, consumption, and allocation not only don’t de-
stroy or obstruct equity, but actually propel it. But what do we mean by
equity?
Parecon of course rejects rewarding property ownership. And it of
course also rejects rewarding power. But what about output? Should
people get back from the social product an amount equal to what they
produce as part of the social product? It seems equitable ... but is it?
Supposing in each case that they do the same work for the same
length of time at the same intensity, why should someone who has
better tools get more income than someone with worse tools? Why
should someone who happens to produce something highly valued be
rewarded more than someone who produces something less valued,
but still socially desired? Why should someone who was lucky in the
genetic lottery – perhaps getting genes for big size or for musical talent
– get rewarded more than someone who was less lucky genetically?
In a participatory economy, for those who can work, remuneration is
for effort and sacrifice. If you work longer, you get more reward. If you
work harder, you get more reward. If you work in worse conditions and
at more onerous tasks, you get more reward. But you do not get more
reward for having better tools, or for producing something that hap-
pens to be more valued, or even for having innate, highly productive
talents.
Rewarding only the effort and sacrifice that people expend in their
work is controversial. Some anticapitalists think that people should be
rewarded for output, so that a great athlete should earn a fortune, and a
quality doctor should earn way more than a hard-working farmer or
short-order cook. Parecon rejects that norm. In fact, rewarding accord-
ing to effort and sacrifice, if one person had a nice, comfortable, pleas-
ant, highly productive job, and another person had an onerous, debili-
tating, and less productive but still socially valuable job, the latter
person would earn more per hour than the former.
So, we have our third value, a controversial one. We want a good
economy to remunerate effort and sacrifice, and, of course, when people
can’t work, to provide full income anyway.
The fourth and final value on which parecon is built has to do with
decisions and is called self-management. In capitalism owners or capi-
talists have tremendous say. Managers and high-level intellectual work-
ers who monopolize daily decision-making levers – lawyers, engineers,
financial officers, doctors – have substantial say. People doing rote and
obedient labour rarely even know what decisions are being made,
much less impact them.
In contrast, a participatory economy is a democratic economy. People
control their own lives to appropriate degrees. Each person has a level
of say that doesn’t impinge on other people having the same level of
say. We affect decisions in proportion as we are affected by them. This is
called self-management.
Imagine that a worker wants to place a picture of a daughter on his or
her workstation. Who should make that decision? Should some owner
decide? Should a manager decide? Should all the workers decide?
Obviously, none of that makes sense. The worker whose child it is
should decide, alone, with full authority. He or she should be literally a
dictator in this particular case.
Now suppose instead that the same worker wants to put a radio on
his or her desk and play it very loud, listening to blaring rock ’n’ roll.
Now who should decide? We all intuitively know that the answer is
that those who will hear the radio should have a say. And that those
who will be more bothered – or more benefited – should have more say.
And at this point, we have already arrived at a value vis-à-vis deci-
sion making. We don’t need a philosopher with a PhD. We don’t need
incomprehensible language. We simply realize that we don’t want one-
person, one-vote, and 50 per cent rules all the time. Nor do we always
want one-person, one-vote and some other percentage required for
agreement. Nor do we always want one person to decide authorita-
tively, as a dictator. Nor do we always want consensus. Nor do we
always want any other single approach. All these methods of making
decisions make sense in some cases but are horrible in other cases.
What we hope when we choose modes of decision making and a
process of discussing issues, setting agendas, and so on, is that each
320 Michael Albert
actor will have an influence on decisions in proportion to the degree he

or she is affected by them.
Participatory economics is built on a few centrally defining institu-
tional choices. Workers and consumers need a place to express and
pursue their preferences. Historically these have been workers’ and
consumers’ councils. In a parecon, within a given council, there is an
additional commitment to using decision-making procedures and modes
of communication that apportion to each actor, regarding each decision,
a degree of say proportionate to the degree to which he or she is
affected. Votes can be majority rule, three-quarters, two-thirds, consen-
sus, or some other possibility. They are taken at different levels, with
fewer or more participants, and use different procedures, depending on
the particular implications of the decision at hand. Sometimes a team or
individual will make a decision pretty much on its own. Sometimes a
whole workplace or even an industry will be the decision body. Differ-
ent voting and tallying methods will be employed as needed for differ-
ent decisions.
The next institutional commitment is to remunerate people for effort
and sacrifice, not for property, power, or even output. Who decides how
hard we have worked? Our workers’ councils decide, in context of the
broad economic setting established by other institutions. If you work
longer, you are entitled to more of the social product. If you work more
intensely, again you are entitled to more income. If you work at more
onerous or dangerous or boring tasks, again, you are entitled to more
income. But you aren’t entitled to more income as a result of owning
productive property, because no one owns productive property – it is
all socially owned. And you aren’t entitled to more income as a result of
working with better tools, or producing something more valued, or
even having personal traits that make you more productive, because
these involve luck or endowment, not effort or sacrifice. Greater output
is appreciated, of course ... but there is no extra pay for it. Both morally
and in terms of incentives, parecon does precisely what makes sense.
The extra pay we get is for what we deserve to have rewarded – our
sacrifice at work. And that extra pay elicits what we can in fact generate
more of – our effort.
All right, but suppose we have workers’ and consumers’ councils.
Suppose we believe in participation, democracy, and even self-manage-
ment. And also suppose our workplace has a typical corporate division
of labour. What will happen?
The roughly 20 per cent of workers who monopolize, through their
positions in this corporate division of labour, the daily decision-making

positions and the knowledge that is essential to understanding what is
going on and to evaluating options, are going to set agendas. Their
pronouncements will be authoritative. Even if other workers have vot-
ing rights, it will be to vote on plans and options put forward only by
this coordinator class. It will be the will of this class that decides out-
comes. In time this elite will also decide that it deserves more pay to
nurture its great wisdom. It will separate itself not only in power, but
also in income and status.
So what is the alternative? Participatory economics utilizes balanced
job complexes. Instead of combining tasks so that some jobs are highly
empowering and other jobs are horribly stultifying, so that some jobs
convey knowledge and have authority whereas other jobs diminish
knowledge and involve obeying orders, parecon involves making each
job comparable to all others in its quality-of-life effects and in its em-
powerment effects.
Each person has a job. Each job involves many tasks. In a parecon,
each job is suited to the talents and capacities and energies of the person
doing it. But each job is also a mix of tasks and responsibilities such that
the overall quality of life and especially the overall empowerment
effects of the work are comparable for all.
A parecon doesn’t have someone who does only surgery, but instead
has people who do some surgery, and some cleaning of the hospital,
and some other tasks – such that the sum of all that they do incorporates
a fair mix of tasks. A parecon doesn’t have managers and workers. It
doesn’t have lawyers and short-order cooks. It doesn’t have engineers
and assembly-line workers – though all the associated tasks get done. A
parecon has people who all do a mix of things in their work such that
each person’s mix accords with his or her abilities and also conveys a
fair share of rote and tedious and interesting and empowering condi-
tions and responsibilities.
Our work doesn’t prepare a few of us to rule and the rest of us to
obey. It prepares us all to participate in self-managing workers’ and
consumers’ councils. It readies all of us to engage sensibly and produc-
tively in self-managing our lives and institutions.
But what if we have a new economy with workers’ and consumers’
councils, with self-managing decision-making rules, with remuneration
for effort and sacrifice, and with balanced job complexes – but we
combine all this with markets or central planning for allocation? Would
that work?
322 Michael Albert
Markets destroy the remuneration scheme and create a competitive

context in which workplaces have to cut costs and seek market share. To
do this, they virtually have no choice but to insulate some people from
the discomfort that cost-cutting imposes – precisely the people who are
earmarked to figure out which costs to cut and how to generate more
output at the expense of fulfilment – and so emerges, again, the coordi-
nator class, located above workers, violating our preferred norms of
remuneration, accruing power, and obliterating the self-management
we desire.
The same would hold with regard to central planning. It too would
immediately elevate planners and, shortly after that, elevate planners’
managerial agents in each workplace, and then also all those actors in
the economy who share the same type of credentials. Central planning
would also impose a coordinator class division and coordinator rule
over workers, who would be made subordinate.
The problem with markets and central planning is that they subvert
the values and associated structures we have deemed worthy. Suppose
that, in place of top-down imposition of centrally planned choices
and in place of competitive market exchange by atomized buyers and
sellers, we opt for cooperative, informed, self-managed negotiation of
allocation by socially entwined actors. Each of these people will have a
say in proportion as choices affect them; each will be able to access
accurate information and valuations; and each will have appropri-
ate training and confidence to develop and communicate his or her
preferences. That would advance council-centred participatory self-
management, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and balanced job
complexes. It would also provide proper valuations of personal, social,
and ecological impacts, and promote classlessness.
Under participatory planning, workers’ and consumers’ councils
would propose their work activities and their consumption preferences
in light of accurate knowledge about the local and global implications
and accurate valuations of the full social benefits and costs of their
choices. This system utilizes a back-and-forth cooperative communica-
tion of mutually informed preferences by means of a variety of simple
communicative and organizing principles and tools, including indica-
tive prices, facilitation boards, and rounds of accommodation to new
information. All of these would permit actors to express their desires
and to mediate and refine them in light of feedback about others’
desires, and to arrive at compatible choices consistent with the values
we have highlighted.
Actors indicate their preferences. They learn what others have indi-
cated. They alter their preferences in an effort to move towards a viable
plan. At each new step in the cooperative negotiation, each actor is
seeking well-being and development, but each can get ahead only in
accord with social advance, not by exploiting others. In an essay of this
length, it is impossible to describe this entire system and all its features,
and to show how they are both viable and worthy.1
Participatory economics fosters classlessness. I can get better work-
ing conditions if the average job complex throughout a parecon im-
proves. I can get a higher income if I work harder or longer with my
workmates, or if the average income throughout society increases. I not
only advance in solidarity with other economic actors, but also influ-
ence all economic decisions – both those in my workplace and those
throughout the rest of the economy – at a level proportionate to the
impact of those decisions on me.
Parecon not only eliminates inequitable disparities in wealth and
income, it attains just distribution. It not only refuses to force actors to
violate one another’s lives, it produces solidarity. It not only resists
homogeneous outcomes, it generates diversity. It not only rejects giv-
ing a small ruling class tremendous power while burdening the bulk
of the population with powerlessness, it produces appropriate influ-
ence for all.
And so, we arrive back at education.
Eighty per cent of us are presently taught in schools to endure bore-
dom and to take orders because that’s what capitalism requires of its
workers. The other 20 per cent are made callous to the conditions of
those below and ignorant of their own callousness, save for those at the
very top, who are simply made cruel.
In a parecon, education must be compatible with society’s broad
defining institutions. Indeed, that will be true in every society, always.
But in a society with a parecon – assuming that other spheres of social
life are comparably just and equitable – society will need us to be as
capable and creative and productive as we can be, and to participate as
full citizens.
A parecon is a solidarity economy, a diversity economy, an equity
economy, and a self-managing economy. It is a classless economy. In
this respect, its educational system would be based on and generate
solidarity, diversity, equity, and self-management – as well as rich and
diverse capacities for comprehension and creativity.
The point is that, under capitalism, talk of desirable pedagogy has
two possible logics. On the one hand, it may be about pedagogy that is
consistent with the reproduction of social hierarchies. If so, it is more
about control and channelling than about what most of us mean by
education, such as edification and fulfilment. On the other hand, it may
be about edification and fulfilment; if so, it is oppositional, in the sense
that it is trying to establish outcomes contrary to the logic of the market,
private ownership, remuneration for property and power, and corpo-
rate divisions of labour.
My point in this essay is that if we ultimately want really worthy
education – like really worthy health care, or art, or sports, or produc-
tion, or consumption – we will need a new economy with a new logic
and structure. I would argue that this new economy ought to be what I
have called participatory economics.
With participatory economics, good education isn’t something we
win and then perpetually defend or lose because the underlying institu-
tions of society are at odds with it. Good education is part and parcel of
the logic of society.
Are there implications for the actual structure and procedures of
schooling and education that are implicit in the logic and structures of
parecon? I would guess that the answer is yes, not least because educa-
tional institutions would be self-managing, would interface with partici-
patory planning, would incorporate balanced job complexes, and so on.
For the specific meaning of all that regarding pedagogy, though, and
for related issues regarding more detailed and specific matters of actual
methodology of training, learning, and so on, I am not equipped to offer
even suggestions. I’d rather stop at this stage. I have made the one
broad point about the economic context of education, both as we en-
dure it now and as we might enjoy it in a better future. I feel secure in
asserting that capitalism annihilates aspirations for worthy education,
and that parecon would actualize them.
Ne Travaillez Jamais: Parecon or Exodus?
a reply to michael albert by nick dyer-witheford

