{"id":5879,"date":"2022-10-23T21:02:23","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T01:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/?p=5879"},"modified":"2022-10-24T13:57:18","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T17:57:18","slug":"bernard-e-harcourt-introduction-to-utopia-3-13-organizing-as-utopian-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-introduction-to-utopia-3-13-organizing-as-utopian-form\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Introduction to Utopia 3\/13: Organizing as Utopian Form"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt<\/p>\n

\n

Today\u2019s organizers\u200a\u2014\u200anot activists, thank you\u200a\u2014\u200amake clear that they are not black bloc participants brawling with police or hippies plotting a love-in. They are inspired by a tradition of professional revolutionaries, by Lenin\u2019s exhortation that \u201cunless the masses are organized, the proletariat is nothing. Organized\u200a\u2014\u200ait is everything.\u201d Organizing, in other words, is unembarrassed about power. It recognizes that to wield it you need to persuade untold numbers of people to join a cause, and to begin organizing themselves. Organizing means being in it to win.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u2014 Alyssa Battistoni, \u201cSpadework: On Political Organizing\u201d (2019)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alyssa Battistoni\u2019s essay \u201cSpadework<\/a>\u201d is one of my favorite reads of all times. I rarely say this. I mean it. I urge you to read it for yourself.<\/p>\n

Battistoni<\/a> brilliantly demonstrates, by recounting her own experience organizing with fellow graduate students for a student workers\u2019 union at Yale, how the praxis of organizing transformed her\u2014how it turned her not only into an organizer, but a political being. It was not the graduate classrooms, nor the seminars, so much as the arduous practice of organizing that gave meaning to political texts.<\/p>\n

In an extended meditation on Antonio Gramsci<\/a> and Stuart Hall<\/a>\u2014two worldly philosophers we studied last year in Revolution 13\/13<\/a>\u2014Battistoni shows us how organizing can penetrate and undermine the hegemonic hold of common sense:<\/p>\n

\n

organizing burrows into the pores of your practical consciousness and asks you to choose the part of yourself that wants something other than common sense. It\u2019s unsettling. It can be alienating. And yet I also often felt I was finally reconciling parts of myself I\u2019d tried to keep separate\u200a\u2014\u200awhat I thought, what I said, what I did. To organize, and to be organized, you have to keep in mind Hall\u2019s lesson: there is no true or false consciousness, no true self that organizing discovers or undoes. You too, Hall reminds us, were made by this world you hope to change. The more distant the world you want to live in is from the world that exists, the more deeply you yourself will feel this disjuncture. \u201cI\u2019m not cut out for this,\u201d people often say when they struggle with organizing. No one is: one isn\u2019t born an organizer, but becomes one.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Alyssa Battistoni does not romanticize the hard work of organizing. Instead, she borrows a term from Ella Baker\u2014\u201cspadework\u201d\u2014to describe what she calls the labor of organizing, \u201cthe hard labor that prepares the ground for dramatic action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Utopia 3\/13<\/h1>\n

The point of gathering for a seminar on union organizing as part of Utopia 13\/13 is not to suggest, by any means, that unions or union organizing are \u201cutopian.\u201d They are, in truth, no more than a makeshift response to the overwhelming imbalance of power between workers and their employers. Unions are merely a first step, but a necessary one, to combat work inequalities. They do not constitute a full-fledged utopia.<\/p>\n

But the act of organizing, the political experience itself, has a utopic dimension. As Battistoni writes<\/a>, \u201cOrganizing relationships can be utopian: at their best, they offer the feminist dream of intimacy outside of romance or family.\u201d Battistoni goes on to explain:<\/p>\n

\n

In the union, I loved people I did not know very well. In meetings I was often overcome with awe and affection at the courage and wisdom of the people there with me. When I needed help, there were always people I could call, people who would always pick up the phone, people I could and did talk to about anything. These relationships often served as a source of care and support in a world with too little of those things. But they were not only friendships, and not only emotional ballast. The people I looked to for support would also push me when it was called for, as I would them; that, I knew, was the deal.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Organizing creates bonds of solidarity that can prefigure a utopian future. It is perhaps in the organizing, not necessarily in the end product, that we can get closest to a space called utopia or heterotopia. As Andr\u00e9 Prettman writes in his study of postpoetry, \u201cwhat is significant is less a question of where one begins and where one ends, but, more so, what occurs in the middle, or the in-between, during the act of wandering; as Gilles Deleuze puts it: \u201cCe qui compte dans un chemin, ce qui compte dans une ligne, c\u2019est toujours le milieu, pas le d\u00e9but ni la fin.<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n

It is nevertheless fraught to mention the term \u201cutopia\u201d in the context of work and employment, especially in the context of the university. It is for this reason, no doubt, that Dominic Terrel Walker<\/a> and Helen Zhao<\/a>\u2014doctoral students at Columbia and elected members of the Student Workers of Columbia-UAW 2710\u2014urge us to read Fred Moten and Stefano Harney\u2019s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study<\/em> (2013), especially Chapter 4 on \u201cDebt and Study<\/a>.\u201d (As you may recall, we studied The Undercommons in Praxis 10\/13<\/a><\/em> before the pandemic, in March 2019, with Marquis Bey, Jack Halberstam, Heather Love, Allegra McLeod, and Kendall Thomas. You can read their brilliant essays on The Undercommons<\/em> here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Moten and Harney\u2019s chapter on debt, credit, and study describes a fractured world where those above have credit and manage debt, pursue their ambitions to join the global conversation or start their own NGO, and those below are weighted down by debt. The latter are the ones, Moten and Harney refer to, who \u201ccarry bags of newspaper clippings, or sit at the end of the bar, or stand at the stove cooking, or sit on a box at the newsstand, or speak through bars, or speak in tongues.\u201d (68) The reference to speaking through bars is a haunting reminder of our carceral society and the need for abolition democracy<\/a>. But the chapter ends on the same theme as Battistoni\u2019s essay\u2014on the theme of organizing. \u201cIf we listen to them they will say: come let\u2019s plan something together. And that\u2019s what we\u2019re going to do. We\u2019re telling all of you but we\u2019re not telling anyone else.\u201d (68).<\/p>\n

