Strike Diary
Friday November 18
Yesterday as I was searching for information on the strike I came across a photo tweet on Twitter, the social media site which may soon implode due to the erratic and narcissistic behavior of the world’s biggest billionaire. It was a flyer, posted on some UC campus with a headline that read “Be Reasonable, Demand the Impossible” and above it the question “What could a strike mean?” The headline is a translation into English of a famous Situationist slogan which appeared in Paris during the events of May ‘68: Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible! French is nice because it makes clear, with its structures of agreement, that this is a plural you, a plural group of realists told to demand the impossible.
What I’m interested in here is the bottom of the flyer, which quotes, without citation, from Diane Di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letter # 19”: you are selling yourself short / you can have what you ask for, ask for everything! If you are in my English 90 class, then you have already read this poem. If you are in my English 26 class, we would have discussed Revolutionary Letters this week, if it were not for the strike. Between the May ’68 slogan and the lines from Di Prima, the flyer is interrogative, making clear who its plural you is: “Why accept a raise when the university is still on stolen land? Why accept a raise when we’ll be right back to working for the UC? Why accept a raise when you will still be a worker?”
What could a strike mean? What can a poem mean? It is notable that what we are asked about here is meaning. The flyer is an act of literary interpretation as much as political intervention. It asks the reader to interpret the strike, to seek out its meanings, much as we might seek out the meanings of “Revolutionary Letter #19”
The poem was written as a critical response to the Poor People’s Campaign, organized by Martin Luther King shortly before he was assassinated in April 1968 and then carried out in May and June of 1968. Participants set up a protest camp on the Washington mall, and stayed there for six weeks, hearkening back to the Bonus Army of 1932, in which tens of thousands of WWI veterans camped on the mall, demanding bonus payment for services rendered, and looking forward to the Occupy movement of 2011. Di Prima is critical of this campaign, however, because its demands remain limited narrow sense of the possible and impossible. This was June 1968, after the assassination of MLK and riots in dozens of cities, after May 68 in France, and the turn toward the armed underground by students and black radicals. To turn back from insurrection and to make demands on the state at this moment was, for DiPrima, an act of treason:
if what you want is jobs
for everyone, you are still the enemy
you have not thought thru, clearly
what that means
Notice how the adjective “clearly” is perfectly placed to mean both “clearly you have not throught thru what that means” and “you have not through clearly what that means.” One comma preserves the double meaning.
The poem is about making distinctions, making things clear. The line that divides friends from enemies. But as we see above, the drawing of these lines is designed to make things clear, to encourage enemies to come over to the other side. We might forget that the poem is conditional: if what you want is x, then you are the enemy. But the poem gets so carried away in listing x, the predicates of the enemy, that you might forget it still holds out hope for the you, By the time we get to the last stanza it comes as something as something of a surprise. If what you want is:
degrees from universities which are nothing
more than slum landlords, festering sinks
of lies, so you too can go forth
and lie to others on some greeny campus
THEN YOU ARE STILL
THE ENEMY, you are selling
yourself short, remember
you can have what you ask for, ask for
everything
The boldface accusation, which completes the conditional formulation, gives way immediately to a generosity toward the you, enemy but also victim of its own desires.
It is remarkable that these last two stanzas are more or less addressed to the same subject as the flyer. The tens of thousands of graduate students now on strike do for the most part hope to keep working in the profession, on other greeny campuses, just as I do, and just as I hoped when was a graduate student.
What can a strike mean? What are the stakes? The response of the UC Office of the President to the strike has been to render the demands of the union illegitimate, illegible. We are told that the union’s demands are too political, that they are addressed toward economic conditions outside of the power of the university, such as inflation, and the housing and rental crisis. This is another kind of drawing of lines, one that seeks to isolate graduate students from undergraduates, from faculty, and from staff. The cost of living may be an issue that affects graduate students, they say, but it is an issue that affects everyone else too, therefore it is outside of the realm of bargaining.
The current strike campaign and its demands are a direct outgrowth of the wildcat graduate student strike of 2019, and its demands for #COLAFORALL, which forced the union to make “rent burden” and cost of living part of its campaign. The very structure of labor negotiations in the US and everywhere is designed to limit the scope of workers’ action, and make it so that only certain issues and questions can be arbitrated by the union.
Many readers of the flyer involved in the strike may find its questions facile. “Why accept a raise when you’ll still be a worker” is answered easily, when the alternative is not being a worker in a society which forces you to work in order to eat. But the questions of interpretation and meaning it opens up are pertinent, and we can see how these sorts of questions, pushing at the boundaries of what can be prosecuted through the union, has led to the vitality of the present historically unprecedented strike.
lovely reading of di prima! thanks for writing this.