The Punchline

Cross-posted from my Live Journal.

An old joke about academia:

Q: “Why are battles in academia so fierce?”
A: “Because the rewards are so small.”

At first it seems like a non-sequitur, which means it's not so much funny as silly. But if you think about it, the punchline is true by itself: rewards in academia are quite small.  The salaries are lower than they are in industry; the apprenticeship period (not only the tortures of graduate school, but the poorly paid non-tenured posts that follow) is especially long and difficult; the list goes on and on.  Then the real humor of the joke hits.  It expresses a bitter truth in a terse, relevatory way.  Imagine you've gotten lost in the woods in the prime of your life and you've gotten stuck in a fetid swamp or bog along with other similar unfortunates: after years of struggling against them just to keep from being drowned, you manage to find some tiny patch of land on which you might actually sit and rest.  Think you can take it without a bloody struggle?  Of course not.  Think you can keep it without resorting to dreadful violence?  By this time, your sensibilities will be so coarsened that you probably look forward to such battles.

Believe it or not, I'm not trying to impugn the academic enterprise as a whole (although I probably should) or the young people who want to join its ranks.  The earnest supplicants often don't know what they're getting into (see Dorothea Salo's ‘Straight Talk about Graduate School’ and her harrowing ‘A Tale of Graduate School Burnout’ for details) and every sufficiently advanced society needs intellectuals, and academia is the institution entrusted with producing them, although it generally turns out blinkered, socially inept specialists in micro-disciplines.  Society needs those people too, but the two types shouldn't be confused.  Instead, I want to raise the question: why are the rewards so small?  I don't have an answer, and taking on the question seriously could be a lifetime's work.  But now that I've got the question in your mind, here's a variation on the first joke:

Q: “Why are battles on what passes for the opposition in America so fierce?”
A: “Because the rewards are so small.”

And the question again: why are the rewards so small?  My suspicion: the major organ of oppositional politics in America, the Democratic party, is absolutely committed to being the minority party.

Explaination by way of interrogation:

Wait a minute.  The Dems are only the opposition party now, and the same goes for their status as minority party.  Your suspicion is internally incoherent.

Consider the regnant organization within the Democratic party, the Democratic Leadership Council. It has repudiated the New Deal/Great Society positions, foresaken a mass base for a big business constiuency, and adapted an electoral strategy known as ‘triangulation,’ where candidates' positions supposed to be in the ‘center’ between current conservative and previous New Deal/Great Society ones.  It therefore caters not to swing voters but swing business interests.  Since the Republicans assiduously serve business at large, those disaffected sectors of the business community that will seek relief from another party will always be a minority of business interests.  Add to this the DLC's neglect of mass politics and you have an organization that is, by definition, serving a niche market.  Even worse, the members of that niche are transients; if one industry sector is out in the cold one electoral cycle, it may be brought into the Republican/plutocratic fold by the next one.

At this point, my interlocutor might give one of two objections:

1.  Well, that's just the DLC, and not the party.
2.  The New Deal/Great Society positions weren't viable; they had to go.

There's not much to the first one: Clinton, Gore, Lieberman, Kerry, and Edwards (to run through the past few Presidential tickets) were all DLC.  Howard Dean was not substantially opposed to the DLC (remember his “I was a triangular before Clinton” line?) but tried to wrap its ideology in populist rhetoric; Joe Biden, first in the ring for the '08 race is DLC; and then there's Hilary Clinton.  If the poster boy for taking back the party is just trying to repackage the DLC's ideology as “edgy,” then the project isn't just doomed but rather a con job, plain and simple.  So much for that.

The second objection is more difficult to address because you have to get at the intentions of the person making the statement, and that's something I'm loathe to do.  Did those programs fail to reduce poverty?  That's an empirical issue, and a complex one; I confess I don't know the answer.  But is that what's meant when people say the New Deal/Great Society (or more commonly, Welfare State) programs weren't working?  It's not clear.  The objection is sometimes a coded appeal to racism, sometimes an expression of frustration with the liberal rhetoric of the time, sometimes an expression of frustration at the inability to counter the right-wing tropes that gained currency during the late 70s, etc.  But those aren't objections worth addressing; best to stick to the narrow, economic question.  Whether or not the Welfare State policies worked, poverty, income inequity, access to health care, and other class issues all remain serious problems in this country.  Ignoring a problem does not fix it; simply declaring it a non-problem does not make it so.  Income inequality has been getting worse and its fair to say we're in a health care crisis now.  Advocating trade policies that will benefit only a tiny minority of the population while exascerbating the aforementioned conditions is politics is reprehensible to begin with, and considering that those interests are already served by the dominant party, it's stupid to boot—but only if you're interested in being the dominant majority party.

