Corporate control of public sphere

Finally, with his usual prophetic boldness, and with Julien Benda’s trahison des clercs in mind, Thompson predicted that most university teachers would retreat ‘within the limited area of manoeuvre allotted to him within the managerial structure’.

More recently, former Essex professor and literary critic, Marina Warner, has voiced several scathing criticisms about her own unfortunate experience of university managerialism, whilst simultaneously recognising that she herself may have been ‘culpable of doziness’, ‘naive, culpably unobservant as I went about my activities at Essex’.

sinister forces presently at play within British universities and their damaging effects: ‘the culture of obedience and deference’ that is cultivated through ‘fear, insecurity, precarious social conditions and shame’; ‘the silence of no comment which universities resort to when confronted with protests and complaints’; and if all else fails, constructive dismissal and the use of ‘gagging orders’. Warner’s most damning indictment, however, is her likening of UK higher education and its ‘rulers’ ideas’ to ‘the world of Chinese communist corporatism’:

Not unlike the three wise monkeys who ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’, rather than face down the conditions of their present existence, too many workers in UK universities have chosen to turn a blind eye or to actively collaborate, yielding here, profiting there:

These are just some of the distortions and hidden injuries of the UK higher education sector. And though some of the above wrongdoings can be put down to everyday careerism, hypocrisy and cowardice, others are symptomatic of an increasingly marketised system that encourages and rewards unfettered commercialism, bullying and deceit. Such developments are furthered by a new cadre of university managers who have become a class apart, an oligarchical elite who, as was the case with the press barons of inter-war Britain, seek to exercise power without responsibility

More worrying still, just as the Third Reich persecuted whole communities (and their structures of feeling) simply because they failed to conform to its Aryan vision, there is a clear and present danger that group after group of higher education employees (liberals, patricians, socialists, feminists, trade unionists, for example) could be similarly purged for refusing to quietly comply to the illiberal tenets of the neo-capitalist university.

the Lesson of Munich reminds us, to quote Noam Chomksy’s 1960s polemic that criticised US intellectuals who knowingly provided the ideological justifications for the Vietnam war,[that] a powerful and aggressive nation with a fanatic belief in its manifest destiny will regard each victory, each extension of its power and authority, as a prelude to the next step.

Or, and to return to George Dangerfield and the decline of parliamentary liberalism in early twentieth-century Britain, colleagues could choose to bear witness to all that is happening in academia, warts and all, and thus bid farewell to that ‘fine old Liberal Hegelianism of at once believing in freedom and not believing in freedom’. Anything less risks universities being turned into enemies of truthfulness and intellectual honesty; indeed, it would be tantamount to the strange death of the liberal university by assisted suicide.

Anthropology courses furnish business majors with a more expansive and empathetic worldview; that in itself has immeasurable value. ROI-minded governors and college advisors – and students – should know that anthropology courses enhance graduates’ workplace value and opportunities. Students who decide to major in anthropology and/or pursue advanced degrees should be aware that the application of anthropology in business offers both intellectual and financial rewards. Is there a need for more anthropologists? There certainly is in business.

Similarly to other cases which severely affected the academic environment in the college in the past few years (cases which could have become a ground for a serious discussion on matters of shared concern), Goldsmiths’ management team has chosen silence as the most suitable strategy to suppress any kind of opposition to the closing of CCS. We are aware that talks towards this so‐called “restructuring” (made necessary by the supposed economic unviability of the department) have been held for years behind closed doors, never involving any of the people who are to be directly affected by the decision.

Our experience of intellectual exchange, learning and close collaboration with academics we consider inspiring for their research subjects and methodologies cannot be quantified or translated in the language of “restructuring”, “merging” and “enhancement”.

The main clash of the first half of the 21st century will not oppose religions or civilisations. It will oppose liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism, the rule of finance and the rule of the people, humanism and nihilism.

Abetted by technological and military might, finance capital has achieved its hegemony over the world by annexing the core of human desires and, in the process, by turning itself into the first global secular theology. Fusing the attributes of a technology and a religion, it relied on uncontested dogmas modern forms of capitalism had reluctantly shared with democracy since the post-war period — individual liberty, market competition and the rule of the commodity and of property, the cult of science, technology and reason.

