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Jan 5, 2022

how do you keep radical politics forever young? European “new lefts” thought they had the answer. my book examines efforts by antifascists, left socialists, & anti-authoritarians to build sustainably democratic alternatives to Social Democracy & Communism press.princeton.edu/books/paperbac

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in the foreground is a farmer who’s tilling the soil, rooted in reality. but behind him is a shepherd who’s daydreaming, and the ships and open horizon suggest something more than reality (negation of what exists). hard to say whether HM saw it as warning or inspiration, or both

just learned that hanging on the wall of Herbert Marcuse’s dining room was a print of Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” (in the bottom right you can see the legs of poor Icarus, who has plunged to his death after flying too close to the sun with man-made wings)

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Terence Renaud Retweeted

Haymarket Books

@haymarketbooks

If you are a high school student in Florida, we will gladly send you a copy of

@KeeangaYamahtta

’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation for free

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Rosa Luxemburg's theory of the mass strike as one tactic among others in a diverse quilt of revolutionary struggle, not as a unique tactic to be fetishized and always applied. illustrated by Kate Evans in Red Rosa

tenure reform from above will always be mere negation of tenure, making it easier to fire TT & NTT faculty alike. only tenure reform from below—demanded by organized faculty, threatening to strike—can result in a true abolition of tenure: job security & path to promotion for all

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Emma Pettit

@EmmaJanePettit

West Virginia University is changing its evaluation, promotion, tenure, and termination policies. Faculty members are (unsurprisingly) not thrilled: insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/2

another absurdity of the US system of employer-based healthcare stems from how often people (especially Gen Z & younger) switch jobs. every time, you’ve got to choose a new plan, persuade the bureaucracy to cover your claims & Rx, have those claims denied, appeal, repeat…

Marcuse, “The Responsibility of Science” (1966), Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 159

according to Marcuse, it’s not an external ethical norm but rather the internal logic of experimental science that tends toward a free and rational society. scientists thus have a responsibility to refuse taking part in applied research for destructive or exploitative purposes

especially interested in this part, where tangping means "lie flat... a form of lifestyle & social resistance by young Chinese people against overwork & the crushing pressure of societal expectations" and bailan means "let it rot": passive resistance is giving way to active forms

Collected Papers (Routledge), vol. 6, p. 98

Marcuse’s supplementary epilogue (1954) to Reason and Revolution, not included in the Beacon paperback, anticipates his argument in One-Dimensional Man (1964): on advanced industrial society and “the total mobilization of society against the ultimate liberation of the individual”

it may be rap, but this is metal aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/23

Jan 23

time to bring back “frondeur”

Jan 23

I wrote NEW LEFTS to revise a narrow scholarly conception of the 1960s New Left, one that didn’t include a longer tradition of radical organizational forms. I’m starting to think that it’s Vol 2, and I need to go back and write Vol 1 to revise popular conceptions of the New Left

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we need to mount a rearguard defense of the 60s New Left. their struggle may not be our struggle anymore, in many respects, but we need to understand their struggle! I can’t stand these dumb dismissals of the New Left as being “culturalist” and thus somehow harmful to labor

that criticism of the New Left misunderstands the historical situation of the late 1950s–mid 1970s. it’s anachronistic to interpret opposition to labor integration amid high density/participation as support for labor disintegration amid low density/participation.

of the working-class & socdem politics into the capitalist state has been revealed as a prelude to their general disintegration/disorganization under neoliberalism: the long decline. still, some critics of the New Left falsely blame it for undermining old left organization:

the New Left theorized and organized against the integration of labor unions & mass left parties into the capitalist state (and the social & cultural conservatism that went along with it) at a time of peak union density and, in Europe, party membership. now, that integration…

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Jacobin

@jacobin

Jan 22

Despite high-profile organizing drives at Starbucks and elsewhere, new data shows that union membership is still shrinking as a percentage of the workforce. Unions will have to massively scale up new organizing to counter the brute might of capital. jacobin.com/2023/01/bureau

isn’t the point of Humpty Dumpty that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could *not* put him together again? anyway, go Red Sox. everything’s fine

