The fundamental instability of capitalism is upward.
Hyman P. Minsky1
[M]ore and more people are being permanently excluded from the economic system because it no longer pays to exploit them.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger2
Upward instability
At this point capitalism’s many escapes from the TRPF have altered it irrevocably. In fact one might say that the counter forces to the TRPF have become more the thing than the erstwhile thing itself (which is one way of appreciating how the dialectics of change allows both for necessity and surprise). Of late, the neoliberal form of capitalism, even amidst its self-referential hysteria, has in reality become an inversion of what the right wing dreams it is. The allegedly arch-individualist titans have somehow banded together with a group solidarity that would be the envy of the most fervent syndicalist in order to rig the financial game for themselves. As Marx himself puts it, “capitalists form a veritable freemason society vis-à-vis the whole working class.”3 There is still plenty of competition, in fact, arguably more than ever, including, on an intra-sector basis, among the capitalists themselves. Due to widespread monopolies, though, the arena of competition is now to be found mostly among the workers, not the capitalists. Whereas we once had more widespread competition among capitals, who together confronted widespread solidarity among unionized workers, we now have the reverse: a pan-monopolist solidarity among capitals that confronts a globalized mass of anomic, consumption-focused workers who have been successfully pitted against one another. It is a dazzling world historical jiu-jitsu move, where competition and solidarity have switched class positions.
Back to that Hegelian ‘no guarantees’ caveat. There is an irony that Marx would have appreciated but he did not emphasize. While class antagonisms are indeed causing the disintegration of capitalism, it is not the proletariat who is the agent of change. That potentially fearsome entity has for the moment been tamed. Rather, in the long battle of their rational self-interest against the steady pull of the TRPF, it is the capitalists themselves who are destroying the system that once enriched them. As a laying hen will do over a lifetime, capitalism’s productive system began yielding fewer and fewer eggs. Along aforementioned lines, strategies were put in place to try to counteract this epic profit slowdown. But these too began to fail. Most prominently, the purely banking and financial sector - as distinct from the traditionally productive sectors - began to rise as a proportion of the economy in an epic corrective quest for elusive profits. Depending on how one calculates it, an extractive FIRE sector currently accounts for a third or more of the US and developed economies and, in economist Michael Hudson’s striking estimation, absorbs 75%-80% of US workers’ wages (viz., housing payments, loans, insurance), “even before employees can start buying goods and services.”4 The speculative thrust of these operations, including the various hedge and outright Ponzi schemes, has illustrated how, as the renegade but now resuscitated economist Hyman Minsky put it a generation ago, “the fundamental instability of a capitalist economy is upward.”5 The instability is “upward” because it is the finance capitalists’ chasing of outsized expectations for profit - expectations that develop during boom periods - that generates the systemic instability. “The tendency to transform doing well into a speculative investment boom is the basic instability in a capitalist economy.”6 Allegedly facilitative of the efficient movement of capital, contemporary hypertrophic finance ironically causes the opposite: a top-heavy wooziness among the bankers who are supposed to be in control but are actually more like a bar drunk stumbling around before finally toppling over, sleeping it off, and then repeating the process. All the while, the rest of us perpetually stand by to repair the damage and pay the costs. Repeatedly.
Influenced by Marx - though ultimately more sanguine about the possibility of “stabilizing the instability”7 - Minsky argues that not only did this upward instability account for the nature of the contemporary boom-bust cycle, where the post-war period of stable growth was actually anomalous from the long term point of view, but it created a longer-term macro-problem as well. Since the amount of debt leverage undertaken by the financiers never resets all the way back down to zero during the de-leveraging bust phase (hair of the dog: the drunk never fully sobers back up), over time the system as a whole becomes more leveraged (i.e. indebted) in a three-steps-forward-two-steps-backward kind of way.8 This means that although there continue to be mini-booms that follow mini-busts (e.g. the “tech bubble” of the early 2000s), with global finance capital now ascendant - especially after it began to be unfettered in the 1990s from New Deal-era regulations - it is only a matter of time until debt levels are radically unsustainable and a final, gigantic de-leveraging event (aka a crash) is inevitable, perhaps even the “terminal” crisis of capitalism always envisioned by the more ruddily apocalyptic Marxists. More frighteningly, the other historical solution to this problem has involved the outright destruction of fixed capital on a massive scale, with World War II being the major example, following as it did - non-coincidentally - in the wake of the Great Depression.9 Just as the US permanent war economy - so-called “military Keynesianism” - has provided a crucial ballast for the system as a whole in the post-war period, outright war itself is the tried and true method for a capital re-set, one that capitalists can be regularly counted on to favor.10
Until the war solution dawns on them once again, the controlling financiers proceed along as if, in their desire to set a speed record, they are blind to that ninety degree turn in the road up ahead. All the while, strapped into the back seat is an isolated proletariat enjoying the scenery provided by the pre-fabricated ideology and yelling at the driver to speed up his own personal indebtedness. The point is that the financial capitalists are themselves doing the world historical work of bringing down their own system, abetted by a corporate ownership structure that encourages short-termism and practically demands that they behave this way, otherwise the expected high rate of short-term return simply will not materialize. In this ironic sense one can only applaud investment mega-firm Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s notorious statement that he is just a banker “doing God’s work.” Onward march the financial soldiers.
To be sure, financialization and monopoly have fattened God’s workers up with Gini coefficients (i.e. measures of inequality) that would be the envy of the emperors of old. But capitalism as we once knew it is now dead. And it is the capitalists who have killed it. They have counterintuitively killed their own summum bonum, the very God they claim to worship. As Nietzsche has his Madman say, “This prodigious event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves.”11 As with Nietzsche’s death of God, even though the deed is already done, the old patterns of thought may still persist for some time (“I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar”); there is a lag time before ideology catches up. But the capitalists have now killed their dearly beloved. Until we collectively recognize the capitalists’ murder-suicide, what we have at best is what the late Chris Harman termed a living-dead “zombie capitalism” that still walks the earth on government support and terrorizes us through austerity and other blood curdling measures.12
In the near term, to be sure, the monopoly strategy may “work” for the few cash-bloated individuals who can remove themselves to their gated communities, islands, and the like. But the system that enriched these individuals is now devolving into something more akin to the robber barons of the nineteenth century or, perhaps, into what might better be termed a neo-feudal arrangement where a monopolist rentier class, insulated from competition, sits back and watches the bellum omnium contra omnes reigning among the paupers on the outside. From the point of view of duties to the public at large, today’s putative neo-feudal overlords are arguably quite a bit worse than their medieval predecessors. Cruelty was certainly widespread, but at least there was a common religious morality to provide some measure of restraint. Plus, as a practical matter, medieval castle walls were typically a place of refuge for the surrounding residents in case of war. By contrast, our neo-feudal lords’ walls provide no refuge as they are built solely to keep the peasants out. There remains neither noblesse oblige nor any other animating ideal or restraining set of customs; there is only consumerist vainglory gorging itself on its “More! More!” This revolution from above has been won by a monopolist rent-extracting class that no longer dreams of Christendom or Imperium but rather of escaping completely from the rest of humanity. They have erected and are perfecting a new finance-based, technology-enabled and geographically stratified pathos of distance.
