Initial thoughts on the Palestine exception at work 2023-2026

 The upcoming Sydney Staff for Palestine forum on repression of speech on campus (you should attend! more information here) has got me thinking about such issues. While it's not something that I have written about before, repression of speech at work has long interested me. For my PhD I studied performance management meetings at university in the 2010s, a period where there was much debate over the nature of free speech on campus. I've also suffered repression firsthand; I can't talk about it directly due to a confidentiality clause, but suffice it to say that I would characterise this action as repression of forms of speech in the context of an industrial campaign.

When I started to become more involved in pro-Palestine activism after Al-Aqsa Flood, the level of repression of speech on campus seemed to hit a new high for me. We had Zionist staff videoing us at rallies, and Zionist students ripping down posters and telling me to 'kill myself' while flyering for pro-Palestine events. Activists like Rose Nakad have been hounded off campus, while others such as Nick Riemer and John Keane face lawfare from Zionist colleagues. Of course pro-Palestine activists had been labouring under these conditions for years, a function of the Palestine exception at work. But some of the forms this repression took stand in stark contrast to 10 years prior, when the confected 'freedom of speech on campus' scare campaign was in full flight.

In order to approach the issue of the Palestine exception at work, as a Marxist I start with the relationships between the structuring of speech in the university on the one hand, and the labour process and the broader regime of accumulation at a larger scale. The current neoliberal regime of accumulation has at this stage profoundly affected the labour processes of all staff on campus; space precludes me from detailing this, and if you are reading this you are no doubt aware of what these might be.

In order to understand changes to the labour process on campus, which results in a change of repression of speech on campus, I use Burawoy's distinction between despotic and hegemonic regimes of production. Despotic regimes of production are the military command style forms of organising production that characterise the factory that Marx wrote about. Burawoy points out though that this is not inevitable, and that despotic regimes of production sit at one end of a continuum, with hegemonic regimes of production at the other end. I would argue that, while despotism always holds sway at work in the last instance, that the neoliberal regime of accumulation was characterised more by hegemonic forms. Here we see more consensus forms of rule, such as the creation of charters of freedom of speech, working groups, and professional modes of thinking, keeping university staff in check. 

However, as the neoliberal regime of accumulation changes into one more marked by deglobalisation, dispossession, and state capitalism, so too does the pendulum swing from hegemonic to despotic regimes of production on campus. In our current interstitial conjuncture though, this can take on perverse forms. Despotic regimes of production still require some forms of hegemony to work, as a fig leaf for the naked application of colonial power. Hence forms of progressive politics in what I term the 'late neoliberal' period (2008 - 2020) get co-opted and reused by various forms of pro-Zionist actors. These include forms of lawfare (originally used by BDS and other alter-globalisation left groups), identity politics (see claims to safe spaces, indigeneity, etc), and, relatedly, management of affect as a rationale (countering the 'passions' invoked by 'conflict in the Middle East').

This is all very much a first sketch, so yeah, if there any claims here you feel are questionable, I'd welcome your input.