03 CL22 Ramsey proofed JR


Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice 
2015-2017 (Whole Number 22), pp. 1-37 
 

Introducing Scholactivism 

Reflections on Transforming Praxis in and beyond the Classroom 

Joseph G. Ramsey 

Let the world change you, and you can change the world. 

—Ernesto “Che” Guevara 

When I was a boy I always assumed that I would grow up to be both a scientist 
and a Red. Rather than face a problem of combining activism and scholarship, I 
would have had a very difficult time trying to separate them. 

—Richard Levins 

Merging scholarship and activism, Scholactivism evokes a conceptual shadow: 
scholasticism, a term with its origins in the first medieval universities, now come to signify a 
“narrow-minded insistence on traditional doctrine.”1 Changing two letters in this old-fashioned 
word, our emphasis shifts from the dogmatic, tradition-bound tasks of academic adjudication, to 
a project more in line with Karl Marx’s famous Eleventh Thesis on Ludwig Feurbach, theses 
aimed at the scholasticism of his own day: “Philosophers have sought to understand the world. 
The point is to change it.” We move from the frame of resolving contradictions through cloistered 
academic disputation, to that of exposing and sharpening contradictions, so they can be 
resolved through extra-curricular, world-transforming practice. 

Change the world through praxis, yes! But how? By what means, from what vantage 
point, upon what terrain, using which tools, towards what end? Certainly the will to change the 
world does not mean the abandonment of one’s current position within that world. Nor can one 
change the world in an emancipatory way without deeply understanding it. So then, our Call for 
Papers asked: How can scholarly work—the work of knowing and learning, from teaching to 
research, writing and publishing—be done differently in light of an activist horizon aiming at 
fundamental social change? Furthermore, we asked, how has the university terrain itself been 
transformed by social, economic, and political forces in the current period, and how have these 
changes closed down or opened up problems and possibilities for scholactivism? The present 
issue sets out from the assumption that if the synthesis of knowledge and action— theory and 
practice— that Marx’s theses on Feurbach pointed towards is to be realized,2 we must grasp 
both the shifting terrain of our immediate situation, as well as the more general tendencies 
affecting the world-system, so we can radically relate actions in the former realm to the horizon 
of the latter. 

As Gary Zabel points out in his essential contribution to this volume, human praxis by 
definition aims at transformation of the social world. Praxis is thought-inspired action—based 



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upon action-informed thought—which leaves both the world and the agent working upon it 
different than they were before. In emphasizing not just praxis but reflections on 
transforming praxis our issue insists on the need to deliberately and collectively take measure of 
current modes of scholarly and activist praxis alike, in light of changing conditions and new 
urgencies. There is of course no shortage of well-intended practice in the world today, but too 
often the lessons drawn from such practice remain localized or are lost when a particular upsurge 
subsides. Such is the state of a left without solid centralizing networks, without geographic or 
temporal continuities in leadership or organization, a left that, we might say, has not yet learned 
how to party.3 By bringing together in this volume the reflections of dozens of colleagues and 
comrades, we hope to help scholar-activists from around the world learn from one another, 
and in this way to make a humble contribution to transcending the fragmentation and isolation 
that remains a barrier to materializing Marx’s Eleventh Thesis. 

The focus here is on praxis “in and beyond the classroom,” but our “beyond” is not a 
simple “outside.” Certainly, many of the reflections gathered foreground extra-curricular modes 
of engagement: faculty union organizing, off-campus anti-austerity mobilization, ecological 
and anti-racist community organizing. Others reflect upon collective struggles taking place in 
non-classroom spaces still linked with the university—from digital university practices, to the 
physical and financial architecture of the neoliberal campus. At the same time, other contributors 
draw out the need to re-conceive classroom praxis itself. The “beyond” here thus also signals the 
way that struggles ‘elsewhere’ reverberate back into the classroom, creating opportunities for 
new and engaged forms of “traditional” teaching and research. 

In this Scholactivist spirit, each of the 26 pieces (43 contributors) in this 500 page 
volume recounts and reflects upon not only a current situation facing our profession, our people, 
and/or our planet, but a deliberate attempt to change that situation. These are not simply 
“applications” of preexisting theoretical knowledge, but narratives and theorizations of practical 
engagement. As Adolph Reed put it in a forceful polemic with the late great Ellen Meiksins 
Wood, “Capitalism’s limits and requirements can be known only by testing them practically.” As 
Mao put it: To know the pear, you must bite the pear. 

By and large our contributors are united in grasping the “pear” as the neoliberal 
university, understood as both a site and a symptom of broader capitalist crises.4 Still, as Edward 
Carvalho’s striking cover art dramatizes, Scholactivism expresses not a sense of settled 
conclusions, but of rupture. The apple—the traditional desktop gift of student to teacher, not to 
mention a symbol of tabooed knowledge— has exploded. A pen torpedoes across the page. 
(Whether it be the implement of austerity administrators or of determined scholactivists 
themselves is not entirely clear.) The specter of a fist rises in the background, as the blasted bits of 
apple scatter. How much of the fruit can be or should be salvaged? What remains edible and what 
is best left to rot? Is the apple to be replaced altogether by the fist? Or can the raised hand save 
the apple from the falling academic pillar? The split page rendering of “Schol-Activism” further 
signals a ripping, a tearing in the academic fabric: scholars compelled to become… something 
else. But what? 

 

 



Ramsey  3 

Conversations with Activist Scholars 

Carvalho follows up his explosive cover image with our opening text, an interview with 
Ward Churchill, “The Activist Scholar: A Responsibility ‘to confront and dismantle.’” This 
provocative and informative exchange, we should note, is a follow-up to an essay Churchill 
contributed to the 2008-9 issue of Works and Days, after being terminated from his post at 
University of Colorado-Boulder.5 This time around, Ward Churchill offers his own straightforward 
definition of scholactivists: they are the ones who don’t “just talk the talk, but walk the walk.” 
Churchill offers a challenge, “There’s a responsibility to engage in concrete actions right along 
with the nonscholars whose liberation struggles we purportedly embrace, outside the comfort zone 
of the academy.” “Absent such entanglement,” Churchill states, “scholactivism is merely a 
sham.” 

As Churchill’s case makes painfully clear, such entanglement comes with risks, even 
for the tenured professor and internationally renowned scholar. Beyond this provocation, 
Churchill offers an inspiring discussion of fellow scholactivists who have for decades “walked the 
walk,” but also some critical reflections on problematic trends that have tended to hamper 
scholar-activism in the current period: from “the left’s so-called turn to theory,” to trends in online 
academic publishing that tend to scatter rather than gather radical thought, to a growing 
emphasis on localism in post-60s activism (and activist-aligned scholarship). Often lacking the 
global vision of emancipation as well as the broad social movement networks of their Sixties 
forebears, such locally rooted activism, for Churchill, is “both good and bad, but makes it a lot 
harder to keep track of who’s doing what.” With our opening section of interviews and 
roundtables Scholactivism strives to assist with this mapping problem. 

The remarkable international roundtable of socialist scholar activists facilitated by 
Babak Amini gives us a comradely conversation that crosses four continents. “Scholactivism: 
A Roundtable Interview” features world-renowned Marxist intellectuals with actually 
existing ties to working class organizations, social movements, and leftist political parties 
ranging from Brazil, to Canada, South Africa, France, and Italy. While attending to geo-
national differences, Amini’s contributors trace worldwide historical trends and their 
implications for Marxist scholarship. Among them: shifts in the state of the workers movement, 
changes in dominant ideology, and the permeation of global capitalism into academic realms via 
the increasingly corporate university. 

Amini’s introduction to this hefty exchange usefully historicizes the concept of “the 
intellectual” in relationship to politics and society as it has come down to us through the ages, 
drawing a focus especially to Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci’s interventions in this tradition. 
He traces a genealogy from the idea of the elite-bound “philosopher king” to the “neutral” 
intellectual seen as on the side of progress “in general,” to the notion of intellectual production 
as necessarily “taking sides” in the social struggle that is fundamental to capitalist society as 
such. 

Uniting with this overall commitment to proletarian partisanship, several in this 
roundtable nonetheless share concerns about the limited space available for genuine scholar-
activist engagement in the current moment. This includes a concern about the resistance to 
serious (self)critique found among many activist, worker, and left-identified groups. The 



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roundtable thus raises a crucial question: How can scholactivists work to create more fertile 
ground for mutually transformative theoretical-practical exchange? What are the actually 
existing prospects for putting critical theory into dialogue with organized working people in 
such a way as it can—again— become a material force in history? 

Though the exemplary rigor of all the responses (including also Ricardo Antunes, Pietro 
Basso, Michael Löwy, and José Paulo Netto) demand attention, I will highlight Patrick Bond’s 
and Leo Panitch’s contributions if only to emphasize their useful methodological proposals. 
Bond proposes that scholars reverse their tendency to see themselves as the “teachers” and 
instead seek out lessons from activists themselves, drawing upon their practical experiences 
challenging established systems of oppression and exploitation as a way of deepening and 
concretizing scholarly understandings of such theoretical issues as the relationship between 
‘Structure and Agency.’ Attending closely to the experiences of activist attempts (both positive 
and negative) may yield valuable knowledge about unanticipated possibilities for 
transformation, as well as the range of state responses to such resistance. Bond frames for us a 
basic method: “activist production of knowledge through conflict, fed back into rigorous 
intellectual exercise…so as to codify this knowledge” and render it capable of being effectively 
deployed as a tool in broader intellectual debates and struggles. This call to put academics to 
work in the service of actually existing resistance movements seems to me a valuable one. The 
focus on resistance as a primary site of knowledge-production and a practical anchor for 
theoretical reflection is especially welcome. Correct ideas about the nature of actually existing 
capitalism and the possibilities for radically transforming it cannot be derived from explication 
of the Marxist classics alone. 

Bond exemplifies the self-critical spirit for which he argues. He discusses his own past 
errors, such as in the early 2000s when he publicly predicted the impossibility of the movement 
for cheap AIDS drugs in South Africa, only to be proven wrong by a social movement. Bond 
admits that he overstated the fixed dominance of power structures opposing the emergent 
movement of the HIV-positive and their allies; within a few short years of intense struggle, activist 
efforts taught Bond the limits of his own sophisticated Marxist theoretical orientation. Activists 
taught him the surprising power of people in motion…and the danger of academic pretense. 
Here in the US, in the wake of a Bernie Sanders campaign whose unprecedented electoral 
success and ideological breakthroughs similarly shook the pompous predictions of hard-core 
Marxist determinists, Bond’s advice seems particularly prescient. Even the rigorous and well-
intended critic can fall into serious error, Bond points out, especially when they are distanced 
from the thick of the struggle. Bars look all the more solid when you’re not close enough to see 
how many people are shaking them. Drawing from such self-critical reflections, Bond valuably 
codifies what he calls the “ten deadly sins” of left intellectuals with respect to people’s 
movements, pitfalls that radicals based in academia need to struggle consciously to avoid. We 
should post them on our office walls. 

Leo Panitch’s comments also deserve some singling out. He favors identifying openly as a 
socialist in his intellectual work—emphasizing the serious responsibility that being a socialist 
scholar entails. After all, for those who really are committed to contributing to the project of 
understanding the world in order to change it, it matters more to get things right..not just to get 
them published. In a similar spirit, Panitch emphasizes the need for critical inquiry within the 
socialist and working class movement, insisting on the need to resist calls to suppress criticism 



Ramsey  5 

in order to “sound optimistic” or paint a feel-good face on an often ugly picture. He argues for 
subjecting social movements and working class organizations to comradely critique—not in 
opportunistic “take downs” in the pages of the New York Times, he writes, but in the pages of 
magazines like the Socialist Register—so we can really learn the lessons of what is working and 
what is not and why. In a similar vein, Panitch draws a distinction between advocate 
intellectuals who ally with existing calls to expand rights to “victims” within the coordinates of 
the existing system, and critical intellectuals who go to the root of things and draw out not just 
the “victimhood” but the actual and potential power of working class people within the 
system. 

Panitch emphasizes the importance of socialist researchers doing what they can to put to 
rest flawed but influential concepts in the Marxist tradition that too-often have functioned to 
comfort, blind, or mislead the movement. He identifies at least two examples. First, the notion 
that capitalism or the Empire is on its last legs, and thus that revolutionary opportunity is right 
around the corner—a view often buffeted by reference to the “falling rate of profit” in Marx’s 
second and third volumes of Das Kapital (volumes which, as Panitch points out, Marx did not 
himself ever publish…perhaps for good reason). Second is the notion that the state under 
socialism/communism is to be “smashed” or to “wither away”—rather than, say, to be 
restructured and run in a radically different manner. Both correctives—one “pre-revolutionary” 
and the other “post-revolutionary”—link up with Panitch’s broader argument for a socialist praxis 
that takes what he calls a “fifty year view.” We need more than calls for overthrowing the 
existing order, he insists; we need to patiently build the kind of institutions and movements that 
can actually challenge, overthrow, and transform a capitalist imperialist system that is in fact 
incredibly strong—financial and ecological crises notwithstanding. While this is not the place 
for a full response to these provocations, Panitch’s willingness to challenge the ruling common 
sense of not only neoliberalism but marxism is commendable. 

Rounding out our “Conversations” section, Carl Grey Martin facilitates a remarkable 
discussion with well-known radical historian Marcus Rediker (co-author with Peter 
Linebaugh of The ManyHeaded Hydra) and scholar-activist Modhumita Roy, presenting a 
lively exchange that bridges from the classroom to the slave ship, from the archive to the film 
screen, from ethics to epistemology, from the “medieval period” to today. Aptly titled “Narrative 
Resistance,” their discussion attends in various ways to both framing terms, exploring the 
theory and practice of writing and teaching “history from below.” Exemplified by Rediker’s many 
books on sailor and slave resistance upon the high seas, this approach seeks out the “lost 
voices of the past,” aiming to recapture not only the individual experience, but also the 
collective agency of workers and oppressed peoples entangled in the exploitative structures of 
capitalism and empire. Emphasized throughout is the value—and the challenge— of writing 
narrative, of crafting stories that are accessible to the broadest possible audience. 