This fantasy of escape - “the possibility of an island” as in novelist Michel Houellebecq’s evocative title13 - represents a departure from an ancient ideal of civic-mindedness that has been influential since it was hyperbolically depicted as the guardian class in Plato’s Republic. The legitimacy of Plato’s idealized elites is based in large part on: a) their ability to reject a personal escape (into philosophizing), along with b) their inability as guardians to own personal wealth.14 This latter was a bargain with at least some moral symmetry, i.e. those who rule cannot have, those who have cannot rule. Our bloodlessly acquisitive neoliberal overlords thus turn the traditional ideal around 180 degrees; they base their legitimacy on what they personally own and their ability to sequester themselves from the rest of us. They take and they consume - and we are to love them for it.
The signal difficulty is that they have now taken the decisive step of occulting themselves from the mass of the population - physically and in terms of the mechanisms of their rule. This severance has been made possible through technological innovation, especially in the areas of automation and computer and communications technology. These processes have in the short term provided a sort of neoliberal fantasy world for the few: less geographical proximity to ordinary people as well as less general dependence on them. Servants for menial and personal tasks are still needed, admittedly, but those from whom the surplus labor value is extracted in direct production are located farther and farther away, in Mexico, China, India and points beyond. It has never been easier to cultivate indifference to these distant toiling others and to remain willfully ignorant of the provenance of one’s commodities, the “made in…” label being essentially part of the background noise of everyday life. At “home,” whatever that means any longer, fewer and fewer of these “extra people” are still needed; they are simply too expensive at this point - with their unions, health care and family needs - and they appear now to be so expensive precisely because it is the surplus aspect of the surplus army of labor that has come to the fore. There is no place for these people; they are no longer needed. A fortiori there is no place for their legal freedoms, their health care, their infrastructure, their physical environment, their public safety or, indeed, their education. Capitalism is now finally done with them.
Elimination as the neoliberal endgame
No longer do they want to exploit you; now they want you gone.
Though the capitalists may be on the downward slope of the TRPF, one might think that the rising productivity that is part of the equation would augment workers’ value and hence their job security, wages and benefits. Alas, this is true only positionally, i.e. for a worker who is relatively productive vis-à-vis his fellows. If I can outsmart and/or outpace my competitor job-seekers, all other things being equal, I ought to be able to command proportionally higher compensation. This dynamic works nicely for superstar athletes as via contract superstar performers enjoy a prodigious transformation of their athletic “productivity” into money because what they have to offer is either unmatched or very scarce. Yet per impossibile when all quarterbacks become Tom Brady this situation no longer holds; as the market becomes flooded with Bradys, the price-per-Brady drops proportionately as Brady-supply begins to outpace Brady-demand. And so it is that college graduates become barristas and PhDs drive cabs.
Such is the fate of the average worker in an age of increasing productivity: temporary positional gains for a lucky few, steps forward for selected individuals that help to legitimate the turning of the hamster wheel, but a long-term weakening of everybody’s position vis-à-vis employers. Economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook term this dismal race the “winner-take-all society” in their book of the same title.15 Frank and Cook explain how productivity gains from technology (with education as an important additive) overcrowd labor markets. This in turn allows employers to be more selective about whom they hire and reward. What follows is an environment where ever smaller differences in workers’ productivity (or at least perceived productivity) begin resulting in widening gaps in compensation; such employees are worth ever more relative to their fellows. An employee who is slightly more productive, say 1/100th as much as her co-worker, receives not just $101.00 as against the co-worker’s $100.00, but may receive $200.00 and/or an entirely better position in the company altogether. Since so few are able to eke out that extra $1, when it comes time for the very few to be differentiated, it is that small group of extra-$1-earners who stand out and not only “win” but win big. This phenomenon of small differences providing outsized gains in productivity and in turn outsized gains in compensation has many ramifications. Among them is the perceived linkage of one’s educational credential, an alleged marker of the quality of one’s education and/or class competence, with one’s productivity. For example, whereas generations ago an applicant may have been asked only if he possessed a college degree or not, or even merely “some college,” now he is asked precisely where he obtained that degree, if not also what he majored in. Ivy League, state school, community college: these are perceived as vastly different entities. Smaller differences matter more and more. Such super-competition is the fate of those condemned to fight over an ever shrinking portion of the pie.
As workers are thus divided and conquered, employers’ leverage is further compounded by the massive downward pressure on wages wrought by globalization. To use an anachronistic manufacturing example, the Michigan assembly line worker no longer competes merely against other Michigan workers, or even those from Ohio or Alabama, but against the nameless, faceless (to him) toiling masses of India, Mexico and China who by US standards earn sub-poverty wages.
This creates an interesting situation for the school system in its traditional role as vocational conveyor belt, what one might think of as a kind of upstream vertical integration of human capital. “It is fully in keeping with the capital concept as traditionally defined to say that expenditures on education, training, medical care etc, are investments in capital,” writes one of the most prominent mouthpieces of neoliberalism, Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker.16 In fact, Becker allows that “education and training are the most important investments in human capital.”17 And capital, whether of the human kind or of any other variety, must be made to pay. It must be rendered malleable and serviceable toward its raison d’être: the accumulation of still more capital. Like fixed capital, human capital must be shaped, and not in ways that are necessarily congenial to the capital which, as part of whatever production process, may need to be re-purposed, transformed or eliminated altogether. The capital doesn’t get to decide its own usage, the capitalist does.
