Introduction: What Is To Be Done? Neoliberalism and the Role of the Humanist in Higher Education

Good evening, Association for Humanist Sociology (AHS) members and others who have joined us for the AHS Annual Meeting 2017.

The AHS encourages its members to make a reflective statement before they present their work. This is mine. I was raped and tortured as a child, so I learned at a very early age about power relations. I did not know how to protect myself. Still I began to stand up for others at 11 years old because I knew what it felt like to stand alone and I knew what it felt like to feel powerless.

At 18, I was told that I would not be given a dime for college because women are for sex and cooking. So I ran away into the world alone and suffered the things women who are alone suffer. In my 20s, I joined the prison abolition movement. In my 30s, I was on welfare with two children, both of whom had fathers who were in prison when I met them and one of whom was black. I went to college at 38 and spent my 40s in graduate school where I learned that even my professors could see me as an object of sexual interest. But in grad school, I discovered sociology and sociology saved my life.

In 1901, Vladimir Lenin wrote a short pamphlet entitled “What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement.” The title was inspired by a popular novel written by a Russian revolutionary of the day, but Lenin’s concern was about the struggle between the two main factions working to free Russia from 200 years of monarchy: the more moderate Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.

Lenin maintained that the working class could not become political simply by fighting purely economic battles with employers over issues like whether or not they were being paid and how much. His claim was that those Marxists prepared to do so would need to form a political vanguard of revolutionaries to spread Marxist analysis among the workers.

Lenin reminded his readers that Friedrich Engels had written about three struggles—political, economic, and theoretical—and that all three arenas would have to be engaged in order to successfully move the revolution forward. His point was that there was already an intelligentsia to take on this role, but that it would have to do so.

Interestingly enough, the term “intelligentsia” had been coined in Poland in the nineteenth century to identify bourgeoisified intellectuals who could culturally influence the mass Polish population to resist their oppression under Tsarist Russia. Now, Lenin was suggesting that a similar group in Russia would be necessary to encourage workers to resist their oppression under the same Tsarist regime, by assisting the workers in knowing how to understand society in general as more complex than just a relationship between workers and bosses. The promise of revolution was not only economic well-being, but a path to implement a future world in which people would be free.

The question I am considering tonight is how people can be free. I am speaking as a U.S. citizen. And I am speaking as a human being, but only for myself.

In the United States, police militarism, brutality, and extrajudicial killings are continuous; prisons are used to make money for corporations on the backs of black and brown people who, as convicted felons, are often not allowed to work anywhere else; what amounts to concentration camps hold immigrant men, women, and children in privately owned detention centers, while Muslims in particular are instructed that their family members are not allowed to visit them from another country; men and women of color are demonized for even attempting to protest 500 years of humans rights violations against them; women are paid less than men for doing the same work all day and then come home to the assumption that they will also clean the house, cook the food, do the laundry, and take care of the family’s needs as if they have no right to fully live as humans themselves; access to health care and birth control are being cut back by the government even as we speak; and now the U.S. president, despite the Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage, has publicly announced to an anti–lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer organization that homophobia will no longer be silenced, that the U.S. Constitution protects the speech of those who hate while criminalizing the actions of those who love.

Only a few miles from here in Guantanamo, the U.S. government maintains a prison where horrendous human rights violations have been and are regularly committed, a hell in which human beings are being allowed to hunger strike themselves to death, a site of struggle where the cry for freedom cannot be muffled by distance, concrete walls, chain-link fence cages, or drugs designed to kill consciousness.

Yet, in the United States, we are socialized from childhood to believe that under economic neoliberalism, “individualism” is freedom, that it bestows on all of us an equal opportunity to own property, an equal opportunity to purchase the necessities of life, an equal opportunity to dream that we can be anything we want to be (even President), an equal opportunity to live under a bridge and die from exposure to the elements—if we like. What cruel irony! A government that allows only the interests of a small group of corporations and rich people to be realized is a government under which the vast majority of citizens exist only to serve the interests of that government and the rich. Freedom? Indeed!

Free market capitalism—the bestower of this supposed freedom—is actually predatory in nature and only kind to those with capital. So overproduction leads to crisis and, capitalism—like a cancer—spreads in its limitless search for ever more profit, ever more markets, ever more consumers, and ever more subjects to subjugate. The game changes forever. Continuing concentration of wealth produces monopoly capitalism and a multinational class of billionaires who seek to prevent any challenge to their power, any challenge that would bring about comprehensive, lasting, and systemic transformation.

