Teaching Politically and the Problem of Afropessimism

[Protesters at the Open Housing March, Chicago. Getty Images/Chicago History Museum]

By Nino Brown and Derek Ford

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

As teachers, we’re tasked with educating our students, students who are increasingly, like their teachers, becoming politically conscious and called to act. Yet the dominant political theories and forms of action are inadequate for real revolutionary transformation. In other words, the schools and universities in capitalist society are all too ready to accommodate and guide this consciousness and energy into forms it can accommodate. This is not a new phenomenon, but one that’s accelerated since the 1960s in particular.

For example, Charisse Burden-Stelly documents how Black Studies emerged in the 1960s “to fundamentally challenge the statist, imperialist, racist, and Eurocentric underpinnings of the traditional disciplines in westernized universities,” but that it was soon “more or less fully incorporated into the westernized university.”[1] What facilitated this absorption was the erasure of political and economic critique and action with cultural and literary analysis, which “reify the abstraction of Blackness” and divorce it from political struggle, not even questioning its relationship to and basis in the material conditions and struggles of the people.[2] As we wrestle with political pedagogy, then, our guiding orientation has to be one that resists such subsumption within capital.

Yet it’s not only that the “scholastic ideological apparatus” provides its own official pathways for “resistance” and “transformation,” from reading groups to Diversity and Equity Initiatives and intergroup dialogues. Perhaps a more fundamental problem for us--as our students participate in protest movements--are the academic theories and politics that they encounter there and often unconsciously absorb. We regularly hear students say “anti-Blackness” and, when we ask them what it means and what political orientation it comes from and reproduces, they’re not sure. Or we hear students say in regards to protests against particular forms of oppression that we have to “listen to and follow” the people who face that oppression. White and non-white students alike believe they have to “follow and listen to Black leaders” at protests against racist police terror and white supremacy. We’re told to cite Black scholars. In either case, the question of politics is completely effaced, as there’s almost a prohibition against asking: “which Black people?” Yet this is not a defect but a feature of Afropessimism, a feature that opens the arms of white supremacist imperialism.

The happy marriage of capitalism, Afropessimism, and liberal identity politics

We and our students want radical transformation, and so many often jump to the latest and seemingly most radical sounding phrases, slogans, and theories. In education, as in so many other disciplines, one of the increasingly dominant phrases is “anti-Blackness” and the theory of Afropessimism. The two foundational theorists here are Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. For Wilderson, Afro-pessimism contends that “Blackness cannot be separated from slavery,” and that “the Slave’s relationship to violence is open-ended, gratuitous, without reason or constraint,” whereas “the human’s relationship to violence is always contingent.”[3]

There are crucial problems with this framework that make it perfectly acceptable to capitalism and perfectly antithetical to those who want to change the world. For one, they are completely Eurocentric in that Africa and the African diaspora are flattened into “Blackness” as a condition of the “human.” As Greg Thomas notes, this is “the [B]lackness and humanism of white Americanism, specifically and restrictively, an isolationist or exceptionalist Americanism.”[4] In other words, Afropessimism takes aim at a civil society and takes refuge in a Blackness that are both uniquely American. The U.S. historical and political experience is transformed into a transcendent, static, and universal ontological status or structure. More specifically, the theories of academics in highly prestigious and exclusive institutions in the U.S. are presented as ahistorical and global realities.

As identities, Black and Blackness are, in the U.S., fairly recent developments. The earliest recorded appearances are in Richard Wright’s 1954, Black Power and in 1966 as the first words spoken by Black Panther Stokely Carmichael when he left his jail cell after imprisonment for registering voters. White and whiteness are older but still relatively recent. Theodore Allen writes that he “found no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691, referring to ‘English or other white women.’”[5] The point here, as Eugene Puryear observes, “is that the ideology of white supremacy emerged not because of timeless antagonisms based on phenotype differences, but in a precise historical context related to the development of racial slavery.”[6] This is precisely the historical context that Afropessimism erases and precisely the phenotypes they use to define Blackness.

