Learning away from neoliberalism: Lines of connection towards other worlds
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2985
In this essay, I envision the university, not simply as a discreet institution with formal boundaries to attend to and defend from neoliberal and conservative assaults, but as a location of possibility from which to locate and advance projects that connect students and ourselves to the possibility of other economic worlds.
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Boone W. Shear
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Learning away from neoliberalism: Lines of connection towards other worlds
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Forum: Anthropologists Witnessing and Reshaping the Neoliberal Academy
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2017-07-18
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Boone W. Shear
2017/07/18
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2985
77
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, United States
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Learning away from neoliberalism: Lines of connection towards other worlds
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                                                  2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 77-82




                                                                                              FORUM




Student demonstration against fees and cuts, Aberdeen. Credits: http://anticuts.com/wp-content/uploads /
2015/07/ Aberdeen-student-left-banner.jpg


Anthropologists witnessing and reshaping the neoliberal academy
Edited by
Tracey HEATHERINGTON & Filippo M. ZERILLI

Contributions of
Virginia R. DOMINGUEZ, Sam BECK, Carl A. MAIDA, Martin A. MILLS, Berardino
PALUMBO, Alan SMART, Ger DUIJZINGS, Alexis M. JORDAN & Shaheen M. CHRISTIE,
Boone W. SHEAR, Alex KOENSLER & Cristina PAPA, THE RECLAIMING OUR UNIVE
MOVEMENT.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © BOONE W. SHEAR
Learning away from neoliberalism: Lines of connection towards other worlds
2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 77-82.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2985
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                                77




Learning away from neoliberalism
Lines of connection towards other worlds

Boone W. SHEAR
University of Massachusetts, Amherst


ABSTRACT: In this essay, I envision the university, not simply as a discreet institution with for-
mal boundaries to attend to and defend from neoliberal and conservative assaults, but as a
location of possibility from which to locate and advance projects that connect students and
ourselves to the possibility of other economic worlds.




  At a Town Hall meeting this past February, a 20-year-old college student
asked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi if the Democratic Party might
consider moving a bit more to the left on “economic issues”. Pelosi’s re-
sponse was, in some respects, unsurprising.
      «I have to say, we’re capitalist, and that’s just the way it is».

   Pelosi’s assertion of capitalism as our natural condition was then followed
by a confession, «we do think that capitalism is not necessarily meeting the
needs with the income inequality that we have». Pelosi then lamented the
imagined loss of a more moral, “stakeholder” economy that has been re-
placed by a less equitable “shareholder” economy.
   On the one hand, Pelosi’s response resonates with what Badiou, Mouffe,
Swyngedouw and others have described as “post-political”, a condition rising
concomitant with neoliberalism in which social action is delimited by a pre-
existing set of possibilities. Politics can then be reduced to discussing, or
merely managing and administering, what is already possible. In this case,
capitalism is claimed as a natural, invariant, encompassing condition. We
can admit that capitalism is not perfect. It might need some adjusting or even re-
sisting. But, capitalism is simply the reality that we all live in.
   It’s useful to understand Pelosi’s response as a post-political strategy that
polices discursive boundaries. But it would be a mistake to presume that it is
indicative of a continued, broader post-political condition in the United


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78                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


States that forecloses on a politics aimed at increasing the “possibility of
other possibilities” (Badiou 2010). What might have been read a decade or
two ago as a re-inscription of capitalist hegemony, today feels more like des-
peration; the very need to make public proclamations that we live in a capi-
talist world is symptomatic of the ruptures in the common-sense, natural-
ness of capitalism. Indeed, in the process of posing his question, the student
at the town hall cited a 2016 poll showing that the majority of young people
aged 19-29 now reject capitalism.