To thwart this transformation, a neoliberal agenda, cold-bloodedly calculated to generate and maximize short-term profit for a handful of select investors at the expense of students and faculty, is attempting to seize complete control of education in the United States.

Students are told: “Don’t think about thinking. Ask what kind of job you’re going to get because you can have anything you want (as long as you can pay for it).” And as if by magic, a new consumer is born, an adolescent chasing a carrot of future prosperity, who will buy books and goods and services necessary to secure and hold their precarious position as student, while unreflectively, almost patriotically, promoting the institution’s brand by proudly wearing T-shirts and caps, using or carrying all manner of products displaying their school’s name.

Under the logic of neoliberalism, with the public sphere shrinking daily all around us, schools—like everything else in the United States—are becoming privatized. Students who cannot pay up front will be encouraged or beguiled by the carrot they have locked in view to accept gigantic loans that will, in fact, bind most of them to an overwhelming burden of debt. This debt is then guaranteed to keep them enslaved in any position they can find among an ever-decreasing pool of job opportunities with dwindling wages and benefits. More importantly, they come to see themselves only as workers and cease to view themselves as humans with human potential to transform the world they produce and reproduce daily.

The path in front of them is strewn with the examples of students who accepted the loans in the past, but who, forced to work for pay many hours per week while trying to meet the rigors of higher education, eventually fell to their knees under the pressure, still wearing the shirt and owing the brutal loans.

Faculty, exhausted by arbitrary and often meaningless administrative demands, their pay frozen, their tenure threatened (if they ever had the possibility), become as quiet as prisoners listening to the sound of a guard’s keys as he’s making his midnight rounds. And neoliberal thought-police pop-up everywhere in the form of letters to the editor, a death threat on social media, or a child recording their lectures on a smart phone.

People in the past fought and died for public services, but neoliberal privatization that is producing a mind-numbing concentration of global wealth appears invincible. No matter where we stand in the community of humanity, we work—as Marx predicted we would—like robots for the owners of the means of production. Alienated beings, we wrap our cloak of false consciousness around us and hide behind a curtain of complacency—or fear—while we watch our students join the work force like so many soldiers being marched off to an endless war.

Comandante Fidel Castro once said, “Capitalism has no moral and ethical values. Everything is for sale. It is impossible to educate people in such an environment; people become selfish and sometimes turn into bandits.”

This is because capitalism is a system that values money more than life—across the board, no matter what. It’s happy to poison food if it will ripen faster. It’s fine with blownup oil rigs as long as routine maintenance can be staved off long enough to save a little outlay. It has no problem with making slaves of children—even sex slaves—for a hefty enough profit. And the CEO who “earns” 475 times what his average employee takes home sees no reason to apologize for his position, his privilege, or his paycheck. It’s not his fault he was born rich and ruthless and others were not.

Capitalism is the promise of a Heaven that never materializes for the workers who make the capitalists rich. Capitalism is the delusion that hard work always means a trip up the ladder when everyone knows that those who work hardest get the least pay of all.

Capitalism is the shell game offered on the emotional street corner of America; the lottery ticket bought daily by exhausted workers who long to be rich and famous; the online poker machine that never pays off at the truck stop on the highway to unpaid bills.

Capitalism is the pimp that introduces each subsequent generation to yet another level of credit-driven materialism and then pushes a fresh crop of addicts into the dark streets of their own souls to terrorize and steal from and laugh at each other.

Capitalism is the vampire that hangs us all in its closet for ready feasting, telling us that it’s sexy in there and we will live forever while we watch it drink from the open veins of Latin America—and Africa—and anywhere else the race to the bottom takes it.

Capitalism is the army of marauders well into the process of kicking in the doors of human habitat, leaving for last those that pay for the weapons the soldiers carry and will ultimately turn on those who paid for them.

Capitalism is the Broadway musical that provides the soundtrack for the nightmare that life has already become for so many and will eventually be for all of us if we don’t face the music and don’t refuse to dance.

Capitalism is the darkness at the heart of institutionalized systemic oppression that uses skin tone or nationality or gender or sexuality or body type or religiosity to segregate us and set us against each other like gladiators trained to bludgeon and stab and slice and bleed and die for the enrichment—and entertainment—of the capitalists. Most Americans think capitalism is good because it has made so many of us fat—and foolish. But it is becoming harder and harder to pretend to be asleep, no matter how afraid we are to face reality. It is time to wake up!