The argument for a narrative restoration of lost voices (including propertyless voices 
from outside trade unions, political parties, or even the wage-relation itself) leads this roundtable 
to challenge postmodern and post-structural paradigms, which, in the guise of resisting “grand 
narratives” of history, often make a fetish of difficulty, particularity, and indeterminacy, 
smuggling in individualist and identity politics in the name of resisting the notion of thinking 
capitalism as a totality. Our discussants challenge such anti-totality totalizing, both on an 
epistemological plane and an ethical one. Rediker provocatively calls out postmodern doubt-



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mongers for “the sheer laziness” of ignoring other—tough to find, but nonetheless available—
forms of historical evidence, prematurely leaping from aporias in the easily accessed documents of 
the ruling class to transcendental questions such as Gayatri Spivak’s infamous “Can the 
Subaltern Speak?” “Can the subaltern speak?” Rediker quips, referring to his own archival 
investigations: “I can’t get the subaltern to shut up!” Squarely facing the crisis of contemporary 
capitalism, the authors emphasize the need to “ransack” the past for stories that can help to stir 
resistance, spread insurgent seeds, and create space for revolutionary thinking in the present. The 
point is not just to pursue knowledge of the past as a scholarly end-in-itself, but to construct 
graspable truths which, however partial, may be of use—in the form of lessons as well as 
inspirations—to people who are still struggling, materially and morally, against in the capitalist-
imperialist system today. 

This sense of historical and human responsibility spills into a valuable discussion of 
classroom teaching, and into reflections on the relationship between activism and scholarship. 
Urgently pressing home the need to do more than model radical ideas and critical methods, 
especially in a historical moment where many university students lack a mass political catalyst 
akin to the Vietnam War, Modhumita Roy argues for incorporating activist assignments into our 
syllabi, to familiarize students with modes of social engagement that transcend the academic. 
Responding to this, Marcus Rediker outlines two of his own crucial pedagogical objectives. These 
remain within and yet also in a way transcend the classroom: first, to bring students to recognize 
and reflect upon the fact that their own (selective) historical ignorance has a (class) structure; and 
second, to situate students imaginatively in dramatic moments in history when actual people 
had to make actual decisions in the face of actual situations involving oppressive institutions. 
While Rediker may not formally assign activist projects in his classes, then, he nonetheless 
compels students to dwell in the existential time-space of activism, where they must confront 
the question of what is to be done in the face of social injustice, past or present. To this Carl 
Grey Martin adds the useful point that, by confronting students with the very fact of resistance, 
such a “history from below” upends dominant notions of History, which even to this day, 
naturalize oppression and injustice, indoctrinating students with the idea that “back then” 
“everyone accepted” injustices such as slavery—slave-holders and slaves alike being mere 
products of their time. To foreground resistance, then, is not just to recover lost voices, but to 
make palpable for students the material fact that history—both as event and as representation—
is produced by actual people, in actual circumstances. In this sense, even the recovery of an 
“isolated act” of “individual” resistance passes the torch of possibility. A single spark of hope 
from the past may start a prairie fire. 

Adding one more dialectical twist, Rediker recounts how important it has been for him 
throughout his career, even as he stands in academia, to keep one foot “planted on the 
pavement,” as a way of keeping in touch with the “sources of rage” in society. Drawing from his 
long-standing prison activism and in particular his conversations with revolutionary political 
prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rediker emphasizes how “activism taught me what to look for” in his 
historical work. Modeling an exemplary mix of accessibility, radicalism, and humility, he offers 
some down-to-earth scholactivist advice: “If you go and talk to people, you can learn a lot.” 

 

 



Ramsey  7 

Defining and Contesting the Terms and Terrain of “Schol-Activism” 

The meta-discussion of how we ought to conceive (or not conceive) the relationship 
between scholarship and activism is developed further in our second section of essays. Toby 
Miller’s “We are All Activists Now” queries the term “activism” as it is often heard these 
days, taking aim at a number of problematic assumptions and tendencies. He alerts us to the 
danger of grasping “activist” as a personal attribute that has more to do with self-conscious leftist 
posturing than with the actual content of work being done. Miller laments and cautions against 
the kind of “activist” stance that exudes skepticism towards all authority and towards established 
institutions and science as such, pointing out how postmodern and post-structuralist traffic in 
doubt and uncertainty has an uncanny resemblance to the anti-scientific skepticism of climate 
denialists. Which is to say, antiauthoritarian or anti-institutional “activism” is not inherently 
progressive. 

Nor is academic activism the exclusive property of the political left. As Miller points 
out, on our very campuses—both within and outside of humanities departments—an activist 
right remains quite strong; indeed, the invisibility of such activism is often a sign of its 
institutional strength. This then brings Miller to another crucial reminder, namely that the 
university itself remains a crucial site of political struggle, not some site removed from ‘real 
politics.’ Would be scholar-activists best learn the particular terrain of the political struggles that 
are going on right on their campus, and within their particular academic discourses. Miller’s 
essay thus usefully cautions us against a one-sided notion of activist practice that suggests “real 
politics” is always elsewhere than the academy, as if the best thing that a scholactivist could do 
with their institutional position is to resign it and “take to the streets.” 

For that matter: where are “the streets” today? Patrick Colm Hogan’s ambitious 
“Politically Engaged Scholars: An Analytic of Positions and Norms” constructs an expansive 
logical “grid” for mapping and evaluating various modes of scholar/activist activity. Hogan’s 
map complicates the idea that there is or should be a single model or single privileged site for our 
schol-activism, effectively arguing for a kind of “diversity of tactics” among politically engaged 
scholars. Hogan goes beyond describing the existing multiplicity, thoughtfully tracing the 
strengths and weaknesses, benefits and dangers, of the various positions and approaches he 
considers. Thus while he argues against enforcing any narrow norm of schol-activism, he does 
not simply affirm spontaneous pluralism, but rather aims to foster what he calls “an effective 
distribution of activities in practice.” Hogan makes clear that there are many valid ways to 
bring together scholarly expertise and political engagement—perhaps then the next challenge is 
how to bring these various modes themselves together in a more strategic manner? 

I won’t recount here the full schema of Hogan’s impressive grid, but a few features of 
his approach deserve to be highlighted. One admirable aspect of his map is that it offers us a 
means for respecting different approaches as complementary rather than as competing. His 
essay pushes back against the tendency to mis-recognize a difference in the mode of 
engagement—or in institutional position— as expressive of an underlying political antagonism. In 
a related vein, Hogan is particularly insightful in his treatment of the practical and theoretical 
implications of scholar-activist modes that take their distance from existing institutions vs. those 
that engage directly or even join them. Here the tendencies he maps are seemingly contradictory, 
but perhaps dialectically so. For instance, as Hogan argues, scholactivist involvement with the 



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nitty gritty of existing organizations and institutions tends to both productively complicate and 
problematically oversimplify engaged theory and practice. Such a mode usefully concretizes by 
giving scholars a sense of the structure, texture, and contingent lived detail of problems that they 
previously understood from afar. Yet it also can lead to simplification, due to several factors: the 
“anchor effect” of dominant positions within a particular organization, the constraints of activist 
time-tables, the need to communicate to non-specialists about complex issues, as well as the 
tendency for such scholar-activists to be drawn out of the zones of their formal training. Are these 
opposed tendencies—towards concretization on the one hand, towards over-simplification on the 
other—inherent to this mode of scholactivism, or might it be possible to develop a synthesis 
whereby the close concretization of practical experience is not undercut by the dumbing down 
of rushed or superficial application? By noting the dangers—and the virtues—of such 
immediate practical involvement, Hogan makes a genuine contribution to thinking through the 
very contradiction that he maps; neither the “pragmatists” nor the “purists” have all the answers 
here. In light of this dialectical reading of the opposition Hogan maps— that is, the contradictory 
fact that changing one’s structural relationship to an issue can have major bearing (both positive 
and negative) on one’s ability to grasp the reality of that issue—it’s tempting to put a bit of 
pressure on a few of his more normative judgments. Hogan’s affirmation of the ethical virtues of 
universality and individual autonomy leads him to make two criticisms that I feel compelled to 
question. The first is his criticism of Stephen Salaita (and those who have championed his cause) 
for a failure of universalism. Here, to be clear, Hogan, like Salaita, condemns the murderous 
assault of the state of Israel on the people of Gaza, and unites with the outrage over Salaita’s 
unjust firing for voicing outspoken criticisms. Where Hogan differs concerns the particular 
form of Salaita’s tweet-critiques, and the general reluctance of the left to take issue with 
Salaita’s use of language that, Hogan argues, implied an endorsement of mass violence against a 
civilian population, albeit an illegal, settler one. While I appreciate Hogan’s willingness to push 
back against the prevailing left-wing view of a hot topic—and I agree with him that we ought to 
struggle to keep open space for dissident views—it does seem that his reading of Salaita’s 
tweets may slight the context in which those comments were made, a context in which Salaita’s 
use of provocative language went beyond the realm of academic civility. Twitter after all is a 
medium characterized by sarcasm, irony, personal emotions, and provocative over-statement—a 
place where often the loudest or shocking voices are the ones that get heard. This context in 
mind, is it not possible that the provocative nature of Salaita’s comments—comments which he 
was of course in no position to implement—by virtue of their directness and visceral rage, 
actually helped to draw more people into paying attention to, and to opposing, the actual mass 
murder being committed in Gaza by the US-backed Israeli state? 

My second concern involves Hogan’s treatment of the ethical virtue of autonomy, as 
it relates to the question of “politics in the classroom” and teachers who “fire up” their 
students. On the one hand, Hogan incisively critiques Stanley Fish, arguing that, insofar as 
politics are organically related to a scholarly field, it is wrong to expect teachers to abstain from 
discussing them; such a “non-politics” is of course itself a disguised politics, what Hogan 
calls a “pseudo-non-politics.” Yet, on the other hand, when it comes to teachers “firing up” 
their students, or introducing “external” politics into a course, Hogan takes a negative view, 
arguing that such an approach threatens to impinge upon the autonomy of the students (and of the 
academic course material). But, again, in light of Hogan’s own treatment of the dialectical 
relationship between (always imperfect) practical engagement and theoretical insight, might it 
be possible that by “firing up” students a teacher prompts them towards a more intensive 



Ramsey  9 

engagement with a topic, making possible a deeper grasp of course-related content than would 
otherwise occur? 

The MLA Subconference Collective (Bennet Carpenter, Laura Goldblatt, Lenora 
Hansen, Karim Wissa, and Andrew Yale) challenges the notion of the autonomous academic 
classroom with their co-authored article “Schol…Exodus: Learning Within/Against/Beyond 
the Institution.” Offering an ambitious rethinking of the terrain of the contemporary university, 
this essay deploys class-composition theory to trace the contradictory and conflictual 
production of both worker and student subjectivities on campus, with the aim of locating crisis 
points that may indicate the sites of future struggles. Central to this collective contribution is the 
notion that these student and worker subjectivities are more and more being produced through 
the pedagogy of the built environment of the university itself, and the practices these environments 
inscribe. Universities are teaching more than course contents; they are teaching unconscious 
“civics lessons” about who belongs where, through the arrangement of dining halls as much as 
course syllabi. 

In light of the centrality of “material-spatial practices” to subject formation in the 
contemporary university, these authors express skepticism towards the idea that the classroom 
itself can function as a transformative space; they argue for exiting the classroom rather than for 
“flipping” it. To be sure, their close readings of on-campus and off-campus spaces—and their 
incisive critique of officially sanctioned university promotional representations of those 
spaces—suggests the promise of “co-research” that partners teachers and students in politically 
engaged collaborations centered outside the traditional classroom. As they point out, the goal of 
such critical mapping is not merely to understand the contradictions running through and 
beneath the university theoretically, but, through practice, to intensify them. 

This team-authored essay is also notable for its historical grasp of the university in the 
present period. While framing their object of study as the neoliberal university, they caution 
against romanticizing the past. Emphasizing the constitutive exclusions and the militarism that 
structured the neoliberal university’s predecessor—what they insist on calling the “Cold War 
University”—the writers take their distance from influential strains within Critical University 
Studies that lament the passing of the “golden age” of higher education. The Welfare State was 
bound up with the Warfare State, they remind us, a state that brought with it a division of labor 
determined by gender and racial hierarchies. Rather than being an alternative to the “private,” 
“the public” has always itself been a class-bound space, determined by the needs of capitalism, 
even as those demands change over time. To call for “defending” or “restoring” the “public 
university,” then, risks reproducing the blindspots that historically defined prior notions of the 
“public.” While the authors do not—nor should we—go so far as to abandon the strategic value 
of upholding “the public” in this age of heightened privatization, they do ask us to think through 
(and beyond) such terms if we are to truly map an emancipatory educational praxis. 

Concerning the question of how capital’s relationship to the public university has changed 
in our time, the co-authors offer the provocative perspective that the university is no longer 
principally a site of production (whether of labor power or of national culture) but has become 
chiefly a site of capital investment and accumulation. At the same time, such massive capital 
investments are creating new low-wage workplaces on our college campuses, generating what 
they argue is a potentially explosive contradiction between “expanding service and space, 



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contracting wages and work security.” Certainly, their assertions merit further research, including 
testing through organized struggle. At a minimum, this essay convincingly suggests how, 
within a university defined by its material-spatial practices and characterized by intensifying 
service worker exploitation, a practice of “schol-exodus” from the physical classroom may be just 
what the dining hall ordered. 

 

 

Resisting Neoliberalism in the University— Classes, Campuses, Communities 

Food service employees, of course, are not the only workers on campus. In this vein, 
Jeffrey Noonan and Gary Zabel offer compelling, largely complementary, theoretical accounts 
of the transformative potential of faculty union organizing in the current neoliberal conjuncture. 

Noonan’s essay takes the form of summing up lessons from impasses hit by previous 
labor struggles, while Zabel moves from a review of core Marxist concepts to a more positive 
program for “revolutionary praxis in the neoliberal university.” Both comrades unfold an 
ambitious, grounded, strategic vision for a democratic socialist praxis that makes the campus 
faculty union not merely the vehicle for asserting particular immediate employee interests, but a 
mass organization that can play a key role in helping to organize broader popular mobilization. 
Modeling a rare fusion of scholarship and activism, Noonan and Zabel draw upon decades of 
personal, practical experience as labor activists—and also as Marxist philosophers—deriving 
positive programs for action in part from a close study of the real barriers that stand in the way 
of unlocking a situation’s radical potential. 

