A Radio Interview on the crisis in higher education: (from the 33 minute mark)

 

December 16

GUEST: Dr. Harry Targ, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, and a co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, talks about how Koch funded neoliberalism is becoming hegemonic in higher education.

www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com

Diary of a Heartland Radical

Also wonderful music and commentary by Fred Nagel on the Korean War. classwars.org

SONG: Pete Seeger, Seeds: The Songs of Pete Seeger, Vol. 3 ... Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)
SONG: Steve Earle, Washington Square Serenade ... Steve's Hammer (For Pete)

NEOLIBERAL ATTACKS ON LIBERAL ARTS

Harry Targ

(an earlier version of this essay was posted on September 22, 2016)

“… if we wait for reform from within the ranks of today’s liberal arts fields, we may wait forever, or at least a fatally long time. The concerns most often voiced about the current university scene—conformity of thought, intolerance of dissent and sometimes an authoritarian tendency to quash it, a rejection of the finest of the Western and Enlightenment traditions in favor of unscholarly revisionism and pseudo-disciplines—these and other problems are not unique to the liberal arts departments, but a host of surveys document that they are most common and most pronounced there. A monotonously one-sided view of the world deprives students of the chance to hear and consider alternatives, and to weigh them for themselves in the process we call “critical thinking.” … Incidentally, the widely criticized policy of lifelong tenure was created to protect diverse viewpoints from discrimination; where is its rationale in schools where everyone thinks so exactly alike? “(Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. “Liberalizing the Liberal Arts,” Remarks Accepting The Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education, October 12, 2018, Washington D. C.  

https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/ee/download/Re-liberalizing-the-Liberal-Arts.pdf

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was founded in 1973 by the Koch brothers as an organization of corporations, lobby groups, and state-level politicians to propose and implement model legislation, prioritizing such policies as promoting educational vouchers and charter schools, limiting the role of trade unions, restricting environmental regulations, and instituting voter identification rules. In addition, ALEC has established networks of think tanks to address a multiplicity of other public policy questions.  

A key issue addressed by this rightwing network of organizations is education. And to that topic the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), to which Purdue President Daniels spoke, was created 25 years ago. ACTA defines itself as “… the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States to support liberal education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives an intellectually rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.” Major funders of ACTA, which was co-founded by Lynne Cheney and former Senator Joe Lieberman, include the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Family, Donor Trust, the John Olin Foundation, and the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation. These and others constitute a “who’s-who” of sponsors of rightwing so-called “libertarian” organizations.

Professor Stanley Fish reports that ACTA believes that curricular changes in higher education,  must be made at the administrative level because, as Fish wrote, professors “...cannot be trusted” to be “responsive to public concerns  about the state of higher education.” In short, ACTA, which claims to be committed to academic freedom, is committed to circumventing faculty participation in matters of educational substance in their universities.

In a 2015 article Lindsey Russell, an ALEC Director of its Education Task Force, wrote an essay entitled “STEM-Will It Replace Liberal Arts?” In it he reports Bureau of Labor Statistics projections that from 2012-2022 there will be a growth of 13 percent in the STEM related workforce. As a result, he poses the question reflected in the title of his article. His answer, although he does not say so directly is a qualified “yes.” Russell quotes a Forbes magazine article that suggests that STEM graduates need “critical thinking skills” to pursue their careers. These skills, the article asserts, along with those in communication, are what a Liberal Arts education can provide. In an interesting statement he says about STEM and Liberal Arts:

“STEM is the present and the future, and STEM related fields are projected to grow by more than 1 million by the year 2022…Liberal arts education may seem irrelevant today, but it is necessary if America’s youth are to become successful members of today’s STEM-dominated workforce.”

In the Daniels speech quoted above, the Purdue President pridefully declared that “At Purdue, by our land-grant heritage and by our current conscious strategy, the so-called STEM disciplines predominate; more than 60% of our undergraduates and an even higher share of our graduate students pursue engineering, chemistry, physics, agricultural and biological science, and the like. We are by that measure the third most STEM centric school in the country.” While Daniels, in his speech recognized the importance of the Liberal Arts, he made it clear that existing faculty in Liberal Arts fields are very unlikely to be responsive to any need for changes in the substance of education; in fact, liberal arts faculty, he asserted are monotonous, dogmatic, and authoritarian, and, reject “…the finest of the Western and Enlightenment traditions in favor of unscholarly revisionism and pseudo-disciplines.”

