美国大学及其对正义的渴望
（摘译）
左派的自我形象
美国大学有两种功能：培养中产阶级；为发起左派政治活动打基础。学生及其教工将他们自己视为国家良心的看守者。左倾教授认为，他们比选举人更了解什么对国家有好处。左派的阵地在大学及学术激动中心，右
派的政治中枢则远离大学城。
学院派与美国中产阶级之间的鸿沟反映在理查德·波斯纳和詹姆斯的思想中。在波斯纳的用语中，“民众主义”（populism）指被左派称为“参与民主”(participatory democracy)的政治决策。罗蒂本人及其他左翼教授们认为，美国中产阶级不能被放心地委以政治权力，只有受过教育的精英们能够减缓存在于大众身上的种种劣习。因此，只有左翼精英的政治措施才可能产生真正的民主。波斯纳认为，民众（粹）主义是一种坏事物，希望人们永远不要有参与民主。用“民治”描述美国政治统治方式并不恰当。美国民主是（也应该是）一种精英统治。这些精英或多或少地腐败(化)，未来也可能仍然如此。尽管这种统治存在着种种弊端，但它是人迄今为止所尝试过的最不危险的一种统治。詹姆斯也将精英主义视为一种必要的罪恶。他视民主为一种宗教，认为信仰与乌托邦是人类理性的伟大实践。罗蒂同意上述二人的主张，认为他们表达了他本人及其他左派人士的担心与希望。只有在弱者抗议强者这一点上，左派才主持和赞同民粹主义。罗蒂认为，将问题诉诸二民众的感情无异于诉诸于怨恨与仇恨。
在美国历史上，文学、哲学、历史等人文系科一直是自我形象（self-image）的核心。但它们与中产阶级之间存在着不一致性。只有当大学对英雄的业绩持一种崇尚态度时，她的公众形象达到极佳，对公众的服务也发挥到极致。在这个时候，人们不觉得“教授是国家良心的守护者”这一主张的荒谬。
罗蒂花了不少文字论述了两种事物之间的紧张关系，即知识分子对没有受过教育的民众的恐惧 与“民主”是他们的信仰这一事实之间的表面矛盾。罗蒂通过对“民主”作出新的诠释和区分来化解矛盾。他认为民主有两种，一是作为一种乌托邦名称的民主在这种乌托邦中，强者不再压迫弱者；二是作为人民统治的民主。第一种意义上的民主是社会正义的同义语；后一种意义上的民主几近神话。将二者混淆在很大程度上知识分子的过错。他们常虚伪地信仰一些他们根本就不相信的东西，什么人民的智慧、投票者的健全常识，但他们又不愿意放弃这些观点。原因在于，一方面知识分子所渴望的社会正义有赖于对公众意见的影响，另一方面，要让社会制度发生变革就得先让民众知晓和接受一些前提性的观念。罗蒂认为，这种双重心态是必要的、且有有益的一面。
近年来左派在以下三个方面的举动赢得美国大学的支持。
1） 倡导课程的多元文化主义，对人文和社会科学等学术系科的构建；
2） 在西雅图及其他大城市中发起对世贸组织和国际货币基金组织的抗议。许多美国大学生参加了些抗议；
3） 在许多大学校园发起了“正义的看守者”运动。
其中第三项举措可能最有成就。
多元文化论
十年前，这一术语在美国校园还很少听到。现频繁地在系务会和系学术会上出现。
通常情况下，人们对“多元文化主义”所做理解具有一定的误导性。八、九十年代中，文化多元主义者在美国校园真正含义：人们在对非裔美国人、西裔美国人、亚裔美国人，女性问题、同性恋等新出现的问题研究过程当中，为了从理论上对这些新问题提出一种解释，才尝试性地提出文化多元主义。这一尝试并不十分令人满意。
文化多元论的出现有其负面影响。其一是，左派的注意力被从经济的不平等转移到文化的不敏感性（cultural insensitivity）。左派教授们开始挥洒 "文化政治是所有政治的核心"及"我们这一时代革命的深层次文化特征"等术语。左派政治理论家们开始著书论证，主张文化是左派政治的主要目标之一。罗蒂认为，只有当文化多元论有助于校正社会经济方面的不平等时，文化认同才有其在政治方面的重要作用。文化认同不是目的本身，它不能成为左翼政治的目标。罗蒂以亚裔、拉美与欧洲移民在二十世纪通婚为例，对其观点做了论述。
通过税收的手段对财富、收入和机遇的重新分配，是左派政治的传统目标，也是社会正义得以实现的主要手段。而文化多元论回避了对这些利益的重新分配。罗蒂本人的目标指对这些社会善的重新分配。
左派的第二个策略就是对新的世界经济秩序（包括全球化引发的问题）的抗议。这些抗议源自大学校园。学生们抵制由第三世界生产的t恤衫和耐克运动鞋，以抗议富裕发达国家对贫穷国家利益的牺牲。这些抗议有如当年左派人士对核竞赛的抗议一样，是在没有其他对策可供选择的情况下的一种激情宣泄。这种激情会逐渐消失。实际上，没有人能够提出一个好的全球经济框架应是什么样子，应建立起一种什么样的机构。
罗蒂既不同意imf和世界银行的主张（对多数国家有利的事情对世界人民也就有利）也不同意里根和撤切尔的保守主义思想（对自由和个人福利的唯一威胁来自国家的权利，市场最终会为人类带来繁荣）。为此，应找出一种应对社会非正义延续和增长的处方。
罗蒂对左派人士的第二个举动（策略）并不看好。许多参加西雅图抗议的学生转向了新马克思主义，这并不是一个好现象。因为后者号召“推翻全球资本主义”。除非你能证明有一个更好的制度来替代它，否则要求人们推翻资本主义就无从谈起。而过了时的马克思主义革命者是从来没有能作到这一点。
威廉·詹姆斯认为，受过大学教育的人更适于做有价值的好领导。我同意威廉·詹姆斯的这一精英主义观点。此刻，作为我们左派人士不会去追随类似恺撤、马丁·路德这样仅仅具有超凡魅力的领袖。但校园里参加正义组织的学生们则会去跟在这些领袖的屁股后面，直到有新的魅力领袖出现。在少数美国人眼，我们的制度散发着正义的光彩，我们的习俗闪耀着美的亮光；有少数人仍信奉民主的宗教。上面提到的学生就是这些人当中的一部分。 他们很适合于担当作为国家良心的角色。
american universities and the hope for social justice
