>>Is Catherine a dean or a provost or some such thing? In that case,
>>I might agree with you that her main job is to police "workers to
>>extract work from them." If she is just a college professor,
>>though, she is no different than a public school teacher, though
>>she might not believe that she is just a worker.
>>
>>I don't know why leftists should insist that college teachers are
>>managers in a class of their own, rather than part of the working
>>class. It makes no sense to speak of an "academic class" bundling
>>presidents, provosts, and deans with professors, adjuncts, and GAs.
>>It's capital and the state that supports it that want to classify
>>collage professors into a "managerial class" and say that we are
>>not in need of unionization:
>>
>
>I reply
>
>Academics have three sets of functions. One is the actual teaching
>of skills, and doing of research. Another is playing their part in
>the shaping of the consciousness of various classes; capitalist,
>coordinators, and workers.
Based upon my experience, observation, and research, I highly doubt that college teachers get to do "the shaping of the consciousness of various classes" at all. Have you ever taught in any college? Too late for us to do much good or harm one way or another, by the time kids get to college, though the Right insists on overestimating the importance of college curricula. Kindergarten and primary school teachers may have a bit more of a chance to do "the shaping," but kindergarten teachers on the average are hardly paid living wages and in fact are among the most exploited wage workers.
The primary and perhaps only way in which teachers take part in "the shaping of the consciousness" is by taking part in grading, rather than by teaching this or that or teaching in this or that fashion. Whether to grade or not is not up to teachers.
>And academics are not in a class of their own. They are part of a
>same class as managers, not managers.
Words like "academics" and "managers," the way you use them, don't tell us much, as they bundle together GAs paid $800 a month and deans and provosts who are actually managers. What's the point of putting both deans and provosts on one hand and GAs, adjuncts, and professors on the other hand into the "coordinator" class between capital and labor? Of course, that's how _they_ want us to think, but that's not what we (leftists, broadly speaking) should argue.
>Coordinators need unions too - to defend them against capitalists.
>But it is not unknown for coordinator unions to act against the
>interests of workers; for example the AMA campaigns against Single
>Payer Health, and helps limit the number of people admitted to
>medical school.
Is the AMA a union? If so, by what standard? BTW, medical doctors (and lawyers, etc.) who have _private practices_ are petty producers, who are not in the same class as wage workers. The AMA and the like have reflected the interests of petty producers, though they might change in the future, as petty producers have begun to lose autonomy and become proletarianized. Just because becoming a sociology professor and becoming a medical doctor with private practice both take years of post-graduate education doesn't mean that they are necessarily in the same class.
Moreover, it is not just such petty-producer-dominated organizations as the AMA that act against the interest of the working class in general. Unions of wage workers may very well privilege their trade-union interests over the general interests of all the workers (e.g., by gunning for protectionism).
Below the most abstract level of analysis of the mode of production, we might possibly employ the following categorization:
(A) Capital (B) Petty Producers (professionals with private practices, peasants, self-employed shop-keepers, etc.), many of whom are increasingly proletarianized (C) the Working Class (be they employed or unemployed, better paid or worse paid than the average, with more or less autonomy than the average) (B') + (C') Capital's Hangers-on (tiny fractions of petty producers and wage workers whose labor _solely_ consists in extracting work from workers -- e.g., deans, provosts, union-busting lawyers and consultants, death squads, etc.)
(B) is marginal in number in G8 nations. Peasants in developing nations _are_ still numerically important, but many of them know where they stand in the big class picture and side with the working class, sometimes led by and sometimes leading the latter.
What you (or Parecon theorists) call "a coordinator class" is ill defined, and the bogus category ill serves class struggles, as it bundles together those whose labor _solely_ consists in extracting work from workers _and_ the workers and petty producers who are subject to them.
The reality (in contrast to what Parecon theorists have us believe) is that capital employs and dismisses a combination of tiny fractions of petty producers and the working class at its whim to discipline and repress if necessary the classes to which they belong. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>