The first American academics fleeing Donald Trump’s America for France have arrived.
Aix-Marseille University last week introduced eight U.S.-based researchers who were in the final stage of joining the institution’s “Safe Place for Science" program, which aims to woo researchers who have experienced or fear funding cuts under the Trump administration. AMU offers the promise of a brighter future in the sun-drenched Mediterranean port city.
While both France and the European Union have launched multimillion-euro plans to woo researchers across the pond since Trump assumed the U.S. presidency in January, AMU’s initiative was the first of its kind in the country — meaning the eight researchers who were welcomed are the first academic refugees planning to trade the United States for France.
Sure. My point wasn’t that. My point is that there are still a not insignificant amount of people that are a part of the professional/managerial class who’s material interests align with that of the ruling capitalist class of billionaires.
There is still a portion of “working” people that benefit enough from neoliberalism that they continue to believe that capitalism is a fair system that benefits hard work.
sure, but it doesn’t feel particularly relevant, those people aren’t that different from less economically privileged working class folks who defend capitalism despite gaining no material benefit from doing so. The upper middle classes that align that way are still exploited in their jobs and victims of the system they align with, and that’s no different than everyone else. Division among the working classes doesn’t help our cause, and those middle upper classes would be some of the most valuable allies in cultivating change if their consciousness was raised, since they at least are not completely empty-handed. Think of people like Che Guevara who had such immense influence - he was precisely one of those middle upper class people whose consciousness was raised when he witnessed the American-backed coup in Guatemala.
I mean the average person in the professional/managerial class is not Che. The entire point is to analyze it from material incentives. That is the tools of dialectical materialism that we have at our disposal.
The material interests of the professional class aligns with the capitalist class. I’m in that class technically. I’m a well paid software engineer that gets a large portion of my pay in stock. I’m doing well.
I know that my material interests are aligned with the success of capital. I have to make a conscious choice to be a class traitor and work against my own material interests. And that’s easier for me. I’m not even a manager or a landlord.
You’re kind of proving my point using an example like Che. He literally was educated into Marxism through personal experience throughout motorcycle diaries.
The average person in the professional/managerial class is not like me and definitely not like Che.
Yes, but we continue to fail to communicate - I was never undermining your point about material commitments, I think that point is well-taken, it’s the conclusions you draw that I disagree with, i.e. in terms of lumping the capitalist class together with members of the working class … When I say Che Guevara was a valuable member of the revolution, it is to highlight an example of how valuable class consciousness can be from members of the working class who are more privileged but are not members of the capitalist class.
I wish to resist the tendency to view someone like a software engineer as equivalent to the capitalist class, just because material incentives exist. A software engineer is not a capitalist, they are working class, and the revolution is served by viewing professional and managerial workers as workers, worthy of being included and incorporated into the revolution. Not because they are that way already, I am agreeing with you by suggesting the opposite, that they aren’t aware of their status as working class because they have some material incentives, so they align with the wrong class interests.
The right response to this, in my opinion, is to work on raising their class consciousness, while it feels like you are suggesting the opposite (essentially lumping them together and furthering the entrenched idea that they are helplessly aligned with the capitalists and thus basically capitalists themselves).