Kieran Healy

Marx vs Weber

Continuing this morning’s theme of head-to-head conflict, the Invisible Adjunct has a great post on opposition to graduate student unionization at Penn.

Deputy Provost Peter Conn thinks it “makes no sense” that “an Ivy League graduate student researching Edmund Spenser is to be identified with a sanitation worker.’” It’s funny how the very mention of “union” is enough to elicit such candid expressions of class snobbery and class anxiety. But this is the Ivy League! We’re not to be equated with—gasp!—sanitation workers. There is Spenser, and there is garbage, and we must not confuse our categories.

Quite. Let us not confuse our categories.

As I see it, there are employers and there are employees. Sometimes their interests will nicely coincide, and sometimes they will not. Increasingly, they do not coincide. And of course it’s not very nice when they don’t.

Here we have a central opposition in twentieth-century social theory. Marx vs Weber. Class position vs status group. Relation to the means of production vs market position and distribution of life-chances. It’s funny that Judith Rosen, Penn’s president, has described herself as “Penn’s CEO” but also rolls out the old “graduate school is a sacred apprenticeship” argument when confronted with the prospect of collective action from the employees. If you want to turn yourself into a CEO, you shouldn’t be surprised if the grad students want to have a union.

Shome mishtake surely….

It should be Marx versus Spenser!

Hee hee. Given the cut-throat nature of the academic job market these days, maybe it should be Spencer vs Spenser.

When I was at NYU as a graduate student and we were unionizing, we often countered this by pointing out that the wages of sanitation workers (auto workers, fill in the blank blue-collar worker here) were far superior to ours. We wish we were sanitation workers!

Perhaps one should think outside the bubble and consider the globe. Consider not the mundane conditions of differences within, but rather what capitalism has accomplished. In the real sense, the difference lies with the blundering exploitation amonst the vulnerable in this world of ours. Marx did not make such trivial issues as class distinction among wage earners a priority(particularly Ivy vs sanitation workers). Come on get with it. Weber’s efforts to place capitalists societies as rational totalizing entities is contradictory given the “rational” many free-market thinkers use to counter the welfare states initiatives. That is, the ideas of Adam Smith and market forces as an irrational self regulatory system which should not be interfered with. Anyway, we may quarrel among one another about the use of concepts which seem irrelevant at least locally; however, there is another concept of which may be of interest to you: globalization. So, let’s take class to a new level. How about internationally.