Occupation as Critique: Left-Wing Student Organizing in Frankfurt and San Diego, 1969

This article offers a transatlantic student perspective on the theory-practice debate at the center of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse’s 1969 correspondence, famously bookended by the occupation of the Institute for Social Research in January and Adorno’s death in August. Noting that there were not one but two student occupations that occurred during this period, with Marcuse supporting the second led by Black and Chicanx students at the University of California, San Diego, it undertakes a comparative reading of the insights and activities of the self-named Spartacus Department in Frankfurt and Lumumba-Zapata College in San Diego. It first recovers a multidimensional critique of the role of the postwar university in advancing capital accumulation and entrenching racial segregation—twinned processes that students recognized as posing an existential threat to the exercise of critical thinking within the university. It then argues that the Spartacus Department’s and Lumumba-Zapata College’s mutual attempts to occupy and refigure corners of the accredited university as sites of horizontal teaching and learning encode the missing theory of organization in the Frankfurt School’s corpus. By recentering the insights and motivations of these two campaigns and two of the students who led them, Angela Davis and Hans-Jürgen Krahl, this article illuminates a path for a more political iteration of Critical Theory after 1969.

On January 31, 1969, Theodor Adorno called the police on a group of students who had occupied the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung; IfS). That April he received a sharp rebuke from San Diego. “If the alternative is the police or leftwing students,” Herbert Marcuse wrote to his friend in Frankfurt, “then I am with the students.”¹ Over the next four months, a correspondence unfolded between the two representatives of the Frankfurt School over the efficacy of direct action, the historical possibility of revolution, and the obligations of their own “Critical Theory” to the social movements of the 1960s. Its contents are all too familiar. Bookended by the occupation of the IfS in January and Adorno’s death in August, the correspondence has been widely received as the Frankfurt School’s final word on Critical Theory’s relationship to political practice.²

This article will demonstrate that there is a danger to overprizing Adorno and Marcuse’s correspondence. In the first place, it neglects the students’ input, confining them to the historical backdrop of a debate that they themselves started. Second, it overlooks the fact that there were not one but two occupations that took place during the correspondence, and the second had a different outcome than the first. Four months after Adorno’s student Hans-Jürgen Krahl led seventy-five sociology students in occupying the IfS in Frankfurt, Marcuse’s doctoral student Angela Davis led an occupation at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). By Davis’s own recollection, when fifty Black and Chicanx students broke into and occupied the Registrar’s Office on May 7, 1969, Herbert Marcuse was with them.³

Already the constellation of figures involved in these two occupations should pique interest: Adorno and Marcuse, the Frankfurt School’s two most famous members in 1969; Davis and Krahl, their two most famous students. On the terms of the theory-practice debate, meanwhile, the occupations themselves urge further consideration. Both campaigns were rooted in a critique of the postwar university’s complicity in organized capitalism, both drew on Critical Theory to articulate their critique, yet both also demonstrated a commitment to redirecting the university’s intellectual and material resources toward revolutionary social transformation. Their shared commitment to political practice is evident in their names: the students in Frankfurt organized as the “Spartacus Department,” the students in San Diego as “Lumumba-Zapata College.”

This article reads the historical and theoretical interventions of the Spartacus and Lumumba-Zapata campaigns together. In doing so, it recovers a multidimensional critique of the university’s historical role in advancing capital accumulation and entrenching racial segregation. As I will demonstrate, this critique puts a new spin on the theory-practice debate at the center of the Adorno-Marcuse correspondence, in that it pinpoints the existential threat posed to critical thought by the structural transformation of the university that was taking place in the postwar period, as capitalist production became, in the United States, increasingly oligopolistic and automated and, in West Germany, export driven and state coordinated. Still, critique was not the sole object of these initiatives. The Spartacus Department’s and Lumumba-Zapata College’s mutual attempts to occupy and refigure corners of the accredited university as sites of horizontal teaching and learning, I argue further, encode the missing theory of organization in the original Frankfurt School’s corpus. By recentering the insights and motivations of these two campaigns and the students who led them, this article illuminates a path for a political-practical iteration of Critical Theory beyond 1969.

The Spartacus Department

The details of the occupation of the IfS and its aftermath are well known. On January 31, 1969, Krahl led a group of students in occupying an IfS classroom. After a ninety-minute standoff, Adorno and his codirector, Ludwig von Friedeburg, phoned the police, who arrested the students, loaded them onto a bus, and took them into custody. Krahl was heard shouting “Shit critical theorists!” as he was forcibly led away.⁴ Rumor has it that Adorno then requested a can of spray paint to graffiti the building with a tagline of his own: “Krahl is inhabited by wolves.”⁵ Krahl alone was charged with breaking and entering, for which he stood trial that summer after Adorno refused to drop the charges. Both men died within months of their final encounter in court: Adorno of a heart attack in August, Krahl in a car crash in February. Finally, at Krahl’s funeral, the remaining delegates of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Students Union; SDS)—the central organ of the West German student movement—voted to dissolve their organization, bringing its decade-long leadership of West German’s extraparliamentary opposition to a close.

