exploiting the intelligentsia

[Chris Burford]

The New Labour government in Britain has a strategic problem. The minister for higher education, Margaret Hodge, was explaining it yesterday. It believes that by 2010, 8/10 new jobs in Britain will require a university education. Therefore it is trying to push the proportion of the relevant population who attend university up to 50%

But finance is limited. Margaret Hodge will not be taking the final decision, but is clearly preparing public opinion for the big debate. Top universities in the UK need to raise fees to be internationally competitive. Harvard we were told, has a generous charitable scheme for a proportion of the candidates who are presumably from the deserving poor intelligentsia.

So although a new system might be smoothed with a bit of charity, and might self-reproduce for a privileged stratum of society, the broad picture is that the UK must remain competitive by increasing the exploitation of the a very large stratum of working intelligentsia. Unless their parents can afford to subsidise them, they will have to accumulate even larger debts which will take them years to pay off.

Although interest rates are low, this will delay the time they can start saving substantially for their pensionable years, which has become all the more difficult with the destruction of capital on the stock exchanges.

And the new culture of "life long learning" for the intelligentsia, is fun and intellectually flattering, but it does require many hours investment of time at personal expense to recreate each year the human forces of production that are competitive in the modern global economy.

It is some consolation to this large stratum of exploited intelligentsia, that they do not have to do manual work. On the contrary such an economy depends for the continued reproduction of the total mass of capital, on the continued influx of cheap immigrant labour, such as the intelligentsia of third world countries. These are dedicated and grateful enough to clean the buildings, prepare the fast foord, or nurse the dementing first world intelligentsia in their old age, in order to be able to repatriate some savings to their families in slower developing economic zones.

Capitalism ideally ensures perfect freedom to be exploited as a commodity for your labour power, skilled or unskilled. When will the vast armies of the working intelligentsia see the bigger picture on a world scale?

Chris Burford

London