I’m going to preface today’s entry with a few statements.
Firstly, I confess that I frequently worry about how little money I make each
month. Though this, in and of itself, does not negate the argument I am going
to put forward, it is best to acknowledge that my personal situation has
something to do with how I view the state of things world wide. On a related
note, a big reason why I am writing this entry today is because I would like to
work the anxiety and pessimism I am currently feeling out of my system so that
I can get back to writing my dissertation.
Okay. Deep Breath.
As the title to this entry hints, I’ve been thinking an
awful lot about the economic situation‑not just in my country, but also world
wide‑and what that means for the future. By economic situation, I do not only
mean a lack of jobs, though that is certainly a big part of it. To speak about
my personal situation, the job outlook has been bleak for decades, and I have
little reason to believe that things will improve in the foreseeable future. If
I can find a teaching job when I graduate, I will likely be forced to teach 4
or 5 classes a term. There is a good chance I will have to accept an adjuncting
position at a community college with a salary that is not commensurate with the
amount of work and energy I will have to put into teaching. Let me be clear. By
describing this kind of job prospect, I do not wish to suggest that teaching at
a community college is beneath me and/or a refuge for substandard teachers.
Rather, I want to call attention to just how little monetary value is attached
to teaching in the humanities at present. This is especially true at the
community college level, which has been marginalized by the four‑year university
system for decades, despite that many four‑year colleges within state systems
around the country are facing enormous pressure to reduce expenses (i.e., to
fire instructors) and are essentially operating under the same stressful
conditions that community colleges with more modest budgets have always had to
deal with. The argument I have often heard for this state of affairs is that
there is a far greater supply of educators in the humanities than there is a demand
for them. My answer to this argument is hardly new, but little has happened to
change the way things stand.
In the first place, despite the argument that four year
universities have been churning out more PhDs than ever, they continue to bring
in more new graduate students rather than fewer. The reason is straightforward
but no less insidious. Four‑year universities rely on new PhD students to teach
lower level classes, for much less than it would cost the university to hire
fully qualified instructors and/or professors. In a sense, graduate student
teachers amount to slave labor, since the reward is not the paltry stipend the
graduate student receives in exchange for teaching (an amount which most
graduate students cannot reasonably live on) but the degree which is supposed
to lead to job prospects (which are virtually non‑existent) upon graduation. In
short, the system is designed to create a far greater supply of educators than
are perceived to be needed. At the same time, however, educators in the
humanities are facing higher enrollments in their courses‑at my university I
saw enrollment in composition courses shoot up from 18 to 20 students to 26 in
a very short period of time‑which indicates that more instructors are, in fact, needed. Lastly,
accredited universities like mine require every undergraduate to take
composition courses that are largely taught by graduate students and
instructors (but also increasingly by tenured faculty).
The rhetoric of the challenges the humanities departments
are facing and the reality of how humanities departments are valued tell two
very different stories. The false story is that humanities departments must
accept the kinds of austerity measures that are now threatening the entire
planet. The real story is that universities, like the corporations and
financial markets that have put the economic health of the planet in jeopardy,
are increasingly driven by profit or the exchange value that receiving a degree
offers rather than by the educational value of same. As such, the humanities
are increasingly not seen as profitable and, by this logic, are not as valuable
as other departments to the economic health of any given university. I will put
this situation as vividly as I can in marketing terms: when a university brands
itself today, it probably does not brand itself as one that offers a great
education in the liberal arts. Rather, it likely does so as a university that
such and such famous persons attended, that is home to this or that college
sports franchise, or that specializes in medical or scientific research or
business or something other than the liberal arts. My university brands itself
all three of these ways, in fact, and it is hard to blame our current
Chancellor for doing so even while I think this approach is problematic. And
although these kinds of brands (as opposed to branding the humanities) often
generate a good deal of profit for the university, they too are only worth as
much the university exploits them (e.g., by reducing labor costs and hiking
tuition rates and other fees as well as by exploiting student athletes, many of
whom will not find work in the professional sports world), as much as
corporations are willing to invest in them (e.g., in research that will lead to
‘breakthroughs’ which the corporation then markets), and as much as consumers
are willing to pay (not just sports apparel and paraphernelia but also tuition,
the cost of books, food, and so on). In short, branding is geared towards a
university’s exchange value rather than its educational value.
