"How Dare He"?
My favorite of all the letters to the YDN about Keith's anti-GESO column is this predictably hysterical number from Robert Proto. Underneath the ridiculously aggrieved rhetoric is the fallacy upon which GESO was founded, i.e., that graduate students at Yale University are proletarians. Once you realize they are not, Proto comes off as an obnoxious gasbag. Beyond that, it's worth pointing out that Proto's comments about racial discrimination aren't even "tangentially related" to Keith's column, which was entirely about the various ways that GESO games its own members and defiles the Graduate School.
posted by Finnegan @ 1:48 AM
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1 Comments:
You seem to have a narrow understanding of labor politics. The idea that unions are valid only when they represent a single kind of worker--the "life-long wage laborer"-- both misreads Marx, who defined "proletarian" in terms of production relations (those who do not control the means of production), not some sociological caricature of an impoverished wage-slave, and ignores the pervasive existence of unions that serve well-off, salaried workers, such as teachers, journalists, and actors. Arguing that graduate students aren't proletarians doesn't demonstrate a fallacy; it merely skirts the larger task facing critics of GESO--trying to prove that graduate students don't do work for the university.
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