Who said accountants ain't greedy capitalists?

Daniel Davies d_squared_2002 at yahoo.co.uk
Wed May 9 00:40:42 PDT 2001


Well, the Securities & Exchange Commission, apparently :-)

Seriously, though, nothing I've said should be taken as meaning that I don't think that there is a very serious problem in the accountancy profession, because there is. It's just that it's a problem which needs to be analysed as analogous to what Marx wrote about the subversion of the medical, legal and educational professions to capitalism -- the proleterianisation of the professionals by the "billable hours" culture that Tim Francis-Wright noticed, and the creeping attack on professional standards by M-C-M' of which this case is a flamboyantly egregious example, and of which the work of Baruch Lev is, in the long term, a far more damaging example (discussed here at http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0002/1743.html ).

And in order to see this, one needs to realise that as an analytical category, accountants are professionals, not capitalists. They are no more greedy capitalists than doctors or lawyers, which is, of course, not to say very much. But neither is it to say nothing.

d^2

===== ... in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. -- Bertrand Russell

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