Those of you who haven't stopped reading in disgust are either nodding your heads in agreement or wondering what brought this on—or both.  What got me thinking about this was a comment by the shadowy Turbulent Velvet at his own blog, UFO Breakfast Recipients:

Let's take any vicious card-carrying wingnut and put them in the grilling chair on some mythical lefty news show. Let's accuse them of sneaky complicity with abortion bombers, or Pat Robertson, or PNAC, or a mountain militia. What will their answer be? Think about this, because you already know the answer. They'll say: "I'm not a member of X and I can't really speak to their views. You'll have to ask one of their spokesmen about that. What I do know is that..." And it's back to the talking point. If you press the point with an aggressive quotation from the Bad Fringe group, they'll say: "Well, I don't agree with all of that. But the crucial point is that..." And it's back to the talking point. No triangulation. Minimalize being baited into open confrontation with anyone else in the coalition. I hate to put this way, but yes: stick to the ISSUE.

And I want to say to the managerial left: how fucking hard is it to do that? It's a good and reasonable way to avoid fragmenting a coalition for no useful gain.

From the fifth comment here.

The tactics outlined are, of course, the exact opposite of Dem/DLC tactics: attack your Fringe groups, even (especially) those that are not Bad^TM, and align yourself with a modified version of your opponent's position.  At first it seems like a sure formula for losing, right?  Well, that depends on how you define winning.  If I'm correct and the DLC intends to cater to the ever-changing members of the temporarily disempowered business sectors, then it's the right tactic.  It's a small party, but it's a stable one.  It'll take the Presidency (and perhaps a majority in one but not both chambers of Congress) whenever the excesses of the Republicans threaten capitalism in the US, find some new way to keep the Ponzi schemes going (or replace the old ones with new ones) and then settle back into its preferred mode as minority opposition once M→C→M' is working reliably again.  Of course, to do that, it has to play so-called progressives for suckers, to whom I say De te fabula narratur—the tale is told of you. Or, if you prefer, you're the punchline.

Comments

[Nate]

Et,
I couldn't agree more with your account of the Democrats. I had a job once working for the for profit entity they contracted to fundraise for the Kerry campaign - seven bucks an hour w/ no benefits and frequent practices that I suspect would be wage and hour violations if we'd had our act together to document them. That's the Democrat difference for working people.
I'm afraid I don't quite follow the link between academia and the Dems, though.
I suspect that the rewards in academia are connected with a lot of different factors, one of which is that it's an industry with low union density and one that, at least some sectors of it anyway, can be relatively safely deprofessionalized. Deskilling and worsening of conditions for doctors, done wrong, would kill people. (Though I suspect there has been something like this in the US medical system, shifting of increasing workloads onto nurses, leading to a lot less people entering into nursing and to some appalling accidents.) Doing the same for those of us in the humanities would ... well, it would suck, but I don't know what other negative impact it would have that'd raise a lot of external outcry, unfortunately.

[et alia]

Nate:

I connection between academia and the (current) state of oppositional politics is a pretty lose one. Both are essential, both are in bad shape, and both suffer from a certain marginality w/r/t the roles they should play in society and poverty of means to carry out their mission. I hope that the joke and its variation would capture that, but I guess it was a bit oblique.

I think deskilling in the humanities has already had terrible consequences for us. IIRC, Guy Debord wrote in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle that once the running of a state depends on a massive and permanent shortage of historical knowledge that the state can no longer be led strategically. I'd expand that to say that once a society has a massive and permanent shortage of general literacy, the citizenry can no longer organize themselves strategically. As the closest thing this place has to a vulgar Marxist, I'd say that's a problem of the capitalist mode of production, and anyone who says different and rings their hands and decries about declining standards, "theory," and the politicization of stuff that's supposed to be above politics needs to get a fucking job.

