File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0106, message 13


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/

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