[Solar-general] OT: Un nuevo manifiesto

Mie Jun 1 04:27:43 CEST 2005

Hoy lei esto que me parecio muy apropiado. El autor juega con la
estructura del manifiesto de Marx, pero en lugar de usar los terminos
originales de Marx, lo pone en funcion del conocimiento, veanlo aca
que es mejor que lo que yo puedo contar (esta en ingles, sacado del
New York Times de hoy).

Karl's New Manifesto

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 29, 2005

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggle. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and
proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stand in opposition to
each other and carry on a constant fight. In the information age, in
which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought
between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.

The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of
production, the education system. The median family income of a
Harvard student is $150,000. According to the Educational Testing
Service, only 3 percent of freshmen at the top 146 colleges come from
the poorest quarter of the population. The educated class
ostentatiously offers financial aid to poor students who attend these
colleges and then rigs the admission criteria to ensure that only a
small, co-optable portion of them can get in.

The educated class reaps the benefits of the modern economy - seizing
for itself most of the income gains of the past decades - and then
ruthlessly exploits its position to ensure the continued dominance of
its class.

The educated class has torn away from the family its sentimental veil
and reduced it to a mere factory for the production of little
meritocrats. Members of the educated elites are more and more likely
to marry each other, which the experts call assortative mating, but
which is really a ceaseless effort to refortify class solidarity and
magnify social isolation. Children are turned into workaholic
knowledge workers - trained, tutored, tested and prepped to strengthen
class dominance.

The educated elites are the first elites in all of history to work
longer hours per year than the exploited masses, so voracious is their
greed for second homes. They congregate in exclusive communities
walled in by the invisible fence of real estate prices, then
congratulate themselves for sending their children to public schools.
They parade their enlightened racial attitudes by supporting
immigration policies that guarantee inexpensive lawn care. They send
their children off to Penn, Wisconsin and Berkeley, bastions of
privilege for the children of the professional class, where they are
given the social and other skills to extend class hegemony.

The information society is the only society in which false
consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university
that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the
more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed.
The more they objectively serve the right, the more they articulate
the views of the left.

Periodically members of this oppressor class hold mock elections. The
Yale-educated scion of the Bush family may face the Yale-educated
scion of the Winthrop family. They divide into Republicans and
Democrats and argue over everything except the source of their power:
the intellectual stratification of society achieved through the means
of education.

More than the Roman emperors, more than the industrial robber barons,
the malefactors of the educated class seek not only to dominate the
working class, but to decimate it. For 30 years they have presided
over failing schools without fundamentally transforming them. They
have imposed a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity
for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower
down.

In 1960 there were not big structural differences between rich and
poor families. In 1960, three-quarters of poor families were headed by
married couples. Now only a third are. While the rates of single
parenting have barely changed for the educated elite, family
structures have disintegrated for the oppressed masses.

Poor children are less likely to live with both biological parents,
hence, less likely to graduate from high school, get a job and be in a
position to challenge the hegemony of the privileged class. Family
inequality produces income inequality from generation to generation.

Undereducated workers of the world, unite! Let the ruling educated
class tremble! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a
world to win!

I don't agree with everything in Karl's manifesto, because I don't
believe in incessant class struggle, but you have to admit, he makes
some good points.

E-mail: dabrooks at nytimes.com