Crucially, these barriers are grasped not only as matters of external constraint imposed 
upon university faculty from the outside, but also as internal limits, stemming from the self-
conception of faculty members and faculty organizations. Both Noonan and Zabel argue that 
unless faculty are able to transcend wrong but still-dominant ideas about the meaning and 
function of not just unions but of universities and of teaching itself, the fight for faculty union 
rights may be lost in advance. In a neoliberal age of aggressive privatization, organized faculty 
can potentially play a vital role in changing the world…but only if they are willing to 
profoundly change themselves in the process, shedding individualist and elitist professional 
ideology as well as an overly narrow focus on one’s own backyard. 

In “Resolving the Contradictions of Academic Unionism” Noonan traces three acute 
and interlocking contradictions that need to be overcome in order realize the transformative 
potential of an organized professoriate. First is the contradiction between a craft unionism that 
serves only its members, and the need for a social movement unionism that recognizes 
obligations towards society at large. Whereas the former focuses only on advocating for the 
immediate interests of those covered by collective bargaining agreements, the latter draws out 
the connections between the needs and interests of faculty as teachers and researchers and the 
broader needs of a democratic society, whose very existence requires the space for critical 
thought represented by higher education. Second, Noonan explores the contradiction between 
the struggles of faculty, and those of students, as well as other campus workers. Reflecting on 



Ramsey  11 

struggles on his own campus, Noonan shows how the failure to build strong alliances with 
these other crucial campus constituencies spells trouble for a faculty union movement. In a 
vicious circle, craft union narrowness on the faculty side both mirrors and encourages 
consumerist ideology on the side of students—turning potential allies into antagonists. The third 
contradiction for Noonan is that between building campus-centered movements to oppose 
attacks on faculty, students, and staff on a particular campus, and the need for a broader anti-
austerity movement that takes aim at state policies (including regressive tax policies) that 
produce university budget crises in the first place. 

With a dialectical insight that is at once sobering and yet objectively optimistic, Noonan 
argues that until faculty unions can overcome these three contradictions—barriers that are 
simultaneously matters of self-conception and matters of outward practice—they won’t even 
be able to maintain what remains of the craft privileges they have eked out over the years. In an 
age of neoliberal austerity, he argues, faculty unions that fail to coalesce with broader social 
movements and that are unable to connect the struggle on campus to the broader social violence 
of austerity, can be easily isolated and defeated. In a political environment where austerity dons 
the garb of populist leveling, faculty rights (from academic freedom and job security, to state 
pensions or healthcare benefits) that are not deployed and defended in ways that connect to 
common social needs and values can easily be cast as undeserved special privileges, and all the 
more ‘righteously’ stripped. 

It may be due to his Canadian location that Noonan does not dwell much on what we might 
put forth as a crucial fourth contradiction that continues to fracture and tongue-tie faculty power 
here in the US academy: the one between maintaining tenured professor privileges and the need 
for a united faculty movement with the critical mass necessary to defend higher education and 
extend the fight against austerity. Noonan argues astutely that tenured professors at public 
universities occupy a strategic position—possessing a mix of job security, cultural and economic 
resources, symbolic power, and workplace leverage that is rare among the unionized. 
Objectively speaking, this position could allow tenurable faculty to play a powerful leadership 
role in both campus-wide and broader social movements against austerity. Yes. And yet, often 
holding back such objective potential is a kind of privilege that enables and encourages the 
tenure-track or tenured faculty to disassociate from their non-tenure track (NTT) colleagues, 
and to consider themselves “lucky.” 

Following Marxist critical race theorist Theodore Allen’s indispensable work on white 
privilege (Invention of the White Race) we might understand tenured privilege dividing and 
dominating the academic teaching classes for purposes of social control and ‘effective 
management’. It is both a system of super-exploitation for those NTTs at the bottom, as well as 
a strategy for winning obedience from tenurable faculty (who, no doubt, are increasingly 
stressed and overworked themselves as a result), a system that grants the tenured both 
psychological and material rewards for being “better than”  the un-tenurable. But of course, without 
the NTTs, who outnumber them on many campuses and teach many more classes by virtue 
of their heavy course-loads, tenurable faculty lack the power they might have if allied alongside 
their disavowed colleagues.  In this way, privilege becomes a barrier to political potential. 

Helping to map the path towards such faculty power is the work of my UMass Boston 
colleague and veteran NTT organizer, Gary Zabel. Zabel’s brilliant theoretical-practical 



12		Cultural	Logic	

intervention, “Critical Revolutionary Praxis in the Neoliberal University,” should be 
considered must-reading for faculty union organizers. This contribution opens with a valuable 
discussion of the key Marxist concept of praxis, and moves forcefully to distinguish between 
two different notions of praxis: one associated with the transformation of nature (and of 
human beings themselves) through labor, and the other with the conscious effort to fundamentally 
transform the “second nature” of society itself. The latter, rephrasing Marx, Zabel refers to as 
critical revolutionary praxis. While both notions of praxis are in some sense “transformative”—
entailing a change in both the world and the one acting upon it—they are distinct notions, if often 
confused and conflated. Whereas praxis of the first type is itself a defining feature of humanity, 
the latter sort requires a determined, strategic, collective political will that is far from spontaneous. 
Zabel’s demarcation of the two types of praxis is no mere academic hair-splitting. In clarifying 
the use of terms here, he is challenging many a would-be “transformative” intellectual and 
“radical” educator to reflect critically on their own praxis and where it falls. Within humanities 
education especially, the conflation and confusion of the two notions of praxis is especially 
common—perhaps even encouraged. The fact that the labor of humanities professors is focused 
on ideas and discussions about society, politics, and questions of social relations makes it all too 
easy to feel like praxis of the first sort (our labor) is really praxis of the second sort (critical, 
revolutionary). Are we not trained to believe that merely professing ideas in the classroom—or 
jotting them in the margins of student papers— constitutes, on its own, a kind of serious attempt to 
radically change the world for the better, “one student at a time”? Who among us has not indulged 
such a fantasy? And yet, as valuable, personally rewarding, and interesting as the former sort of 
praxis is, without the second sort there is no overcoming of capitalism, nor its attendant injustices, 
inequities, and mounting horrors. How, if at all, we must ask, does academic praxis of the first 
sort translate into praxis of the second kind? 

Of course, for Zabel, the point of distinguishing these two notions of praxis is ultimately 
to bring them back together again, but in a sober and strategic—classically Marxist—way. If 
the spontaneous labor of people (including academics) is not enough to transform social relations 
beyond capitalism, it remains the case that the working class of society, whose labor produces 
and reproduces the social world, is the only collective agent capable of actually carrying 
through the project of critical revolutionary praxis, for it is the only group in society that has not 
only the interest but the power, collectively, to radically transform social relations—ultimately 
by taking control of the means of production, and supplanting capitalist class domination 
altogether. 

Here we might call attention to a difference in the theoretical orientation informing the 
practically allied articles of Noonan and Zabel. Whereas Zabel roots his argument for the 
most part in the centrality of working class interests and power, Noonan grounds his in the 
foundation of socialist ideas and ethics. Noonan’s notion of life-value offers an added 
philosophical dimension—underscoring the importance of a hegemonic struggle that does not 
only make the case for working class power from working class interests, but argues that socialism 
is essential for supporting, cultivating, and protecting life-values on earth in general. Noonan’s 
socialist ethics of life-value offers us a critical supplement to the nonetheless crucial politics and 
appeals of class. The notion of class interest itself, after all, is not without its contradictions: 
between short-term and long-term interests, present and future interests, local and global 
interests, among others. Working class people have an interest in minimizing their time 
commuting to work (short term), but also in having an atmosphere that their grandchildren can 



Ramsey  13 

still breathe without choking (long term). Here enters the need for something like the eco-socialist 
ethos that Noonan foregrounds.6

 

Besides offering a method for adjudicating the contradictory interests and desires of a 
differentiated and far from self-identical global working class, Noonan’s notion of life-value 
foregrounds a crucial ethical and cultural dimension of the struggle for socialism, one that 
scholar-activists may be well-equipped to help with. We need to change hearts and minds as 
well as to organize bodies on the line. The fight for public education and against austerity thus 
becomes not only an exercise in building working class power, but a chance to popularize the 
crucial social insight that neoliberal capitalism has become incompatible with basic life values 
and human need writ large. In this sense, there remains a need not just for teachers to become 
class-conscious workers, but to become teachers of the public in the broadest sense. Here Noonan 
differs somewhat from the MLA Subconference Collective. Noonan frames public higher 
education—and the realm of public services and institutions within capitalism more generally— 
as a contradictory site that remains of special strategic value. Certainly, such institutions cannot 
be thought of as autonomous ‘socialist’ enclaves within capitalism; they play a role in 
capitalist reproduction as well as in legitimating the system. Nonetheless the semi-autonomy of 
public institutions as zones not completely subsumed under the rule of capital and commodity 
exchange also means that they can be seen—and claimed—as ‘civil commons’ where a 
notion of life value other than that of capitalist profit maximization obtains. Public education and 
other public institutions thus represent sites to be defended and extended, the inheritance of 
valuable (if incomplete) social and working class struggles against capitalist domination. There is 
a danger in under-stating their autonomy, as well as in overstating it. 

Zabel’s class analysis of the position of both professors and students in contemporary 
neoliberal US capitalism further supports the view of higher education as a potential strongpoint 
for proletarian organizing. While recognizing that not all professors and not all students can be 
categorized as working class—some come from families that live off capital and the exploited 
labor of others, while others are now using the space of the university itself as a site of exploitation 
and profit-making—Zabel offers cogent arguments that most professors (tenured and tenure-track 
faculty included) can in fact be considered as working class. Notwithstanding perceived 
cultural differences or clear involvement in “hierarchies of command,” the vast majority of 
professors still must sell their labor power to live. Nor does the possession of a Masters or a 
Ph.D. allow them to set up shop as any sort of independent petty bourgeois intellectual. In other 
words, unlike earlier historical periods, when intellectuals, academic and non-, often did stand 
‘objectively’ outside the working class—a fact that gave rise to voluminous and vexatious 
debates about the fraught relationship between “intellectuals” and the workers—such is no longer 
the case: most professors are proletarianized, and not only the adjunct and contingent faculty who 
now constitute the majority of higher educators across the US. There is then an objective basis for 
unity and power within this proletarianized professoriate, and thus for optimism—if we can 
get our collective act together. Too often, however, this potential is dampened and 
dismembered by pervasive and persistent professional ideology. As both Noonan and Zabel argue, 
such ideology reinforces individualism, idealism, and elitism, all of which undermines the 
solidarity, strategy, and egalitarianism that is crucial to actualizing all this proletarian potential. 

Building from his class analysis and an account of historical trends affecting higher 
education, Zabel derives a compelling strategy sketch for socialist professors in the academy 



14		Cultural	Logic	

today—one that encompasses both the officially designated realms of classroom teaching and 
research, as well as the class-conscious labor organizing that remains the essence of a Marxist 
praxis. He offers us forward-looking proposals for how professors in the university who aspire to 
critical revolutionary praxis can go about concretizing those aspirations—working in alliance 
with students and other campus and off-campus workers. The latter project, Zabel notes, will be a 
learning experience for us professional teachers—often a humbling one. “In the academy above 
all,” he writes, “the educator must be educated.” 

Starting from the here and now of a more ‘traditional’ classroom, Bradley Freeman’s 
essay “‘Better Days Ahead’: Teaching Revolutionary Futures and Protesting the Present” 
provides a forceful argument for the continued value of ‘old fashioned’ close reading, specifically 
of texts that engage themes of social rebellion and revolution. Interpreting novels and films that 
foreground historical ruptures, Freeman argues, can offer us a means of regenerating radical 
hope, a particularly crucial dimension if we are to energize Marxism in an era of neoliberalism. 
Against both a naive Obama-esque optimism and a cynical pessimism that sees in the present 
nothing but ‘more of the same,’ Freeman draws upon the work of Ernst Bloch as well as the 
queer Marxism of Kevin Floyd and José Muñoz to argue for a pedagogical practice that moves 
beyond critique of the current social order to discern within this order the actual and potential 
sites of social rupture, the “not yet within the now,” as Tillie Olsen once put it. And I invoke Olsen 
with intention. For Freeman appropriates the temporally and politically disruptive insights of 
queer theory for a critical project aimed at recovering overtly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist 
literary and cultural texts, including proletarian literature of the Great Depression era (as well as 
contemporary eco-dystopian film). Freeman reminds us of how pro-communist literary texts of 
previous crisis eras, with their radical sense of historical possibility, can help us estrange the 
neoliberal present. The proletarian novel that Freeman examines, H.T. Tsiang’s And China Has 
Hands (1937), expands our sense of the possibilities of the (still-neglected, oft-derided) pro-
communist literary genre. Of particular interest is this book’s insistence on framing its 
historical moment in explicitly international terms, a welcome emphasis. Interestingly, both of 
Freeman’s selected utopian-revolutionary texts ‘look to Asia’ for the hope on the horizon. Whether 
in the 1930s or the imagined year of 2031, revolutionary leadership assumes an ‘Eastern’ form, as 
if imagining a USAmerican revolution in the 21st century requires an Asian supplement. 

If Freeman’s treatment of Tsiang’s And China Has Hands is provocative at a theoretical-
methodological level (bringing proletarian literature studies through the wake opened by queer 
theory), his discussion of Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) stirs thinking about our immediate 
moment: a moment of ecological crisis and refugee crisis alike, of openly acknowledged (but 
often displaced) class inequalities and resurgent nationalisms—of Bernie Sanders as well as 
Donald Trump. Freeman affirms the radical rupture that Snowpiercer presents (Spoiler Alert #1). 
As he writes: “In the end…Bong condemns reformation and half measure, suggesting that it is 
the train itself,” symbolizing the capitalist system—or perhaps more precisely the bourgeois 
prohibition on thinking outside the naturalized assumptions of this system—“that must meet an 
explosive end.” The radicalism of the film, for Freeman, is to reveal that the problem with the 
Train is not merely a problem of leadership, or even of its class compartmentalization: there can 
be no reforming The Sacred Engine. The Train, we discover, requires a kind of human fuel that 
we must never accept—better to blow it sky high than let it barrel on, even under “more 
humane” leadership. 



