In two books written in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Slavoj Žižek suggested that a new “Communist prospect” was in the process of emerging.
Very interesting. I especially enjoyed the peeks into management culture. The McKinsey study on corporate giving and Amazon's document on diversity were both striking. The conclusion made me think of Houellebecq's prediction about life after the pandemic: "It will be the same, but a bit worse."
Article in the WSJ today "Corporate America Is Sitting Out the Trump-Biden Rematch" saying that corporations, wary of conflicts amongst emnployees, are backing off from political engagement. Contrasts this with 2020 when they were more enagaged. They do not distinguish the *sort* of corporation or the size. So maybe those with cadres of progressives are still fighting the good fight. Or maybe fatigue is general. How and why do cultural moments/movment like woke fade? It's like chasing shadows.
I think what's happened since October 7 is that large institutions (and universities especially) have stepped on the third rail of political economy. That is, what John Searle called "campus holism" (the idealistic student conviction that all things are connected, and that the university's business is the world's business) has collided very awkwardly with the realities of financialisation and private equity. So, yes, the students are right in suspecting that their universities' endowments are indeed implicated in investments in all sorts of companies and industries. However, university leaders have no ultimate control over this because external fund managers take care of all that. So the Ivy League customer model (universities endlessly "address" students' moral concerns and provide administrative "services" in response) founders on the shoals of what these universities actually are now in the financial sense (hedge funds, essentially), which cannot be "responsive" in the way students would like.
Very interesting. I especially enjoyed the peeks into management culture. The McKinsey study on corporate giving and Amazon's document on diversity were both striking. The conclusion made me think of Houellebecq's prediction about life after the pandemic: "It will be the same, but a bit worse."
Article in the WSJ today "Corporate America Is Sitting Out the Trump-Biden Rematch" saying that corporations, wary of conflicts amongst emnployees, are backing off from political engagement. Contrasts this with 2020 when they were more enagaged. They do not distinguish the *sort* of corporation or the size. So maybe those with cadres of progressives are still fighting the good fight. Or maybe fatigue is general. How and why do cultural moments/movment like woke fade? It's like chasing shadows.
I think what's happened since October 7 is that large institutions (and universities especially) have stepped on the third rail of political economy. That is, what John Searle called "campus holism" (the idealistic student conviction that all things are connected, and that the university's business is the world's business) has collided very awkwardly with the realities of financialisation and private equity. So, yes, the students are right in suspecting that their universities' endowments are indeed implicated in investments in all sorts of companies and industries. However, university leaders have no ultimate control over this because external fund managers take care of all that. So the Ivy League customer model (universities endlessly "address" students' moral concerns and provide administrative "services" in response) founders on the shoals of what these universities actually are now in the financial sense (hedge funds, essentially), which cannot be "responsive" in the way students would like.