Afropessimism addresses an apparent radical omission in the primary theory that oppressed people have utilized for liberation: Marxism. Wilderson’s work, however, is based on a fundamental misreading of Marxism, such as his contention that in “Marxist discourse” (whatever that is) “racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative of political economy.”[7] To be sure, there’s an unfortunate history of some Marxist groupings asserting “class first” politics, but Marx and Engels, and Lenin, together with the history of the international communist movement, always asserted the primacy of race.  Marx’s theory of class was a theory of race and colonialism, as was his communist organizing. As a historical-materialist, Marx understood that the base and superstructure of society change over time and are context-dependent. Neither the base nor superstructure are unified, static, or ahistorical. The relations of production in the U.S. are neither unified nor even strictly economic in the sense that they’re structured and divided by hierarchies of race, nationality, gender, dis/ability, sexuality, and other divisions.In an 1894 letter, Engels clarifies yet again the base-superstructure model, what it entails, how it works, and exactly what it’s supposed to do. First, he says that “economic conditions… ultimately determines historical development. But race itself is an economic factor.”[8]

Marx not only supported anti-colonial uprisings in India and China but even said that they might ignite the revolution in Britain. “It may seem a very strange, and very paradoxical assertion,” Marx wrote about the 1850-53 Taiping Rebellion in China, “that the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of government, may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire.”[9]

Marx fought ruthlessly against racism and national chauvinism, particularly as he experienced the deep-seated racism of English workers against the Irish. He “argued that an English workers' party, representing workers from an oppressor nation, had the duty to support an oppressed nation’s self-determination and independence” and that “English workers could never attain liberation as long as the Irish continued to be oppressed.”[10] He recognized that the fate of Black slaves, Black workers, and white workers were bound together when he wrote in Capital that “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the [B]lack it is branded.”[11] Marx even organized workers to support the abolitionist struggle by galvanizing them to oppose a British intervention in the U.S. Civil War on behalf of the slaveocracy, an intervention that, because the British had the largest Navy in the world, could have altered the war drastically.[12]

Perhaps the real problem is that Marx treats race as a dynamic and contingent social production rather than a fixed and abstract ontological category. Black people face particular forms of oppression in the U.S. and elsewhere, as do other oppressed and exploited peoples. These change over time and are in a dialectical relationship with the overal social totality. Iyko Day got it right by equating economic reductionism to Afro-pessimism, insofar as it “frames racial slavery as a base for a colonial superstructure” and “fails to take into account the dialectics of settler colonial capitalism.”[13]

Why the neoliberal university loves Afropessimism

The reason anti-Blackness critique is welcome in schools is because it is devoid of praxis and politics, or, to be more precise, because it celebrates its lack of politics. The impossibility of praxis and the rejection of organizing are fundamental tenets for two reasons. The first is that there is no answer to the question “what is to be done?” and the second is that the mass movements necessary for transformation are “from the jump, an anti-black formation,” as Wilderson told IMIXWHATILIKE.[14] Of course, the only thing to do is to condemn every attempt at fighting oppression and improving material conditions. For example, when a student group at one of our schools staged a protest when Condoleeza Rice came to speak, they were denounced as “anti-Black.” There was no political criteria for such a denouncement, no defense of Rice, and likely no knowledge of the reasons behind the protest. It didn’t matter that Rice was a key figure of the white supremacist imperialist power structure, or that she played a major role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the torture of thousands of Arab and African people.

Examples of “anti-Blackness” that often come up in organizing are that non-Black people of color are to be met with suspicion when organizing on issues that sharply affect Black people. One such issue is immigration. In the struggle for immigrant rights, which is often overcoded as a “Latinx” issue, some Black activists and organizers point to the fact that 44% of those caged by ICE, for example, are Haitians. Instead of directing their ire towards the racist state that holds many Black immigrants in horrendous conditions, the focus then becomes the irrevocable anti-Blackness that exists in Latinx communities. Ideologies like Afro Pessimism have working class people of color (Black people included) fighting amongst each other, with the same framework as liberal identity politics. They both reduce solidarity to checking one’s privilege and fashioning oneself as the consummate ally of Black people and their liberation. So, instead of building a united front against the racist state, the lack of corporate/mainstream media focus on the fact that there are many Black immigrants, and immigration is a “Black issue” unnecessarily shifts attention to other workers who are subjected to the same “anti-Black” ideology of the ruling class and it’s media apparatuses. Instead of calling out the “Latinx community” for their “anti-Blackness” a revolutionary perspective frames the issue as not one stemming from any said community, but from the ruling class which oppresses the vast majority of immigrants in this country.