american universities serve two quite different functions. on the one hand, they are cogs in an efficient mechanism for training and credentialing the american middle class. the schools of medicine, law, engineering, nursing, and the like keep the economy and the society going by supplying skilled professionals and by carrying out research projects. on the other hand, the universities, and particularly the departments of humanities and social sciences, are staging grounds for leftist political activity. they contain the largest concentration of people concerned with social justice-people who agonize over the vast disparity in life-chances between the rich nations and the poor nations, and between middle-class americans and poor americans.
students and faculties in those departments often think of themselves as the keepers of the nation's conscience. the most liberal candidates for political office typically have their power base in university towns, and can always count on faculty and students for campaign contributions and canvassing. leftist professors are notorious for thinking that they know better than the voters what is good for the country. they often look like moralistic prigs, which is why the right has been able to make political capital out of the academic absurdities lumped under the heading of "political correctness".
the gap between this segment of the academy and the vast majority of the american middle class is well described in a forthcoming book by richard posner, a federal judge who is perhaps the most admired member of the american legal profession--respected for his wide learning and for his intellectual acuity both by conservatives and by leftists like myself. he writes as follows:
the alienation of the intelligentsia is an old story, but a true one, at least so far as the nonscientific departments of the modern american university are concerned. from the perspective of the faculty of these departments, the average voter is ignorant, philistine, provincial, selfish, materialistic, puritanical...superficial, insensitive, unimaginative, complacent, chauvinistic, superstitious, uneducable, benighted politically, prone to hysteria, and overweight....the gulf between the middle class and the academic elite is so wide that the members of the latter class, despite their own intense political and moral disagreements, are at one in their hostility to populism.
