See this NYT article.   NYC schools, and soon Baltimore too, are giving kids monetary incentives to excel on standardized tests.   This is actually great news, because it blatantly exposes the once “hidden curriculum” of disciplining students to be capitalists.  Hey kids, dodgeball is the new class war.

Circuit City: made up of assholes.

This is one of the things disturbing me about capitalism as it operates today: a small number of very wealthy people who seem hell bent on making sure their friends stay rich, regardless of the consequences for the rest of us.

This NYT article, “Too much information? Ignore it,” is about the recent fad in Silicon Valley of a new self-help guru named Timothy Ferriss, whose book, “The 4-Hour Workweek,” offers advice for how to shorten one’s workweek by cutting out “useless information,” e.g., by reading email much less, not reading the news, and outsourcing routine tasks to low-paid workers abroad. The NYT article does a good job of highlighting Ferriss’s hypocrisy for claiming to work less while seeming to work a lot on his own self-promotion (e.g., book tours and hyping himself to the media). Yet, I find this guy to be so annoying that I think the critique needs to be taken much further. Particularly, what this guy neglects is the class privilege that enables him to live such a “light work” lifestyle. He seems ignorant of his position as a capitalist who is able to work less only because he is exploiting the labor power of other people who lack his privileges (he’s white, went to Princeton, etc.). The question left unaddressed is: who are you working for? If you’re just working for your own selfish purposes and you’ve already attained a lot of cultural and financial capital, then sure, you don’t need to work much at all, and you can outsource your capitalist administrative tasks to exploited workers (and then go enjoy yourself in a hedonistic lifestyle, as this guy seems to do: scuba diving and horseback riding, etc.). Yet, if you are working on projects for someone other than yourself, e.g., if you care about the problems that other people have in the world (and that your own capitalist lifestyle has created and is reinforcing), then it would be obscene to think that you could reduce your workweek and just enjoy yourself in hedonistic pursuits. The underlying assumption in this guy’s argument is that you are a capitalist. But why accept that definition of your subjectivity? Capitalists are selfish jerks, and this “4-hour workweek” is just another ideology to mask their exploitative behavior and make them feel better about themselves.

Here’s an example from today’s NYT of biopower in action: “Facebook to Turn Users Into Endorsers”

Facebook was just bought by Microsoft. Now they are turning their website into a tool for users to internalize corporation’s brands into their personal identities. This is a good example of why Hardt & Negri see “the primary site of struggle on the terrain of the production and regulation of subjectivity” (Empire 321). Facebook users now have the option of choosing to join an “i love Escalades” group or a “protest the RNC” group. Which group gets more members may be determined by which group owner has more capital to buy advertizing space. Thanks to Microsoft for decreasing the democratic character of facebook. A good critical article on how consumers are becoming biopolitical producers of brands is:
Adam Arvidsson’s “Brands: A critical perspective” (2005) -

Abstract. This article proposes a critical perspectives on brands based on recent developments within Marxist thought. It argues that brands build on the immaterial labour of consumers: their ability to create an ethical surplus (a social bond, a shared experience, a common identity) through productive communication. This labour is generally free in the sense that it is both un-paid and more or less autonomous. Contemporary brand management consists in a series of techniques by means of which such free labor is managed so that it comes to produce desirable and valuable outcomes. By thus making productive communication unfold on the plateau of brands, the enhanced ability of the contemporary multitude to produce a common social world is exploited as a source of surplus value.

(also, see his book - _Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture_ (2006))

Radiohead drops the middleman - music transmitted directly from band to listener via this newfangled ‘internet’. I’m glad that Radiohead is the band who finally put the nail in the coffin of the RIAA. “Hey Lars, go f— yourself.” - Radiohead album pricetag: ‘it’s up to you’

http://uofmhungerstrike.com

Check it out! -> info, updates, videos, interviews, pictures, articles, etc.

By commenting on the blog, you can enter the discussion with the hunger strikers about how we students can remind the UofM administrators that they are supposed to be serving the public good - starting with a fair contract for the AFSCME workers who keep our school running.

The website is run by the hunger strikers and their support collective, which is open to all - if you’re in the Twin Cities, please come talk with them and lend a hand at their encampment on the east end of the Washington Ave. pedestrian bridge.

