Training Scientology

Abstract

Training scientists construct their own Scientology: ideological systems based on a desire to develop the potentialities of their trainees. Each system is valid in so far as it is made accountable to its own limits, which are expressed in the range of choices within which that potential is constrained. This Scientology, in all its various forms, expresses the reified way in which the most modern training scientists explain and respond to the problems and pressures that confront them in their working lives. These pressures are real, but they are dealt with as if they were the starting-point of social life and not the result of social processes. What is problematized, then, is limited resources, not private property; youth, not adulthood; land, labour and capital, not value; low-skill equilibriums, not abstract labour; raw material for capital, not young concrete social individuals; the national interest, not exploitation; technological determinism, not historical materialism; life experience, not class; logical progress, not rupture nor even restructuring; evolutionary change, not class struggle; funding models, not the rule of money; social democratic alternatives, not negation; review, not critique; special needs, not needs and capacities; civil servants, TECs and the government, not the state; anxiety, integrity, loneliness and despair, not alienated labour; abstract theories, not a theory of abstraction.