Where there is life, there is hope! Where there is breath, there is life! And where there is humanity, there is possibility! Foucault wrote that “every power relationship implies a strategy of struggle.” Capitalism is not a God. Our hands are not tied. And our consciousness is not false.

We, in the AHS, have already come to understand this all too well. We are disgusted and embarrassed by our culture, our government, and sometimes—secretly—by ourselves for not having fought harder to stop its progression. In moments of self-reflective clarity, we know that we have often chosen to observe the panorama of agony that cries out to us from all sides while we sit in a comfortable office chair surrounded by many, many books that discuss freedom abstractly.

Why indeed did those of us who pride ourselves on our consciousness find it so easy to ignore the suffering of our colleagues, our courageous brothers and sisters, just 90 miles from our shores on this beautiful island? Who among us would dare to cling to the excuse that we did not realize their plight? Who among us would purse our lips defensively or lift our chins in indignation when presented with the idea that we could at least have made a public statement of solidarity when our comrades were going without food while we got fat if we agreed to look the other direction? But Cubans have become strong on the bread of revolutionary struggle. So there is much we can learn from them. We face a dark and terrifying time under the same government that has tormented them for so long. Perhaps our nonchalance has been rewarded darkly. Perhaps it is now our turn to service or submit.

Over the past 60 years since the revolution, the U.S. government—with the acquiescence of the U.S. population—has done great damage to the Cuban economy. It was intentional, of course, but what they could not and did not imagine was the effect the blockade would have on the Cuban people. Comandante Fidel Castro once said, “There have been 678 attempts on my life. If there was an Olympic event in surviving assassination attempts, I would win the gold medal.”

And just like their leader, the Cuban people, rather than being demeaned, debilitated, or dissuaded by the 60-year attack on them and their way of life, became stronger, smarter, more creative, more resilient, more ingenious, more determined, and ever more committed to their community than any other group in human history.

The fact is that when President Barack Obama initiated a change in the U.S. government’s approach to relations between our two countries, he admitted that he was doing so because the United States’ original approach to undermine the Cuban Revolution had not worked. The Cuban people had not broken under six decades of a punishing blockade.

Even knowing all this, however, the U.S. government is choosing to act like a bully—the way it often has and increasingly does—to manipulate, threaten, coerce, and otherwise discourage people like us and groups like this from opting to convene events of this nature. Nevertheless, we have done it.

So to you as individuals, particularly those of you from the United States, I want to say that your decision to attend and participate in this conference in the face of all efforts to turn you around, your willingness to brush aside complications, inconveniences, and even personal anxiety to commit time, energy, and money to this project to interface with your colleagues and comrades on Cuban soil amounts to a revolutionary act. And for that, I salute you.

Still, comparatively speaking, as academics from the United States, we are a rich and privileged group. Yet we are here in Cuba because we are seeking what we do not have and to learn what we do not know.

First of all, we have hopefully learned that money is not more important than life and that sharing can be a regular aspect of personal and community relations rather than just something to do when somebody’s house burns down or a hurricane blows. Evo Morales once called himself a great admirer of Comandante Fidel Castro. “Fidel shares not just what he does not need,” said Morales, “but every little thing he has. That is called solidarity.”

As educators, we have hopefully learned that providing free education to all citizens is necessary. We have bought into the idea that this expectation is ridiculous. It is not. Education is a human right.

As activists, we have hopefully learned that the revolution is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s not an event, it is a process. It has no beginning and no end. It requires the willingness and decency to admit mistakes when they’re made and the maturity to set aside ego and act for the greater good in order to undo and repair the damage our mistakes may have caused. And it requires a commitment to a global connection to others that the United States typically only reserves as a way to make money or wield power.

Lastly, we have hopefully learned that socialism does not magically and immediately do away with all the complicated social ills that plague our world as a direct result of centuries under white supremacy and multiple millennia under a patriarchy. After initially hoping that a socialist economy would neutralize all inequalities, Cuban leaders and the Cuban people are engaged together in a process of committing resources, energy, and thought to addressing the issues of white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia wherever it appears in their nation. Because of this, Cuba is once more modeling for the rest of us how practical progress can be made more rapidly in complicated matters.

In our own backyard, we have our work cut out for us. We must resist because, as Steven Ward writes, “[W]hat is at stake here is not just modernizing and ‘improving’ universities or schools, but determining how society will be organized and by whom.”