Capital in these instances are let off the hook. The problem is no longer that the ruling class owns the means of production and thus the means of ideological production that reinforce anti-working class ideologies such as racism. The problem is the “anti-Blackness”--and the often posited “inherent” anti-Blackness--of non-Black communities. It’s a structural feature of society, but apparently one that can’t be changed. As a result, there’s no need to do anything except critique.

No wonder, then, that Afropessimism is so welcome in the neoliberal university and the increasingly corporatized public school system in the U.S. It’s incredibly easy to call something anti-Black, to condemn anti-Blackness, and to play more-radical-than-thou. It’s more than easy, it’s what academia is about. Moreover, and this is related to the Rice protest mentioned earlier, when “Black faces” do appear in “high places,” they’re immunized from any possible critique from any group that isn’t Black (enough). It doesn’t matter if the head of a school, corporation, or any other entity has the same politics as the imperialist and racist power structure, because they’re black and so to critique or challenge them would be an act of anti-Blackness.

This last reason is why white people love Afropessimism so much. The vague calls to “follow Black people'' not only fulfill racist tropes that all Black people are the same (in, for example, their unruliness and “threat” to society) but moreover let white people off the hook for doing any real political investigation and work. The real response to “Follow Black people'' is: “Which Black people?” Should Derek follow his comrade Nino or John McWhorter? Should he go to the police protest organized by the local Black Lives Matter group or the one organized by the local Congress of Racial Equality? Should he get his racial politics from Barack Obama or Glen Ford? He certainly shouldn’t get his politics--or take his lessons in class struggle--from today’s Afropessimists.

None of this is to devalue Black leadership in the Black liberation movement, to be clear. Black people have and will lead the Black struggle and the broader class struggle. Nor is it to claim that random white people should show up to a Black Lives Matter protest and grab the microphone. Then again, how much of a problem is that really? Shouldn’t we forget the myth that we can learn all the proper rules before we struggle and instead just go out and struggle? And as we struggle, be conscientious of our actions and how they could be perceived; know that we’ll make mistakes and own up to them; and most importantly build with those whom this racist society has segregated us from so we can unite against a common enemy. Black people will lead the Black struggle and the class struggle. So too will Asian Americans, Indigenous people, and Latino/a/xs. So too will the child of an African immigrant and a Filipino domestic worker. So too will some white people. The key ingredients are unity, political clarity, and strategic proficiency.

Such a recipe entails a necessary risk in that, first, politics are divisive and draw lines between friends and enemies and that, second, achieving unity and strategic proficiency takes hard work without any guarantees of success. Educators who are or want to be radical, however, have no choice but to accept this risk. We need to be rooted in movements and resist incorporation into neoliberal structures, refusing to allow them to guide our political decisions. Only if we have hope and faith in the power of the masses to change the world does it make sense to struggle at all. We choose to struggle! And we hope our students do too.

Nino Brown is a public school educator and labor activist in Boston. He is also an organizer with the ANSWER coalition, the Jericho Movement and the Boston Liberation Center. He's a member of the Liberation School Collective and is an editor of the forthcoming book on Marxist pedagogy, Revolutionary Education: Theory and Practice for Socialist Organizers (2021).

Derek R. Ford is assistant professor of education studies at DePauw University, where he teaches and researches at the nexus of pedagogy and political movements. He’s written six books, the latest of which is Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (2021). He’s also the lead editor of Liberation School’s “Reading Capital with Comrades ” podcast series.

Notes

[1] Charisse Burden-Stelly. “Black studies in the westernized university,” in Unsettling eurocentrism in the westernized university, ed. J. Cupples and R. Grosfoguel, pp. 73-86 (New York: Routledge, 2019), 73.

[2] Ibid., 74.

[3] Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020), 217, 216.

[4] Greg Thomas, “Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-pessimism (2.0)? Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (2018): 291.

[5] Theodor Allen, The Invention of the White Race (vol. 2): The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York: Verso, 1997), 161-62.

