Capitalism is a suicide pact.
-Noam Chomsky1
Education and sustainability
My thesis is that the neoliberal endgame is precisely that, an endgame. The neoliberal phase of capitalism advances a series of moves the execution of which causes the game to end; upon completion of its final sequence the players cannot continue. Though ultimately merely a symptom, neoliberalism represents capitalism’s moving beyond its traditional concern with extracting labor’s surplus value, i.e. worker exploitation, into a posture of worker elimination and, ultimately, elimination simpliciter: we ourselves, future generations, and much other life on earth. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”2 This searing sentence must once again be read in its most literal sense.
Traditional Marxist eschatology is thus correct to posit that, driven by its own contradictions, capitalism will finally enter a terminal phase. Yet few have understood until recently just how literally that “terminal” needs to be taken. As the ideological expression of the latest mutation of capitalism - a systemically hybridized monstrosity of state subsidy and oligarchic monopolism - at its deepest structural level neoliberalism amounts to an uncompromising thanatology. It is a death wish that has taken hold of our collective mentality. It will eliminate first the poor and otherwise vulnerable and then it will kill all of us as it destroys the capacity of our planet to sustain human life. I mean this not as hyperbole but as a sober extrapolation from present economic and environmental trends. As John Bellamy Foster and colleagues, in their study of capitalism’s effect on the environment, warn: “the stability of the earth system as we know it is being endangered. We are at red alert status.”3
There are more optimistic scenarios. But at the moment these seem less probable. Unfortunately, sometimes it turns out that the news is bad and it may even lack the silver lining we seem almost hardwired to try to locate. So many of us proceed like we deserve a happy ending, as if by birthright. This sense of cosmic entitlement has a long intellectual history: from the Judaic self-understanding as God’s “chosen” people, to the Aristotelian scala naturae where humanity serves as biological telos, to the Calvinist-Puritan-American conviction that God will prosper his elect, to today’s suitably banal expectation for technological fixes that “they” will figure out in order to deliver the Hollywood happy ending upon which “we” the audience insist. Human beings may even be hard-wired for a certain degree of psychological ruddiness; speculative evolutionary rationales for the survival positivity of “high hopes” are easy to imagine (though depression may have its own evolutionary rationale as well).4 But clearly optimism can delude, too. This calls to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s dangerous insight that at times truth can be inimical to life. “Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous?”5 This attitudinal ambivalence pervades every worthwhile discussion of the realities of the neoliberal predicament in which we now find ourselves.
Take the critical notion of “sustainability” that is often quite reasonably offered in opposition to the present annihilative path. Every reasonable person should be in favor of sustainability. But as a guide for action it can be misleading. Sustainability is largely a strategic notion. It tends to assume as static the desirability of certain outcomes and therefore frequently frames problems as technical malfunctions needing appropriate technical fixes. If I decry our present oil usage as “unsustainable,” implicit in that message is an imperative to locate an alternative energy source in order to sustain the same activities fueled by the old energy source. What tends to be assumed is that our general way of doing things, our “lifestyle,” needs to be preserved but by alternative means, in this case, say, by developing sources of renewable energy; we are not the problem, it is only our current way of doing things that is to blame. As essayist Paul Kingsnorth pointedly puts it, “It means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people - us - feel is their right, without destroying the ‘natural capital’ or the ‘resource base’ that is needed to do so.”6 Admittedly, this is not what is meant by “sustainability” by our most enlightened activists (one hopes); nonetheless, it is what is heard by an ideologically degraded consumer culture that ultimately sees itself as the universe’s center.
In this crucial respect, the rhetoric of sustainability is inadequate for describing the magnitude of what is at stake with neoliberalism and the comprehensive - and compounding - damage it currently wreaks. The problem with “sustainability” in the larger context of human survival is that it tends to understate matters. When resource depletion and environmental destruction are factored in, the neoliberal phase of capitalism is more than merely unsustainable. If it is allowed to play out its endgame, it will not just alter our lives and cause us to seek new ways of achieving what we currently desire. It will eliminate us, and when we exit, so will the sustainability question, as the question of what is to be sustained and how to sustain “it” - namely, us - will no longer remain. In this sense, neoliberalism’s endgame is not just another problem for clever humanity to figure out and from which to move on. In the parlance of our now endless war against “terror,” it represents an existential threat, not a threat against specific practices or even our particular way of life as a whole. It is a threat against life itself: our lives, certainly, and also much other precious nonhuman life as well.
To illustrate the point, I could frame a life-or-death struggle against an assailant as a conflict over the “sustainability” of my life. Once again this would be true but it is misleadingly understated. It would be more accurate to say that I am engaged in a struggle against being eliminated, where I may face the harsh survivalist disjunction of either killing or being killed. The more chronic question of sustainability (and its strategies and solutions) rightfully comes into play only once this more acute life-or-death existential question has been decided. I contend that this is where we are now finding ourselves with capitalism in its neoliberal phase; we have been enduring a chronic condition that has recently turned acute in the life-or-death sense. Consequently, we are subject to that harsh survivalist disjunction: we will have to kill it before it kills us. And soon. For the powerful imperatives for which neoliberal ideology provides cover are actively destroying everything in their path, in a congeries of extractive processes that go well beyond the “creative destruction” ambivalently identified by Marx and celebrated by capitalism’s dead enders as an always right and necessary manifestation of market forces. For creative destruction has given way to just plain destruction - alone and for its own sake. Driven by its own kind of internal optimism, Marxist dialectics might see in this rape of nature yet another, though perhaps the final, Hegelian master-slave reversal, where we end up debilitated and conquered by that which we created and over which we thought we had control, like the situation with capital itself writ large. For its part, the Christian tradition might see in all this destructive nihilism the figure of Satan making an audacious apocalyptic move. The scientist simply measures again and sees more and more clearly a planet in peril, one already ominously exceeding life’s limits across what leading environmental scientists have identified as nine key “planetary boundaries”.7
This book focuses on the one area that, broadly construed, almost all oppositional forces agree is the sine qua non for any possible salvific response: education. Education comprises a highly ambivalent set of practices in this connection: everything from servicing capital accumulation as additive “human capital” to providing a potential seedbed for real resistance against the same. Temporally, it is both a lagging and leading indicator, by its very nature showing us both past and future. Much that it accomplishes merely reproduces the existing social order while at the same time it also provides sites for the development of the inevitably altered rising generations. Further, it functions at both the smallest scale of personal experience - from gestalt “aha!” moments to (reported) individual spiritual awakenings - while it also scales up as a sociologically larger phenomenon having to do with mass government schooling, public awareness campaigns, policies having to do with the societal flow of information, and the like. Education exists both formally in schools, workplaces and other institutions yet also informally in group and intimate settings and in an almost infinite variety of popular media - all of the above instantiating education in its widest anthropological sense as the transmission of culture. Of course it also goes beyond transmission in a static sense as well. The very act of transmission often generates novelty, as what is learned has its own appropriative autonomy. And education is also almost always - perhaps merely always - what sets the scene for innovation and discovery. It is among the largest and most varied human phenomena and the approaches to it are infinitely varied. There are “educational” aspects to everything. So some specificity is required in order to make meaningful claims.
Accordingly, a specific focus will be on education in one of its most formal and largest-scale aspects, namely, the enterprise of universal public education that has become a definitive component of the world’s most developed economies. The qualifiers “universal” and “public” are of course perpetually contested and have both meant different things in different eras and different things to different parties in the same era. For example, there are always to be found unresolved but basic distributive questions about who exactly gets this education and similarly unresolved substantive questions concerning what precisely it is that “they” are to get. Be all that as it may, the shorthand term for this unwieldy grab bag of phenomena may be reduced accurately enough to “schooling”: a selective formalization of ongoing educational practices. Schooling itself has been around a long, long time, perhaps in some form since the advent of the settled communities made possible by agriculture some 10,000 years ago. It obviously far predates capitalism. Its modern institutionalized form, however, arose along with the labor needs of nascent industrial capitalism, in the US things really took off with the rise of factory production in the nineteenth century. Though not alone, capitalists quite clearly and deliberately built the institution of schooling as we now know it - along with the ancillary legal framework of compulsory education that supports it. Although it contains plenty of its own internal peculiarities, schooling’s structural core has always consisted of its economic functionality, including its service to the economic and political elites who typically coordinate that functionality. So nobody should become doe-eyed about any alleged golden era where schools were bastions of authentic learning and civic ideals. They have always been sites of both domination and, to at least some extent, resistance - now no less than in earlier times. Schools therefore provide an interesting and ultimately telling vantage point from which to observe the depredations of neoliberalism, as they function both as symptoms of those depredations yet also as staging areas from which resistances constantly arise, just as in the realm of production itself. It is in the nature of the thing to be both symptom and cause.
This traditionally dual aspect of schooling is also reflected in the more personal experiences of education that are possible. As the practices of teaching and learning, it reflects the range of human beings’ moral capabilities and ambivalences. On the one hand we are causally determined playthings of larger forces who can do no other than as we do. But on the other hand, from within our own experience we ourselves undergo our lives as if we possess the personal capability to exercise our will. Spinoza says that free will is merely an illusion caused by ignorance of the causes of our actions.8 That may be true. But still, it is also true that we nonetheless feel that we can act and probably are not capable of ridding ourselves of that experience, however finally illusory it may be, save perhaps in the extraordinary and fleeting epiphanies said to be achieved by the world’s aesthetic and spiritual masters. As our illusions may surely damn us, it may well prove that suitably transformed they may save us too. This contradictory pedagogical “workshop where ideals are manufactured,” to use Nietzsche’s phrase, are thus an appropriate primary focus.9 It matters how we see ourselves.
I offer little uplift, though, and certainly no Boy Scout techniques for sustaining our current activities. As a philosopher I am committed to the deepest intellectual pessimism, in Hegel’s sense that if it flies at all, the Owl of Minerva alights only at dusk.10 And after dusk is darkness.
Falling rates, instability, extraction
Neoliberalism deals eliminationist death in two interrelated modes:
1 as a function of internal economic contradictions rooted in capitalist production
2 as a function of external environmental contradictions occasioned by capitalist production
Current and future prospects for education must be understood as profoundly shaped by both of these phenomena. Educational practices and institutions have some ideological autonomy. But education at all levels currently labors under mercilessly severe constraints supplied by neoliberalism along these two axes that have become definitive of capitalism’s current and so far most desperate phase.
First the internal economic contradictions. I will address two interrelated themes that are, I believe, driving contemporary events, including the recent economic crisis:
The first of these is identified by Karl Marx as the counterintuitive TRPF. Though typically hidden by an array of counter forces, the TRPF is the first of three root causes that I will discuss that all but guarantee late capitalism can only lurch from one crisis to the next, to such an extent that it should be understood that crisis is actually a “normal” part of today’s capitalist system. There is no easy fix for the TRPF for, as I explain below, it is arises from within the very internal dynamics of capitalist production, namely the interplay of technology and labor in the form of productivity and in the long-term ability of rising productivity to generate the profits that fuel the entire system.
The TRPF had experienced its own falling rate of popularity, even among otherwise sympathetic thinkers such as David Harvey, until its recent resuscitation by prominent Marxist theorists such as the late Chris Harman, Guglielmo Carchedi, Alex Callinicos and Andrew Kliman.11 Unusual for high Marxist theory, the TRPF and associated ideas also enjoy an able popularization in the compelling educational videos created by YouTube sensation Brendan Cooney as part of his Kapitalism 101 project.12 Through careful analysis of the relevant texts, especially the later volumes of Capital, as well as supplementary empirical work on the best available recent economic data in this very difficult area (see especially Kliman’s analysis of relevant data on profitability), these theorists in the ensemble make a convincing case that since the 1970s, world capitalism has experienced an epochal change due largely to technological change and its effects upon productivity. As shall be explained below, via the TRPF, these productivity increases have generated a crisis of profitability first in manufacturing and later in other sectors. To be sure, as Marx himself immediately pointed out, there are many counter forces, to the extent that the counter forces become in some sense a larger story - neoliberalism itself being one such. And it is, in my view, undecidable as to the precise extent the TRPF drives events. Economics simply isn’t that “hard” a science as it claims to be - let alone predictive - beyond a certain level of confidence. Some Marxist proponents of the TRPF err in fact in this scientistic direction. I have no stake in the “intestine wars” of Marxist economics and there is good reason to be as wary of Marxist sectarians as one should be of all sectarians because, by definition, they tend to end up valuing doctrinal purity over truth. As a cautious philosophical outsider, then, I will content myself with a weaker and more defensible claim than is advanced by some of the theory’s proponents: the TRPF matters, and if it is not the reason capitalism is morphing into its death spiral neoliberal phase, it is surely a reason.
The TRPF along with its counter tendencies provides the best available general framework within political economy for making larger sense of this vast interplay of forces. While not always purely “wrong,” leading popular explanations for the financial crisis are either inadequate on their face (e.g. personal character flaws that certain “greedy” bankers just happen to have) and/or they supply only proximal causes - they are correct as far as they go (e.g. widespread criminality and short-sighted deregulation in the financial sector) but they immediately beg larger questions. Why the myopic drive toward deregulation in the first place? Why was that perceived by elites as so necessary, in the US by both Republicans and Democrats, and in Europe by conservatives, labor/liberals and even many (nominal) socialists? Why despite ostensible ideological differences, such a united and zealous deregulatory front? Why was it so irresistible to move capital out of traditional productive sectors and into the financial casino? In the end, the TRPF fills a void of explanation and becomes indispensable for helping answer such larger questions. It needs supplementation, however, as I begin to describe in the next section. But it provides a core part of the reason why piecemeal reforms are inadequate to a problem that is rooted in the structural dynamics of capitalism itself. Like any good idea, though, if taken in isolation and pushed too far, it can become misleading. It must be integrated into a larger account and not treated as a magical explanatory pill.