Labor will thus be utilized or, more pertinently, not utilized. Simultaneous with the winner-take-all narcissism of small differences at the shrinking top of what Mikhail Bakunin (and later Lenin and others) called the “labor aristocracy,” there grows at the bottom a mass of neo-peasants that is rendered structurally less and less employable - no matter what their standardized test scores and what good boys and girls they’ve been.18 It seems that technologically-generated increases in productivity have allowed for a massive overaccumulation of human capital. One no longer just gets a decent and steady job by simply following the societal rules, as per the Clintonian rhetorical trope of championing those who “work hard and play by the rules.” So at the diminishing top there is escalating incentive (and pressure) to succeed at school, whereas at the widening bottom there is diminishing economic incentive to care.
Just about every American kid, and certainly every middle class one, knows the promised (or threatened) chain of causality: do well on this exam for a good grade in the class for a good GPA, for a good college for a good job for a good salary for a good life for one’s children’s good life, etc. Reflecting on his working class youth in the American Midwest, John Marsh memorably elaborates what so many of us have always heard on the receiving end of this train of reasoning: “They put the fear of McDonalds in you. Either you studied hard and enrolled in college, or you took your chances in the local labor market. And for those with a high school diploma or less, those chances led, more or less, through the Golden Arches to a minimum wage job.”19 So there is constant striving at the apex for very real stakes at the same time that cynicism, alienation and despair spreads throughout the student body writ large. In its job-yielding role, one imagines the school system as a capsized and sinking ocean liner, where survivors scurry upwards to the remaining above-waterline areas, even as those areas disappear. Some have huge head starts and even their own life boats while some are all-but-doomed from the start. But nobody is really safe. There are no guarantees anymore. Not even McDonalds is always hiring.
What do these developments portend for education policy? With a certain economic instrumentalism regarding schools having almost completely saturated our political life, we can expect macro-economic conditions roughly to determine the outlines of education policy. (Hence the relative school/economy correspondence asserted above in the Introduction.) Not that this is airtight : as indicated earlier, the school system is vast, serves a number of interests, has its own internal imperatives and so enjoys a degree of relative institutional autonomy.20 Nonetheless, a relatively crude economism holds sway overall and is manifest across a number of fronts, from the “accountability” craze to the commodification of schooling (higher education included) as a purely personal “possession” rather than any kind of public good that speaks to collective as opposed to individual/consumerist aspirations.21 As the global economic plate tectonics shift in the direction of efficiencies of outsourcing, vertical integration, and the incessant augmentation of technologies of production, it is reasonable to expect education systems eventually to align themselves (or to be aligned) with economic needs. Via whatever policy levers are available to money-sniffing potentates, this has ever been the case.
Though it is unglamorous for educators who like to think they can by their everyday activities “change the world” (who like other Americans are taught this morale-booster as a birthright), history establishes that school systems track fairly reliably the socio-economic system within which they are ensconced. It is a correspondence thesis too dull even to say much about it: Nazism yields Nazi schools, Communism communist schools, apartheid apartheid schools, capitalism capitalist schools etc. And within those school systems, predictably, individuals are slotted for the cultural and economic roles that their environing society makes available for them, an iron law of correspondence recognized from Plato and Confucius to Horace Mann. The weak countercurrents that are commonly observable - however locally strong they might be - in the end only help to emphasize the direction in which the main body of the river still ineluctably flows: downstream. For every Deweyan Chicago lab school or holistic Waldorf effort, there are the other 99.9% of American schools; ditto for every freedom-loving Summerhill vis-à-vis the English system and every child-centered Reggio Emilia vis-à-vis the Italian. As per the cliché, these are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Understandably, many critical educators find this correspondence picture lacking in psychological uplift and therefore offer an imaginary, kill-the-messenger, deflationary sort of objection that school-society correspondence is bad for pedagogical morale; the lack of “agency” it seems to offer is regarded as depressing. A kind of reverse Tinker Bell logic is offered against any kind of structural analysis: if X makes one feel bad and is “disempowering,” then X must be untrue. Unfortunately, one’s emotional reaction to a possible state of affairs proffers nothing either for or against its existence. As Nietzsche understood, truth may be inimical to life and still be what it is. Besides, whether or not a given truth is inimical to life requires a separate argument. If the truth strikes one as deterministic, this may lead to quietism, yes. But it may also lead to activism. Consider the Calvinists-cum-Puritans-cum-Pilgrims: as Max Weber famously described it in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the world has rarely seen such a deterministic theology as Calvinist predestination. Yet “the Puritan ethic,” holding that God would prosper his “elect” and show material evidence of His favor, counter-intuitively yielded one of world history’s most energetically activist psychological orientations. One could make this same argument regarding ancient Stoicism (and Roman fatalism generally), for example, those versions associated with Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. One simply cannot assume the psychological directionality of a worldview.
Unjustified optimism may also lead to improper target selection. This is the classic Marxist position: while it may have a measure of relative autonomy, as a superstructural element, education is not where the real action is. The scene of resistance is the class struggle. In fact, an excessive focus on education, say, in the form of advancing an allegedly liberatory pedagogy, in the absence of a broader and enveloping social movement, is ultimately going to be delusional; at best it will help create even more delightful personal experiences to which the children of the bourgeoisie already feel entitled.22 Marsh’s above-quoted study Class Dismissed presents an updated statement of this thesis, reminding his readers of the sociological tradition from James Coleman to Christopher Jencks that shows the severe dependency of educational attainment on family background, aka social class. For Marsh, “we cannot teach or learn our way out of inequality.” In the American context, this observation is reminiscent of FDR’s “second bill of rights,” and above all its declaration that “opportunity, including educational opportunity, emerges from a foundation of economic security.”23 More, the consistent faith that education is the cure for our national economic woes, as well as for individuals “the path to economic prosperity,” has long performed the crucial ideological function of distracting citizens’ attention away from unjust economic outcomes in favor of a focus on allegedly omnipresent economic opportunities, helping everyone maintain what Marsh sardonically calls “the belief in a just economic world”:
Education, you might say, is what allows people to sleep at night. Because Americans have built schools and funded loans and scholarships, anyone who wants to get ahead can. If people cannot or do not get ahead, however, that is on them. Indeed, the nineteenth-century faith in hard work and industriousness on the job did not disappear so much as it did migrate to a belief in hard work and industriousness in school. Those who succeeded must have worked hard in school. Those who failed must have not taken school seriously.24
Move along from the economic crime scene, children, nothing to see here. Nothing at all. In this respect, belief in the efficacy of schooling ultimately helps keep everything just as it is.