No utopian pedagogy without a practical utopia! This should be a
watchword for all anticapitalist educators, for it cautions against the
bad faith of critique without alternative, and against the slippage from
radical theory to reformist politics. Michael Albert’s account of parecon
A Reply to Michael Albert 325
is a vital contribution both to the overall reconstruction of a twenty-

first-century Left, and to the specific discussion of pedagogy this book
undertakes. Part of such discussion, however, involves clarifying dis-
agreements and multiplying options, so here I will make some criti-
cisms of parecon and outline an alternative to Albert’s alternative.
Unlike many of parecon’s critics, I dissent from it not because it is
too utopian, but because it isn’t utopian enough – because it fails to
recognize a historic opportunity to break with ‘the society of work.’ All
previous societies have, perhaps, been societies of work. They have made
mandatory labour a central institution, one that is required for livelihood
and that is definitive of social identity. But the capitalist revolution, by
commodifying human creativity, instituted a peculiarly intense form of
this regime. Indeed, we need to remember that capitalism created work
as we know it today, in the form of ‘the job’ – a concept that is being
projected into visions of a future, thereby laden with baggage from a
capitalist past. With the necessity of ‘the job’ came the systematic smash-
ing of subsistence practices, idleness, and carnival. Hard work became
equated with moral virtue (the Protestant work ethic), a reductionist,
utilitarian ideology that recognized humans only as supports for an
economic system, as workers, managers, and (later) consumers. Calcula-
tive rationality and administrative bureaucracies were then developed as
tools to police this order of market-compelled labour. These are the
interconnected antecedents of today’s global factory.
Historically, the Left has had difficulty deciding how much of this
nexus to reject. State socialism replaced the market with command
planning but did not break with the society of work. On the contrary, it
made of Marxism a new and nightmarish economic reductionism, glo-
rified the toil that built the so-called workers’ state, and enforced that
toil with totalizing discipline. It was against the conversion of commu-
nism into a gigantic workhouse that the libertarian Left fought.
All the more surprising, then, to find in parecon an anarcho-socialist
version of the society of work.2 Consider the language of Albert’s
account. This is a description of postcapitalism that speaks almost
exclusively of humans as economic agents – as ‘workers,’ ‘consumers,’
and ‘managers’ – albeit ‘self-managers.’ This functionalist vision is as
austere as Bentham’s or Bukharin’s. Perhaps parecon sounds this way
because in articulating an economic system, even an alternative one,
Albert has no choice but to use economists’ categories. Perhaps. But the
world of parecon as described in his article is one of work and meetings.
A world oriented towards balancing the ‘job complex.’ A world of toil
and committees. Self-organized toil and committees, certainly; more

fairly distributed toil and committees, probably; but toil and commit-
tees nonetheless.
It is also a world that really would (once again) foster hard work: that
would approve ‘remuneration for effort and sacrifice,’ giving you more
reward ‘if you work longer … work harder … more intensely … in
worse conditions and at more onerous tasks.’ And it would encourage
such work even if it were not actually socially necessary; Albert insists
that such toil should be well rewarded even if it could be done
more efficiently, with better tools or organization. This, he rightly notes,
is ‘controversial.’ I would call it astounding: a recipe for anarcho-
Protestantism, for a society of self-organized superfluous overtime,
endlessly administered by councils of auto-apparatchiks who have
internalized the ideology of ‘sacrifice at work.’
What is missing from this vision? Time off. Time away. Time off from
work – even work in ‘balanced job complexes.’ Time away from meet-
ings – even those wonderful meetings involving ‘cooperative, informed
self-managed negotiation of allocation by socially entwined actors.’
Time off from managing the self, from obligatory social participation,
from planning, and from being evaluated according to how sacrificial,
intense, or onerous one’s toil is. Time for play, aesthetics, sex, mysti-
cism, conviviality, idleness, carnival, and learning. Struggles to maxi-
mize free time – rather than to provide incentives for long, onerous
labour – have historically been crucial to the Left. But there is no
mention in Albert’s essay of more leisure, shorter hours, the reduction
of the working day.
Albert’s book, Parecon: Life after Capitalism, both clarifies and confirms
this point. In parecon, people would have greater liberty to decide the
labour/leisure trade-off than under capitalism – certainly a good thing –
but livelihood would remain conditional on a job, as very traditionally
conceived: ‘People can work less and consume less, or work more and
consume more, in each case in proportion to the effort/sacrifice in-
volved.’3 But is it not precisely this narrow equation between sacrifice
and livelihood that a practical utopia should reconsider? If we are to
remake so many of the habits, institutions, and ideologies formed by
capitalism, why stop short at preserving that ultimate sacred cow, that
possessively individualized quantum of labour – ‘the job’?
Parecon is a long way from the graffiti scrawled by the students of
1968 as they battled police in the streets of Paris: ‘Ne travaillez jamais’
(never work). That slogan – hyperbolic, certainly, a bit juvenile, maybe,
A Reply to Michael Albert 327
but undeniably joyous – was an expression of another sort of Left

utopianism, one very different in tone from the puritanical planning of
parecon – but not necessarily less practical. This approach lacks a single
manifesto as eloquent as Albert’s account of parecon. It goes by a
variety of names: ‘the refusal of work,’ ‘zerowork,’ ‘autonomism.’ For
the sake of simplicity, I’ll call it a strategy of ‘exodus.’4
Exodus aims not to reorganize the society of work, but to defect from
it. Its recurrent theme is the possibility of using the cornucopian pro-
ductive capacities of capital to explode its constricted social relations.
What, today, makes the strategy of exodus less of a dream and more of
practicality are the potentially high levels of productivity and
reproductivity enabled by computers and other new technologies, al-
though very rarely reached in the context of hierarchical corporate
organizations preoccupied with intellectual property rights. A good
current example of exodus-style practice would, therefore, be the explo-
sion of ‘dot.communist’ experiments, from peer-to-peer networks to
open-source software. Other exodus examples of the free distribution of
goods, independent of the recipients’ sacrifice, range from some of the
educational experiments described in this volume to ‘food not bombs’
kitchens.
The ‘exodus’ strategy has focused on the social wage, sometimes
known as the citizen’s wage or basic income. The idea here is to break
the dependence of livelihood on work by providing everyone with a
guaranteed remuneration. A social wage could be inaugurated at a
modest level, adequate to free people from having to sell their labour
power, even if the possibility of supplementation continues for a while.
Its level should rise as social productivity rises, and this should be
accompanied by a generalized reduction in waged work, to a point
where the social wage becomes the main form of income. The idea of
universal income is to free people from mandatory labour, rather than to
involve us more intensively in its organization; it is to create ‘the right
to be lazy.’5
There is not space here to review the history and complexities of the
concept of the social wage, or to explore whether it is antithetical to
participatory planning or might in some way be combined with it.
Rather, I’ll quickly and schematically compare and contrast education
in hypothetical societies of parecon and exodus, not so much in terms of
institutional organization, but in terms of pedagogical content.
One similarity between parecon and exodus is, I think, that both
would want high levels of technoscientific training and research: parecon
because of the very sophisticated society-wide systems of computer-

ized simulation, communication, and planning that Albert envisages;
exodus because it entails developing technologies to minimize unpleas-
ant work and maximize free time. Both, though in significantly differ-
ent ways, therefore depend (to a degree that might antagonize some of
our more Luddite comrades) on the high development of what used to
be called ‘forces of production’ – so both require education for a social-
ist technoculture, pedagogy for commie cyborgs.
Beyond this, however, there are real differences. Education under
parecon would involve a lot of socialization for cooperation and plan-
ning, because in such a system, people would be committee-servers and
self-administrators par excellence. There would also be a lot of voca-
tional training, since everyone would be required to have, in effect, not
one job but several – a sort of ultimate post-Fordist flexworker. And, of
course, there would have to be a certain amount of social conditioning
about the merits of preserving unnecessarily onerous and sacrificial
work, because this is the sort of thing that requires serious indoctrina-
tion. There’s much about all this that might be positive; but there is also
something that recapitulates the instrumental, functionalist, and cheer-
leading tendencies of contemporary capitalist education: like being on
the inside of a vast, democratized MBA program.
Education in exodus, on the other hand, would involve a lot of
‘useless’ activity. Since its emphasis would be on creating space and
time for autonomous self-development, we can anticipate that people
would want to learn and teach about many of the things that are more
or less pointless in terms of work or administration – things like deep-
space astronomy, neo-Platonism, and minor literatures, things that
are non-functional from the point of view of the economy, whether
organized by capitalist managers or democratic committees. Of course,
‘useless’ is in quotation marks, since it is from such non-obligatory
activities that many socially valuable forms of cooperation and innova-
tion emerge … among which we might include writing, thinking, and
arguing about alternatives to the existing social order, including about
how to organize education, just as we are doing now, in this book. It is
only by multiplying such spaces of discussion – which is in itself a part
of exodus – that transformation can be achieved. The success of Albert’s
writings on parecon confirm that a strong desire exists for such a
transformation. All the more reason, then, not to confine the collective
imagination within the dead categories inherited from the society of
work.
A Reply to Nick Dyer-Witheford 329
Jobs Are Not the Problem
a reply to nick dyer-witheford by michael albert