At any rate, the TRPF has helped spawn what we now refer to as “neoliberalism”: a catchword that signifies the ideological management of a set of phenomena that are symptomatic of the failure of “normal” productive capitalism to make a profit. Let me be clear on this: neoliberalism is an ideology, a story that is advanced - explicitly and also, more powerfully, implicitly as “common sense” - to justify the machinations of today’s global capitalism. It is, as economist Andrew Kliman puts it, “the tail, not the dog that wags it.”13 If capitalism is the client, its new and spectacularly effective public relations firm (since the 1970s or so) is neoliberalism. It is a rebranding of capitalism, not unlike the ads unleashed to sell us on the idea that, say, post Gulf oil spill BP is really an environmentally conscious “energy” company that just happens to dabble in a bit of petroleum. In this sense, neoliberalism does not actually exist, in that economic realities such as the state-aided monopoly of capitals and the debt-servitude among the populace does not match the ideological fairy tale where worldwide liberty advances via rugged, self-made entrepreneurs, fairly winning their spoils in a free market through their ingenuity and hard work. This is just what is told to people to avoid the legitimation crisis that looms any time rational individuals get a glimpse of how fatally rigged the system is against them. Like legitimating “noble lies” from time immemorial, the neoliberal lie greatly helps both victims and perpetrators accept their respective roles in the mechanisms of domination.
Keeping its unreality as a justificatory fantasy firmly in mind, the four key symptomatic features of the era of the neoliberal lie are:
1 the globalization of labor and consumer markets under the banner of “free trade” and the like; and
2 the propping up of demand (and therefore profits) for those products through the massive playground pusher-like extension of consumer credit (viz., credit cards, autos, student loans and, most importantly, home mortgages/refinancing); and, consequently,
3 the mass migration of capital from production to finance and, within the latter sector, from old-style growth-oriented investment in actual businesses that create saleable commodities to the quicker and easier money within the highly leveraged phantasmagoria of speculative finance (including the proliferation of hedging and derivatives schemes) in the casino that now becomes the center of world capitalism; and, as an effect of the degenerate gambler’s short-sighted rapaciousness,
4 an increased adventurism toward accumulation by dispossession as stressed elites seek to marketize, financialize and finally burglarize erstwhile public resources such as criminal justice, health care and education systems that must be dragooned into providing the liquidity insatiably needed by the “too big to fail” to cover their old bets and further leverage their new ones. The titans of finance are at this point, literally, gambling thieves. Complementing this domestic adventurism aimed at taking over unsuspecting schools is a continuation of more or less old-fashioned imperial military adventurism. This too feeds the gamblers’ permanent addiction by securing perpetually outsized war profits while creating lucrative disciplinary grids against resistance, as attested by heightened…surveillance (e.g., as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden about the US National Security Agency) and ridiculously overwrought “tactical”-style police gear now regularly deployed against peaceful protesters.
What Marx’s theory of the TRPF offers is a key component of a deeper structural analysis of these neoliberal developments, an analysis not content with an emotive condemnation of personal “greed” and the like that so often poses as the explanation. Yes, the bankers are greedy and the regulators corrupt. Lots of them anyway. But decrying such individuals would be, as they say, like handing out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500. They speed because they have to. In the ensemble, any group of human beings will always possess an abundance of good and bad qualities across the full spectrum of human capabilities. For present purposes, what needs explaining is not the existence of those behaviors but why we have built institutional traps for ourselves that emphasize certain of those behaviors and not others. The perspective provided by the TRPF helps satisfy this acute diagnostic need.
My specific focus on educational institutions supplies a case in point. In sum, because of these changes in capitalist production occurring over the last several generations, we have moved roughly from an era in which the predominant telos of worker subordination involved exploitation, i.e. as per Marx, the extraction of abstract labor value pursuant to capital accumulation and capitalist profit. From the capitalist’s point of view, in the best case there existed a “surplus army” of workers whose existence would help ensure that labor market competition was kept internecine among the workers (i.e. worker vs. worker) rather than amongst the capitalists themselves for workers (capitalist vs. capitalist). In the former scenario, wages tend to fall and in the latter they tend to rise. The traditional capitalist, of course, wants wages to fall in order to maximize workers’ exploitation and hence, ultimately, profits. It is in short all about worker exploitation. In capitalism’s neoliberal phase, however, the “more is better” mania for exploitation is replaced by a technologized “less is better” mania for eliminating labor costs. Both tendencies have certainly always been present in capitalist production, but the overwhelming contemporary drive toward automation signals the decisive ascendency of the sentiment that wants to eliminate human beings from the production process. They are merely “costs” to be overcome via the latest technology or, in the second best scenario, outsourced overseas to far cheaper labor. At this point, one should be so lucky as to be exploited.
This economic eliminationism sets the stage for the eliminationism we are now seeing in education. In the industrialized world, public discourse on education has always had its economistic side but once upon a time the discussions also appear to have at least been tinged with larger concerns of a civic and moral nature. Of late, however, education policies are almost always justified by virtue of their economic utility alone, especially in the US and the increasingly Gradgrindian UK. We should fund X because it is an “investment” in our future; we need Y because businesses require it; we need Z so we can keep up with the global competition. Educators have usually been happy to play along with this mode of justification because, well, it worked to make it rain resources. For a time. But: live by the sword, die by the sword. For what if, instead of businesses needing to see X, Y and Z in their workers, it turned out that they wanted to see - domestically at least - drastically fewer of them? What if, instead of criticizing schools for not producing workers with enough X, they started criticizing schools for their very existence? This, I contend, is exactly what is happening. Eliminationism in the economy is quite predictably morphing into eliminationism in what was once, in the good old days of exploitation, the primary conveyor belt for supplying human capital: the public school system. A situation in which there is a surfeit of workers becomes one in which there is a surfeit of students, who in turn are well on their way to becoming part of the surfeit of humanity logically slated for elimination.
