[lbo-talk] Inside job

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Dec 28 08:00:18 PST 2010


Chuck Grimes: " Of course there was collusion between captial, government, and education systems, with capital in the position to dictate terms. How could there not be."

This is either totally and irredeemably wrong, or Chuck is guilty of misusing the English language when h speaks of "collusion." The word makes an empirical claim or it is entirely empty, even deceptive. And how can one make an empirical claim about three abstractions. "Capital" is not an agent; government is not an agent; the education system is not an agent. None of these entities can enter a room, check, for concealed microphones, then lay out a plan of action for the management of 300, 000 , 000 people. Individual persons with names and addresses _collude_.

Moreover, with all the endless complaints on this list about academicians S0oons Marxism list from which it emerged), no one has ever offered one shred of empirical evidence for the existence of any harmony, let alone self-conscious collusion, among on the part of any sizeable number of professors, the vast number of whom are simply, like everyone else, trying to earn a living without understanding what the conditions are that control that effort.

Until all traces of moralism (making moral judgments; blaming; judging) are eliminated from discussions of education and scholarship in the u.s. there will be no progress whatever in our understanding of how that huge institution (not a capitalist institution but vital to to capitalism*) actually works, how it both serves and threatens capitalist processes as well as the self-conscious aims of particular capitalists and of particular state officials.

My suggestion for a beginning point in analyzing the way in which teachers at all levels as well as scholars contribute to capitalist hegemony is by inculcating in a million ways the superstition that capitalism is evil rather than history.

Carrol



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