by "populism" posner means the sort of political decision-making that leftists sometimes call "participatory democracy". his point is that leftist professors like myself think that the american middle class includes so many death penalty enthusiasts, gun nuts, rednecked racists, and homophobes that they cannot safely be trusted with political power. only the retention of power by an educated elite can mitigate the unthinking, resentful, sadism of the masses. so we leftists spend half our time claiming that only leftist political measures can bring about true democracy, and the other half regretting that most of the voters are still so ill-educated that they refuse to support such measures.
despite his somewhat satirical treatment of the bind in which we leftists are caught, posner agrees that populism is a bad thing. he hopes that we will never have a participatory democracy. he much prefers the sort of struggle between interest groups which goes on in our legislatures, and the deal-cutting half-measures that are the usual upshot of such struggles. he thinks that the slogan "the rule of the people" is a misleading description of how the us is actually governed, and a good thing too. for american democracy is, and should be, rule by an elite. this elite has always been more or less corrupt, and probably always will be. but this sort of rule is, for all its disadvantages, less disastrous than any other form of government that has been tried so far.
we leftists find it hard to disagree with posner. for we are only in favor of populism when it is on our side-when it is the protest of the weak against the strong. typically, it is not. an appeal to the feelings of the masses is more often an appeal to resentment and hatred. jesse helms, for example, is a good example of a successful populist politician. politicians of that sort aim at dividing the poor into warring factions in order to serve the interests of the rich. in the american south, ever since the civil war, rich whites pitted poor whites against poor blacks in order to insure that they will remain in control of state and local governments.
this technique of dividing and conquering is an age-old populist technique, which is still being employed. before president johnson joined the civil rights movement it was the basis for the democratic stranglehold on the former slave states. after johnson's switch that strategy played in important role in molding republican majorities in the south. jesse helms first gained his seat in the senate by conducting a scurrilous, populist, campaign against an incumbent democrat, frank graham. graham had been the liberal president of the university of north carolina, and he opposed racial discrimination in a period when doing so was still unusual for a southern politician. mocking elitist eggheads is an old populist technique, practiced by hitler as well as by helms.
posner is right to emphasize the discontinuity between the members of the literature, philosophy and history faculties and the rest of the american middle class. there really is such a thing as political correctness, at least in the sense that faculty members in those departments who are dubious about abortion on demand or gay marriage or affirmative action are often reluctant to make their doubts known. one can make oneself very unpopular with the majority of one's colleagues by expressing doubts on these matters. the atmosphere in such departments is very different from that of most middle-class workplaces in the us. the universities have a different ethos than do the hospitals, the corporate offices, the law firms, and the government agencies. there are leftists in all those places, of course, but they do not set the tone. in certain university departments, they do.
a hundred years ago, the literature, history and philosophy departments were more central to the self-image and the educational function of us universities than they are now. in those days, the members of those departments were less unanimously leftist than they are now, but those we remember most fondly were the ones who championed leftist causes. william james, for example, was a determined opponent both of racial discrimination and of american imperialism. he was infuriated when president mckinley grabbed the philippines in the aftermath of the spanish-american war.
james' collaboration with mark twain in the campaign against that incursion into asia resembled the collaboration of eminent professors of philosophy and literature with literary bohemians like norman mailer in opposing the war in vietnam. in protest movements of this sort, the professors, then and now, hang together with the novelists and the poets and the artists. their coalition has been known, ever since the word was invented at the end of the nineteenth century, as "the intellectuals". (the term "conservative intellectual", which has come into fashion only in the last few decades, still has an oxymoronic ring, especially in the third world. there leftist banners still call for unity between workers, peasants and the intellectuals. such banners are immediately intelligible, for they refer to a familiar and long-standing alliance.)
james was quite aware of the gap between the intellectuals and the middle class which posner describes. it was even more sharply marked in his day than now. but he did not see it as a problem, and he was an unabashed elitist in his conception of how social progress or regress occurred. as he saw it, gifted good men and gifted bad men--people like jefferson, debs, and hitler--see visions. then they try to gather support for these visions. the advantage of democracy over oligarachy is that in democracies such visionaries have to win the support of a majority of the citizens, and not just of the powerful. here is james' account of the relation of the universities, and of their graduates, to their fellow-citizens:
mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great and small, and imitation by the rest of us...individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns which the common people then adopt and follow. the rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world. the democratic problem thus is statable in ultra-simple terms: who are the kind of men from whom our majorities shall take their cue?....
in this very simple way does the value of our educated class define itself: we more than others should be able to divine the worthier and better leaders. in our democracy, where everything else is so shifting, we alumni and alumnae of the colleges are the only permanent presence that corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries..."les intellectuels"! what prouder club-name could there be than this one? (110)
as a result of james and others picking it up, the term "intellectual" was brought over from french into english. its proper use has been contested ever since. populists like senator helms and journalists like rush limbaugh have done their best, throughout the twentieth century, to make the term into a pejorative. there is a strong populist tradition which insists that a college education--especially the kind which james called "humanistic"--is likely to make one incapable of understanding the needs of the uneducated, unable to sympathize with their feelings and grasp their needs.
james took note of this view when he said that the name "harvard" suggested, to many people, "little more than a kind of sterilized conceit and incapacity for being pleased". (111) he cheerfully admitted that there was some basis for this impression, and that colleges and universities in general, and harvard in particular, did produce lots a few socially useless prigs. "but," he went on to say,
every good college makes its students immune against this malady...it does so by its general tone being too hearty for the microbe's life. real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains--under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core. if a college, through the inferior human influences that have grown regnant there, fails to catch the robuster tone, its failure is colossal, for its social function stops: democracy gives it a wide berth, turns toward it a deaf ear. (111)
i think that james' contrast between sympathies and disdains, and between admirations and dislikes, helps one think about the present situation of the leftmost members of american university communities, and about their relation to the rest of us society. the universities are at their best, and speak in a robuster tone, when the dominant political emotion on campus is whole-hearted admiration for heroic actions undertaken outside the university. they are at their worst, and speak in much less attractive tones, when they are filled with disdain for the failure of the rest of the middle class to live up to the university's example. in the last thirty years, unfortunately, disdain has prodminated over admiration.
the times when the universities are filled with admiration for heroic achievements are also the times at which the university looks best to the public, and performs the greatest public service. at such moments, the claim of the professors to be the keepers of the nation's conscience ceases to sound absurd. the sort of achievements i have in mind are those of the reverend doctor martin luther king jr. and the other leaders of the civil rights movement. the universities' admiration for people like rosa parks, medgar evers and julian bond changed the tone in which professors and students spoke about their country and its future. in 1963, thousands of buses left hundreds of campuses and headed for washington to hear king's "i have a dream" speech. as they went down the highways, these buses were filled with faculty and students singing "we shall overcome." the universities did not initiate the civil rights movement, but they provided support for it in just the way that james had imagined that they might.
a similar wave of enthusiasm had gripped the campuses at the turn of the century when news came of aguinaldo's struggle against the american invaders of the philippines, of his heroic fight to permit the philippine people to govern themselves, rather than submitting to american overlords who hoped to replace spanish ones. another such wave occurred a decade later when the professors who were sympathetic to the progressive movement urged support for the strikes being organized by heroes like eugene debs. another occurred when professors and students sympathetic to the new deal supported strikes organized by walter reuther, john l. lewis, and david dubinsky. another such moment occurred when the universities stopped serving grapes in the dining halls because cesar chavez had asked them to. the same sort of thing happened when nelson mandela asked the universities of the world to divest themselves of investments that might benefit the apartheid regime in south africa. admiration for heroes and heroines such as these pervaded american campuses. students returning home from campus, and arguing with their parents, played an important role in changing government policy and american society.
it helps to remember these pages in the history of american universities, and to use that memory to qualify the assertion, made by both posner and limbaugh, that the professors are out of touch with their fellow citizens, and are consumed with elitist disdain. it is good to remember the generous enthusiasm in which the universities became caught up in the visions of men like debs and king-men of the sort james had in mind when he referred to "individuals of genius [who] show the way, and set the patterns which the common people then adopt and follow". the people whom james called "the intellectuals" may be elitist, and they may even be snobs, but they have been consistently good at what he called "divining the worthier and better leaders". some of the great disturbers of the peace upon whom our nation now looks back with pride might never have succeeded had it not been for the tub-thumping of the intellectuals.