No longer possessive of much exploitability, these are the people seen purely as costs, redundancies, superfluous, “extra” people, regrettable instances of systemic waste and excess. As I shall discuss in the next chapter, the best place to see these coal mine canaries is in the “planet of slums” overtaking the developing world in places like Kinshasa where almost everyone there exists outside the “normal” economy and subsists ever more desperately. Closer to home, large swaths of African-American youth in such inner cities as the Baltimore depicted on HBO’s The Wire provide domestic examples of individuals caught in the grips of a savage proto-eliminationism. For many of these no-longer-exploitables, family life and schooling have effectively ended, and the method of elimination for them is to be tracked via the sinister “drug war” into the largest carceral network in the world, one that has grown by 500% in the last thirty years and now holds more black men than were antebellum slaves.14
Supplementary to Marx’s theory of the TRPF is a second root cause of capitalist financial crisis identified a generation ago by American economist Hyman Minsky and later refined by Australian economist Steve Keen (one of the very few to have predicted the US housing crash). Influenced by Marx yet also departing from him, Minsky defends a “financial instability hypothesis” in which modern hyper-financialized capitalism’s tendency toward instability and crisis is due to “upward” forces, namely, the behavior of an elite speculative behavior - the 1%, if you will, or perhaps more accurately, the 0.1%. Pace Marx, for a variety of factors, it has turned out that it is not so much the working classes that are positioned to precipitate a terminal economic crisis and are destined then to seize historical agency and destroy capitalism. Sometimes the good guys don’t win. Instead of the essentially downward instability predicted by Marx (“downward” in the sociological sense of the economic ladder) it is instead an upward turbulence ironically generated by elites themselves that is the proximal cause of contemporary economic instability and is thus one of the primary threats to capitalism.15 In an interconnected speculative environment that allows high levels of leverage-based risk taking (ex hypothesi that deregulatory environment having been created by dearth of profitable opportunities in productive sectors), elites can be counted on simply to go too far - especially when government backstops allow them to utilize public wealth in order to hedge their bets, in effect to gamble with the house’s money. Former US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy Paul Craig Roberts summarizes this rigged game:
It is ironic that the outcome of financial deregulation in the US is the opposite of what its free market advocates promised. In place of highly competitive financial firms that live or die by their wits alone without government intervention, we have unprecedented financial concentration. Massive banks, “too big to fail,” now send their multi-trillion dollar losses to Washington to be paid by heavily indebted US taxpayers whose real incomes have not risen in 20 years. The banksters take home fortunes in annual bonuses for their success in socializing the “free market” banks’ losses and privatizing profits to the point of not even paying income taxes.” Roberts then asks, “Will the disastrous consequences discredit capitalism to the extent that the Soviet collapse discredited socialism?”16
Given the global interconnectedness of the financial system, this increasingly top heavy speculative behavior causes both an intensifying cycle of crises in which, in a three steps forward two steps backward manner, an increase in the overall amount of debt, as the deleveraging that occurs during the crises never resets all the way back down to zero. Massive - and, really, unimaginable - debt accumulation thereby becomes the shadow twin of capital accumulation. This debt is simply unpayable. All the “austerity” in the world will not repay losses from the 2008 financial crisis that the Bank of England estimates to be between $60 trillion and $200 trillion.17
The Minsky financial instability hypothesis proceeds from the inherently cyclical boom-bust nature of capitalist economies, where capital expands and contracts in an almost respiratory manner (as Smith, Marx and others saw from the beginning). For Minsky, however, the analogy stops there. For among elite money managers there are interesting goings on of a psychological nature during these swings. During the growth or boom part of the cycle, especially as memories of any previous serious downturn fades (such as the Great Depression of the 1930s), investors tend to experience success in venture after venture and come to see themselves as immune to any downturn, their confidence only increasing as they go from triumph to triumph in what Minsky called a “euphoric boom economy.”18 This is essentially equivalent what even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan famously termed “irrational exuberance.”19 In this environment, the customary psychological hedge of risk aversion may vanish to an almost zero point, as investment bankers note that the more leveraged ventures are the ones that have been making the most money; simply put, in this euphoric environment, more leverage means more profits. Cautious investors are seen to be punished by the market, if not literally by stockholders demanding ever higher returns like “the other guys” are enjoying. This collective experience sends the overall amount of leverage in the system skyward. This mentality extends to average consumers as well, who come to feel as if asset inflation is a law of nature, one conveniently designed to reward them - as if they were all little landed lords collecting rents - for the mere fact of ownership. Never mind that all the while it is the bank holding the actual mortgage lever. (I remember being told by a mortgage loan officer during the housing boom of the 2000s that the main mistake borrowers make is “not getting enough house.”) In sum, this boom period creates a general financial climate of ever-greater risk taking, where “ownership” becomes a mere means toward collecting one’s ordained high rate of return.
Previous safeguards against what seem by now to be ancient and irrelevant market downturns are ignored or overturned - on the largest scale such as the US New Deal era’s Glass-Steagall Act (The Banking Act of 1933), which separated consumer and investment banking in the wake of the Great Depression and was designed to prohibit banks from speculating with their depositors’ money. All this leverage and lessening of risk aversion then sets the stage for a harbinger of financial doom that Minsky calls the Ponzi financier, who meets his current cash liabilities by increasing his amount of debt outstanding (so new creditors pay back current ones), in a trajectory of perpetually augmenting liabilities. The Ponzi financier is crucial because he creates a situation even beyond the casino-style speculator where assets and liabilities no longer match up in a one-to-one correspondence; per impossibile, as a result there is actually more overall debt in the system than there are covering assets. There is no “other side” there to cover investors’ losses when the Ponzi strategy inevitably comes crashing down of its own inverted pyramidal weight. When this kind of thing happens on a large enough scale, as in 2008, where various Ponzi-like hedging, insurance, and derivative schemes went awry - via a vast armada of obfuscatory financial instruments that nobody really fully understands - the entire global capitalist system is placed under threat. The system is so, literally, top heavy with inequality and leverage that it threatens to topple of its own weight at any moment.
Depressingly, as Minsky saw, the cycle of upward financial instability into which we now appear locked creates a situation in which it is darkest not just immediately before dawn but right in the middle of the day: any inkling of a salutary boom or boomlet gears up the whole euphoric leverage machine once again, with consequences that bring great devastation the next time. The 1987 stock market crash becomes the 2000 dotcom crash which becomes the 2008 housing crash which will become, presumably, even worse without urgent corrective action, of which there appears to have been very little. According to Minsky, the only thing we can count on is that there will be a next crash and it will be still worse than the preceding one. For the Minskian Keen, the only saving move is the radical one of what he calls a “modern jubilee,” where debts are forgiven and savers are awarded cash in order to minimize the moral hazard of pre-jubilee savers being effectively penalized as their holdings are liquidated when borrowers’ debts are canceled. Jubilee policies are of course highly improbable - for now - but the intensity of an anticipated and even more acute economic crisis might well change some minds.20 The alternative is chronic stagnation if not outright collapse and, most significantly for present purposes, a continuation of the eliminationist program.
What might be the educational correlates of this frightening upward financial instability phenomenon? Education mirrors this economic system in which the rich have grown richer and moreover have increasingly insulated themselves against the rest of the population via a geographical stratification where they inhabit a very few US counties in Manhattan, Silicon Valley and a handful of others. As such, public schooling is not really a direct problem for them because of their location and because of their financial ability to opt out of the public system altogether via expensive private schools. However, the influence of this top heavy group is felt less directly, though powerfully, in several areas. First among these are the proliferating schemes to suck wealth upward from what were once public institutions like schools into private hands in order to make them available for speculation. Schools are to be drained of resources and then restructured to function more fully as “extractive institutions,” to use the provocative phrase from political scientists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s influential study of elite rapaciousness, Why Nations Fail (2011): “Extractive political institutions concentrate power in the hands of a narrow elite and place few constraints on the exercise of this power. Economic institutions are then often structured by this elite to extract resources from the rest of society.”21
A favored long-term extractive strategy is accumulation by dispossession via the strategy of privatizing schools in various ways. The championing of school voucher schemes (and precursor “charter” schools), where public money is doled out so that parent-consumers can make school “choices” among, ultimately, private providers, is a prominent policy initiative along these lines. This accords quite nicely with the casino mentality of the too big to fail banks: take educational risks not only with other peoples’ children but with public money as well. A second best strategy in the US is to champion so-called “charter schools,” which are public only in the sense that they are government funded but they are exempt from many state regulations. The ideology here is that such hybrid schools will demonstrate the wonders of educational competition where the invisible hand will then guide everyone closer to educational success. In the spirit of “follow the money” detective work, the telos of these operations is to funnel money into private and ultimately for-profit hands. Like social security and the prison system, the school system is too big a potential treasure house for the money funnels of the great investment houses to ignore. The money will flow upward and there will be that much more to play with.
