[lbo-talk] The Bruenig Firing: 'Civility' As A Tool To Control Dissent

[Jeffrey Masko]

This is particularly a tool on college campuses; I personally had it used
against me again and again at Penn State as I refused to buckle under to
"middle class manners." I won't go into details until my PhD in deposited
in a few months, but radical working class academics at the graduate level,
as adjuncts, or tenured, have targets on their backs. "Not playing nice
with others" is used when one points out the division between
students/faculty and administration precludes a "working together on
solutions" approach, often within do-nothing committees when there is
little common ground.

Political identity movements are complicit or at least compatible with
neoliberal directives; intersectionality as I've written, is a way of
describing how overdeterimination functions on the individual level. But
intersectionality coming from legal studies is just a way of talking about
overdetermination without reference to Marx and how Marx has been
interpreted and reinterpreted.

The same is true of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, as flawed a book
as you can get when it comes to talking about the prison system by never
mentioning capitalism, by pandering to white liberals by excluding
revolutionary names in prison abolition like George Jackson, Huey Newton,
and Abdul Mumia-Jamal. See Osel, Joseph D. "Toward Détournement of the New
Jim Crow or the Strange Career of the New Jim Crow." *International Journal
of Radical Critique* 1, no. 2 (2012) and his other articles on the topic
for more salient critiques. The point is that liberals and some radicals
are easily mislead by political identity agendas, however radical they seem
on the surface.

​And it should be noted that civility is another way of separating the
"legitimate" and "illegitimate," whether it be race or gender. These same
white, liberals often prove their legitimacy by pointing out how racist or
sexist (or both) the ignorant "Other" is in order to plaster over their own
more refined racism and sexism.


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