Capitalism and Your University Education
Marxist Collective At Syracuse University
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • November 13-27, 1991 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1, No. 2 (pp. 6-7,15) | ||
| • August 26, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
In order to understand the purposes and structure of any social institution, it is necessary to understand the society which produces and supports it. The purposes served by an institution are not merely its own but are also broader social purposes. Furthermore, the structure of any institution tends to reflect the structure of social relations in society as a whole. In order to understand the university in capitalist society, then, we must understand capitalism, as an economic and social system. In this article, we will outline the general features of the capitalist system, and then show how they are connected to the institution of the university.
There are three main aspects of the capitalist economic system. First, capitalism is characterized by generalized commodity production. That is, the social division of labor has become so extensive under capitalism that the vast majority of the products of human labor are produced, not to be used by the producer, but for the purpose of being exchanged for other products (and ultimately for money).
Second, capitalism is characterized by the class division between capitalists and workers. In other words, the means of production in capitalist society (the factories, technology, scientific knowledge, etc., required for production) are owned and controlled by a small minority of people who also appropriate the profits of their operation. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the population in capitalist society consists of those who own no private property, and therefore have no way to earn a living other than to sell their capacity to labor to some member of the capitalist class.
Third, capitalism is characterized by reproduction on an increasingly expanded scale; to put it another way, capitalism must grow if it is to continue. It must constantly find more labor power to exploit, and it must constantly find more human needs that can be transformed into needs met by commodity production and exchange.
Finally, the political relations in capitalist society follow from its economic structure. The capitalist state exists to protect private property relations: first, by preventing the exploited and oppressed from challenging the systematic basis of their exploitation and oppression; second, by protecting capitalists from the consequences of their own actions and of the system itself, through the maintenance of a monetary and credit system, and a system of government spending that “stabilizes” the capitalist system for the corporations.
Capitalism has developed into a global system in an uneven and combined fashion as a result of contradictions within the capitalist mode of production itself. Because of the anarchic and competitive structure of capitalist market relations, the drive for profit necessarily sets one company, one region, one part of the world in opposition to others. One section (i.e., the “advanced” or “developed” one) of the global capitalist economy gains precisely through its contrast with and advantage over other (less “advanced” and “developed”) sections.
Thus, the “First” and “Third” worlds are not merely “developed” and “underdeveloped” countries which happen to be contiguous and contemporaneous. Rather, the “First World” IS the “First World” BECAUSE of the “underdevelopment” of the “Third World. The contradictory (and irrational) nature of this situation is demonstrated by the fact that “overproduction” in the First World (for example, of food) is combined with “underconsumption (i.e., hunger and starvation) in the “Third World”.
This unevenness also applies to the fields of knowledge and ideology production. It is not a coincidence, for example, that while scientists in the academy debate the origins, physical structure, and possible future development of the universe, a substantial number of Americans continue to believe in “creationism”, flatly rejecting the same work going on in the academy. This situation is a result of the isolation of the academy, its alienation and separation from other areas of material life.
This separation and alienation is itself a consequence of the university‘s function as the site at which the resources and labor necessary for the production of knowledge have been concentrated, placed under the control of a small elite, and subordinated to the economic and political ends of the capitalist class. In other words, as we indicated earlier, the university reflects the structure of capitalist society.
It produces the advanced scientific and technological knowledges required for late capitalist production, as well as the skilled labor power and managerial functionaries needed to run the production apparatus. It also, as we shall see in a little while, produces the kind of ideological domination required for the maintenance of class rule. In addition, the very separation of knowledge production from other sites in culture aids capitalist domination.
To the extent that the academic scientist and creationist meet, they meet as adversaries, each having something at stake which is threatened by the other. This “struggle” prevents them from perceiving interests which they might have in common: for example, those resulting from their common exploitation by and subordination to capitalist and imperialist interests.
The political significance of the unevenness of the capitalist system is enormous. First of all, the contradictions of the capitalist system are more intense, concentrated and visible at some social sites than at others. It is therefore at such sites that political eruptions are most likely to take place.
Second, it means that within the global order, and within particular countries, political opposition is not only more likely to exist, but to be more informed and effective at some social sites than at others. We think that the university is such a site, as we will now try to demonstrate.
The university has become, almost exclusively, the predominant site of knowledge production in advanced capitalist countries today. The “independent” inventor, social critic, radical intellectual, novelist, and so on hardly exist today. These functions have become almost entirely dependent upon the academy for any kind of economic, institutional, and intellectual support. In short, the university exercises a virtual monopoly on and over the production of theoretical and scientific knowledges.
This situation has the effect of making the production of these knowledges far easier to regulate and control. It also, as we suggested above, serves to “cordon off” and isolate intellectual work from society as a whole and thereby prevent intellectual work from being subordinated to the collective needs of society. i.e., from any democratic function.