Ramsey  15 

Paired with Snowpiercer’s anti-reformist rupture is a suggestive radicalism at the level of 
revolutionary agency: whereas Curtis (played by Chris Evans, an American actor best known for 
comic book superheroes such as Captain America) appears for most of the film to be the 
anointed macho white “leader” of the excluded—and the hero of the film—appearances prove 
deceiving. (Spoiler Alert #2) Arriving in the front car, Curtis hesitates, tempted by mastermind 
Wilford’s offer to assume leadership of the train, as Wilford has intended all along. It is, 
instead, the non-white figures, Nam and Yona, the saboteur-security agents sprung from prison, 
who, though mistaken for self-serving drug addicts—and held in suspicion by their tail car 
liberators— keep the flame and the faith of revolution alive. Nam and Yona aim not only to 
reform the train, but to burst its confines completely. This radical aspiration remains a secret 
until the climactic moment—as if to speak of it too soon would undercut its very possibility. 
“You and your fucking gates,” Nam exasperates to Curtis and points out the gate that is so 
naturalized that “it might as well be a wall”: the gate leading out of the train altogether. As 
Freeman argues, Snowpiercer climaxes by rendering profound the cliche: quite literally, it’s 
necessary to think outside the box(car). 

Freeman’s close reading of the film is lucid and compelling and his emphasis on the 
film’s enactment of a radical rupture fits with his Benjaminian frame.7 One wonders, however, 
how the film’s rapturous derailment might read differently if the cameras lingered longer on 
the sympathetic proles trapped in the back of the train. Presumably they too are sent to their 
deaths when cars roll down the mountain. Read literally at least, for virtually all of the rear car 
passengers, what began as an attempt at revolution ends in annihilation. Is this a story of 
liberation or of bare survival in the wake of tragic negation? 

Furthermore, it may be important to appreciate the way that this “explosive” rupture 
comes about in the film. Nam and Yona’s radical rupture is made possible precisely through the 
‘less radical’ efforts to reform or shift power within the train. Though we may retrospectively 
posit that the radical idea of bursting the train completely existed from the start, the ethical 
necessity and the concrete possibility of making this desire a reality does not become clear without 
“Curtis’ Revolution”, limited, prone to compromise, and even officially staged as it may have been. 
Without Curtis and company, Yona does not get to see the brutal child slavery that sustains the 
engine. Without Curtis’s ‘misguided’ and, yes, even co-optable crusade, Nam does not gain 
access to the gate he wants to blow wide open. 

Transposing Snowpiercer’s allegory back to today’s USA, then: Might it be possible 
that despite, or even because of, its reformist “naivete,” the Sanders “revolution” may bring 
about more radical possibilities than it set out to create? More radical possibilities than a more 
openly “revolutionary” approach could have brought into being?  Calling forth revolutionary 
agency that lives on even after Sanders meets his end? Thus we might ask: If Bernie Sanders be 
Curtis….where are Nam and Yona? 

As radical as Snowpiercer may be in terms of its explosive anti-reformism and its surprise 
displacement of white macho saviors, the film can also be read as a kind of symptom, or—
perhaps more charitably—as a critique of a certain kind of symptomatically limited radicalism, a 
radicalism characteristic of a certain contemporary ecological anti-capitalism in particular. To 
be blunt: the film represents an attempt to imagine a revolution without a working class— a 
revolution of the excluded. Curtis’s is a revolution led by members of a class of ‘passengers’ who 



16		Cultural	Logic	

have no material lever on the productive forces; they have only their will and wits, their courage 
and their numbers. Even more so with Nam and Yona: this is a revolution that has no hope of 
changing society…but might still manage to blow it up. Far from an aberration, isn’t this inability 
to imagine the working class as a revolutionary subject quite typical of radical thought 
today? Nor is this meant as a narrow critique of the film for some kind of ‘petty bourgeois 
ideology.’ Arguably, at least here in the United Sates, the coordinates of radical imagination 
and (im)possibility often take something like this form: disenfranchised and discontented white 
middle-to-working classes demanding redistribution, but prone to co-optation and the 
restoration of past privilege; criminalized and incarcerated non-white minorities more open to a 
radical opposition, but lacking a practicable grip of the productive forces that thus appear as 
nothing but a kind of racing prison. Indeed, the working class that presumably is necessary to the 
functioning of the privileged front cars in Snowpiercer is not just not politicized, it is virtually 
invisible—in their place stand endless ranks of soldiers, their faces masked as if to bar the 
thought that they too might be won to the side of the rebellion. There is no possibility for 
ideological struggle, no one to win over, in Snowpiercer’s revolutionary universe. This may indeed 
make the film a fitting allegory for the revolutionary imagination of our polarized times—but not 
a very hopeful one. 

Complicating ecological-egalitarian aspirations further is the way that the rulers of the 
Train themselves invoke environmental catastrophe—and even environmental sustainability!—in 
order to justify their continued class stratified “order.’” How can the chaos of rebellion be 
permitted when cold frozen death lies just the other side of the walls? Quite provocatively in a 
moment where much overt anti-capitalism appears to be coming from an environmentalist 
place, Snowpiercer paradoxically reminds us both of the impending horror of global warming-
related climate collapse, and of the profound ideological danger of allowing appeals to “Nature” to 
justify ruling-class calls for “order” in the face of tail-car rebellion. 

John Maerhofer’s essay, “Lukács, Mariátegui, and the Dialectical Roots of Edu-
Activism,” similarly “looks East”—and back to the interwar proletarian novel—for his concrete 
example of “edu-activism” in the classroom. Together with Freeman he reminds us of a history 
that ruling forces would have us forget: the history of a Trans-Pacific Proletariat. Maerhofer too 
covers a great deal of ground, ranging across time and space, from institutional to textual 
analysis, from the 1920s to the present, from Japan and Peru to the halls of CUNY. He begins 
with a provocative critique of the (PMLA-approved) notion of the “semi-public intellectual,” 
showing why it’s a conceptual copout. In its unquestioning acceptance of the privileged position of 
“intellectuals” who stand apart from ‘the public’ to which they eclectically relate, this 
discourse stands in stark contrast to—and helps to disavow—the radical pedagogical tradition. 
Associated with the name Paulo Freire and his classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, this tradition 
starts out by acknowledging the special authority offered to intellectuals and teachers within 
class society, but moves to theorize the methods though which this often oppressive hierarchical 
relationship can be transformed and overcome. The latter move, Maerhofer points out, is 
missing from this latest trend. 

But the vital intervention that Maerhofer makes is more than calling us to return to Freire; 
he roots Friere both conceptually and historically, in relationship to his predecessors and to our 
contemporary pedagogical moment. With help not just from Freire but from Georg Lukács and 
José Carlos Mariátegui, Maerhofer helps us to see why a pedagogy of the oppressed, though it 



Ramsey  17 

may begin in the classroom, must not end there. His essay shows us how these well-known 
revolutionary Marxist thinkers are also pedagogical thinkers, helping us to identify the ways in 
which their insights—and the classroom space itself—remain as relevant as ever in our current 
moment of enduring capitalist crisis. 

The literary text that brings Maerhofer’s essay home is the proletarian novel by Takiji 
Kobayashi, Kani Kosen (The Crab Cannery Ship), a work that expresses in an accessible form 
several of the key lessons that Maerhofer teases out of theoretical work from Kobayashi’s 
Hungarian and Peruvian contemporaries. In this way, Maerhofer exemplifies the revolutionary 
internationalism for which he argues. His essay spans four continents—North America, Europe, 
South America, Asia—drawing on the work of comrades then and there to better illuminate our 
radical grasp of the here and now. To activate the latent potential in our proletarian classrooms, 
his essay suggests, may require intercontinental syllabi. 

If Freeman and Maerhofer offer us positive pedagogical suggestions—recovering crucial 
concepts and fanning the spark of hope— the critical dimension of Scholactivism is in full force 
with Gregory Meyerson and Stephen Ferguson’s blockbuster essay, “Shred of Truth: 
Antinomy and Synecdoche in the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” This astounding co-authored 
work exposes major blindspots in the writings of a contemporary who has quickly been 
established as an authority on the topic of race in America, and who is now showing up on 
college syllabi across the country. Even more significantly, Ferguson and Meyerson follow the 
cracks in Coates’ outlook to deeper sources, producing an eye-opening account of both the 
material facts and the pervasive misconceptions surrounding racial oppression and state 
violence in the contemporary United States. 

Meyerson and Ferguson deploy the tools of both literary and of statistical analysis, as 
well as a deep grasp of the historical analyses of Ted Allen (The Invention of the White Race), to 
offer an immanent critique of the key tropes as well as the historical and sociological 
assumptions that define and delimit Coates’ “world”—both in his best-selling Between the 
World and Me and in his influential articles for The Atlantic. Working through statistical evidence 
Coates’ categories can’t deal with, and that many in our movements resist as well, they show in 
detail the inadequacy of “white privilege” theories that paint all whites—even impoverished 
working class whites—as “beneficiaries” of anti-Black racism. Parsing the actual statistics of 
police killings and mass incarceration in the US, Meyerson and Ferguson look the stark and 
appalling racial disparities in the face, but without falling into the common trap that mistakes 
differential oppression for a universal caste-race privilege. 

To put it bluntly, Ferguson and Meyerson show us how the fact that young Black men 
are being subjected to an outrageous and disproportionate rate of brutal state violence—and they 
are—must not lead us to the mistaken view that all whites are akin to “guards,” and all blacks to 
“prisoners” within the US race-class system. Such a view, implied by Coates' work, overlooks 
at least two crucial and defining facts of our era: 1) Even the “lesser” rate of incarceration and 
police kill rate for white males in the USA is through the roof compared to other countries. And 
2) in the era of neoliberal multiculturalism, the ruling class of the USA is no longer an 
exclusively white club. Their article brings into view crucial complexities in the actually existing 
race-class conjuncture, realities that are at once unthinkable within the textual “world” of Ta-
Nehisi Coates, and often silenced within major currents of the existing anti-racist movement. Key 



18		Cultural	Logic	

to their method is a thoroughgoing critique of the way that Coates consistently slips from the 
realm of ideology to that of history, taking as descriptive of reality what is in fact a (reactionary) 
political intervention in that reality. This slippage characterizes Coates’ account of both the past 
and the present: both the white supremacist polemics of J.C. Calhoun, and the Dream of white 
folks’ “bubblegum and ice cream” privilege that Coates saw broadcast on television as a child 
growing up in West Baltimore. That Calhoun or the 80s suburban sit coms of the Reagan Era 
paint a world without exploited white workers—where all whites lived in privilege towering 
above all Blacks—does not make it so. Our co-authors make clear why it is crucial that anti-
racist analysis, in its urgency to combat reactionaries, does not reproduce the blindspots of their 
rhetoric. 

Also key is Ferguson and Meyerson’s deft attention to what we might call the 
dangerous allure of synecdoche—that literary term for representing a part as standing for the 
whole—especially when it comes to matters of state violence and racism in the USA. A “shred 
of truth,” as their title suggests, is seldom something that can be directly extrapolated into the 
totality of that truth. Such unmediated magnification tends to turn that “shred” into something 
altogether misleading. Our co-authors here parallel the lyrical theorizing of Demetrius Noble, 
as well as my own essay, “The Petrified and the Proletarian: Ta-Nehisi Coates & Richard 
Wright,”8 by placing special emphasis on Coates’ central trope of “the black body”—as if there 
were only one, as if all black bodies were the same. Their acute conclusion on this point is worth 
quoting at length: 

In the hands of Coates, the ‘Black Body,’ which seems to be a corporeal, material 
body, is in fact a reifying abstraction severed from the historical materiality of class 
struggle, the division of labor, and social relations of production. The abstract 
concept of the “Black Body” replaces the concrete—and contradictory—
experiences of the Black lumpenproletariat, working class, petit bourgeoisie, and 
bourgeoisie. 

Meyerson and Ferguson identify what seems to me a critical danger facing today’s anti-
racist movement: the urge to dramatize the severity of the problem of racist state violence can lead 
to a distortion of the nature of the problem itself, paradoxically weakening the antiracist 
movement by making it seem like whites—even the increasingly superfluous and 
impoverished, downwardly mobile white working class—inhabit an entirely different “world” 
from the Black people being targeted by police violence and hyper incarceration. It follows from 
such an outlook that whites cannot relate to the struggle against state repression, except in some 
distant “allied” role—after all, according to this dominant view, murderous and excessive state 
violence is not something that happens to white folks…so it’s not their fight. 

But it very much is “their” fight—is our fight. As Ferguson & Meyerson show, the entire 
US working class is now subject to a historically unprecedented level of repressive brutality—
with the urban black poor bearing the brunt of it. The point is not at all to minimize the horror of 
what is being done to the hyper-incarcerated Black “surplus population” of the USA’s collapsing 
ghettos; the point is rather to reveal the possibility of going beyond calling out injustice to 
actually changing this situation, showing the potential for broad working class unity on this 
crucial front. As our authors put it, the bottom line is this: “Any effort to reform criminal justice 
policy in the United States must have a broad working class base in order to make a difference.” 



Ramsey  19 

However valuable Ta-Nehisi Coates’ voice has been as a catalyst for popularizing discussion 
about persistent racial disparities in the USA—and I believe it has been—Meyerson & Ferguson 
argue forcefully that Coates’ writings dangerously obscure what is both needed and possible: 
a broad interracial working class alliance to oppose racist, capitalist state repression. Despite—
or perhaps even because of—the poetic power of his account, Coates’ outlook promises to 
shadow-box American racism rather than to uproot it. 

