Louis Proyect wrote:
> One of the unfortunate legacies of the "academic turn" in Marxism is that
> it fragments his thought into compartments. You can even find this in
> mailing lists, where Progressive Sociologists and Progressive Economists
> live in separate sections of cyberspace. In order to remedy this
> fragmentation and to bring to bear the full power of Marx's method, it will
> be necessary to reconstruct a working-class revolutionary movement.
When I first read this this morning I more or less nodded agreement to
this paragraph. Since then I have read and reread a long post on
the marxism list that reveals there is perhaps an important task for
academic marxists to perform -- one involving areas of marxist study
which I along with others have been wont to see as merely trivial: questions
involving extraction of surplus value and of theoretical class analysis in
terms of the extraction of surplus value.
The post begins as follows:
-----
Late last year there was an upsurge in student protest in NZ, which had
been in the doldrums for much of the 1990s. Unfortunately, it takes
place in the absence of any notable level of working class struggle -
days lost through strikes have declined by 95 percent in NZ in the past
decade. This not only deprives students of a powerful ally but also
conditions the way they see their struggle. In the absence of working
class struggle, the narrowest kind of 'me' politics tend to dominate
student 'radicalism' and threaten to turn it into a defence of middle
class privilege rather than anything socially radical.
Below is a very rough draft of something I'm working on, in relation to
this issue. I would really appreciate feedback. What am I not
considering? Am I being unfair to students? Could the arguments be
better put? Are they sufficient arguments anyway? Is anything
factually incorrect? Etc etc.
----------
After some introductory paragraphs on current student activism in
New Zealand and brief comment on leftist response to that activism,
the writer proceeds, and these paragraphs indicate the thrust of the
draft on students as a whole:
-----------
But students' demands are actually rather more complicated and
problematic. For instance, while most students seem to believe they are
being 'exploited' or at least ripped off by rising fees, this is simply
not the case at all. Students in humanities who are NZ citizens are
paying around $NZ3,400 - $3,500 in fees this year at Canterbury (ie
about $US1700), slightly more in science departments; this is only a
fraction of what it costs to educate them at university each year.
Overseas students, for instance, now pay around $NZ15,000 for a standard
course in areas like the humanities, which is roughly the total cost of
what it takes to educate each student (NZ citizen or overseas student).
In other words, NZ students probably pay a quarter of what it costs to
have them at university each year.
The rest basically comes out of surplus-value, the origin of which is in
the exploitation of the working class. Workers' labour-power produces a
much greater value than the value of their own labour-power (whose value
is paid to them in wages). This surplus-value is in the hands of the
capitalist class since this class owns the means of production and thus
the labour-power of workers. Some of it is invested in expanding
production (new machines, technology, more workers etc), some of it
is consumed personally by capitalists (big yachts, flash cars, big
houses, partying up etc), some of it is taken by the government through
the mechanism of taxation - not just tax on company profits, but also
tax on capitalists' and workers' personal incomes. For instance, the
tax that workers pay is usually a deduction from surplus-value, not from
the value of labour-power.
So university education is underwritten by the exploitation of the
working class. Thus the demand for *free education* is a demand by
students that they be given a greater share of surplus-value. Now
we also know that the majority of students are neither members, nor
the sons and daughters, of the class that creates surplus-value. They
are predominantly the offspring of the middle class and the
bourgeoisie. In this sense, the demand for free tertiary education is
a demand by young(ish) members of the middle and upper classes that the
grown-up members of these classes share with them more of the spoils
extracted through the exploitation of the working class.
=========
There has so far been only one response to this post on the marxism list,
which I quote in full:
> Thanks for the laugh. This is one of the funniest parodies of the
> narrow, reformist economism of incurable sectarians that I've seen in the
> longest time.
That rather sums up my own response -- but nevertheless the post's
errors originate primarily among leftists whose attitudes were derived
from the treatment of class in the academy by both leftists and
establishment scholars. And the smashing of this use of "middle class"
as a marxist category (profoundly unmarxist as it is) will very possibly
be the task, primarily, of marxists on campus. This would, however,
underline the importance of one point Lou makes: that the separation
of marxists into "sociologists" and "economists" (on maillists as well
as in the academy) is most unfortunate. for the subjects raised relate
to issues which overlap the two disciplines.
I have been railing against the use of the term "middle class" by leftists
for almost 30 years -- and I think the post I have quoted from sufficiently
underlines the real political harm done by such sloppy usage.
Those students the writer defines as "middle class" should be distributed,
I suggest tentatively, under four classifications (and I think that we
should use English not French, since the use of french is so blurred
by history in this regardd): Capitalists (mostly small but some large),
Petty Producers, Workers, and Demographically and Politically
irrelevant. "Middle Class" is probably the most offensive piece
of jargon in usage on the left today. It is not only stylistically offensive
but seriously confuses thought. "Petty Bourgeois" *could* be a useful
bit of jargon but is so widely misused that it too should be dropped.
Carrol
