[lbo-talk] The Neoliberalization Of Higher Educa tion: Whats Race Got To Do With It?

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Sun Nov 22 07:25:33 PST 2009


At 05:51 AM 11/22/2009, Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
>On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:27:41 -0500 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>writes:
> >
> > On Nov 21, 2009, at 9:23 PM, Miles Jackson wrote:
> >
> > > More people getting more formal education does not solve the
> > > problem; if Obama had his fondest wish granted and all U. S.
> > adults
> > > earned a college degree, we'd just have lots of low-paid janitors,
> >
> > > security guards, and restaurant workers with college degrees.
> >
> > And maybe a lot more pissed-off people? Isn't that part of what
> > brought down the Soviet Union and its EE clones?
>
>Wasn't it a deliberate policy in the Soviet bloc to
>produce a surplus of people with university degrees
>so they wouldn't have to pay them that they were
>paying skilled blue collar workers?
>
>Jim F.

furthermore, it's two different political contexts. In the u.s., there's a long literature on the way underemployed people and unemployed people end up blaming themselves for the situation, instead of blaming social structural factors: Ehrenreich's Bait and Switched, Katherine Newman's Falling from Grace, and I'm too lazy to dig out my reserch and look up the rest.

In the FSU, you had people who were made promises about a socialist utopia pissed b/c those promises didn't come true. In the u.s., you have people who are told that success in the workplace is completely based on your own hardwork and effort. and that also means that people in the workplace will then blame themselves for their own lack of advancement, their own ability to be recognized, their own inability to get a job commensurate with their education.

I watched it happen the other day when a guy I work with was complaining about being told he was too quiet and that's why he wasn't advanced; he said, "but i think you should work hard and they will just notice and advance you." And everyone, meaning well, jumped in to say yeah, it sucks, it's not right, but you gotta do what you gotta do. IOW, they helped him see that it was his own fault for not becoming less quiet. As authors in this literature point out, what's lacking is an organized movement or places where workers -- underemployed or not -- can turn to get political analyses of what goes on in their workplace or what goes on in unemployment counseling sessions -- where, as I've shown here before, you are continually blamed, as an individual, for your unemployment and underemployment. it's treated as in individual failing to be remedied by a heroic individualism.

As for it already going on, yeah: see the education and underemployment debates at the think tanks in the early-to-mid-nineties in which Jared Bernstein criticized Clinton's policy as the "field of dreams" approach. Create educated workers and the jobs will come. It's been goign on for a long time, and no one got pissed off in the first half of the nineties.

And what the heck is this crap about creating situations of misery for people -- unemployment, underemployment, whatever -- this flies in the face of the frequently lobbed argument that it's under conditions of prosperity that people get pissed and then join in organized struggles of a more lefty persuasion.

As Ehrenreich points out in Bait and Switched, what happens when there is nothing in place to channel that anger, people are prey to the rightwing elements that do organize that frustration and anger. In this case, conservative, pro-capitalist, xtian organization use the resentment of the un- and underemployed to fill their ranks and they do so by providing these folks with services that help them survive the landmines of the employment market.

It hardly makes sense to advocate such a strategy if there is nothing in place to shuttle that anger and resentment into a productive movement opposition to capitalism. Or to, at the very least, demonstrate the very solidarity we, as leftists, claim that we want to encourage.

This was the message of the film, Black Legion, which I wrote about the other day: these workers, feeling shunted to the side by the managerial capitalism that was taking the place of the foreman's empire, ended up turning to fascist supremacist groups. They were organized and offered an explanation to these people represented by Frank in the film. The only effective way of dealing with the resentment is to provide something similar, from a radical left analysis. ust hoping they'll get pissed off and become socialists seems like an approach destined to fail to me. We have decades of evidence of its failure.

shag



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