The Sublimation of Activism and the Business of Politics (As Usual)

The dominant political and ideological apparatuses in the United States have reached an agreement on how to extricate American society from contemporary conditions of “crisis” and “decay”: what is needed, the dominant accounts now assert, is “change.” Even the most entrenched and long- standing defenders of the institutions that now presumably require drastic change (George Bush, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot…) find it indispensable to represent themselves as the agents of that change.

Of course, it is easy to be skeptical of the credibility of such claims. However, it is necessary to understand why “average Americans” are likely to find such claims compelling, that is, why there is a demand for them. If we are unable to understand this phenomena, then however easy it might be to recognize the duplicity and cynicism of a Bush or a Clinton, we will still have failed to critique the roots of the demand for such figures — and this demand will simply respond to more “attractive” and apparently credible “alternatives” (like Ross Perot).

What is at stake in this empty and abstract call for “change” is the reworking of contemporary mainstream political values and possibilities. The notion of change which is being sold at the moment is one which is the result of initiatives and agents which can disassociate themselves from existing institutions and engineer social transformation from some “free space” external to those institutions. Such understandings are now propagated by conservatives, neoconservatives, erstwhile liberals and neo-liberals alike; in addition, they are becoming increasingly prominent on the left in this post-Stalinist era. In this article I will critique these ideological and political tendencies through a reading of a text which provides them with what we could call a “post-liberal” articulation: Wendy Kopp’s address delivered at the Syracuse University Commencement ceremony last May (“America can be what we want it to be,” printed in the Syracuse Record, May 18, 1992).

In her address, Ms. Kopp constructs a narrative of the successful realization of an “idea” — more specifically, her “Teach for America” idea of a national teacher corps. However, her narrative is a highly problematic and contradictory one. Kopp begins by positing a kind of direct connection between “conception” and “execution,” mediated only by the intervention of the “will” of the individual: “I wish that more people would realize that they can get out there and make things happen.” The liberation of the “will” from apathy and cynicism is seen as the secret of “success”: “If [our generation] [is] [“the cynical, do-nothing generation”], it must be because not enough of us realize that positive change can happen and that it can happen easily if we decide that it should.”

Kopp’s argument draws, of course, upon the deep resources of social idealism and dissatisfaction with the status quo that Kopp (rightly) believes still exists in American society and among college students. However, it also draws upon and reproduces the American liberal tradition which informs our existing institutions. According to American liberalism, society is a product of the mutual cooperation of “free” and independent individuals. Individuals cooperate socially because in so doing they maximize the benefits to themselves by combining the powers of many as opposed to depending solely upon their own individual efforts. That is, social and political cooperation is a “rational” choice for the individuals involved. However, the individuals in question do not, according to liberalism, thereby surrender their individual liberty of their “natural” right to govern their activities according to their inherent rational capacity — in fact, political cooperation is supposed to have been devised precisely in order to protect this “liberty” and this “right.”

This of course raises the question as to the viability of a strategy for “change” which depends upon the ideological and cultural resources of the very institutions one wishes to transform. Furthermore, more than cultural and ideological resources are in question here. On the one hand, Kopp’s narrative of her own self-liberation from the constraints of the existing educational system is one of a confrontation between an inquiring, energetic “mind” and the “obsolete” institutions and practices that are resistant to “change.” So, the “concept of a national teacher corps” “hit” Kopp as an “answer to an uninspired search for a senior thesis topic.” That is, in response an “uninspiring,” merely conventional and perfunctory “assignment,” Kopp is able to “discover” an idea about which she can “dream” and get “obsessed.” Such discoveries, then, are only possible insofar as one can “transcend” the restrictions of institutional requirements. Also, Kopp notes that she finally took independent action after she “had fired off a letter to President Bush suggesting that he call upon our nation’s youth to build the future of this country…” However, her innovative proposal runs into the bureaucratic inertia of government practices — the White House, unappreciative of “ideas” and only suited to process “administrative” details, “misreads” her letter and responds in a mechanical, comically inefficient (“bureaucratic”) manner: with a job rejection letter.

