Chapter 1: Capitalism and Other Cults, Part IV

But there is another fount of false consciousness, common to eras ancient and modern and lands around the world: the academic sub-class of the petty bourgeoisie. They must appear to swear fealty to the principles of objectivity (or whatever passes for evenhandedness to postmoderns), because to openly repudiate those principles for political convenience would remove their credibility as founts of false consciousness, and therefore their usefulness to the bougies and their reason for a paycheck. This means they must hide their lying; they must falsify or obfuscate their data to the point where they can come to conclusions that flatter or at least do not threaten power, or like the postmodernists, focus on utterly irrelevant things incomprehensible to non-specialists for the faint praise of people who have no idea what the hell they just read but know it must be "smart." But they must at the same time do this in a way that appears extremely radical and leftist.

Academia has always appeared such; radical and leftist. But its petty roots showed itself when the hippie revolution gave way to the Reagan administration without dropping a beat. All these students were supposed to have been radicals in college, but they ended up giving us George "Read My Lips" Bush and Bill "Hold My Cigar" Clinton. This is not a contradiction, but a natural evolution of petty class interests in practice.

Another two such evolutions of petty class interests have been the use of education as a replacement for the welfare state and industrial planning, and the rise of a mass petty class traitorate in modern America. The one led to the other.

America signed up troops for World War II and afterwards by promising that any GI that served would get to go to college. This was later expanded to be just about every white child with good to average grades, and later on many oppressed nationality children with good grades. This was a clever trick by the rich. Pulling millions into academia gave those millions petty class interests and perpetuated the capitalist cause in the Cold War, thereby bolstering the bastards against the Bolsheviks. It also ameliorated real suffering to a degree; people thrown out of work by capitalism could now retrain for better-paying petty work. But such educational and vocational training is not a true replacement for the welfare state, which itself is not a true replacement for the prole ownership of the means of production.

It does remain that such training is much cheaper than the welfare state, and insofar as it involves "individual initiative" and "personal responsibility" instead of a "handout," it is the preferred policy manifestation of vicious petties who nonetheless realize that the bougiest bougies are wracked with liberal guilt and so they must pretend to be as well if they wish to keep up with the Joneses. It also eventually results in a nation full of over-educated people taught to have petty class interests, but also accidentally given the tools to recognize, analyze, criticize, and correct these class relations. There are a lot of these people, finally too many of us to find employment in the petty professions, which besides autistic unemployability is the other material basis for middle class treason.

In the defense of the clueless petties and liberals that voted this brilliant failure of a policy in, they had no way to know that widespread education would undermine the capitalist consensus, because such a thing had never had to be tried before. The capitalist order had never been pushed to the point of this many concessions by its own subjects. The US embraced the Montgomery GI Bill as a point of necessity; it needed soldiers and it needed a plausible hypothetical way forward for the working class that was shorn of hammers, sickles, and guillotines. The US bougies needed its working class to be wealthier than the Soviet working class because facts are the best propaganda, and as long as there remained a Soviet working class, the American bougies made sure this was so. (They paid for this by plundering the Third World, a fact Lenin pointed out in his discourse about the "labor aristocracy.") But the particular way they made sure this was so, by using education as the primary basis of the labor aristocracy, created for the first time a petty bourgeoisie huge enough that the class traitors among the petties were numerically too large to ignore. This is probably the single most progressive side effect of the Cold War: in order to win it, the American bougies had to create the conditions for their own eventual internal collapse.

The Bernie Sanders campaigns were the result of this, but it was merely the tip of the iceberg. Bernie Sanders is a half-liberal social democrat, as is the petty student class traitorate that voted for him. But that they are masquerading as socialists at all points to the power of education, even a liberal education, to inexorably point the way to the truth. They sought out a socialist because on some subconscious level they knew socialism was the truth, because their overpriced textbooks filled with corporate lies could not effectively brainwash this underpaid generation as it had the overpaid Boomers. America's underclass had simply been permitted to be too smart for too long, and the bougie lies were obvious by the third generation. Bernie's campaign was a bridge that brought a bunch of these young idealistic liberals who had once powered Obama's campaign into the realm of socialism. A smaller few of us crept deeper from this movement into the ancient tombs of Ho and Guevara to discover, Indiana Jones-like, the dusty tomes of Marxism-Leninism.

Continue reading Part V