The first American academics fleeing Donald Trump’s America for France have arrived.
Aix-Marseille University last week introduced eight U.S.-based researchers who were in the final stage of joining the institution’s “Safe Place for Science" program, which aims to woo researchers who have experienced or fear funding cuts under the Trump administration. AMU offers the promise of a brighter future in the sun-drenched Mediterranean port city.
While both France and the European Union have launched multimillion-euro plans to woo researchers across the pond since Trump assumed the U.S. presidency in January, AMU’s initiative was the first of its kind in the country — meaning the eight researchers who were welcomed are the first academic refugees planning to trade the United States for France.
Yes, but we continue to fail to communicate - I was never undermining your point about material commitments, I think that point is well-taken, it’s the conclusions you draw that I disagree with, i.e. in terms of lumping the capitalist class together with members of the working class … When I say Che Guevara was a valuable member of the revolution, it is to highlight an example of how valuable class consciousness can be from members of the working class who are more privileged but are not members of the capitalist class.
I wish to resist the tendency to view someone like a software engineer as equivalent to the capitalist class, just because material incentives exist. A software engineer is not a capitalist, they are working class, and the revolution is served by viewing professional and managerial workers as workers, worthy of being included and incorporated into the revolution. Not because they are that way already, I am agreeing with you by suggesting the opposite, that they aren’t aware of their status as working class because they have some material incentives, so they align with the wrong class interests.
The right response to this, in my opinion, is to work on raising their class consciousness, while it feels like you are suggesting the opposite (essentially lumping them together and furthering the entrenched idea that they are helplessly aligned with the capitalists and thus basically capitalists themselves).