Rithika Ramamurthy
@rithika_ram
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comms director @cpluscp | @GradLaborOrg forever | cofounder @ReclaimRI | close reader/ marx tweeter/ man eater
Brooklyn, NY
Joined April 2017
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🚨‼️BIG NEWS‼️🚨 Tomorrow is my last day at NPQ. I’m so excited to step up as Director of Communications with
@cpluscp
and join a team of dedicated and brilliant people tackling the climate crisis and economic inequality together!
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No, grad students are not workers. Neither are professors, or writers, or anyone involved in culture. Workers are big burly men who pull levers and eat lunch when the whistle blows. Hope this helps.
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The salary for an English PhD at Brown has increased from under 26k and no summer pay in 2015, to around 32k now, and will be over 39k with STEM pay parity in a couple of years— thanks to our union’s ongoing fight to make grad school a secure and well-paying job for everyone. 🥳
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has anyone written a book on South Asian elite capture yet because it is getting really embarrassing out here
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This piece has got it all: third-partying the union, simping for the boss, and championing right to work— a masterclass in union-busting rhetoric. There is no cultural institution too special for worker democracy! Solidarity with
@newyorkerunion
✊🏽
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Every time we do this discourse we stray further from god’s light! Anyway read this it’s good
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Every single department in the humanities and social sciences was forced to pause admissions this year due to “pandemic budget constraints,” but Brown collected record endowment returns and just hired a new top cop 🙃
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went to a lawyer wedding in dc and only mentioned we’re marxists twice 💋
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After my MA, I applied to 22 jobs in 2 months with zero luck. Grads are an exploited, educated workforce, degrees mean less than ever due to wealth accumulation + the devastation of unions, what’s out there is shitty underpaid work. But sure, the problem is identification thanks
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HAPPY TUESDAY I just filed three unfair labor practice charges against my employer in my capacity as president of
@GradLaborOrg
. Members are outraged that the university is making unilateral changes to employment and undermining our union. Brown needs to respect our worker power!
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If your boss wields the argument that a union will change the special unicorn vibes of your workplace— the way they often do in academia— chances are they’re trying to get you to give up real, material security for an imaginary ideal that props up exploitation! Don’t fall for it
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If your idea of who “counts” as working class or who belongs in unions relies on outdated caricatures of labor and silly culture war content rather than a basic grasp of exploitation, ownership, production, and solidarity— please exit my replies and read some Marx 😇 tysm
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⚠️ big news ⚠️
Today is my first Monday at my new full-time job: Economic Justice Editor
@npquarterly
! I'm excited to be working for a magazine dedicated to social movements. Pitch me at rithika at npqmag dot org if you want to write for us! 🥰✍️🥂💖✌️
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.
@dennismhogan
and I wrote about how the College for All Act could solve the higher education crisis by reducing debt, making college free for many, and enforcing employment security for university professors. Everyone deserves the right to the university!
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To all of the very intelligent people that think I’m serious or that I’m dunking on any kind of worker, please get better at using this website
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Here’s my Princeton take by way of a
@GradLaborOrg
anecdote: Between when grads at Brown started to form a union in 2016 and when we had our election in 2018, my pay went from 26-30k. The university took complete credit. Then they started fighting us tooth and nail for raises.
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a good faith outline of concerns
I'm sensitive to concerns about holding together a giant union that represents many kinds of workers with differing relationships to the international and, possibly, different sets of interests. Asking graduate workers to think long-term and institutionally can be challenging
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Breaking: Haters stay extremely mad at graduate student workers who are organizing to make universities—both public and private— better workplaces.
Graduate students are primarily students and trainees, not ordinary workers. Academia is a calling. I suspect unionization will tip the balance so faculty prefer, at the margin, to hire post-docs to do research in their labs rather than students.
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jonah grasps the contradictions as usual!
There's lots of Discourse on here about grad students in the labor movement.
The actual answer is that everyone deserves a union, AND the industrial labor movement has gone searching for new populations to organize as they have become unable to organize in their core industries.
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more and more people are saying that boards of trustees should be dissolved, upper level administrators should be fired, and endowment control should be democratized amongst all university workers
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my
@GradLaborOrg
comrade found me and hooked me up with a keffiyeh right before i walked 🙏🏽🇵🇸
I’m graduating with my Ph.D in English tomorrow, but organizing and leading
@GradLaborOrg
was the honor of my time at Brown.
Thank you to the members for their inextinguishable commitment to building worker power. Solidarity forever and ever!
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Pinch me, I must be dreaming: 10 glossy pages in
@readlux
for my first print feature! I couldn’t have done it without careful editing and endless cheerleading by
@natalieayay
💞
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It took me nearly half of grad school to learn these insights: 1) making the workplace better comes at the expense of my work and 2) the ruthless critique of everything existing is not just writing. Intellectual labor is labor— alienated and exploited. The point is to change it!
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the spurious distinction between academic jobs and other jobs, between intellectual and physical labor, and why these divisions allow the boss to break up solidarity between workers.
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Saying goodbye to our little blond son Ollie today. Eleven years together was not enough 💔
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If you’re a freelancer or organizer who wants to write about this, email me at rithika at npqmag dot org
There are huge protests everywhere in the US against genocide in Gaza, in solidarity with Palestinians and calling for not only a ceasefire but an end to US support for occupation. Yet, I haven’t seen a single article in a major newspaper about what is becoming a mass movement 1/
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Last night I dreamt that I was addressing a large crowd in a marble courtyard about the immortal science of Marxism to uproarious cheers, Trotsky was there and told me I did a good job??? He was surrounded by hot babes. What is happening to my unconscious
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👏🏽 👏🏽 👏🏽
Our infallible crystal ball reveals that 2022 will make workers want to holler.
via
@hamiltonnolan
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Last year, Brown admin told faculty there was a 200M budget deficit, forcing admissions freezes across humanities + social sci and refusing
@GradLaborOrg
demand for raises while the endowment grew 12% to 5B. What will they say this year, after 50% returns?
Private equity and venture capital performed especially well in fiscal year 2021, causing the largest university endowments to swell.
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Issue 54.2 of
@novelforum
: Victorian Subjects, Victorian Forms, edited by Ellen Rooney and yours truly 🥲 What a dream come true!
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@bigblackjacobin
gonna drive to ezra’s house and scream this entire thing to him over a loudspeaker
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not me working really hard on an essay on anti-work theory
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This is the dark side of organizing a grad union: You fight like hell for a fair contract, the other side insists on good faith bargaining, you reach an agreement— and then they try to do death by a thousand cuts. Petty, bureaucratic bleeding of gains, but THE UNION WILL PREVAIL.
🚨🚨🚨Most Harvard grad teachers get a small "financial aid" payment on top of their teaching compensation (to match payment w/fellowships). First paychecks of the semester are in, and Harvard has surreptitiously SLASHED that amount to counteract our union-negotiated COLA raise.
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For
@thebafflermag
, I wrote about Amber Husain’s REPLACE ME, a lyrical and ambitious book, both a love letter to intellectual inquiry and a missive from the front lines of academic decline. Sometimes you write something you’re proud of, that’s this for me!
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I wrote for
@npquarterly
about the movement pioneered by the Debt Collective
@StrikeDebt
: their roots in Occupy, their campaign to cancel student debt, and their ultimate political commitment to demand reparations. A debt-free world is possible!
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Anywhere from 30-100 thousand people estimated to be in DC tomorrow. I will be one of them, see you there ✊🏽
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One of the best things I have ever done with my life is having been sounding board, research assistant, copy editor, cheerleader, and more for this book. It changed my life to see it from concept to proof! AK is a genius 🩷🥹
Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. Immediacy names what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand the end of mediation.
Now available for preorder: Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh
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Brown Anthropology grad worker Ayse Sanli is being forced out of her program, which will cut off her income, devastate her academic career, and force her to leave the country. All workers deserve to have their disability accommodations honored. SIGN ✍️
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@matthiasellis
ok but why does she look like Laura Dern playing an early millennial politician
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UIC is where I read my first Marx and walked my first picket line. Proud of our union sibs at
@IndianaGrads
+
@uicgeo
for demanding recognition + fair contract. Public school grad unions are the foundation of academic labor. Open your purse and let's blow up these strike funds!
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Brown refused to bargain with grad workers over COVID safety! We had to push for tests to be covered by insurance and had no say over working conditions. Testing program was cited as a reason to deny us a raise. Just cloth masks, no contact tracing, budget cuts, and bad vibes. 🤡
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I’m graduating with my Ph.D in English tomorrow, but organizing and leading
@GradLaborOrg
was the honor of my time at Brown.
Thank you to the members for their inextinguishable commitment to building worker power. Solidarity forever and ever!
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It’s Sunday. Oodi Library in Helsinki is popping. People of all ages reading, crafting, drinking wine on the roof deck. You can rent anything from basketballs to guitars. There’s a full design studio. Eric Adams’ New York could literally never!
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there is a surplus in the selfie supply chain so we are posting instagram content here
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I talked with the inspiring
@OlufemiOTaiwo
about his new book, Reconsidering Reparations, for
@npquarterly
. We discussed why reparations are a necessary part of mitigating the climate crisis, rectifying racial injustice, and building the repaired world.