Marsh is right, in my view. But the situation is even worse than the Sisyphean picture of educational futility that he imagines. For the ideological cover schools provide is already being blown. Notwithstanding the place in our political tradition that Marsh rightly ascribes to it, even the pretense of education as the source of legitimate economic opportunity cannot be sustained in the face of chronic youth unemployment and youth disposability. The very economic forces that Marsh rightly places in the driver’s seat are currently driving an entire generation off a cliff (minus a few privileged types who get to watch). The era of exploitation is ending. Enter the era of elimination. Say goodbye to social reproduction, “working class kids getting working class jobs” and all the rest of what was once thought by the left to be the most outrageous of injustices: the lie of equal opportunity and social mobility. Say hello to uselessness, disposability, precarity and whatever other dismal synonyms might describe the growing - and disproportionately young - ranks of the super-surplus humanity that has been squeezed out of a world that simply does not need even their hardest and most degrading labor. It simply wants them gone. They thus have less than their mere labor power to sell, as Marx imagined as the ultimate existential nadir for industrial capitalism’s proletariat. All they have is their mere humanity.
Back to fatalism, then, this time both figuratively and literally. First, as in the Calvinism example, it is important to keep the lack of necessary connection between fatalism and inaction firmly in mind because the picture at present of large-scale human obsolescence is scary and bleak. Across many areas, especially in technology, many milestones are being passed, new vistas are being opened and new discoveries are being made. But from the point of view of the non-rich these milestones are likely to translate into new lows, the vistas are terrifying and the discoveries offering little cause for optimism. It was once thought that the worst thing that the capitalists did was to exploit you such that you ended up as less than a fully flourishing human being, your very mind and body turned into another productive gear. Yet as British economist Joan Robinson once remarked, “the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”25 In retrospect, it may look as if we never had it so good as back when they were exploiting us. In that same vein, we may retrospectively comprehend that the only thing worse than undergoing exploitation via schooling is not finding a way to undergo it.
With the advent of the globalized marketization of everything, we have now collectively crossed a rhetorical threshold beyond which the traditional left critique of education as exploitation seems quaint by comparison. Neoliberalism triumphant presents us with the more frightening specter of what I am calling educational eliminationism, by which I mean a state of affairs in which elites no longer find it necessary to utilize mass schooling as a first link in the long chain of the process of the extraction of workers’ surplus labor value. It has instead become easier for them to cut their losses and abandon public schooling altogether. Any remaining commitments are purely vestigial and have more to do with social stability than with education proper, as vast swaths of our school system (particularly in urban areas) are decisively repurposed as holding facilities for (putative) proto-criminals, lost within what Henry Giroux decries as a “youth crime-control complex,” with a special layer of legal menace for urban kids in what Michelle Alexander pointedly terms “the new Jim Crow.”26
I adapt the term “eliminationism” from the very dark context of Holocaust scholarship, specifically the work of Arno Mayer and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.27 These historians trace the rise of what they call “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” which is to be distinguished from the more practical “instrumentalist” orientation to be found among a segment of Nazi officialdom. The instrumentalists were ascendant at the outset of the War. They championed using Jewish and other prisoners as slave labor so as not to waste this valuable resource toward the war effort. It is the eliminationists, however, who won out at the notorious Wannsee conference (1942) with their advocacy of outright genocidal elimination of the Jews.
This ambivalence was reflected throughout the concentration camp network. The Nazis themselves distinguished between, on the one hand, mere concentration and forced labor camps (arbeit-slager) and, on the other, single-purpose death and extermination camps (Todeslager, Vernichtungslager). Treblinka and Sobibor were largely examples of the latter, whereas Dachau and Buchenwald were of the former type. The lines were sometimes blurred. One could find both types of operations, for example, in the large camp complex comprising Auschwitz-Birkenau, where there existed both a series of labor camps (where untold numbers perished) alongside outright extermination operations for those considered unfit for work. The labor camps reflected the Nazi instrumentalists’ desire not to “waste” this exploitable human mass, whereas the extermination camps reflected the exterminationists’ desire for a “purer” genocidal elimination. Hybrid situations like Auschwitz were in this dark context a kind of compromise between the competing Nazi factions: work them to death. A “win-win” for both sides. Drain away as much labor value as possible and then when the slaves are expended, murder them. First exploit, then eliminate. Given the fundamental moral depravity of the genocidal world view that divides people into “human” and “sub-human,” this is an eminently “rational” solution.
To those standing by to misunderstand this alarming comparison, let me make it clear that I am not saying that being unemployed in Flint, Michigan or enduring a dilapidated school in East St. Louis, Missouri is equivalent to being shipped to Treblinka. Given the choice, anyone would choose the former over the latter. My point is that the two situations share a similar moral structure: both involve persons who have been ideologically constructed as surplus humanity vis-à-vis the reigning power structure. The range of eliminationist possibilities open to someone in such a predicament is not inviting. It is, however, still a wide range, one whose spectrum encompasses wholesale neglect (e.g. disabled children a few generations ago, the street kids of the sprawling favelas of the global South) through to mass incarceration (e.g. young African-American males in the US, 1 in 10 of whom are actually in jail and in major US cities an estimated 80% have criminal records and so are subject to various forms of legal discrimination, including disenfranchisement, an internal form of statelessness) all the way through to the extreme endpoint of programmed mass genocide.28 The point is that even though the quantitative difference between two states of affairs can be decisive, just as too much medicine can make it poison, a special vigilance must be maintained where the phenomena in question are qualitatively homogeneous. So while the ideational stance of eliminationism admits of a wide spectrum of responses, once people are consigned to social categories such as “useless,” “disposable,” “parasitic,” and the like, history demonstrates all-too clearly that this is a slope that can become slippery very fast.
