INTO THE WEEDS

I am now deep into Chapter Three of my re-reading of Capital, and as I read I also turn over in my mind possible paper topics for the students.  One idea I have long had was to turn a student loose on the Irish University Reprint Series of the British Parliamentary Factory Inspectors' Reports.  These are wonderfully rich, detailed accounts of what government inspectors found when they went into factories and interviewed workers in the early nineteenth century.  The reports, which gave rise to a series of reform bills, served as part of the evidentiary basis for Marx's famous Chapter Ten, "The Working Day."  He read them, along with much else, during his endless hours in the British Museum.  I have myself spent some hours reading in these volumes, and they are mesmerizing.  [The entire series runs to one thousand volumes, and deals with everything from the slave trade to sewage and drains.]  I have just ascertained that the Duke University Library has the entire thousand volumes on its shelves, available to UNC as well as Duke students.

What might a student work on?  One idea is to compare the copious quotations from the volumes in Capital with the originals to see whether there is any pattern in Marx's process of selection.  For example, do his selections reveal a sentimental bias by emphasizing the experiences of women and children in the factories?  Does he choose passages that indicate worker militancy? 

I have no idea whether there is already a journal literature on the subject, but if not, this could make a very nice publishable essay.

HEARTSICK

Here in Chapel Hill, attention has been focused on a scandal that has now broken wide open involving the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, shadow courses and phony grades, and thousands of Black student athletes and White fraternity members over a period of eighteen years.  Carol Folt, the new Chancellor of the campus, commissioned a study of the matter by an old, established New York law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft, and while Susie and I were in Paris, their 130 page report was released by the university.  I have read the entire report, and it is so appalling that it makes my heart sick. 

Two decades ago, a misguided office manager in the campus's Black Studies department took it upon herself to "help" at-risk Black athletes, who are required by NCAA regulations to maintain a 2.0 GPA in order to be eligible to play.  These student athletes, who at a school like UNC are essentially full-time unpaid athletic employees, were encouraged to sign up for phony "Independent Study" courses that never met and had no content.  At the end of the semester, they would submit patently inadequate "papers," often plagiarized in part and even not written by them.  The office manager would glance at them and herself give them A's or B's, which, when averaged in with their other courses, would suffice to bring them above the 2.0 cut-off.  Eventually, she roped the Department Chair into this scheme, and listed him on occasion for as many as 300 Independent Study courses in a single year.  When questions were raised about the large number of Independent Studies showing up on the student records, she actually started creating phantom lecture courses and "enrolled" the students in them, signing her own name to the grade sheets.

The employees of the Academic Support Program for Student Athletes [ASPSA] worked hand in glove with the department secretary, often telling her precisely what grade a student needed to preserve eligibility, which she would then provide.  The Higher Administration and the Athletic Directors and Coaches of the university claim to have been blissfully unaware of the practice, which extended over two decades during the tenure of five coaches of the world-famous basketball team, but it did not escape the notice of the student body.  Young men on fraternity row caught wind of what was going on and started enrolling in these phantom "courses."  The Cadwalader report, which is exemplary in its completeness, reveals that 53% of the enrolments in the non-courses were by frat members, not athletes.

These sorts of scandals typically unfold gradually.  The NCAA has not yet been heard from, and it is entirely within its authority to ban UNC from television or from March Madness for a number of years, as well as to reduce the number of athletic scholarships UNC is permitted to offer.  The sports affected by the scandal are principally men's basketball, women's basketball, and football, although a few of the phony enrolments were of students in what are apparently called "Olympic sports."  I think we can safely predict that the shit is going to hit the fan.

Kenneth Wainstein, the author of the Cadwalader report, interviewed everyone even marginally involved in the affair, including notably the department secretary, whose retirement five years ago triggered a crisis that led to the exposure of the scheme [the ASPSA employees were frantic that they would no longer be able to get phony A's and B's on request for their charges] and the Department Chair, who was forced to retire.  Wainstein's focus, quite properly, is on what people knew and when they knew it, to invoke the useful phrase from the old Watergate hearings.  But in everything I have read on this affair, there has been not a single word about an aspect of it that touches me personally, and is I believe of very great importance.  In this extended blog post, I am going to talk about that.  In a phrase, this scandal has done devastating damage to the reputation of Black Studies. 