Terence Renaud Retweeted

Anthony Barnett

@AnthonyBarnett

Jan 21

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Jan 22

another way of putting this: economics assumes that individual subjects are given, reacting rationally to an objective world. at least since Hegel, critics have argued that subjects are produced historically by the objective (social) world

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Alexander Wade Craig

@alexwadecraig

Jan 20

The biggest thing missing from contemporary economics is an understanding of how agents conceptualize the world. Too many models assume agents already know the possibility space, even if they don't know the probability of different possibilities.

Jan 21

churn-meritocracy is the boss's ideology: it's the story that higher ed administrators want to tell, need to tell in order to justify the waste and anguish of endlessly running job searches for instructional needs that are consistent and predictable

my hunch is that a large majority of tenured/TT faculty do not enjoy participating in the institutional churn through contingent faculty. only a small number of senior scholars, concentrated at a few elite unis, actually believe in the "meritocracy" of the churn

besides basic solidarity with less secure scholars, tenured/TT faculty have an immediate interest in reducing the waste of endless job searches to fulfill instructional needs: it's a workload issue, and it would create a healthier workplace environment

I often have to explain to non-academics how hiring works in higher ed—performance doesn't really matter; most faculty are not eligible for promotion; positions are time-capped; experience starts working against you, etc—and they are baffled, just can't comprehend it

reduce the waste of endless job searches, the churn of constant hiring, and the toxicity of workplaces in which contingent faculty know there's little to no chance of sticking around regardless of how good they are at their jobs

faculty unions & professional assocs could do something right now to alleviate the humanities/sosci jobs crisis: through bargaining & public pressure, insist that higher ed institutions formalize their existing instructional faculty, renew their appointments, and hire from within

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we’re stuck in the dumbest timeline

The 2022 AHA Jobs Report: A New Normal?

Jan 19

obviously unfamiliar with Kermit’s “It’s Not Easy Being Green”

“Toads do not win medals for being toads. You can have a good toad, but not a virtuous one. On one view, however…, human beings have to work fairly hard to become human beings, and so can indeed be congratulated on being human.” Terry Eagleton, After Theory (2003)

A large increase in the number of academic jobs listings conceals deeper structural problems.

from 2022 Jobs Report: "Taken together, the 2020–21 and 2021–22 hiring years look much like the late 2010s." i.e., Covid hasn't had as deep an impact on number of History jobs as the 2008 crisis. but: there was "a shift within the listings from permanent to contingent positions"

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Jan 17

figure from the 2021 @AHAhistorians's Jobs Report: "Advertised job openings and new history PhDs awarded." (all jobs, both contingent & tenure-track) unfortunately an updated version does not appear in the 2022 report with data from the pandemic years historians.org/ahajobsreport2

figure from the 2021

's Jobs Report: "Advertised job openings and new history PhDs awarded." (all jobs, both contingent & tenure-track) unfortunately an updated version does not appear in the 2022 report with data from the pandemic years historians.org/ahajobsreport2

Jan 17

figure from AAUP Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2021-22: % of PT contingent faculty, FT contingent faculty, tenure-track, & tenured, broken down by public uni vs. private-indep vs. private-religious, and by degree-granting rank aaup.org/report/annual-

Jan 16

I should say, a broader unity of the struggle by all the world’s oppressed people

from her Autobiography, 3rd ed, p. 153

Angela Davis remembers the day when MLK was assassinated. she was further to the left than him, and shares her “amorphous sense of guilt” that it took his sudden death for her to realize that MLK’s vision was part of a broader unity of Black liberation struggle

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I’m late to the 2-part Nova series “A to Z” (2020) on the history of writing: highly recommend! fascinating discussion of the materials of writing (papyrus, pen, parchment), printing, and origins of the alphabet pbs.org/wgbh/nova/seri