Who’s afraid of activists anyway?
Connie Bostock
I recall a conversation with my friend, in which she told me that her political theory tutor claimed that bell hooks isn’t a theorist, instead that she is an activist. This comment was made with a pejorative tone, in an attempt to relegate hooks’ contributions from those of political theory to those of political activism. It seems to me that this particular tutor was simply gatekeeping, attempting to prevent the deviant black woman and her radical politics from infiltrating the discourse of the elite group of liberals which dominate the academy. Are ‘activist’ and ‘theorist’ mutually exclusive categories of political actor? Or was the claim that to be an activist weaken one’s credibility as a theorist? Either way, it is clear that the tutor in question has a rigid view of what it means to engage in political theory, and their account leaves no room for activism. This is an account that ought to be challenged.
When political theory and activism collide, great changes can occur. This isn’t to say that every political activist has to be driven by some sort of political theory, a guiding doctrine that the activist is able to articulate using philosophical terms (such a stringent requirement would be politically devastating due to its insistence on elitism). However, it is to say that the political philosopher ought to be engaged with some form of political activism. Even within the confines of the university, one can see the efficacy of the combination of political theory and practice - the success of the campaign for divestment in Cambridge surely represents a happy marriage of the shift toward climate justice as justified by theory and the demands of student activists to save the planet. Alarmingly, however, the ability to do free and open-ended thinking within the university is under threat. Academics and support staff are underpaid and overworked, forced by their Vice Chancellors to ensure that their students are getting enough bang for their buck when they decide to attend university. The neoliberal university is therefore designed to churn out students with qualifications that will enable them to take on bourgeois job positions, as well as academic publications which enable the university to claim that it is on the forefront of research, and thus worthy of student investment. In order to prevent the university from suffocating under the weight of marketisation, it is clear that direct action needs to be taken. Because there is only so much that appeals to truth and rationality can achieve, particularly when these appeals are heard by those who are unwilling to concede their power and privilege for the common good of the university, I want to ask: Can activism help save the discipline of philosophy from the perils of neoliberalism?
Because despite this attack on the higher education system, the university remains a site of possibility, a bubble of resistance against the neoliberal orthodoxy of the political status quo. It remains a site of the pursuit of knowledge, a space in which students are free to play, to make mistakes, to defend beliefs that tomorrow we may find naive. This vision of the university must be protected, not because of the financiers and solicitors that the university helps to generate, but because speaking and thinking freely and together is a condition of human fulfilment — is this not in part why we do philosophy? One way these possibilities kept alive is through striking.
The University and Colleges Union (UCU) strike action of the 2019-20 academic year breathed life into the university. This action both generated and enacted a vision of what a properly nurtured university could look like. Teach-outs organised by left-wing student organisations popped up on the calendar. These provided an opportunity to reclaim the university, stealing power from the institutional norms and handing it back to students and staff. They provided an opportunity for groups divided by the hand of neoliberalism to discuss themes that are typically unable to be discussed within the university that is full of overworked and underpaid staff. The bringing together of people brought with it a re-working of old ideas in an act of defiance against the real world marketisation of our education system. Tireless organisation was necessary to ensure that a vision of what the university could be was put into action, if only for a fortnight.
The act of doing philosophy can itself clearly bring people together — it did during the many teach-outs organised during the strike period. Political philosophers can learn a lot from on-the-ground political movements and the activists that make them up. In a parallel with political activism, the ends of political philosophy are not at all individualistic. Whilst the individual philosopher accrues some form of welfare gain, some kind of joy, when doing philosophy, I believe this to be a secondary motivation of the philosopher engaging in political thought. And so we ought to be doing our political philosophy such that the collective is not only the subject of our endeavours, but actively contributes to the way in which our philosophy is formed.
A barrier to positive change can often be that individuals and even particular groups are unable to imagine a world that is so radically different from the one in which we currently inhabit. Now, for many political philosophers, imagining radically different worlds is part and parcel of doing philosophy. But it is clear that articulating a critique of the world as it is, or having a vision of how the world ought to be, is not sufficient for this political vision to be enacted. For these visions to be enacted, it necessitates that there be activists to do this work. It begs the following question: why be engaged in political philosophy if one has no desire to put their philosophical vision into practice? If political philosophers insist on sitting in their armchairs, dismissing activists and not raising consciousness of how the world might be, what are they complicit in?
These concerns hit home further when we consider who it is that makes the claims that there ought to be a distinction between philosophy and activism. The subject of political philosophy ought to be the collective. The nature of this collective is to be defined by the political philosopher in question, and we need to think carefully about who the collective subject of our endeavours is. In many cases, those who seek to uphold the distinction between political philosophy and activism are those whose existence does not necessitate that they are engaged in a political struggle - namely the rich, liberal, cishet white man. Unsurprisingly, the tutor who said that bell hooks was an activist but not a theorist is someone who hits this demographic. What they do here is close down possibilities and make it hard to imagine how the world could be improved. What they do is watch what made the project of the university so special disappear term by term.
As philosophers, we must take the opportunity to define the ‘we’ that we talk about when we think about opening up our discipline. It is imperative that this ‘we’ extends beyond the confines of Oxford, and the ivory towers of the liberal university itself. Even if we consider the university to be a safe haven for philosophy, while doing their activism activists themselves become theorists, theorising their struggle while simultaneously fighting against their oppressors. It is important whoever wishes to do philosophy is able to do so freely outside the university and that we respect it. I fell in love with philosophy in an entirely non-academic context and it is this doing of philosophy collectively that can inspire the change that we would like our public philosophy to create. By breaking down barriers between philosophers and activists, and allowing that the work that activists do can itself be a form of philosophy, we are expanding who it is that is doing philosophy. By having a broad collective of people engaging in political philosophy, we are able to use our differences in order to articulate a politics that benefits everyone and importantly, put it into action. We ought to be creating spaces that enable us to make the most of the productivity of difference — something that can only be achieved when theory and activism go hand in hand, despite what some tutors in Oxford have to say.