Daniel Burnfin

This paper presents a critical-philosophical reflection on the state of working conditions and academic production in contemporary higher education. It addresses the concept of “bullshit” advanced by Harry Frankfurt and developed by others as it might apply to those domains. The necessity that professional academics either “publish or perish” is a gentler way of saying one must “work or starve.” And this economic condition introduces extraneous motives that undermine the epistemic goals of intellectual inquiry and scientific community. In short, those economic conditions of intellectual work give rise to much of the “bullshit,” as Frankfurt might put it, which academics and even those outside of the academy must now endure, given the current institutional situation. The paper concludes, however, that academic work is not exactly what David Graeber has called “bullshit jobs,” though it does indeed seem inseparable from the latter.

A growing number of voices have proposed to understand the contemporary political-economic order by comparison with feudalism. Critics like Evgeny Morozov, meanwhile, object that the talk about “neofeudalism” is confused, because it’s still just the same old capitalism. In what follows, I’ll examine the views of Michael Hudson, who has for years spoken convincingly of “neofeudalism,” of J.W. Mason, who criticizes Hudson’s view, and of Evgeny Morozov, who only mentions it in passing. I won’t be able to prove that any view of “neofeudalism” is right, but only that, if it’s wrong, it’s not because it’s nonsense or un-Marxian, as these critics contend. There are serious terminological problems which must be resolved before any real debate is possible here, but they’re due to the critics’ own confusions about the fundamental distinction between profit and rent. Hudson uses Marx’s own categories to give an updated account for the present, and something very close to his view can be derived from Marx’s writings. The scholastic question whether “neofeudalism” is a new, worse type of capitalism or something altogether different, meanwhile, is less important than the perspective on contemporary economies gained by taking the idea seriously enough to think it through.