These readings frame our discussion of union organizing\u2014both as a retrospective discussion on all the successful organizing that has been going on across the country, at Columbia University, and at other places like Starbucks and Amazon, and as a prospective discussion on the future of work. In this respect, we are especially delighted to be joined by Casey Moore (@unioncasey<\/a>), a leading organizer in Buffalo, NY, with Starbucks Workers United.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Future of Work<\/h1>\n

The moment could not be timelier. The fact is, something is happening among workers in America. It\u2019s not clear exactly what, but we\u2019re in a time of turmoil and change. And these moments always have great promise.<\/p>\n

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered what people now call \u201cthe Great Resignation,\u201d following Anthony Klotz<\/a>, a professor at Texas A&M University\u2014or what NPR labeled<\/a> the \u201cGreat Renegotiation.\u201d Beginning in early 2021, workers started quitting their jobs en masse, some of them retiring, others looking for better jobs, yet others working at home. That year, 47.8 million workers quit or changed jobs, an all-time high. The pace continued in 2022, and it has now extended into a new phase that people are calling the \u201cQuiet Resignation.\u201d According to Zaid Khan, who popularized the notion on TikTok, quiet quitting is \u201cwhere you\u2019re not outright quitting your job, but you\u2019re quitting the idea of going above and beyond. You\u2019re still performing your duties,\u201d Khan explains<\/a>, \u201cbut you\u2019re no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life.\u201d Few workers seem to want to return to work, having experienced remote work from home, resulting in what people are calling the \u201creturn-to-work wars<\/a>,\u201d as executives at large corporations are trying to get the workforce back in the office.<\/p>\n

At the same time, there have been increasing movements toward unionization, as evidenced by the successful union vote at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, at R.E.I. in Soho, and at many Starbucks stores. The National Labor Relations Board reports<\/a> a 57% rise in the number of filings of union election petitions for the five months following October 2021. \u201cMore than 250 Starbucks locations filed petitions, and after notching a first win late last year, 54 Starbucks company-owned stores have formally organized,\u201d according to CNBC<\/a>. \u201cGoogle Fiber contractors in Kansas City successfully voted to unionize their small office in March becoming the first workers with bargaining rights under the one year-old Alphabet Workers Union.\u201d This year, so far, the unions have prevailed in about 77% of the union elections<\/a>, which is the highest rate in recorded history. For the first half of 2022, 78,000 workers have gone on strike, which is three times more<\/a> than for the same period in 2021. Moreover, since 2010, there has been a steady increase in public approval<\/a> of labor unions\u2014from a low of 48% to a high of 71% in 2022, the highest approval rating for labor unions since 1965.<\/p>\n

The Times They Are A-Changin’.<\/h1>\n

As Alyssa Battistoni shows in her essay \u201cLabor without Love\u201d in The Nation<\/em><\/a>, all of these changes and transformations need to be placed within the larger arc of broad societal shifts in labor associated with deindustrialization, automation, and the rise of the service industries. The number of manufacturing jobs in the United States declined continuously since the mid twentieth century, thereby reducing the type of work that came with solid benefits, stability, and even, in some cases, pensions\u2014replaced by more precarious jobs in the service sector. Automation has always been the source of both utopic and dystopic visions of the future. At one end, some believe that it will ring in the end of work and leisure time for everyone. That was always part of the ideal of a communalist future. At the other end, some believe it will come with scarcity, even greater inequality, and a collapse of social structures.<\/p>\n

In conversation with Sarah Jaffe\u2019s book Work Won\u2019t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, And Alone <\/em>(Hurst, 2021), Battistoni explores the affective dimensions of service jobs, especially those traditionally considered \u201cwomen\u2019s work,\u201d such as daycare, housekeeping, caring for the elderly, teaching, and nonprofit work. \u201cIn these kinds of jobs,\u201d Battistoni writes, \u201clove is invoked to squeeze out more work with less pay.\u201d What is expected of workers in the service industries and their relation to work is different than in the more traditional manufacturing context, which also has many implications for understanding the transformation of work today\u2014the quiet quitting, the great resignation, the increased unionization.<\/p>\n

To discuss all these dimensions of union organizing and the future of work, we are delighted to welcome to Utopia 3\/13 Alyssa Battistoni<\/a>, Casey Moore,\u00a0Dominic Walker<\/a>, and Helen Zhao<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Welcome to Utopia 3\/13!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt Today\u2019s organizers\u200a\u2014\u200anot activists, thank you\u200a\u2014\u200amake clear that they are not black bloc participants brawling with police or hippies plotting a love-in. They are inspired by a tradition of professional revolutionaries, by Lenin\u2019s exhortation that \u201cunless the… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2332,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[51935],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-3-13"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2332"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}