A second set of strategies involves student loans in the lucrative higher education sector. This is no small scale operation, having recently passed the landmark $1 trillion mark, making US student loan liabilities total more than consumer credit cards and auto loans. This market is even more directly tied to the financiers than the K-12 privatization schemes, especially given the growing segment of that market governed by private as opposed to government loans. However, again, just as in the case of the too big to fail banks, the “private” nature of these student loan creditors is rather illusory given that they are either government-backed in case of borrower default and/or non-dischargeable for borrowers in bankruptcy. What this phenomenon shares with upward financial stability are its bubble-like characteristics: the overhyped rhetoric and hyperbolic claims about the coming age of “knowledge workers,” “symbolic analysts etc., the outsized expectations for the remuneration associated with the personal “investment” in college, and the credential inflation that fails to keep pace with any actual underlying societal economic needs and where a decreasing amount of formal learning is taking place. Surveying a half century of data, for example, economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks report broad based declines in the amount of studying done by full-time US college students, from 40 hours/week in 1961 to just 27 hours/week by 2003.22 My own experience as a college instructor leads me to feel safe in assuming that since then study rates have remained low or are falling. What to make of such a severely inflationary situation where students are paying more but getting less in every respect? Specifically targeting the rising generation, this sad situation is the subject of Chapter 4.
Finally, there is the rise of what has been termed “venture philanthropy,” as exemplified by initiatives such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million “gift” to the Newark, New Jersey public school system. These lordly dispensations have an inevitably coercive element because they are carrots offered amidst the sticks of chronic and, in more and more cases, emergency levels of underfunding by states and localities of public schools, especially those in poor urban minority areas. The premise of venture philanthropy in education is that public education policy is not to be seen as a matter of public deliberation among ordinary citizens but rather should be directed by the mega-rich, who are presumed to be experts not just in Microsoft and Facebook but in all policy matters, merely on the grounds that they are rich. Wealth is its own justification. Education scholar Kevin Kumashiro further explains:
Unlike traditional philanthropy, which sought, at least in principle, to “give back” to society, venture philanthropy parallels venture capitalism in its goal of investing capital in ways that earn more. In contrast to venture capitalism, one benefit of venture philanthropy is that it operates under different incorporation laws, providing tax shelters for what are really financial investments. Whereas the financial returns may not be as immediate as those of corporate transactions, the policy foci of today’s venture philanthropists indeed reveal the economic incentive of their investments. They overwhelmingly are pushing for the privatization of public education, creating new markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars, as well as for the prerogative to direct how public tax dollars get spent. They target the large urban school districts, experimenting with models they hope eventually to “scale up” nationally, as they have done in Chicago, where the Gates Foundation alone has spent millions on small-school initiatives, school turnarounds, youth organizing, and parent organizing.23
Though there are some outliers, predictably, these initiatives tend always to amount to pushing some corporate structure as panacea, including efforts to make over school leaders into CEO-like “managers,” provide various Pavlovian material “incen-tives” for teachers to “add value” to their student-products, “empower” parents to act more like “customers,” and the like. The Obama Administration has jumped into the ring and offered its own version of this kind of thing with its “Race to the Top” initiative, whereby cash-starved schools are thrown money in exchange for further corporate style reforms, with an emphasis on those pretending that standardized test scores can stand in as sales numbers or whatever other quantitative measures of productivity are said to be analogous in the hallowed and infallible business world. As a result, as Kumashiro summarizes, the “result is a philanthropic sector that is inseparable from the business sector, advancing school reforms that cannot help but to be framed by corporate profitability.”24 We can fully expect that these corporate reforms will accomplish for American education what JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and AIG have for the American economy, which is to say they will suck it dry of resources, pocket the proceeds and then stand back as the whole thing crashes and burns.
Educational externalities
The second set of neoliberal calamities is to be found in capitalism’s often unacknowledged externalities. These include both what one might call the “upstream” externalities that are necessary for the system’s performance, in other words, its required inputs, and also the “downstream” externalities that result from the system’s operations, its outputs. These are both externalities in the sense that they are widely (and mistakenly) thought to be outside the ambit of economic activity proper.
Absent government regulation, the capitalist’s power plant smokestack spews, say, mercury into the air that drifts off into the surrounding area and goes on to have whatever poisoning effects. Yet absent some sinister covert plot, the mercury (or greenhouse gasses or whatever) is merely a byproduct of the coal-burning plant’s production of the commodity of electricity, rather than that production’s intended goal. In this example, the mercury output constitutes a downstream externality vis-à-vis the power company. There are also of course the inputs. The resources going into the plant, in this case, say, coal and/or natural gas, water etc., are typically considered only in their aspect as commodities themselves, i.e. how they in turn factor into the costs of production and ultimately profitability and so on. It is assumed that resource inputs necessary to maintain operations in general will always be around in some form and that there is no inherent scarcity that cannot be dealt with by the simple laws of supply and demand: the market will find the proper price and discipline resource use appropriately.
Thus understood, any form of productive activity, as it requires both inputs and outputs, can be said to generate both upstream and downstream externalities. Yet the narrow focus of traditional economic models considers only the latter, and then only as potential short-term costs. This comes at the expense of a larger contextual understanding that would include upstream externalities and also long-term externalities across the whole range of spheres of human activity, including where those effects’ economic characteristics might be neither direct nor easily observable nor especially prominent at the moment of production. For example a rare aquatic species might be jeopardized by the power plant or some mercury-induced form of cancer might arise in surrounding populations, but only decades later.
