The coronavirus has hit the City University of New York, where I teach, hard: more than 20 deaths of students, faculty, and staff, and counting. Yet the impact of the virus on CUNY has received almost no press coverage at all.
At the same time, the media continues to focus its higher education coverage, during the coronavirus, where it always has: on elite schools.
The combination of these elements—the unremarked devastation at CUNY, the outsized attention to wealthy colleges and universities—led me to write this piece for The New Yorker online:
It seems likely that no other college or university in the United States has suffered as many deaths as CUNY. Yet, aside from an op-ed by Yarbrough in the Daily News, there has been little coverage of this story. Once known proudly as “the poor man’s Harvard,” CUNY has become a cemetery of uncertain dimensions, its deaths as unremarked as the graves in a potter’s field. Â
The coronavirus has revealed to many the geography of class in America, showing that where we live and work shapes whether we live or die. Might it offer a similar lesson about where we learn?… Â
During the Depression, the New York municipal-college system opened two flagship campuses: Brooklyn College and Queens College. These schools built the middle class, took in refugees from Nazi Germany, remade higher education, and transformed American arts and letters. In 1942, Brooklyn College gave Hannah Arendt her first teaching job in the United States; an adjunct, she lectured on the Dreyfus affair, which would figure prominently in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In the decades that followed, CUNY built more campuses. Until 1976, it was free to all students; the government footed the bill. Â
What prompted this public investment in higher education was neither sentimentality about the poor nor a noblesse oblige of good works. It was a vision of culture and social wealth, derived from the activism of the working classes and defended by a member of Britain’s House of Lords. “Why should we not set aside,” John Maynard Keynes wondered in 1942, “fifty million pounds a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university.” Against those who disavowed such ambitions on the grounds of expense, Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” And “once done, it is there.” Â
Public spending, for public universities, is a bequest of permanence from one generation to the next. It is a promise to the future that it will enjoy the learning of the present and the literature of the past. It is what we need, more than ever, today. Sending students, professors, and workers back to campus, amid a pandemic, simply because colleges and universities need the cash, is a statement of bankruptcy more profound than any balance sheet could ever tally.
Since it came out on Thursday, I’ve learned of three additional deaths at CUNY, all students in their last year at Lehman College: Daniel DeHoyos, Zavier Richburg, and Lenin Portillo. The Lehman College Senate has voted that they all be awarded posthumous degrees. That brings the total number of deaths at CUNY that I know of to 26.
Speaking of the activism of the working classes, I also wrote for The Nation an essay on the communist, which doubles as a review of Vivian Gornick’s classic The Romance of American Communism, which has recently been reissued, and Jodi Dean’s excellent work of political theory, Comrade.
The communist stands at the crossroads of two ideas: one ancient, one modern. The ancient idea is that human beings are political animals. Our disposition is so public, our orientation so outward, we cannot be thought of apart from the polity. Even when we try to hide our vices, as a character in Plato’s Republic notes, we still require the assistance of “secret societies and political clubs.” That’s how present we are to other people and they to us.
The modern idea—that of work—posits a different value. Here Weber may be a better guide than Marx. For the communist, work means fidelity to a task, a stick-to-itiveness that requires clarity of purpose, persistence in the face of opposition or challenge, and a refusal of all distraction. It is more than an instrumental application of bodily power upon the material world or the rational alignment of means and ends (activities so ignoble, Aristotle thought, as to nearly disqualify the laborer from politics). It is a vocation, a revelation of self.
The communist brings to the public life of the ancients the methodism of modern work. In all things be political, says the communist, and in all political things be productive. Anything less is vanity. Like the ancients, the communist looks outward, but her insistence on doing only those actions that yield results is an emanation from within. Effectiveness is a statement of her integrity. The great sin of intellectuals, Lenin observed, is that they “undertake everything under the sun without finishing anything.” That failing is symptomatic of their character—their “slovenliness” and “carelessness,” their inability to remain true to whatever cause or concern they have professed. The communist does better. She gets the job done.
