Date: Thu, 9 Oct 1997 01:26:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Adorno, Ellul and The Bell Curve


I don't really understand what Rakesh is on about.

At 01:06 AM 10/9/97 -0800, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>I sent this to another line. Writing it made me think that I should study
>Adorno and Ellul. So I am sending it to the line.

I'm sure Ellul is a waste of time.  And though Adorno is more interesting,
what has he to do with the bell curve?

>I think the *Bell Curve* is easily understood as an intervention in an
>already framed debate. 

Something tells me your framed debate is different that the one I have in mind. 
Mine goes back over two decades, when in 1975 I studied the history of
scientific racism and IQ testing from the beginning of the century through
Jensen and Shockley and other folks (including Hernnstein, if I recall) who
revived this stuff in the heat of racial strife in the late 1960s.  This is
the framed debate into which THE BELL CURVE fits for me.  But it seems you
have something slightly different in mind, reminding me again of the
generation gap.

>The basic idea is that jobs which required unskilled
>labor are being replaced by jobs which require more skill. While economists
>argue about whether these jobs have been moved abroad or simply replaced in
>the course of technical change (Adrian Wood v Robert Lawrence), most agree
>that the demand for new skilled labor exceeds the supply.

I thought it was the other way around, not enough jobs for skilled people.
In any case, the difference between 1968 and 1997 is that while the process
you cite has been going on ever since the word automation came into vogue,
the economic decline in which we are living is promoting an artificial
scarcity and austerity that has made the black working class even more
superfluous in the eyes of capitalism than it was beginning to be 30 years
ago, when black militants were scared of genocide.  Hence THE BELL CURVE is
an indirect argument for the politics of extermination administered through
the privatized prison industry.  However, people were worrying about
something of this nature even in times of prosperity when you were little
more than a sperm cell.  See for example WHO NEEDS THE NEGRO? by Sidney
Willhelm (a radical white Southerner), whom I remember well from Buffalo.
This is how I frame the debate.

>The liberal response to this has been that it is possible to train the
>cognitive underclass, to make of them lawyers, accountants,
>problem-shooting shopfloor engineers, computer-using cashiers--in short to
>hold out hope that they too can become upstanding, family oriented, law
>abiding functionaries of a system, in which everyone can have some
>specialized, "9-5" function in this immense overpowering productive
>apparatus ..... 

I haven't been following the liberal response to THE BELL CURVE.  The
liberal response to earlier incarnations of scientific racism was to (1)
decry the pseudo-scientific racism upon which it was based, (2) to impute
the alleged deficiencies of blacks to culture (Moynihan) rather than to
genetics, (3) to blame perceived deficiencies not on the "underprivileged"
but on the system, (4) to deny any cognitive deficits whatever but to prove
and even celebrate the cognitive creative abilities of blacks (Labov,
Dillard).  I do not understand the liberal-conservative dynamic you are
setting up here because I don't see the liberal response to scientific
racism as intrinsically tied to specific policy implications.  A number of
policy implications are possible, from the one you give to "benign neglect"
to the expansion of the welfare state which is not in the cards now as
opposed to the '60s.

>In one vision, the system really has no room for the cognitive underclass;
>in the other vision, all people can be made to function properly in the
>system and make the system stronger in turn.
>
>The whole debate leaves one wondering what an anti-systemic critique would
>be like. But I haven't spent much time reading people like Theodor Adorno
>or Jacques Ellul or Paul Goodman or other famous anti-systematic thinkers.
>Anyways, the sixties are over and there is no alternative.

To me the above paragraphs are complete nonsense, so if you could clarify
your conception of the problem, perhaps more constructive feedback would be
possible.



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