[PEN-L:2015] Re: (c)lass position of professors

[knoWWare@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Tom Walker)]

I love the way Terry McDonough said that:

>Academia retains a
>guild structure and along with the mafia and the Catholic Church is
>one of the few relatively uncontaminated feudal institutions still
>viable within the twentieth century capitalist social formation.

I would like to agree with what Terry said simply for its eloquence of
expression. However, Blair Sandler's and Jerry Levy's points make it clear
that the analogy doesn't hold. I still want to account for why I found
Terry's comment so appealing.

It might be useful to recall a distinction that Marx made between the
*formal* and *real* subsumption of labour under capital within manufacturing
and machine production, respectively. One could describe academic labour as
being "formally subsumed" under capitalist relations of production and still
hold that the academic labour process itself (including guild-like methods
of recruitment and promotion) has not yet been transformed into a "properly
capitalist" labour process.

This whole discussion brings to mind a point about the "relations of
production" that is terribly easy to overlook and has severe political
consequences. It's tempting to think of relations of production as simply
something that happens on the "shopfloor" -- i.e. relations between workers
and bosses. But relations of production encompass hierarchical, market and
socialization factors. The "shopfloor" might best be thought of as the place
in a Venn diagram (three overlapping but non-concentric circles) where the
three "spheres" intersect. But the three spheres also take up a lot of
non-shopfloor space (where they don't intersect). I think this is why there
is such a huge difference between objective "class position" and subjective
"class consciousness".

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"Only in mediocre art does life unfold as fate." -- Michael Ignatieff

Tom Walker
knoWWare Communications
http://mindlink.net/knowware/