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Good luck to my forever union
@GradLaborOrg
at the table today for better wages and more in our second contract! Admin better not call us on our bluff!
LIVETWEETING NEGOTIATIONS
Today the Bargaining Committee introduces proposals on wages and healthcare.
It's a packed house!
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Raises are often preventative measures when union campaigns are ramping up. They allow admin to say: see, you don’t need a union here! But as
@loggins__
says here, the number says very little about the power dynamic that’s at play.
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My latest for
@npquarterly
: grad unions at private universities demand democratic institutions. Struggles at Columbia, Harvard, etc are not only about better pay. Grads want their due share of power, and may be positioned to reign in boards gone wild:
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There is no better feeling than being a leader in your union for years, starting to hand off power to others who pick up the torch, and then watching those new workers take over and absolutely rock negotiations with the boss. Love and solidarity with
@GradLaborOrg
forever ❤️
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just saw
@dennismhogan
in a bookstore buying yet another book smh
I’m apparently not allowed to buy books anymore because “we’re becoming a hoarder house”…..please rt to raise awareness of this injustice
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For the back to work crowd:
@dennismhogan
and myself in
@TeenVogue
on the urgent need to put the universal back into the university. College for all, now!
.
@dennismhogan
and I wrote about how the College for All Act could solve the higher education crisis by reducing debt, making college free for many, and enforcing employment security for university professors. Everyone deserves the right to the university!
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which 👏🏽 side 👏🏽 are 👏🏽 you 👏🏽 on 👏🏽
If you're on twitter long enough your personality either becomes "the woke mob can't handle me" or "I'm hot and sad and pro-union", there are no other options
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post a photo of yourself in early 2020, not knowing what is coming
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Co-ops are not unions and neither of them are communism. Both are versions of workplace democracy that undo the steady upward transfer of power + wealth, a reversal we badly need. If anyone wants to talk co-ops,
@tylerbrown_88
loves to help workers make this dream a reality✨
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I don’t have enough adjectives in my vocabulary to express how excited I am to be moderating this conversation between superstars alongside my comrade for life,
@dennismhogan
✊🏽 Please join for a spirited and incisive conversation on race, the labor movement, and the university!
💥💥 IN ONE WEEK! 💥💥
We host Robin D.G. Kelley and Naomi R. Williams in a conversation on race, unionism, and higher education.
@rithika_ram
and
@dennismhogan
will moderate. The event starts at 7pm ET on Feb. 23.
Register now:
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The end of strikes are not all celebration, as workers who lost pay still have to make ends meet. Grads shouldn’t suffer because the boss tried every trick in the book to deprive
@SW_Columbia
the contract they deserve. Every union supporter on my timeline, cut the check! 💵💰💵
SWC members are thousands of dollars in debt from the strike and need immediate support to pay late fees, rent, and bills. Can you donate to our hardship fund?
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One really hard thing about writing this response is that I have 9 paychecks left from the university as of this publication. Dedicating my time in grad school to my union
@gradlabororg
saved my intellectual life; I don’t know what thinking and writing will look like without it.
Here is my last paragraph, featuring one of my favorite Marx quotes. Literary scholars should not only strive for the best ideas about social transformation; we need political organization to realize a new commons within our workspaces. Without that, we're just brains in a vat.
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I wrote about how Providence’s city council became the first local government to pass an explicit ceasefire resolution pressuring the Biden administration to act as Gaza burns.
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more and more people are asking where i got my beauty and brains 🥰
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part of the problem is that most people take their personal experience and its vicissitudes to be indicative of capitalist totality and its contradictions. when their feelings change, so does economic organization. i blame affect theory and i won’t be taking questions.
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Anyway, next year pay for my position will be 39k and counting. THAT’S THE UNION DIFFERENCE!
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“[Academics] are workers and our employers do not care what we think, what we fear, or how we get through the day. So we are very much like the public—without real advocates and in desperate need of ideas, politics, organization, and solidarity.” the brilliant
@KeeangaYamahtta
👑
In another installment of our
@RicJhu
partnered series,
@RaychelGadson
sat down with
@KeeangaYamahtta
to discuss her journey through academia and the political moment we’re experiencing as a nation.