Note also the complicating factor that austerity and policy eliminationism are rarely advertised as such. The publicists for these efforts are much too effective to allow such crudeness. They are of course typically advertised in the opposite terms as efforts to save schools and children and so on, akin to how budget cuts to education, including such programs as Head Start for impoverished preschoolers, are advertised as for the benefit of “our children and grandchildren.” This bizarre hypocrisy calls to mind Slavoj Žižek’s point that consumption seems always justified in terms of saving money. The ads don’t directly say “SPEND! BUY!” etc. but instead they say “SAVE!” and present themselves paradoxically as the embodiment of frugality. You cannot afford NOT to buy our product! As part of this effort “free” items are ubiquitous: 30% more - absolutely FREE! Žižek jokes that he would like to ask for only the free 30% of the toothpaste and leave the rest at the store for someone else to buy.29 We see precisely this rhetoric at work with regard to today’s educational eliminationism: We must destroy today’s schools in order ultimately to help future children, who will somehow emerge for the better from the damage done to their current education (which if true would justify further destruction). This is reminiscent of the notorious reported quote from a US Army officer speaking about the Vietnamese village of Ben Tre during the Tet Offensive: “We had to destroy the village to save it.” One of course notes the irony of moving from “it takes a village to raise a child” to destroying the village in order to raise the child. Which, I wonder, do we think will actually raise the child?
The exsanguination of public goods and collective life in order to enrich banking elites, otherwise known as “austerity,” is one such location along the above-named strategic spectrum. Pressing examples of the starvation diet of what might be termed “austerity eliminationism” would include the devastating higher education fee hikes in Britain and the massive K-12 public education cuts at the state level in the US. The other side of the same coin might be termed “policy eliminationism,” with leading examples being the designed mass failure of US schools under No Child Left Behind and the ongoing and multifaceted attacks on public school teachers’ working conditions. It should now be clear to everyone that neoliberal education policy is not about reforming public schools. It is about obliterating any remaining vestiges of the public square via a market discipline that is officially supposed to apply to everyone but in reality is selectively applied only to those lacking sufficient wealth to commandeer state policy; ironically, the sacred market applies to public schools not to megabanks. It is in essence the strategy of the gated community, where those at the top “have theirs” and withdraw from the educational commons and into their state-backed corporatist enclaves. Our elite captains are abandoning the public educational ship in whose hold still lie nearly 90% of US school children.30
A caveat about how we should understand this new educational enclosure. In my view it is a misunderstanding to say that what we are witnessing is a “withdrawal” or “retreat” of the state from the public sphere simpliciter. There is indeed a push toward “privatization” and Orwellian named “public-private partnerships” in schools and elsewhere (especially in universities), but as in the case of voucher (and many charter) schemes, these are still to be funded by public money and as such they are better understood as reallocations of public resources such that they are available for private capture by elites. In this sense it is a redistribution (upward of course) of public wealth, in a sense a vast theft and a form of domestic accumulation by dispossession.31 On the largest scale, the processes before us might be described, in Hungarian-British Marxist philosopher István Mészáros’s terms, as a “systemic hybridization” of state and private sectors where, ironically, the state attempts to protect elites from the vagaries of the marketplace through massive bank bailouts, loan guarantees etc.32 Regarding the latter, even the oft-used phrase “casino capitalism” is misleading. In our current situation of socialized risk and privatized gain for those at the system’s “commanding heights,” it is tails they win and heads we lose. Imagine a casino in which you play with the house money and if you win you get to keep all the winnings to yourself, whereas if you lose, the house covers your bets. The literally astronomical public sums required to continue this arrangement for the minutest percentage of the population is the proximal cause of the squeeze on public resources. Schoolchildren, the poor, the sick, the disabled, the elderly etc., must all sacrifice so elites no longer have to undergo the risks that are officially supposed to be inherent in their role as fearless capitalist risk-takers. But the zombie lives on in the cherished ideology of “competition,” whose virtues are conveniently to be reserved only for the masses. Competition and risk is for small businesses and other little people like private and public sector employees. Populist conspiracy mongers such as radio host Alex Jones are quite right in this sense to fear a “socialism” that they equate with government-enabled neoliberal globalization and enslavement by world banking cartels. On this point, the critique is not so different from that of the Marxist Mészáros (above) who indicts systemic hybridization. Simply put, what we have currently is the worst of both systems: a “lemon socialism” that provides a genteel monopoly and social safety net for elites while it simultaneously increases austerity, meanness and heartless competition for everyone else.
Can this eliminationist strategy be opposed? Identifying and naming it helps, I think, but that is only a start. A great deal more than argumentation is needed actually to challenge the eliminationist trend, but argumentation is part of it. As a preliminary step, it is helpful to grasp as fully as possible what it is that one opposes; weaknesses in conceptualization tend to manifest themselves in the course of political struggle. There is of course a dialectic in which one grows clearer about one’s goals as one actually engages in the struggle, just as one becomes clearer about the nature of a roadblock as one tries to remove it. But one must start somewhere, otherwise there is blind lashing out and inadequate self-awareness. As Immanuel Kant put it in his first Critique, “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”33
In this spirit, I contend that traditional left narratives of opposition have generally framed their concerns - either explicitly or implicitly—within what I would call a neo-Kantian moral framework. Specifically the familiar “formulation of humanity” version of the categorical imperative, where Kant advances his famous dictum that one should treat human beings never merely as means but also as ends in themselves.34 One does not have to self-identify as a Kantian to be generically “Kantian” in this regard; there is a strong sense in which we are all Kantians now, particularly when it comes to near-universal lip service given to some notion of human rights. In Kantian terms, for example, slavery is understood to be uniquely morally abhorrent because it represents a comprehensive reduction of human beings to tools for someone else’s projects, the zero point of human exploitation. The simple moral argument against this kind of dehumanization is rendered in the iconic “I AM a MAN” placards carried by the Memphis sanitation workers in the 1968 strike. Upon such general moral bases, canonical left critiques of education have tended - rightly - to focus on education’s exploitative aspects which, in the Marxist analysis, means exposing the extent to which schooling is at the service of capital both directly, qua supplier of labor, and indirectly via social reproduction of existing class relations.35 And analogs have emphasized how racial, ethnic, gender and other identity configurations are similarly implicated in the reproductive dynamic.
Yet despite the diversity of legitimate concerns, the moral outrage still flows from a sense of violation that is most coherently understood under the aspect of the Kant-like imperative to resist states of affairs that reduce human beings to mere means. If systems of work and schooling are exploitative, the root moral concern is that in some crucial sense they rob people of their full humanity (again: the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike). If those systems are vicious regarding persons’ particular identities, the violence (symbolic and real) being perpetrated implies a diminution of those persons’ dignity in precisely the Kantian sense. As anti-colonialist existentialists such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire emphasized, identity-based forms of violence constitute yet another way of reducing a person to a thing-like status and therefore represent a denial of core constitutive features of our shared humanity:
Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses …No human contact but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.