Recall that although I am by profession a Philosopher, I spent the last sixteen years of my half-century career as a Professor in the W. E. B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  I joined the department to help in the creation of a ground-breaking doctoral program in Afro-American Studies, and when our proposal was approved by the state education board, I ran that program as Graduate Program Director for twelve years.  It is an astonishingly successful program that takes Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian students, puts them through a severely rigorous course of study, and turns out a stream of professionally qualified graduates who go on to write books and professional articles and earn tenure at colleges and universities.  I am more proud of what we did during those years than I am of anything else I have accomplished in my teaching career.

Let me briefly review a subject on which I have written at length elsewhere.  Black Studies as a university discipline was created in struggle during the 1960's.  The Civil Rights Movement broke down the barriers that had blocked all but a tiny handful of Black students from enrolling in historically all-white northern colleges and universities.  When significant numbers of Black students showed up on those campuses, they found that their story and that of their forebears could nowhere be found in the curriculum.  Slavery scarcely got a mention.  The Civil War seemed to have been fought over States' Rights, the literature and art and science created by Black men and women was invisible.  It will be difficult for the younger among you to understand, but even jazz, the quintessential Black contribution to American culture, was attributed initially to a white band leader named -- I kid you not -- Paul Whiteman!

The students demanded that their story be part of the curriculum, and the White colleges and universities, terrified by the prospect of riots and demonstrations on campus, gave in.  For the most part, they created ad hoc Committees, Programs, Majors, Minors, Institutes, and other administrative dodges designed to allow the appearance of acquiescence without the permanence of tenure.  Very quickly, more than five hundred such Black Studies programs sprang up, for the most part paid for with "soft money" that did not involve "tenure lines."  [The academics among you will understand the deeper meaning of these administrative arrangements.]  Even in the Harvard Afro-American Studies Department, made famous by Skip Gates' show-boating and money raising and his assembling of what he called his Dream Team, every single member of the department has a joint appointment with Afro-American Studies and some other "real" department.  Hence, should Harvard decide that the heat is off, it can summarily decommission the department, send everyone back to his or her other department, and avoid breaking tenure.

The Academy never wanted Black Studies, never believed in Black Studies, did not consider Black Studies a legitimate field of inquiry, and has for half a century taken every chance it gets to defund it, discontinue it, or fold it into some larger entity like "Ethnic Studies" [on what might be called the "Nigger Jim Theory"  -- I refer of course to arguably America's greatest novel, Huckleberry Finn.]

At UMass, Afro-Am was constantly under assault, despite the fact that the campus was then, and perhaps still is, one of the most politically progressive campuses in America.  The doctoral program we designed was extraordinarily demanding -- a required first year two semester double seminar in which the students read fifty major works of history, politics, sociology, and literature, and write fifty papers!  But when we submitted our proposal to the Faculty Senate for approval, it languished for almost a year because the sub-committee professor assigned the task of finding three people to review it claimed she could not find anyone.  In twenty-four hours, we found three of the most distinguished members of the faculty who took on the task and gave the proposal resounding approval.

Black Studies is always under attack in a way that no other academic discipline is.  The rest of the faculty is always looking for reasons to deny its legitimacy, defund it, deny its status as a field of study.  What that departmental secretary, that department chair, and all those across the campus complicit in this appalling scheme have done is to give the nay-sayers all the excuse they will ever need.  What is more, in this instance, the nay-sayers are right!  The department has not be engaged in a legitimate academic enterprise.  It has for twenty years served as an enabler for all the frenzied Tarheel fans for whom making it to the Final Four is the alpha and omega of their college experience.  This scheme has done a profound disservice to two decades of UNC undergraduates, and it has dealt a devastating blow to the discipline of Afro-American Studies, at least on this campus.

This is why reading the Cadwalader Report made me heartsick and outraged.

As for the Tarheels, I am not a fan.

A REPLY TO CHRIS, AS PROMISED

Chris poses the following objection to my recent post "The Morning After."  [This is only part of his comment.  I encourage everyone to read the rest of it]:

"Are you sure Wolff? I was always under the impression that the possible candidates that can and will run are PRE DECIDED by those with the power and capital to do so. It's only after a sorting committee of those in power say "we could live with X, Y, or Z" that then X, Y, and Z become viable candidates, of which the “American people” is now either in a position to vote for or not at all. So I have a hard time blaming ANYONE who doesn't vote, or votes in an alternative way, for being responsible for the elected officials for instance. I rarely vote, because X Y and Z have never represented so much as 10% of my views on issues."

