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specialization is complicated, loquitor, because it changes with the type of work---what holds the various definitions together is the fragmentation of tasks, fragmentation of information. routinization of a small task. repetition. repetition repetition. loss of control over work. in skilled areas, it is a diminuition of range, but can be ambiguous as to outcome--at semi-skilled and unskilled areas, specialization is in the main the logic of the assembly line.
in academic work, the main obvious symptom that can be linked to the above is the fragmentation of information--but the social position retains considerable autonomy at the level of skills within that---shot through with other problems that are institution-specific.
lawyering--i dunno, like alot of activities, the index of the extent to which your organization is capitalist in its organization is a matter of scale.
and it does not follow from posing a critique of a particular capitalist practice or form that the idea is shake the etch-a-sketch and send all those sand particles zipping backward in time to some lot as 10th century peasant.
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cyn---it's really hard to know whether when you write these things you do it for the pleasure of repeating the horatio alger story or if there's something else: what your position most clearly comes down to is that story-line and capitalism is its necessary
background.
so you define your main character----the perky abstraction "the guy who shows up here with 2 bucks"---and you endow your perky abstraction with every petit bourgeois virtue---you make vague reference to the narrative pattern of pilgrims progress---and so the adequately virtuous perky abstraction was able to reach the promised land because endowed with every petit bourgeois value. and so the context that enables the rise of the righteous to the promised land must be rational, otherwise it would not favor the perky righteous abstraction's trajectory. and because the existing order is "demonstrated" in this circular manner to be rational--because it favors the outcomes that you say it favors---then is must necessarily be legitimate.
because in the end what is real is rational because it can't be otherwise.
once motoring about in the bourgeois promised land, your perky abstraction can be linked to other features like pension funds in order to effectively claim--not argue, but claim---that the Moral Order of the Capitalist Universe which you demonstrated through the stories of your perky abstraction holds Benefits and Financial Redemption for all who are possessed of Adequate Virtue.
there's really nothing to be said about these horatio alger stories.
they can be based on "real life" but their appeal as stories has to be intuitive---they either seem to signify or they're just stories. if they don't signify for you who reads them, there's really nothing to say---that's a nice story. it might be well written, it might not be. it might have been fun to read, it might not have been.
but these nice stories are not arguments. they aren't about argument at all. they're just nice stories.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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