The space for scholactivism in the classroom, of course, is framed by broader institutional 
forces which condition the freedom to take up controversial themes. Ian Butcher’s essay 
“Student Evaluations, Neoliberal Managerialism, and Networks of Mistrust” calls our 
attention to problems with what is often seen as a rather innocuous feature of academic life: 
end-of-semester student evaluations. Building on research that shows the inadequacy of student 
evals as a means of capturing actual student learning, Butcher examines the rise of the eval—
and in particular of its anonymous and highly quantified form—as a symptom of the neoliberal 
reshaping of the university since the 1970s. Offering a robust historicization of neoliberalism in 
education, he locates the spread of student evaluations in relationship to the rising 
commodification of higher education—from growing privatization, marketization, and a concern 
with financial bottom lines, to the rising emphasis on protecting the quality of the college “brand,” 
even amidst growing casualization of academic labor, and the rise of administrative managerial 
strategies that hinge on increased surveillance and data-driven “accountability” measures. 

Butcher brings out how student evaluations have functioned in this mix as a three-pronged 
administrative power-play: alienating students from teachers, teachers from other teachers, and 
teachers from themselves. Evals signal to students that the instructor’s authority is “conditional, 
probationary, and granted only at the discretion of the administration.” At the same time, these 
quantitative (and often percentile/comparative) evaluations encourage competition between 
teachers, rather than the cooperation and collaboration that is necessary for developing 
constructive dialogue about teaching, which must include open discussion of struggles as well as 
successes. Furthermore, by making aggregated numerical representations of teaching more 
important than actual observation or analysis of teaching itself, evaluations encourage a split 
within individual teachers, encouraging them to perform entertaining “schticks” while 
discouraging passions, personalities, and rigorous academic standards that are unlikely to win 
popularity points. 

Butcher suggests that we radically reform student evaluations, stripping them of their 
anonymity, and replacing the false concreteness of stand-alone number-bubbles with evaluative 
narratives that will allow (and compel) students to provide valuable contextual information about 
their education expectations and experiences. Not only would such evaluative narratives give 
teachers more useful and fully framed feedback, but they could become the springboard for 
actual conversations between student and teacher. Indeed, it strikes me upon re-reading Butcher’s 
essay that one of the more insidious features of the prevalent student evaluation form is 
precisely that guarantee of anonymity. The standard justification of this guarantee of course is 
that it assures the student that they are “protected” from possible retaliation from the instructor. 
Sounds fair enough. But the underlying assumption that this ‘protective’ message smuggles in is 
quite unsettling: namely that a teacher should be expected to take criticism of teaching style or 
methods as a personal attack, rather than, say, as an occasion for critical reflection and 
constructive dialogue. Generally, as Butcher draws out, evaluations prompt students to assume a 



20		Cultural	Logic	

view of education as commodity, enabling them to fulfill their consumer duty by quantifying 
‘satisfaction,’ while subtly suggesting that actual criticisms need to be offered secretly, not to 
the teacher directly, but to the managers in charge. His essay calls for faculty to re-assert control 
over the evaluation process, both in order to “advance a more teacher and student-friendly vision 
of education,” but also in order to short-circuit the neoliberal managerial schemes that judge 
and rule by numbers stripped of context. His closing proposal thus merges a call for 
pedagogical solidarity with a technique of principled anti-neoliberal sabotage. 

Learning in the Shadow of State Terror: A Poetic Interlude 

Opening our poetic interlude, and expressing an unapologetically Black proletarian 
outlook, Demetrius Noble’s work demonstrates the possibility of fusing a layered class-conscious 
and anti-racist critical analysis with popular lyric. Laced with vivid and accessible images as 
well as challenging communist concepts, these pieces take up crucial political imperatives: 1) 
to dramatize the crimes of the racist, ruling-class establishment; 2) to push beyond feelings of 
outrage in the face of these crimes to raise the question of “Why?” and of “What is to be done?”; 
3) to challenge the ideological, organizational, and subjective limitations and contradictions of 
the emancipatory movement itself; and 4) to emotionally rally its listener/readers to “Dig 
Deep” to overcome both the external and internal obstacles that we are up against. Those who 
have had the experience of hearing D Noble perform these pieces will testify to the added force 
they carry in person. 

As their subtitles suggest, Noble’s poems “I am Not that Corpse: A Working Praxis 
for Black Lives Matter” and “A Martyr without a Cause, or Much Ado About Trayvon” 
issue polemical challenges, not only to a racist police state that steals the lives of the innocent, 
but to a social justice/protest movement whose theory and practice still lags far behind the needs 
of the crisis at hand. Invoking pervasive protest chants (“I AM Trayvon Martin,” “I AM Michael 
Brown,” “We ARE Eric Garner”…) these poems simultaneously express deep sympathy for the 
fallen while exploring the problematic implications of identifying political movement too-
closely with the slain bodies of victims. Noble worries that what needs to become a 
revolutionary movement, alive and anchored in the present, may come to resemble something more 
like a zombie march—heads bowed, eyes fixed on images past that can’t be changed, or learned 
from politically—only mourned. “I am NOT Trayvon Martin/I am NOT Michael Brown/I am NOT 
Eric Garner” Noble attests: “I’m still alive,” And yet, he adds, “The truth is we’d rather be dead.” 
In ways that echo the above discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Demetrius confronts us with the lure 
of the corpse: the way its shadow offers to shield us from responsibility, from developing ideas, 
actions, and organization that can truly transform our present—as if an oppressive social order 
could ever be overthrown simply by reading back to it a list of its crimes. 

In both poems, D Noble confronts us with the gaping chasm between the radical 
demands of the situation and the domesticated tropes and tepid modes of practice—from 
slogans, to vigils, to ritualized non-violent protest marches—that threaten to restrain the 
antiracist movement. Provocatively taking up the famous signs of Trayvon Martin’s 
murdered innocence—his Skittles, his Arizona Iced Tea—Noble demands that we shift the frame, 
in global terms. “What is/Who is Trayvon within the global cartography of black death?” he asks. 
The billions of Black people living on dimes a day, cannot even dream of “tasting the rainbow,” 
while migrant laborers from Latin America face both ICE and the Tea Party in Arizona daily—



Ramsey  21 

why don’t we know what their last meals were? Though Barack Obama may express sympathy 
for Trayvon as the son he never had, he continues to drop bombs on Black youth across North 
Africa almost daily; D’s poems sniff out such liberal-imperial hypocrisy. 

Noble’s work further explores the dangerous lure of reimagining our present conditions 
as merely a repetition of past ones—of seeing Trayvon Martin as merely some second coming of 
Emmet Till. As he asks, “Ain’t it ironic how commodified iconography of yesterday can sabotage 
our ability to properly theorize today?” Noble’s poems deny us an easy escape. Relentlessly anti-
sentimental and hostile to conciliatory nostalgia, Noble’s “Homecoming” reminds us of how much 
life “outside” the official mass incarceration system still resembles a prison for the 
proletarianized. 

In a starkly contrasting style, but an allied spirit, Jill McDonough’s poems present us with 
poignant, fragmentary eye-witness reflections on humanity trapped—yet still breathing, still 
grasping—in spaces of incarceration, commodification, and empire. Her opening poem, like 
many of her deeply researched yet accessible lyrics, captures a sense of despair, and yet, 
somehow, of hope. Exploring the case of “Amos D. Squire, Chief Physician of Sing Sing, 
1914-25,” McDonough presents us with the horror that a doctor could preside over 138 state 
executions, but also with a revelation: this death-doctor eventually quits. Whether it is 
sympathy with the condemned or sheer psychological disturbance that leads this man to 
desire to touch the living victim whose death he is supposed to verify, Squire’s long arc to 
decision is a reminder of the fact that people can change—even executioners—but also of 
how protracted that process of change can be. 

The last and shortest poem here, “Joe Hill’s Prison,” captures at least three crucial 
intersecting themes that run through McDonough’s work: a historical recognition that 
USAmerican judicial violence has often been used in ways that have more to do with maintaining 
ruling class power than with meting out justice; an ironic lament that this historical memory 
itself is under threat of being plowed under and erased, just as Joe Hill’s prison has been replaced 
by a neon and brick “Sizzler” restaurant; and a breathtaking juxtaposition of majesty and 
violence, which McDonough often lets us glimpse, but seldom in such a devastating manner as 
in these closing lines describing the mountains Joe Hill looked out on “Rising purple up beyond 
the wall where he was shot.” 

But if McDonough opens with the historical reminder of an executioner’s heartbeat 
revival and closes with a reflection on a martyr whose deathbed lies buried under neon and brick, 
her other poems provide us with more contemporary, and in some ways more personally 
intimate accounts of human beings stuck in dehumanizing spaces and situations. They range 
from a reflection on the horror-irony of Starbucks coffee being advertised as reward for those 
Guantanamo detainees who are willing to “tell us everything we want to know” (“Coffee 
Everyone”), to accounts of the forgotten riverbanks of Blackwater, before it became a 
synonym for Mercenary Inc. (“Memorius: Blackwater”), to personal accounts of teaching 
literature and composition to prisoners in the Massachusetts State Correctional system. Notably, 
McDonough’s prison snapshots humanize those locked behind bars not by sentimentalizing them 
as pure victims but by letting us glimpse their struggles, as inmates but also as students, as 
readers and writers dealing with painful memories as well as classroom pressures, and as 
women, somehow finding ways to express their sense of style even after bright colors and 



22		Cultural	Logic	

delicate textures have been all but banned from their world (“Women’s Prison Every Week”). 
McDonough’s work confronts us with the fact that many who are locked in the booming prison 
industry have committed heinous acts against other people, while calling us to reflect on how 
wise or fair it is to label someone for life based on actions taken decades ago, not to mention the 
fact that many who have committed still greater atrocities continue to walk free (“Where You 
Live”). 

Running through many of these poems is an insistence on the power of imagination, 
as a way of transforming not only individual lives, but, potentially, society writ large. As 
McDonough puts it at the end of “Where You Live”: “Prison cell, cathedral: we imagined them, 
invented. Built them / around our bodies, or the bodies those spaces would hold.” And yet, just 
as the desire to be a writer does not itself put the words on a page, so McDonough reminds us 
that the wish to see war criminals punished—or the over-punished freed—is but a whimsy 
without the work to back it up. Her poems hold out the promise of human redemption in even 
the coldest of concrete confines, without lulling us with the fantasy that such radical 
reconstruction can be achieved short of sustained and shell-shedding effort. Such work is a bit 
easier to imagine—and even to enjoy—accompanied by a voice like McDonough’s, one that 
continues to play as it pulverizes, refusing not just the conditions she confronts, but also the 
petrified straight face of pure moral judgment. Her poems dance the line between taking 
oppressors seriously, and laughing their wasted wieners right off stage  (“Dear Gaybashers”). 

Virtual Universities, Digital Activists, and their Discontents 

Effective praxis requires an understanding of the situation that we now face. Indisputably, 
‘technology,’ and digital internet technologies in particular, form part of that terrain. Ali 
Shehzad Zaidi offers a broad and quite damning view of recent trends in digital higher 
education in “The Promise and Peril of the Virtual University.” Revisiting the utopian 
propaganda of inevitable “progress” that helped to justify the “gold rush” into online education 
over a decade ago, Zaidi calls attention to the role played by corporate interests and their 
political allies, who mapped out this field as a profit-making opportunity from the beginning. 
By no means a technophobe, he concedes the obviously positive pedagogical potentials of the 
internet but calls attention to a number of serious dangers, both political-economic and 
pedagogical. While proponents of online education point to the greater access that digital 
platforms have provided non-traditional students, for instance, this same “flexible” system has 
exerted a downward pressure on faculty wages and autonomy, allowing institutions to staff 
classes by pulling from a broader pool of distant adjunct labor, while imposing new forms of 
standardization from above. Similarly, whatever its benefits, the institutionalization of email (and 
other online platforms such as Blackboard) has led to an effective expansion of the workday. Even 
when it comes to a topic such as academic research, the internet, Zaidi argues, remains a very 
mixed bag. 

One may detect in Zaidi’s account faint touches of nostalgia for the days when libraries 
were actually full of books, but what he offers us at root is an incisive class analysis of 
ostensibly value-neutral, “technological” developments, unmasking the administrator and ruling 
class power-play that is veiled by the irresistible rhetoric of “progress.” To be sure, Zaidi 
gives us an overview of some of the worst abuses, both nationwide, such as the for-profit 
ventures like University of Phoenix, and internationally—the notorious diploma mills—



Ramsey  23 

reminding us of the outrageous fortunes that have been made at the expense of underprepared 
students, exploited faculty, and hoodwinked taxpayers. But even more worrisome may be the 
way in which ostensibly non-profit institutions have integrated similar (“for profit”) priorities 
and approaches. Zaidi thus points us to his own institution of SUNY Canton, where he 
personally witnessed the slide of introductory Spanish courses into the online ether, with serious 
negative effects on student learning and persistence. 

While privatization and austerity—the massive state defunding of both public and private 
higher education—have certainly laid the basis for such profit-drive absurdity, Zaidi argues that 
the process underway is not just a side effect of the drive to balance state-strapped budgets. (After 
all, university administrations continue to magically find funds for costly new sports stadiums 
even while announcing major faculty cuts.) The project at work, Zaidi argues, is not simply 
about commodification and profit-maximization within higher ed itself—objectionable as that 
is—but a project of class-based social control more broadly, concerned with assuring the 
steady flow of profits to the employers across the entirety of society. “Virtual education deprives 
teachers of workplace autonomy,” he writes, “which accounts in part for its powerful corporate 
backers.” And as for the teachers, so for the students. “Rather than educating students to become 
informed citizens, administrators promote vocational training to create an atomized, docile and 
dispirited workforce.” In his conclusion, Zaidi rallies us to collective resistance, while conceding 
a deep pessimism about the state of the industry as a whole. “This is no time to be polite,” he 
writes. “The time for revolt is at hand.” 

The developments charted and criticized by Zaidi also create new vectors of resistance and 
opportunities for struggle, against the grain of the neoliberal project. The high-level concerns 
about the university “brand,” as well as the university’s expansion into online space, both involve 
creating not just new structures of exploitation and alienation, but new vulnerabilities as well. 
I am reminded here of David Harvey’s work in his book Rebel Cities, where he analyses the 
contradictions of cultural capital and in particular the dynamics of monopoly rent. In Harvey’s 
account, contemporary capital’s drive to bestow cities—and thus the products and services from 
that city— with an aura of “unique”-ness and “authenticity” does not only artificially drive up 
prices and thus buffer profits; it also creates potential leverage for labor and other progressive 
movements to rally public attention and demand reforms—even radical ones—in the spirit of 
forcing the city to live up to the noble image its “authentic” brand proclaims. Does not the 
brand-investment of neoliberal universities similarly lay them open to analogous struggles? 
Similarly with the expansion of university life into cyberspace. 

As Xavier Best and Efadul Huq argue in their co-authored essay, “Untangling the 
Scholactivist Web,” the internet—and social media in particular—remains a crucial terrain for 
activist work in the current period. Enabling activists to spread images and information across 
national boundaries, social media embodies an “adversarial spirit” that challenges both 
mainstream media and government accounts, expressing a popular desire for more participatory 
and “non-mediated” engagement with current events and pressing issues. Through a dialogic 
and fragmentary essay that itself bears the traces of a Facebook friendship, Best and Huq offer 
us what they call, a “user review of social media platforms as tools in our [scholactivist] 
toolbox.” 



24		Cultural	Logic	

Best and Huq argue that it is both possible and necessary to bring to social media 
“informed and relevant critique” and a commitment to creating the time and space for “critical 
friendships.” They write not to “eulogize” social media, but in a hope that social media activism 
may continue to foster solidarities across boundaries, countering and outflanking the state 
attempts to intimidate public dissent through mass surveillance or win outright popular consent 
for barbarism through the glamor of “digital militarism.” Paying special attention to social media 
struggles grounded in Palestinian solidarity and in opposition to state violence (from Gaza to 
Ferguson), Best and Huq provide powerful examples of how tactical social media activism has 
disrupted dominant state-sanctioned narratives. 

At the same time, as a common space owned and managed by private corporations, 
social media platforms remain far from “unmediated.” Best and Huq call our attention not only 
to the catalyzing power but also the co-optive and dissipating dangers of social media that 
simultaneously connect people and yet often encourage fast and superficial rather than slow and 
substantive interactions, reinforcing individualist, consumerist, and identitarian tendencies, always 
with a corporate eye towards data-mining and marketing (not to mention a state eye towards 
surveillance and repression). Nor are the only dangers those coming from the “outside”: Huq 
and Best urge us to consciously struggle against the bad habits and sectarian tendencies that 
plague the left on social media. The fast-paced nature of social media interactions, as well as the 
lack of personal familiarity or accountability that frame much public discussion, easily morph 
urgent exchanges into antagonisms, leading to public and prideful disputes that threaten to 
disrupt or dismember much-needed organization. Nonetheless, despite its dangers, Best and Huq 
argue forcefully against the anti-social media (and anti-“PC”) position of a figure such as Michael 
Chait, whose complaints about millenials betray the elitism of an established writer objecting to 
commoners crashing his party. The radical potential—but also the challenge—of social media 
scholactivism lies in critically embracing this new commons, while developing structures and 
habits, online and off, that can enable activists to transcend sectarianism, defend against state 
surveillance, disrupt dominant narratives of oppression, and foster critical solidarities that defy 
existing social boundaries. 

Sophia McLennen offers a forceful, sympathetic reappraisal of youth activists and 
social media users in her essay “What’s Wrong with Slactivism: Confronting the Neoliberal 
Assault on Millenials.” Drawing our attention to the uncomfortable similarity between Right and 
Left denigration of the new generation and its activism, McLennen defends so-called 
“Slacktivists,” showing how the “generational warfare” aimed at them is both symptomatic of 
and complicit with a broader neoliberal assault on youth. Her essay refutes misconceptions about 
millennials being a politically un-engaged generation and makes thoughtful arguments for both 
the effectiveness and the promise of new modes of millennial politics that aim to reclaim the 
power of spectacle and “to make politics pleasurable.” A new terrain of political engagement is 
already emerging, she argues, one that complicates traditional notions of “public vs. private” as 
well as “entertainment vs. seriousness,” mixing suspicion of traditional authorities with hope for 
the future. Contrary to being the “worst generation ever,” for McLennen, millennials are “poised 
to be the best generation of political actors we have ever seen.” 

Effectively anticipating the massive youth-based (and social media-driven) movement for 
Bernie Sanders, McLennen counters the “either/or” logic that suggests online “clicktivism” 
begins and ends at the “like” button. She points us to recent studies showing how, in fact, 



Ramsey  25 

social media users tend to be more politically and socially engaged than non-users, and how 
millennials tend to be more socially engaged than their elders were when they were that age. 
Arguing for the effectiveness of hash-tagged social media efforts associated with 
#OccupyWallStreet, #BlackLivesMatter, her essay provocatively suggests that the teachers ought 
to start learning from their students rather than complaining about them. Indeed, McLennen 
usefully points out how educators who demonize “slacker” youth become complicit with a 
neoliberal state apparatus that seeks to justify the criminalization, repression, and de-legitimation 
of ever greater numbers of young people. Bringing in the socio-economic reality of millenial 
lives, McLennen points out how one-sided and unrepresentative the ruling stereotypes of 
“spoiled youth” today really are. Most millennials are struggling to survive: mounting tuition 
bills and debt loads on the one hand, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates on the other, 
all the while living in the shadow of an increasingly militarized racist police state. That 43% of 
today’s millennial are non-white and many from single parent households further gives the lie 
to the myth of the over-privileged slacker. The helicopters hovering over these kids’ heads don’t 
belong to their parents. 

McLennen convincingly exposes a powerful —and disabling— irony: ostensibly radical 
critiques by would-be leftist scholar-activists may in fact manifest an insidious conservativism, 
reproducing a neoliberal cynicism and passivity in the guise of exposing it in their students. 
Certainly social media activists often deploy the “marketing” strategies of capitalism, but they 
also reach beyond them—and often they are acutely aware of the impurity of the imperfect tools 
they are using. She urges would-be scholar-activists to “reconsider knee-jerk participation in 
millennial bashing,” beginning with our own blogs and Facebook pages. Perhaps, rather than 
posturing as the elder critics of youth activists, McLennen suggests, we should join with 
them—online and off—and build together, learning as we go. McLennen’s recent book, co-
authored with an undergraduate at Penn State, suggests the great possibilities, even as the rarity of 
such a teacher-student collaboration indicates how much more intergenerational work remains to 
be done. 

Doing What We Can from Where We Are: Personal Histories, Case Studies 

The essays in our section on “Personal Histories, Case Studies” offer narratives of 
struggles from various sides of the tenure line. They range from stories of integrating activism into 
university life (Van Der Meer), to stories of leaving academia entirely to link up with 
community activism beyond the college walls (Cortez), to reflections on how best to marshal the 
privileges of tenure in a sustainable and progressive direction (Leitch), to accounts of both 
complicity and of solidarity from the “dark side” of (mid-level) university administration (K. 
Hogan and DiLeo, respectively). Each author reflects on decades of praxis, offering us lessons for 
today, caution as well as inspiration. Jeffrey DiLeo’s “Top Cover: on Administrative Activism 
in the Neoliberal Academy,” speaks to the importance of seeking allies in what might seem 
to be unlikely places. Writing from the perspective of a contingent faculty member turned tenure-
line professor turned dean, DiLeo argues forcefully against the idea that going into academic 
administration necessarily involves joining “the dark side.” He urges faculty to judge 
administrators as they ought to judge one another (or their students): by practice, not position. 
While acknowledging the actually existing problem of administrative bloat, DiLeo suggests that, 
especially in a climate of neoliberalism—where economic and ideological forces compel the 
university to become more and more financially driven—there is both a basis and a need to 



26		Cultural	Logic	

develop alliances between progressive administrators and faculty. Such an alliance is made 
doubly difficult however, he argues, when faculty cling to the notion that administration is the 
“sick” part of the university, a “dark side” from whence no good can come. This one-sided 
outlook impairs potential alliances both by discouraging progressive faculty from entering 
administrative positions of influence in the first place, while also curtailing in advance the 
dialogue that might lead to an alliance of concerns. “The problem with placing all 
administration on the ‘dark side,’” DiLeo writes, “is that one assumes what they are going to do 
when the heavy weather hits rather than actually working—or struggling—with administration to 
make the better decision.” 

A further danger in this black-and-white outlook is that the divisions among the faculty 
themselves become white-washed, obscuring the grip of individualism, careerism, and various 
complicit practices. Such divisions and contradictions can be found at all levels of higher 
education—and of society, one might add—which is precisely what necessitates struggle and 
makes politics possible in the first place. DiLeo usefully challenges a prevalent moralism, one 
that is infused with a kind of academic “workerism” that too-quickly conflates position with 
political line, location with practice. He urges us to judge each individual administrator (or faculty, 
or student, etc.) on their own values and actions, and, to be sure, his own informed and 
passionate criticism of neoliberalism speaks to the existence of sincere and progressive deans in 
academia today. 

At the same time, DiLeo’s focus on individual values and actions contradicts somewhat 
his acknowledgement of the reality and detrimental effects of administrative bloat as a historical 
and institutionalized phenomenon. That is to say, if it is possible for this or that administrator 
to be or to become an ally in the anti-neoliberal (anti-austerity, anti-privatization, etc.) coalition, 
is it possible for all administration to do so? Who is likely to be won over and who, by virtue 
of their structural position, is deeply vested in the current state of things? DiLeo’s focus on the 
exception to the rule risks suggesting that there are no rules at all. No doubt the pervasive “dark 
side” metaphor goes too far—and he is right to criticize it—but is there not a thing called 
institutional gravity? His essay thus raises the question—and it is a vitally important one, one 
that must be asked in each particular context, at each institution, and in each struggle: How 
are we to draw the line? How do we draw the friend/enemy distinction in the neoliberal 
university? Who can be appealed to on the basis of common interests and who must be struggled 
against? 

DiLeo’s criteria for answering such questions would appear to reject a structural-
institutional analysis of positions and offices within the university in favor of the idea that 
progressive administrators are those who work to “mitigate pain and increase attainment” for 
those their decisions affect. This sounds quite reasonable. Still, DiLeo’s sketch of the duties 
of a progressive administrator demand some scrutiny. As he writes: admin’s job is to 
“calibrat[e] the educational interests of faculty and student with the external conditions that 
prohibit their attainment. Once this is determined, the role of the administrator needs to be 
one of maximizing conditions for achievement.” Again, all sounds good, until one presses the 
question, what do we mean—and what do we accept—as “external conditions”? 

Here we need to put some pressure also on one of DiLeo’s organizing analogies, the one 
that likens university administration to the “captain” of a ship. The problem here is not just that 



Ramsey  27 

this analogy appears to assume the need for a kind of authoritarian leadership. The deeper 
problem lies in how this analogy likens the “external” factors of neoliberalism to the 
“weather” or the “stormy waters” t h a t  a captain and his ship must face as ocean beyond 
their control. Is there not here a danger of reifying and, indeed, naturalizing social and political 
conditions, as if they weren’t themselves the products of human practice? Of treating as a 
navigable but immutable “outside” what is not in fact outside at all? In an era of neoliberalism 
and financialization, austerity is routinely justified precisely by painting a picture of “bad 
weather” that is “beyond our control,” as if the budget is fixed, as if the spending priorities are set 
in stone, as if the rich or the corporations could not be further taxed, as if the salaries of upper 
administration were off the table, even as faculty are first for the chopping block—as if there is 
no way to mobilize together against such things. It might be argued that one of the main 
ideological tasks of managing the neoliberal agenda is precisely to get people to see the 
radically political situation in which they are living as if it were as immutable as the waves of the 
ocean. DiLeo’s navigational metaphor may still catch wind so long as we are talking about 
mitigating the dangers of the neoliberal storm, but it tends to sag when we begin to contemplate 
how the university can become a space for trying to change that neoliberal climate itself. What 
can those in the university contribute to such political climate change? How might administrators 
give “top cover” to those seeking to bring it about? How can administrators use their positions of 
influence to enable other actors who may not be as tightly bound to official office requirements? 
Nothwithstanding the limitations of this nautical analogy, DiLeo’s challenge to progressive or 
radical faculty to occupy administrative positions rather than merely decry those who hold 
them remains a useful provocation, one that, at the very least, pushes us towards finding a 
strategy for progressive leadership, whether by moving suitable faculty up the existing 
administrative chain of command, or by implementing other—more accountable, more 
democratic—structures of governance altogether. 

Katie Hogan’s essay, “Complicit: on Being a WGSS Program Director in the 
Neoliberal University,” offers us the nuanced reflections of a program director who is torn 
between her urge to stop the exploitation of adjunct colleagues, and her desire to keep a 
beleaguered, underfunded, and historically marginalized discipline alive. Recognizing the 
conflicted, partially compromised, and yes, complicit, position she occupies in managing a 
department that runs almost exclusively on adjunct labor, Hogan pushes us to develop a “more 
multifaceted understanding of complicity,” as well as a mode of political practice that transcends 
the moralistic and the individualistic to open paths for a broad-based coalition that can empower 
both precariously deployed faculty members and vulnerable departments alike. “Expounding on 
privilege, guilt, and complicity is not going to overthrow the system,” she points out. Nor, she 
implies, will washing one’s hands of complicit positions help to overcome inequalities that are 
structural in nature. 

Hogan reminds us of a painful historical irony. A discipline such as Women and Gender 
Studies would appear to be doubly well-positioned to play a leading role in the struggle to fight 
for equity and justice for adjunct and contingent faculty—first because of its longstanding 
commitment to activist principles and methods, and second, because of the disproportionate 
feminization of contingent faculty work. Yet the marginalized position of WGSS—in the form 
of a long-standing “respectability problem,” as well as endemic underfunding—has kept this 
ostensibly egalitarian discipline from fully realizing its principled promise. The fear of budget 
cuts or outright “discontinuation,” as well as anxieties about being stigmatized as less than 



28		Cultural	Logic	

“respectable,” has pushed some scholar-activists in the field to confine their praxis to places other 
than the university—even as that university itself is rife with the kind of everyday injustice that 
WGSS is pledged to dismantle. 