This sequence of events has cast a long Freudian shadow across the reception of both the Frankfurt School and the West German New Left. Witnesses, commentators, and scholars alike have found in it proof of Adorno’s quietist philosophy,⁶ of the SDS’s pseudorevolutionary aspirations,⁷ and of the generational conflict that allegedly motivated the West German 1960s.⁸ Yet among the many things that get lost when their denouement is inflated, personalized, or otherwise deemed self-evident are the events that led up to the occupation of the IfS—and intentions of the students who participated in them.

In fact, the January occupation of the IfS belonged to a larger campaign that had occupied the Sociology Department (a separate building) the previous month. This December campaign had been part of a campus-wide “Active Strike,” wherein thousands of students had boycotted classes in solidarity with students in the Education Department, whose program had been reduced from eight semesters to six (FSS, 1:373–74). These striking students argued that such curricular reforms were aimed at the university’s “technocratization.”⁹ That is, they were aimed at containing the university as a space of dissent and at streamlining its operations toward meeting the labor and knowledge demands of the West German economy.

Importantly, the West German economy had been revived in the aftermath of World War II by capital investments under the US Marshall Plan, inaugurating a period of seemingly miraculous economic growth driven by an export boom, which ordoliberal state management helped prolong into the 1960s.¹⁰ This same period of postwar prosperity had also seen a baby boom that propelled more students into the universities than ever before, with many eying career opportunities unknown to their parents. Then, in 1966, the endurance of the economic miracle and the new ways of life it had promised were shaken by the onset of the first global recession in the postwar period. Higher education was one of several industries to face austerity measures, as state governments raised entrance fees, reduced program lengths, and ex-matriculated students who had been enrolled for semesters on end.¹¹

Political consciousness on West German campuses had been building since the beginning of the decade, thanks to anticolonial struggles in Algeria, Cuba, the Congo, and Vietnam.¹² As the austerity measures came down, politically active students were quick to receive these new reforms as part of an orchestrated assault on the university’s autonomy. Yet these students argued further that the assault was not aimed only at intimidation. Rather, at the structural level, the university was becoming integral to the smooth operation and continued expansion of an economy whose growth rate was tapering.¹³ Krahl, a key voice in this critique, characterized the postwar university as a “workshop . . . caught up in the contradictions of the technologization process.”¹⁴ As industrial production became increasingly capital intensive at the expense of physical labor, demand grew for workers bearing the technical knowledge and managerial skillsets needed to automate, administer, and advance capital’s machinery. Aided by the new reforms, universities were being rationalized to provide for the new knowledge economy. However, the price of their restructuring was steep: it threatened the very kinds of noninstrumental thinking that held out for alternative futures.¹⁵

In the wake of the 1966–67 recession, the need to maintain and enhance the infrastructural conditions that fostered critical thinking within the university emerged as a central organizing objective of the student movement. In West Berlin it gave rise to the aptly named Critical University.¹⁶ In Frankfurt it gave rise—among other initiatives—to the Spartacus Department.

On December 3, 1968, when twelve hundred students in the university’s Education Department called for a campus-wide boycott of classes in response to cuts to the program, sociology students were among the first to join their “Active Strike” (FSS, 1:373–74). Among them were several prominent faces of the West German New Left, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, former SDS presidents Karl Dietrich Wolff and Reimut Reiche, and Krahl. These students organized a town hall and drafted a list of demands. “We’ve had enough,” they wrote in their first public missive, “of being trained in Frankfurt as dubious political leftists, only to supply the integrated alibi of the authoritarian state once we’ve finished our studies.”¹⁷ They wanted “a fundamentally new organization of the sociology program aimed at the practical communication of social career opportunities and political activity.”¹⁸

What followed was a proposal to radically democratize decision-making over the department’s curriculum and pedagogy, faculty hires, funding, and accreditation. An early pamphlet circulated among students called for student input on course content and a classroom pedagogy that would foster more egalitarian social practices in place of the “authoritarian teaching situation” inherent to the traditional lecture format.¹⁹ A subsequent pamphlet, Negative Catalog, addressed faculty with a series of transformative demands. These included the abolition of preliminary exams, the assembly of a joint student-faculty board to decide over future faculty and assistant appointments, the allocation of a portion of the department’s financial resources to student-led initiatives, and the accreditation of working groups organized as part of the Active Strike.²⁰ Still another pamphlet, The University Belongs to Us!, advertised ten working groups for striking students to attend. Students could learn about “revolutionary theory” and critique “the authoritarian and constitutional state[s].” They could also explore “career opportunities for sociologists,” an acute consideration in the wake of a recession.²¹

Five days into the Active Strike, on December 8, the students escalated their campaign by occupying the Sociology Department on Myliusstraße. The move brought the department’s accredited curriculum to a near-total stop. Participants in the occupation graffitied the facade of the building with the words active strike, spartacus department, and an aphorism by a young Max Horkheimer. “If socialism is unlikely,” it read, “it requires an even more desperate conviction to make it true” (FSS, 1:377). Under this new aegis, the working groups began.

