Comments on: Early fragments on the intellectual precariat https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/ critical anthropology of academic culture Tue, 22 Sep 2015 20:17:29 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.1 By: gautam chandra https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-6269 Tue, 22 Sep 2015 20:17:29 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-6269 a great article. thank you sir.

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By: eli https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-1372 Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:40:36 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-1372 Hi Jacob,
You know, I don’t really think of this blog as a platform for political organizing per se; more like a mediating space where some reflections on politics, particularly academic politics, can take place, and where Anglophones can learn something (perhaps) about life and politics in French universities. I’m not opposed to seeing explicitly political propositions here, and I think that I follow the logic of your proposal, but who is the “we” in this comment thread that might advance a politics? That’s far from clear, and the readers here are clearly a politically (and socially, linguistically, institutionally) heterogeneous group.

So much for meta-reflections on your comment. A couple of more specific questions about your proposal also come to my mind:
1) What does “emancipation” mean? I’m not sure this is something we can take for granted.
2) Can you say more about why collective re-appropriation “can arise ONLY from the direct action of the primary producers, organized in a distinct mass party-movement”? Or why this “must” be pursued? I’m not really a determinist about political strategy; it seems to me that for any given political goal there are generally multiple ways of getting there, and it’s more a matter of weighing different options than of embracing THE one and only method. Which is why activists generally need to deliberate about strategy. The burden of proof is on you, it seems to me, to show that the “mass party-movement” is the only possible way forward. You know what I mean?

take care, Eli

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By: Jacob Richter https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-1371 Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:27:03 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-1371 To paraphrase Marx:

Considering, that against this combined power of the elite classes the primary producers or precariat cannot unite and act for itself except by constituting itself into a mass party-movement, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties and movements, that this constitution of the precariat into a mass party-movement is indispensable in order to ensure the emancipation of its labour power,

That such labour power can be emancipated only when, at minimum, the precariat is in collective possession of all means of societal production, all commons, etc., that there are only two forms under which all means of societal production, all commons, etc. can belong to them or return to community:

1) The individual form which has never existed in a general state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress;
2) The collective form the material and intellectual elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist society;

Considering,

That again this collective re-appropriation, or political and economic expropriation of the elite classes, can arise only from the direct action of the primary producers or precariat, organized in a distinct mass party-movement;

Such permanent organization must be pursued by all the means the precariat has at its disposal.

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By: ana australiana https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-1370 Mon, 30 May 2011 04:25:16 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-1370 Hi Eli. I guess I was showing my Australian location, where it seems to me at least that the casualisation of the academic labour force (I think it’s something like fifty per cent of university teaching is now done by people on sessional, aka casual, contracts) is considered to be a facet of the ‘crisis’ in higher education, and is linked specifically with the surplus of graduates to available academic postings (as per the links I share above from Melissa Gregg’s work). The term precarity itself is less likely to be used in that discourse of crisis though I think – possibly just due to a regional preference of some kind! Having said that, this piece has had some circulation.

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By: eli https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-1369 Fri, 27 May 2011 13:58:13 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-1369 NB: it seems like the more usual spelling is “precariat,” not “precariate,” so I changed it here!

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By: eli https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-1368 Fri, 27 May 2011 04:04:56 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-1368 Thanks, everyone, for such supportive comments! If anyone knows about comparable histories in other countries (European? Non-European? Soviet Bloc, maybe?) I would love to have tips there too…

@Ana, I share your skepticism about the usefulness of “crisis” talk, which always seems to me partly performative and theatrical… But can you say more about how you see the relation between precarity (which is at once a social reality and a discursive construct) and crisis discourse? Haven’t thought about that before.

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By: eric https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-1367 Thu, 26 May 2011 16:13:18 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-1367 very interesting. small contribution: it’s a term under debate in France already in the 1890s.

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By: mmcglynn https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-1366 Thu, 26 May 2011 12:01:03 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-1366 #8 on Google already! I like your keyword strategy son!

http://www.google.com/search?q=precariate

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By: Nick Thorkelson https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-1365 Thu, 26 May 2011 01:25:27 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-1365 When I worked on Radical America and most of the board members were unemployed or underemployed PhDs, fellow editor Frank Brodhead called it the lumpen intelligentsia.

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By: ana australiana https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-1364 Wed, 25 May 2011 02:55:06 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-1364 Thankyou for this! I think that notions of ‘intellectual precariat’, ‘intellectual proletariat’ and ‘un(der)employed elite’ are valuable for the historicising that you are doing here, and also as another way of thinking the problem along with ‘casualised academy’ or ‘precarised workforce’ or indeed ‘higher education crisis’ which sometimes seem (to me at least!) less revelatory of the classed nature of the experience of being, say, an out-of-work PhD – including the very low level of labour organising amongst us. It ties in with this discussion, too.

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By: eli https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-1363 Tue, 24 May 2011 22:47:27 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-1363 Hi Tim, thanks very much for this. That is a great graph!

I guess if one were seriously going to pursue a project of this sort — based on graphing various keywords over time — one would have to think about possible other semi-synonyms for “intellectual proletariat” that might be points of comparison. “Unemployed elites,” something of that sort…

Eli

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By: Tim Lacy https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2011/05/24/early-fragments-on-the-intellectual-precariate/#comment-1362 Tue, 24 May 2011 21:29:43 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=1750#comment-1362 I’m going to read your post again for more detail. But, in the meantime, here are the results of a Google Books Ngram search: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=+intellectual+proletariat&year_start=1800&year_end=2011&corpus=0&smoothing=3. I couldn’t find the source for the blip in the 1830 period. – TL

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