However, at the same time, this concentration of knowledge production transforms the university itself into a heterogeneous and contradictory arena of ideological conflict. It is a place where the greatest demands for conformity — i.e. learning to submit oneself to the authoritarian structures inherent in capitalist institutions and to never question the political implications of the knowledges produced at the university — compete with emancipatory discourses such as feminism, Marxism, gay and lesbian liberation, and black liberation.
The university, then, rather than an “ivory tower,” place of escape for speculation and personal “growth,” is in fact a microcosm of social struggles in which the entire society is implicated.
In fact, it is the contradiction between the dominant ideology of the academy as a “neutral” institution and its real functioning in the service of the ruling class which lies behind the current “controversy” over so-called “political correctness.” What disturbs conservatives and dominant interests is that radical intellectuals uncover the mendacity of the university‘s claims to serve the “common good.” Such revelations are potentially dangerous to those interests which actually depend upon the work done in the academy for the perpetuation of their rule.
It is in relation to this particular place of the university, and intellectual work in capitalist culture today, that we urge students and instructors to take the responsibility of political and intellectual leadership in struggles for social change. Even as the “finishing touches” are being made in the manufacturing of students as “productive” and “obedient” subjects, they can not only be “exposed to” radical and oppositional modes of knowledge but learn how to participate and enable others to participate in the construction and dissemination of emancipatory forms of theory and practice. They can intervene in the (re)production of ideology, culture, and social relations and thereby contribute to the collective struggle to transform society.
We would now like to elaborate upon this argument in relation to the university as a site of knowledge production. One mode of political intervention is, of course, through participation in politically progressive and oppositional organizations: socialist, feminist, gay and lesbian, and black liberationist groups. This work is absolutely necessary and students should participate as much as they are able to in these groups.
No less indispensable is the work of theoretical activity and ideological struggle, of actively contesting dominant modes of thought and models of interpretation which reproduce the “common sense” upon which bourgeois ideological domination rests.
Bourgeois thought is dominated by what Marxist philosopher George Lukács termed “reification”. What this means is that objects, rather than understood as part of broader processes which unite and interrelate them all, are viewed as separate and autonomous, frozen and fixed “things”, with no necessary or discernable connections between them. Furthermore, these “things,” including “knowledges,” often seem to have little relationship to human needs and practices — they appear as alien and are experienced as alienating, rather than as the product of human practice and produced for the realization of some human purposes.
Lukács saw the division of labor within the factory (with its absolute differentiation of tasks, and the subordination of each individual worker to a broader process over which she has no control and of which she has no comprehension) as both the model and one of the main determinants of reification. The factory division of labor, of course, reflects conditions of life in capitalist society as a whole. Our existence under such conditions is “distributed” among a wide variety of institutions and activities which seem to have no connection and which appear to stand “above us” and “against us,” and to be irrelevant to our needs and our capacities. This whole division of labor is reflected and reproduced in the ideological world of capitalism.
The division of labor, and intellectual activity in general, within the university corresponds precisely to the logic of reification. Economics, political science, literature, for example, appear to be “inherently” separate and autonomous disciplines. No need is felt to integrate them within an understanding of society as a whole. Furthermore, the objects of study which correspond to these disciplines are treated mechanistically and reductively. Thus, sociologists can speak about “deviance”, without having to question the “norms” which are being “deviated” from; psychologists can speak about “learning” as if it were detached from whatever material is actually being learned; and political scientists can theorize “power” and “interests” without inquiring into those material and historical relations which ground these categories.
There are two main effects of reification. The first is the absolute separation between theoretical knowledge and actual practice. Last year, in an interview in Newsweek, Milovan Djilas argued that with the “death of Communism”, Marxist theory will in the future be relegated to the university, along with all other political theories. For a bourgeois thinker such as Djilas, it seems only “natural” that “politics” can be practiced without any political theory.
American leaders, with their emphasis on “pragmatic” politics and “competence” (without “ideology”), are, of course, in full agreement with this conception: rarely, if ever, do they find it necessary to account for their actions theoretically. However, in the vacuum left open by this eclectic “anti-ideological” stance, there rushes the actual correspondence between the needs of dominant interest groups and political practice. In other words, the emphasis on running “things” well excludes the question—which is necessarily an ideological one—of in whose interests these things are being “run” for in the first place.
Second, reification serves to reproduce, in individuals, a highly fragmented consciousness. Systematic thinking is made impossible. The division of labor in the university is reflected in the inability of the majority of citizens to make connections between different spheres of activity. So the “drug problem” can be isolated and thought of separately from the “crime problem”, the “S & L problem”, the “race problem”, the “urban problem” and other neatly categorized problems. Only the most local and limited change or intervention can therefore be imagined, and this only on the condition that the foundation of the whole not be questioned. As Lukács observed, a partial rationality (the conscientious and detailed “analysis” of seemingly separate “problems”) coexists with and reproduces an irrationality of the whole, a whole which appears uncontrollable and incomprehensible.
