[PEN-L:32706] Re: exploiting the intelligentsia

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Gene wrote about the sophisticated financing that allows Harvard to
maintain its position as a preeminent business while apparently offering
charity.

and 

At 02/12/02 08:02 -0800, Johan wrote:

> >When will the vast armies of 
> >the working intelligentsia see the bigger picture on
> >a world scale?
>
> Having recently left the academic sanctum - with
> astronomic debts and tiny prospects of finding work, I
> have some thoughts on the subject. 
> Tutition fees and student debt is necessary. Not to
> pay for education, but to keep the pecunary mindset in
> place in an expanding population that - for most of
> their lifes - are redundent to production and 
> labourmarket relations. Student revolts in the 60's
> was possible thanks to stundents not beeing mindlocked
> by debt and insecurity in future employment. Had the
> financial security remained with todays increase om
> proportion of students, social stability would have
> been in trouble. Instead students are disciplined by
> fear of indebted unemployment and promises of entering
> the middle class. When those hopes are finally
> frustrated, things will start to happen. From what I
> know, radicals in muslim third world countries (where
> the false promises have been proved wrong much
> quicker) are often disappointed and redundant
> ex-students. Question is, how can frustration be
> channeled into a positive force against capitalism,
> and not destructively into fascism or religious
> fanatism?
>
> /Johan

I think your comments are eloquent. Particularly about how the academic
world has been more closely tied into the capitalist world of commodity
exchange, in which the well-educated wage slave has no option but to try
to sell your labour power,  

and

your thought-provoking comments about the newly educated intelligentsia
turning in islamic countries to radical and even reactionary
solutions.

The only thing I would question is your perception of being unemployable.
I assume you are writing from a capitalist country. The subjective
experience after leaving university is that the world of modern
capitalist production is quite alien to the values you have been taught.
But the paradox is that modern advanced capitalism needs a highly
educated workforce, able to work sensitively and flexibly to produce
operationalised outcomes more often in the form of services rather than
material commodities. You have already demonstrated enough insight and
flexible irony, to be good at that, if you could only have conviction in
the importance of increasing the market share of enterprise A versus
enterprise B and feign some team spirit until you are organised up into a
completely different team.

Despite some slowing of economic expansion, the western economies have
continued to maintain economic circulation despite a lower and lower
proportion of the economy devoted to manufacture. Whereas in the
countries on the periphery of the capitalist/imperialist centres of
economic gravity, like the islamic countries or latin america, the
contradictions of capitalism bite deeper, and the intellectually
privileged intelligentsia suffer badly and are in contact with other
classes and strata who suffer badly. I do not want to sound
unsympathetic, but the working intelligentsia suffer more in the less
developed countries than the more developed countries. The problem is how
to help all workers by brain (as well as by hand) realise in all
countries that the system is a juggernaut, that produces tremendous gains
in technical productivity, while lives are mangled beneath its
wheels.

Chris Burford

London