The Spartacus students’ actions did not find approval among faculty, who demanded an immediate end to the occupation. Speaking at an assembly convened by striking students on December 16, Jürgen Habermas accused the students of instrumentalizing thought and knowledge, and he suggested that their actions discredited the very political practice they aimed to ground. By preventing the department’s courses from convening, Habermas argued, the striking students were attacking “the basis of enlightenment, render[ing] enlightened political practice impossible.” If escalated further, he warned, their actions would amount to a dogma no different from “the intellectual prototype of a fascist or Stalinist.”²²

In the discussion that followed, one student, Reinhard Wolff, sought to redirect Habermas’s attention to the critique of the university that had motivated the Active Strike. Wolff pointed out that the “business as usual” approach to education did not guarantee unencumbered enlightenment—in fact, the opposite. The traditional organization of the classroom, for example, functioned to entrench social hierarchies by positioning students as structurally dependent on their professors’ intellectual authority. “In an institution like this one,” Wolff countered, “it should be possible to find forms in which you [Habermas] actually enter in the process of academic work as a participant, a perhaps especially qualified participant, where you dismantle all institutionalized authoritative restraints.” What the students desired, Wolff argued, was not to disrupt the circulation of knowledge, but instead to work with faculty to develop new forms of collaborative teaching and learning that could resist reproducing hierarchical social relations. “It is the chance of this strike,” he concluded, “to attempt this in practice for the first time in the Federal Republic.”²³

Wolff was not far off the mark. To be sure, tactics such as classroom disruptions and building occupations were not new to the West German student movement, and nor were teach-ins and self-organized working groups. But the self-organization of students as an academic department to expedite institutional reform did register a new political strategy.²⁴ Unlike in West Berlin, where the Critical University had operated alongside the normal workings of the Free University, the Spartacus students sought to bring about institutional change by enacting it themselves. Through their physical occupation of the Sociology Department, they not only disrupted entrenched hierarchical channels of academic study and decision-making; they also put into practice new, antiauthoritarian alternatives in their self-organized working groups and participatory-democratic assemblies. Their actions thus encoded a prefigurative theory of organization aimed at carving out spaces within existing institutions in which horizontal social relations could be practiced.

Still, the Spartacus students’ high hopes for lasting departmental reform did not bear out. The December 16 assembly was followed by a written request from faculty to vacate the building before police action. The students voted to disband, and the Sociology Department was secured by police on December 18 (FSS, 1:380–81). Their attempt to revive their campaign after the winter break met the January 31 roadblock that has since garnered such an overdetermined place in Frankfurt School history: the students’ occupation of the IfS and Adorno’s phone call to police.

Marcuse’s Response in Context

Adorno’s phone call to police garnered (and continues to garner) many critical responses, yet none was so devastating as Marcuse’s, coming as it did from within the recognized ranks of the Frankfurt School. “Occupations of rooms without a threat of violence would be no reason for me to call the police,” Marcuse wrote in a letter to Adorno dated April 1969, shortly after hearing a student’s account of the events. “Our cause is better taken up by the rebellious students than by the police.” Marcuse then added in what would become the correspondence’s most famous line: “There are situations, moments, in which theory is pushed on further by praxis—situations and moments in which theory that is kept separate from praxis becomes untrue to itself” (A/M, 125; my emphasis).

Since the publication of an English-language translation in 1999, the correspondence has generated a cottage industry of its own,²⁵ thanks in large part to Adorno’s refusal to go quietly. Notably, Adorno did concede Marcuse’s theoretical account of the reciprocal relationship between theory and practice, but he vehemently denied that the students’ direct actions had anything to do with either Critical Theory or revolutionary transformation anyhow. Adorno characterized the students’ actions as “actionist” (A/M, 127), self-indulgent performances of political action that had no potential to effect concrete social change. He further reprised Habermas’s earlier argument that, in foreclosing rational discourse, direct actions were prototypically fascist and risked inciting an authoritarian backlash (A/M, 127, 131–32). “I do not doubt for a moment,” he wrote to Marcuse in May, “that the student movement in its current form is heading towards that technocratization of the university that it claims it wants to prevent, indeed quite directly” (A/M, 128). By provoking the state, Adorno thought, the students’ actions would pave the way for more state intervention in the university, not less.

Marcuse disagreed. As the debate unfolded, it became clear that, despite their many shared theoretical premises, the two men had arrived at opposite political assessments of their historical conjuncture. Their main point of contention was Adorno’s diagnosis that political practice was “blocked” (A/M, 127, 129–30, 131–32)—the crisis management policies of the state together with its successful material and ideological integration of the waged working classes had postponed revolution indefinitely. Marcuse readily conceded that their present moment wasn’t a revolutionary one, nor even a prerevolutionary one (A/M, 125, 133), but he disagreed with Adorno’s blanket determination that therefore no political interventions aimed at social transformation on any scope or scale were possible. Oppositional political practice may have been “blocked” under fascism, Marcuse argued, but this moratorium no longer held under the present conditions of “bourgeois democracy.” Rather, precisely because there was no revolutionary mass base and because the bourgeois democratic state was so eminently capable of absorbing dissent, Marcuse argued, direct action emerged as one of the few tactics available to the Left for making interventions (A/M, 130). Direct actions were necessary, he contended, because legally sanctioned channels of opposition secured the state as the authoritative site of democratic self-governance, displacing the ability of individuals and communities to organize their time and labor according to their own needs and interests. “Of course, one has to defend parliamentary-democratic institutions when they still guarantee the right to freedom and work against the deepening of repression,” Marcuse wrote to Adorno. “But they are not dismantled by student activity but by the ruling class” (A/M, 135; my emphasis).