However, there is a second narrative embedded in this heroic, individualistic one, and this second narrative both undermines and completes the dominant one. Kopp’s success story is punctuated with the appeals she made, not to “independent,” similarly motivated people, but to another kind of institution — the late capitalist corporation. She sends a 30 page prospectus to “the chief executive officers of 30 major corporations…” (one of them provides her with office space, another with a $26,000 seed grant); she contacts Ross Perot (who gives her a $500,000 grant); in all, she has raised $13m, presumably from similar sources. Apparently will and desire are not the only ingredients needed to “make things happen”: one also needs to come up with the cash. In fact, the first person she encounters who is able to grasp the power of will and imagination is an executive in Los Angeles (with whom she had lunch) who gives “validity and credibility” to her initiative by articulating for her the secret of her success: she had “Figured out that you can just do things.”

The connection between Kopp’s idolization of corporate figures (she relates that when she received a call from Ross Perot she was so awe-struck that she “could barely function let alone say something impressive”) and the liberal voluntarism she promotes is far from accidental. As Kopp says, “There is no magic to it.” It is precisely corporate executives, those individuals who control the major portion of society’s productive resources, who are able to “just do things.” Furthermore, it is this class of people who have most forcefully articulated over the last two decades the same argument that Kopp has adopted: American society is “falling behind” because of the interference of “government” with the freedom of individuals to realize their potential; in order to bring about the needed “change,” therefore, it is necessary to weaken the power of public institutions in order to facilitate the more effective utilization of private resources. Kopp has evidently not considered that there might be some connection between the practices which follow from this claim (like tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, and funding cuts for education) and the disastrous conditions of schools that she deplores.

While Kopp mentions that she met “as many people as I could,” including education reform leaders and school district officials, it is clear that she sees those currently employed within the existing education system primarily as part of the problem. Her short list of commonly supposed obstacles to “radical change” in the schools reads as follows: “How many times have we heard that the unions won’t allow meaningful change, that the bureaucracy won’t, that the teachers won’t.” Kopp’s argument is not that these agents are not in fact obstacles to “meaningful change,” but rather that these obstacles can be circumvented by building a new system outside and alongside of the existing one: predictably, she finds “absolutely inspir[ing]” a market based strategy devised by Chris Whittle, who is raising money to establish a for-profit school system which will be so “radical and so superior” that “the public system has to respond.”

The “free space” of ideas and activity that Kopp represents as the solution to the problem of change is really, then, no less “inside” the system than are the current batch of political “outsiders.” What she proposes is simply another way of utilizing social resources so that they will be more effectively controlled by, and will be more beneficial to, the most privileged elements in American society: both the corporate elite which demands more “productive” results from the school system, and those upper middle class families which can afford to “choose” to send their children to expensive private schools. Despite Whittle’s claims, which Kopp endorses, it is hardly plausible that these private schools will have the “same student population” as the public ones, since it will actually be the schools that are in a position to “choose,” rather than the students or parents who will be competing to gain entrance into a few “choice” schools; and it is for this reason, in addition to the lower teacher salaries in private schools, that they might actually be able to spend the “same dollars per child.”

Meanwhile, if Kopp’s plan meets resistance from the “unions” and “teachers,” (as has, in fact, already been the case), perhaps it is because career teachers are able to see that Kopp’s corps of volunteers, regardless of their intentions, are highly likely to have the same effects as the introduction of non-union workers into a closed shop: that is, they will function to undermine the teachers’ bargaining power as employees, and their power to maintain or extend what little control they already have over their working conditions. That is, in addition to its attack on the principles of public accountability and universal availability of decent education, Kopp’s program is a “worthy” successor to the union-busting practices of the 1980s (and, so far, the 1990s). This will be the case in particular if, as it appears from Kopp’s description of the program and her references to the Peace Corps, her teacher corps will not be made up of people interested in teaching as a profession, but rather of those who see it as a “stepping stone” and therefore have no real investment in the long term interests of teachers. Those making up these corps, that is, are likely to be the kind of self-maximizing individuals Kopp admires: acquiring “experiences” in order to impress future employers (i.e., to pad their resumes), or, perhaps, because they — like Kopp — received “some…job rejection letters.”

