Author: Nicholas Taylor
Graduation Year: 2006
Advisor:
Reader:
Date: 02 May 2006
Link to Thesis: nicholastaylor.pdf
In the spring of 2000, a band of undergraduate students staged a series of demonstrations against the administration of the Claremont Colleges over the plight of the campus dining hall workers. The malcontents were indignant that the colleges would not censure the contracted food services company over the issue of workers’ rights to unionize and their general undercompensation. For several weeks, the protesters camped out on lawns, held rallies and workshops, and, at the more tense moments, boycotted classes and blockaded the entrances to administration buildings. Articles were written about the goings-on in the student newspapers and there was even some coverage by local media.
I have an intimate familiarity with these events since I was an undergraduate at the Claremont Colleges at the time. As the collective size of the campuses of the five sister colleges was relatively small – perhaps a twenty-five minute walk from southern- to northern-most point – in a typical day I crossed paths with some of the demonstrators. I witnessed a great deal of student activism at the Claremont Colleges but these particular protests have never sat well with me. I have long had the sense that, the students’ good intentions notwithstanding, there was something misplaced about this approach. In retrospect, I felt it to be emblematic of a not-uncommon simplified oppositional analysis and a preference for spectacle over materiality seen in strategies of dissent generally.
I was troubled by the protesters’ apparent indifference to the underlying structural relationship between themselves and the workers, and I ask myself: does the privilege to attend an elite, liberal arts college not presuppose complicity with an economic system that depends on inequities such as those that led to the marginalization of the dining hall workers? What did the students ever do to earn the right to be there? Speaking for myself, I would not say that I had in any material way earned that privilege. There were no doubt many students there like me, advantaged children of upper-middle class, white professionals, and even the ones who were not like me must have necessarily had some especial opportunities. My fortune is explained by that my immigrant great-grandparents had been both resourceful and lucky. They were able to bootstrap their children into a position of sufficient economic stability that my grandparents could then go on to provide my mother and her sisters with the education (much as I was subsequently to receive) that would situate them firmly in the professional class – that class that is primarily the beneficiary rather than subject of the exploitation of labor under capitalism. I believe that no amount of personal virtue justifies this privilege, nor do I subscribe to the fantasy that my great-grandparents worked any harder then than the dining hall workers do now. It seems to me that my education was enabled by the accumulation of excess wealth that capitalism permitted. Whether or not that indirectly entailed the disenfranchisement of workers analogous to those dining hall workers, I do not know.
So I guess I felt that it was disingenuous to vilify the administration for an injustice that I, and, by reasonable extension, many of the other students, were complicit with and therefore audacious to claim, as did one student in an editorial directed at the President of Pomona College that, “The dining hall workers have been forced to work at a slave wage, largely without the benefits you take for granted.”
The protesters took their benefits for granted, too, for as disenfranchised as they apparently felt the workers to be, they considered themselves to be safely outside the production of that disenfranchisement that they could tenably prosecute others for their complicity. Without being willing to admit the contingencies of their position, they were unable to confront them. Supposing the protesters’ sincerity, I find it odd that there was no discussion of the forfeiture of privilege as a possible solution to the perceived injustice. Rather than internalizing the cost associated with the imposition of their ideological values, the testers wanted the non-party community to assume the burden, either through increased tuition or degraded quality of education and facilities. If they were so passionately dedicated, then why could they not take all of the tuition money that was being paid for them to, among other things, boycott classes and degrade the administrative functionality of the colleges for all of the other students, and just give it to the workers? It was the workers’ money in some sense after all, that the students and their families had only come into by virtue of the inequality that capitalism legitimized.
The same aforementioned student editorialist went on to argue that the plight of the dining hall workers was anathema to the principles that a liberal arts education stood for: “The pursuit of justice, and the development of progressive attitudes toward action to counter injustice, rest at the very core of a liberal arts education…The view from the President’s office seems to have levitated off this hallowed ground and focused its sights instead upon a bureaucratic regulation of the highest order.”
In the case of the university, however, the aim of such “bureaucratic regulation” is not profit. Rather, monetary capital is just a means to the ends of accumulation of knowledge capital and the generation of institutional prestige. The marginal compensation of the dining hall workers incidentally supports this agenda as resources that are not spent on labor can instead be spent on cultural studies professors, lectures by guest speakers, workshops on race and gender, and the recruiting and subsidization of a “diverse” student body. The rationalization of labor thus serves the noble objective that the editorialist identified: the provision of a robust and socially-informed liberal arts education. If the renunciation of privilege could have led to an actual improvement in the lives of the dining hall workers, this points to the conclusion that its alternative, protest, was not, in this case, a strategy for challenging the inequalities in the system so much as for concealing their perpetuation. The student editorialist affirmed proudly that “The members of the Claremont Colleges Community who still see the world at ground level have risen up in vast numbers in protest of these injustices, and in so doing, have courageously restored the faith of their education.”
The irony was that the editorialist was right – not in that our education was meant to show the path to practicing justice in earnest, but rather that the function of our education was to learn how to play the game well enough to self-affirm our commitment to justice while still doing virtually nothing to redress it. As I noted before, we the students were fine with inequality; it served us by furnishing us with an education. However, as would be the case for anyone with a conscience, the idea of our complicity with such an arrangement created cognitive dissonance. So we staged a protest to convince ourselves of our sincerity and solidarity with the worker’s cause, feigning that this was the most bold and efficacious strategy we could employ. This strategy did not aim for material effect, however. It was principally an exercise in ego maintenance: the need to disavow a sense of responsibility for the reality that the disenfranchisement of the workers was our own fault, the need to believe that we have agency, and the desire to feel better that we had had a positive impact on people’s lives.
I am troubled now to see the same disingenuous ritual played out on a far grander scale, aggrandized by the media. Bill Gates is lauded for his $1 billion contribution to fight AIDS in Africa, but it is just money expropriated from PC users worldwide via Microsoft’s software monopoly. We have effectively all paid a tax to Mr. Gates so that
he can take credit for his generous philanthropy with our money. The website for a political action committee displays a scanned letter from a disbursement recipient. What cachet we might suppose such an artifact to have is perturbed by the fact that it was composed by a congressional intern, printed, autopenned, faxed, scanned back into digital form, and then ultimately uploaded.
Tens of thousands of protesters manifest, logistically facilitated by the consumption of commensurate resources, to protest a “war for oil” in Iraq, all with the hope of a highballed headcount estimate on the evening news. This is not to dispute that Africa needs aid, that individuals should be made to feel more a part of the political process, that we should get out of Iraq, or even that the dining hall workers deserve more rights, but it is to say that, if these are changes we sincerely mean to effect, we had better start thinking a little deeper about how we are going to go about ccomplishing them. This thesis is an examination of the multifarious functions of the dislocation of interests wrought by both globalization and dissent.