The obvious case in point was (or should have been) the student organizing taking place on their very own campuses. Yet although Marcuse did defend occupations of university buildings and disruptions of lectures as legitimate “in certain situations” (A/M, 128), perhaps out of deference to his friend and colleague, he did not go into detail. Neither he nor Adorno revisited the Frankfurt students’ motivating concern that, insofar as state overreach was not the exception but the rule, the continued exercise of critical thinking within the university was terminal. Nor did either attempt to decipher the theory of organization implicit in the actions of the Spartacus Department, one aimed not at disrupting critical thought but renewing its very possibility within a horizontal and participatory institutional framework. Nor, for that matter, did Marcuse mention to his colleague a strikingly similar campaign at UCSD, to which he had lent his support. Led by Black and Chicanx students, the UCSD campaign was aimed at founding a “Lumumba-Zapata College” on campus. As the university’s new residential college, Lumumba-Zapata College would house a student body and a curriculum worthy of its revolutionary name. Curiously, not only did the Lumumba-Zapata campaign also culminate in the occupation of a university building on May 7, 1969, but, according to Davis, who spearheaded the campaign, Marcuse even participated in the occupation. “When we took over the building,” Davis has recalled, “we had to kick in the door, break the glass, and the first person to occupy the building—the first person to set foot in the building—was Herbert Marcuse.”²⁶ “Our work,” she says elsewhere, “acquired a legitimacy that would have been impossible without his participation.”²⁷

The Lumumba-Zapata occupation has received no attention in the scholarship on the Frankfurt School, despite having taken place in the thick of Adorno and Marcuse’s correspondence. Yet it very much belongs to its historical constellation. Moreover, for the theory-practice debate, it offers several important insights. First, the campaign’s driving critique demonstrates that the structural transformation of the university diagnosed in Frankfurt underpins a still larger project of racial capitalism that ought to be in the crosshairs of any critical theory of society. Second, the campaign’s vision for a revolutionary university and its use of direct action help advance a political strategy that complements that of the Spartacus Department. This transatlantic twinning suggests that these two campaigns are not peripheral to the Frankfurt School tradition; on the problem of organization, they offer its immanent critique.

Lumumba-Zapata College

Lumumba-Zapata College was the brainchild of two UCSD student groups: the Black Student Council (BSC) and the Mexican-American Youth Association (MAYA). In the fall of 1968 BSC approached the university’s administration about including an ethnic studies program in the curriculum for a new residential college, scheduled to open in 1970. California, like West Germany, had witnessed a surge of students in the postwar period, prompting a statewide building spree. UCSD was one of six University of California campuses to be founded in the 1960s, and the new college was slated to be its third, allowing the university to grow its student body and expand its curriculum into history and the classics.

In the fall of 1968 BSC had barely a dozen members. The organization had been founded a year earlier by Davis, who had arrived from Frankfurt in the fall of 1967 to continue her graduate studies with Marcuse. Together with Edward Spriggs and his partner Liz,²⁸ Davis had spent her first year canvassing the campus for Black students, faculty, and staff to join their union. Among their early recruits were fellow student Azzan Davis and two faculty advisers, Joe Watson in Chemistry and Keith Lowe in Literature.²⁹ After learning of the administration’s plans for the third college, BSC decided to reach out to MAYA to increase their leverage. MAYA was then an only slightly larger and older organization on campus that included Israel Chaves (who roomed with Spriggs), Martha Salinas Chaves, Vincent C. de Baca, Milan Molina, and faculty adviser Carlos Blanco (Literature). The two organizations formed a coalition and drafted a list of demands.

“Lumumba-Zapata College: B.S.C.-M.A.Y.A. Demands for the Third College, U.C.S.D.” dropped on March 14, 1969, in a meeting with UCSD chancellor William McGill and Armin Rappaport, the chair of the new college’s planning committee. McGill later recalled how some fifty members of BSC-MAYA had looked on as Davis read aloud the collectively authored document, which called for “the Third College [to] be devoted to the relevant education for minority youth and to the study of the contemporary social problems of all people.” “To do this authentically,” the document went on, “this college must radically depart from the usual role as the ideological backbone of the social system, and must instead subject every part of the system to ruthless criticism.”³⁰ Lumumba-Zapata College, as BSC-MAYA explained in a later meeting, was to be a fully funded, fully accredited “critical university.”³¹

