I suppose this was what they call repressive tolerance. You could read what you liked — no one would stop you — but you would be met with incomprehension if you said anything that smacked of the New Left Review rather than the reliably liberal Philosophy & Public Affairs: “reify” or “heteronormative” or, indeed, “decolonize.” It was tiring to have to swaddle every utterance in layers of irony, to carry on as if the trouble with racists and sexists was their vulgarity, to go along with the idea that earnestness and stridency (“ranting”) were best left to the uncouth.

In the end, my assimilation into this attitude — three generations of collabo blood will tell — was easy. There was no need for an announcement; you just went quiet and got with the program, which was to make the world safe for social democracy with British characteristics. If you had a different program, you retreated to dark basements to read your Said or Ambedkar or Fanon and were never heard of again. For a while, it was fun to be in the mainstream and speak its language of liberty and equality. Everyone was quick, everyone was clever, most everyone was nice. I kept all my promises: I got my First; I kept off the opium; I did not rant. I would apply for a doctoral program and stay at Oxford for six more years.

Rhodes Must Fall was picked up in Oxford by student activists during my last term there, in response to a landscape just as marked as Cape Town by Rhodes and his money. They set their sights on similar goals: “the plague of colonial iconography,” the “Euro-centric curriculum . . . which frames the West as sole producers of universal knowledge,” the “underrepresentation and lack of welfare provision for Black and minority ethnic (BME) amongst Oxford’s academic staff and students.”

It was about more than a statue, of course, but the statue wasn’t incidental. Its continued presence, they write, “is incompatible with a community that posits itself as progressive, enlightened and intellectually honest.” That last bit is mischievous, raising the excellent question of what you’d expect the physical environment of Oxford to look like given everything it says in the prospectus. (The short answer: fewer statues of colonialists, and those that remain framed to reveal just what they thought and did.)

For the first time, I had a student in my John Stuart Mill class wanting to talk about the East India Company rather than the harm principle. It can be hard to know what to do when you get what you want. There were awkward conversations with other scholars of my vintage and older: Why had we been so quiet, so complacent? What were we scared of? And why did we, most of us, settle for the centrist-parties-and-think-tanks vision of engagement, for being seminar-room-only insurgents, for assuaging our political consciences with monthly donations to approved charities? It took effort not to get defensive, not to retreat into irony, to be happy that someone was saying out loud what I’d felt and had found unsayable.

The usual apologists appeared in the broadsheets with the usual arguments (it’s complicated; we gave them the railways; we shouldn’t erase history; who’s next once Rhodes falls?), and it’s impossible to go through the rote replies (not as complicated as all that; the railways weren’t a gift; whose history?; Winston Churchill, probably) without an acute feeling of déjà vu. More generally, the movement had the effect on the mainstream press of all student protests: consternation at the fact that the students were holding up placards and no attempt to read what was written on them (This Is Not “Rhodes” House, Make Rhodes History, Take It Down). Everyone was talking about universities as a way of not talking about colonialism.

If Oxford is worth reforming, as activists must believe it is since they’re not demanding that we tear it down and start from scratch, then it must be because it can be reformed, that this can be effected by argument and persuasion. But we should keep our expectations low. Oxford — and the mainstream British political culture it feeds — is formidably well armored with defense mechanisms and comforting fables. The easygoing liberalism of Oxford life, for all that it implies of right-on attitudes and Guardian readership, is somewhat stretched when dealing with anger, censure, and the call for reparation. Its institutions of student welfare can’t help translating what are at base political demands to the kind of things a well-meaning bureaucracy can deal with: more therapists, a couple more black writers on the syllabus.

In such circumstances, moral arguments by themselves have about as much effect as telling a brat to go stand in the corner and think about what he’s done. There won’t be a redemptive gesture, just a series of accommodations with history, some of them honorable, some squalid, most of them mercenary. No one should be holding their breath for an apology.

But if Oxford must keep its statues of dead imperialists — and it will, for a while yet — it had better be up to something in all the silence: bringing the rest of its physical environment into line with its professed principles, making the question of its own complicity in the history of empire itself the focus of sustained academic attention. What Oxford will not do — and quite literally cannot do without gutting itself — is divest itself of its relations with power. [...]

“Decolonize” is a big idea, but it does not yield, by itself, a systematic political program. Nor need it. Nothing wrong with starting on one statue and seeing what comes of it. The thing for the less engagé among us is to listen and learn what we can. Universities are resilient creatures and have several advantages over the students who challenge their ways: the students have exams and relationships and hangovers to deal with; their degrees end, their student visas expire, their loan repayments start. Sometimes the next cohort carries on; often it forgets, or moves on to different things. These are perennial facts about student movements, but they do not make them pointless. They only invite us to look for tests of their success in something other than outright victory: in the traces they leave on those who take part in them, what secrets they expose, what indignations they provoke, what solidarities they help to form, what energies they unleash.

[...] when Mr. Turner refers to the assault as “twenty minutes of action.” This action is not a slang word for sex, but a nod to the necessity of a plot he cannot comprehend; he cannot even think in terms of conflict, of stories with more than one side.

The lollipops and little skirts are tropes of girlhood and that turns viewers on, but no one is fooled that the models are anything but adults. And the women in chains? Might they also exist in a world where pain is an enticing idea, but only an idea — a place where whips draw no blood?

I have no way to evaluate these things, no context in which to put them, it is true. But maybe the idea of fucking the lollipop girl or torturing the bound woman is like Danny Conrad’s kiss. I fantasized about it all summer, but when it happened — a sticky lamprey-like attack — I didn’t want it. Until later, when, in fantasy, I wanted it again.

I have no firm answers, but I am able to formulate a few hypotheses. For instance: desiring something is not always the same as wanting it.

[...] as a recent forum in the Nation asked, “Does labor deserve its own downfall?” The movement’s long, sad decline must in some way be a comeuppance. Pick your poison: racism and sexism, retrograde valorization of toil and hostility to environmental protection, bureaucratic complacency, institutional rigidity, top-down authoritarianism, political tepidity, toxic organizational culture, history of corruption — need we continue?

These criticisms are not altogether wrong. But they tend to forget the fundamental order of things. It’s the power of the boss that makes for a sorry labor movement, and the political economy of the past five decades has made for a strong boss. Labor markets are slack and layoffs endemic, which keeps wages stagnant, costs low, and shareholders happy. Wage theft is common and largely goes unrectified; health and safety standards are unenforced. A byzantine nest of subcontracts and corporate shells often separates the workers from the profits, so that whatever subentity is the employer always appears in the red. Labor law’s teeth have been worn down to the gum: to take concerted action these days is to invite near-certain employer retaliation with little chance of remedy. And when the boss inevitably tells workers they should be grateful for what they have and warns them that plenty of people would be happy to take their jobs, the workers have no trouble picturing these people. They are their nieces, cousins, and neighbors, stuck in part-time jobs or out of work. The workers feel isolated and discouraged, the organizers wring their hands, and wages and conditions keep deteriorating.

Union opponents think this quiescence means workers don’t want to fight. Romantic union supporters, perhaps including the people at the conference, tend to think that workers are ready for a struggle but held back by conservative middle-class leadership. Neither account fully contemplates the idea that the struggle between labor and capital might more simply reflect the balance of power. The union movement’s problem, in other words, isn’t that workers don’t want to fight; it’s that they don’t want to lose.

Employers have long argued that unions represent a sectional interest only — that they distort the market to the benefit of whoever their members happen to be. But organized labor’s dream is to stand for the common interests of all working people. The more members unions have, the better they will be at representing the interests of the entire working class, organized and unorganized. The flip side of this well-worn aphorism is more rarely stated: the fewer members unions have, the more time must be spent defending the interest of those few members. What these members want, typically, is representation and a good contract. They want the union to be there when the boss tries to screw them. They want it to deliver wage and benefit gains in bargaining, especially as the remnants of the unionized working class find themselves obliged to support the more indebted and underemployed members of their own families.

Union leaders, on the other hand, often know perfectly well that if they only serve their members’ immediate needs, they betray the deeper interests of those very members. The more the standard of living of American workers falls, the clearer this fact becomes for those who are organized. Still, immediate needs often trump long-term planning. Walk into a union hall today and you are likely to find staff concerned with getting a good contract and winning grievance fights, hoping that something offstage will salvage the larger situation.

This problem is no one’s fault but the employers’. But if the union is going to pursue something other than short-term gains or fixes, someone has to pay. People are going to need to recruit and train volunteers to knock on doors. Communications staff will be necessary to generate materials. Researchers will need to be hired to uncover points of strategic opportunity; lawyers, to safeguard the union against hostile courts. And while workers ultimately make the movement, it is usually the organizing staff who create the conditions for them to stand up, by linking them to workers in other parts of the shop and ensuring strategic coordination. Spontaneous working-class action happens occasionally, but today it is riskier than most can afford.

Organized labor, by contrast, is at its finest both reliable bureaucracy and mass spirit. That these two souls contradict each other suggests the difficulty of challenging the socially powerful for decades on end: you must be both lawyer and pamphleteer, accountant and agitator. On the one hand, as Rosa Luxemburg once warned, the working class will ultimately lose every battle but the last one. On the other, a social insurgency fades without interim victories, and these require everyday satisfaction of the needs of the movement’s constituency. Solidarity is the binding together of self-interests on a scale sufficient to win; it demands not just transformative vision but transactional strategy.

Strategy, though, is not a skill learned in the schools of theory that shape left-wing political culture. Rather, it tends to be acquired over years of defeat and passed down through institutional memory — an asset that has become increasingly precious and uncommon as the lights go out on the labor left.

Few, then, know how to recognize strategy when they see it. Take the outrage over a recent Los Angeles minimum-wage proposal. The city, under pressure from organized labor, passed an ordinance raising the hourly wage to $15. Unions, however, sought an exemption for workers covered by union contracts. The right-wing media were the first to report the exemption, citing it as evidence for what every antiunion campaign argues: that the union is a business and dues are its profits; that if the union has to screw over workers to amass an army of low-wage dues payers, it will do so. As the Chamber of Commerce put it, “With sympathetic politicians’ assistance, unions hope that creating an exclusion from minimum wage laws will entice employers to accept unionization to avoid costly new wage mandates.” But the Chamber was joined by some unlikely allies. Marxist commentator Doug Henwood wrote a tweet mocking the desire of unions for the “freedom” to bargain for low wages. Labor historian Erik Loomis — generally an astute observer — decried the move for its “optics.” A minor internet affray resulted, bringing embarrassment on LA’s house of labor.

A more charitable reading of the proposal would be that low-wage workers are concentrated in competitive sectors of the economy with low profit margins. Although bosses will lie about what they can and cannot afford, it’s true that they cannot afford everything. Low-wage workers often prefer good benefits to a pay bump, since it can be easier to get multiple household members into low-wage no-benefit jobs than to get one into a job with health care. A minimum-wage hike thus has, in theory, the potential to limit the ability of workers to organize for better benefits in a low-margin workplace.

[...]

The exemption might well have been a miscalculation, particularly given the momentum that has built behind the $15 campaign. But it isn’t self-evidently exploitative just because it sounds bad. Calculations like this, however, require a union bureaucracy — that century-long bête noire of the left. As Kim Moody, a leading labor leftist, has written, “Union ‘leaders,’ those who make the policy, lean not toward the workers, but toward the rulers of the nation. Since most unions are rigidly bureaucratic, there is little opportunity for the workers to make their voices heard under normal circumstances.” This is sufficiently accurate to have become common wisdom. Taken too far, though, the argument imagines workers who will rise up if only they are freed from conservative leadership. It is a legacy of a fundamentally different moment in the history of the American working class — the turn of the 20th century, when capital was hungry for labor, rather than oversupplied with it — and a different balance of power.

The accelerationists are right in one respect: although it’s by no means “necessary,” more of labor may yet be broken before much can recover. It’s only by trial and error that unions have ever figured out how to become what the workers have come to need; the movement has historically grown in great spurts, when new organizational forms emerge that fit the new shape of the ever-changing working class. The idea of industrial unionism, for example — a single organization for each industry, rather than different unions for different trades — was present among American workers from the beginning of mass production in the late 19th century, many decades before its realization in the founding of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1935.

While it’s hard to know what could lead to new union growth, to embrace the destruction of existing unions is to cede the initiative entirely. You can’t ever really be ready for the class war, but much of the job of working-class strategy is to stage and escalate conflict at the most advantageous moments. So-called legacy unions represent living traditions with institutional memories of what worked and what didn’t against an individual boss, in a given industry, or among workers of particular types. It’s an error to perceive union defeat as evidence of some strategic mistake. American workers can do everything right and still lose.