[6] Eugene Puryear, “The U.S. State and the U.S. Revolution,” Liberation School, November 01, 2018. Available at: https://liberationschool.org/the-u-s-state-and-the-u-s-revolution/.

[7] Frank WIlderson III. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 225.

[8] Friedrich Engels, “Engels to W. Borgius in Breslau.” In Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (New York: Progress Publishers, 1894/1965), 441

[9] Karl Marx, “Revolution in China and Europe,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected works (vol. 12), 93-100 (London: Lawrence & Wisehart, 1979), 93.

[10] Gloria La Riva, “Lenin and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World, ed. J. Cutter (pp. 75-83) (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2017), 76, 77.

[11] Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): The process of capitalist production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 284.

[12] ​​See Gerald Runkle, “Karl Marx and the American Civil War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 6, no. 2 (1964): 117-141.

[13] Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and settler colonial critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 112.

[14] Frank B. WIlderson III, “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson,” in Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance: Danger, Im/mobility and Politics, ed. M. Gržinić and A. Stojnić (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 55.

How Black Student Civic Agency Impacted the 2020 Elections

By Asha Layne

The years of Trumpism have been marked by relentless assaults on facts and evidence based science leaving an indelible memory on the minds of all Americans. In the final months of his presidency, Trump’s futile efforts along with other Republicans, to cancel out the votes of many Americans, specifically Black voters, in many Democratic states was representative of voter disenfranchisement. True to form, one of his most outrageously alarming act of voting misinformation, was when the former president encouraged his supporters to commit voter fraud, by suggesting that voters should send in a mail-in ballot and to vote in person. When that failed, Trump and his allies quickly began targeting voting ballots with largely Black voter populations in a desperate attempt to discredit Joe Biden’s presidential win. Recently, former Trump lawyer and staunch ally, Mr. Rudy Giuliani was handed a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems accusing him of spreading false claims about the company’s handling of the November 2020 elections. In keeping up with the barrage of viral misinformation and right wing voting conspiracies, we must not overlook the civic agency of young Black student voters that prevented Trump from retaining power despite his unprecedented attempts to disenfranchise Black voters.

In November, Black voters showed up to the polls in record numbers in response to the former President’s appalling, yet unsurprising attempts of racial division and voting suppression, the COVID pandemic, and a nationwide call for racial justice after the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. According to exit poll data, Black voters overwhelmingly voted Democratic and with a surge in turnout among young people of all races. Research conducted by Tufts University, Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), reported that Black youths played a critical role in the 2020 election especially in key swing and voter suppression states like Georgia where 90% of young Black youth voted for Joe Biden. In the same report, data also showed that young Black women strongly supported the President-elect Joe Biden by voting slightly higher at 90% compared to 84% for young Black men. This data reflects the significance of Black students who fall under two categories: the Black vote and student vote.

Black student civic agency is nothing new, it has a deep rich history that affirms the tradition Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) play in politics. Historically, HBCUs became known as sites for political activism during a time when White supremacist ideologies prevented Black students from entering White college institutions and mainstream society. These educational institutions would also serve as sites for political activism and agency as tools of empowerment. HBCUs held and still today, possess the unique advantage in increasing political activity among young Black people. Civic engagement and HBCUs have played a critical role in American democracy and democratic politics.

HBCU representation in politics can be traced back to the Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century at which this political process produced prominent leaders of that time who lead Black students in political agency activities like sit-ins, boycotts, and voter registration drives that would help shape the legacy of HBCUs for generations to come. What this 2020 election have shown the country is that HBCUs are not only leading institutions of higher educations but the producers of political stalwarts for the Democratic Party such as Spelman alum Stacey Abrams, Morehouse College alum Raphael Warnock, and Howard alum and Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris.

The November elections confuted the misconceptions that Black students and Blacks do not vote. The truth is, young Black voter agency propelled the now President, Joe Biden to the White House and Democratic Georgia Senators Jon Osoff and Ralphael Warnock to the Senate affirming the significance of young Black voters. More than ever young Black students at HBCU campuses have become more civically engaged as a result of Trumpism, racial injustice, the pandemic, and desperate need for change. Despite the United States’ long history of voter suppression of people of color, the recent events during the tenure of former President Donald J. Trump will not only empower young voters to critically think but to continue the fight against injustices.

