University Fees

The Globe and Mail highligted a seies of hidden service charges in Canadian universities today that should be considered tution increased by stealth. The highest comes in at an insitution in Nova Scotia where students pay $1,960 on top of average tutition fees of $6,000 all to subsidise the sort of community and work faciltiies you'd think the original fees were covering: technology, gyms, funding student associations and other core supports to student life. The article really highlights how modern education systems can contribute to excess credit card debts, double jobbing and ridiculous work hours rather than the assumed social mobility associated with them.

In an old analysis from the sixties, that was somewhat updated into the knowledge economy schema - universities were very much points of production, "sausage factories" as a head of sociology in my old university put it, that churned out skilled, disciplined technocrats carrying the ideology of rule with a smattering of self knwoing critique. With fees like those the Globe covers they go one step further and multiply yearly thousands of broke workers whose lives are on loan to capital and workplace drudgery until they dig themselves out of debt. A machine that perfectly conditions the material expectations of youth.

Work Life Imbalance

Elsewhere in the paper's ever telling career section there is an article celebrating the blurring of work and life, the erosion of that "chinese wall between work and personal life" - that created cogs in the machine rather than the flexible, engaged employees that execute the goals of business with "a magic effect on the bottom line." Coming from the angle of profit making over employee need its a useful article for understanding the core concerns of business in this regard, with a history of pioneers in the area. What is most telling about articles like this is how aware businesses are of critiques of the effect of hierarchical and regimental work practices - moving beyond them where possible to sow a loyalty to the company that absorbs personal concerns in return for more hours and productivity. Call it the social factory or the methodology of post-fordist business practices or whatever, but there is an astuteness here that creates difficulties for anarchist analysis parsed in ideas of workplaces as regimented centres of discipline that ignore their social effects on employees life outside the time clock.

Thicko of the Day.

So I'm lazy and haven't really scanned more than the Globe today, a letter from a certain Erna Paris carries an amazing birth of conflation in throwing right wing National Bolshevik nutter Eduard Limonov into the category of "a familiar type: an old fashioned nationalist/anarchist/trotsykist" - certainly his movement are a confusing one, but really rushing off a description like that is a bit much are we meant to cancel out one of the equally diverse political types and form our own opinion of her letter? Even more hilariously the page layout person saddled a photo of dear Eduard with a hammer and sickle in the background and the wonderful caption of "an old fashioned anarchist" running under it.

Reports from the Transit Strikes In France:

In a typically politely scheduled in advance action by the mainstream French unions transit acress France was brough to a grinding halt as workers faced off with Sarkozy over plans to phase out special retirement benefits for workers from 50 on. Here are some reports from across the web:

Thousands March In France As Strike Shuts Down Transit - Globe and Mail

Strikes Paralyse Paris Region - Libcom

BBC Report