On This Campus: The Work of the Revolutionary AO Cadre Under Attack by Bourgeois Reformists

The Revolutionary Alternative Orange Cadre

Revision History
• Fall/Winter 1995-6	Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students.
The Alternative Orange: Vol. 5, No. 1 (pp. 4-5).
• August 28, 2003	Webpage: .
DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.7) from original.

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Over the last half-decade or so, the Alternative Orange has struggled to provide a revolutionary space within a corporate university. This has been a collective task and almost every issue of the AO has been published under tremendous pressure from right-wing students and faculty who have, in many ways, opposed us, ridiculed us, and accused us of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, elitism. . . And, of course, all these charges are correct. They are correct given the political culture of the corporate university and the cult of the post-al left among “activist” students and faculty who currently define the limits of “acceptable” politics (i.e. a politics which is attentive to the interests of the owners of the corporate university in a bourgeois “democracy"). We are, by any standards of a bourgeois democracy “authoritarian"—we simply do not accept the masquerade of democracy which is put forth by the liberal state as “democratic”; we believe that radical equality is not the function of purely political practices (the right to vote, the right to veto. . .) but entails struggles to completely restructure all the social and politico-cultural institutions of the liberal state and to abolish the regime of exploitation that undergirds them. The AO has, over the years, opposed all reformist views and practices and for this it has paid a high price in the time its editorial cadre has had to spend fighting the continual invasion of reformists, in the way it has been treated in classrooms by professors who have used their institutional power to punish members of the AO editorial cadre for their political practices. . . The very professors and students, in other words, who accuse the AO cadre of “authoritarianism” (and the entire history of their interaction with the editors of the AO is marked by such a predictable revival of a Cold War rhetoric) have, in their classes and other sites of the institution, used their institutional power and support to punish and thus attempt to intimidate the AO cadre so as to block revolutionary politics.

Such “punishment” is not an unusual development. It is part of the daily practices of liberal institutions to put into place “disciplinary” measures to police the space of radical knowledges and to prevent these knowledges from ever being disseminated and becoming a force for transformative social change. However, for the purposes of the public record it will be useful to recount some of the instances of this “punishment”; of the disciplinary measures which have become a standard feature of intellectual life for the revolutionary editors (past and present) of the AO cadre at SU. One of the severest instances of “retribution” has been the sabotaging of the letters of recommendation written for one of us, Dr. Adam Katz, by three feminist professors, Linda Alcoff, Felicity Nussbaum and Dympna Callaghan. Their “revising” of his previously outstanding letters (which was initiated by Professors Alcoff and Callaghan without even informing him), and substitution in their place of the most damaging allegations in regard to his pedagogical and intellectual practices is the most blatant instance of the use of their institutional authority to blacklist a Marxist student in order to attempt to prevent him from ever getting a job in the academy. In another instance, one of these very same professors—supposedly a progressive “materialist feminist"—Dympna Callaghan, refused a recommendation to Amrohini J. Sahay who had received the highest grades from her in her class. This refusal was accompanied by another refusal. The racist refusal of a relatively privileged white woman professor to give any reason for her decision not to support the Marxist intellectual work of a woman of color. Subsequently, of course (and all these instances have been documented in past issues of the AO), Professor Callaghan also attempted to intimidate Jennifer Cotter, another Marxist-feminist student, by “publicly” (in the space of the snack bar) “stigmatizing” the AO and her participation in the AO without offering any theorization for this “stigmatization." The list is very long. We are the only group of students on this campus who have been literally verbally abused and thrown out of classes, who have been continually subjected to anti-Marxist tirades, who have been ridiculed and harassed by both professors and students in the classroom (professors and students for whom the very idea of working towards social revolution for a just economic society is a source of amusement and cause for an “enlightened” cynicism), who have had “rules of acceptable behaviour” in classrooms written into course syllabuses to keep us out, who have had professors themselves walk out of classrooms in which their ideas were subject to contestation and critique... who have had...

While these instances have taken place in the “formal” spaces of the institutution [sic.] we have also been subject to the same disciplinary logic in its “informal” spaces. In the discourses of the political “fringe” which exists at Syracuse University, by all the generations of the post-al left students (and under the approving tutelage of their ideological mentors), we have been marked as the self-valorizing extremists and charged as being non-representative of the interests of people of color, women... We have been told that we should be out on the streets with guns (and not deploying the weapon of materialist critique in classrooms), that our policy of non-compromise with the bourgeois institution is, alternatively, an idealist refusal of the “marketplace realities” of intellectual work, or a self-serving ploy to boost our own “market value”, that we should engage in endless “dialogue” with the practices of the broad left and to refuse such a dialogue is an act of silencing and privileging of ourselves. We have received hostile telephone calls making insidious insinuations about our collective work with Marxist professors on this campus, and celebrating capitalism and legitimating its brutalities... Recently, during our efforts to publicly denounce the incident of the sexual harassment and intellectual intimidation of our comrade Jennifer Cotter by Creative Writing professor Stephen Dobyns, one of us, Stephen Tumino, was physically threatened by a reactionary student from the Creative Writing Program. These students, who often speak from opposing theoretical and even political positions, and yet who are uniformly hostile to our materialist theory and materialist politics, are at the forefront of charges that the practices of the AO are non-representative of their “voices” while doing everything possible to silence the voice of the AO cadre who have not in the past, and do not now, believe in the idea of representation that prevails in their bourgeois discourse communities. In other words, while we have, over the years been marked as totalitarians who are indifferent to the heterogeneity of voice, our own voice—which introduces radical heterogeneity—has been constantly threatened with silence.

