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Social Movements And The Academy

By Delia D. Aguilar

05 October, 2010
Countercurrents.org

There is no dearth of media commentators and social critics lamenting the state of the nation today. The economy is in shambles. While 43.6 million Americans live in poverty, amounting to 1 in 7, with 29 million unemployed or forced into part-time work, the top ten hedge-fund managers rake in $900,000 an hour. The gap between the rich and the poor is wide and getting wider still—and among the wealthy there now exists a perceptible gulf between the super-rich and the just-plain rich. Only twice before in US history has a situation like this transpired: during the era of the robber barons in the 1880s and in the depression of the late 1920s. But as Les Leopold, author of Looting of America has observed, even robber barons built industries that employed people—steel, oil, railroads. None of that is happening at present. Today robber barons build palaces out of fantasy finance.

Now as you all know, this train wreck of an economy cannot be dissociated from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where, as of September 23, 4,739 US military personnel have been sacrificed. Eighteen vets commit suicide per day and 320,000 suffer brain injuries. Often ignored are the one million Iraqis killed, 4 million forced out of their homes or fled the country, and a country in ruins. The cost of the war is an amount so vast I don’t know how to read it to you: $1,085,090,966,047. Who are the winners in these wars? It’s the arms dealers, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, drone manufacturers and F-16 spare parts outfits and the private firms that hire mercenaries to foist terror on Muslim lands. British journalist Robert Fisk wrote on the anniversary of 9/11: “Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead…and nothing learned.”

Nothing learned. That’s a damning statement that we ought not accept. For sure there is a great deal of anger, frustration, and anxiety seething and boiling over in this land, currently unleashed by rightwing forces who have successfully tapped into the legitimate fears of folks who perceive themselves as middle-class. I don’t know about you, but I am the lucky daily recipient of internet emails that twist and distort facts about healthcare reform, social security, immigration, etc.. In the past year, in particular, I was inundated with emails informing me that Obama is a Kenyan, a radical Muslim, a socialist, a Marxist. And of the last two I want to say, would that that were so! Suffice it to say that the President is under extraordinarily close scrutiny. This past week, for example, I was apprised of the presumably frightening fact that Obama had omitted the word “Creator” from the Declaration of Independence in a speech. If one must sum up the theme of these messages, they all lead to a condemnation of “big government” and the endorsement of an unfettered market. Although there are days that I can hardly stomach what I read in these vile posts, I have not stopped acquaintances from sending them because I do want to keep informed about what’s circulating outside urbane, refined academic circles. I’m sure we all wonder whether, if President Obama were not Black, such vitriol as we now witness would have been generated.

And what about the young? What’s on their minds? Let’s look at what an NYU student recently wrote regarding the apathy of today’s youth about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Joan Wile, author of Grandmothers Against the War, asked students whether a draft like that during the Vietnam war may have mobilized similar protests. Sadly for us, this thoughtful young man agrees that students at large are “vastly apathetic.” He describes his fellow youth as “generally spoiled and materialistic, interested only in “designer clothes and slouching around coffee shops talking about foreign films.” He was 13 during 9/11, he writes, “so in the crucial years when one strikes out to form an independent view, the default state of the world was one of war.” But what he writes further should be very disturbing to those of us who teach. Young people, he says, “know almost nothing about the history of American imperialism, nor do they know about the rich (and bipartisan!) anti-militarist tradition in America. Years of school has only served to leave Uncle Sam looking strapping in his camouflage.”

This young man’s last statement, in my opinion, is an even more damning indictment than the harsh words of Robert Fisk. It is also one that we shouldn’t have the privilege of ignoring. What’s happened that it has come to this? Henry Giroux offers an explanation. Citing Paul Krugman’s puzzlement over the endurance of the “zombie doctrine of Reaganism,” Giroux draws attention to the Powell Memo dated August 23, 1971, a directive that is “the most succinct statement, if not the founding document, for establishing a…political blueprint for the current assault on…democratic public life.” Titled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” this memo written by Lewis Powell (appointed to the US Supreme Court a couple of months after the memo) urges the enlistment of higher education in support of free market ideology in order to counter what Samuel Huntington later referred to as “an excess of democracy.” It identifies college campuses—where student activism was then in full force-- as the critical training ground for intellectuals whose task must be to produce knowledge to buttress the established order. It urged moneyed conservatives to donate “the collective sum of roughly $3 billion over a period of 30 years…to build a network of public intellectuals, think tanks, advocacy groups, foundations, media outlets, and powerful lobbying interests.” There you have it. Heeding this call, Coors, Mellon Scaife, Olin, Koch, Richardson, Bradley financed right-wing think tanks that went to work to make of our minds “occupied territories,” in the words of Bertell Ollman. It was this push that made the Heritage Foundation the major architect of the Reagan Doctrine.