During the impending strike of the AFSCME union at my school, I’ve been collaborating with some grad students to support the workers by organizing A People’s Conference: Rethinking the University of Minnesota within the Moment of Crisis.  This forum will facilitate discussion about how workers, students, and faculty can take back the soul of their university and downsize the greedy administration.

Things we should have in America, but don’t:

1. Free, high quality healthcare for all americans
2. A good teacher in almost every classroom that makes a professional salary
3. A well maintained transportation infrastructure.
4. Government services that can be relied on.
5. Affordable and efficient mass transit in urban areas.
6. Extensive government funding for science, the arts and other intellectual pursuits.
7. Free pizza in the lunchroom.

I don’t see why these should be radical proposals. Today, these are decried as “socialism”, as if this is a bad thing. What drives me crazy is that we used to actually have all of these things, during that golden era conservatives (at least social conservatives) look on with nostalgia. The decades immediately following the Second World War were, ironically, the closest that this country ever came to socialism. After the war the massive increase in government spending was sustained by the cold war. Free education was provided to huge numbers of men through the GI Bill. Free healthcare was provided through the Veteran’s Administration. Private corporations, funded by government grants and aided by nationalized industry invested heavily in research that provided jobs and economic growth. Large infrastructure projects employed millions and provided the country with a truly modern transportation system, while mass transit systems were yet to be completely destroyed. Investment in primary education was considered a priority to keep ahead of the communists. Investments in the arts, although flawed by the social conservatism of the day, were also considered and important way to keep ahead of the eastern block.

The economy did not destroy itself. The government did not go bankrupt (thanks to 95% tax rates on the richest americans) but somehow, since then, the country has decided that ideas like national healthcare, highly payed teachers and good transit are political suicide. What happened?

This is a good start: Governor Commutes Sentence in Texas. But still, it’s embarrassing that the US is right up there with China, Saudia Arabia, and Iran, which collectively account for 94% of all state-sanctioned executions of their own citizens. Why do we prefer punishment over rehabilitation? According to some studies cited in Wikipedia, sending people to prison actually increases their risk of offending, while rehabilitation is the only effective way of reducing repeat offenses. I think that one reason the US government prefers punishment is because punishment helps keep the powerful in their places by keeping the poor politically disenfranchised (they can’t vote when their in jail) and by scapegoating the poor for the problems in this society. If we instead invested the resources into rehabilitating so-called “criminals,” we would have to confront the high costs of rehabilitation, which would then lead us to question whether it might be cheaper to address the deeper problems that condition poor individuals to adopt criminal behaviors, such as educational and economic inequality (poverty and poor education correlate very strongly with likelihood of criminal behavior). But again, such investigations would lead to a critique of the capitalist and anti-democratic institutions that keep the rich and privileged in power. It’s a vicious cycle that we can only pull out of by persistently and collectively criticizing and organizing against capitalists and their lifestyles of excess.

…leave your spirit of free inquiry at the door as we lobotomize our universities and take a banal ride back to the dark ages!

In this article, “Reverse the Firings: Purge of Professors Accelerates Suppression of Critical Thinking,” Reggie Dylan discusses the recent, politically motivated firings of two radical professors, Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein, and he connects these with another event: “the trustees of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio—long known for its radical and open-minded approach to education—announced the school’s shutdown, despite fierce opposition from students, faculty and alumni groups around the country.” These events are all related to the general campaign of conservatives, particularly David Horowitz and Anne Neal, to redress a supposed “liberal bias” in universities. While Horowitz’s “Academic Bills of Rights” called for colleges to institute certain principles that state governments could enforce, Neal’s “intellectual diversity” acts generally require only that colleges report to legislative committees (see Scott Jaschik, “Intellectual Diversity or Intellectual Insult?”). Opponents, particularly the Association of American University Professors (AAUP), argue that such reports would create ideological litmus tests, since college administrators would feel pressured to classify professors, campus groups, and invited speakers as “conservative” or “liberal.” Such labeling encourages a simplistic, bipolar view of the world, in opposition to the more nuanced and subtle debates that we need for grappling with contemporary problems. Further, they argue that this is reminiscent of McCarthyism, and could have a similar type of chill effect on faculty.
But we can resist! - not by hiding in our disciplinary caves, but by militantly organizing into a democratic university… Read the rest of this entry »