My turn to state an equation: colonization = ‘thingification.’36
Whatever “civilizing” rationale was provided as pretext, it seems clear that colonialism was motored first by the economic exigencies of exploiting the labor of indigenous populations (concomitant with the resources of the “discovered” land itself). The oppositional moral core of the intergenerational anti-colonialist project was one of basic recognition, the human right to be self-determining, autonomous, and a chooser of one’s own destiny.
A fundamental part of the dream of emancipation remains the “negative freedom” not to be coercively subordinated by some powerful Other.37 Abolitionism is therefore also a dream of nonexploitation. Along with the many poems and songs of the Arab Spring, from Tahrir Square and elsewhere, the most poignant and now iconic example of this dream remains the Tunisian fruit seller Muhammad Bouazizi’s self-immolation, December 17, 2010. Harassed, robbed and otherwise pushed to the edge by corrupt and petty government officials, Bouazizi felt he had no other gesture open to him than that of publicly taking his own life, the ultimate “illustration” of his thing-like status vis-à-vis ruling elites. The power of Bouazizi’s desperate moral lesson - in a way the purest imaginable “pedagogy of the oppressed” - can be seen by the near-universal sympathy it evoked among Tunisians and later Egyptians, and eventually protesters across the region and the entire world and remains widely credited for the Arab Spring revolts that overthrew the dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak and still continues to reverberate in the region. So powerful in fact was Bouazizi’s cri de coeur regarding basic human dignity that it was able to overcome in the Muslim popular mind the traditional Qur’anic prohibition against-suicide.38
Despite the continuing resonance of what I am identifying as a neo-Kantian approach, from abolitionism to Bouazizi, the globalizing mechanisms for which neoliberalism speaks work to change this thoroughly modern equation. As per the Robinson aphorism, we are now in a position to understand how exploitation may not be the worst possibility, even with its dehumanizing aspects. The newer kind of non-recognition involves not merely reducing people to means but simply wishing them away and ignoring them altogether; in this way at the level of concern for the Other, we are transitioning from abuse to neglect. An increasing proportion of humanity - in the global South but also here at home - grows non-exploitable economically. Their labor is incapable of importing enough value to render them serviceable for traditional capitalist production and so they are economically “out of the loop” - and often geograph- ically as well, as in the case of the restive suburban banlieues around Paris. They have become “extra people” and superfluous. At best their relation to the formal economy is occasional and precarious as evidenced by the stunning growth of those living most of their lives in what anthropologist Keith Hart describes as “the informal economy,” living, for example, under subsistence conditions of “forced entrepreneurship” such as prostitution or the selling of odds and ends.39 These are the disposable ones, the “outcasts,” from Kinshasa and Dakar to Detroit and Brixton, who increasingly populate our “planet of slums.”40 Furthermore, as anthropologist Jan Breman suggests in his study of the laboring poor in India, “A point of no return is reached when a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labor process becomes stigmatized as a permanently redundant mass, an excessive burden that cannot be included now or in the future, in economy and society. This metamorphosis is, in my opinion, the real crisis of world capitalism.”41 Estimates are that about one third of the world’s work force presently falls into this category, those more or less permanently ensconced in the “informal” economy without a regular paycheck and beneath the “normal” chain of exploitation (nb: they are still of course exploited, but in a modes antedating traditional capitalism such as chattel slavery and patriarchal domination). In Marxian terms they still constitute a vast “reserve army of labor,” albeit one that long ago became much more “reserve” than “labor.” Their main productive function now is to serve as part of a disciplinary warning to precarious remaining workers that “but for the grace of the (job) Creator, there go I.” There is nothing quite so helpful as an economic downturn for reminding workers how grateful they should be for a job, any job.
In some areas there is little need for even the pretense of offering these forgotten people an education. Where appearances need to be kept up for political reasons, the new “education” being envisioned for these subaltern populations is no longer that of our grandparents’ world of schooling as an extension of economic exploitation. The new educational policy is animated by the simpler and even more chilling logic of eliminationism. Its immediate precursor is not in the dark and satanic mills of eighteenth century Manchester, but rather the literally eliminationist industrial genocides, ethnic “cleansings,” and indiscriminate air bombardments of the twentieth century. The shortcomings of current education policy do not equate to the murdering of people in camps. But the moral logic of their situation is structured perilously close to identically: some are no longer exploitable and are beneath even being treated as means to our ends; and if we cannot even use them for our own purposes, we would be better off without them around at all. Chronic unand under-employment leads ineluctably to disinvestment in universal schooling; austerity becomes an easier pill to swallow when there is a sense that those on the receiving end are no longer needed anyway.