What is the End Game?: Moving Academics Out of the Ivory Tower

By Cherise Charleswell

As I sat on the panel for a session entitled, " Where Ebony Meets Ivory: From the Tower to the Streets (Towards a Critical Race Theory in Activism) " during the 2017 National Women's Studies Conference, I found myself asking the attendees this question. Unlike myself, an independent scholar and practitioner, they were mostly academics -- tenured faculty, adjunct, post-docs, and those trying to get their feet into the door of the Ivory Tower.

We discussed the irony of wanting to be a part of and completely beholden to the very institutions that their research and work focused on as being problematic. But, hey- folks have to eat right?

With my own professional background that involves working in biomedical and public health research, I find myself perplexed, annoyed, and frustrated with academia when it comes to the humanities, and related fields. See, those working in STEM research do so with an End Game in sight - and that is to develop a compound, drug, device, method, or intervention that will eventually go to market and be used to improve the lives or health outcomes of the public. That is the point of clinical research, that it is moved from "bench to market." The End Game for public health looks quite similar - conduct research in order to design programs, projects, and interventions that address an identified need. Now, I must admit that raking in profits is also another motivating factor, with the great irony that many of these companies that bring things to the commercial market are often making use of research developments that were funded by the public and distributed through federal grants, from agencies such as The National Institutes of Health.

Anyhow, my annoyance with the humanities (and I say this as someone who studied cultural anthropology as an undergrad) is that I truly lack the patience to theorizing in absence of action. Once again, when the germ theory was developed (first proposed by Girolamo Fracastoreo in 1546, expanded upon by Marcus von Plenciz in 1762, and later revolutionized and standardized by the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch), it helped to revolutionize public health and led to vaccinations and anti-microbial medicines that have greatly benefitted humankind. Imagine if these leading scientists decided to simply spend the next few centuries theorizing, speaking in round, and never applying their knowledge. It is a reason why I wrote the article Feminism is Not Just for Academics: Overcoming Disconnect and Division , and made a point of asserting that feminist activism cannot rely on academics.

As more humanities courses, whether ethnic studies, women/gender studies, sociology, and others come under attack and go on the "chopping block" -- as was the case at the University of Wisconsin Superior, where 25 of these programs have been suspended - it is imperative to demonstrate their relevance, and much of that relies on application of scholarship. Showing how the knowledge that has been curated is actually being put to use to impact society, change dialogues, guide policy development, design interventions, and help to ensure that funding is correctly directed.

Simply stated, there is absolutely no value in research and theories if none of this information reaches the groups that were studied or whom the theoretical framework applies to, or society as a whole. There is no value in research that points out problems, but offers no insight or recommendations on how they may be counterbalanced, and there is certainly no value in research that only serves the purpose of ensuring that another person earns the right to put large letters behind their last name.

These points should especially resonate with scholars who come from minority or marginalized racial/ethnic/religious backgrounds; those who should be able to produce knowledge that betters or addresses the conditions that members of their racial/ethnic/religious group are subjected to. Historian, author, journalist and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Carter G. Woodson, said it best with the following statement: " The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people."

But being worthless is apparently what is being taught, encouraged, and reinforced to academics. In response to my question during that NWSA session, my co-panelist turned to me and said, "There is no end game." She shared with the audience words of guidance imparted on her by a senior faculty in the sociology department. He tried to throw shade by calling her an applied sociologist, and reiterated that she should focus more on publishing. He also finished with stating the following: " If my work ever reaches or is used by the public, that is fine, but that is not my focus, or concern ."

A number of scholars have pointed out why this problem of meaningless and inactive research persists: it is due to the fact that the institutions dictate that they focus on publishing and doing nothing. It is an insidious cycle -- where the research and the employment of faculty is often being funded through donations and major grants by those who actually have a stake in ensuring that the social ills described in all of this research never go away. And by focusing on theorizing, not acting - academics do not have to worry about biting the hands that literally feed them. The neoliberal academy often shares the same supporters as the politicians in Washington, D.C. and state houses across the U.S., and there lies the problem. It is why academics are unable to include a vision of an "end game."

The Hampton Institute, a working-class think tank, was actually established with this End Game in mind. Building a community for inquiry, knowledge creation, discourse and networking - are the purpose of this organization, because we realize that it is these tenets, along with accessibility, that have always made it possible to create social change. While a university education is a recent privilege for many, it was not always something that was accessible to most Americans, particularly prior to the 1944 GI Bill. Intellectualism has always been something that was respected. People read novels, newspapers, foreign books translated to English, wrote poetry and entries into journals, and even developed what is now known as town halls in order to share or debate their understanding of pressing social issues.

The Hampton Institute (HI) harkens back and takes direction from this era and other subsequent social movements - Civil Rights, women's rights, and so on. As stated on our About Us page, the organization was "founded with the purpose of giving a platform to everyday, working-class people to theorize, comment, analyze and discuss matters that exist outside the confines of their daily lives, yet greatly impact them on a daily basis. The organization was named after former Black Panther, Fred Hampton, and also cites inspiration from Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, as well as educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire. In order to remain consistent with its working-class billing, the HI seeks out, as well as aims to develop, organic intellectuals within the working class; both in the US as well as internationally." Further, we are "dedicated to not only providing commentary, theoretical analysis, and research on a wide range of social, political, and economic issues from a distinct working-class perspective; but also to focusing on the continuation of transforming these ideas into practical steps towards revolutionary social change."

It is imperative that in this era of anti-intellectualism we show the importance of inquiry and knowledge-creation. There is no greater reminder that there is a need for applying this knowledge and engaging in activism than the current state of affairs that has left many adjuncts impoverished , overworked, and under-valued . Some adjuncts are even dealing with homelessness and have turned to sex work . It is just a reminder to academics that they should be loyal to the working class and not the plutocracy.

Democracy, Higher Education, and the Ivory Tower Critique of Neoliberalism

By Jacob Ertel

Few dedicated to any semblance of left politics are celebrating the state of higher education in the United States today. From unprecedented student indebtedness to budget cuts to attacks on tenure, the future of academia looks bleak. Yet for the general concurrence on the symptoms resulting from the neoliberalization of the university, it is less established how this process of neoliberalization is best conceptualized. Analyses of neoliberalism tend to fall largely into two camps: one that describes a series of economic policy moves with varying degrees of deliberation or foresight, and one that describes a markedly new form of governmentality. These critiques are not mutually exclusive, but they often do diverge in their understanding of capitalism's historical progression, its underlying logic, and its most pronounced effects. In particular, the latter camp (largely comprised of cultural theorists) that evaluates neoliberalism as a paradigm shift in governmentality risks romanticizing the Fordist-Keynesian regime of publicly financed mass production and consumption, and the nominal freedoms typically associated with post-war governance. By adhering to the paradigm shift schema, this line of thinking loses sight of the historically contingent movement of capitalism, and in doing so erroneously leaves open the possibility of a return to a prior era. This is not only inaccurate analytically, but entails a range of counterproductive assumptions regarding the political nature of capitalism and liberal democracy. Looking at the higher education system in this light can be instructive for thinking through the political-economic changes of the last several decades, as well as how we can re-conceptualize resistance to ongoing processes of neoliberalization without resorting to a nostalgic imaginary.

Of central importance to any discussion of neoliberalism is that we know what we want. To be sure, since the 1970s inequality has increased, along with the privatization of public goods and services, the incorporation of poor and working class people into the financial sector, and the disembowelment of the already precarious welfare system. While these trends are serious and palpable, and emerge from a range of contradictions endemic to the Fordist-Keynesian arrangement-including low growth, high inflation, worker militancy, and destabilizing foreign inflows of capital-we need to be careful in discussing neoliberalism as a veritable paradigm shift. This is not to understate the realness of neoliberalism, but to argue to that it represents a historically contingent escalation of capitalism's underlying tendencies towards capital concentration, uneven development, and crisis. This distinction holds implications for formulating any sort of left political imaginary. If we accept neoliberalism as a paradigm shift, how much inequality under capitalism are we comfortable tolerating? A common response might entail what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten would term a 'restorationist' argument, which laments neoliberalism's abandonment of ostensible democracy or democratic institutions. Restorationist arguments can have radical theoretical origins, but fall more fully in line with humanist and social democratic affiliations that critique neoliberalism on the grounds of its moral baseness rather than its concrete functionality. Such critiques can be useful in helping us articulate our relationship to political and economic centers of power, but they often idealize pre-neoliberal iterations of such power. Instead, we should look to reconfigure our relationship to neoliberal institutions, especially if we decide that our objections to them come not from their neoliberalization but from their social function throughout capitalism's development.

