As to the more specific point about collusion: in my experience the self-consciousness of "progressive" professors is largely limited to posturing.
Taking correct positions and denouncing the right things (combined with writing checks to elect Obama) establishes one's credentials. All of this is largely divorced from any self-critical examination of the conditions of production of one's own position. This shows up most clearly in the invisibility of the army of adjunct faculty at my and other campuses - the people whose exploited labor makes my own position as a relatively privileged, tenured professor possible.
This refusal to understand the university as a site of production with its own conditions of reproduction is mirrored in the Obama-mania that overtook campuses (by the end of the campaign, Obama got more contributions from universities than even the financial sector). Obama talked like one of us, after all, so all we had to do was elect him and everything would be good. This aspect-blindness of the privileged left, rather than conscious collusion, helps explain how, at the end of the day, pwogs end up encasing their critique within rigid limits that leave their own privilege unexamined and, incidentally, preserve the bases of the reproduction of capitalism.
----- Original Message ---- From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tue, December 28, 2010 10:00:18 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Inside job
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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