No surprise, then, that the end result has been, to quote Lewis Gordon, “the market colonization of intellectuals.” To be sure, Gordon doesn’t present a very flattering portrayal of academicians who, if they are to survive, must bow to the demands of marketability; for him that means scholars who “function more like the knowledge equivalent of brand names than ideas.” We’re all familiar with the corporatized academy and its managerial class who have installed for our use a consumer model of education. For many younger faculty today, this is all they’ve ever known. You are all familiar, I am sure, with examples of conservatism—ideas that are aligned with market goals, some even passing for radical!—that currently dominate the academy. With the war against progressive ideas beginning the 80s, what is truly astonishing is that our young student has miraculously escaped such molding and can critique the “education” that he has received!

Nor is it a surprise, in this context, that an uncompromising, principled, and committed progressive like Howard Zinn would be criticized and assailed by fellow historians. This is what they have to say about Zinn’s work: Michael Kazin of Georgetown University, “strong on polemical passion” (therefore apparently weak on facts); Sean Wilentz of Princeton: “agit-prop, not history” (history presumably being a dull narration of boring events); Jill Lepore of Harvard: “upending is not an advance, only upside-down” (no property relations involved, just a switch of hands). Proof positive of the effectiveness of the Powell Memo and the subsequent market colonization of intellectuals is that scholarly works avoid mention of Zinn.

Zinn was not displeased by any of this, I would venture. For his worldview, in plainspoken words, expresses a fundamental departure from the faux liberalism of his colleagues: “How we think is not just mildly interesting, not just a subject of debate, but a matter of life and death. If those in charge of our system can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.” I should hope that this conference, held in Zinn’s homestate, shows the way to unmuzzling ourselves.

I never had the good fortune of formally meeting Howard Zinn, although in 1972 or ‘73 I was on a panel with him at MIT (it must have been one of those anti-imperialist conferences which were in abundance during those times of social ferment) where I spoke on the Philippines (martial law had just been imposed by Ferdinand Marcos at that time). Progressive Filipinos have always felt an affinity with the man; for one, because he never failed to mention the Philippines and the havoc US colonization wreaked on that distant country in his writings. Perhaps this may have been because of his friendship with radical historian Daniel Boone Schirmer, who wrote his dissertation with Zinn as his advisor. At Boone’s memorial in May 2006, Zinn described his meeting with Boone this way: “This tall elderly gentleman just walked into my office one day and said, ‘My name is Daniel Boone Schirmer. I want to write about the US conquest of the Philippines at the turnof the 20th century. I am a communist. Will you be my advisor?’” Zinn then laughed and added, “How could I turn down this grey-haired man who was even older than me?”

So in fact my knowledge of Howard Zinn came through Boone, who was one of the staunchest supporters of the struggle of the Filipino people. It was Boone’s house in Cambridge that was the meeting place for any of us who wanted to do progressive politics. From him we learned of Zinn’s politics as “anarchist.” That was a time when, because leftist thinking was in the air, distinctions could be made about the variety of leftists in existence. And “liberal” was not such a complimentary label: “scratch a liberal and you will find a conservative,” is a phrase one often heard, especially when referring to some professor or other. It’s amazing how, with the Reagan/Bush administration and the conservative turn, what was then “liberal” gradually became “left” because the “left” had evaporated. As you can see, I have now segued into a recounting of my experience of the social movements in New England during the 70s as a brief response to our young student who rightly complained that he was never taught the history of anti-imperialism. These are also my instructions from Professor Cabusao who, in inviting me to speak, explained that people his age—i.e., young professors--also need to be apprised about what it was like to live at a time when social movements were thriving.