The controversies over Liberal Arts, shared governance, and the vitality of non-STEM curricula resurfaced recently when the Purdue University student newspaper reported that the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts was freezing faculty hires in the English Department, downsizing popular programs in the department such as Creative Writing, and requiring the reduction of the numbers of admissions of new graduate students to its various programs. Budget cuts imposed on the department threaten the survival of The Sycamore Review, a highly regarded literary journal run by graduate students. Faculty in STEM fields, Liberal Arts colleagues, and alumni of the Department of English have publicly communicated their frustration with the Dean’s decision to reduce funding for the English Department. https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_b04b6564-5772-11ec-8b9e-7f950e2bb4d0.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share

While debates continue about how much STEM fields should be prioritized in the educational process, a more important discussion should involve the substance and role of what usually is called “the Liberal Arts.” Should Liberal Arts be seen as only a training ground for honing critical thinking and communications skills or does the Liberal Arts project go much deeper?

Henry Giroux, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMasters University, Hamilton, Ontario, posted an essay he called “Neoliberal Savagery and the Assault on Higher Education as a Democratic Public Space,” on September 15, 2016. His critique of the growing connections between higher education and market needs, as reflected in the public policy stances of Koch Foundation organizations such as ALEC and ACTA seem relevant to the Purdue case. Political pressures to change and marginalize Liberal Arts have their roots in the theory and practice of neoliberal ideology, an ideology based on a crude vision of markets, privatization of public institutions, and the reduction of all of social life to commodification. Reinstituting older curricula celebrating markets and the efficacy of United States political institutions are part of the mantra of these pressure groups as opposed to what Daniels called “unscholarly revisionism and pseudo-disciplines,” presumably curricular innovations that revisit issues of race, gender, class, the environment, and war/peace.

The most important element of Giroux’s essay is his assertion that the university represents a “public trust” and a “social good.”  He correctly asserts that in an age of media concentration and a profusion of unsubstantiated information on the internet, the university remains a scarce and valuable venue for exposing young people to rich, complicated discourse and analyses of society—past, present, and future. Giroux’s suggests that the university is “a critical institution infused with the promise of cultivating intellectual insight, the civic imagination, inquisitiveness, risk-taking, social responsibility, and the struggle for justice.” Giroux quotes Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist, and Leonidas Donskis, a social philosopher: “how will we form the next generation of intellectuals and politicians if young people will never have an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumental university is like?”

https://cafedissensus.com/2016/09/15/neoliberal-savagery-and-the-assault-on-higher-education-as-a-democratic-public-sphere/

The tasks cultural theorists such as Giroux lay out do not, or should not, suggest that only through Liberal Arts can the civic responsibility of the university be maintained. But, and this is critical, Liberal Arts should be seen as necessary partners in the curriculum of every university, so that students are prepared to be vibrant contributors to the larger society in which they live.

Conceiving of Liberal Arts as just a limited instrumentality of a narrowly defined STEM education, as advocates such as the ALEC spokesperson and their colleagues in ACTA suggest, demeans not only the fundamental importance of the Liberal Arts for pursuing an intellectually curious and socially just society but the basic project of higher education. And English Departments remain an important part of this project.

What Ails American Democracy: a podcast from China Plus

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RED SCARES IN HIGHER EDUCATION: REWRITING THE NARRATIVE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Harry Targ

Purdue University has become the first public institution of higher education to adopt a free speech policy called the ‘Chicago principles,’ condemning the suppression of views no matter how ‘offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed’ they may be. (Tyler Kingkade, “Purdue Takes A Stand For Free Speech, No Matter How Offensive Or Unwise,” Huffington Post, May 15, 2015).

Colleges and universities often boast of their diversity in terms of race, sex, gender or sexual orientation, but too often they fail to encourage diversity of thought. (Kathleen Parker, “In Name of Free Speech at Purdue, Beyond,” Lafayette Journal and Courier, Thursday, May 21, 2015, 7A).

Cliches, however shopworn, can retain their usefulness provided they continue to describe their object with some accuracy. One cliche that has lost almost all value is “speaking truth to power.” These days, it almost invariably is attached not to an act of genuine courage but to its opposite, the spouting of some politically favored bromide. (Mitch Daniels, “This climate change contrarian gives us an important reminder about science in general, ”Washington Post, October 12, 2021).

