Their attempt to flex that they know more than us is a link- its an element of capitalist education to make everything a market competition

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

There are four broad, overlapping tendencies in contemporary oppositional studies which weave through the literary theory world, but not there alone: individualistic careerism, romantic particularism, luxury production (insider trading), and organic praxis. Briefly, these trends are as follows. The first, individualistic careerism, is the competition to know the most about some aspect of the politically and oppositionally “new”—the new text, performance, tune, theory. This competition, driven as it is by the market anarchy of late capitalism, is characterized by a lack of connections. As Margaret Prescod puts it, careerism promotes one particular aspect of social change without integrating that struggle into the larger struggle for social change. In academic work, “careerism” assigns primary importance to the fact—and survival—of oppositional studies within the intellectual and social structure of the university, the master’s house. In this regard, “individualistic” refers both to the practitioners of such cloistered studies and to the studies themselves. Their disarticulation from the larger struggle for social change enables the system to reproduce itself through a multiculturalized professional managerial class. The class is disinclined to or incapable of bringing about realignment of what Stuart Hall has called “the fatal coupling of power and difference.”