…The left has good reason to be wary of the stern antinomies of the comrade. The freedom that goes by the name of discipline, the suppression of difference in the name of solidarity, the words of emancipation as window dressing for authoritarian constraint—we’ve been down this road before. We know where it ends, and neither Gornick nor Dean denies that ending. Nor do they provide an easy way around or out of it.
Gornick interprets the tragedy of communism through Greek myth. Helen awakens in Paris an intense love, one he never knew before. He is turned outward, directed to another soul in a way he is not accustomed to. He becomes larger than himself. Then the love takes on a life of its own, eclipsing its object. Love becomes the object, the feeling and need; Helen disappears from view. All manner of mayhem and destruction follow. Dean interprets the tragedy through psychoanalysis: The healthy ego ideal of the comrade becomes the ravenous superego. In the same way that the superego feeds off the transgressions of the id, growing ever more powerful from the punishment of impurity, so do comrades turn inward, generating a feeding frenzy of their own. Collective power, once a source of freedom, becomes a prison.
There’s a reason Gornick and Dean turn to myth and psychoanalysis, respectively. Each, in its way, is a story of unhappy endings, in which the conclusion is written from the start. Yet even if we don’t head down the path of authoritarian communism, even if we avoid that unhappy ending, we’re still left with other bad endings that neither psychoanalysis nor myth can account for. Not only has capitalism run rampant since the fall of communism, and not only has the left yet to find a replacement for the parties and movements that once created socialism in all its varieties, but even the contemporary left has not left behind the challenge of reconciling freedom and constraint….
You can read the rest of the piece here.
Since it’s been a while since I posted at Crooked Timber, I thought I’d alert folks to some other writing I’ve been doing recently at the New York Review of Books online: one, a piece on the Iowa Caucuses (remember them?) and minoritarian democracy; and the other, on what the isolation of the pandemic means for democracy.
Hope everyone is healthy and safe.
{ 13 comments }
Barry 05.09.20 at 3:12 pm
Welcome back!
Gareth Wilson 05.09.20 at 9:01 pm
” even the contemporary left has not left behind the challenge of reconciling freedom and constraint….”
A few weeks back everyone was saying the virus proved the necessity of socialism. Maybe so, but this was also when young people were congregating on beaches despite the risk of sickening themselves and killing their parents. Socialism just has to avoid placing any new restrictions on the behaviour of young people, and it’ll all go just fine.
notGoodenough 05.09.20 at 10:42 pm
Gareth Wilson @ 2
Actually, I would say all socialism has to do is avoid killing over 100,000 people* through short-sighted greed, wilful ignorance, and shocking incompetence and it would already seem to be ahead on points.
That is, of course, just one person’s opinion. We could ask the dead of the UK and US, but sadly they seem to be quiet on the matter.
estimated dead of UK + US from COVID-19
Hidari 05.10.20 at 8:12 am
@2 ‘A few weeks back everyone was saying the virus proved the necessity of socialism. ‘
I think in a few weeks, or, even more so, in a few months, it might be an economic catastrophe the likes of which no one now living has experienced, which might be making a strong case for the necessity of socialism. It hasn’t really sunk in for a lot of people yet, but if present trends continue, the current economic apocalypse looks to be far worse than 1929 (The Guardian recently had a piece in which it argued that one has to look back to 1706 (!!) to find an economic catastrophe of this degree of severity).
Given the various fun things that followed from the Great Crash (the rise of Hitler, the Great Depression, a war that killed 50 million people) it is entirely possible that our current situation, in a few decades, might lead to similar demonstrations of the wonders of capitalism (a war between the United States and China suddenly looks much more likely, for example, and not in 100 years but in 30 or 40 years….or less).
Let’s just say that IMHO, Fukuyama-ish diktats about the ‘end of history’ and the ‘inevitable’ triumph of capitalism might have been slightly premature.
Tim Worstall 05.10.20 at 10:34 am
“It seems likely that no other college or university in the United States has suffered as many deaths as CUNY.”
Given that CUNY is rather larger than any other college or university in the US isn’t this rather what we’d expect? Your 26 out of 276,000 is 0.009%. Yes, tragedies and statistics and yet….
