Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 04:23:34 +0100 (BST) From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Scott=20Hamilton?= <s_h_hamilton-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: Re: AUT: introduction Let me try to explain what I mean with reference to a real situation, so it maybe doesn't seem so arid and philosophical. At Auckland, where my partner and I work (me irregularly, thank God, her full time for a year ending in July, neither academic jobs)twenty five people recently came to a special general meeting of the union. This meeting was called because bureaucrats' attempts to censor the union's bulletin had created something of a crisis in the union, with resignations, disputed vetoes and general paralysis (you can read about all this on a rank and file website at http://www.geocities.com/aucklandunistaff/index.html) Anyway, twenty five people, out of a membership of 1500, came to the special general meeting called to try and sort these problems out. Around the same time, the government's budget announced insufficient funding for tertiary education, and a large demonstration was held at a university in the South Island by students and staff - 2,500 -3,000 people came, out of a university of I think 10,000 - 12,000 students. A similar protest at Auckland uni attracted 30-40 people. Based on totally unsystematic enquiries, I would say that what might be called 'invisible' forms of resistance amongst Auckland uni workers are less than epidemic - on the contrary, some workers at least regard such things as disloyal, and would be horrified to see them occuring. I guess I'm wondering how we could characterise the level of class struggle at Auckland university - if we say it is at a low level, what do we mean by this? Are we referring to the quantity or the quality of class struggle, or both? Like, are people resisting the same as they seem to be in the South, though in semi-secret, underground ways (a change in quality) or is the amount of resistance they are prepared to offer different (quantity)? And, most importantly, what conditions would have to obtain for us to be able to say that no resistance was being offered? If you can't answer these questions with reference to Auckland, maybe you could use a university workplace you're more familiar with, your own for instance? In terms of trying to do stuff politically, the answers to the questions asked above are quite important. If people are already resisting, and we're just not seeing the resistance, then those trying to fight the uni bosses should try to work out, possibly, tactics and strategy that are more compatible with what workers are actually doing already in their own interests. For instance, less messing about trying to capture the union machinery! On the other hand, if people are not offering resistance, maybe we need to focus on making information available that might inspire them to take action - ie information about the financial staus of the uni, their role within it, the plans of the uni bosses etc But it seems that it would be quite difficult to answer *accurately* the question of whether significant resistance exists without having the yardstick of an understanding of what conditions would signify the absence of resistance. Some miscellaneous responses to Harry's: "These are not apriori beliefs but analyses that I accept because when I look around they help me understand what I see." Whilst I accept that you need to have some theory up your sleeve to do empirical work, I think that the results of the work itself have to justify the theory independently of the practical purposes that they serve. A theory can't be justified on the basis of making sense of reality alone - in fact, the problem with too much conventional leftist theory is that it makes *too much sense of reality* I mean, Trotskyism makes sense of the Soviet Union - reduces the mass of phenomena from 1917-1991 into a tidy theory of a degenerate workers' state, but it is false. I could use astrology to make perfect sense of my life, but astrology would still be false. We could take up Chris' suggestion (Marx's suggestion?) and look for criteria for judging the usefulness of theory solely in terms of its usefulness in political struggle, but how would we define usefulness? I mean, a Trot would define the usefulness of her theory to the anticapitalist movement on the basis of how many members it recruited to her grouplet. The appeal to usefulness to struggle as a criterion for assessing a theory is, I believe, circular, because the assessment of the usefulness of a theory in driving forward struggle has to go through criteria of usefulness which are themselves set up by the theory. A set of criteria for the evaluation of theory needs to focus on more than usefulness. Cheers Scott ====For "a ruthless criticism of every existing idea": THR-AT-LL, NZ's class struggle anarchist paper http://www.freespeech.org/thrall/ THIRD EYE, a Kiwi lib left project, at http://www.geocities.com/the_third_eye_website/ and 'REVOLUTION' magazine, a Frankfurt-Christchurch production, http://cantua.canterbury.ac.nz/%7Ejho32/ ____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free -AT-yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk or your free -AT-yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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