<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Thank you Brian for the interesting discussion! It provides an occasion to reflect on a current situation at the University of Auckland, in which opportunist staff (I shall not name names) blithely write public articles to support 'resistance' (I suppose what you call purported leftists) when in private they have chosen to accept the Vice Chancellor's offer of a pay rise on condition of not joining the Union and the resistance it poses to blatantly neoliberal and predatory management strategies. These get worse and worse by the day, and ultimately I think in a sense (however cliché), actions - e.g. refusing the pay rise to preserve minimal conditions of dignity at the university - speak much louder than words.<div><br></div><div>Leon</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div>On 2 Oct 2011, at 22:54, Brian Holmes wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; ">Here's what I think. Academics who have no intellectual capital had<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>better build it right now through ethical-political struggles within<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>their own hypercompetitive, corrupt, and radically inegalitarian fields.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>Which means changing the ways they work so that the products are not<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>self-referential, self-interested and therefore aligned with predatory<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>neoliberal management strategies. Those who have built it up already<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>through such struggles had better spend it right now, critiquing and<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>opposing the sudden and violent power grab that money capital has been<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>carrying out since 2008 on the entire public sphere and on the majority<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>of humanity, or "bare life" as Agamben says. I have been told that<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>Cornell West is camping out in Zuccotti Park in New York City. Until I<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>see great numbers of purportedly leftist academics following suit,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>either in that movement or in other, better, more potent ones, I shall<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>go on trying to help you by producing concepts and agitational forms,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>and (in all friendliness) by goading you from those extradisciplinary<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>and extra-institutional positions that I occupy and which are<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>dialectically related to the public institutions, as civil society is<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>dialectically related to the state. One of the concepts I'll continue to<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>use is that of the "total corruption" which in my considered analysis is<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>threatening the public university and all public institutions.</span></blockquote></div><br></body></html>