the minnesota review n.s. 48-49 (1998)Richard Levin"Activist Politics" and/or the Job Crisis in the HumanitiesI'm taking up our editor's invitation in issue 47 to respond to the exchange between Michael Bérubé, and Jim Neilson and Gregory Meyerson that appeared there. I want to focus on their disagreement about ways to deal with the crisis in the job market, but before discussing this I'll look briefly at some more general issues related to it. And before looking at them I should warn prospective readers that I was recently accused of being "a self-confessed liberal" (Drakakis, Rev. 406-7), which I self-confess is true. Left/Right EquivalenceIn their review of his book (45: 268) and again in their response to his response (47: 247), Neilson and Meyerson accuse Bérubé of using "the left/right extreme thesis" or "trope of left/right equivalence" that equates the far right and far left and that was "fundamental" in "legitimating" US support of rightist dictatorships in Central America. I don't understand the connection, since this support (which I'm just as opposed to as he is) was legitimated by the claim that the far right was very different from the far left, for otherwise there would be no reason to favor it. In fact many people behind this support were on the far right and certainly didn't argue that they were equivalent to the left. Yet I think the equivalency thesis has some merit if it's properly qualified. We must recognize that neither the far right nor the far left is a single entity: there are three distinct groups on the far right (fiscal reactionaries, religious fundamentalists, and the militias. The far left is divided into several separate and often hostile factions. Clearly no group on the right is literally "equivalent" to any group on the left, yet it can be shown that many people at these two extremes, despite their important differences, share certain basic tendencies, and to show this I can draw much of my evidence from Neilson and Meyerson. There is, to begin with, a marked tendency by partisans at both extremes to view life as a Manichean conflict between the good forces and the forces of evil, which are often personified and demonized as a vast malevolent monster seeking to enslave us all (see my "Polarization"). Stephen Greenblatt points out that most Marxists treat capitalism not "as a complex historical movement" but "as a unitary demonic principle" (151), and this is demonstrated by Neilson and Meyerson's assertion that they "identify capitalism as the engine behind global suffering" (47: 242). Note that "capitalism" has become a monolithic super-agency that does things all by itself(of course only bad things(and that the assertion can be transformed into a credo of the far right by simply replacing "capitalism" with one of its favorite demons, like communism (no longer very useful), the Jews, the Anti-Christ, the UN, feminism, secular humanism, or the Trilateral Commission (a Bircher target that's also attacked by Neilson and Meyerson(47: 244). The two extremes can even use the same terminology for this demon: the militias call it "the New World Order" (Bennet), which is now adopted by leftists like Baker (270), Ginsberg (215), and Giroux (312). Pat Robertson and the militias blame it on "international bankers," while leftists blame "global" or "transnational capitalism" (they don't refer to it as "international," which has positive connotations for them). As a result of this view of the world, many people on the far right and far left are single-causers; they believe not only that everything the demon does has bad effects in our society, but also that everything bad in our society is caused by this demon. Right-wing extremists hold feminism or secular humanism or ZOG responsible for drugs, crime, floridation, and the decline of "family values," and many leftists—including some appearing in mr—claim that capitalism is the cause of racism and sexism (Cotter 119-21, Lewis 97-98, Young 288-91). This, in turn, leads to the belief that there's a single cure, and only this one cure, for all these social ills: the complete extirpation of the demon that causes them and the complete transformation of society. Thus extremists on both sides tend to be all-or-nothingists, to reject all reforms as "band-aids" that are doomed to fail since they don't get at the source of our problems and so won't further this radical transformation (Neilson/Meyerson 45: 268-69). Many are also millenarians who believe the transformation will be brought about by an apocalyptic clash between the forces of good and evil ending in the permanent defeat of the demon and the creation of a utopia(for fundamentalists this is a literal Armageddon and Second Coming, for militias it's RaHoWa (Racial Holy War) or the uprising of true patriots against our traitorous government foretold in The Turner Diaries with its Hitlerian "final solution," and for Marxists it's the proletarian revolution that, their anthem tells us, will be "the final conflict." Another consequence of their polarization is that partisans at both extremes try to eliminate the intermediate positions between them, often by denying their differences. Neilson and Meyerson say that "we should see liberalism and conservatism as flipsides" (45: 269) and argue that Republicans and Democrats are really the same (47: 242), as does Tom Lewis at greater length (89-90). Similarly, George Wallace, in his racist, third-party