Parasites of Surplus Value

EDIT: I have written previously on academic labour and subsumption in “Libraries, Labour, Capital: On Formal and Real Subsumption” and “Can Academics Strike?”

In The Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg includes professors in the category of “parasites of surplus value”, that is, those who are paid not for their labour-power (i.e. not workers) but out of the profits from the exploitation of labour-power by capital. In eighteenth century political economy, these parasites were marked by their “unproductive consumption” and their “unlimited capacity for wealth and luxury”. Because they are paid for out of the surplus-value produced by labour, they must, in Luxemburg’s view be economically lumped in with the capitalist class. Prior to the innovations of Henry Ford, which turned workers themselves into consumers, this “unproductively consumptive” class was vitally important to the capitalist economy as purchaser of commodities.

Besides their economic role, academics play an ideological role. Gramsci writes that

The intellectuals have a function in the “hegemony” that is exercised throughout society by a dominant group and in the “domination” over society that is embodied by the state, and this function is precisely “organizational” or connective. The intellectuals have the function of organizing the social hegemony of a group and that group’s domination of the state; in other words they have the function of organizing the consent that comes from the prestige attached to the function in the world of production and the apparatus of coercion for those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively… (Q4 §49)

Over the course of the twentieth, and especially in the twenty-first century, the dual requirement for the maintenance of an intellectual class - commodity consumption and organization of consent - became less and less necessary to the capitalist project. After Ford, workers themselves became consumers of commodities, and this development has proceeded apace; with the development of mass communication and, perhaps especially, directly manipulatable social media, intellectuals were no longer needed for the organization of consent. The only reason to maintain a class of academics, from the capitalist perspective was, then, to train “skilled” workers (i.e. to increase the exchange-value of some workers’ labour-power) and to occupy the position of a labour aristocracy, and so split the working-class and hold out the image of a privileged type of worker for the rest fo envy, covet, and aspire to.

If those are the only roles that academics need to perform in capitalist society, then there is no reason to grant them immunities or privileges beyond what is required to play that role. In other words, there is no reason not to convert “parasites of surplus-value” into direct producers of surplus-value, that is, into workers.

But ideology always lags behind material reality, and so still today many academics do not see themselves as workers, but as a kind of hothouse-flower of enlightenment and democracy. When the usual tactics applied by capital to reduce the privileges of a section of the working class are applied to them - precarity, austerity, downsizing, outsourcing - they are at a loss. The category of “tenure”, like that of “academic freedom”, is precisely the kind of sop offered by capital to ensure academics continue to see themselves as different from “ordinary” workers.

But at a certain point, capitalism finds itself able to drop the mask, and in Canada, after years of quiet defunding with one hand while mollifying the egos of academics with the other, the mask was well and truly dropped yesterday with the massive attack on all workers (academics, non-academic staff, students) at Laurentian University. While - as usual - the university has not been forthcoming or transparent - the best estimate of yesterday’s carnage was that over 80 faculty members were fired and who knows how many non-academic staff (all by a disinterested, outsourced HR company). Around 70 academic programs were closed. Sudbury City Councillor Geoff McCausland said “I just don’t understand what’s going on at Laurentian”.

What’s going on is that, now that academics have been fully converted from parasites of surplus-value to workers - and the precarious, un- and underemployed academics already made up a “reserve army” to keep wages and labour demands down - capital can move on to the complete restructuring of universities as factories producing particular kinds of workers (the “skilled” workers of the knowledge economy, primarily). This process of restructuring an organization according to the tenets of capitalist efficiency and profit is called “subsumption” by Marx and and is an important concept in the dynamics of capitalism studied in particular by autonomist Marxism.

The end-game is privatization. While academics were “unproductive consumers”, capital sought as much as possible to pay for them out of the public purse, offloading their maintenance onto taxpayers, etc. Now that they are proletarianized, capital seeks to profit off the functioning of the university. By gutting Laurentian University, the government and capital can argue that publicly-funded higher education doesn’t work and opt for the usual response: privatization. Who better to train the “skilled” workers of the knowledge economy than the private sector. Government’s job is to get out of the way.

And this will be the model for other universities across Canada. What began as (possibly criminal) mismanagement of public funds on the part of Laurentian administrators and the Board of Governors has now become an opportunity to make Laurentian the test-case for the new regime. If capitalist governments have learned anything from capital, it’s always to turn a profit from a crisis.

This process, while it may be surprising and incomprehensible to Sudbury city councillors, began 40 years ago as tuition began to rise, the proletarianization and adjunctification of grad students and lecturers increased, the “instrumentalization” of education became the watchword. Many academics recognized this process for what it was, but many more continued to believe in the “vocational awe” (as Ettarh has described librarianship’s self-image) of the academy, and to be bought off by their privileged position (tenure, academic freedom, good salaries, administrative perquisites) and to have their egos stroked by honorifics and honoraria. The Laurentian end-game has been hiding in plain sight since the 1990s.

The opportunity presented by the desperate incompetence of the Laurentian administration and BoG forced the Ontario government’s hand: let the university go under and then privatize it. In Alberta, no such opportunity presented itself, and so the process continues to move forward slowly, as a death by a thousand cuts. But there is no doubt that the end goal is the same: the proletarianization of (previously immune) academics and the full subsumption of higher education to capital itself.

Academics cannot rely on vocational awe to halt this process. No amount of letter-writing, sidewalk chalking, or sign displays will “convince” the government to “save” higher education. The government is not mistaken, it isn’t missing the point or misunderstanding the value of education in a “democratic” society. It is rather pursuing the logic of profit to the end, a logic which has no place for education at all, beyond the tradeable investment in the individual entrepreneur, by which they mean students. And anyway, actual real human education is an impossibility under capitalism, which deforms human relationships to such an extent that all education is corrupted by commodity exchange.

So what is to be done? Academics have to figure out what they want. Going back to the old mode of unproductive consumption is impossible. I would suggest a future society not based on exchange and the exploitation of labour would be a suitable goal. But no matter the goal, academics who have now joined the ranks of the fully proletarianized must learn from proletarian labour tactics: the slowdown, the wildcat strike, sabotage. And we must abandon our privileged self-image and join with the other workers who are under attack by the same logic of subsumption, primarily teachers, health-care workers, and civil servants, not to mention the even less privileged classes of workers: precarious workers, the service industry, migrant workers. De-industrialization meant that we lost the large, militant unions that produced the wave of labour unrest a century ago; but this simply provides us with new opportunities for Canada-wide labour organization to take its placed based on the post-Fordist labour regime of former-parasites, precarious workers, illegal workers, and all the ungovernable and dangerous classes of this phase of capitalist society.