There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, you can't take part, you can't even tacitly take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to indicate to the people who own it, to the people who run it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. Mario Savio, Free Speech Movement leader, Berkeley, 1964

I'm generally pretty amenable to debate, and I consider it a sign of weakness when other people resort to name-calling. If you can't address my arguments, then you don't have an answer to them.

That doesn't mean I enjoy being called names, however. Here's something I wrote about the process of teaching and one of the contradictions I see in it:

- enforcing academic power relations. When we mark/hand back papers, we're acting as bosses/supervisors. We're using the power granted to us by a hierarchical, capitalist educational system. And we bear the brunt of that from unhappy students.

Don't they have work to do? - FSM Berkeley radicals

And here's what another TA wrote me:

This comment of yours that I pasted below has to be one of the dumbest things I've read in a long time. No offense.

Marking and handing back papers is the work that needs to be done. That's part of what TAs do. As far as "enforcing academic power relations" granted by "a hierarchical, capitalist educational system," well, what do you expect? This is university, not the coffee house, where feedback, class leadership, and yes, evaluations, count for something.

Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do. That's why we say, "tough shit."

He also called my comment "useless, childish whining."

What is it with toadies? I've heard this argument so many times before, in many different contexts. It all amounts to the same thing: this is way things are and always have been, so just shut up and accept them. Any critique is just utopianism. If you can't take the heat, you shouldn't be here.

But of course, we are here. We have no choice. We have to work or we starve. This is why people started unions in the first place. And it's why some of us have decent working conditions: because we, as a class, fought for them. We looked at those unequal, hierarchical conditions - be it lean production or grading - and said, "This isn't fair."

Here's two examples of what workers, factory and educational, have accomplished: sit-down strikes in the auto industry, and the Berkeley student revolt.

Nothing happens unless people question why they're doing what they're doing. 150 years ago, English workers agitated to work 12 hours a day. The capitalists told them this was utopian, it would destroy industry. They had to fight for decades to get the 12 hour day, then the 10 hour day, then 8. We're still fighting this battle. And it is a battle. You have to take sides, or you end up justifying what the boss does with the tired refrain, "It could be worse."

Hey, they could've sent us to Vladivostok! - Estonians exiled to Siberia by Stalin, 1956

Well, I've got news: it could always be worse. That doesn't make it right. We have an obligation to point out how we're being used by the powers-that-be to maintain their control and profit, in big ways and small. I'm not suffering like a political prisoner. But capitalist power relations operate everywhere: we encounter them daily in a myriad of ways and, if we feel that change has to start somewhere, we have a responsibility to question them. Critique on its own doesn't lead to change. But change doesn't start without critique.

Denying our own exploitation is not an innocent statement. It's part of a continuum that leads directly to Prof. Scott from my last post, claiming we should see the virtues of factory exploitation. If you don't oppose the values of the system, you end up supporting them.

Damn lickspittles.