campaign, insisted that "there isn't a dime's worth of difference between them." More sinister is their tendency to "disappear" these intermediate positions by equating them with the opposite extreme. McCarthy and his followers attacked Democrats and even liberal Republicans as "pinkos" and "fellow travelers," and Marxist regimes condemned social democrats and even communists who deviated from the party line as fascist counterrevolutionaries who must be liquidated. Some extremists on the academic left employ this tactic against moderates and liberals, although with less lethal results. The same Marxist critic who called me a "self-confessed liberal" also called me, in another essay published in the same year, a "reactionary" ("Terminator" 64), and Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh consign Gerald Graff, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty, and Andrew Ross to the same camp as Rush Limbaugh (32-33). (Neilson and Meyerson's attack on Bérubé is more restrained--the worst thing they call him is a "liberal pluralist" [45: 267, 47: 239, 245]; but they try to connect him, as I noted, to support of the far right in Central America.) Such people need a simplistic division of the political world into two polar opposites with no awkward alternatives (just as they need a simplistic explanation of the cause and cure of all our problems), because they can't tolerate complexity or uncertainty. That mental set, I believe, is the most significant similarity (or "equivalence") between the far right and far left. Alliances and ReformsThe same mental set accounts for Neilson and Meyerson's condemnation of Bérubé's proposal that leftists form an alliance with liberals to alleviate the job crisis (47: 241-42). Political alliances are usually created by groups with different long-term goals who agree to work together for a specific and limited short-term goal, which is what Bérubé is proposing(he sees his plan, I think correctly, as a way to reform graduate education that many liberals will endorse and doesn't claim it will precipitate "the final conflict" that solves all our problems. But that's precisely why Neilson and Meyerson oppose it. Although they say at one point that "the left . . . should fight for reforms where it can" (47: 242), they don't seem to mean it, because a few lines later they reject Bérubé's proposed alliance on the ground that liberals won't work for a radical "reconfiguring of society." Apparently the only reform they approve of isn't a reform at all but the realization of their long-term goal, and they reassert this position at the end of the paragraph (and again in 246) by opposing all "pragmatic reforms" that leave capitalism intact. This confirms what I said about the all-or-nothingism of the political extremes and it confirms Bérubé's description of these two exemplars as "ideological purists" who will only form alliances "with people who believe exactly what [they] believe" (232-33). They remind me of my first encounter with left-wing purism during the thirties when I joined the Socialist Labor Party, a small Marxist group founded by Daniel DeLeon that regarded the Communist Party as the fourth capitalist party (the third, of course, was the Socialist Party). In the question period at the end of a meeting, a worker said there was an election in his factory to determine whether the CIO or a company union would represent them, and asked the chairperson (then a chairman) how to vote. This was the time of the great CIO drive to "organize the unorganized" mass of industrial workers, which was supported by many Marxists and marked a high point of enthusiasm and achievement for the American left, but our chairperson would have none of that. His answer was, "It's a choice between rotten apples," and he went on to explain that the CIO wasn't trying to overthrow capitalism and so was no better than a company union. I assume that Neilson and Meyerson would have agreed with him. This doesn't mean that all Marxists have always opposed all alliances with liberals. Many of them formed such alliances within the CIO, as I said, and in Europe a similar alliance was created by the Popular Front, which Bérubé invokes as a precedent. Marxist parties oscillated between this reformist policy of coalition with moderates against the far right and a purist policy of rejecting any reforms, and attacking moderates as indistinguishable from the far right. They even entered coalitions with the far right against "bourgeois democracy," as seen in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and now in some countries of Eastern Europe and the former USSR where Marxists are courting right-wing nationalists. It could also happen here if academic leftists follow Fred Pfeil's suggestion that they might find allies in the militia movement since it shares their hostility to our "totalitarian state" (Hill 125-26, and see Talbot 119). Talk about the "trope of left/right equivalence"! Political "Education" and Political "Action"One reason given by Neilson and Meyerson for opposing Bérubé's plan to decrease graduate admissions in the humanities is that it will deprive the rejected students of "a political education, a means by which students learn to read the . . . truths hidden and distorted by capitalist culture" (45: 271, 47: 247). Most liberals would agree that students should learn to "read" hidden or distorted truths and that