A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name. Slavoj Žižek
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amount to? Many empirical studies demonstrate that most of higher education is not really of use for the reproduction of capital – even business schools actually do very little to train individuals to become effective managers. Consequently, although the media bombard us with the message that education is crucial for a successful economy, most college studies are irrelevant for business purposes. This is why state and business institutions complain all the time about how the humanities serve no purpose, and how universities should be made to serve the needs of actual life (i.e., of capital). But what if this, precisely, is what makes our enormous educational system so precious? It serves no clearly defined goal, it just multiplies “useless” culture, refined thinking, sensitivity for art, etc. Consequently, we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: at the very moment when, formally, even education gets more and more subsumed under capital as a field of investment, the actual result of this subsumption is that enormous amounts of money are spent on the cultivation of knowledge and art as its own aim. We thus get hundreds of thousands of highly educated individuals who are of no use to capital (who cannot find jobs). But instead of protesting against this meaningless spending of financial resources, should we not celebrate this result as an unexpected sign of the expansion of the “realm of freedom”?
Maybe this gap can function as a source of hope, maybe it opens up the possibility of radical change: the logic of capital gets threatened not from some external nonintegrated rest, but from its own inner inconsistency, which explodes when subsumption gets total.
Notes
1 4. Quoted from http://crisiscritique.org/april2019/milner.pdf.
2 5. I rely here heavily on Maria Chehonadskih, “Soviet Epistemologies and the Materialist Ontology of Poor Life: Andrei Platonov, Alexander Bogdanov and Lev Vygotsky.” Unpublished manuscript, from which all non-attributed quotes are taken.
3 6. Etienne Balibar “Towards a New Critique of Political Economy: From Generalized Surplus-Value to Total Subsumption,” in Capitalism: Concept, Idea, Image (Kingston: CRMEP Books, 2019).
4 7. Balibar, “Towards a New Critique of Political Economy,” p. 51.
5 8. Balibar, “Towards a New Critique of Political Economy,” p. 53.
6 9. Balibar, “Towards a New Critique of Political Economy,” p. 57.
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