Nick Dyer-Witheford’s idea that incorporating ‘jobs’ into a model of a
future economy is somehow missing an opportunity to be more radical
by doing away with work per se makes no sense to me. I guess, there-
fore, we have a real disagreement.
An economy of the future will of course involve people grouping
together to produce products from inputs, to allocate the inputs and
products, and to consume the products. Of course it will involve much
else as well, but that is another matter.
Parecon says that work in a society ought to be decided by the self-
managing say of its citizens, each of whom has appropriate claims on
the product. To these ends, parecon proposes balanced job complexes,
remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and other features noted in my
original essay.
Saying that work should be handled via new arrangements of the
division of labour, decision-making, and allocation in no way implies
‘commodifying human creativity,’ eliminating ‘carnival,’ equating ‘hard
work with moral virtue,’ adopting a view of humans as only producers,
and so on. Dyer-Witheford implies but offers no reasons to believe that
parecon is saddled with such failings because it has ‘jobs.’
The one claim in Dyer-Witheford’s list of debits that is almost true of
parecon is that ‘it makes labour mandatory.’ But what parecon says is
that if people are able to work and wish to enjoy the fruits of social
labour, then they have to partake of that labour – in a socially useful
manner – and, having done so, their share of the output will be gov-
erned by the duration, intensity, and onerousness of the work they do.
Dyer-Witheford says nothing about why this is unwise.
The fact that I described an economy means that I talked about
work, the division of labour, and so on, and not about kinship rela-
tions, culture, religion, and so on. That is an artifact of the topic, not an
indication of priorities. And as long as there will be work, isn’t it
correct to handle it in a way that is fair, just, and in accord with our
values?
Dyer-Witheford writes that the language of my account – ‘workers,’
‘consumers,’ and ‘managers’ – albeit ‘self-managers’ – is economistic
and narrow. Sure it is, but the article is about economics and education,
not about sex and education, or art and education, and so on. Humans
330 Michael Albert
are multifaceted and have diverse dimensions of development and

involvement, but we needn’t always discuss everything.
To say that ‘the world of parecon ... is one of work and meetings’ is
silly – though I did talk a lot about work and decisions because the
article is about how work ought to be undertaken and organized, and
about how inputs and outputs ought to be allocated, and about the
impact of each on education.
Dyer-Witheford says, ‘More fairly distributed toil and committees,
probably; but toil and committees nonetheless.’ Yes, along with plea-
sure and other pursuits too, of course, so the ‘more fairly’ is precisely
the point. Does Dyer-Witheford really doubt there will be labour, in-
cluding unpleasant and even rote and tedious labour, in a new economy?
Isn’t it better to handle such labour, in whatever volume it remains, in
accord with just remuneration, classlessness, and so on?
Dyer-Witheford says, ‘It is also a world ... that approves “remuner-
ation for effort and sacrifice,” giving you more reward “if you work
longer ... work harder ... more intensely ... in worse conditions and at
more onerous tasks.”’ That is correct. But Dyer-Witheford adds, ‘And it
encourages such work even if it isn’t actually socially necessary.’ That is
false. In fact, there is remuneration in a parecon only for work that is
socially valued, which means it utilizes assets in accordance with needs,
without waste, and so forth. Another misunderstanding is that ‘toil
should be well rewarded even if it could be done more efficiently, with
better tools or organization.’ No, if work can be done with better tools,
then it will be or it won’t be remunerated due to being socially wasteful.
However, the point actually made is that if there aren’t enough good
tools to go around, then those who use better tools will not earn more
than those who use worse ones.
Dyer-Witheford asks, ‘What is missing from this vision? Time off.
Time away. Time off from work – even work in ‘‘balanced job com-
plexes.’’’ If Dyer-Witheford means I didn’t try to say what people will
do with their non-work, non-economy time, that is correct. If he thinks
he knows what they will do, fine – but I certainly don’t. But, parecon
not only has time off, it places no pressure on people to work once they
have met the needs they wish to meet. Individuals can work less than
the social average without penalty, and there is no upward pressure on
the broad social average either. Indeed, ironically, the main complaint
made by mainstream economists about parecon is precisely this – that
in a parecon people would choose to work many less hours.
‘There is no mention ... of more leisure, shorter hours, the reduction of

the working day.’ This may well be the case in this short essay, but in
longer essays I have made it perfectly clear that in a parecon the length
of the work day, week, and year are entirely a matter of people’s pref-
erences: they can enjoy more output by doing more labour, or they can
enjoy more leisure by opting for shorter work hours.
Dyer-Witheford rightly says, ‘Albert’s book, Parecon: Life after Capital-
ism,6 both clarifies and confirms this point. In parecon, people would
have greater liberty to decide the labour/leisure trade-off than under
capitalism – certainly a good thing – but livelihood would remain
conditional on a job, as very traditionally conceived: ‘People can work
less and consume less, or work more and consume more, in each case in
proportion to the effort/sacrifice involved.’ But then he adds, ‘But is it
not precisely this narrow equation between sacrifice and livelihood that
a practical utopia should reconsider?’ My answer is that as long as there
are onerous things to do, they ought to be justly distributed. We should
share the burdens and the benefits of being a member of society fairly,
justly, and in ways that propel the values we aspire to. If Dyer-Witheford
has a proposal he thinks would succeed better than parecon at develop-
ing potentials and meeting needs (including needs for leisure, carnival,
and so on), I am eager to hear it, of course.
Dyer-Witheford asks: ‘Why [preserve] that ultimate sacred cow, that
possessively individualized quantum of labour – “the job”?’ I am be-
fuddled. If he means we should get rid of alienated labour, get rid of
subordinated labour, get rid of unjustly rewarded labour, and also
strive to increase the average quality of labour – I very much agree. But
if he means we should keep labour but let some able people not do it, I
reject that on grounds of equity, solidarity, and so forth. And if he means
we should get rid of labour, period, I think he is out of touch with
reality – out of touch not only with reality’s material requirements, but
also with the positive virtues of self-managed labour.
My guess is that Dyer-Witheford has no institutional suggestions for
operating an economy without work, nor, much more realistically, for
operating one that seeks to reduce onerous tasks while sharing them
fairly and in accordance with people’s needs and desires, which is what
parecon achieves. His idea that we should ‘break the dependence of
livelihood on work by providing everyone with guaranteed remunera-
tion’ leaves open many questions. How high is this guaranteed income?
Where are the products people consume to come from? With what
332 Michael Albert
division of labour is production to be undertaken? With what modes of

remuneration, with what decision-making, with what allocation?
Imagine a thousand people shipwrecked. We arrive on shore. We
have various tools. There are children. We realize it is likely to be a year
or more until we are rescued. We need signal fires, housing, food,
schools, day care, ways of enjoying ourselves using produced goods,
and so on. So we start to discuss how to organize the economic part of
our small society ... and Dyer-Witheford says, ‘Hey, I would rather go
swimming all day and play on the beach. But I want a house, food,
benefits of the signal fire, day care for my kids.’ Or maybe he says
everyone should have all that, automatically. Some people may think
this island should morally honour such a request or even that it could
function sensibly while elevating such a request as virtuous – but I
don’t. I would instead work with others on this island to try to figure
out how to divide up our tasks so we all had comparably empowering
responsibilities and also our fair share of the less pleasant work, and
how to mediate between consumption desires and production inclina-
tions on behalf of meeting needs and developing potentials consistent
with values we all celebrate.
Dyer-Witheford might say, ‘But we don’t live on an island. We have
modern technology.’ True, and this may mean we can have less onerous
work to share, and can have more output to share, but not no onerous
work and limitless output. Thus, whatever the ratios, we are back to
defining economic institutions, rather than assuming them away.
Dyer-Witheford says, ‘The idea of universal income is to free people
from mandatory labour, rather than to involve us more intensively in its
organization; it is rather to create “the right to be lazy.”’ Does he think
that the content of the social wage comes into being without labour?
Can we all be lazy? And if some work has to be done, who is to do it,
and shouldn’t it be done without class division and rule, and, if so, how
do we achieve that?
Dyer-Witheford’s discussion of the difference in education between
an economy without work and a parecon is based on an unreal hypoth-
esis – that the former could exist. Furthermore, it bears little resem-
blance to anything I actually believe or that parecon implies about
education ... such as the implication that in a parecon we would not
have, or would have less, education in cosmology or art or whatever.
Given that I am already over the space limits, I will let the comments
about education in my original essay stand for themselves.
NOTES
1 For more comprehensive information on parecon, see www.parecon.org.