capitalist culture provides plenty of material to work on, but we'd like to know whether they'll also learn to "read" the truths hidden or distorted by Marxist culture. When they encounter a statement like "capitalism [is] the engine behind global suffering" (47: 242), will they be able to "read" it by asking: was there no suffering before the advent of capitalism? Is there no suffering now in non-capitalist societies? Is capitalism responsible for FGM or AIDS, or the ethnic massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda, or the horrors of Stalin's purges and Mao's Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot's holocaust? And has it had no beneficial effects? If the kind of training that Neilson and Meyerson have in mind doesn't lead students to ask such questions, then they're talking not about political education but about political indoctrination. They're certainly not the only academic leftists to regard indoctrination in Marxism as the proper goal of teaching(Jennifer Cotter says it should "produce knowledges that enable the fundamental transformation of capitalist economic and social relations" (121), and many more examples can be cited. Their usual defense of this practice is to deny the "liberal" distinction between education and indoctrination by arguing that education that claims to be nonpartisan is really indoctrinating for the right. Many people on the far right also deny this distinction, which is why they try to censor the teaching of books with "wrong" ideas: they assume that students will be indoctrinated in these ideas, whereas they want them to be indoctrinated in "right" ideas. This is another similarity of the two political extremes that follows from their polarized perspectives(just as they cannot admit any intermediate positions between the two poles, so they cannot admit any intermediate kind of teaching that doesn't indocrinate for one pole or the other. We should go on to ask what Neilson and Meyerson expect students to do after receiving this Marxist education, but we won't find an answer. Although they claim to be supporting(and attack Bérubé for rejecting(an "activist politics" (45: 265), they are very vague about that action, and here they're all too typical of many far-left academics who in their essays and books regularly call for a radical reconfiguring of society, and just as regularly forget to explain how it can be brought about. It's difficult to imagine what action students could take (beyond writing more ''activist'' essays and books calling for this reconfiguring) that Neilson and Meyerson would approve of, since any intervention in the extramural world, to be effective, would require alliances with non-Marxists and so would be condemned as "pragmatic," which is a dirty word in their "activist" vocabulary, or, even worse, as "leftish," their epithet for impure leftists. Thus students who adopt their views would end up practicing not an "activist politics" but what Bérubé aptly calls a "paper politics" (234), and would presumably join them in their splendid and impotent isolation, being thankful, like the biblical Pharisee, that they're holier (lefter) than ordinary mortals. On this point we find an important difference between people on the far left and those on the far right, who are very active politically; but there's an "equivalence" here too since many partisans at both extremes share the same hypertrophied sense of self-righteousness. We should also ask what kind of society Neilson and Meyerson want to create by their reconfiguring, but here again we encounter a vagueness that is again typical of many academic leftists, who keep their goal a secret from the rest of us (and perhaps also from themselves). They often call it "democratic socialism," but that's a slogan, not an explanation. Presumably it will be a form of socialism very different from any socialist regimes that ever existed (which, we're told, weren't really socialist), but we never learn how it will be different and what will prevent it from becoming like them. Will its economy be based, like theirs, on central planning, which proved so much less efficient than the market? Or have they discovered another system (let's name it utopia) that combines a planned and a market economy by preserving all the advantages and eliminating all the disadvantages of each? And how will its political system be better than previous Marxist regimes or our "bourgeois democracy"? Will it permit separate parties (including pro-capitalist ones) to organize and compete for votes? Neilson and Meyerson's continual attacks on Brub?'s "liberal pluralism" suggest that they oppose pluralist politics, but they don't reveal what they'd replace it with. This vagueness about their goal gives academic leftists a big advantage, since it leaves them free to criticize the ills of our society (of which there are many) without having to present an alternative. And it excuses, and is excused by, their vagueness about the action to be taken to achieve this goal. The Job CrisisI come now to the disagreement between Bérubé, and Neilson and Meyerson on dealing with our job crisis. The cause of this crisis is explained by John Guillory (97-8), who shows that our present system operates like a financial "pyramid scheme" since the people who invested in it by working their way up the pyramid to the PhD can win the promised reward (a good job in a good institution leading