G'day Jim, Quoth you:
> The relationship between lords and serfs involves the direct > application of > force by the former against the latter to extort surplus-labor. That > doesn't > fit with academia well at all. (We do rely on the reserve army of > academic > labor, so that there is coercion of the common capitalist sort.) I'd've thought it depended rather more on the failure of the latter (99% of the population) to apply direct force on the former. > >However, the administrators -- who > _are_ bureaucrats -- and the corporate types are pushing to make the > system > more bureacractic.< And are rapidly succeeding. This they were managing well enough when they were relatively few. Now they are many. Having seen what the apparat did to the Soviet Union, we lefties in the triumphant 'west' have but to wait, I suspect - as this 'unproductive labour' cohort costs society more and more - first as immediate soaker-up of social wealth and then as complete misdiagnostician, misprognostician and mistreater of its ever expanding object (ie domesticating ever more space, ever more time and ever more of human life by way of its neat, universal abstract categories and procedures, tendentious data sets and besuited enforcers). I think there's a limit, at which the whole thing comes crashing down. Even if it could be done, we create a global monoculture - and, as we (should) know, a monoculture needs only a potato blight to make it look silly. Democracy is so important precisely because it places something higher on the pecking order than the bureaucrat, I reckon. More variation over space, more flexibility, and more potential to reflect qualitative rather than purely quantitative developments. And more responsive to the specifically actual rather than the universalised abstract category into which the specifically actual happens to fall. And less of this busy-body bloody surveillance shit that's doubtlessly blocking up data bases in all sorts of white-walled, potted-palm-strewn, No-bloody-Smoking 'work stations'... and demanding the employment of yet more potentially useful human beings ... Er, that wasn't a criticism of bureaucrats - there being bounded tasks and challenges for which they are no doubt just the thing. Rather it was one of the very idea of global bureaucracy - a future capital seems as bound to impose upon us as the nomenklatura were. So much for Hayek and his precious bloody price mechanism (sorry, Justin) ... and so much for Lenin and his precious bloody democratic centralism (sorry, Charles). Both institutions would turn the rightful subjects of history into the objects of policy - in the former case because political power is drawn to an ever concentrating black hole of economic power, and in the latter because economic power is drawn to an ever concentrating black hole of political power. The consequent elites need bureaucracy to maintain and optimise these convergences - but bureaucracy, like capital, must expand to survive, must domesticate ever more to its system, and there's just too much stuff out there ... Yours inefficiently, chaotically, democratically and socialistically, Rob.