As their surplus labor no longer powers any capitalist’s profits, the only schooling that makes sense for them would be in the service of social control: physical surveillance and incarceration, on the one hand, and on the other, the psychological diversion of desire into harmless self-wounding channels of consumerism and/or drugs, the latter providing an expedient way to lock away a huge number of potentially disruptive lumpen elements. David Simon, creator of the HBO series The Wire, set in what he would surely agree is a post-industrial, eliminationist Baltimore, writes:
It’s been estimated that nearly half of the adult African-Americans in Baltimore are unemployed or underemployed - a consequence of decades in which the need for an American working class has been minimized and the industrial base has been transferred overseas to improve corporate profit. Meanwhile, we relentlessly pursue a drug prohibition that has quadrupled our prison population over that same period, creating a prison-industrial complex that is the largest in the world. By any measure - in raw numbers, in percentage of population - America now jails more of its people than any country, including all totalitarian states. We pretend to a war [sic] against narcotics, but in truth, we are simply brutalizing and dehumanizing an urban underclass that we no longer need as a labor supply. And what drugs have not destroyed in our ghettos, the war against them surely will. [emphasis added]42
Meanwhile, those (temporarily) outside this growing carceral system are themselves being prepped for a life of perpetual uselessness, where the capacities are cultivated neither for creativity nor production but only for commodity consumption, which presents the only remaining arena of social value and recognition. These are neoliberalism’s ideal “democratic” subjects, who political philosopher Wendy Brown describes as “available to political tyranny or authoritarianism precisely because they are absorbed in a province of choice and need-satisfaction that they mistake for freedom.”43 It is no longer so much a matter of fine-tuning schools vocationally to align them with perceived corporate needs (though there is still plenty of that for those temporarily more fortunate). It is ultimately a matter of eliminating education in any meaningful sense as a component of what is expected for a “normal” life for most of the population. To channel Mike Judge’s simultaneously horrifying and hilarious film, a near-documentary of “normal” late capitalist everyday life, the planned education-less “idiocracy” awaits.44
One does not have to be a Foucauldian adept to suspect that neoliberalism has for some time been redesigning our education systems for failure - just as Foucault’s Enlightenment era prisons began a profitable and self-justifying cycle of delinquency and recidivism.45 These kinds of systems “succeed” as they inevitably fail in a self-perpetuating restructuring of schooling as pre-incarceration. As Simon puts it in the above-quoted interview, what we have created in our urban no-hiring zones, in “places like West and East Baltimore, where the drug economy is now the only factory still hiring,” is a situation where the “educational system is so crippled that the vast majority of children are trained only for the corners”. On the model of the prison, the one-two punch of accountability and austerity - again, the strategic twins known as abuse and neglect - are designed to destroy the possibility of meaningful education for large parts of the population, beginning with the poorest segments and colonizing outward. Is it mere coincidence that in the urban US, the school dropout rate for young black males hovers around 50% up to 70% in some areas) and their incarceration rates are not much lower, around 35%?46 And only one in four young black men in New York city aged 16-24 are employed.47
Under the ancien régime of human capital theory, such a situation would have been thought a waste. Why throw away all that potential labor that could, even if engaged only in menial occupations, add value in the production of commodities and services to help enrich elites? Why leave that money on the table? The current situation leaves one almost nostalgic for that older debate. It says, “Spare me your worries about exploitation! You should be so lucky as to have that problem! At least you get a paycheck.” Whereas before in the retrospective “good old days” the struggle was to justify one’s economic usefulness, the struggle at present is to justify one’s very existence. This is in many ways far more frightening than before. For their part, elites have not clarified for themselves the question of the defensibility of: If I can neither convert you nor exploit you why bother to teach you? There is a need for institutions of surveillance and incarceration, certainly, but education is a waste. The shorthand way of saying all of this is found in the newfound battle cry of the global capital: “Austerity!” Or, more precisely, austerity for the 99% while the 1% - purely because of their class position - enjoy apparently limitless government backstops and bailouts.
This progression away from education-for-exploitability to educational contingency has given a new urgency to the basic question of the universal distribution of public education; the basic Kantian moral question of what is involved in treating others as ends in themselves rather than mere means takes on a specific new urgency. In recent years we have conceded the argument about universal education almost wholly to a narrow economic instrumentalism about the aims and purposes of the enterprise. Predictably, we now see that those who live by the sword of economic utility die by it too; if educational outlays are to be justified on the basis of their economic utility, when the utility is gone, so is the justification. As recently as a few decades ago, one might still hear in public discourse talk about human rights, democracy, civic and moral education and maybe even the odd murmur about such broader ideals as human creativity and flourishing as such. That is all gone now. Even once politically bedrock Jeffersonian and Deweyan visions of education as the bases of democratic sovereignty and intelligent social policy are few and far between. At best there is a distributive justice argument - a mere shadow of the civil rights movement - that sees education as one consumer good among others that should be distributed more fairly so that those who are disadvantaged can enjoy consumer goods at the same rate as their wealthier compatriots. Implicit in this argument is that education is a personal good that is “owned” by the individual as a legitimate vehicle for personal enrichment and that the magic of the invisible hand aggregates these educated individuals and purposes them toward an overall societal good. But it is in no sense a public good that creates any wider communal obligation beyond one’s personal consumerist horizon. The “good for everyone” part we never quite reach; as an alternative “next best” outcome, a certain segment of the population is simply enriched instead.
The victory of this narrow ideology of educational economism is so complete that it is no longer distinguishable from what passes as common sense. These unexamined assumptions grow more powerful as they become less explicit, withdrawing into an éminence grise controlling position from amidst the shadows of our collective psyche. It goes without saying that the point of education is to enhance personal economic life chances. It goes without saying that the reason to expend public funds on schools is because the economy demands it. It goes without saying that universities are worth funding because they help “grow” the economy, meaning that they are to be repurposed toward corporate and military interests.
Philosophically all this presents a stark challenge concerning the ideal of universal of public education. The neoliberal educational new order negates the universal aspiration by bifurcating educational subjects into two main categories: the narrowly economically useful “saved” and the narrowly economically superfluous “damned.” Not that there once existed some Golden Era of “education for itself” from which we are now fallen. One should remember that industrial capitalism gave rise to the current system of universal public education in the first place. But when Marx famously wrote “all that is solid melts into air” he meant precisely “all.” Not even one’s most cherished institution is safe from the creative/destructive capitalist whirlwind - not even practices and verities that once seemed completely outrageous to alter. We have thus come to a point where the economic base has shaken elements of the educational superstructure such that parts of it once thought impregnable have started to crumble and fall. Those who hitched their education cart to an exclusively economic justification - we should educate all children because of the economic benefits that will accrue to us all collectively - have no answer when automation renders even “educated” labor unprofitable to elites. During times of economic crisis, “education for its own sake” and even “democratic citizenship” become feeble rationales for the vast outlays necessary to maintain a system of universal free public education. Plus, the logic of education-as-commodity comes home to roost precisely here: if school credentials are one’s own personal ticket toward economic advancement, why should the rest of society have to pay for it? (See Chapter 4.)
It is important to understand further that eliminationism may come in many forms. It is not necessarily that campuses and schools are being physically shut down. There may even be a building boom. It is that these institutions lose any independence and directional autonomy, for example, schools that become little more than a testing factories, military recruitment centers, and in-processing operations for the penal system. (I was reminded of this personally when I observed the three banners decorating my son’s rural high school cafeteria: “Go Navy,” “Join the Marines,” and “Drink Milk!”) So it is not necessarily so much a matter of the physical boarding up and shuttering of the buildings. The bricks and mortar can be used for whatever purpose. Consequently, it is a mistake to assume that one is necessarily preserving anything essential by maintaining them.