This myopia concerning both types of externalities may prove capitalism’s real undoing. Marx certainly did not ignore environmental aspects of production and described the relation between humanity and nature as “metabolic” in the sense of their mutualism and their co-creation of one another. But catastrophically debilitating environmental effects and, especially, the finite nature of currently indispensable resources like liquid fossil fuels are not a primary focus. Since just after Marx’s time, capitalism has enjoyed a bonanza of what might be the world’s most astonishing upstream externality: cheap fossil fuel energy, mostly in the form of oil and gas. Oil and gas provide an extremely richly concentrated, versatile, efficient and consistent source of energy that is not remotely yet matched by renewables such as biofuels, wind or solar, or even nuclear (which obviously has other externality problems). They provide the sine qua non of both industrialism and globalization. But these are finite resources and they will not last. “Peak oil” is a controversial idea because some equate it with a sudden running out of oil and hence a rapid and spectacular collapse of contemporary civilization. But all it signifies is the unimpeachable reality that at a certain point finite oil reserves will reach their peak and then it is all downhill as far as oil’s existence for our use. There should be no controversy about this; peak oil is a certainty. Increasing global usage of a nonrenewable energy source logically entails it. The controversial part is the timing. Has it already occurred? If not when will it? Will the down side of the slope be steep and precipitous or smooth and gradual - or some hybrid, such as stepwise? These essential questions are strangely missing from “serious” public discussion.
Just a moment’s glance at modern lifestyles is enough to appreciate what is at stake here. Living without cheap fossil fuel is obviously possible (human beings did it until a few hundred years ago) but it is no longer something most of us in the industrialized world can even really contemplate. Unless one lives wholly self-sufficiently and sustainably (a negligible percentage of the population), just about all of one’s activities are based upon fossil fuels: almost all the food we eat depends on petroleum-based fertilizer, mechanized agriculture and gas-driven transport, our water depends on the same in terms of motorized public works and even most of those with wells require electric pumps. Electricity, it should be remembered, is created in power plants that burn fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas. Our jobs and transportation systems are obviously petroleum-based. So are all of our modern institutions, including schools, prisons, hospitals, police and the military. Without this energy input, and even with it in a compromised and/or substantially more expensive form, modern life would be unthinkable. But it is running out and it is only a matter of time. The same can be said in mitigated form of other indispensable resources whose easy abundance can no longer be assumed, such as unsullied fresh and ocean water, usable topsoil and certain minerals needed (and not merely optional) for agriculture.
For the present analysis, the point is that neither capitalism nor even, really, its historical critics, have made the reality of the finitude of relevant natural resources central enough to their worldviews. This is, I think, the ultimate externality problem in both its upstream and downstream aspects. Upstream, the models created in classical economics have assumed the infinite availability of energy and other natural resource inputs. Downstream, the potentially catastrophic effects of running out (or effectively running out, for example, when the costs of extraction become too high) are nowhere factored in; these are other peoples’ problems, and future others at that. This standard corporate attitude of deliberate indifference to these larger questions is simply unacceptable. We have come to grasp the externalities question with regard to obvious pollutants and it is now time quickly to extend that understanding to the question of the scarcity of key natural resources - if it is not already too late.
Would that resource depletion were the only large environmental externality problem. But there is still pollution and other forms of industrial toxicity along with their byproduct, perhaps the most fearsome and intractable externality of them all: climate change. For libertarian ideologues and capitalist apologists, this problem cannot possibly exist. It seems too grim a twist on the old invisible hand story, allegedly providing only salutary effects. This time, however, the invisible hand represents the deleterious ensemble of CO2 emissions resulting from the aggregation of our individual economic choices. And yes, regimes carrying the label “socialism” have had significant emissions-related problems, too, to wit, Chernobyl in the twilight years of the former Soviet Union. By general agreement, though, capitalism is far more productive and therefore proportionately presents by far the largest danger. Yet, please excuse the pun, climate change presents an almost perfect storm of difficulty as far as our ability to address it. As behavioral economist Dan Ariely argues, the problem of climate change seems almost “designed” to depress human motivation toward addressing it. It occurs (so far) relatively gradually, it is not (yet) perceived to be effecting us directly, there is just enough cultural noise from corporate media outlets to cast sufficient doubt in the minds of “low information” types and, as Ariely suggests, the relevant issues are so complex that they discourage the conviction that one can mount a meaningful personal response; everything one might do seems to be a mere “drop in the bucket.”25 Add to the equation that those on the other side of the issue, the climate change deniers, are often intensely motivated (by ideology and money), and we have a recipe for almost certain inaction.
Meanwhile, just as with many of the resource depletion problems, the frog in the cooking pot is not noticing as the water temperature rises around it.
The larger point is that capitalism as presently constituted may be unable to handle these kinds of environmental externalities, owing to the deliberately-produced ideological fog surrounding them and their relatively long time horizons. This concern is pointedly articulated by investment analyst Jeremy Grantham of GMO Enterprises. For Grantham, “the current US capitalist system appears to contain some potentially fatal flaws.”26 These he identifies as roughly the above two types of externalities I have discussed thus far: climate change and resource depletion. With regard to the latter, emphasizing topsoil problems, he writes:
Damage to the “commons,” known as “externalities” has been discussed for decades, although the most threatening one - loss of our collective ability to feed ourselves, through erosion and fertilizer depletion - has received little or no attention. There have been no useful tricks proposed, however, for how we will collectively impose sensible, survivable, long-term policies over problems of the “commons.” To leave it to capitalism to get us out of this fix by maximizing its short- term profits is dangerously naïve and misses the point: capitalism and corporations have absolutely no mechanism for dealing with these problems, and seen through a corporate discount rate lens, our grandchildren really do have no value.27
He concludes that capitalism’s necessary fixation on short-term growth at all costs - literally all costs - presents its greatest Achilles heel. Present trends - which are accelerating, especially as China, India and others come online - concerning both resource depletion and climate change are bleak. Above all else, then, the neoliberal endgame appears to involve an energetic and almost completely heedless destruction of the biospheric preconditions of human existence. This is why the imagery of mass death is neither hyperbolic nor hysterical but appropriately reflective of a sober extrapolation from present trends. “Capitalism, by ignoring the finite nature of resources and by neglecting the long-term well-being of the planet and its potentially crucial biodiversity, threatens our existence …My conclusion is that capitalism does admittedly do a thousand things better than other systems: it only currently fails in two or three. Unfortunately for us all, even a single one of these failings may bring capitalism down and us with it.”28 This is from an enlightened lifelong champion of the system, from within its very center.
How does education stand regarding these grave matters? The question admits of different approaches.
First there is the question of institutional form, a.k.a. the question of schooling. Resource depletion has enormous ramifications across the board and it is important to begin engaging in something like scenario planning as the effects of various resource peaks begin to be felt. For starters, something like a rudimentary counterfactual exercise might make sense. Take peak oil. What would the US school system look like under different peak oil scenarios? Let’s take a moderate forecast, one in which there is no short-or medium-term “running out” of oil but where the next decade or two see huge price rises that are a function of increasing scarcity, speculation and diminishing “energy return on investment” (EROI), sometimes simply called “net energy.” EROI is a crucial but often neglected concept reflecting the distinction between the simple presence of, say, oil of whatever grade and what the cost might be of extracting it, refining it, and otherwise making it usable. There is much excitement about shale deposits and tar sands, for example, and there is certainly oil there. But it is of a lower grade and far more expensive to reach (not to mention far dirtier and therefore climate destructive), to the extent that in some scenarios it would not be worth it in terms of energy and financial input even to bother. If it takes more energy to extract the oil than the oil itself provides, in other words, if the EROI falls below zero, it would make no sense to proceed. (An analogous point applies to the economics of energy extraction; if the extraction costs more to accomplish than it would generate in profits it is not financially rational to continue, any more than it makes financial sense for a farmer to grow crops that sell for less than it takes to produce them.) Bearing such considerations in mind, then, it is important to understand that “peak oil” is a much more multifaceted concept than simply the sheer quantity of oil left in the ground. It represents the possibility of a hard economic limit as much as anything else. It would therefore be advisable for scenario planning, which should of course involve an assessment of the most basic necessary physical resources, to factor EROI into forecasts for the drastically worsening economic constraints upon an already highly stressed public school system.