eventually to their teaching future PhDs) only if there's a continual geometrical increase in the number of people entering the pyramid at the base by becoming humanities majors and then graduate students, who will create the demand (and hence the jobs) for people at the top. But since such an expansion of the base can't possibly be maintained, the gap between the supply of new PhDs and the demand for them must grow ever wider and the system must collapse, like a pyramid scheme, so most of those at the top will lose their investment of time and money and end up unemployed or underemployed in part-time jobs. These are the facts and any proposal to deal with our crisis must confront them if it's to be taken seriously. Bérubé's proposals clearly do confront these facts and seek to mitigate the crisis through a two-pronged attack (234-37). He wants to increase the demand for new PhDs by replacing part-time adjunctships with full-time positions and by encouraging the early retirement of professors, and he wants to decrease the supply by closing down marginal graduate programs and cutting down the number of students admitted to the surviving programs. Although these proposals are not without problems, they seem reasonable and I think many liberals would endorse them, as I said earlier. Neilson and Meyerson have very little to say about his first set of proposals but attack his second set with four charges: they are anti-leftist since they will decrease the number of students who get a Marxist "political education" (45: 271, 47: 247); they are elitist since they will result in graduate student bodies composed mostly of rich white men (45: 270-71, 47: 245-46); they are capitalist since they are a form of corporate down-sizing (45: 270, 47: 243); and they are selfish since they serve the interests and enhance the prestige of Bérubé and others who teach in institutions with respectable graduate programs (45: 272, 47: 247-48). Yet only the first charge is valid(if it's true that many graduate students now receive this "political education," then admitting fewer of them will mean that fewer people can receive it. The second charge is a non sequitur: there's no necessary connection between reducing graduate admissions and altering the race-gender-class composition of the group that's admitted, which will depend, as it does now, on decisions made by each department. The third seeks to exploit the negative connotations of corporate downsizing, in which employees are fired to increase profits; but it's a false analogy since a graduate program has no obligation to applicants it rejects, who aren't its employees, and it doesn't profit from rejecting them. This also invalidates the fourth charge, for it isn't true that department members will benefit from lowering the number of graduate students, which actually works against their interests. And the prestige of a middle-ranked graduate program won't be enhanced by abolishing the programs below it on the prestige scale—this would diminish its prestige since it would then be at the bottom of the scale. It's significant, however, that they accuse Bérubé of benefiting from his proposals, because the assumption that the enemy always has ulterior motives is another "equivalent" tendency (the last one, I promise) of the far right and far left. It's also significant that they don't tell us how they might benefit from their own proposals, to which I now turn. They make one specific proposal that addresses the problem—that we work for smaller classes and reduced teaching loads in colleges where they are too large (47: 245); but this doesn't counter Bérubé's proposals and can be added to his first set since it will create new jobs and so increase the demand for new PhDs. But to counter his second set, aimed at reducing the supply, they propose that we maintain "the wide availability of graduate studies in the humanities" (45: 271) by enrolling the same number of students, and so increase the supply of job-seekers at the present rate. (Actually two of their charges against him should lead them to argue for enlarging enrollments, which would result in more non-elite graduate students and more potential Marxists.) And their proposal to resolve the crisis that this policy has already created is to insist that all new PhDs in the humanities must be hired, since they seem to assume that society is obligated to provide good jobs for them, no matter how large their number and how small the number of students taking humanities courses. They don't reveal why society has this obligation (which presumably doesn't apply to new MBAs and JDs), and their only suggestion for enforcing it is to call for "activist strategies" such as "mass protest" (45: 271), without explaining who will make up the "mass" for these protests or whom they will be directed against. The vagueness of this proposed action resembles the vagueness of the action that they and others on the far left recommend to reconfigure society, which I noted earlier, but perhaps they believe that these are the same thing(that the "mass protest" against the job crisis will help to bring down capitalism and usher in an undefined form of socialism. Even if they don't believe this, they ought to tell us what the socialist solution to the crisis would be. In all socialist countries known to me it's very simple(a government agency decides how many people with advanced degrees are needed in each area and then admits that number into graduate programs. The result is that there are no unemployed holders of advanced humanities degrees, but also that the number of graduate students in humanities is much smaller (as a percentage of their age group) than here. We certainly don't find anything like "the wide availability of graduate studies in the humanities" that Neilson and Meyerson champion, and we can assume that many qualified people who want to take them are excluded. No doubt they'd say that these countries aren't really socialist, yet the policy is based on the Marxist principle of full employment: the socialist state is supposed to guarantee that everyone will have a job, but it can't guarantee that everyone will have the job s/he wants, which is impossible, and so it must rely on central planning and match people with the jobs that are needed. If Neilson and Meyerson know of a different kind of socialism that will ensure "the wide availability of graduate studies in the humanities," they should reveal it. It should be obvious that I'm much more sympathetic to Bérubé's proposals for dealing with our job crisis than to Neilson and Meyerson's, which don't really deal with it. Yet the proposals in his second set present a major problem because, as he realizes (and as they do not), a large graduate program is very useful to senior members of a humanities department. In addition to the prestige it brings, it provides the warm bodies needed to teach the introductory courses that they don't want to teach and to take the doctoral seminars that they do want to teach, and to serve as their paper graders, research assistants, etc. As a result, many humanities departments become dependent on this program, and so we can expect that only a few of them will voluntarily make major cuts in it (indeed if the cuts are too great it will no longer be viable), and that even fewer will voluntarily abolish it. This means that in order to put his proposals into effect, they will often have to be imposed on a department from above, which will invite many kinds of abuses. I'm troubled, moreover, by the paternalism that his proposals share with those of Neilson and Meyerson, who assume that they know the interests of graduate students better than the students do. They know that what's best for our students is to get a "political education," even if that isn't what the students want, and they don't seem to be very concerned about the students' suffering after they get this education and enter the job market. Brub? clearly is concerned and so would save them from this suffering by not allowing them to enter our graduate programs, even if that's what they want. His plan is much more humane than Neilson and Meyerson's, but in it we also find that the students' own wishes are ignored for their own good. I'd like to present another proposal that isn't open to this objection because it's based on the principle of liberal individualism, which holds that rational adults, such as the applicants to our graduate programs, are the best judges of their own interests, provided that they're adequately informed. What I suggest, therefore, is that the department should adequately inform them by sending all applicants a letter that tells them, in the frankest possible terms, what kind of job market they'll face when they graduate and also tells them, in the same frank terms, what I said earlier about the department's need for and use of graduate students. (The MLA and other professional associations could have a hand in drafting this letter and ensuring that all departments send it out.) Then, if they still want to apply, they should be admitted if they're highly qualified and there are spaces available. After all, some of them may not want a teaching job, and some may believe that they will get one despite the odds. They may be wrong, but the principle of liberal individualism allows rational informed adults to make their own mistakes, instead of having someone in authority try to prevent them from making mistakes by a prejudgment of their prospects, which may itself be mistaken. I'm not, however, presenting this as the only correct way to deal with the job crisis because I don't think that liberal individualism is an absolute (liberal pluralists are leery of absolutes, as they are of all-or-nothing choices and single cures). It's not meant to replace Bérubé's first set of proposals to increase the demand for new PhDs, which I support. Nor does it really conflict with his second set to reduce the supply; it can be applied in conjunction with them, and if it succeeds it would render them unnecessary, since a major decrease in graduate applications will cause the marginal programs to wither away and the others to shrink, without the need for anyone to make these decisions or to impose them on the departments. I'd also argue that this concept of informed individual choices should be applied in other areas. That's why I began my paper with a kind of product description warning prospective readers that it contains liberal ingredients, so that those who feel threatened by liberalism can decide to avoid it. And I hope that teachers who share the Neilson and Meyerson view of "political education" will issue a similar warning to students enrolling in their classes, in order to let them decide if that's what they want to undergo. Works Cited
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