“Ooohhh...ressentiment!” cry some, as if that were a refutation and not just a categorization. Sure it's ressentiment. But if everything is a will to power, then ressentiment is a will to power. Why deprive it of its rights, hrm?

[Nate]

hey Et,
I'm not sure I follow everything you say, but at a minimum I'm down with at least some marxist vulgarities. I suspect that people who decry politicization already have jobs, probably pretty cush ones.
Two things:
-I don't think the Dems have ever been much in the way of an oppositional political force, more like the (slightly more) left face of the Janus state monster. That said, I'd take the left face any day over what we have now, but it's still be one face of a monster.
-As for literacy and all that, I'm not convinced. I don't think literacy is an index of capacity for political activity. If we look at this as a scale, and assume both higher rates of literacy in higher end jobs and take unionization efforts as an index of capacity for strategic organization (both questionable, perhaps), the reverse is true: service sector workers are the folks with the most capacity for strategic organization (particularly as compared to the very literate set of academic professionals). I also don't think this would hold up if we made some international comparisons, though I'm not sure.
Maybe I'm more vulgar than you are (fuck!), I think a lot of people just don't have the time and energy to do much, too busy working to not get by (and it'll just get worse in the US when the credit card minimum payments go up in January).
Oh yeah, one other thing: I wasn't clear about de-skilling/de-professionalizing. I meant more along the lines of shifting the workplace from one where the professional is uniquely important to one where the product is standardized etc. That's not necessarily something that has to be all bad for the people who buy those services (medical de-professionalizing potentially has, as a moment of it, an erosion of the power of the doctor to simply dictate conditions to patients). It is bad for the people who work providing those services. We don't necessarily need highly specialied professors in order for people to learn and be educated - in some ways I think hyper-specialization can make the credentials of professors a relative non-sequitur, with maybe a few exceptions. If I was an expert in, say, the attempts by writers to use math to generate story elements in attempt to depersonalize/de-individualize the writing process, that wouldn't help address the shortage of historical knowledge in any anti-spectacle/anti-state fashion.
take care,
Nate

[et alia]

Hi Nate—

If I'm hard to follow there, it's probably because I need to correct some really awful flaws in the comment. Proofreading is not one of my strengths, sorry.

You're right that my assertion about literacy and organizational capability is questionable (at least). At best it's a suspicion and/or a wish for an intellectual culture that wasn't tied to credentials and a very narrow range of institutions. International comparisons would certainly be interesting, if unfavorable to the thesis. I mean, what working class history is available to/common knowledge among the organized workers of Western Europe? I remember reading somewhere that France has strong rank-and-file traditions, but I couldn't tell you where.

I agree with you regarding the lack of time and energy for organizing. Overwork isn't just a means of extracting surplus value; it helps guarantee passivity outside the workplace.

Finally, on specialization: given an ever increasing division of labor, increasingly refined specialization is going to be required for the reproduction of society. It wasn't my intention to suggest these people would be revolutionary or transformative agents. Vice versa, deskilling is not a problem in and of itself, but rather a problem in a social context (capitalism, of course!) where the heterogeneous determination of a commodity's value is misunderstood as a property of the commodity itself. (Good old commodity fetishism in other words) I suspect you know this, and I'm just repeating stuff we both agree on.

Hoping that this is somewhat clearer (and perhaps better proofread),
et al.

[et alia]

Finally, regarding the Dems: I don't deny that their status as an opposition party was a limited one—Remember the phrase, "Cold War Liberal?" What is distinctive (if I'm right) is the DLC commitment to minority status. The Dems of the Kennedy and Johnson days were certainly dedicated to preserving capitalism, but they were also set on being the majority party.

[Nate]

hi Et,
Much clearer now, thanks. I think I agree and share your wishes. Frankly, having just returned to university after a while out, I'm not sure if there's all that much intellectual culture that IS tied to institutions and credentials. To me it seems like as much as inhibited as it is enabled (though what's inhibited and what's enabled are different than when I was working in other jobs). I get the point about the Dems now, and that's interesting. I'm not super up on that history as it's not one that's resonated w/ me, but you may be on to something w/ this thing about the Dems becoming just a minority party.
take care,
Nate