there's our catastrophe

“so you can activist more”

ardhra:

ourcatastrophe:

it honestly seems like some leftists believe that only conservative politics are promulgated within the family so we should just ignore kids and wait until they get to college

which would be repugnant even if it were true

but it’s not true

lots of radicals have kids, lots of them pass their values onto their kids, you just don’t see them, because you push them out of your collectives and sharehouses and radical reading groups

but probably they don’t even wanna see your misogynist, racist, anti-working-class, child-hating face

This is just off the top of my head, but it’s not just to do with children, maternity or family responsibilities, it’s broader and to do with internalised capitalist assumptions about work… there’s been heaps written about “activism” and the tendency towards hyper-commitment and burnout, and how capitalist work ethics are partly behind that. I think the assumption is that it’s an individual responsibility to facilitate being able to do work/activism, however they manage that - the partner who has less $ to lose by staying at home with the kid (a woman, 90+% of the time) does so, you pick menial jobs and deliberately structure your life so you’ll never have to support anyone else (even people you probably should be supporting) so you can activist more… and that’s why there’s so much gross scrutiny about peoples’ personal choices in food/hairstyle/shoes - these personal choices are all supposed to facilitate doing more work.

But there’s never any discussion about how “the movement” or “the campaign” might actually be responsible for any of that. Or why it should be, or how. Because that’s “service delivery” not actual politics - with the subtext being that people who need “service delivery” aren’t important to “the movement” or to politics, because politics is something that can be abstracted from life. And so uni students are more important to “the movement” than anyone else because they’re deliberately cosseted into an environment where they have minimal responsibilities for others, and due to class barriers, inaccessibility, ablism, racism, and a whole lot of other structural inequality built into tertiary education, tend to have few personal needs of their own.

Ugh, too much rambly. I should go to bed.

totally.  I remember thinking it was really weird that Melbourne Uni had a more visible and active Student Activist population than the more working-class Victoria University — I mean, what did Melbourne Uni students really have to protest about?  Now I get it — the whole concept of the Student Activist is set up for this.  and getting out of caring responsibilities to spend more time doing activism is somehow seen as being more responsible!  serious!  yet activism, like caring, is seen not as a social responsibility, but as a personal choice, one that requires sacrifices and can’t, indeed shouldn’t, be supported by broader social structures. 

it’s like a weird vanguardism or something, except Lenin had way more of an idea of how, exactly, the vanguard’s actions would radicalise and mobilise the general population.  there’s certainly no serious expectation that the majority of people will be able to join this activist class — after all, somebody needs to do the actual productive labour.  somebody needs to grow the food, make the trains run on time, care for the old and the sick and the young, pay the taxes that go towards the activists’ dole, throw out the food they dumpster…like, I’m not against dumpster diving, I’d do it if it was a bit easier where I lived, I’m on the dole myself, partly because I want time to do other things so I’m being picky about jobs, I’m thoroughly implicated in this, I’m not just having a kneejerk “lazy hippies” reaction.

it’s just that on a very basic economic level, this activist lifestyle is predicated on being a small fringe group.  our society could not support a significantly larger activist class.  can the activist class act to destroy itself as a class?  because that is what a significant attack on the power of capitalism, imperialism, etc would entail and indeed require. but in a lot of ways it’s a sweet fucking lifestyle.  can they (we?) act against their own class interest like that? 

jesusmaryandjosephclosethewindow:

ourcatastrophe:

sodawound replied to your post: sodawound replied to your post: …

thru the uni is what i’ve heard #rumourmill

this was actually a big part of the objection to packaging student association fees with the rest of your loans rather than having to pay them up front — it seems like an idea with no downside but it means they aren’t administered by the student union, therefore the uni can do sketchy shit like this

nope uni always collected student union fees. just always gave it all to student orgs. student fees being deferrable is A+, unis not giving money to student orgs is the problem.

where do you live/study and how old are you?  When I started uni VSU had been passed but not implemented, and fees were indeed collected by the uni — but I was told by older students that this hadn’t always been the case, it was a change following the introduction and then repeal of Victorian government VSU legislation.  I’m not sure if that was 100% correct, I haven’t researched it personally.  but later, during the period of VSU, fees were directly collected and administered by the student union.  (it’s worth mentioning here, though, that most of the student unions that survived received extra funding from the university they were attached to.) 

it’s a fact that a lot of student activists around the time of the campaign to repeal VSU had concerns about the loss of autonomy that came with anything requiring student union fees to be administered by the university and government. whether you agree with them or not is a judgement call, but it was an argument that was had often and loudly within the student movement. 

Personally, I agree in theory that it’s best to have the money autonomously administered, but the $392 fee I had to pay pre-VSU is a shit-ton of money to come up with and it’s not feasible for many students.  however, I’d point out that this kind of thing is also an active debate within the trade union movement — not so much with loans, but with employers collecting union dues on behalf of the union.  helps with budgeting for workers, helps the union cut down on admin costs, but it’s generally seen as the lowest kind of selling-out by the union to accept such a loss of autonomy. 

that’s some bioethics right there

one of my favourite illustrative Melbourne University “Fuck You, Pleb” Moments was when I had a class in the James Hardie Lecture Theatre.  my dad has asbestosis (b/c blue collar).  I know it’s not surprising from the institution that was the heart of the eugenics movement in Australia; almost every building is named after someone with some charming opinion about how working-class or Aboriginal people were genetically inferior and simply couldn’t be taught.  but it was a fucking slap in the face all the same. 

I mean someone with a bachelor’s in management from one of the new universities like Deakin is not gonna have the same opportunities as someone with a law degree from Melbourne Uni and those two people have likely been in different social classes since birth and will continue on those trajectories and were put on those paths over a century ago by Victoria’s documented historical commitment to anti-egalitarian eugenically-minded education so like fuck off with your erasure of those differences, Glyn Davis, that’s all I’m saying

today I saw Glyn Davis, the vice-chancellor of Melbourne Uni, on TV.  he was talking about how great it is that Australia went from having 3% of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher to 40% and rising within two generations.  he’s a very well-connected man, a personal friend of previous Prime Minister Kevin Rudd; it’s an elite institution, possibly the most elite in Australia.  it’s also where I got my bachelor’s degree.  (thanks to scholarships it was actually the cheapest option for me.  it’s one of the weird paradoxes of massively elitist institutions, they like to practice charity.  likewise, melbourne uni has really good student aid if you can get through the door in the first place.)  I got really upset watching him, surprisingly upset, and I’m not 100% sure why. 

I know it’s partly because the normalisation of bachelor’s degrees is not necessarily liberatory.  often it just means another hurdle you have to jump before you can get a job at a reasonable pay level, an expensive one.  you didn’t always need a bachelor’s degree to work as a teacher, nurse, librarian, etc, but now you do.  I don’t think that necessarily a good thing.  I want people to have skills and be prepared but I don’t think university necessarily does that better than apprenticeships or on-the-job training, and it’s an institution that’s inaccessible for a lot of people.  plus it puts people in a lot of debt: it can make your financial situation much worse in exchange for the partly illusory feeling of class mobility that goes with a devalued degree.  it sucks for women in particular: the much-ballyhooed increase in the numbers of women going to university hasn’t led to a corresponding movement in the gendered pay gap.  I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that university is simply a scam, or a way in which the most adept at working the system are assimilated into ruling class values regardless of their class origins, but I’ve got quite a bit of sympathy for those arguments. 

I don’t know. I got a lot out of university at times but I also found it incredibly alienating and depressing.  I have a lot of weird class feelings about it which I won’t go into.  but I will say that as having a degree becomes more normalised, other ways to keep the elites elite are found.  and institutions like melbourne uni are a huge part of the replication of those class structures.  and it’s fucked that Glyn Davis is talking like “more degrees for more people” is some kind of pathway to “education for liberation” when he and the institutions he represents are so culpable in this. 

just gonna have a fucking wah about it, ok