To its credit, the Purdue University Board of Trustees in 2015 passed a resolution defending free speech on its college campus. The new policy was strongly endorsed by the Purdue President Mitch Daniels who, quoted by Parker, condemned universities that spawn “a bunch of little authoritarians with an inverted view of our basic freedoms.”

While the policy is correct, the implied narrative of the threat to academic freedom and diversity of thought as coming from the Left, progressives or liberals, constitutes an extraordinary rewriting of the experience of a hundred years of higher education. Any serious revisiting of the history of the modern university shows clearly that the ideas, disciplines, purposes of higher education have been shaped and transformed by money, power, the perceived needs of United States national security, and conservative ideology.

For example, Ellen Schrecker documented the enormous impact that the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s had on higher education in her book, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1988).  She interviewed academic victims of McCarthyite attacks on faculty at prestigious universities.  They were subpoenaed to testify before state legislative or Congressional committees about their former political affiliations and associations.  As was the requirement of the times, those ordered to testify could not just admit to their own political activities but were obliged to give witness against others whom they may have known.

Some victims were former members of the Communist Party, others were signatories to petitions supporting the Spanish loyalists during their civil war, and still others had supported banning atomic weapons.  Perhaps the most troubling element of the Red Scare story was the fact that university administrations refused to defend those of their faculty who were attacked. Furthermore Schrecker reports that some university officials demanded that their faculty cooperate with these committees.  Her subjects reported that they received little or no support from administrators because officials wished to protect their universities from funding reductions.

Since the end of the Cold War, some scholars have begun to examine other aspects of the anti-communist hysteria as it related to the academy. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, in Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism: 1945-60, addressed the multiplicity of ways in which funding priorities, rightwing assaults, official pronouncements from government officials, lobbying efforts by big business groups, and shifting electoral political currents affected and formed the content of academic programs since World War II. 

For example, disciplines then, and now, have been shaped by dominant "paradigms," or approaches which have included assumptions about the subject, aspects of the subject that deserved study, theories that were most appropriate for understanding the subject of the field, and the methods that should be used to study subjects in the field.  Most important, all the social sciences and humanities adopted views of their disciplines that did not challenge ongoing U.S. Cold War assumptions about the world. In each case, dominant paradigms of the 1950s and beyond constituted a rejection of 1930s and 1940s thinking, which were shaped by the labor and other struggles of the Depression era.

In the words of scholar Henry Giroux, the military-industrial-academic complex influenced personnel recruitment and retention and the substance of research and teaching.  Disciplines with more ready access to research dollars -- from engineering to psychology -- defined their research agendas to comport with the interests of the government and corporations.

However, students in the 1960s began to demand new scholarship and education.  Opposition to the Vietnam War particularly stimulated demands on professors to rethink the historical character and motivation of United States foreign policy.  William Appleman Williams and his students, the historical revisionists, articulated a view that the United States practiced imperialism ever since it became an industrial power.  Classrooms where international relations and foreign policy were taught became "contested terrain" for argumentation and debate between the older and more benign view of the U.S. role in the world and the view of the U.S. as an imperial power. 

The contestation spread.  Students demanded more diverse and complicated analyses of race and racism in America, patriarchy and sexism in gender relations, and working-class history. Every discipline and every dominant paradigm was subjected to challenge.  The challenges were also reflected in radical caucuses in professional associations and even in some of the more upright (and "uptight") signature professional journals. As a result, there was a diminution of Red Scares in higher education, for a time.

The spirit of ideological struggle in the academy diminished after the Vietnam War and especially after Ronald Reagan became president.  Reagan brought back militant Cold War policies, radically increased military expenditures, declared Vietnam a "noble cause," and developed a sustained campaign to crush dissent and reduce the strength of the labor movement.  The climate on campus to some degree returned to the 1950s.

However, a whole generation of 1960s-trained academics were now tenured faculty at universities around the country.  They institutionalized programs in African American Studies, Women's Studies, Peace Studies, and Middle East Studies.  Critical theorists populated education schools, American Studies programs, and other pockets of the university. Faculty continued the debate with keepers of dominant paradigms, created interdisciplinary programs, and developed programs shaped by key social issues such as racism, class exploitation, gender discrimination, the environmental crisis. and war.

But by the 1990s, a new version of the Red Scare was surfacing.  Some conservative academics and their constituencies talked about declining standards they said were caused by the new programs.  Others criticized what they regarded as an insufficiently rosy view of United States history.  They claimed that the United States was being unfairly condemned for the killing of millions of Native Americans or because slavery and racism were presented as central to the history of the country.  They formed academic associations and interest groups to defend against critical scholarship.

David Horowitz came along.  Overseeing a multi-million-dollar foundation funded by rightwing groups, Horowitz launched a campaign to purify academia of those who had records of teaching, research, and publication that he saw as unduly critical of the United States, ruling political or economic elites, or the global political economy.  He opposed those scholar-activists who participated in political movements or in any way connected their professional and political lives.  And he opposed those academics who participated in academic programs that were interdisciplinary, problem-focused, and not tied to traditional fields of study.  

Horowitz published a book in 2006, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, in which he presented distorted profiles of illustrative faculty whom he believed violated academic standards.  Most of those identified either engaged in political activity and/or participated in interdisciplinary scholarly programs that he found offensive: Middle East Studies, Women's Studies, African-American Studies, American Studies, and Peace Studies.

In conjunction with the book and similar assaults on those he disagreed with on his electronic news magazine, Horowitz encouraged right-wing students to challenge the legitimacy of these professors on college campuses and encouraged conservative student groups to pressure state legislatures to endorse so-called "student bill-of-rights legislation."  Such legislation would have established oversight by state legislatures of colleges and universities, especially their hiring practices.

Campaigns led by Lynn Cheney, the former vice-president's wife, and former Senator Joe Lieberman from Connecticut, included the creation of an organization called the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.  As Giroux summarized it, ". . . ACTA actively supports policing classroom knowledge, monitoring curricula, and limiting the autonomy of teachers and students as part of its larger assault on academic freedom" (Giroux, The University in Chains, Paradigm, 2007, 162).

Horowitz, ACTA, and other conservatives who attacked the university targeted visible academics for scrutiny and persecution.  Ward Churchill, a provocative professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, was fired after a university committee was created to review his scholarship because of controversial remarks he made off campus.  Norman Finkelstein, a DePaul University political scientist who had written several books critical of interpreters of Israeli history and foreign policy, was denied tenure after a coordinated attack from outside his university led by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.  Distinguished political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt became the subject of vitriol and false charges of anti-Semitism because they published a long essay and book analyzing the "Israeli lobby." More recently, the University of Illinois reversed its contractual relationship with Professor Steven Salaita who posted electronic messages strongly critical of the state of Israel.

In addition, the new Red Scare has reinforced and legitimized the dominant paradigms in various academic disciples and created an environment of intellectual caution in the academy. While the impacts are not easily measurable, untenured faculty cannot help but be intimidated by the public attacks on their senior colleagues.  The system of tenure and promotion in most institutions is vulnerable to public pressures, individual reviewer bias, and honest disagreements among faculty about whether published work and teaching is worthy of promotion and tenure.  Therefore, just as the administrators and faculty of the 1950s felt vulnerable to outside assault on their institutions, those passing judgment on today's faculty might see the necessity of caution in hiring and retaining faculty whose perspectives are new, different, radical, and engaged.

In short, the real threats to academic freedom and free speech on college campuses have almost always come from those who wish to defend the status quo in scholarship, teaching, advocacy, foreign and national security policy, and the way the economy is organized. 

Furthermore, in a recent book Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola, (“Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War,” Pluto Press, 2021), argue that today the most fundamental question that supporters of real academic freedom should address is what politically motivated and economically powerful forces are raising the issue of academic freedom and individualism and what newer supporters mean by these terms. From the standpoint of these authors, vast resources of the Koch Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, their think tanks and support groups, advocate an higher education that celebrates individual freedom and the virtues of western civilization “while denying the existence of actual material and historical legacies of racial, gendered, and class-based exclusions, marginalizations, and violences.”

In short, Wilson and Kamola argue, these powerful economic interests in US society today seek to remake higher education to celebrate “individuals maximizing utility within the freedom of immaculately self-regulating markets.” And, for them, “manufacturing a campus free speech crisis” uses the traditional language of academic freedom to stifle scholarship and debate on issues and traditions of scholarship that have been growing to equip students with a more accurate understanding of the past and the present. And educational spokespersons like President Daniels, cleverly misuse the apt phrase “speaking truth to power” to defend those who wish to stifle real debate on issues of educational and public policy significance.

 One would hope that the new defenders of free speech and academic freedom, such as Kathleen Parker and the Purdue University Board of Trustees did in 2015, will defend faculty who are critics of various public policies and the prevailing distributions of wealth, income, power, and unequal privileges based on class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. This would be an historic change from the practice of silencing progressive voices in higher education.

An earlier version of this essay was posted on May 21, 2015.

 

WAR, MILITARISM, AND RESISTANCE: REVISITING CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

 Harry Targ

The original essay was written in 2013. Senator Sanders and the Progressive Caucus today, 2021, are demanding a cut in military spending. The analysis below is still relevant.

("The spending on contractors continues today at the same rapid clip, accounting for more than half of average Pentagon spending each year. And with Congress poised to approve a $778 billion one-year spending package (that would be around $7.8 trillion over ten years, even without further increases) for the military, the contractors stand to gain again. Democrats are slashing the Build Back Better bill from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion over ten years. Meanwhile, Pentagon contractors have received $3.4 trillion over the past decade." (Lindsay Koshgarian, "U.S. Military Contracts Totaled $3.4 Trillion Over 10 Years,”  Institute for Policy Studies, October 28, 2021)

Imperialism

 I still find compelling the main points about modern imperialism articulated by Lenin in his famous essay on the subject. Reflecting on the transformations of capitalism from its early manufacturing days until the twentieth century he argued that economic concentration had replaced a multiplicity of semi-independent economic actors, manufacturing capital had merged with financial institutions creating a system of monopoly finance capital, and as a consequence the export of capital--what we would call today foreign investment, financial speculation, and the debt system--would replace the export of commodities as the dominant form of economic exchange on a global basis. During some periods capitalist states would divide up the world each extracting wealth of all kinds from its own sphere of influence and during other periods they would engage in competition and even war to pursue profits. Lenin could not foresee a time, from the mid-20^th century until now, when resistance would come not only from competing and militarized capitalist states but from masses of people in colonized, neocolonial, and dependent societies.

The Cold War and Post-Cold War International Systems 

The latest phase of the system Lenin described was constructed at the end of World War II. The United States emerged from the war as the most powerful nation and used military, economic, political, and cultural tools to enshrine its dominance. This meant building a system to crush the emerging Socialist Bloc, controlling the drive toward independence of former colonies, and shaping the politics of lesser but significant capitalist states. To achieve these difficult goals, the United States began to construct a “permanent war economy.”

By the 1960s, the United States capacity to control the economic and military destiny of the world was severely challenged. The Tet Offensive of January, 1968 represented a metaphoric great divide as U.S. presumptions of hegemony were sorely challenged by a poor but passionate Vietnamese people’s army. From the late 1960s onward the U.S. was challenged not only on the battlefield but in the global economy. Rates of profit of U.S. corporations declined. Industrialization had led to overproduction. Working classes in the United States and other capitalist countries had gained more rights and privileges. Socialist countries were experiencing significant growth spurts. Countries of the Global South began to demand a New International Economic Order that regulated the way global capitalism worked. In addition, inter-capitalist rivalry grew. On top of all this the price of oil increased markedly.

The response of the global capitalist powers (the G7 countries) to the crisis of capitalism was a dramatic shift in the pursuit of profit from the production of goods and services to what became known as financialization, or financial speculation. The banks Lenin talked about became instrumental. With rising oil prices, oil rich countries awash in new profits, and banks swelling with petrodollars, nations were enticed and forced to borrow to pay for the oil that cost many times more than it had in the recent past. The global debt system was launched. When the United States freed the dollar from the gold standard, currencies themselves became a source of speculation. 

The debt system gave international financial institutions and banks the power to impose demands on countries that required loans. Thus, the IMF, the World Bank, regional international banks, and private institutions demanded that the world’s countries open their doors to foreign investors, cut their government programs, privatize their economies, and shift to exporting commodities to earn the cash to pay back the bankers. The era of neoliberalism was advanced by globalization, the scientific, technological, and cultural capacity to traverse the globe. No geographic space could maintain autonomy from global capitalism. So a Cold War that was launched by creating a permanent war economy was transformed by financialization, neoliberalism, and globalization. With the shift of work from higher wage capitalist centers to low wage peripheries, deindustrialization became a common feature of the economic landscape.

By the 21^st century the system of neoliberal globalization was facilitated by new techniques of empire. Wars which traditionally had been fought between states were now fought within states. The United States established a military presence virtually all across the globe with an estimated 700 to 1,000 military installations in at least 40 countries. Major functions of the globalization of military operations had become privatized so massive U.S. corporations gained even more profits from war-making than they had during the days of the Cold War. The military—public and private—began to engage in assassinations and covert “humanitarian interventions.” And, aided by new technologies, the United States and other capitalist countries, using unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, could make war on enemies without “boots on the ground.” As we have learned, intelligence gathering, spying on people, has immeasurably advanced as well.

To put it succinctly, while imperialism remains generically as it has been throughout history today:

 -Imperialism has become truly global.

 -The military continues to be big business, sucking up at least half of the federal budget.

 -The United States has developed the capacity to fight wars without soldiers on the ground.

 -Empires, particularly the United States empire, kill with impunity.

 -The connections between economic interest and militarism remain central.

 -Ideologies defending 21^st century military interventions vary from those neoconservatives who argue that the United States must use its power to maximize our global position to the humanitarian interventionists who claim that the United States acts in the world for good.

Resistance

This narrative is not unfamiliar to us. What is less familiar is the idea that throughout history the forces of domination have been challenged by resistance, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. It is important to note that the drive for U.S. hegemony, for example, has been affected by resistance. A recent articulation of this narrative appears in the writings of Vijay Prashad, who has described the efforts of the newly independent nations of the Global South to achieve political and economic sovereignty. Many of these efforts from the 1950s to the 1970s faltered at the steps of the debt system and neoliberal globalization. But the struggle has continued. In addition, there have been examples of people such as the Cubans and the Vietnamese who, with much pain and suffering, were able to achieve some measure of economic sovereignty and political independence.

21^st century movements for change are varied and complicate the efforts of imperialism to achieve its goals. Resistance has included the following:

-Mercosur, a trade organization that once included Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and others waiting for admittance constituted the third largest trading bloc in the world. 

-The development of collaborative relationships among powerful Global South nations have occurred from time to time such as when representatives from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) met to chart an independent agenda in global affairs.

-The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) has consisted of ten Latin American/Caribbean countries which launched a program of economic integration and political cooperation.

-The Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) a new grouping of some 33 Western Hemisphere nations, minus the United States and Canada, seeks to expand regional collaboration.

-Individual nations, based on their historic resistance to imperialism, such as Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, and Mexico continue to inspire activists.

-The United Nations system, considerably weakened from the days of the Cold War, still engages in global mobilizations through its conferences, support for some progressive NGOs, and projects involving education, development, and peacekeeping. Affiliated organized such as the International Labor Organization pursue goals that are sometimes independent of imperial agendas.

-Global anti-capitalist mobilizations, such as the World Social Forum, brought together thousands of activists largely from the Global South to discuss the problems faced by workers, women, indigenous people, environmental activists, and others.

-Perhaps most important at this time is the grassroots mobilizations of millions of people all across the globe demanding economic justice, worker rights, gender equality, environmental justice,  and peace. Such mobilizations, while stimulated by local issues, are defined as part of a global movement such as the 2011 “From Tahrir Square to Madison, Wisconsin.” People worldwide, particularly the young, workers, and women are seeing the common dimensions of struggle against imperialism.

 

Where Do Left and Progressive Forces Fit?

First, we on the left need to “bring imperialism back in;” that is socialist organizations can through education revisit and revise the theory of imperialism so that it is more serviceable for 21^st century socialist movements.

Second, progressives should link war/peace issues to environmental issues, to gender issues, to class issues, and race issues. As Martin Luther King declared in 1967: “I speak of the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”

Third, every socialist and progressive organization should challenge the permanent war economy. Andrew Bacevich pointed out that the framers of the permanent war economy in the 1940s believed that the role of the citizenry was to remain quiescent, pliant, and supportive of the decisions made by the foreign policy establishment. That assumption must be resisted.

Fourth, local and national work should link economic justice, environmental preservation, and peace. These issues are inextricably connected.

Finally, left and progressive groups should respond to specific imperial transgressions by:

 -working to cut military budgets

 -opposing drone warfare

 -saying no to US military aid to rebels fighting against governments the US opposes

 -supporting the just demands of the Palestinian people

 -challenging the construction of military bases in Asia and Africa

 -demanding an end to subversion in Latin America

 -calling for the end of hybrid wars in Latin America.

 -insisting on the end of the Cuban blockade.

 

 

 

Ideological Hegemony and Higher Education

 

Ideological Hegemony and Higher Education: Ideas as Material Forces

Monday, November 15, 2021 - 1:00pm

CST

Dan Morris & Harry Targ

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