We must speak truth to power because, as Gaye Tuchman advises, “When professors speak their mind, especially when they ‘speak truth to power,’ they are making news.”

And we must teach students to think critically to recognize the contradictions. If, as Steve Biko famously said, “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” then it’s no wonder that neoliberal decision makers have marked education as a battleground where their vision of the future must be secured. As Andrew Delbanco reminds us, “[T]he most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter. It’s a technology that will never become obsolete.”

What is to be done?

I started with a question tonight and have attempted to answer it throughout this address. But in the end, the answer begins with another question, a question that is most relevant to members of this organization: What does it mean to be human, to be a humanist?

Resistance, we know, is the crack in the tsunami of neoliberalism. But what does that resistance look like in the United States, the bastion of evil, the vortex of power gone wrong?

Humanism is the celebration of our unlimited collective potential to transcend and transform life on this planet, the conscious awareness of future possibility, and the presentation of the human as a citizen of Earth. It is necessary, but insufficient for social change, for societal transformation.

We must take on the cultural, political, and economic institutions and ideological images of hate and negate the existing present. We must create a matrix of resistance where the classroom is the site of the struggle. What makes us human is work, the creative production in which we take such joy—not the work they make us do, but the work that creates a new and better world.

By allowing ourselves to become engaged in the many iterations of “dog eat dog,” we have lost the capacity to see others as ourselves, as humans. We are made uncomfortable by the challenge of being open to those who are different from ourselves, who we imagine to be unwashed masses, as it were, with all their chaos and confusion in contrast to our orderly middle-class—dare we say bourgeois?—ways.

Comandante Fidel Castro was raised in a comfortable upper-class home. He met the expectations of his environment with ease, became a lawyer with a golden future stretched out ahead of him, and could most certainly have lived out his life as a padron. Yet he made a conscious choice not to do so. To paraphrase Karl Marx’s famous quote, “People think as they live.” And Comandante Fidel Castro set aside his suit, donned olive drab, and talked a whole generation of young revolutionaries into following him into the mountains for the adventure of a lifetime.

It was not the mistake of an uneducated oaf that made the Comandante show up in Washington to meet the President of the United States in 1960 wearing fatigues and with a Cuban cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth. It was a statement that set aside the standards, values, and principles of the past, declaring without apology that a new world is possible. And I would suggest that our presence here tonight is proof positive that he was right. But he did not lead his people with his words. He led them with his actions.

What comes out of our mouths in a classroom, appears in our books, or touts our names in a scientific journal may earn us an award, get us tenure, or even build us a following. But only the fire in our belly can ignite the blaze that is the human race’s only hope.

So, the philosophical point is about who we really are, what we really are, and what we are really capable of being. In this address, I have tried to outline some of the problems private property has produced in our current world. Our work; our self-reflection; our commitment to the struggle in our universities, in our communities, and inside ourselves; and our willingness to fight and die if need be to implement a just and compassionate reality for all people on this planet can be our contribution to the solution. The Old Guard doesn’t know what it is missing. Are we willing to be free? We know what must be done. The question is: Will we do it?

Comandante Fidel Castro told us, “A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.” We cannot long survive with one foot in each camp.

And so I challenge us tonight—as an organization and as individuals—to stand in agreement with our destiny, to carry forward the energy of this historic moment, and to recommit ourselves—on this sacred ground—to a clear understanding and acceptance of our purpose as it was originally conceptualized by our founders.

On the way to Havana last week, I was listening to Arundhati Roy reading her new novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” In it, one revolutionary says to another, “We can’t just recruit our bodies. We have to recruit our souls, too.” And the other revolutionary adds, “The only way we can hold onto our dignity is to fight back—even if we lose.”

Comandante Che Guevara said, “At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I tell you that the basis of all revolution is love.”

Therefore, we must recruit—body and soul—a growing army of futuristic minds representing every single group in our society—and most particularly among the young.

We must mentor these bright young people that they might realize their own full potential as academics, as scholars, as activists, as revolutionaries, and as humans—lest we disappear as an organization, as a nation, and as a race of humans carrying the banner of transformation.

We must learn to listen—to their voices, their concerns, their criticisms, and their passion—so we can learn to respect their vision and trust their truth.

And then, we must welcome the opportunity to step aside and let them lead us into uncharted territory, where we are uncomfortable and even anxious. If we have mentored them with love and truth, they will not fall or fail to take the revolution into the future where we cannot follow.

The future awaits us! Let us forge ahead! As humans! As humanists! Together!

Venceremos!