Like much else upon which we depend, the current US public school system makes sense only under the conditions of cheap energy, the gargantuan energy windfall that has made industrial capitalism possible in the first place. This is so clearly the case that it would seem appropriate to describe the currently predominant arrangement as petroschooling.
Let us take some of our system’s most obvious features in this regard. First are the historically consolidated factory style schools that we have come to favor due to their economically efficient batch processing of relatively large numbers of students. As distinct as they could be from their largely non-age-graded one room schoolhouses that were much smaller and per capita far more numerous, a typical American high school enrolls thousands of pupils because it is able to draw from a geographically wide catchment area. Especially in rural areas, the school itself may be many, many miles from most of the students who attend it. As a result, a gigantic transportation system has developed in support, and there is no icon more instantly recognizable in America than the yellow school bus that that has been making its rounds here for generations. Among many other things, this transport system makes compulsory education possible, as because of it even the poorest and busiest parents lack the excuse that they cannot get their children to school. It also underwrites the entire extracurricular life of the school and the culture built up for generations around that in America: inter-school competitive athletics and other activities, for example.
All of this is possible because the costs of providing free and convenient transport to all students is regarded as economically feasible and a good return on investment, given durable (perhaps until now) education policy goals having to do with universal education. But what if, as per the peak oil and diminishing EROI type of scenario sketched above, vehicle gas prices rose, say, five-or ten-fold? At current prices (2013) this would mean a five-to ten-fold rise (from ca. $4.00/gallon to $20-$40/gallon). Would US school districts be able to afford this? Would bus transport still seem like such a winning investment? It is hard to imagine that it would. One would then have to factor in the costs of staff getting to work as well. And the situation would be greatly compounded when one considers the climate control (HVAC) costs for these large buildings as well, especially in certain geographical regions, considering that many of these large schools were built under the standard assumption of cheap energy, e.g. a multi-storied school building in south Florida which would need to be cooled not just for comfort but to be habitable. All this is worthy of more detailed research, but even the tip of the iceberg of such considerations is sufficient to accentuate the present point: the material infrastructure that makes possible our current school system rests, like so much else, on the alarmingly precarious basis of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. One does not have to be much of a “futurist” to see how this could easily go very, very wrong. At the very least, the paradigm of what I am calling petroschooling might be in for some severe shocks where we might have to rethink what makes sense in terms of the physical arrangement of schools. Maybe homeschooling becomes more attractive. Or a return to more numerous but walkable/bikeable small schoolhouses. More dramatically, might face to face rural education largely be given up upon so that public schooling becomes more of an urban affair? And how would that reshape the American social and physical landscape? Questions upon questions.
Obviously, whatever its particularities would actually happen to be, this kind of shift would be sure to have huge ramifications for American society as a whole, let alone just education policy. This is an enormously complex set of changes about which to speculate and a useful analysis would require intense and thorough multidisciplinary study. But very few are even close to considering all this. We prefer to proceed under current assumptions. It is easier for the moment and requires less thought. Unfortunately, education reform’s traditional pattern of muddling through and “tinkering” may not be adequate to future constraints dictated by our vanishing energy resource base.
An even scarier thought begins with the recognition that the last century’s fossil fuel bonanza was a necessary condition for the past century’s momentous gains in universal education (just as this same energy windfall may have been a necessary condition for industrial capitalism itself). This is true both directly, in the above sense of the net energy inputs necessary to efficiently get children to the new consolidated and hence farther-distant schools, but also indirectly in the sense that powerful energy inputs around, especially, mechanizing agriculture, reduced farm labor needs such that kids could be sent away during the day to learn. (The American system retains vestiges of this previous era in its antiquated school calendar that still allows for two to three month summer “vacations.”) From the point of view of extending public education, this freeing of agriculturally laboring children was no trivial matter. In 1910 the population share of rural America was 72%, most of whom also worked in their local areas (especially farms), whereas today the rural population stands at just 16%.29 Liberating these farm families from ancient human labor needs made universal education possible. In 1900 only 6.4% of American kids graduated from high school. By 1960 that number had grown to 60%, peaking at around 80% a decade later.30 This revolution in secondary school attendance was made possible by the productive efficiencies wrought by cheap fossil fuel. These efficiencies were realized in the technologies that then came online to exploit the energy windfall: from affordable tractors and petroleum-based fertilizers to vast government projects such as New Deal rural electrification and the extension of telephone service. The current structure of mass schooling in the US is unthinkable apart from its mutualism with cheap fuel.
From the point of view of public education, the disquieting thought thus occasioned is that the literacy gains achieved during this 6%-to-80% explosion of universal education was an exercise in plucking most all of what economist Tyler Cowen refers to as “low hanging fruit.”31 As this metaphor suggests, once the easy gains are achieved, further educational fruits are available (e.g. greater amounts of higher education) but they are increasingly difficult to obtain and require higher expenditures of resources; the returns start to diminish. One imagines a plateau regarding the economic yield brought about by the achievement of universal literacy and the like. As Cowen notes, taking “a smart, motivated person out of an isolated environment and sending that person to high school will bring big productivity gains.”32 The trouble is that once those initial large productivity gains have been reaped, the return on the human capital investment levels off, perhaps to the point of unfeasibility. Ironically, while technological development made universal basic education possible, those same technological developments and consequent productivity increases render further education for the masses mostly a waste.
Sure there is an ongoing need for a small percentage of the population to reap the spoils accruing to those with the technical background to run the machines. Such people do well. As the machines get better, however, by definition even a smaller percentage of the machine-maintainers are ultimately needed. This level of expensive educational investment simply does not “pay” with regard to most people, because more and more of us are not exactly needed for much of anything. No longer needed as workers, the domestic masses are needed as open mouths into which to force feed as much consumption as possible, an irrational strategy that purchases short-term overconsumption at the price of long-term underconsumption (due to the inevitable ensuing debt overload) and hence is defeating of its very purpose. Domestically at least, neoliberalism really needs consumers and otherwise neutralized types (e.g. the incarcerated) rather than the industrial era of capitalism’s skilled and semi-skilled labor. For the dirty little secret of the high tech economy is that, despite incessant boosterism to the contrary, it does not need widespread technical competence; most jobs in the high tech environment demand stultifying activities that require nothing beyond basic literacy - if that. The “cashier” at the high tech fast-food restaurant no longer needs to figure anyone’s change, as was the case for yesteryear’s cashiers using the earlier, lower tech machines. She doesn’t even need the skill and minimal mental wherewithal to fill drinks properly: all she has to do is push the small, medium or large icons on the soda machine. For every “high tech, high wage” worker enjoying a cool workplace at google.com, there are many, many more who are “enjoying” the inverse proportion between high tech and their job demands: the higher the tech, the dumber the worker can be and, ultimately, in the best case neoliberal scenario, phased out altogether where possible (via outsourcing and/or further automation). Just like the industrial age factories of yore (and in today’s developing world), the labor is almost purely de-skilled and reduced to simple timing and motility. Such people - the lucky ones who have even those jobs - merely need behavioral training and not education in any substantive sense.
