Social-Justice Activism in the Academic Industrial Complex

The theme of these "Got Life?" essays begs the question: How did "having a life" become constructed as something at odds with having a job in academia? Why has being a good scholar and academic come to mean that one should be working incessantly at the expense of doing social-justice work, having fun, or maintaining interests outside academia? It is not sufficient to ask, How can we lead lives that are more balanced? Or, How can we balance a life of social-justice activism with a job in academia? Rather, we must deconstruct the logic of the academic industrial complex to see how it has trapped us into needlessly thinking we must choose between academia and having a life.

Louis Althusser argued that educational systems are an "ideological state apparatus" by which the capitalist system reproduces itself ideologically.¹ "Education" is not innocent or neutral, it is designed to teach peoples to be subject to colonial and capitalist structures. Similarly, as Pierre Bourdieu elaborates, dominating classes assure their position through not only domination over economic capital but over cultural capital, a form of domination that enables them to secure the terms of discourse and knowledge to their benefit. The educational system is particularly important in the reproduction of symbolic capital under capitalism. The standardization of academic qualifications—a given amount of labor and time in academic apprenticeship is exchanged for a given amount of cultural capital, the degree—enables a differentiation in power ascribed to permanent positions in society and hence to the biological agents who inhabit these positions. According to Bourdieu, what is significant about the educational system is not just the set of ideologies it promotes, but the set of tacitly unequal institutional power relations it ensures through the fiction of equal access to education.² However, in order to function as an ideological state apparatus, the academy must disavow its complicity in capitalism by claiming itself as a meritocratic system. That is, only those academics who are smart and work hard will succeed. Even progressives within the academy tend to perpetuate this myth of meritocracy by their refusal to see academia as a game whose rules anyone can learn to play strategically. Otherwise, if one appears not to be working endlessly for the academic industrial complex, that person will be condemned as being a lazy or undeserving scholar. I, for instance, have been told on innumerable occasions that if I have time to do as much activist work as I do, then I must not really being doing scholarship. But if we do support social justice, then we should be demystifying the academy rather than perpetuating its capitalist logics. The reality is that one does not have to work tirelessly to be successful in the academy. Rather than always feeling compelled to promote the appearance of busyness in our lives, we should demystify the academy and share strategies of how to manage it effectively. Below are some survival strategies I have learned that have enabled me to continue my social-justice organizing while employed in the academy in order to contribute to this necessary conversation.

1. 1.  Understand intellectual work as collaborative. A phenomenon that results from academia's myth of meritocracy is that scholars feel an undue burden to prove their brilliance. They can never take short cuts. They cannot publish anything unless it is perfect. Consequently, it takes many scholars an inordinate amount of time to finish their work because they suffer from excessive anxiety attacks as to whether or not their contributions are going to be sufficiently brilliant to warrant their publication. In addition, the capitalist logic of the academic industrial complex promotes extreme intellectual individualism. If one were to seek help from others, it would mean that person is intellectually inferior. In reality, however, all intellectual production is collaborative. Thus, we should unashamedly seek intellectual partners and collaborators in doing our work. If you have a hard time organizing your thoughts, then find someone who will help your organize them. Meanwhile, you may be a good copy editor who can help someone who needs this skill...