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Eric Wycoff Rogers

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Featured
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Oct 31, 2024
What is agency and where does it come from?
Oct 31, 2024
Oct 31, 2024
The Metaverse Must Be a Pluriverse
Dec 24, 2021
The Metaverse Must Be a Pluriverse
Dec 24, 2021
Dec 24, 2021
Screen+Shot+2021-01-09+at+6.00.40+PM.jpg
Jan 9, 2021
In the Aftermath of the Storming of the Capitol
Jan 9, 2021
Jan 9, 2021
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Dec 13, 2020
Why I Don't Post Slogans (reflections on declarative politics)
Dec 13, 2020
Dec 13, 2020
WORK_folder.png
Nov 14, 2020
Prompt for Imagining the Post-Work City
Nov 14, 2020
Nov 14, 2020
emotional ecology-01.jpg
Sep 18, 2020
The Dimensions of Social and Emotional Ecology
Sep 18, 2020
Sep 18, 2020
personal political?-01.jpg
Sep 13, 2020
The Personal is Political . . . Right? (Balancing Personal and Planetary Thrival)
Sep 13, 2020
Sep 13, 2020
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Sep 11, 2020
Why Your Love of Nature May be Destroying Nature
Sep 11, 2020
Sep 11, 2020
Left-realism.png
Sep 9, 2020
Left Criminological "Ultra-Realism" and Defunding the Police
Sep 9, 2020
Sep 9, 2020
lens-systemic-oppression-1024x627.png
Jun 14, 2020
Oppression vs. Discrimination: Why You Can Have Racism Without Racists
Jun 14, 2020
Jun 14, 2020
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Jun 11, 2020
The Meaning of Autonomous Zones
Jun 11, 2020
Jun 11, 2020
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Jun 7, 2020
Why Is Academic Language So Inaccessible?
Jun 7, 2020
Jun 7, 2020
Covidiots and Looters (or, nostalgia for "good citizens")
May 31, 2020
Covidiots and Looters (or, nostalgia for "good citizens")
May 31, 2020
May 31, 2020
Consent-01.jpg
May 13, 2020
Consent and Beyond
May 13, 2020
May 13, 2020
Radical Professionalism-01.jpg
Apr 27, 2020
What Is Radical Professionalism, and Can It Help Us Build Post-capitalism?
Apr 27, 2020
Apr 27, 2020
DISTROID-01.jpg
Mar 19, 2020
The Meaning of DISTROID
Mar 19, 2020
Mar 19, 2020
Feb 13, 2020
Are Shitty Men Really the Problem?
Feb 13, 2020
Feb 13, 2020
Nov 25, 2019
"No Scrubs": Deconstructing the WWI "Slacker," Sexual Manipulation and Gendered Power
Nov 25, 2019
Nov 25, 2019
Sep 4, 2019
Social Media and Post-Authenticity
Sep 4, 2019
Sep 4, 2019
May 7, 2019
Becoming-Feminist: Consciousness-Raising and Social Ecology
May 7, 2019
May 7, 2019
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Mar 20, 2019
Assertive Modesty
Mar 20, 2019
Mar 20, 2019
Jul 3, 2018
Situated Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of End Times
Jul 3, 2018
Jul 3, 2018
Apr 12, 2018
Notes on Oppression
Apr 12, 2018
Apr 12, 2018
post-work city-01.jpg
Feb 9, 2018
Post-Industrious Society: Imagining the cities of a post-work world
Feb 9, 2018
Feb 9, 2018
Feb 1, 2018
The (classed) Political Economy of Data
Feb 1, 2018
Feb 1, 2018
Jan 13, 2018
Business against Capitalism: production that undermines reproduction
Jan 13, 2018
Jan 13, 2018
Jun 22, 2017
Reflections on (uncritical) Aristocratic Hedonism
Jun 22, 2017
Jun 22, 2017
Mar 4, 2017
Queer(ing) Space
Mar 4, 2017
Mar 4, 2017
Dec 21, 2016
Professional Interests: how professionalism came to dominate common sense
Dec 21, 2016
Dec 21, 2016
Dec 6, 2015
Towards a New Sharing Economy
Dec 6, 2015
Dec 6, 2015
Radical Professionalism-01.jpg

What Is Radical Professionalism, and Can It Help Us Build Post-capitalism?

April 27, 2020

A great indictment of the way that we structure our society is that those who have the solutions to our problems are stymied from implementing them.

In the 1970s, the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas briefly mentioned the concept of “radical professionalism”—a phenomenon that he suggested might rear its head in a moment of “legitimation crisis,” when the state and other established institutions proved to be ineffective at providing the kind of leadership and producing the kinds of outcomes that they were mandated to provide and produce. During such a moment, people belonging to various professions might come to understand their own mandates as conflicting with the systemic totality of the state and existing institutions. To truly serve their mandate—as doctors or architects or social workers or civil engineers or public health experts—they would require deep structural changes to society. Such radical professionalism comes to question the deep nexus between professions and capitalism.

