In his latest book Richard Ohmann continues a thirty-year project of historicizing the social placement of academic labor within the changing scenes of a capitalist economy. The essays collected in The Politics of Knowledge demonstrate, for example, that the shifting fortunes of academic labor have since the late nineteenth century been closely tied to, though not absolutely determined by, the needs of capital; that capital during this period has not always needed academic labor in the same way; and that the current “crisis” in academic labor is no such thing, having been steadily evolving for the last thirty-five years. If today “the conditions of academic (and other mental) labor increasingly approximate those of industrial labor,” does this mean only that, like other professions in the U.S., the academic profession is declining in power, prestige, and workplace autonomy? Or do academic labor’s changing conditions also suggest that college teaching is becoming (“especially for professionals in the lower tier”) a working class job? I believe that’s already happened. I believe that most college teachers in this country have, right now, working class jobs. I’m not thinking only of teachers of introductory courses in writing or math or languages. I mean the majority of the entire teaching workforce, whose core fraction of tenure-track faculty continues to decline as a percentage of the whole.