What Is to Be Done?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore could have easily titled her presidential address "It ain't where ya from, it's where ya at," taking a line from one of the best-known essays of Paul Gilroy,¹ who borrowed the line from one of hip-hop's genius founding fathers, Rakim, who absorbed this popular aphorism from the same working-class black folk tradition Gilmore invokes when she talks about her family roots. Gilmore is speaking about our place of work—the academy—and reminding us that in our place of work we are workers. Thus, she transformed a hotel convention room into a union hall, infusing the annual presidential address with the tone of a labor revival meeting. She appeals to all of us to stop angsting about the "real" world outside of the academy and recognize that we live and work in a real world—one that must be organized at every level. Her pleas are urgent. She points out that the freedom, safety, economic security, political enfranchisement of working people, students, and people of color are under assault across the country (as they have been around the world under neoliberalism and its attendant security regimes). In particular, she identifies structural adjustment, security enhancement, and the "antistate state" as three powerful heads of the neoliberal monster breathing fire down our necks. The consequences are obvious to all of us: an obscene disparity between the rich and the rest of us; enormous bailouts for banks and tax breaks for the wealthy; states stripped of the revenue needed to fund education, to fund infrastructure, and to provide a safety net for the most vulnerable; the privatization of virtually everything—from schools to prisons to (potentially) social security—as states extend no-bid contracts to private corporations; a war on public sector unions (which began, let us not forget, with the dismantling of the predominantly black teachers union in New Orleans post-Katrina); the expansion of security regimes (ICE raids, new anti-immigrant legislation, continued prison growth, extension of foreign military intervention, continued functioning of Guantanamo Bay facilities, etc.). Meanwhile, companies such as Goldman Sachs recently announced plans to pay out $17.5 billion in compensation for 2010, as home foreclosures rise to record numbers. In short, we're all under assault, every sector of society, and the university is not immune.

And yet, in this age of retrenchment, Gilmore is not calling on us to dig into the trenches, to develop strategies of self-defense against a right-wing revolution. On the contrary, she is calling fellow academic workers to organize where we're at, to sustain the traditions of abolition-democracy that kept her family fighting back: "However embattled the academy is, we must direct our energy and resources as workers toward the goal of freedom . . . radical abolition. The abolition I speak of has roots in all radical movements for liberation and particularly in the Black Radical tradition. The . . . abolition I speak of somehow, perhaps magically . . . resists division from class struggle and also refuses all the other kinds of power difference combinations that, when fatally coupled, spark new drives for abolition. Abolition is a totality and it is ontological. . . . we have to organize."

Gilmore's insistence that we take the revolutionary offensive is all the more extraordinary when we consider the fact that at the time of her address, the labor struggles in Wisconsin, which spread like wildfire throughout the Midwest, had not yet erupted, and the mass uprisings in the Middle East, which toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and may lead to revolutions in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, were inconceivable to much of the world. In every instance, universities and their workers were critical to the success and shape of these various movements.

To call Gilmore's words prescient because she anticipated the current global wave of uprisings against structural adjustment, neoliberal security regimes, the antistate state, and the general assault on democracy is to say too little. She is a student of history. She knows the arc of rebellion. She knows that the roots of these uprisings can be traced back at least to the...