As I’m sure everyone here knows, there was a variety of issues and movements brought to the fore in the 60s and 70s, the main one of which, after civil rights was, of course, the anti-Vietnam war. Hovering around Vietnam but never entirely separate were the women’s movement (which was the last to fizzle out), movements of people of color (Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, Asians), the anti-nuclear movement, environmental movement (Clamshell Alliance), and solidarity with national liberation struggles—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Puerto Rico, the Philippines. There was also Palestine, Iran, South Africa. Zimbabwe, etc. And let’s not forget liberation theology that originated from Latin America. (Unfortunately, liberation theology has been successfully supplanted by evangelical fundamentalism where it once had a foothold, and we can surmise who’s responsible for this.) I remember one anti-war meeting I attended in Nyack, NY with David McReynolds as one of the speakers. I sat along with Catholic nuns (most likely of the Maryknoll order) who informed me that without their having gone to Third World countries, they would never have acquired the political views they now held. Because the Vietnam War served not only as the catalyst but the overarching conceptual frame for viewing all struggles, an anti-imperialist perspective and a capitalist critique constituted a more or less shared outlook among movement people. For me as a Third World person, that was the most appealing and exciting aspect of the social movements then.

The draft was the main mobilizer of colleges campuses, as one might expect, and so when student organizing extended to other political issues, a systemic analysis would almost inevitably be incorporated or deployed. However, I should say that while college campuses, particularly public institutions, were buzzling with activity, that doesn’t mean that large numbers of faculty were necessarily supportive of what was taking place out in the streets. In fact in going around giving presentations to groups outside campuses—in church basements or unions, for example, or even people’s homes and neighborhood associations--I was pleasantly surprised that the climate in those places was on occasion far more open, welcoming, and more informed than on campuses. I need to say this lest I give the wrong impression that colleges and universities then were functioning very differently from today. They were not. In so far as they offered courses with a progressive slant, it was only in response to student clamor for a more relevant education, an education the purpose of which would be to genuinely enlighten, to help make sense of what was taking place outside the academic enclave. Under such circumstances, there were responsive faculty who struggled to re-educate themselves and took positions that in many cases hurt their careers. Otherwise, under normal conditions, the ultimate goal of a liberal education is to inculcate in students ideas that would support existing social arrangements, and instruct them that being “law-abiding citizens” meant not asking impertinent questions and rocking the boat. I recall describing to Boone a professor’s unabashedly backward thinking in a classroom I observed (that was my job then, observing teachers in action in the classroom), to which he replied--and I never forgot his phrasing—“You know, the bourgeoisie needs academic servitors.”

I did not intend this to be a nostalgia trip or a journey down memory lane that the elderly are prone to. What I am hoping to draw attention to, instead, is the way in which social movements, when they are as robust as they were in the 70s, exert an impact on the academy to such an extent that key ideas vital to any progressive undertaking get infused into the academic lexicon and mindset. No one here needs reminding that the battle for people’s minds—that is to say, an ideological struggle—is what Howard Zinn devoted himself to for 60 years of his life. In this ideological struggle, the debunking of the notion of neutrality is central. For Zinn it is impossible to be neutral. He wrote: “In a world …moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now.” It is true that fields of study such as women’s/ethnic studies and cultural studies--American Studies, without a doubt—understand and take this position of non-neutrality, but do not always take into account systemic analyses in the way that was vital to movements for change; instead, our studies favor the cultural and discursive over the concrete and material. Consequently, the change alluded to generally becomes confined to the cultural and individual realm.

It must be remarked that we owe a lot to the Vietnamese, not only for the tenacity with which they fought and won the war against US imperialism, but for the ways of thinking they imparted. The anti-war movement learned from the Vietnamese who, looking to US progressives for solidarity, never failed to distinguish between the government and the people; that is, the US government was their enemy but the people were their friends. Everybody in movement circles was aware of this. From all indications, that lesson has been thrown out the window, as witness my formerly Marxist friends who now casually talk about the way in which “we invaded Iraq and how we engage in torture.” This is not a matter of mere semantics. The ability to make a distinction between the government and the people is actually critically important to our understanding of power relations in this country, because it reflects our comprehension of the role of the state and the class on whose behalf it operates. No, ordinary people did not make the decision to invade Iraq and Afghanistan! Remember the massive demonstrations taking place around the world that protested the US invasion in the spring of 2003? Those were incredible manifestations of everyday people declaring to the world that they and their governments were by no means one and the same.

Just how difficult this lesson is to re-learn is suggested by Marc Ash (editor of Truthout and Reader Supported News) who, writing just this week, urges President Obama to “organize his base.” I suppose it wouldn’t be entirely bad if Obama proceeds to do that. Nevertheless, let’s listen to the words of Howard Zinn in his interview with Bill Moyers on December 11, 2009: “Think your own ideas. And don’t depend on saviors. Don’t depend on the Founding Fathers, on Andrew Jackson, on Theodore Roosevelt, on Lyndon Johnson, on Obama…You know, Johnson and Kennedy were pushed by the southern black movement. And maybe Obama…hopefully today, maybe he will be pushed by people today.”