Of course, there is another argument that surfaces in Kopp’s text that appears to contradict the claims that I am making here. I am referring to Kopp’s argument in the tradition of American Progressive education theory and practice, which insisted that the purpose of education should not be narrowly conceived in terms of producing marketable skills, but should rather prepare students for full participation in a democratic society: therefore, education should be open and liberatory rather than regimented, and it should attend to the concrete needs of the individual students rather than simply measuring them quantitatively with standardized tests and grading systems. Kopp also seeks to question the restrictive and “homogenizing” aspects of American education: for example, she criticizes the assumptions on which grading is based, e.g., that a certain number of students will inevitably fail. Furthermore, Kopp even associates herself with some of the most egalitarian elements of the Progressive tradition in education by proposing that the country commit itself to achieving equal education opportunity for every student. Finally, Kopp attributes the same transformative capacity to education as progressives like John Dewey, suggesting, for example, that a thoroughly reformed education system can be an important means of reversing the deterioration of conditions of life in the inner cities and elsewhere.

It is this portion of Kopp’s argument that is likely to constitute its appeal for idealistic college graduates who are genuinely concerned about the future of the society they live in. However, for this very reason it is necessary to look more closely at the “logic” of these arguments. First of all, Kopp does not consider that a grading system which places students on different “tracks,” along with the entire hierarchical structure of the higher educational system (community colleges, state universities, “elite” universities, etc.) corresponds to the hierarchical economic structure (unskilled workers, skilled workers, professionals, managers, executives…) which Kopp takes for granted in outlining and implementing her proposals. In other words, if students are “distributed” to different “slots” for reasons which are ultimately conventional and not “natural,” it is because a central function of the school system is to aid in the production of criteria and modes of regulation which will assign individuals to their “proper” places within a capitalist economic order which is also by no means “natural.”

Also, Kopp does not seem to realize that the reason why the “Bridgehampton public school system” spends $32,000 per student while New York City spends $7,000 per student” is because the funds available to a school district depends upon the size of its tax base. This is especially the case in the absence of any commitment on a national level to equalize the funds available to all districts — that is, the very stress on “private initiative” outside of the confines of the government bureaucracy that Kopp applauds serves to aggravate already existing inequalities, along with the de facto racial segregation which still pervades American society.

Finally, Kopp’s extremely appealing claim that social inequalities can be remedied by equalizing opportunities through education is just as problematic. This idea always has great power when the deepening of social inequalities and antagonisms appears to be a threat to the social order. Rather than take steps to abolish these inequalities, progressive education advocates naturalizing them by attributing them to different educational levels. This not only defers any solution of the problems to the next generation (implicitly giving up the present generation of adults for lost), but it “explains” inequality in terms of the qualities and abilities of those who suffer from it. As I suggested earlier, this reverses the actual relation between economic or class and educational stratification, and therefore justifies the existing class structure. Also, by making education the primary source of social change, progressive educators assume that change takes place through communication: rather than taking organized and collective action against their oppressors, then, oppressed groups should try to “persuade” the oppressors to behave reasonably and improve social conditions. However, oppression is not a result of a mutual misunderstanding, much the less of the oppressed’s inability to communicate effectively; rather, it is determined by the control of the ruling class over the social means of production, which they cannot be “persuaded” to relinquish through rational argumentation. (That Kopp does not consider these issues is evident in her ability to neglect the question of whether her current corporate patrons actually have an interest in her more broadly conceived agenda which would, for instance, have the effect of placing their own sons and daughters along side those of the residents of South Central Los Angeles in the schools. Would their appreciation of the power of ideas reconcile them to such a set of arrangements?)

Thus, Kopp’s egalitarian rhetoric, like that of the Progressive movement before her, simply presents American liberal assumptions in idealized form, rather than challenging them. Liberalism assumes that since individuals are inherently free and rational, the preferred way to solve social problems is through rational discussion. In this way, individuals can be liberated from antiquated and restrictive “ideas,” and especially those ideas imposed by repressive and irrational institutional structures. That is, institutional structures are conceived as impositions upon the free movement of individuals; these structures might sometimes be necessary, but they are necessary evils, whose power should be reduced to a minimum. However, since these (capitalist) institutions are increasingly inseparable from every aspect of our lives as capitalism becomes ever more global in character, there seem to be fewer and fewer “free” spaces in which our innate individual capacities can be expressed. In this context, the image of the school as a place abstracted from social conflicts and problems (where children understood as “natural,” “untainted” beings are molded into the free individuals of a future, better society) can become a convincing way to imagine the resolution of social contradictions in a peaceful and ethically satisfying way. However, in this case, the institutional character of the school itself must be imagined away (therefore: no grading, no general standards). For this reason, it is only corporate executives, who seem to Kopp so free of institutional constraints, and not agents located within the schools themselves, who have a special interest in effecting these changes. Since it is this class of people that have always been best served by the educational system, the more “radically” Kopp imagines educational transformation the more energetically she reproduces those social relations which, after all, have made the schools what they are in the first place.

It does not follow from my argument that proponents of the democratization of the U.S. school system should restrict their activities to the “interior” of the schools: that is, to bargaining with school administrators. What it does suggest is that the agents of any such change must be sought within the schools (above all, in the struggles of teachers and students to maintain and extend their autonomy and power relative to bureaucratic and corporate power alike); furthermore, the struggles of these agents must be connected to those of other groups interested in progressive change (like gay rights, feminist, civil rights and others). This means that such struggles, even if waged “within” the educational system first of all, are also in a sense located “outside” of it in the sense that they are part of a larger project of social transformation. Finally, they are only “within” the existing system to the extent that they are against it, and represent social possibilities and cultural criteria incompatible with the existing economic system (like the principle of determining the allocation of resources in accord with democratically determined needs, rather than profit).

Kopp’s project represents a new mode of post-liberal activism, which attempts to exploit the idealism of students who “remember” the participatory social struggles of the 1960s. It is a “sublimation” of social activism, employing the populist rhetoric of “change” and volunteerism in abstraction from the need to contest (not escape) oppressive institutions which characterized the struggles of the 1960s. Also, it has the consequent advantage of being free of risks and “unpleasant” confrontations. It is a “neo-left” version of George Bush’s “thousand points of light,” but one which is able to benefit from the public perception of Bush as residing over a “do-nothing” administration, and of the bankruptcy of the Republican policies of the past dozen years. It is therefore especially important to recognize that Kopp’s agenda presents no challenge to the right wing attack on public institutions. Quite to the contrary, as I have argued, much like the centrist Clinton campaign which seeks to unite the country behind the interests of the white middle class, it takes the results of that attack for granted, and tries to consolidate and build upon these “successes.” In both cases, criticism of the “excesses” of the “Reagan era” can be incorporated into political discourses which still accept the terms of the debate as Reagan and his corporate sponsors articulated them. Like the “just say no” anti-drug campaign, such proposals as Kopp’s locate all social problems in the “will” and “mind” of those with a direct stake in their solution. In this way, public and social responsibility for the management of institutions, and a democratization of all institutions (including “corporations”) for the sake of ensuring this responsibility, is excluded from any “reasonable” political agenda, including those which express a desire for “change.”