2 Anarchists who disagree with Albert and dislike parecon would reject this
description – but in an extended debate with these critics, available online
at www.zmag.org/anardebate.htm, Albert describes himself as an ‘anar-
chist regarding the political dimensions of society’ (accessed 5 May 2004).
3 Michael Albert, Parecon: Life after Capitalism (London: Verso, 2003), 233.
4 On ‘exodus,’ see Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis
of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), and Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
For accounts of the tradition out of which these writings arise, see Harry
Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1979); Midnight
Notes, Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992 (New York:
Autonomedia, 1992); and Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and
Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1999).
5 Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy and Other Studies (New York: Charles
Kerr and Co. 1883).
6 Albert, Parecon.
19 Academicus Affinitatus: Academic

Dissent, Community Education,
and Critical U
The university is a contested space. It is a site of persistent antagonisms

and conflicting possibilities. As the articles in Part I of this collection
attest, such dynamics of struggle are not captured in the cynical portrait
of a one-dimensional institution wholly integrated into the machinery
of neoliberalism. Nonetheless, increasingly the university is being re-
structured to conform to an instrumentalist model – witness the
managerialization of academic subjectivity, budgetary pressures on criti-
cally oriented programs, and the market logic that governs so many
university ‘partnerships.’ These trends seem to portend a bleak future
for academic dissent, and the historical conjuncture of ‘with us or
against us’ thinking in which these changes are taking place requires
oppositional, university-based academics to soberly rethink strategies
of dissent. Whatever strategies we adopt, it is imperative for us to
continue to defend the university as a site of critical inquiry. Further-
more, in the light of the real limits on what is politically possible within
that institutional space, we must extend ourselves to other communi-
ties to explore possible contributions, however modest, to the struggle
against the ‘dogmatic images of thought’ that prop up power as domi-
nation.1
Inspired by our participation in the affinity group that initiated and
organizes a community education project in Vancouver, British Colum-
bia, in this chapter we address two dimensions that, we argue, are
of fundamental importance to the revitalization of academic dissent:
(1) the need to open a conversation about possible modes of academic
subjectivity; and (2) the need to experiment in the creation of autono-
mous spaces of radical teaching and learning that stand apart from, but
relay with, pockets of dissent in the university. The chapter has two
sections. In the first, we propose the term academicus affinitatus as part of
Academic Dissent, Community Education, and Critical U 335
our attempt to unsettle the hermetic scholastic habitus of what Pierre

Bourdieu termed homo academicus.2 We conjure this conceptual persona
to describe how what we term a political logic of affinity might affect the
production of an engaged academic–intellectual subjectivity and also
guide the design of community education initiatives such that they
might be stitched into the movement of movements within and against
neoliberal globalization.
The second section provides an account of Critical U, an experiment
in the creation of a public space for critical dialogue and for the forging
of relays among university-based dissenting academics, progressive
community organizations, and the communities in which we live. De-
spite the project’s modest size and ambitions, Critical U offers valuable
lessons about academic subjectivity, the relationship between universi-
ties and communities, possible alternative models of education, and
finally, the contribution that conceptual tools and community educa-
tion might make to a ‘long revolution’ with an ‘impulse … to make
learning part of the process of social change itself.’3
Academicus Affinitatus
The point of departure for the conceptual persona we want to develop

is Antonio Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual,’ the figure through which
discussions on the Left about the political role of the intellectual and
alternative education are so often filtered4 (see chapters by Berardi and
Hall in this volume). Discussion of the Gramscian model’s value for
intellectual engagement today must heed the historical specificity of the
Italian Marxist’s situation. In the 1920s, Gramsci was an executive
member of the Italian Communist Party, persuaded by the seeming
success of the Soviet model and witnessing, first-hand, Italian cities
teetering on the brink of proletarian insurrection. Gramsci’s organic
intellectual was drawn from the ranks of workers and/or identified
with such class interests; this figure performed a ‘mediating function’ in
class struggle,5 and crucial to this was its pedagogical practices, which
sought to deepen class ‘homogeneity’ by raising workers’ awareness
of their economic function in the capitalist system.6 The Gramscian
organic intellectual is conceptually housed within and operates out of
the apparatus of a political party: the party is nothing other than ‘the
organic intellectuals of the proletariat,’7 an intellectual/educative/
institutional composite that assumes the ‘directive and organising’ role
in the revolutionary socialist movement.8
Today, we reject an image of political engagement that has Left intel-
lectuals assimilating the ‘masses’ into a ‘homogenous group,’ or orient-

ing pedagogical efforts singularly towards taking power, or channelling
diverse oppositional tendencies into an overarching party organization.
It is important to recognize that although the organic intellectual is
oriented against capitalist hegemony, this figure’s ethical commitments,
pedagogic methods, and political vision remain governed by a logic
that is itself hegemonic. It is a logic that endeavours ‘to assimilate and
to conquer’ a ‘social group,’ and that seeks ‘dominance’ over an entire
social formation.9 Even in its antiessentialist forms in various post-
Marxist accounts, the concept of hegemony retains a Leninist will to
totalizing irradiation effects.10
From our perspective, a central task of radical theory and practice
today is to explore lines of flight from this hegemonic compulsion. We
must break with the idea that the only way to achieve social change
is to totally remake an entire national-social order, as in classical
Marxist and anarchist theories of revolution, or to partially remake an
entire social order, as in classical and post-Marxist theories of liberal
reform. Social movements and indigenous communities around the
world have been extremely instructive in exploring the possibilities of
non-hegemonic social, political, and economic alternatives, from the
autonomous zones of Chiapas, to the autonomist-inspired Italian Social
Centres, to the global network of Independent Media Centres.11 They
show us that sustainable, radical social change can be achieved without
‘winning’ a hegemonic struggle – which by Gramsci’s definition is
impossible anyway – through the construction of alternatives within
and against the existing order.
Despite its shortcomings, the figure of the organic intellectual con-
tains instructive tensions that inform academicus affinitatus. Gramsci
understood the importance of weaving alternative media and educa-
tional spaces into the fabric of oppositional movements as a means for
fostering dissenting voices. He stressed the intellectual’s responsibility
to maintain contact with the dynamics of everyday struggle: an injunc-
tion to ‘active participation in practical life.’12 Most importantly, Gramsci
rooted the organic intellectual in an ethicopolitical commitment of which
any community education project must be cognizant: ‘all men [sic] are
intellectuals.’13 Intellectual capacity is universally distributed, though
its modalities differ in kind and intensity. Thus our communities are not
passive receptacles into which ‘expert’ knowledge might be poured;
rather, they are made up of active, living human subjects, possessed of
ways of seeing, listening, thinking, acting, and imagining. When we
confront such capacities of ‘mass intellectuality,’ to borrow the words of

Paolo Virno, ‘what comes to the fore is only (but that only is everything)
the more general aspects of the mind: the faculty of language, the ability
to abstract and correlate, and access to self-reflection.’14
The university was a key site that unsettled Gramsci’s organic intel-
lectual. The late 1960s saw student revolts and rebellions draw atten-
tion away from worker struggles in the factories. Students become
protagonists, and universities became sites of mobilization, while radi-
cal academics entered new combinations with oppositional movements,
and numerous attempts were made to democratize relations of power
within the university. One of the legacies of 1968, in the Paris context, was
the creation of Centre Experimental de Vincennes, an experimental site of
interdisciplinary postsecondary education. Vincennes’s philosophy pro-
gram was, until 1971, run by an intellectual-activist who, like Gramsci,
profoundly influenced debates about the intellectual: Michel Foucault.
In its day, Vincennes – or the ‘anti-Sorbonne’ as it came to be known –
was home to some of France’s most influential thinkers and militant
activists. It was a place where the limits of the university as a site of
radicalism were tested. Seminar topics ranged from Maoism to sexual
revolution; evening classes were offered to non-traditional students; the
campus was used by both faculty and students as a base for organizing
external activism; and students played a lead role in university gover-
nance. The extent to which the limits were tested is exemplified by the
case of Vincennes’ philosophy instructor, Judith Miller, who was known
to hand out credits to students on the bus simply ‘on request.’ She
proclaimed: ‘I will do [my] best to make sure [the university] functions
worse and worse. The university is a state apparatus, a fragment of
capitalist society, and what appears to be a haven of liberalism is not
one at all.’15 Education authorities intervened, fired Miller, and refused
to recognize Vincennes’s philosophy degree. The department has been
described as a ‘monster’ hatched by Foucault, ‘Dr Frankenstein.’ None-
theless, he resolutely defended the contribution that the experimental
program – and the student rebels generally – were making to the fight
against political, cultural, and philosophical conservatism.16
The cacophony of voices that filled Vincennes’s classrooms no doubt
revealed the difficulty of squaring the ‘new politics’ with the traditional
role of the intellectual, what Foucault later termed the ‘“universal”
intellectual.’17 This inheritance of ‘a faded Marxism’ was an intellectual
who ‘acknowledged the right of speaking, in the capacity of master of
truth and justice,’ the ‘consciousness/conscience of all,’ the ‘spokesman
of the universal.’18 This subjectivity, argued Foucault, had been eclipsed

by the ‘specific intellectual’ in the postwar period. These new intellectu-
als had ‘become used to working not in the modality of the “universal,”
the “just-and-true-for-all,” but within specific sectors, at the precise
points where their own conditions of life or work situate them (housing,
the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family and
sexual relations).’19 For us, the specific intellectual, as theorized, prac-
tised, and problematized by Foucault, operates according to a logic of
affinity – a logic made visible in the forms of organization, in the
conception of micropolitics, and in the ethicopolitical commitments
with which this figure is aligned. In these aspects, we move closer
towards academicus affinitatus.
Elements of an affinity-based organization of academic engagement
are visible in the Prison Information Group (GIP), which Foucault co-
founded in 1971. The GIP, which involved prisoners, former prisoners,
academics, student radicals, and prison psychiatrists, among others,
was a ‘transversal’ network organized to investigate and publicly ex-
pose the conditions of life in French prisons.20 It operated under exten-
sive lateral connections, in order to ‘bring together different social strata
which the ruling class has kept apart thanks to the interplay of social
hierarchies and divergent economic interests. They must bring down
barriers which are indispensable to power by uniting prisoners, law-
yers, or even doctors, patients and hospital personnel.’21 Certain ‘spe-
cific intellectuals’ were woven into this matrix on the premise that, in
modern societies characterized by great accumulation and deployment
of knowledge, intellectuals are increasingly called upon to defend power
– but also are uniquely positioned to speak against it. Most importantly,
the stance of ‘scholarly objectivity’ was abandoned; instead, struggle
was recognized and sides were taken. In many ways paralleling the
Italian practices of conricerca (see Borio et al., in this volume), the GIP
utilized research tools such as questionnaires, and collected first-hand
accounts by prisoners of beatings, revolts, abusive guards, and daily life
in general. These accounts were then disseminated via pamphlets and
press conferences. One of the group’s members, Gilles Deleuze, called
the GIP an ‘experiment in thinking’ – an apt description of an attempt to
invent a bottom-up, collaborative communication apparatus. The aim
was not to win concessions but to make visible the operation of power
as domination, with the goal of provoking a public rethinking of the
very idea of punishment.22
The GIP is relevant to our discussion in that it questioned the role of