Drawing analogies to the contradictory position of minority police officers, as explored 
by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow, and taking lessons from activists in the anti-
sweatshop movement, Hogan argues against both the idea that department directors should be 
expected to play the leading role in the movement that is needed, but also the idea that 
“boycotting” adjunct labor hiring itself would do much good. Instead, she very usefully 
concludes her essay with an exemplary checklist of what sympathetic department chairs can and 
should do in the current climate: “support contingent faculty unionization; pressure state 
legislators to fund higher education; demand cuts in president, administrator, and athletic coach 
salaries; and reach out to parents so they can insist that their children be taught by teachers 
paid a living wage.” While not as “dramatic” or “media-worthy” as outright refusing to hire 
adjuncts or publicly quitting a “complicit” position, such avenues, sustained over time, and 
across departments (perhaps with the aid of unionization of the chairs themselves, as recently 
has occurred at my home institution), hold real potential to empower both precarious faculty and 
precarious departments alike. 

In his “Letter on Scholactivism: To Graduate Students and Young Colleagues,” 
Vincent B. Leitch draws from over forty years of experience as a tenure-track activist. Leitch’s 
account spans—and contests—the passing of the era of the “welfare state university,” offering 
lessons drawn from progressive activity in a variety of forms and forums, from the classroom, to 
the scholarly anthology, from the Modern Language Association, to the American Association of 
University Professors. As he reminds us, “Today’s activist teachers stand in a long line of 
educator advocates starting with Socrates.” Yet Leitch’s lessons tend away from the grandiose, 
focusing on humble, down-to-earth insights. He surveys the emotional costs of sustained 
activism, offering a list of everyday habits that may help scholar-activists to persevere in the 
face of long, time-consuming struggles and daunting odds. He emphasizes the importance of 
the inglorious work of maintaining and sustaining organizations, and underscores the dangers 
of isolation—“Don’t allow yourself to be singled out,” he advises—as well as of being 
consumed by fear or anger. He cautions against the temptation to project resentment or 
arrogance towards colleagues, but also the danger of getting mired in formal bureaucratic 
obligations to the point of squelching one’s critical voice. He admits a preference for the role of 
“fringe” dissident, while underscoring the importance of maintaining the organizational ties that 
allow one’s dissidence to have meaning in the first place. 

At the same time, Leitch’s account of advocacy efforts beyond the strictly academic does 
not imply a denigration of the traditional avenues for scholarly activity. While cautioning against 
“indoctrination” he upholds the importance of teaching “critical citizenship”—and of a 
participant-oriented pedagogy—in the classroom, and expresses pride in his enduring efforts to 
open the literary and theoretical canon. The latter extend not only to his own students, but, 
through his work on the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, to an entire generation of 
humanities scholars. His “Letter” expresses a humility that does not overstate the influence 
that a particular individual can have on the tides of history (or even the sloshing waves of a 
department or an organization), but also the well-earned satisfaction of a life of sustained 
activism that has made a difference. Leitch “goes on the record” here in a way that offers 



Ramsey  29 

considerable wisdom to a new generation of activist teachers and scholars. Even as relatively 
few of us may share his privilege of the tenure-track, his level-headed view and his advice for 
sustaining activism for the long haul remain relevant. 

In stark but allied contrast, Marisol Cortez’s essay, “Occupy Los Intersticios! Or, In 
Defense of Carbon-free Unicorns,” offers us the restless, even nomadic narrative of a cultural 
studies critic and cultural activist who has long struggled against the traditional terrain of 
academia, sometimes deliberately, sometimes as a victim of circumstance. Recounting not only 
her varied activist efforts but also her dissatisfaction with the confines of existing praxis on 
both sides of the university walls, Cortez presents us with the paradox of academic and activist 
communities/organizations that need each other and yet all-too-seldom find ways to work 
together productively. Her essay explores her own struggles—rough edges and all—as a lived 
example of the tensions between ‘academic’ and ‘activist’ work. 

Cortez cautions us against the illusion that academia is “unique” for being a place where 
people take critical, political, and cultural issues seriously, and yet she also testifies to the 
difficulty of creating the time and space necessary for critical reflection within activist 
organizations. Too often a sense of urgency (or outright emergency), compounded by a 
narrowly positivist notion of political “results,” makes talk of “theory” or “culture” appear to be 
a diversion from the pressing “concrete” work at hand. (Who has time for “theory” when people 
are dying of X, Y, and Z?!) Cortez both respects and pushes back against activist impatience, 
reminding us (via Stuart Hall) of how vitally important theoretical questions of representation 
are if we are to actually develop effective strategies for solving even the most urgent social 
emergency. And yet, as we Marxists claim to know, ideas only become a material force in 
history when they are gripped by masses of people. Here Cortez challenges academic cultural 
studies: lacking a major expansion of our audience, Michael Bérubé’s dismissive metaphor 
likening the political impact of the field to the “carbon footprint of unicorns” may, alas, 
continue to prove all too apt. 

Cortez’s wager is that Bérubé’s unicorn can be turned around: that the impossible in-
between-ness of the activist-cultural studies scholar, compelled to occupy the intersections 
between existing institutions, might just give rise to modes of community-based praxis that can 
change the terrain altogether. In a way her prescription for the anemic political impact of 
cultural studies is not less cultural studies but more, including critical analysis of the terrain 
itself. Crucially, Cortez calls not just for more cultural critique in the usual spaces, but for 
critical work that dwells within the local communities just outside the campus gates. 

Similarly insisting on the need to transgress the “traditional” functions of the university, 
Tony Van der Meer’s essay “Fighting to be Different in the Academy” shifts the terrain of 
radical teaching, “going to the roots” of his own praxis on both a philosophical and a very 
personal level. Van der Meer makes a multi-layered argument for recognizing what activist-
scholars do—inside and outside the classroom—as both effective pedagogy and community 
oriented research, adding value to the university’s professed mission, in particular at a public and 
ostensibly “urban” and “student-centered” institution such as UMass Boston (where not only Van 
der Meer, but this editor and several other contributors to this volume presently teach). 
Refreshingly, Van der Meer makes his case for the educational value of activist teaching not only 
by citing scholarship on different modes of knowing, but also by reflecting on the importance of 



30		Cultural	Logic	

educators in his own life who went “beyond the call of duty.” He gives a vivid account of three 
educators—including a principal and a guidance counselor—who made a major impact on his 
life, not so much by what they taught in the classroom, but by the way they took him and other 
students outside of the classroom. As Van Der Meer makes clear, especially for youth from 
working class families and oppressed minority groups, the fact that a teacher expresses a special 
interest, taking time out of her schedule on a weekend for an educational experience, can be 
transformative. 

The educators who made the big impact in Van der Meer’s account were those who were 
flexible enough to take advantage of “teachable moments,” who respected their students as 
young adults, who trusted and were transparent, standing with students even in times of trouble. 
They were the teachers who sought to unite with what was positive in students’ rough-edged 
rebellion, who put themselves, their personal time—even their homes or cars—at the service of 
students in need. The teachers who made the difference were the ones who shared more than just 
their professional side, expanding their pupils’ off-campus horizons. This difference is one that 
Van Der Meer now seeks to create in the lives of his own students at UMass Boston by creating 
community space and relaxed conversations—often over food and off-campus—and by 
encouraging students to take on community events and social justice campaigns as topics for 
engagement in his courses. His essay eloquently testifies to the pedagogical value of activist 
scholarship and radical teaching, over and above its political motives or impacts. 

Kim Emery’s essay, “Rights and Rebellion: The Faculty Role Revisited,” closes out this 
section with a case-study drawn from the history of her home institution, the University of 
Florida. Emery relates and reflects upon the story of Marshall Jones, an activist professor whose 
support for the student rebellions of the Sixties finally cost him his job. Working from her own 
original oral history research, Emery teases valuable lessons from Marshall’s inspiring yet 
sobering story. These lessons include both those that Marshall and his fellow activists drew 
from their practical organizing experience, as well as subtle but critical lessons that Emery 
herself discerns concerning the conceptual limits of the notion of academic freedom, a shield 
that failed to protect Marshall Jones when he needed it most.  

Closely examining this notion of academic freedom as it actually exists in the by-laws of 
universities, or even for advocacy groups like AAUP, Emery makes the case that the actual 
language concerning scholarly and institutional obligations provides a highly contradictory 
situation for the scholar-activist, in Marshall’s day as well as ours. Soberingly, but 
convincingly, Emery makes the argument that it is ultimately impossible for serious 
scholactivists to fully abide by the 1940 AAUP Statement on Academic Freedom, a fact which 
lays activist faculty open to university administrators’ manipulation of “conflicting definitions 
and contradictory demands.” The problem, she argues, lies not only with the way administrators 
are interpreting (or ignoring) these long-standing principles—the problem goes to the heart of 
these constructs themselves. Emery pushes us to take the foundational inconsistencies that 
structure academic work seriously, recognizing the “system of double-binds,” that, to this day, 
make professorial activism a risky proposition. As she writes: “Changing the status quo requires 
challenging the institutions that sustain it, including the key terms and distinctions on which their 
operation relies.”  



Ramsey  31 

A few other lessons that Emery draws out deserve mention. Challenging the habits of an 
academic left that is often big on radical talk and short on attention span, Emery’s account of the 
developing Civil Rights movement in and around UFL underscores the importance of building 
relationships, on- and off-campus, through sustained, accessible, public actions that mobilize 
people in ways that long talk sessions will not. Just as crucially, Marshall’s story shows how 
seemingly “moderate” political practice led to more radical learning over time—as opposition to 
particular policies drew participants to see the ways that those policies were embedded in and 
defended by ruling institutions and their backers. The explicit politics of these early campaigns 
may appear mild to us today; nonetheless the critical mass of people they drew together 
consistently on the picket-line put them in opposition with the ruling order. This then created 
the conditions for the actual development of mass consciousness, through experience—
through shared reflections on struggle.  

Looking back at the Civil Rights movement —and its trajectory towards Black Power and 
more openly revolutionary formations such as the Black Panther Party—it is tempting for us 
today to want to claim the theoretical/political/rhetorical radicalism that the Sixties movements 
produced as our starting point. After all, it’s easy to think that what they learned—what they 
revealed about the “true nature of the system,” etc.—we should not have to re-learn: “We 
know these things already, don’t we? Shouldn’t we be able to start our struggles where theirs 
left off, picking up the radical lessons as our launching point?” Perhaps. But to learn from 
the practical successes—rather than the culminating theoretical conclusions—of the CRM might 
mean something quite different. If we emphasize—as Emery does in her account of Marshall 
Jones and crew—the practical process that produced those radical insights as a collective 
phenomenon, not just as isolated intellectual knowledge but as something like a “material force 
of history,” the radical lessons we draw might take a surprising form. We might reconsider once 
more the crucial role played by “moderate” language and “old-fashioned” tactics as the 
condition of gathering forces, laying the basis for a radicalization that has roots far beyond the 
narrow clique of the advanced. Emery’s account makes clear the importance of learning over time, 
and, crucially, of understanding teaching and learning as collective and multifaceted—with 
lessons often coming from the students, and from summing up mistakes, not just relishing 
successes. The summing up together being the key. 

Learning from those who taught us: Tributes 

Our special issue concludes with moving tributes to three influential educator-activists. 
Each honors the life and work of a cherished teacher by reflecting on how their example 
illuminates the way forward for those of us who continue in their wake. Notably, each of these 
tributes gives us an example of grounded praxis, calling our attention to a life-work that was 
particularly concerned with the relationship between people and their environment, understood 
simultaneously in natural and social, local and global terms. Whether concerned with the 
complex ecosystems of socialist Cuba, the symbolic importance of the land in indigenous 
communities, or the historical sediments of an industrial city such as Pittsburgh, each 
became a great radical teacher-activist in part by dwelling with the land, the life-systems, 
histories, and the people who constitute it. 

Victor Wallis honors the late Richard Levins (1930-2016) by showing how his work—as a 
scientist and an activist—exemplified the power and the necessity of dialectical thinking. 



32		Cultural	Logic	

Levins’ work—and his life—gave the lie to those who would separate Science from Politics, as if 
the scientist were not a part (and a partisan) of the world s/he was studying. Wallis focuses on 
Levins’ contributions to environmental thought and agricultural practice, contributions that were 
bound up with his lifelong internationalist commitments to the socialist struggle in Cuba. 
Underscoring Levins’ opposition to technocratic “experts” and his deep respect for the 
experience and knowledge of people who actually work the land, Wallis suggests the way that 
Levins’ activist commitments informed his intellectual approach. His insistence on thinking in 
dialectical and holistic terms did not emerge from theoretical study alone, but from working 
alongside farmers on the Cuban soil. Wallis concludes by demonstrating how the dialectical 
approach Levins practiced remains essential to the socialist project in the United States, 
particularly with respect to relating the class struggle against capitalism to the particular identity 
based struggles associated with the “new social movements.” 

In their co-authored essay, “On the Ground with David Demarest: Toward a 
Methodology of Scholar Activism,” Joel Woller, Courtney Maloney, and Charles 
Cunningham offer a moving reflection on their late mentor’s critical pedagogy, in particular his 
“place-based activism.” Drawing from personal experience and research alike, these three former 
students distill from Demarest’s example a clear set of adaptable scholactivist principles. In this 
way, they not only testify to what made their teacher’s work so transformative, but present this 
understanding in a way that enables readers to adapt elements of Demarest’s approach into their 
own teaching and activism. 

Woller, Maloney, and Cunningham emphasize how Demarest (1931-2011) linked what 
are often thought of as opposed realms: classroom and community, literary study and public 
participation, local history and global critique, inquiry and advocacy. What emerges is an 
inspiring portrait of a teacher who was as committed to pushing his middle-class students to 
explore histories and geographies that had been hidden from them as he was to creating and 
defending educational spaces for those excluded from academia. Demarest literalized the 
notion of history “from the bottom up,” developing a “proletarian pedestrian” pedagogy based on 
the humble form of the off-campus walking tour. Step by step, Demarest cultivated an 
interdisciplinary approach that enriched both his students’ grasp of literature and of the literal 
landscape around them, including the human labor and class struggle that shaped it. Moreover, 
through his steadfast involvement in community efforts to defend irreplaceable historical sites—
including the literal battleground of the Homestead Strike of 1892—Demarest did not just teach 
students to study the natural and social environment, but to transform it as well. 