Educationally, it has been a long run but it is finally over for them. They can now expect to revert to their traditional status as a kind of non-waged and economically precarious peasantry and/or imperial military fodder. The future to which they can look forward is comprised of a carceral circuit of police state schooling, poverty-level ad hoc jobs that are radically un-steady, military service in any one of our perpetual wars (one cannot predict which war only that there will be war), and consequently a life shorn of all the basic cultural elements of what was once considered a “decent” life, such as stable family units - let alone the American dream. The chaotic recent unrest in capitals such as London and Paris offer a glimpse of the future public life of this element that Marx called the “lumpenproletariat,” i.e. those who find themselves outside the loop of “normal” capitalist wage labor. As will be discussed in later chapters, these unexploitables are already a massive presence globally in our growing “planet of slums” and they are rising, ineluctably, here at home as well. There is nothing to romanticize here, no place to look for “inspiring” stories of “slum dog millionaires” “against the odds” that can warm and reassure the bourgeois heart that “life goes on” despite all. (One just needs to be plucky and clever!) It is an intolerable human tragedy writ large.
Despite the epochal evil they have wrought in these regards, one should never make the mistake of giving elites too much credit for planning and foresight. A central theme of this book is how resource depletion - the “limits to growth” - may reshuffle everyone’s deck. It is even possible that such phenomena as peak oil, whose predominant effect in the coming decades is likely to be rising energy costs rather than a simple running out of anything, may bring back the need for higher quantities of good old-fashioned manual labor right here at home.
For the moment, though, because of the technological productivity heights it has now reached, capitalism simply no longer needs as many workers, particularly of the expensive North American or European kind. Absent countervailing vestigial cultural forces, it is predictably therefore likely to care proportionately less about yesteryear’s costly enterprise of mass schooling whose economic rationale always did lie in the upstream externality it provides to commerce and industry in the form of skilled labor. However, as per the general TRPF hypothesis, as profits dry up long-term due to the decreasing labor component of production, and as fossil fuels simultaneously grow scarcer and more costly, any imagined post-petroleum capitalist elite stands to discover that in fact they need other human beings after all. The scary thought is that it may be too late by then. If social unrest due to economic turmoil doesn’t do it, the apparently inexorable downstream externalities of climate change and resource depletion may propel events beyond anyone’s control. Current systems of social control may not even function. Under “collapse” conditions, the project of universal education may seem quite the quaint relic of more innocent times.
A second set of educational considerations has to do with much more general pedagogical question of the desirability of and prospects for altering human self-understanding toward repairing what Marx called the “irreparable …metabolic rift” we have created between ourselves and our environment that industrial capitalism, beginning with mechanized agriculture, has greatly widened. Marx has often been mischaracterized in this area, largely due to distortions during the Soviet era after Stalin’s ascendancy. As John Bellamy Foster shows, Marx is actually clear and prescient on this point, developing a kind of “interactionism” between human beings and nature that was centrally concerned with long-term sustainability and future generations, especially with regard to modern agricultural practices and their impact upon soil fertility.33 The point is that there is an enormous pedagogical challenge involved in repairing this metabolic rift toward a more defensible conception of the relation between human beings and nature, much of which involves understanding how our own (capitalist) social relations are implicated. As Foster puts it, “a potentially fatal ecological rift has arisen between human beings and the earth, emanating from conflicts and contradictions of the modern capitalist society. The planet is now dominated by a technologically potent but alienated humanity - alienated both from nature and itself; and hence ultimately destructive of everything around it. At issue is not just the sustainability of human society, but the diversity of life on Earth.”34
But what would it take to overcome this monumental “alienation”? What would this even mean? The difficulty is that attempts to articulate “getting back to nature” and the like quickly spin out into vagueness and, usually, essentially contested notions of spirituality and associated religious stances.
Yet there are four general moves that seem to me in the right direction. I explore these at various points throughout this book, especially in Chapter 7.
The first of these has to do with challenging our stance toward technology and our workaday conviction involving what I would call a “principle of sufficient technological reason,” according to which we assume there exists a technical solution - out there somewhere - to every problem we encounter. The only uncertainty is whether we will be bright and clever enough to come up with it. Disguised as an unimpeachably modern attitude of “better living through science,” this attitudinal stance is really an atavistic form of magical thinking: little better than a faith that “those in the know” in the priestly caste (for us, the technologists) will conjure up something.35
Second is taking steps to recognize and alleviate the purely extractive stance toward nature and each other that has come to govern our collective unconscious, providing us what we take to be “common sense.” The Heideggerian admonition “to let beings be as the beings which they are” takes on a new urgency in a finite world of rapidly approaching natural limits.36 This includes examining how intersubjective relations might be rendered less extractive, for example, in practices of “gift giving,” long recognized as fundamental to pre-capitalist forms of social organization by anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss and outside-the-mainstream contemporary thinkers such as Charles Eisenstein.37 Another world is indeed possible because it has actually existed.
Third and more philosophically is questioning our sense of control regarding the effecting of future outcomes, where we see ourselves fundamentally as choosers who exercise free will and so are not wholly subject at the micro-level to causal forces and at the macro-level to anything like “fate.” This is a strategy associated with ancient Stoicism, one that has and continues to take many forms. I explore a couple of relevant ones in the last chapter.
Fourth, and perhaps most fundamentally, there is interrogating deep yet lightly examined assumptions we carry about human and even biological exceptionalism. Paradoxically, our predicament might best be addressed by attempting to alleviate both anthropocentric and biocentric mechanisms of problem framing, the outlines of which are being supplied in the developing object-oriented school of ontology. One such deflationary iconoclast, philosopher Levi Bryant, explains: “The point is to recognize how we are dependent for our agency and existence on broader networks of entities, that we aren’t little gods legislating everything in our image, and that if we wish to do well we better attend to these things. The stakes are not to defend science over culture, but to reconceptualize the very nature of ourselves, nature, our duties and obligations.”38 This weird and discomfiting constellation of philosophical concerns goes against most of what everyone has been taught about the uniqueness of human beings: our consciousness, reasoning abilities, ethics, etc. But we may need to be willing to explore some way down this rabbit hole if we want actually to counter that which animates the neoliberal endgame sequence currently underway. Nobody said it was going to be easy - or even likely.