From a wider lens, what is actually occurring is that monopolistic neoliberal elites are asserting their grip more strongly by more directly harnessing all social institutions as adjuncts for their ever-more desperate drive to accumulate capital. The Nazis called this cultural harnessing Gleichschaltung, by which they meant the airtight alignment of social institutions with Party ideology. This was one of their most distinctive ambitions. In 1930s Germany, Gleichschaltung was accomplished by subjugating the population through mechanisms of fear, prejudice, propaganda and legally-sanctioned Party criminality. In the contemporary world it is accomplished through fear, prejudice (against the Undeserving Other), propaganda, and legally-sanctioned banker criminality. In terms of the potential richness and complexity of human life, however, the end-result is structurally similar: a flattening-out and homogenizing of the range of what human beings value, where every activity is to be translated into the language of only one would-be totalizing sphere. This in the end is the neoliberal leviathan in all its monomaniacal glory. It seeks only itself, a monomaniacal sameness, ultimately offering the existentially terrifying boredom of absolute self-identity.
In making itself its own goal it thereby excludes such extraneous claimants for moral status, such as, say, human beings. This should begin to make us quite suspicious of this neoliberal “ideal.” Who are these rugged competitive heroes who live by the global free market alone? Who actually embraces this? It is manifestly not today’s capitalist class, who by now by and large enjoy secure monopoly positions from which they can watch at a distance the little people tear each other apart as gladiatorial economic sport. As they have utilized government rules to snuff out anything resembling the free markets of yore, the monopolists atop the system are perhaps the least likely actually to believe in neoliberalism. There are segments of the rest of the population who do embrace it, though, in bits and pieces here and there - albeit manifest in sometimes incoherent sentiments such as the pitiful cretins holding signs warning the government away from their medicare (a government program). These are people who have half-internalized the idea that turning against one another and competing for crumbs is somehow more ennobling than collective action against the gluttons at the high table.
Old tricks of divide and conquer such as racism, xenophobia, religious clannishness (which yields a sense of belonging and “metaphysical comfort”), and sometimes purely Madison Avenue-manufactured aesthetic preferences, like the designed distaste for protesting “hippies,” further confuse the crumb-seekers. The depressing irony appears to be that the only people who “believe” in neoliberalism - and then only halfway - are the ones who are actively being victimized by it, the ones against whom it is wielded as a propaganda weapon. Neoliberalism thus reveals itself as nothing more than a propaganda campaign, an ideology that corresponds to nothing and has no actual adherents; those who mouth its rhetoric loudest would not dream of actually living by what appear to be its precepts of radical competition and value monomania. In the end it is a weapon whose power derives from its not being viewed as such, an empty signifier whose very potency derives from the vacuum at its center. Like a well-placed ellipse, its appeal lies in its ability to become the object of whomever’s projections, as is often the case with abstract ideals like “freedom.” As Kierkegaard suggests in his wickedly sardonic Diary of a Seducer, contextually vague abstractions are always the best for seduction and flattery, as they are indeterminate and open enough to serve as a blank screen for the flattered one’s projections.48 Vain creatures, we always love our own projections more than those of others. In this way, an ideology in which nobody believes is potentially the most dangerous of all; in its very vacuousness resides great power. Traditionally, this core of narcissism, flattery and deceit is the telltale modus operandi of none other than Satan himself. “When flatterers meet, the devil goes to dinner. Flattery is so pernicious, so fills the heart with pride and conceit, so perverts the judgment and disturbs the balance of the mind, that Satan himself could do no greater mischief. He may go to dinner and leave the leaven of wickedness to operate its own mischief.”49 Ye old deluder neoliberalism!50
Am I saying neoliberalism is Satanic? Yes, precisely that. As per the English proverb, it is the perfect demonic possession for a secular age: it is Satanic but without the need for Satan himself. With neoliberalism as the reigning ideology, the 1% can go to dinner; they can relax, enjoy themselves, and allow their favorite ideology to babysit the masses and put them to sleep with all the right stories. It is the Platonic noble lie perfected and made global.
Is this perhaps itself an elitist conception of Althusserian “false consciousness”? Yes. It is. I do not believe there is a deep-rooted, respect-worthy peasant Truth to be found in pickup truck ads, personal ownership of assault weapons and FOX News. On offer in this sloppy neoliberal mix is a colorful collage of self-contradictory and self-congratulatory images: pristine nature to race a car through by oneself, an eternal sunshine of abundant fossil fuel, insatiable consumer appetites, and also, somehow, allegedly “traditional” Christian “family values.” It is a simultaneously senile yet also infantile hallucinogenic panorama of illogic and ignorance. It is the ideological expression of the strip mall and the chain restaurant, all simulacra, all nostalgia and every molecule of it geared toward immediate consumption. Bright lights, dim bulbs. Or, I should say, bulbs made to be dim.
This is the educational world we fall into when we allow the ideology of neoliberal eliminationism to take hold. Capitalism has run its course. And as per Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, it is the capitalist class and not the proletariat who have killed it. But still, zombie-like, the appellation “Capitalism” still roams the earth, gratifying adherents and frightening the children. But the major capitals of the world are no longer in a competitive position vis-à-vis one another; they have become, as Marx foresaw, a more or less fused and generalized capitalist class whose dominion over states is almost total. The alleged existence of a “competitive capitalism” is arguably the greatest illusion of the era, and the greatest credit for the victory of that illusion goes to a neoliberal ideology that softens the targets sighted for monopolist dominion. As argued previously, the sphere of education is one of the juiciest of these targets. It is one of the last bastions where people work for paychecks, yes, but also for something other than a paycheck. This “other than” must of course be eradicated - through austerity, testing, merit pay, public shaming of teachers, in short, by whatever means are at hand. All save the true owners of the world must be disciplined by market forces in order that they too must learn that they are mere tools in another’s workshop, mere things to be discarded when no longer of use. And the educators’ uses are running out. At present, they are mostly in fact running on the fumes of the historical promises and labor militancies of yesteryear.
Only a shrinking segment of the population is economically useful anymore; they are no longer providing sufficient value to justify themselves economically. They are simply not needed and are now a net drain, just as is their very biological existence (witness the US politics of health care.) From the point of view of neoliberal systems and the monopolists they - and the terrorizing point is that one never knows when that “they” becomes a first person “I” or “we” - are in the most literal sense from a systemic point of view better off dead. This, I think, should concern us: that we have come to inhabit economic and educational mechanisms that stand to benefit from our non-presence - our elimination.