@4 “I think in a few weeks, or, even more so, in a few months, it might be an economic catastrophe the likes of which no one now living has experienced, which might be making a strong case for the necessity of socialism.”
We have evidence that socialism is good at preventing, ameliorating or recovering from economic catastrophe, do we?
No, not social democracy, or Bernie’s democratic socialism, but actual socialism as a cure for economic degrowth?
Hidari 05.10.20 at 1:14 pm
‘We have evidence that socialism is good at preventing, ameliorating or recovering from economic catastrophe, do we?’
Maybe, maybe not, and as you allude to, it depends on what you mean by ‘socialism.’ But I would add the, so to speak, ‘missing section’ of that question:
”We have evidence that socialism is good at preventing, ameliorating or recovering from economic catastrophe caused by capitalism do we?’ To which the answer is: maybe, maybe not, but let’s not forget where the problems started, to which socialism might (or might not) give the solution.
As has been pointed out, almost all strands of mainstream economic thinking, even Austrian economics (although this tends to be hidden….I read this in an academic article which I have now lost although I could doubtless ferret it out again), and that Krugmanesque version of Keynesianism (which has been termed, rather crudely, Keynes with his balls cut off) are equilibrium theories. In other words, ceteris paribus, capitalism tends towards equilibrium between supply and demand and it’s only the evil machinations of the State which prevent that. Hence: ‘laissez-faire’.
Marxism and (so to speak) ‘undiluted’ Keynesianism are, on the other hand, anti-equilibrium theories, although in different degrees of ‘strength’ (this is why, despite their differences, socialists and Keynesians can find common ground: there is no common ground between the left and neo-classicism).
Keynes merely remarks that ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ may well go ‘out of sync’ and that this might be a long term problem necessitating state intervention. Marx, of course, stressed that over the long term, ceteris paribus, the overwhelming probability is that supply’ and ‘demand’ in a market economy will go out of sync and that regular recessions and depressions were inevitable in an advanced capitalist society, and, again, that, ceteris paribus, they would tend to get worse over time, as the State ran out of ways to deal with the problem.
Looking at the headlines today, and making informed guesses about the future, would we tend to see capitalism as tending towards equilibrium, or not? In other words, looking at the last 25 years or so, has the globalised capitalist system become more ‘stable’ or the reverse?
Bob 05.11.20 at 12:23 am
Isn’t it time that we stopped talking about socialism and capitalism? If you want to produce goods and services for a population there are two models: private and public. The vast number of experiments conducted in real life economies, particularly during the 20th century, suggest that there are areas where private production is best, and others where public provision is best. And where by “best” I mean a level of quality and variety that is delivered at an efficient cost. (If you feel that some people won’t be able to afford the privately produced good, food say, which is otherwise produced and delivered to convenient locations in an efficient way, then the solution is to tax rich people and just give them money, not to turn it over to the public sector.) So if you want to produce something publicly you will need a system of taxation and an organization for hiring and managing bureaucrats. If you want to produce something privately, then you will need to recognize some property rights, but no more than is necessary to incent people to put up money and start businesses–as the Scandinavian countries show, this is far less than people in the UK and US think we need now.
What does socialism even mean now? And wouldn’t moving to where Denmark or Finland are now (are they “capitalist” are they “socialist”?) be revolutionary and transforming enough, relative to where the US is today, to give the left more than enough to work on, for a generation at least? I mean, relative to the sheer cruelty of the US today, these places are living, functioning utopias.
George Head 05.11.20 at 11:19 am
@7
Bob, that would be true only if socialism were premised on maximising the efficiency of economic production and consumption, and simply re-organising the distribution of income to lift individuals to a common threshold of need or well-being. But that is a very limited frame. It does not describe many socialists, or indeed many political ideologies wherever they lie on the political spectrum. We care about the texture of life and society, not just economic input/output and its distribution. What kind of people are we, what kind of lives do we lead, what human goods do we manifest, what kind of social relations are possible, what is the character of our culture, who has power over whom – we care about these and many other questions besides.