Wendy Brown's critique of the neoliberalization of the university exemplifies a kind of restorationist nostalgia. In her recent Undoing the Demos, Brown portrays neoliberalism as a distinctly new governing rationality that constitutes a clean break from post-war governance. In so doing, Brown idealizes the university's historical role within the United States while equating democracy with liberal arts education. Brown conceives of neoliberalism as "an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life."[1] For Brown, the notion of the free market as a governing rationality fundamentally reconfigures our self-understanding-we become "homo oeconomicus" (a term borrowed from Foucault), or human capital, that constantly must work to leverage our ability to compete and enhance our self-worth.[2] Brown contrasts neoliberal from liberal rationality in three ways. First, whereas liberalism allowed for a degree cultivation of personal interests, under neoliberalism our identity as human capital becomes a singular and ever pervasive subject position. Second, as opposed to the impetus under liberalism for human capital to compete in order to participate in the purchase of use-values, neoliberalism mandates the infinite appreciation of self-as-exchange-value. Finally, neoliberal human capital operates in the sphere of financial or investment capital, rather than entrepreneurial capital. [3]

Brown explains that this neoliberal rationality is dangerous less so because of the material consequences of intensified economic polarization, but because it undermines our potential to effectively participate in democracy (broadly articulated as the ability for people to control their own political decision making process). This limitation is not due to a repressive state power or the impact of financialization on people's livelihoods, but to what Brown calls a reconfiguration of the higher education system in accordance with neoliberal rationality. For Brown, "Citizens cannot rule themselves…without understanding the powers and problems they are engaging," and that understanding must come first and foremost through education, and liberal arts education more specifically.[4] If "the dramatic thinning of key democratic values coupled with this intensification of nondemocratic forces and conditions threatens to replace self-rule with a polity in which the people are pawns of every kind of modern power," then the only way to combat "people's wholesale ignorance of the forces shaping their lives and limning their future" is through an educational model that challenges neoliberalism's professionalizing imperative.[5] This model looks to the post-war period in which, Brown claims, the university "promised not merely literacy, but liberal arts to the masses…it was a time in which a broad, if not deep college education-one of the arts, letters, and sciences-became an essential element of middle-class membership."[6] Here Brown misrepresents the university's social function as fundamental to the production of the "intelligent citizenry" needed for democratic self-rule. Though she often provides stipulations when discussing the pre-neoliberal university in the United States, such disclaimers are effectively rendered mute by her insistence on the university's (and in particular, the public university's) construction as a means for egalitarianism, social mobility, and democracy.[7] According to Brown, this conception of the university destined citizens "for intelligent engagement with the world, rather than economic servitude or mere survival."[8] Brown admits that this model is a classically liberal ideal, but one that is founded on a commitment to egalitarianism, humanism, and the public good. [9]

Yet why should economic mobility rest on a liberal arts education? Why should entering into the 'middle-class' be contingent on any particular kind of education? And how is classical liberalism commensurable with any kind of redistributive ethos? The goal here is not to take up Brown's understanding of the pre-neoliberal university as an institution of egalitarianism by arguing that the university is a purveyor of false consciousness or brainwashing. Rather, it is to assert that her views regarding what constitutes intelligence are rooted in unfair assumptions about education and democracy, and thus fail to provide an alternative to the tendency towards professionalization that she argues is unique to the neoliberal university. Even if we set aside the race-blind character of her analysis here, Brown's equation of liberal arts education to democracy is fundamentally elitist: its corollary is that those without such an education are unfit for participation in self-rule, as if exposure to Plato and Aristotle rather than accounting or marketing better qualifies one to truly understand one's own interests. This line of thinking is of course disengaged from the lived experiences of those who voluntarily seek vocational training (there is no voluntary activity for Brown), or those whose livelihoods depend on such preparation. One's contribution to society is determined through one's access to a particular kind of education. In making such claims Brown paradoxically accepts the neoliberal logic she writes against, and she does so without questioning the undemocratic nature of pre-neoliberal institutions themselves. Brown's democracy implies a flattened understanding of power, one that takes the notions of citizenry and nation-state for granted.

