universities under attack (in britain as elsewhere)

Keith Thomas in the LRB:

Advanced study and research are essential attributes of a university and some of that research will have vital social and industrial applications. But that is not its primary purpose, which is to enhance our knowledge and understanding, whether of the physical world or of human nature and all forms of human activity in the present and the past. For centuries, universities have existed to transmit and reinterpret the cultural and intellectual inheritance, and to provide a space where speculative thought can be freely pursued without regard to its financial value. In a free and democratic society it is essential that that space is preserved.

Yes, the model of the university has been a residuum of the middle ages, a feudal formation changed by its recontextualization in later capitalism. But now it is even later for capitalism. While I share the intent to resist the commodification of the university, I suspect we have to develop something new, rather than simply try to preserve the old frame for cultural transmission, transformation, and creation.

Then there's Brian Holmes on the financialization of the university, arguing that "most of US universities have become systemically corrupt --that is, captured by interest groups - in the course of the neoliberal period, essentially since the passage of the Bayh-Dohl act in 1980 which reengineered the conditions under which knowledge is patented and sold by the intellectual property departments"; and raising "questions about the "public" nature of education where undergraduate tuition pays for the administrative execs, real-estate deals, six-figure professors and corporate labs." Although

"in an era where the critique of public institutions is carried on by the corporate class, the point is not to destroy those institutions .... However, what has actually happened in the UC system and in many other cases . . . is not so much the destruction as the appropriation and remodeling of those formerly public institutions. The ground has already changed beneath our feet. So to worry about whether we are losing the Enlightenment, at this point when the universities massively manufacture, not only neoliberal subjectivities but also neoliberal policy and technology, is . . . to be exactly the kind of humanist that the Frankfurt School thinkers would have excoriated for being unable to see that - how did Adorno put it? - "the whole is the untrue." "To defend the university as it is, means defending a highly advanced state of corruption."

no government better than any government

Or, the value of continuing to spend, from John Lanchester in LRB:

Quarterly GDP data don’t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic gloom. Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that, if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium doesn’t have a government. Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any existing government.

marx's recent popularity

Facts for Working People, "Capitalist Class Worried about Marx's Popularity" (via Links):

Coy attacks Marx through his followers, who were some of the 20th century’s worst “mass murderers”. He starts with Lenin, who was a Marxist but Coy gives no examples of mass murder on Lenin’s part. He cites Mao who was not a Marxist, certainly not in practice. The next Marx follower is Pol Pot and what he has to do with Marxism heavens knows; and lastly Stalin, who may have had Lenin poisoned, murdered all the Marxists in the leadership of the Russian revolution and sent hundreds of thousands more to the gulag and had already abandoned any pretense to Marxist ideas or way of looking at the world except in name only. Coy's point here is to scare us, not educate us which shows how weak his position is. He wants us to associate Marx with dictatorship and the denial of basic democratic rights that Marx, and those who agree with him have fought for throughout recent history against fierce resistance from people like the economic editor of Business Week and the magazine's billionaire owner.

It's like saying that christianity is obviously bogus because look at the Inquisition.

It's an ad hominem argument, or something, not about Marx (or Xst) but about his followers.

But Louis Proyect on Bourgeois Pundits not getting Marx right anyway, either (via pink scare).

That is something that bourgeois economists can’t seem to get their head around. It is not just that the masses lack consumption power; it is that the “revolutionization” of the means of production continues to replace living labor with dead labor to the point that more and more workers either become unemployed or underemployed. That is a dilemma that no amount of “helicopter drops of money” can solve.

state murder

"What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared. For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him, and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life." - Albert Camus "Reflections on the Guillotine" 1957.

The Waste Land

 You can find America’s future in blueprints minted in business-funded think tanks 30 to 40 years ago at the dawn of the neo-liberal age: destruction of organized labor; attrition of the social safety net; attrition of government regulation; a war on the poor, fought without mercy at every level. Last year the New York police stopped and questioned 601,055 people, predominantly blacks and Hispanics, and the numbers were up 13 per cent for the first six months of this year.

(Alexander Cockburn in the current counterpunch)

art, life, imitation

In Steig Larsson's Millennium novels (The Girl Who... series), the Swedish government gives a bunch of crazy violent misogynists a free pass to abuse women and girls, because the misogynists provide useful information to the so-called "intelligence" services. I thought this was a bit over the top, as a plot point. But maybe not. Turns out, some of the informants and provocateurs the FBI has been using to entrap supposed terrorists have been in return getting away with domestic violence. E.g.,

The charges had come about because of a 23-year-old Yemeni clerk named Abbas al-Saidi, who'd been a police informant since he was 16. The fbi helped bail him out when he was in jail facing charges of assaulting his girlfriend.

education in capitalist societies

From pink scare:

"We have needs beyond the needs to consume and these aren't recognized by capitalism. We have a need, for example, to develop and exercise our talents. When our capacities lie unused, they don't enjoy the zest for life that comes from having one's capacities flourish. People are able to develop themselves only when they get good education. But in a capitalist society, the education of children is threatened by those who would contort education to fit the narrow demands of the labor market.

The ruling class wants education to be geared toward restoring profitability to the system. It's dangerous to educate the young too much, because they will become cultivated people who are likely to be less satisfied with the low-paying jobs the market offers them. This might create aspirations that capitalism can't match. This, for obvious reasons, is dangerous for the ruling class. People must be "educated to know their place".

The state is trying to fashion individuals who will be willing sellers of low-grade labor power. It is deliberately underdeveloping large sectors of the population. The elites think that it's dangerous to give the masses too much education. It's hard to imagine a more undemocratic approach to education. There's a lot of talent in almost every human being. But in a lot of cases that talent goes undeveloped, because people lack the time, energy, resources and facilities to develop it. Throughout history, only a leisured minority has enjoyed this fully on the backs of the toiling majority. This should no longer continue to be the case. We have superb technology to restrict toil. Capitalism doesn't use that technology in a liberating way; it uses it to confine people to largely unfulfilling work and it shrinks from providing the enriching education that the technology makes possible."

-G.A. Cohen, "Against Capitalism"