james' view of elitism as a necessary evil is reflected in his way of dealing with posnerian doubts about participatory democracy, the sort of doubts that were being voiced in his day by his friend henry adams. james paraphrased adams' fear of redneck populism in the following passage:
vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing everything superior from the highway, this, they tell us, is our irremediable destiny....when democracy is sovereign...sincerity and refinement, stripped of honor, precedence and favor, will have to vegetate in sufferance in private corners. they will have no general influence. they will be harmless eccentricities. (109)
nobody, james admitted, can be "absolutely certain that this may not be the career of democracy". but, he went on to say, "democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. the best of us are filled with a contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with beauty." (109)
what james wrote a century ago still expresses the fears and hopes of the sort of leftist professors like myself, the sort of professor whom posner has in mind. we balance their dread of the resentful and ignorant masses with the thought that in the past century appeals to public opinion initiated by an intellectual elite have made a great difference. such appeals gave women the vote, ended the lynching of black men, and opened the universities to both women and blacks. american institutions at the end of the twentieth century did not glow with justice but they were considerably less unjust than in the year 1900. the intellectuals think they deserve a bit of the credit for this change, and they are right.
in what i have said so far, i have been emphasizing the apparent tension between the intellectuals' fear of the uneducated masses and the fact that "democracy" is the name of their faith and of their utopia. the tension disappears if one distinguishes between democracy as the name of a utopia in which the strong no longer oppress the weak and democracy as the rule of the people. democracy in the first sense is pretty well synonymous with social justice. democracy in the latter sense is pretty much a myth. the confusion between the two is largely the intellectuals' own fault. they have often pretended to believe in something they do not really believe in at all-the deep wisdom of the people, the sound common sense of the voters. often they have pretended this even to themselves.
the reason for this pretense is obvious. it is that the most effective way to argue for the superiority of representative democracy over other forms of government is to claim that the masses will vote their interests, and will elect candidates who will improve their lot. the common sense even of the ignorant and badly educated will, so this argument goes, be enough to make them vote for candidates who help them to be better off.
this claim is largely false. it is because the intellectuals have tacitly recognized its falsity that they have always feared populism. but they have been unwilling to simply abandon the claim, since their own hopes for social justice depend on their ability to influence the masses' opinions. on the one hand, leftist intellectuals know perfectly well that the masses are suckers for demagogues like jesse helms. on the other hand, the only way they themselves can help bring about institutional change is to tell the masses that certain premises they have always accepted dictate such change-for example, that the doctrine of universal human brotherhood dictates the end of racial and sexual discrimination. so they find themselves trying to have it both ways-saying that although at the moment the masses are stabbing themselves in the back, in the long run they will have enough sense to stop doing so.
this double-mindedness seems to me necessary and desirable. it is an expression of the state of mind james described when he said that "democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure". conventionally religious people have to have enough double-mindedness to believe both that there is terrible evil in the world and that that same world is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent creator. they believe both that bad things constantly happen to good people and that god's providence means that everything happens for the best. such double-mindedness is not a sign of irrationality, but is rather a reasonable compromise between fear and hope.
the people whom james called "the intellectuals" are making the same sort of compromise. for the will of the people is no less puzzling a notion than is the will of god. the religion of divine providence hopes that god will somehow make everything right. the religion of democracy hopes that the people will someday come to their senses. in the meantime, both can only say that their respective object of worship works in mysterious ways.
so far i have been offering a rather general and abstract account of the self-image of leftist american professors and of their role in our nation's cultural and political history. in the time that remains, i want to be more concrete, and to take up three leftist initiatives which have, in recent years, found support in american universities: (1) the attempts to encourage multiculturalism in the curriculum and in the configuration of academic departments in the humanities and social sciences; (2) the protests against the world trade organization and the international monetary fund that rocked seattle and other cities, and in which many american students participated; (3) the "justice for janitors" campaign that has sponsored rallies and demonstrations on many campuses. i shall argue that the third of these initiatives is likely to be the most fruitful, because it is the one in which the appeal to public opinion is most likely to be successful.