In this new landscape, knowledge will be defined as knowledge for the market. The market itself will be re-imagined as the primary mechanism for the validation of truth.

Yesterday, human sociality consisted of keeping tabs on the unconscious. For the social to thrive meant exercising vigilance on ourselves, or delegating to specific authorities the right to enforce such vigilance. This was called repression. Repression’s main function was to set the conditions for sublimation. Not all desires could be fulfilled. Not everything could be said or enacted. The capacity to limit oneself was the essence of one’s freedom and the freedom of all. Partly thanks to new media forms and the post-repressive era it has unleashed, the unconscious can now roam free. Sublimation is no longer necessary. Language has been dislocated. The content is in the form and the form is beyond, or in excess of, the content. We are now led to believe that mediation is no longer necessary. This explains the growing anti-humanist stance that now goes hand in hand with a general contempt for democracy.  Calling this phase of our history fascist might be misleading unless by fascism we mean the normalisation of a social state of warfare.  Such a state would in itself be a paradox because, if anything, warfare leads to the dissolution of the social. And yet under conditions of neoliberal capitalism, politics will become a barely sublimated warfare. This will be a class warfare that denies its very nature — a war against the poor, a race war against minorities, a gender war against women, a religious war against Muslims, a war against the disabled.

Neoliberal capitalism has left in its wake a multitude of destroyed subjects, many of whom are deeply convinced that their immediate future will be one of continuous exposure to violence and existential threat. They genuinely long for a return to some sense of certainty, the sacred, hierarchy, religion and tradition. They believe that nations have become akin to swamps that need to be drained and the world as it is should be brought to an end. For this to happen, everything should be cleansed off. They are convinced that they can only be saved in a violent struggle to restore their masculinity, the loss of which they attribute to the weaker among them, the weak they do not want to become.

In the street fight politics will become, reason will not matter. Nor will facts. Politics will revert into brutal survivalism in an ultracompetitive environment. Under such conditions, the future of progressive and future-oriented mass politics of the left is very uncertain.

Social media relies on intense statements of personal feeling. It thrives on the circulation of affect. Outrage gets more shares and likes than nuance.

The complex array of factors that figure into political choices, the myriad ways such choices are not determined by an essence designated by and captured within demographic terms, the fact that political identities have to be constructed rather than assumed; all this was submerged under an ever-amplified insistence on a direct connection between identity categories and political commitment.

The blend of identity politics and commanded individuality was a hallmark of the Clinton campaign, from its opportunistic tweets on intersectionality, to its misrepresentations of Bernie Sanders, to its excoriation of left critics in personal terms — childish, purist, naïve, irresponsible.

As I detail in Crowds and Party, recent work by sociologists Jennifer Silva and Carrie Lane sets out the material conditions that have given rise to the intense attachment to individual identity. Mistrusting institutions, many people today believe that they can only rely on themselves. Their sense of dignity and self-worth comes from being self-sufficient. Skeptical of experts, they speak from their own experience, drawing legitimacy from the identity that makes them who they are. The more they have to combat, to overcome, the more valuable their identity. Solidarity feels like a demand to sacrifice one’s own best thing, yet again, and for nothing.

The added bonus of this weaponized identity politics is how the privileged can use it against each other even as they leave communicative capitalism’s basic structure intact. We see this when we look at the arsenal of identities — sex, race, gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, religion, citizenship — and recognize what is missing: class.

The identities from which one can speak rely on the exclusion of class. On the one hand, the assumption is that class means white. Yet prevalent within the discourse of identity politics are accounts of the racialization of poverty, the feminization of work, important accounts that recognize and analyze the fact that class in the contemporary United States does not mean or signify white at all.

Suppressing the history and present of radical black anti-capitalist struggle, of communist feminism, of the leading role of people of color in working class movements, the politics of identity functioned in the 2016 election to demolish rather than build solidarity.

The investment in identity is intense. It shores up a fragile individuality. It provides a location for political righteousness. It prevents the formation of the solidarities opposition to capitalism requires.

This Trump-washing will make regular Republicans look reasonable and Democrats look like champions of equality and diversity. The hatred the Trump candidacy legitimized will take on a liberal form of hatred for working class white people, in the name of a multiculturalism that erases the fact of a multiracial working class.