The term “radical professionalism” may seem like an oxymoron, because of the degree to which professions are embedded within the system of capitalist accumulation. Professions have not only tended to operate according to a for-profit, capitalist logic, but also have served a vital role in allowing capitalism to reproduce itself and overcome its various contradictions. To understand how such a relationship between professions and capitalism formed (which I will not do here), we need to look back to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the 20th centuries, when many of the professions were born (or indeed reformed into something resembling their current form). It was then that the professions assumed their enduring alignment with the dictates of capitalist extraction—an alliance that would simultaneously allow for the proliferation of professions and, at the same time, sanctioned all of them with strict limitations. A profession could exist, so long as it operated within the for-profit straightjacket.

The result is that most professions have been forced to organize themselves in ways that are extractive, monopolistic and myopic. Professions have been forced to be extractive because they have tended to be constituted as for-profit means of extracting monetary value from paying clients. The implication is that you cannot have quality services or care or design without paying for them. We have, as a society, made many compromises to pay for the services of professionals, and often this has been a poor investment—one that the mainstreams within the professions have, for obvious self-interested reasons, refused to admit.

Professions have been monopolistic because many they have tended to keep their expertise scarce in order to increase its market value. Through gatekeeping professional accreditation organizations, many professions have artificially limited their membership partially in order to inflate the salaries of its members. Many professions have replaced methods of care and administration that existed informally before they were established, and at their worst, accreditation organizations (backed by a litigious army of lawyers) have insisted upon the dangers and risks of attempting to solve your problems on your own or within your community. “Used a licensed _______, “ says their ransom note, “or risk losing your ______.” While quality control is of course another important (and worthwhile!) dimension of accreditation, there are ways of ensuring that all practitioners possess high-quality education without establishing a scarcity-inducing cartel that gatekeeps expertise.

Professions have been myopic because they fail to account for the bigger picture, the far-future, or those who cannot afford to commission their services in a capitalist economy. Professions have been prevented from realizing how they might plan for better and brighter futures, or even prepare the way for their own obsolescence. The best they can do, under present conditions, is rally for greater financial assistance to those who cannot access their services—a mere band-aid for what is a larger structural failure to design and distribute what should be shared by all.

My hunch is that these three aspects of a stymied professionalism are the real reason for all of the conspiracy theories we see today: almost every person that our society elevates has gotten to where they are by virtue of their heavy buy-in to a regime of accumulation that drastically limits the ability of its participants from being effective. To the casual observer, it appears that there is a conspiracy to prevent progress, when actually there is a systemic logic that conditions what is possible and what is visible.

What we need is a rebirth of the various professions, on different footings—a radical professionalism, if you like. Experts should be more accountable to the stakeholders who have to live in the world that they shape and perpetuate.

Can we even imagine a world in which we valued the knowledge and skills of our experts differently? Where the foundational principles of our myriad professions were allowed to inform how we build society, and in which their expertise could actually alter the overall structure when it became clear that the status quo was creating unnecessary problems and/or preventing some crucial progress?

Perhaps in such a future—one that seeks to diminish rather than unnecessarily perpetuate human work—professions would be conjured up as temporary task forces for solving and addressing a key set of problems and/or realize specific opportunities. In such a mode of organization, the profession would not need to indefinitely perpetuate itself as a source of income and stability for the professionals who fill its ranks. It therefore would not result in the kinds of “industrial-complexes” that contemporary capitalism does. This would be a kind of profession that, instead of creating perpetual dependency, builds the infrastructures that empower our society to thrive in new ways—independently of the ongoing subscription service of that professional caste. Here, a profession could be a “one-shot” instead of a loop—rather than turning into a myopic, extractive monopoly, the radical profession would seek to render itself obsolete by solving the problems is was conjured to solve.

One advantage of this framing is that post-capitalist society will be extremely complex, and will be impossible to organize without many of the existing professions. Any societal transformation that altogether alienates, abandons, or leaves behind these groups will likely fail. There is a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge that will need to be inherited (and much that will also have to be reworked, rewritten and redesigned!), and that cannot be done by activists.

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Most Recent

Featured
Oct 31, 2024
What is agency and where does it come from?
Oct 31, 2024
Oct 31, 2024
Dec 24, 2021
The Metaverse Must Be a Pluriverse
Dec 24, 2021
Dec 24, 2021
Jan 9, 2021
In the Aftermath of the Storming of the Capitol
Jan 9, 2021
Jan 9, 2021
Dec 13, 2020
Why I Don't Post Slogans (reflections on declarative politics)
Dec 13, 2020
Dec 13, 2020
Nov 14, 2020
Prompt for Imagining the Post-Work City
Nov 14, 2020
Nov 14, 2020
Sep 18, 2020
The Dimensions of Social and Emotional Ecology
Sep 18, 2020
Sep 18, 2020
Sep 13, 2020
The Personal is Political . . . Right? (Balancing Personal and Planetary Thrival)
Sep 13, 2020
Sep 13, 2020
Sep 11, 2020
Why Your Love of Nature May be Destroying Nature
Sep 11, 2020
Sep 11, 2020
Sep 9, 2020
Left Criminological "Ultra-Realism" and Defunding the Police
Sep 9, 2020
Sep 9, 2020
Jun 14, 2020
Oppression vs. Discrimination: Why You Can Have Racism Without Racists
Jun 14, 2020
Jun 14, 2020