The last ten years have showed us that, taken historically, socialism still has a great deal of life left.
anonymous 05.12.20 at 1:56 am
“Your 26 out of 276,000 is 0.009%. Yes, tragedies and statistics and yet….”
I just quickly googled the annual death rate of people in their twenties. Roughly 1/1000 for men, 1/2000 for women.
The coronavirus death rate at CUNY (0.009%, or rounded to 0.01%, or 1/10,000) is 1/10th of the normal annual death rate for males of student age.
Devastation indeed.
anon
DAT 05.12.20 at 3:32 pm
Anonymous and Devastation, Let’s stipulate that your mathematics are correct. Now imagine that you are listening to your radio before leaving for work, and the announcer says, “This just over the wire. Today everyone whose name starts with the letter A has a 10% increase in their risk of dying.” Are we to understand that this news will have no effect on how you meet the day?
Andres 05.13.20 at 6:22 pm
Hidari 6: While the description of Marxism and Keynesianism as having anti-equilibrium elements is correct as far as it goes, it is incomplete. Every social/economic theory has a tension between equilibrium analysis and disequilibrium analysis. Some, like Austrian theory, emphasize almost entirely disequilibrium analysis, e.g. in Austrian theory prices are not a way of clearing the market at equilibrium (there is no such thing), but a way of transmitting de-centralized information about production costs and relative demand. By contrast, neoclassical microeconomics focuses almost entirely on equilibrium models and situations, though more sensible neoclassicals like Bob Solow and the late Paul Samuelson are quite aware of longer-term disequilibrium analysis.
Marx and Keynes were both aware of this tension. Keynes and his followers were rather straightforward about it: predictions and policy prescriptions from equilibrium models should not be relied on in the long run because in the long run we’re all dead: i.e. waiting for an economic system to return to equilibrium would not be socially or politically practicable, especially as the equilibrium itself may shift over historical time (i.e., time in which everything in a mathematical model can change, as opposed to only the endogenous variables). Or as Joan Robinson pithily put it “Equilibrium is blither”, at least when considering historical time. But Keynesian analysis cannot get by without equilibrium models. e.g. the income-expenditure model that determines equilibrium output even if this equilibrium output leads to less than full employment (the Krugman version). The trick is to figure out when to set this model aside in view of complicating factors.
Marx was more sophisticated and opaque. His version of dialectics adapted from Hegel was an explicit anti-equilibrium methodology. But certain portions of his analysis of capitalism such as the law of value (a.k.a. the labor theory of value) are unavoidably of the equilibrium type: the law of value is a model of why the economic surplus and exploitation are compatible with long-term equilibrium prices, even though in the real world the “givens” in the model (production technologies, range of products, non-technical institutional costs) and therefore the magnitude and number of long-term prices change over historical time, which Marx was quite aware of.
The implications for capitalism vs. socialism are that for both systems equilibrium models are a good way of understanding market or planning processes, but it is a fool’s paradise to think that such models can be translated to rigid policy prescriptions. Central planning under communism stagnated because it could not handle disequilibrium “moments” such as the processes that create new products and technologies. Market processes under either system fall apart if they have to depend on collective action (e.g. to avoid or mitigate financial crisis) rather than decentralized decision-making. Choosing socialism vs. capitalism does not eliminate the social coordination problem; that will always exist and that is why economists exists. The choice only affects which portions of the social sphere are democratic vs. authoritarian.
Andres 05.13.20 at 11:41 pm
Er, getting back to Corey’s original post, the continuing social and financial pressure exerted against CUNY that he has documented is a microcosm, imo, of why social democracy is an unstable transitional period between crisis and pre-crisis capitalism, with capitalism never being able to occupy a stable middle ground between the two. The degree of political commitment to social democracy correlates well with the degree of funding for public institutions such as CUNY aimed at low-income beneficiaries.
The transition away from social democracy is evident not just in the U.S. but almost everywhere in Europe. The transition illustrates the cyclical instability of social democratic capitalism: as living memory of the past catastrophic crisis (that is, 1914-1945) recedes, the capitalist class can and will increase its own profits by chipping away at social democratic institutions and therefore reducing redistribution; the chipping away portion is done by the growth of anti-social democracy media/propaganda, and the institutionalization/legalization of pro-private capitalist corruption in government. Capitalism has screwed over the long-term vision of Keynes at least as much as it did that of Marx.