***********************
multiculturalism is a word less frequently heard on american campuses than ten years ago, but the topic still comes up in meetings of faculty senates and of academic departments. it was, however, never very clear what this word meant. one reason for this is that it was never very clear what those who said that "every culture is worthy of respect" had in mind. nobody wanted to claim that nazi culture, or that of islamic fundamentalism as practiced by the taliban, or the culture of the marauding mongols or aztecs or zulus, should be respected. for to have called for such respect would have undermined the criticisms that those who repeated this slogan were simultaneously making of american sexism, racism and imperialism.
that misleading slogan was really a way of saying: "we need to realize that the culture of the educated classes of europe, the culture which until recently formed the substance of humanistic education in us universities--the eurocentric culture that revolved around the lives of wealthy, leisured, white, heterosexual males--is not the only culture with a claim on our attention." but when put in this mitigated form, the slogan was both uncontroversial and pointless. it provided no guidance. for nobody was prepared to argue that every culture worthy of our attention should be incorporated into the undergraduate curriculum, or even that every such culture should be a subject of attention somewhere in every university. there are simply too many such cultures. there is no way in which a single student or professor, could become acquainted with more than a tiny fraction of them. some selection is necessary.
the attempt was awkward because the only rationale that was needed was that various groups which had been given a raw deal by american society would be able to use academic programs such as these in order to help themselves get a better deal. by directing attention to the history of these groups, and to their literary and artistic productions, such programs gradually helped alter the relations between these groups and the rest of american society.
the emergence of these programs was a very good thing both for american universities and for the nation as a whole, but the notion of "culture" was largely irrelevant to their nature and function. that function was political. these programs, as judith butler has said, kept the left alive during the reagan and bush years. their existence has produced a whole generation of white male heterosexual college graduates-the part of america that still retains most of the economic and political clout--whose notions about and attitudes toward blacks, women, hispanics and gays are appreciably different from those typical of their parents. such academic programs helped make the us a more decent place. they constitute one of the great contributions of the american universities to american political life.
but there were unfortunate side-effects of the rise of these programs. one was that the attention of leftists was diverted from economic inequality to cultural insensitivity. leftist professors began to brandish phrases like "the deeply cultural character of the revolution of our times" and to say things like "cultural politics is central to all politics". leftist political theorists began writing books and articles proclaiming that cultural recognition was one of the principal goals of leftist politics. because they were themselves, for the most part, specialists in culture rather than economics, they easily persuaded themselves that reciprocal appreciation by americans of the cultural backgrounds of their fellow-citizens was as important as insuring that all american have equal educational and economic opportunities. they came to believe that respect for someone's cultural background was as urgent a goal as paying him or her a living wage.
i would argue that cultural recognition is of political importance only when it contributes to rectification of socio-economic inequality, and that that contribution is marginal. cultural recognition is not an end in itself, and should not become a goal of leftist politics. in support of this claim, i would cite the similarity between what is likely to happen to the descendants of immigrants from asia and latin america with what happened in the course of the twentieth century to descendants of immigrants form europe.
my hunch is that the children of recently arrived asian-americans and hispanic-americans are going to intermarry with the descendants of earlier waves of immigration, just as the poles, the italians, the jews, and the irish immigrants did. as michael lind has pointed out, these people will all simply be dubbed "white", and nobody will understand why it was once predicted that in 2050 the majority of americans would be non-white. intermarriage is the standard way in which cultural differences become political irrelevant, and is the basis for the claim that america was already, long before the advent of multiculturalism, a pluralist society.
by 2050 millions of middle-class americans with vietnamese or salvadorean grandmothers will be journeying to those countries with same curiosity as moved me when i traveled to ireland to look up my grandfather's baptismal record. there will be as much respect for the cultures of those countries as the american descendants of white anglo-saxon protestants have for the culture of italy.
