File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-23.012, message 38


Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 21:35:12 -0500
From: Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu (Yoshie Furuhashi)
Subject: Re: M-I: Academic Marxism


Will Brown wrote:
> Returning to a material analysis, I am still not clear from reading your
>[Andrew's] text if you believe
> surplus value is extracted from university academics or not.

Though Will's question is directed to Andrew, let me put in my two cents. I
think it is impossible to see the workings of the law of value in the kinds
of labor academics perform. So I don't think we, including low or no waged
grad student employees, can say that surplus value is extracted from us.
Andrew's post doesn't make this point clearly, but the products--both
tangible and intangible--of academic labor are not sold directly as
commodities. It is tempting to make the kind of analogy Andrew
used--"University professors are exploited in the same way as a worker
producing machinery is exploited"--but I don't think that it captures the
essense of academic labor relations. Both "skilled" human beings--in the
capacities of managers, engineers, etc.--and machinery may embody the
"technology that will increase the rate of exploitation in the capital
accumulation process," but we do *not* sell such human beings in the
market. So our products--or at least most of them--cannot be transformed
into exchange values directly. Students who graduate do most of the time
enter the labor market, but still it is incorrect to call them commodities
in the marxist sense. It is they who sell their labor power.

In the strict marxist sense, most academics are "unproductive" workers. (As
all the subscribers to this list should know, this does not imply insult.)
There are and will increasingly be exceptions, though. Scientists,
engineers, and others who produce goods and services traded in the market
but do not have full claims to their products find themselves at least
partially in the sphere where the law of value operates.

If analogy is needed, it's better to look to the public sector employment
in general.

And to Wes, I don't think that it is because of "false consciousness" that
the (narrowly defined) working class do not see academics as simply "fellow
workers." It is partially due to income differences (though I don't see it
as the main reason, simply because most academic workers are not that well
paid here.) Another reason is that we have more free time and control over
our work processes. And maybe more importantly, teachers--not simply
academics, but teachers at all levels--function as "gatekeepers" who have
the power to exclude sons and daughters of the (narrowly defined) working
class from "better" sorts of employment. (Remember the ebonics debates?) We
"grade" them and most of the time, those who are born into the (narrowly
defined) working class end up getting graded as "inferior." (Books such as
_Learning to Labour_ and _Schooling in Capitalist America_ explain how this
happens.)

As one of the few daughters of the (narroly defined) working class parents
in graduate schools, I understand why academics can't simply claim that we
are "just workers" even if we do work. And this sort of analysis doesn't
even begin to address the kind of gap between the core and the periphery of
which Siddharth reminded us in his last post.

yoshie furuhashi (furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu)







     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005