the intellectual as a representative. Foucault’s conception of the intellec-
tual is propelled by a utopian impulse ‘to be done with spokesper-
sons.’23 In a conversation recorded in ‘Intellectuals and Power,’ Deleuze
lauds Foucault for teaching us about ‘the indignity of speaking for
others.’24 Avoiding this ‘indignity’ is an ethicopolitical commitment,
one that neither relegates the academic–intellectual to insularity nor
sanctions her silence when power operates as domination. But ‘what
does it mean to speak for oneself rather than for others?’ Deleuze
suggests in a later interview: ‘It’s not of course a matter of everyone
finding their moment of truth in memoirs or psychoanalysis; it’s not
just a matter of speaking in the first person.’25 Instead, the injunction of
the indignity of speaking for others gives expression to a problem, the
resolution of which requires that questions be formulated. For example:
Through what mechanisms do others claim the right to speak on your
behalf? Even when one speaks for oneself, how do prevailing concepts
function to condition or constrain that which one speaks and sees?
Perhaps it was in the light of such questions that Foucault believed:
‘Years, decades, of work and political imagination will be necessary,
work at the grass roots, with the people directly affected, restoring their
right to speak.’26 Community education is just one space among many
where such questions might be opened.
The specific intellectual, as the term implies, intervenes in struggles
in local and specific situations of power. Although Foucault used the
categories of ‘specific’ and ‘general’ to conceptualize the field in which
the intellectual operates, he did not so much privilege one modality
over the other as propose that the intellectual must set to work in the
middle of them. Operating transversally is a defining quality of
academicus affinitatus. In this sense, this figure engages in a version of
what Félix Guattari, like Foucault and Deleuze, called ‘micropolitics.’
This is not a simple inversion of the usual relations of value between the
‘micro’ and the ‘macro’; rather, micropolitics ‘concerns the relationship
of large social groups to what surrounds them, to their own economic
set-up, but it also concerns attitudes which run through the individual’s
life, through family life, through the life of the unconscious, of artistic
creation, etc.’27 Micropolitics challenges community education to pay
constant attention to the ways in which local concerns and subjectivities
are articulated with – but also expose possible lines of flight from –
hegemonic power/knowledge formations.
But Foucault warned of the limits of specific–intellectual activism

and localized struggle:
The specific intellectual encounters certain obstacles and faces certain

dangers. The danger of remaining at the level of conjunctural struggles,
pressing demands restricted to particular sectors. The risk of letting him-
self be manipulated by the political parties or trade union apparatuses
that control these local struggles. Above all, the risk of being unable to
develop these struggles for lack of a global strategy or outside support.28
This does not lead to an about-face or a simple reprivileging of the

general. Instead, Foucault suggests that one of the ways in which the
specific intellectual’s ‘position can take on a general significance, and
that her local, specific struggle can have effects and implications that
are not simply professional or sectoral,’ is by working within and against
‘the politics of truth in our societies … The intellectual can operate and
struggle at the general level of that regime of truth so essential to the
structure and functioning of our society.’29
Foucault’s remarks on the specific intellectual can be reread today
in the light of a post-Fordist regime that has spectacularly captured Gramsci’s
precept that ‘all men are intellectuals’ and that has exponentially increased
the size of the cadre of ‘specific intellectuals.’ In the contemporary context,
Foucault’s comments are prescient: intellectuals are ‘drawn closer to the
proletariat and the masses … because they have often been confronted,
albeit in a different form, by the same adversary as the proletariat, namely,
the multinational corporations, the judicial and police apparatuses, the
property speculators, and so on.’30 The success of the ‘corporate campus’
shows, however, that there are no guarantees that an encroaching force of
capitalism will be perceived as an adversary rather than as an opportunity.
Foucault was nonetheless clear that certain criteria had to be met if mani-
fold micropolitical struggles were to ‘enter as allies of the proletariat,’
adding that ‘power is exercised the way it is in order to maintain capitalist
exploitation’:
They genuinely serve the cause of the proletariat by fighting in those

places where they find themselves oppressed. Women, prisoners, con-
scripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals have now begun a
specific struggle against particularized power, the constraints and con-
trols, that are exerted over them. Such struggles are actually involved in
the revolutionary movement to the degree that they are radical, uncom-
promising and non-reformist, and refuse any attempt at arriving at a new

disposition of the same power with, at best, a change of masters.31
In this quote, we can see the operation of an ethically driven, utopian

radicalism. Notwithstanding that it has been ignored or misread by
Foucault’s many detractors, it is notable more for its particular appro-
priation of the Enlightenment tradition than for its cynical renunciation
of humanism’s highest values. Similarly, academicus affinitatus does not
dismiss the dimension of universality. Indeed, this conceptual persona
shares with Foucault an ethicopolitical commitment: ‘to be respectful
when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the
universal.’32
As we have tried to show, Foucault and Deleuze provide valuable
insights, though no clear answers, for a portrait of an engaged intellec-
tual. At the most basic level, they suggest political engagement in which
the intellectual neither assumes the mantle of leadership nor abdicates
responsibility. Operating under the injunction to avoid the indignity of
speaking for others, while challenging his or her own structural privi-
lege, the affinity-based academic-intellectual seeks dialogic participa-
tion in contexts that exceed the limits of the university classroom. In
such practices, academics might enter into the role of ‘exchangers,’
within networks of ‘mutual exchange and support.’33 This could entail,
for example, the development of new lines of affinity that bring to-
gether critical social scientists and social movements, as called for by
Bourdieu: ‘Our objective is not only to invent responses, but to invent a
way of inventing responses, to invent a new form of organization of the
work of contestation … of the task of activism.’34 Ultimately, we agree
with Gayatri Spivak when she insists that it is ‘not a question of speak-
ing for, but of building an infrastructure so that resistance/agency
might be recognized … not to teach people how to resist.’35
The task, then, is one of inventing, of building. This creative impulse
distinguishes academicus affinitatus from other modes of academic-
intellectual engagement – for example, the public intellectual, though
that figure need not be entirely displaced. For academicus affinitatus, the
infrastructures described by Bourdieu and Spivak are most valuable
when they exceed the term resistance and take on the quality of proto-
typical but necessarily partial alternatives – what might be called non-
branded strategies and tactics, such as Food Not Bombs, Reclaim the
Streets, Tent City ... In this sense, academicus affinitatus perceives aca-
demic dissent as a laboratory for experiments in non-capitalist, non-
statist futures, and seeks to produce encounters in the name of explor-

ing a potential politics of solidarity across all of the divisions – of race,
class, gender, sexuality, ability, age – that are crucial to the continued
functioning of the system of states and corporations.
The persona of academicus affinitatus is, therefore, a style of working
that responds to a transformative impulse, that accepts responsibility
rather than leadership, that prefers open experimentation to rule-based
procedures, that chooses the politics of the act over a politics of de-
mand, that pursues inventions rather than reforms, that respects heter-
onomous systems of difference rather than universalizing hegemonic
formations, and that is committed to the task of minimizing the opera-
tion of power as domination in every situation. Academicus affinitatus
proceeds with patience – not, however, to justify some terminal delay
in radical social transformation, but rather because she believes,
with Foucault, that ‘the work of deep transformation can be done in the
open and always turbulent atmosphere of a continuous criticism.’36 In
the capacity of an educator working in a specific locality, academicus
affinitatus aims to create spaces that, while engaging hegemonic forma-
tions, are necessarily limited, and do not seek irradiation effects across
some fantasmatically constructed singular entity called ‘the commu-
nity.’ It is in the name of these utopian impulses that we undertook the
Critical U experiment, as our own modest contribution to the develop-
ment of a community-based radical pedagogy based on the logic of
affinity.
Critical U
Critical U is a community education project in Vancouver that started

running free courses in 2000. Currently governed by a neoliberal provin-
cial regime, East Vancouver – where Critical U operates – has long been
home to a broad array of activists and creative resistance. Critical U takes
place in a neighbourhood known as Commercial Drive, which was popu-
lated by Italian immigrants early in the twentieth century. It was they
who initially created a strong sense of public space and engagement that
has persisted, despite many changes in social and economic conditions.
Today, the neighbourhood’s composition ranges from the working and
unemployed poor to a gentrifying upper-middle-class. The district is
home to significant numbers of Aboriginal people, migrants, students,
and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people. It is a vibrant
activist community with many commonalities and many deep divisions;
thus it is a laboratory of sorts for testing the limits and possibilities of

