Capitalist production creates and funds even its own academic critics

Evidence

It is a well-documented fact that technological capitalism must be dynamic in order to survive and must find newer methods of extracting surplus value from labor. Its “civilizing” efforts are felt everywhere and are not to be dismissed and ignored. In every humanistic discipline and every variety of fine art, the exigencies of the production and reproduction of capital produce impressive and exquisite byproducts. In our own bailiwick, one of them would be such a group as ourselves, helping to hold money in the institutional humanistic budget, producing explanations in terms of pure categories such as cognition, epistemology, the aesthetic, interpretation, and the like; at the other end might be the tremendous exploitable energy of the freshman English machine as a panacea for social justice. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 314

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘freshman English machine as a panacea for social justice’ is a bitter seed for an essay on how universities outsource the alibi of social progress.
• XREF: Recalls Frankfurt School culture-industry analysis where entertainment is engineered to return subjects to drudgery, and the general motif of capitalism co-opting critique. — connects to: Capitalism generates intellectuals who are hostile to the system that produces them — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 272; Capitalism absorbed its critics’ language to legitimize neoliberal privatization — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 439; Capitalist production relations are reproduced socially and ideologically, not just economically (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Capitalism generates intellectuals who are hostile to the system that produces them #corroborates (0.95) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 272
• Capitalism absorbed its critics’ language to legitimize neoliberal privatization #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 439
• Capitalist production relations are reproduced socially and ideologically, not just economically #expands (0.75)
• Marx criticized bourgeois society immanently by using its own claims against it #expands (0.72) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1435