I must also face the real possibility that I will be seeking
work outside academia upon graduation, since such little monetary value is
placed on my area of expertise.
Of course, the kind of capitalization I am describing, one
that exploits not just material goods but also cultural information and knowledge,
is hardly limited to what is going on in the American University system. A
perfunctory glance at the ‘booming’ technology industry shows the direction in
which humanity is heading. To be sure, some of the technological advances that
man has come up with in the last fifty years have undoubtedly made life easier
for people in the West and increasingly in the East as well as other parts of
the globe (by this fact I do not wish to imply that bringing such technological
advancements to the third world so that the industrialized world can profit
from it is a good thing). But there is little doubt that those who have seen
the greatest improvements in their quality of life are those who have been able
to successfully market and exploit technology. The iPod, to name one
technological marvel, is truly a powerful and ingenious piece of machinery that
has given people all over the planet nearly instantaneous access to information
in the form of music. But we should not fool ourselves that the iPod was
designed with only this purpose in mind, or that this was even its primary
purpose. Rather, it was invented and later refined through networks like the
iTunes portral (which itself very successfully though not exclusively controls
what iPod owners can consume and at what price) with the express purpose of making
Apple (and Steve Jobs in particular) immeasurably wealthy by exploiting both
the West’s consumption of music and, much more insidiously, the cheap labor
markets of the East who manufacture these devices for the benefit of the West.
In addition, the controlled exploitation of information through linking technologies
like the iPod and the internet has in many ways served to further divide the
diverse cultures of the globe rather than bring them closer together. In much
the same way that ‘history’ is seen as transparent by those who are in the
position to write it, the ‘real‑time’ transfer of music is seen as a seamless
process by supressing not just the artistic production value that went into
creating any given musical track (transmitted as a digital copy of an
‘original’) but also the the value of the physical labor that went into putting
the piece of machinery together.
The iPad, of course, takes this strategy several steps
further by simultaneously controlling how we access visual data (video as well as
text), audio data (music, voicemail and the like), and telecommunications. To
be fair, Apple is hardly the only corporation interested in controlling
information in ‘real time.’ Witness Microsoft’s latest build of the Windows OS,
which is aimed at the computer tablet market. It does not seem like an accident
that the feature of the new OS that has garned the most attention thus far,
bearing in mind that Microsoft has encouraged this attention, is its
purported 8‑second boot time. The faster we can access information, it seems,
the more transparent and more beneficial technology appears. We should also
consider the amount of patent litigation that corporations like Apple have
brought to bear on information markets. Google has felt the pressure Apple is
exerting through its litigation strategy and has been buying companies in an
effort to shore up its patent portfolio, despite that Apple’s primary target in
its patent war has been Android. Nor does the race to control ‘real time’
access to information not stop even here. A recent blog post at GinandTacos.com
very persuasively argues that Accuweather is attempting to control access to up
to the minute weather reports purely for financial gain. Accuweather’s lobbying
the US government over who should control weather reports is a perfect example
of the lack of transparency, considering that Accuweather relies on the
National Weather Service to make its reports in the first place.