affinity-based politics. From the outset, the Critical U project focused on
issues relevant to the Commercial Drive district, where most of the
people in the affinity group live and work. In the remainder of this
chapter, we discuss the organization and pedagogy of Critical U as well
as some of the unexpected lessons gleaned from our participation in it
over the past few years.
When we became involved in the planning of Critical U in 2000, two
of us were graduate students in communication at Simon Fraser Uni-
versity (SFU), and one was a sessional instructor in social theory there.
Alongside a couple of members of the university’s student society, a
few interested students, a handful of community organizations and
activists, and a professor, we envisaged a space for critical thought and
dialogue in our neighbourhood. This space would try to link dissenting
academics and students based at SFU with critical theoretical concepts
and research, and social issues and struggles that members of our
neighbourhood had already defined as most relevant to their lives. We
agreed that a space in which we might think collectively about the
material conditions of everyday life – where analysis, concepts, and
hope might be emphasized in equal measure – would make a valuable
addition to the community. This would not be a recruiting ground for a
specific activist project, but rather a public space where interested people
from the neighbourhood could collaboratively learn, think, and talk.
The project was also conceived as an attempt to explore the possibilities
of a non-profit, non-state educational sector.
A logic of affinity guided the organization of Critical U. It would be
an alliance neither initiated nor directed by any formal academic orga-
nization. Rather, it would be the result of the collective efforts of aca-
demics at SFU and community organizations that were in touch with
the everyday dynamics and concerns of people in the area.37 From its
inception, the project has been coordinated by a small, loose, and shift-
ing network of undergraduate and graduate students, professors, non-
profit community organizations, progressive community educators,
university-based research institutes, and the Britannia Community Cen-
tre, out of which the courses operate. The composition of this group is
both fragile and ever-changing, as people move away from and into the
neighbourhood, and as desires and interests move on. Many new par-
ticipants have joined in the organizing, and it has been our hope that
the project will be driven increasingly by the needs of those who have
come to it from diverse perspectives and locations.
Since the pilot course was offered in 2000, Critical U has run a
number of courses and workshops, lasting between eight and twenty
weeks. We introduce concepts from social and political theory, political
economy, and cultural studies, bringing those perspectives to bear on
topics that include capitalism, globalization, food production, democ-
racy, social movements, and mass media. An ongoing emphasis is on
the points of overlap between locality (spatial, subjective, everyday life)
and global configurations of power (Empire, imperialism). Here we are
in agreement with Lawrence Grossberg when he writes: ‘If political
struggles are won and lost in the space between people’s everyday lives
and the material production and distribution of values and power ...
then it is here that pedagogy must operate.’38
Participation in Critical U classes is free, and no previous post-
secondary education is required. We promote the classes locally on a
minimal budget, through pamphlets and various local activist websites,
though, increasingly, word of mouth is the most effective. We strive to
be participant-driven to the best of our abilities, but of course there are
constraints. Typically, a group of organizers sketches in advance an
overall course outline structured around a series of general workshop
themes, with recruited volunteer professors, students, and community
educators acting as facilitators for a specific evening. The general ethos
is that the more specific course content is decided collectively by the
participants who show up at the first meeting; in actual practice, it is a
negotiated struggle between the needs and capacities of the organizers
– what they are willing and able to teach – and the needs and interests
of the participants. As such, we never know what to expect, and the
resultant affinity or antagonism of the negotiation depends on each
course’s unique composition. So far, each course has been oversub-
scribed, with between thirty and forty people showing up for our first
session, although typically this levels off to fifteen or twenty. In every
course offering to date, the challenge of forging friendship and commu-
nity has always been the primary determinant of success (or lack thereof).
The initial meeting of our first course was exemplary of the dynamics
of Critical U: because of unexpectedly large numbers, we had been
moved from a smaller room at the community centre to a large audito-
rium, in which the ‘instructors’ dutifully arrayed themselves at the
front, and the ‘students’ took up positions in rows of seats facing us. We
apologized for the layout, which couldn’t be changed because the chairs
were literally bolted to the floor. Several participants wanted more than
an apology, and suggested that we reassemble as a large circle on the
floor of the stage. This was done, and throughout the evening, ideas
went flying around the circle, as the participants expanded on and
delimited the suggested themes. The primary space of Critical U is a
classroom, which makes pedagogy an ongoing question, one that we
strive to open up with participants from the outset.
A central element of our approach in the classroom – and perhaps
this is where Critical U’s unique contribution lies – is that we introduce
theoretical concepts to practise a ‘pedagogy of the concept.’39 As Bourdieu
has suggested, academic workers would be unwise to renounce their
accrued intellectual capital: ‘We are dealing with opponents who are
armed with theories, and I think they need to be fought with intellec-
tual and cultural weapons. In pursuing that struggle, because of the
division of labour some are better armed than others, because it is their
job.’40 One of the things we try to do in each Critical U course is offer
participants an ever-expanding toolkit of interlinked theoretical con-
cepts. While no concept is beyond reproach, we introduce concepts to
help us both construct and respond to the problems we face. We view
concepts as ‘tools’ that, as Brian Massumi puts it, ‘pack a potential in
the way a crowbar in a willing hand envelops the energy of prying.’41
While concepts and research are raised in relation to specific problems,
we are also concerned with destabilizing what Deleuze called a ‘dog-
matic image of thought,’ where an ‘image of thought’ refers to ‘some-
thing deeper that’s always taken for granted, a system of coordinates,
dynamics, orientations: what it means to think, and to “orient oneself in
thought.”’42 Moreover, concepts are intended not to merely recognize a
situation but to aid in transformation, enhancing our sight and ulti-
mately our capacity to enact new ways of living.
Central to the Critical U courses is the process of collectively analysing
how practices and spaces of everyday life are sites for reproducing and
potentially transforming capitalism, statism, and the discourses of divi-
sion, and also how power is exercised in, through, and on our own
bodies. As Judith Butler has noted: ‘If subversion is possible, it will be a
subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities
that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected
permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be
liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but
to an open future of cultural possibilities.’43
This means, too, of course, that those of us at Critical U who work out
of the university must address our socially structured position as aca-
demics, as well as the operation of cultural capital as a form of power –
albeit a form whose effects are undecidable. At one of our first meetings
for a new class, for example, our openness towards organization, the
concepts we relied upon, and our insistence that we were not recruiting
people for the university were taking us on the wrong path. ‘What’s
your agenda?’ some demanded. Others admitted how intimidated they
were by our presence. Others expressed frustration about the lack of
structure, while others lamented that we had arrived with even a skel-
etal outline. Finally, a participant intervened, saying something to this
effect: ‘Each one of us came here because we read the description for
this course, and so we’ve got some sort of common mind. We need to
trust one another until there’s a reason not to.’ People stopped leaving
the room. Once again, the precarious nature of ‘community’ had re-
vealed itself. Though ‘visiting instructors’ are chosen by the affinity
group and/or suggested by people in the classes themselves, there have
been situations where the interiorization of academic power and the
irradiation of arrogant authority were brought to light by the partici-
pants, and dealt with in the meeting.
The format of the Critical U classes varies. Often there is a talk of
about twenty minutes, followed by a group conversation. One night, for
example, a political theorist asked the group to consider whether a shift
was taking place from class-based politics to radical democracy as a
social movement. Out of this, the participants, who included anti-
capitalist activists and corporate managers, began to consider together
the moral acceptability of violent action against private property as a
means of political expression. Other times, there are popular education
activities. For example, a banjo-toting Marxist labour historian set up a
role-playing exercise with a select few as factory owners (with, of
course, the requisite security force and strikebreakers) sitting on one
side of the circle, and the rest of the participants as workers on the other.
Later, this elaborate game of ‘Capitalism 101’ truly became musical
chairs as the facilitator picked away on his banjo in a hootenanny of
nineteenth-century labour songs. In other sessions, the concept of ‘place’
has been explored in relation to a discussion about how alternative,
bottom-up community design might proceed in practice.
Several of the university-based facilitators have commented on the
unusual vitality of discussions at the Critical U seminars. This can be
attributed in part, we believe, to the fact that everyone is there because
they choose to be there, rather than as a means to the distant end of
achieving a grade or qualification. Another key factor is the range in the
age, experience, political orientation, race, and class of the participants.
The absence of written work, grading schemes, and all of the regular
instrumental apparatuses of the university is also crucial to creating
and maintaining a sense of an alternative to an increasingly deadened
world of work, school, and consumerism. We remember too that some
of the students who come to Critical U have fled from the higher
education system, for reasons that range from poverty to disenchant-
ment with how their teachers exercised academic authority. Finally, we
think it suggests something of the pleasure to be found in engaged
learning as an act of self-transformation.
The Fragility of Affinity
Throughout the planning process and during the courses themselves,

there has been a constant tension between ‘intellectualizing’ about is-
sues and discussing tactics for confronting them head-on through activ-
ism and political intervention. This tension is never fully resolved, but
remains a vital dynamic left in play, and one that we conceptualize
through the notion of ‘relays’ between theory and practice. For ex-
ample, during a session on the topic of political economy of media
ownership, guests from the local Indymedia Centre came to describe
the resources they make available for independent media production,
and self-publishing was discussed as one possible alternative to corpo-
rate journalistic practices. In other courses, we have created more op-
portunities for these sorts of concrete relays between the session topics
and grassroots initiatives. In a session on cooperative institutions, mem-
bers of local cooperatives, researchers, and participants debated to-
gether the viability of co-op economic models as an alternative to, or a
form made compatible with, capitalist market relations. In this sense,
Critical U is a space where people from disparate political positions can
gather to enter a dialogue about alternatives to liberal-democratic glo-
bal capitalism. The logic of academicus affinitatus compels us not only to
analyse dominant social, cultural, political, and economic practices, but
also to produce and facilitate relays with alternative practices.
As a new experiment, Critical U offered a twenty-week course called
‘Food for Critical Thought,’ which examined the intimate connections
between our bodies, everyday lives, consumption, science and technol-
ogy, and global capitalism by combining the classroom with the field –
literally – through the planting, care, and harvest of a community
garden. In the class, topics ranged from the political economy of global
food production, to genetically modified organisms and monoculture,
to DIY-autonomous practices; in the field, discussion ranged from or-

ganic and other earth-friendly approaches, to tomatoes, beans, and
corn. There are two things worth emphasizing about this experiment.
First, to date it is the most concrete set of relays – between theory and
practice, local and global, and specific and general – that Critical U has
been able to establish. Second, the limits of affinity – in a composition of
‘community’ – were severely tested. Early on, one participant reacted to
what she perceived as an imposition of ‘theory’ on the course by ver-
bally abusing the facilitator and violently disrupting the class. Though
one participant deftly defused the situation, the spirit of affinity was
shaken considerably. As well, that affinity was challenged in practice.
The actual community gardening began enthusiastically; over the course
of an unprecedented warm and sunny summer, however, collective
care of the gardens became more sporadic; finally, the course ended
prematurely, with its composition proving to be far more ephemeral
than the plants we put in the ground.
A shorter course was offered the following winter. At the time of
writing, a new group of organizers has emerged from within and is
planning to offer ‘Critical Youth,’ with a focus on media literacy and
video production. In the end, the future of this experiment depends
exclusively on those who take part in it. The participants refuse to seek
constituted power in a hegemonic formation; this means that no perma-
nent structure is built and that there is no mechanism for providing the
inertia of reproduction. This, perhaps, is the most abiding lesson to be
learned in Critical U’s pursuit of affinity: its strength or fragility de-
pends foremost on the formation of friendship, a commonality of vi-
sion, and a willingness to pursue that which is always ‘not yet.’ As such,
modesty becomes not only a virtue to behold but a watchword for
political action.
Conclusion: Continuous Criticism
Academicus affinitatus resists a transformation of academia into ‘a circle