Neoliberalism and possibility at the university
   The student’s comment squares with my changing experience teaching
undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As part
of the U.S. higher education terrain, UMass has profoundly restructured in
relation to and through public disinvestment, privatization, and market log-
ics – what some characterize as “neoliberalism”. Labor conditions, university
governance, campus space, teaching and learning, and institutional objec-
tives all bear the marks of these restructurings while new affects, beliefs, and
desires that steer the university towards the interests of capital circulate
among administrators, faculty, and students (Hyatt, Shear, Wright 2017;
Shear, Zontine 2017).
   However, even as the university is more intricately woven into market im-
peratives – and as white supremacy and patriarchy structure inequalities and
violence across and through identities – new threads of possibility for social
and ecological well-being are laid bare. A decade ago, undergraduate stu-
dents in my gen-ed classes displayed considerable emotional and affective
resistance to critical investigations of capitalism and interrelated forms of
oppression. Invested in the imagined rewards of hard work and individual
achievement, their beliefs, hopes, and desires were woven tightly into the
fabric of neoliberal fantasies. Today, many of my students have no such faith
in the American Dream. They are well aware of their precarious economic
and ecological futures. Like most of us, they are anxious and insecure, dissat-
isfied with the world we live in and wary of what is to come.
   Of course, experiencing overwhelming precarity does not necessarily lead
to a true desire for other ways of being. As Lyon-Callo (2017) discusses, it’s
not enough for students to know and feel that capitalism is “bad”. Without
other possibilities at the ready, a reasonable solution appears to be to rein-
vest in ourselves as individuals or, at best, to resist the impacts of exploita-
tion and oppression. What then might be the role of anthropologists and
other academics in creating and supporting projects for students that reveal

2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 77-82
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            79


the “possibility of other possibilities” and that show and connect them to
other ways of being in the world?
   In the rest of this essay I envision the university, not simply as a discreet
institution with formal boundaries to attend to and defend from neoliberal
and conservative assaults, but as a location of possibility from which to lo-
cate and advance lines of connection to egalitarian worlds. I briefly describe
the emergence of a solidarity economy (SE) framing of social justice in Mass-
achusetts. I argue that the enabling conditions of SE are opening new possi-
bilities for communities, activists, and students. I suggest some modest and
practical ways that anthropologists and other academics might participate in
further connecting students and ourselves to the enabling conditions of
other worlds.

Solidarity economy
   Emerging as responses to capital accumulation and neoliberal ideology, SE
is a movement and a framing of economy that has its roots in Latin America
and Europe. Formulated and discussed in different ways – SE can be under-
stood as an effort to organize economic relationships, practices, and institu-
tions that reveal and encourage, rather than conceal and discourage, our so-
ciality and interdependence. For example, community land trusts transform
land from a commodity to a landscape in which the needs of individuals,
neighborhoods, and ecology can be fully considered. Instead of alienation
and exploitation structured in capitalist enterprises, worker cooperatives en-
tail collective control and deliberation over world-making surplus. Following
Tsing, if precarity is the human «condition of being vulnerable to others»
(2015: 20), SE helps us to see, embrace, and organize around our humanity.
   In Massachusetts, efforts have exploded around SE activity over the past
10 years, with explicit formulations in our three most populous cities of
Worcester, Boston, and Springfield (Loh, Shear 2015; Loh, Jimenez 2017). Of
particular interest, these efforts foreground a social justice frame that seeks
to address exploitation and oppression by transforming the conditions that,
in part, create inequalities and violence in the first place.
      A solidarity economy movement is emerging from lower-income communities of
      color in Massachusetts. This movement aspires to transform capitalism – as we
      know it – into a world rooted in values of democracy, justice, and sustainability.
      These dreams arise from those making Black Lives Matter, from immigrant
      workers making poverty wages, from ex-prisoners locked out of the mainstream
      economy, from tenants barely able to make rent, and from communities being
      displaced to make way for the 1% (Loh, Jimenez 2017: 3).



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80                                                   TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


   Loh and Jimenez describe eight different SE networks in Massachusetts
that are organizing through consciousness shifting, building power, and alter-
native economies in order to «transform and go beyond capitalism» (ibidem 7).
SE makes claim to worlds that embrace our shared vulnerability, «at the base
of these big dreams is collective care for each other – solidarity» (ibidem 4).
SE enables people who are dissatisfied with or actively rejecting the set of
existing possibilities delimited to capitalist ideology, to truly imagine, orga-
nize around, and enact other economic worlds. To illustrate further, I turn to
a remarkable student activist group, Divest UMass.