The proliferation of all manner of left-wing publications that gave voice to Third world struggles exerted a profound impact on social movements in this country. “Serve the people” was a slogan that some on the left—“sectarian” left is what I later heard them called somewhat derisively by colleagues--adopted for themselves, precisely noting the difference between governments and peoples. Then there were those “criticism/self-criticism” sessions, however mechanically applied, that followed political meetings. Similarly, the women’s movement drew immense inspiration from Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese women. The C-R or consciousness-raising that emerged as the principal strategy of second-wave feminism, for instance, could well have derived from the “speak bitterness” meetings held in China during the now derided Cultural Revolution. The astoundingly resourceful and innovative ways in which Vietnamese women fought US invaders were lessons not lost on the women’s movement here. When a group of Asian American women returned all fired up from attending the 1971 Indochinese Women’s Conference in Vancouver, men left behind couldn’t help expressing the wish that they, too, had been able to participate. Overall, wars of national liberation then raging alerted people of color in this country that right within the US a Third World—in Robert Blauner’s terms, an “internal colony”—also existed. That was a call for them to mobilize against domestic owners of capital who were also imperialists.

As you all know, courtesy of the finance industry, the now favored more “objective” term “globalization” was soon to replace imperialism, causing a few academics, David Harvey among them, to regret the concession. With the demise of social movements and the advent of neoconservatism, many commonplace themes and viewpoints essential to progressive thinking have been sadly turned back, upended, or simply forgotten. Moreover, with the corporatization of the university and the market colonization of intellectuals, the desire for so-called nuance and complexity have substituted for the clarity and directness that projects for social transformation require. Recently, several retired academic women in a feminist study group of long-standing that I nominally belong to complained that they couldn’t make heads or tails of the articles (or should I say unpack?) they had to read for the next meeting. Apparently these had to do with “signifying” and other such preoccupations. Nina Powers writes that perhaps feminist scholars should be “less concerned about representation than with serious structural and ideological factors.” It is no wonder that Hester Eisenstein concludes that hegemonic feminism has been seduced and made complicit with imperialism, a position with which, sadly, I cannot disagree.

For all the contemporary backwardness surrounding us, Howard Zinn never lost hope. He was himself constantly immersed in struggle, always guided by the view that history made by the grassroots, not those at the top, is what must concern us. Two weeks ago we saw a documentary-in-the-making about a woman in her late 80s named Yetta Stromberg who, in 1929 at the age of 19, was given a sentence of 1 to 10 years in San Quentin for flying a red flag over a children’s summer camp. The sentence was overturned in 1931, marking the US Supreme Court’s first victory for free speech. For years Stromberg resisted her grandniece’s request to document her story, assuming it wasn’t of much significance. But it is precisely narratives like hers that captured Zinn’s interest. Undergirding such a stance must surely have been a deep belief that an aroused, awakened people comprise the necessary ingredient for the making of a democratic, more humane society.

I quickly consented to speaking on this panel because I thought it would simply be one of several concurrent sessions. That the New England American Studies Association decided to centerstage Howard Zinn in this manner speaks highly of all of you. It makes me very hopeful that we can begin to defy market demands, reinstate progressive ideas and systemic thinking, and push back against the conservative bastion that the academy has unfortunately become. Then students like our young man in NYU can be furnished with the ideological equipment to enable them to query received ideas and change material conditions to lay the groundwork for what could be a better world.

References

Ash, M. “Mr. President, Welcome Their Hatred,” Reader Supported News (Sept. 26, 2010).

Eisenstein, H. 2009. Feminism Seduced. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Fisk, R. “Nine Years, Two Wars, Hundreds of Thousands Dead…” The Independent, (Sept. 11, 2010).

Giroux, H. “The Powell Memo and the Teaching Machines of Right-Wing Extremists,” Truthout / Perspective, (Oct. 1, 2009).

Gordon, L. “The Market Colonization of Intellectuals,” Truthout / Op-ed (April 6, 2010).

Power, N. 2010. One Dimensional Woman. Waashington: Zero Books.

Delia D. Aguilar has written extensively on feminism and nationalism, among them a book titled Toward a Nationalist Feminism published in the Philippines. She recently co-edited a collection of essays, Women and Globalization, with Anne Lacsamana. She was on the faculty of women's studies and ethnic studies at Washington State University and Bowling Green State University