I used to raid my dad’s library in the summers, when I ran out of books to read. One summer I grabbed Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism, which sits beside me as I write this. [Umass Amherst]

Sometimes I would come down to breakfast with a book, and my dad would look at it and cock an eyebrow, “you may not have the background to follow that.” That wasn’t my dad’s way of saying “don’t read that” it was more, “look, if you’re going to read that you need to ask me which shelf of other books you should read first so you’re not just wasting your time.” Since then I have absorbed a lot of books on politics (but more the effect of politics, i.e.: history) and I think I am probably still not ready for any of them. To this day I remain convinced by Wolff’s arguments, but I don’t think negating politics leads to a successful human civilization, either. [stderr]

Wolff’s legacy will probably mostly be In Defense of Anarchism. Once I looked up a few lectures by him and was shocked to discover that he was an actual, genuine Marxist. I mean, he thought that Marx had figured out economics, and that it was possible to use Hegelian dialectics to prove things about stuff, rather than bore freshmen into switching majors. I thought then, as I still do, that he was also frustrated by his own deconstruction of state authority and found that he couldn’t really replace it with anything. Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, two of my other intellectual/political heroes, seem to feel likewise – but, remember, they got to see what happened in the 70s when the antiwar/Vietnam protests fused with anarchism, the equal rights movement, and authoritarianism, and we had the death of the summer of love – in 1969-1970 over 4,000 bombs were detonated by US revolutionaries against targets within the US. [stderr] Wolff, Zinn, and Chomsky lived through that. I don’t think they were ever colleagues simultaneously but Wolff and Zinn were at Columbia for a while, though they missed the sit-ins that my dad got stuck in the middle of. Anyhow, it has to be problematic for someone who has convincingly refuted state authority, but then has to come up with a way of living in that context because the alternative appears to be worse. Put another way, no, I do not want the Weather Underground to force me to be free.

It’s not Wolff’s best book but another of my favorites is a sort of autobiographical mea culpa called Autobiography of an Ex-White Man. [stderr] I tried to discuss it with Anna, who said she wasn’t interested in some old guy’s bourgeois guilt. True. But it provides an interesting view into the university system that the SDS and Weathermen were protesting against. How do you wind up at a big name university with an African-American Studies program that is run entirely by one white guy who has to start every semester by explaining to his black students how he got there? It’s a perennial problem for anti-authoritarians, because it’s hard to say “do as I say!” when you aren’t really doing what you are suggesting. So, he tried to be proudly black. I think it was an honest and sincere attempt to be an ally, but, um… maybe not successful. Academics’ job, after all, is not to be successful it’s to be thought-provoking.

It must have been painful for him, though, to see the world’s recent slide into authoritarianism. Depending on how you score, something like 60% of humanity lives under dictatorships or pseudo-democracies that are politically controlled and treat the people’s will as a suggestion at best. I always wanted to ask him, Chomsky or Howard Zinn, “given that anarchism seems like such an obviously rational approach to politics, why is it that humans seem to be taking a marked turn toward self-subjection?” Wolff was where I started, with that book I pulled off dad’s shelf, and he raised questions I still can’t answer, almost a lifetime later. [stderr] [You may notice a lot of links in this piece – it’s because In Defense of Anarchism shaped and formed years of my thinking]

Some of you are involved with academia, and have perhaps wondered sometimes “what is wrong with universities?” I sure have. So did Wolff. He was always questioning the established order.

To meet challenges, the proprietors of the system – the educators – have devised a masterstroke, a brilliant device for emasculating and domesticating the critics. Rather than argue against them, which would elevate their importance, or censor them, which would confer all the appeal of martyrdom upon them, the intellectual establishment welcomes the critics into the academy and puts their books on the required reading list! Mastering the condemnations of the system becomes one of the conditions of success in the system.

The academic establishment defends itself against these charges by insisting that it takes no stand on issues of war or peace, capitalism or socialism. As a setting for debate it remains strictly value neutral. Perhaps so, the radicals reply, so far as the content of the university education is concerned; there is no ban in the academy on the works of Marx, Lenin, Mao, or Che Guevara. But the form of the education beats the content, no matter how radical. Theory is divorced from practice, students grub for grades in courses on revolution as in courses on organic chemistry or the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Competition sets students against one another even in courses devoted to the study of cooperation and community.

Then, he proceeds to explain how a university should be run. He uses a method which is familiar to his readers: he runs through the possibilities and eliminates them or scores them, then discusses what’s left, developing a social contract for universities. He says:

A university is a community of learning

Then uses that to separate a university from other communities of purpose. It’s not a store or a rock concert. It’s not hard to see where he’s going and where it’s going to end up: it’s the teachers that are the experts in their area, and they should be making the decisions. Perhaps the political science department might weigh in on some organizational issues, but it’s not possible for a physicist to teach moral philosophy, unless they have a dual specialization. And let’s not even get started (though Wolff does) on what qualifies a person with an MBA and a fat rolodex of billionaire’s phone numbers to be the president of a university? The book was published in 1969, during the height of the student challenge to the structure of the university, and I wonder what Wolff would say about current university leadership.

ALL POWER TO THE FACULTY AND STUDENTS

Enough. Goodbye, RPW, and thank you for helping make me the person I am.

Wolff also inspired some of my best work, or what I think is my best work. Namely: [stderr]

My dad, at 93 and being notable in his field, has been struggling lately with a flood of requests for obituaries. He has outlasted his few enemies, and his friends are becoming fewer and fewer, too. It’s a regular thing now, “Do you remember….?” and then he describe someone I knew only as the pair of shoulders I rode on through some fortified town in Spain, or other. I don’t think that this will happen to me, because my field really is not academic and does not reflect on itself, much. Or maybe it’s that nobody asks me to write obituaries because I might actually say what I think. Who knows?

Wow, transcribing books when you have a damaged short-term memory is really interesting. I believe (if I am remembering right?) that I used to be able to short-term 3 or 4 sentences, rattle them out, check them and scan the next couple. Now, I operate phrase by phrase.

A regretful tip of the hat to Elliptical Proton Accelerator A. D. for the sad news about RPW. I actually thought he had gone a few years back when dad started referring to him as a “former colleague.”