but, as michael lind has also predicted, it seems likely that this process of cultural assimilation will do nothing whatever for african-americans. they will form the only group that does not get reclassified as "white", and with whom those who are classified as "white" will remain reluctant to intermarry. the incredibly cruel caste system which was created by african slavery is quite likely to survive the creation, as a sequel to the civil rights movement, of a sizable african-american middle class. as long as employers would rather hire a day laborer who has just arrived from mexico, and whose english is feeble, than one whose african ancestors were brought here in chains three hundred years ago and whose english is perfect, that system will persist. that familiar hiring pattern is, as william julius wilson has pointed out, still in place.
programs in african-american studies are very unlikely to do anything much to alter it, or to change the laws that make possession of crack a far more serious crime than possession of cocaine, or the laws that permit the armaments industry to unload millions of saturday night specials onto young, unemployed, despairing black men. if these laws are ever changed, and if black children in the cities ever get to attend safe and clean schools, it will not be because the college-educated whites have become better able to appreciate black history, black literature, and black contributions to american culture. it will be because they have become willing to pay more taxes, and to have those taxes used to promote redistribution of wealth, income and opportunity across caste boundaries.
********************
such redistribution is the traditional goal of leftist politics, and is the principal means of bringing about social justice. i want to turn now to an initiative that, unlike multiculturalism, is aimed directly at such redistribution. my second example of a leftist strategy that originated on the campuses is the protest against the new world economic order that were made in seattle, washington and genoa. this is part of the same revulsion at the thought of the rich nations profiting at the expense of the poor ones that motivates the campus boycotts of sneakers and t-shirts that come from third world sweatshops.
these protests stem, in part, from the realization that national governments have less and less power to control the life-chances of their citizens. for those life-chances are at the mercy of economic developments about which such governments can do increasingly little. globalization, and the extraordinary fluidity of investment capital, make it impossible for governments to predict or control the course of their own economies. even rich nations like the us can be thrown into recession, and perhaps into depression, by events which are pretty much out of their control-events such as the collapse of a currency on the other side of the world. nobody knows what would happen in the us and europe, for example, if the japanese yen should collapse in the way in which the thai bhat and the mexican peso did. that collapse would be on a scale that would make it impossible for the u. s. treasury to intervene effectively.
poor nations, of course, are far more easily endangered. they live in constant fear of decisions by international investors to move production away from to some country in which wages are even lower and the government even more corrupt. if the workers in malaysia, for example, demand the equivalent of a dollar an hour, it is easy to build a factory in laos where they will happily settle for twenty-five cents an hour. the effect is to drain off the entire surplus value of the work done in the third world into the hands of corporations whose managers and shareholders have no stake whatever in the lives of the people who work in their factories.
there is, obviously, a lot to protest in this situation. nobody is able to deny that the imf and the world bank are assuming that what is good for the multinationals is good for peoples of the world. the assumption is linked to the one which is at the heart of conservative thinking of the sort that lay behind the policies of reagan and thatcher-the assumption that the only danger to the freedom and the welfare of the individual comes from the power of the state, and that the market will eventually produce prosperity for all. both assumptions are, we leftists think, false. acting on them is a recipe for the continuation, and indeed for the increase, of social injustice.
the problem with the seattle protests and the nike boycotts, however, is that they are being made by people who have no alternative policies to advocate, no concrete suggestions about what is to be done. they resemble in this respect the campaign for nuclear disarmament, a movement that produced similar enthusiasm among leftists and then gradually disappeared. the trouble with the campaign was that nobody could suggest a way of dealing with the possession of a nuclear arsenal by an evil and unpredictable empire except the seemingly crazy policy of mutually assured destruction that the west in fact adopted. the trouble with the seattle protests is that nobody has much of an idea what a good global economic setup would be, and by what agencies it might be brought into being.
it is one thing to say, rightly in my opinion, that jungle capitalism on a global scale is likely to be fatal to be fatal to the life-chances of most of the peoples of the world. it is another thing to propose a different world economic order, one which does not depend upon jungle capitalism as the agency of economic development. maybe there is such a proposal on the table, but i have not seen it, and i doubt that most of the seattle protesters could formulate it. but in the absence of such a proposal the seattle protests cannot become a viable political movement, as opposed to an entirely justified expression of dread. the campaign for nuclear disarmament was a similarly justified expression of dread but it never became a political movement because nobody could take the idea of unilateral disarmament seriously. protests like those in seattle are likely to fizzle because nobody, even ardent leftists, can take seriously the idea of protecting the forests and the seas at the cost of denying a better life to people who are now living on a dollar a day--people who want nothing more than for a sweatshop to be built in their home town.