closed onto itself,’44 and strives to reimagine the role of theory as a
practice that, to borrow the words of Stuart Hall, ‘always thinks about
its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in
which it would have some effect.’45 In experimenting with the efficacy
of theory, the Critical U project reminds us that dissenting intellectual
traditions, while not constituting politics in and of themselves, can
contribute to the development of transformative political and peda-
gogical practices. The affinity-based academic leverages the opposi-

tional potential of her academic capital by forming relays with other
like-minded individuals who continue to work, at least partially, inside
the academy. Extending those links to progressive organizations that
are rooted and working in specific communities is one avenue towards
a revitalized pedagogy that we have found fruitful. Community educa-
tion, while no panacea, is one space of possibility where oppositional
academics might work – within and against both the neoliberal model
of education and the sociosymbolic order of neoliberalism generally –
‘to create an autonomous space where a certain kind of discourse can be
broached.’46
Creating such spaces, we remember with Gramsci, is of fundamental
importance – not merely as an adjunct but as a constituent element of
social movements. We agree with one activist who, in response to a
polemic on ‘anti-intellectualism’ on the activist Left, called for ‘projects
that provide new activists with the analytical tools to begin to critically
engage the hard questions that confront our movements and that offer
them in a manner in which people will actually be able to grasp them.’47
Valuable lessons to guide such a project can be learned from revisiting
the history of radical education initiatives – from anarchist Free Schools
to the Workers Education Association in Britain – and from exploring
present-day experiments – from California’s School of Unity and Lib-
eration to the Community Economies Project. However education is
wired into activism, it must not shy away from the prospect of constant
criticism. But Critical U, we want to stress, is not activist education; it is
community education, where ‘community’ – as participants were swift
to insist at our first meeting – must be maintained as a multiple rather
than a monolithic category. The Critical U experiment confirms that, as
Massimo De Angelis explains, ‘commonality is a creative process of
discovery, not a presupposition.’48 Academicus affinitatus gladly accepts
this injunction and the drive for a progressive interplay between theory
and practice; the experience of Critical U, however, is a reminder that
such efforts will always be fraught with unresolvable tensions.
We have offered this chapter in the name of furthering a radical
utopian impulse that proceeds from the assumption that, as Michael
Hardt writes, ‘the tasks of political theory do indeed involve the analy-
ses of the forms of domination and exploitation that plague us, but the
first and primary tasks are to identify, affirm, and further the existing
instances of social power that allude to a new alternative society, a
coming community.’49 The allusions of Critical U are manifold. For us,
it demonstrates the possibility of a non-state, not-for-profit, community

education sector. It demonstrates that the political logic of affinity can
guide the concrete design of educational and pedagogic alternatives.
The real utopian allusions, however, are discovered in the desires ex-
pressed by those who participated in Critical U. Speaking at a wrap-up
session of a course, one participant described his enduring loneliness,
and said that, for him, Critical U filled a gap in his life with ideas and
friendships. Reflecting on this gap in subjectivity and on the intellectual
collectivity glimpsed at Critical U, we find ourselves remembering
what the anarchist socialist Martin Buber called ‘the most intimate of all
resistances – resistance to mass or collective loneliness.’50 Indeed, it is
precisely what we do not know about how our communities live – and
how they might want to live – that demands such experiments in
community education, in the hope of producing something unknown
and unknowable – something that is valuable precisely because it ‘doesn’t
yet exist.’51
NOTES
1 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone Press, 1994).

2 Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1988).
3 Raymond Williams, ‘Adult Education and Social Change,’ in Border
Country: Raymond Williams in Adult Education, ed. John McIlroy and Sallie
Westwood (Leicester, UK: National Institute of Adult Continuing Educa-
tion, 1993), 257.
4 Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals,’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks,
ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International
Publishers, 1971), 5–23.
5 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, introduction to Antonio
Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals,’ in ibid., 3.
6 Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals,’ 5.
7 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, ‘General Introduction,’ Selec-
tions from the Prison Notebooks, xci.
9 Ibid., 10.
10 For the most influential post-Marxist rereading of Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). For a critique of the theory of hegemony
from the perspective of the logic of affinity, see Richard J.F. Day, ‘Ethics,
Affinity, and the Coming Communities,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 27:1
(2001): 21–38.
11 See Richard J.F. Day, ‘From Hegemony to Affinity: The Political Logic of
the Newest Social Movements,’ Cultural Studies 18:5 (2004): 716–48.
13 Ibid., 9.
14 Paolo Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,’
in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael
Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 194.
15 Cited in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Vintage, 1993),
228, 229.
16 James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Flamingo, 1994), 180.
17 Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault,
1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2002), 127.
18 Ibid., 126.
19 Ibid.
20 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Breaking Things Open,’ in Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New
York: Columbia Uiversity Press, 1995), 87–8.
21 Cited in Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 268–9.
22 Gilles Deleuze, cited in Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, 193.
23 ‘Interview with Michel Foucault,’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 289.
24 Deleuze, in Deleuze and Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power,’ in Foucault
Live: Interviews, 1966–84 (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989). For a critique of
Deleuze and Foucault on the role of the intellectual and representation, see
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.
25 Deleuze, ‘Breaking Things Open,’ in Negotiations, 88.
26 ‘Interview with Michel Foucault,’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 288.
27 Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 87.
28 Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ 129–30.
29 Ibid., 132.
30 Ibid., 126.
31 Foucault and Deleuze ‘Intellectuals and Power,’ 81.
32 Michel Foucault, ‘Useless to Revolt?’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault,
453.
33 Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ 127.
34 Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New
York: New Press, 2001), 58.
35 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in discussion on a panel on ‘Subalternity and

Marxism,’ at Marxism and the World Stage conference. 7 November 2003.
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 6–8 November.
36 Michel Foucault, ‘So Is It Important to Think?’ in Power: Essential Works of
Foucault, 457.
37 The affinity group involved the Vancouver Institute for Social Research
and Education, the Britannia Community Centre, the Vancouver Eastside
Educational Enrichment Society, the Simon Fraser University Institute for
the Humanities, and the Simon Fraser Student Society.
38 Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Bringing It All Back Home: Pedagogy and Cultural
Studies,’ in Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 388.
39 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 15–34.
40 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Scientists, Economic Science, and the Social
Movement,’ in Acts of Resistance, 53–4.
41 Brian Massumi, ‘Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy,’ in A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), xv.
42 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995), 147–8.
43 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), 93.
44 Maurizio Viano and Vincenzo Binetti, ‘What Is to Be Done? Marxism and
the Academy,’ in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare
Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl (London: Routledge, 1996), 250.
45 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,’ in Cultural
Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 286.
46 Viano and Binetti, ‘What Is to Be Done?’ 250.
47 Retrieved from www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/02/08/
4177015 (accessed 20 February 2004).
48 Massimo De Angelis, ‘From Movement to Society,’ in On Fire: The Battle of
Genoa and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (London: One Off Press, 2001), 124.
49 Michael Hardt, ‘Introduction: Laboratory Italy,’ in Radical Thought in Italy,
7.
50 Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 14.
51 Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadoria,
trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e),
1991), 121.
Contributors 353
Contributors
Michael Albert helped found and operate South End Press and later Z
Magazine and currently works primarily on Z’s website, ZNet. He is the
author of many books and articles on a wide range of activist concerns,
most recently Parecon: Life after Capitalism (Verso) and Thought Dreams:
Radical Theory for the Twenty-First Century (Arbeiter Ring).
Brian W. Alleyne teaches sociology at Goldsmiths College, University

of London. His academic interests are in global issues, cultural politics,
and research methods. When time allows he does some activist work
and explores software development and Linux.
Ian Angus is professor of humanities at Simon Fraser University. He is

the author of (Dis)figurations, Emergent Publics, A Border Within, and
Primal Scenes of Communication as well as essays on politics, technology,
and phenomenology.
Allan Antliff, Canada Research Chair, University of Victoria, is author

of Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde
and editor of Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology.
Franco Berardi (Bifo), a media theorist, was a militant in Potere Operaio

in the 1960s, and founder of the magazine A/traverso (1975–81), and of
the radio station Radio Alice (1976–8). Recently he launched the Telestreet
experiment against Berlusconi’s media-dictatorship. His books include
Ciberpunk e mutazione (1992) Cibernauti (1995), and Félix (2001). The
Book Telestreet – Macchina immaginativa non omologata is being translated
into English.
354 Contributors
Mark Edelman Boren teaches at the University of North Carolina at

Wilmington. He is the author of Student Resistance: A History of the
Unruly Subject (2001), and his essays have appeared in Lingua Franca,
Chronicle of Higher Education, Style, Philological Quarterly, Genre, and
Studies in American Fiction.
Guido Borio was a militant in the Italian autonomist movement of the

1970s. He is a coauthor of Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘quaderni rossi’ ai movimenti
globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano (2002). He works in the
field of social cooperatives.
Enda Brophy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at

Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His work has appeared in
Computers and Society, Historical Materialism, DeriveApprodi, and the Ca-
nadian Journal of Communication.
Colectivo Situaciones is a collective of researcher-militants based in

Buenos Aires. It has participated in numerous grassroots research ac-
tivities with unemployed workers (piqueteros), peasant movements, hu-
man rights groups, neighbourhood assemblies, and alternative education
experiments. Their elaboration of their experience has resulted in many
articles, a series of notebooks published under the title Cuadernos de
Situación, and four books: Genocida en el barrio: Mesa de escrache popular;
La hipótesis 891: Más allá de los piquetes; Contrapoder: Una introducción;
and 19 y 20: Apuntes para un nuevo protagonismo social.
Mark Coté is a visiting scholar at the Institute on Globalization and the

