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   ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭ (radical_egocom@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jan-2025 09:22:45 JST ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭

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   • Miguel Afonso Caetano

   @remixtures

   What kills capitalism is the contradictions that capitalism creates between the working class and the capitalist class. No matter what happens to academia, these contradictions would still exist and would inevitably lead to class struggle, which will lead to class war, which will lead to the working class seeking to abolish capitalism.

   #capitalism #classstruggle #classwar

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     Miguel Afonso Caetano (remixtures@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Thursday, 02-Jan-2025 09:22:46 JST Miguel Afonso Caetano

     I still haven't read the whole article but the main thesis seems quite plausible. Maybe the model of the incubator that stems out of academia is not so crazy after all... Maybe we could just allocate the money that is currently spent on administrators to art and tech incubators...

     "The question then becomes whether capitalism can survive without a high rate of innovation and the growth that it brings. If not, it may have to liberate academia from the constraints imposed by administrators whose principal concern is treating students like consumers of a product that is supposed to make them feel good. Furthermore, the peer review system will also need to be reformed, if not abolished. It has performed poorly as form of quality control, as seen most clearly in the cases of academic fraud that occasionally come to light. Fraudsters can be published, but innovators often cannot. It is unsurprising, then, that much of capitalism’s recent innovations—most notably, the Internet and large language models—have largely been based on research done outside the peer review system that the NSF made the founding stone of academia.5 Innovation has tended to come despite the peer review system.

     Capitalism’s problem is that it needs the free-thinking radicals who so scared Joseph Schumpeter. In the 1940s, the atomic bomb needed J. Robert Oppenheimer, despite him being a “New Deal Democrat.” The fear of such radicalism then fed the expansion of university administrations, which exercised greater control over faculty, including through the use of the peer review system. In academia today, researchers must produce peer reviewed articles, which is most easily done by not challenging the dominant paradigms espoused by senior professors. The dull conformism of academia then tends to stultify even the most brilliant minds, resulting in a lack of innovation. Maybe academia is killing capitalism after all."

     https://thepoorrichworld.substack.com/p/is-academia-killing-capitalism

     #Capitalism #Academia #HigherEd #Innovation #Universities

     ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭ repeated this.