Revolution, sexualised power, feminist objectivity

If you want a good laugh and cry, have a look at this article about what is on offer to students at the University of California at Santa Cruz. It consists mainly of excerpts from the course descriptions with comments by the article's authors. Mostly, it doesn't need comment. However, they are right to do so since the effect of reading the descriptions would be a sort of mental constipation.

Some examples

Theory and Practice of Resistance and Social Movements

“The goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a revolution. We will learn what communities past and present have done and are doing to resist, challenge, and overcome systems of power including (but not limited to) global capitalism, state oppression, and racism.”

Luckily, American revolutionaries demonstrated long ago that they were so far removed from reality as to form no real threat to anything. Except in one area, where they have been most successful: occupying the universities.

You have a course (Women and the Law) which “examines how the law structures rights [unfairly], offers protections [to the privileged], produces hierarchies, and sexualizes power.” Another, Feminist Methods of Teaching, is run by Bettina Aptheker.

According to Aptheker, the crux of her approach is to break down the distinction between subjective and objective truth, what Aptheker refers to as “breaking down dualisms.” This old-fashioned Marxism and is particularly useful to her agendas, because it allows her to inject a “women-centered perspective” into the curriculum to correct what she claims is the “male-centered” bias of traditional university study.

Objective truth must be dethroned so that in the course called Introduction to Feminist Science Studies, science can be

“tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy” -- and calls for “a doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects,” or a what Haraway terms, in an obvious self-contradiction, “feminist objectivity.” In short, only a “science” that is consistent with feminist prejudices can be considered worthy of the name and genuinely “objective.”

There's also the History of Consciousness Program, which sounds like Monty Python, and much, much more. Read some of these out at parties - they're a sure hit.

View from the academy

Stephen Bainbridge has an interesting post on whether academics' opinions on topics outside their area of expertise deserve more respect than yours or mine. For example, on the free market.

He quotes an article by a law professor called Larry Alexander.

My experience has taught me that aside from the fact that those inclined towards liberalism are disproportionately disinclined to go into business and the professions and thus more inclined to become academics, there are reasons in addition to groupthink that explain why academic liberals become more dogmatically liberal and anti-conservative once inside the academy. Foremost among them being the orthodox academic's negative view of the free market.

Now the free market, buttressed by public education, has raised more people out of poverty than all government poverty and redistributive programs together have done. Nonetheless, the free market--and the bourgeois values that undergird it--is typically disdained, if not reviled by academics, at least academics outside of economics departments.

For one thing, the free market is disorderly, while the academic mind is attracted to rational planning and control and, thus, to statism. The academic looks at the free market and sees gigantic waste--the vast number of businesses that prove unprofitable and fold, and the incalculable misspent hours and dollars people invest in training and educating themselves for occupations that disappear or never materialize.
[my emphasis]

This thesis is explored at greater length by Robert Nozick in an article for the Cato Institute which I summarised here.

I think similar arguments to Larry Alexander's could be brought against artists, the nature of whose work demands order and single-minded control from 'above' and who can attain within their work a god-like omnipotence.

(via Instapundit)

Radical head 2: The Reichstag Fire

This is the second of three pieces that I am writing based on Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals by Stephen Koch. The first post (about the Sacco and Vanzetti trial) is here. I am interested less in the espionage and secret politics of the story than in the use that Stalin made of Western intellectuals and idealism. And I am interested in his manipulation and betrayal of such people because I wonder if we are still living with the mental aberrations he induced, and if much of the anti-Western feeling of so many academics and intellectuals comes in a direct line of inheritance from the dupes of the thirties.

The Reichstag Fire
Hitler had been in power for less than a month when on the night of the 27th February, 1933, Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, was set on fire and destroyed. In the flames, the police arrested Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist recently arrived in Germany to do his bit against the Nazis. Far from denying his guilt, he insisted on it and claimed until the end that he acted alone.

Hitler was having none of that. He was determined to use the fire to destroy the German Communist Party, as he had long said he would. Some 8-10,000 opponents of the regime, including 5,000 communists, were arrested in the days and weeks that followed. Among these were Georgi Dimitrov, a senior official of the Comintern, and his fellow Bulgarians, Simon Popov and Vassili Tanev. Together with a German Communist deputy of the Reichstag, Ernst Torgler, and van der Lubbe, they were put on trial in Leizig. Hitler made great use of this crime against the state. He was able to ban the Communist Party sooner than would otherwise have been possible and stack the parliament for the vote that would give him dictatorial power. The Reichstag Fire made the transformation of Germany into a Nazi dictatorship almost an inevitability.

Münzenberg's Paris group went to work to make of this case what they had made of Sacco and Vanzetti: an international cause celebre, a beacon for anti-fascism. Not that it would have lacked the oxygen of publicity in any case; the crime was sensational, the rhetoric it provoked violent, the consequences for Germany as yet unknown but already ominous.

The first task was to show up the show trial and to point the bone at the real perpertrators. To this end, a counter-trial was staged in London, ostensibly under the auspices of some leading cultural and legal figures, such as HG Wells and Stafford Cripps. In reality, it was Münzenberg who pulled the strings and manufacturing the evidence that cleared the defendents in Germany and inculpated members of the Nazi elite, including Göring.

Then he directed the writing of The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag, which was translated into seventeen languages and had a combined print run of several million copies. It had a preface by Lord Marley of the House of Lords and was the first popular exposure of Hitler's concentration camps, his destruction of political parties, universities and trade unions, the book burnings and the persecution of the Jews. It and its 'sequel', the Second Brown Book helped set the tone for the anti-fascist struggle of the 30s and transmitted a view of the Reichstag Fire that would hold sway for 40 years.

Here's a sample

Murder stalks through Germany. Mutilated corpses are carried out of Nazi barracks. The bodies of people disfigured beyond recognition are found in woods. Corpses drift down the rivers. "Unknown" dead lie in the mortuaries.

Here's the cover of a copy that is for sale in the Georgetown Bookshop (Washington DC). It is extraordinary that such crude polemic should be mild compared to the reality.


Meanwhile in Leipzig, on the day after the London counter-trial delivered its verdict, Hitler's trial opened with half the world's press gathered to watch. By the standards of the totalitarian show-trials that were to come, it was a pretty shoddy affair. Göring spent his time on the witness stand spluttering about the London verdict and threatening to knock Dimotrov's head off. That may have just been performer's envy because the Bulgarian was the star of the show. He cracked jokes, mocked the proceedings and lectured the courtroom on Marxist-Leninist principles. He and his Bulgarian comrades were fearless and were admired all round the world for their pluck. The attempts to link them to the crime were laughable and the Nazis that took part came out looking like fools. No wonder Hitler didn't indulge in any more show-trials and reverted to swifter methods of retribution. Much less sloppy and embarrassing than this one.

Not least because the three Bulgarians were acquited. So was Ernst Torgler, even if he was sent to Dachau in any case. (He survived the war.) Van der Lubbe was guillotined in January, 1934. Despite Göring's threats, Dimitrov, Popov and Tanev were flown back to Russia. It was a huge embarrassment to the Nazi regime and the first (and last) victory of the pre-war anti-fascist movement.

End of story? Not quite.

It may well be that Dimitrov, Popov and Tanev didn't need much pluck. According to the story recounted by Koch, the trial was a stitch-up, a cosy deal between Stalin and Hitler. The Bulgarians were in no danger whatsoever and they knew it. Koch quotes Ruth Fischer (née Eisler), to whom the agreement was revealed beforehand by Wilhelm Pieck (later leader of East Germany) and about which she wrote in Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party. He quotes Peter Semerdjiev, ex-member with Dimotrov of the Bulgarian PC Central Committee, who says it was common knowledge among senior communists there. Arthur Koestler suspected it. Babbette Grosse (Münzenberg's wife) confirmed it. However, there is nothing approaching documentary proof that the two dictators started co-operating so soon. There is no smoking gun or grubby piece of paper. On the face of it, it seems so unlikely. What could they hope to gain from it?

The removal of the SA. By 1933, Hitler's army of thugs had reached 1 million, all salaried and armed, and 10 times the size of the real German army, the Reichswehr. It was the SA that terrified France and England, and Stalin as well. Hitler had to be continually reassuring the Western Europeans that he had control of these thugs in uniform and that he would rein them in further. In fact, he had to go further. He was now Chancellor and would soon have the powers of the President, the official head of the Reichswehr. He couldn't have both the Reichswehr and the SA; one had to go. Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, thought it would be the Reichswehr, and that he would be the leader of the new German army. He was already the second most powerful man in the Reich, and Hitler didn't enjoy competition. Röhm and the SA were for the chop.

Strangely enough, the campaign against Röhm was started by the communists, or more precisely by Willi Münzenberg. In the London counter-trial, but more especially in the Brown Books, the main target was not so much Hitler, who was not blamed for the Reichstag Fire, as Röhm and the SA, who were. For the fire and much else, most of it true. For example, that Röhm was homosexual. But they went further, and produced a documented list of Röhm's toy boys, among whom was Marinus van der Lubbe, who was the Nazi's "small, half blind love-slave”. The list was a forgery, probably produced by Münzenberg's people.

And then there was the Oberfohren Memorandum. Dr Ernst Oberfohren was a conservative who, in despair at Hitler's triumph, committed suicide. Soon after his death, the memorandum appeared, detailing the horrors committed by the new rulers of Germany, but putting all the blame for them on Röhm and the SA, mad dogs that Hitler has lost control of, thugs who threatened the state itself. This one was probably written by Gibarti, one of Münzenberg's closest collaborators.

And so it went on. Hitler is not the danger; Röhm and the SA are. Until the Reichstag Fire, Röhm had been one of the least visible of the leading Nazis; after it, he became internationally vilified, the face of the threat to world peace. The sighs of relief after the Night of the Long Knives, June 30th, 1934, were audible from one end of the Old Continent to the other.

That's what Hitler got out of the Leipzig trial. What about Stalin?

Stalin was, in his own little way, an appeaser. Though the hint of 'peace' that you hear in that word would be completely out of place in this context. He simply didn't feel strong enough to take on Hitler; and according to Walter Krivitsky (Soviet Military Intelligence) "Stalin had always believed in coming to terms early with a strong enemy." This he set about doing from the moment of Hitler's accession to power. By the Night of the Long Knives (June 1934), the policy was set in stone, and it was "to cut a deal with Hitler regardless of setbacks or rebuffs."

Not that he wanted Hitler to 'win'. Stalin saw little difference, in Marxist-Leninist terms, between Nazi Germany and the democracies. The first merely exposed the true class relations softened and disguised by the second. Besides he wanted to turn Germany westward against France and England; he foresaw correctly that he would only win Germany after a war, which he hoped would be entirely fought between it and the Western powers. The anti-fascist rhetoric that was born with the Reichsag Fire was useful in that it galvanised the left, it induced the democracies to re-arm and it formed an emotional basis for loyalty to the Soviet Union. But it was a tactical diversion, one whose outcome would be entirely different from that imagined by the idealistic and devoted minds it attracted.

So a deal with the Führer was merely a step towards Stalin's medium-term aim of a broader strategic pact, one that he achieved in 1939. But it was a foretaste of what was to come, for the grand anti-fascist alliance called the Popular Front would be a deception and betrayal on a far greater scale, one whose bitterness lasts until today.

Nothing new

Arthur Koestler writing in 1953:

"It is to be hoped that this speech will be taken everywhere as a sincere and well-considered utterance....There are no greater enemies to the peace of Europe than those who would spread an atmosphere of suspicion..."
The Times, May 21 1935, on a speech by Hitler.

The scapegoat of the deluded was at that time not the United States but the 'militarism' of France. When Hitler marched into the Rhineland and the French Prime Minister came to London for consultations, he had the same type of welcome that American generals have nowadays in Europe, for it was obvious to all peace-loving enlightened men that the real danger to peace came not from Hitler but from the aggressive French.... It was the same unconscious desire to evade reality which we observe today; it is so much easier to stand up in a manly way to 'French militarism' in 1936 and to 'American imperialism' in 1953, than to the Nazi and the Soviet Empires.
The Invisible Writing, 1954 (Vintage), p232

Who's got the six-pack?

Madeleine Bunting at The Guardian

The abolition of the slave trade is a painful reminder of British imperial history, which we have, incredibly, managed to largely forget. Who remembers the Bengal famine or Hola camp, the empire's opium trade with China or our invention of concentration camps in the Boer war? We too easily overlook how empire was a linchpin to British national identity, vital to welding Scotland and England together. Indeed, historian Linda Colley suggests three ingredients for British identity: "Great Britain is an invented nation that was not founded on the suppression of older loyalties so much as superimposed on them, and that was heavily dependent for its raison d'etre on a broadly Protestant culture, on the treat and tonic of recurrent war, especially war with France, and on the triumphs, profits and Otherness represented by a massive overseas empire."

I have already written on the absurdity of beating ourselves up over the slave trade, but that is beside the point. Notice how the events we have to come to terms with are all events we are supposed to be ashamed of. Coming to terms with history for people like Maddy of the Sorrows is always penitence for wrongs done to others, who are implicitly assumed to be innocent. The analysis she quotes is one done from Zero, that is, as if the starting point were Eden or Rousseau's noble savage, so that everything that comes from the past, such as social cohesion and the national sense of self, is an artifice. The pre-Protestant, pre-imperial country just disappears as if there were no continuity between Chaucer's England and Disraeli's Imperial Britain.

In a sense, the real problem (if that is right word) for British identity is its success. What holds this country back from the moist embrace of Europe is the difference in starting point between these islands and the continent. France, Germany and Italy needed Europe as a bulwark against their past political failure and the fear of similar future catastrophe. Just count the systems of government employed by those countries over the 20th century. Contrast it with the one system that has been evolving here (with a brief interuption in the 17th Century) since the Norman invasion. Only a fool rushes to change something that has been so successful, and while economic forces push us towards the EU, we are rightly very diffident about the political cosiness that would seem to follow.

Perhaps there is no clearer sign of the difference bestowed by Britain's historical success than its willingness to act while the Europeans talk. The great question remains hovering over the continent: will it ever have the confidence to match its economic muscle with a military six-pack? While that question hovers unanswered, the UK does well to keep its distance and to re-assert its identity not just in the microcosm of these islands, but in the macrocosm of the Anglosphere. Of course, it is just that confidence here that Madeleine Bunting and her ilk most want to undermine.

Radical head 1

What I am going to write in this post and others are notes towards answering a question that I have never been able to: how was it that so many intelligent, educated people, living in the most priveleged society ever known could defend for so long a regime (Soviet Russia) that was amongst the most murderous and backward in history? It is a question of more than historical interest because the mentality that defended Stalin's purges lives on today in the anti-Western tirades of so many members of the intelligensia. So many of the tropes and habits of mind that came to the surface then are still among us. It is a poison that has never been leeched.

These are, as I said, notes. They come principally from a book by Stephen Koch called Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals. This book does not answer my question, but it does provide some excellent case studies of how the subjection of Western intellectuals was achieved in specific instances. I am going to describe three: The Sacco and Vanzetti trial and execution; the Reichstag fire; the Popular Front.

In 1925, the American Communist Party was in a mess - it needed rescuing. Not that Lenin or Stalin after him had any illusions about fomenting revolution across the Atlantic; they were far too busy at home and in Europe for that. However, the American Dream was the great mythical competitor to the soviet Working Man's Paradise and so there was the need to find and establish an anti-American cause and rhetoric that would "instill a reflexive loathing of the United States and its people as a prime tropism of left-wing enlightenment". They found a cause that would both revive the Party and sully the United States. Sacco and Vanzetti.

During a robbery in 1920, two men were killed by the robbers. Two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested, tried and condemned to death. Their anarchist comrades started a Defense Committee to finance the appeals and to make use of the case for propoganda, but by 1923 or so, the campaign had run out of steam.

Then Münzenberg got to work. It didn't matter that the condemned men were anarchists; what mattered was what could be done to reputation of the US by means of the slurs of racism and institutional injustice. A branch of Red Aid was set up in Chicago. Called the International Labor Defense, its prime task was to make the Sacco-Vanzetti case an international cause celebre. It did its task very well indeed.

Münzenberg had always seen the need to reach out far beyond the boundaries of the Party. The Soviet cause would be best served by those who, no matter how manipulated, were seen and saw themselves as 'independent'. He called them “innocents”, and this affair saw him reach out and gather them in their thousands both in the US and in Europe. Fund raising, meetings, propoganda, mass demonstrations, and bombings on both continents. Half a million dollars raised in the US alone ($6,000 of which reached the anarchist Defense Committee). Major cultural figures (the most useful innocents of all) got involved. In the US, Felix Frankfurter, later to sit on the Supreme Court, wrote a stinging denunciation of the trial in the Atlantic and so brought round many non-radicals to the cause and had a huge impact in Europe. HG Wells summarised the article and so set the tone among the right set here. He could not have known that Frankfurter's wife, Marion, had gained the almost constant companionship of a certain Gardner Jackson, who worked with Münzenberg's organisation at least until the War and whose charms, it seems, also led an infatuated Dorothy Parker to the Communist Party.

The success of the propoganda effort was very evident on the night of 22nd of August, 1927 - at midnight Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed. What followed was pandemonium - international grief and hysteria, like Lady Di, but with vandalism, barricades, looting (in Switzerland!), six deaths in Germany and the Red Flag sung outside Buckingham Palace.

Sacco and Vanzetti remains even today a cause and a rallying cry. I remember seeing an Italian film from the 70s or 80s which was, to say the least, impassioned and made you want to curse the people that put those two dignified men to death. I have said nothing about the presumed guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti because I don't think it really matters in this context. The point is the use that intelligent people could be put to by far more cynical ones, the terms on which the Russians had decided to fight the propoganda war, the use to which they could put the idealism of 'innocents', the way they could lassoo the West's own adversary culture to undermine it.

Katherine Anne Porter was a writer who joined the campaign for Sacco and Vanzetti. She was moved by their plight and hitched herself to the first group that came to hand. It was led by a woman who was anything but an innocent. They shared an exchange which, I think, epitomises the relationship between the innocent and the witting.

I remarked to our Communist leader that even then, at that late time, I still hoped the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti might be saved and that they would be granted another trial. "Saved," she said, ringing a change on her favorite answer to political illiteracy, "who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?"

The first chapter of Stephen Koch's book was excerpted in the New Criterion. Katherine Anne Porter's memoir and Felix Frankfurter's paper are available to subscribers of the The Atlantic. There is more on the Sacco and Vanzetti case here and here. According to the second, new information on the case surfaced as recently as 2005.

Clippings

Some stuff that I've clipped into EverNote in the last few months.

And then England--southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen--all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.
The final paragraph of Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell

Speaking to a Comintern packed with intellectuals, he pounded at his point: “We must organize the intellectuals.” The revolution needed middle-class opinion makers—artists, journalists, “people of good will,” novelists, actors, playwrights … humanists, people whose innocent sensitivities weren’t yet cauterized to nervelessness by the genuine white-hot radical steel. Lenin himself recoiled at this idea. Here were the people he loathed most—he who loathed so many people. Middle-class do-gooders? Bourgeois intellectuals clutching their precious “freedom of conscience”? Lenin would kill and imprison them by the thousands. It took him a while—until 1921—to consent to use them, too. “We must avoid being a purely Communist organization,” Münzenberg explained to his men. “We must bring in other names, other groups, to make persecution more difficult.”
"Lying for the truth: Münzenberg & the Comintern" by Stephen Koch

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society - a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.
Friedrich August von Hayek - Nobel Prize Lecture

History of games

Though I have never played a computer game of any sort, and probably never will, other people's descriptions of them, including No.1 Son's, have made me think that interactive games will be in the foreseeable future what the novel has been since the Victorians: the prime imaginative response to, and exploration of, the world and our part in it. For the moment, they seem bound by simple cause and effect and without the capacity for uncertainty and ambiguity that is necessary for any real empathy with a character or even understanding of the world. But it will come (if it hasn't already come unbeknownst to this benighted, and generationally-challenged observer).

What makes me sure it will come is reading the comments thread on a site called game+girl=advance, which my wife happened upon (after reading neo-neocon on Paul Robeson. Yes, there is a connection.) It starts with someone named Justin bemoaning the lack of a game that features

a politically conscious person with a passion for current events and human justice, an informed view of struggle and history, sings with profound passion - a voice filled with quivering depth.

As a model, Justin had in mind Paul Robeson. Paul Robeson singing I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night. The thread sets off with the central issue, basically the one I was writing about above, but then someone called Brain From Arous spoils the fun. He quotes an article that Robeson wrote in 1953 on the death of, and in embarassingly-naive praise of, Joseph Stalin. It includes such gunk as this

Here was clearly a man who seemed to embrace all. So kindly - I can never forget that warm feeling of kindliness and also a feeling of sureness. Here was one who was wise and good - the world and especially the socialist world was fortunate indeed to have his daily guidance. I lifted high my son Pauli to wave to this world leader, and his leader. For Paul, Jr. had entered school in Moscow, in the land of the Soviets.

Poor little bugger.

The other commenters are off then with this theme and shake it and wring it out. It is truly a rich vein. I will post soon about a book that explores this very area - the use and abuse of Western intellectuals and their righteousness on the part of one of the bloodiest and most cynical tyrants in history. But enjoy the thread. Games and games players impress me more and more. (But I'll probably stick to books.)

Intellectuals

I love simple, obvious emplanations. Maybe I'm just simple, but explanations that can't be set out quickly, or with a good story ask a lot and so often disappoint. (I wouldn't want to make a law out of this, however.)

I've just come across a beauty concerning something that has puzzled me for a long time. How is it that so many intellectuals, people that have benefited so much from capitalism, should nevertheless nurture such suspicion, resentment or downright hatred for it? How is it that they could be so bedazzled by alternative systems as to ignore how inefficient, oppressive and downright murderous they are? Why do they become so hypotised by the snake charm of absolutism?

Well, thanks to Jonathan Pearce of Samizdata, I have come across a wonderfully simple explanation. Its greatest virtue is that it doesn't require any tracing of intellectual paths or rely on the maleficent influence of a certain group, but is built on the most common experience.

Robert Nozick maintains that the intellectuals' deep resentment of capitalism is born in the passage from school to the world of the market. School differs from the outside world above all in how it chooses its elite: it rewards and prizes the book-learned, the articulate, the quick-witted. Their dominion over words and ideas elevates them to pre-eminence over their peers. School is a meritocracy of the intellect. This is not the case in the outside world of the market economy. It, too, is described as a meritocracy, but the merit it rewards is quite different.

The cruellest aspect of capitalism is that it puts a value on you that is so different from the value you assign yourself. Stated baldly, it is: what are you worth to other people? What can you do for them? The intellectual sees his pre-eminence usurped by the vulgar, showy or ruthless (as it seems). Not the meritorious, but the meretricious.

There is another characteristic of the reward system at school that remains impressed on the resentful. It is that excellence is adjudicated and recognised by a central authority, the teacher, whose word is final and whose authority is established and comparatively unquestioned. Compared, I mean, to the market, which lacks a central authority and does not reward excellence (at least in the short term), but rather convenience.

The above is a summary, though (I hope) an accurate one. Does it hit below the belt? Maybe. Is is demonstable, or falsifiable. Unlikely. Nevertheless, I find it very satisfying. Have a look.