My point to these lengthy digressions, I hope, is becoming
clear. Capitalism has insuated itself into nearly every aspect of life as we
know it. I will freely admit (and I hope that this is the case) that I could
just be overly paranoid from thinking about this too much over the last few days,
but I feel as though we are quickly approaching a point of no return, though
what direction humanity will go in remains unclear. But I am thinking, for
instance, about the recent debt ceiling crisis in the US (only staved off for
approximately 18 months by some estimates), itself the symptom of a much bigger
problem that has much to do with capitalism, and the impending debt crisis in
Europe via the fear that Greece is going to default on its debt. I state the
situation with Greece this way for a reason. It is abundantly clear to me (and
I’m sure to many others) that what is driving this crisis is not simply government
nor the majority of people of this world who are only trying to make ends meet,
although the people and their governments must necessarily participate in
capitalism. But Statements about Greece ‘spending beyond its means’ by the
media, which parrot what financial markets are saying about the situation,
completely miss the point. So, too, do statements that Greece must enact further
austerity measures‑it has already done so once and been bailed out once, with
no appreciable effect-if its government hopes to continue to operate. Such measures will only hurt those who are already
barely scraping by and will do nothing to strengthen Greece’s economy, since all
economies depend on‑and have always depended on‑the ability of the masses to
consume goods. And I’ll add here that the example of what is happening in
Greece should warn the US that austerity measures are not the answer, but this
has not been the case. The problem, rather, is the same fundamental problem
that has existed since capitalism became a driving force in the course of human
history, the impulse to accumulate wealth. By this, I do not only mean that the
financial markets, which are largely based on greed and, as the case with Greece
makes clear, fear, are to blame, though finanicial speculators are certainly
some of the biggest abusers of the system, since the purpose of financial
policy is obstensibly to regulate and safeguard the citzenry’s money, a task
which has been largely disregarded and/or abused. But more importantly, I mean
that we must change our impulse to accumulate wealth and posessions. The result
of not doing so has been a history filled with not only physical violence (the
actual battles for land and resources via the sword or less direct but no less
violent means) but also with mental anguish and anxiety for both the have‑nots and the haves (who must always worry that they will lose what they have
accumulated, whether they have done so through ethical or unscrupulous means).
Indeed, I would argue that capitalism thrives on the threat of loss, whether
that is the physical loss of goods, the loss of cultural information, or any
variation of loss we can think of. And the threat of loss that captalism exerts
on its participants is largely responsible for the divide that exists between individual
people and whole cultures. To return to my own example, the ‘reality’ is that I
will be competing with hundreds if not thousands of people for the same
position(s) I apply to. I emphasize reality here because the mindset among
educators is no longer only about educating the future (if that was ever truly
the mindset; I honestly don’t know). Rather, it is just as much about earning
some kind of living wage if not more so. This ‘spirit’ of competition that
capitalism instills in us can only drive a wedge among educators rather than
bring them together in common cause. And I lump myself in with this mindset,
since I have written above that my chief worry in looking for a job upon graduation
is being able to provide for myself. Much the same can be said at the national
level. In the US, the recent debt ceiling crisis was clearly the latest in an
endless string of fights over who gets to control the government, a fight that
capitalism resoundingly won and which has done nothing to bring the two major
parties in the US any closer together. In Europe, financial pundits are not
saying much about what is best for the people of Greece if its government defaults. Instead, they
are discussing what would happen if the other members of the EU turn their back
on Greece or if Greece decides to abandon the Euro and go it alone. If this mindset is ever going to
change, something fundamental about what drives humanity to do what it does
first needs to change.
I am reminded of a few scenes from Star Trek the Next
Generation that discuss what humanity could be like in a future that has
shifted from a capitalist based system to a human based system. In this
universe, there is no poverty. There is not even money, whether by this we mean
physical currency or digital records of currency. One scene from the movie
First Contact involves the Enterprise’s Captain Jean‑Luc Picard explaining that
the accumulation of wealth is no longer the driving force in people’s lives.
Instead, humanity has put aside its differences and begun to work solely for
its betterment. Scenes like this sound utopian and more than a little bit
hokey. They are also misleading, since this view of humanity is also used to
show its superiority to alien species like the Ferengi (the ultimate
capitalists with their ‘rules of acquisition’) still engaged in the kind of
commerce that we engage in today. Yet Star Trek does posit a possible future
that on its face would solve much of the economic and social issues that
capitalism has created‑that it needs to create‑which are driving humanity to
the edge of financial ruin. I personally don’t have much hope that humanity is
going to make the kind of shift away from capitalism that is needed anytime
soon. It certainly isn’t going to do so on on its own. In the Star Trek
universe, it takes a nuclear war that kills the majority of the population plus
first contact with a (luckily) benevolant alien race for humanity to finally
get it together. I can’t help but think that violence is going to be part of the
‘solution’ if our ancient history and the recent riots in Greece, Egypt and
England are any indication. In any event, I think something must happen
relatively soon if we are ever going to affect change. Michael Moore has
recently put the situation the US currently finds itself in succinctly: “If we
don’t change, we’re doomed.”
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