BSC-MAYA’s vision for a critical university mobilized a familiar critique of higher education’s role in service of a profit-driven economy and Cold War security state. The coalition took aim, for example, at the university’s part in facilitating students’ ideological assimilation (LZ, 1), and they pointed specifically to the US military’s contracts with USCD’s own Scripps Institute as local evidence for the structural integration of capital, the state, and the university (LZ, 6). Yet BSC-MAYA further trained their sights on a target that, while present in student activism elsewhere in the United States, hadn’t featured in the West German critique at all: the forms of racial exclusion that the university enabled, all while touting itself as a vehicle of racial progress. As the coalition wrote in their “Demands,” the university claimed to be “the key to equal opportunity for all” (LZ, 1), and they themselves, as students of color, had been frequently tokenized as evidence thereof. However, they viewed their tokenization as ideological propaganda disguising a different material purpose. The university’s real function, the coalition argued, was to underwrite “Black capitalism,” a managerial strategy of the Nixon administration aimed at subsidizing entrepreneurship among an emergent Black middle class to curb the appeal of communism among the Black working class.³² “Black capitalism,” they explained, “divides the minority people into exploiters and exploited, the exploiting class being the college-trained bourgeoisie” (LZ, 1–2). Under the guise of providing a means of social mobility toward diversifying and strengthening the middle class, the university was in fact reproducing and entrenching society’s racialized class hierarchy.

BSC-MAYA’s indictment of the university on racial grounds offers a critical expansion on the West German critique. The structural transformation of the postwar university, it indicates, goes hand in hand with new forms of segregation. As universities were retooled in the 1960s to produce new kinds of knowledge and skilled workers for the organized, capital-intensive industrial economies in the West (as argued in Frankfurt), they were also instrumental in maintaining a racialized underclass excluded from the new labor market (as argued in San Diego). These two processes were linked because the emerging class of educated workers was precisely responsible for the automation, administration, and eventual relocation of industrial production that precaritized those workers who had been last to enter the industrial wage relation, or who had never entered it at all. In the “Demands” BSC-MAYA gave voice to this recursive linkage by framing their university critique from the vantage of Mexican American agrarian workers in the Southwest and Black workers in the industrial North—two groups who “perform[ed] the dirty but necessary tasks of building a society of abundance, while systematically being denied the benefits of that society” (LZ, 1). These were the people whose exploited labor facilitated the material uplift of the white working class, aided by selective university access from which they themselves were barred.

The positive vision for a Lumumba-Zapata College was born of this critical nexus. The coalition’s best remembered demand was for the new college to enroll a supermajority of Black and Mexican American students, with each group constituting 35 percent of its student body (LZ, 4). As MAYA member Milan Molina later recalled, “All of a sudden we said: it’s the Third [College]; this is the Third World, so we want the whole college, okay?” (TC, 10). Yet the coalition also recognized that the new students could not fend off their recruitment into the project of racial capitalism while the university remained organized as it was, so they made infrastructural demands aimed at empowering the students themselves. They demanded a plurality of students on the college’s Board of Directors and its Admissions Committee, course credit and financial compensation for students elected to serve on these committees, the suspension of UC admissions requirements used to discriminate against minority applicants, and comprehensive financial aid, so that no student would have to work while in school (LZ, 3–5).

To fulfill the college’s mission as a critical university, meanwhile, the coalition outlined a new curriculum for the college. Its students would study the “History of Revolutions” and the “Critique of Political Economy,” paying special attention to non-European revolutionary movements and “the crucial roles played by colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and genocide” in Western capitalist development (LZ, 5). In the subject areas “urban and rural development” and “health sciences and public health,” they would jettison the profit motive to pursue the “satisfaction of human needs” in areas like health care, housing, waste disposal, and transportation (LZ, 6). Still elsewhere they would find opportunities to study non-European languages and traditions and critique the “colonial perspective” from which these were usually taught (LZ, 7).

In sum, Lumumba-Zapata College would be a new kind of institution, defined by its minority student body, critical curricular content, and student-staffed governance. Like the Spartacus Department, it saw the university as an important, if compromised, base for critical thinking and political struggle, and it sought to shore up and build out these capacities through a series of reforms aimed at autonomy and self-determination. Lumumba-Zapata College further explicitly positioned itself as a vanguardist institution, echoing the arguments of the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Black Panther Party, and other Black and Third Worldist organizations that “Black and Brown people have become the vanguard of social change because they constitute the most oppressed sector of American society” (LZ, 5).³³ With the new college, BSC-MAYA hoped to secure a direct conduit between the kinds of critical-political ideas made possible within the university and the people whom they saw as most likely to actualize them.

What was also different about the Lumumba-Zapata campaign was its success. It helped that the campaign had a local precedent in the Third World Liberation Front strikes in Berkeley and San Francisco, which had concluded that March,³⁴ and that, on a broader scale, it belonged to a historical upsurge in minority student activism that by 1971 could claim the founding of some five hundred Black and ethnic studies programs across the country.³⁵ Yet BSC-MAYA also ran a formidable campaign. Already when unveiling their Demands in the March meeting, the coalition had managed to sideline the college’s planning committee and make Chancellor McGill the primary respondent to their campaign. McGill then made several well-publicized blunders that added fuel to the coalition’s fire, including offering a counterproposal for a “junior college” that BSC-MAYA dubbed the “Back of the Bus College.” Facing mounting pressure, McGill made the consequential decision to cede his authority over the college’s future to the Faculty Senate (TC, 12–17).³⁶

Four Senate meetings took place between April 23 and May 7 with BSC-MAYA members in attendance, though lacking voting power. A repeated sticking point for the Senate was the coalition’s demand that the college’s governing board be able to appoint faculty, which would require that the Senate cede its own power of appointment to a plurality-student board. When the Senate again deadlocked on May 7 over what biology professor and coalition supporter Silvio Varon remembered as “three hours of whether or not we should use the word ‘college’ or ‘colleges’” in a proposed motion (TC, 20), BSC-MAYA decided that they would make no further progress through these legislative channels. They escalated to direct action. They walked out of the Senate meeting and broke into and occupied the Registrar’s Office.

According to BSC member Azzan Davis, the occupation had been Davis’s idea, suggested after the coalition had regrouped on Revelle Plaza (TC, 19). By her own recollection, Davis then solicited Marcuse’s aid.³⁷ Twenty years after the fact, MAYA member Milan Molina admitted to having kicked in the door of the locked Registrar’s Office, where the group hunkered down, not knowing what to expect next (TC, 20). As word of the occupation got out, four hundred people gathered outside in support, prompting visits from local newspapers and news channels. One camera crew from KOGO-TV caught footage of Marcuse’s wife Inge passing water, food, and sleeping bags through a window of the building.³⁸ At the ongoing Faculty Senate meeting, news of the occupation provided the necessary extraparliamentary pressure. A resolution passed overwhelmingly to appoint BSC-MAYA members and their faculty representatives to the college’s planning committee. The occupying students negotiated amnesty, and, less than two hours after the occupation had begun, they voted to disband. When repairs for the broken door were later reimbursed by an anonymous money order, multiple sources pointed to Marcuse as having footed the bill.³⁹

In accordance with the Senate resolution, a series of planning committee meetings took place that summer with BSC-MAYA setting the agenda. Coalition members enumerated the reforms necessary to achieve their ideas for equitable admissions and college self-governance, and they expanded on their curriculum proposal, revealing it to be transformative not only in its content but also in its pedagogical emphasis on participatory learning and community building. Students would be encouraged to tutor in local schools to maintain community ties and prevent their own “cultural alienation.”⁴⁰ Premed requirements would include public service and community medicine.⁴¹ Philosophy courses would enable students to “express their own needs and attitudes” as a basis for the study of philosophy.⁴² Among the white papers emerging from these summer meetings was one that counted Davis, Carlos Blanco, and Fredric Jameson among its authors. It characterized the college’s proposed curriculum as a departure from the “dehumanizing academic and formal isolation of the ‘humanities’ from the sciences and the ‘social sciences,’ an isolation resulting particularly from the refusal to commit knowledge to the critical understanding of social reality.”⁴³ A close reader will recall that this split had once been the impetus for the project of Critical Theory, as defined by Max Horkheimer.⁴⁴ In the plans for Lumumba-Zapata College, however, the intention to recommit knowledge to critique was embedded within a new institutional structure geared toward minority self-determination. What emerged was thus an organizational form for realizing the college’s second intention—to recommit critique to socially transformative practice.

Legacies of Struggle

The long history of Lumumba-Zapata College is less triumphant. When Third College—as it would be called for the next twenty years⁴⁵—opened its doors in the fall of 1970, its inaugural class was already below target. The college enrolled 32 percent Black and 25 percent Chicanx students in its first year, and those numbers would not rise but fall to 12 percent each by 1978, ten years after the coalition had formed.⁴⁶ Meanwhile, of its radical vision for curriculum, only a Communications Department was ever created. And of its radical vision for college self-governance, it soon proved easy for the provost to sideline the student representatives on its governing board.⁴⁷

Given this trajectory, one could ask whether Adorno had been correct in his prognosis that students were “heading towards the technocratization of the university that [they] claim [they] want to prevent, indeed quite directly” (A/M, 128). According to this view, student demands for reform helped pave the way for more bureaucratic overreach, despite their better intentions. Adorno had had Frankfurt in mind when he voiced this criticism, yet Lumumba-Zapata College has also been cited as an example of administrative capture. Most recently, Roderick Ferguson has put forward the history of the college as a microcosm of the post-1960s era, wherein material demands for racial equity and self-determination were neutralized by industry, government, and universities embracing a liberal politics of representation that has become hegemonic.⁴⁸

If the success of the Lumumba-Zapata campaign’s swift co-optation confirms Adorno’s prognosis, it is not to his credit alone. As Ferguson also points out, what makes the example of Lumumba-Zapata College so poignant is that BSC-MAYA had anticipated this threat from the beginning: the coalition’s starting point had been their own recruitment and that of the university into the project of racial capitalism.⁴⁹ BSC-MAYA had thus already authored a critique of the university’s structural transformation similar to that which Adorno cited as grounds for suspending political struggle. In the arsenal of the students, however, this critique served as a call to action.

Critique as grounds for action is one key takeaway from the Lumumba-Zapata campaign—one that was echoed in Frankfurt, drawing a line of generational continuity between the two student campaigns. Indeed, these students’ commitment to political practice endured even when their institutional critiques testified to a reality in which their odds of success were slim. Davis would make this point explicit in her autobiography a few years later: “Those of us leading the movement knew that despite our victory . . . , [c]oncessions would be inevitable. . . . [Yet] the fight was not over. On the contrary, it had just begun. The most important responsibility resting with us was to ensure that whoever became involved in the college—students and faculty alike, carried on the legacy of struggle out of which the idea of Lumumba-Zapata was born.”⁵⁰ One might be inclined to read Davis’s summation of the campaign as mere rhetoric, a rallying upshot in the face of long-term ossification. However, there is a deep-seated philosophy of practice at work here. Tellingly, Davis’s emphasis is not on the coalition’s critique of the university, however much it was proven right by the college’s “inevitable concessions.” Rather, it concerns the students’ responsibility to continue their political engagement in the face of an all-too-probable defeat on the grounds that real change, however unlikely, remained a possibility.

This understanding of practice is one that Davis had already begun to work out conceptually in her dissertation research on Kant, which dates to the same period as the Lumumba-Zapata campaign, 1969.⁵¹ Using a method of immanent critique, she demonstrated there that Kant’s strong concept of moral autonomy provides the philosophical grounds for challenging the a priori authority of the state authorized by his political philosophy. According to Kant’s moral philosophy, it was incumbent on people to act in the interest of freedom, “even if there is not the slightest theoretical likelihood that it can be realized, as long as its impossibility cannot be demonstrated either.”⁵² This same logic of moral duty, Davis indicated, could be claimed for liberation struggle as such, even and especially when it found itself contesting the authority of existing states and institutions. One can extend her strong concept of moral-political practice to her ongoing campus activism to arrive at Davis’s autobiographical reflections: so long as the Lumumba-Zapata project’s impossibility could not be demonstrated, there were grounds to act—and to continue to act—in the interest of its realization.

Davis’s philosophical defense of continuous political engagement challenges Adorno’s contemporaneous skepticism on the possibility of practice, (re)opening a door once closed by the Frankfurt School. It provides a conceptual base for teasing more from the legacies of the Lumumba-Zapata and Spartacus campaigns. Read together, they put forward a theory of organization otherwise absent in the Frankfurt School’s corpus. Recognizing that the conditions for revolution remained absent for precisely those reasons that Adorno had already indicated—both the suspension of economic crisis and the integration of the working class had been arranged by the state—the two campaigns attempted to realize more equitable forms of social organization within their immediate institutional settings, with the larger goal of sustaining resistance and creating a ripple effect. Part of this project was their shared desire to secure a more robust framework for critical thinking (and Critical Theory) as its practice came under increasing threat of instrumentalization. Yet they further understood the success of this new institutional framework as a function of its collective self-determination. Autonomy and self-governance, they agreed, were the best defenses against neutralization or co-optation.

The university’s competing claims to autonomy and self-governance, in turn, were undermined by the campaigns’ mutual recourse to direct action. In the case of the Spartacus Department, the initial eight-day occupation even allowed the students to enact their desired institutional reform, giving teeth to the prefigurative theory of organization implicit in the project. While this theory remained largely encoded in the students’ actions—it did not precondition their political practice so much as crystallize from it—Krahl’s prolific thinking on the problem of organization might offer its nearest articulation.

Krahl is perhaps best remembered for wanting to restore Critical Theory to its Lukácsian roots by recentering organization as the concrete mediation of theory and practice.⁵³ Yet where Lukács had championed the party form, Krahl worried that the party’s hierarchical structure reproduced the coercive character of class society, lending itself to state capture. His critique was rooted in an Adornian reading of the integrationist forces of late capitalism as having penetrated deep into the human psyche. It wasn’t only that waged workers now had more to lose than their chains, in other words; rather, their very will to freedom had been badly blunted and maimed by the manufactured needs and desires of advanced capitalist society and its pervasive culture industry. In its place, a compulsive pursuit of satisfaction in material and cultural consumption took hold of people’s consciousness, securing not only mass conformism and political passivity but also critical and creative stasis as such. To break through this reified consciousness, Krahl argued, more than theory—more than propaganda and education—was required. Because reified consciousness was secured by the coercive social structures in which it daily took part—including mass party politics—its recalibration necessitated noncoercive practice.⁵⁴

For Krahl, then, fostering the embodied practice of a noncoercive sociality became the task of organization. It was inherently prefigurative. As he put it in one instance, “When we fight against this society, it is necessary to seed the first germ forms [Keimformen] of the future society in the organization of political struggle itself—the first germ forms of other human relationships, of human exchange free of domination.”⁵⁵ Still elsewhere he borrowed Ernst Bloch’s concept of a “concrete utopia” to describe these new forms.⁵⁶ They amounted to councilist spaces where people could collectively practice solidarity, spontaneity, and self-organized discipline. These organized spaces would not only provide a concrete base for political struggle but also encode the revolution’s blueprint in their own social relations.

The import of Krahl’s theory of organization for the Spartacus Department should be discernible, insofar as the department also sought to enact horizontal forms of teaching, learning, and governance, with the further goal of fostering antiauthoritarian consciousness. To the extent that Lumumba-Zapata College aspired to similar goals—albeit with different terminologies (“critical” rather than “antiauthoritarian,” “vanguard” rather than “utopian”)—the theory gains wider traction. The result is a transatlantic twinning: where Davis offered the philosophical grounds for committing Critical Theory to political struggle, thereby moving beyond Adorno’s blockage, Krahl penned a theory of organization on the very terms of Adorno’s critique of the administered society, which had led the latter to conclude a kind of moratorium on political action in the first place. Arguably, these two students still echoed Adorno’s argument that Critical Theory served as the “placeholder”⁵⁷ of practice in the present, only they and their comrades recognized that the uninterrupted continuation of critical thinking was not a given; it had to be shored up by organization, by political practice itself.

The theoretical value of Davis’s and Krahl’s interventions in the Frankfurt School’s theory-practice debate is to be found in their historical content: the Lumumba-Zapata and Spartacus campaigns in whose ranks they were written. Yet it may further be measured against the revival of university occupations in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, which reanimated concerns about the university’s role in organized and racialized capitalism, the tactics of direct action, and the relationship between study and struggle. In the fall of 2009 students seized buildings at UC Berkeley and Santa Cruz shortly after dropping the anonymously authored “Communiqué from an Absent Future.” There and in statements that followed, they declared not their occupied spaces, but the university itself to be a closed social form—closed, they wrote, “to the majority of young people in this country by merit of the logic of class and race and citizenship.” “What would it mean to restore the public university to its former glory as an engine of class mobility?” they asked in a searing indictment of the ideology of the university left over from its golden era, the 1960s: “It would mean the restoration of a system which, while ensuring that some individuals, here and there, ascend the rungs, also ensures that the rungs themselves remain immovable. . . . [It would mean] to save a system in which some people study and some people clean the floors.”⁵⁸

The UC students’ critique of the university’s role in reproducing the racialized class structure of society echoes that of their Lumumba-Zapata predecessors, but with renewed attention to the changing needs of capital. Where the Lumumba-Zapata students (and their Spartacus comrades) had criticized the postwar university for churning out a professional managerial class to pioneer new vectors of exploitation capable of prolonging economic prosperity, the students of the post-2008 era had grown up in the ensuing period of economic downturn, wherein higher education itself served as a vehicle of expropriation. For a growing number of students, a university degree no longer guaranteed a salary commensurate to paying back the loans with which it had been purchased. As the authors of the “Communiqué” surmised, “The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers.”⁵⁹ The university, its students, and its workers had been caught under the wheels of late capitalism’s sinking labor demand and the neoliberal casualization of labor that accompanied it.

Strikingly, this fate too had been anticipated by students amid the economic miracle of the postwar period. Krahl in particular had projected the proletarianization of the intelligentsia as a necessary outcome of the university’s structural integration into the production process amid a declining economic growth rate. It was on the basis of this class analysis that he had first defended students’ political agency, arguing that it was time to retire the Marxian notion of the “class traitor” as the extent of the intelligentsia’s political possibility, together with the Marxist preoccupation with the industrial working class as the historical subject of revolution.⁶⁰ Both amounted to a dated identity politics, Krahl insisted, obscuring the need to think—and organize—these interdependent classes anew and in tandem.

Just as Krahl’s class critique rooted his work on organization, so too did the critique of political economy in the “Communiqué” ground the post-2008 university occupations. Yet here their political strategies begin to differ. Where the Spartacus and Lumumba-Zapata campaigns made demands on their institutions, believing that certain kinds of reforms could be in service of revolutionary social transformation, the occupations at Berkeley and Santa Cruz repudiated demands point-blank, writing that negotiations were a death knell to movements.⁶¹ Instead, these latter occupations championed communization theory as their political strategy, seeking the immediate disruption and renunciation of exploitative social relations to elaborate “new forms of subjectivity and affectivity” in the here and now.⁶² To be sure, communization theory did not reject so much as reinstate the antiauthoritarian, prefigurative, and utopian dimensions of the earlier campaigns, but it resisted the question of formal institutionalization, which the earlier campaigns still hoped to instill with dialectical possibility.⁶³

These critical continuities and departures between the 1960s and post-2008 university campaigns afford the former a contemporary discourse and afterlife much different from the academic generational mapping that typically characterizes Frankfurt School history, one that centers the German philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. They indicate that there is a tradition of Critical Theory that can exceed its academic address to still find political purchase. Part of this purchase may follow from the “critical theories” themselves—that is, in the critiques of the universities that motivated the early campaigns and can still sharpen our present perspective. Still more may be found in their affirmative ideas about political action and organization, which can help root and expand contemporary struggles. Having hacked a path from Critical Theory back to political practice in 1969, Davis, Krahl, and their Spartacus and Lumumba-Zapata comrades may still help illuminate their moving dialectic in the present.

Notes

References