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If you work in the nonprofit sector and have been silenced at work or fired from your job for speaking out about Gaza, DM or email me at rithika at npqmag dot org
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cheers to the cannabis workers of
@UFCWLocal328
for making history in the ocean state this year! ✊🏽🌱
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Very extremely superlatively proud of my union
@GradLaborOrg
for voting (by supermajority!) to divest from the occupied territory of Palestine. This is part of our union’s vision to give financial control of the endowment to the workers, not millionaire trustees 🇵🇸❤️✊🏽💰
THE BROWN DIVEST REFERENDUM HAS PASSED!
It is clear: graduate workers’ values should inform our employers’ financial investments. Our grad worker is calling for Brown Divestment 🇵🇸
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When your union bestie has a baby 🥳💋💗🥺 Auntie Rith is going to spoil the hell out of you Molly🥰🌸🎈🥂👶🏻
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Powerful, inspiring, sustained collective action from the grad workers at
@SW_Columbia
! The cause of labor is the hope of the world, this is the proof. Solidarity from all of us
@GradLaborOrg
: to big wins, bravery, and telling the boss to get lost! 💖🥂🥳✊🏽
We finally reached a tentative agreement at
@SW_Columbia
. Ten weeks of striking, three years of bargaining. A first contract with excellent wins, because of the tenacity, commitment, and courage of every striker.
#CUoffStrike
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thinking about the house of cards of free and underpaid labor sustaining all published scholarship in the humanities as graduate admissions and department budgets get cut
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Fantastic interview with
@aparna_gopalan
on the impending
@hgsuuaw
strike! Read what it’s like to sit across the table from administration for months only to hear that dignity and quality of life are not worth the $$.
@GradLaborOrg
is with you— united we bargain, divided we beg!
Harvard is the world’s richest university — and Harvard’s student workers say they are being paid sub-living wages. A Harvard Graduate Student Union leader tells Jacobin about the union’s struggle with the university and why they’re prepared to strike.
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Good afternoon! My article on anti-work writing— including reviews of bold and important books by
@sarahljaffe
and
@AmeliaHorgan
— is online!
Read it, then realize your wildest fantasy of subscribing to the premiere mag for socialist feminism,
@readlux
Pinch me, I must be dreaming: 10 glossy pages in
@readlux
for my first print feature! I couldn’t have done it without careful editing and endless cheerleading by
@natalieayay
💞
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Good morning to everyone but especially to the
@GradLaborOrg
bargaining committee! Get ready for the wage reopener of a lifetime, coming to the table this spring 😈
NEW: The
@BrownUniversity
endowment's investments returned a stunning 51.5% in 2020-21, pushing its value to nearly $7 billion
Provost Rick Locke says the money "will have a transformational effect on Brown" over the coming years
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You don't have to read this, I promise! You can read this, by
@still_oppressed
instead:
Pro-Palestinian protesters have frequently disrupted or shut down speeches and events held by Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates. These tactics, which include harassment and confrontation, are illiberal and wrong on principle.
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Every academic on here should be making this call! Tell Senator Murray to support 75% TT instructional workforce requirement in higher ed today!
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Seeing compensation as a sign of worker struggles at Princeton and elsewhere is one way to understand the dynamics of academic labor mvmt. These unis have cut budgets while growing endowments to the worth of small countries. If they’re suddenly offering raises, the iron is hot!
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I'm in
@mediationsmlg
thanks to
@V21collective
and
@crhiday
, talking about Carolyn Lesjak's new book on the commons and why the academy has a lot of work to do in order to not only rethink the idea, but to enact it. Look at the lineup on this roundtable!
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NEW: Over 5,000 graduate student workers at MIT are unionizing with
@MITGradUnion
,
@ueunion
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i love my union 🥲
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The life of the mind is impossible without the often invisible labor that is university publishing. As the leader of an academic union + an assistant editor of an academic journal, I support the workers at
@OxUniPress
in their demand for recognition and collective bargaining!
We, the workers of Oxford University Press USA, are forming a union! We are excited to join 24,000+ workers at
@newsguild
& for the opportunities ahead. Support us in our campaign for voluntary recognition by liking, retweeting, and sharing our platform!
#OUPUSAGuild
#UnionizeUP
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Here is my last paragraph, featuring one of my favorite Marx quotes. Literary scholars should not only strive for the best ideas about social transformation; we need political organization to realize a new commons within our workspaces. Without that, we're just brains in a vat.
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Once again, private sector employers think they are above labor law and are unfairly threatening a grad with termination! Please take two seconds to sign and share this petition, so we can tell Brown to respect our contract! 😤✊🏽🗣💪🏽
@BrownUniversity
agreed to protections against workplace abuse in our contract. But now
@brownengin
grad worker Asimanshu Das is facing possible expulsion for seeking protection from an abusive advisor. Sign our petition to let Asimanshu stay!
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“The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay.”
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