Hi all,
I'm stealing this text which was recently posted on the Nettime email list by
Patrick Lichty. And I thought, why should they get the more detailed posts?
I know Patrick will forgive me ;-)
Wishing all well. Marc
The New Metropolis: The Neoliberal/vectoral Carrots, labor and education. By
Patrick Lichty...
I’ve been sitting down here from my science fiction scenario perch in the
Middle East, and see the following in my old home, the US, but see echoes in
Europe as well. There is a cultural scaffold unfolding regarding education,
labour, and capital that concerns me greatly, and most of the commentary I see
is amazingly short term,a nd I would like to connect some dots for a longer
term scenario.
Regarding education, I have seen devaluation of academic labor and revaluation
of relatively unskilled labour. This week, there was furor about University of
Illinois Carbondale recruiting “volunteer” adjuncts to teach seminars, single
classes for up to three years for Free. According to the Chancellor’s office,
my understanding was that this was a chance to get teaching experience before
becoming PAID adjuncts. Being that getting a PhD often entails many tens of
thousands of dollars to get to the point of being a graduate, the idea of
allowing “free” adjunct labour is especially repugnant when these should be
paid teaching assistantshipsor junior adjunct positions. In no way should this
sort of arrangement be tolerated – as it reminds me of the common idea given to
artists of gratis “exposure”
Exploitative vectoral extraction of value is exactly what it looks like. Every
time.
On the other side of the educational fence, news stories like the spurious Fox
News report that put forth an invective about student being passed on, not
studying, and if they engage, being indoctrinated with Left Wing values that go
against the values that their parents had instilled them with (perhaps from Fox
News…) Additionally, Gross and Marcus’ recent piece on NPR gives a strange
mirror from the more progressive side – that higher-paying trades are begging
while high schoolers are being sold questionable futures through a college
education.
I see this as a tremendously fraught situation where an economic incentive is
given to enter trades and not enter the university system, which might be a
backhanded way for the working class (re: Fox News audience) to be enticed once
again not to enter an environment that could run afoul of the ontological
regime of neoliberalism. While I am not against a good living for anyone,
there was a time when higher education was about creating the citizen of a
liberal society (as such, not in the pejorative political term), and not purely
in the creation of Labor (i.e. “getting a job”).
Being that total U.S. student debt stands at 1.4 trillion Dollars (Dr. Evil
pinky pointed to mouth), the shift from federal support to private loans while
administrative costs has gotten much higher is something to consider. The
cost of higher education in North America, and especially the USA, has become
onerous, and driven students increasingly into the strictly utilitarian camp.
Meanwhile, in the workforce, these trades might be extant, but on the left
hand, jobs are either being replaced by automation, AI, or offered at fast-food
wages.
The issue here is forcing a workforce to retrain at increasingly higher cost
while the necessity for retraining increases (with the onus of paying for
retraining being largely on the worker), where even fast food jobs are being
replaced by automation, and the concentration of wealth continues to increase
at exponential rates.
Secondly, the notion of Basic Universal Income, I still hold to my argument
with Stanley Aronowitz’ regarding his 1990’s book, The Jobless Future, in that
a large percentage of individuals, given the chance to be independent of paid
labour, that the gainfully unemployed will take to ideas of enlightened
self-interest, where my experience in Eastern Ohio in the USA would be to
engage in less than gainful activities, not be involved in healthy behavior,
and so on. But on the other hand, this is not that I am supporting work-fare
programs either, as they are intrinsically demeaning as they place difficult
work requirements for little money who need to be searching for better jobs
with that time.
But on the other hand, what if BMI is merely a strategy for vectoral extraction
for consumer spending from the public sector while concentrating that wealth in
the hands of the automators until… … … the reserves of capital are gone.
This is, as I see it a scenario in at least the USA in 15-30 years. At this
time, I see an utter collapse of Western economic stability, shifting into
Asian markets, or a huge redistribution of wealth, heralding an economic
“Rebuilding of New Zion” after the reset of the Economic Mattix.
However, as Morpheus once said, “What is the matrix? Control.” Except in this
case, instead of the Duracell battery (a historical stroke of brand placement
genius), it is a dollar a shekel, a euro, to mirror the classic movie Network’s
“Forces of Nature” speech.
Even with the rise of cryptocurrency, we have seen the regimes of traditional
economic power rise to curtail the more anarchist economic forces. Forces of
nature, indeed.
From all this, adding in peak oil, Asian economic stresses, and so on that I
have not even begun mention, I see a coming crisis in economic and intellectual
capital as the vectoral class continue to siphon value from the highest perch,
tell the masses that education isn’t worth it (maybe except for their children)
while the floor on valuation of labour gets dropped ever further.
It’s from this dire molecule that I applaud things like the Pirate Party, the
MoneyLab intitatives, and I call for an overall need for the political will for
the reinvestment in academia as a whole, as quaint as that sounds. It may be
quaint, as I see this from my position in the Middle East, I see no quick short
term solutions, and as capital continues to increase at the highest levels, the
necessary correction becomes more painful with each passing year.
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