Republicans and Class War

Today the New York Times published an article titled "Republicans Call Obama’s Tax Plan ‘Class Warfare’" by Brian Knowlton. He writes:

Representative Paul D. Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and a leading proponent of cutting spending on benefit programs like Medicare, said the proposal[Obama's current one]would weigh heavily on a stagnating economy.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Ryan said it would add “further instability to our system, more uncertainty, and it punishes job creation.”

“Class warfare,” he said, “may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics.”

It's funny that the only people that still talk about class war are the ones waging it. Class war is rotten economics and rotten politics. Everyone needs to get out their US history books and study how life was for workers in the US before the advances propelled by the labor movement. The class warrior elites want to reduce us to our slave status we had in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century.

Going to Texas to Read Marx

I'll be heading to the Society for Social and Political Philosophy's roundtable on Marx's Capital, Volume 1, tomorrow. The schedule is up here, and it looks like a strong selection of presentations. I'll be giving a paper entitled "Equality and Differentiating Totality: Reading Marx after Rancière," in which I argue two things:

1. That Rancière's principle (as he sometimes calls it) of equality must be thought as a contribution to a praxis that seeks to produce forms of social relations that both break the governmentality of elitist expertise and overturn the logic of capital.
2. That his critique of the intersection of state functions of expropriation and the logics of capital under neoliberalism should be complimented by David Harvey's work on the uneven geography of capitalism, including his analyses of capital accumulation and accumulation by dispossession.

Before going, with the news of people fighting the attack against unions in Wisconsin and Indiana (among other states), I would like to mention that my travel is funded by our part-time professors union's (the APTPUO) travel grant fund. Yet another benefit of union membership.

One (More) Reason Unions Matter to Professors

Inside Higher Ed reports that an arbitrator has ruled that Florida State University fired twelve tenured professors in violation of its contract with the faculty union, and ordered these jobs reinstated. In response the university also reinstated nine non-union tenured professors. This, of course, speaks to the importance of unions, and also tenure. The arbitrator's decision-making process should be of some interest, especially by those of us who have made such arguments:

Further, the arbitrator touches on an issue that has angered many faculty members in traditional liberal arts departments in this era of budget cuts: the idea that their departments are somehow evaluated as less financially viable than others that attract outside grants. The arbitrator uses anthropology -- the target of cuts at Florida State -- to challenge this thinking by noting, as many faculty members have, that its tuition revenue makes it financially strong (running a surplus in fact).

The finding compares anthropology (subject to deep cuts) with meteorology (which was protected), applying the administration's stated goal of focusing on departments with high costs. Anthropology's cost per degree awarded is $33,343, compared to more than $50,000 per meteorology degree. And anthropology's net tuition earned exceeds that of 14 of the 17 departments in arts and sciences at the university. "It made no sense to eliminate anthropology from a budget standpoint," the arbitrator writes.

While I don't think that financial calculations should be at the forefront of reasons as to why humanities departments should not be cut, we shouldn't take that reason off the table. If the numbers lean in favor of such departments we should use them in order to shift the debate to ideological terrain: universities are going after the humanities because they (in better situations) engage students and challenge them to think critically about their place in society or within the university (so many of which are rapidly transforming into glorified business and tech schools).