In particular, the claim that a university-educated citizenry precedes democracy performs a theoretical sleight of hand, as it inadvertently refers back to a logic of social intelligibility that codifies competency via institutional validation. Brown calls for a return to the vague democratic pluralism that has been eroded by the requirement for "skilled human capital, not educated participants in public life and common rule." [10] This understanding of democracy actually occludes an engagement with power, as such pluralism is distinct from the power-ridden selection process that determines which desires are legitimized and enacted. If we follow Brown's claims about the democratic nature of the post-war educational system, then it is puzzling as to why such a system would have eroded in the first place, unless neoliberalism is the natural outcome of a democratically engaged polity. In this sense, construing neoliberalism as a paradigm shift in governing rationality from the Fordist-Keynesian period-while avoiding a serious discussion of that regime's engrained racialized inequities, its economic contradictions, and its deepening militarization-fails to examine how the intensification of these tendencies under neoliberalism is endogenous to capitalism itself. This shortcoming is particularly acute when it comes to the academia: the professionalization Brown laments is part and parcel of the university under capitalism.

Here we may find Harney and Moten's work on the university instructive. In contrast to Brown's view of the pre-neoliberal, liberal arts university, Harney and Moten aver that self-identified critical academics must by nature of their position recognize and be recognized by the university. In other words, some buy-in is required. So-called critical education, apropos of Brown's appeal to the liberal arts, is thus constituted "in an opposition to the unregulated and the ignorant without acknowledging the unregulated, ignorant, unprofessional labor that goes on not opposite them but within them." [11] Academia's purpose is not to encourage a free flow of ideas-it is a striated and hierarchized field that envelops and regulates, but is also fallible in its own capacities. In contrast to Brown, Harney and Moten understand the university as a space of conflict that can serve as refuge but never enlightenment.[12] True subversion lies not in the call for a more critical education, but in stealing from the university what one can, in rendering oneself unintelligible within its mode of professionalism. Critical education's paradoxical relationship to professionalization entails a negligence of those who operate both within and outside of the university through a politics of deception, of theft, and of a true unprofessionalism. Such negligence then constitutes the crux of professionalization, while this professionalization is the means through which negligence is carried out.[13] To recognize or accept this logic is to simultaneously render oneself intelligible to it, and thus to adhere to Brown's call for pluralism. Such reasoning does not include this unprofessional group (for Harney and Moten, "the undercommons") in its understanding of democracy, and in so doing it accepts the claim that participation in the polity requires institutional codification. Meanwhile, the unintelligible sneak in to these institutions and work to bring them down. If this is what democracy actually means-institutionalization-then perhaps we need to reconsider our axes of opposition to neoliberalism. We need to go beyond the critique of the neoliberal university, to consider the intimate linkages between critical academia and the professionalizing tendencies endemic to the university under capitalism, neoliberal or not.

The problem with Brown's ivory tower critique of the neoliberalization of the university is not about an error in identifying this process's outcomes; the effects of neoliberalization are quite clear. The argument here is simply that rather than understanding neoliberalism as a new governing rationality, we should look to it as an exacerbation of capitalism's internal logics. Analyzing the conundrum of the neoliberal university in this way allows us to begin to analyze capitalism in a way that Brown is unwilling to do: we are better prepared to analyze the relationship between democracy and the state, more attuned to the experiences of the poor and the working classes, and able to move away from restorationist nostalgia.

Notes

[1] Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 30.

[2] Brown, Undoing the Demos, 10.

[3] Ibid, 33.

[4] Ibid, 175.

[5] Ibid, 179.

[6] Ibid, 180.

[7] Ibid, 184.

[8] Ibid, 185.

[9] Ibid, 187.

[10] Ibid, 177.

[11] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013), 32.

[12] Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 26.

[13] Ibid, 31.