Human Condition at McMaster University and a doctoral candidate in
the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. His current
research is on Foucault, Italian autonomist marxism, and creative
networks.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa is a professor of globalization studies, global

social movements, human rights, and feminism in the Faculty of Politi-
cal Science at the Università di Padova. A well-known figure in the
international feminist movement, at the beginning of the 1970s she
opened the debate surrounding domestic labour and the woman as
reproducer of labour power. Works by Mariarosa Dalla Cost include
‘Domestic Labour and the Feminist Movement in Italy since the 1970s.’
International Sociology 3:1 (March 1998); with Giovanna Franca Dalla
Costa, eds., Paying the Price: Women and the Politics of International
Contributors 355
Economic Strategy (London: Zed Books, 1995) and Women, Development

and Labour of Reproduction: Struggles and Movements (Lawrenceville, N.J.:
Africa World Press, 1999); with Dario De Bortoli, ‘For Another Agricul-
ture and Another Food Policy in Italy,’ The Commoner 10 (Spring Sum-
mer 2005) (www.thecommoner.org); and with Monica Chilese, Nostra
madre Oceano. Questioni e lotte del movimento dei pescatori (Our Mother
Ocean. Questions and Struggles of the Fishermen’s Movement) (Rome:
DeriveApprodi, 2005).
Richard J.F. Day is an anarchist activist and scholar based at Queen’s

University, Kingston, Ontario. His work on radical social theory has
appeared in various academic journals, zines, and websites. His latest
book, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements,
is available from Pluto Press.
Greig de Peuter is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communica-

tion at Simon Fraser University. He is currently active in the Toronto
School of Creativity & Inquiry.
Nick Dyer-Witheford is an associate professor in the Faculty of Infor-

mation and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario in
London, Canada. He is the author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of
Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (1999) and, with Stephen Kline
and Greig de Peuter, of Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture,
and Marketing (2003).
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Profes-

sorship at McMaster University. His most recent books include The
Terror of Neoliberalism (Paradigm, 2004); Against the New Authoritarianism
(Arbeiter Ring, 2005); Take Back Higher Education (with Susan Giroux;
Palgrave, 2006); America on the Edge: Henry Giroux on Politics, Culture and
Education (Palgrave, 2006); Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism (Paradigm,
2006); and Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Para-
digm, 2006). His primary research areas are cultural studies, youth
studies, critical pedagogy, popular culture, media studies, social theory,
and the politics of higher and public education.
Stuart Hall was born in Jamaica and educated in the United Kindgom.
He has lived in England since 1951. He was director of the Centre for
Contempory Cultural Studies and professor of sociology at the Open
University. He is currently chair of the Board of Autograph, the Asso-
356 Contributors
ciation of Black Photographers, and inIVA, the Institute of International

Visual Arts.
Kelly Harris-Martin is a graduate of the archaeology program in the

First Nations Program in Kamloops, B.C. She has been accepted to
continue her work in forensic archaeology in Bournemouth, England.
Imran Munir is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication at

Simon Fraser University. His dissertation focuses on globalization, so-
cial and political movements, and peasant revolts in Pakistan. Origi-
nally from Lahore, he has worked extensively as a journalist in Pakistan
in both print and television, with a focus on politics, labour, and human
rights. Besides struggling against both martial law and religious funda-
mentalism, he has been connected to the street theatre movement since
the mid-1980s.
Francesca Pozzi has a degree in communication science from the

Università degli Studi di Torino. She is the co-author of Futuro anteriore.
Dai ‘quaderni rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo
italiano (2002). She works in the field of social research.
Jennifer Pybus is a graduate student in Cultural Studies and Critical

Theory at McMaster University. Her research focuses on the role that
affect and immaterial labour play in the construction of ‘tween’ (8–12-
year old) subjectivities.
Gigi Roggero has a degree in contemporary history from the Università

degli Studi di Torino. He is the coauthor of Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘quaderni
rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano (2002).
He is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and Political
Science at the Università della Calabria.
Shveta Sarda works at Sarai/CSDS (www.sarai.net), Delhi, with the

CyberMohalla (a project of Sarai and Ankur: Society for Alternatives
in Education). She is a process chronicler and keeps the diverse
CM content in circulation among English-speaking publics through
blogs, essays, and postings on discussion lists. She seeks to critically
engage with the debates in pedagogy, translation, technology, and
inequality. She is a member of the editorial collective of Sarai.txt.
<shveta@sarai.net>
Contributors 357
Sarita Srivastava’s research interests include the interdisciplinary, his-

torical, and organizational study of race and gender. She is currently
working on a book, Facing Race, Saving Face: Anti-racism, Emotion and
Knowledge in Social Movement Organizations, which explores the histori-
cal debates, emotional responses, and educational practices that arise
when social movements such as feminism are faced with internal
antiracist challenges. She has been active in the environmental, labour,
and feminist movements and is a professor of sociology at Queen’s
University, Kingston, Ontario.
Richard Toews is a lecturer at Simon Fraser University in the First

Nations Institute at Kamloops B.C., where he teaches sociology and
anthropology. He has published short stories in West Coast Line and the
Anglican Catholic and is the author of the forthcoming novel A Dance
with the Dragon.
Carlos Alberto Torres, professor of social science and comparative

education and Director of the Paulo Freire Institute (GSEIS), is a politi-
cal sociologist of education who did his undergraduate work in sociol-
ogy in Argentina, his graduate work in Mexico and the United States,
and postdoctoral studies in education foundations in Canada. He is
also a founding director of the Paulo Freire Institute in Sao Paulo,
Brazil. Dr Torres has been a visiting professor at universities in Argen-
tina, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico, Portugal, and Sweden. He has
lectured throughout Latin America and the United States and at univer-
sities in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Sebastián Touza is a PhD candidate at the School of Communication at

Simon Fraser University. He is writing his dissertation on intellectuals
and autonomy. He is currently finishing an English translation of a
book by Colectivo Situaciones on the Argentinean revolt of December
2001 – a project done in collaboration.
Jerry Zaslove has taught literature, humanities, and the social history of
art at Simon Fraser University since it opened in 1965. He is compiling
his writings on modernism and anarchism under the title ’Anarchism
from the Other Shore’ and is actively writing on the fate of cultural
memory, utopia, exiles, and outcasts. Recent publications are on Herbert
Read, Siegfried Kracauer, W.G. Sebald, and Jeff Wall.
CULTURAL SPACES
Cultural Spaces explores the rapidly changing temporal, spatial, and theo-
retical boundaries of contemporary cultural studies. Culture has long been
understood as the force that defines and delimits societies in fixed spaces. The
recent intensification of globalizing processes, however, has meant that it is no
longer possible – if it ever was – to imagine the world as a collection of au-
tonomous, monadic spaces, whether these are imagined as localities, nations,
regions within nations, or cultures demarcated by region or nation. One of the
major challenges of studying contemporary culture is to understand the new
relationships of culture to space that are produced today. The aim of this
series is to publish bold new analyses and theories of the spaces of culture, as
well as investigations of the historical construction of those cultural spaces
that have influenced the shape of the contemporary world.
Series Editors:
Richard Cavell, University of British Columbia
Imre Szeman, McMaster University
Editorial Advisory Board:

Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago
Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University
Hazel V. Carby, Yale University
Richard Day, Queen’s University
Christopher Gittings, University of Western Ontario
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina
Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto
Heather Murray, University of Toronto
Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney
Rinaldo Walcott, OISE/University of Toronto
Books in the Series:

Peter Ives, Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the
Frankfurt School
Sarah Brophy, Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning
Shane Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies
Jasmin Habib, Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes of National Belonging
Serra Tinic, On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market
Evelyn Ruppert, The Moral Economy of Cities: Shaping Good Citizens
Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter, Utopian Pedagogy: Radical
Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization

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UTOPIAN PEDAGOGY:

RADICAL EXPERIMENTS AGAINST

Utopian Pedagogy is a critical exploration of educational struggles within

mark coté is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication at

richard j.f. day is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociol-

greig de peuter is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communica-

Edited by Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day,

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8923-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-8675-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Utopian pedagogy : radical experiments against neoliberal globalization /

1. Anti-globalization movement – Study and teaching (Higher)

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for

Introduction: What Is Utopian Pedagogy? 3

Part I: The Contested University

1 Utopian Thinking in Dangerous Times: Critical Pedagogy

2 Teaching and Tear Gas: The University in the Era of

3 Academic Freedom in the Corporate University 64

4 A Revolutionary Learning: Student Resistance/Student Power 76

5 Exiled Pedagogy: From the ‘Guerrilla’ Classroom to the

6 Universities, Intellectuals, and Multitudes 108

Part II: Rethinking the Intellectual

7 From Intellectuals to Cognitarians 133

8 The Diffused Intellectual: Women’s Autonomy and the

9 Conricerca as Political Action 163

10 On the Researcher-Militant 186

Part III: Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy

11 The Making of an Antiracist Cultural Politics in Post-Imperial

12 ‘Before Coming Here, Had You Thought of a Place Like This?’:

13 Transformative Social Justice Learning: The Legacy of

14 Breaking Free: Anarchist Pedagogy 248

17 ‘Let’s Talk’: The Pedagogy and Politics of Antiracist Change 294

19 Academicus Affinitatus: Academic Dissent, Community Education,

mark coté, richard j.f. day, and greig de peuter

This book offers a critical examination of the educational dimension of

expressed in this collection and by highlighting some of the affinities

Affinities across Disparate Traditions

The contemporary scene is animated by diverse educational struggles.

liams, by a philosophy of education whose ‘deepest impulse was to

which hegemonic social formations can be contested – for example, in

Deployed in myriad teaching and learning contexts – from university

liberal aims.’19 This is because schools in fact alienate us from our

political movement that preceded autonomia, methods of inquiry fol-

a central site of struggle. For Bifo, the challenge is to generate ‘institu-

This rapid passage through traditions raises an important question:

tation – a ‘multicultural’ politics – allows excluded identities and com-

ongoing corporate colonization of public school systems at all levels,

What Is Utopian Pedagogy?

It is important to clearly distinguish our use of the concept of utopia

imminent threat – critical thinkers, educators, activists, builders – all

hope is the celebration of the possible, or rather of specific, existing

These directions and forces are documented throughout this book,

munities.’44 These can be defined positively as marginal crucibles of

1 For critiques of the neoliberal transformation of higher education, see

Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism, ed. Notes from Nowhere (London:

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985); Special Issue on

Technology Capitalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,

37 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ October 59 (1992): 3–7.

academia as a ‘circle closed onto itself.’1 Sharing a commitment to a

and the spectre of American imperialism, he makes a passionate argu-