Chris' entire comment raises a number of very interesting questions, which I shall address in this response.  Let me start with his "impression that the possible candidates that can and will run are PRE DECIDED by those with the power and capital to do so."  This used to be quite literally true, before the introduction of a national system of primaries, but it is not true now.  Mind you, powerful, wealthy people do of course meet privately and discuss whom they can live with as candidates, and they then of course do everything in their power to make sure that only one of those candidates is chosen as the nominee of this or that major party.  Indeed, these days those meetings tend to be reported in the press and on television.  But it is simply not true that these powerful people, and others like them, can block an unacceptable candidate who has broad enough support in the electorate.  Try telling Herman Cain that!

Let me sketch a fantasy, an imaginary sequence of events, what law professors call a hypothetical.  Suppose Professor Arthur Kliman were to decide to put forward his name for the Democratic Party's nomination for President.  I hope Professor Kliman will forgive me for using his name in this light-hearted example.  Readers of this blog will recall an extended and very interesting series of exchanges between Professor Kliman, Professor Alan Freeman, and myself some while ago.  I choose Professor Kliman because I am reasonably confident that if Chris were presented with the opportunity to vote for Kliman he would consider it worth his while to go to the polls.  Would Professor Kliman be the first professed Marxist to stand for the highest office in the land?  No, that honor forever belongs to Eugene V. Debs, who ran for the presidency on the Socialist ticket five times between 1900 and 1920.  However, I think we can be certain that Professor Kliman would be the first presidential candidate to profess allegiance to the Temporal Single-System Interpretation of Das Kapital. 

We all know what would happen.  But what, given the nature of the American political system, could happen?  With no money to mount a national campaign, Professor Kliman would be forced to rely on social media.  Slowly at first, he would send out e-mails and tweets and post FaceBook announcements of his candidacy.  If enough people were of Chris's mindset, this would create a frisson of excitement.  The announcements would go viral, and very quickly millions of Americans would become aware that at long last an authentic Marxist, and a TSSI proponent at that, was offering himself as a candidate.  The excitement would mount.

Eventually, the media, always looking for oddball stories to amuse their bored viewers, would catch wind of Professor Kliman's  quixotic candidacy and use it as amusing filler or color commentary [to borrow a phrase from sports reporting].  To their astonishment, they would be flooded by requests for more information about the Kliman candidacy.  The name "Kliman" would start to show up on opinion polls, pulling support so inexplicable as to cause the statisticians to recheck their calculations.  Nate Silver would check into rehab, and Sam Wang would close down the Princeton Consortium.

As it became clear that Professor Kliman was the odds-on favorite to win the Democratic nomination, powerful, wealthy, connected people would hold a series of hastily convened meetings to decide how to squelch this thing before it got out of hand.  A concerted attack on Professor Kliman's character would be launched.  It would be reliably reported that he was not a Professor of Economics at all but an Republican operative sent out to wreak havoc on the Democratic Party.  Scandalous tidbits would be fed to the press:  Kliman actually owned stock in capitalist corporations, he had been seen saluting the American flag at a baseball game, he was opposed to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories [this to suppress his support in the Jewish community, always suspected of Marxist tendencies.]  A faux-scholarly study would be quickly thrown together demonstrating irrefutably that Kliman was not an orthodox Marxist at all but exhibited unmistakable sympathy for Rosa Luxembourg.

 But none of this could stop dedicated Klimanites from expressing their will.  At the Iowa caucuses, a flood of Marxist farmers would dominate the meetings, and Arthur Kliman would emerge the clear winner.  If there were enough Chris's in America, Arthur Kliman would be the next Democratic Party nominee for the office of President and then the next President.

All right.  I have taken Professor Kliman's name in vain for too long.  Let me return to the real world and offer a quite serious hypothesis.  Hillary Clinton is the all but certain 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee.  Those wealthy and powerful people of whom Chris speaks are, we may be sure, quite happy with that prospect.  Clinton is as committed a supporter of Wall Street as Wall Street could possibly ask from either party.  They will do nothing to block her nomination and, should it seem likely that she will be elected, they will happily contribute money to her already well-funded campaign in hopes of buying even more influence once she wins.

Suppose Elizabeth Warren were to make a run for the nomination, as she pretty clearly will not.  Warren is not Chris's cup of tea, I am sure, but that does not matter.  What matters is that she would very definitely not be Wall Street's cup of tea.  The rich and powerful would fight tooth and claw to stop her from getting the nomination.  Could they block her?  Not if enough Democrats decided they wanted her.  Even as between Clinton and Warren, both candidates well within the traditions and rather narrow ideological limits of American politics, the "power brokers" would be unable to enforce their will against the strong commitment of enough progressive Democrats.

o as a simple matter of fact, I suggest, Chris is wrong when he says that a handful of powerful people decide whom the American people can consider as presidential candidates.  If enough Republicans had wanted him, Herman Cain would have been the 2012 presidential nominee, and if enough Americans had wanted him and had troubled to go to the polls, he and not Barack Obama would be president now.

