Today, this same choice is faced by all\u2014both the Left and liberals\u2014opposed to the degenerated and gangsterized Thatcherism of Trump. Trumpism shreds the structures of liberal accommodation, which once maintained institutional overlaps between Clintonism and Reaganism, Obama and Bush. Moreover, Trump\u2019s axis is destroying the administrative state, decapitating cultural institutions, and taking full ownership of the federal knowledge infrastructure. And Trump\u2019s movement seeks the final subjugation of the knowledge institutions\u2014the nation\u2019s colleges and universities\u2014and the knowledge classes. It is waging war on knowledge itself.<\/p>\n
All of Trumpism\u2019s methods are larded with illegality, when not simply unconstitutional. They regularly lose in the lower courts. These limited victories within the liberal constitutional framework might lull the center and the Left into trying to wait Trump out. This strategy will fail.<\/p>\n
One reason waiting will fail is that Trump is starting to nullify court orders that he especially dislikes. Another is that the US Supreme Court has supported Trumpian executive power when the relevant cases reach them. A third is the nearly total absence of opposition among US corporate chief executives and heads of state to Trump replacing procedural frameworks with the methods of sultanistic oligarchy<\/a>.<\/p>\n But a deeper concern is the power of Trumpism over US culture. Hall\u2019s problem is still our problem, and his solution is still the one that can succeed: to build a new cultural order, a new civilization. To do so, academics must embrace an unusual new role: as knowledge workers, they must seize the means of knowledge production.<\/p>\n The building of new cultures happens all the time. The delirium of the attacks on liberal compromise practices like diversity in college admissions or NCAA rules on the inclusion of trans athletes reflect the attackers\u2019 fear that Left-liberal values (they do not distinguish) have achieved an iron hegemony that must be destroyed. The elements of a new Left civilization are indeed present in abundance, and are operative.<\/p>\n But this raises the question of why Trumpism has been able to seize state power, and why he can slowly strangle universities.<\/p>\n Here I\u2019ll mention just one major factor that doesn\u2019t get enough attention: the failure of knowledge workers to enter US history as an independent Left political force, that is, in keeping with their general repudiation of anti-intellectual conservatism in America. The victory of a minority MAGA Right owes much to the disorganization and compromises within a professional-managerial class (PMC) that now, for the first time, is facing a mortal battle for its academic institutions.<\/p>\n Hall published most of the Hard Road<\/em> essays in Marxism Today<\/em> and New Socialist<\/em>. A rough US analogue was South End Press in Boston and Z Magazine<\/em>. Not long after Hall published \u201cThe Great Moving Right Show,\u201d South End Press issued a collection called Between Labor and Capital<\/em> (1979). Discussion revolved around Barbara and John Ehrenreich\u2019s lead chapter, \u201cThe Professional-Managerial Class.\u201d<\/p>\n The PMC consists \u201cof salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production,\u201d explain the Ehrenreichs, \u201cand whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.\u201d Put simply, professional work\u2014that is, most white-collar jobs, including knowledge workers in elite professional service firms in corporate law, finance, and property development, as well as network administrators and building inspectors\u2014serves capital. And this is also the case with the professoriat in a university sector, who are officially dedicated to job placement for students and technology transfer from scientific research to corporations. Even so, a large share of knowledge workers are alienated from this service to capital. And most try to carve out zones of autonomous agency.<\/p>\n No wonder, then, that Trumpism targets these zones of intellectual autonomy for obliteration. Trump and his people have made categorical attacks on every trace of conceptual divergence from current far-right orthodoxy. Trumpism doesn\u2019t defund this or that diversity program; it seeks to eradicate everything<\/em>\u2014whether program, grant, or person\u2014that mentions diversity, for any reason. Unacceptable nonconformity includes college courses on the history of slavery, public health policy, and developmental biology that does not support binary sex determination. Nonconformity consists, in other words, of ordinary advances in knowledge, developed in large part by PMC labor over the past century.<\/p>\n Universities have existed as partial exception to demands for complete intellectual loyalty from presidents, bosses, executives, financiers. Such internal freedom, university people have assumed\u2014at least since the 1960s\u2014was respected by the establishment, or at least accepted as necessary to the good working order of knowledge societies.<\/p>\n But Trumpism has canceled the knowledge society.\u00a0 PMC autonomy has been under culture war attack for 40 years, but is now targeted in a final push for extinction. We must work step by step, in an organizational way, toward direct control of universities.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n <\/p>\n Academics are not well prepared for this moment. This was unfortunately foretold by the Ehrenreich prophecy: the PMC was too subservient to capital and its representatives to build an independent power base, in the teeth of disapproval. Not a class but a contradictory class position, academics have a diverse membership that lacked a class<\/em> interest in aligning with the noncollege working class, in spite of such an interest held by many individual members. They also failed to build organizational power for themselves<\/em>; instead, they bonded with senior managers and their superiors through academic senates and status-based private bargains, in a stable PMC-capital overlap of interests.<\/p>\n Generally, we academics have carved out private agency within our universities, rather than seeking collective agency by running them. We are attracted to ideas of self-managed craft and nonmarket investigation, and we pursue these individually. Yet we regard them as impractical or marginal to public and collective life, best suited to exceptional people who have merited tenure and the like. In the academy, the strong forms of intellectual independence are less a necessary feature of democracy than an individual privilege, the result of personal merit rather than its collective cause.<\/p>\n Academic freedom remains an important value, but we mostly see it as constituted by procedural safeguards rather than by the self-directed work processes of individuals in groups. Academia generally operates as managerial humanism, and faculty are its submissive individualists.<\/p>\n Worst of all, we\u2019ve treated knowledge as a privilege that depends on the university\u2019s complex managerial structures. We could have been seeing knowledge as crucial to our own collective self-determination.<\/p>\n\n The current moment requires building Hall\u2019s new cultural order: a \u201cnew civilisation\u201d of greater ambition, justice, and appeal than that of the Thatcherite-Trumpian counterrevolution of the past fifty years. One prerequisite is the professoriat repudiating its PMC legacy of institutional passivity.<\/p>\n Instead, we must work step by step, in an organizational way, toward direct control of universities. If we do, we\u2019ll be of real use to our knowledge allies\u2014government scientists, public health advocates, local news journalists, community researchers, theater company directors, et al.\u2014in building the self-governing knowledge systems we need to block authoritarian implosion and get a future we want.<\/p>\n Trumpism has canceled the knowledge society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":60715,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2466,422,826,290],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1366],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-60710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","tag-higher-ed-under-trump","tag-higher-education","tag-knowledge","tag-trump","section-higher-education"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n The Big Picture: Trump\u2019s Attack on Knowledge<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
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<\/a>\n \n Craig Calhoun <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n