Re: <nettime> Another insult of the 1 percent: everybody does it!

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 05/10/2012 03:23 AM, Dan S. Wang wrote:

> My friend at Yahoo, a senior engineer, tells me that his co-workers are in a
> lather. Their CEO, known for a leadership style, reorganization strategy,
> and corporate housecleaning method akin to swinging a double-headed axe
> blindfolded, apologized twice last week for having made the mistake not of
> lying, but of including an ³inadvertent² false credential on his resume:
> that he had earned an undergraduate degree in computer science when in fact
> he hadn¹t, and had only a degree in accounting.
A real CEO! What Veblen would've called a "business entreprenuer." 
That's a class whose function, with regard to the engineers, is making 
profit out of them by any means necessary, most often through what 
Veblen called the *sabotage* of productivity in order to maintain market 
prices and profitability. Check out the little book he wrote in the wake 
of the Russian revolution, during the 1919-1920 recession and the great 
wave of strikes that accompanied it:
http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/veblen/Engineers.pdf

Veblen, like OWS, was a genius at inventing new terminology for Marxist 
concepts so they could be smuggled into the United States.
> Neutrality? Complexity? No. The question is this: how does one group of
> people make another group of people do something that they really 
> don¹t want to do?
That is the political question. The neutrality comes in when 
intellectuals, whose job it is to formulate political questions, prefer 
instead to retreat into a consensus which they falsely believe will 
protect their own positions form the arbitrary will of... guess who? 
Another millionaire of the 1 percent.
You're right to take this seemingly trivial case as an example, because 
at this point the attack is not only on the poor and marginalized, 
who've been treated to quite brutal aggression since Reagan, but now 
also on the middle classes, whose secular project of credentialization 
as a key to a stable and rule-governed meritocracy is just being trashed.
In this way you can see that the current attack on the universities is 
not just a caste issue for academics, it's a societal issue. The 
structure of society based on distinct professional fields defined and 
guarded by credentials is useless for the business entrepreneurs. The 
real question, imo, is not how to defend professional status but rather 
how to transform it into something that can have a positive social 
function for everyone. So instead of getting a degree to carve out a 
protected niche in the economy, you would get both a degree and a 
profession in order to contribute to a greater good.
Sounds like sheer naivete to the cynics, I know, but wait for one degree 
more of civilizational collapse and these questions will start to have 
immense practical value.
A while ago I read an excellent book by Scott Lash and John Urry, surely 
the best thing either of them ever wrote, called The End of Organized 
Capitalism (1987). It has a very detailed historical treatment of the 
formation of professional classes via education in the US and in various 
European nation-states in the early 20th century. The reason Veblen 
addressed the engineers, rather than the proletariat, is because the 
United States in particular - for better and for worse - formed such an 
extensive range of "middle class" positions.
I'll leave it to Eric Olin Wright to suss who is exactly where in this 
famous middle class, but let's say it's not entirely one-dimensional. 
The attacks on professional privileges are one of the drivers of the 
Wisconsin movements and indeed, of Occupy, which is deeply inhabited by 
the figure of the "graduate without a future," unable to get the job 
s/he is credentialed and indebted for. The shift from an instinctively 
defensive posture into a consciously transformational one is at the 
heart of any chance to make something positive and progressive out of 
the current political moment.
all the best, Brian


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