This issue of the AO is published under the same conditions. The political climate at Syracuse University has become increasingly reactionary and repressive and the political culture of students is now marked more than ever by the most retrograde and fascist practices aimed at erasing all revolutionary praxis against a system in which they hope they will prosper. To be more specific, a group of students headed by Corrine Zoli, Nirmala Erevelles and Robert Young, have, as the deadline of publication of this issue of the AO neared, tried to prevent its publication by disrupting editorial meetings and by attempting to stage a coup d'etat in order to turn the political clock back and change the AO from a revolutionary paper to a simple post-al left publication. Robert Young—a long time practitioner of reformist politics in the English Department—has over and over again tried to intimate that the practices of the AO are “undemocratic." His tactics, similar to all footsoldiers of reactionary politics of the opportunistic bourgeois left, has been to cloak his own actions as the epitome of being democratic and left, while at the same time trying to smuggle through the kinds of practices that will justify and legitimate the ideological owners of this university—the reactionary professors and their cliques of students and supporters among administrators. As a recent indication of his attempt to introduce a petit bourgeois understanding of “democracy” into the work of the AO, Robert Young tried to suggest that AO editorial meetings be divided into the “pragmatic” (the code word of the reformists for “practice") and the “theoretical” (as if this is even possible!) in order to fracture the praxical coherency of the editorial practices of the AO, and in order to accomodate the ideas—through the setting up of a “separate” space for “discussion"—of the latest bourgeois arrivals at the AO. Robert Young, is, of course, not acting alone: reactionaries come in groups. In close association with his practices, Nirmala Erevelles has undertaken a combination of a threatening personal style—throwing fits in the editorial meetings—and the reading of a list of questions from the old bourgeois book-of-democracy catechism: as if the AO's struggle against the bankrupt notion of democracy that she is advancing is not written on every page that it has published over the last several years! As if her own reformist bourgeois feminism (now posing as a post-al “marxist-feminism"), which demanded her (on-going) SILENCE on the issue of the sexual harassment of Jennifer Cotter, as well as the principled political response by members of the Marxist Collective and the AO cadre, is not a matter of public record!

Moreover, in the absence of any sustained political, cultural, or social theory, the reformists, in their attempt to silence the Alternative Orange and its collective, have always appealed to the “how” questions... hence the staging of the (failed) coup d'etat at one of the editorial meetings of the AO was once again conducted through a prolonged appeal to the procedures of the “how” (the ur-concept of the bourgeois democrats). “How” was the publication of texts going to be decided, “how” was the AO going to accomodate the reformists, “how” were members of the AO cadre going to “account” for their practices, “how” were the meeting times going to be called, “how”... Since the reformists actually have no conceptual and theoretical way to deal with our political views and positions, they over and over again resurrect the formalist banalities of reformist politics and the stale litanies on whether the way we go about publishing the AO is “democratic." In other words, once again, it is not WHAT we do that becomes the question but HOW we do it. Of course HOW we do things is shaped by WHAT we are doing: What we are doing is, for one thing, NOT providing more space for reformist politics and more discussion sessions for the narratives and performances of self—and the way (HOW) we do this is equally anti-reformist. It is, in fact, just this anti-reformist and anti-accomodationist approach that is targeted in the narratives of these reactionaries as “undemocratic." In a strange, but not surprising way, “democratic” has come to mean non-CRITIQUE-AL to the reformists: those who are desperately trying to “redefine” radical materialist critique as an extended “conversation” over the “how” (while all the while employing the language of “materialist critique").

In intimate association with the practices of Young and Erevelles is their close ally Zoli—a writer of texts in defense of an infantile feminism (the kind propagated especially, but not exclusively, by faculty associated with the Women's Studies Program at SU) and the staunch promoter of the “theory for the marketplace” school of professionalism. At the very same AO editorial meeting during which Erevelles was deploying fits of rage as a tactic of intimidation, and Young was advancing his bankrupt notion of a split between theory and practice, Zoli was busy raising once again, in 1995, the spectre of the “unethical” publishing practices of the AO (as she did during her brief interlude with the AO in 1993). She once again wanted to know whether we were in fact “privileging” the revolutionary texts that question the very foundation of education that she is trying to complete at SU, package, and sell for a high-paying job in the corporate university. Was, for example, the AO actually privileging the publication of the texts of Zavarzadeh? That enemy of democracy who, after all, has publicly said that he does not believe in bourgeois democracy, that pedagogy is not for jobs ("I do not train students for the capitalist machine") and has openly declared himself for

“A PEDAGOGY FOR INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM."