1968

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Subversion and self-critique in the self-managed university

I am pleased to share that my first peer-reviewed article, “Re-visioning the university: José Revueltas and academic self-management,” has been published by the journal Radical Americas. Below is a short post contextualizing and summarizing the article that I wrote for the journal’s blog, reposted here with permission.

This past 14 April marked fifty years since the death of José Revueltas, a singular figure of the mid-twentieth-century Mexican left. A four-time political prisoner, a winner of the National Prize for Literature, a communist twice expelled from the Mexican Communist Party, and a self-taught university professor, Revueltas was a heterodox, flawed, contradictory but immensely committed individual in the struggle for a better world. As a student of social movements and state repression in Mexico, I was intrigued by both his fascinating biography and – with important and notable exceptions – the limited scholarly engagement his later work and theoretical contributions have received.

Initial drafts of this article came together as students around the United States and beyond claimed space on their campuses to demand an end to U.S. and academic complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza. That wave of mobilization has passed, but another will surely come. In the meantime, the university remains in crisis, caught between forces of neoliberalism and far-right reaction and the ever-present question of its role in society. Revisiting Revueltas’s theory of academic self-management as put forward during the student movement in Mexico City in 1968 thus seems apropos at this moment. I am excited to have it published as an open-access article by Radical Americas, a journal welcoming early career professionals (which I most definitely am) and dedicated to the practice of systemic critique.

As such, my article seeks to accomplish two main tasks. One is to trace Revueltas’s political trajectory over the decades, demonstrating how it evolved to criticize the means he once embraced as the framework for revolutionary change, and how this evolution coincided with the dynamics of the 1968 movement. The second is to examine the contents of his theory of academic self-management as a transformative vehicle for the restructuring of society as a whole. In his attempt to theorize and give shape and direction to a movement as it was unfolding, Revueltas argued for the subversive role of the university as space for the self-critique of the society in which it was embedded. He proposed a non-hierarchical institution collaboratively managed by faculty and students dedicated to reflexively engaging with the most pressing concerns of the country and world. His vision for academic self-management began in the university but did not end there. Instead, practices of self-management would extend to the masses, ultimately leading to a socialist Mexico predicated upon absolute freedom, democracy, and justice. While aspirational, arguably utopian, and not explicitly adopted by the student movement, Revueltas’s theory offers insights not only into his own political progression and the mobilizations of which he was a part but can serve as a point of inflection for those immersed in similar concerns today.

Re-visioning the university: José Revueltas and academic self-management by Scott Campbell (Claremont Graduate University, CA, USA) is published in Radical Americas, volume 11.

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A specter is haunting Mexico

I have been thinking a lot about grief, about mourning. Unsure what to do with it, I have done nothing. I have also been working on a project about José Revueltas and came across the following piece, beautiful, if flawed, which I felt called to translate. Perhaps someone else’s words, from some other time, can do better than mine in speaking to the present moment. I don’t know. Yet here they are.

These were written in Mexico in 1968. In July of that year, a massive student movement erupted, shutting down numerous universities and bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets. A movement that was crushed with overwhelming force on October 2, when the army and a paramilitary battalion opened fire on a student gathering in the Three Cultures Plaza in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, killing hundreds.

José Revueltas, a self-taught professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), was involved in the movement from the very start. An award-winning novelist and heterodox communist militant with, I propose, more anarchistic leanings than he would care to admit, Revueltas was painted by the Mexican state as the intellectual leader of the student movement. At the time that he wrote this, he was underground, moving from house to house in Mexico City. He would be arrested on November 16, 1968, charged with innumerable crimes, and become a political prisoner for the fourth time in his life, released from Lecumberri Prison as part of an amnesty in 1971. These words were initially written in his journal, then published in two outlets in 1969. They can be found in the 1978 text México 68: juventud y revolución, on pages 79-83, as Un fantasma recorre México.

A specter is haunting Mexico
By José Revueltas
Translated by Scott Campbell

I begin writing these notes in an ample room, orderly, in some house somewhere in the city, today, Tuesday, October 29. A house, a refuge of a friend who I will call Cronos. Cronos smiles with his eyes, he’s a wry and very good person. He’s left me alone to write. To write… The very act of writing is strange, uncanny. One doesn’t know what it means, what is this thing of joining together words, in a world, in an unbreathable emptiness where they all appear to have been broken and not daring to say what happened, what they mean: it’s not the horror but this emptiness, this orphanhood, so many dead that they surround us. In reality, I started making notes in the beginning of May, before the Movement. One day or another I’ll reconstruct them, in the ever-new light – new every minute, every hour – of this dizzying, changing, intangible life, where something that had an enormous or distressing importance in the moment, later appears unreal to us, dreamy, implausibly lived, as if we ourselves were our own story, our own distant tale told by other people.

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