Of special note, Demarest also seems to have transformed himself. Beginning as someone 
who confessed he “didn’t like” living in Pittsburgh, he grew to become a passionate activist-
expert for his home city and the surrounding region. Granted the privilege of tenure in the 
1960s, he worked for decades against the current, putting his academic capital at the service of 
others who needed it. From his twenty-two years editing an inclusive campus union 
newsletter, to his anthologizing working class literatures, to scores of critical community events 
across Western Pennsylvania, Demarest comes through as someone distinguished by his 
willingness to do the often anonymous, painstaking, “behind the scenes” labor that remains 
absolutely necessary if we are to have spaces that will allow marginalized voices to be heard. 
Even when he was working with historical documents, our co-authors point out, Demarest 
operated collectively and democratically, as a “collaborator with the dead,” aiming not to cull his 



Ramsey  33 

own genius insights from the archive, but to “host a conversation” through which new alliances 
might be forged, old lessons passed on. Woller, Maloney, and Cunningham, encapsulate 
Demarest’s research ethos: “The living protect the memory of their predecessors and fan the spark 
of hope ignited in the past, just as the voices of the past inspire, provoke, and perhaps instruct 
their descendants.” Clearly, these three scholar-activists had a great collaborator in Dave 
Demarest. Thanks to their essay, their collaborator can now be ours too. 

Bringing our tribute section, and our special issue, to a close, Christopher Craig’s 
essay, “John Trudell and the Spirit of Life” honors the late Native American activist, writer, 
and musician, John Trudell (1946-2015). Unlike Wallis and the Carnegie Mellon team, Craig 
never had the chance to meet his activist teacher in person. Nonetheless, he shares an insightful 
review of Trudell’s life and a moving personal account of his own experiences introducing 
Trudell’s work to students at a Catholic liberal arts college. Within the context of a course that 
critically examined “The West,” Trudell provided Craig with ample opportunities to challenge 
students’ ideas about American history, US society, and the genocide of indigenous peoples. His 
work further challenged their generally liberal-humanitarian ideas about “how to change the 
world for the better,” ideas that were encouraged by the “social justice” mission of their 
institution. As Trudell and Craig both remind us, inherited ideas about what “solutions” look like 
are often in fact part of the problem. 

Craig gives us a vivid sense of the student-to-student debate in his classes, a debate that 
often pit liberal-volunteerist “activists” against “critics” who called out the ideology motivating 
such activism in the first place. As Craig shows, Trudell’s work both inspired passionate 
discussion, and pointed the way out of this deadlock. Creatively but forcefully relating the acute 
struggles of front line indigenous communities back to the more general situation facing so 
many people today (“the new indians” as Trudell called them), Trudell shows how the genocide 
of native people is an expression of a system that also seeks to exploit and oppress humanity in 
general, a system that turns our natural energy against us. What is needed, then, is not activism 
motivated by charity for the suffering “other,” but struggle in solidarity alongside these long-
oppressed peoples—against institutions and ideologies that alienate, exploit, and oppress the 
life of our planet. With their long legacy of surviving and resisting this system, perhaps it is 
indigenous people’s movements—and voices like Trudell’s— that should be seen as offering the 
“new indians” some desperately needed assistance. The directional dynamic of the charitable-
liberal “social justice” volunteer must be turned around. 

By problematizing the volunteer-liberal-uplift spirit that emerged as his students’ 
spontaneous response to stories of indigenous oppression—a kind of latter-day missionary 
practice that would aim to “better equip” indigenous people for “success” within the current 
system—Craig evokes a tension that runs through higher education more generally. The 
university, after all, remains an institution deeply invested in notions of “better equipping” students 
for “success,” even as dominant notions of American “success” are often less a solution than a 
part of the problem. Student resistance to Trudell thus reflected not just the students’ own 
limits, or those of Catholic ideology, but the limits of prevailing notions of “social change” 
perpetuated by liberal educational institutions in general. 

Whatever his students’ verdict on Trudell’s more radical proposals, Craig convincingly 
demonstrates how a sustained engagement with Trudell made students stretch their thinking, 



34		Cultural	Logic	

instilling in them a deeper sense of the importance of the earth upon which we all depend, an 
earth to which we belong—an earth under threat, from both liberal ideology and genocidal land 
grabs. Closing our volume, Craig’s essay reminds us that student resistance is often the site of 
genuine learning—and not just for the students. After all, as we scholactivists know, it is only 
by pushing inherited limits that we discover who we are, where we are…and what we might be 
capable of. We must “bite the pear” not just to know the pear, but to discover our own teeth. 

 

 Notes   

1 According to Google’s online dictionary. 

2 For the full set of questions that prompted this volume, see the original Call For Papers, 
appended to this introduction. 

3 For a discussion of the deficits incurred as a result of the lack of a mass left party in the 
United States, see Jodi Dean’s Crowd and Party (Verso, 2016) as well as my essay “How do 
communists party?” in Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 27, No.3 (July 2015). 

4 For a fuller discussion of the various capitalist crises structuring our current moment, 
see the 2010 special issue of Works and Days, Culture and Crisis available online at 
http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/2010.html 

5 That article remains an authoritative document on Churchill’s case, providing 
meticulous and compelling evidence that Churchill was indeed wrongfully targeted and fired 
from his post, subject to a deliberate and malicious campaign of misrepresentation and 
repression at various levels of university and state administration. It remains must reading, as 
does much of Carvalho’s edited Works and Days volume, entitled Academic Freedom and 
Intellectual Activism in the Post-911 Era. Scholactivism: Reflections on Transforming Praxis is 
but the latest contribution to a tradition of critical resistance and intellectual activism that Works & 
Days has represented for decades under the leadership of David Downing. I would like to thank 
David Downing for his unwavering support and guidance during what has been nearly a three-
year project. It has once again been an honor and a pleasure, David. Thanks also to Works and 
Days editorial assistants, Peter Faziani and Matthew Stumpf, and to Carl Grey Martin, Chris 
Craig, Linda Liu, and Greg Meyerson for offering helpful comments that strengthened this 
introductory essay. 

6 Indeed, Zabel himself relies on ideas about the needs of all humanity for socialism, 
namely when he invokes the pressing specter of ecological catastrophe to set the stage for his 
socialist version of the Pascalian wager. As he frames it, the Pascalian question would be 
something like: 'Is it worth betting on the uncertain but potentially great possibility of socialism 
in the face of the certainty of longterm capitalist-ecological collapse?' Such a question seems 
easy enough to answer in the affirmative. However wouldn't the less prejudged --less certain, but 
more accurate--manner of posing the question be something like this: 'Is the uncertain but 



Ramsey  35 

potentially great gain of socialism in the future worth focusing one’s life work on that goal at the 
expense all the amazing individual material pleasures that capitalism might offer you before it 
destroys the planet?' The lure of such pleasures after all, actual and hypothetical, real and 
delusional, are far from beyond the gaze of much of the working-class. Insofar as it is possible 
for any individual— proletarianized or otherwise—to be taken in by ruling aspirations, the 
struggle over ideas and values remains crucial. 

7 Indeed, Freeman’s essay inspired me to use the film in several sections of a course on 
Popular Culture. The experience discussing it with students helped me to develop the 
interpretation that I share below. 

8 “The Petrified and the Proletarian” published in Red Wedge Magazine in two parts: 
http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/coates-baldwin-wright?rq=Ramsey and  
http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/the-petrified-proletarian-two?rq=Ramsey  

  



36		Cultural	Logic	

APPENDIX 

 
A Call for Papers for a special volume of	

	
Works and Days	

&	
Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory and Practice	

	
on the question of 	

	
SCHOLACTIVISM:	

Reflections on Transforming Praxis Inside and Outside the Classroom	
Edited by Joseph G. Ramsey	

Where do radical scholarship, teaching, and activism connect? Where should they? How 
do academics at present engage in activism? How ought we to? What are the strengths and 
weaknesses of prevailing modes of scholar-activist political praxis—from union efforts, to 
conference assemblies, from summer seminars, to partybuilding efforts, to various on and off-
campus coalitions? What do scholars and teachers in particular have to contribute to activist 
campaigns beyond the classroom? How can the classroom itself be understood as a site of 
activism? In what ways do the “educators need to be educated” today? 

What should effective activism produce? What can we learn, both positively and 
negatively, from past attempts at transformative intellectual-political praxis? What positive 
models, past or present, local or distant, can we point to in terms of scholar or teacher activism 
that have opened new radical possibilities? What pitfalls threaten such academic-activist 
interventions? In what sense does the intellectual, scholarly, or pedagogical production taking 
place on or around university, college, or K-12 campuses today become a “material force” in the 
world in which we live? To what extent does it enable or become an obstacle to genuine 
movement for radical social change? 

What opportunities for transformative praxis are being opened up in the current 
conjuncture of crisis-racked neoliberal capitalism? Which are being shut down? How is the 
shifting terrain of the “post-welfare state university” –with its decreasing state support for the 
humanities and its increasing reliance on super-exploited “adjunct” faculty and high stakes 
testing—creating new chances and new dangers for radical praxis? Which avenues of activism 
hold the most promise for us in the present period? Which appear to foreclosed or blocked? 
Which appear to be fundamentally exhausted and why? What modes of activism today in fact 
play a negative role in dissipating, confusing, or ensnaring radical political energies, preventing 
them from pursuing more productive avenues? 

How should we to relate to the experiences, the legacies, and the cultural productions of 
previous eras of activism? To what extent do we see our present scholarly and activist, 
intellectual and political commitments as extensions of these prior efforts? To what extent do we 
see our own praxis as representing a rupture from these past moments’ work?  What are the 
positive and what are the negative lessons that can be critically abstracted from these prior 
moments, and how are they of value for us today?  For instance: What are the correct critical 



Ramsey  37 

lessons to be derived from the rapid rise and fall of the Occupy Movement in the US? From 
recent labor movements on and off campus? From other mass mobilizations across the world 
since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008? 

In our writing, our teaching, our conversations, and correspondence: how do we relate to 
the notion of ‘activism’ in theory and in practice? What is the unconscious political content of 
the scholarly and pedagogical forms in which we are engaged?  What is the message that our 
activism sends out, and to whom is it addressed? 

We welcome: Testimonials, Credos, Manifestos of Academic and/or Activist practices, 
and Reports from the Field, as well as more traditional essays and scholarly papers. We seek 
first-hand accounts of attempts to overcome particular obstacles to engaging social struggles and 
radical political issues in the classroom or in other academic contexts, in all their mix of positive 
and negative results. We also welcome personal accounts of struggles to overcome the various 
forms of alienation that characterize academic labor in the humanities today, and that confront 
academic activists in particular.  How have you sought to reconcile your commitments as activist 
and as scholar and as teacher in the current environment? What insight or advice can you offer 
others facing similar struggles? 

We also welcome:  Poetry as well as prose, photography, graphic art, and other creative 
forms, as well as reviews of recent critical or cultural production (books, films, blogs, etc) that 
thoughtfully engage any of the above topics. 

Please submit all proposals (250-500 words) to: Joseph Ramsey at 
jgramsey@gmai l .com and David Downing at downing@iup.edu. The print edition of the 
two-part volume will appear in Works and Days (www.worksanddays.net) in 2016. An expanded 
online open-access version will appear in Cultural Logic: an electronic journal of Marxist 
theory and practice  (www.clogic.eserver.org). 

  



 
 

Since 1997 
ISSN 1097-3087 

http://clogic.eserver.org/ 

Editors 
Rich Gibson 
San Diego State University   

Martha Gimenez 
University of Colorado (retired) 

Gregory Meyerson 
North Carolina A & T University   

James Neilson 

 
Joseph G. Ramsey 
University of Massachusetts - Boston   

E. Wayne Ross 
University of British Columbia   

David Siar 
Winston-Salem State University   

North Carolina A & T University  
 
Advisory Group 
Robert Albritton, York University, Canada 
Theodore W. Allen, Brooklyn Public Library (1919-

2005) 
Crystal Bartolovich, Syracuse University 
Rosalyn Baxandall, State University of New York, Old 

Westbury 
Vladimir Bilenkin, North Carolina State University 
Jamie Owen Daniel, Director of Organizing and 

Development, UPI Local 4100, IFT/AFT/AFL-CIO 
Anthony Dawahare, California State University, 

Northridge 
Greg Dawes, North Carolina State University 
Teresa L. Ebert, State University of New York, Albany 
Barbara Foley, Rutgers University 
Marcial González, University of California, Berkeley 
Rosemary Hennessy, State University of New York, 

Albany 
Mike Hill, State University of New York, Albany 
Peter Hitchcock, Graduate Center-City University of 

New York 
Amitava Kumar, Vassar College 
Neil Larsen, University of California, Davis 
John McClendon, Michigan State University 
Sophia A. McClennen, Pennsylvania State University 
 
 
 
 

Andrew Milner, Monash University, Melbourne 
Warren Montag, Occidental College 
Bill V. Mullen, University of Texas, San Antonio 
Richard Ohmann, Wesleyan University 
Bertell Ollman, New York University 
Vijay Prashad, Trinity College 
Russell Reissing, University of Toledo 
Modhumita Roy, Tufts University 
E. San Juan, Jr., Philippines Cultural Study Center 
Sean Sayers, University of Kent 
Helena Sheehan, Dublin City University 
David Slavin, Westfield State College and Emory 

University 
Paul Smith, George Mason University 
Alan Spector, Purdue University Calumet 
Michael Sprinker, State University of New York, Stony 

Brook (1950-1999) 
Carol A. Stabile, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 
Richard Stahler-Sholk, Eastern Michigan University 
Kenneth Surin, Duke University 
Jeffrey Williams, Carnegie Mellon University 
Richard Wolff, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 
Michael Yates, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown