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Title: Profession and Movement
Author: Anonymous
Date: Wildcat no.96, spring 2014
Language: en
Topics: Aufheben, work, Greece, Black Bloc, the state, police, UK, the left, Wild Cat
Source: Retrieved on March 15th, 2016 from http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/wildcat/96/e_w96_berufubewegung.html

Anonymous

Profession and Movement

The Aufheben Scandal

Three years ago a small scandal took place when the Greek group TGTP

published in an open letter that the co-founder of Aufheben, John Drury

1 , lead workshops for the police and military and is known as a

“provider of ideas” in these circles. These workshops took part within

the framework of his academic career researching Crowd Control, mass

panics and rescue operations. Together with his closest colleagues Stott

and Reicher he has developed the Elaborated Social Identity Model

(ESIM). The social psychologist Stott is renowned to be one of the

globally leading experts for protests and violent uprisings. ESIM claims

that a ‘mob’ acts according to certain patterns: people in a crowd have

individual thoughts and emotions, so when the crowd is attacked

indifferently by the police, people act in solidarity with each other

and resist together. Therefore ESIM advices that the police should

proceed in a multi-levelled approach and extract ‘individual

perpetrators’ from the crowd. Using such kind of methods, Stott

coordinated security preparations for the European football cup in

Poland and Ukraine in 2012. (for more details see both open letters by

TPTG)[1]

Aufheben is a group from Brighton, which publishes one of the few

collectively produced magazines of the radical left in England. The

magazine consists of mainly long articles tackling fundamental questions

(what was the Soviet Union, decadence theory, “Green New Capitalism”

etc.). They often deal with similar subjects as us (theory of the oil

rent, criticism of Negri's autonomist marxism, debate about Beverly

Silver's book). We have translated some of their articles (21st century

Intifada, criticism of the commons thesis by Massimo de Angelis, Dole

Autonomy) and have criticised them at certain points (e.g. in wildcat

89, “The oil rent, Ricardians amongst themselves”). We share similar

positions when it comes to the issues of working-time reductions and

guaranteed income. During the end of the 90s we initiated a closer

collaboration with Aufheben and other collectives in Europe, which

ultimately failed.

Therefore the revelation about John Drury came as quite a shock - which

in itself would not have been a reason to write in Wildcat about it. But

the way the debate about this case was lead within the left-communist

scene in Europe has initially left us speechless. Most of the people

shook it off (“let's move on”) or attacked those who had made these

scandalous facts public.

The current movements open a public space again to debate ‘general

interests’. But the fact that many participants of these movements don't

criticise their own social situation, but rather ideologise it (“we are

all precarious”) render these movements toothless. This is related to

the fact that all these movements have ‘two souls’: one part of the

movement is young and has formally high qualifications, whereas the

other part is formally less qualified and in the long run ‘decoupled’

from social progress. During the crisis, the conditions within the

movement regarding the individual ‘professional choice’ and regarding

what I am willing to swallow at work have eroded dramatically. As a

result of the casualisation of work relations, the interest in a

‘profession’ and in a professional career has increased enormously.

Often people then cling on to jobs although they deeply hate them.

As long as our highest-performing youth still sees their chances in the

highest-paid jobs in the finance industry, we don't have to fear a

revolution, the Financial Times Germany commented at the beginning of

2012 - but at the same time pointed out that decreasing wages could

“lead to investment bankers looking voluntarily for more sensible tasks,

even when they are not actually made redundant. Amongst the Harvard

graduates, Wall Street lost its mobilising effect as early as 2011.”

(FTD) Perhaps revelations of the role of the German secret service

during the NSU scandal [2] and the debate following Snowden's NSA-leaks

will lead to a process of re-thinking even amongst programmers and the

hacker scene. At least certain professional careers are now debated and

scandalised publicly:

One example is Occupy Wall Street-activist Justine Tunney, one of the

more famous people in Zuccotti Park, who, amongst other things, set up

the website “OccupyWallSt.org” under the slogan “The only solution is

WorldRevolution”. After the end of the movement she took a job as a

software developer for Google, declared publicly that the Google CEO

Eric Schmidt should become US-president and said thinks like “I think

Google is actually doing things that are making the world a better

place” and “even though they operate within a capitalist system, they

still do the most good throughout the world” When Google's role in the

current surveillance scandal was criticised she retorts “I am always

surprised to see as to what extent people distort reality in order to

denounce a company which offers everything for free”. Also politically

she now argues against the movement and attacks left-wingers like David

Graeber or rants against social welfare on Twitter - here she might not

even have had to change her previous opinion. Her proposal to pay people

for going on demonstrations finds support e.g. by Micah White, a former

editor of AdBusters, who now works for a ‘social movement consulting’

company.

The scientific work on cryptography is as little ‘neutral’ as research

on crowd control. And whoever presents their sociological thesis on

panels organised by the secret service [Verfassungsschutz: Federal

Office for the Protection of the Constitution] cannot at other occasions

preach ‘no grassing to the cops’ at their antifa events. Paradoxically,

in parts of the radical left these types of double-standards exist

because one's own wage work is not openly debated. The ‘opposition to

the state’ then becomes ideology or attitude - and expresses itself

‘practically’ only on the occasional demonstration.

Movements only gather force once they make the ‘private’ public. An

important step in political groups is to discuss the earning and

spending of money together. But even with the approval of the group

certain borders cannot be crossed. The cooperation with NATO, police or

secret services surely belongs to this category. A wide and public

debate is therefore necessary. This debate will touch upon more or less

every question - from one's own reproduction, to forms of organisation,

revolutionary moral to ‘what revolution actually is’. This is why we

want to start a small series of articles in order to encourage you to

participate in the debate: What role do I play within the capitalist

division of labour? What are the costs I have to pay for a professional

career? Can I move around on the labour market in any other form but

individually? The following is meant as an introduction for the debate.

…the puddle of an iceberg

Aufheben were doubly affected by the revelation. Alongside the aiding of

organs of repression, JD was caught having friendly and cooperative

dealings with reformist colleagues - Aufheben had always keenly

castigated other left-wingers with far fewer reformist affinities.

Aufheben reacted immediately - they had to obviously not think for long

about it, as well as not change their political and theoretical

assumptions. They saw nothing wrong with the fact that their comrade was

making his career in a ‘state-security linked science’ (Hartmut Rübner).

Instead, they generously explained to their critics how ‘academia’

works: “The ‘blue light services’ work closely together; and so talking

about emergencies means probably talking to cops as well as the others.

His University encouraged this, and it would have looked odd to refuse

to communicate with the cops. So he accepted this as a small cost of the

overall job of research work.”. They cheekily made their critics out to

be acting like a police state because they had made the name of the

collective's member public. (Nevertheless we've decided to use the name

as well, if John Drury makes no secret of his political origins to

‘blue-light colleagues’, then the left scene can know about his academic

achievements).

In the ensuing confrontation, JD was defended, also from people who were

politically close to Aufheben. Here, there are deep commonalities

amongst people on the ‘radical left’, who see themselves as radical but

meanwhile explicitly advocate the depoliticisation of their own

reproduction: how I earn my living, how I spend ‘my’ money - that's

nobodies business! To confront each other in sharp ideological clashes

is one thing, to share the same social behaviour ‘modes of behaviour’ is

another. Food comes first, then morals. A left that can no longer

imagine a revolution, look for material security and social recognition

in their waged work - how else is is supposed to go any other way in

capitalism?

If unions and foundations beckon with jobs, funding and research

projects

It is problematic that the left-wing scene itself has become an

inscrutable mix of political projects and sources of income.

Self-employed people do contract work for leftist publishing houses;

left-wing magazines offer paid jobs; many of these jobs you only get if

you have the right political connections… this goes as far as

self-employed activists, who protest against nuclear power, banks or

gene-technology for pay; paid by people who lack the time for protesting

themselves. Once the boundaries between political engagement and earning

money become blurry it becomes impossible to distinguish between what

people actually think and what they propagate for professional reasons.

In the UK this type of employment is called ‘movement jobs’ and compared

to Germany this tendency is more widespread. Many people of the ‘radical

left’ work as organisers for trade unions or as lecturers at the

university. A quote from a comrade in London: “When I attend meetings to

‘support cleaning workers’ half of the meeting consists of people

because they are just about to write a freelance article about the topic

or because they do a PHD on ‘migration and affective labour’ - or

because they have a job or function within the union and are therefore

required to participate. Later on in the pub this schizophrenia

continues (“do you know what, I just have to finish this article for the

Guardian, this then will give me more time to write more radical stuff”

etc.).

Since the Hartz-reform [3] , the left in Germany has caught up when it

comes to ‘movement jobs’ - since the onset of the global crisis there is

literally a boom of these types of job relations. Nearly half of the

former radical left will now be dependent on political party funding

(mainly from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of the ‘Partei die Linke’) or

on doing professional ‘training against racism’ at schools, or

‘human-rights oriented children and youth work’, and so on.

The many former activists of the radical left who now work as

‘organisers’ in the trade unions are an example for the fact that by and

large doing such jobs doesn't guarantee an ascent up the social ladder.

We have written about the working conditions of ‘organisers’ in detail

in wildcat no.78 and no.80. In addition we refer to the article ‘Left

co-management - Critical remarks on ideology and practice of union

organising’, by Berger/Meyer, published in 2011 in the anthology

‘Organisation and Critique’. Referring to the example of the former

radical-left refugee activist Franziska Bruder, Berger/Meyer point out

the difficult consequences of such a professional choice: the

‘lead-organizer’ was sent “by her employer ver.di [service union], of

all possible branches, to organize the security sector”. (footnote

p.261) And although the union campaign was obviously not about “an

emancipatory questioning of the self-defensive interests of private

property owners and state institutions” nor about “an organising of

those who are locked up or excluded and who are controlled and detained

by the security guards”, Bruder was quoted in the trade union journal

Mitbestimmung 12/2007 that “trade unionism has to be fun”. Berger/Meyer

rightly point out “the danger, that campaigns for the ‘organising of the

unorganisable’ finally turn out to be vehicles for the career

aspirations of left organisers”. (p.265) Which is no contradiction,

given the fact that “the explicit self-positioning as think-tanks for

the trade union leadership could turn out to be the academic version of

the ‘self-organisation of the [self-proclaimed] precarious’”, of which

there is a lot of talk within the left. (p.248)

Not only trade unions and companies are interested in the management

skills of activists; having a left background and contacts to social

movements are seen as an additional qualification for certain jobs. This

is why Dr. JD had no problem to explain his political development in a

scientific magazine [4] :

(“What critical psychology can(‘t) do for the ‘anti-capitalist

movement’”) “As such, we [critical psychologists] appear to have the

best of both worlds; we can satisfy some of our own needs as critical

people (and be true to our conscience) while at the same time making our

living as psychologists – even perhaps getting a decent career out of

it.”

The “professionalisation of our media work” [5] , campaign work and the

whole social-pedagogic civil-society blabber is just the other side of

the coin of such careers - in the end the trained knowledge has to be

made use of somehow! The “Castor Schottern”-campaign would have been the

optimal fieldwork ground for JD! [6]

“Professionalisation” of what?

The left movement as a whole pays a high price for such kind of

individual careers, the negative repercussions on the ‘socio-political

fabric” are grave. The political left is not external to the process of

the extreme increase of social inequality in society; compared to the

rest of society during the last years the income gap within the left

will have widened even more. Individual careers on one side, increasing

pressure and atomisation on the other side pushes more people towards

individually feathering their own nests. The turn towards ‘Realpolitik’

in the radical left in the first half of the 1990s was enforced by

people with an intellectual and finally social self-interest in the

(improved/reformed) continuation of the social division of labour (e.g.

Joachim Hirsch propagated in his “The National Competitive State” in

1995 “revolutionary politics are impossible”). Today left congresses are

organised like university lectures, left speak and academic jargon have

become indiscernible. And people like Roland Roth collaborate with the

state intelligence service - see in more detail the book

“Gegnerbestimmung” [7] .

While more and more people turn their back on the state (see for example

the falling election turnout), the formerly radical left has moved

towards it and at various points it wasn't possible anymore to

distinguish the left from state institutions. The left doesn't know

their enemies anymore; the state security administrations become

increasingly powerful in Germany, most of all the intelligence service

[Verfassungsschutz] - and the formerly radical left share panels with

representatives of these institutions or have their anti-racist

pamphlets financed by it - even after the uncovering of the NSU!

It would be worth some separate research to see how many formerly left

activists globally contribute on behalf of European and US-American

foundations to the fact that movements of upheaval such as in Egypt are

not getting out of control, that they orient themselves towards

civil-society/democratic values and don't radicalise themselves through

social conflicts. Also, a historical analysis of how the decline of

movements result in institutionalisation, but how this

institutionalisation was already present as ‘tendencies of

professionalisation’ during the movement itself, could help us progress

in this necessary debate; e.g. some research into the composition of the

First and the Second International would be interesting (artisanal

workers’ clubs vs. leadership of engineers and lawyers, who declared

better state planning to be their main aim).

The assumption that by working within the institutions you could siphon

off resources or money while having to give little back in return is as

false as Aufheben's opinion, that working within the (academic)

institutions is necessary for revolutionary theory production. “However,

it is a matter of fact that a large part of theoretical Marxist

production has in recent times come out from under the generous wings of

academia. After all, for a young radical student who has been involved

in struggles and genuinely believes in communism, a university career is

ideal – it would provide the possibility of attacking the system and be

paid by the system itself to do so.” Aufheben is well aware of the

problematic relation between ‘revolutionary theory’ and the academic

apparatus: “But this separation of human activity, which is a real

separation, cannot come without concrete consequences. By submitting

itself within the scope of university research, the activity of thinking

was necessarily redefined as a specialist activity, done within the

requirements and parameters of the academic world. However genuine the

authors’ inner feelings are, this concrete aim will inevitably affect

both the form and the content of their work.” [8]

But they pose the problem in a way (“The very fact of belonging to the

exploited class gives us less time to make theory than the time given to

those belonging to the bourgeoisie.”) which affirms the (at that point

not yet publicly known) decision of JD. Their perspective before and

after the ‘scandal’ is coherent - This is the really disturbing fact and

forces us to reconsider left-communist theory production of recent

years. Cynical commenting on left ‘Realpolitik’ and their

professionalised campaigns has become the raison-d'etre of groups like

Aufheben. Aufheben masters skilfully the sharp critique of collective

efforts out of the off without ever having to put themselves into the

spotlight of consideration. Their criticism isolates and divides -

similar to what a successful police strategy has to look like according

to ESIM. (In hindsight their criticism of the call centre inquiry of

Kolinko - claiming that inquiry is a “functionalistic relation between

militants and workers”- in which they portray themselves as critical

Boheme-thinkers, who are neither militant (want to ‘intervene’) nor see

‘being worker’ as a potential starting-point of political activity,

seems almost allegorical.

Critique of the profession

“with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man

is a debased, enslaved forsaken, despicable being…..”

(Karl Marx)

Sergio Bologna once said that if you had to summarise the revolutionary

content of the movements of 1968 and after in one sentence, it would be

the critique of the profession, the critique of the capitalist division

of labour. People who took part in the movements during the end of the

1960s, early 1970s knew that they would have to change themselves within

the revolutionary process and criticise their position in society. They

were not able to just start from their ‘interests’. Instead they

radically criticised the totality of the capitalist division of labour

(science, school, factory, family, prison…). This revolutionary impetus

has gotten lost today - but it's certain that it will re-emerge and grow

within future revolutionary movements.

Nowadays it is fashionable to snigger about people who decided ‘to go

into the factories’ back then… - the widely maintained lie that all

revolutionary students had left the factory again after a few weeks and

made a career demonstrates that this past still raises questions and

aspirations which have to be fought against if one wants to make peace

with the existing social relations. (From today's perspective the idea

to work in a bigger workplace has a totally different attraction, given

that jobs tend to become more isolated. At university, in the web-design

companies and similar jobs you often have only few work-mates; or you

work completely on your own as a freelancer or other forms of (false)

self-employment, or during writing your PhD. In such jobs it is pretty

difficult to impossible to get something going collectively.)

The reverence for experts within social movements (theory experts,

organisers, lawyers) is also related to ‘technical’ changes. With an

increase in the polarisation of the social division of labour and

intensified control of labour the gap between the intelligence of the

collective worker (as an antagonistic subject) and the special knowledge

(as scientists or ‘high-skilled’ professions) widens. A collective of

mechanics was able to understand and anticipate the work of engineers

(often engineers merely appropriated their ‘inventions’). Today we are

often confronted with strikes of (migrant) workers who on their own are

not able to make use of their productive power, given that machine

operators and technicians are able to run production without them

(because the training period of newly hired workers would be

sufficiently short).

Trade union organising addresses these very ‘leaders’, e.g. branch

supervisors in retail etc.. “Organizers focus on the ‘alpha-(fe)males’

within a circle of workers, independently from their political

positions, and thereby foster the internal hierarchies and tendencies of

exclusion within work-places” (Berger/Meyer, p.268). Emancipatory

movements have to attack such hierarchies and try to invert them.

Critique of the capitalist division of labour also has to be a critique

of the content of capitalist science; not only of the social science,

but also natural and engineering science. The critique would have to

unveil how the ‘gods with or without ties’ cannot develop their

knowledge separate from the social cooperation of labour - once it

concerns ideology (the benefits of gene-technology) or is of significant

danger (nuclear technology) or is simply aimed against us (military,

cops, intelligence services). It was correct that TPTG in their open

letter did not criticise the discipline ‘crowd control’ as academics

with a counter-expertise, but that they criticised the content of it as

a political group.

Finally bin the ‘precarity-ideologies’! No one has ever promised that in

capitalism everyone will get a position and income according to their

qualifications! Fulfilment in your work and profession has always been a

privilege of the middle-classes. Whoever sees a guaranteed/permanent job

according to one's university graduation as their special and individual

right, rather than criticises the capitalist rat-race behind such

promises and divisive structures, affirms capitalist competition.

Instead of complaining about a lack of professional prospects, the

‘overqualified precarious’ should rather criticise the capitalist social

relations around them!

You cannot simply proceed in a professional career and be

‘revolutionary’ in your free-time. We need our own structures as a

material alternative to the ‘profession’; we need commonly organised

living arrangements, collectives and (social) centres which would allow

as a different way to approach ‘work’: to kick a shit-job if necessary;

to work for a low-wage, because the job is politically interesting; to

stir up a work-place collectively. Instead of ‘professionalisation’ and

Realpolitik we have to advance the movement through a continuous

international exchange.

Pros piss off!

Everyone can learn everything.

Footnotes:

[1] The open letter of TPTG, The answer by Aufheben, The second letter

by TPTG, Wikipedia Article on John Drury

[2] NSU: National Socialist Underground; After several murders of

Turkish migrants by a fascist terror-cell NSU between 2000 and 2006 it

became known that most members of the NSU were paid for by the

intelligence service; the home ministry knew about the close

intertwinement between fascist armed groups and intelligence and tried

to hush things up by all means necessary. This did not prevent formerly

radical left activists to ‘work together’ with representatives of the

state intelligence ‘against the right-wing threat’;

[3] The Hartz-reform slashed the dole, which was connected to the lasst

salary to a minimal wage and forced a lot of workers in low-paid jobs.

[4] John Drury: What critical psychology can(‘t) do for the

‘anti-capitalist movement’ in Annual Review of Critical Psychology 3:

Anti-Capitalism

[5] In German on question ‘proletarian public sphere’ vs. ‘professional

media work’: Wie machen wir's öffentlich?, Wildcat Nr. 81

[6] In 2010 during the protests against nuclear-waste rail transport

near Gorleben the political disaster of protest management by

‘professional left campaigners’ became apparent. While ‘radical left

spokespersons’ on on side mobilised protestors into ‘symbolic militancy’

around the railtracks, they at the same time had come to agreements with

the police. For their media campaigns they needed some sort of ‘movement

event’ (crowd) and in order to be accepted as ‘political players’ they

had to contain it at the same time, e.g. through diplomacy with the cops

(control). Various groups criticised in hindsight that this

‘double-play’ lead to unnecessary arrests and victimisation.

[7] Gegnerbestimmung = “Enemy Identifikation”: A former left-winger

Roland Roth published the book “Die sozialen Bewegungen in Deutschland

seit 1945” [The social movements in Germany since 1945], asking not only

his ex-comrades from the radical left to participate, but without their

knowledge also collaborated with members of the intelligence

service[Verfassungsschutz], who contributed articles about the ‘radical

right-wing movement’; this is one of several recent examples where

‘left-wing antifascists’ work together on ‘democratic platforms’ with

representatives of ‘deep’ state institutions

[8] Reclaim the ‘state debate’; Aufheben #18 (2010)