Enabling conditions and the edges of other worlds
   In 2016 Divest made national news. After years of organizing, culminating
in the occupation of the UMass administration building, Divest forced a pub-
lic commitment from the Board of Trustees to divest the university’s endow-
ment from the fossil fuel industry. Shortly after this fantastic win, thoughts
turned to a project of reinvestment. Rooted in an intersectional, climate jus-
tice analysis, Divest wanted to ensure that the divested funds were rein-
vested in a socially-just way. As ideas were formulated and discussed, Divest
members encountered a solidarity economy frame, which has begun to re-
shape their imaginings and politics.
   In the summer of 2016, some Divest leaders attended a meeting with the
Boston centered Ujima Project. The Ujima Project aims to help cultivate soli-
darity economy through a community-controlled capital account; commu-
nity members envision and then democratically decide how to invest in local
SE enterprises and initiatives. It was during one of these visioning meetings
that the Divest members began to reframe what was politically possible. One
Divest leader describes how the stance towards possibility presented new af-
fects to embrace.
      It was the first time, that, well, it felt like a purely hopeful space. It was like, we
      have everything we need in this community… we need to connect the dots and
      use our own creativity and solutions. That was really, really, really cool.

   For another prominent Divest leader SE is a way to help move beyond a
politics of opposition and redistribution within our dominant economic on-
tology.
      [Divest] was always [intended to be] about taking down the bad, and building
      the new. I was getting not very energized because I couldn’t see a direction to
      go in after taking down the bad. Even when we talked about reinvestment it
      didn’t make sense. I knew that capitalism was bad but, I didn’t know how to get



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      out of that…then we went to Boston to talk to [SE activists]…we talked about
      the solidarity economy network that they were envisioning and thinking about
      that combined the theory and the values and practical things that were already
      happening. We don’t have to wait for this thing that would come it was already
      happening.

   Divest leaders have subsequently spread these new imaginings, affects,
and desires – activated through the enabling conditions of SE – to member-
ship and the broader public. This past winter, Divest held a well-attended
teach-in at UMass featuring a panel of SE activists from across the state. The
teach-in was intended as both general education and as the beginning stages
of a potential campaign to reinvest in the SE movement. In addition to the
potential campaign, members of Divest are now working with SE activists in
a variety of ways through existing university structures. One has developed a
collaborative research project involving video documentation that is a part
of their senior thesis. Another has taken an internship with the Data Com-
mons Project that is mapping and connecting SE. Still another has joined the
communications committee of a growing worker cooperative organization in
Springfield whose staff director is also the director of the U.S. Solidarity
Economy Network.

Lines towards other worlds
   SE invites a politics from which to envision and organize around “new”
and suppressed ways of being. It’s but one example of a project that shows us
the possibility of, and begins to connect us to, other worlds. Worlds in which
our precarity – our vulnerability to others – can be collectively embraced and
social and ecological well-being can be more fully realized. I suggest that an-
thropologists concerned about the multi-faceted dimensions of what some
describe as neoliberal restructuring of the university can pay careful atten-
tion to the opening of multiple political fronts as capitalist ideology loses its
coherence. As we struggle against the impacts of capitalism and related sys-
tems of oppression in, through and beyond the university, we can mobilize
our existing resources and practices – our teaching, writing, and research,
and even “neoliberal” practices like internships and volunteer opportunities
– to help create and support lines of connection towards other worlds.




                                                 2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 77-82
82                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)



REFERENCES

Badiou, Alain, 2010, The Idea of Communism, in The Idea of Communism, Slavoj
     Žižek, Costas Douzinas, eds, London and New York, Verso: 1-14.
Hyatt, Susan Brin, Boone W. Shear, Susan Wright, eds, 2015, Learning Under Neolib-
     eralism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education, New York, Berghahn.
Loh Penn, Sarah Jimenez, 2017, Solidarity Rising in Massachusetts: How Solidarity
     Economy Movement is Emerging in Lower Income Communities of Color, Solidar-
     ity Economy Initiative Report.
Loh, Penn, Boone W. Shear, 2015, Solidarity Economy and Community Develop-
     ment: Emerging Cases in Three Massachusetts Cities, Community Develop-
     ment, 46, 3: 244-260.
Lyon-Call, Vincent, 2015, To Market, to Market, to Buy…a Middle Class Life?, in
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     Susan Brin Hyatt, Boone W. Shear, Susan Wright, eds, New York, Berghahn:
     79-102.
Shear, Boone W., Angelina Zontine, 2015, Reading Neoliberalism at the University,
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     tion, Susan Brin Hyatt, Boone W. Shear, Susan Wright, eds, New York,
     Berghahn: 103-128.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 2015, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possi-
     bility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press.




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