The Bottom Line
Here’s lefty blogger K-Punk, in full-on collision with the Business Mentality as manifested in academia.
On the one hand I feel like saying “Nyer nyer, now you know what the rest of us have been dealing with”, on the other I can’t help but admire his detached observation of a phenomenon that would’ve had me jumping over the desk and shouting.
I’ve met these people, and little else works.
Attack of the Capitalist Realist Straw Women
[…]
Last Friday, as a long, bitter and ultimately successful battle to wrest control of the union branch from managerialists was nearing its end, I was around the college to sound out staff views. I asked a couple of members of staff what they thought of the union, and suddenly found myself in a situation akin to that moment in a Horror or Science Fiction film when the protagonist discovers that the ‘people’ he is talking to are Not Like Us.
I had naively expected that more or less all lecturers would support the union in its struggles against the continuing implementation of the government’s authoritarian-bureaucratic ‘compliance’ agenda and the spread of neo-liberal ‘reforms’, if not out of principle then for reasons of personal expediency. But I found myself talking to (pod) people from my worst imaginings. Neo-liberal Stepford Wives. The effect was heightened by sleep deprivation and adrenal depletion: everything felt edgy but at the same time distant, disconnected, as if shot through a fish-eye lens. Words came at me very quickly, while my responses were desperately slow, in part because I was scarcely able to credit what was I was hearing.
Here were people who really, genuinely seemed to fully believe that ‘it isn’t for the union to criticise management. Management are there to manage. That is why there are managers and workers.’ (Interesting how, as Harvey suggests in his book on neoliberalism, the neoliberal ethic of ‘freedom’ is so often accompanied by an utterly credulous faith in authority.) The union shouldn’t raise the issue of the principal’s salary because ‘he is on a different contract to us. The market rewards different skills differently.’ Click, whirr. The union shouldn’t complain about increasingly invasive appraisal systems because vacant Stepford blink ‘that’s the real world, and we can’t change that here.’ ‘Where my husband works’ (uh-oh) mirthless Nanette Newman smile ‘all staff are appraised and if they fall into the bottom 20%, they will be sacked.’
Was this some kind of loathsome awake dream, in which Capitalist Realist Straw Women from my unconscious had assumed a corporeal form?
At this point, a member of middle management barreled into view, as rotundly pleased-as-punch with himself as a minor character from Dickens. ‘Yes,’ he boomed, (sounding for all the world like one of those puffed-up local dignitaries forever telling young Pip that he ‘should be grateful to them what ‘ave brought ‘im up by ‘and’), ‘You should count yourself lucky that you’ve got this management! I think we should bring in performance-related-pay. If a student leaves your course, you should lose money from your wages, instantly!’
It’s always amusing when intellectuals come into contact with the petty-bourgeousie. Because their assumptions and outlook are so radically diffeent humour is almost bound to ensue. But the K-punk’s serious point is that we have so accepted the business paradigm of profit and loss into our general discourse to the extent that nobody appears to even question at all when the most inappropriate subjects are judged in the light of business language and morals.
What was interesting, theoretically-speaking, about what all three of them had to say was its complete lack of any ethical or even economic argument for the rapacious state of affairs they were cheerfully advocating. At most there was an implication that neo-liberalization would lead to greater efficiency. But the main appeal of their arguments was not to ‘improvement’ of any kind, but to ‘reality’.
An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. In the case of the lecturers I was talking to, it seems that Capitalist Realism has been so successful in installing Business Ontology that there is no longer any question of evaluating it at all. Business assumptions are now transcendental presuppositions, defining the horizons of the thinkable. It is simply obvious that everything in society, including education, should be run as a business. It is simply obvious that no other criteria can come into play. Hence the reason that my flailing attempts to raise issues of ‘justice’ were not so much rebuffed as greeted with blank incomprehension.
To which I can only respond, well they would say that wouldn’t they? There’ll always be a place in the capitalist hierarchy for good little managers, who’ll balance the books for the meagre reward of a pat on the head from a superior, a ticket to the annual dinner-dance and the warm glow of knowing they’ve kept those uppity working class types down.
Tags: “UK Politics