The bourgeois academy is grounded in this contradiction. On the one hand, this academy is committed to rational discussion and debate. On the other hand, what the majority of those located within the academy rarely comprehend is the irrationality of the university‘s basis in class exploitation and domination and in commodity production and exchange (the material roots of reification). It is this which subjects knowledge,no less than other products of labor, to the logic of exploitation and the market. In other words, the rationality practiced by academics is almost invariably of a partial kind; a kind that is interested in its own sphere of “problems”, but does not ask how these problems get formulated or whose interests the “solutions” which are found are going to serve.
It is not difficult to understand the reason for this blindness. In order to fulfill their commitment to rationality—of a general, not a partial and contradictory type—those who work in the academy would have to work towards its abolition in striving to abolish the conditions on which its real irrationality depends. That is, with the elimination of class exploitation, the generalized division between intellectual and manual labor will also be eliminated.
In other words, the self-interest of the academic intellectual, as a middle class “manager” in capitalist society is placed in contradiction with the ideological premises which legitimate that self- interest— the commitment to the expansion of rationality. Of course, the hierarchical and authoritarian structure of the university supports the self-interest of the academic (while contradicting it at points as well). The academic has a “right” to “academic freedom” as long as he/she doesn‘t ask too many questions about the anti- democratic and autocratic mode of decision making (who has elected the board of trustees, for example?). In this way and through academic claims to “impartiality the struggle which results from the contradiction between two modes of rationality—one partial and idealist, the other general, materialist and emancipatory — is concealed.
It does not at all follow from this critique that the university, or the commitment to rational discourse, should be abandoned. This could hardly be the case for those of us committed not merely to truly rational discourse, but to the possibility of a rational society in which human means correspond to human ends, human needs to human capacities, and in which social relations are subject to conscious, collective and democratic determination.
What does follow, though, is that the putative function of the university must be transformed, in actuality, into its general social function. This is what we mean by the abolition of the university: its integration into “society” as a whole, along with the elimination of one of the most pernicious forms of the division of labor—that between intellectual and manual labor.
Such a result can only be the result of a protracted political struggle: both practical struggle, to transform social conditions, and ideological struggle, to transform consciousness. Ideological struggle is necessary in order to contest the effects of reification, both in “advanced” theory and in the consciousness of oppressed and exploited groups. It is this latter function which constitutes the primary responsibility of academic intellectuals. It involves a critique of reified forms of thought through a theoretical grounding of social practices and forms of consciousness in the totality of social relations, social struggle, and historical transformation.
To put it another way, academic intellectuals must ask (and students can pressure them to ask) questions about the purposes towards which the knowledges they are producing are being put. Which type of social arrangements is being advanced and what type are being blocked by the knowledge produced in this classroom, in the laboratory, at this university?
Finally, ideological struggle must be united with practical struggles at all sites and levels of the social order. This becomes possible given two conditions: first, that intellectuals take struggles for social transformation as their starting point in theory; second, that intellectuals make use of the academy to produce the most powerful theoretical discourses, those which can usefully and effectively transform practical struggles. As Marx once said, the educator must him/herself be educated.
However, as long as we live in a society in which some people have access to education at the expense of others, it remains the responsibility of those who are educated to transform their knowledge into something useful and enabling for those by whose labor and deprivation such education depends upon. . That is, the “educated” must become “educators”, and help to make it possible for all people, someday, to participate in the production of knowledge, and the work of constructing social relations.
For students, there is one excellent place to begin. Ask your instructors to take responsibility for the knowledges they are providing you. Are they using their position as teachers to critique capitalist social relations, or to “instruct” students in the art of submitting to these relations? If they claim to be “neutral” about “politics”, or to consider these questions irrelevant, you might ask them how, in such a sharply divided society, any one can claim to be “neutral”—especially someone in such a position of authority and responsibility.
Whose interests are served by this “neutrality”? If you are told that these questions are “interesting”, but “outside” of the topic of discussion, you can always ask for a reasonable accounting of the relations between “inside” and “outside”—that is, some things must always be excluded, but this should be determined according to the general aims of the course, including its social and political aims.
So, if the instructor considers one thing more important than another, he should account for why he believes this to be the case? What purpose is served by addressing one particular issue and not some other? Whose interests are brought to the center and whose are marginalized?
Try not to allow yourself to be intimidated, either by the instructor or other students, who might “complain” that you are “wasting their time.” Such “complaints” are common tactics used by those in authority to prevent their authority from being questioned, to silence and marginalize opposition. Questioning the way in which social institutions are used, whether they are used to oppress or emancipate is not only not a waste of time but essential to the project of ending authoritarian and oppressive social relations and building a more humane and rational society.
For example, in a political science class, ask whether the instructor considers politics to be connected to economics? If so, how—in particular, how can there be political democracy with class domination? What implications follow from this conclusion—how does this course take these conclusions into account? If there is no connection, how is that possible, how did they get separated?
If these kinds of questions are urgent, in your opinion, you must be patient and keep trying — political intervention in the classroom, like any other activity, takes practice; especially for those raised in a society which goes out of its way to encourage conformity and discourage independent and critical thinking.