Gloomy pessimist that I am, my guess is that institutions like CUNY will experience a resurgence only after decades of recurring killer hurricanes, pandemics, drought in agricultural heartland areas, dying oceans and food shortages have brought about another 1914-1945 period. Let’s just cross our fingers that it’s not too late.
Hidari 05.14.20 at 2:38 pm
@12
‘The transition away from social democracy is evident not just in the U.S. but almost everywhere in Europe. The transition illustrates the cyclical instability of social democratic capitalism: as living memory of the past catastrophic crisis (that is, 1914-1945) recedes, the capitalist class can and will increase its own profits by chipping away at social democratic institutions and therefore reducing redistribution; the chipping away portion is done by the growth of anti-social democracy media/propaganda, and the institutionalization/legalization of pro-private capitalist corruption in government. Capitalism has screwed over the long-term vision of Keynes at least as much as it did that of Marx.’
This is of course true, and why capitalism is like the Green Slime in that Stephen King story (later turned into a terrible short film) or the Borg in Star Trek: Generations. Other socio-political formations can tolerate alternative models. Feudalism co-existed with slave states and other ‘asiatic’ modes of production. Eastern bloc style socialism ‘tolerated’ being alongside capitalism, and, despite the hysteria of cold warriors, never made any serious attempt to ‘convert the world’ to communism.
Capitalism is not like this.
It cannot tolerate any other mode of production other than capitalism. In capitalism, there is no such thing as ‘live and let live’. Once one state started to produce, and, therefore, reproduce the capitalist mode of production (the first signs of capitalism began to develop, like a zombie plague, in the 12th and 13th centuries in Mediterranean city states) it was inevitable that, ceteris paribus, capitalism would eventually spread all round the world and convert all other countries and all other states to this mode of production.
And so it proved. This is why the state of affairs we are in at present is unlike any other in all of previous history. As Branko Milanovic pointed out, in the title of a book, we now see ‘Capitalism, Alone’. In no other period in world history has there been only one socio-economic formation governing the entire planet, with no alternative on the horizon.
So it’s inevitable, in other words, that of course, capitalism would eventually destroy socialism, as it did, but also why Keynesian style social democracy and then milquetoast Blairism would also have to go. Capitalism can tolerate no alternatives, no ‘other’, no way out. Like the Borg, everything must be assimilated. And everything has been.
The problem of course is that socialism and communism were the best thing that ever happened to capitalism. Under pressure from (fear of) the Eastern Bloc and then militant trade unions etc. capitalism was forced to backtrack and introduce (e.g.) a ‘safety net’, nationalised industries etc.
But now that all other alternatives have been crushed, capitalism can do no other than to continue to reproduce itself. Why bother to privatise the NHS (as is happening?). It poses no threat.
But the NHS must be privatised for the same reason that Everest was conquered: ‘because it’s there’. Everything public must become private. Everything that can be bought and sold will be bought and sold. Even tiny countries that pose no threat like Venezuela and Cuba and North Korea, must eventually be assimilated, because that’s what capitalism does. It can do no other. Capitalism MUST expand into new markets: always.
So, all the forms of capitalism that we saw before 1992 (and really since 2001, as the Blairite peace was really a dead cat bounce) weren’t really capitalism</>. They were ‘mixed forms’ with other pre-existent (e.g. aristocratic, feudal) forms still ‘alive’ or else mixed forms with elements of socialism or social democracy.
The capitalism we have seen developing in the 21st century on the other hand….this is the real deal. This is what capitalism really looks like, when it faces no challenges from outside, or from below. Increasing inequality, increasing instability, increasing environmental devastation, and all of these feeding into each other.
Capitalism only worked when it didn’t win, but now it has won, it doesn’t work.
Or, another way to look at it, capitalism is auto-annihilatory. Once it runs out of alternatives to destroy, it slowly but steadily destroys itself.
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