If it is in the clear self-interest of a majority of Americans to elect Marxists to public office, as I believe, why are there no self-proclaimed socialists in Congress save for Bernie Sanders?  The only way to address this question sensibly is to stop talking as though Americans [or any other people] are self-conscious rational agents who are capable of drawing elementary inferences from manifest facts, and instead talk [as I shall be next semester] about mystification and false consciousness and the material bases of ideology.

But if that is the way to think about this matter, then we really must stop indulging in conspiracy theories about people in back rooms carefully manipulating the masses.  We need to ask why Nobel prize winning economists, who are manifestly intelligent by any normal psychometric measure, persist in really believing that the bloated pay of CEO's is simply a return to them of their marginal product.

And so I return to the subject that seems to agitate Chris more than any other -- viz, how I can call myself a Marxist and yet insist that when it comes down to voting, one ought to vote for the less bad of the alternatives rather than stay home.  Since I have talked about this several times on this blog, and inasmuch as this is the aftermath of the election, not the run-up to it, I shall leave that one alone.

COMING SOON

Chris asks a very interesting question, the answer to which is quite complex.  Tomorrow I shall try to address it at length in a blog post.  For now, I am enjoying my quiet time with Chapter One of Capital.

IT IS ALWAYS SO MUCH NICER TO SPEND TIME WITH KANT" -- HANNAH ARENDT

Despite my long involvement with politics, my eleemosynary efforts through University Scholarships for South African Students, my administrative term of office as Graduate Program Director of the W. EM. B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies, I am at heart a man of the book.  I am never happier than when reading the Critique of Pure Reason,  A Treatise of Human Nature, The Gorgias, or the Philosophical Fragments.  This morning, deeply distressed by the election results and exasperated with my fellow Americans, I turned away from affairs of the public arena and began my long-planned re-reading of Volume One of Capital.  As I began the series of Prefaces and Afterwards written by Marx himself or Engels to the first, second, third, and fourth German editions, the English edition, and the French edition, my mood lightened and I found that I could again take deep, satisfying breaths.  Escapism?  Absolutely.  An ascent into the ideological superstructure?  No doubt.  But how pleasant to spend time with Marx rather than with Ted Cruz, or Thom Tillis, or Mitch McConnell -- or, for that matter, with Chris Matthews, or even with the estimable Rachel Maddow.

When I have worked hard on a book and have eventually written an essay or a book about it, I tend to forget all the passages that do not play a central role in my interpretation.  Re-reading Capital, my copy of which is filled with underlinings and marginal comments in red ink, I have repeatedly come upon paragraphs that had totally slipped my mind.  It was a delight to revisit them, although rather troubling to realize that even a semester-long course is too little time to mention them all.

Perhaps I should propose that the department make this a year-long seminar.

THE MORNING AFTER

Well, it was about as bad as it could be, and now I shall have to come to terms with being represented in the United States Senate by the likes of Thom Tillis until I am eighty-six at the least.  I am sure I have done some things during my long life for which I deserve to be reproached, but this seems like cruel and unusual punishment for them. 

Whom to blame for last night's debacle?  The answer is obvious: the American people, those who voted, and the much larger number who chose not to vote.  Democracy has its flaws, as the author of In Defense of Anarchism can attest, but it does have one great feature:  If enough of the poor, exploited, and down-trodden get together, they can in fact change who controls the State and what the State does.  I have no doubt that the voter suppression schemes of the Republicans have made a difference, but they could not have made enough of a difference to stop a determined popular movement to use the vote as a means of social change.  Here in North Carolina, the State Legislature led by the same Thom Tillis eliminated on-campus voting.  This contributed to his victory over Kay Hagan, but only because these bright young UNC students ostensibly engaged in getting a higher education could not be troubled to travel for a few minutes to downtown voting sites.

I had planned today, after my morning walk, to begin the re-reading of Capital Volume One in preparation for my course next semester.  Perhaps that is the best way to put a bad night behind me.

OUT THE DOOR

We are gearing up to take the train from Gare du Nord to St. Pancras station in London, thence to a hotel at Heathrow, and tomorrow the direct flight to RDU and home.  Because of the Marx course, we shan't be back until next May.  We arrive home just in time to vote and watch the debacle on television.  The next decade and then some is not going to be fun, but we will always have the sixties. 

I shall try to return to the blog on Monday.