these are the reasons why i do not see much promise in the second of the leftist initiatives i have mentioned. unlike multiculturalism, the protests against the new economic order are aimed at what seems to me the right target-namely, social injustice. nothing is a more appropriate object of leftist concern than the monstrously unjust arrangements that drain off most of the surplus labor of people outside of europe and america in order to permit the europeans and the americans to fill their houses with consumer goods. but leftist protests against injustice only get off the ground if they are incorporated in a program for change--a description of an alternative set of concrete arrangements, and a road map showing how we might get there from where we are now.
it is a bad sign that some of the young american leftists who demonstrated in seattle are reverting to a neo-marxist rhetoric which calls for "the overthrow of global capitalism". there is no point in asking people to overthrow capitalism unless you can explain what is to be put in its place, and can explain why the alternative is preferable. that is just what the old-timey marxist revolutionaries were never able to do. unless and until the critics of globalization come up with either substitutes for the imf and the world bank, or else spell out in more detail what they would do if they were in charge of those organizations, it is unlikely that the seattle demonstrations will jump-start a movement in the way that king's selma march did. we knew, at the time of selma, just what changes in which laws would remedy the wrongs which the marchers were protesting. we do not know anything like this in the case of the globalization of the economy.
****************
consider, by way of contrast, the campaign for justice for janitors. campus protests against the university's treatment of its non-academic, blue-collar staff have mounted in recent years, as have attempts to get municipal governments to pay, and require that their suppliers pay, a living wage. here the wrong being done is uncontroversial (badly distributed money) and the remedy is obvious (fairer shares). universities have taken, in recent decades, to contracting out the task of serving food, cleaning toilets, and the like to organizations that pay the lowest possible wages and typically provide no benefits at all. this has weakened what used to be a sense of pride in working for the university, and a sense of community among its employees. it has also weakened the ability of non-academic employees to get better treatment by becoming members of labor unions.
the students who take part in these protests typically come from middle-class families. two-thirds of the freshmen who matriculated in the fall of last year came from families whose annual income was above $50,000 per year. twenty-five percent called themselves "liberal" and only eighteen percent called themselves "conservative", with fifty percent answering "middle of the road". but fifty-two percent of those freshman said that they thought that "wealthy people should pay a larger share of taxes than they do now". the sense that the people in the dead-end jobs at the bottom of the academic ladder are being treated unfairly, and that the rich are having it all their own way, is quite widespread.
suppose that these protests were taken up by the faculty and students in university after university. suppose that the faculty voted that there should be no raises in faculty pay until the lowest-paid workers at the university were getting a living wage-something more like ten dollars an hour than like six-and until all university workers had the same medical and disability benefits as the professors got. suppose the students voted that they would not protest tuition increases that were specifically, and demonstrably, used to achieve that level of wages and benefits. suppose that both groups joined in demanding that the university stop interfering with attempts by its workers to unionize.
this is easier to imagine happening at the richest universities, the ones with the richest students and the best-paid professors-places like princeton, stanford and rice. but these rich private universities have often served as standard-setting models for the public universities, and might again. if the "justice for janitors" movement spread beyond this charmed circle, and if it became a matter of pride for a university to be on the list of those who met a set of national standards for decent treatment of workers, it is not impossible that the universities could set a model for the larger society.
all this may be a pipe dream, but the idea of collective bargaining seemed a pipe dream a hundred years ago, and that of desegregation seemed a pipe dream fifty years ago. sooner or later, after all, the country has to make some attempt to narrow the gap between rich and poor that has been widening in the us for three decades. widespread public support of the labor union movement helped narrow that gap between 1940 and 1970, but that support has sharply diminished. some other institutions have to take the lead if it is to be narrowed, since neither democratic nor republican administrations have the courage to propose any measures that will do so. the universities are as good a place to start as any.
richard rorty
april 2, 2001
